1) Tell us how it originated and how you developed the project on the American Musuem of Natural History. Nature seems increasingly quaint and fading, while at the center, someway in contrast, we found the human spectator. Disturbing and dark shapes depict us as a sort of executioner in front of exotic preys. Or behind all of this a desire for reconciliation is masked?
All of my photo projects begin in the most non-intellectual way. That is, one day I’ll discover that I’m intensely drawn to something I want to capture, and I stop the analysis right there. I experiment. I shoot to work out how to capture the thing in a way that satisfies my fascination, experimenting with every technical and visual variable. I try to keep myself from overthinking my motivation for as long as I can — at times it’s an almost mystical process. Eventually, of course, I start to see the images the way others will see them, with all the implicit meaning and references and influences.
The amnh project was the first project I ever pursued, and it followed that pattern. It started with one photo I brought home and kept returning to. I ended up buying a membership to the museum and visiting as often as I could during the fall and winter of 2005, shooting thousands of frames to end up with about 15 final images in the series. Of course the images were always about observation — me observing those visitors, those visitors observing the dioramas, the stuffed animals observing us all — but the fact that these people are shot against famously artificial nature was a bonus, a layer of meaning that I enjoyed even though it was not the reason I was there. So while I’m pleased that there’s a lot to think about — the natural versus the artificial, our relationship to the exotic, observing and being observed — those questions are not why I shot the series.
2) The theme is also reflected in the LCD series. To put it bluntly nature appears smaller, fake, brittle, and in the alien hands of the beholder. Can we ever fill this anthropological gap?
The LCD series came about by accident. I went back to the American Museum of Natural History in 2008, three years after my first project, intending to shoot a new series of silhouettes. But in those intervening years, museum visitors had begun to act differently. They no longer stopped to stare at the dioramas. Instead, almost everyone was now pausing to photograph them with little digital cameras. Some even passed through the diorama rooms shooting video without stopping at all. And I found it incredibly frustrating. It was much harder to find someone standing still for a moment, contemplating the dioramas. And so I decided to kill time by trying to see if I could capture this new thing in some interesting way. Again, I experimented with a lot of different approaches, over many days.
Ultimately I decided to take my cue from the visitors and make the LCD screens, and not the people or the animals, the subject. That meant that each image was shot so that everything — focus, exposure, etc. — was all about the little screens. Most important, the final images were color-corrected for the LCD screens, throwing the color of the rest of the room completely out of whack. That’s the biggest clue that the captured image has now become the important thing, not the room in which we’re standing, nor, to take it to a whole other level, the actual plain in Africa.
3) Workspace look at the workstations as many microcosms. Intimate and colourful visions that seem to reveal different personalities better than a portrait. Almost as if the things that we leave behind on the desk, and the many signs that we hang on the walls (as psychological borders) could tell our identikit…
Almost from the start I was thinking of the Workspace images as portraits of people without the people. But the more workspaces I shot, the harder it was for me to keep to that narrow concept. I kept shooting and rejecting workspaces that were simply dull to the eye, revealing in their details but visually flat and uninteresting, images that dragged down the whole series. And there was the flip side as well: beautiful workspaces sometimes didn’t offer a portrait of a person at all. And then I finally realized that I was less interested in workspaces as oblique portraits than as these gorgeous sculptural conglomerations. I was drawn to the light and detail and symmetry of something created intentionally, but not designed. And that was enough for me.
4) Also in NYS Xmas Tree Vendors images lead us to imagine different stories, to make poetic distinctions between people, to focus on their details. At the same time the eyes fall on the background, where a decorated nature is ready to return to the homes with the distant call of the wild. The smell of what was once a forest, and now an orphanage. Yet, in hindsight, we still feel some peaceful missing…
I think the Xmas Tree Vendors images offer one kind of experience to New Yorkers and a completely different kind to everyone else. I grew up in a tiny town where my dad would grab a saw and we’d head up to the Christmas tree farm at the top of the hill. A tree might cost five dollars, but he’d have to lay down on the ground and saw the thing down. So when I moved to New York City as an adult and saw these vendors on the streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan every year, with the trees sitting on the sidewalks for weeks waiting to be carried home, I had a very strong feeling about what it all meant. It was a very urban sight, almost completely unrelated to my own Christmas memories.
At the same time I romanticized the vendors, as if they were something from Miracle on 34th Street. I imagined them tending trees all year on Canadian tree farms and then driving them to New York on trucks to sell on the corners. Only when I started talking to the vendors, introducing myself and asking to shoot them, did I discover that it’s actually an extremely competitive business, dominated mostly by a few companies who claim certain corners around the city year after year. Probably half the vendors I shot were simply hired hands, taking a break from some other job to stand in the cold for a month and sell. On the other hand, some of the vendors fairly closely fit my fantasy fairly closely . A guy named Tom drives down from Alaska every December in a pickup truck with his wife and little boy. And he looks and acts the part.
5) Many of your works speak of the city, maybe your city, and of its less tens aspects as in The Urban Wilderness. How is it living in a city «having grown up in a tiny factory town in rural Pennsylvania». What do you carry of your past in your present and how you express it through photography?
I have a vivid memory of a time my family visited Philadelphia when I was probably 7 or 8 years old. We were walking down the street and suddenly my parents walked me to a stairway that led down a hole in the sidewalk, that went underground. I had never heard of subways before, so when I discovered that day that there were trains running in tunnels under the streets, my mind was completely blown. I was stunned and delighted, as if I’d discovered Santa’s secret workshop, or Superman’s hideaway. And there’s a part of me that still feels that way about cities. People walking and riding underground! Highways in the air! Elevators to the sky! Moving to a city for the first time was like getting off a bus and stepping into the distant future — a crowded, dirty, expensive future, but amazing nonetheless. I’ve made an effort not to erase that feeling of awe and wonder. Someone recently asked me if I would have as much success as a photographer if my subject weren’t New York City. I have no idea. I do know that New York is such a rich and strange place that I look forward to walking out with my camera every day to try to capture it. Not every artist is as lucky finding a muse.
Text by Steve Bisson
© All copyright remains with photographer Joseph O. Holmes