On the eve of her exhibition at Lilltejohn Contemporary, Pamela Crimmins discusses her work with fellow photographer DEBORAH GARWOOD. Portrait of the artist's camera by Bruce Strong
Pamela Crimmons Rider 2005
digital c-print; 16 x 24 inches; ed. of 5
Pamela, you’re exhibition opens April 28th. The title of the show is Dream House. Tell me about the title and how it relates to what we’re seeing in these test prints.
These photographs all have references to architecture in them for the first time. When I was looking for places to photograph over the past couple of summers, I sought out architectural structures that were close enough to bodies of water so that I would be able to see them from inside the water.
You wanted to look at reflections of architecture in the water?
I’m under the water. These are shot up through the water with an underwater camera. Water is a lens, so it’s like adding an extension onto the camera - a moving, wiggly lens. And I agitate the water with my flippers and my hands. I also have to consider whether there are jets in the pool, or the amount of wind, for example. There are a host of variables that affect the surface of the water, and determine whether the photography is going to be successful or not.
You want a certain amount of agitation, not too much, just the right amount?
Yes, absolutely. Actually, when I was preparing things for you to look at, I pulled out a box of pictures that are at the edges of my project, directions I decided not to pursue. There are some pictures that are much less agitated. At the other extreme, here’s a group where the image hovers on the border between figuration and abstraction. The image is completely broken up. You can’t read it. I decided not to work in either of these directions for now, but it doesn’t mean I won’t try this again another time. I could go back to either of these ways of working.
Let’s go back a little. How did you begin taking pictures underwater, using water as a lens?
I had bought a disposable underwater camera to take pictures of my daughter when she learned to swim. As I looked up at her from below the surface, the image showed a bit of her shoulder in normal perspective, while her face above the surface was distorted. I thought gee, that’s interesting! Since then, I’ve adapted my equipment and working process for underwater photography, and have made several bodies of work based on the figure. My models have mostly been my children and our circle of friends.
In my new series, I wanted to include architecture because we know that a house is regular, rectilinear, geometric, and stands up properly. When the water distorts it, it’s dramatic. The figure is already sort of wiggly and irregular, somewhat. We do have symmetry in our bodies, but we are not as regular as a house. I had a hunch that distorting the figure and distorting the house would end up being two different things.
Although this series focuses on architecture, there are always figures in the pictures. The people in the recent work have become really tiny. They’re not standing right next to the pool, as in my other work; they’re visible somewhere in or near the gigantic edifice of the architecture. The work really ended up being about people interacting with both the built and the natural world. Their diminution is like that of figures in a Chinese landscape or Hudson River School painting where the setting is overwhelming relative to the figure. It’s been exciting to gain this new perspective in my work.
Pamela Crimmons Afternoon 2005
digital c-print; 24 x 36 inches; ed. of 5
What is your relationship to these dream houses, to the communities where they’re located? Are these places you know? Is that important to the viewer’s understanding of the pictures?
It’s important to me, but I don’t think it’s important to the pictures. The homes belong to family or friends or clients. And in most of the pictures, the owners of the homes have posed for me in the pictures. It’s necessary for me to work in familiar places because I need to visit the location at several different times of day and in different weather and have time to figure out what I want to shoot. Here’s an example. I took this picture, “Afternoon”, in the late afternoon when the shadow of a dead tree starts creeping across the house. It’s only there for about 10 minutes before it engulfs the house in darkness. But I had had a lot of time to observe this house. I knew it was going to happen and I was prepared.
Tell me about the unusual color that’s going on.
One of the interesting things the water does is break light into the color spectrum. You get these little rainbows here and there if the angle of the sun is right. You get flashes of deep cyan blue, fiery orange, or red or any of the other colors, and they are highly saturated and dense. A lot of people think I’m photographing reflections, but you wouldn’t get that rainbow effect in a reflection.
This series brings up the whole conversation about suburbia as utopia and dystopia.
I think suburbia is alternately utopia and dystopia. But I’m not sure I’m really commenting on suburbia in particular. The tiny figure in this image, “Rider”, is the only thing stable in the photograph. She’s standing straight and tall and holding on while the whole house heaves around her. (DG: Gaudi-esque!) I thought of her as the anchor, the mother-anchor of her home, holding everything together while she manages her family’s life and this house—this home. And I think it’s beautiful! So maybe chaos is beautiful, maybe it’s not completely frightening and negative. At least in this image, the subject is enjoying the ride.
Pamela Crimmons View 2005
digital c-print; 24 x 36 inches; ed. of 5
At the end of The Great Gatsby, Gatsby commits suicide by drowning in the pool - now there’s a perfect example of the dream house and suburban dystopia on Long Island... What about the topic of digital technology in your work?
This year, for the first time, there are digital things happening in the work. I had my color negatives scanned and printed digitally, and the funny thing was that we did almost no altering of the image. The liquefy tool was used in a small way in exactly one image. And I had a few small things removed from some of the images. The digital imaging ended up as a way to spot and clean up the prints. And so the fact that they’re being run through Photoshop should not suggest to anyone that I’m altering the image in any major way.
