© Misha de Ridder

Carl Gunhouse: What is your earliest and/or fondest memory of photography?

Misha de Ridder: When I was five I watched my father print and develop the vacation photos in our home bathroom. I remember the smell of the chemicals and the sudden appearance of the image on the photo paper in the red glow of the darkroom light. It was magic.

CG: What attracts you to the medium as a way of making art?

MR: Again, the magic. Light reflects, altered it enters the lens and is fixed in chemicals or electrons. Due to this causal relation to the world, photography suggests truth and objectivity, but most of time ends up establishing the opposite. The eye and the heart somehow get mixed up with reality in the dark insides of the camera. In a way, the camera is like Plato’s cave, reminding us that when we think we understand the nature of things, we are in fact only looking at mere shadows on a wall.

CG: How do you find your process of working with video differs from working with photography? Does one impact the other?

MR: Video opens up a world of possibilities. Landscape is always the same and always different. Nature is in constant change. When the light changes, the mood changes. Shadows move. When mist dissolves, the landscape slowly regains its shape. By making very minimal movies these subtle changes intensify and become perceptible. The major difference between working with still images and video is that with video your subject needs to be in process of transforming. When making photos, this is not necessary. And I also recently discovered the dimension of sound in the landscape, which can be a revelation for someone working with still images.

CG: You work in various kinds of terrain, from the American Southwest to Switzerland, yet your pictures always feel like they were made along the same wooded coastline. How important to you is it that the viewer read your work as a specific place?

MR: The landscape should be read as a metaphor, but the particularity of the characteristics of the location functions as a point of departure. The Dutch-made DUNE is a thought experiment in finding certain representations of the past in the present. In Abendsonne, I marvel at the wonders of unreal reality at a mirror-like Swiss alpine lake. And in the almost other worldly subarctic Nordic landscape of Solstice, the landscape becomes an existentialist metaphor.

I feel that I should tell you some facts about The Netherlands: it is about the size of the Greater Los Angeles Area and is flat, no mountains. The rural area consists mainly of fields and meadows and is rapidly transforming into city. With 17 million people here, it is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. Nature, if any, is very scarce and fragile. This is one of the reasons I have this longing for wildness and the remote, and the reason I travel to make my work.

Nonetheless I very much like the idea that you had this fantastic vision of The Netherlands through my work. But the vision you had was not of The Netherlands, it was a vision of the land that is located deep within me, far beyond the realm of the conscious.

© Misha de Ridder

CG: The word ‘sublime’ seems to get used a lot when people talk about your work. Is it an idea you’re comfortable with in describing your pictures, and if so, what separates, say, an attractive landscape photograph from something more transcendent?

MR: Edmund Burke first used the word sublime in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful from 1757. He concludes that next to the common category of the beautiful, a second esthetic category exists, with a character of its own: the sublime. The sublime inspires terror and awe, but because this reality is not actually threatening us and only reminds us of possible danger, we experience great pleasure in experiencing this terror.

Sublime comes from sub limen: on the verge of, on the threshold of. Who stands before my pictures, experiences exactly that; the spectator sees a world he is not standing in, but is about to be ushered into. He has to re-learn to look, and to open up his other senses to what he regards.

The sublime invites the viewer to be in the present, to go to extremes of reading and understanding the essence of the landscape according to its own system: in that endeavor, my work is really that of a minimalist, a land artist, for whom the experience counts, not the object. I aim to explore the boundaries, the world beyond the threshold, the limits of the light, the limit of our presence, by observing, feeling, and to attempt to demonstrate what cannot actually be photographed.

CG: As someone who makes landscapes, have you ever felt a pressure or desire to take on social or political topics in your work? I somehow suspect you occasionally find yourself fending off questions about environmentalism or overdevelopment.

MR: Well, I think our identity as a modern urban dweller is only completely definable if there exists an intense relationship between our culture and the living world of nature and landscape.

We have arrived at a moment in history when we are asked to think in a new way about our relationship to nature and landscape. In an urbanizing world, the challenge for our relationship is that human intervention may no longer be denied because it is universal and makes landscapes what they are, but there is also need for a deep exploration of the meaning of nature and landscape from inside ourselves.

© Misha de Ridder

CG: As a landscape photographer, how much do you find yourself taking ideas from painting? Especially with your tendency to create images that deal with the literal processing of the transcendencies of everyday moments, I would think on some level that the work of Impressionist painting might impact your practice?

MR: When I was printing my Solstice show at the Grieger lab in Düsseldorf, their master printer asked me if I did painting too. He noticed the terminology I used to communicate corrections for my prints drew from the vocabulary of a painter.

Recently, I saw a documentary on David Hockney about the making of his new work A Bigger Picture that is currently on show at London’s Royal Academy of Arts. Picturing the East Yorkshire landscape, he started making sketches of the undergrowth. He was amazed with the diversity he found in grasses. This enormous and infinite joy of looking at nature in detail is something I recognize.

At a certain point he states a landscape is never an empty landscape. The viewer always brings himself to the landscape. Sometimes I can be jealous that the translation of landscape to picture through painting is such a sensible process where you use your hand and body, and I have to cope with this unruly mechanical box.

