Shane Darwent’s photography documents the remnants of declining Americana in a sparse, yet technically proficient style. Using black & white photography or altering images with collage, watercolor pigmentation, gum arabic, and an inkjet printer, his artwork vividly portrays a nation in a perpetual state of irony and intrigue. He was born in Austin, TX, raised in Charleston, SC, and currently lives in Chattanooga, TN. He attended Maryland Institute College of Art and completed a two-year Core Fellowship at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina.
In anticipation of Shane’s forthcoming photos in TRACHODON 2, we asked the artist to tell us about his creative process and his new book, The Flag in Our Hands (Blurb, 2010).
You've titled your blog “Black Camera Crusades.” In what ways is being a photographer like being on a crusade? What's your particular mission?
Well I suppose that the title is part mockery, part truth. On one hand, the idea of a crusade is totally wild to me—that any one group of people could feel so confident about their beliefs, enough to march across the land to convince others, is hard for me to imagine. On the other hand, my favorite aspect of photography has always been that I get to share what I find beautiful, or culturally ironic, or totally depressing with others that might not see those moments in the same way.
Tell us about your new book, The Flag in Our Hands:
The Flag in Our Hands is a self-published book that I put together to coincide with my current show at the Rebus Works Gallery in Raleigh. It began during the summer of 2008 when I decided I wanted to spend a while rambling around the country making pictures. Later that year is when the recession slammed down and I knew that it would be an interesting time to travel through and document America. During that same time the gas prices where also outrageous and I decided that I wanted to do a large portion of my traveling by bicycle.
I started my journey in January of 2009 working for a sculptor in rural Tennessee. I lived and worked in New Orleans that spring and then spent 3 months on a bicycle, riding from San Francisco, CA to Charleston, SC with my girlfriend and a good friend of ours. I then made my way back out west in the fall, through Texas, Colorado, and ultimately Wyoming where I spent a couple of months at two different artists residencies situated on working cattle ranches. My main goal each day was to make sure my camera had film and to just capture what I was seeing and remember the stories I was hearing.
Ironically enough, 2009 ended with my girlfriend and I moving back to where I had started the year—Tennessee. We moved to Chattanooga and, a few months later, I received a grant that allowed me to put this work into a book. Eventually I edited down over 1200 film negatives to 120 pages of black & white photographs with a few stories interspersed. So yeah, The Flag in Our Hands is pretty much the culmination of my travels throughout the country during 2009, my homage to America during a time when what it meant to be American was rather blurry.
Your artist statement says, “Still young and forever expanding, the story of this nation is one of continual change. The physical remnants of this change intrigue me...as if they were epic sculptures made by divine and ironic craftsmen.” What remnants do you find especially fascinating and why?
I have always really responded to parts of our built world that no longer serve the function they once did, or that are being slowly overtaken by natural forces. Old signs and billboards for example, there is just something about the way they age, how their meaning becomes distorted over time. I have also always appreciated crumbling concrete, especially when plants start to grow through the cracks and take back over. Recently I have become taken with the Cedar posts that are used to make fences here in Tennessee. Whole trees will grow directly out of those limbless Cedar posts that have been pounded into the ground. Basically anything that suggests the force of time or nature regaining control over what we have built inspires me. It gives me a little hope, you know?
Apart from hard work and determination, what would you say has been the key to your success?
First and foremost, a supportive family. I come from working class parents. My mom is an accountant and my dad is in concrete construction. He used to tell me that he was working so hard to help send us to college so that we might not have to work so hard, physically, that is. Then, when he took me to visit art school and saw how much tuition was he had a mini stroke...But really though, they have been behind me 100 percent even though at times I think they have a hard time knowing exactly what it is that I do.
I also feel like I have had to believe in myself to get to this place. You really have to feel like you have something special to offer to spend so much time making things that so few people may see, so it has to come from a genuine and passionate place.
Which artists (in any medium) do you look to for inspiration in terms of technical proficiency and content?
As far as photographers, there are a couple that have had a direct impact on me. Edward Burtynsky's photographs of large-scale industry just cut me to pieces. Also, William Christenberry's architectural portraits have really changed the way I look at the South. In fact, my first road trip last year was to go on a pilgrimage through Hale County in Alabama where Christenberry returns every year to photograph the same buildings and their subtle changes.
Above any visual art though, music has always moved me the most, especially any in the raw and bluesy realm. With fairly primitive tools, these musicians are able to report on everyday life and fill it will so much soul it actually hurts.
What factors go into your decision to photograph something in color versus black & white? Or to intentionally alter and obscure an image digitally?
Fortunately, or unfortunately, I do not have multiple cameras that I carry around so I am left to use whatever film I happen to have in my camera, which is most often my Rolleiflex. Depending on what type of film I have in, I tend to look at things differently. When shooting in black & white I pay more attention to the quality of light, versus shooting in color where I will be drawn in by shapes and surface textures. And of course, as soon as I put a roll of black & white film in my camera I will immediately see something that would be incredible with color film and vice versa, but I try to think there is some hidden meaning in my arbitrary decision.
