Projections
Interview by Kija Lucas
Your work has a distinct focus on the urban, how did this interest begin and how has it evolved?
Urban photography really began for me when I moved to New York in 2002. When I moved there in August, mixed in with the initial love-affair of its neighborhoods and sights there was also the sobering 1st-anniversary commemoration of 9/11. I’d read a lot about how businesses downtown were affected by the attacks, how a lot of them shut down. When I was exploring the city I was struck by the preponderance of empty retail space all around. Vacancies are of course a normal part of urban reality. But there was an excess of it at that time – they felt like empty husks, casualties and memorials of a recent trauma that affected the millions in that city. This was all still palpable when I arrived. So I started photographing these stores from the sidewalk, through the glass windows, using reflections as a way to study how the emptiness of these abandoned interiors were informed by, or had some telling relationship with, the varied presences of the street world all around, and vice versa. At its heart for me this work was about the ‘strangeness’ of absence (as natural as it is) amid the remarkable densities of a megalopolis. In more or less direct ways, all my work since that time elaborates on this concern.
Since then (and even at that time), my approaches have been less about some specific history of a city than it is a philosophical consideration of substance and nothingness in the context of cities. My work rarely has any people in it, and if it does, they appear as incidental figures in the landscape. But the work is all about people, since cities are always all about giant collectivities of people. The absence of a thing in a photograph can speak very eloquently about it. This is interesting me more and more lately, how a photograph is not “merely what it shows,” but often it’s just as much about what is not there, what is not seen.
You maintain a sense of quiet throughout your work, what draws you to the silence?
When I’m photographing I’m usually in a very comtemplative state. I suppose that’s something of the experience I intend to offer, a contemplation for the viewer. Silence is yet another contrast with the immediate character of cities, countering the noise and hub-bub. Silence apprehended in a city is entirely different from silence you find on a mountain or in the ocean. Experiencing urban silences can say a lot about cities, their other dimensions.
Do you seek out and photograph less populated areas of a city or do you find moments between the chaos?
I generally like to photograph in the busy areas – if not busy with people, then busy with structures. Hunting for emptiness or absence in these areas is what it’s about for me. That’s why I don’t find myself photographing in the suburbs: they’re already empty, quiet, absent. I say that partly in jest, but there’s also some truth in it, at least with regards to my work. It feels best to me when I’m considering areas that thousands of people are passing through or near every day.
How did you decide to make this body of work?
Projections was suggested to me when I was working on taking pictures for the empty retail project in Manhattan. It was late in the day and I hadn’t taken any pictures worth anything. I was tired. I saw this instance of light on a building and I took a picture. The idea sat with me for half a year before I started working to develop it. These reflections of lights on buildings is something I and everyone has seen before, and that’s part of the interest for me. It’s a very pedestrian phenomenon, but it carried meaning for me. I was interested in the challenge to make something of it.
What parameters did you set for yourself when setting out to make these images?
At first I didn’t have any parameters, but after I did a lot of shooting I realized that the images seemed to work best when the light was hitting only the face of a building, not spilling onto the sidewalk or street below. It also seemed to work best when I was shooting straight-on, with more a matter-of-fact point of view. I also try to avoid cars, which can be difficult. And I need intense light, so it only works when the air is especially clear.
What made you decide to use color in these images as opposed to your other bodies of work?
For me there is a matter-of-fact literalness about color. This idea of the projections seemed to have enough lyricism in it, with these lights dancing off of surfaces, that going with black and white would be over-the-top. The color grounds the contours and facts of the urban environment, which allows the light itself to hum and play above it all. It’s like counterpoint. Color helps make the city more mundane and the light projections more separate, more other.
I like your photos. I did have similar expierience when I was in NY. I think when you are surrounded by the city you start to perceive part of it as a work of nature due to the fact that no single man can create it… it is a new urban element, next to fire, water, air, earth should be city. I love industrial photography and very much like your works presented.
Mieczyslaw Bielawski