On my photographs

In February, 2004, I was invited to speak about my work and to meet with students at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond. Thanks to Elizabeth King and Carlton Newton of the VCU Department of Sculpture and Extended Media, and to the Department of Photography, for sponsoring my visit. What follows is the script for that talk.

©Charles Hagen 2004

Thank you. Thank you all for coming. Thanks to all the people who arranged this visit.

I've been working in photography for over 30 years. I've worked as a photojournalist, a camera salesman, a magazine photographer, an editor, curator, writer, a critic. And I'm now a teacher and artist. What first attracted me to photography, and what remains intensely fascinating, is the central mystery of the lens image--how it works, its almost magical appeal, its seeming authority--and how much we can shape its suggestions of meaning.

This is a picture of my daughter, Anna, hiking on Isle au Haut, Maine, when she was about 3 years old. I took it in about 1996. It's one of a handful of pictures that I recognize as particularly significant in my understanding of what I'm doing now. This picture was a revelation to me. It violated rules I had been taught about what constitutes a good photograph--it's blurred, a bit out of focus. But when I saw it coming out of the color processor I felt a physical thrill. The bursting sun of red hair, the figure striding forth out of the picture and into the world: it was, and is, a very exciting picture to me.

At that time I was the weekly photo critic for the New York Times. Before that I had been editor of Aperture magazine, and an editor at Artforum. But I was growing increasingly dissatisfied with my work in criticism and editing, even though it had brought me a lot of attention. I'd started out as a photographer, but I've always been interesting in figuring out how photographs work, and so got into criticism. By the early '90s, though, I wanted to go back to my photography. This desire came to a head in 1992, when my wife was teaching in Nova Scotia, and we were asked to do a show together. I'd been shooting a lot that summer--in all my years as a critic I never stopped shooting, I just stopped showing--so I had my pictures printed as 4x6 snapshots and made this grid piece.

But after the show was over I felt that some of the pictures were better than that others, and deserved to be more than just placeholders in the grid piece. So I picked out the best ones, and went back and printed them larger.

After that I turned increasingly back to my photography. A couple of years later I left my job at the Times, and stopped doing freelance criticism. I began to teach, and grew more and more involved in my picturemaking.

And then we had our daughter, Anna. I'm very aware of how cliched it is to photograph your kid, and how typical it is to think that everyone else is as interested in her as you are. All parents want to talk only about their own kids--forget anyone else's.

At the same time I found, and find, Anna fascinating. I found photographing her very rich in possibilities--not simply for making family photos, but as something more.

I didn't consciously set out to make photographs of Anna as my art. At first I was like all new Dads: I just wanted to take pictures of my kid, for grandparents, and just to have as keepsakes. But as prints came back from the lab I would notice that a few of them were more interesting than others--and some were as interesting as any other photographs I was seeing.

This was one of those. It's a picture of Anna with her babysitter's daughter and a friend, taken in 1995, when Anna was 2-1/2. I was struck by the poses and expressions of the three girls. It reminded me of Velazquez--Las Meninas.

So I began to photograph Anna, and to some extent my wife Laura as well, in a more serious way. I started shooting with larger cameras, producing larger negatives--6x9 cm., or about 3x4.5 inches, or 4x5 or even 8x10 inches--in order to make larger prints. I wanted, and want, viewers to be able to enter the scenes imaginatively. I also like the sense of ceremony that comes from working with large cameras, on tripods. These next pictures are from that early work, from around 1997 to 1998. Many of these were shown at the Sarah Morthland Gallery, in a show I had there in 1998.

I realized that in photographing Anna I was opening up a whole can of worms, at least conceptually. First there were questions of what it means to photograph another person: what is the relationship between the photograph and the person? Not to mention between the person and the photographer. There's an essential mystery to any portrait. What's the difference between a picture of someone you know and someone you don't know?

Then there was the huge question of snapshots. I like to point out to my classes that probably 95% of all photographs ever taken have been snapshots. There's no way to check those figures, but I'd bet that's pretty close to the truth. In photographing Anna I was unavoidably placing my work in that context, at least to some extent.

But I soon realized that I wasn't that interesting in making pseudo snapshots, or in another recent kind of family photograph, which involves treating your family in a kind of documentary, sociological viewpoint. Pictures of this sort can be very powerful--I think of the British photographer, Richard Bellingham, who has photographed his alcoholic father. But that wasn't something I wanted to do. Our family is not colorfully dysfunctional enough. And that kind of work seems a little voyeuristic to me, anyway.

