Anodyne
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
 

John Divola in conversation with Jan Tumlir:

"I was a student at UCLA, living in Reseda. I was studying with Robert Heineken. At the time, nobody in the UCLA photography department had a camera, or if they had one, they didn’t use it. Everyone was doing gum-prints and blueprints, and so was I initially, and I remember looking at this gum-print I’d just made—it had this fetus floating in air along with elephants and so on, and I thought to myself, 'Why should I care about any of these things?' I didn’t have any answers for why I had chosen this iconography other than that it was vaguely fantastic. So I decided that I would start photographing my neighborhood because at least it had an immediate connection to me.

Initially, I thought up the conceit that I’d been dropped from outer space, that I would be completely objective. But, of course, I had no criteria for this objectivity, and I wound up being formal. I made photographs of abstract garage-door designs, bushes next to other bushes that made interesting formal patterns. Then, at some point, I became interested in images of women watering their lawns; I gave up on objectivity and totally dove into subjectivity. . . ."
- posted by cjb @ 9:01 PM


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