As far as altering my images through different processes, I believe that comes from the part of me that really loves to be physically involved. My first real art-making passion was collage, where I got to use a number of different processes on a given piece. That way of working followed me into college where I began to experiment with photo printmaking techniques and ultimately ended up spending more time in the print shop than in the darkroom.
This has continued to evolve to the point where, now, I am able to pair a certain process with the imagery to hopefully enhance the content I am working with. For example, a couple of years ago I was photographing old satellite dishes in rural settings and printing them through the gum bichromate process. Gum prints are built up through successive layers of watercolor pigment mixed with gum arabic and a light sensitive dichromate. I wanted the satellite prints to conjure up the feeling of looking at an old television set, so I built up the prints in rather faded or bleached out colors. The imperfections of gum printing also gave the prints some “vignetting” at the corners. The discoloration and unplanned imperfections of this process blended together, relating the final prints of the satellite dishes to the imagery that satellite dishes might have transferred to low-fi television screens back in the day.
Most recently, I have been making what I call Painted Prints. While scanning in the some 400 negatives from my travels during 2009, I became really nostalgic for the places I had seen. I also grew tired of looking a black & white images all day, so I decided that I would try to turn some of those images into full color memories of that place. For these prints, I make a quick black & white print from the original negative. I then transfer the outlines and important information from those prints to a new surface so that I can map out what to paint where. Finally, I take that finished, full color painting and run it through my printer to add the detail from the photograph back over top of the painting. The final prints take on a saturated vibrance that references a certain romanticizing of the past that so many of us take part in.
Ultimately, altering certain images can add another layer of history to a scene that I already find curious for its wonder and possibilities. This allows me to pass on these enigmatic puzzles to the viewer.
Photography, like writing, is a common denominator for many people. We all take pictures. We all put pen to paper. Yet there is something inherently different about choosing to dedicate your life to it. At what point did you realize you weren't just “taking pictures,” you were photographing?
If I had to pinpoint a moment where I knew I wasn't just taking pictures, I was making them, it has to be when I was a junior in college. I had just taken a color photography class with the head of our photo department. He was this total guru who seemed to know everything about photography and how it related to the rest of the world. In that class, I wanted to continue to experiment by collaging in the darkroom and learning all sorts of color printing tricks, etc. He really encouraged me to just keep it simple—take some photographs, learn how to print them, then refine my vision.
The series I ended up shooting that semester was this kind of post modern one where I flattened space as much as I could and ended up turning the picture plane itself into a collaged surface. I photographed the sides of cars and imagined that the peeling paint stripes were brush strokes. I photographed details of old signs and saw them as cut-paper collages. And I photographed the gap between two beat up garage doors and saw in that image a minimalist, color-field painting.
At the end of the semester I had a series of 18 color photographs that truly impressed my professor. He asked me to hang them for the first show in the photo department the following semester. I remember putting them up and feeling happy about how I had grown during that previous semester, but wasn't sure exactly how I had grown until I read a note that a student left in the exhibition notebook. The student told me that my images were beautiful, but what made them beautiful was not the prints themselves, but the way that I saw my surroundings. That was when I realized that, beyond any technique, my underlying gift was in my observation, and photography was a direct way for me to share that with others.
Tell us about some of your favorite cameras to use and why.
For the past year and a half I have been shooting primarily with a medium-format Rolleiflex. It is lightweight and simple and has been treating me well. Before that, I was using a Mamiya C3, also a medium-format camera, that was loaned to me by a friend. It was the first time that I had ever used a square format camera and taking pictures has never been the same since. Because it is a square, I began to place all of my subjects directly in the center. At that time I wasn’t photographing people, but the objects I was shooting began to take on a portrait feel. The square format seemed to remove the subject from its surroundings in a way that allowed me to see these objects differently. Also, with the negatives being 2 1/4” square, they capture a lot of detail that you might not have noticed in person.
You just completed a major body of work, currently on exhibit at Rebus Works in Raleigh, NC. How do you recoup after working with such focus for so long? What do you plan to set your sights on next?
You know, I was not at all prepared for letting go of that work. It had been a part of me for a year and a half. It consumed all of my thoughts and it defined me for a while. I even got a little scared that I was going to be one of those artists that had one song to sing or one book to write and then, poof, my creative energy would be sucked into some black hole...
Actually, on the way back to Tennessee from the show at Rebus Works, I stopped in to see a friend of mine who was doing a craft fair. I told her how bittersweet the whole feeling was. And Dana, being the wise young mom of a sweet little two-year old, likened my feeling to postpartum—which I clearly have no experience with—but from all that I have read since, seems quite accurate.
As for looking forward, I feel that there is something worth pursuing in the portraits I have recently begun to take. I have been so focused on man's remnants, that I have almost staunchly avoided having people present in my photographs. Taking that cross-country bicycle trip though, really helped me to see the same curiosity in the people that flow through this world as in the objects that they leave behind. At the same time, I am also really enjoying making the wooden sculptures of the signage that I have loved looking at for so long. I feel that they are something I will be able to work on for some time. Really though, as long as I am able to continue making work, I will be grateful.
Shane was kind enough to talk to Katey Schultz, associate editor of TRACHODON, over email this month.
0 comments:
Post a Comment