PARALLEL LINES: David Campany
Federica Belli Your writings around photography often take different forms in order to best tackle each issue: conversations, essays, fictions, interviews and much more. When is it better to publish a conversation with a photographer rather than a text about their work?
David Campany For me, it is often quite an intuitive decision at the beginning, yet writing is a very detailed business. It cannot be just intuitive, though I never really know how a piece of writing might go. There are some photographers whose work I admire, yet I do not find any way in for myself, as a writer. It happened just the other week: I thought about a piece I had been asked to write, but I knew a conversation with the photographer would be a better approach. Photographers are often thoughtful and articulate, especially in response to questions, if they’re good questions. I think about context. If I’m writing for a book of a photographer’s work, I generally prefer my words to be at the end rather than at the beginning. An afterword, not an introduction. Sometimes the writing is parallel to the work rather than ‘about’ it, and suggestive rather than explanatory or interpretive. In the last few years, while my library has been packed away in storage, I have written quite a number of pieces of fiction. I’m not really known for my fiction but when invited by photographers, I’ve asked if I could try it. If they liked it, we kept it. If they didn’t, I’d write something else. I’ve published around nine or ten of these stories, and I’m surprised to find that images feature in all of them, in one way or another. It feels like I am using a different part of my brain when I write fiction, as opposed to an essay. I can’t really explain it.
F.B. In a weird way though, fictional stories feel even more realistic than other forms of writing. For instance, my favorite is the one you wrote for FOAM on how to be a great viewer; that is precisely what fictions should do: phrase perfectly one’s thought and making it relatable.
D.C. That’s interesting to hear. That story came about through my work as a curator. It’s mysterious how viewers interact with exhibitions. You cannot really know what’s going on in their minds. You can get great reviews and tell yourself it was a great show, yet one never really knows. So, when I can I just sit in incognito in a corner of the exhibition and look at how people interact with the work, how long they spend with each piece, how they talk to their friends, whether they come back to certain images. I imagined a morning in the life of a woman visiting an exhibition. She felt like she needed to be taught something as soon as she walked in, and went looking for a wall text to tell her what to think. But she also felt a bit awkward about this. She comes to a very conscious decision to have a different relationship with viewing. You could say it is a piece of fiction, but it also is not. Again it was a matter of context, written for an issue of FOAM that was exploring what words can say about photographs. So I thought it would be interesting to write a piece which did not involve an image, but was somehow about this complicated way that certain kinds of texts become ‘scripts for looking’. Fiction seemed like a good way of doing it.
F.B. The photographic language, just like most contemporary art forms, is often expected to be accompanied by words guiding the viewer’s interpretation. Yet, photography Is meant to generate mixed feelings and shake our preconceived ideas. Where does such need for guidance stem from in viewers?
D.C. Sometimes it’s important that captions accompany images, for sure. Look at Henri Cartier Bresson’s The Decisive Moment from 1952, to take a classic example. Most of his images were a poetic kind of reportage in which nothing much needs to be explained. Think of the image ‘Behind the Gare St Lazare, 1932’ of the guy jumping across water: you are not thinking about who he was, whether he fell, or why there is even water on the ground. You are thinking about the picture. It doesn’t have a caption, just a title stating the place and date. But there is one picture in that book, taken in a liberated Nazi camp at the end of the war, where a Nazi informer being denounced. The photograph is dramatic, it looks like someone is about to hit someone, people are watching. It is quite clear there is some historically important aspect to it. And you need to know about it. The photograph alone does not, cannot, account for it all. It needs a caption. The picture opens up too many questions that require answers. There definitely are areas of photography in which an explanation really matters. Documentary, journalism, reportage, science, broadly speaking.
F.B. What kinds of writing are there that do not supply the reader with the default script for looking at a photographer's work, but rather add another layer to its interpretation?
