Hi Paul, how did it all start for you to be interested in Photography?

Paul Bevan (P.B.): Way back – two things happened. My Norwegian grandfather gave me his old camera for my 8th birthday (I think) and more importantly, my American uncle (married to my mother’s sister) is a photographer. He had a formative influence on me for sure when I was growing up. He used to do a lot of pictures of the immediate family, especially when we were on vacation in Norway. He used a Polaroid Land camera on a slow shutter with an off camera flash, and produced a series published as Slow Motion, (Jim Bengston, 1986). He was really interested in the effects this had on the image, as part of the image, and he shared that passion with us. This camera used film that produced a positive and negative, and I remember carrying his bucket of fix for the negs around, and the smell of the squeegee thing that used to coat the small polaroid prints! These are really fond memories.

I began taking pictures myself at an early age, often self-consciously experimenting and playing with techniques. I won the school photography prize (along with the art and choir prize!) when I was a young teenager. This interest in playing with technique and photographic characteristics led to constructing images and performing for the camera with a certain intuition about what I could expect. In some ways, this was the start of how I have continued to work, even if I’m not always the performer in front of the lens, I see the act of photography itself as a kind of performance, and this has come to include the act of viewing the work where an act of observation is repeated.

© Paul Bevan, How my Body Copes, England, 1985

I developed a number of serial photo works at this time, that includes a series of 12 images where I am lying under a tree in a canvas bag for 12 hours (each image taken on each hour). I was looking at artists like Chris Burden and Keith Arnatt at this point, and really developing my own work in the area of photography and performance, where the camera is the audience. Another important piece is a series of 16 pictures where I am standing on the edge of a rock on the coast of Norway, and removing an item of clothing in each image until I am completely undressed. At this point I jump into the water, then go on to get dressed again, with each added item of clothing being recorded in individual images where I am mid-jump between the rock and the water, with the final image being a pose that repeated the very first image; the difference being that I am now completely wet.

© Paul Bevan, Vannkanten (the water edge), Norway, 1989

© Paul Bevan, Vannkanten (the water edge), Norway, 1989 (detail)

The water’s edge is a both a real place and a metaphorical space, and I find myself at this place often enough to know that in this space I’m at a brink, an in-between. At the place where the land meets the sea and the sea meets the land, I’m at the precipice, the peripatetic time and place between states, and in this series, between being dry and wet; dressed and naked and at a stretch, of alive and dead. Photography, my friend and life-time accessory was there with me, ever ready, poised in the same peripatetic moment to witness the transformation that I’m about to engage. All that is to come, the before to the after of the decisive and transformative act, physically and conceptually, in the real time and real place and my real experience, is about to become visually crystallized for future viewing, so my viewer can be or ‘be-come’ there in a future ‘sometime’, in another place and of another experience, in every new moment that the work is seen.

Tell me about your present practice in the field of image making.

P.B.: I showed this piece from 1989 recently along-side a new series that I developed in 2015, that was reminiscent in some ways, not least as I stand again on the edge of a rock - albeit this time in Finland. These pictures were made for an on-going project about the idea of the superposition, which is actually proving to be a way to think about all of my work.

The term ‘superposition’ is perhaps most commonly used in the quantum world and describes the point when matter might exist in all possible states at the same time. Usually this matter is invisible or too small for us to see (hence the subatomic world) and it is only through the act of detection or observation, that the superposition collapses into a known or fixed state. Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger proposed the famous thought experiment Schrodinger's Cat in 1935, where a cat is hidden in a sealed box containing a radio-active vial that could be broken at any point. While this animal is invisible (not because of its size, but because it’s concealed in a box) the cat remains in the superposition of being both dead and alive until the moment the box is opened and the status of the cat is observed. Of course, this thought experiment was also designed to ridicule the idea of the superposition, since a rational mind would know that a cat cannot be both dead and alive at the same time!

I have come to consider the superposition as a phenomena that is a ‘human condition’, a kind of condition of being alive and mobile (and visa versa) – As a footnote, in thinking about what the term human condition means, look at Rene Magritte’s two paintings titled ‘the human condition’ about which he says: “In front of a window seen from inside a room, I placed a painting representing exactly that portion of the landscape covered by the painting. Thus, the tree in the picture hid the tree behind it, outside the room. For the spectator, it was both inside the room within the painting and outside in the real landscape.” - Isn’t he actually describing the very condition of the superposition?!

