Interview with Allan Ellerby

TM: One of the major themes in your work that inter­ests me is this use of the city’s image as a sort of build­ing block.  I believe I referred to them as recon­struc­tions or assem­blages in my intro­duc­tory post to this inter­view. How would you char­ac­ter­ize the way in which you com­bine these images?

AE: Yes, I agree there is a build­ing process but recently, as what I have been doing has gath­ered pace, it is prob­a­bly best char­ac­terised as a flow. Per­versely enough, I don’t think of my work as try­ing to make sense of it all, life that is, I just like to revel in all the com­plex­ity of both the appar­ent sur­face real­ity of what sur­rounds us, but also what lies under­neath. I like to push an image right to the edge of what might be con­sid­ered visu­ally accept­able; the results can be very sur­pris­ing. But recently, when the process has been going well there has been a flow from image to image, which comes in part at least, from the way I work.

TM: Do you find that one image becomes that edge you speak of and do you then push that newly defined limit with sub­se­quent work?

AE: There is a ten­dency for the images to increase in com­plex­ity as they move through one image to the next, cer­tainly becom­ing more abstract. I don’t impose any lim­its on the amount of abstrac­tion but there has to be a point whereby you say this is just no longer inter­est­ing to look at. I tend to work by view­ing the image as a whole, which I think in part con­tributes to the mon­u­men­tal feel they some­times have.

TM: What do you see as the com­mon theme run­ning through the work, par­tic­u­larly these flows as you char­ac­ter­ize them? I mean, you men­tioned that you have an inter­est in the deep psy­chol­ogy of the human con­di­tion, but what specif­i­cally in those depths inter­ests you?

AE: I sense from your ques­tion that you are not quite sure what to call my images, which is ok, as I am not sure myself! The com­mon theme within my work is the way peo­ple cope with city life, but I don’t use por­trai­ture because I want to give the city a mon­u­men­tal qual­ity and then look at the peo­ple of the city within that mon­u­men­tal space. I like to cre­ate a feel­ing of peo­ple flow­ing through the images; they are not fixed within the city, but are pass­ing through it.

The feel­ing I think I strive to cre­ate is some­thing Samuel Beck­ett was so adept at cre­at­ing. It’s the ‘Wait­ing for Godot’ kind of thing where the play­ers are going about their day seem­ingly con­vinced of their pur­pose but never quite being able to pin it down, but it’s ok they are wait­ing. I love Beckett’s phrase, “I can’t go on, I must go on, I’ll go on”. It sounds a bit grim but I think he is describ­ing a basic fun­da­men­tal part of our human­ity, and I think that was his genius. If I can get just a hint of that in any of my images it would make me very happy. The city in my images is also a sym­bol, an abstrac­tion rep­re­sent­ing the world that peo­ple cre­ate for them­selves. There’s a mar­vel­lous line in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series that reads, “Go then, there are other worlds than these”. That had a big effect on me. Even if you ignore the pos­si­bil­i­ties of quan­tum mechan­ics there are at least as many worlds out there as there are peo­ple, because we all con­struct our own world, one way or another. Of course, there are com­mon threads that con­nect us all and those are what I try to tap into.

TM: I dig quan­tum physics, mul­ti­verse the­ory, and all that shit too! The Beck­ett and King quotes made me think of this inter­est­ing cos­mo­log­i­cal the­ory that basi­cally says real­ity works more like a holo­gram, famil­iar with it? The the­ory is built on the work of David Bohm and Karl Pri­bram. In any case, the idea of a holo­gram con­tain­ing the whole within its con­stituent parts seems to speak well, for me at least, to your work in express­ing this notion of mul­ti­ple events and places con­tained within a sin­gle frame. How­ever what I think is even more com­pelling about your work is that these mul­ti­plic­i­ties have a ten­dency break out, maybe leak out is a bet­ter word, from one image to many.

AE: I think what these guys are doing is expand­ing our con­scious­ness. When Hub­ble dis­cov­ered the expan­sion of the uni­verse it also expanded our per­cep­tion of our­selves as well, our place in it all. I’ve always liked the joke of the two men gaz­ing out into space. One says, ‘Ah gaz­ing at the infi­nite vast­ness of space. It makes you feel quite small and insignif­i­cant doesn’t it?’ The other man replies, ‘I don’t need to gaze at the infi­nite vast­ness of space to feel small and insignif­i­cant!’ It’s like ‘an entire uni­verse is here with me’ sort of thing; we can only imag­ine it here and not in some infi­nitely reced­ing void.

