No, not minimalist photography! But a personal response to having spent half a year studying Minimalism in print, and at museums. What’s it to me? An inspiration, a pathway into serial repetition that has led me to add the second dimension to a line of single-sequenced photographs (a form of panorama) into multiple-sequenced compositions.
Where did the actual practice begin? Somewhere on the Brooklyn Bridge. Concurrent with my study of minimalism, I was working on compositions for a show featuring that Bridge. While selecting, playing and creating for that show, I began investigating the central idea of serial images. While thus employed, I recognized that not just any photographic string would do. I culled through recent (ok, dating back to July 2005) to find suitable pieces with which to play. Then, in late 2007 with ideas having turned into mind-held vision, I spent a morning at Mission San Juan Capistrano—before the bus loads of school children arrived—directly photographing sequenced strings for later incorporation into compositions.
Now, it isn’t just the repetition, but the cleanness of the image that counts: something with stark ingredients, clear lines, clear forms, clear tones. In fact, that I am drawn to architectural forms ties in nicely with the Minimalist penchant for sculpture as the only true presentation of minimalism, which Donald Judd and Carl Andre would certainly ascribe to. In this regard, the Brooklyn Bridge clearly showed the way.
But it was actually Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin who more inspired my visions. Flavin’s tilting a florescent tube to a 45 degree angle made a world of difference: the possibilities in small shifts. LeWitt’s variations on the compositions with cubes and Ryman’s steadfastness to working the textures of white surfaces give inspiration to hold to the course I embarked upon—that the testing is in the doing. And lastly, Agnes Martin’s fine and even pastel lines to which I can only aspire.
Not so oddly, as one artistic movement influenced this work, behind that school of artistic thought lays others: abstract expressionism particularly. Rothko is ever in my eye, Mondrian in my search for color, and Malevich in recognizing geometric presentation.
And, of course, there are always others: Escher for his playfulness and Amy Archer for her sense of composition. And on…
With all this artistic backgrounding, it has dawned on me that I’m more an artist than a photographer. I know that many a photographer is an artist, but I am beginning to feel different. I use photographs to create works of art—it is the medium for my compositions (I would say collages, but I’m just too goddamned neat). I do try to present the images with the utmost care and perfection, but judged as a photographer, I find myself wanting. On the other hand, judging myself as an artist I reach satisfaction. Yes, with time, older works seem less rewarding, but the encapsulated ideas I enjoy, especially as I can see them as markers along the path I have traveled to the present work.
February 2008