Brea Souders: Eleven Years. Published by Saint Lucy Books
The artist’s first monograph brings together her wide ranging approach, process, and strategies to reimagine what a photograph can be, and what it might mean.
With the publication of Eleven Years by Saint Lucy Books, Brea Souders’ restless interrogation of the photographic medium and its materials is celebrated. Her inventiveness eschews signature style thus risking what conventional wisdom casually dictates, and gives license to perform an inquiry without formula and reliance upon the habitual. It is a methodology that foregrounds the thought process rather than the appearance, and siphons experience and observation into something unfamiliar.
The photographs cull from reservoirs of impermanence, illusion and shards of memory and grief, and engage the archive, map, the picture postcard; the fragment. Her process is nomadic rather than sedentary, cultivating a renewed understanding of the artist’s task.
A few weeks shy of the book’s release (and Souders’ opening reception and book launch at Silverstein Gallery) former SVA Photography and Video chair and Dear Dave Magazine founder and Editor in Chief Stephen Frailey speaks with Souders about the many angles of her career and practice.
Brea Souders in conversation with Stephen Frailey
© Brea Souders. From the series The End of the Road
Stephen Frailey: The gorgeous new book of your work, Eleven Years, amplifies the aesthetic variations of your practice. I am struck by the investigative nature of it; the sense of inquiry with an agenda which is open. Is this accurate?
Brea Souders: Definitely. Photography is embedded in every aspect of our culture and, like a mirror, it reflects slices of ourselves and our histories back at us. You can drop in nearly anywhere. In that investigative process, I'm interested in the way that we interpret, organize, and make sense of these reflections. How we shape meaning and how we converse with the images in our lives and of our lives. The medium is full of truths and falsehoods, and it fascinates and frustrates me endlessly.
The versatility of the medium allows me to shift styles and strategies with each project. What will best deliver the idea or convey the message. In a book spanning a baker's decade, this way of working comes into relief. Autobiography, the archive, digital space and identity, grief, illusion, impermanence, mapping, memory, the natural world, the postcard, and voyeurism are some of the themes and photographic styles I explore in the book.
© Brea Souders. From the series Vistas
© Brea Souders. From the series End of the Road
Frailey: Are these themes evident when you begin, or do they become named as you work with material?
Souders: For me, I have to respect flexibility even when it goes against my nature. I usually have a conceptual framework or set of interests to begin with, but unanticipated discoveries or procedures push or carry those into new territory. The effects on my initial approach cascade from there. Nothing is fixed, and there are no perfect outcomes, and I want my work to mirror that. Which is not easy, because I’m obsessive. And drawn to structure. So there is always tension there, between inherent determination and irresistible fluidity.
Embracing both can make you feel like you joined The Flying Wallendas. Acrobatics aside, in the end the images that keep me up at night are the ones I know I just need to push further. Sometimes I’ll subject those to a series of tests or experiments. I do that to better understand where they came from and what they're saying, and what they're not and where they need to go. It's a conversation between us about their outer and inner worlds. And it's how I grapple with the space any viewer will need to join in and experience on their terms.
Sunburn In Naples © Brea Souders
Frailey: Well, you have just articulated with great clarity the process of learning from the work, which depends upon encouraging its autonomy and a watchfulness, both. And then you mention this space for the viewer to join. Is it related? And would you also please, amplfy this thought that ‘there are no perfect outcomes’?
Souders: I remember being influenced by the mathematical idea of an “elegant solution.” For me, it's a way of making a simple entry to a complex world that effectively conveys the work. Which then reminds me of the filmmaker Fassbinder. He talked about each film being part of building a bigger story. And that making all his films was like building a house one piece at a time. One's a wall. The other is a part of a ceiling. Then another wall. Then a door.
That resonates with me because I think the viewer can enter the work from any part of it, and I'm aware that they will. The work is effective if the entry is simple. The viewer can then experience it in their way and bring other worlds of complexity.
There are no perfect outcomes because there are no ideal entries. It's not breadcrumbs in a forest. It's an invitation to a forest.
A spread from Brea Souders’ Eleven Years
Frailey: Thinking of the achievements of film directors is quite useful in placing the variations of your projects, as we do seem to accept that directors will be engaged with different genres, say, over time, shifting film technique with the narrative. I’m not sure that visual artists request that flexibility. Was the organization of Eleven Years a given from the beginning of the project?
