Interview: Allison Grant

Careful examination always rewards the viewer of Allison Grant‘s enigmatic photographs. Her images keep no secrets, but they do speak in a kind of code that has to be mulled over a bit before its full meaning can register in the conscious mind. Her two latest projects, Unsoiled and The Nature of Instability, toy with our ability to distinguish between natural and unnatural elements in outdoor environments. Like puzzling over a Buddhist koan, our initial confusion is always compensated with a higher level of enlightenment, a more refined awareness of the things that make up our universe and their origins. Grant recently took some time from her busy schedule to share with me her techniques, inspirations, and some exclusive images from a new project!

How did you first become interested in exploring this ambiguous boundary between the natural and the synthetic?

In 2006, I moved to Chicago from suburban Cincinnati and began photographing in Chicago’s parks and forest preserves. For whatever reason, I was never drawn to photograph urban life and found myself turning to the park systems as a way to exclude the city from my pictures. Spending time in these spaces caused me to reconsider how I defined nature. Without really realizing it, my impression of the natural world had been almost entirely shaped by the region of Ohio that I had grown up in and the photographs of wilderness that filter through our media culture. I conceived of nature as a place that remained unused by human beings because that is how it appeared in photographs and in the undeveloped plots of land that make up much of the Ohio landscape.

In Chicago, I was photographing in spaces that were specifically set aside for recreational use. These places are heavily trafficked and littered with trash. Deer and other forest animals that live in the preserves are tame and will come right up to you. Suddenly, the idea of “nature” was reconfigured in my mind. Instead of being places that were uninhabited, wild, and free of people, these spaces were anything but.

2006 was also the year that Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth was released. At the same time that my thoughts about the conditions of the natural world were shifting, the topic of global warming was becoming part of a major public discussion about our sense of interconnection with the natural world. I decided that this idea was compelling enough to give it some deep thought and began making pictures about nature and what “nature” means shortly thereafter.

The photos in both Unsoiled and The Nature of Instability seem to employ a kind of self-destruct dynamic. What I mean is they create this strong initial impression of a beautiful, almost idealized landscape, but they also provide subtle hints to their own inauthenticity. Do you think these images can be appreciated purely at face value (i.e. as just a natural scene or just an arrangement of man-made objects in an unusual setting) or is the viewer’s recognition that an illusion is being created/dispelled necessary for a full understanding of your work?

I think that recognizing the illusion in each image is a key part of understanding my work. I try to allow the materials or objects that I place into my pictures to simultaneously enhance and interrupt the romanticized “natural” settings that I work with. I am actively trying to use artifice as a way to question the authenticity of a common type of nature photography that can be found throughout our image culture. This imagery emphasizes the pretty and panoramic rather than the harsh and hostile aspects of the natural world.

Do you ever have to re-shoot something because it looks too real or too fake? How do you go about striking the proper balance?

Absolutely. This is one of the biggest challenges in my work. It is very important that each photograph has an illusion that is both deceptive and translatable, but the image must remain interesting after the artifice is figured out. I keep an archive of images and materials and it often takes 5-10 recombinations or more before one of my photographs seems to satisfy all of these criteria. Some images never come together, and I end up throwing out ideas entirely.

It is worth mentioning that I do include some pictures in my projects that are less illusionistic than others are. One example of this is the image Macintosh Forest, which is a picture of a screensaver that comes standard on Macintosh computers with a piece of green mesh plastic draped over the screen. Though the material does not faithfully mimic tree foliage, I think that there are confusions of space and scale that are intriguing and metaphoric. I try to mix images into the project that surprise and disorient viewers so that the level of illusion is not completely consistent throughout.

In a way, it seems like you have an advantage over straightforward nature photographers since they are largely at the mercy of the universe to provide them with substance for a beautiful image whereas you are free to supplement it with whatever materials you choose. Do you feel like being able to stage your photos gives you more freedom or do you still feel constrained by the standards of natural beauty?