Another issue that arose quickly has to do with posing. When I was a student the big thing was to get candid photographs--preferably of strangers. So there was always a lot of interest in fast films, fast lenses, photographing in extremely low light. Somehow candid photos were thought to be true, while posed pictures were lies.

But I was, and am, interested in differences between what we call reality and what we call fiction, in the considered artifice of theater, in the idea of characters and types, as opposed to individuals.

I recognized all these conceptual issues, but there were other factors that shaped how I made these pictures.

Some were technical choices: I would photograph in natural settings, primarily. I followed, and still follow, ideas that I've worked out over years, personal preferences: for dramatic lighting, for open color. I believe color expresses emotion, and if an area in a print is in shadow I'll dodge it to try to open up the color; I think a pure black area in an image is in some ways a wasted opportunity, a missed chance to complicate the emotions in the picture. I also work a lot with a flash, held off the camera so I can direct light and increase the sense of theatricality in the scenes. I was very concerned with the quality of light in these.

Scale is important to me, too. I think in terms of three kinds of scale: pictorial, which you can hold in your hands, and control; life-size or real scale, which emphasizes the illusion of the image; and monumental scale, bigger than life, unreal but imposing. I usually print my pictures big, 20x24 up to 40x60 inches. I think of these as large, although actually many people print that as big as that and much bigger today. But I print them myself, because I haven't found a printer who can produce the colors I'm after.

I also rely a lot on chance. I value the opportunity it offers for discovery. I want to let the process work for me, and not always be telling it what to do.

Rather than deciding beforehand what the pictures will be, I prefer to look at them after I've made them, and try to figure out what they mean. In these early pictures I noticed what I think of as fairy tale themes: gold falling onto the sleeping princess; the girl cupping the ocean; the child walking in the dark woods, shadowed by a giant.

I wanted, and want, to make the pictures not just about Anna. I don't think of them as portraits. I sometimes think that I don't have any really good pictures that show how Anna really looks; instead I've got these pictures, where she is an actress playing roles. I almost always hide her face, or distort it.

For me, looking at contact sheets is an important stage in the creative process. I'm always trying to learn from my pictures--to ask why I took them, what was it about the scene that made me think it would be a good picture.

After that first group of work I found myself exploring various aspects of the images--thinking more about backgrounds, say, or gestures, or expressions. In some ways I was trying to figure out the vocabulary of these pictures.

I've been lucky enough to receive several small grants from the University of Connecticut, where I teach, to do this work. So one summer I got a grant to photograph Anna in Italian gardens. I always laugh when I say that, because it sounds so idyllic. Last summer I got another grant to photograph her in Italian architecture. Unfortunately, these projects never work out as I'd like them to. I find a grant proposal to be a form of fiction. I'm never quite sure what I'm doing; the next picture I take may totally change my sense of what I'm doing. So I write something that sounds plausible, and when I start shooting I really do try to fulfill whatever project I've proposed. And in fact I usually do get a few pictures I like that fit into the proposal. But I always end up with other pictures that really excite me, even if they don't fit into what I thought I was going to do.

As Anna has gotten older she's become more active in shaping the performances. Typically we'll start a session and I'll have some vague ideas for things I want to try, a gesture I want to explore, or a quality of lighting. Then she'll do something, more or less spontaneously, and that will be it. I'll yell, "Hold it! Don't move a muscle!", and that will be the picture.

Closeup portraits:

These next pictures are from my most recent group of work. Before this I'd taken most of my pictures in the summer, when the light was good and we could travel. I'd photographed Anna a lot on vacations, because the places would be interesting, and she and I would both have time to work together. But when winter hit, the days would get short, she and I and Laura would all be busy with school, and it just got very hard to take photographs.

For several years this was OK. I was working hard at teaching, and just printing pictures I'd taken in the summer was enough to keep me busy. That's how Minor White, the great photographer, used to work--he lived in Rochester, which has intense winters, so he'd shoot a lot in summer and just print during the winter.

But a couple of years ago I started to want to photograph during the winter.

So on Sunday afternoons when I was watching Anna while Laura went out to the studio I'd ask Anna to sit by the window, and photograph her with my 4x5. I'd pose her a little, but I was really more interested in things that happened spontaneously. In this case I'd asked her to look at her hand--and she'd looked at the back of her hand, rather than the palm, which was what I'd expected.

