Lucas Blalock & Sam Falls

A Conversation between Lucas Blalock and Sam Falls

LB: I feel that in my own practice I use various strategies to alienate the viewer from the picture but the pictures figure as stand-ins for the world at large. I feel that your practice alternately is more concerned with questions within the picture, with the pictures qualities? You have said before that medium is not particularly important to your practice, where as to me I find the photograph and it’s indexical history quite central. To put it a different way, I feel like your interest in appropriation and abstraction are in service of the image and it is on this plane that the pictures operate. How do you feel about this?

SF: Well I think you are getting at very fundamental issues and that’s good, but one thing I try to avoid is defining any central concern to my work – I don’t want to pin down one methodology or theory to what I do and why, not only because it’s limiting, but I think this is always in flux, or what I do can influence and direct why and/or how I do the next thing – so there’s no commanding explanation. But first I want to separate appropriation and abstraction, which you kind of equated in what I do, though I think they are very different. When I source images (either placing them within a photograph or scanning them), I am very much interested in their life as representations of something specific and their own indexical history, this is a primary reason for selecting an image and the references are always intentional – like in the Return to the Alps images or the Pickin’ On pictures.

Abstraction on the other hand often works ‘in service of the image’ as you say, and is a sort of flattened sculpting that deals with aesthetics and I’d say pictorial expectation vs. pictorial possibility. This latter function serves both as an invitation to the viewer using taste and my own notions of pictorial structure, but I think it similarly functions as a form of alienation, it distances the viewer from an immediate and inflexible reading. This isn’t to question what was in the picture (what was in reality), but what it is that they are looking at now. This is a big reason for my reference and direct involvement with other mediums like painting and collage. I want it to function in the present tense with the viewer, not as something re-presenting the past – is this what you are talking about when you say your ‘pictures figure as stand-ins for the world at large’? Re-presenting the past? And what is your intention with alienating the viewer? You seem to consistently work with everyday objects and settings, often-mundane subject matter, do you ever consider your postproduction strategies as enhancements or alterations in the essential meaning of the subjects? Do you feel like you are engaging the objects with some sort of metaphysical dialogue they are otherwise left out of? Or are they more just the available pawns in a game you are playing with photographic history and its contemporary context?

LB: I don’t think I so much equated abstraction and appropriation, but in some ways both of these tendencies in your work (in your specific uses) really begin to constitute an attitude toward pictures, which, though it does not require a “commanding explanation”, does constitute an aesthetic perspective. And, though I think experimentation is quite evident in the work, a hypothetical model always underlies practice, and this is what I was trying to get at. As to my own work and your questions, I think that the photograph is literally a re-presentation of the past, is it not? Is this what you mean? I don’t feel my work is particularly concerned w/ content except in terms of the kind of flexibility you have mentioned. When I say my pictures are “stand ins” I mean that I am interested in the photograph’s power to direct and focus attention. I feel that any strategy/category, whether documentary, studio, appropriated, abstract, snapshot or whatever greatly defines the viewers interaction, and can act as a real impediment to a picture opening onto the world in a resonant way. My work over the last few years has involved borrowing elements from these traditions, as well as developing these more gestural methods, and yet trying to undermine these ready made systems of meaning.

I believe we have this last bit in common.

So maybe this is the point at which we diverge. You said that you are not so interested in the viewer questioning the reality of the object, but what they are looking at in the picture, where I feel like I am most interested in the picture presenting the world in a way that is basically about how we look at the world. For me the digital interventions are less in terms of the image than they are about bringing out specific qualities in the objects, places, or people photographed. I want pictures to feel provisional, and to in some way make the viewer aware of my choices as well as the set of possible choices inherent in the making of the image. When this is successful, I hope people come to feel their own looking and their own choices more explicitly.

To get to another part of your question, I think we are very close to what I mean by alienation. I, taking this from Brecht, believe that by making people aware of the mechanics of a situation you more fully engage them in the possibility of it’s outcomes. I feel like you also work w/ this thought?

I am interested in what you see as the mechanics or material in your work? Where I feel like the basic material in my own work lies in people’s expected experience w/ photographs compounded by people’s experience of the mundane world, I feel like your work is made out of a somewhat different set of means. Can you talk about this, or what these might be?

