Interview with Amanda Marchand

by Kevin Miller

Amanda Marchand will speak Saturday, May 7 at 9:30 am PST

In-person festival registration is available at the door

Kevin Miller: Amanda, your works have spanned quite a number of years now and your practice has taken a number of turns as it has evolved. Can you give a description of the principles, themes, ideas, and motifs of your work?

Amanda Marchand: My mind tends to work metaphorically and it’s these buttressing pillars I come back to over and over again as I work in photography; time, because it is universally the human condition, tied to life and death; and light, for all of its suggestive richness and open-endedness, knowing and not knowing, inspiration/blindness, allusions to spirit and, of course, its inextricable relationship with time.

My work is a bit of a shapeshifter, both figurative and abstract, leaning minimalistic, often accompanying text, united by the themes and questions that buoy it along. There is constant reinvention, project to project, borrowed ideas from multiple sources, as well as working with different tools and aspects of the photograph. Overall, I’ve gravitated towards work about the natural world, our changing, vast, tiny, extraordinary, troubled planet, as a starting point for deep questions about the nature of human existence, what it means to be alive.

KM: Over the course of their careers, many artists’ works remain remarkably consistent with a series of what could be called “deep constants” that are tied to their ongoing artistic vision or quest. Is this something you can relate to?

AM: I love this question of “deep constants”. There is definitely something larger that I feel I do not control, or have very much to do with, except to remain open and attentive. It’s a longtime relationship with vulnerability and trust. It’s a process of getting out of the way. I would say this source is connected to the great mystery of being here—the star-packed galaxies beyond, the heart beating I am—a response to the call of poet Mary Oliver, “What shall you do with your one wild and precious life?”

KM : A photograph is often regarded as purely a record of some especially interesting fact, event, or circumstance. Your works are mostly not such records of the life that transpires beyond one’s self, but are rather more exploratory of intangible qualities.

AM: I come from a literary tradition, not a fine art background. Writing/reading informs a lot of my work. Writing begins with internal stimuli, and, as with painting, you apply layers additively until the work is done. Photography feels more subtractive—it’s inherently a relationship of absence and presence, what is left inside the photographic frame when you click the shutter, and what lies just beyond, what is left out; what is recorded, and the way the photograph then forever indexes the absence of the thing it describes. So, a photograph always points to something lost or gone.

Conceptually, these underpinnings of photography end up shaping a given project. Each project, while grounded outside in the natural world or landscape, is a way of reflecting inward – thoughts on life and death, states of awe and surrender, presence, gratitude, offering glimpses of what brings us all together and make us most human.

KM: Many of your series and individual works deal with intangible sentiments and phenomena that cannot be readily or directly depicted. Often it seems the case that you are embracing a conundrum that deliberately forms the heart of your pieces and tries to render in a visual and intelligible language, things that you know lie beyond seeing, beyond rendering, and which are ultimately ineffable.

AM: Exactly! How do you depict the ineffable? I have begun to realize that many of the underlying questions I am asking have to do with seeing (knowing)—with camera optics, (as reduced to the vertical/ horizontal axis in the landscape), the photographic subject, and where subject matter is located, how meaning is produced. But always at the center, that very human thing that eludes articulation, but may be felt or universally perceived.

KM: As a photographer are you working in ways that are based beyond the inherent contradictions of the traditional representational rendering of photography and embracing more of a sculptural, theoretical, and phenomenological set of goals and methods?

AM: Yes, there is an internal structure and set of parameters I work with in a given project, that may be any or all of the above. As I make work, I can’t help dissecting the process and thinking about it, unlike some who are able just to run with it. For example, in 2017—with a new administration in the White House—I felt it impossible to continue working in the same way that I had been. I think many artists were asking the question, What now? and was there any value in making art. The moment demanded—for me—a new language, a new way of working that could address the arrival of a newly perceived reality. I decided to leave behind the camera. I wanted to find a way to bring people together amidst the turbulence. I made a 12x12 foot collaborative, “lumen” circle exposure. People were invited to sit in silent meditation on the tiled photo paper, marking our time together on the planet. I had never even heard of lumen printing until then, but I fell in love with the process and I’m still on that train.

KM: Many of your recent works have been directed away from the camera as the means of capture, even eschewing any form of lens. These processes, such as Lumen prints, have used direct engagement with phenomena using materials and process that allow a more “actual” translation of the phenomena, object, or thing. Can you explain how these processes are essential to your methodology?

AM: In recent lumen explorations I have been trying to reduce to the simplest tools and methods. At the heart of this work is The World is Astonishing with You in it: A 21st Century Field Guide to the Birds, Ferns and Wildflowers. The series depicts—through color, abstractly—different birds (beak shapes, wings etc.), different brute, fern shapes, and flower shapes. Each image is a sun-print or photogram. Each references through its title a bird, fern, or flower on the endangered species list.

The lumen process is simple. One places black & white photo paper in the sun—usually with an object on its surface like a leaf—which brings out latent color in the paper. The meaning of the images is rooted in the process of making, in the transient nature of the lumen print whose colors are destroyed with chemical fixing. Like the species they depict, the lumens are in a state of flux, evolving in the light with time, fugitive if fixed.

KM: Your background in literature and your early embrace of so-called “alternative” processes and their underlying potential to re-position photography both point to your restlessness with the traditional medium of photography and to your redefinition of the medium for your own purposes.

AM: Less a restlessness than, originally, a defiant opposition to. Maybe, like a teenager rebuking a parent. And then, gradually, an appreciation and acceptance of the photograph’s terms and syntax. And finally, a surrender and devotion to.

KM: It seems that two things are central to your vision. The installation as a final and over-arching form for photographic works is one; and then the “book” form as itself a final and very different form or performance space for the concepts of a given project. Each creates a different impact and conceptually shapes the final version substantially differently.

AM: Yes, the book has been a central part of my practice. Work almost always starts as a book idea. The photobook is—for me—a place that conceptually a body of work comes together. Books are intimate sculptural spaces. You enter a book like you enter a room. They have the element of time built in as pages turn. They have a multitude of forms and layouts—and materials that I love to wrestle with. Also, something happens when I work with books—things fall into place like pieces of a puzzle, I am in a state of flow, there are things that come together that feel as though they are gifted to me.

As for installation, it’s a natural direction once a book is underway. I love the way meaning shifts and a body of work is remade when its container shifts. It’s fascinating to reconsider work for different spaces and it absolutely substantially changes the way the work reads. I’m always excited for future possibilities.