MFA in Photography Thesis, 2014

Dan Baird-Miller 2014 MFA in Photography Graduate Thesis My family never appeared ordinary. Maybe I was just too perceptive. My mother and father were psychotherapists. Summer vacations, and winter snowmen building were normal enough, yet dinner table conversations were filled with psychiatric jargon. With a hippie and a social activist at the reins of my upbringing, I was encouraged to express myself freely. Often, I would use both hand gestures and facial expressions to communicate. The need for verbal communication seemed cumbersome, and time consuming. Speaking only when necessary, I was loud compared to my brother. Because of this I’ve miscommunicated with nearly everyone in my life at least once. I walk along this tightrope of clarity. As my legs buckle, I sway back and forth between lucidity and murkiness, sanity and insanity; leaning towards a self-evaluation of weakness and failure. When I was a child, I felt most comfortable in the woods behind our house. The woods provided a place of solitude and created a sense of security, while the world around me was expanding, School forced me to articulate and construct my language in a clear and homogenized format. The language I had cultivated at home immediately became useless. School embodied the rigid structure of “right and wrong.” School made my language incoherent. I wondered who wrote these rules? My parents took me to museums, intending to broaden my understanding of art and history. Was my understanding really broadened? To an insecure teenager it felt like a field trip, another attempt of simplifying complex ideas. I felt stifled in my own expression, and how I perceived art. Finally after years of thinking this way I visited the Museum of Modern Art. When faced with a bronze statue of what seemed like a figure, I stopped. I was curious what it was. Was it art, because it was in a museum? Was that really the reason? Who declared this art? A golden blob of nothing, what I assumed was a mistake. Abstraction sat uncomfortably in my lap. It was not cut and dry like the other arts I had been introduced to. This left me with questions, with doubt and with frustration. Maybe I was just jealous of not being able to understand. Maybe failure was a risk decided by the artist. Asking more questions of “why” in school taught me to think about failure and success as a scale. Once I understood this structure I began to question it. When it came to art history, I was reintroduced to that blob as a bronze sculpture known as Unique Forms of Continuity in Space by Umberto Boccioni. I thought to myself, “what the heck does that mean?!” Another barrier placed in my way. There must be more at play than just what was in the title. Peering out onto the landscape of art from one perspective was problematic. I viewed my history as a stream of consciousness. Time was only one measure of the experience. I was taught history in small consumable pieces. In college I found myself attempting to grasp concepts using this mode of thinking. My comprehension buckled under the shear magnitude of scope and subjectivity. I imagined conceptual art as a subject in painting meant to epitomize inaccessibility. Abstract Expressionists with sunglasses, carrying a paintbrush and wearing all black came to mind. Did they too have their own language? Instead of only staring straight ahead, I stood on my toes, shifted my weight to one side past the abstract expressionists towards the cubists. I began to peer over the edge of the barrier. Cubism made lasting impacts on me; it felt like a puzzle. I viewed these paintings as a code of complexity connected by shapes and colors. I could grasp some parts, piecing together fragments until I began to pull together what the painting described. Eureka! The title unlocked the subjectivity. So I played the game and tried to figure out the content before glancing at the title. The concept of communication surfaced. I saw Cubism exploring multiple perspectives culminating into a single visual experience. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque had a personal connection to each other. Their paintings illustrated striking similarities in content. The forms of Violin and Candlestick by Braque and The Accordionist by Picasso appeared to my eyes as two paintings from the same artist. Cubism as a tool for expression came with symbols that could be interpreted. Unlike looking at a painting where the painter and the viewer were separate entities, performance art involved me. In college, I was encouraged to take a class called Performativity. Focusing on performance art from Futurism to the present day, I was immersed in a world of artists who expressed their art not only on a two-dimensional plane. The class forced me to reenact a performance. My version was strange and awkward, but in the moment, it didn’t matter. The audience and I participated in a give and take that I had never felt within painting. Then, I came across Fluxus, a group that did not attach itself to one