Pho­tog­ra­phy has always been about work­ing within tech­ni­cal con­straints. I am still try­ing to rep­re­sent the four-dimensional world in two dimen­sions. It will be inter­est­ing to see pho­tog­ra­phy as the re-creation of real­ity becomes ever more ‘real’. After all peo­ple still paint, but of course it is the attempt to get beyond the sur­face real­ity, which is the fas­ci­na­tion. I wish I under­stood the math­e­mat­ics of what these guys are about, per­haps one day these con­cepts will be as com­monly under­stood as a spher­i­cal earth is today. Wouldn’t that be something!

Your point about ‘leak­age’ is inter­est­ing because that is always with me when I am work­ing with these images – that real­ity is slip­ping, over­lap­ping, merg­ing – so I am very pleased you have picked up on that!

TM: Is the work more tech­nique or con­cep­tu­ally driven?

AE: It would be with­out a doubt ‘con­cept’ before ‘tech­nique,’ every time. Pho­tog­ra­phers can be incred­i­bly anal about the sanc­tity of the cap­tured image, as if the cam­era has cap­tured real­ity and it should not be tam­pered with. Cam­eras always cap­ture what they are tech­ni­cally capa­ble of cap­tur­ing which usu­ally involves a com­pro­mise on expo­sure, and cer­tainly on space (lens choice) colour (white bal­ance) and per­spec­tive (the brain will cor­rect for con­verg­ing ver­ti­cals for exam­ple) com­pared to what the brain per­ceives. That is not to say today’s dig­i­tal cam­eras are not incred­i­bly good, because they are.

Often the untouch­able nature of the cap­tured image is espoused by cham­pi­ons of the black and white image, itself an abstrac­tion. This kind of idea often goes with a fas­ci­na­tion for all the tech­ni­cal aspects. Quite hon­estly, it leaves me cold. The final image is every­thing to me. If it stim­u­lates the imag­i­na­tion, then noth­ing else mat­ters to me and it cer­tainly won’t mat­ter if that image – cap­tured with a strobe 500 bounce­light using dif­fuser umbrella, cross-process mul­ti­tonal film, (tra­di­tional pro­cess­ing) rated at 400 ISO – is found in the bot­tom of someone’s draw fifty years from when it was taken. It will still just look like a pho­to­graph of a cup and saucer, or worse still, a beau­ti­ful model per­fectly lit with a vac­u­ous expres­sion on her face. We’ve all seen that kind of thing. I don’t doubt it intrigues some, but not me. Learn the tech­niques but they are still just tools.

TM: You men­tioned that your work devel­oped out of a more casual start. Hav­ing looked back at some of those images, I was sur­prised to see that the orga­ni­za­tion and pat­terns in the con­structed works is rem­i­nis­cent of some of these ear­lier, straight­for­ward doc­u­men­tary type shots. The ones I’m refer­ring to are the cityscapes and the nature pat­terns — rocks, plants, etc. — that seem to be reprocessed or maybe even coded into the more recent work. Is there a con­nec­tion between these that you’re attempt­ing to make apparent?

AE: Yes your right, this goes back to the build/flow idea. I will blend together any image, and that will include already blended images to cre­ate a new image that gives me what I am after. This re-using of a final blended image can pro­duce a kind of gen­er­a­tional effect; a new mar­ry­ing of images that can pro­duce inter­est­ing results, inter­est­ing to me at least. The whole process can be as quick as trans­fer­ring one image to another. I don’t pause to cat­a­logue which images I am using and there are times when I sim­ply couldn’t say which images have been involved. That would be a ‘tech­ni­cal’ tail wag­ging the ‘con­cep­tual’ dog. Nor do I chase down end­less amounts of details in my images, it would sim­ply drive me mad to cat­a­logue and work the images in this way, and it would rob the process of its spon­tane­ity, which is one of its great joys. I think my col­lec­tion of images is becom­ing a bit like a palette and ask­ing me about which image is in which is a bit like ask­ing a painter how much blue and red he used to paint his sky. To me it has become irrel­e­vant. I don’t like using paint­ing metaphors, but there it is.

