An interview about the thought process of making the images.
The following is distilled from an interview that took place between Barbara Koppleman and me in Jan 2009.
Barbara Koppleman: Let’s talk about the landscapes first. What is your affinity (with or to) landscapes?
Amy Kosh: I think a big part of my work comes out of where and how I grew up. I was raised in the midst of acres of woods and farmland. My brother and I were always going into the woods as kids to play or to sleep overnight in yurts we built. To us the landscape was really an extension of our house. Early on I didn’t really make images of the landscape at all. Both my parents are painters so I was more influenced by the models we had at the house every week. My earliest work was based on life drawing and using the figure as an object to modulate light.
BK: So when did the landscape change for you as a subject?
AK: In graduate school we had to do a nine-month project along with a summer residency portfolio. I was working with very emotionally driven images of the nude for my longer work one year and began just shooting the landscape as a way to unwind my brain from what I then thought was the “real” work I was doing. At that time I thought photographic landscapes were too easy. It turned out that when I showed them, they drew the most response from people. I began to realize that there was something in the landscape which I wanted to express.
BK: So you switched to landscape then?
AK: Nope, I’m stubborn and it took me until about 5 years ago to really get into making images of the land. Between 1996 and 2003 I did do some shooting out on the land but I always felt as though I were failing to reveal some essential aspect that needed to be exposed. Then I turned 40, quit my job, sold my house and went solo backpacking with my 4x5 out West for 8 weeks. It was exciting because I’d never before camped, much less solo, and I’d never been in that part of the country . It was all new, visually astounding and I think what changed for me was that I was alone with my thoughts, alone with the wilderness. This time I gave myself time to really live in the land, in the moment. Hauling a 4x5 camera and film holders around on your back does make you more aware of the land you are walking across. I came back with hundreds of images, both film and digital. I’m still working though printing them.
BK: What's interesting to me is that you refer to "the land" It implies to me a kind of deep respect and otherness about your relationship with it that may come from that early childhood familiarity I want to say it “harkens back”. It contains respect and connects to expressions like settling the land or exploring the land, or taming the land that notices or respects this otherness but has no choice except needed to establish a relationship with it,... a means of understanding it deeply, an interest in it's rhythms, its own relationship with itself, weather, water, movement a sense of being " land, earth, landcape whatever that coexists, that you want to capture in your work by itself or underlying in a sense a foreced relationship to coexist with humans and animals who live in it and alter it and claim it. That it remains its own thing: It reminds me of what you said your were trying to highlight, to photograph in terms of time and movement.
BK: Why do you choose to photograph the particular kinds of landscapes that you do?
AK: Where the earth is raw or roughened usually holds my attention. For instance those images from Glacier National Park are the remnants of forest fires the year before. In that case I was fascinated by the patterns of the burn marks, the lines which ran horizontally through the forest; darker at the bottom with bands of light, ashy twigs breaking up the trunks. The forest looks wintery though it’s the middle of summer, and a very rainy summer at that. In Telluride I was drawn to the old Lumber mill buildings. The ground around them had been torn up by the logs that were dragged from one position to another. There is a sense of the earth and trees fighting against the buildings there. The mill is still in use but the buildings look as though they’ve grown up out of the mountainside on their own.
I’m interested to a certain extent in what we do to the land, how we change it, but ultimately I’m drawn to those areas, images, patterns which are created without man’s direct intervention. The forest fires were caused by lightening, the ice patterns in the fields were rain, then snow, then freeze, then melt, over and over again for a week or two.
BK: I notice that some of your images are cropped to the proportions of Chinese scroll paintings. Why is that?
AK: I finally gave myself permission to crop after years of being a “full-frame purist”. It was a big thing for me to give up- that rich black border and the proof that I’d made exactly the shot in the camera that I’d intended; it was very “Alfred Stieglitz” of me. But I got over it and started going back to my roots in painting. As every artist will tell you, “you learn all the rules of the craft so you can throw them away after you know how to use them well”. I threw that rule out somewhere in Wisconsin I think. When I started printing for the exhibition of that work I let myself follow the flow of the land in the image. I wanted the viewer to be pulled through it the same way I was when I was standing there. Varying the frame achieves that to a certain extent.
