The Photographic Works of John MacLean by Wayne Ford

Wednesday, August 10th, 2011

The Photographic Works of John MacLean by Wayne Ford.

Over the past few months I’ve had a number of conversations with photographers, curators, and others involved in the world of photography. Whilst none of these conversations has had a fixed point of departure or theme, they became linked through a singular coincidence, with each of these people recommending that I look at the work of one photographer, John MacLean.

Born in England, MacLean spent part of his childhood in both the United States and Canada, taking his first photograph at the age of 14 after encountering a copy of American Images: Photography 1945-80 (Viking, 1985), a book edited by Peter Turner former editor of Creative Camera, and featuring the work of Garry Winogrand (1928-1984), Robert Frank, Lewis Baltz, and John Gossage, the later having a significant influence on the young photographer, with MacLean remarking today, that Gossage is the one photographer whose work he views on a regular basis.

Having initially studied mathematics, physics and geology, MacLean went on to study photography at the University of Derby, and following a period working at the Royal College of Art, he launched his freelance career in 1998. Today, his work has been acquired by numerous private collections and The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, as well as being exhibited internationally, most recently at the Flowers Gallery, London.

In 2007, he self-published his first book, 21 Recent Photographs, and the following year released, 48 Recent Photographs (Hunter & James, 2008), both these books feature colour images from his City series, an expansive body of work produced around the world. But MacLean does not seek to to document a specific city or its occupants, but to create or construct his own metropolis through a series of images, allowing his own ‘internal world to overlap with the external.’ It is here that he fuses the two together to create a third place, where forms and chance encounters are recored, becoming ‘a catalogue of my ideas and values.’

The themes explored in his first two books, are continued and overlap with the third and fourth, City: Book One (Hunter & James, 2009); and City: Book Two (Hunter & James, 2010). Throughout these four books, we see MacLean utilise real street names from the cities in which he works, for the titles of his work, with each of these street names reflecting a personal influence on the artist, names like, Brandt, Walker, Lynch, and of course Gossage.

The ‘City is a microcosm of calmness, but one empty of the qualities most easily celebrated,’ suggests MacLean, who liberates the everyday object from the ‘drudgery’ of its existence in his images, and in doing so, ‘Each questions its own history — how it came to reach this place. Here, the photograph can exalt a hosepipe into an object of affection or recast a tree into a flattened, synthetic structure. A machine registers as a nocturnal beacon of light, a collection of trophies seem to have waited their whole lives to come together. In the City, the aesthetics of science are cherished in a world of geometries, energy, interference patterns and diffracted colour. Random motion distributes seedlings on a white car bonnet. A block of ice radiates before entropy erases its outline. Underground, neon light generates a deep glow of blue. Chemicals bleed across concrete whilst the camera records the quality of light and the quality of surface.’

As we can see by the titles utilised in the earlier work, MacLean’s influences are far wider than artists simply working within the realms of the photographic medium, and in his next series, we see the influence of American artist Robert Rauschenberg, who in the 1950s established a simple methodology for his Combines. ‘If I couldn’t find material to do an artwork walking around the block once, I wouldn’t do it,’ an approach reflected in MacLean’s series of 69 images produced between March 2008 and May 2009. Whilst his City series was produced around the world, Neighbourhood (Hunter & James, 2009), saw the photographer document the streets around where he lives in southwest London. Marked with the distinctive visual signature now so familiar of his work, each image is simply titled by date and time, with the non-chronological narrative forming part diary and part archive, but it is also ‘part lament on the passage of time, part psychogeography and part playful push-and-pull of photographic conventions,’ writes MacLean.

The interest or influence in Rauschenberg’s work can also be felt in, Two and Two (Hunter & James, 2010), MacLean’s sixth book, where he turns away from the single photographic image, or ‘decisive moment,’ towards a multi-dimensional view which presents two distinct views of the same subject. ‘Two and Two asserts that there is more than one way to take every photograph,’ writes MacLean, ‘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.

In his most recent book, A to B (Hunter & James, 2011), the graphic quality that is seen throughout MacLean’s work, is taken to a new level, becoming more abstract in nature, a sense heighten by a restricted colour palette of rich blacks and vivid sky blue. Having watch a documentary about Stanley Kubrick in late 2009, in which it was revealed that the director 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, MacLean began to explore how he could employ the basis of this process in his own work.

