“There remains a sizeable part of the art world that simply does not get photography. They get artists who use photography to illustrate their ideas, installations, performances and concepts, who deploy the medium as one of a range of artistic strategies to complete their work. But photography for and of itself - photographs taken from the world as it is - are misunderstood as a collection of random observations and lucky moments, or muddled up with photojournalism, or tarred with a semi-derogatory ‘documentary’ tag.” Read the rest here.
(via)
Update: Some typically astute commentary about this article over on Conscientious, see it here.
March 31, 2010
March 16, 2010
Stefan Heyne
Perhaps we take the seeming continuity of the world and its surfaces for granted. After all, there are certain conventional expectations in how we see, which in practice often means seeing what we expect to and not what we might if our experience of the world wasn’t so obscured by conventionality. The distinctive photographic work of Stefan Heyne probes the complex tension that occurs between appearance in the flow of human perception and meaning, or what can be understood of the visual reality in which we are immersed. It is the anxiety of living in a world so utterly saturated by images that we can no longer be sure exactly what we are looking at and how this uncertainly in turn bleeds out into the negotiation of lived experience. His work is a challenge to what is often thought of as the rational way we perceive in direct correlation to some external reality. This is what Heyne’s photography takes at its starting point, the moment when the certainties of appearance fail and break apart. We can almost name what he photographs, but not quite. His subject is the familiar, but still mostly unrecognisable – it is perception itself.
How far can we get from the conventional ideas about the medium, from description and from content, but still call an image “photographic” in any sense? Or, put another way, in what sense is an image a photograph? He doesn’t necessarily propose answers to any of these questions, or really need to, but brings a philosophical awareness to photography that is all too often absent. The particular subject matter (if it is even that) Heyne works with has, no doubt, some particular significance in itself. The pictures consistently draw our attention to built structures, often with repeating elements and a restricted colour palette, as opposed to landscapes or the human figure. He doesn’t seem to operate by breaking down the descriptive qualities of the photograph however, but by seeing what survives intact once that “description” has been eliminated. The visual structures that remain relate to the psychological (and of course physiological) structures of seeing itself, hard-wired, primary forms of visual perception, along with the conventions that develop around them.
What is increasingly overlooked too is the physical presence of the photograph as an object, a quality obscured by the fact that more often than not we treat it like a surface for the content of an image, a subject or a narrative. Heyne’s work, given its resistance to the norms of photographic description, brings our attention back to the dimensionality of the print. Yet a frame won’t just naturally fall around how we see and Heyne makes that artificiality a central part of the work. Here photography becomes an eloquent way to address the fundamental ways in which perception endlessly mediates our experience of the world and also how our systems of representation are often balanced on a very contingent kind of order, after-images of a moment that will not resolve into something wholly legible, fixed in their uncertainty.
His own website is here.
March 8, 2010
Marking Time: David Farrell in Conversation (Part 2)
The story never really ended either, although the searches did – for a time at least, because perhaps no amount of searching could ever be enough. “There was a picture from Wicklow that was made on the last day of the search in 2000, of the bog cut away and I said to myself at the time – how much further do you go? Six inches? Six feet? How far do you go and when do you stop? Anyway, that was supposed to be it. There was a couple of small searches in the intervening years, and except for an accidental recovery nothing was found. I had noticed, again in 2000, that nature was reclaiming these places very quickly, making even the evidence of the searches disappear and I thought that in itself was an interesting metaphor about what the killers had intended, using nature to cover their traces, but it was also about healing and the passage of time.” The landscape itself becomes a surface on to which these larger questions can be projected. “Thinking about it on a fundamental level,” he said “I’ve used the landscape like a studio; the way that some people go to the blank wall is how I’ve used the landscape over the last ten years, in this and other projects.”
So periodically he began returning, to take account of every loss and every frustrated possibility, because despite maps we can never be sure where we stand – here all certainties are provisional. “I started then to do these annual re-visits,” he said “because it was such an unresolved issue, just to keep going back to these places seemed important, particularly as I might be the only one to return, but it became increasingly difficult to do so, which also highlights another theme within in this work, the real difficulty of sustaining a memory. Then literally by chance I came across this team of forensic archaeologists about two years ago while they were searching in Wicklow and it reminded me again of what had drawn me to the subject, that I had been right to keep with it because other people hadn’t given up. At the same time their intervention actually ruptured my time-line of a landscape being reclaimed, because in most cases they were going back into the same place and digging it up again, which I suppose is interesting too in that it’s kind of like having a scab and taking it off, in the hope that with time it will heal itself properly. The current landscapes, while they are often the same piece of field or bog, look considerably different, as their approach is so different, the pace is different. With the recent searches I’m seeing something stand still in so many different types of light, where as before you took whatever light was there on the day, because the searches went so quickly the landscape was radically altered between visits. While I’m more or less photographing the same thing from one day to the next, each time something has changed and I’m searching for what I feel is the maximum out of the subject. The sense of their presence (or absence) is much less immediate in the landscape now; the pictures have become more about the searches themselves, though you do remind yourself every so often exactly what you’re dealing with.”
