Richard Long

Richard Long has been a strong influence on me as a photographer for about ten years now. His work appeals to me on several levels, among them, the hiker inside me. My favorite pieces of his are any of the lines made by walking. In making these sculptures by walking, he is "echoing the whole history of mankind." Rebecca Solnit devotes some of her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, a book I highly recommend, to Richard Long's art.

A Line Made By Walking, England 1967

England 1968

His work is as much performance art as it is anything else. Similarly to Andy Goldsworthy, his work lives in the ephemeral, and were it not for a photographic record, or in other instances, text works, there would be no evidence of Long ever having made his sculpture. 

Leaving the Stones, A Five Day Walk With Dogs on Spitzbergen, Svalbard Norway 1995

Pujet Sound Mud Circle, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle 1997

Visit Richard's website to view more work. 

Andrea Dale

Andrea Dale has some really lovely pieces that she titles Ash Paintings. She gathers ashes from recent wildfires and suspends them in resin, which results in an image that has the appearance of rising smoke and ash and fire. Her work falls right into that category I'm such a fan of: beautiful and yet ugly at the same time. Beautiful, because the Art of the work is beautiful, and/or well crafted, but ugly because of the content. In this case, something had to burn to ash in order for the pieces that Andrea creates to exist. She even mentions this in her artist statement:

Destructive wildfires provide the art material, while the ma, or vast empty vertical space, represent the absence of the ash's original form. The alchemy of transforming this base material into art with an emotional weight and presence, portrays a dance between grace and gravitas. My work lures the viewer in by relying on humanity’s love of beauty, but delivers a statement about the danger of living life in a state of disconnect from nature, the self, and empathy. 

Check out more of Andrea's work on her website.

Jeff Frost

If you like time lapse photography, night photography, and video, you'll enjoy Jeff Frost's work. He even crosses over into Earth Art a bit. I've been looking at Jeff's work for a while mainly through his Instagram feed, but also through his website, and his videos hosted on Vimeo.

Jeff was kind enough to answer a few questions about his work that you can read below:

Would you mind telling me a bit about your background as a photographer? 

My background is really as a musician. So I tend to think of photography and contemporary art in terms of rhythm, texture, and mood. The timing of a video edit is as delicate as the fixing I used to have to do to for one of my shitty ex-drummers. If you're getting it right, you're 'in the pocket' in both mediums, and that can come down to mere milliseconds of difference. Time lapse itself is as mechanical and precise as a Roland 808, which can make it difficult to humanize, but also prevents an invigorating challenge. 

I never imagined myself being a photographer or a film maker. When I realized the music thing wasn't going to work out, I went to a school that essentially taught me the basics of commercial photography: how to shoot headshots and weddings, studio lighting, product photography, etc. All of which I did as student to scrape by. As I was shooting weddings I'd find my thoughts wandering. I'd make estimates on how long a couple would last before the divorce. Then I'd feel guilty and think, 'Well this can't be healthy.' In class I was rebelling by creating fine art instead of commercial work. The weirder and more complex I could make it, the better. This lead to painting optical illusions in abandoned houses, which I think of as some sort of minimalist-maximalist paradox in motion, and weaved into a non-linear film narrative. 

Who are some of your influences as a photographer, and who is your favorite photographer? 

My influences are also more towards the music and painting side, but I'll get to a few photographers as well. Musicians who influenced me early on were a lot of the alternative rock stuff like REM, Wire, the Cure, but when I heard Nine Inch Nails "ruining" sounds it really changed how I think. Right now my influences are becoming more abstract on that front: John Cage, Autechre, Aphex Twin, Kim Cascone, Christina Kubisch. All of this filters into how I shoot photography, make soundtracks, and work on sound design. 

I love the minimalist painters (Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Piet Mondrian, etc), but really I love every era of painting. Classical painters such as Caravaggio and Bosch are examples of wild innovation within their time, and also examples of how to get away with it. I adore Andy Warhol and pop art. Street art has had a huge influence on me as well, and that's where my paintings of abandoned buildings stems from. 