So last year I had this idea for a new series of pictures of Anna. Before I'd put a lot of emphasis on backgrounds, and I'd been trying to avoid making portraits--I hadn't wanted her face to be visible, for the most part. So I thought, what if I concentrate just on her face, closeup, with no background at all? So I went out and bought a large sheet of black velvet as a backdrop, and dug out the lights I use for making slides of Laura's paintings. I had Anna sit in front of the velvet, and used the lights to make her face as dramatic as possible--backlighting, rim lighting.

There are always too many sources for any picture you make; theatrical lighting, movie lighting. I've always been very interested in film, and its values come through in many of my pictures. I think of the great lighting of films like Citizen Kane, shot by Gregg Toland. Another important reference is to Caravaggio, the great Italian baroque painter.

But after a while you start to try to figure out what you're doing, and I often come up with simple formulations to tell myself what the pictures are about. So after a couple of months I came up with the idea that I was interested in how little needed to happen in the picture for it to be interesting--I would rely on effects of lighting, and simple facial expressions, rather than narrative settings, or the interaction of characters.

I wanted to pare down the images, close off certain kinds of readings--for example, that these are just kid pictures. I wanted to make the window of the photograph as thin as possible. I used to write a lot, both criticism and fiction, and when I was writing I was very interested in the idea of words, or writing, that were very thin, that reduced the space between the reader and the world. The window in these pictures is still there; in a sense that's the essential tragedy of photography. And Anna, on the other side, is performing. But I wanted to emphasize the window, and the nature of the exchange on both sides of it. There's a kind of existential confrontation that I wanted to point to.

Not surprisingly I often find connections between my pictures and issues I'm thinking about in other aspects of my life. Something I'm very interested in right now is the question of the relation between self and other--each of us as an individual, and how we interact with one another and with the physical world.

These are big questions, and I don't pretend to have anything original to say about them. But I think these issues are very important. I'm struggling to understand myself, the mysterious inner landscape of my existence--and I assume you are, too. But we're in a mass age. We're all consumer types, raw data in exit polls. Do we count as individuals? I teach video, and one thing I talk about is the experience of watching TV. I always feel as though it's not talking to me, but to someone else. And I'm never sure who that somebody else is. I feel alienated from mass culture.

They're also really interesting questions in terms of photography, which we think of as being objective. Don't forget that Fox Talbot called the first photography book "The Pencil of Nature"-implying that Nature would draw her own picture. But for whom? Who would look at those pictures?

For me it comes back to a basic question, or maybe two basic questions. What happens when you put this magic box between you and the world, and what do the objects that come out of that process mean, and why? Why do photographs thrill and delight me so much, even when I know exactly how they're made and in precisely what ways they fail in their supposed representation of the world? I don't have good answers, but I don't think anyone else does, either. And in the meantime I just want to keep making these pictures, and try to use them to point to deeper mysteries.

I want to close with a few slides of work by people who I think about in terms of my own photos. In terms of lighting, and gesture, I think of Caravaggio, and of the ignoti of Michelangelo--the figures of unknown slaves, twisted into expressive poses, that you find on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Then, closer to home, there are photographers who've worked on similar subjects: historically, Julia Margaret Cameron and Lewis Carroll; more recently, Sally Mann, of course, and Emmett Gowin--both from Virginia--as well as P.L. di Corcia and Tina Barney. More important to me are two somewhat earlier photographers: Harry Callahan and Ralph Eugene Meatyard.

Finally, I want to show you a few pictures from a new group of work. These are Polaroid 4x5s that I started doing as I was shooting Anna in very dark scenes, lighted only by Christmas lights and candles. I wasn't sure I would get any image at all, so I started doing tests--and I found that I liked them a lot. These are very new, within the last month or so. Each is unique, about 4x5 inches. I think they're really mysterious and beautiful. I've tried to do a few consciously, but I worry that once I start to think about doing something I won't be able to do it with the freshness and openness that I had when I was doing it by accident. So these are very much in process. But I really like them.

Like many photographers, I love a book by Roland Barthes called Camera Lucida, in which he tried to consider how photographs work. What's wonderful about the book is that Barthes, who was a semiologist and very analytical earlier on in his career, very much a proper French rationalist, by the time of this book had gotten very subjective; in fact the focus of the book is a photograph, which he never shows, of his own mother. But I found a quote in the book that I like very much in relation to my pictures of Anna. "It is not indifference which erases the weight of the image," Barthes writes--and by weight I understand him to mean its blankness, its quality of being pure fact, evidence--"It is not indifference which erases the weight of the image,... but love, extreme love."

Thank you.