Boy Running

Image_0093, Boy Running © Richard Ansett 2014

Man in Sheltered Accomodation

Image_0049, Man in Sheltered Accommodation from 'The Big Society, 2008' © Richard Ansett 2014

Image_0004, Man in Sheltered Accommodation from 'The Big Society, 2008' © Richard Ansett 2014

Image_8698

Image_8698 © Richard Ansett 2013

Detail from Image_8698 © Richard Ansett 2013

An Unsuccessful Serial Killer

I have re-connected with Foley Galley, New York at the London Art Fair this week. I was mentored by Michael Foley after being selected for the Summer Show Project in 2011.

During the mentoring sessions I developed some lines of enquiry, but (as is usual for me) my objectivity in the moment can be clouded by so many other considerations, that I can easily miss the most valuable developments. I have an understanding of this now and so rely more and more on a well documented archive. Ironically the 'wisdom of hindsight' can be applied to existing work as well as something closer to an audience objectivity to one's own work. I also find it useful to identify the long term themes that I return to, there are some processes and compositions that I am unable to emotionally escape from. I don't fully understand the motives but they are irresistible and there is a trail of clues left behind in everything I do. I would make a very unsuccessful serial killer; my modus Operandi would be very easy to identify.

The archive can equally pose some major issues when considering the concept of legacy and there is a huge temptation to 'do a Francis Bacon' and destroy everything that feels unworthy in the moment. There are some disastrous examples of horribly mined archives of great artists who were less careful. I remember specifically with dread, a show a few years ago of Robert Maplethorpe at The National Portrait Gallery London; they included a large body of his utterly banal commercial portraiture. It was horrible, it undermined his genius and I could feel the poor man turning in his grave.

Equally though, if we destroy images that we feel in the moment are of no value, we may miss their re-invention in a future defined by different aesthetic rules. Wolfgang Tillmans has been my most important influence in this regard and his example opened my eyes to a new way of viewing my otherwise lifeless previous work. I have destroyed over 10,000 original transparencies since then, by placing them in bins or leaving them in public places to be found by random strangers and I have no regrets but a concern for legacy can be a serious block to development and I love and am inspired by the likes of Michael Landy and originally Marcel Duchamp for the notion "Destruction is also creation".

I feel sometimes that I am creating work for a future audience, this is inescapably true as photography is 'immediate nostalgia' as Susan Sontag beautifully constued. Everything is an immediate archive. So don't delete those digital files? Not immediately anyway.

See below a rediscovered image and detail taken of performance artist Catherine Hoffmann changing before a test shoot during my residency at Foley Gallery.

Image_9376, Catherine Hoffmann changing, at Coldfall Woods, 2011 © Richard Ansett 2014

Detail from 'Image_9376, Catherine Hoffmann changing, at Coldfall Woods, 2011' © Richard Ansett 2014

Seton Beach

I am reminded of a post on 2 December 2012 called 'Fracture and Healing'; it s a short quote from Edgar. N. Jackson's 'The Many Faces of Grief.' The principle metaphor is of the trees, whilst being seemingly identical in genus, responding entirely differently to the same external force, over the same period of time. Jackson is making the comparison with the human condition to illustrate how we are all different in how we deal with the universal and inevitable concept of grief or for my purposes, all emotional injury. Our ability to cope with a shared trauma is conditional on a genetic hidden integrity.

As an adopted person from birth, I have no social or biological information about my birth parents, I am denied the clues available to others that may indicate my current and future genetic strength. In this regard I objectify myself and observe my development without the original to compare.

Selfie with Block_2430 and 2429 © Richard Ansett 2014

I had not found an example 'in the world' that comes close to the Jackson metaphor until last weekend. I was walking along Seton Beach, just outside Edinburgh, Scotland and all along the front I observed identical concrete blocks, scattered, (I am assuming as a sea wall). Each block, whilst seemingly identical, is responding differently to the long term attrition of the waves, all within the same timeline. It is an inescapable bombardment of the same force applied to each block and each responds and is evolving into a unique structure.