Concerning Impressionists, recently I saw Monet’s Water Lilies in the MoMA and I found myself looking at it for quite a while. But maybe I prefer the more emotional expressive approach of Post-Impressionists like Cezanne and Van Gogh. What I like in Paul Cezanne’s oeuvre is his Mont Saint-Victoire series where he painted the same mountain more than sixty times. I can see why you would revisit a subject over and over. I find myself revisiting certain places and at some point you establish a relationship. Religions with an animistic view of the world, like that of the Sami people in northern Scandinavia, believe that all places and things in nature possess a soul. Out of respect, the Sami move through nature in silence. I like this idea.

In my bag I carry this pocket aquarelle sketchbook along with my camera. Occasionally, just to slow down and in order to examine the landscape on another level, I would spend ten minutes making a quick watercolor impression.

CG: That said, do you think there is a place in contemporary photography/art for a practice as steeped in tradition as landscape photography? If so, how do you think it fits into a contemporary photography/art dialogue?

MR: I think landscape, especially the natural landscape, is an infinite subject. One can always say something new about landscape and nature. The tradition in landscape representation is a bonus, rather then a burden. In the process of making a representation of landscape, one always has to construct in order to make an image. Landscape is a construction. In this way tradition helps, not only technically, but also in presenting meaning.
In my work I try to play with different references to create new meaning. It is one of the many layers that make up an image. With all this tradition, and with all this ubiquitous landscape imagery that daily floods our senses, what better challenge than to photograph a sunset anew? It might not even be a challenge, it is a task.

© Misha de Ridder

CG: How have your work and practice evolved from, say, your Wilderness book to your more recent DUNE book? And what is on the horizon for you art wise?

MR: Wilderness has been the departure in working with nature. Nature provides a good starting point for photography in such a way that a priori nature has no intrinsic meaning. In the built environment, meaning is already contained, and one ends up having to deal with that while making photographs. For me that feels as a restraint, as noise obscuring what really needs to be said. The next task was to find form.

Later, video and sound came in. Everything came together last year in my show Solstice at Foam. Here the photographs are presented alongside video, and my books Abendsonne and DUNE came out.

Currently I’m focusing on processes and transformations. Recently I was filming how the sun was burning away the early morning mist at a lake. At some point, a swimmer emerged from the freezing water. It was an old man and he was stark naked. He came up to me and inquired in a friendly tone, “Now, what can I learn from you?”

Arianna, 2011
Embroidery on Photograph, 17 x 14 in.
© Maurizio Anzeri

Twins, 2011
Embroidery on Photograph, 14 x 17 in.
© Maurizio Anzeri

Untitled, MakeUp
Oil Painting, Thread, Glass, Wood, 35 x 28 in.
© Maurizio Anzeri

Luca, 2011
Embroidery on Photograph, 9 x 7 in.
© Maurizio Anzeri

Marianna, 2010
Embroidery on Photograph, 9 x 7 in.
© Maurizio Anzeri

Springtime Entropy, 2009
C-Print, 50 x 40″
© Kate Steciw

Lucas Blalock: Over the last few years your work has shifted from a sculptural space within the frame of the picture to sculptural objects partially made of photographs. Can you talk about this turn in your work?

Kate Steciw I would like to be more eloquent or philosophical about this transition but really a lot of my explorations in three dimensional work have developed out of having access to studio space for the first time in a few years. Having the ability to literally take up physical space rather than virtual or implied space has led me to the realization that it is not so much the space of a photograph as confined to two dimensions and the problematic presented therein, but the ways in which that representational space enacts certain psychic and ideological demands on our physical world that interested me. That is, I found that the conceptual drive in the work had more to do with the ways in which photography creates appetites for physical objects that are then fulfilled to varying degrees of success or failure by the objects themselves – in particular, commercially manufactured objects. In a way, I see the objects and materials I use in the work as images themselves.

“antelope, ancient wisdom, all-seeing eye, arizona, background,
canyon, color, effect, flame, glowing, heat, illuminated, image,
important, iridescent, light, luminosity, nature, navajo, orange,
order, orbs, page, pattern, red, riverbed, rock, sacred spaces,
sandstone, shadow, shiny, silk, spring, stage, texture, upper, usa,
yellow”, 2012
Duraclear print, Household Items, Dimensions Variable
© Kate Steciw

LB: I remember talking to you a little while back about this and you drew a relationship between .jpgs and commercial products like those produced for IKEA. I walked away thinking about qualities of exchange and interchangeability, as well as about surface. Here you seem to be thinking more in terms of the body of the object, frustrated by its inability to always “put it’s best face forward,” or that our desire is not for the material but instead it is the material that, in the end, interferes with our desire?

I want to return to what you said about space as well, that having a working space clarified the spatial considerations in your practice. I feel like you are saying that contemporary physical objects act greatly the same way as photographs do, as representations of desire, and maybe that a photographic universe not only informs but creates the terms of these new objects? Maybe this is closer to what you were actually talking about regarding the .jpg and modular products?

KS: The relationship I was interested in at the time was not so much between “.jpgs” and commercial ephemera but images in general and their relationship to manufactured objects. In a social system in which so much culturally relevant information is transmitted via images, it is in the form of images that we most often encounter the objects of our desire. The image is representational of both the desire and the desired, and if/when the object does materialize it is often represented and disseminated again as an image (documentation). No only that, but due to the objects origins in mechanical reproduction it too behaves as an image unto itself – an image both of it’s representational intention (a mold injected decorative sconce as an image of a hand hewn wooden sconce) but also it’s ideological function (a chair acts as an image of or stand-in for romantic love, casual whimsy or intellectual integrity). Images and objects function as delivery systems for commerce-driven ideologies. That said, such systems are entirely reliant on context and composition and are fatally disrupted by even minor interventions.

