DISCOVERY

Photography is steeped in technical discipline, organization and control. I have a love-hate relationship with the predictability of the resulting image.  Over the years I have experimented with multiple ways of disrupting this predictability. I find letting go of an aspect of the usual control of the process opens the door to the possibilities of discovery or “mistakes” that have often provided a wealth of fertile territory to explore visually.  Something as simple as pushing the shutter button while not looking through the view finder or at the screen on a digital camera encourages me to consider the world differently.  The resulting image is a rejection of my own human perspective or rational space, and the discoveries I make pull me forward into further exploration.

As an artist in the era of film and the darkroom, I also challenged this predictability by considering how the light and the developer got onto the silver gelatin photographic paper.  For instance, why was I using the print developing solution in a tray?  Why not put the solution only where I wanted it?  In the series “Singing the Dark,” I knew through making study-sketches that I wanted the mass of the body to be as black as possible, so I used the developer on the print as if it was paint, deepening the body to an almost impenetrable black and allowing the face to partially emerge only at the very end of the process.  Significantly, the hand application of the developing solution also did away with the “frame” or window of the image through which most photographs are viewed.

Yet another approach that brought me even closer to the edge of that predictability is seen in the small series made in 1988 entitled “Dark Blood.”  After slipping the already exposed silver gelatin paper into the developer tray, I continued to “paint” on the print paper with a pen light, further exposing it through the liquid solution.  This resulted in a soft, rich grey, gestural line, visually pushing itself into the camera image.  Although this way of working involved a good deal of trial and error using expensive photographic paper, the tension between the resulting hand “painted” gesture and the lens image altered the spatial relationships in the photograph in an interesting way.  It may be the predictability of the photographic print which causes me to intervene, or it may be something else, but  the surface of the photograph seems to cry out to me to alter it.  I want to break through that surface and make the image come alive;  I want a photograph to reflect the intervention of my hand with a sense of movement, a suggestion of something ongoing.  For me it is the difference between the impersonal, mechanical nature of type versus handwritten script; I want the touching to show.