A Conversation with Beth Dow

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Beth Dow‘s photography is unexpectedly cool and non straightforward. Her imagery demands her witnesses to view and look at the work with a slow eye. Tricks, surprises, details abound in her photographs. Tucker Hollingsworth recently interviewed Ms. Dow about her current projects, recent works, and ongoing interests.

Dow’s photographs have been exhibited throughout the Midwest, as well in New York, the United Kingdom, Japan and China. She has been the recipient of two Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowships (2008, 2011), a McKnight Foundation Fellowship (2004, 2011), and a Greater London Arts grant (1989). Her work is represented in public collections such as the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Portland Art Museum.

MPB: You like order and design. Why photograph landscape?

BD: I’m actually most interested in acts of rebellion against order and design. That might be why I love formal gardens, especially English ones. We kid ourselves that we can impose artificial structure on living, organic things, and go to great lengths to impose our will. We can only fail, and I love those little gestures of failure.

MPB: Do you respond to fields and plains–undeveloped, unused, or left to hazard?

BD: I tend to overlook those landscapes in favor of examples of more direct human interference. I’m sure the wilderness is marvelous, but it wouldn’t occur to me to make photographs in such a place.

MPB: Are you philosophical at all in terms of contemporary land use/mis-use?

BD: I am in other aspects of my life, but not in my photographs. I recognize that we live on, in, and from the land, and that parasitic existence can’t always be pretty.

MPB: I just want to understand: Chaos in nature is a form of order. Chaos is visually unorganized. I think there would be quite a number of people who would find fussy, over-the-top gardens to be just a slight step away from chaos. Yet, you see an opportunity to communicate order using horticulture-forms, arranging mass and scale into your compositions.  Is your work a conscious reaction to this paradox?

BD: I tried to compose my garden photographs in a way that would slow everything down. They sort of feel like held breaths to me. Having said that, I shoot very quickly, and with a hand-held camera. I’m far too impatient for a tripod! Those photographs are about the illusion of stillness, but insects are buzzing, leaves are rustling, and sap is rising. There is movement all around, but on a small, subtle level. And they are also about the illusion of imposed order, but branches break, and shoots sprout.

MPB: We both manufacture and observe landscapes. We landscape with our tools and shovels and pickets; we observe and interact with landscape as well. Do you have interest in manufacturing landscapes with your camera?

BD: Yes, but that newer work is not on my web site. I’m currently using digital tools to make artificial landscapes that move through time and space.

MPB: That would be a new venture for you, as you’ve mostly involved historical processes with your work. What excites you about the change in your work?

BD: I’m messing around with the malleability of space and time, and the tensions between fact and fiction. I’m trying to make landscapes that look rational at the first glance, but that are also illogical, and digital editing is an obvious tool for that. My previous work, printed in platinum-palladium by Keith Taylor, uses the labor, process, and rich, unsurpassed tones of the medium as part of the metaphor of the imagery. They are meant to be ageless and permanent. This new work is less about the photograph as object and more about it being a fleeting instant in space and time.

MPB: What projects are you working on during your current McKnight fellowship?

BD: I’m combining my interests in the history of photography, world history, geography, and books. I’m experimenting and having fun!

MPB: You’ve received two McKnight fellowships for photography. Does the first inform your current fellowship?

BD: I’m surprised to realize it probably doesn’t. The two projects aren’t related in any way.

MPB: Who and what have been your most enduring non-visual influences?

BD: Literature, always. I especially like people who say seemingly subtle things that, on further reflection, are rather subversive.

MPB: I see your work and I immediately think back to works by Atget. But I understand you respond to Frith–and in a lot of ways that makes sense because your interests to capture exotic locales or unique views seems shared. Are you deeply affected by early photography?

BD: Absolutely, but I’m interested in Francis Frith and other Victorian expedition photographers for perhaps the wrong reasons. I’m mostly interested in the ways their process failed, so I love the white, heavily retouched collodion skies behind graphic pyramids and other antiquities, and I also love the titles in their print margins.