BK: How does your new work follow from the landscapes? They don’t appear to be landscapes at all.
AK: The newest suites of work are directly from the land though they may not look it at first glance. “Fractured Surface” are observations of land as I walked across it this winter. We had snows and rains and days of freezing weather; and all these created the patterns I found on the ground. The other suite, “Variable Walls” is another arm of that idea. Wandering around very old structures with my camera there were all these wonderful “landscapes” which appeared on the walls I passed by. Why not shift the emphasis onto the textures, the colours themselves, instead of allowing the viewer to get caught up in what the object was? I wanted viewers to experience the richness, the density of the colours and the surfaces as they would a painting.
BK: I know in other discussions we’ve talked about how layered your process is for making images. Are these new works heavily manipulated?
AK: No. These are actually the most straightforward works I’ve done in a while. They are essentially “what I saw is what you get” in the prints. They are a combination of film negs. and digital files for capture, but the only things I did were the same as one would with any silver print. I tweaked the contrast and bright/darkness, so that what I noticed is what the viewer is able to see. Some of the images were shot at dusk or in basements, so I had to open up the prints a bit so that we could see what caught my attention in the first place. I haven’t changed the colours at all in these; those wild reds, greens or tones of grey were there already.
BK: Speaking of “What you see is what you get” in images, are the images from the “Asylum” suite also this straightforward? They don’t look manipulated to me.
AK: Funny, though it doesn’t look it this is one of the most manipulated suites I’ve created.
BK: Really? How so. They look like what I’d expect to see if I stood in those rooms..
AK: These were shot in an abandoned children’s asylum. I shot them on film, cross-processed the film and then scanned the images into the computer. When I started making the prints I wanted that sense of the unreal to pervade the images so I made some rules for myself. I had to “pin” the colour of one thing in the image to what was really there. But because of how I’m manipulating the colours through Lab colourspace and curve adjustments, the rest of the colours slide around. So I end up with maybe one wall being “realistic” but then there’ll be a band of hot pink or electric blue slipping into some other space in the image. When I was shooting the buildings they seemed unreal to me, like I was walking through several layered realities. That’s what I want the viewer to experience- a sense of the real and the unreal in coincidence.
BK: Okay, so what about “Windows”? These are completely manufactured right?
AK: To some extent ,yes, but again I was starting with film and cross processing to shift the colours and densities first. After that scanning, then I started working with pulling the digital files apart and recombining them. So many of these aren’t even from a single piece of film.
BK: Recombining? Do you mean you are layering the scanned negatives?
AK: No. I take the scans and pull them apart in the computer. Then I re-combine them to create a unique file. After I get the elements in the image to be where and how I want it, I start to play with the colour as I did in the “Asylum” suite. Again I kept that rule of pinning one colour in the image, though in this case I pinned a colour that I liked to part of the image and then let the rest fall where they would. In this case the layers created were both colour layers and image information so there’s this nice wavering as though things are being moved by wind. It’s all digital manipulation but I tend to approach it as though the medium was paint.
BK: I notice you reference painting a lot as we’ve talked. Why is that?
AK: Well my parents are painters and my earliest exposure to art was through that medium. I think I am more influenced by painters, musicians and writers than I am by photographers. Don’t get me wrong, I like looking at photos but when I’m trying to spark my brain I go play music, or draw or paint. Or go see some works in galleries or museums. I like the layering of paint on canvas, it’s got that textural aspect that you can’t get in photos. Music’s the same way- layered, textural.
BK: So why didn’t you become a painter instead?
AK: Ha! I’m not a very good painter. I don’t find the work of painting to be exciting enough. It’s funny, I’ll spend hours in the darkroom coating paper with emulsions, or hours on the computer refining one image but put a paintbrush in my hand and I want it to be done in five minutes! My brain has it all backwards.
BK: Well that makes sense. You can’t make interesting work if you are bored doing it!