As the title suggests this work depicts a journey, ‘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,’ writes MacLean, who in total made 37 journeys between these two points. Although initially intending to select these points at random, MacLean had for sometime been aware of the Tyburn Tablet, a memorial to the site London’s ancient gallows near Marble Arch.

‘The tablet, circular and set into the ground, resembles a full stop, writes MacLean, ‘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.’ A to B, is not a literal interpretation of this historical journey, but by selecting these two ‘macabre points of arrival and departure, hoping their significance might add a subtle layer of influence to the images I produced.’

The 42 photographs produced between August 2009 and February 2011, are arranged chronologically, and one can immediately see a progressive link to two earlier images from MacLean’s City: Book Two, Bloom and Nix are both marked by an abstract quality, which may represent in MacLean’s words ‘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,’ says MacLean. These two embryonic strands, can be characterised in two forms, firstly the already mentioned abstract nature, which addressed a question that had been on the photographers 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?’ And secondly, we see an attempt to explore ‘the resonance of an image that looks from darkness into light.’ Something that MacLean had been aware of in W Eugene Smith’s (1918-1978) A Walk to Paradise Garden (1946), and in Anthony McCall’s Solid Lightworks.

For MacLean, Bloom and Nix were the first photographs where he utilised light to silhouette an object rather than as a means of illuminating it, and it is this approach that is seen throughout A to B, the latest chapter in the work of one of British photography’s most exciting artists.
48 Photographs, City: Book One, Neighbourhood, City: Book Two, Two and Two, and  A to B are published by Hunter & James, each in an edition of 800, and are available from Phototitles.

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‘A to B’ Artist’s statement

Saturday, March 5th, 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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‘A to B’. Book review in Source issue 68.

Friday, March 4th, 2011

By Daniel Jewesbury in Source, The Photographic Review, Autumn 2011.

For hundreds of years, until the end of the 18th century, condemned prisoners in London were brought west from Newgate Prison in the City, through Holborn and the infamous rookery of St. Giles, along Oxford Street, to the large gallows at Tyburn, on the present-day site of Marble Arch. John MacLean’s A to B is a symbolic revisiting of this dolorous route.

His series of views, produced on a number of walks between the two historic sites, comprise abstracted shapes silhouetted against the sky – the interlaced struts of a viaduct, densely clumped foliage, single wandering branches – so that almost the entire book features only black and blue. These shapes become suggestive once one knows the context of the book: a twig curls round to form a noose, two rough squares of blue resemble eyeholes in a mask. Most threateningly, towering trees swathe entire pages in black, and at the end of the book a (waiting?) crowd is caught under a huge black wedge.

MacLean’s approach to the photobook, as an affective, abstract investigation of a place and the spirits inhabiting it, is powerful and novel. The photographs at first appear to be totally non-representational, since any foreground detail in them is entirely erased; yet they convey simple, intimate meanings, the shapes and patterns invoking the familiar, repeated nightmare of going inexorably to one’s execution, just as they re-create a residual memory that might almost have been found, concealed, in the place itself.

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‘Two and Two’ review by Francis Hodgson

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

Playing Games with Real Life

By Francis Hodgson

Published: June 16, 2010.

John MacLean is a commercial architectural photographer by trade who publishes little monographs of thoughtful pictures as his personal work. The latest is called Two and Two and is on view at London’s Flowers East. The principle is straightforward. Two pictures are made of the same scene and printed together. They might be separated by a few moments, or they might be separated by a few hours. The process is deeply formalist, but not at all dry.

The artist has referred to Robert Rauschenberg’s twin paintings “Factum I” and “Factum II” as a starting point. But photography has always looked at controlled series. The release of work in series by artists such as John Baldessari or Ed Ruscha is after all merely a continuation of the natural outcome of roll film passed through the printing and editing process.

In MacLean’s hands, the doubling is normally purely photographic. He will shift focus, reframe, use a reflection, sometimes simply move the camera a few feet to get a new take on the scene. The small effects can be very strong: a wavy line of shadow up some steps is straightened in the companion view. A (beautiful) postmodernist image of a “no parking” sign becomes a high-period Hollywood lighting cameraman’s version of the same thing simply by moving round the corner. There is a games-playing element to all this: it can take a few moments to spot the connection between views.