This image, “Thirteen”, is a Photoshop composite of two images, and it’s the only one where the figures are large. In one image, I liked the two peak-roofed houses, the two girls, the way their hands join together. There were a lot of two’s going on. But there were things that bugged me, and things in another frame that were better. I really wanted this picture to work out. It suggested to me a lot of things about puberty and adolescence, but it just wasn’t quite there. So I had a head from one image put on the body from another image, and there were some other things I moved around. So of all of the pictures in the show, this is the only one where I really exploited a full range of Photoshop tools. Before I’d done this, I used to look at my prints and think of all the things I would do to my pictures if only I knew Photoshop. But in fact, when I did start to use Photoshop, I changed very little. Sometimes you fantasize about a tool that’s out there, that it’s going to make everything different or better. And it’s important to buy different lenses and things just to satisfy your curiosity; then you either go ahead with what they can do for you, or return to the way you worked before. In my case, I am using a new tool, but not in the way I had anticipated.
Pamela Crimmons Thirteen 2005
digital c-print; 24 x 36 inches; ed. of 5
The way you resolved this image of the two young girls with digital tools has a very different look from, say, the way Loretta Lux idealizes very young women and their settings using a combination of photography and Photoshop. You keep the alterations to a minimum because you’re still interested in the reality of the photographic image.
I am! It’s a funny thing because when my work has been written about before, some people (the ones who don’t think they’re reflections!) have said my images were created on the computer, but they’re not. At the same time, I never intended to be a stickler about all of this and make a statement to the effect that my images were not, and would never be, altered digitally. Why limit myself? I think art is about freedom and choices, and I want my medium to be as plastic as possible. Artists should do whatever they want to.
What other issues came up as you began to combine photography and digital technology, and how did you handle them? Even though you haven’t “made the image on a computer,” you’re using it in place of an enlarger to actually make the finished print.
Let me show you a test print from the batch of works being framed. This is a digital print created from a scan of the color negative. One reason to do it this way - scan from the negative - is that with an enlarger, the image is projected in a cone, and the outer edges of the cone are slightly less in focus than the center. It’s an inevitable result of the enlargement process. A scan captures more information, and all the sharpness of the negative is retained. I think that’s a big advantage. It also picks up more grain. Grain is an issue in photography; photographers genrally dislike visible grain, whereas painters enjoy seeing an image break up. I like the effect of pronounced grain.
I wanted to ask you about presentation. How are these being framed for your show?
Presentation is a big issue and I’ve spent a lot of time and energy trying out different things. Here for example is a framed work, one of my first in this whole series of using the water as a lens. It’s under glass with an 8-ply matt and a white washed wooden frame. Next, I tried removing the frame entirely by mounting images on freestanding museum boxes. Then I mounted them on aluminum. There are lots of variations on this - here’s one sandwiched between plexi and aluminum, and another one on aluminum with a protective coating. At one point I thought the reflective qualities of water would be complemented by the shininess of the plexiglass, but then I changed my mind, because I thought the shininess was mimicking the wiggly effect of the water in my images in an annoying way. So then I moved to non-glare plexi. Finally, I put one of these mounted images in a box frame without a matt or glass. The problem is that all of these solutions leave the image very vulnerable. When I’d have an aluminum mounted photograph hanging in my house, I worried about it as much as I enjoyed it! It was like having a frail baby on the wall. So that convinced me to find a compromise between getting rid of all the frame stuff and retaining its protective virtues. So for this show, the prints are going to be behind non-glare plexiglass in shallow boxes, no matting.
Pamela Crimmons Tower 2005
digital c-print; 36 x 24 inches; ed. of 5
What other types of photography are you interested in, not limiting the discussion to photography in an art context?
I keep files of newspaper or magazine photographs that I like. The most recent picture I cut out was on the front page of the New York Times. These are people mourning the Pope as he lay in state. Look how many of them are taking pictures – more than half! You can tell that a lot of the cameras are digital because people are looking at the screen attachment rather than holding it in front of their faces. So many are using cell phone cameras. This is an example of an important world event being memorialized by ordinary people. I wonder how many photographs of the Pope are on people’s computers now. But this picture is interesting to me because of what it says to me about photography, not the Pope per se.
I’m also interested in the way that people take snapshots. How many snapshots are there in the world?! People document their lives and tell their life story in scrapbooks. We love old family photographs because they have a real quality that a painting does not. And now many, many people have access to photography and can tell their stories the way they want to. I see photography as a democratic medium. Humble, inexpensive mediums that can be reproduced in multiples, like printmaking, have contributed to the lives of democracies, to getting more points of view from more people out to other people.
So you see one of photography’s strengths as being a vehicle of personal story telling, and that this is a valid and valuable cultural phenomenon.
Definitely! There’s the example of the Pope’s funeral, the family snapshot collection. Lots of people are still going to the World Trade Center site, memorializing and recording what they see. I think taking pictures helps us develop a personal way of thinking about these events aside from the images the media carefully edits. We’re all trying to make sense of what’s happened in the past, and what’s going on now, and making pictures is a wonderful way to do that.
[c] Bruce Strong, 2005
"Pamela Crimmins Dream House Photographs" at Littlejohn Contemporary, 41 E 57 Street (The Fuller Building), New York NY 10022, 212 980 2323, April 28 to May 26, 2005
