Gary Dwyer
Gary Dwyer BORN:
Colorado
RESIDES:
California
E D U C AT I O N :
EXHIBITIONS:
COLLECTIONS :
Syracuse University University of Denver New York State University Images’08 Vevey, Switzerland Bienal Internacional, Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain La Biennale Internationale de l’image, Nancy, France La Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris The City of San Francisco The City of Los Angeles
CLIENTS:
World Monuments Fund - Rome UNESCO - Vietnam
AWARDS:
CENTER for Photography, Santa Fe PX3 Prix De La Photographie, Paris London Photographic Association American Academy in Rome MacDowell Colony Lucie Award
www.garydwyerphotography.com writedwyer@gmail.com (805) 545-9981
Seeing / Thinking / Living
“We see only what we look for, and look for what we know.” Goethe
You could think of this title as a linear process. First, Seeing, then Thinking about what you have seen, and then somehow having those elements as a part of how you are actually Living. The truth is much more complex than that. It is not so much a question of consciousness or even paying attention. Rather it is an endless curiosity: What is that? How does this work? What is that for, and why is it here? In the case of a photograph or a digital image, it is always about the past and specifically what I think about that past. Images are especially about what (we) make that past mean. I got serious about making photographic images about twentyfive years ago. Even then I had substantial photographic experience behind me, but I still had to think about every single thing I did. Every change, every tiny little decision. Today, like everyone else, I just shoot. Thoughtlessly - think of it as Irish Zen. All the effort goes into finding the shot and then simply getting out of the way. The hardest part is in the nearly endless editing. Really, no one cares how you did something, they only respond to what you did. And so, ultimately images are content, and they reach us either by what we see, or what we imagine in them, and that usually means what we dig out of our own past. What we get from a photograph is most certainly not what is on the surface of the paper or the screen.
I would like my images to give off more light than they take in. I make these images because they engage me. I find them intriguing because they often leave more questions than they produce answers. Enigma, irony, and duality come looking for me. I seem to make a lot of images where it looks like someone has just left. I didn’t set out to make the world enigmatic, it just appears that way to me. I enjoy being amazed. I am amazed at how many points of view, amazed at how we can see more than one thing at a time, amazed at how and where we live and how we present ourselves. More than anything else, I am amazed at how much wonder there is left in this world for us to see. Gary Dwyer www.garydwyerphotography.com
Cover Photo: Black Dog / Red Table Indonesia © 2002 Gary Dwyer
SEEING
This is a topic of choice. We choose to see things, we pick them out. We separate them from all the rest. The physiologists have come to understand that our vision is not composed of seamless flow. Rather, it is a continuous display of still images and our brain joins them together. And it is not an evolutionary accident that our focus is in the middle and blurry at the edges. Hunters pay attention in many ways, but most of it is where they choose to point their head. A camera just puts a frame around it, but it is a conscious choice to see the scene in the first place. Recently, I have had new plastic lenses surgically implanted in my eyes. There is a mili-second lag between looking at something and having the lenses fall into focus. I am like a camera in the same way my camera is like me. The difference is taking the trouble to notice something. I have to will an image into being.
One Yellow Leaf. (From the series ‘Underfoot.’) The ‘Smart and Final’ supermarket parking lot, San Luis Obispo, California 2005
Our hotel room was on the second floor. I glanced out the window to see a silver Mercedes speeding down the street, then a squeal of tires as it came to a stop. The enraged driver began backing up when he realized he had come to the bottom of a dead end street. The kings of Portugal rode these streets long before the Mercedes but 9:40 AM November 1, 1775 was the real and permanent dead-end for all of Portugal.
Red Stripe Guimares, Portugal 2001
I have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get both near and far into focus at the same time. It is a silly compulsion, but occasionally fruitful. Looking and seeing at the same time is a way to understand ourselves and it means that, like this image, all photographs are selfportraits. It means we have to look a lot harder to see them, to attempt to understand them. This is a single image, not a composite, but I had to look very hard to find it and and even harder to see myself in it. However, the image being a self portrait has been obvious to everyone I have shown it to. I guess I’m just slow.
