abstract – Camera Obscura

Quanta, by Michael Taylor

Michael Taylor — Wed, 07 May 2014 04:56:09 +0000

“Photography is Light Architecture.”

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy¹

“Light is beautiful in itself, for its nature is simple and all of it is there at once. Wherefore it is integrated in the highest degree and most harmoniously proportioned and equal to itself, for beauty is a harmony of proportions.”

Grosseteste²

Introduction

I first explored photography as a child taking photographs on film using ‘box’ cameras. In 1978 at the age of fifteen, my parents bought me a Praktica camera: I shot a roll of 35mm film and was hooked for life! A few years later I made a small darkroom in the loft of my parents’ home and loved watching the magic of black-and-white images emerge before my eyes. This experience will never leave me. I still have a good darkroom.

Although I loved drawing and art I always favored photography. After my two science degrees at Queens University I completed Design BA and Fine Art MA degrees.

Light has always fascinated me throughout my life.

The qualities of light that excite me most are purity, harmony, paradox and unpredictability. Light is “pliable” and can be merged, moved and shaped. However, there is always feedback: light reveals its own inherent possibilities.

Quanta (2014)

Quanta is a subset of the life-time Lumen series that I started in 2010. My ultimate aim is to mediate the properties of light via photography.

The abstract photographs shown here were created using long exposures of light in a fairground in Southern France. The images were all taken at night:

“…even the purest light, lacking the robe of darkness, would be without expression”.

Mary Oliver³

Choreographed camera movements recorded the energy of moving light. While wandering around reacting to light and choreographing camera movements during long exposures I lost track of the activity around me and felt like I was dancing with light. The experience was immersive. There was a mixture of both planning and spontaneity.

Moholy-Nagy’s earlier vision was that of an orchestrated painting with light:

“The work of the future lies with the light engineer who is collecting the elements of a genuine creation.

…just as one paints with brush and pigment, in recent times one could have “painted” direct with light, transforming two-dimensional painted surfaces into light architecture.

I wanted a… light-symphony which follows exactly the composer’s score.”

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy⁴

Quanta involved a more direct and spontaneous orchestration involving a choreographed recording of variations in the intensity, chroma, hue, line, movement, texture and depth of light.

Continuous experimentation is the engine of the creative process. In the words of

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy:

“The enemy of photography is the convention … the salvation of photography is the experiment.”⁵

Both staged and found light patterns are equally important to me. Unpredicted moments where light reveals itself are gifts of grace.

My basic approach is to keep focused on one area, observe different aspects and look deeper. I never try to force anything: what I love defines the style.

Vision usually precedes execution: imagination is primary but focused discipline, planning and craft skills are vital to translate a latent image into a real one. The key priority is always attention to interpreting light.

These Quanta images were very intuitive and instantaneous: vision blurred into execution. I was at play with light and instinctively knew in advance which images would remain.

The light patterns are also metaphors pointing to events beyond their creation.

For example, the embryonic life inherent in Quanta 004 and human presence in Quanta 003:

A key aspect is transformation. The emphasis is not on the figures/objects but on light and its modulation:

“Objects are chosen for their light-modulating characteristic; their reality and significance disappear.”

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy⁶

Fairground rides now become new worlds.

The formal qualities unique to photography as a medium are vitally important. My aim is not simply to document reality but to reveal hidden aspects of the world, especially of light and photography. By using these unique qualities, the referential / indexical aspects of photography are now so abstracted that the images no longer convey as-seen reality.

When the “object” is light itself, abstraction is pushed beyond the photographic transformation observed by Barbara Savedoff :

“In the case of painting, the forms refer to objects … In the case of photographs, the forms are the objects (or more precisely, the forms are those of the objects before the lens): the image is both record of the object and abstraction. There is a sense in which we see the object transformed.”

Barbara Savedoff, Documentary Authority And The Art Of Photography.

((From: Wladen, Scott (ed.). Photography and Philosophy: Essays On The Pencil Of Nature. London: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2010, p.122.))

A constant theme in my work is a quest for simplicity and minimalism.

These studies of light also emphasize transcendence:

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite.”

William Blake⁷

Abstraction involves going beyond precise recording of seen objects – from seen to unseen, from objective to subjective. It is a highly selective and partial disclosure of reality. Abstraction also encourages the viewer to participate in creating their own meanings. As Aaron Siskind observed:

“When I make a photograph I want it to be an altogether new object, complete and self-contained, whose basic condition is order…

The object has entered the picture, in a sense; it has been photographed directly. But it is often unrecognizable; for it has been removed from its usual context, disassociated from its customary neighbors and forced into new relationships.”