The assumed rigor of this relational system of symbolic language is what drove me to experiment with re-contextualizing objects and images in an effort to create new or alternate ideologies, or simply disrupt the delivery of the intended ideology. I think of images and objects as words that can be arranged to form a sentence, and that sentence can be didactic or absurd but must always point back to the nature of the elements comprising it. That is, the strategy is to reveal or rethink what is said and how it is being said via the increasingly complex visual schema with which we have become so accustomed. Much in the same way as in our day-to-day lives, omission, repetition, and juxtaposition become the primary creative gestures or points of agency over an otherwise highly prescribed matrix of use. 

To get back to your question: I agree that, in this way, a photographic universe creates the terms of the objects represented. The photograph or grouping of photographs used to initiate a desirous response dictate not only the prescribed use but the emotional/psychic intention of the object as it exists in that perceived space. You are no longer being sold the chair but the concept of everlasting love and the chair is simply an element in the larger constellation of products or objects that represent that elusive concept. All images exist in an implicit relationship to the production of desire whether it be for a chair, the past, a person, or a feeling. 

“black, bokeh, celebration, color, cool, copyspace, decor,
decoration, defocused, deliverance, design, elegant, element, eve,
event, feast, festive, flakes, flash, gala, garland, gleam, glint,
glitter, glittering, glow, intuition, light, magic, magical, new,
night, occult knowledge, purple, space, stars, symbol, text”, 2012
Duraclear print, Household Items, Dimensions Variable
© Kate Steciw

“abstract, assistance, bed rest, biology, blade, botanic,
clean, clear, close-up, closeup, detail, dew, dew-drop, drop, droplet,
flora, foliage, fresh, green, grow, harmony, hope, leaf, life, light,
macro, morning, mourning, nature, organic, pure, purity, purpose,
rain, reflections, scattered, spring, survival, water, warning,
weather, wet”, 2012
Duraclear print, Household Items, Dimensions Variable
© Kate Steciw

LB: I want to push further with these ideas about transmission and specifically “resolution.” I am really interested in the way that both the image and the manufactured object deliver these promises in terms that privilege the ease of the delivery system over the integrity of the delivered. This is what I meant by the “interference” of the material, that the actual existence of the object or images gets in the way and becomes a limit in both the efficiency of exchange and the fulfillment of desire. I feel like your sculptural impulse addresses these failures of objects but in the positive – developing a formal or libidinal economy for the very material concerns that interrupt or drag in the commerce model. 

I also want to try and to get to something about materiality that is proving sort of slippery. 

I am wanting to approach these sculptures in terms of photography and the kinds of material solutions recent photo practice has proposed. I think we can say that there has been a widespread reconsideration of the photograph (both materially and conceptually) of late and that each practice exploring these questions hinges on an implicit definition of what the photograph’s material “is.” These investigations have been fraught with dead ends and potholes and I think that considering the image’s material in terms of a container for manufactured desire (that needs not be photographic at all but simply act “like a photograph”) is a really inventive solution. I want to relate what you are doing in these sculptures to the implications addressed by the advent of the collage in Cubism, except here it’s not the representational economy of painting that is being expanded and undermined, but instead you are shifting the implications of the image as carrier of desire/information onto the object. Both situations propose a movement from “within” to a solution of “on.” I was wondering if you could talk a little about the object language and formal vocabulary in the pieces. Maybe I am too hung up on Cubist collage as a starting point, but I find myself wanting to relate to them as figures.

KS: I like that you used the word “slippery” because I feel that we are living in a time that materiality as such is a rather slippery concept and I think you are absolutely right to address the ways in which both photographs and manufactured objects “privilege the ease of the delivery system.” I think that this may be exactly why the photograph and photography have been reconsidered so extensively in recent years. Working from the attitude that photography, a product of the industrial revolution, presented a machine to match humanity’s newly formed appetites for both mechanical efficiency and a kind of anomic abstraction (I see a relationship to the death drive here), it is not a big leap to conceptualize the medium as an extension of our relationship to industry and, in turn, commerce – the perfect mode of production for a culture enslaved by modes of production. 

Cubism: I think this is an apt connection to make to a lot of the conceptual and formal investigations (perhaps even your own!) occurring in and around contemporary photography, not only because we find ourselves at a similarly challenging aesthetic junction but also because new technologies again have created new spatial and perceptual potentials that must be considered from the vantage point of the current artistic paradigm. I think this is what is most compelling about both Cubism and recent photographic trajectories is that they represent a kind of conceptual bridge between movements.

This would probably be as good a time as any to introduce the fact that, in general, I view much of contemporary human experience through the lens of either the user or the consumer, or a conglomeration of the two. As consumers of media, It is almost as if we are no longer concerned with the content so much as the stylistic elements of the delivery system itself. Not that style privileged over substance is a new concept, but that it is perhaps more pervasive than ever and, in my opinion, reaching a tipping point into the realm of style as concept, or style as philosophy. This is where I think Flusser’s ideas about image literacy are more poignant than ever. There is a kind of fractal world of meaning embedded in these photographs and objects whose very aim is to remain hidden yet, as I said earlier, sometimes the simplest shift in position or association can lay bare otherwise arcane information. 