D.C. Often, it just depends on how well written it is. Writing can open things up against the tendency to close them down or simplify. Sometimes photographers write about their own work, and I understand it is tempting for them to ‘explain’ what they have been trying to do. However, though sometimes the the stated intention might is interesting, it may not really be true. It may take us a long time to figure out why we made the photographs we did. Moreover, good work can be made without clear intentions. That is really fascinating. When I teach, I ask my students to reflect on the work they have done only after some time, as a way to avoid any promotional text and rather produce a more honest and searching piece of writing, that might actually help their own understanding, rather than ‘sell’ their work.
F.B. I guess it really is one of the most important parts of being an author, whatever language one uses. I have been doing it since I started doing photography and honestly at times you realise that you have been promoting a concept for so long that you actually start believing in it. Only time and detachment then allow for a deeper understanding of the motives behind a work. Why can we not accept our real motivation more easily?
D.C. The American photographer Stephen Shore once asked me to write a piece for one of his books but I realised I would rather talk to him. He agreed. He asked me to not ask the same questions everyone had been asking him, because he knew he would give the same answers out of habit. Language really can fixate us. And we are under such pressure to promote our work that at times we can’t get out of it. It’s a worry. Anyway, I asked Stephen questions he’d not been asked before, and his answers were amazing. Thoughtful, and genuinely spontaneous. But once our words are in print they belong to those who read them. I was giving a public talk in Toronto, and in the Q& A a woman stood up and started reading a passage of text. She asked me what I thought of it, so I just answered “I don’t know but it sounds like you’ve got something on your mind”. She actually had some disagreements with the writing, and she wanted to tell me about. She realised I didn’t recognise the paragraph, so she pointed out that it was something I had written back in 2008. The room laughed and so did I. I said that the text belonged to her now, I was merely the writer. Once you’ve published something and it is out in the world, it is not yours anymore. I tend to write things so I do not have to think about them so closely again. Certain ideas do recur and end up being revisited, of course. Just as artworks in the end belong to the viewer, writings belong to the reader.
F.B. Which is also why we cannot explain them I guess. They do not respond to any underlying motive anymore.
D.C. Yes, when we look at something or read something we do create our own version of the author’s personality. And every reader, every viewer has their own idea of it. Maybe it is better to enjoy our constructed version of a person behind the work.
F.B. Totally. I remember when I started reading the literature classics as a child: most of the fun actually consisted of imagining how the characters reasoned, who they were and what the author wanted to communicate. I don’t think I would have wanted anyone else’s explanation or view on that. And I apply the same line of reasoning to my own work in a way. I don’t really want any viewer to investigate too much on who I am, but rather I would want to understand how they position themselves before an artwork. I am currently working on a project which is honestly quite weird to my eyes at times, and I honestly don’t think I feel like explaining it yet. I can barely try to explain it to myself. I look at the photographs and I feel like I am not the author at times, no matter how good it feels to create them. I often feel like I have no right to explain anything to anyone, I can only try to communicate.
D.C. And creative people are influenced and affected by what is around them. I was listening to a radio programme about how some songs by The Beatles were analysed by computational intelligence to calculate whether they were written primarily by John Lennon or Paul McCartney. The problem is that while each had some distinctive characteristics as a songwriter, they were capable of imitating each other. There are very few photographers whose work is really distinctive, to the point that you couldn’t confuse it with anyone else’s.
F.B. That is true. But actually, I have come to think that real mastery of a language usually leads to an opposite result. An extremely aware artist most probably knows how to adapt his language to the message he is trying to get across.
D.C. I remember working my way through the oeuvre of the photographer Walker Evans. At first you encounter his extremely famous images, then you find out he has done something else, then something else once again. He was able to pick up and rework many different popular idioms of photography. In the subway he is a spy, before architecture he is an architectural photographer, and so on. It got to the point where I learned not to be surprised by what I discovered he was able to. In other words, I let go of my view of what I thought he was as a photographer. If there is something distinctive there, it’s not a style or an aesthetic. It’s a disposition towards the medium and the world, perhaps. And that is actually much more difficult to write about. Photography is almost easy to write about, but that makes it incredibly challenging to do it well, and with a genuine acceptance of how complex it is.
F.B. And it is probably part of our tendency of looking for guidance. But as an author, it is part of the fun: subverting your own and others’ expectations, leaving some space for irony.
