Lloyd Godman - Interviews - CURRICULUM VITAE - © Lloyd Godman

Questions and Interviews.

Interview Questions: Emily Goldthorpe

• How do you feel the roles of photographer and conservationist fit together?

Because photographs communicate in a way no other medium can a natural and effective association grew between the photographer and conservationist. Photographs speak in a way words, paintings and even film cannot, they have always assumed an unseverable link to visual truth and they reference natural beauty and human intervention of the land in a manner that is difficult to deny.

It became a 20 century instinct for most people to photograph the "beautiful" places in nature they visited -  Milford Sound, the Grand Canyon, Uluru etc.  Through "friends" pressure to  on facebook, flicker etc, in the  21st century the instinct is even more pronounced. The taking and online pasting of the images acts as verification of the self present at a particular point in time, in a particular landscape.
However for engaged landscape photographers with a driven concern the methods and issues remain a more intense personal quest - it is the critical eye that defines the landscape in the viewfinder in a manner that escapes most people taking photographs.

• How did you approach the Last Rivers’ Song project? Do you research first about the place or is it a more personal experience?

My research was set as a kid where we camped in the area for summer holidays - you can get the full story on this at  http://www.lloydgodman.net/River/Info/Info1.htm
scroll down - there is heaps of info

• Your work is the most kinetic of the photographers that I am looking at. Every image in Last Rivers’ Song suggests movement, emphasising that nature is in a constant state of transition – this is strongly related to the more intimate perspectives that you use, they emphasise that nature is alive in a way that more conventional landscape photography does not.

This is exactly what I mean by the critical eye.
Two rivers were affected by the Clyde dam,  the Clutha and Kawaru rivers and both had a raw energy with significant rapids and monumental glacial rocky abutments.   For me it was the movement of the river that would be lost when the dam was filled. From the onset, I had a deliberate aesthetic, metaphysical and documentary perspective that I wanted to capture with the project and  often I aimed to achieve this by placing the camera on a boom out in the centre of the river inches above the water and shooting with a long cable release and motor drive. The water and rock had a strong dichotomy - a yin and yang.   The rock was hard solid and contained the water, while the water was soft, fluid wore away at the rock - at times it even threw huge boulders downstream with amazing power. And yet despite the opposites,  there were evident parallels in the veins and ribs in the white water and the lines in rocks that suggested they had once been liquid.  One pointed at the creation of the other and the time scale needed to produce it in a manner where a human life span seemed irrelevant.

• More primeval than picturesque – there is something quite threatening about the Clutha/Kawarau images – was this intentional?

 Absolutely  - They were designed to be sublime and primeval  - threatening  -  a threatened landscape threatening the viewer - That is evident in the scale of the murals, particularly mural 2  below where the visual structure  overhangs the viewer.
 

and the graphic qualities where often the film grain explodes like shrapnel - like in  this  image of Robert Capa -  From this photograph I learned that photographs don't have be sharp or have a rich zone system tonal scale to have sublime power.  For me capturing  the wild river had a similar urgency and power to D-Day

-  I was aware of the work American photographers like Timothy O'Sullivan, Carleton Watkins,   Ansel Adams - using classic photographs as a means of establishing National parks. But rather than emulating these  acclaimed international  landscape photographers, I turned more to NZ  artists who dealt with the spiritual qualities of the land and equated it to black and white, light and dark.  So while there was an undeniable documentary aspect to the work, I was more interested in creating photographs with a bold graphic aesthetic where black and white symbolized light and dark - spiritual aspects of  land and water.

For instance  I remember drawing from this Necessary Protection painting of Colin McCahon - the white T as the sunlit water and the black the rock containing it. The intersection of the Kawarau and Clutha rivers at Cromwell. At the top where the black smudges into the white I saw the water pulling away at the stone, the eddies of current that pull at our life's and there was a sense of movement -  So I used slow shutter speeds to let the water blur and the image fill more with emotion than information. In some cases like panel 5  http://www.lloydgodman.net/River/Gallery/LRS/LRSP5.htm I use special techniques to have exposures of 1-2mins in bright sunlight The structure of the Clutha Panels were often influenced by paintings like  -  Six days in Nelson and Canterbury

• Why did you choose to work in black and white? You use a variety of different photographic processes, how does your choice of project relate to how you create it/what method you use?