For photographers the ones I admire and am influenced by have little to do with my work aesthetically (in most cases). The fearless, tireless, tenacity of Diane Arbus has always blown me away. Richard Avedon honing his portraiture craft to include interactions designed specifically to illicit emotional responses from specific people is an example, for me, of how productive it can be for a photographer to step away from passivity and jump into the thick of things as well as the importance of brilliant planning. Lee Friedlander is one example where you can at least somewhat draw aesthetic parallels. The way he composes and plays with the psychological reaction of the viewer has always had a huge impact on me; same goes for Edward Burtynsky in a much different arena.

I can't say that I have a single favorite. Too hard to choose. 

I love when artists make work that is interactive and collaborative with the landscape, and there is a lot of that in Jeff's work, and my favorite examples are found in his Flawed Symmetry of Prediction body of work.

Check out more of Jeff's work on his website, and follow him on Instagram.

Nancy Holt

Back in 2008 I wrote about Robert Smithson, and how influential he and his writings were becoming on my art then. Through all that reading I learned about Nancy Holt, who was married to Smithson. I really only remember getting familiar with only one of her works, Sun Tunnels in north-western Utah.

Holt, who passed away in 2014, really was quite a prolific artist. Many of her works no longer exist, due either to their intentional ephemerality, or to their being destroyed, as in the case of her Missoula Ranch Locators (1972), which was destroyed so that the owners of the property could build a home.

Her work was made to be an interactive experience. At Sun Tunnels, the viewer stands in one of four concrete tubes and looks through holes cut into walls that line up with certain constellations. Or, the viewer might look through two tunnels to see the sun rise and set at the winter solstice, or the other two tunnels to see the sun rise and set at the summer solstice. Through this interaction, or participation, Holt views her pieces are fully complete.

“I have a strong desire to make people conscious of the cyclical time of the universe”

If you feel like making the trek to the Sun Tunnels, you can find some info here: Sun Tunnels info from Utah Museum Fine Arts

And you check out the Sun Tunnels on Google Earth

You can read more about Holt here.

David Shannon-Lier

This post originally appeared on my Departures Blog on May 27, 2017, and the interview in a subsequent post on June 2, 2017.

Clear back in October, Lenscratch had an article in their Art + Science series on the body of work by David Shannon-Lier titled Of Heaven and Earth. The first image in the article, Chalk Moonrise, Muley Point, Utah, pulled me in, since I love long exposures of the moon and sun, but also, there was more to the image than just the long white arc of the moon as it traveled across the sky: on the rocks in the foreground is a light line that matches the radius of the moon's path. 

Chalk Moonrise, Muley Point, Utah

Not only are these absolutely gorgeous photographs, but the concept behind them is so fun and interesting! 

In a LensCulture article, Lier says this about his work:

“To produce each photograph, I leave open the shutter for a very long exposure. The result is an image of the moon or sun playing off of an altered landscape. In this way, the heavenly meets with the human, the immense with the intimate and one of the most constant forces in our world—the movement of the solar bodies—interacts with a line of rocks or grass: a mark that is small and completely fleeting in meaning and form.”

Badlands Moonset, Badlands National Park, South Dakota

I emailed him and asked some questions about the body of work, and he was kind enough to answer.

Andy Duncan: How long have you been working on this project, and do you think there will ever be an "end" to it, or point at which it will be considered finished?

David Shannon-Lier: I have been working on this project for a little over 5 years now, though the first year and a half to two years of that was spent figuring out how to make the pictures and refining my methodology. I hope to put a book of this work together and I am actually working on including long exposures of the movement of the sun. This is a little trickier as days tend to be a bit windier than nights. I am now building a folding wind break to bring with me on my trips after this last outing.

 AD: What was your inspiration for this work?

DS-L: The inspiration for the work came when I was driving from Massachusetts to Arizona for graduate school. I began to think about our old home and how as we drove west it was slowly setting below the horizon. It occurred to me that I rarely thing about the larger world in three dimensions. I wanted to make work that would point to that gap in our thinking. Now I see that gap as a metaphor for the gap in our conception of our own lives: we know we are small, ephemeral beings, but we can't shake the notion that the things we do every day carry some sort of weight.

 AD: How did it begin, and how has it evolved?

