published on
Hear artist Leslie Hewitt and scholar Tina Campt talk about how we experience photographs, as well as the history, strategy, and dynamics behind techniques such as collage and perspective.
TRANSCRIPT:
Leslie Hewitt: My name is Leslie Hewitt. I am an artist, and I am discussing the work "Riffs on Real Time"—work made between 2006 and 2009.
I think that oftentimes people assume that photography isn’t operating on our subconscious, that we have to understand. We really don’t often need to, because it’s hitting us just like sound on a subconscious level. And I think how I work with photography is acknowledging that first.
Tina Campt: I am Tina Campt. I’m a professor of modern culture and media, and I teach about Black contemporary art, vernacular photography, and Black feminist theory.
The only way you register sound is when it physically penetrates you. And similarly photographs come into physical contact with us, even when we’re not holding them—if we allow ourselves to really respond to them, and to respond on all sorts of different levels that are not necessarily exactly about what you’re seeing. There are about a relationship that is being forged between you and the entire sort of ecosystem of a photograph
Hewitt: Early part of the 20th century gives us a lot of hints at different shifts in culture. There’s industrialization. There’s a lot of technology that we now really take for granted, right? Film photography really comes during this period where a different time-space is self-evident for everybody. We get different techniques that come out of that time period, too, right? One of which is collage.
Campt: Another way of thinking about collages are as palimpsests, right? And palimpsests are not simply layers, they’re sort of overwritings, right? In the sort of classical form of what a palimpsestic manuscript is that, you know, there’s different layers of writing that are on the same page. They impact each other, but it can also shift, right? And jostle, and it’s juxtaposed with one another.
And in thinking about both that sense of layering as intensifying but also sort of shoving, moving, interacting with, you have to think about their dynamic interaction, that they’re actually talking to each other.
To think about the collage as being really a dynamic relationship between all those different layers, activating a kind of really dynamic positioning of us in space and time.
Hewitt: The camera is monocular, right? It is a single lens that’s capturing. It is a compression because we are a monocular, right? The camera is like this proxy. We could think of one-point perspective, you know, it can move us back to the Renaissance. We could go back even further, you know, experiments in optics in the 10th century. So it’s actually a very rich and luscious history, though, I think, oftentimes we think of photography as a new modality in art.But what forms it is a lot older.
Campt: It’s not two-dimensional. It’s three-dimensional, even if it’s a photograph, right? She’s trying to actually give us the depth of the fact that these are objects that are taking up space, right? And coming from different times and interacting within that frame three-dimensionally.
Hewitt: Juxtaposition for me is one of those modalities that really speaks to the time-space that we’re in. And maybe we could say that that began in the early part of the 20th century with collage, or you know, maybe it began in the 17th century with, you know, the beginning of global capitalism, with mercantilism. And being able to have something that’s not local as a part of your reality, to me, is a form of juxtaposition.
Leslie Hewitt, "Riffs on Real Time (3 of 10)", 2006–09, Chromogenic print, 76.2 × 61 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee 2010.55 © Leslie Hewitt
- Genre
- Art and Culture