It’s not all games, though. MacLean’s procedure has a solid cumulative effect. He doesn’t ask us, pair by pair, to decide between a “good” picture and one that is worse. He asks us instead to suspend for a time the too-rapid picking and discarding that we all do in defence against the sheer volume of photographic imagery that we see.

In Phoenix, Arizona, MacLean made a parody pair of images after the US photographer Lee Friedlander and suddenly an ordinary road crossing is a piece of art history. And while he was at it, MacLean curled the branches of a tree – which adjoin in the pair – into a shape more glorious than nature had given it in either picture alone.

Slightly further east in London, at Maureen Paley’s gallery, Hannah Starkey’s show is more conventional. This is an apparent overturning of the law by which art exhibitions are radical in inverse proportion to the rent. As such, it is in character: Starkey has a neat trick of consistently making old-fashioned pictures without losing the commercial allure of a certain edgy cachet. In fact, she has ploughed much the same furrow for quite some time; a radical change in her ideas may be overdue.

Having said that, this pared-down little show is close to being brilliant. If, as I rather hope, it is a swansong for this work, it is a good one. Starkey’s shtick for years has been to make set-up or staged photographs, invariably of youngish women, in which an implied narrative is caught by a single picture. It is crafted to look as though it might have been just a snapshot, and the effect has always been to make the viewer fill in the gaps of an apparently dramatic story whose beginnings and end we were not told. It is a process that many other photographers have explored but here, in five pictures made within the past year or so, Starkey has finally found real consistent form.

Each study is of a single woman, physically isolated in a still moment of contemplation. The picture spaces are deliberately, even lovingly, complicated. One woman, for example, studies her own appearance in a window as she smokes outside a blandly labelled television office building. She wears muted clothes, a dark trouser suit (it might be a uniform) and masculine shoes. She stands in a darkened doorway. Next to but not visible to her is a window that reflects a gleaming stretch of tarmac with a dozen different kinds of shining grey in it. The inescapable thought is that this woman is missing out. Something’s there, but not for her.

The only picture that has a title is a self-portrait. A figure holds a camera to her eye in a window, surrounded by white frames of an industrial kind, perhaps aluminium windows. Whatever they are, they are puns on the business of making framed imagery. Is she outside and reflected, or inside and screened? Hard to tell. What is most arresting is the sheer number of masks between us and the artist: the window itself, a clear plastic sheet, draped, a backlighting effect that keeps her face in darkness, and the camera. Defensive? She’s inaccessible.

These are very good studies of wistfulness, of the private person visible in public spaces. Like MacLean’s, their complexities are deliberate and well-mastered and their references to earlier pictures rich and helpful. Like MacLean’s, they show that to be a photographer in the age of the mobile phone takes more than just equipment. Neither photographer really photographs the world. Each is more interested in remaking it. By properly photographic means, naturally. John MacLean runs until June 26, www.flowersgalleries.com; Hannah Starkey continues until July 18, www.maureenpaley.com

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‘Two and Two’ article: British journal of Photography

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

Before and After

July 2010

“In Shimmer, I relaxed and recognised that it’s about the moment before and after as much as it’s about the ‘perfect’ moment,” said Paul Graham in a recent interview for Aperture, referencing his 2007 tome, A Shimmer of Possibility. Made up of 12 small books, published by Steidl, it includes various sequences of images, in which Graham shot the same subject from a variety of angles and distances. “Could I be the devil’s advocate and argue that this sequence represents a more natural way of seeing; that we as photographers have become too obsessed with looking for this ’special moment’, this one punctum in life?” he asked.

Graham is not alone in his thinking, as sequential images have become something of a small trend recently. George Georgiou won BJP’s Project Assistance awards last month with a proposal that includes pictures captured close together and then displayed alongside each other in pairs and groups. Examples include a woman walking down the street towards the camera, and candid portraits shot from the same angle over a short period of time.

“It’s something I’ve been playing with for the last five years,” he says. “I’m fascinated with comparing the same space over time and seeing how it changes.”

John MacLean, whose images are shown here, just finished a project called Two and Two, in which he experimented with “different ways of shooting the same thing”. It was shown at London’s Flowers East gallery in June. “I was inspired by Robert Rauschenberg but also, perhaps in a spirit of contrariness, by William Eggleston. I had read an interview with him saying, ‘I believe in taking one picture of one picture’, and it stuck in my mind. I began to wonder what taking two pictures of one picture and printing them side by side could show.”

