Movie

When I first learned to use a camera, I was photographing a friend in his studio.  It was evening, and as he painted on pages he’d pinned to the wall, his figure threw shadows that seemed to me to be in conversation with the shapes in his paintings.  I was excited to photograph what I was seeing but I was new to photography so my exposures and consequently the images I made were not successful.  Nonetheless, I never forgot the experience.

Decades later, when I’d completed a series of work, thinking what do I want to do next, images of that evening and those photographs came to mind.   In a phone conversation with my son Julian, I told him I was thinking that I wanted to make photographs like that again, photographs of people working, making art.  He responded by saying he was about to make a movie and that I should come and photograph while it was being made — so I did.

The movie was mostly shot in one small room.  Actors and crew were Julian’s artist and actor friends.  Working days were long and intense.  I had to be silent and keep out of the way, which suited me as I wanted to go unnoticed.   Too involved to be much aware of me, the people I was photographing were able to be unself-conscious and thus quite graceful as they focused on their work.  

I used color film which had to be processed in a lab a few rolls at a time so sequencing images was very slow.  I built small sequences slowly over months and was only able to really see what the sequence could become when I had the last images.  

What I had made didn’t document Julian’s movie.  Nor did I try to create a story in the images.  Instead I responded to what the images were showing me and let them form the dance of engagement and disengagement that happens when people are together working.