I am also quite interested in how you arrived at the desire to intercede in a picture w/ this kind of rough/loose digital work? When we met both of us had already begun this practice. You had just produced “A Finality” and I was making the nudes and the first group of still lifes. What were your motivations then? And have they changed?

SF: In addressing your last question, first I want to say that the digital work is really only one way among many that I think about pictures and produce them. A Finality came about quite literally as a response to work I was doing at the time which involved painting directly on inkjet prints on watercolor paper and liquid emulsion prints I was making on canvas in the darkroom, as well as photographing paintings I was making just for photos and experimenting with color and composition. I came across that line in Analytic of the Beautiful where Kant writes about flowers and how we can universally judge them as beautiful because they do not point to any other end beyond their aesthetics. So it was an experiment in the sense that I photographed over a hundred flowers and then spent quite some time manipulating their colors and composition to make a book that re-presents them with newly attributed aesthetics that are of my own interpretation – that is, the flowers were subjected to a new means of an aesthetic end: fine art. I did it digitally because I knew I would have the most flexibility with the photographs.

At the same time I began Return to the Alps where I applied screen-printing paint and process to images from a book of photographs of the Alps to sort of enact the antithesis of what I had just done, now to a pre-existing body of work. Those two projects overlapped and functioned in a very similar theoretical vein and in my mind my work depends on this sort of Hegelian dialectic where the synthesis resides in the other work I’m making at the time, such as straight photographs and paintings. Plus, the digital work I think was pretty clean and considered, while the analog painting work was more rough and loose. And I really don’t want to call the more recent digital work I’ve done rough or loose, because there is time and ample sketches involved before the final piece is considered finalized – which is the case for your work as well I believe. But I think the digital work you are referring to began at a very specific point, which was when I started photographing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and I had to intervene with this one Victorian oil painting that depicted a woman of the court with her dog and a black child servant with a metal shackle on his neck and a caged parrot nearby. This was the piece where I felt the need to make very gestural and blatant movements on such a subtle piece of realism that seemed to just slip very neatly into display in the museum without receiving heed from the viewers I observed. In my own way I wanted to draw attention to the glaring colonialism, which ended up with me drawing a color-spectrum line of telepathic communication from the caged parrot to the woman’s pampered poodle, selecting and highlighting the metal collar on the boy, and erasing his face and cloning it onto the woman. These are very powerful and apparent interventions done with Photoshop, which presented itself as the most available and seamless tool. The nature of the marks also presents a sense of irreverence toward the original piece that I am glad to convey. I think that this irreverence occurs in other pictures since that one, as well as the digital interventions that began with A Finality, which on the contrary I find polished and reverent.

So I don’t see digital manipulation as dominant in my work, and probably less than half of my work is manipulated at all. Digital manipulation is just one method to get at an idea that meshes nicely with other ways of working, such as painting, collage, video, and projection. I guess this brings up your other question regarding mechanics and material, which I think are also tied very closely to what you call an aesthetic perspective and your notion of a hypothetical model. I’m not going to argue that a photograph isn’t a re-presentation of the past, as it exists this way in albums, on facebook, in the news, etc. But no, when I think about a photograph in terms of what I consider my own work I’m not concerned with it as a re-presentation of the past. When you talk about your own work dealing with people’s history with photographs and bringing out specific qualities of what is in the photographs, I think this requires the veil of disbelief that the photograph is re-presenting something that once was.

For me, this doesn’t matter, which is why I’m really open to abstraction and inkjet printing, because I’m not interested in a specific historical fidelity or the continuation of light from the subject to the negative to the final print. I’m more interested in what people’s notions of the idea presented in the picture are and if I can put in my own two cents.

Most recently it’s not about a time or place, but rather what can function as a catalyst for the viewer to question or consider a subject that I am or at least was when I made the picture. And really, abstraction as we all know is inherent in photography as it’s distanced from time and three-dimensional space, so I won’t argue that most of my work isn’t abstract, but a lot of my pictures are mechanically straightforward. I really believe that my aesthetic perspective doesn’t lie in abstraction or even ambiguity (though I find these both valuable and inescapable in photography), but rather a lack of knowing mixed with an inquisitive nature, which results in a need to be prolific as the questions sort of exponentially rise. So when you talk about photographic strategies acting as impediments to a picture opening up in a resonant way, I think that I end up creating photos that could be situated in or rather pitted against these strategies if someone wanted to do that, but because they are also pretty singular this sort of read doesn’t apply when the viewer moves on to the next picture.