If the searching in his first set of pictures had been a devastatingly accurate metaphor for violence, for the hidden landscapes of memory, and for disappearance itself, meaning the continuity of a place (its lives) irredeemably shattered by something – or rather someone – simply not being there, an absence breaking through the surface of the world, this incredibly sustained approach in how the new searches are being conducted (and images he has made of them) seem more like a way of marking time, as a measure of duration. Perhaps they become instead a way to describe the impossible task of accounting for the loss that they represent, as the observation of some endless of ritual – of not forgetting, and he keeps going back too, trying to refine the logic of this process. “Now you could go in and the first picture you make could be sufficiently strong,” he said “but for me it’s this drive to really get deep into the subject, like I say, you’re “excavating” something. One of the difficulties with photography is that making a picture, the gesture itself, seems so easy that you really have to feel the picture, that it has to be coming through the subject and into you. I’m aware now that certainly the work I’m making with the re-visits is probably slightly more refined in an aesthetic sense, that they have softened a little, though I’m still trying to hold onto that edge of tough beauty.”
Regardless of how persistent the searches are – and have been – it seems as if the ground will keep its final secrets, memory has its unreachable avenues after all, and some wounds might never heal, but it will be a useful comparison if, at some time in the future, these new images are gathered in book form, to see the distance that has been covered during the intervening years. This will undoubtedly be a large body of work and what of it has gradually been appearing seems at once as similar and as different as he says. The “edge” is still there of course, the hint of some presence endlessly just beyond reach, insisting on the unstable nature of memory, on the spectre of loss, and on what cannot be brought to light – even more so now perhaps than before. Constant too is the quality that defines the whole of Farrell’s work on Innocent Landscapes to date, the tangibility of absence that is never satisfied by recollection, never made whole, or even just accounted for – time has changed too much, or has buried too deep whatever we hope to find, but the searches go on, because they have to, because even if no trace of those disappeared remain, we can still cut to the poisonous root of violence that fractures lives and the places we live.
(I'd like to thank David for his patience and for his co-operation in putting this article together. A blog charting the development of his latest work can be found here and his own site is here).
March 1, 2010
Marking Time: David Farrell in Conversation (Part 1)
Innocent Landscapes, Coolgagh, 1999
Innocent Landscapes, Wilkinstown, 2000
Innocent Landscapes, Balynultagh,1999
Perhaps like opening the body of time, opening memory, we find our darkest secrets, our unspoken tragedies, all held in layers furthest from the surface. The photographs themselves manage to accommodate all that, and more, reading collectively as a profound dialogue with absence. I asked David about his first visit to one of these search locations: “It was a beautiful summer’s evening,” he said “and I just remember it was this country lane, with a slight hill at the end of it. You went over that and came into this landscape that looked like some force had roared through it. The visual shock when I got there was of this landscape having been violated, with all the trees uprooted, and that somehow being a metaphor from the violence of what had happened to these people, their disappearance. So it was a really powerful sensation to be there, feeling how the mind projects emotion onto something and this landscape was so torn apart, it looked like the search had been quite desperate really, just the nature of it. I made some pictures that first night, but it was purely that I was there and I should make some pictures, because at the time I wasn’t sure, feeling maybe that it was too powerful, that I wouldn’t be able to do anything with it. But there was something about the pictures I made, something in the quality of the colour that convinced me to continue, so it was a simple act then of deciding just to go and look at the other places, seeing what happened, seeing what was there.”
There is a distinct – at times quite uneasy – pull between the aesthetic richness of the images and the violence implied by the searching, these fractured landscapes, that lends a unique power to the work. “In truth I probably didn’t know what I was doing for the first six months, other than simply going there, responding, obviously with my brain, but also in an emotional way, trying to frame images that had a certain tension to them, something that was working off the beauty – I always feel that those pictures have a sort of tough beauty. It was a case of going out and sometimes not really having – or not wanting to have, too much of a direction, because often if you put a box around it before you start, you’re going to miss something. It’s a crude metaphor maybe, but useful in this context, of excavating a subject, digging and digging and digging, until I felt like I’d reached the point of almost having exhausted it, I had to keep going back, photographing the same thing over and over again. It was a momentum of going to make pictures and then thinking about it as you’re making the pictures, as you're working through it, to see is there anything emerging from the dialogue you're having with what your photographing.”
From the buried layers of our collective memory – and of collective forgetting, the landscape seems to contain all the fraught interdependence of place and memory, the forces that shape a culture (its histories), moving restlessly under a charmed surface, present and yet not. There is also a sophisticated narrative thread that draws you into the haunting complexity of these images, with a structure that moves through the broken landscapes – and through the searches themselves – creating a powerful sense of some incipient, but crucially unrealised, discovery. The cumulative structure of the book, a kind of gravitational pull between the images and across them, brings a forceful clarity from this cutting into the landscape’s hidden core that has both a formal and emotional rigour. There is arguably some lingering influence too from his training as a research chemist on how Farrell has subsequently approached making photographs. “When you work in science you have an idea, you set up an experiment to test this idea, you gather all the data, you take it in, you assess it, you formulate something, and you go and test it later on. So I sort of do the same thing now as I’m making pictures. I actually have to go out and make as many pictures as I feel I’m responding to, take them in and then begin this process of editing. So while I’m looking at – and I almost hate to use the word – the “strength” of an individual image on one level, I’m really interested too in the dialogue it has with the preceding image, the facing image, the one after and the next one again – because I’m always thinking of the book. Narrative is very important to the way I make work, certainly between the pictures, but also within each picture.”
(Part 2 above)
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