MPB: Do you feel your photos have any relationship to Atget’s work?

BD: I realize it’s logical to mention Atget in regards to my garden photographs, but I was actually thinking about earlier artists, like Claude Lorrain. Garden photographs are usually made in color, so I can see how my tonality has something in common with Atget.

MPB: Do you feel your photos have any relationship to works by Henri Cartier-Bresson?

BD: Most of my early work was shot on the street, and usually included bits of people passing through. I made that work before I knew anything about Cartier-Bresson, but some of my shots look like his!

MPB: How do you see your work in relationship to the photographers of yester-year?

BD: I use historic processes and visual conventions to tell stories about the contemporary landscape.

MPB: Frith’s meta-statement, “Oh what pictures we could make if we could command a view” strikes me as a good entrance to looking at your existing, collected body of work.  Looking ahead at work you are working on currently or want to make in the future, could you offer a statement to viewers as a perhaps for where to “come from?”

BD: Why must we fidget with the world? Because it’s there. And where do our efforts get us? Here.

MPB: One of my favorite images of yours is “Broken Tree” from Fieldwork. At immediate glance I’m pleased by the structure, and miss the comedy or action of what’s happening or occurred. If you remember the details, could you describe if the break-down was a live-action shot, or if it’s part of a slower deconstructive process?

BD: That picture came about in a way that’s unusual for me. It was shot in rural Wisconsin on a road we traveled frequently. A huge wind storm blew apart the weeping willow, and that enormous branch hung there for ages, dangling precariously above the piles of neatly cut fallen branches. I loved that the owners never bothered to just pull that branch down, and finally took a picture after watching it week after week. As I said earlier, my photographs are usually quick, spontaneous responses to things I happen upon. That one festered for months.

MPB: I also think about the way I read that image and I realize: It’s allowing the photo to speak to you versus us reading into images.

BD: My whole Fieldwork portfolio is a collection of curious sculptural arrangements and forms in marginal rural landscapes. Many of these forms and structures were made for utilitarian reasons, and that was their only meaning. I love finding those little intrusions on the landscape, and especially like to leave the narratives wide-open for speculation.

MPB: Another image I enjoy of yours is, “Soccer Game: Bell Field.” The image captures nostalgia, but for me it’s really successful in delineating tension in point of view, trying to see action as it is best happening. When negotiating with the image, I think about where I’d perch myself to see the game, where are the other open spots or other people camped, what’s happening on the field, what’s the geography. Essentially, the photo can be read as a metaphor for how to look and how to interact with space. “Image as space,” I see it more than “image as place.”  I see the image more universally than a Carleton College experience. For you, what about that image works, and what do you see in it?

BD: I love that people are just scattered all over the place. Even though a soccer game is underway, the players are dispersed evenly and show little engagement with each other. Likewise, the spectators are spread randomly on the slope, staring ahead and waiting for something, anything, to happen. The clouds kept opening up, flashing little spotlights on the scene. This photograph has a lot in common with my earlier photographs I spoke about previously.

Recent Works by Andy Mattern

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Andy Mattern is currently pursuing an MFA in Studio Art at the University of Minnesota. His photographs are receiving attention not only within Minnesota but around the country for their depiction of human life without visualized human forms. Instead, influences from culture are mined to examine our technologies’ and abilities to create and express. His recent projects will be seen at The Katherine Nash Gallery in Mountains Were Oceans, opening March 30, 2012, and in Duluth at PRØVE Gallery (opening March 19, 2012). Just this week, Andy received a 2012 Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Grant.

MPB: Why DETACHED GARAGE?

AM: These photographs are from a recent body of work inspired by evening walks in the alleys of St. Paul and Minneapolis. The title refers to the structures pictured, but also to the experience of being separated from the activity of the street while wandering in the alleys.

