© Gary Green from the series 'The River is Moving / The Blackbird Must Be Flying' 

Hi Gary, 10 years have passed since that first interview by Daniel Kariko on Urbanautica. That article was very much focused on your experience with teaching. How are things going on with your program at school?

Gary Green (GG): I have now been at Colby for over 13 years and the program has grown and expanded. We have a full range of digital and analog tools now including an Imacon scanner, an Epson 44” wide printer, and all analogue processes including a 12-station darkroom and color film processing. Our senior year curriculum includes a year-long capstone that includes all artistic disciplines, a thesis exhibit in our museum, and a really nice catalog that includes their work, an artist statement, and essays about their work by art history students taking a course in art criticism. It’s a robust finish to four years of studying art. I also continue to bring in guest artists and speakers, who over the years have included Mitch Epstein, An-My Lê, Mark Steinmetz, John Divola, Andrea Modica, and Emmet Gowin. This year, because of the pandemic, we had a virtual visit from Nelson Chan, who is now teaching at California College of the Arts. We had a terrific visit talking about his own work as well as his technical expertise in creating scans and separations for many great photobooks when he worked for Aperture. I should say that, because of the pandemic and remote learning, most of my students made print-on-demand books instead of traditional darkroom prints or even pigment prints.

In 2015 we made a book together, a fascinating book, a free dialogue with Morandi, 'After Morandi' (conversation on the book available here). Why was this important to you? How were you able to build your own narrative without appearing too much didactic? What were your impressions when you visited Morandi's heritage in Italy?

GG: I never planned to make a book about Morandi or “after” him. It came about totally organically and I think that’s why it succeeds in not being didactic or too direct in its content. On my first trip to Italy in 2014, I wanted to visit his lifelong home because I had loved his work for many, many years. I saw the great show at the Met (and have the catalog) and have often wondered if there was a project where I could address or reference his work. There never was until I visited his home in Bologna, where I made a few photographs with my large camera and a few with my phone. After that I was at a residency in Assisi for a month, where I made both still life photographs – a pretty new genre to me – and a series of photographs based on the many walks I did on Mount Subasio, which is above Assisi. Subsequently, I spent a month at Yaddo (an artist residency in Saratoga Springs, New York), where I scanned and printed the output from this trip, which was pretty large. In studying the work later in my own studio, the Morandi book just came to the fore and my first version was very much by intuition and instinct. After many refinements, I made ten copies that I bound by hand. You got the first one and brought it to fruition with L’Artiere. I’m very proud of that book.

Book 'After Morandi' by Gary Green, Urbanautica / L'Artiere Edizioni, 2015 

© Gary Green from the series 'After Morandi' 

Gary Green with Chuck Ferguson at Colby College while working on the prototype of the book 'After Morandi', that led to its publication. 

You said once photography is about understanding, where you are, well places in general. I know you are very much related to Maine and its landscape. If you had to describe what makes it different, what would you say?

GG: I’d say that’s part of it for me. I think my work is about paying attention to where you are. By looking closely and photographing places, you can’t help but understand more than you did before. The landscape tells us so much about the life around it. My work in the terrain vague, those sort of unclassified spaces at the edge of a town or city, speaks to the transition of rural to urban space and also the constant change in the landscape. By photographing Central Maine, where I’ve lived for over ten years now, I’ve seen so many spaces and buildings and streets change many times. It’s like watching light move across a room throughout the day but it takes a bit longer. Some places regenerate naturally and others are built up or knocked down by humans.

© Gary Green from the series 'Elm City' 

© Gary Green from the series 'Elm City' 

© Gary Green from the series 'Elm City' 

I don’t think the landscape of Maine is inherently that different from any other except in the obvious ways having to do with geography, geology, and climate of course. But the same sorts of things happen everywhere if at different scales and with different flora. An abandoned lot sits vacant and the grasses are overgrown before it’s developed and the neighborhood now has a new bank. A building gets knocked down and becomes an abandoned lot until the same happens with that one. What’s most different for me is that I kind of know it pretty intimately as opposed to other places I’ve photographed for shorter periods of time. But for me, the landscape represents history, natural and otherwise. It bears the scars of war, development, abandonment, etc. But in the right light, looked at in a certain way, it can address beauty, sadness, life, and death.. It’s both a subject matter and a metaphor. It can also be personal. I think what I’m talking about is facing what’s in front of us, squarely, and paying attention to that and honoring it, whether it be agreeable to us or not. The redeeming aspect of a rough-looking landscape can be evoked by a photograph that brings order and visual transformation. There are really so many levels and ways to look at landscape and they’re all valid. I most of all love photographs that never fully reveal themselves or at least don’t for a long time and many views. That’s where the transcendence is for the medium, the play between subject and representation, real life and pictures.

© Gary Green from the series 'Terrain Vague' 

You have visited Asolo 1 year ago and contributed to Urbanautica's research. What were your impressions of the place and the people?

GG: I can’t say too much about the people I met, aside from those who participated in your program and your friends and acquaintances, who were all wonderful people. I loved the café nature of the place. I felt really comfortable in the city, which is beautiful. What’s most interesting to me, in terms of photography, though, is the overall landscape of The Veneto. I love the interaction of Medieval towns and cities interspersed with suburban manufacturing centers. It is appealing to me in both its nature and its industrial aspects. We did a book for your Asolo project and I think I’d like to go through all the work I made those weeks and maybe do an expanded edition. I might want to continue to photograph there again, along that route we traveled from Asolo to Bassano del Grappa. (Picking up another bottle or two from there wouldn’t hurt either!). I still haven’t seen Guido Guidi’s The Veneto so I will wait until I see that book and if there’s anything to add or be in dialogue with before I go further. But I do love the push and pull and of the new and the old.