Little Couch Pig Barcelona, Spain 2010
Dusty gray claustrophobic death floats in front of me and I do nothing about it. There is nothing to be done. It just happened, in the way that things happen. The tree falls, the car crashes, he couldn’t swim. An avalanche.. I wish I knew more about what happened here, but no, I really (don’t) can’t care. Then why is this image going to stick in my mind?
Interior Pompeii, Italy 2005
Hot, Indian Summer, afternoon. Water and tree colors made me stop the car, yet again. Well, isn’t this what you came here for? All this collision of colors? What is it exactly that happens when colors riot? Working with my heavy camera on the other side of the pond, swatting mosquitoes away, and trying to act brave and professional. My wife gestures to me from the other side, and says, ”Why don’t you look at it from over here?” I follow her guidance walk over to where she is standing and, just to please her, I take one prefunctory shot with my phone.
Impressionist bog Near Newfound Lake, New Hampshire 2011
Autumn, but steamy, not cold. The car is now in front of the church and because it is on a plaza, it is not supposed to be there. She has to go look for a hotel and I have to stay with the car. It is raining heavily, but I have to stay in the car to try to argue with any police who might happen by, to explain why the car is there in the first place. There is nothing to do. I point my camera at the windshield. The police never came. She found a hotel.
Rain Window Amalfi, Italy 2005
I enjoy almost anyplace that is at least a day trip from a city. This one is another pilgrimage site, but I’m not a pilgrim this time. Once a year people walk 73 kilometers to get here. I would rather ride in the ‘Colectivo’ with the locals. I find it odd when people use the expression, “If walls could only talk.” Well, walls do talk. And they speak loudly too. Like most walls this one tells old and new stories at the same time. It tells us that forest is not the dominant landscape because the wood is old and used sparingly. It tells us that the rain is infrequent here, but when it comes, it is a torrent, and it erodes the wall. There is poverty here, and there has been armed conflict, but there is organization too. The arrow speaks of regulations, and the advertising speaks of access while the single electric wire is optimistic. The red bag, making the color compliment with the riddled lower wall and the blue sky, is a signal of the old ways. It means home-brewed beer is made in this house and it is for sale. Even now, having given many of its secrets away, I still find a lot to look at in this image. And even more to think about.
Red Flag Otuzco, Peru 2008
When there is deep silence, it is a pond with no wind or a profound darkness. We fear, yes, fear, making a sound, a ripple, or finding a light. Silence is where everything is going on and you can’t hear it. It comes in through your skin. There is an urge to collaborate with silence. We learn how to tip-toe and whisper. We fear the barking dog and the closing door. The red drape does not flap, it waves, as if to force me to participate and to see the quiet.
Red Curtain Vejer de la Frontera, Spain 2012
My long time delight with reflections has to do with me being greedy with my eyes, I always want to take in more than whatever is on the most obvious surface. Reflection means the amount of light, heat or sound thrown back after encountering a solid surface. Reflection means to bend back. I think of reflection as a second chance for something to be seen. Often not the same but seen nonetheless. Occasionally, I prefer the idea of ricochet when it is thought of as light rebounding off something wildly in a seemingly random direction. It becomes something unpredictable that you have to work at to see. The ricochet changes whatever you are looking at into something else. Why I take such delight in looking at them remains a mystery. Perhaps my eyes really are greedy.
(Lempicka) Girl Reflect Cagnes-sur-mer, France 1999
Rocamadour is in Southwest France and it was the home of an early Christian hermit named Zaccheus of Jericho. It is believed that he died in about 70 AD and had conversed with Jesus himself. The stuff of legends abound and the pilgrims and the tourists continue to flood this tiny town that is carved into a cliff on the banks high above the Lafajadou river. The pilgrims often go to the shrines on their knees, but because it is a town as well as a pilgrimage site there are commercial shrines that ricochet off the cliff walls. Some of the Pilgrims must need sandwiches and high-heeled boots and spectacular bracelets as garments of their pilgrimage. However, I think their pilgrimage will be to a different shrine. This store window has a fashion poster, a blank piece of paper, a small stool. The window is picking up the reflection of the paving, an awning, some plumbing, and the closed sandwich shop across the street. (See the previous page for why I think this image is more of a ricochet than a reflection.)
