The typological array’s inherent ability to depict prevalence and repetition make it the perfect technique for examining the excess, redundancy, and meaningless freedom of our current age of consumption. Part of my intent with this work is to answer the question implied by the title of Robert Adams’s book What We Bought: If there is some kind of big sellout occurring, what are we getting in the deal?
The typological form achieves an uncanny synergy and resonance with this subject matter because it mimics the mental images I suspect many of us form as a way ordering the chaos of abundance that surrounds us. We can’t help but form in our heads lists, groups and categories based on product, brand, price point, style, market segment, country of origin, etc. Seeing these groups turned into grids of images induces a contradiction: We are both comforted by the ordered abundance they present and repelled by the blunt evidence they portray.
Ridgemont Typologies Artist Statement (extended, a work in progress)
Several years ago, at a well known photographer’s review event, I was showing a series of carefully crafted black-and-white images of decaying mid-century architecture, and a comment by one reviewer had an unintended effect. The comment was about how the forms of curb and powerline were echoed in the architecture, how lovely this was, and how the work displayed a gift of being able to harness these things. My reaction (long familiar with the work) was inner frustration with the fact that he was reading the photograph, not the subject. And while I appreciated his generosity, this time I saw also that I was being given credit for things I didn’t do, or didn’t intend to do. The more I thought about our interaction, the more I came to see that not only could I not take credit for previously existing form, I had no desire to. Furthermore, I was less willing to give such credit anymore either.
At some point I caught on and realized that the resulting assembly of pictures was itself a distinct entity, that the initial idea was my principal contribution, and that the subsequent making of pictures was an act of searching and collecting rather than seeing or creating. And about this process of collecting, I thought: instead of not acknowledging it or being uncomfortable with it, why not embrace it? Why not use groups of images, rather than individual ones, as the currency of my work?
>> Working with the typological form has provided me some convincing insight into the question of whether photography has a ‘privileged’ relationship with subject or with ‘reality’. I’ve always felt that it does, and that its ability to approximate reality for us is based more on inherent elements of its process, specifically the requirement that it depict, than those of the photographic image itself. The typological form is a demonstration of how this works.
When we look at one of these pieces, we are immediately dealing with relationships between the images that assume the existence of the subjects, if not the intimate details of them as objects. To be convinced of this reality, we apparently do not require persuasion by the images themselves, only the knowledge that they are photographs. We accept the images as records of interactions between camera and subject, and it is this knowledge, this ability to place camera and subject at the same place at the same time (the pieces of depiction), that gives photographs their ‘privilege’.
>> With this work (Ridgemont Typologies) I completely embraced digital photography. What’s surprising (important) isn’t how different it is from that of chemical photography, but rather how similar it is. It’s obvious now that what’s been done away with- the negative- has always been superfluous anyway. Digital is the consummation of photography’s manifest destiny: to become a truly object-less conveyor of information.