IN CONVERSATION
For a few months now, Anna and I have been discussing her practice in preparation for her most recent solo show in Mexico City titled Topografías y otras ficciones. As we have been navigating concepts around the notions of landscape and the role of the image in the construction of truth, our exchanges included topics such as the body and its relationship with space, methods of reshaping space through photography, as well as the potential of merging sculpture and photography to rethink the environments that construct the unquestionable truths under which we guide our existence. This interview compiles key points from our face-to-face and written exchanges while capturing insights into the artist’s current approach to her work.
Janila: Reading about your practice I found this definition of photographic construction as an “agreed upon logic between land, truth and image.” How is this understanding of image-making represented in your work and process?
Anna: I think about photography fundamentally as a process of construction, even for images with subject matter generally considered documentary. When I talk about an agreed upon logic between land, truth and image, I am considering how photography has been used as a tool to define, map, and index, how images because of their ability to mechanically represent have always been tied to reality. Thus landscape photography, as both a genre and a singular object, is an entanglement between land, truth and image, wherein the photograph has been historically understood as a direct means to know and define land. In my work I aim to loosen this entanglement; I create clearly fictitious landscapes that exist more in an implausible than a rational realm.
Janila: You also describe the image as a “trace of truth” and photography as a tool to reshape perception and generate other worlds. Can you elaborate on what inspired your interest in creating fiction through photography? How has this influenced your approach to photography?
Anna: I think this is a really great continuation to the last question. Photography’s ability to so faithfully and precisely replicate its subject, has obviously made it an indispensable tool for science and documentation; yet this same quality also makes it a generative medium for working with fiction and creating uncertainty between what is real or fake. Photography, historically and for me personally, has always had a connection to magic. The ways in which light, chemicals and time coincide to produce a fixed image is alchemical, it is a transmutation of matter. So photography is inherently a medium aligned with metamorphosis and the changing of physical reality (fiction).
What attracted me to photography as a medium is this ability to build and construct fictional spaces that immediately, unlike for example a painting, have a relationship to the real. An image always in some way seems plausible, believable and I think that is what makes it such an effective medium to re-imagine existing ideas and structures.
Janila: We’ve talked about the landscape as a point of view, with a beginning and an end, as an image that manifests a way of seeing reality, but not reality itself. How has this concept of “landscape” and its production influenced your work?
Anna: The image doesn’t just reflect the world, it produces it. And though it has historically been used as a means to order and verify the existence or materiality of people, objects, and places, it can also be used to take apart and rebuild these same orders and verifications. I frequently focus on the landscape, producing images of monolithic rock formations or mountainous horizons. These landscape images are not based in real spaces, but constructed from plaster, wood, paper and other materials. My aim is to disconnect the landscape photograph from its direct relationship to the real and to understand it as a way of seeing reality. The landscapes I make are a manipulated reality, they explore the subjectivity and mutability of defininging the real.
I focus on landscape because for me it was a dominant part of my photographic education. I was trained to read images and gauge their value in comparison to Edward Weston’s dunes or Carleton Watkins’ Yosemite. My dad is also a landscape photographer, so I learned that this is what photography is, but it wasn’t a photography that I connected to or felt welcomed into. It wasn’t a way of making images that reflected my reality or my own relationship to the world. My constructed and fabricated landscapes not only rebuild the landscape as a pliable and fantastical space but also rebuild my own relationship to the image.
Janila: Following the idea of fiction, where images can create worlds and landscapes for the body to feel and express itself better, how are your own body, identity, and sense of scale reflected in your image-making process?
Anna: In my recent work with landscape the body appears in two distinct ways: performative photographs of myself within sculptural sets that depict landscapes and a series titled Topografías paralelas in which I connect cropped sections of a body builder’s flexed muscles with mountain silhouettes. In both of these the body exists in states of transformation and instability, which for me connects very clearly to queer traditions of metamorphosis within art and literature. Though the point of departure in this work is landscape and concepts of photographic truth, it is also an exploration of queer topographies and/or the queering of topographies. It takes into consideration the ways in which standard organizations or definitions of bodies and space are often incongruent for queer bodies and there is an inherent need to seek out or build congruent spaces. For me queerness represents malleability, questioning, and destabilization of fixed categories. The permeability between animate and inanimate in my work is an expression of this, a way to understand both the body and its physical surroundings as flexible and unfixed.
Janila: Your recent work shows a shift towards more spatial and volumetric representations. When did your photographic practice start to become more sculptural? How has this changed your perception of space and its capture through images?
Anna: My photographic practice has, in some ways, always involved sculptural components, even if, in the past, I may not have labeled it that. When I was first learning photography and in particular studio lighting, I would purchase second-hand objects or furniture and/or borrow items from the theater department at my college to build sets in the studio. I did this without thinking about any relationship to sculpture, though there was a clear interest in objects, installation and constructing space. I later took a few years away from directly working with photography and worked on projects in sculpture and video.
When I started making images again I naturally integrated more sculptural methods and began constructing sets from scratch instead of building them from things I could find. This pushed me to further investigate photography’s relationship to construction and sculpture, and in particular the way the image flattens 3-dimensional space into 2-dimensions. I find it particularly interesting that some of the first photographic images were of busts and statues as their static nature worked well for the long exposure times of early cameras. I am currently thinking a lot about how a photograph depicts an object or subject and yet how that same object or subject is actually physically absent when looking at the image. Through my current studio work in sculpture and photography I am seeking ways to express and make physical this absence of the object.
About the writer: Janila Castañeda is an independent writer and editor based in Mexico. Her research focuses on exploring concepts around spatial theory, expanded sculpture and sensorial readings of space. She is the founder and editor of BLOQUE, an editorial proposal focused on new ways of thinking, speaking, reading and writing about sculpture. She holds a master’s degree in Narrative Environments from Central Saint Martins, UAL, and a master’s degree in Curatorial Studies from the University of Navarra.
About the artist: Anna Berenice Garner’s work combines performance, sculpture, photography, and video. Born in New York (1982) and raised in San Diego, CA, Anna currently lives in México City. One person exhibitions of her work have been presented at Lateral, México City, México, Lighthouse Works, Fisher’s Island, NY, and ltd los angeles, Los Angeles, CA. Anna’s work has been included in thematic exhibitions at Simone Subal Gallery, New York, NY, Museum aan de Stroom, Antwerp, Belgium, The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, and Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ. Her work is held in the collections of The San Diego Museum of Art, The Federal Reserve Board, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and The National Museum of Women in the Arts.