Phil Bergerson Interview

Interview by Davin Risk

MR: Can you begin by revisiting the process prior to even realizing that you were working towards a book? You were at a point of re-examining where you were professionally and artistically. Was this series of trips, first in Canada and then in the U.S., a way for you to find what you were doing?

PB: Yeah. I think it’s the problem all of us have as we are working through our lives, if you stop at a certain point and say, “What is the value of what I’ve been doing?” You have to be a little older to be able to look back and you have to have done something too. I see what I’ve done and there is a value but it’s fairly shallow relative to what I thought it was at the time of making it. That started me re-evaluating what I was doing and realizing that I still had a lot of time to do anything I wanted. If I thought that other work wasn’t significant on some sort of world level, on some kind of human level, really important in terms of its human significance then I should re-evaluate it. I saw that it wasn’t important except as artwork and being my artwork and me being an artist but what I found always in the greatest artwork was something more significant, something larger that hit humanity on a larger scale.

So, how do you do that? I realized that in teaching and everything else I’ve done, you can’t force these things. I’d done painting and printmaking and a variety of other things before but the thing that I was teaching about all that time and the reason I was doing photography, there was something inherent in it that I really identified with. And I didn’t really understand fully at that point what that was. So I decided to just to go out and shoot. I began to meander around just photographing very direct photographs not knowing if they were going to be the base of some great manipulated thing or what. The slow growth of just building the group of images was great. And not thinking about exhibiting them, not even showing anybody the work, just closing down shop as an artist in terms of what I had done before, no exhibits - no whatever, just let me keep working.

At a certain point, I had accumulated enough that I could sit down and just analyze, “What is here?” I made 16 x 20 prints of everything as I was going along because I wanted to see them in that presence. So I’d spread them out and just look at them. Not look at them for any particular thing, just look at them and try and read what was there and see what was going on. That freedom, without trying to make something of it just brought me to - like you pull out 4 pictures and suddenly you saw that they weren’t necessarily the best 4 pictures if I was going to exhibit them right now but they are really speaking about something more significant. Even as they were sort of awkwardly made, there was something in them that brought me to them. There was something there that I could start to work on. The thing I began to define was that it was some sort of social, cultural “hit” in them. That is they spoke about the culture, the society from which those little fragments came from. I realized that I should actually pursue that.

I began the process of searching a little harder. I would still let myself photograph however, whatever, any way I wanted - at that time I was photographing people also - just do the same process. But I would start putting my radar out, thinking “I’ve got some now done, have I shot anything that has that in it?” And especially when I’m standing in front of something and I’ve shot it I would think, “Okay, what have I done in shooting this and have I got something in front of me that actually has some of those cultural hits but I actually haven’t photographed it?” This simple thing that you know about and you teach about in terms of framing and relationships inside the frame, I started to realize that this is all it is and this is this powerful thing to work with. So in examining the framing suddenly you have these interactions that were saying even more than in the earlier photographs.

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Phil Bergerson has been a professor of photography at Ryerson University in Toronto since 1972. His work has been widely exhibited internationally and can be found in many prestigious collections including the National Gallery of Canada and the Bibliothèque National in Paris. A travelling exhibition of images from Shards of America, organized by the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography will tour North America beginning in September 2004. For more information, check http://www.philbergerson.com