5 minute read
Photographer, Kenny Gray
Mythmaker
By Mamie Pound
Every photograph you see is a document of 1/100th of a second. The photographer engages the shutter to capture what’s in front of him, and for that brief moment, he is blind. The result is the product of a chain reaction, only set in motion by the photographer once he pushes that button.
It’s a bit of performance art – magic really, according to Kenny Gray, whose collection, “My Southside,” will be available to view at the Do Good Fund Gallery August 10th through September 28th. I asked Kenny what inspired him to become a photographer.
“In the late sixties, there was a show at the Museum of Modern Art curated by John Szarkowski,”he says. It featured then-unknown artists, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand. It was called “New Documents.” It was arguably the first time that vernacular photography, personal photography, was considered art.”
Kenny says he started taking photographs as a serious art form in 1977. Back then the process was analog and required film and a darkroom. He describes the process as frustrating, citing the limitations of manipulating the images. “They were always compromised,” he says. There was no Photoshop. But with the advent of digital photography and digital editing systems, many of those problems went away. Kenny embraced the shift. “It’s the perfect marriage of capture capability and technology,” he says. By 1998 he’d fully switched to digital. “With digital, all the barriers disappeared.”
When asked if photographs are fact or fiction, he says he considers them a fiction. “A photograph lacks our 360-degree world of three dimensional sounds and smells,” he says. In other words, it lacks a certain context. Kenny says the interaction between photographer and subject always affects the final result, creating something that’s not quite a representation of reality. It’s part of the process. I got the impression it’s not necessarily conscious, but it is inevitable. Even in that 1/100th of a second, something is captured that will change slightly in another half second.
When Kenny moved back to southside Columbus in the late seventies, he was inspired by its people and their circumstances. He recognized the beauty and intrinsic specialness of the days and nights of everyday life, and in the characters who live their lives in those spaces. This is evident in the fragile, fleeting glimpses of vulnerability in the photos in “My Southside.” In each tiny window of time, there’s fear and hope, pride and brazenness. He must have been within arms’ reach of some of his subjects. In the photograph, “Santa’s Helpers, Christmas Parade,” the candid shot reveals a hundred different impressions of high school cheerleaders. They’re at once distracted, bored, hopeful, preening. The image is unique and universal.
I asked Kenny what makes a great photograph. He said, “It asks questions rather than provides answers. It makes me want to know what happened right before and right after.” The worst art is sentimental, he says, it overexplains, tells you exactly what you should be thinking. “I want my audience to bring the meaning. I don’t want to provide it.” The real power of photography, according to Kenny, is in the fact that people believe.
They bring their experiences to the picture. Kenny says he’s not doing serious photography nowadays. He’s given himself over to writing, of fiction, screenplay, and poetry. Poetry, he says, might be most similar to photography for its metaphoric quality. In poetry as well as photography, you need only a suggestion to evoke a million sensations. According to him, ambiguity is a heavy lifter. Something seemingly small and unimportant can provoke a powerful response. He told me a story about Bruce Springsteen and how he’d always introduce Steve Van Zandt as “Miami Steve Van Zandt.” Someone interviewed Bruce and asked why he always referred to him as Miami. Springsteen responded, “Because he went to Florida one time.” It takes very little to create a myth.
The images of “My Southside,” are similarly mythical. They suggest a time and a place that’s long gone. It can’t be fact, Kenny says. It’s only a two-dimensional representation. You can’t smell the car exhaust, can’t feel the cold December wind of the Christmas parade, the uncertainty of a high school sophomore. You can’t know the pride of a tattooed, shirtless man standing beside a Cadillac with a shellacked alligator on its roof. You can’t hear the cush of the leather seat in which Phyllis sits, just outside the Domino Lounge smoking a Pall Mall.
Or can you?