MPB: In the series, every door is closed. Thematically, the back door or secret portal’s a personal and private place. But these structures are detached from their houses.

AM: My work often begins by locating a certain type of private space in which I can focus intensely and without distraction. The activity of photographing for me is similar to meditation because it is a repetitive attempt to focus on a single point while letting everything else go. I am enamored with the forms of these garages, their surfaces, shapes, and hints of individuality, but more important to me is the pursuit of solitude through seeing.

MPB: Is DETACHED GARAGE is an extension of your series, EMPTY BUILDINGS? 

AM: Inasmuch as an artist is always saying the same thing, albeit in different ways, yes, these two series are related. The connection for me is mainly in the experience of photographing and the desire to be alone, but certainly the content of the images and the way they are presented is similar.

MPB: What are DETACHED GARAGE’s influences? 

AM: The New Topographics has been a big influence on me, Lewis Baltz and the Bechers, in particular. Their formal and systemic approaches appeal to me because they create a method of engagement with the world. This method becomes ritual and the output, although ordered by a set of parameters imposed up front, becomes a surprise.

MPB: Why DRIVEN SNOW?

AM: Last winter was the 5^th snowiest in Minnesota’s recorded history. During the months of astonishing cold, I noticed a peculiar product of weather and urban movement: masses of dirty ice and snow that accumulate under cars. I dislodged these forms from parked vehicles, or retrieved them from the street, and brought them back to the studio to photograph. Impossibly suspended in midair, these odd forms are presented like specimens, removed from their context. The visual result is something between scientific record and abstract painting that is a meditation on impermanence.

MPB: Do you have any anecdotal responses from your audiences about the work?

AM: Some people think they are rocks or even organisms. I like this uncertainty. Even though the objects are evenly lit and presented at life size, they are still mysterious.

MPB: What are the scales you present these two series’ work? 

AM: Detached Garage is printed 24×30 and the Driven Snow is printed with the depicted objects exactly to scale, one-to-one, which makes the paper size 17×22.

MPB: Other then geography and place, do you find similarities between these two series?

AM: Both deal with seriality. I am interested in the production of collections of images that work together. The repetition this entails is an important part of the process, not just as a generative strategy, but also as a psychological statement. I love looking deeply at closely related images, finding the nuances and variations. This type of seeing is similar to listening to the same song on repeat, over and over, each time you hear something new.

MPB: What are the next opportunities and venues to share your work to the public?

AM: My work will be in two group shows coming up at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery. The first, Regarding Place, is a continuation of the exhibition I helped organize this past summer in Turku, Finland with my colleagues from the Department of Art, Areca Roe, Jan Estep, Erin Hernsberger, Sam Hoolihan, Justin Newhall, James Henkel. This spring in the Nash I will be showing work with my fellow graduate students in our MFA thesis exhibition.

Justin Newhall

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Justin Newhall’s photography has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, including solo, two- and three-person exhibitions, at the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), Galerie Lichtblick (Cologne), Franklin Art Works (Minneapolis), and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

His work is represented in numerous public and private collections, including the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the Walker Art Center.

Justin is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He received a BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art & Design and an MFA from the University of Minnesota. Aperture has published an individual title of Newhall’s work. Newhall is represented by Weinstein Gallery in Minneapolis.

For more information, contact newhall.info@gmail.com.

MPB: Your work involves myths and history, and in your Lewis and Clark series, many of the photos depict “history” as it relates to opportunities for tourism and commerce. In America, public knowledge about her history is a commercial industry in as much as commerce equates America’s national pride. For you, is there a semblance which stories from history sell, and which stories people are attracted to, and how those stories are spun over time?