This disruption is also where my relationship to alienation takes place, so rather than being inside the picture as you talk about with your work, I like to think about it being more of a situationist thing that keeps the viewer from bringing their beliefs from one picture to the next and lifting whatever intellectual or emotional read arise as one looks at a single piece of artwork. I think this is more the hypothetical model I subscribe to as well, which is allowing myself the freedom from any ideology or consistent aesthetic structure so that the viewer is free from me in their relationship with the picture and their reading is as valid as my intention. That’s a pretty good explanation I think for both what my pictures are about and why I work non-serially (not to say that there aren’t alternates to the chosen images), but in terms of subject matter I think of visual art like writing like thinking, and because there is so much an individual is capable of taking in these days everyday I think we can trust readers and viewers more than ever and so I feel pretty liberated in moving between subjects with poetic brevity and often do, finding the move between love, to religion, to fine art, to nature, to depression, to happiness, to language all possible within a week of picture making. How these subjects present themselves to me and the available methods of moving forth with the idea aesthetically always changes as well, so it fits quite nicely into my consistent scheme of change.

I am curious now when you talked about trying to undermine these ready made systems of meaning (like studio, abstract, new-topographics) because you feel like they define the viewers interaction and act as an impediment to a picture opening onto the world in a resonant way – in what ways are you trying to undermine them? Through digital intervention? I find your work to be very much in dialogue with these strategies of photography and it’s funny to hear you say this because I often think of you expanding on these strategies, especially studio and New Topographics, rather than undermining them – how do you feel about this? If you undermine them where then do you photos stand?

Also, it seems to me that digital manipulation is only part of your practice, could you talk about how you think about it in relationship to other ways you work with photography and say perspective or optics, such as when we encounter double or triple exposures in your work and your reoccurring use of mirrors?

LB: For me there just is little relativity about the material of a photograph. I don’t believe there is any “veil of disbelief” in plainly stating that a photograph IS a record of light from a previous occasion. And although I can accept that you see this as unimportant it seems disingenuous to not accept this most basic definition? I am also not interested in any kind of “specific historical fidelity” but am enough of a materialist to believe that the photograph, like any other object, brings along it’s history which is intricately bound to it’s substance. I believe this meaning structure is not discardable and greatly defines the viewer’s relationship. However, you seem to be saying that your work really functions between the pictures, in their relation to each other. Are there models that interest you in terms of these juxtapositions? I tried to organize a show last year around some of these concepts and ended up talking about Godard’s innovation of the jump cut. Is this something you are thinking about?

To some of your questions. When I said I was interested in undermining these traditions I only meant that my picture isn’t successful if people interact with it as an “articulate product picture” or a “good landscape picture”, or a “digitally altered picture”, because I really want the onus of the picture to be more involved w/ specifics than that, to present a situation of constituent parts that require inspection to take on their meaning. And if they easily fall into a predetermined lens this action fails to happen, it shortcuts the sorts of alienation we have been talking about.

I don’t feel that these digital interventions are the only way I have approached this, nor even the dominant way, though as an overlap between our methods it seems a central motif. For me these strategies have a lot to do w/ the historical situation in terms of photography. There has been so much made of the material transition going on right now w/ digital, and, in turn, there is a lot of talk about the loss of the indexical aspect, however the history of photography is already rife w/ aberrations from this viewpoint. To me the real point of interest is one of scale. I feel that the film picture is based on a model easily associated w/ the photographer and with the eye, so that it’s scale is human and seemingly dependent on the individual’s looking. I feel that digital has interrupted this metaphor by aligning the picture not so much w/ the eye but w/ the technology. We come to a juncture where the picture is a bit of information that relates abstractly much more to the web or the archive than it does to the person. I think that this creates a lack of transparency, no longer can we see the machine working, which ends up in a sense of mystification. Part of my work is endeavored to recapture a sense of agency in regards to this technology and in so doing reconnect with a human scale which comes out in the rather rough “handiwork” in some of my pictures and in the ambiguity of method in others (i.e. double exposure or layering in Photoshop).

