statement by the artist


Fantasy and the forlorn (1980)

Primitive man often sought religious experiences through dreams or trances.
Fantasy originates in the secret pastimes of the lonely child who builds dream
palaces in shoeboxes and opera theatres of cardboard. He overcomes the
sufferings of neglect and abandonment by creating private illusory worlds of
anger and escape: self-contained universes where anything at all is possible.
»Anything at all is possible« becomes the motto of his emerging artistic sen-
sibility and the emblem of his survival against irrational events. Eventually we
all become such orphans, isolated fabricators of fancy, some near the be-
ginning of life, others only at the approach of death.

It is in the nature of fantasy to contradict photography, which itself seems so
objectively concrete. In truth, it is the shadow side, a counterfeit reality, a sham,
a contrived manipulation that somehow goes deeper than the fractured instant
that the shutter begrudgingly allows us. Fantasy is always an intermingled
meditation upon past terrors and future hopes. Yet the mechanics of photo-
graphy demand that the camera operate only in the narrowest fragment of the
present. To create imagery that is consonant with our innermost feelings, we
must dare to reverse the passive light-absorbing functions of the film. (...)

In fantasy, the action shifts from the moment to the timeless, the subject from
the specific to the archetypical, the technique from reportage to the parable. A
chance collection of everyday objects is relocated to the realm of the sacred
altar. The unnoticed human relationship is taken out of context and expanded
into a symbolic ceremony. The natural landscape is transformcd into a scenic
background for a heroic quest. Thus by means photography, fantasy pene-
trates through to a deeper level of experience to give the ephemeral the solidity
of the mysterious: the essence of the negative.



Return