In the past, I've seen what I used to do as very separate from posed photography. But I have since refined the way I think about and execute these images and have found myself reaching for the tools from my previous life.
As a writer I control time. Real time is linear, elapsing quite orderly from the hour we are born until the moment we die. Occasionally it feels slow or fast, but it's always ticking away at the same pace.
On the page, everything is different. A writer with no sense of timing is quickly lost in a sea of quotations and plot devices. Masterful writers extend and contract, bend and twist time until they achieve what all artists are trying to achieve: not simply to tell a story, but to evoke emotions in their audience. Writers do this by creating the illusion of reality. How much of an illusion depends on where one lies between journalist and poet.
As a photographer I control what you see and seek to use these elements to create the same illusion of reality. It's a mixed media process, really, combining constructs that are visually evocative (light, color, backdrops, positioning) with real people and their own evocations (laughter, love, excitement, youth) to create art that looks effortlessly real.
I was thinking about this process while watching Gabe Askew's glorious fan video of Grizzly Bear's Two Weeks:
Two Weeks - Grizzly Bear from Gabe Askew on Vimeo.
The video is computer generated but uses photographic elements to create a mixed media film that marries the realistic and the fanciful. We see what seems to be real dioramas mingling with animated fishes and birds creating a more beautiful image than either media would create alone. Then, what gives the video emotional output is the appearance that we really are traveling via film across box after box of cardboard cut-outs and the fantastical notion (and sight) of such a dramatic endeavor. (Read more about how the video was made here.)
Whereas I began my career as a photographer trying to capture what I see, even in portraiture, I am now working more and more to create, instead, an artistic rendering of reality. I'm utilizing all the things lay observers and amateur writers take for granted as so-real-there-is-no-need-to-contemplate-their-explanation — things like intensity and color of light, the tilting of heads and subtle expressions — to create verisimilitude, but not actual verity, in my images.
Whereas I once sought strict fidelity to a collective reality, I am now courting photographs that reflect a world containing all those natural elements but appearing much more beautiful. I'm now making art.
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