The Other Universe
At the age of 15, I decided that I wanted to be an artist and never looked back (much). I started out in documentary photography, street photography, people, any small thing that caught my eye from pocket lint to the earth at my feet to everyday life wherever I may roam. It goes back to the basics of my artist statement in which I say that I want to be able to show the world to the world.
But about 10 years ago, I started to see things in an abstract way. I had never been much (and am largely still not) a fan of Abstract Expressionists like Pollock and De Kooning and I like to tell people that I got wanged on the head and started seeing everything in strange new ways. But it has really been an effort to express a complexity of emotion or strength of feeling that I felt I could no longer convey with straight photography. And while I’m not willing to burn a lot of energy trying to appreciate the manifestations of Abstract Expressionism, I connect and work in a world of its reasons and rationale.
Abstract photography for me exists in a different universe from straight fine art photography, a wholly different process of the brain. Abstraction is more like painting in that I start with a feeling and add layers of photographic image, lifting elements, letting elements bleed and recede until I feel like the idea has been achieved. Conversely, straight photography is pure (ish) observation of life. The photographer discriminates between information; elevating details and leaving others behind, ultimately directing our gaze to a subject. With black and white images particularly, it is the play and mechanics of light and shadow telling a story. Still, for me, it is observation translated, more than existing as something that bursts or bleeds from within.
So now, having spent a long while now in one universe, it seems strange to find myself once again, charmed by that cool photographic eye. I’m revving up to a new series that ties, hopefully, both of the worlds together. For the moment, I am looking…
Did I get wanged on the head again?
Doesn’t seem like you got WANGED on the head. We believe that art is subjective and can mean many things for many people and they all are not necessarily the same things to any two people.
We think that people should do art for themselves and if others happen to like it then that would be a bonus.
What do you think?
No, I totally agree with you. I am firmly in the camp of art is what we say it is and if we find people who agree with us, so much the better. But I also spend a lot of time with photographers who I will kindly say have a more fixed and narrow definition of what photography is. And working in abstraction was a pretty big departure for me from everything I had done before. I threw myself into it head first to a degree that it had a lot of people wondering what the hell happened. So I’m a bit flippant about it. But not apologetic. 🙂