Commodity Derivatives, 2012
Silver Gelatin Prints, 40 x 30″
* Also available as C-Prints, Ink Jet Prints, Giant Wall Stickers,
Duvet Covers, Couch Throws, Personalized Kellogg’s® Rice Krispie®
Treats, Chenille Photo Pillows, Photo Tote Bags and Custom T-Shirts…
© Kate Steciw

LB: I am curious how you see choice fitting into this? I mean the word to simultaneously refer to both the “choice” of the marketplace as well as the very specific “choice” or selection that often constitutes the work in contemporary art. I am thinking of your works where you have “photographed” weapons designed for 3D gaming environments and made traditional black and white prints. On your website these works are captioned as, “Silver Gelatin Prints, 40 x 30″ * Also available as C-Prints, Ink Jet Prints, Giant Wall Stickers, Duvet Covers, Couch Throws, Personalized Kellogg’s® Rice Krispie® Treats, Chenille Photo Pillows, Photo Tote Bags and Custom T-Shirts…”

KS: I see choice as a mechanism that is both liberating and oppressing in contemporary culture. On one hand, we can do whatever we want whenever we please with whomever we want. On the other, there are so many choices so readily available that it seems like there is little time left for anything other than choosing.

The body of work you are referring to is a series called Commodity Derivatives and represents an investigation into the evolving concept of the commodity in the computer age. Using the economic concept of the derivative (essentially an investment tool that allows investors to profit from certain items without possessing them) as a starting point, I was interested in investigating the similarity between these kinds of ephemeral financial products and objects rendered for online and/or manufacture using online services. The idea was that an element (a sword, a diamond, or some chain) in the form of a 3D digital file, purchased at a nominal fee, could find its use in any number of online or computer-generated media as intended, yet that initial purchase could render additional objects or commodities that would enter the market at different points. Depending on qualities like rarity, material, size, and longevity, these objects would then command a certain monetary value – acting as derivatives of the initial purchase. Regardless of the fact that the “original” is immaterial and belongs to me, the material derivatives generate value based on their own circulation in the market. Certainly not a new concept in the discussion of photography, but one thrown into relief by digital culture. 

“Kissing the back of one’s hand is a popular method of attracting birds.”

Yoko, 2010
Offset lithograph, lovebird feather, 9 x 10.75 in.
© Emilie Halpern

Karina, 2010
Offset lithograph, lovebird feather, 9 x 10.75 in.
© Emilie Halpern

Feather Lips, 2010
Chromogenic print, 11.5 x 15 in.
© Emilie Halpern

Sycamore, 2010
Archival pigment print on cotton rag paper, 11 x 18.5 in.
© Emilie Halpern

Anonymous, 2010
Archival pigment print on cotton rag paper, 11.5 x 17.5 in.
© Emilie Halpern

X, 2011
C-Print, 17 x 22 in.
© Sarah Conaway

Lucas Blalock: Lately I’ve been interested in the way that photography relates to jokes. I don’t mean this in terms of humor (though that can be a part of it), but in the way that a photograph I am excited about is immediate, or that this excitement itself is a feeling of immediacy, and it isn’t until later that I begin to unpack it. In the playbill you composed with Lisa Williamson, titled Keep Off Death, the two of you have a discussion in very similar terms about an artwork being “Alive” or “Dead.” Does this relate to your thinking about photography?

Sarah Conaway: If you can pick apart the contents, structure or motivation too quickly then usually the work doesn’t add up to much. So yes, I do think that a photograph should engage you immediately — it has to overwhelm you at first or why bother? Of course this need for an immediate reaction can be applied to painting or sculpture as well. One other thing; in talking about art work we are often compelled to explain what is going on, but no one really asks Louis C.K., “So, can you tell me a little bit more about what is going on in that joke you just told?”

LB: Ha! Very true… though I do think jokes specifically relate to photographs because of the way that a photograph can be understood as the product of a single decision (pushing the shutter), which is an act of timing or delivery. Although this is obviously only one in an extended set of decisions involved in a photograph’s production, I think this idea of a gestalt turn makes the photograph rather joke-like. 

On the other hand, I think that this is something that has been destabilized in the digital era. Photographs, it seems, are now perceived to be more manufactured than captured (a characteristic underpinned by the shift from a chemical burn technology to that of a text based code) but it doesn’t feel to me that this older understanding has receded as of yet.

When I look at your pictures, this question of the digital doesn’t really even enter my mind. I feel like there is something vaudevillian about the way they carry the history of photography with them into the present. I don’t mean in a referential way but in a living, breathing way. Do you feel the work in relation to these things? Is photography with a capital ‘P’ important to you?

IX, 2011
C-Print, 17 x 22 in.
© Sarah Conaway

SC:  In my work I think that I am using photography to get at something larger, but I suppose that it is the discussions surrounding the medium of photography that make it such an interesting place to work; you can reference film, performance, drawing, painting. I get bored really fast with arguments about the “truth” or “reality” of photography, if the argument is only about the material of film or how the digital has changed all that. So I am walking a tight-rope, and trying to have my cake and eat it too!
 