As to a con­nec­tion between the city and nature, maybe on some level there is but my nat­ural pes­simism makes me lack any real con­vic­tion for the ‘eco’ recon­struc­tion of the world into a won­der­ful utopian whole. As an archi­tect you have your work cut out there. Over pop­u­la­tion will drive all the argu­ments of the future. The great Amer­i­can come­dian Bill Hicks said that life was just a ride and that prob­a­bly sums up my feel­ings. It can be a hell of a ride though.

TM: I get the impres­sion that there is this urban/natural schism or some­thing going on that, for me at least, is attempt­ing some res­o­lu­tion in the work. I mean, expe­ri­en­tially, the city is quite wild at times, even dan­ger­ous. Then again nature is often con­sid­ered just that, but it also has a roman­ti­cized role of being nur­tur­ing and restora­tive. Both set­tings have a pro­found impact on human psy­chol­ogy. So, is there a les­son or under­stand­ing of either that you’ve arrived at through your work?

AE: Of course for some the city can have a nur­tur­ing qual­ity as well. I think the roman­tic ideal of a house in the coun­try is for many peo­ple a bit fan­ci­ful. I think I now realise I couldn’t do with­out the city, par­tic­u­larly New York. For me the bus ride from New Jer­sey into Man­hat­tan via the Lin­coln Tun­nel is every bit as mem­o­rable as stand­ing on the Cuillin Ridge on the Isle of Skye. It’s some­thing I won’t be forced into a prej­u­dice about, I love the moun­tains but I also love Man­hat­tan. So if my work has taught me any lessons about that con­flict it is to embrace both, two sides of the same coin. Not all cities are such a rich source of imagery as New York of course.

There was an inci­dent that hap­pened when we first trav­elled to New York in 1991, we landed at JFK and whilst we stood by the lug­gage carousel a New York police­man noticed some­one was smok­ing, which is not allowed in the ter­mi­nal. The police­man went up to the man and placed his hand on his gun and said, politely but very firmly, “Excuse me sir, put that cig­a­rette out.” Not want­ing to get shot for smok­ing, he did. I think at that point some small light in my brain clicked on say­ing, “Okay, this is going to be inter­est­ing!” The multi-cultural aspects of New York are fas­ci­nat­ing. Eng­land in many ways is a very stunted cul­ture, class-ridden and full of its own self-importance; small-minded, closed, and unimag­i­na­tive. New York­ers say, “Hey what do you think of the place, it’s spe­cial don’t you think? But watch out it might kick your butt!” I love that about New York.

Another thing I like to watch out for in New York is the seem­ingly self-parodying signs such as ‘One Way Only’, ‘This Is Not A Tree’ and ‘No Stand­ing at Any Time’. I have just read a fab­u­lous book by William Kotzwin­kle called ‘The Mid­night Exam­iner’ which is about the mag­a­zine pub­lish­ing busi­ness in New York. One of the char­ac­ters is a slightly deranged Arab taxi dri­ver who con­stantly ham­mers his car horn on one par­tic­u­lar street because it has the sign ‘Fine For Blow­ing Horn’, that is one to watch out for.

I like to play the noble sav­age game when I’m in Man­hat­tan.  You know, imag­ine I have just stepped out of the deep­est part of the rain for­est and here I am. Times Square! It is that kind of naivety I’m after, that kind of experience.

TM: I’ll keep my eyes open for those signs. Does sig­nage play a more sig­nif­i­cant role in the cre­ation of your images since they already have an imbed­ded meaning?

AE: When taken to extremes it’s a symp­tom of the nanny state ram­pant in Eng­land I hate it with a pas­sion. In my work it is a sym­bol for this cosy kind of total­i­tar­i­an­ism that plagues us. Just let peo­ple sort their own lives out.  We don’t need instruc­tion at every pos­si­ble oppor­tu­nity. Let peo­ple fuck up. It is part of a long-term self-sufficiency process.

