Scott Conarroe

 

 

An edited version of this interview can be found at Canadian Art Online

 

Justin Mah interviews. Scott Conarroe responds.

 

Can you talk a bit about your choice to shoot in long exposures? And how long were your exposure times? Did your decision have to do with the painterly manner in which natural light is captured with long exposures? I ask because the sky features quite prominently in many of your photographs. They appear to be illuminating the landscapes below.

I use long exposures for a number of reasons.  The pragmatic explanation is that they are necessary in the subdued light and deep depth of field I like to work with.  Conceptually, I like that scenes change continuously while I photograph them, that they look different at the beginning of an exposure than at the end.  Long exposures increase a photograph’s autonomy because the truthfulness of its negative doesn’t portray a specific instant that appeared a certain way, it portrays a compilation of moments blended together; they underscore the camera’s roles of abstractor and editor as well as recorder.  And long exposures introduce an element of chance into the precision that view cameras are capable of.

I try to complement twilight with streetlamps and other electric highlights when I’m able; I like projecting tension between the vast shifting romance of a sunset and the arbitrary on/off nature of light bulbs.  And, yes, I’ve probably invested in these rhetorical positions because I like how dawn and dusk look in photographs.  The painterly effect you describe has to do with latitudes of light.  I generally work with sky that’s about as close to dark as it is to bright; when the tonal transition from sky to landscape is less abrupt than we are accustomed to seeing in photos the sense of visual unity is greater.  I suppose it is slowness and deliberateness in the process that comes across as painterly.

The shortest exposures in By Rail are Streetcar Stop, New Orleans LA (It was maybe 15 seconds, the length of time the streetcar stops when only a person or two get on early in the morning) and Boaters, Kalamalka Lake BC (probably a second or two).  The longest exposures are fifteen or twenty minutes: Canal, Cleveland OH and Cul De Sac, Hawthorne CA are among them.

 

It is written that the railway tracks in your photographs function as a “unifying device,” connecting the photographs. Can you speak a bit about this?

Well, the tracks are a “unifying device” in that a range of geographically and culturally disparate environments are seen as a cohesive statement because each photograph has a piece of railway somewhere in the frame.  In a way this is as true across the physical landscape as it is in the photographs.  Miami is profoundly different from someplace like Cochrane, Alberta and yet a railroad is the same dimensions and construction in each place.  There are variations in language and currency and time (!) throughout this continent, but train tracks illustrate a certain type of constancy.

There is much to be read in your contemplative photographs. Was there a certain message that you were hoping to get across in your images, or was it your intention to leave their ultimate meaning open to interpretation? Do you see you work as a kind of ‘artful’ documentation?

Yes to all of those?
I like to think of By Rail as more “sweeping epic” than polemic.  The conversation I find most interesting has the railway as the skeleton of our northern New World civilization.  In the myth of America immigrants and civil war veterans constructed The First Transcontinental Railroad in eastern states, and from the Pacific prodigious Chinese labour forced tracks through mountains; rail populated frontiers and diminished native-controlled territories.  Here, coast-to-coast confederation was contingent upon a rail link, and telegraph lines (remote communication!) were erected in rail sidings.  We’ve matured in tandem with mechanized travel; the design of our communities, our conception of how to utilize space reflects that.  I think it’s useful to extrapolate further and recognize more ephemeral conventions like time zones are also products of railway companies.  I suppose the short answer to your questions would be something like “a lot of things we take as plain truth and basic fact and common sense are constructs, and in this part of the world much of what we think and how we behave are functions of a particular set of technologies”. 

This is a period where we’re teetering on economic and environmental and cultural brinks again.  When I speak polemically around this project I go on and on about how it has taken spiking oil prices and the collapse of our auto industry to start meaningful conversations about the ethics and logistics of land use and transportation and civic design.  By Rail portrays North America during a period of seismic cultural transformation.  The earliest images in the series were cherry-picked from a 2005 project and I finished shooting shortly after Obama’s historic inauguration; he is, among other things, the first president-elect since 1953 to arrive in Washington by rail.  I love the literary connotations of that.

 

Could you speak briefly about how these photographs resonate with you on a personal level? It is quite clear that there is a sentimental connection expressed in the images.

On a personal level, By Rail is my first mature body of work.  It more or less illustrates my artmaking ideals as they exist at this moment.  Someday, I hope to look back and enjoy By Rail for a charming naiveté, but right now it is involved with so many breakthroughs in my career and personal life that I have trouble considering it apart from them.  In 2008 when the bulk of By Rail was shot my LTR disintegrated, I was received as a guest at some very fancy institutions, I was detained as a possible “Terror Threat”(?), I bathed in rivers and oceans and truck stops and hot springs, and I lived in the same van I did as a ski-bumming tree-planting kid a decade ago.  A lot happened in my world and that’s all tied up in this project for me.