Leg Heel Vert Rocamador, France 2006
As a one-time geology student, I was fascinated by idea of time being in layers, their complicated names and the incomprehensible lengths of time they represented. Roadside cuts showing layers of flint alternating with limestone was a sideways map I could read and somewhat understand. A long time before the term multi-tasking existed, I was delighted by complicated scenes. How many things can I find in one gaze. I got good at staring and if I really concentrated many scenes stared back at me. In Fatehpur Sikri, I once saw a jewel thief being trained. An old man held a handful of seven pebbles in front of a small boy. Two of the seven were uncut gems, and to my untrained eye, they were indistinguishable from the others. The old man opened and then closed his fist around the pebbles. He then moved the pebbles to his other hand then opened and closed his fist with lightning speed. The apprentice boy was supposed to be able to know what was the position of the real gems. If he guessed wrong, he was beaten. If you look carefully you will find there are images of four women in this shot. A construction fence, an important church being restored, a newspaper, a magazine, a bus and once you look at the expressions on the images of the women, you could write a whole novel about what their faces are saying. I’m content with the richness and complexity of the scene.
Bus Women Ragusa, Sicily 2005
Lens manufacturers do their very best to make the clearest, sharpest, brightest, most accurate equipment possible. Then, (pre-Photoshop) I would smear some Vaseline on my lens filters to get as far away from perfection as possible. The reason was to use a little obscurity to increase the contrast. Because sometimes our seeing everything prevents understanding. If there is too much clarity, imagination goes out the window. And, as ‘Victoria’s Secret’ so clearly demonstrates, Imagination (the making of images) might be better than what we really have, and because we know (ultimate) precision is an illusion, imagination might be all we have. A little rain on the window and some condensation on the glass was better than Vaseline and yes, her eyes are that bright. Nothing else comes close. Not even the two, not so obvious, silhouette portraits of the photographer.
Misty Girl Poster Grenoble, France 1998
I always hated shooting in the studio. I don’t think I was ever any good at it. There was always more preparation than discovery. You had to make change instead of finding it. I was a street shooter before I knew there was such a thing. Grab it, take it home, remember it. Seeing is really the second part. Seeing is preceded by looking and looking is driven by curiosity. Seeing carries with it the presumption that something has been found. Looking is pure investigation. Think of it as the theoretical physics of the eye. And having no idea about something might go means it has endless possibilities. It also means endless dead ends, but it is not driven by hypothesizes or formulas. Looking is a great freedom, up until the point where something is seen. I didn’t see this Bus stop kiosk, I looked at it, then I stole it. I saw it. I saw it through eyes that had danced over green fields near red poppies. I had sat through art history lectures on color field painting. Lamplight, sunset, what more could I ask for? I was waiting for a bus. What else was I supposed to do?
Bus Station Piazza Venizia, Rome 2005
THINKING
This topic enters the realm of processing. Using memory and cognition, we mash things together. Compositing both consciously and unconsciously. Sometimes we get hash and other times we get poetry. The first reason for Adobe Photoshop was to get images onto the computer. The second reason for Photoshop was to manipulate images, and the idea of compositing was at the top of the idea list. John and Thomas Knoll may have invented Photoshop, but Jerry Uelsmann was putting lots of images together years, perhaps decades, before Photoshop 1.0 came out in 1990. In the ‘Maine Photographic (now Media) Workshops’, an upstairs room was filled with computers where they taught the first commercial Photoshop (2.0) classes. (1995) All the people downstairs who were using traditional methods wondered what all the nerds upstairs were doing. The purpose of Photoshop is to combine ideas. The acts of Composing, (Bach) and Constructing, (Gaudi) are impossible without compositing. Perhaps thinking is a form of weaving. Even though time makes us think of layers, there are holes in those layers and earlier ideas poke through. It may mean that looking at one thing makes us think of something else. The purpose of thinking is to combine ideas.