Sacagawea State Park, Walla Walla County, Washington

JN: My work in Historical Marker revolved around the 200-year anniversary of the Lewis and Clark expedition. One of the things I was interested in with that project was exploring how we tell or sell our historic past. It is usually incredibly oversimplified and often hyperbolic – animated dioramas, reenactments, etc.  As a kid visiting these places, I can tell you it did little to shed light on history in any thoughtful or educational way.  I also wanted to juxtapose those often absurd images with images of the geography itself, which is often unremarkable.  Many historic sites and monuments belie the significant events or histories that actually took place there.

MPB: Contrarily, photographing up in Churchill, Manitoba is more about hunting down the mythology that inspired Gould. Whatever community there was, it was a fringe-society without the glamour of the heroic American mythological epic. Your series, Northern Studies, is less about a public or collective connection to history, yet, like any other story, the landscape’s narrative is mysterious and compelling. Is there a reason why you started the series as it relates to the hyperbolic tourism found in Lewis and Clark’s legacy, or the shared fetishism found in Axis and Allies?

JN: With Northern Studies I wasn’t so much interested in “hunting down” the North that Gould portrayed in his experimental radio documentary as I was in finding a way to translate its essence into visual form.  As for how it relates to my Historical Marker images, I would say that both involve following someone else’s path.  And in both those projects and in my Axis and Allies series, I was interested in history – past and present. Also, in all three bodies of work, the landscape figures in or looms largest.  Even in Axis and Allies, the Midwestern landscape, full of buckthorn and honeysuckle, becomes a character.

German Soldiers, Rosemount, Minnesota

MPB: What’s an experience about an image you had difficulty making, and could you describe what potentially distracted or diluted the image before you were happy with it?

JN: With Northern Studies I had many difficult experiences making images. My first of several trips to Churchill, Manitoba (where the Northern Studies images were taken) involved a 10 day trip (five of which were on a train) with me shooting around 100 rolls of film – and I didn’t like any of the images I made.  There were a few images from that trip with promise, but I could tell I just needed to figure out a better way of picturing them.  On my next trip I switched from a medium format to 4×5 so I could get more descriptive power from the images and that helped a great deal. The worst part about shooting in the region was the cold in the winter (one trip the mercury never made it above -30 F), which made taking pictures with my 4×5 almost impossible.  And add on top of that that the very real possibility of a polar bear attack. The summers weren’t much better – I still had to be worried about polar bear, but the real menace was the bugs. You can’t even imagine how insane they were. It was the Boundary Waters times ten!

MPB: Is the purpose of your work satire, or to critique? Or both?

JN: No comment.

MPB: Your previous series Axis and Allies explores history as consumption: the rituals of subculture, nostalgia, and respect ultimately compel larger bodies of people-groups to reenact war battles. How much is spectator-sports? Education? 

JN: Many people who participate in reenactments feel like they are having this very intense and “real” connection to history.  Of course in reality, it’s a very selective and often nostalgic one.  Sometimes there is a component of public education – reenactments often take place as part of celebrations commemorating historic events.  But what I was interested in was the private events that reenactors hold, where the general public is out of view. There, there’s very little pretense about educating.  Participants are still obsessed with “authenticity,” especially as it relates to their gear and weaponry, but in my experience at least (I participated in many private events as a Russian soldier in a Soviet unit), there’s not a whole lot of talk about the nature of war or its outcomes. They would have these battles with an end goal, and sometimes they’d relate it to a particular historic battle, the Battle of the Bulge for instance, but the outcome wasn’t actually predetermined.  Most of the time I participated, the Germans won.

MPB: I’m also curious: what is your understanding of the psychological motivations of the participants? Is there a general through-line as to why they participate? Are there financial costs to participate (do they pay a participatory fee)? And if there are fees to participate, does money go to something specifically?

JN: Motivations vary – everyone comes to their “impression” from a different place.  Typically, there are no fees to participate.

MPB: Were you able to deduce how much of the battle re-enactments are a way for two sides to continue fighting, or for two opposing frames of thought not to compromise? 

