Contemporary Photographer Series - Christopher Colville

© Christopher Colville

Photographer Christopher Colville earned his BFA in Anthropology and Photography from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri and his MFA in Photography from the University of New Mexico. He has received multiple awards for his work such as the Humble Arts Foundation New Photography Grant, Artist Project Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, a Public Arts Commission from the Phoenix Commission on the Arts and an artist fellowship through the American Scandinavian Foundation. His work, The Iceland Trilogy & Movements, was published as a book in 2011. He was recently interviewed by Jennie Dean for our Contemporary Photographer Series (CPS).

In 2006 you produced a body of work called The Iceland Trilogy & Movements which contains four suites of images - Movements, 27 Small Tragedies, Cairns and Sleep. I wanted to ask you some questions regarding this project. You've stated you spent 27 days living in a tent in Iceland. What was it like photographing and living in such a rugged terrain over such a long period of time?

It was wonderful! Working for an entire month in Iceland was an amazing experience for multiple reasons and the American Scandinavian Foundation fellowship was an amazing gift. One of the greatest challenges working artists face is balancing life and art. Typically artists struggle to balance life, family, work, bills and the need to create. Having an entire month to focus on creating work, without the distractions of normal life, is invaluable and rare.

The landscape in Iceland is rugged, violatile and seemingly inhospitable, which is not all that different from my home, the Sonoran Desert. There is a wonderful network of campsites and trails throughout Iceland that make camping and moving from point A to point B fairly simple. Truth be told I often feel much further from civilization camping in the Arizona wilderness than I did in Iceland. Part of the wonder of the trip in Iceland revolved around the interactions I had with different people from all over the globe.

You have a unique process for each of these suites. How did you decide which photographic process was appropriate to use?

That is a good question and one that is harder to answer than you may think. My interests in photography are varied and my methods are transient. Often photographers align themselves with a specific approach to the medium, be it idea driven, traditional, intuitive, experimental or alternative. I believe each of these approaches toward making work have a legitimate foothold on the medium of photography, but I also believe they are often dismissive of other forms of creation. I also believe each of these small sects become traps when adhered to exclusively. My goal is to move through the medium of photography fluidly, engaging the tools that best fit the work at hand.

When I left for Iceland, I had a few ideas of ways I might approach work but wasn't sure what I would encounter. I packed a variety of tools I had been using regularly at home and tried to keep myself open to possibility, to see what would happen. When I arrived in Iceland, I pretty quickly let go of my original ideas and started making work as a reaction to the land I was traveling through. Each of the four bodies of work grew out of the experience of being there, and was formed by the tools I had at hand. The separation of the work into four series didn't happen until I returned home and had time to work with the materials I had gathered.

from the series Movements © Christopher Colville

The locations for your photographs produced in Movements have an otherworldly quality to them. Was there any particular process behind choosing the locations to photograph for this suite?

The Movements series, was for me, the most surprising work to come out of this project. As I was traveling, I found myself attracted to the spaces that revealed movement or change in the land. The change or transformation was both due to the natural volatility of the young land mass as well as evidence of human interaction with the space. The images were often made in reaction to experiences with the land, often experiences I could not fully explain.

I want to be careful to say that I did not create this work to reveal "human folly". The negative impact of human presence in the land has become a common theme in contemporary landscape photography. I do believe we do terrible things to the land and I am concerned with issues of land use and conservation, but these photographs are not meant to take an activist's role. These images are meditations on the complex experience of inhabiting space; I want these photographs to reveal what it feels like to be there.

In 27 Small Tragedies, you created a photograph each day with a different plant. Other than being a talisman for the day's journey, did each plant represent something different for that day, such as an idea or emotion?

The plant prints were really created out of a desire for ritual. Initially I made the prints as a study of regional flora, partially inspired by the cyanotypes of Anna Atkins. As I traveled from one location to the next, the geology, atmosphere and plant life changed and the sequence of the plants became a sort of road map for my travels. There is also something more personal that happens as you carry an object on your back from one location to the next. It may be a bit delusional, but as the month progressed, the plants began to feel more and more like gifts and offerings to the land.

from the series 27 Small Tragedies © Christopher Colville

I find it rather interesting that Iceland is covered with cairns, which are these piles of stones that serve as memorials and markers for travelers. Could you talk more about the spiritual aspect of traveling to the cairns and what is was like to photograph these markers?

I have been fascinated by cairns for quite some time. Cairns are piles of stone found throughout the world, used to mark trails, graves and other features in the landscape. Cairns range from small piles of loose stones to artfully crafted monoliths that stand as memorials and grave sites. I am interested in the sense that the majority of cairns are not monumental, they are instead simple markers, indicating the movements of individuals through the landscape. At the same moment each cairn marks the place an individual stopped and took the care to handle and move the stones into place. Often I find the simplest cairns are as moving as the monumental memorials created to mark the passage of life.

I don't know that I so much traveled to the cairns, instead, as I traveled alone, the cairns reminded me of the people who had traveled before me.

from the series Cairns © Christopher Colville

In Sleep, you photographed the midnight sun as it tracked across the sky. This must have been quite the experience since we have nothing like that here in the States. You mentioned that on clear nights, the sun would burn holes into the exposed paper negatives. How were you able to successfully capture these images while you slept?

The Sleep images were the final attempt to make use of every second I had to create work while on this fellowship, which was part of the challenge I had set for myself.

My first day in Iceland, I stayed up late into the night excited with anticipation for what was to come and a bit disoriented by the 24-hr sun. Since I couldn't sleep, I started experimenting with the materials I had packed and was curious if I could create an image with POP (printing-out-paper) in camera. After a couple of failed experiments, I attempted one last image before I went to sleep. I started the exposure, then laid down for the night and when I woke four hours later, I had an image. The burning of the paper by the magnifying glass effects of the lens was a bit of a surprise, but it was exciting. I later discovered that in the States, that same summer, the photographer Chris McCaw was making his first experiments with sun burns. While my images of the sun tracking across the night sky function as a small series to mark the dreamtime of one trip, McCaw pursued this process and turned it into an amazing body of work. I am excited by this coincidence because it is similar to the historic simultaneous discovery of photography in multiple countries at the same general time.

Not all of the images were successful, but they were all part of the journey. 

from the series Sleep © Christopher Colville