Aaron Siskind⁸

Lyle Rexer describes abstraction in photography as:

“… novel seeing, a vision of things that have not been seen – investigative or undisclosed photography rather than abstract photography. At its most extreme, it offers objects defined by their concrete, material existence, referring to nothing outside themselves.”

Lyle Rexer, Introduction: Undisclosed Images.⁹

There are several methods of photographic abstraction involved in Quanta such as the selective framing of reality and time exposures revealing unseen worlds within reality.

Influences include Goethe, books on cosmology and science, art films and theatre (especially the lighting), abstract photography and movements in paintings ranging from Renaissance to Abstract Expressionism.

I am fascinated by the work of artists such as James Turrell who create environments in which the qualities and properties of light are replicated and enhanced in front of the viewer. This is revelatory:

“Light is not so much something that reveals, as it is itself the revelation.”

James Turrell¹⁰

Photographers with abstract visions of the world appeal to me. Examples include Moholy-Nagy, Minor White, Man Ray, Alexander Rodchenko, Frederick Sommer, Paul Strand, Brett Weston, Aaron Siskind, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Tokihiro Sato and Alvin Langdon Coburn (Vortographs).

An entire series of light-related experiments is planned for the future: hopefully images from the different series will show cohesion.

My final advice is to keep focused on one main area, stay open to all the possibilities and always keep going.

The greatest inspiration for photographers is the inexhaustible reality of light surrounding us.

We just have to look deeper.

Moholy-Nagy, Laslo. “Fotografie ist Lichtgestaltung”, Bauhaus, 2/1, 1928, p.1
From: Eco, Umberto. The Aesthetics Of Thomas Aquinas. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1988, p.109
From: A Certain Sharpness In The Morning Air, in Oliver, Mary. New And Selected Poems. Volume 1. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992, p.41
pp. 155&156, Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. Moholy-Nagy: Experiment In Totality. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1969.
From: Vision in Motion; quoted on the frontispiece of David Travis And Elizabeth Siegel (eds.). Taken By Design: Photographs From The Institute Of Design, 1937-1971. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (74th edition; 6 Mar 2002).
p. 71, Kostelanetz, Richard. Moholy-Nagy : An Anthology. New York: Da Capo Press, 1991.
From: Erdman, David V. The Complete Poetry And Prose of William Blake. New York: Anchor Books, 1988, p.39.
From: Credo. In: Aaron Siskind: Photographs 1932-1978. Oxford: Museum Of Modern Art, 1979.
From: Rexer, Lyle. Photography’s Avant-garde: The New Wave In Old Processes. New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 2002, p.11.
From: Zajonc, Arthur. Catching The Light: The Entwined History Of Light And Mind. London: Bantam Press, 1993, p.324.

Conversation between Christian Erroi and Deirdre Donohue

Christian Erroi — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:41:54 +0000

The following was a conversation after-dinner in Harlem recently between artist Christian Erroi and librarian Deirdre Donohue.

Deirdre Donohue: Christian, you are having a New York moment right now! Your work is seen in both “Now You See It, Now You Don’t” at the Camera Club New York, and also in “Transmutations” at Michael Mazzeo Gallery at the same time! Tell me how did you come to the attention of Bernard Yenelouis, curator of the Camera Club show, and gallerist Michael Mazzeo?

Christian Erroi: Well, I have known Bernie for many years at the International Center of Photography, and admire his work as artist, thinker and curator greatly. It’s a privilege to be included in a show with artists whom I particularly appreciate: Marina Berio, Laura Larson, Tim Lehmacher, and Egan Frantz, to name my favorites. The theme of the show is about illusion and inclusion, and that is also, it turns out, a common thread that ties together artists in Michael Mazzeo’s show “Transmutations.” He found out about me from Evan Mirapaul, a great friend who collects and has been an advocate of my work for some years.

Deirdre Donohue: Well, you were selected for two group shows that furnished you with some notice as an Art + Commerce emerging artist in 2004 and 2005, a number of solo shows in Switzerland, and last spring a solo show that was part of Houston’s Fotofest. Do you think that there is something unique about participating in these two current group shows?

Christian Erroi: Thank goodness, after so many years of hanging around New York [my adopted home], I can be in exhibitions here where I feel inspired by the content, pleased with the modest scale, and that my work is well-suited to the themes. Of course it is gratifying anyway to be in a gallery in Chelsea and in the historic and important institution of the Camera Club.

