Notations
Having studied with Nathan Lyons at the Visual Studies Workshop, I am tuned into Nathan’s interest in how an extended sequence of images could become a framework for seeing “between images.”
As Nathan said, “If metaphor is a verbal strategy to evoke images, then as a photographer I’m interested in combining images to alter associations by extending the image itself. A juxtaposition of images enhances this possibility, while an extended sequence of images establishes a highly interactive structure … It is this act of transformation, interactively between images, that I find most challenging.”
And as Nathan writes of his book, “Notations in Passing” . . .
“The present series of photographs began sometime in 1962, although it directly relates to a much earlier body of work completed in 1958, which was exhibited under the title, 7 Days A Week.
Environment and landscape have always been central to a thought process or process of experience that words did not always parallel or satisfy. Theatre and poetry were important to me, as were a color seen for the first time in Japan, a sound in Atlanta, Georgia, or a sensation of space in Canada. Distinct images, directly perceived, began to replace the need for verbal orientation. Relationships that were attainable began to question intensely everything I had avoided, which included myself-beliefs, thoughts, and responses. Art became more important: first as product, but later, and more significantly, as process.
The process necessitated a beginning, which in reality could only be a continuation. The choice, not of conscious intent, but from past experience of response, was the meaning of a picture remembered as a child, or carried in a wallet-a snapshot-not as product, but process-unpretentious, and yet important, aspiring to nothing-a notation in passing. Do we see things as they are, or do we see what we make of them? My attempt was to let objects be objects in object spaces, to form simultaneously a neutral yet actively observational position, to combine non-photographs as photo graphs-not one or the other, but all of them together, of many places and spaces-to form a continuity of impressions.
It could be about me, but I think it is probably a series of questions about us and our stuff-pictures, objects, and things. They may question us more honestly than we can ourselves.
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I’m moved by Nathan’s concept of a continuity of impressions. Maybe that’s why I prefer listening to a musician’s full album rather than to the greatest hits collection.