Composite Map Nepal (solukhumbu) 1987 San Andreas Fault (California) 1983 Saltzburg (Austria) 1979 San Gimigano (Italy) 2001
Travel is a process, not a thing. It is a way of not being located. Taking a picture (making a photograph) is a way-finding tool. Photographs are maps of time. If Saint Anthony’s job was to be the patron saint of ‘finding things’ and ‘locating missing persons,’ then photography’s job is to place us in time. Space has always had a lot to do with photography, but it is now in second or third position against place and time. The chant used to be, ‘Location, location, location.’ And now it is ‘Time, time, time.’ A photograph is not a thing, it is a time. And it is a map of that time, often used, like Saint Anthony, to find missing persons. Like a photograph, a map is an attempt to fill in the gap between what we know and what we see. It is in this gap where our mind wanders and imagination takes hold. To imagine, in any way, is an attempt to map the distance between right now and whatever is next. More on this later. Just not right now.
Modern Apocalypse (street market with mural) Palermo, Sicily 2005
A composite image - Yes, of course, but from four places with intimate connections. An island where shrubs are the exuberant colors of spring, growing on some of the thinnest of soils. Growing on an island that was covered with forest until Rome decided it needed ships and fuel. Next, a part of the peninsula thought important enough to have its own temple complex during the Ionic period, and to the rear another temple of power raises its nuclear head and we wonder how long this new temple will last. Then another island, this one with a whitewashed building and a doorway blocked up with stones, speaking of opportunity lost. Finally, pieces of the airport because there are times when the only option for staying is leaving. A composite because we see with our fragmented and vague memory as though it were our eyes.
Homage to Greece Amorgos, Nafplion, Tinos, Athens 1998
The title of this image is more than enough. It is all I can manage.
The Persistence of Religion Seville, Spain 2012
I should probably come clean here, even if it is painful to do so. I love this image because there is so much to look at. I can wander inside it and it has space enough to accommodate my imaginings. I remember bits of it rather distinctly. The black and white cobblestones were on the church plaza, and just a few steps above where a man was climbing the stairs, on his knees, as an act of penitence. It was late spring and hot enough so the early grasses had gone to seed, but the red Poppies were still pulsing with color and the stones, always the stones, sagging in the heat of time, their patience obvious and infinite. All of this, and more, arrived on a single frame of film, from four different exposures because my camera did not advance when I thought it had. It became a single photograph and it is one of the most intentional images I have ever made. It worries me. And it should.
Tinos, three layers Cyclades, Greece 1998
We have a little box with which we look at the world, and it is not a camera.It is our head. We think our eyes convey the truth, but that is just an illusion involving selective and filtered perception. Whether vivid color or dim shadows, we harbor the illusion that we can decide what is important and what we will remember. Our dreams prove we have as little control of our memories as a chimpanzee does of a Hasselblad. All we get are pieces of visual crumbs flying off the spinning plate of existence. My eyes are never anyone else’s. How could they be? My eye, not my camera, is skittish and erratic. My camera does what it is told, and yet, I must always depend on my eyes to pay attention to whatever is important, central or absolutely essential. My camera does not wander around from place to place, I do. I am turned on to continuous auto-focus mode. The problem is me. I am glad the camera has a shutter release. A tool or mechanism of precise purpose. I wish I had one.
Paintings in the park with shadow Prague, Czech Republic 1999
Peristeriones is the Greek word for the ornate pigeon houses (dovecotes) brought to the island by the Venetians. The doves were used for food and fertilizer. They date from the 18th and 19th centuries and are scattered around the hills and valleys outside of the towns. You can find one of the pigeon houses in the facing image. If you walk from one town to another you will see a lot of the little houses with their imaginative ornate brick openings near the roof. If you screw up with your camera, you will have to do the walk all over again. Even then it will be complicated. Openings and closings are different forms of the same thing. Memorable, but confusing too. I was not a part of this. I had nothing to do with it. Well, OK. afterword, maybe, but surprisingly, not much.
Odd Opening Between Tarambados and Smardakito, Greece 1998
What does it mean to have lived somewhere? How long do you have to remain in a place to say you have lived there? I had a friend who said he liked to live in a place until he began to understand the politics and then it was time to leave. So is living about the duration of time, or is it about understanding? I have lived in a lot of places that I don’t understand. I even have citizenship in two of them. The places we live make layers on us. Printed pages stacked together, providing evidence of having been somewhere long enough to remember part of it and to have at least some of it stamped upon us. Occasionally the stamping is done with indelible ink and never washes away and hides in the corners of language and seeps out when we say even the simplest words. The ink has bled away from some of the pages and it is only a blur, but it is still there. The map is gone but the image is still there. The evening meal of grilled fish, the flat light of Autumn coming in through the window. The smell of dry stones.
3 or 4 places where I have lived Cuxhaven, Germany 1984 Hue,Vietnam 1994 Rome, Italy 2005 Soller, Spain 2012
At first glance, this appears to be a train of some kind. Upon closer inspection the realization comes that this is an extraordinary machine. In fact, it is a kind of ‘Complication’ - (In horology (study of clocks), complication refers to any feature in a timepiece beyond the simple display of hours, minutes, and seconds.) This complication is a composite photo and was produced by compositing six different train engines to finally become, like many of our institutions today, a beautiful, finely crafted machine that cannot possibly work.
Complication Machine Zurich, Switzerland 2001
LIVING
Living seems to be inseparable from the word where. It is about a place. (Or many places.) Of course living is about other people as well because we live in communities of one form or another. Where did you grow up? Where do you live? Living in a place means it has identity. You can find it. You can identify it from other similar places. Home, on the other hand, is about identity and proximity and memory. Choice may have nothing to do with it. Tradition and force may be the determining factors. Defense, customs and economics have many of us living in complicated, often painful circumstances and yet, even in those circumstances, we seem to be able to see and to think and even thrive.
Looking at this picture, this image And not caring about what comes next. This cluster of colors and Rectangular holes of darkness Sewn together by walls of saturation. Windows are black because they let the insides out. Rooms, like houses Breathe and doors are where all the exhaling happens All that bright paint on the walls Is just a distraction A small chromatic distance between Getting ready and Letting go.
Ragusa Sicily 2005
The whole thing was a fiasco. Wrong bus, wrong time of day. We got started too late and it was probably my fault. Did I mention the heat? It was the kind of heat that pushes you from behind and it has a presence. Like someone much larger walking behind you. Ordinarily, you might be able to find some shade, but when we finally arrived at the town, it was noon. Siesta. Siesta has a purpose. The less informed think it is connected to sloth. Those people have never been to Spain. Siesta is the one and only path to simple survival. The people in this town were taking siesta. They always have. We fools, we were walking the streets. And as I walked from the protective shade of a nearby arch, this scene presented itself. A time of consensual quiet, when a community has a collective common sense of how the world works, and how to behave in it. Some time later, nearing exhaustion and feeling extraordinarily stupid for visiting this place during siesta, we rounded a corner, and to our surprise and delight there was an open restaurant. They were serving other fools. They had shade. They had Sangria.
White Houses Group (Siesta) Vejer de la Feontera, Spain 2012
The thin soils over soft calcareous limestone makes for precarious agriculture. After the Greeks and the Romans and the Normans and the Spaniards and the Arabs and the Italians have cut off the native oak and the Sycamore forest there is not much left. You can only extol the virtues of the rocky soil on wine bottles. The farmers just might have emigrated to New Jersey, but the cycle is simple: After all the trees have been cut down and the resources extracted and the slaves gone. After having built astonishing things and because the climate is so much better than most other places, you invite the tourists to come enjoy the sunshine, the regional cuisine, the wines grown on the rocky slopes of the volcano. And you invite them to dance in a disco made from stones hauled by slaves, and to dance in a Jewish ghetto made out of the leftovers from a Roman amphitheater. That’s how it works. And as long as there are vacations, the tourists will roll in like the rain in the gutters: fast, dirty and noisy.
