When you make art it can be a challenge to find the right language to explain what you’re doing. One might say that an artist needn’t ever explain him or herself. But art is a good conversation topic precisely because no two viewers or listeners share the same perspective. And since a viewer doesn’t share the artist’s own perspective, since a viewer isn’t intimately familiar with the history of choices the artist made in pursuing a certain visual result, the artist must offer the viewer a stepladder for reaching a vantage point that allows a work’s potential to be seen. That “stepladder” might be a word or phrase, a bit of language that gives the viewer a suggestion of where to look, how to begin understanding the piece at hand.
I’ve been describing my effort in photography as “photo pairing.” That’s been my language so far. I’m looking to create pairings or marriages between images that give rise to a kind of contrapuntal dialogue, where each image gains from being situated next to the other, where the viewer’s eye is guided seamlessly back and forth between the two images in such a way that no one image steals all the attention.
Some new language occurred to me the other day, as I was trying to make a video. Each photograph in a pairing can be thought of as an individual “word.” Together the two photographs combine, like words, into a “visual sentence.” The sentence draws out a deeper, and more specific meaning than each component word or image would convey on its own.
So instead of saying I’m working to create interesting photographic pairings, I’m going to try out some new language. I’ll say that I’m working to compose “visual sentences.” Sentences that mean more than the words they consist of. Sentences that teach us something. Here’s a video where I’m using this new terminology: