Hi Tim, can you introduce us where you grow up and what you like or not about those places?
Tim Carpenter (TC): My father was in the U.S. Air Force, so we moved around a fair amount (though not as much as many military families) when I was a kid: California, Florida, Alabama, Ohio. But the extended family home was in central Illinois, and had been for several generations, so that’s where we went for holidays and where my parents returned to after my dad retired.
It’s funny, I’m not sure that I’d say that I liked or disliked anything about any of those places at the times I lived there. I did eventually feel, after college at the University of Illinois, that I wanted to go to a place with more cultural activity, so I moved to Portland, Oregon at age 22. After eight years there, I wanted even more, so I headed to New York City. I suppose I’m pretty adaptable to wherever I am, although my “adaptation” has continually been to locations with more and more music, art, literature, theater, &etc. So I’m not sure I could go back on that; a big part of what fuels my desire to make things is to be found only in larger cities. For example, I recently spent a whole day listening to the music of Morton Feldman at NYU, and there’s a great new show of Joan Mitchell paintings in Chelsea. It’s just not quite the same in most other places. So maybe to answer your question, I like very much the stimulation I find living in New York, while I’m also grateful that I’m able to spend so much time in Illinois.
© Tim Carpenter from the series 'Illinois Traction'
About photography what are your early memories and what are the main steps you took to become a photographer?
TC: My father has had cameras since he was a kid, so one thing I always had when I was young was a point-and-shoot. I recall that I photographed stuff like fire hydrants and fences as much as I did people, but that’s pretty hazy in my memory. I know that I always liked what the camera could do. But as far as active steps to become a photographer, all that is in my much more recent past. I took a course in “Personal Vision” with Robert Lyons at the International Center of Photography in 2008, and that really got me going. Lyons not only helped me elevate what I was doing, but he also encouraged me to consider graduate school, in particular, the one that he founded in 2010 at the Hartford Art School. So around 2008 is when I think of myself as changing from a “committed hobbyist” to a photographer.
About your educational path, does it fit at all with what you are today?
TC: Mostly no, partly yes. But even that “no” probably sort of fits, because I’m very happy with where I am today. My undergraduate degree is in Finance, but it was offered in the School of Liberal Arts, so I was able to take several classes in literature, art history, and the like, and those were formative experiences. I went to law school in Oregon in part because I didn’t really know what to do after undergrad. I passed the bar exam there, but never practiced. Instead, I got a job doing communications for the Portland Art Museum, an even more crucial formative experience, because I got to work with Terry Toedtemeier, the Museum’s Curator of Photography, who was very generous in looking at my pictures and suggesting photographers to look at in the Museum’s collection.
I quit full-time marketing work back in 2010 to attend the graduate school I mentioned before, at Hartford. The MFA I got there obviously has a much more direct impact on my life at this moment. Not only because it required that my pictures get better, but also because it showed me that there could be a variety of ways of working as a photographer and not starving. The program also heightened the expectations that I had for myself, because the faculty and my fellow students expected (and still do) a lot from everyone. Many of the people I met there are still my best critics and confidants.
How would you introduce yourself and photographic research?
TC: I like this question because it brings up questions that I myself have. What I mean is that I’m utterly unable to conceive of photographic research or how I could possibly go about it. And yet I know that others successfully research particular topics before and/or while making pictures on those topics. The only way I can do things is to make lots of negatives and see what happens. I’ve mentioned this before, but the subject matter is of very little concern to me, so there’s not much for me to “research.” Rather, I’m trying to place myself (and a camera and a lens) in different relationships to the world to see what happens with the (quite different) formal relationships that result in a two-dimensional picture. So maybe I could say that my research is in just laying waste to a whole lot of Tri-x.
© Tim Carpenter from the series 'A house and a tree'
© Tim Carpenter from the series 'A house and a tree'
© Tim Carpenter from the series 'A house and a tree'
I could also say that all the music I listen to all, all the novels and poems I read, all the paintings I see are – in a sense – research. I’m interested not only in how other people are experiencing the world, but also in how the things that they make actually work to convey the ineffable. So to answer the first part of your question, how would I introduce myself: I’m primarily interested in the epistemological aspects of making pictures with a camera. I think photography is a medium that’s particularly good (verisimilitude and immediacy of making being our greatest assets) at getting at the peculiarities of how we know anything, which is through direct experience – the meeting of mind and world to make meaning. This is a continual process in every human brain (we are form-making creatures first and foremost), and occasionally it is manifested in a picture. Or a poem or a song.
Undoubtedly, when it comes to landscape photography, the United States show an important heritage, with great contributors and who marked the short history of photography... How do you relate to all this?