JN: Not sure what you mean? I think in large part it’s a way for a bunch of grown men (and some women) to get together, camp, drink, smoke and play war. I believe much of it is about fantasy and play.

MPB: Political-theorist Hannah Arendt said, “I’m more than ever of the opinion that a decent human existence is possible only on the fringes of society.” All of your work appears to be focused on fringe-societies. In many ways “the other” (aka “fringe societies”) is becoming more consistent in our own society. What’s a fringe society now?

JN: I’ve never thought of my work as concentrating on the idea of “the other” except perhaps in Axis and Allies.  With Historical Marker the work was born of familiarity – paying homage to decades of family trips out West and also to the work of a generation of photographers often associated with the New Topographics exhibition at the Eastman House in 1975.  I guess with Northern Studies there was a sense of the exotic – due in large part to geographic distance and isolation – but in reality the town of Churchill isn’t all that much different from what you find in Northern Minnesota or Rural Montana. Fringe to some, but again I think familiar to many others.  I’m not sure what I would consider a fringe society as it requires you to set a baseline for the norm, which is something quite difficult to do.

Cold War-era Radar Facillity, Fort Churchill, MB

MPB: Could you list your most important influences–visually and philosophically? 

JN: Tough one to answer, there are so many, and it varies depending on which project I’m looking at.  Music in general is almost always an influence, whether it’s a specific band or song  or composer, or a general movement – punk rock, folk, classical, etc.  Frequently, I think of my projects in terms of structure the way I would a song or album. That was one of the reasons I was so keen on using Glenn Gould’s Idea of North as the foundation to build my Northern Studies series.  Gould’s work is a radio documentary but it’s structured like a musical score.  Also, with my most recent work, I keep coming back to a song by the British post punk band Wire – Outdoor Miner. It’s spare, simple, beautiful and mysterious in a way that resonates with me.

MPB What inspires you to photograph currently?

JN: At the highest level of generality, I make photographs to discover and make sense of the world and to communicate what I find with others.

MPB: Do you have any opinions about the future of photography: technically, artistically?

JN: Practice-wise I could care less if an image was made with an iPhone or with an 8×10 view camera as long as it’s compelling. Also, I’m sure digital cameras will continue to get better and the means of producing images easier – though you will still need a good idea to make something worthwhile. Predicting photography’s artistic future (in terms of subject matter)  I would say that, from now until the end of time, we’ll be rehashing the same broad or general themes and ideas.  What’s the quote…“the really original artist does not try to find a substitute for boy meets girl, but creates the illusion that no boy ever met a girl before”?  Some might find that discouraging.  But I find it comforting.

MPB: What is the surprising-best quality about the “Minnesota photo-scene”?

JN: I’m not sure if I see it as a scene per se, but I do think there is a strong visual arts community here.  Its best quality is that it’s accessible to anyone seeking it out.

MPB: Are there any dynamics you would wish could change? Or things “we’re doing,” but could do better?

JN: I do think that one could argue for trying to make it (the MN visual arts community) better known to the world outside of MN.  There are certainly a number of people in town whose reputation or work is well known elsewhere, but there’s still a sense that artists in the Midwest are not the same caliber as their coastal peers and that there is a provincial quality to work made here. Both in my experience are not true.

MPB: Whose unnoticed photo-work are you particularly excited and engaged by and would like to find wider exposure?

JN: This is a bit of a copout but there are too many to list.

MPB: I’d associate you as a Minnesota photographer. Have you lived elsewhere, and if so has that experience informed your work specifically?

JN: I was born in Los Angeles, but shortly thereafter my family moved back to Minnesota. But my family has had a long connection with the state of Montana, going back almost 100 years, so growing up I spent many of my summers on my grandparents’ ranch in Central Montana.  That connection has and continues to inform the work I make.