DS-L: The work began as mostly technical problems and solutions. How to plot the motion of heavenly bodies? How to do it accurately enough to where the pictures didn't fall apart? How to nail down the exposure, especially considering small apertures and reciprocity failure? These problems took the better part of a year an a half, most of the experiments taking place in my back yard. As I solved those problems, I began to travel in concentric circles around our home in Arizona, at which point I had to solve other problems to do with travel and how to do this out of a car and away from the support of a home base. Now all that is behind me, which makes the work easier, but in some ways less exciting in the execution. The concepts have developed a bit and I now see the work as about that particularly vexing mix we have as a species of being mortal, conscious and aware that we are both.

 AD: Do you have any thoughts or ideas of what comes next for your photography?

DS-L: I am always taking pictures of things that fascinate me. I am interested in the landscape and the sublime, particularly that aspect of the sublime that is closest to fear or dread. It seems to me in these moments we can begin to get at that human knot I mentioned above.

 AD: Who is a favorite photographer of yours?

DS-L: There are a lot. I find the best persona to embody as a visual artist is a compulsive thief. It does no good to steal from one artist or movement, or even one medium. But if you can constantly be taking in new information, and stealing a bit from here, a bit from there, from other artists as well as science, philosophy, theology, culture the work will end up being rather more interesting. This is all to say that sometimes (as is the case with compulsive thieves) I am unaware that I am borrowing from some area until long after and I could spend entirely too long listing all of them. All that being said I will mention Bill Burke and Mark Klett, who I worked closely with and who have influenced me by osmosis. Also, someone who is working now and really gets at the ideas of the landscape and the sublime is Michael Lundgren.

 AD: Because I'm a bit of a tech junkie, what programs or software do you use to project or predict the positioning of the sun and the moon?

DS-L: The solution to that technical problem was to use very accurate data and a very accurate tool for measuring the data. I started getting my data from the U.S. Naval Observatory, but I now use an app called stellarium. It has the same data, but is a little easier to access on the road. From that I can get the precise location for any heavenly body at present or in the future. I use a surveyor's tool called a transit, or a theodolite to plot the points that I get from the data, and then place my camera in the spot where the transit made its measurements. It's a bit more complicated than that and a lot more tedious, but that's the gist of it.

Man, I loved the part about stealing from everywhere!  I've heard the quote that's often attributed to Pablo Picasso: "good artists borrow, great artists steal." But for all the times I've heard it, I never really thought to apply the stealing to all facets of life, not just to steal from other artists.

Thanks for your time David! I can't wait to see more of your work!

To see more of Lier's work, which I highly recommend, you can visit his website. Also, he's been featured on LensCulture, Fraction Magazine, and Hoctok.

Robert Smithson

I’ve missed two posts here at 52Photographers.com, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been looking at other photographers. Quite the contrary. I’ve been looking at many photographers and artists working in other media, but school has made it a little harder to actually put together a post about any of those artists, however short they may be.

One artist I have been looking at, and who wrote quite prolifically, is the late Robert Smithson. As the creator of the Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake, he is quite well known. Along with looking at his own photographs and photographs of his environmental sculptures, I have been reading a lot of his essays that he wrote and were published in several art magazines in the late Sixties and early Seventies before his untimely death in 1973.

Smithsons work and theories of art are completely fascinating to me, and are rapidly becoming quite influential in my own work.

Here are my most favorite sculptures:

Spiral Jetty

Broken Circle

Chalk Mirror Displacement

Oolite Island

Links:

Official Site

Robert Smithson on Wikipedia.

Andy Goldsworthy

Andy Goldsworthy is more of a sculptor than a photographer, though without the camera much of his art work wouldn’t be seen by many people or any at all. Much of his work deals with the ephemeral and the transient, and the more I see his work and the more I read about him and his art the more I love it.

I am totally amazed at how sensitive Goldsworthy is to the environment he works in, and how out of place and alien he feels when he is in a new environment.

All his sculptures are made with materials found locally in the environment in which the sculpture is made. All the tools he uses are mostly other rocks, sticks, his mouth, his hands.

Check out one of his many books; my favorite so far is “Time.” Also there is a documentary titled “Rivers and Tides” that is well worth watching.