TC: Less and less as an active force. And yet, I certainly recognize the ubiquity of the influence. After all, Robert Adams is the first photographer who really opened my eyes to what pictures made by a camera could aspire to (also: the recent Steidl reissue of From the Missouri West is just insanely beautiful). And, in general, I don’t show many interiors or pictures of people, so the bulk of what I do is most easily categorized as landscape. Perhaps this is another way of talking about the effect on me of seeing John Gossage’s The Pond. Because it’s by anyone’s reckoning a landscape book. But also not really, at least for me. What I mean is that when we say “landscape,” we’re usually speaking of the subject matter, and less about the maker. (Contrast this with the pictures seen in The Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort, and all that came after it, where the maker is palpable: managing the picture and sometimes physically in it.)
© John Gossage from the series 'The Pond'
So yeah, the pictures in 'The Pond' show trees and water and roads (“landscape”) but that’s all beside the point. Rather, I think the point is the manifestation of a form-making intelligence restlessly creating meaning in an otherwise chaotic and formless world. Most landscapes – hell, most pictures – feel like the result of thinking; Gossage’s pictures feel like thinking itself. He just happened to be doing that thinking in a “landscape.”
In several of your works, although you get topographical attention, what wins over the description, or rather a prose is a lyrical wish. Tell us more about your approach to subjects...
TC: Right, and that lyrical wish is what I was getting at in my answer about landscape when I talked about “the thinking itself.” But there’s another aspect of all this that’s highlighted when you ask about an “approach to subjects.” I’ve adopted the convention of using the word “subject” or “subject matter” to mean the motif of the picture – a tree, a person, a mountain. Whereas the “content” of the picture is the subject and the formal approach taken together (as they are indeed inextricable). Using these terms, I have little (but not zero) concern for the subject. When I was younger, I was on a constant search for the good subject matter, and the resulting pictures were, for the most part, just me pointing at “interesting” or “relevant” things. But now I am less concerned with what a picture means than with how it means.
Making photographs is all about creating relationships that don’t exist in the real world, while getting to use subject matter that clearly does exist in the real world. With cameras and lenses, we can do all sorts of things with both space and time to bring about unique pictorial associations between the things that ended up in the viewfinder or ground glass. And those relations are for me the only real way to start to understand what another human being is trying to tell me in a photograph. Which is another way of saying that form manifests a unique sensibility, a self. The motif tells me what the maker knows, the picture tells me how the maker is.
© Tim Carpenter from the series 'Local objects'
© Tim Carpenter from the series 'Local objects'
'Local Objects' is your most recent book. In this series that collects an abacus of topographical signs, one feels the need to go beyond the iconic vision of the landscape. Some subjects even repeat themselves. The observer thus dwells on a prolonged atmosphere, almost as if he could hear his steps. A sort of local walk. Quietly absent. In fact, man is missing, always. Man is like disappeared from photography. His traces remain, heavy, bulky, incessant. Tell us about these places you've been through, tell us about your memories. Because your photographs seem to project more than all the memory of a feeling of a place.
TC: Your reading of the book is quite close to my thoughts in making it. And the last sentence of your question really triggered something in me, because I like how you said “the memory of a feeling of a place” rather than “the memory of a place.” In fact, I may simplify and reformulate it as: “a feeling meets a place” because memory is the key constituent of feeling.
Book 'Local objects', published by The Ice Plant, 2017
I’ve lately been under the spell of Paul Valéry’s essays. Here’s the key to what I’m getting at:
«Our poetic pendulum travels from our sensation toward some idea or some sentiment, and returns toward some memory of the sensation and toward the potential act which could reproduce the sensation. Now, whatever is sensation is essentially present. There is no other definition of the present except sensation itself, which includes, perhaps, the impulse to action that would modify that sensation. On the other hand, whatever is properly thought, image, sentiment, is always, in some way, a production of absent things. Memory is the substance of all thought. Anticipation and its gropings, desire, planning, the projection of our hopes, of our fears, are the main interior activity of our being.»
© Tim Carpenter from the series 'Local objects'
«Thought is, in short, the activity which causes what does not exist to come alive in us, lending to it, whether we will or no, our present powers, making us take the part for the whole, the image for reality, and giving us the illusion of seeing, acting, suffering, and possessing independently of our dear old body . . . »
So “sensation” is the current phenomenological experience of the world, in our case the objects present in front of the camera. The formal aspects of the picture are the production of things absent; that’s the “Local” part of the title of my book – the objects are calibrated against the locality of the self, and vice versa in a ceaseless, repeating the epistemological cycle.
To go back to the part of your question: “Tell us about these places you've been through, tell us about your memories.” If I could tell you about those things with any sort of validity, then I wouldn’t need to take pictures.