The City of Gang Sicily 2005
A recent short story editor said, something like, ‘A short story is about an individual. Surely with all the quirks and flaws, but whether comic or tragic it is still about an individual.’ The novel on the other hand, is about community. A place where what is going on is between individuals as well as about them. This idea, this separation of individual and community, is perhaps some of the difference between still photographs and film. If the analogy is true, then each still photo is a short story, and often has an expanded caption. It is, perhaps, why we expect photographers to speak about their work. What gets forgotten in this expectation is that the story the photographer is telling with his or her images has always two actors: the subjects on the surface of the images, and the entire life story of the photographer behind the lens. (Note: This is a city of cave dwellings. (Troglodytes) Up until 1955, there were at least fifteen thousand people living in the caves of this town. Their soft stone is easy to carve, and when you needed another room, you just cut one out. The community was surprisingly energy efficient due to nearly constant temperature and water catchment systems. Mel Gibson thought it looked so much like Jerusalem, he used the whole town for a movie set. Many of the cave homes are in the process of being renovated to accommodate restaurants and holiday homes for tourists. Communities change according to what we call living.)
Matera Reggio Calabria, Italy 2005
With apologies to John Fowles: Larks swing and waxwings wheel under what the English think passes for sky and while we stumble through the shiny stone streets of this second largest of the (formerly Greek, Byzantine, Roman, etc.) now Italian isles, I wonder how things have come to be the way they are. Youngsters sporting attire copied from American prison inmates in fabrics imported from China while black Africans peddle knockoff copies of purses made in Italy. For two hours each day, well, not each day, because Sunday, everything is closed, locked and dead. So, almost each day, for two hours the Main Street turns into a pedestrian shopping promenade. Passagetta is the real term, but this is Christmas, so it is real buying, going along with the walking, hustling, the meat market, and old guys with their hands clasped behind their back. More than anything else it is the daily form of the ‘Sunday Strut.’ Empedocles and Pirandello lurk in the background but it is Robbie Williams and Madonna that are driving the machine made from fabric and leather with glass storefronts and the glitter. Sunglasses at night and the highest and the tightest leather boots are the only boots possible. It is all so fragile. The fifty steps perpendicular to the axis of this street is the distance from the throbbing throng, all the way to oblivion. Fifty steps from the center is the damp stone hunger seen in the stern faces of the old street dogs and the dark lines of graying laundry. This land of now, this place that has told itself it will reinvent the future beginning today, this place of caffeine and speed where faster is always better has left at least one of its arms in the frozen muck of the past. And it is so severely stuck in tradition that gangrene is a real possibility.
Chefalu Sicily 2005
It was muggy and uncomfortable. The hill was steep and there were no sidewalks. We stopped to ask an old woman directions for a church we knew about that was further up the hill. She had a quizzical look on her face when she responded, but she said it wasn’t too far, so we continued up the hill until we came upon a man who was using a plastic two liter bottle to pour gasoline into a grimy dented car at the side of the road. Again, we asked for directions to the church. He looked at me carefully and glanced at my wife. Continuing to pour the gasoline, he said softly, “You are not safe here.� I thanked him for his advice and I clicked the shutter, just once, before we turned around and walked back down the hill.