It’s interesting that we are using performance as a metaphor in this conversation as I do think that there is a performative aspect to the way I work. I also think that an important working idea for me, which you have nicely picked up on, is that I am trying to inhabit whatever it is that I am doing in front of the camera and breathe life into it. In my photographs I am trying to create a sense of objectness within the pictures – I play around with set-ups, using “real” objects. One major problem with all of my vaudevillian maneuvering is that I could end up old-timey and washed up.

LB: I don’t think so at all! I feel like working with such simple materials already foregrounds a kind of failure or limit in the pictures. Not to say that acknowledging a limit makes it less real, but I think that there is a generosity to acting on such a human scale. In my own work I think often about the stand-in or ‘body double’ as a metaphor and I was wondering if you could talk more about “performing” in your pictures? Are you thinking about photography as a theatrical situation? 

III, 2011
C-Print, 17 x 22 in.
© Sarah Conaway

SC: When I started using Polaroid 55 to make some of my black and white pictures, my photographic process seemed to become much more performative. I was shooting in my studio, usually against a gray paper backdrop, and I would play around with different objects and set-ups in my studio. With that particular film you would get a positive Polaroid and a negative, so I could instantly see what I had and could adjust things. It began to feel like a more performative process for me, but not theatrical so much… the objects aren’t actors.

LB: For the most part you make your pictures in black and white. Could you talk a little about why?

SC: Well, it’s funny because for a while I was totally against using black and white. I was only interested in color. But at some point when I started doing set-ups in my studio I always ended up working against a black background, and at that point it seemed like I was trying to rob things of color. I remembered that in grad school I had also done a series that was shot on color film where I was shooting scenes and images that were predominantly black and white. But my return to black and white was also dictated by my starting to use Polaroid 55 (which has now been discontinued!). I was using that film and shooting against a gray background, and it really felt like I was gaining access to another space, a gray space. So using black and white feels to me like an intuitive rather than a conscious choice to champion black and white, and I can’t seem to get out of it now. I keep making small attempts…

II, 2011
C-Print, 17 x 22 in.
© Sarah Conaway

LB: When I first saw your work it was on the Bellwether website from a show you did there in 2007 (which feels like a precursor to a lot of things going on right now). The works on the site were divided between independent pieces with titles and a suite called “Ten Large Photographs” titled with Roman numerals. I was wondering if you could talk about how you title your pieces and also how you structure a body of work? 

SC: The images that are titled on the Bellwether site are the ones that were in the show. I really like playing with words and titles; sometimes my titles are very matter of fact, and sometimes they are a little more poetic. I do like to give the works some context. I did a separate series which I called “Ten Large Photographs,” of which there are a few examples on the gallery site. This set of ten is really the most structured set of images that I have ever done. When I was working on them I had very specific goals: there would be ten, they would be a certain size, they would be presented in a specific order, I had to finish by a certain date, etc.

I ended up titling them with Roman numerals because I wanted to make the order clear and I wanted them to be seen as a set. More recently I had a two person show with the artist Lisa Williamson at The Box here in Los Angeles, and again I used Roman numerals to title those pieces because I wanted them to remain a bit structural and opaque.

IV, 2011
C-Print, 17 x 22 in.
© Sarah Conaway

LB: Before I let you go could you say a little about what you are working on now?

SC: I have been working on a new book project, and for my most recent photography I have been looking at a lots of paintings of battlegrounds, decorative Japanese screens, and religious icons. I will just have to see where that takes me.

Four Clay Scrollbars And Several Rocks, 2012
Digital Print, variable sizes
© Rachel de Joode

Untitled, 2011 [from "Untitled Portraits"]
Digital Print, 15.7 x 23.6 in
© Rachel de Joode

Venus, 2009 [from "The Residue of those Celestial Objects bound to our Sun by Gravity"]
C-Print, 39.4 x 47.2 in
© Rachel de Joode

The Small Blue Gradient, 2011 [from "The Small Blue Gradient"]
Digital Print, 19.7 x 27.6 in
© Rachel de Joode

Neptune, 2009 [from "The Residue of those Celestial Objects bound to our Sun by Gravity"]
C-Print, 39.4 x 47.2 in
© Rachel de Joode

Install of Knife (J.G.), 2011
© Owen Kydd

Lucas Blalock: Can you talk about the transition in your work from more episodic videos that produce a sort of serialized experience to the very tightly contained loops you have been making recently? I further wanted to ask a sort of goofy question about whether you think of these static, durational, looped pieces as still films or extended photographs?

Owen Kydd: I began by working with a duration of about 30 to 40 seconds per image. I found it was a good length to investigate still/motion, because it seemed enough to provide the manifest of a moment while also giving me the chance to create a montage. I made projects that would slide between a series of 9 or 10 of these images (with ellipses in between). Through this process of looking and editing I began to learn more about making pictures that responded to an extension, and I eventually felt like I could make some singular works.

One thing I found was that durational photographs worked better when they lost the indicators that tied them to a past, and began to confuse the moment of filming with the experience of viewing. Cinema or video works that have a long duration usually quote a recorded or lived time, and even in early pieces like Warhol’s Empire, which is close to losing its temporal markers, one is always made conscious of at least the possibility of an end point. This awareness could also be the tied to the projector’s flicker and the grain, but I also have found this condition in more recent video works. I am interested in trying to locate a more hallucinogenic or endless quality.