 I mentioned some of  this above, but in 1984 colour was still striving to the achieve archival qualities of B&W so this was a factor.

 There is a good article you might want to check out  - B & W magazine, USA - issue 57 - Spotlight feature pages 88 - 95- interview with Dean Brierly you might like to check out
Dean Brierly writes " It is doubtful if Australasia has a more protean, visionary and ecologically committed artist than Lloyd Godman" and there is truth to this  -  I just can't work as an artist creating a populist commercial career where as long as you stick with the same medium and methods a definable style will emerge that one can cling onto like a shipwrecked sailor.  While sticking to relatively set parameters allows one to refine them, it can also act as an obstacle.

So rather than defining the parameters of a project by always working with a set medium and technique - I select a medium that seems to relate to the project -  This has allowed me to create a huge range of techniques which are more often linked through ideas, but also allows them to overlap in a hybrid fashion. 

	For instance at the same time I was producing the large colour photogram works for Evidence from the Religion of Technology file:///D:/Art/htdocs/htdocs/Eviden/Index.htm
	I was using 120 B&W film for the James K Baxter images - file:///D:/Art/htdocs/htdocs/baxter/index.html  As  means of exploring darkness and light in the land that is so evident in Baxter's poetry

• I’m looking at a number of other photographers in my thesis, amongst them John Johns, Wayne Barrar and Haruhiko Sameshima. Are you aware of the work of these photographers? How do you view the work of these photographers/ does your work relate to theirs?

I know of all these photographers and have huge respect for all of them. Each has developed  their own unique visual voice and has a different story to tell, I see my work as a different voice with a different story, perhaps darker and symbolically more spiritual. Actually Haruhiko is special to me - I was working at the Otago Plytech as photographer and in the late 1970s we had a helper arrive via some government scheme  - it was Haru - So I got to work with him for some time. Technically he reminded me of a violinist  - in full control  - he was creating great images then and has done so ever since. I was more the impromptu live dada performance that was difficult to repeat  - and any way why would you - the moment would have past  and for me time, place and events demanded a new approach.
The first time I saw  Wayne Barrar's work in Art NZ I was instantly drawn to them - There was a highly critical eye at work on an altered  landscape that I often saw but did not have time to photograph - he produced some pertinent images that speak of the way we affect the land  - Since then he has continued to refine this vision and the images just get stronger and stronger.
John Johns is a master of the classic photographic images,  tone sings in unison with form.

• How do you feel that your plant sculptures relate to your photography work? You have combined the two mediums in several cases – do you think that there is a connection between photography and nature?

 There are many connections to silver based film and the process of photosynthesis. The connection with photography and nature is they both use light. The cells of the plants grow in a similar manner to the way silver salts grow when exposed to light  also although we only see the surface of a silver print, they both have 3 dimensions where the salts and cells sit over each other, we have layers of vegetation. They both rely on specific temperature, water, chemicals, dilutions and time. There is a whole essay in this.
A digital sensor on the other hand works differently -  Imagine  the sensor is covered with vegetation -each pixel is a tree reacting to light  - that is how the image is recorded - when we displace the trees of a building it is like a dead pixel in the sensor. This is what is happening to the landscape.
In  2006 I wrote ...the largest photosensitive emulsion we know of is the planet earth. As vegetation grows, dies back, changes colour with the seasons, the "photographic image" that is our planet alters. Increasingly human intervention plays a larger role in transforming the image of the globe we inhabit.

 Now I am looking to work more with living plant sculptures -  I have begun to look critically at the number of "concerned" photographers documenting key aspects of threatened landscapes and asking if this in itself is not a threat to the very landscape they propose to be concerned about. With the advent of digital photography and the high numbers of art school graduates  there are 1000s of fine photographers. I am looking to move my work into practical contribution rather than visual comment.

• How has your work been influenced by events in the art world – Earthworks, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, performance art which brought aspects of the natural world  - plants, grass, soil - into the gallery space.

