“There are no heroics in [his] images, but rather a poetics of the ordinary and the everyday and a refusal to create an effect for its own sake, echoing Walker Evans’s desire to reveal the “deep beauty of things as they are.” His approach can be tied to a long American tradition of elevating the simple and the commonplace, in form as well as content, to a certain poetry and a way of life, from Ralph Waldo Emerson writing that “I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of familiar, the low,” to Walt Whitman championing “a transparent, plate-glassy style, artless”, characterized by “clearness, simplicity, no twisted or foggy sentences.” Despite its historic context, this enthusiasm for the vernacular, when expressed through photography, has been unsettling for some observers, and continues to this day.” ~ from Stephen Shore: Solving Pictures by Quintin Bajac
AS I BEGIN TO EMBARK UPON A PATH OF intense self-promotion, with the objective of creating recognition / awareness of my photography in the gallery / exhibition world, I am directed toward the necessity of writing an Artist Statement, one that could be universally applied to any work that I have created; i.e., to each and every one of my 20 individual bodies of work. It might be said that that task is fraught with complications given the diverse variety of referent matter depicted in my various bodies of work. However, I think not cuz, regardless of the depicted referent, all of my photographs are unified under the aegis of my singular vision, the identifiable manner–if one can see / grasp it–in which I see and photograph life and the real world––hence, the discursive promiscuity nomenclature that I ascribe to my cumulative body of work.
That written, an Artist Statement most often addresses two objectives, aka: the how and the why. The how is the easy part––at least for me cuz it will essentially be a derivation / variation on the quote included above; simply written, I make photographs of the quotidian world without effects or “twisted or foggy sentences.” The why part is, however, a different kettle of fish ….
…. that’s cuz, in large part, I am not attracted to a particular referent material of any particular kind, as in, being drawn to––per the medium’s directive to photograph the singular “thing” that interests you––the landscape (natural world or man-made), people, still life, nudes, events / human activities, et al. For example, I will never write the sentence, “I am attracted to the dirty dishes in my sink,” cuz, the fact of the matter (pun) is that I am not attracted to the stuff in my sink other than for it potential to be made into a photograph. So, that all-purpose answer to the why question has exited stage right, aka: out the window.
It is also fair to write that I do not photograph to espouse any “deep” meaning, re: my referents or my personal “beliefs” or involvement is a cause or ideology; my intent is to make photographs that instigate feeling / emotions, not thoughts, to wit, visual interest, not intellectual interest. So, an appeal to the Academic Lunatic Fringe is most certainly not in my future inasmuch as they probably consider me to be a picture-making simpleton.
What I can state could be a variation on the idea that I am attracted to “the common” and that I do “explore and sit at the feet of familiar, the low,” but that still begs the question of why I do so ….
It is my belief that to address that question I need to. A) embrace the Shakespeare-ian concept that “what’s past is prologue” inasmuch as I am coming to the the conclusion that my “baked in” picture making proclivities are a direct result of my past young-life experiences of sitting next to the window on the passenger-side, back seat of my parent’s car, staring out that window at the everyday, real world landscape as it scrolled past my eyes like an old-timey newsreel––especially so during those long-which I thought of as boring-1950's drives on the 2-lane roads through small towns and the rural country side on the way to the Adirondacks*––made an indelible imprint on my visual perception of how I see the real world ….
…. and, B) I can also state that I take great pleasure / satisfaction in making photographs that express the idea that a beautiful or, at the very least, a visually interesting object––aka: a photographic print––can be created from the from the most likely considered un-beautiful, un-visually interesting referents.
All of the above written, be forewarned that I will be continuing to write quite a bit more about the creating recognition / awareness of my photography endeavor I am pursuing.
*not to mention the fact that I now am a longtime resident of the Adirondacks
