Photographs as Drawings

When I started this page I didn’t commit to any particular number of posts. The thinking was (is), if I don’t feel compelled to say something, I’m not going to have a deadline force me to take up digital space. I also just want to be considerate of other’s time.

Unexpectedly, I’ve ended up spending more time with photography than writing this summer. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised.

What’s also happened is that this platform, Substack, has started to resemble the social media environment that I’ve long sought to get away from. I am seeking a more deliberate form of working and thinking, and the Substack app and website seem to line up less with this than I’d originally thought. I’m not sure what this means for the long term. Perhaps I will end up hosting all of this work on my own website eventually. Either way, I’m always trying to find a way to work that rejects the content churn as much as I can.

That said, as I’ve been in my studio printing a lot this summer I wanted to share some older pictures that have been on my mind. I’ve often thought that if I had the skill I might be a painter or a drawer (I have dabbled), but instead life brought me to the camera. More specifically I have often thought about photographs as drawings or sketches. This isn’t novel - photograph means to draw with light!

But when I learn about an artist I love to see their sketches, their journals, their ideas before they are fully realized. To me, the journal alone is an art. Perhaps under-appreciated. Some of my favorite photography books elicit a personal journal. (We Make the Path by Walking by Paul Gaffney, Wintereisse by Luc Delahaye, as it is by Rinko Kawauchi to name a few.) The size, the intimacy, the lack of fuss about it all has a particular charm. Sometimes the full realization of a work even speaks less to me than the journals and sketches leading up to it. At some point an idea loses magic after too much polish, perhaps.

But anyways, with this in mind I started to make pictures that sought to elicit some of the qualities of these journals drawings, and later, more specifically something more like charcoal or pencil drawings. The oldest of these pictures is probably 2016, but I’ve been toying with the idea since before I even made my first artist’s book in 2012. The photographs I’m showing here are about form and place, primarily. They’re from Illinois, North Carolina and Michigan. The three states I’ve lived in the longest. They are texture and light and possibly, hopefully, to some degree, start to articulate a worldview that finds the uncanny in the ordinary. If you’re interested, I’ve put up a few more on my website which I am always working on.

Thanks for reading and looking.

- Peter