Christopher Campbell, Artist's Statement, 2006.12.12
“Lens-based Drawing”
After many years of doing large-format, black and white landscape work, around 1990 I began a period of using photography primarily as source material for abstract paintings (a gathering-in of structural configurations, or chords of color out in nature). Then, several years ago, working more seriously with digital cameras and following the promptings of the ongoing conversation between my painting and photography, I began to feel that I wanted to literally shake off the limitations of more conventional photography. In the early spring, walking in the evening along the forest on the Gatesburg Ridge, an area near my home in the mountains of central Pennsylvania, I came upon a single luminous birch tree. The rain was sluicing down over a melting snowbank, any trace of the sun had vanished at least half an hour before, and the forest was almost impossibly dark but boiling with mist. Studying the hillside, I began to imagine ways to work with the pattern of dominant black tree trunks against the broader shapes of snow bank and dark fallen leaves. Over the course of a protracted series of long, hand-held exposures, I tried to imagine myself shaping an image by reshaping my relationship to the device in my hands: not regarding it as an optical recorder that captured an instantaneous slice of time, but re-conceiving the camera as an instrument for making an extended drawing. During each subsequent exposure, I began to visualize myself as holding and moving the camera so as to literally paint colored light over and across the miniature rectangle of the sensor in overlapping layers, as though it were a flow of layered pigment in time instead of photons. In so doing, I found that this act of lens-based “drawing” performs a strange and wonderful phenomenal algebra: mapping disparate tonal values into unexpected conflations, and creating unanticipated conditions of additive color.
Stepping back, I have been struck by the realization that this mode of seeing and imaging has traded away one of the elemental characteristics of classical photography — the registration of texture — in exchange for a recording of the color of things in the world and the space around them, as it is averaged by the movement of the camera. Released from the necessity to record the texture of a tree trunk, the photograph allows us to see that not only does every square centimeter of every object around us have its own chromatic and tonal specificity, but so also does the surrounding envelope of space, in an almost Cézannian sense. Shooting long sequences of images, and making use of the continuous feedback from the display of the digital camera, I find that establishing the balance between revealing and making becomes part of the conscious act of shaping the photograph. Most recently, I have been making very large individual prints, and combining them into grids and groupings that approach mural-scale.
Print Information
I am currently making archival inkjet prints on a Hewlett-Packard 130nr printer (Wilhelm rating, 82 years), and my standard print size has tended to be 24 x 36" (60 x 90 cm). Some images are also available in a larger size such as 36 x 54" (90 x 135 cm), with editions limited to five at each size. For display, my preference is to laminate the print to an aluminum composite panel (Dibond), and then face-mount the image to Plexiglas. When assembling large grids of images, face-mounting has the added benefit of permitting the smoothest optical flow between panels, without interposing the visual barrier of matting or framing edges.