Monthly Archive for April, 2008

My friend Matt Lut­ton has been work­ing on a series of pho­tos of New York City for the past cou­ple of years, titled “I See A Dark­ness” after the Bon­nie ‘Prince’ Billy album. He recently set up a show at an epic photo supplies/rental store here in Seat­tle called Glazer’s and is putting together a book of a few pho­tos from the series with another friend of ours, Louise Fos­ter, who is a pretty great designer. I wrote the intro­duc­tory essay for this forth­com­ing book, so I nat­u­rally feel the need to post it here.

I promise I’ll write some­thing that’s just for Exis­ten­tial Media soon. Promise, I say! For the time being, check out Matt’s pho­tos on his web­site. The Kosovo: On The Edge series is my favorite.
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I have a very vivid mem­ory of being in Bel­grade with Matt Lut­ton as he pho­tographed light. We’d just fin­ished hav­ing cof­fee and were walk­ing down Knez Miha­jlova, a major pedes­trian street, when I spot­ted an ATM and headed off to get some cash, leav­ing him in the mid­dle of the street. As I waited in line, I turned around to see if he was still there. He was, of course, but now he had his cam­era at the ready and was fanat­i­cally tak­ing pho­tographs, which (I fig­ured) were of the foun­tain in front of him. When I walked back to meet him, he didn’t lower his cam­era; instead, he held up his hand to stop me, and started tak­ing pho­tos of me and my shadow. “The light’s great right now,” he explained, “do you mind stick­ing around here a lit­tle longer?”

I didn’t. So we stayed around the foun­tain for a few more min­utes, and as we walked to catch our bus, Matt kept his cam­era near his face, stop­ping us every now and then to catch some whis­pers of light sift­ing through build­ings as peo­ple walked through them or as they con­tin­ued to the pave­ment. Every now and then, Matt would say to me (with­out turn­ing away from the viewfinder): “Do you ever wish you could freeze time?”

Matt will always tell you that he’s a pho­to­jour­nal­ist, but after that after­noon at the foun­tain, I always refer to Matt as a pho­tog­ra­pher or a visual artist. Sure, he has the abil­ity of a pho­to­jour­nal­ist to cap­ture a con­tem­po­rary issue in a sin­gle frame, but he has an addi­tional bizarre qual­ity — cap­tured through detailed atten­tion to light­ing, or oth­er­wise — which makes many of his pho­tographs reach a level of time­less­ness that jour­nal­ism can’t.

That aside, let’s be hon­est: a few peo­ple before Matt have pho­tographed the eter­nally enig­matic New York City. Though we can all agree that the City will con­tinue to inspire young artists for many ensu­ing gen­er­a­tions, it is extremely dif­fi­cult to find yet another new angle on this ground that has been so heav­ily cov­ered. Even in con­sid­er­ing Matt a photojournalist-slash-visual artist, the ini­tial view­ing of “I See a Dark­ness” comes with a residue of skep­ti­cism. We see pho­tographs of crowds in parks, police­men in Times Square, sleep­ing youth on sub­way cars, images of Amer­i­can flags: if you take only a quick glance at these pho­tos, you have to won­der: what does Matt have to tell us?

Some­how, though, Matt found an under­ly­ing nar­ra­tive which suits his pho­to­graphic vision, which largely comes from an inter­sec­tion between Amer­i­cana and Russ­ian lit­er­a­ture. The “I See a Dark­ness” series is wed to a quo­ta­tion from Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Mas­ter and the Mar­garita, where the devil in dis­guise says to a Levite: “Think, now: where would your good be if there were no evil and what would the world look like with­out shadow?” In con­sid­er­ing this quo­ta­tion and its con­text, there’s sud­denly an extra layer of that infa­mous Russ­ian con­vo­lu­tion that pulls us in and makes us gaze at Matt’s pho­tos for an extra sec­ond. We look again at the sleep­ing kid on the sub­way: he looks famil­iar, we’ve seen oth­ers like him before, but sud­denly we react to the pho­to­graph. The shot is framed so closely on his face that sud­denly we feel inva­sive. We may feel like we know him, but we don’t: we’re out­siders, we’re not a part of his life even though we may feel like we do. His prox­im­ity to our own faces makes us feel claus­tro­pho­bic, even nau­seous, dis­ori­ented, but our real­iza­tion to our own inva­sive­ness makes us feel lonely.

And then we notice the shadows.

In our sen­sory reac­tion, we begin to make sense of each pho­tos com­po­si­tion. In most of them, there is a sig­nif­i­cant pres­ence of dark­ness cre­ated by a per­son. We acknowl­edge it; we don’t really have the choice not to. Each time we move onto a new photo, we go through the same process: we notice some­thing famil­iar, and sud­denly the shadow knocks us off bal­ance. Matt’s pho­tos never let us rest. In our acknowl­edge­ment of the dark­ness, we con­stantly reeval­u­ate the way we’d seen the pho­to­graph in our ini­tial glance.

Thank­fully, Matt’s pho­tos also inter­sect with music, and in this case, the work’s sound­track is Bon­nie ‘Prince’ Billy’s “I See a Dark­ness.” It’s in this sup­ple­men­tary music that the com­bi­na­tion of the famil­iar images and mind-bending dark­ness begins to shape itself into a nar­ra­tive. In the album’s title track, Will Old­ham sings:

“Well you know I have a love, for every­one I know / And you know I have a drive, to live I won’t let go / But can you see this oppo­si­tion, comes ris­ing up some­times / That is dread full impo­si­tion, comes black­ing in my mind / And then I see a darkness.”

Even in the most pas­sion­ate lives, we still have our moments of despair. These moments, though dis­ori­ent­ing and some­times nausea-inducing, don’t take away from the beauty in our lives, but instead, they accent the beauty and give it new clar­ity and value. Old­ham continues:

“There’s a hope that some­how you / Can save me from this darkness.”

The same way we some­times sing along to lyrics (such as Oldham’s) and sud­denly find our­selves say­ing, “What the hell am I singing along to?” Matt’s pho­tos get us to believe in the unfa­mil­iar. When we start to believe, and to eval­u­ate the new dark­ness in the beauty of famil­iar­ity, we begin to make up sto­ries for these indi­vid­ual moments that Matt presents to us in this series.

It’s here that Matt’s pho­tos become intensely per­sonal, and why they mat­ter. In all his orig­i­nal­ity and suc­cess in alien­at­ing the viewer, he now pulls them back in. We’re no longer out­siders. We do know these peo­ple. Not per­son­ally, maybe, but on a fic­tional level we’ve sat near to that boy on the sub­way before, and we can feel where he’s going next.