Souders: It all started with Mark Alice Durant, who reached out to me with a vision for the book that would bring my projects together in shared space. He suggested it contain two pieces of writing that would act as pillars: a critical essay and a conversational profile. We also decided to include a short story he had written that I thought just fit perfectly. This was in late 2019, so the structure of the book has been set from the beginning. The editing of images, on the other hand, was a lengthy process. Mark and the book designer, Guenet Abraham, worked closely with me to shape the book and I am immensely grateful for their contributions and what turned into a running collaboration that stretched out over months.
Organizing the book was done primarily during the pandemic, and we included a project that I worked on during that time, bringing it right up to date. They would make a case for certain images that I had abandoned and we also made the choice to cut some images that I love--it was a little like having hard talks with your family. In the end, we wanted to spotlight the conceptual and aesthetic filaments running through all of my work.
© Brea Souders. From the series Film Electric
Frailey: To return to a few of these filaments you have referred to earlier: autobiography, identity, grief, impermanence; I am aware of what seems to be the fragmentary consistency of the work, of parts disassembling. As viewer, I feel a bit like an archeologist, but it is emotional, not necessarily cultural.
Souders: Emotional archaeology is necessary. What sits on the surface shifts from project to project, but the seams of personal history, creative method, and cultural motive run deeper, and tangle. For example, in Film Electric I subject detritus from my film archive to static electricity and clear acetate to create dimensional, unpredictable, and transitory forms. When I began that work, I had just lost both of my parents, and there was chaos and realignment. It entered my process and projects.
At the same time I saw how images online were circulating in newly random and surprising ways. I related to that fragmentation. That splintered reality has only increased since 2012, when I began the work. I think of the film cut ups I used as photographic dust. Like something inherently part of us, but strayed from their original source. Sticky but also kinetic. Disintegrated but lingering. Destroyed but haunting.
The intact images we see daily can have this effect as well. In Counterforms, I used personal effects and props from ancestral countries as well as my parents’ home to physically act out abstract and layered concepts relating to cultural heritage and dislocation, history and art history, family and loss.
Test Tubes © Brea Souders
Frailey: What is striking, I think, is the dialogue you create in both your process and in the work itself between a materiality of the medium and a somewhat inchoate depth of feeling, the physical and memorial.
Souders: The materiality of the medium is appealing to me, in part because I've come to trust it. Everything else, however, lives on shaky ground. I think that tension may be why many artists prefer to discuss process over semantics. Regardless of approach, the expectation frequently remains that photography should explain, illustrate, or improve reality.
My work accepts and engages with this, but I also actively make space for absence. For the ambiguous, the transitory, the less fully formed and even the irrational. Which isn't my taking some kind of stand. There is a tremendous generative energy in those spaces, and that gravity affects me. To better understand the land of the indirect and the oblique, for a time I studied and even became certified in Eriksonian hypnosis. That had my own semantics doing cartwheels, especially with some of my earlier projects.
Knight © Brea Souders
Frailey: One last question. Thinking of your reference to Fassbinder (and to not forget the Flying Wallendas) are there any literary references that you could mention to shed light on your thinking? Or anything that you’ve read recently that has had an impact?
Souders: A few enduring selections for me are Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson, Open City by Teju Cole, and A River of Shadows: Eudweard Muybridge and the Technological West by Rebecca Solnit. This summer I’ve been catching up on Brian Christian’s series of books on AI, and I recently read The Lonely City by Olivia Laing, which I loved.
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Stephen Frailey is the former Chair of the Photography and Video Department at the School of Visual Arts, the founder and editor-in-chief of Dear Dave Magazine and author of Looking at Photography, published by Damiani in 2020. His work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Arts Magazine, ARTnews, Artforum, the Village Voice, and the New Yorker, portfolios have appeared in Artforum and the Paris Review. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Art, Houston; the International Center for Photography, New York; and the Princeton University Art Museum.
Brea Souders is an artist working primarily with photography. Her work has been shown internationally, including solo exhibitions with the Abrons Arts Center and Baxter St. at CCNY in New York, as well as the Centre Photographique Rouen Normandie in France, and the Peel Art Gallery, Museum and Archives in Canada. Souders’ work has been featured in the New York Times, ARTnews, the Jeu de Paume Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New Yorker. Her work is included in the books, The Photograph as Contemporary Art; Feelings: Soft Art; How Color Works and Photography is Magic, by Charlotte Cotton. She is represented by the Bruce Silverstein Gallery.