photography – Gary Engle

Because I usually prefer a square print and work with rectangular negatives, I have to pay particular attention to cropping. I hardly ever see the edge of my image through the lens. When I shoot I am drawn to an element of light and I place it within the lens frame where I think it might eventually be in the print, but I’m not fanatical about it. Cropping in the dark room adds another stage to the creative process. It can be done with a degree of deliberation not possible when shooting in the field in ambient light that is always changing.

In determining the edge of an image I consider three options: closed frame, open frame, and broken frame. Which option I choose isn’t just a matter of where I place the edge of the image. It’s really a matter of how the edge interacts with the overall composition of the photo.

Closed Frame
A closed frame implies nothing outside the frame has any particular relevance to the image. The image is complete unto itself. In general, such images are carefully composed with the attention of the viewer directed toward specific elements. In complex images if the eye is tempted to explore, there are elements to direct it away from the edge and back into the center of the image. Such framing is the most conventional type and is the mainstay of studio work and commercial photography. Closed frame pictures are the closest to pure artifice, creating a reality sufficient unto itself that may or may not have anything to do with the real world the viewer occupies.

Open Frame
An open frame creates the impression that the subject of the image is only part of a larger reality beyond the edge of the picture, as though one is watching life unfold through the arbitrary constriction of a window. It allows for the possibility that the focus of the viewer’s attention may be anywhere within the image, even–in the extreme–outside the image itself. Open frame compositions may appear more chaotic than closed frame compositions and have the effect of making the viewer consider the relationship of the image to the real world of which it is only a limited reflection.

Broken Frame
An image with a broken frame both has and doesn’t have an edge. This is accomplished by printing an image with some white space at the edge so there is nothing to mark the boundary between that part of the image and the paper it is printed on. Such images are rare. When I first began printing in this way, I met with resistance from viewers disconcerted by their inability to tell where the image ended or began. To requests that I reprint such photographs, burning the white sections until a clear edge appeared, I politely declined. It is important to me, in such photographs, that the paper isn’t just a surface on which the image rested but is itself an integral part of the image.

Over time I have become more interested in broken frame, particularly in the photo abstractions of the series Obsessive Emulsion Disorder. Without a clear and complete edge, an image seems not entirely artifice but actually fuses with the world of which it is an assumed reflection. When looking at such an image, we are not only looking at the world through art, we are looking at the world itself. Such images also serve to remind the viewer that when we look at the world itself, we are looking at art of which our consciousness is an essential part.

I do not consider myself a documentary photographer because I do not believe photography has a documentary imperative. From a spiritual perspective, to grasp at life in order to create some sort of permanence is a misperception of reality, so to believe the camera preserves a moment in time is to believe photography perpetuates a delusion. Life is a process of perpetual becoming, of infinite creation. Life is art, and the meaning of art is the process itself: from inspiration, through creation to perception by another. This is the meaningful narrative arc repeated endlessly through the illusion of time. Photography can only tell the truth if it affirms this.

So if I am not documenting the world with my camera, what am I doing? Perhaps an explanation of how I became a photographer will help make it clear.

In the early 1990s I attended an exhibition of Ray Metzker’s landscapes at the Cleveland Museum of Art. The work literally took my breath away. The illusion of time disappeared in the viewing of his images and I felt completely alive.

Being artistically and spiritually naïve, I thought the proper response was to incorporate what I had seen into my sense of who I was. So I went into the woods with a camera to re-create a “Metzker Landscape,” working first with a 35 mm pentax, then a toyo 4 x 5, and eventually a deardorff 8 x10. Such folly was a form of grasping and could only end in failure.

Re-creating Metzker’s work was, of course, impossible, but I kept shooting and processing and printing because these activities themselves engaged me. Over the years, my work improved so that I eventually began to take pleasure from looking at my images. What I experienced when I saw them was not to remember Metzker’s remarkable photographs, even less to remember the subject of the particular picture I had taken. My delight (if that is the right word) came from the resuscitation of the feeling of making the photograph. Not that seeing the images made me remember standing in the river or field with all of my senses engaged, experiencing the light, handling the equipment and calculating the aperture and speed. What I experienced on viewing the images was the recreation of the feeling of being fully in the present moment—in short, of being completely alive.

This is what I seek in any work of art I view: the experience of being fully in the present moment. It is all that I hope to provoke in others through my own work.

One of my chosen media for this is the darkroom. Whether the subject of a photograph arises by means of the camera from the world around me, or without the camera from the infinite potential of the film emulsion itself doesn’t matter. What does matter is being completely alive.

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Rocky River Basin, a portfolio of images, was published in the Fall 2015 issue of Still Point Arts Quarterly. Recent work can be seen in Art Through the Lens, Yeiser Art Center, Paducah, KY running June 20 thru August 1, 2015, and in Photowork '15 at the Barrett Art Center, Poughkeepsie, NY June 20 thru August 8, 2015. New work is included in the 4th annual Jackson Hole Photography Competition, Jackson Hole Art Association Gallery, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, April 17-May 22, 2015.