The Weekly Photograph #17
A Letter to a Photographer
Entry #17 from The Work
New Entrance, near Corbin, Kentucky, 2024
30x40”
pigment print from 8x10” transparency
Dear Jill,
Your work has remained important to me, but especially early on as a younger photographer who was uncertain about my own path. Seeing your stuff helped give me the confidence that “I could do it.” I think this was because the environments you worked in and wanted to photograph were similar to mine. I must have felt the same proximity to the same apparitions which called on you to photograph places on the edge of appearing, or more importantly, disappearing into a pile of rubble, which too can be a photograph! Anything can be photographed, I think that’s what I learned from you. The documentary mode of image making is a varied one with styles running the gamut from the deadpan to the enigmatic, the latter which can find itself teetering on the brink of comical. Thank you for showing me the fine line between the overdone and how to carefully navigate the nuanced.
I don’t know how you feel, but the more I work the more I realize that photography is very much a mind game with all these variables and aesthetic choices banging around our head until a few stick together, we see something, and a picture is made. After our discussion, I increasingly value your dedication to the principles of linear narrative in photography. It is an unpopular mode in this current milieu, the giving of distinct voice to either places, or people. The fashion of blending pictures of people, landscapes and still life seems to me to devalue the potency of both extremes (and they as extreme as Pollock is to Breughel) simply to serve some confidently espoused and eternally meaningless, orbiting narrative. Nevertheless, while I have been seduced by its potential, and challenge, I keep returning to more fundamental approaches we have discussed.
I am enclosing my latest book The Grove which I think pertains to this idea. I worked on it, as with Carbon County, with Zatara Press. There are no distractions in this work, no switching from a Teddy Bear to Ruined Building, just the way I saw and felt about a group of articulate trees in Wyoming. The power of photography is to centralize its subjects and slowly chip away at truth through comparison. It is in this area where organic contrasts and dissonances will emerge, not from the clashing of subject matter. The book includes a 24 quatrain poem which I composed in order to somehow reinforce the meaning behind it all.
In addition to the book, I hope this enclosed photograph will stir something in you, both emotionally and intellectually in the mind, for we need both to continue to grow and question what it is we do. The picture contains an ironic depiction text in the land, which I know you are fond of. I tried to give it my own take with the inclusion of the religion element and the strong verticality of the billboard on the right diametric to the empty escaping sky the left. Being a New Yorker, I need to brace the frame with strong verticals!
Remaining true to our most cherished values in creating art.
Will call earlier next time.
Yours truly,
John Sanderson
New York City
1/14/2025
My New Book
“THE GROVE”
CAN BE SEEN AND ORDERED HERE
(free shipping)
Journal introduction from The Work
The American landscape in my time. Thousands upon thousands of miles traversed in search of pictures.
They become pictures when I see something.
Something which cannot be explained in words, only related to on some level of empathy.
Feeling with the light, subject or an arrangement of the two.
Driving, walking, searching deeper and longer for that which eludes me.
What I search for is unattainable.
But what keeps me coming back is the Quest, for those moments where a picture lines up with my imagination.
It is a complete circle.
"To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield." -Tennyson
In other news…
See/listen to new interview with Urbanautica’s Urbanaut Podcast