Ha! Nature photographers do face different challenges than I do, but I think that most photographers are equally at the mercy of the universe regardless of what they are taking a picture of. But you bring up an interesting point about the difference between a constructed photograph and a straightforward photograph. Because many people interact with pictures not just as viewers, but also as creators, there is often a sense that the photograph bears witness to a particular place or event. For example, if someone photographs a flower in her back yard, they have seen that flower, touched that flower and smelled that flower in addition to recording its image. I think that many assumptions about nature photographs are derived from the experience of recording one’s surroundings. There is a sense that nature photographers have traveled to the places they photograph, witnessed the land, and recorded it faithfully.

But, as you say, nature does not always arrange itself for the camera. I am interested in the ways this “faithful recording” follows particular conventions of natural beauty and, in many ways, defines nature through a set of pleasing compositional elements, tones and colors. Because so many pictures of “perfect” nature circulate through our lives, we come to expect the natural world to conform to a sensationalized and fictionalized vision.

I see my work as seeking a “perfect fiction” that is analogous to the nature photography aesthetic. Although I don’t always have to endure the physical hardship of dragging a camera to a remote location or spend hours waiting for the sun to set in exactly the right place (although I have done this for pictures), when it comes to the standards of natural beauty, we are seeking nearly the same effect. Of course the difference is that I leave behind visible traces of my deceit.

In your statement for The Nature of Instability you make a very interesting argument: “There is a troublesome impossibility to the idea of the natural world exhibiting a sincere embrace of the synthetic. Even in the illusions of these photographs, it is difficult to reconcile a true sense of peace between the artificial and natural forces that meet to create the scapes of our world.” Are you troubled by encroachments of the synthetic into the domain of the natural in your daily life? Are your photos an attempt to reinforce/clarify the boundary between these two forces?

What I find problematic is the ways we have been able to distance the idea of production from the natural world. We think of the wood that our houses are built with or the food on our plates as products from a store, not materials derived from other life forms and natural systems. Nature is able to remain, as an idea, outside of our day-to-day experience. For me, the troublesome impossibility is that we cannot see ourselves as entwined within the systems of nature.

Are you typically inspired by a particularly pretty setting into which you then decide to insert some kind of synthetic aesthetic analogue or vice versa?

Initially, I think that the allure of nature photography was what interested me. Now that I have been working with the same ideas for a few years, I think my inspiration goes both ways. Sometimes I will see objects or materials that inspire me to look for an image to place them into and sometimes the imagery will inspire me to seek out a particular type of material.

What is your process for setting up these scenes? What does it feel like to adorn nature with these objects? How do you “cover your tracks” so to speak after the shoot is complete?

I try to be very economical with my setups. I am not trying to achieve the look of a diorama or a set that has been highly constructed. Rather, I prefer to let the simplicity of an illusion be as surprising as the illusion itself. Often my setups look like a pile of trash from any vantage point besides the camera’s and I use natural light or window light rather that staged lighting. I spend a lot of time slightly moving materials back and forth until they are wrinkled in just the right place or draped over something in just the right way.

The process is very exciting when everything comes together. I have actually had bugs try to pollinate or rest on materials that I have set up. Sometimes a bug will return to the material repeatedly, even once it realizes something is fake. I think that the attraction is more to the color or texture of the material, rather than to the shape or feel, because, as I just said, the set-ups don’t usually look real at all. For me, this always affirms how much animate creatures depend on and trust vision as a guiding tool of perception. We trust what we think we see and I love messing with that.

There really isn’t any “covering of my tracks.” The images have only minimal manipulation in Photoshop aside from layer masking, which functions mostly like dodging and burning in the darkroom. I have found that keeping things simple and trying to do everything before I take the picture yields the most believable results.

Are you currently working on any new projects? If so, what kind of themes will they engage? Are they in any way a progression of those you’ve explored in your previous work?

I just started making some new photographs that seem like they might develop into some sort of project. As of now, the images are about the ways the Internet and digital communication simultaneously connects and isolates us. The new work looks very different from any previous work I have made, but many ideas carry over. Much like human beings are disconnected from the systems of the natural world through technology, we are also disconnected from one another through technological communication. I think my new work may explore that idea.