medium but branched out to design, drawing, painting, and sculpture. This potential for working within multiple disciplines simultaneously, revitalized my expectations for art. I saw little flexibility when it came to photography. There were restraints on the medium much as in painting. Scientists, artists, engineers and philosophers did the unthinkable by capturing an image and fixing it upon a substrate. Photography was a science, ingrained with rules. The photographer, Henri Cartier Bresson crafted ideologies about photography. The decisive moment was the best time to snap the perfect image. Ansel Adams developed previsualization -the act of seeing the image in your mind before loading your camera with film. In this context, the exactness of “success” could be calculated and achieved. I acknowledged these rules yet yearned to build a bridge outside of these limitations. Abstraction in photography became an obstacle, much as the golden blob of a statue created a mental block in my childhood understanding of art. I began to question why my conception of photography needs or has, a barrier. In school, my visual perception always flew under the radar. I wanted to have my own perceptual unedited language. I could bend my understanding in multiple directions yet my articulation was anemic. Realizing my interest in Cubism was less about the content and more about an ephemeral gesture in which the titles grounded the content. Breaking down perceptual hurdles such as these, I have seen past my own notions of an image. My images speak more clearly than I do. Testing the waters of what lies beyond photography I have explored the aesthetics of photographic materials past their prime, making images at night, and building my own cameras. I feel connected to something bigger than myself when working with these apparatuses. I revel in the unpredictable; chance having equal weight to my emotional experience in my photographic process. I can fathom how Henry Fox Talbot, Louis Daguerre, Hippolyte Bayard, and Nicephore Niepce felt while waiting for the first photographs to appear, or not. Within the physical confines of my camera, I investigate the ideas behind the photograph. I value artists who create work within the realm of my own aesthetic In Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin’s The Day Nobody Died, the images are long pieces of photographic paper exposed directly to sunlight. The results are fields of monochromatic tones transitioning into a solid color. Broomberg and Chanarin’s experiments of long exposures on rolls of photographic paper raises questions about how to express a collective visual experience exemplifying the limitations of describing a subject. This work speaks to our limited understanding of psychology and perception. Their work demonstrates a contemporary shift in how images are represented. Searching further for art that looked like my own, I came across Ted Serios. His low quality, darkly vignetted photographs spoke to the sensibility of my low-tech cameras. I evaluated Serios as a collector of images, finding places and documenting them through a specific personal aesthetic. Using a Polaroid instant camera, he would point the lens at his brain in order to create images directly from his mind onto the film plane inside the camera, creating instant “thoughtographs”. Serios’ contribution to photography, or lack thereof, became an access point where I saw a distinction between his intentions and how he was evaluated in the art world. Serios created entertaining illusions to make money, and to be accepted in both the medical community as well as the general public. His story was recounted in The World of Ted Serios by the psychiatrist, Dr. Jule Eisenbud. In this book is a hand written message from Serios stating ”What’s in this book is true, every word of it.” It is impossible to create a photograph with your mind. I am driven to understand why someone would go to these lengths to write this statement in a book with such conviction. Serios was a sociopath and an alcoholic. All of his work advocates the insanity of postulating miracles as true. Why do we cast such a wide net between truth and lie? If photography is inherently a lie, why did we find such issue with Serios? The aesthetics of the images are suggestive of the unknown. Visually, the photographs speak to his concept of what the mind thinks. One man’s illusionist is another man’s con artist. Whether Serios was aware of this or not is ignored because of the perception of his personality. Today at UC Berkley, scientists are unlocking these types of mysteries of the brain. Magnetic resonance imaging machines (MRI) are used to map what the brain sees. Subjects watch movie clips for an extended period while their brain activity is monitored. Researchers are able to map together shapes and tones that describe an image. These images reference Serios’s claims. We are beginning to tap into what was previously deemed fantastic and impossible. Pushing against boundaries of the representation, and