© The Human Condition, 1933 by Rene Magritte

I would assert that it is conceivable that we live in a state of the superposition, each one of us a body or particle, moving around in time and space. From the single vantage point of an individual (me/ you), there are a seemingly infinite number of other particles (bodies) out there, unknown and unobserved strangers, existing in superposition. Brief encounters, fleeting observations, or meetings collapse this status, albeit momentarily, as our lives collide in time and space in the present moment of a here and now. “Ah, there you are”, words spoken in the mind of the observer, or through the contact of the eyes, that collapse the superposition into a transient moment of known clarity and confirmation in a fleeting or random encounter with a stranger in the street. These moments have little lasting significance beyond the utterance of a collapsed superposition, unless another outcome follows or even the shutter of a camera is released in a further ‘decisive moment’ that incisively observes such an encounter.

I’ve made three important exhibitions on this theme, that also play on the idea of the human superposition by engaging my observers into the work at the moment of their presence (or collapsed superposition). These works also assert the idea that photography itself is an act of observation that collapses the/our superposition. One was in Gallery Gro, Jakobstad, Finland, titled Paul Bevan: In Superposition, and the other in Oxo Gallery, Southbank, London titled In Superposition (again). I also had a show in Ramskram Gallery, Reykjavík, Iceland in March 2018, titled In Superposition: Ice and land, where I developed new work, and included the older work titled ‘How my Body Copes’ from 1985 in the exhibition. This brought the idea of superposition, and specifically the status of Schrodinger's Cat, to my own body that was concealed in a canvass wrap and effectively invisible.

© Paul Bevan, In Superposition (again), exhibition at Oxo Gallery, London, 2017

© Paul Bevan, In Superposition (again), exhibition at Oxo Gallery, London, 2017

I made a series of pictures at the water’s edge in Fäboda, Jakobstad, Finland, where I performed the superposition in a series of images depicting multiple states of my body (as matter) moving from one side of a rock to another; in a series of many images, I positioned myself either to the left and to the right of the frame. This also marked out the possible space of a ‘double-slit experiment’, which is another scientific demonstration of the superposition. In the double-slit experiment (first performed in 1909), particles pass through two slits and project an interference pattern onto a screen. The interference pattern suggested the bizarre co-existence of both waves and particles. When scientists placed detectors at the slits to observe what was happening, the interference pattern disappears; the implication that the particles somehow know they are being observed continues to baffle the scientific community to this day (I think). There is no doubt that observation effects any system - think about photography itself, again.

In this exhibition I made a creative interpretation of the double-slit experiment in the piece Waves and Particles (2017), that emerged through the exhibition. I invited my observers to place a white dot (particle) directly onto or around the image of my body as an act of observation), thereby effecting the visibility of my body image, which progressively disappeared during the course of this exhibition, and became in superposition (again). But what each dot also marked, was the momentary collapse of the superposition of my observers, as they marked the moment of encounter with the work, before disappearing once more themselves (and back into a superposition). In London, I had contributions from observers of over 50 nations, and this piece titled Waves and Particles (2017), became a truly international collaboration. As an aside, this piece also became a site of defiance of Brexit, as I started it on the very day that the UK government triggered the so called Article 50 countdown – but that’s another story!

© Paul Bevan, 'Waves and Particles', London 2017

© Paul Bevan, making of 'Waves and Particles', Oxo Gallery, Southbank, London 2017

You’re also head of the MA Fashion Photography course at the University of the Arts London. Could you clarify your role in the school and how this influences your personal oeuvre?

P.B.: There are many ways in which I engage with photography, and this has included writing about it and teaching it for almost 30 years. I’ve developed photographic courses and undergraduate and post graduate, and within disciplines across art and design. My own academic background is in Fine Art, and I think this gives me a platform from which to comprehend and discuss photography in a range of concepts and contexts. I’m currently running the MA Fashion Photography at University of the Arts London, and I think my approach really pushes the bounds and definitions of what fashion photography is or might be. Of course there is an industry protocol and expectation, but the material of fashion photography is quite similar to much of my own material in my work – the body, identity, dress, performance, culture etc. and all the various relationships and connections that come in attendance with this. I’m interested in many kinds of photographic ontologies and affects, that might be more visceral than cerebral – for example, in the inability of the photograph to reveal all or to give up its image, it’s keeping of secrets and the power of suggestion invokes a desire; a desire to know, to have, to possess or to be – surely these are the very underpinning of fashion photography.