Still from Sighting, 2010
© Owen Kydd

In terms of the loop’s designation, I can say that when I think about making a still film, I think about changing a momentum and this feels decisive. But when I think about extending photography it suggests continuing a photograph’s inertia, and this seems more indefinite. My works are technically films because they rely on apparent motion, but the movement is limited within the frame, the effect is minimized, and often the same image is overlapped for many seconds without interruption. This process allows me to consider how a photograph can involve itself in motion.

LB: It is interesting to me that through this ambiguity between the still film and the “durational” photograph you end up bringing into question the boundaries of the device and even the strict usefulness of these categories. I feel that this is akin to the kind of interrogation that has prompted artists of late to return to the darkroom (amongst other strategies), but we are really discussing different limits here altogether.

OK: My pieces are exhibited on backlight screens or monitors. So, as with photography, there is a picture merged with a surface, albeit one that has a CFL light and a refresh rate. I feel that there is still an implicit tension between the screen and the subject. And because I am interested in making a picture of something in the world, I hope this tension presents something like the “possibility of reference” (to borrow Walter Benn Michael’s terms) rather than a fight against it. This is wrapped up in the forced distinction that the flatness of the photograph (and here, the screen) must make between itself and the exterior of the object it depicts, and this is a separation that I’m not sure fully exists in the projected image. I can also say that (with the monitor in mind) I find myself looking for specific surfaces.

Still from Yucca Color Shift, 2011
© Owen Kydd

LB: Thinking now of the refresh rate, I am also beginning to feel two competing senses of time in these works – one that relates to the possibility of a totalizing photograph achieved through massive accumulation and the other a very slow, meditative temporality that fluidly elongates our looking.

OK: I think the temporal modes you are describing always appear together, although in different ratios, and probably stem from distinct types of photographs; the totalizing image probably begins with a snapshot while the more meditative likely comes from genre imagery. I made a picture of a carving knife in a store window that I think begins with the former. It has the found street ambience of an object that has been framed or chosen out of a passerby’s field of view, and in this sense it is a snapshot – a photograph that exemplifies an instant of lived time.

The Knife begins with this traditional correlation, where a frozen segment of time comes to denote its opposite – that is, fluidity. It adds back the perception of lived time, and this is mixed in with the occurrence of watching the video. In this sense I am trying to intensify the elongated sense of looking that is less pronounced in the imagined photograph of the knife, or the moment the head or camera turns to see it. It reenacts the moment the image was taken.

Still from Knife (J.G.), 2011
© Owen Kydd

LB: Your description makes me think of Barthes and the melancholy that he associated with the temporal/photographic relationship. I am wondering if you could talk a little more about what you meant by “looking for specific surfaces”?

OK: You could say it’s a bit like adding-back-in Barthes’ lament, trying to apply duration but after the fact, and usually to an image that doesn’t contain a high degree of trauma in the first place. I’ve been concentrating on documentary or street images for this, somewhat to the chagrin of photographers in my life, because I find these images fit the performance better. I think the pictures I’m looking for also have something to do with that sense of inertia I was describing, not necessarily in terms of a compositional arrangement that draws the eye around the image, but more in terms of the things themselves, objects with a resistance to change. The monitor contains this same constancy, always on, or sleeping, it’s pixels perpetually repeating in the same place.

LB: There is something rather sci-fi about that and it is interesting to think about this stillness or constancy as a cultural metaphor of the digital age where the same binary code and pixel matrix underwrites an extraordinary breadth of information. Seeing the material of the “information super highway” as inert opens up some really unusual relationships to the inertias of the objects. For me these objects occupy a really tense environment. To stand still for some duration in the world, particularly without peripheral vision, as the space of your videos ask us to do, introduces a sense that something could “happen” at any moment. But for me it is not so much that I am waiting for something to take place in the video as much as I find myself bodily anxious as if the parameters of vision leave me both highly attenuated and at the same time vulnerable.

OK: That’s a great way to describe that sense of anxiousness. I think it stems from the fact that the snapshot image is made continually strange by duration, instead of being completed by it or reassured by it. When time is added, it is akin to an accumulation of snapshots all pointing to the flow of time, or the ‘before and after’ of the moment the knife was photographed. As a series it could appear as a bit of a paradox. But at 30 frames per second and 60hz, the accumulation masks the illogical nature of the sequence. The result is an unreal and impossible time and I think the ultimate effect of this is a more traditional ‘distancing’ between us and the picture, albeit a heightened separation.

Still from Canvas Leaves, Torso, and Lantern, 2011
© Owen Kydd

LB: To end I’d like to ask about Canvas Leaves. This is a new work that uses the same presentation device to ponder a very different, highly contrived tableau.

OK: Canvas Leaves is intended to reverse the distancing process. It is a studio-set with a window box chiaroscuro made as a compendium of several storefronts on Pico Boulevard. Everything in the arrangement is plastic or artificial and even though it is static, I tried to make its arrangement unpredictable. The white canvas leaves hanging upside down, rotate left and right with the flow of air in the room (I had to rent an air-conditioner because it was a really warm August).

I hope in a way this piece takes a type of still-life that concerns the effect of time across objects, and doubles down on its imaginary time by adding a perpetual loop. There is no original ‘before and after’ and also no specific space or time that is chosen out of ‘reality’, so something like a psychological rupture occurs when it is brought into the framework of a lived interval. I think the autonomous and abnormal time of the still-life is actually normalized by this process and that is what is really unsettling. This is hard for me to apprehend though, because I filmed it – it exists as a memory as well.