deconstructing my images, I find myself returning to the beginning of the medium. Sitting with the ghost of Henry Fox Talbot beside my camera, I have been led to investigate the physical device itself. I first tried to create photographs of my body. My urge to become part of the image did not address the sea of new questions I was creating. The specificity of my body was the fulcrum, which tipped me into this current work. A six-sided cube can create a world of possibilities. This world was something that appeared to me as a black box. Information was allowed into it and something else was realized. Building cameras that were life-sized created new intimacy, which allowed me connection to a philosophical and physical process of image making. I have embraced failure as a part of the whole puzzle. I have discovered a way to embed meaning within the image without tying myself to obvious subjectivity. Within photography, the camera’s role shifts. A carpenter can love his hammer, but its still a hammer. I have began to look at the camera as something I have an emotional connection with, a thing that has more complexity than a single purpose. Instead of staring into the camera lens, I’ve taken ownership of the apparatus and involved my body as part of the experience. Wearing a camera, I am the black box experiencing explicitly what the camera does. I am constrained, unable to look around and see left or right. Blinders cause anticipation. While in the camera, I feel like something more is happening; a déjà vu, and a wash of disorientation, elation, confusion, and clarity all at once. The relationship with the photograph, the viewer and the creator become tangled within the machine. The meaning does not easily rise to the surface. The context is experienced where the viewer paints his or her own projections. The photographs are failures in the conventional sense where color is the only thing that succeeds. Titling changes the dynamic, relying on the viewer’s imagination. Without sitting inside my camera, the experience of creating a photograph is not reciprocal. I use text to communicate the complexity of relationships, events, and time within my work. Taking the hand of the audience, I allow for their contemplation of photography itself. I have found a way to share. Staring at the blackness of this photographic experiment I ask myself, is it a failure? It has to be; there is nothing descriptive in it. I was planning on making an image of my studio, nothing revelatory, just an image to prove that my camera worked. Lots of black, a few hints of green and magenta. My studio has bookcases, tables, and equipment strewn about. And yet my image doesn’t even have a geometric shape, let alone a navigable form. I previsualized what I wanted to communicate, took the lens cap off and stayed still… I bet Ansel Adams would be turning in his grave. Immediately recounting the technical steps to myself, I ignore what actually went on. I take the small piece of paper and start flipping it around until something takes shape. I see the curve of my head; stepping back I begin to see where information has begun to sprout. I hear a voice over my shoulder. “What are you doing?” “I’m trying to make an image of a photograph.” “Like a copy? Just scan it.” “It isn’t that simple, I’m not explaining this right, I want to use photography as the subject and point to other things at the same time.” “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I like that image.” “I like that image” reverberates throughout my skull like a super ball. Maybe I’m going crazy, wearing a camera on my head looking like a middle school science fair project gone awry. To survive in art, I have made photography malleable. My mistakes and intuition create a space where things I don’t understand are able to seep into my images. The tape in my photographs declares itself as evidence of the making instead of looking through the image into a window; the images are a reminder of the hand within the photograph and the person within the camera. *This list of text informed and shaped this thesis. Although, not directly noted in the thesis, this list informed and shaped both the written as well as visual components. Towards a Philosophy of Photography Vilem Flusser, 2000 The Photographer’s Eye John Szarkowski, 2007 Written on the Body Jeanette Winterson, 1994 Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography Geoffrey Batchen, 1999 Des Imagistes: An Anthology Ezra Pound, 1914 The world of Ted Serios,: “thoughtographic” studies of an extraordinary mind Jules Eisenbud, 1967 What Photography Is James Elkins, 2011 Photographs Not Taken, Will Steacy, 2012 The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography Lyle Rexer, 2013 What is a Photograph? Carol Squiers, Geoffrey Batchen, George Baker, and Hito Steyerl, 2014 Performance Art: From Futurism to Present (Second Edtition) RoseLee Goldberg, 2001 Live For A Living Buddy Wakefield, 2007 Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction Catherine Belsey, 2002