Which gets to the how, though this digital intervention is just one facet. I think my work has engaged a really broad set of methods in these terms. I have used the artificiality of the studio, reflections, double exposure, overlay, filters, etc. but always as a means to try and up the level of attention a picture can encourage. Werner Herzog’s Minnesota Doctrine on documentary cinema has been a kind of jumping off point for me. Herzog writes, “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization”. I am not inclined towards any totalizing version of “the truth”, but really appreciate the wedge Herzog drives between his notion of truth and the “unencumbered” presentation of facts.

Really, all of these concerns came into focus for me researching the second half of the 19th century, a project brought on by reading Moby Dick, which was an era at a technological turn even more audacious than the one at present. When I first started making these pictures I was interested in the way the modern and the scientific had taken shape and the kinds of information that these systems had left out as well as the strategies used to display the “facts” that had become central. Nearly simultaneously you had the Industrial Revolution, the secularization of culture, and a breakdown of traditional communities as more and more moved to the cities. I was interested in the way that figures as disparate as Courbet, Thomas Edison, and PT Barnum exploited this transition and how the spirit of these methods might play out today. Some of my pictures, like the “multigraphs”, borrow explicitly from this period. In the end though, this ended up opening up the 20th century to me as a multitude of methods to deal with the anxiety and ambiguities created by this transformation into the modern which is close to where I feel I am now.

SF: Perhaps what I was trying to get at was not a denial of the photograph as a material record of light so much as a theory that it can function now if we want it to as an object that is, rather than the Barthian something that has been. When I’m photographing a painting combined with a projection there are different periods of time presented in the final image and I really feel like this conflation jettison’s any sort of historical representation. I’m not trying to say there wasn’t a moment when the lens opened and light hit the negative, but when the object is largely made through digital or analog manipulation, the referent is lost and there’s just the signified and the photograph as signifier. So the subject occupies a reality less tied to its past place in time and more to the idea and object at hand. This is also why I keep talking about inkjet printing because unlike even the digital c-print there is not light transmitted to the final object presented to the viewer, more along the lines of a carbon copy or lithograph than a photographic print. This is going on a limb I know, but I like it. Also, I think it is inevitable that the viewer will draw connections between images next to each other in a gallery or a book, and I think the ambiguity between my pictures benefits from this sort of natural gestalt. However, I don’t mean to say that my work implements a juxtaposition to create meaning essential to the pictures, it is just one aspect that is available and unavoidable really when presenting more than one image. Because my recent work is largely concerned with color and composition, the images certainly relay but are ultimately independent. I’m not trying to focus on the fact that there is no serial relationship so much as the way people expect to view photographs linearly highlights the lack of this quality in my work which I myself find alienating when moving from image to image.

LB: The confluence of temporalities is a nice way to put it. I feel ambiguous about this definition in relation to my own pictures, but I think for some of them it is a valuable approach. I’ll have to think about it more.

Sort of in conclusion, I wanted to ask if you have anything coming up? Also it would be great if you could talk a bit about your books. Do you see this as the prime vehicle for your work?

SF: Well, coming up I have a piece in the Blind Spot auction at the X-Initiative in December, a solo show at Higher Pictures in February, my MFA thesis show at ICP-Bard in April, a solo show at Capricious Space in June, and a book project in the works that will be published by Lay Flat this summer sometime. The book thing is something I’m consistently working on and really started using it as a platform not only for organizing my work and cataloging it, but also getting it out into the world. I got really tired of the internet viewing arena and blogs and I think books are a nice way to share my work with people I don’t know and maintain some quality control without burdening people with galleries and high-prices, it’s so much better than the Internet in my mind and not pretentious at all.

I know you had one book project, I Believe You, Liar, come out this year, but you’ve made a lot of work since then, are you editing it into a book yet? How do you feel about photo books in relation to your own work in the gallery context? Other news?

LB: I am undecided about the structure of a new book. I have several ideas in the works but am unsure how it will come together. I do have work in the upcoming Lay Flat 02:Meta, which I am excited about and am currently looking for an outlet to publish a semi-fictive book-length correspondence between myself and a writer-friend in the Mid-West. I will also have a portfolio published in the upcoming issue of Lines&Gold this spring. Otherwise business as usual, just battening down the hatches.