Installation View of Northern Studies at Franklin Art Works

Stephanie L. Rogers: Memento Mori

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Tucker Hollingsworth discusses with emerging Minneapolis-based photographer Stephanie L. Rogers about the themes and concepts she engages with in her work. Stephanie graduated from Saint Olaf College as a studio-art major in 2007, and her interests are heavily informed by the Memento Mori tradition (Latin for “remember your mortality”).

TH: Dead bugs, damaged photo-albums. How did you land in the photo-making world, behind a camera?

SLR: I have impulses to document memories. However, for a long time I considered myself a photographic printmaker, so now I’m trying–with difficulty sometimes–to force myself to go out and shoot new images.

TH: Do you know why photography captures your attention?

SLR: I’m interested in how photographs function, and the way photographs function with memories. Because photos are part of our everyday lives as much as they are an art form, I ask questions about how the art form relates to the photos that are our everyday experience.

TH: In other words, your projects relate to the way photographs function in our society.

SLR: Yes –they have a time-based nature, collective effects–and my concerns about mortality and memory are loosely affected by Susan Sontag’s “a photograph is a slice of time that will never happen again,” and Roland Barthes, “every photo is about death.”  Even though both of these quotes are revered and often cited, I think both of them are true.

TH: Would you describe your interest in death as morbid? or a preoccupation?

SLR: No. I think death and mortality are huge themes in my work. But I’m concerned more about how photographs become instrumental to how we remember things. I at least am constantly reminded by . . .

TH: Images’ influences?

SLR: Yes.

(Pause.)

TH: What influenced you to make the New Orleans series?

SLR: Seven-months after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, I volunteered with a group of friends from school to help rebuild in what ways we could. I naively thought we would be rebuilding–but we weren’t–we were still cleaning up. It was while cleaning out mold-affected houses, I came across families’ photo albums.

TH: Were your thoughts involved that somehow you were violating some kind of space and privacy?

SLR: Yes. Opened-up memory books is a voyeurism.

TH: How did you go from processing or invading someone’s personal space to making these pictures??

SLR: A friend encouraged me to take the photos and worry about it later. “You’re never going to have the chance again.” And I told myself, “I have a camera, it’s loaded with film.” I’ve thought about it a lot since then. Part of what bothered me was that it felt selfish to take five minutes to shoot the film when there was so much clean up work to do. The homeowners were also in a very emotionally raw state, so I didn’t feel that I could ask their permission then. Because I still feel guilty about not asking permission, I would love to hear from the families.

TH: Did you take photos of individual pictures? Were they all anthologies?

SLR: A group of photos. I didn’t have time to think about it–it was an impulse. I’ve now come to realize the work is an intimate, personal look at what people lost. I also think the albums are contextually important.

TH: I like the photos for the fact that the photos in your photos have deteriorated. When looking at them, I like that the dye is swimming on the paper with mold that’s floating on top of that. It reminds me of Justin Newhall’s found photos that were discarded, a similar but different thing. (To compare discoveries, the photos Justin found appear to be images of ex-lovers, intimate images of women that were physically discarded. Click here to see the images.)

Are you interested in photos that are already made?

SLR: Yes, but it comes back to what I experience. The way we remember is influenced by the photo. I’ve found even when someone close to you dies, I have a hard time remembering what they looked like. And if someone from past centuries didn’t have a painting made of them, their faces were lost.

TH: How do you feel about photographs being described as “archival footnotes to memory?”

SLR: I think photographs are more important than that because photos don’t just remind us–family stories are told through them.

Personally, I use my work as a way to process what’s going on in my life–my family is a huge theme. One technique is to take old images and reprint them in new methods.

But I’m more fascinated by the things on the threshold between two things. As an artist, dying is more important to me than birth. The coming into being is also interesting but not as much as death because birth is more pleasant to think about, and therefore we’ve seen more images of sprouts and buds.

TH: Are you working on anything now? 

SLR: Yes, but I’m not ready to share. It’s new work, and it touches on themes of archiving and memory.

