For years, I’ve talked about the evolution of making a cohesive body of work—communicating a strong, solid narrative with photographs that support the narrative. I’ve tried to communicate how important it is to have a plan, how plans change, and how to adapt and move forward.
It’s important to know when you are “on course.” The course changes all the time; it’s a moving target until it isn’t. I’ve emphasized self-examination, authenticity, and honesty. That’s how you find the target and move with it until it stops and you hit the mark.
Of course, everyone is different. We struggle and fight with certain problems in different ways. And sometimes, what one person perceives as a problem, the other person embraces as a supporting element. It’s much harder to do this than it seems. The evidence is that very few people do it, and even fewer are really successful at it. For me, these ideas are at the core of making art, and I’m always working toward them.
The winter is ending here in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado (finally!). It’s been long and cold. The good part about that is that it’s given me a lot of time to write, research, and think. I’ve realized that making images constantly (all year long) might not be a good thing for me. I need a pause. I need time to evaluate, to ponder, and to deeply think about what I want to do and what I’m actually doing. I used to believe the work “revealed” itself as you made it, and you adjusted from there. That’s somewhat true, but you have to have something to evaluate it with—a matrix of some kind. Without that, you’re simply making “pretty, chocolate-box pictures,” again lost somewhere between the commercial world and the derivative or technical world. If your goal is fine art, those are not places you want to be.
I’ve had several changes over the past 18 months on my project, “In the Shadow of Sun Mountain: The Psychology of Othering and the Origins of Evil.” It started as a look at the Tabeguache-Utes that once occupied the land I live on, visually representing their land and their history. Then it evolved into a closer look at the events that drove them off of their lands and into prisoner of war camps (aka reservations). And now, it’s a full-on examination of the role of death anxiety and terror management theory—an examination of how these theories have driven human behavior and what it did to the Tabeguache-Ute and all of the other people throughout history that've suffered atrocities.
Ernest Becker was a cultural anthropologist and author who wrote extensively on the human condition and the nature of evil. According to Becker, the cause of evil in the world is rooted in the human condition itself. He believed that human beings are uniquely aware of their own mortality, which creates a fundamental sense of anxiety and dread. To cope with this anxiety, individuals create symbolic systems of meaning, such as religion and culture, which provide a sense of purpose and significance to repress existential terror (death anxiety). However, these symbolic systems can also lead to conflict and violence as individuals and groups become attached to their own particular worldview and seek to defend it at all costs. This can result in acts of aggression, oppression, and even genocide. That’s where I’ve been for a while with this work.
And now, the project takes another step toward its final form. Several months ago, I purchased a nice (French) watercolor set from an art store. I wanted to incorporate two things into the photographs: a painterly look and the beauty of this place, as abstract as that may be.
In reality, I’m more interested in revealing and celebrating the beauty here than anything else. I’ve always said, “I’m a frustrated painter.” And the idea of a painting—pre-photography—is appealing. A painting is a one-off, meaning it can’t be reproduced (copied, yes, but never another original). I’ve always embraced that about tintypes and ambrotypes. There is something very intriguing about having “only one”—a lot like human beings themselves, there is only one of you! That’s a wonderful and beautiful thing.
I’ve always liked a quote from the movie Beware of Images: "We live in an age of hyper-reality, where the authentic is gradually being eclipsed by its endless representations, where every new layer of mediation stands between us and the natural world, where forgeries have so viciously attacked the original that they now reign victorious in its place, and as the forgeries themselves are relentlessly replicated, we are left with infinite simulations of that which never existed." I can relate to this idea on many different levels. Look at AI, social media, etc. We’re in an Orwellian nightmare when it comes to this topic and how it’s affecting art and authenticity.
So, I want to incorporate color into this work. I was looking at some of my flora (plants) prints and lamented that the beautiful colors of the bright yellow Sneezeweed, the white-purple Slender Tube Skyrocket, the bright red of the Prairie-Fire, and the vivid purple of the Rocky Mountain Geranium weren’t there. It felt wrong. The landscapes here are gorgeous, but a lot of the time the wet and dry plate processes simply don’t capture that, nor do the paper negative or POP processes. They are beautiful in their own way, but I feel like I’m after something else.
