This work has its roots in street photography. Some of them began as gross enlargements of small sections of a frame, scale transformations. Later it became repetitively photographing this one antenna on the flight path to LaGuardia. You get a jet every two minutes, and the challenge is to accurately locate an aircraft doing 200 knots on the head of a pin. The resulting scale discontinuity is playful and intriguing.
The jet trails, when divorced of scale become abstract and beautiful.
For me, the sense of “recovering” the wonder of looking up at a plane in the sky is part of this. We all know what it means now. There is a gross scale “distortion” going on in those photographs of the planes impacting the Twin Towers. Your mind cannot “span” the distance to understand what went on. I think this is part of the fascination those images create, they can be awful and beautiful simultaneously. In this work, however, I would like to recover some of the innocence and wonder of looking up, if that is possible. I have other images that are closer to echos of 9-11, and I think having lived with them for a while, I have no interest in showing them.
You should also note my last name is Wright, and my dad worked in an aircraft factory his entire career. One of the first photographs I ever printed was in a darkroom he built for us where developed contact prints from his war time negatives, images of Spitfires and Lancasters in the Egyptian desert.
And about me;
The reason I picked up a camera in the first place was to experience the world and understand it. Later I realized I was primarily investigating my relation to the world and making meaning out of it for me. At first I was trying to express intelligence. Lately I can see that I am also trying to express emotion. The process for me is like trying to decipher a language. Characters appear, and them a syntax. What does it mean? The same symbols over and over. A context changes but a symbol remains. A clue. Eventually it is revealed to me what I am doing. Rarely can I start out knowing “what” it is that I am doing. Or if i think I do, it is not what I thought…
I grew up in Canada and came to New York in 1996. I am self taught and have worked professionally as an editorial photographer in the last twelve years. I have a BA from Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada in Film Studies and Literature. Film Criticism and Theory was a large part of that degree, and I continue somewhat in that vein on my blog, robertwrightphoto.com/writing…
Writing these things is very difficult, especially if you have a rambling kind of voice like I do. So I had to economize. I think it is pretty free of art-speak, although I did say “recover.” That’s a little weak.
“Art-speak”. Good one. I have recently become morbidly fascinated by how different groups (eg., fine art photographers, commercial photographers, jazz musicians, classical musicians, etc.) “render” the language in an effort to differentiate themselves. It always brings me back to the chapter of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, by Carl Sagan, called Us and Them.
I hate having to write anything at all. Wish my work could just speak for itself. I think if “they” didn’t require this, it would too.
I forget who said about artist statements, “what, you want me say it worse?”
Nevertheless, the process of writing it is helpful and important.
Yeah, not so sure if you have it pretty clear already in your head/heart. It would be nice to get a guarantee that people always read your statement after first viewing the work. I imagine it happens this way most of the time, though, so that’s a relief.
well if it is that clear writing about it should be a piece of cake.
for shits and giggles I made a montage of some artist statements I found not saying where.
“I look to address in my work the subtle ways in which every-day presence that is largely overlooked intrigued by the intersection of man and nature create magical interpretations of everyday mundane spaces investigate the tactile beauty and semiotic frailty of both subject and medium deconstructing these common forms typically unseen and ignored it is not the victim I am the victim results in disorienting and wholly unique self.”
..I can’t even edit my own comments on wordpress?…
anyway
I bow to this Koan-poem of artist’s statements…
Ha! Nice.
In relation to that, I think statements work best when they feel like you are explaining your work to a friend for the first time.
I’d like to imagine Weegee, Mapplethorpe or Witkins or Araki doing that…(insert your own here)
So much better than mine, which was written in the dying minutes of the submission window.
I’d always imagined that there was an on-line ‘art-speak’ generator that would fit well in the Orwelian society that we find ourselves today. But I couldn’t find it.
Go back and read “I look to address… in the voice and manner of Linus Van Pelt.
Good Grief!
Robert, I find most artist statements pompous, especially since they convey so *little* thought!
I read this post in my RSS reader, so I probably only glanced at its title. I did not realize that I was reading your artist statement until I reached the very end. I trust you’ll interpret this as a word of praise.