Serendipity

Last night I spent a very pleasurable hour listening to a Sally Mann Q&A from the Art Insitute of Chicago from a few years back (it's available as a free podcast on iTunes ) and it got me thinking...

About several things in fact, and I can't cover them all here. One of the things she made me consider being the rise of the internet and what that means for artists and photographers today. Is the overexposure a good thing, or would we produce better work if we went and lived/worked in the wilderness for a few years with no audience in mind? I'm inclined to think we would all produce better work.

It's hard to keep up with expectation, or to maintain a web presence because it constantly requires you do be doing something new. And why should we be? The internet accelerates everything: the amount of time before a series becomes old, it makes relatively new work seem passe, and doesn't allow non-linear development. Everything has a time stamp. For me, at least, I feel like I am not pulling my weight if I don't upload a new photo every week or so. But is that right? Should we have this pressure? The work suffers, I think, and we become too overtly conscious of our 'public'. I used to live without any pressure, because I was plugging away doing my own work in private, I never had any visions of 'making it'. The more shows you do, the more private views you attend the more you are asked "So what's next for you?", there is always an expectation placed upon us, and sometimes that hinders growth. The best projects come from prolonged periods of reflection, and this is something we are not afforded, unless we stick by our guns. Time is a pertinent issue for me, as each day the film I work with is less usable and more expired than the day before. Plus everyone is "doing" Polaroid. I feel as though my time has to be now, dictated by the medium, and by trends. It's frustrating - my work aims to be 'timeless', but currently it is the opposite. The object doesn't change through time but our perceptions of it do, and sometimes it's difficult to discern which is more important.

Secondly, Sally spoke articulately about how much of her work with wet plate collodion was down to serendipity. That is the word I am always seeking to describe my relationship to what I do, and my relationship to analogue photography in general. It is the antithesis of digital. I like giving myself over to luck. Like Sally, I'm not a perfectionist about my output. I have the "que sera sera" attitude, and that's what I find magical about process led photographic practice. You have to give yourself over to luck. You can engineer your subjects, you can retake pictures, but essentially all work is a collaboration with your medium. I am fascinated with the idea of the photograph as an "object" rather than something constructed from a binary series of 0s and 1s. A photograph should have soul, an essence. A tangible quality. I want a photographic print to be a piece of art - something you can hold, but something that is unique and bears the marks of its birth. Sally Mann's work bears birthmarks, and captures the Romantic (yes, with a capital 'R') sensibility of the Southern states not so much because of what she photographs, but the way that she does it. I am often asked about my 'intent', and why I shoot on Polaroid - I don't know what more I can add to Sally's points - but I know it is all bound up in recreating a sense of place.

She also touched upon the idea of the photograph as 'truth' - I often throw that word around when talking about Polaroid as a medium, but I'm wrong in doing so. I mean something other than a simple 'truth', 'honesty', or 'appealing to the senses', or 'visceral' would perhaps be better words/descriptions...