Urbanautica

KYLER ZELENY. CROWN DITCH AND THE PRAIRIE CASTLE

by Steve Bisson

«We know the American west, but when we think of the Canadian west what do we imagine? Who is that person and what is that place and how do we know when we are in it?»

Hello Kyler, can you tell us about where you grow up in Central Alberta?

Kyler Zeleny (KZ): I grew up on a farm on the Canadian prairies. It is a simple idiom but when you’re young, all you know is what you know. It was through leaving that I realized what made the place special for me and for others; the wide horizon stretching in every direction and the eternal sky that perpetually pushed down upon it. Some use empty or banal to describe the prairies, I use the term sublimely banal. The writer and prairie son Wallace Stegner once called the emptiness of space on the prairies “almost frighteningly total.” The place I grew up could be argued to be the last ‘proving ground’ of colonial settlement, as such, it is a place largely without a history, there have been no barons here, no great battles on hills just the sublimely banal horizons of a landscape and a culture in its youth.

© Kyler Zeleny from the series 'Crown Ditch and The Prairie Castle'

And then photography. How it all started? What are your memories of your first shots?

KZ: When I was sixteen my friends and I would drive around looking at old country buildings: houses, schools, and churches, just for something to do. Just fighting off boredom. We’d wait until 2 am and enter buildings, using only the glow of our flip phones and the flash of our cameras to guide us around these relics. From an early age, I was interested in seeing how old farmsteads seem to disappear back into nature. I once had a friend who said if I grew up in a city I would have moved to the country when I was eighteen just to “find out what that was all about.” Those first years of having a camera (a digital Sony point and shoot with a 128mb memory card) were just about straight documenting, I knew little about composition, lighting and great photographers like Robert Adams, Robert Frank, or Stephen Shore. It would be some time before I would be introduced to their work and even longer before I started to make good photographs.

© Kyler Zeleny from the series 'Crown Ditch and The Prairie Castle'

What about your educational background? How do you relate to this? Tell me about your experience with the bachelor's in Political Science from the University of Alberta and the masters from Goldsmiths College, University of London, in Photography and Urban Cultures.

KZ: I studied political science and sociology for my undergraduate, as a result, I think my work, in general, is informed by the world in a way that is more analytical than conceptual, or at least that is what my work has been up to this point and that has diverged more recently. I think in a lot of ways photography and sociology or political science are related disciplines, both are fascinated with society and the human condition and having an understanding of one can help you with the other. This was something that was fostered at Goldsmiths where photographers learned from the social sciences and those from a social science background, myself included, learned to use photography as a tool to explore, understand and create. It is at Goldsmiths that I developed my interest in pairing photography and critical writing to understand a place or topic. There is a lot of good photography being produced today but a lot of it lacks sophistication and layering. This practice of critical writing paired with photography is something I have carried into my Ph.D. and will be a key feature of my next two books.

© Kyler Zeleny from the series 'Crown Ditch and The Prairie Castle'

© Kyler Zeleny from the series 'Crown Ditch and The Prairie Castle'

What do you think about photography in the era of digital and social networking? How is the language evolving and impacting the daily life of people and communities in your opinion? Fast interconnections and instant sharing. How this is affecting the role of a documentary photographer and your own practice?

KZ: As Marshal McLuhan would say, we live in a 'Global Village' with everyone and everything connected. As someone growing up on the prairies where documentary photography is not a common practice it would be nice to know if I was eighteen today I could find an online community to connect with. I also think the speed and omnipresence of imagery can help us pause and see the importance of the photo-book as a physical object for interacting with, as a medium to slow down our time with photography. My only criticism of platforms like Facebook and Instagram for sharing photography is that they destroy scale, quality and privilege some formats over others. Social media definitely pushes the learning curve providing us with a steady stream of good work to critique or emulate. I am not sure if that is good or bad for the medium as a whole. I do believe photographers should spend more time doing their homework, think about what they are doing, why they are doing it and what it can offer the world.

What about your own practice...

KZ: I like to think of myself as an “ideas man”. I have many ideas, lots that end up staying in a desk or buried in my documents folder but that is ok. I initially start a project with an idea, sit with it for a year and if I still like the idea (I have a similar opinion on tattoos) I will do follow-up research or begin to photograph for it. I work slowly and given I don't live where I like to photograph, I also work sporadically. From there I will continue the work until it feels complete.

Can you introduce us to the series/work 'Crown Ditch and the Prairie Castle ' that was selected for Urbanautica Institute Awards. What are the basic motivations and assumptions of this project? How this relates to your recent work 'Bury Me in the Back Forty' a long-term multi-media project that documents Mundare, Alberta, a seemingly typical rural community.

