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Two and Two

Monday, October 10th, 2011

Two and Two

Photographing the same subject twice.

A rediscovered interest in Robert Rauschenberg’s collages, particularly his twin paintings (Factum I and Factum II), had diverted my thinking in 2008 away from the single photographic image towards combinations of two or more. This, coupled with a desire to embark on a project that addressed the characteristics of the medium of photography itself, became the genesis of Two and Two – a series in which I have taken two photographs of the same subject and displayed them side by side.

Two and Two asserts that there is more than one way to take every photograph, and that two different photographs of the same subject represent two distinct choices. By presenting these two choices together, I aimed to define my decision-making process and thereby learn something about my use of photographic language.

I began by listing what I thought the intrinsic photographic strategies might be – and these became frequently used points of reference in the project. My list comprised the decisions any photographer might make to influence the perception of an image: point of view, cropping, choice of moment, intervention, focus, lighting, orientation and sequence. Although I wanted the process of taking the photographs to be spontaneous, inevitably I thought about the kind of situations which might illustrate these devices.

As I began photographing, I gradually accumulated a folder of diptychs which I frequently returned to when considering new combinations. I had quickly discovered that taking one photograph in anticipation of taking another meant holding at least two images in mind; and this stretched my capacity for previsualisation. The first photograph was taken whilst thinking of the second, and the second taken with reference to the first. Predictably some carefully considered diptychs failed whilst other, more whimsical, attempts were effortlessly successful. My camera’s subject matter was dictated by its potential to be photographed twice.

After two years I brought the project to completion. The editing process, perhaps unsurprisingly, offered the most valuable overview. The final selection does indeed offer some insight into photographic rhetoric. But what interests me more is the appearance of an underlying theme – a fascination with photography’s ability to describe and distort, conceal and reveal, dislocate and unite.

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A to B

Sunday, May 8th, 2011

A to B John MacLean

Forty-two photographs taken during 37 walks between the sites of Newgate prison and the Tyburn Tree, between 23 August 2009 and 3 February 2011.

In late 2009, a TV documentary about Stanley Kubrick caught my attention. The programme explained how Kubrick frequently shot more than 30 takes of one scene in order to ‘wear down’ the actors – to force them to work through the obvious approaches and find something new. I began to wonder if I could employ the basis of this process in my own work.

Looking at the 4ft wide map of London on my studio wall, I decided to choose two points (A and B), one east and one west, and take photographs as I walked repeatedly from one to the other. I would record each journey with GPS, and the line between the points (representing my directional choices) would be transcribed onto a map for each day – an apposite metaphor for my drifting thought process, perhaps.

Initially, I had planned to choose the points A and B arbitrarily by sticking a pin into the map. However, I had for some time been aware of the Tyburn Tablet, a memorial to the site of London’s ancient gallows near Marble Arch. The tablet, circular and set into the ground, resembles a full stop. And indeed it was a full stop for the thousands of condemned prisoners who were transported three miles from Newgate Prison in the east, to their demise on this site – a process that ended in 1783. Although I had no intention of producing a literal body of images concerning this historical event, I decided to reemploy these macabre points of arrival and departure, hoping their significance might add a subtle layer of influence to the images I produced.

In keeping with all of my projects, I photographed for two months, then ordered the images chronologically, and took an overview. Immediately, the progressive influence of two photographs I had made for an earlier project (City: Book Two) was clearly evident (cross-pollination between projects is something I relish). Perhaps these two images, Bloom and Nix, represented ‘unfinished business’, or what Charlotte Cotton calls ‘itchy scratchy’ photographs (the transitional pieces, the precursors of a new phase or project).

The ‘itchiness’ of these earlier photographs had arisen, I think, from the fact that they represented two embryonic strands of a new investigation.

Firstly, they were attempts at exploring the resonance of an image that looks from darkness into light. This is something I had been aware of in Eugene Smith’s photograph, A Walk to Paradise Garden (1946), and that was reinforced when I attended Anthony McCall’s Solid Lightworks at the Serpentine Gallery in 2008. Bloom and Nix were the first photographs where I decided to use light to silhouette an object rather than as a means of illuminating it (in this respect, I feel they are related to photograms: the image is formed by light that passes through an object to reach a light-sensitive medium, and everything else falls away to black).

Secondly, Bloom and Nix are abstract images. Abstraction had become intriguing because it addressed a question that had been on my mind: what makes a photograph a photograph? Specifically, if the information in an image is reduced to the point where the object-matter is unrecognisable, when is a photograph no longer a window to look through but an object in itself?