Valparaiso Chile 2011
Photography without intention is simply decoration. The photographic project intends to explain the place or time to both the photographer and their audience. It is the intention that matters more than the method or the technology. More than anything, a group of photographs, grouped around an idea or intent, is an attempt by the photographer to explain the world - to the photographer. A group of photographs together in a project merely represents a desire to share momentary fragments of understanding. It doesn’t matter how the intention comes about. It can arrive before the outset of a project or after thousands of seemingly mindless frames, but it must arrive. Even if the photographer has not thought about it deeply, there is always the hope that the images will be causal, that they will cause thought, that they will be memorable and make us reflect, to think about where we are, who we are and what we value. Very little of photography is about photography. I am acutely aware that the process of making a photograph is entirely different than looking at a photograph. Many photographers simply love the process. They love all of the making, the tools, and the actions. It is like singing, it gives photographers joy. The products resulting from their effort and the evaluation of their quality is entirely a different matter. It turns out that snapshots are just plain dumb. Decoration is useful but it has no aspirations. Something that is achingly beautiful is not necessarily memorable. Recently I have been shooting for ideas and techniques more than content. This effort will be an enormous aide memoir because, at the moment, I have much less memory of recent events than I would like. We now take photographs to remember ourselves. Not merely to remember a time or place, or even who we were with, but to remember who we were. The camera is a tool for compressing the ego. We are so awash in imagery we forget it is we who are doing the seeing. Images contradict themselves by simultaneously helping us to remember and
forget. The single image seems to help us reflect and to remember, while the flood of images, like in a film, cause us to become connected to the film and distanced from who we are as individuals. We often say we don’t recognize ourselves in photographs. What we don’t know how to recognize is the time and the distance that has been placed between ourselves and our own image. The reason we look at an image of ourselves and then announce, “That can’t be me,” is that the image is not us, it is who we were. The larger the interval of time between the image and our perception of that image further fragments the understanding until there is finally no relation at all. The single image also begs the issue of context. Where there is an identifier of when; and while a great deal of effort is put into the mise en scène of a film, the context in still images is often completely overlooked in favor of the subjects. The heroes of landscape photography have turned context into a subject. And the scene they usually set is timelessness. Places with minimal or no human intervention. And because these scenes of context are often in remote isolated places, we think of the photographers as heroic explorers and they often are, but what they present to us, through their imagery, is the always unfair comparison between their presumed glamorous life of the outdoor photographer and the unfairly perceived mundane and repetitive lives of ordinary people. We have beautiful pictures on our walls and dream of being in faraway places. The images of context are so convincing, we no longer see the places at all. All we see is ourselves being in a place, which, in all likelihood, only exists in the surface of the printed page. The images of unspoiled landscapes are images of hope. They are Mendelssohn’s “Songs without words.” They exist in the same unknowable realm, and a delusion is not reality. They are fantastic in the truest sense of the word – fantasma. They are, ‘the ghosts,’ Floating
in and out of our world. It is in this way that we find the beautiful landscape completely contradictory with an obviously manipulated image because the manipulated image often tells the whole story, the dream, without leaving enough space for our own imagination, our own fantasy. It is by now obvious that photography, as we once knew it, is completely over. The much bigger question is how do we respond and what does it mean. The movement from making images to sharing them has similarities with words moving from poetry to conversation, from distilled concentrate to randomization. With this process, what it seems to imply, is the collective consciousness. The group production and sharing of imagery believes spontaneity paramount and active engagement to produce quality automatically. Reportage is elemental and sharing or (broad) casting is now nearly a responsibility. The random recording and accidentally produced is considered the final product and is accepted as having different, newer and even higher levels of quality than were used to measure earlier more static forms of the medium. We are, however, clearly, in a very dynamic transition. One minute fascinated about the latest video to arrive on our devices and the next standing in long lines and battling crowds to see a group of 100-yearold impressionistic paintings. We want the mood and the emotion we can garner from a few extra seconds with a still image and yet jump to participate with the violent interactivity of a video game. Above all other video games, we love playing the nightly news. Always harboring the mistaken conception that by watching, something will change. When watching the thunder of images washing across our screens the only thing that changes is us.