‘The Tri­umph of Mam­mon’ shows a mon­u­men­tal city, a tow­er­ing mono­lith reach­ing into a sickly blue sky. At its heart is a strange kind of altar, but in the cen­ter of the image are two red hands stop­ping any for­ward motion toward that altar. There are also signs at left and right for­bid­ding motion in either direc­tion. Over­all, there is a kind of beauty, but on a deeper level it is much more claus­tro­pho­bic, per­haps tomb­like. The sig­nage makes the image work. It has an Old Tes­ta­ment feel to it, hence the title. Of course the fact that it is based on the view from Tiffany’s win­dow in Man­hat­tan means it is not entirely fanciful.

TM: Given the quick­ness and casu­al­ness with which you cre­ate the works, I imag­ine there’s quite a bit that you dis­cover after the fact. Like look­ing back on the work, see­ing some­thing and say­ing, “Ah ha! I don’t remem­ber doing that, but I’m glad I did.”

AE: Oh yes it hap­pens all the time It may be just a tiny frag­ment. Peo­ple have told me they have spot­ted some­thing I never knew was there. Because of the abstract nature of the images, there is an oppor­tu­nity for per­sonal inter­pre­ta­tion, and always the desire to cre­ate a face, which of course we humans have. The face is always the first real point of con­tact we search for hence we find it all over the place. It’s some­thing I love about the process I use.

I may cre­ate an image that will act as a cat­a­lyst and pro­vide an idea that will form the con­cep­tual base for a new series of images. I may cre­ate an image that has the strength to sup­port the devel­op­ment of an idea. The series ‘The Divided Self’ came about in this way. That was prob­a­bly the first of what was a new approach for me. Oth­ers fol­lowed as a con­se­quence of devel­op­ing that idea. A bit of a flow of con­scious­ness I guess. I don’t like to get too pompous about it, but I sup­pose that is really the way it hap­pened. ‘The Divided Self’ is a book by the psy­chi­a­trist R.D. Laing that attempts to explain schiz­o­phre­nia. A cen­tral part of the series is a pho­to­graph of a cadaver on the side of a tour bus in Man­hat­tan adver­tis­ing the ‘Bod­ies’ exhi­bi­tion, which I believe is cur­rently tour­ing the States at the moment. I think you can catch it in Las Vegas at the moment!

The series ‘Con­tra­punc­tus’ took an old pho­to­graphic idea of revers­ing an image and       plac­ing it on itself. I pushed it fur­ther by lay­ing other images on that. An image may fit into more than one idea, the one below being both a rever­sal and an explo­ration of ‘The Divided Self’ theme.

‘The World In A Garage Door’ has con­tin­ued a move into the more abstract.

This image has moved on to sev­eral gen­er­a­tions but still con­tains traces of the orig­i­nal work.

The idea for ‘The Man In The Rock’ series came from a per­sonal involve­ment with some­one I believe is a schiz­o­phrenic. The pho­tographs in this series explores how some­one can be impris­oned within his own delu­sional con­scious­ness yet show glo­ri­ous moments of per­fectly lucid behaviour.

‘The City That Is Its Own Cap­tive’ is a more gothic devel­op­ment but entirely based on lay­ered images.

I like to think the work is gain­ing in strength as it moves on. My brother-in-law made me laugh recently when he told me he looked at one of images that had a hint of Escher in it. He said he made the mis­take of look­ing at it for too long and he fell off his chair and vom­ited. It made me very proud.

TM: I guess you wouldn’t want that image mounted in a stair­way! Has any­one you know who is schiz­o­phrenic seen your work, how did they respond to it?

AE: Yes, that has hap­pened. Schiz­o­phren­ics don’t piece things together the way other peo­ple do. His reac­tion was that it was inter­est­ing, but I don’t believe he iden­ti­fied with it, well, any more than any­one else. I am an athe­ist, proudly so, I don’t believe in demons, gods, or ghosts – other than those cre­ated by us – by the brain, in other words. The prob­lem for schiz­o­phren­ics is how can they per­ceive what their prob­lems are when the very mech­a­nism for cre­at­ing that aware­ness is faulty. It’s a bit like stand­ing between two mir­rors end­lessly reflect­ing back, hence the idea behind ‘The Man In The Rock’. The brain is every­thing for every­one; it gives free­dom and impris­on­ment either in enlight­en­ment or super­sti­tion. We can never step out­side of it any­more than a two-dimensional crea­ture can per­ceive a three-dimension world. Sure we can alter its mech­a­nism (Where is that nice glass of red?), but we never step out­side it. That was really part of the think­ing behind ‘The Divided Self’, the schiz­o­phren­ics’ dis­lo­ca­tion, never meta­phys­i­cal, always phys­i­o­log­i­cal and chemical.