KZ: I have been working on a trilogy on prairie space and life in western Canada. My first book 'Out West' (2014) was the first ‘chapter’. 'Crown Ditch and the Prairie Castle' (Crown Ditch for short) is the second chapter and should be coming out later this year as its own photobook. The third and final chapter is titled 'Bury Me in the Back Forty' and is something I’m still working on. Hopefully it will be completed later this year but it still requires massaging and attention. There is a logic to the whole process, 'Out West' is about looking at small rural communities of 1,000 or fewer inhabitants across western Canada; a large area comprised of four Canadian provinces. 'Crown Ditch' is about shrinking the space to focus on the prairie region found in Alberta and Saskatchewan (and a few American states) while also widening the scope to include communities of 10,000 or fewer plus people and their landscapes. The final chapter, 'Bury Me', is about using ideas of post-photography and multi-media practice to understand a specific rural community on the prairies. It is also my home community so this near decade-long interest in prairie space is coming to an end and its ending with me looking in my backyard. So there is this inverse relationship between the area I’m focusing on photographing and what I’m looking to photograph within that area. The smaller the area the more interested I am in turning up every rock to find something meaningful to this region.

© Kyler Zeleny from the series 'Crown Ditch and The Prairie Castle'

Your projects often developed into books. Tell us about your experience... And how your books digest your intentions?

KZ: I am keen on sharing my work through books and so I conceptualize my long-term projects early on as book projects, they could be shown in gallery spaces but for me, their primary resting place is in a book that can live on people’s shelves wherever they are. Coming back to the question of social media and photography, the book is the medium that more than others allows us to express our ideas clearly, of course, we are bound by certain parameters within it, cost, size, etc. but we can decide sequence and intention. It also allows for a number of creative outputs than sending images into the ether of the web or placing them on location-based gallery walls for a short period of time. I think a lot of photographers are now turning to the medium of the photobook which is good and bad, good for the practice of photography bad for selling books as competition is tough.

Mockup of the book 'Crown Ditch and The Prairie Castle'. Pre-orders on 'The Velvet Cell'

Mockup of the book 'Crown Ditch and The Prairie Castle'. Pre-orders on 'The Velvet Cell'

With Andriko Lozowy you have contributed to the special edition North by West issued by 'Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies'. You have invited photographers and academics to collaborate and contribute to the idea of regionalism in North America. This approach was used to draw attention to Western Canada, a region that lacks a strong photographic identity. Any lesson learned?

KZ: Yes, we were the guest editors for the special edition of 'North by West'. I think this work offered the academic community something unique, a way to see a region through the collaborative efforts of photographers and academics working around similar ideas and topics but often not having a collective conversation. For photographers who wish to engage with it, I think it offers them a way to see the value of textual exploration of their projects in ways that often only writers and experts can execute. In a general sense, we were interested in building some ideas of the region, to explore the question: “We know the American west, but when we think of the Canadian west what do we imagine? Who is that person and what is that place and how do we know when we are in it?”

© Kyler Zeleny from the series 'Crown Ditch and The Prairie Castle'

On the issue “Amateur Archives: The Uses of Public and Private Archives in a Digital World” in the International Journal of the Image you developed your points about the rise in the intensity and relevance of online archival sites-both those that showcase archival/found imagery as well as those that collect, publish and then sell reproductions of archived documents themselves. What's your position in this regard?

KZ: It is a complicated question and so I’ll give a complicated answer. I wrote that article from an academic perspective on the rise of what I call the ‘amateur archive’, but you could as easily call a lot of these practices as part of a larger movement within the field to an idea of post-photography. I also have my own project Found Polaroids, which was published more recently with Ain’t Bad that is about collecting orphaned Polaroids and asking people to write fictitious stories about what may have happened to these people because we have lost the ability to know. In a more general sense, the rise of individuals collecting imagery is interesting, it allows us to think about the material nature of photography in the 19th and 20th centuries, something we have for the most part abandoned today. I also think this is partly why we have an innate interest in physical images, it's a connection with the analog and the physical which we have largely lost. A lot of images are stored in private collections and public museums that don’t see daylight and at least these individual projects are allowing us to be creative with imagery that would otherwise be boxed up and forgotten.

KZ: I have too many books to recommend especially as my practice is starting to diverge into more conceptual work. Related to prairie photography I would go with the lesser known works of Albertan photographer George Webber’s Prairie Gothic, a wildly underrated book. Second would be an even lesser known project titled Keepsake: Selections from the Archives of a Photographic Project, this book brought ten photographers to photograph communities in Alberta and is by some metrics (cost being one) is the greatest photographic exploration of rural community in Canada ever produced and then forgotten (perhaps even in North America). The project itself has some issues and numerous reasons for its limited reach but it is nonetheless an important work and the third is by the always lovely British photo-theorist Liz Wells titled Land Matters, the most comprehensive book on the relationship between photography and landscape

What are you up to?

KZ: A lot of things are moving right now. In general, I have not been photographing as much as I would like. I have been occupied the last few years with teaching, doing some independent research and working on my PhD, with the bulk of my focus on battling with that beast but that should be coming to an end soon. I’m also trying to complete Bury Me as it still needs some work and I hope to put that into production in the next year or two. But only when it feels right. I am also going to be starting a couple of new projects but those I am being hush-hush about until I break ground on them. But I will say one is focused around demolition derbies and the other is focused on a cursed story.

© Kyler Zeleny from the series 'Crown Ditch and The Prairie Castle'

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LINKS
Kyler Zeleny
Pre-orders for the book 'Crown Ditch and The Prairie Castle'
Urbanautica Institute Awards 2019

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