Art Drop #6: Giving Up Control
Dual Visions, One Lens: Uniting Perspectives Through a Shared Shutter
Imagine giving up complete control and opening your creative eye to pure collaboration. Could you resist the urge to influence someone else’s contribution? Could you hand over your element of the work, trusting and valuing the other person’s artistic input above your need for control over the final product? On the flip side, would you ensure your portion of the work is not pulled into the direction that the other person would prefer it went in?
We took on these challenges for this month’s art drop inspired by one of our favorite photography publications, F-Stop. The theme of F-Stop’s recent Issue #121 was Collaboration and featured fifteen pairs of photographers working together in a range of different ways – sometimes using a central theme, or call and response, as two examples – to deliver an online exhibition of their partnership.
SETTING THE PARAMETERS
So how could we interpret collaboration? After much discussion and testing, we eventually settled on utilizing the in-camera double exposure of our Fujifilm X-T3 camera with each person shooting one frame as part of each double exposure. For one image, Tom would take the first photograph and Diana would then complete the double exposure. For the next image Diana would shoot the first frame before handing the camera to Tom to complete it, and on and on it would continue. The strategy here was that each of us had the opportunity to set up the other as well as getting the chance to close out half of the compositions.
And so on a misty, rainy, colorful day of peak autumnal foliage we went to Skylands in Ringwood State Park in New Jersey. It started with a self portrait – or portrait of selves? Then the real work began.
Over the course of two hours we had a collaboration session that was surprising and unexpected, measured and deliberate, a give-and-take happening within the camera we passed back and forth. By the end of the shoot we had only made 18 photographs, less than the equivalent of a small roll of film, a far cry from the hundreds of photos we could easily have taken between us if we were shooting independently.
ART DROP #6
Our 16th photograph from the shoot is our print offering for this month’s art drop. The entire collaboration will be presented in full in our newsletter next week so you can see the photographic conversation unfurl through trial and error and success, but for now let’s look deeply at our newest work, Layering for Fall.
Layering for Fall
Ringwood, NJ, USA
by PappasBland
Rain, trees, mist, meadow, tree, autumn, fresh air – it’s all here, harmonized into a single view of a landscape. Whose photograph is it really? Neither one of us would have captured it on our own and we are unable to deconstruct it into who-shot-what. But we love the result, and how this melding of our images has created such a painterly piece. We have a feeling more collaboration is in our future.
Prints are only available of Layering for Fall until November 7, 2023, with no further production of this work for at least a year after the close.
Thanks for reading and being here for this inaugural PappasBland collaboration! We are particularly keen to hear any feedback on this piece and our process, and if you have any similar experiences or anecdotes to share please leave them in the comments.
We’ll be back next week to unveil the complete shoot.
Bye for now,