TM: ‘Abalone City’ was one of the first pieces that jumped out at me. The work itself has a tremen­dous amount of per­ceiv­able depth to it, which I imag­ine is increas­ingly dif­fi­cult the more lay­ers and bits you’re work­ing with. So, for me, pieces like Abalone city are work­ing more spa­tially than say, as a col­lage. Even to the point of being spa­tially fre­netic and ever fresh.

AE: ‘Abalone City’ was a fairly sim­ple image to cre­ate, the idea is always the hard bit right! Abalone City is of course New York. It took the same process of com­bin­ing two images. Things can get com­plex with more images but it can throw up some fas­ci­nat­ing results. Apart from the basic form and shape of the things giv­ing us clues to their cor­rect plac­ing within the space of the frame, there are often con­flict­ing van­ish­ing points in the image. There may be a colour tone con­flict such as a warm tone that the eye expects to be in the fore­ground may be thrown to the back by the per­spec­tive. I will often leave these con­flicts within the frame to increase the ten­sion and the fre­netic feel. Fre­netic is good when it comes to New York!

Know­ing when to stop is key because there is a tip­ping point when the image becomes far too detailed, but even at that point I may enlarge a por­tion of the image and find some­thing else totally unexpected.

I would agree with you that the pieces are more spa­tial than the tra­di­tional approach to col­lage. The nature of their con­struc­tion weaves them together in an incred­i­bly intri­cate way, so as you sug­gest I am not sure col­lage is what they are. As to the nature of their cre­ation, yes it can be a very fast process, very spon­ta­neous and often with sur­pris­ing results. I did a com­bi­na­tion of images that led to ‘The Exhi­bi­tion’ and in the right edge of the frame a small lemur like fig­ure appeared, one of those serendip­i­tous things that are a real joy. I love that lucky acci­dent that has always been a part of photography.

There is a famous pho­to­graph by Alfred Stieglitz called ‘The Ter­mi­nal’, a pho­to­graph of a win­ter scene in New York of man work­ing the horse drawn trol­ley ter­mi­nal. There are sto­ries of how he metic­u­lously planned the scene, waited his moment. But to me the thing that ele­vates the image is the fact that at the moment he pressed the shut­ter the man turn­ing the horse and trol­ley car had shifted his weight onto his left foot, lean­ing slightly in synch with the horse and trol­ley. Maybe Stieglitz saw that or had some kind of vis­ceral response to it. I don’t believe that could have been planned, but what­ever, the result was some­thing extra­or­di­nary, spine tin­gling for me. The pho­to­graph was taken in 1893 and here we are still talk­ing about a man sim­ply shift­ing his weight onto his left foot. There is a kind of magic there for sure.

TM: You have some inter­est­ing titles. What’s the rela­tion­ship between the work, its title, and you the artist?

AE: They are a pointer to the direc­tion the image is going in, some­thing of clue to the thought process behind them. Some are tongue-in-cheek like ‘The Assas­si­na­tion of Ansel Adams.’ Some are more seri­ous. One I felt tran­scended the image was ‘Mon­sters Once Held Teddy Bears’ which was a reac­tion to 9/11. The image takes parts of pho­tographs of the Eagle Rock memo­r­ial in New Jer­sey and also of the Port Author­ity Build­ing in Man­hat­tan. Many of the Port Author­ity staff were killed on that day.

My wife Joyce and I were due to fly to New York just three weeks after 9/11. We had booked our flight months before. The scene of dev­as­ta­tion at the World Trade Cen­ter site was huge; even then they were still reg­u­larly wash­ing down the streets because of the dust. Every­where there were posters of miss­ing moth­ers, fathers, sons, daugh­ters, and friends, cry­ing out for some expla­na­tion as to what had hap­pened to loved-ones. And, there were teddy bears wedged in rail­ings. The Eagle Rock Memo­r­ial shows a young girl clutch­ing a teddy bear. I wanted to go a lit­tle deeper and the Teddy Bear motif got wedged in there. I think the title asks what hap­pens to a child that once slept peace­fully hold­ing a teddy bear that, as an adult, can carry out such acts of unimag­in­able cruelty.