© Tim Carpenter from the series 'Local objects'
Also in the series '(Excerpts from) Township' I observe a will that revolves around an idea of place, as a search for meaning. It is a markedly objective ontological position, which expresses the need to look without intermediaries, in being at all dogmatic but strongly idealistic. The human figures are merely and deliberately absent, and in this is inevitable the reference to the painting of the vedutisti although your photography is aimed at a more angular, vernacular, anonymous, unresolved dimension. Tell us about silence, and how you build your stories ...
TC: Here again, I’m grateful for your reading of the pictures. I very much like your phrase “a more angular, vernacular, anonymous, unresolved dimension”, and in particular how it relates to a search for meaning in the project. In contrast to 'Local objects', I wanted much more decentralized pictures, ones that in form worked actively toward and against the edges of the frame. I’d certainly like to think of those photographs as having an objective ontological position, because my desire for them was to look plainly at an aspect of being in a world in which there’s simply no external meaning: it’s both literally and figuratively cold. It’s all chaos that we’re barely keeping a rein on.
As for building the story, it’s crucial to note that the pictures were made expressly for a collaborative project with Raymond Meeks and Adrianna Ault, a book called township. (The “(Excerpts from) township” section of my website has only my photographs in it.) In my estimation of that book as a short story, my pictures are the set the tone of the protagonist: the silence of winter, absent of human presence. In contrast, Ray and Addie’s pictures – full of people, however isolated in multiple layers of clothing in frigid January – are the event of the story: a fleeting and perhaps frustrating connection to others. Whether and how the protagonist is changed by the event is up to the reader.
© Tim Carpenter from the series '(Excerpts from) Township'
© Tim Carpenter from the series '(Excerpts from) Township'
© Tim Carpenter from the series '(Excerpts from) Township'
Some say that art can only speak of the present. Perhaps this is almost essential today to break down growing nihilism. From this point of view, how do you think your works tell or interpret the contemporary of your country?
TC: I don’t make anything with any sort of political/social urgency or even relevance, so I don’t think that one could look at what I do for any interpretation of the United States of this time. But I believe that, in work of any importance, aspects of our whole complicated and contradictory selves are necessarily present. For someone like me, this is a disheartening era; one must sometimes actively resist the nihilism you speak of. And that is part of me and must, of course, find its way into how I measure myself against the world in pictures. But also I find so much joy in so many things – and that’s all baked in there too.
One thing that concerns me and that I work against is a growing collectivism, even among some whose opinions I largely share. While appreciating how identity politics have bettered the lives of many people – mine included – my default mode is to value above all else the deeply strange idiosyncrasy of each individual person, all of that which defies tribal inclusion or exclusion. We’ve gotten to quite a place when we think of people as enemies or traitors because of whatever group they’re in.
© Tim Carpenter from the series '(Excerpts from) Township'
© Tim Carpenter from the series '(Excerpts from) Township'
Books now. Tell us about your experience with TIS publishing. About your motivations and your personal perspective within the photo publishing panorama. I like the "cooperative" construction of these books, its dialogues...
TC. Really the main motivation when Nelson Chan, Carl Wooley, and I started TIS was that we knew of some really great work by our friends and heroes that hadn’t been published, and we wanted to make that happen. And there was a DIY aspect to it as well, because we published small book sets of our own work (along with that of J Carrier, the fourth member of our collective). While we have distinct sensibilities, you’re correct in observing that Nelson, Carl, and I are concerned the dialogue of the book, both internally and externally, and that our titles are collaborative efforts between us and the artists. I don’t think we’d want it any other way.
© The volume 'TIS02', photographers Carl Wooley, Nelson Chan, J Carrier, and Tim Carpenter
As for my perspective on the publishing panorama, there’s a sense of exhaustion in the photobook world – that there are too many books and too many booksellers at the big fairs. One even hears of the “death of the photobook”. I do not share these sentiments. I’m always inspired and invigorated when I spend time with other publishers, seeing not only the breadth of the work they’re promoting (Is some of it bad? Yes. There are bad movies and records, too.) but also the ways in which they’re rethinking the medium and maybe even making a living, or at least making a life worth living.
Any readings you'd like to recommend to our readers?
TC: As I mentioned, those Valéry essays are amazing; they’re collected in 'The Art or Poetry'. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s book on Edvard Munch, entitled 'So Much Longing in So Little Space', feels really essential to me right now, and one needn’t care for Munch at all to get a lot out of it. I’ve very much enjoyed 'Truth and Photography' by Jerry L. Thompson, though I don’t agree with it entirely. Finally, I’m going a second time through a longish study from 1961 called 'The Continuity of American Poetry' by Roy Harvey Pearce. It’s one of the most important books I’ve ever read, because of how it’s enriched what I understand about the self and our capacity for meaning-making – ideas about which spring from Emerson, Whitman, and Dickinson, and eventually find rich expression in my hero Wallace Stevens.
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