Why this trend right now? It’s partly to do with digital technology – Georgiou points out that digital capture has made shooting multiple images more affordable, while Graham says that he was part-inspired by flicking through images on his computer. But maybe it’s also just time for one of photography’s most famous dictates to be reappraised. “Someone I know, who is working on the 2010 Henri Cartier-Bresson retrospective at MoMA and has seen his contact sheets has said to me, ‘The decisive moment is bullshit’,” said Graham in Aperture. “There are ten pictures before and ten pictures after every one of them. He actually took 30 pictures of people leaping over that puddle.”

“I’m not sure that I ever really cared for the concept of the decisive moment,” agrees MacLean. “It has always sounded rather rigid. I think it is far more exciting to consider that there is more than one way for a photographer to take any picture, and exploring that fully means exploring the medium itself.”

British Journal of Photography, Diane Smyth. July 2010.

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‘Two and Two’ artist’s statement

Monday, June 21st, 2010

Two and Two

Photographing the same subject twice between 2008 and 2010.

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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‘City’. An interview by Deana Vanagan of Artwise Curators

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

Interview between Deana Vanagan (Artwise Curators May 2010) and John MacLean on the occasion of the publication of City: Book Two.

DV: How important is it that the essence of the city (ie, the location) comes through in your images?

JM: In this series, my goal isn’t one of documenting a specific city or giving my impression of a particular place, but of creating a city of my own – a ‘city’ that only exists in these photographs.

DV: Which element do you feel is more dominant in your work – the essence of the ‘city’ or that of the photographer?

JM: I don’t think photographs can ever escape their subject (what was in front of the lens) to become completely about the photographer’s ideas – the best we can do is explore the overlap between the two. It may be the easiest medium to pick up and become competent in, but perhaps photography is the most difficult in which to find self-expression. That is to do with the tyranny of the lens-machine, I think. In answer to your question, I would hope that the thoughts behind an image are more dominant than what the image depicts.

DV: Is this more conscious or intuitive?

JM: Recently I have been consciously trying to move away from ‘subject-driven’ photographs towards photographs that address particular characteristics of the medium itself.

DV: Which characteristics of the medium are you specifically interested in exploring? And why?

JM: All characteristics of the medium that are camera based – I’m not interested in computer post-production. I am talking about the photographic decisions that can skew the perception of an image to a totally new angle, such as cropping, point of view or lighting. This interests me because it concerns the unavoidable, underlying subject of photography which is always representation itself.

DV: Does your own state of mind on a particular day influence the photograph? And if so, how?

JM: I’m sure it does, but I don’t think I could tell you exactly how. I wish I knew. I know that in order to make photographs I prefer to be in a state of natural alertness rather than forced alertness. I decide to make an image when I recognise a quality I have been looking for. Later, when I look at my own photographs, each one has a palpable sense of relief associated with it.

DV: Humour creeps into a number of your images. Is this indicative of your ability to recognise humorous situations or do you seek to create a humorous quality in a particular shot?

JM: I don’t set out to create humorous photographs and in fact, if someone recognises an image as humorous it often comes as a surprise to me. I find humour in some of John Baldessari’s work and for me, it is frequently because the ordinary is made to seem absurd or the absurd to seem ordinary. So perhaps there is something similar happening in my work – the bitter-sweet absurdity of everyday situations.

DV: Minimalism appears to play a huge part in framing your images. How conscious are you of this?

JM: I have a background in science so I often think of my projects as investigations or research. A scientist will pare back an experiment to the essential elements – anything superfluous just muddies the water. Whereas in photography, the temptation is always to record too much because the camera does the work. I have collected a few books of Ed Ruscha’s work, and the audacious simplicity in his paintings has been an influence.

DV: In many of Ed Ruscha’s paintings the pictorial subject matter often becomes abstracted due to the dark shadows and strong influence of light which negates detail. Is this something that influences your choice of image-taking and/or do you emphasis this aspect during the developing/edit stages of you works?

JM: This would be something I would think about when shooting, and it might be something I emphasise when processing an image. I am looking for ways to isolate elements of what I see around me – using strong light and deep shadow are one way of achieving that. I am not trying to clarify the subject, just produce an image which has a resonance.

DV: When you are looking for subject matter or identifying an image to take are you conscious of certain paintings that you have seen or been influenced by?

