A photographic imagination

"African futurist" on Flickr once observed that I "liked people, but not that much. People lost in space.' I think that is a very valid statement that underlies my approach.

My approach is primarily about low resolution image harvests generating photo references. It is not about mega-pixels although it very much about the pixel. It has to do with how the images come out and the way I interact or or more correctly don't interact with the people in the pictures. It is a slow process, harvesting these images and then looking again (and again) at them over time on the screen.

This process separates me from the subjects. The first time I am really looking at the capture is on the computer screen. That can can be days, weeks, months or more after taking them. I am in a different place literally and figuratively. It allows my imagination to work more freely on the reality of what was captured. So there is this distance. A distance of time. A distance of space. These are images of images of that space, that distance. The space between me and the world.

When I begin working on these, really seeing what's there - the subject is no longer there. However on the screen they glow and take on a life - so part of the transformation is that the subject becomes an object. The representative becomes representational.

The look of the result isn't in the detail or sharpness any more. It is in the actual viewing experience on screen. And seeing transformed and and go from 640 x 480 to a 19" screen, you can take in the whole scene - all jewel like and glowing.

So the use of photography is different. It is not the decisive moment frozen. It is a more measured purposeful encounter - the creation of the physical object. This is what I consider to be the "art". The screen image or the photographic print is the object, the document of my process where the image becomes an image of itself. An event takes place but the viewer doesn't experience that. They experience the idea of that. And ideally the viewer will have an experience where they will respond to the pictures - think about their own memories, perceptions and premonitions.

What I love is this process that you can go outside right now and capture something and then transform and present them as an idea, my imagination of the experience rather than the experience itself. There is alot of imagination in reality. You just have to look for it.

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The first in a series of posts where I will take on the answering of questions posed at other people. These questions come from an interview with Magnum photographer Martine Franck at ArtInfo.com (from Personism)

I am very struck by how often you return to images of people who are either alone or who are different in some way. Do you see photography as a tool for describing difference?

RD: Photography appropriates the world. I present an imagined context. Ambiguity and anxiety from outside the border of the image is an editing choice.

Let me put it another way, do you see photography as a means of exploring the differences that one encounters in the world?

RD: No. Photographers want to be something else - a witness, too often a witness that can't be cross examined. If anything I am trying to explore the lies we tell oursleves. Or at least the lies I tell myself.

Someone once said that taking someone’s photograph is rather like meeting them on a train.

RD: I encounter alot of people on the New York subways that I would not want to meet. So that is true for me to the extent that it is in passing and I will tell my own stories about them. I am not interested in telling theirs.

Your work portrays both sadness and happiness, but it seems to me that there’s always something melancholic about your portrayals of happiness.

RD: I was an altar boy for many years when I was younger and witnessed the cylce of life - baptisms, weddings and funerals. I think that there must have been some days that I served at all three. In looking back I have come to understand how melancholy and hapiness can attend the same events. It must have had some effect on me and ultimately my work.

Would you say that your work is about the fragility of the human spirit then, or about its strength?

RD: I would rather say that the work speaks to how we get on with what we have to do. We live most of our lives in the middle. In these ambiguous and indecisive moments we find ourselves.

What would you say to the suggestion that the key balance in your work is between curiosity and compassion?

RD: Compassion is a big word better to be applied in smaller circles than society at large. Curiosity yes - but the kind of curiosity that make people rubber-neck - watching people consume themselves and then get indigestion. I think the balance lies in the contradictions. I am a man of many contradictions and in those contradictions I hope I find a truth.

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I am please to announce that I am now represented by Peter Hay Halpert Fine Art in NY.

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