| I am interested in exploring the nuclear-powered sublime on a firsthand basis. Over the past several years, this interest has provoked excursions to malignant locations like the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant, former East German Atomic Bunkers, and the Swedish Space Corporation’s Esrange Launch Site in the Arctic Circle. In addition to these specifically charged spaces, I have spent countless hours gazing at empty lots, waiting in fast food drive-thru lines, and observing the world from various vehicles at high speeds and altitudes. Within these approximate figure/ground relationships I imagine assortments of devastation while attempting to remain in contact with the logical and illogical elements of a catastrophic event. |
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Milton Fletcher talks to Joel Meyerowitz, a photographer who is now incorporating video and film into his work to create multimedia installations in his ongoing project, The Elements.
Joel Meyerowitz, The Elements: Air/Water #6. Courtesy of Joel Meyerowitz and Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York.Milton Fletcher: What do you want The Elements series to be?
Joel Meyerowitz: This series has only just begun and the first part is Air and Water, and soon there will be Fire and Earth, and then who knows what other combinations. Originally, I thought I was just going to do videos of these combinations and then large-scale photographs. But once I was out in the landscape taking in the experience, I had this flash that there is a bigger range for this work and I began to think in museum-scale possibilities, where I might actually bring in the elements in some very direct way. Let’s say I brought in 40 square feet of Tuscan earth or Hawaiian lava—something that would have the phenomenal quality of the thing itself—and deep enough so that people could literally walk on it, if they want.
I’m opening myself up to the possibility that this could be a three-way exhibition where the photographs at their scale look a particular way without the illusion of reality and deep space, but more about the pure phenomena itself, along with the videos and the three-dimensional object spaces.
That’s sort of long-term planning. What my energies will be, what kind of funding I’ll get, how I can bring this to actually happen is part of what you do in the art world—how do you make it happen? You can collect earth, but you got to have a place to put it.
MF: For The Elements, you’ve cited the work you did documenting the cleanup at Ground Zero as an inspiration. Why?
JM: When I was in Ground Zero, originally it was only a massive pile. And having to navigate it every day, walk over it, and around it, the phenomena of the pile itself was just magic. You were looking at the matter of these hundred-and-ten-story buildings. And confronting that and feeling the massive scale went into me in a way that I didn’t really understand in terms of how it was going to pay off later on.
At the midpoint of the Ground Zero project, I left for ten days to go to Tuscany to begin work on a book that I had been contracted to do before 9/11. I found myself in the middle of winter walking on Tuscan soil and I brought from Ground Zero some of the awe I was experiencing in the pile. I brought to it the simplicity of earth just lying where it belongs. Walking on this kind of rural earth was so satisfying. It had a sense of goodness and continuity, as if the world really was good. It wasn’t all about terror. There’s a long history of Man tending and husbanding the earth. I found myself making pictures very much like Ground Zero pictures—just of the run of earth in front of me without the illusion of the skyline, the horizon line, or anything else. I thought that was kind of strange because I have never made a picture like that before.In my vocabulary, those are sort of “dumb” pictures. They just lie there. They’re undemonstrative. There isn’t anything that separates this clod of earth from that clod. Whereas when you make a picture and put a frame around it, you put in the trees over there and you leave out the hill over here or you move the camera to make a photograph. And here it was I could take any piece of the earth and photograph it and it seemed to satisfy me.
That came into focus for me this past summer when I discovered the elements as a kind of issue for me. It was the next body of work that appeared in front of me. As a photographer, I’ve always trusted impulse, instinct, and chance. You have to accept chance to be the kind of photographer that I am. I’ve been trained to react spontaneously to something in a positive way.MF: Besides for the completion and exhibition of The Elements Air/Water Part 1, what states of development are the other components of the series at?
JM: I have photographed Earth and Fire. I filmed Earth and Fire. All of it is rather simple for me. I’m not looking for exotic water, earth, fire. In every one of these elements, the smallest part is equal to the whole.
What distinguishes the elements for me is how I see them in an interrelated way. I was in Italy and there was a brush-burning event where they were clearing some land. I filmed that by following the brush’s ash on a column of hot air as it floated delicately into the sky. I will probably relate that in some way to the Water piece, which ends with bubbles going up into the darkness. I don’t know yet. It’s editing.
What I’m doing is building The Elements as a library. And then I will sit at the computer and do an edit and make a film out of it. It’s important to sit and work with them all at once so that I have a grasp of it.
I also carry the view camera with me wherever I go. So, I try to make a similar record of what I film with a still camera, too. It doesn’t always work. Sometimes the film stuff is better as film—it doesn’t do it as still pictures. I have to find another way. I noticed that with the fire. But I’ll find it.
MF: What kind of cameras are you using for The Elements project?
JM: I’m using the Canon HD series of video cameras. I’m using my Deardorff view camera. I also use a Mamiya 6×7 for certain pictures. And that’s it. For instance, in some of these diving pictures I needed something that was a little more handheld and spontaneous so I could work at 125th or 250th of a second when I was in the underwater room photographing. However, I also used the 4”x5” during that time.
There’s a little more uncertainty when you are dealing with human behavior at slow film speeds and the view cameras tend to be slower. I was amazed at the frames that I actually made with the view camera that stopped everything perfectly. I also use a second camera to cover myself for any degree of action that might be necessary.
MF: When do you envision the completion of The Elements project?
JM: That’s one of the hardest calls ever. I see the next two years involved with this, traveling to places, and adding dimensions to it. I’ve never been someone who makes a project and then sort of knows how to finish it. They either end because they’re gone, like World Trade Center; it ended because it closed. But other projects take me five years, seven years, and it’s fine; I live them, which I think is a good way to do it.