JM: No, never. It is something that is far away in the background. I do my research beforehand but that is left behind when I start working. I like to photograph very quickly – and I hope that this also keeps the process intuitive. Later, I find that I can recognise influences quite readily in some of my photographs, but others are much more difficult to untangle. Other than painting, I would say that cinema is very influential, especially in terms of lighting. The titles of the photographs in City are street names and they are frequently chosen to reference these influences.

DV: You deploy the painterly concept of ‘figure / ground ambiguity’ when constructing some of your photographs. How conscious is this?

JM: It is something that I discovered in a roundabout way by making mistakes when taking photographs. A negative can only record a certain amount of detail from highlight to shadow – if there is an exceptionally bright object within a dark scene the shadows go to black and leave the object floating in ambiguous space. The result is an object that can be perceived as projecting out of the picture plane or receding into it.

DV: How important is repetition in your work?

JM: On the positive side, a form that begins to repeat itself during the production of a series may be an unconscious motif that is rising to the surface. In this case I would say it is something that should be used – at least until it becomes a habit. On the negative side, if it is a conscious repetition, the repetition may have become a refuge from trying something new, so it needs to be developed or discarded.

DV: Do you seek to break a mould or are you more comfortable working within defined restrictions you have set for yourself?

JM: Recently completed projects have incorporated quite definite restrictions. For example, Neighbourhood required me to take photographs only within a five-minute walk of my house; Two and Two required me to produce 40 diptychs where I photograph the same subject twice. Within these self-imposed parameters, however, there must be room to ‘drift’ – to allow one image to lead to another and the project to change course. City has only one restriction – that I photograph urban environments. It is, by intention, the most unruly of my projects.

DV: Would you describe your work as ‘found images’? Do you discover works as you go about your day walking, cycling, or commuting? Could you please explain your process?

JM: All of my photographs could be described as ‘found images’ in the sense that I don’t photograph constructed or staged situations. However, even though there is an element of chance in my work, I wouldn’t describe my discoveries as serendipitous – they are images I have been looking for in one way or another.

In general, I photograph in concentrated periods, say ten days, and try to avoid distractions within that time. I have worked in California recently because ten consecutive days of good weather is not unusual there and the continuity this affords is invaluable. Outside these intense periods of work I don’t produce anything, nor do I reconnoitre places to assess their potential.

DV: How does your movement through different neighbourhoods and areas affect your finished works?

JM: Recently I have been trying to slow down and cover less ground. It occurred to me that in walking long distances I might be missing more than I was discovering. In slowing my movement through a city I hope my photographs will become less about recording ready-made subjects and more about actually making photographs with the camera, where what is in front of the lens is largely irrelevant.

DV: Once you find an appropriate site for the structure of one of your photographs, do you wait for the ‘right’ time of day to bring it to life? How often do you wait for the desired light?

JM: I never wait for the light to be right – I like to work too quickly for that. What directs my progress through a city is the search for good light – so if a fork in the road appears, I choose the road best lit. I see a pool of great light, head towards it and see what I can make with it.

DV: Do you carry this sentiment into the editing room? Describe your editing process.

JM: I think of the editing room as a place where a much more protracted, considered process takes place. To edit the finished photographs, a certain period of time must elapse so that the images can become somewhat unfamiliar – then a process of reacquainting myself with the photographs can begin. This is necessary because I want to try to see the work as someone else may see it – as much as that is possible.

DV: What kind of qualities must a photograph have to make it through your editing process?

JM: I recently read that a number of photographs Diane Arbus made, and then rejected, were found in her archive. On the back of each print was written ‘Not complicated enough’. I think a number of my works fall at the ‘Not complicated enough’ fence in the early stages of my edit. I am not trying to disorientate or leave the viewer rudderless, but I am interested in images that require deciphering.

In general though, a photograph that has more than one thing to say or can function on more than one level will be a strong contender to make it through an edit.

DV: How do you determine the size of the works you make? Is this something that you think about when taking your photographs?

JM: No, this would be one of the last decisions I would make in the process. I think large prints should only be made if there is a discernable advantage in doing so.

DV: Why do you make books?

JM: Publishing City as a series of books gives punctuation to the project, creating small units within the whole. I will be working on City for a number of years, so each unit offers me a chance to pause and contemplate what may be missing and can be addressed in the next book.

