fredfehlau

Why Work (?)

There are trillions of photographs in the world; millions more are added each hour. Not many are ever deleted. Why would anyone want to take another? Because there is something new to photograph? Probably not. So why, what, and how to photograph? I am trying to find out.

I am not particularly interested in a single (unique) moment, a single (exceptional) image, or a single (specific) point of view. I am interested in complicating the idea of the single image, and of the singular experience of time and place, by finding ways to inject simultaneity and multiplicity into photographs, objects, and actions. I am interested in duration. I am interested in memory. I am interested in looking.

My work addresses the complexity(ies) of locating oneself physically and temporally in the world. It usually relies upon manipulations such as doubling and/or halving, of seeing two or more things simultaneously, and of not being able to see the whole of either one. Consider the (im)possibility of being able to look forward and backward, left and right, or at the front and back of something — at the same time. I have produced works informed by the critical and formal languages of painting, sculpture, site-specific and location-specific installation, and since 2006, photography. A specific investigation of time and space runs through all of these works (a “mashing” of two- and four-dimensional conditions). I also think of my current photographic work as “episodic” — somewhere between the instantaneous and the cinematic. An episode is not a single moment, nor is it a complete narrative. It is what, and how, we remember.

The question remains: why, what, and how to photograph? Although much of what I do is outside, I am not interested in landscape (except for Jean-Baptiste Corot’s paintings of trees). I prefer the harsh light of midday or the artificial light of midnight to the “magic hours” of dawn and dusk. I usually shoot buildings, but I am not particularly focused upon architecture. I am drawn to 16th – 18th c. northern European still lifes; their quiet dustiness forever frozen in their painted surfaces. I sometimes — oftentimes — do not look through the viewfinder when I shoot. I look ahead to what may be in the camera’s path. I shoot low to the ground and above my head. I am interested in what is between photographic moments — empty spaces that one sees just outside of one’s vision — or what is directly in front of me with little attention to composition.

I am also interested in how the camera sees things differently than I do. It remembers all that it sees without discretion. The camera works impartially, determined by the settings chosen and the conditions of the scene. It does not decide; it operates. It is dumb/smart. My problem, then, is not how to take a technically correct or beautiful image, but how to use the camera and digital technology to disclose what we cannot see — movements in time, objects in time, locations in time.