TM: What’s so inter­est­ing for me is the seem­ing absence of the teddy bear; as if it is some­thing that once was but now extremely dif­fi­cult to imag­ine being a part of such a person’s childhood.

AE: There is a teddy bear in this image, but your right it has become so embed­ded. The crossed hands are vis­i­ble in the cen­ter of the image. There is a great poem by Philip Larkin on child­hood, I don’t know if you know it?

This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on mis­ery to man.
It deep­ens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

“Man hands on mis­ery to man, it deep­ens like a coastal shelf!” Wow, have a nice day!  Not exactly an opti­mistic world view, but very insight­ful I think.

TM: Are these images places as you see them or as you imag­ine them?

AE: You’re kid­ding me, right! I would love to be able to claim to have visu­alised some of these images but there are one or two that couldn’t pos­si­bly be imag­ined this side of some fairly seri­ous med­ica­tion! They are def­i­nitely an expres­sion of con­fu­sion, which we can all see or imag­ine, but I like to think it’s a beau­ti­ful con­fu­sion. One way or another it is all about imag­i­na­tion. I saw some­thing some­where that said imag­i­na­tion, like a lot of things, needs feed­ing to grow, and if left unfed it dies. I like to think my images are a dif­fer­ent way of look­ing at things, stim­u­lat­ing to the imag­i­na­tion. Feed the imag­i­na­tion, it will set you free!

TM: I like that. Ever con­sid­ered design­ing urban cam­ou­flage? Seri­ously, well half-seriously, cause the urban works con­ceal as much as they reveal. How much of that game is going on in these?

AE: I like the idea of the images con­ceal­ing more than they reveal, I hadn’t thought about them in quite that way. Was it Fran­cis Bacon who talked about art’s pur­pose being to inten­sify the mystery…yes, I like that. Don’t come to me for an expla­na­tion of it all, I am a stranger here myself!

But urban cam­ou­flage sounds good too. Or maybe tee shirts with ‘Mon­sters Once Held Teddy Bears’ on them. Must wear one. I can hear the voice of an irate New Yorker now, “I gotta ax ya…what the hell you talkin’ ‘bout man? What­sat mean!” Well, I wish I knew.

TM: It’s and inter­est­ing propo­si­tion for you I think. Cam­ou­flage is a curi­ous thing. Attempt­ing to blend in through a scat­ter­ing or dis­per­sal of pat­terns and col­ors that on its own would be more obvi­ous. Inter­est­ingly, I think your work is doing some of that, but unlike cam­ou­flage the images can’t return to the con­text that aided their cre­ation.  It’s just too much, no? They need that blank­ness around them to really feel the full force of their energy.

AE: I have been explor­ing the idea of plac­ing the images back in their con­text. I have a series called ‘The Exhi­bi­tion’. The twist is to place them into another image of lay­ered real­i­ties. ‘Cel­e­bra­tion’ and ‘A Brief His­tory of the United States’ are exam­ples whereby there is no divid­ing line between the ‘gallery’ and the ‘exhibit’. The gallery and the exhibit are inter­act­ing on each other form­ing another image of another altered real­ity. The abstrac­tion is car­ried fur­ther with ‘Scat­tered Blue’.

In a sense ‘Cel­e­bra­tion’ is a cel­e­bra­tion of an art work becom­ing com­pletely embed­ded into the world from which it was cre­ated, at the same time both rep­re­sen­ta­tion and real­ity, albeit an altered one. An image that worked well within this frame­work is ‘I Dreamed a City and There It Was’. For me, this brought many ideas together in a sin­gle image.

TM: Well, thank you for your time Allan. It’s been a great plea­sure dis­cussing you work. I’ll be look­ing for­ward to more!

AE: Thank you Tommy for your kind invi­ta­tion to speak about what I am doing. I hope it has been of inter­est. You’ve cre­ated a fas­ci­nat­ing blog and I wish you every suc­cess with it in the future.