© Paul Bevan, study for Runway series, London 2008

© Paul Bevan, Mia Maya, France, 2011

© Paul Bevan, image from proposed book cover of On Fashion Photography, France, 2013

When i looked at your archive, I saw 4 different approaches in your photography: 1. Mirrored images; 2. the double slit experiment; 3. the sequential works; 4. the rather spheric imagery. Could you tell me the basis of those four categories and maybe the red line through all of this substantial oeuvre is: performance and your inner circle of friends and family?

P.B.: For a long time, I have recognized a range of paradoxes that are either inherent or attendant to photography. This may be particularly true to the manner in which I have deployed photography as an artist over the last 30 years, and the way in which I discuss it as an academic and teacher. I’m interested in the performance (performativity) or narrative possibilities, with the photograph either as document or a ‘record’ of this or of some kind of performance itself.

The interplay or oscillation between image and material, is one example of the notion of dual (or even multiple) states that creates a paradox; this is an interest that has remained consistent throughout my own work either implicitly or explicitly, and in my engagement with photography.

Of course I am not alone in this recognition in either practical or theoretical contexts. Indeed, it could be argued that even in its first moments, photography offered up imagery that was ambiguous by default or intent, either in its limited scientific capacity for ‘true’ representation (Daguerre) or its artistic application (Bayard). Many formative texts and textual analysis of photography also propose oppositional or dual positions and parameters that have become established discourses. Mainly, these are suggested points or terms of reference for developing an understanding of photography, and creating a protocol or structure for certain kinds of practice and/or experience from an operational, curatorial or spectator perspective, for example. These may be meant to also assert some degree of clarity or determinism in providing the tools for classifying particular kinds and purposes of photography from others, at the sites of production, image and audience.

My work has always been less determinate, and concerned with a variety of relationships that might be personal, universal or both. My work is about the figure, the body. My work is about me, but it’s also about you. And my work is about photography itself, as an interface, a condition, a metaphor, and as a kind of unique dilemma. Another example of this is that between the still and the moving, or the punctum and the studium (in his text Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes identifies the studium as a general and common viewing experience of the photograph against the punctum which is ‘that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me), and the looking to seek. Im interested in the environment of photography, it’s time and space, its own intrinsic qualities, it’s interior. (One morning I awoke to find myself inside a pinhole camera, with the image of the building across the street being thrown upside-down onto the wall above my bed, via a small hole (lens) between the curtains opposite.) I’m interested in the idea of a discovery through a particular photographic curiosity to see things that only photographs can show – an example of this would be a series of 5-hour exposures that I made through the night of myself sleeping.

I think these interests permeate all my activities in and around photography, and that both photography and I are central to it in some way – that both elements exist together, and sometimes in a superposition.

© Paul Bevan, Stealing the Glory, Europe, 1991

© Paul Bevan, from series Galerie, Europe 1989-91

These performances and the eventual pictures are not the end result. What goes on after eg during an exhibition?

P.B.: My research-led practice takes place on both sides of the camera, and also on both sides of the production. When I am in front of it, the camera occupies the position as audience to my performance (I am a body) and the camera image becomes my ‘other’. When I am behind the camera (I am a mind), we are a single and unified spectator of some ‘other’ object or event, and I am a camera. Photography is inherently divisive, both as apparatus in-between photographer and subject, and as image-interface between real and illusive. This divide is closed in the instance of (i) my being performer and camera simultaneously and (ii) gallery dissemination where the viewer is implicated; a unified entity of body and mind as photography is performed in time.  And so as an installed exhibition, I tend to implicate my viewer/ audience somehow into the work so a reciprocal or other experience can be had or played out, as another kind of performance in real time. I’ve always done this; it just feels right.

© Paul Bevan, from series Meta-photography, New York, 2014

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