I have always been impressed by the book production of Japanese photographers – specifically Araki. Takashi Homma has produced a beautiful book called Tokyo and My Daughter, and I adopted its exercise-book format in my productions. The unit cost of such a small book means I can afford to give a large proportion away, so the books have become a great way of sharing the work.

DV: You have mentioned that Robert Rauschenberg was a key reference for your last two books (Neighbourhood and Two and Two). Does he continue to influence you in City: Book Two?

JM: Not especially. Although I have been thinking about his statement that he wanted to work in the gap between art and life, because that gap may just be where photography works too.

DV: Which other artists were you looking at during the time you were shooting images for Book Two?

JM: I had been looking at James Turrell among many. The influence of his work is something I can readily see in a least two of the images in City: Book Two, Coacoochee and Taub Loop. The appeal of Turrell’s work is two-fold: his interest in the material nature of light, and his investigation into the influence of light on our perception. Both are central to the nature of photography. I have also been looking at painters who use photography: Baldessari, Bacon, Hockney, Richter and Ruscha.

DV: Who else do you admire? And why?

JM: I admire artists who, even though they have acquired a high level of recognition for their work, change tack in order to continue learning. Stanley Kubrick comes to mind.

DV: What do you feel has been the most prominent shift for you, in your process or in your work, between publishing City: Book One and City: Book Two?

JM: There are two shifts that I recognise: one is a move further towards abstraction. I think I have understood that I cannot dictate what a viewer will understand from looking at my photographs and, as I do not set out to send a clear message anyway, I worry less and less about trying to do so.

The other is a realisation that photography is particularly well suited to themes of perception: exaggeration, distortion, illusion, error, anomaly, etc. And that the investigation of how the perception of a photograph can be altered requires no other tools than those already in the camera.

DV: What is next for you? Have you already started thinking about how to approach City: Book Three?

JM: I will be working on two other projects before I start Book Three. I hope to cross-pollinate some of the ideas that arise there into new City works.

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‘City’. IANN magazine introduction

Monday, May 24th, 2010

Text by Editor in chief – Jeong Eun Kim.

“Nameless Cities”. IANN contemporary photography magazine. Special Issue No.4.

Modernity is not a dazzling spectacle or a superficial reality; modernity represents both. – Baudelaire

As we experience the rapid expansion of urbanization, we can say that modernity is an era of cities. If a person was to claim that life in the ‘city’ rather than a ‘nature’ –based lifestyle was preferable and more familiar, we would probably agree without a moment’s hesitation. Moreover, the number of people who assimilate into the city increases daily, causing a wide unification of social constructs. In particular, the major cities of nations experiencing fast growth in the wave of globalization, such as Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai and Honk Kong, are in the driving force of development. They are also recognized as emblems and indicators of the economic strength of a nation. At the same time, we are constantly reminded of issues surrounding urbanization and that cities experience diseases brought on by consumerism and greed, or problems related to discrimination and division. Although order and organization create a basic outline for the formation of a city based on social understanding, countless complications can also reside in the deep structures and divisions of modernity.

Just as Baudelaire stated that modernity is contradictory and unstable, the image of a city is also comprised of a dual construct that is variable and dynamic, forming an intersection of ‘order and ‘chaos’. This special issue brings together different cities that have been formed by rapid industrial development. Nine artists presented in volume 4 reveal a parallel gaze on the city, rendering subjects in a way that is neither beautiful nor vulgar. Instead, each image transforms what was once familiar into an unaccustomed cityscape.

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‘Neighbourhood’ interview by Source, The Photographic Review

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

An interview conducted by Source editor Richard West which accompanied the publication of Neighbourhood in issue 61.

A commitment to place is a common theme for the three photographers in this issue. John MacLean has chosen to operate only within a five minute walking radius of his house in south London. A process that has forced him to re-explore a place dulled by familiarity. Pacing out the same terrain repeatedly he picks up on the minutiae and incremental changes in his neighbourhood.

Q: What is your neighbourhood?

A: For the purposes of this project, I defined my neighbourhood as an area within a five-minute walk of my house.

Q: Do you think of the work as a particular ‘project’ with a start and end date, and an objective?

A: Initially the project was just an exercise. I thought that I would use it to explore the effect of a strict geographical limitation on the type of photographs that I made. I just wanted to drift and see what happened. After about four months I could see that something more interesting might be emerging.

