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.

“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.” The Editors, Source Magazine.

“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. The camera allows my internal world to overlap with the external – it fuses the two together – to create a third place. Forms and chance encounters are recorded, and these become a catalogue of my ideas and values.” John MacLean 2009.

Statement:

A figure, seen from above, draws a line in the sand. Workers dutifully engage in their Sisyphean tasks. A commuter advances towards the viewer, the time on his watch legible; he is doubled in a softly, distorted reflection. An Edenic pastiche provides a wry framing for a couple engaged in a duel of digital communication. The screened image of a mother and child struggles for recognition from the minimum of information supplied. Here, transient traces of natural light are awarded the same status as the city’s absurd monuments. In this microcosm of calmness and spatial ambiguity, nothing is perfect, nothing lasts and nothing is finished.

City is a place empty of the qualities most easily celebrated. Everyday objects are liberated from the drudgery of their existence, frequently forming a rapport with other objects. 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.

City’s population either shelter in solitude, or strive to make their voices heard. The isolated everyman moves from place to place, obscured by screens, rarely facing the camera, watched over by the urban monolith. Traces of his ambition are in evidence behind glass, taped to walls, cut into snow. Fragments of narrative combine with abstractions, tempting the viewer to create meaning from inconclusive evidence.

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.” John MacLean 2009.