 Here there have been many influences -
For more than a decade I had been intrigued by the technologically simple and environmentally sensitive practice of artists like Andy Goldsworthy, Hamish Fulton and Richard Long, and although they do not use light as part of the process to make images, some works, like Goldsworthy's colour spectrum forest leaf arrangements, provide a poignant response to nature's photo reactions. During this time I had also become aware of artists incorporating living plants in their art activity. Activities like Joseph Beuys "7,000 oaks" project in Germany, Ian Hunter's willow to charcoal to willow project in England, Angie Denes "Wheat Field in Manhattan Dump" and Gustav Mahler's "Earth, Poplars, Grass", demonstrated the direct relationship plants can play in contemporary art practice while contributing positive benefits to the environment the works make comment on.
Some of Goldsworthy's works, where he lies on the dry ground during a passing rain or snow shower and later photographs the marks his body has left on the dry area of earth provided the impetus for the hypothesis for my present work proposal. I was engaged by the idea that a simple natural phenomenon could leave such telling yet ephemeral marks on `nature'.
From here I began focusing on another natural phenomenon that has been central to my earlier work; light. I began considering the essentiality of light to all life forms on the planet, considering how light reacts in the natural environment through photosynthesis, considering the intermediary part plants play in transferring this energy to usable substances other life forms can access , and considering how this process could be explored in my art practice.

During this time I had also expanded my interest in collecting Bromeliads , (a family of epiphytic plants from South America). I began researching the biotic strategies of these plants, particularly the leaf and inflorescence colour change at flowering, the efficient epiphytic system of water and nutrient gathering and retention, and the relationship of these plants to their ecosystem system.
I concluded that while they provided a suitable living emulsion to investigate the image-forming potential through photosynthesis they also provided a conceptual model to juxtapose epiphytic and parasitic behaviors of various species on the planet.
As I began work on the project, it became apparent that the process of forming images on the leaves through photosynthesis is incredibly slow, time-consuming and uncertain. (It can take up to several months to form an image while on some plants images of any kind are difficult to attain). Also there was the added complication that the collection of plants requires daily attention and care. While staying in touch with contemporary theory and practice, it became obvious that I had to devote disproportionate research time to biology, botany and horticulture if the project was to succeed. 
During this exploration, I became aware of the work by English artists Heather Ackoryd and Dan Harvey, where they project UV light onto sprouting grass seed to produce images. I have since corresponded with them about the similarity of our work and in reply, they mentioned that while they had considered the photogram technique, they had never found time to implement it, and wished me well with the project.
During the the initial phase of the project, I also investigated two other potentials using the plant collection. The first was the use of the collection of bromeliads to explore the visual incongruity between the in/organic when they were installed in various unfamiliar locations like industrial sites and museum cases.
The second was the idea of connecting the plants to sensitive electronic devices to record their response to the a changing environment around them and in turn use this response to drive other electrical devices within a gallery context. While his aspect of the work is still under exploration and some progress has been made, it has not progressed enough at the present time.
Electromagnetic radiation (Light) is essential to sustaining life on the planet Earth, and the ability of plants to photosynthesize is a crucial factor in the transference of this energy. Archimedes 287?bc 212 first noted aspects of the pigmentation change in plant tissue due to exposure to sunlight and since then photosynthesis has been central to much speculative and scientific investigation. 
But light is also central to sight, and as such is as essential to the visual arts as it is to the life process. As far back as prehistoric times, the power of light from the sun was recognized and became an integral part of ritual and image culture, became a central icon that crossed generations and race, became the centre of myth and religion and became the centre of life. The Greeks, Empedocles, Leucippus and Democritus were among the first to contribute documented theories on light, and the fascination to explain the phenomenon and its meaning have continued for centuries. 
Until the 1920s, many artists produced representations of light, but from the 1920s there was a distinct difference: Man Ray, Moholy Nagy, El Lissitzky, Len Lye and others initiated contemporary investigations into light itself as a valid medium for art making, an investigation which has continued in various forms through the century to the present day by artists like Ralph Hotere, Christian Boltanski. 
My interest in the theme for this project came from the conceptual amalgamation of two long held personal activities that employ light:
*the process of growing plants (which I had engaged in since 1973, but previously only as a botanical endeavor) 
*and that of photography. (Which has been central to my work since 1974)