Q: What started you on this project?

A: It was the most difficult thing that I could think of doing. So, I thought that it would do me good.

Q: Why did you suppose the project would be particularly difficult?

A: I had begun to realise that when I couldn’t find a photograph to make in a particular place, I took the easy option – I moved on to a new place. This had become a habit. Continually moving on is exhausting – but moreover I questioned whether it was always the right thing to do. I wanted to break a habit.

Q: Are all the pictures taken in places that you would usually pass?

A: I was already familiar with each place through day-to-day experience, but never through ‘switched-on’ photographic experience.

Q: A number of your pictures are of the same thing photographed more than once, are these over a long period of time?

A: One pair of images is separated by only one second while another pair is separated by seven months.

Q: When you take a picture in a place do you plan to come back and photograph it again?

A: No, it is not planned. It only happens if I pass by that same place again and notice that something significant (to me) has changed.

Q: Can you say something more about what ’switched on’ photographic experience is, how do you switch on and what is the difference in the state of mind?

A: I think that in order to take photographs we have to be able to mentally process appearance into image at an incredible rate. Only by doing that can photographers sort through the myriad of possibilities that confront them. So, to be ‘switched on’ is something like seeing the world as a series of stills. It’s not a relaxed state of mind, so it takes a conscious effort to remain ‘switched on’.

Q: Why did you photograph the moon in a loop of rope?

A: I had been watching Jacque Tati’s film Playtime. A vicar is shown standing in front of a sign that reads “Drugstore”. The letter “o” becomes a halo over his head. Tati’s films are full of photography’s tricks.

Q: Your pictures don’t have many people in them.

A: I often try to make photographs that question how people interact with their surroundings and each other. However, my photographs are not of constructed situations, so these telling moments can be infrequent.

Q: Are any of your pictures jokes?

A: I never start out wanting to make visual jokes, but I am interested in both errors of perception and the absurd, and this often results in quite humorous images.

Q: What is absurd in a picture?

A: A subject can be absurd in itself. For example, a house that is physically divided down the middle because the two owners are in disagreement. But more interesting perhaps is an absurdity created because the camera excludes context – either the context which is outside the frame or the context of what happened in the moment before, or after, the photograph was taken.

Q: Can you describe some of the things that would motivate you to stop and take a picture?

A: Although I don’t leave the house with any preconceived notion of what to photograph in mind, I do have a mental reservoir of images and ideas that I am constantly topping-up through a process of scavenging – books, films etc. Anything with a particular resonance may be retained for future use – some less consciously that others. When I am trying to take pictures I will stop when I see an overlap with something that I have already been thinking about – it’s like a ‘hit’ of recognition. I visualise what the subject in front of me will look like as a photograph, and if it seems exciting, I take it.

Q: Why do you photograph strangely shaped trees?

A: A plant or tree that has contorted itself in the search for light has a curiously human quality to me – a kind of vulnerable ambition. It also seems reasonable to record distorted objects with a medium whose fascination (for me) lies in its ability to distort.

Q: Do you see the things you are photographing as sculptures sometimes?

A: No, I always see them as photographs.

Q: Are you interested in photographing shapes, patterns or abstraction, and if so, why?

A: Only if they occur in combination with other ideas. A photograph of a shape is not enough on its own, even if that shape offers visual pleasure. But if it is visually arresting and throws up a question, it makes a stronger image.

Q: When you photograph something, like a pavement in two states (wet and dry), or the movement of the sun, are you recording the passage of time?

A: In these examples my primary interest was in trying to photograph phenomena. I wanted to explore whether it is possible to photograph the effect of a rise in temperature, the earth’s movement, a gust of wind or a cloud moving over the sun.

Q: How do you edit your pictures?

A: In two ways: from the beginning, I edit as I work. That way, as the folder of successful photographs grows, it can inform the direction that I take from there on. Finally, when I have 60 images that I am happy with, I edit them down to 40. Usually this edit runs in parallel with the sequencing of a book, so it is a process that I like to ruminate over for a couple of months.

Q: Do you find the things you photograph beautiful?

A: Occasionally. However, I don’t find that ‘beautiful’ subject matter is a great help to me at all.

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‘Neighbourhood’ artist’s statement

Tuesday, December 29th, 2009

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 taken 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.

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