Image_G11_2430, from series 'Exploring the Varying Genetic Structural Integrity of Seemingly Identical Concrete Blocks © Richard Ansett 2014'

Image_G11_2431, from series 'Exploring the Varying Genetic Structural Integrity of Seemingly Identical Concrete Blocks © Richard Ansett 2014'

Image_G11_2429, from series 'Exploring the Varying Genetic Structural Integrity of Seemingly Identical Concrete Blocks © Richard Ansett 2014'

Image_G11_2426, from series 'Exploring the Varying Genetic Structural Integrity of Seemingly Identical Concrete Blocks © Richard Ansett 2014'

Image_G11_2437, from series 'Exploring the Varying Genetic Structural Integrity of Seemingly Identical Concrete Blocks © Richard Ansett 2014'

Image_G11_2440, from series 'Exploring the Varying Genetic Structural Integrity of Seemingly Identical Concrete Blocks © Richard Ansett 2014'

Boy Bitten by a Dog

I am revisiting ‘Boys in a City Park’ whilst I am working on an exhibition proposal. The project was developed during a personal enquiry into concepts of fracture and healing in Donetsk, Eastern Ukraine. At the point where the previous ‘Hospital Gardens’ project evolution was at the very limit of what seemed possible, I met a child whose traumatic experience was locked within him (see below image from exhibition and outtake of him with his mother). This moment was key and led to an exploration of a form of fracture beyond the physical and an introduction to the charity supporting families with autistic children.

When we initially approached the boy and his mother, as they wandered around the garden of the Central Hospital in Donetsk, she immediately dismissed our request to photograph him. She was particularly protective of her son at that moment; he had been attacked by a dog previously and had come back to hospital for some corrective plastic surgery on the scarring on his face but it was clear that he was also distant and emotionally vulnerable. Sometime later the mother came back to us and explained that her son had said he had wanted to do the photographs, so she agreed.

It is hard to explain the experience of sharing an emotional event as powerful and as complex as this; it is even harder to believe it is possible to capture something of it in two dimensions with a camera. Beyond this, it is even harder to believe that anything of our living present experience will communicate in anyway to an objective future audience.

It’s a mistake we can easily make as photographers (and as people), that because we feel something ourselves so strongly that this will automatically be felt by others; it isn’t. In the need to communicate, we are tempted to cut corners and fall back on aesthetic cliché’s to help make an immediate connection to others. Its hard to resist, especially in the moment when we must make an instantaneous decision on how to communicate an event as it reveals itself to the camera. In this respect, we must ‘become’ the ‘person’ as a photographer that interprets that immediate moment instinctively.

I am undeniably an objectivist, I am inescapably, emotionally drawn to the dogma; I allow the emotion of an event to occur uninterrupted in juxtaposition to the cold, hard reality of the camera lens and fixed composition. I believe that some part of the emotion and humanity are revealed as a foil and in spite of, the brutality of the objectivist dogma. By stripping away any aesthetic emotional language to ‘help’ communicate, we are left with the raw emotion which is not the whole story but a kind of ‘truth’. (A word I hate to use). My approach always feels dangerous and there is a very thin line between a form of success and complete failure but I prefer it to belittling such complexity with cliche.

I found this quote recently, I can't remember where but it resonated with me and reminded me of the boys in Ukraine and the bright and powerful flashes we used that captured a small part of their hidden world.

“All of a sudden there was a dazzling light and in the centre of that bright whirlpool was a core of blinding light that flashed down from the depths of the sky with terrifying speed until suddenly it stopped, motionless and sacred…The sparkling features of the being wore an expression of supernatural beauty and grief.” – St Francis receives the Stigmata, from Brother Leo’s account, circa 1224.

Image_2096, Boy Bitten by a Dog, from series 'Hospital Gardens, Ukraine © Richard Ansett 2011

Image_2099, Mother with Boy Bitten by a Dog © Richard Ansett 2011

Image_1887, Bedlam Garden

Image_1887, Bedlam Garden © Richard Ansett 2013

Originally named Bedlam, as an English abbreviation of Bethlehem or ‘house of bread’, the word has became attributed to the confinement of 'lunatics', and the colloquial understanding of it as a ‘house of confusion’ and uproar. This image is recorded within the walls of a garden specially created for the patients of the Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital, London.