The nature of photography

Charlotte Heth/Aileen Figueroa

Photography provides our culture with ongoing snippets of reality. The instantaneous nature of these snippets are not being questioned because, after all, they are photographs. The camera is a machine and it objectively records reality accurately. It records reality unbiased and we ignore, or forget, the subjectivity of the photographer, who, by selecting which instant to share, already interpreted reality for us. Painting, contrary to this, is not instantaneous, and will not be considered as objective reality. The subjectivity of a painting is an automatic integral aspect in our reading of it, how we interpret what we see. In the same manner objectivity is an aspect of how we see a photograph. While painting from a photograph, which is what I do with these Top 100 portraits, the two different realities overlap, or rather the second (painting) is superimposed on the first Photography.) Certain aspects of instantaneous reality, taken for granted in a photograph, can look rather out of place in a painting. A photo of a figure in mid-motion, for example, could look awkwardly out of balance in a painting. Our mind simply recognizes the continuous motion in the photo but fails to so in a painting. The instantaneous moment is extended in the painting and the figure looks hopelessly unbalanced. You can easily tell the difference between a portrait painting from a photograph from a painting using a live model, a sitter. A big smile in the face is a first and easy giveaway. A big smile can be captured by a camera because its instantaneity, those photographed in fact, often do smile. While painting the smile it can not succeed in capturing the emotion, expression, of the instant. When looking at a painting of a person with a big smile, you will see certain wrinkles, individual teeth, but not a happy joyful expression. When I occupy this place between the instantaneous and the extended, I consider all these aspects of representation. I will remove evidence of the instance, and try to capture a person in an extended viewing, to show a broader view of a person's character as if this person were viewed over time. In the case of my Top 100 paintings this constitutes the viewing of many different photos, or videos.

Alaci Tulaugak;Nellie Nungak/Mary Sivarapik

Lately, I've become interested in reversing this relationship. To paint precisely those things that make a photograph a photograph, aspects of reality that are the unique property of photography. I paint the broad smile, the mid-motion depiction of a figure in motion, the out-of-focus face, or background, the disproportionate view that results from an odd vantage point (like being real close to a person for example.) In a video I recorded last week, I hold a record sleeve of a randomly selected disc. The person depicted on that cover seems up-side down, but she isn't. It's just that she is laying down on the ground and the photographer hovers over her with a (his) camera. In a painting, I thought, the image of the woman would look for sure up-side down. While I was recording the video I was in the process of painting certain Canadian Inuits from Nunavut that are part of the Top 100 2022. The video, shown below the second Inuit painting, became about that record sleeve, rather than about the current painting I was working on at that moment.

Two singers from Canada: Inuit Games and Songs

Even though the record, A Stereo Visit to Italian Movies, is not at all a part of the Top 100 2022 list, far from it, I had to paint it as if it were. I was reinforced doing so because of another random pick from my record shelves. This was a record of the Argentinian singer Ramona Galarza, the cover of which shows a background upside down as trees are reflected in the body of water directly behind Galarza. The painting then is a double portrait of the model featured on the Italian movie record together with Ramona Galarza, as she appears on the cover of the self titled record. At this moment I feel this painting is part of the current Top 100 series but I'm not 100% yet on this issue. This is the painting in question (below.)

Ramona Galarza/Cover of Italian Movies

Boom!

Max Roach/Joe Chambers

A double portrait of the percussionists Max Roach and Joe Chambers, both members of Roach's M'Boom ensemble whom are listed in this this years top 100 list.  In one single painting such as this one, as a microcosm, the whole series of 100 paintings, of all series of a hundred paintings play out. In it, as the subject matter, is the music. It all starts with the music. The music carries that feeling of being carried away into a different state of being, a more timeless and more real sense of being. When hearing the Max Roach M'Boom group for the first time you feel as if you are there, as part of the ensemble, as part of history, as part of a world that is different from the world you encounter when you balance your checkbook or bring your car into the shop for an oil change. The moment you hear the ensemble for the first time the checkbook and car oil are forgotten, they don't exist at that moment in time. It is a little different when you listen to it for a second time and a little more different the third time. You start to distinguish individual details and chance, surprise, and spontaneity cease to exist.

Now the M'Boom recording is not as transformative an experience than hearing, for the first time, the unpretential and spontaneous song a mother gets into when washing her child in the middle of the New Guinean jungle (as recorded by Charles Duvelle in the 1970s) but in a way it's the same sensation be it less removed from my own experience. I have no memory of my mother singing to me and I have no memory of being washed but I do remember seeing jazz concerts. The first shockingly new jazz concert I saw was when I was in my early 20s and saw Han Bennink perform with Mischa Mengelberg. Jazz, perhaps more than other Western type of music, is transformative because it is often improvised and spontaneous. I too have unforgettable experiences of jamming with other musicians right around that time too. These feelings I seek to duplicate in painting now. Painting did become a substitute for music. Painting allows me to transport my being to a different reality, the reality of color and form and creativity. Honestly, as I'm painting this painting representing M'Boom, that delayed conscious state isn't there. Most of the time, making the painting is work. The shift in conscousness is there only in moments, moments of spontenaity and creativity that often occur after lengthy spells of plain work.

Alaci Tulaugak, Paul Hodge/Marvin Green, Nellie Nungak

From: Inuit Throat and Harp Songs: Eskimo Women's Music of Povungnituk recorded in 1979 by Paul Hodge and Marvin Green. The katajjait of Povungnituk in Quebec has characteristics that distinguish them from those of Nunavut (see Nicole Beaudry for example) in that their songs are strictly imitations of the sounds of nature. In Sound of the Wind the sounds of wind blowing through the cracks of an igloo are imitated. Different too is a variation of katajjait that is performed by four women as opposed to the customary two (female) performers standing close to one another.