Clusterfall, 2010 [from "Photo Sculptures"]
C-print, plywood, rubber, nails, 30 x 20 x 2 in.
© Letha Wilson

Hu Grand Tetons, 2011 [from "Photo Sculptures"]
Unique C-print, cheesecloth, cement, 24 x 20 x 7 in.
© Letha Wilson

Extrusions of Jack and Carol outside Mesquite, Nevada, 2003 [from "Photo Sculptures"]
Digital print, wood, styrofoam, plaster, paint, 60 x 84 x 64 in.
© Letha Wilson

Sailor’s Delight, 2009 [from "Photo Sculptures"]
C-print, wood, Aqua Resin, paint, 48 x 10 x 45 in.
© Letha Wilson

Flaming Gorge Rock Concrete Bend, 2011 [from "Photo Sculptures"]
Unique C-print, concrete, wood frame, 25 x 31 x 2 in.
© Letha Wilson

Images courtesy of the artist.

View more work by Letha Wilson here.

Skeleton 1, 2007 [from "Skeleton"]
Collage, 27 x 22 cm
© Eftihis Patsourakis

Skeleton 6, 2007 [from "Skeleton"]
Collage, 21 x 21 cm
© Eftihis Patsourakis

Skeleton 10, 2007 [from "Skeleton"]
Collage, 73.5 x 88.5 cm
© Eftihis Patsourakis

Skeleton 7, 2007 [from "Skeleton"]
Collage, 69 x 80 cm
© Eftihis Patsourakis

Skeleton 3, 2007 [from "Skeleton"]
Collage, 64.5 x 77.5 cm
© Eftihis Patsourakis

Images courtesy Eleni Koroneou Gallery.

View more work by Eftihis Patsourakis here.

50,400 combinations of a 3×3 grid, 4 colors – BBC1BD, 6FACAD, AB98AC, 5A292F, 2011 [from "Aggregates"]
15 x 18 in. framed, Creased Archival Pigment Print
© John Houck

Lucas Blalock: Can you begin by explaining what it is we are looking at, and how this piece was made?

John Houck: This is a work from a new series I’ve been working on for a couple of months, thinking through the digital din of photography. Last year I wrote some software to generate every possible combination of a given grid system. I can specify how many rows and columns the grid has and select a series of colors to fill the grid. This creates a lot of images: a simple 3×3 grid with four colors has over fifty thousand possible combinations. There is no software that can handle this many images, so I wrote another program to turn all these images into an index sheet.

I then print these index sheets and crease the paper. I light it, re-photograph it, and then print it out again. I continue this process several times as a way to reclaim and alter the highly rational system of a generative index sheet. The recursive process of re-photographing also reveals itself in the layering at the edges of the print. I show them mid process, so some of the creases are photographic and others are actual creases. It’s a bit hard to tell on the web.

Installation View, 2011 [from "Aggregates"]
© John Houck

LB: It is also true that a grid like this (each individual unit on the index sheet) expanded exponentially has a very real relationship to the informational realities of a digital photograph? And could this collection of possibilities be activated in this way?

I also wanted to touch on how these pieces are called “Indexes,” and was wondering if you would talk a bit about how you see their index relates to the index(ical) classically associated with photography. On the surface it is ‘indexing’ the creases but there is a sense that the investigation goes much further?

JH: You’re right, I am trying to address the way the “informational” has shifted. When I was in the Whitney ISP last year, we had a series of seminars on the history of photography and I started to think through what it means to move from the recording of light on a surface to the encoding of light into bits. One thing that happens is the image is now backed by a symbolic system or language. It is only temporarily fixed and can be manipulated. It also means I can write software to generate images as opposed to taking them. My software isn’t terribly sophisticated and generates a lot of noise, so once I generate these images I still have to make the rather photographic choice and select images from this field of generative images. Similar to Lacan’s claim that “the unconscious is structured like a language,” these combinatorial images act as the unconscious of the digital ground. With computation, everything is structured as a language.

Flusser’s book, Towards a Philosophy of Photography also made sense to me in terms of the camera as an apparatus the idea that photographers are consumed by its combinatorial game. I wanted to play out this game as a way to subvert it. I started with the idea that this software could generate every possible image that a typical computer screen could display. Each pixel on your screen is a discrete number of colors. There is a limited set of images that can be shown on a screen and I wanted to generate all of them. Lay claim to every photograph in this set. The image of you reading this text is in that set. I quickly realized this would take thirty thousand years to generate every combination and would be almost entirely noise, and so I simplified the variables.

20, 735 combinations of a 2×2 grid, 12 colors – 8A9CB2, 43383E, 8F8383, 71778D, 524149, 4A6578, A6A5AA, 578F8E,ADCFD0, C08A6E, E39D57, DD9E25, 2011 [from "Aggregates"]
15 x 18 in. framed, Creased Archival Pigment Print
© John Houck

LB: I am interested in this idea that with “computation everything is structured as a language.” It also reminds me of Flusser and his contention that the “technical picture” has textual underpinnings that become obfuscated by the image. But I feel like in these works you are also recording another layer (in regards the creases) that bring this textuality back into the physical world. It seems like you are accounting for another materiality altogether?