Partly because artistically I have a short attention span: four months go by, I’m ready for a new project.

TH: Whose work do you respond to?

SLR: Laura Letinsky.

I’m also intrigued and shocked by Angela Strassheim. Some of her series I feel have exploitative qualities and raise ethical questions. But essentially, I enjoy issues that are dark and issues that go to the depths of human nature– horrifying, if they are sometimes; but it’s important that her work is out there and that someone is bringing up these ideas for others to think about.

TH: Lastly, how do you take photos of bugs?

SLR: The bug series were taken in my neighborhood in Minneapolis or in Cass County Minnesota where I spend a lot of time. The bugs are what I encounter. They get at the idea of what I find incredibly moving about Momento Mori.

To see more of Stephanie’s work, please visit her website: www.stephanielrogers.com

LAST WEEK: Edo Pop at MIA, Interview with Emily Allchurch

Minneapolis Institute of Art’s Edo Pop show celebrates Japan’s graphic influence on world art. Presented with a survey of Japanese woodblock prints are several works by contemporary artists also influenced by woodblock prints and the concepts underlying the floating world. London artist Emily Allchurch discusses her photo series’ “Tokyo Story” which is exhibited in its entirety in Edo Pop.

Edo Pop closes next Sunday, January 8, 2012, and is highly recommended.

MPB: Your series of ten photos, Tokyo Story, is presented in lightboxes. But you also show prints of the same work. In your mind is there a distinction between presenting these pieces through a lightbox versus print?

EA: I have been working with backlit transparencies (duratrans) for 12 years now. I came to photography via sculpture whilst on my MA at the Royal College of Art in London. My approach to the medium was playful and experimental, just as any other material I had been working with in a sculptural sense. It was upon moving to London that I realized the language of photography was the most appropriate medium to present my experience of the contemporary city. However, I was trying to capture a very specific feeling with my photography, one dealing with the gulf between our dreamscapes and the realities of life, perhaps you could say the beautiful versus the mundane. The choice of presenting the work as light-boxes, with its simulation of natural light and seductive luminous quality seemed to capture this pull and push notion, emphasizing an ethereal quality that is artificially constructed.

Tokyo Story is the first time I have created a set of prints, alongside light-box works. The framed archival prints are smaller in size and thus have an intimacy that relates closely to the original Japanese woodblock prints by Hiroshige from which they are inspired. I took great care over the presentation of the prints and feel the float mounting of the works in large, highly polished wooden frames have a contemporary finish whilst presenting a sympathetic nod to the Japanese Ukiyo-e tradition.

MPB: Exhibition-wise, where else have these photos been? And are they going anywhere else?

EA: Tokyo Story was launched at the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation in London in January 2011, by Tim Clark – Head of the Asia Department at the British Museum. The show then went on to Diemar Noble Photography in London from March to May 2011. I was involved in a number of public talks and seminars during both exhibitions and the work received some good press coverage including profiles in the Sunday Times Magazine (6^th March 2011) and the art photography journal Zoom (Fall 2011). It was a real honour to be invited to take part in Edo Pop at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. To see my work curated with other contemporary artists, alongside the museum’s extraordinary collection of Japanese prints, including some works from Hiroshige’s ‘One Hundred Famous Views of Edo’ was such a privilege and a thrill. I was very impressed by the Mathew Welch’s (Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts) vision for the show and the quality of the execution was immaculate. I’m not sure where they will go on to in 2012, but I hope one day to be able to show them alongside Hiroshige’s original prints and to exhibit the series in Japan would be amazing.

MPB:  Do you have fixed ideas about technology, photo-making and its tangential influence from painting?