I think I know what you mean about a “sentimental connection expressed” in the images themselves.  I am not an overly cerebral artist; I buy into the logic that in visual arts aesthetic intelligence is as important as the rhetorical framework.  Even though a lot of what I do is conceptually motivated, it’s silly to downplay the fact I make pictures.  Since I’m not inventing “a new visual language” I’m free to sample from established conventions, to use optical and pictorial strategies that can be grasped by different audiences in various contexts.  Perhaps it’s because I got to art school when I was a little older that I don’t identify strongly with the ideals of the enfant terrible.  Rather than confronting viewers with challenging work, I’d like to draw them in and hold their attention long enough to infiltrate their day somehow.  Maybe that kind of hey-neighbour-seduction is read as old-fashioned.

 

Setting history aside, what is it exactly about the railway that fascinates you? What relevance do you see in these railway tracks under today's culture?

The current-affairs-lefty in me believes trains are more efficient movers of freight and people than trucks or planes in a lot of circumstances.  It’s worth considering why the rest of the developed world is decades into a rail renaissance and we view the technology as a heritage contraption. Forty years in, Japan is still expanding its bullet train system.  Germany and China have based ambitious development schemes around new stations and lines. The Chunnel between England and France opened in 94, and even longer tunnels scoot under the Alps.  Our high profile projects chip away at a vast transportation infrastructure turning it into museums and condos and parks and malls.  To what degree the existing system might function could be up for debate, I suppose.  I do find it curious though that something in our psychology seems determined to disregard it out of hand.

I like the poetry of parallel tracks meeting at the horizon, joining separate realms at a single point, etc.  As someone who photographs places where various activities transition into one another that whole “other side of the tracks” thing is rich for me; the trope of railway tracks defining the boundary between neighbourhoods or economic zones or whatever rings true in books and movies because that’s how we’ve arranged our continent.

Visually, few things satisfy like backlit railway tracks i.e. ribbons of pure light.

This one’s a tangent and it briefly lapses into history, but there’s a lovely symmetry in the biographies of photography and train travel; their narrative arcs traverse similar eras, they revolutionized our perspective in comparable ways, and their logics can be described as similar.  I like to think of photo’s influence on representation (and by extension on thought) as analogous to how railroads transformed the landscape.  Cameras record optical information as units of relative certainty and circulate them broadly; this contributed to the industrialization of how knowledge is regarded.  Railway networks rendered wilds into arenas of settlement, and that did something similar to physical distance.  Cameras abstract the flow of time; railway planners divided the earth itself into time zones to standardize schedules.  These ideas have been integrated so fully that they seem eternal, but the photographic paradigm has already been supplanted by the rhetoric and imaging power of digital technologies, and satellite views have replaced the once exhilarating expanse of sweeping eye-level vistas.  I find this fascinating.

 

Finally, you obtained your images while traveling by car around the country. In what way did this trip inform your work? Had you already had in mind the images you wanted before leaving on your trip, or were these more scenes that you discovered while traveling and felt needed to be captured. (Also, I have that your trip started in Dawson Creek. Where did it end?)

The wonderful thing about making photographs is that I’m obligated to go out and actually be in different places.  Without undue coyness, the trip was the work, and the photographs are, as you put it, “artful documentation”.  This project was definitely shaped by the railway’s proximity to highways.  Tracks typically run alongside the road making them an integral and constant part of a driver’s eye-view of the landscape.  In a way, the elegiac tone read into these pictures is as much about driving as it is about train travel.  There is a tradition of photographers from the earliest Geological Survey to Robert Frank to Stephen Shore heading out on grand exploratory road trips.  When I was doing By Rail and gas was more costly than ever before and the term “carbon footprint” entered the common tongue and my old van was making uncomfortable sounds, it struck me repeatedly that the window for this particular type of adventure is probably closing.

I didn’t have specific images in mind at any point.  In 2006 I noticed that tracks often find their way into my pictures of other things.  They were so consistent in my images of Vancouver and Halifax and London that I couldn’t ignore a rather intense, albeit sidelong, interest I have in railways.  I didn’t begin with a thesis and an inventory of sites to illustrate my position.  I began with a vague interest in the subject, and was compelled by curiosity. 

It’s more or less accurate that By Rail was made on a trip that began in Dawson Creek, BC, the town where I grew up and learned to drive.  The trip did end in Toronto where I live now.  I also like the literary connotations of that.

I am very grateful for the support of The Canada Council for the Arts, The Ontario Arts Council, and Light Work.