Christopher B Fowler
Your transition from graphic art to photography seems to be a journey of evolving creative expression. How has your background in drawing and animation influenced your photographic style?
Drawing, animation/filmmaking and photography are about communicating through images rather than words.
With drawing and then with animation my focus was on depicting things—the latter simply bringing my drawings to life and increasing their verisimilitude.
I particularly remember being mesmerized by the pen and ink illustration on the cover of the Beatles’ LP Revolver and trying to emulate it in my own drawings. My attention, now, to the interplay of the fine details in what I see may go back to that.
With the changeover to live-action movies, and with my growing exposure to the work of the master filmmakers of the day—Bergman, Fellini, Truffaut and the rest—and certainly with the experience of seeing Steichen’s photograph of the Flatiron Building, I became more aware of what could be conveyed beyond just capturing things visually.
Your photographs exhibit a wide range of subjects, from natural landscapes to architectural forms. How do you decide on the subject of your photographs, and what draws you to capture these varied scenes?
It’s a familiar cliche, one used by many photographers—I believe it was Henri Cartier-Bresson who was the first to say he didn’t take photographs so much as they took him.
It is the abstract qualities of things that catch my eye—the interplay of lines, planes, textures, colors, light and darkness, solid and diaphanous—which are as much a part of scenes in nature as they are in man-made forms.
The use of light in your images is particularly striking. How do you approach the interplay between light and shadow, and what techniques do you employ to harness these elements in your photography?
Another of my significant experiences was a retrospective at the Philadelphia Art Museum in the late 1980s of the painter Thomas Eakins. His use of raked light—where the light source is off to the side of or even essentially behind his subjects, darkening the shadows and picking out the details in the lighted areas—made a great impression on me and has been an element in my work ever since.
There's a palpable sense of stillness and contemplation in your images. How important is the concept of time in your photography, and how do you capture the essence of a moment?
People have mentioned the quality of stillness in my work, though it’s not something I try specifically to evoke. I do have pictures of flowing water, waterfalls, the wind blowing through trees.
Once a subject has caught my eye, I take my time composing the image—figuring out, in what I’m seeing, what it is that’s truly capturing my attention, and then orienting the rest of the picture around bringing that out.
I remember Georgia O’Keeffe in one of her interviews saying she wanted people to recognize how carefully she’d looked at her subjects.
It seems to me it’s the being arrested and held by the experience of the image that produces the sense of “pause” in the viewer, the stillness.
Your mention of the Steichen retrospective and the lasting impact of the flatiron building photograph is intriguing. In what ways do you see Steichen’s influence in your own work, and how do you pursue the “ghost” that you refer to in your creative process?
Pretty much everything in my work goes back, in one way or another, to the flatiron building photograph: the contrasts of darkness and light, straight lines and curves, man-made and organic forms, fine details and less-distinct shapes (in the case of the building itself, its shift from the perceptible details at its base to the monumental dark form it becomes as it ascends), even the delicate pastel of the blue sky as it shades toward evening.
That said, It’s now probably more the power of the experience that I try to emulate.
Reflecting on your journey from a child with a passion for drawing to a photographer who exhibits his work, what advice would you give to artists who are in the midst of finding their medium or voice?
I would say to keep doing what you’re doing, but continually analyze what you’ve done to recognize what it is in it that’s most important to you, then work to refine and enhance that and let go of what distracts from it.
The irony, at least it is in my own case, is that the more clear your sense of your own voice comes to be, the more transparent it becomes—you, yourself, become no longer an impediment to the experience you wish to convey.
You likely will never completely “disappear” from your work—it will still be recognized as yours—but the people who view it will be focused on it rather than you.
Igor Stravinsky once famously said he didn’t compose The Rite of Spring, but rather was the vessel through which it passed. For me, I don’t know a better goal to strive for.