The more I think about the work I make, the more I realize scale is a factor. Not in the size but rather in the relationship between the moment and the stream of time. The images I make all have a long duration, to capture movement that a glimpse can’t properly reveal. I’m compressing long periods into a single frame to include the dynamics of the world, because this is how we experience it ourselves – not as increments of stillness but as a continuous flow.
When I first began thinking about this post I thought I had a clear argument, but now as I write it – not so sure. In this year’s Toronto Contact Photography Festival catalogue it seems a lot of the publicized exhibitions are photography as a vehicle to express a concept rather than photography as an art form. I’ve never been a great fan of photography as a means to express a non-photographic concept, I prefer photography as a means to express a visual idea – like landscape, portraiture, abstraction etc.
But here’s where my argument breaks – and I’m guilty of doing this myself since all my abstract work is really at it’s heart the exploration of emotion – which is a concept not a visual idea, oops. Perhaps the prevalence of photography as vehicle has arisen due to the explosion of quality imagery expressing visual ideas – so now it’s a more popular avenue to explore. Perhaps we’re beating the visual idea thing to death and are merely refining and tweaking the long explored precepts – iterating with each new generation of photographers… or maybe I’m just jaded.
Either way I’m trying to think of some new idea to explore photography as an art form, but – I’m afraid all I’ll be doing is iterating and refining an already well defined idea.
When people ask what I photograph, I usually launch into a long involved explanation – how what I’m doing evolved from who I am. But… judging from the glazed looks on peoples faces, that’s not working. So here goes another somewhat shorter attempt.
When I moved to Toronto I began looking for a new way to document the city. I decided to concentrate on the dynamism and movement symbolic of a city coupled with the underlying structure – the form and colours.
And that’s what I’m still doing, abstract expressionistic images of the city – movement, form and colour.