Why, however, did these two seams of inquiry, which had been lying undeveloped in a previous body of work, resurface in the making A to B? Certainly the journey I retraced – from life towards death – echoed with these earlier abstract images of darkness and light, and so offered a framework for exploration. As Wolfgang Tillmans said in his lecture at the Royal Academy this year: ‘If something taps on your consciousness three times, it is usually worth pursuing.’

John MacLean March 2011.

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City

Saturday, May 7th, 2011

City.

“The intention of this body of work is not to document specific cities or individuals – it is an endeavour to construct ‘my own city’ through photographs.

‘City’ is a place pieced together by utilising both photography’s assets and its limitations – it is consciously photographic.

The resulting worldview is a sparsely populated, absurd theatre. A stage set of caves, screens, portals and ambiguous landscapes. A ‘city’ built on the foundations of an inherently surreal medium that can’t help but veil, dislocate, displace and abstract.” John MacLean 2010.

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Neighbourhood

Friday, January 8th, 2010

John MacLean – Artist’s Statement

Neighbourhood. Sixty-nine photographs taken in John MacLean’s immediate locality of Tooting Bec, south-west London, between 1 March 2008 and 24 May 2009. Published as an A5, 44-page book.

“If I couldn’t find material to do an artwork walking around the block once, I wouldn’t do it” – Robert Rauschenberg 1955.

“Throughout the history of photography, practitioners have frequently looked to fresh, unfamiliar locations to generate new work. Inspired by the methodology Robert Rauschenberg employed to make his Combines, I decided to try an opposing strategy. Why not, I reasoned, photograph the place that was most familiar and least far-flung? So, I began to produce a large body of photographs made within a strict, five-minute walk of my house.

What emerged, over a period of 15 months, were the new approaches that surface when a photographer, forced into a corner, has to photograph his way out. The resulting book, Neighbourhood, is part diary, part archive, part lament on the passage of time, part psychogeography and part playful push-and-pull of photographic conventions.

The book’s preface takes the form of a seemingly random assemblage of black dots arranged in relation to the icon of a house: an allusion to a pattern of work. A date and time for each image is supplied in an index, thereby creating a diary of the thought process that evolved when each photograph taken was fed back to influence the next.

The self-imposed geographic limitation is central to Neighbourhood. It compelled me to explore, camera in hand, every narrow street and yard of my locality – places that had gradually become dulled by a layer of everyday familiarity. In the past, I had mustered a state of adrenalin-fueled, heightened awareness by travel to exotic places; suddenly this was conspicuously absent.

Walking had no destination, so a process of drift resulted. I began to slow down. I began to hope that by avoiding ideas that could be identified in advance, something unexpected might emerge. By returning to the same terrain repeatedly, minutiae and increments of change became apparent. Chance encounters were embraced whilst themes and patterns were allowed to crystallise. Process had become an integral influence on the work.

As months elapsed, it became apparent that my mood on any given day could react with the ambiance of my environment and influence the resulting images. Good work made on one day could colour the next, just as a lack of success might instigate a redoubling of effort. Frequently, the frustration at the shortness of my leash would catalyse new directions of thought. I discovered an appetite to photograph in a provocatively oblique way, a thrill in creating ambiguity between surface and depth, an interest in visual dislocations and a desire to elude the tyranny of the single, time-locked image. Increasingly, I welcomed allusions to the cinema and art that I was studying during the same period.

Finally sixty-nine images were chosen and stacked together, they constitute a curious archive: one that charts the movement of objects and people; that records growth and decay. A musing on photography’s potential to acquire value through its ability to outlast – in some cases immediately – the subject it records.

Addendum

A project running parallel with Neighbourhood required me to travel to Los Angeles in 2008. The intention was to visit locations of seminal photographs from the 1970s. Standing where Stephen Shore had set up his camera in 1975, holding a copy of the photograph he took that day, brought to mind Garry Winogrand’s famous statement, “I photograph to see what something looks like photographed” – a privilege only available to the photographer, unless the viewer is able to return to the original location, image in hand. This thought led to the inclusion of a map of image locations in Neighbourhood – a veiled invitation to discover the source of each photograph.

Subsequent serendipity revealed a new facet of the work with the arrival of Google Street View. Now each of my photographs can be compared, on the internet, with those seen through the dispassionate eye of a camera designed solely to collect objective information.” John MacLean 2009.

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