A few reflections after reading Joel Meyerowitz discuss his early days . . .
One of the things that I love about photographing is that my images reflect what interests me as an artist and who I am as a person at any particular slice in time. On the occasions that I go back and look at my earlier work, I typically remember making the individual images, but I see someone else’s aspirations. Nowadays, these images don’t say anything except to remind me of where I’ve been and to chronicle techniques and motifs that I still use. So, while I’m unwilling to disown these parmelian prints from my first dozen years or so of image making, I don’t feel any great compulsion to incorporate them into what I currently show either. (They may go into Jeff Mather: The Early Photographs someday, which no doubt will outsell everything else I do.)
After moving to Massachusetts, lots of things weren’t working for me. “What do I want to photograph now?” I couldn’t photograph the way I had in Wyoming, Canada, and the Midwest; and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do about that. “Is this new work interesting?” My photographs were pretty uninspired, and I could make many of the images in my sleep. I came back frustrated from most excursions because my execution and the vagueness of my vision moved in opposite directions. I was even having serious doubts about the honesty and integrity of so-called nature photographs (especially my own) that removed people from the landscape — from the entire world, actually.
Although photography had been a constant in my life since my first roll of film in 1990, I put my camera aside for a while to indulge my interest in history. Images became adjuncts on my New England explorations. Cameras were just extra tools to make me look harder at where I was. Eventually, when I thought we would be leaving the Bay State, I had gotten really interested in where I was and wanted some images to show what Newton was “like.” People became interesting, too, though I was petrified of photographing unknown people.
So I started by photographing runners along Commonwealth Avenue as they trained for the Boston Marathon. Runners don’t like to stop and are too tired to jabber coherent disapproval while tackling the hills. Those scowls might be from running-induced pain. (The same cannot be said for other pedestrians. That’s why I have no Arbus or Wegee-esque pictures of Jews walking to temple or people sunning themselves in the park. It’s also why I was so happy when Jose and Maria from Brighton wanted me to photograph them as part of the neighborhood after they finished some odd jobs.) On the way, I walked around Newton photographing much smaller things that I was used to and tried to imprint my personality onto the images of the human-made environment.
This kind of stylistic and thematic change is never complete (“ineluctable modality” James Joyce called it) and I made large changes when I started the Commonwealth, High Tension, and Signs of Nature projects and after I had my first honest portfolio review. But the tectonic plates are moving slowly these days, building up energy for some future cataclysmic change. I still have excursions that are more frustrating than productive, but I’ve found that I think more as I photograph, that its become an active process of communication with where I am and the notions I have of place and people. And because of this intention, the activity and the images are much better and dearer to me.
But now it’s late, and I must go. I have a bunch of developed film in need of scans and a couple more rolls to drop off. So I hope to have something new for y’all to see soon.