EA: As I have already mentioned, I came to photography via sculpture. I see myself as an artist that works with photography, rather then a photographer. If anything I am probably a natural painter and I have come full circle over several years to deal with image manipulation: modulating colour, contrast, perspective, focus, highlight, shadow and construction, except that for me the traditional canvas is replaced by a computer screen. I see the photograph like any other medium; one to be manipulated and worked with to communicate an idea. I’m not particularly interested in any rules associated with image taking. The photograph is a starting point, a raw material, to work with, to develop my ideas. I feel lucky to be working in such progressive times for image making. We have so many tools available to us to aid self-expression. For me it is essential that I am working with photography rather then painting a recreation of an old master. The point of my photographic homage is that they are images of real places, existing in time and space at the point of capture. They therefore still function as a form of documentary record, even though they are subsequently placed in a new constructed context. Many of the works I choose to recreate, such as Piranesi’s Carcere d’Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons), first published 1743-45 and reworked for even darker menace in 1760, were conceived as architectural fantasies. However, the style and atmosphere of the architecture in these scenes can be seen to exist all around us in the modern-day metropolis, with the same possibility to reflect on the human condition.

MPB: Could you explain how The Minneapolis Institute of Arts acquired 10 light boxes from your series?

EA: To be honest there’s a fair amount of mystery to me as to how these works came to the attention of Matthew Welch, the Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. I think the world of Asian art curators is probably quite close-knit and it was definitely significant that Tim Clark from the British Museum agreed to do the opening introduction for my show at the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation. I had the opportunity to meet with a number of influential Japanese print dealers and collectors whilst the show was on in London and the work received a good amount of publicity in the press and online. All these forms of communication helped to build up a profile for the series in a remarkably short period of time. Matthew recounts that my work came up when he did a web-search over the summer, but I’m assuming he made some calls before he contacted me about being involved in the show.

As for acquiring the series for the museum’s permanent collection, this was a remarkable leap of faith on the museums part and a most significant landmark in my career. As an emerging artist, especially in the States, we were able to work a good proposition to our mutual benefit, to enable the museum to acquire a full set of Tokyo Story and for myself to have a first museum acquisition. I am so happy that the series has a permanent, public home at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. It feels like a real endorsement of me as an artist and gives me courage for the journey ahead.

MPB: Do you live with any of your work on your walls?

EA: I used to have some of my works on my wall at home, but these days if works are not on exhibition, in transit to clients or on consignment to galleries then I need to have them safely stored in an art storage warehouse. It’s a shame as it means I get to spend so little time with the actual final artwork, having spent so many months working with each work as an image on the computer screen. I did find it very hard to leave my exhibition room in ‘Edo Pop’ at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, as this was the first time I had seen all ten works together as light-box images and knew it would be a long time until I would see them displayed in this way again.

However, I have started to collect some works myself, supporting artists at the start of their careers – so my walls are increasingly full with these works.

MPB: Whose photo work especially excites you right now? Is there anyone catching your eye you can share and briefly explain why?

EA: There are a good number of artists whose works have inspired me over the years from Jeff Wall, Julian Opie and Ori Gersht, to Gregory Crewsdon and Elisa Sighicelli. I have a real love for work that explores capturing a particular quality of light, for example I love Hiroshi Sugimoto’s ‘Theatres’ series where the exposure time lasts the duration of the film to capture a whole movie in a single frame. The resulting white light of the movie illuminates the surrounding setting. In a similar way Darren Almond’s ‘Full Moon’ series uses the light of the moon, over a long exposure to reveal on film what would otherwise not be visible to the naked eye. Dan Holdsworth and Sophie Rickett work with artificial illumination alongside nature to create hyper-real, evocative landscapes. I am also very interested in photographers who explore narrative and reference art history (such as Tom Hunter, Neeta Madahar and Christian Tagliavini) and those who use collage and image manipulation freely in their works. It seems to be a very exciting period right now with a growing number of photographers, and increasingly female artists who are working in very experimental ways – photographers such as Yao Lu, Sohei Nishino, Lisa Creagh, Jane Ward, Suzanne Moxhay and Won Seoung Won.