Deirdre Donohue: Talk me over the bridge that connects the notion of photographic illusion of the Camera Club Show and the abstraction of nature in the Michael Mazzeo show.

Christian Erroi: I love the liberty that one has viewing something abstract. It allows for aesthetic pleasure without any rigid proscriptions. I don’t want too much information in an image because it might be a burden, in a sense. I am looking for a little information. What matters to me, as I analyze an image, is that it is not tiring to the viewer or me. I just need a spark. The Camera Club show is about adaptations photographers make through interventions like erasure and selection, which, in my case, leads to an abstraction of nature. A number of the artists in “Transmutations” end up with their abstraction through the rigors of selection and denial, despite the fact that nature is so much about coincidence. I try to marry the two.

Deirdre Donohue: OK, so your method is both extreme editing and accepting some of the serendipity of nature’s little surprises? Tell me where all of this appreciation of happenstance and selection comes from?

Christian Erroi: It’s the opportunism of me trying to learn from whatever I can, and employ it in my work. The genesis for the “as above” pictures was my own MRI’s – images of my thoroughly-examined brain – and how fragile and gestural its branches are. Gradually, I developed a vocabulary from nature that was adopted to express this. As the work progressed, layers of subsequent meaning were overlaid, and now it is a long way from those MRI’s, as am I.

Deirdre Donohue: They do look like botanical illustrations from a century or more ago, so I get the scientific vocabulary, but the materials you use tend to differentiate what you are doing from other photographers – who do “works on paper.” Talk about why you’ve made these material choices.

Christian Erroi: I am taken with transparency, because it looks extremely fragile, but is extremely elegant at the same time. I also like it because it permits me to create a three-dimensional world that is extremely flexible, so that I can, by changing sequence, change the narrative, as well.

Deirdre Donohue: Can you give a little perspective on the translation of artistic ideas into materials that are usually used in commercial industries, for example, the one inch thick plexi-glass objects?

Christian Erroi: This originated in the traditional natural history specimens of my youth, which sampled information outside of its context, detailed but divorced from reality. My thoughts about depicting scientific forms are related to the way that the eye feeds data to the brain – our little sophisticated camera obscura – ever baffling and alluring.

I tortured a number of fabricators into getting these plexi things to be realized to an art connoisseurship standard, as opposed to a window display level, and it was an expensive and educational process. The final iteration, the ones mounted on zebra wood, ultimately are the fruit of some five years of R&D.

Deirdre Donohue: Enough about production! Whose work do you love?

Christian Erroi: Golly, never ending and ever changing! I grew up in fertile soil: adoring photographers Mario Giacomelli, Gabriele Basilico, and Mimmo Jodice, as well as Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan, and artists like Modigliani, Andrea Mantegna, Caravaggio, Giacometti, Paul Klee and Egon Schiele.

More contemporary influences include Gerhard Richter, Thomas Flechner, Axel Hutte, Cy Twombly, Elgar Esser, Thomas Struth’s forests, Reineke Dijkstra, Francis Bacon, Paul Graham and so forth.

I should say that in many of these cases I love more than just the pictures these artists make. I read them, and attend their talks curiously. For a while I carried that Vic Muniz Reflex book around like a bible. Now I am on a Modigliani kick. Next week, who knows?

Deirdre Donohue: Yes, you do make full use out of New York as the big art incubator, hitting galleries and museums, bookstores and libraries. Increasingly, as you spend more time here, I sense a better perspective on your sources of inspiration from being both Swiss and Italian. Would you say that you are communicating Swiss or Italian-ness more now than when you had your first show in Lugano in 1999?

Christian Erroi: I am Swiss and Italian, but my sensitivity to nature is a more universal impulse, and, although some of the camera captures happen in Italy and Switzerland, many are in Harlem, the Rockaways, community gardens, parking lots, bridges and other places in New York. My wellsprings of naturalism were Gerald Durrell and a junior high school mentor in Riverdale, NY named Mr. Mueser, who first encouraged me to use a camera for science.

Deirdre Donohue: So, you are a New York artist in the sense of your inclusion of all stimuli from wherever/whenever/whomever?

Christian Erroi: Ever more so, as time goes by, and I am more adaptable, and receptive. I don’t think that is from my Swiss or Italian backgrounds. It strikes me that it is a New York trait I most admire in my friends.