© Gary Green from the series 'Let Us Dream'

© Gary Green from the series 'Let Us Dream'

© Gary Green from the series 'Let Us Dream'

And what about the small village of Riese? I remember a funny story of the man sitting on the bar and having a bunch of cigarettes all day as he was trying to kill himself. Do you ever take portraits Gary?

GG: You’re referring to the café downstairs from where I was staying at the hostel. There were a group of about five or six men, clearly retired or unemployed, who sat around every morning talking, drinking coffee (a couple of them always had little white wines no matter the time of day) and looking through the newspapers. My relationship with them was mostly a silent one, although one man did attempt to have a conversation and we managed to talk pleasantly for a little while. I just did not feel comfortable photographing them. I made many portraits in the seventies and eighties, some of them published in my book When Midnight Comes Around, which was published by Stanley/Barker in 2020. I don’t make many these days and I think what keeps me back is not having a group of people around me who I’d feel comfortable photographing. It’s been hard for me move beyond that. Besides that, I’m naturally shy, particularly in Italy, where I can only speak a few words and phrases of the native language. I would do better with a translator/guide.

© Urbanautica Institute, Manifesto of Gary Green'exhibition in Asolo, 2017

Book 'When Midnight Comes Around' by Gary Green, Stanley/Barker, 2020

© Gary Green

It's also meditation, I mean photography... That's why you are rather into the analogic and large format?

GG: Photography is a practice like meditation so if you do it regularly and think about it often, it is a lot like that kind of practice. I do love the view camera for that aspect. It’s also why I love being alone in the landscape. I don’t see the point in working digitally now when I still have film, which I love, and cameras that I can afford. I think I will always choose analog if it matters in the end, which, for me, it still does. I find the delay in shooting, processing, scanning and/or printing in the darkroom to be very important. When I’ve traveled, I wait until I get home to process all the film and begin the process of editing and printing. That time and space—the distance—is meaningful to me and important to my work.

© Gary Green from the series 'Maine Trees'

I often see your photographs as a state of mind. Like the Meadows series, I can hear the wind moving the high grass and beat yourself in the face...

GG: Well, I love that! The meadows and prairies series was critical to my understanding of being in the landscape and communing with my subject. Again, with the view camera, it is almost a spiritual experience to see a place, upside down and perfectly clear on a ground glass. If that state of mind comes through, I am very honored. I try to work with a heightened perception of the world with the hope that the result will be the same. Although the photographs can’t really declare the wind on my face, I think those atmospheric phenomena come through, or at least I hope they do, through the decisions I make and in the way I’ve made the photograph.

With Interiors you dive into the abandonment. Tell us more about these places and what pushed you there...

GG: I think it was a natural transition or by-product of photographs I’ve been making in Central Maine, where I live. I started to be curious about the interiors of the buildings whose facades I was often photographing. It’s another part of the city’s history and, sadly, marks the end of usefulness for many of the buildings that contain that historical residue. I have tried very carefully to restore some dignity to these spaces by photographing them, remembering them, paying considerable attention to them. Like the new book I made The River is Moving, The Blackbird Must be Flying (L’Artiere 2020), for me the interiors are really indoor landscapes that reflect human interests and behavior, from churches to gyms to stores, etc. This is where life was lived for a certain amount of time. Before long it will be gone or reconstituted, wiping away a history and, for the most part, its artifacts.

© Gary Green from the series 'Interiors'

© Gary Green from the series 'Interiors'

© Gary Green from the series 'Interiors'

You said that you see beauty as a kind of religion without religion. Nature is "beauty" in this sense? And I think about your series 'Trees'...

GG: Well, I think people use religion as a way to make sense of the chaos and noise in the world. Religion gives them a way to understand themselves a little better and can help them make good decisions. It’s a structure based on a particular ethos that may provide a kind of order if practiced with genuine passion. Photography and art are ways to look at the chaos and the world to find a visual order, which can reveal beauty and thus a feeling of hope.

© Gary Green from the series 'Maine Trees' 

What about your recent book The River is Moving / The Blackbird Must Be Flying? Can introduce it to us?

GG: That book began with a single picture taken on my iPhone while walking along a stream near my home. I was interested enough in the photograph to consider getting more serious. As the academic year was ending, I started taking my camera down to the stream and making photographs. Once I started processing my film and scanning it, I could see that were many possibilities and variations in this simple practice. I photographed there for about two years on and off and in different seasons. I thought of the title when I exhibited a group of six large prints from the series. I have loved Wallace Stevens’s poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird for a long time and have even used it as a prompt for my students. I think it helped me define the project because it brought with it the idea that as nature we are all one, and ultimately the message that we need to pay attention to and take care of nature because it is simply taking care of ourselves. If one part of nature is damaged or neglected, we all lose. We must keep the river moving, lest the blackbird stop flying and human beings stop being.

© Gary Green from the series 'The River is Moving / The Blackbird Must Be Flying'

The design was a little more collaborative with L’Artiere this time. They took my basic dummy and came up with a binding that allows us to see the spine of the book—part of its usually invisible structure—and a glassine covering that is translucent and delicate, a kind of skin barely protecting what’s inside. I think it’s a really beautiful object and that in itself is a victory.

LINKS
Gary Green (website)