Thoughts on Creative Process: Texture
A major theme in my perspective on the photographic process is texture. By texture I do not mean simply depicting ‘pleasing colors’ or showing subjects having a texture (i.e., visibly raised or smooth; appealing to the tactile sense of touch; etc.). Rather, my focus here is oriented toward:
i) Presenting photographic texts that are meaningful on multiple levels, planes, or layers, each of which is participatory—meaning reader-viewers of the photographic text inescapably participate in it, and thus help to co-create the meaning of the work; and
ii) Challenging the traditional notions of a text.
According to many traditional conceptions, a text is seen as definitive, discretely knowable, and having a distinct boundary separating what it does and does not include. Yet visually, there are not atomistic “texts” flung about here and there, making up the contexts and surroundings we call our environments. At least this is not what I see or intend when I conspire with my camera to create a photograph. Instead there is text-ure. Texture is more like an open-question, and a process of naming, interaction and meaning-making rather than an object, which tends to appear distinct and well-delineated from its surroundings, or as something “clearly discernable” and readily recognized across time and space.
As it strikes me, something always has to be left out in order for there to be “anything there”—capable of grasping, memorializing, or conveying. In other words, we’re dependent on our frames (and what they remove from our view) in order to focus on or “see” anything. In this way, then, we seem to be enmeshed in a paradox: our capacity to make any given subject “visible” is directly tied to how well we maintain the ability to direct our blindness toward that which surrounds it; how well we omit that which detracts from our center of focus; or with what resolve we manage to hold our gaze fixated on one plane while so many other planes of texture—each with their own possibilities, beauties, and truths—pass before us, unnoticed or neglected.
How we elect to delineate objects is indicative of how we approach the world. As we interpret meanings in photographic texture, formulating the boundaries of the meanings we can understand, hold, and take away with us, we impose frames and limits on texture. In effect, these gestures “tidy the madness,” enabling us to “read” the complexities and multiple planes of a photograph more readily. Yet these gestures also require a photograph’s texture to reach us in terms of “texts,” which are already more or less familiar, more or less known.
If, as Jean Baudrillard contends, “the object is never anything more than an imaginary line… both imminent and ungraspable,” then our interpretations of a photograph—for example, as simply one or a series of static forms—may be more telling about our own imagination, and its horizons, boxes, and categories, than about the photographic textures we confront. I aim to cultivate a greater awareness of our own habits of interpretation, as well as the assumptions at stake in the act of viewing and in the many questions of meaning-bestowal this implies.
With my photography, I aim to evoke a more imaginative and stimulating response from viewers, because how each of us walks in the world exerts a series of changes within it. Our perceptual attention “paints” the world with color, highlighting certain aspects while hiding others. These are the revolving “doors of perception.” As each of us walks along these corridors (or across these thresholds) of potentially validated meanings, we contribute (or deny) our own flavor to the ongoing project of constructing what’s collectively “real”—knowable, familiar, and important.
While first impressions of these photographs may yield impressions of a well-known subject (i.e., “a wall”), my intentions are not about depicting “wall-ness,” showing ‘a wall beautifully,’ or revealing “walls” in some extraordinary way. Instead, it is about challenging the foundations of our largely un-thought distinctions, which tend to delineate what we see (and do not see) more on the basis of inherited habits than conscious choices. As a result, the potentials for us to see with fresh eyes, to decipher the previously unknown, and to catch glimpses of the unexpected—and then learn something novel through such a viewing experience—become diminished, impaired, and more difficult to reach.
As an impulse in the opposite direction, these images are intended to disrupt the “usual” flow of less conscious image consumption. In this way, each image is intended to evoke a more active response from the viewer, which engages the imagination and evokes a sense of meaningful participation. Accordingly, the process of reading such ‘Images with Imagination’ sets the stage for an evolving dialogue, the threads of which arise in a context of enchantment and “can-do” possibility—which springs from both the allure of an open question and the promise of being more truly heard, and more fully seen. In this way, all of these photographs are intended to speak not “in one tongue,” but with the potential of a multitude, weaving itself like a dynamic living language, embodied in visual terms. It is at this point that we realize exactly how, as Jacques Derrida remarks,
It’s not easy to improvise. It’s the most difficult thing to do… There are already a great number of prescriptions that are prescribed in our memory and in our culture… One can’t say whatever one wants. One is obliged, more or less, to reproduce the stereotypical discourse. And so I believe in improvisation and I fight for improvisation—but always with the belief that it’s impossible.