About China
China (2012-2015 & 2018)
“In art the only thing that counts is the bit that cannot be explained.” – Georges Braque (1882-1963)
It is perfectly reasonable not to devote much effort to looking at photographs. After all, very few are made with the expectation that they will be given thoughtful consideration. Snapshots of kittens or sunsets, portraits of family members or of famous people, documentary images of the homeless or of life on a farm, vacation postcards, advertisements and real estate pictures, news and fake news, fashion shoots, mug shots, and selfies: the vast majority of photographs appear to disclose themselves fully at a glance. We expect them to be instantly readable.
My photographs from China are not instantly readable. I often make pictures that are somewhat challenging to take in. In part this is because I am drawn to ambiguity and obscurity, to the oblique and the evocative more than to the obvious. But it is also because a sense of mystery, curiosity, puzzlement, and astonishment was central to my experience of China itself.
My purpose in making pictures is to create something that did not exist before I made them. My pictures metabolize, displace, reconfigure, & transform what I saw into new visual experiences.
What my pictures are really about is looking. Photography seems always to be anchored in nouns – this thing, that thing – but at its best it is a medium of verbs: glancing, staring, questioning, provoking, revealing, altering, intimating.
For me, the point of making a photograph is not simply to show something by making a picture of it. The point is to make a picture that shows how something was seen. I think it is unarguable that, “A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.” And I would propose a corollary: A picture of a thing is a picture; it is not the thing.
All photographs are translations, and all translations are interpretations. The primary question we must ask is not whether a translation is accurate in any pedestrian sense, but whether it is illuminating.
Rudolf Pannwitz (1881-1969), a German poet and philosopher, wrote, “The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state of his own language instead of allowing it to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue.” He goes on to say that the translator, “must broaden and deepen his own language by means of the foreign one.”
I believe this was exactly the case with my photographic work in China. The language of my photography was profoundly influenced by the culture in which I was immersed.