JH: I like that you are pointing out the layered nature of the work. I started with the layer of the digital, that is the index sheet of pixel patterns. I had these hanging in my studio for a few weeks and they were too rational and predictable, but I did like that they resembled some absurd linguistic system.

I then remembered this definition of what constitutes a language from an intro to psych course I took in undergrad; that a language contains combinatorial symbols that are used recursively. Thinking about recursion, I started to re-photograph them and crease the paper. I wanted to reclaim them and make them physical because they were such virtual objects at this point. To overlay an intuitive system on a combinatorial system was the way out of the dead end of a predictable notational system.

The creasing also has to do with desire. This layer was the important to me. The philosopher Bernard Stiegler would say that today there is a fall in desire that is linked with the rise in drives or repetitive behaviors brought about by technology. This is a big simplification, but highly repetitive tasks like checking your email a hundred times a day result in the waning of desire. Desire is outside of repetition, its object is continually shifting. The initial contact sheets are repetitive and creasing them and re-photographing them made them more subject and specific.

The last layer is the digital camera itself. As I was re-photographing these pieces I noticed that the digital camera was color fringing. Around each pixel would be a purple or cyan fringe of color. This error of the digital camera begins to accumulate after they are re-photographed a few times and the colors in the piece shift and new gradients of color are added by the simple act of photographing them. It’s a way to engage the structural possibilities of the digital camera. The camera also wants to expose everything to fifteen percent gray and so the white of the original index sheet shifts toward gray as do the colors as they are re-photographed.

Ultimately, the contingency of working with the photographic print in real physical space lead me to all of these discoveries. To go back to Stiegler, I think I’m trying to deal with the digital in my practice without being reactionary against it nor embracing it in a naïve way. Getting away from the screen is one way for me to do this.

16 in. o.c., Constructed Anamorphically, 2010 [from "Crisis of Accumulation"]
© John Houck

LB: You had mentioned to me before that “index” had become an important touchstone for you in making these pictures, both in terms of the index (of a book) and also the indexicality of the photograph. To me it seems that the both of these indexes relate to the limited possibilities of the referent; a position primarily characterized by standing outside and looking in (I am sort of obliquely thinking of Sontag talking about the sexual metaphor of the camera in On Photography). I feel like these works as you have been speaking about them are interrogating the workings of a picture making apparatus and developing a map or model for thinking about these issues. Could you talk a bit about the confluence of indexes at work here? And how a position of neutrality or suspicion without dismissal can open to generative production?

JH: In a rather general sense I think there has been a shift from the index as a singular thing to the index as multiple thing. From a single truth claim to a work that is a multitude of truth claims. In a broad sense, Google is an example of this. They have arisen to prominence simply by indexing things. For photography, this is akin to the move from the “decisive moment” to a photograph of a photograph. I’m also thinking about how photographs are more and more experienced as a multitude of photographs, a contact sheet, an image search result page, or a blog. Unlike a written story, we can see a photograph all at once, and now we continually see a number of photographs all at once. It’s impossible not be overwhelmed by this.

One reaction is to retreat into outmoded forms of photography. I’m not sure that is so productive. It’s the other side of the totalizing embrace of technology. In the aggregates, I’m photographing, and re-photographing indexes or contact sheets of images to work through this condition of the index. The folding then becomes a way to make them singular again, to slow them down, and resist the overwhelming nature of the all at once index.

LB: I really like your idea that the folds slow the pieces down or a system of resistance for an informational system. I would like to shift gears a bit and ask about the video work you made for Parallelograms. I feel like this investigation relates to the Aggregates as it also sort of indexes the effects of an action. Can you talk about this and how you came to make this work?

JH: Yes, resistance and in the case of the Parallelograms work, a failure of the machine of display. I used to do some hacking and the best way to learn about a system is to break it. The failure of a system is also perhaps when it is most human or affective. When I was editing photos of the Aggregates for my website, I zoomed way out in Photoshop and noticed the way the computer screen started to create moiré patterns. As the grid of grids of the Aggregates reached the size of the grid of pixels on the screen a third visual system emerged.

I made movies of this zooming in and out on the screen and the resulting breakdown of the display. Then I decided to create some software that would simply draw a grid and decrease the size of the grid by one pixel each frame. As the grid decreases in size and approaches the size of a pixel it creates patterns. Rounding errors also begin to occur because you can’t draw something smaller than a pixel on the computer screen and I was quite surprised with the amount of different patterns this created. It’s a novel form of structuralist film that uses the material of the computer screen and software. At the time I was looking at lot at Lichtenstein and his notion of ground directed painting and use of the Benday dots had a real influence on me. I wanted to take the elemental pieces of the computer display and hack them to see what I could find.

Sweep First in Front of your Own Door, 2010 [from "Crisis of Accumulation"]
© John Houck

LB: Before we finish can you talk a bit about your new publishing project, Loosee?

JH: Loosee is a new publishing project I put together earlier this year. I invite an artist every few months to make an editioned work. There are a few rules the artist has to follow; the work has to be shipped flat to the buyer and the buyer has to complete the work through some set of operations. Letha Wilson was the first artist. Her piece is a double sided print that can be folded in three different ways. The instructions for folding the piece are part of the work. I like the way this activates the spectator and encourages the artist to encode the rules for their pieces activation linguistically. Hopefully these rules encourage the medium of photography to engage with the history of installation and conceptual art.