“If you come close to the truth, there are consequences.� Dorthea Lange
GARY DWYER EDUCATION MFA, School of Art, University of Denver - summa cum laude BLA, School of Landscape Architecture, New York State University BFA and BSLA, Syracuse University - cum laude Web site http://www.garydwyerphotography.com Before turning his efforts entirely to photography in the late 1980’s, he had a career as a sculptor engaged in large-scale commissions: ‘Marker for the Site of an Ancient Spring.’ l’île de Vassivière, Sponsored by the French Ministry of Culture, Paris. 1982 ‘Angular Unconformity’ Stone and earthwork – 9th and Hope Street. Commissioned by the Community Redevelopment Authority (CRA) The City of Los Angeles. 1983 ‘Miwok Link’ A Ten Acre Landscape / Earthwork for the San Geronimo Water Treatment Plant. Commissioned by Inter-Arts of Marin (California) ‘Garden for the Blind’ on the North Sea Coast. Cuxhaven and Bonn, Germany. 1984 ‘Memorial for the Last Battle of World War II.’ The Place of Broken Promises - Rave Na Koroskem, (Slovenia) Now a National Monument of Slovenia Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Belgrade. 1985-85 ‘The Garden of Time.’ Minnesota State Prison for Women, Shakopee. Commissioned by the Minnesota State Arts Board. 1989-1991 ‘The Seven Sisters’ Waiting Room - Mission District Police Station. Commissioned By the San Francisco (City) Arts Commission 1993-94 In 1987, he photographed two climbing expeditions in the Himalayas. (Sponsored by REI.) In 1992, he photographed the Botanical Survey Project on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic (Sponsored by York and McGill
Universities and the Province of The Northwest Territories.) In 1994, he documented World Heritage Sites for UNESCO in Vietnam. (Nguyen Imperial complex, Hue.) While a Resident Artist at the American Academy in Rome in 2005, he photographed Architecture in Danger of Disappearing in Italy, for The World Monuments Fund. (The work was exhibited in New York and Paris.) HONORS , FELLOWSHIPS AND RESIDENCIES The MacDowell Colony – Fellowship. Peterborough, New Hampshire. Institut De France - Fellowship - Academie Des Beaux Arts - Paris Lila Wallace / Reader’s Digest Fund - Fellowship - New York Tyrone Guthrie Centre - Fellowship - Annamakerig, Ireland Cité Internationale des Arts, and the American Center - Residency - Paris Department of Housing and Urban Development Design Award American Academy in Rome Resident Artist National Endowment for the Humanities Urban Architecture Fellowship American Society of Landscape Architects Design Merit Award Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) with The Rockefeller Foundation SELECTED PUBLICATIONS - PHOTOGRAPHY 2013
Forty books on the works of Gary Dwyer are available on:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/gary-dwyer/id265388372 and http://stores.lulu.com/dwyergc Also on Amazon, Blurb, Viovio, MagCloud, Issuu, Barnes and Noble 2014 2009 2008 2008 2007
Seeing / Thinking / Living San Luis Obispo Museum of Art Best of Photography 2009 (book) International Photographic Biennial, Nancy, France Image08, Vevey, Switzerland “Atlántica Colectivas”, Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain
2006 World Monuments Fund - New York and Paris – http://www.wmf.org/project/temple-portunus 2004 International Photography Awards Advertising Photographer of the Year “Lucie Awards” Los Angeles. 2004 Santa Fe Center for Photography http://www.sfcp.org/programs. 2002 Gary Dwyer Photography http://www.calpoly.edu/~gdwyer 2000 Landmarks of Slovenia http://www.burger.si/ RavneNaKoroskem/FormaViva_a5.HTM 2000 Community Redevelopment Authority City of Los Angeles http://www.crala.org/internet-site/ Other/Art_Program/artist_list/gary_dwyer.cfm 1995 UNESCO, Nguyen Tombs, Hue, Vietnam http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/678 1994 Landscab og skulptur, #2 - Spring, Denmark 1993 Landscape Journal, Summer, Berkeley 1992 Metropolitan Home, April, New York 1991 The Architectural Review, ‘Land Art’ April, London 1990 Landscape Architecture Magazine, February (cover and feature article) Gary Dwyer’s work has been exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, The Oakland Museum in California and is in the collection of La Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris and the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
All photographs and text in this catalog and in the attendant exhibition copyright Gary Dwyer © 1914
This exhibition was only possible with the generous assistance and support of Odile Ayral, Brian Ackerman, Skip Moss and Spectrum Color Images. Sincere thanks to the staff of the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, especially Ruta Saliklis and Rebecca Leduc.
Seeing / Thinking / Living
Gary Dwye r San Luis Obispo Museum of Art 5 July - 31 August
2014