Phil Bergerson Interview

MR: Was a square format an intentional choice for this because of its sensibility or because of the intimacy?

PB: I think you can shoot with a square format and not have the intimacy that you’re talking about but for the majority of cases, 95% of the photographs in the book are of that nature and it’s part of what I enjoy. But the idea of working with the square format wasn’t dictated - it could be anything. But as I got into the photographing and started shooting more intensely for this project I realized that the square is a real pain in the ass to try and make compositions and it slowed me down. It made me bring a certain rigor to the process of making compositions that I delighted in. You’re out there doing these things that you know very few people are going to absorb in the pictures but you’re enjoying this, it’s like it really gets your juices going in terms of every one of them being an adventure.

MR: That looseness of traveling and not knowing where you were going next combined with the rigor of having to think more and spend more time on each image is a good balance.

PB: The word methodology, I never used such a word until the middle of my career teaching because it seems to come from some foreign place - that it’s the scientists’ word and you don’t want to use such a word in terms of making pictures. But it is this beautiful word. When you pull it over to what you’re doing you can talk about the process. Before then we would just use the word process - what is the process through which you’ve gone to make the photograph. Often as I’m talking to students, they aren’t aware that their going through a process. As you question them, “What is the process that you used? What did you go through to make this image?” They don’t know how to answer and then slowly when they get to it they realize that they can answer the question and they start talking about it. That becomes this beautiful thing. Once they can describe it, they have that one particular methodology that they can use in another situation. And once they do describe it and I can break it down into two big words, “Is it more intuitive? Is it more analytical?” They will feel that because you’re talking about methodology that it always has to be analytical and I’ll say that it can be either and that inside each of those we can break it down a lot further.

MR: You began with a fairly rigorous editing and categorization process with the work you were continuing to bring back.

PB: Yes, the warm things, the cool things, spatial relationships, specific things like Jesus, tree, whatever else. I just learned that with teaching how good that was. It’s the reading of your photographs, you keep reading into pictures and that’s the problem, you just want to be able to read what is there. So just finding any objective way of looking at the photographs not to think that you would ever put all of those things together for any reason but it teaches you about the work. I then began to pair them and I could remember what might be the five ways I was thinking about that picture and the five ways I was thinking about another picture and now how do those 5 ways interact. You maybe brought them together because of way number 3 or 4 and you’re knowledgeable about that but what happens is that suddenly there is this other wonderful thing in the ones that always get locked together, you never separate them anymore. They are something beyond any of the things you ever categorized or ever thought about the picture.

MR: You’ve said that in the middle of this process you began laying out batches of prints not really knowing where they were going, when did you start thinking in terms of pairs and sequences of pairs?

PB: I had used sequencing. I taught through sequencing, and pairing of images, making diptychs as issues in terms of giving projects to students. The student process is trying to learn about what it is that you’re doing. So, anything that can allow them to get a little more objective about their work is a great process of discovery. Getting them to sequence their work and talking about “Why would you put this one against that one?” or give them a project where they couldn’t give me one picture, they had to give me a diptych — they had to give me two pictures which when put together made a third thing happen. It just changed the whole dynamic of my teaching because it didn’t matter if they made a good photograph. The education through talking to them about what they had done was like gold. And I had used a little bit of that in my own picture making but not until I really understood that I was actually going to make a book.

Robert Frank when he came to the United States for the first time, he brought little books in which he had paired images because he saw that that was a great vehicle for trying to get some jobs - they could look at them and see the way he thought.

Once I began to realize that I was going to use those things, it just taught me so much about what I had done that I didn’t realize I had done. There are things like, a good one is religion, like Jesus is everywhere, I photographed it so often and when I sat down to start putting things together I looked around and thought, “Well, let’s just pull out the Jesus pictures. Where are the Jesus pictures?” And they never made it in the selection process of what I was going to print. Out of like 300 pictures I had 5 but I had shot a thousand. So that made me aware that you think you’re doing something but you don’t know whether you’ve done it or not until you stand back because so much stuff is happening in your mind. That was an incredible learning experience to think that wow, even at this stage I think I’m doing something but I’m actually not doing it. And no one’s telling me, I’m now witnessing it. Every time I went out and I was shooting something, Jesus, or whatever it was, I realized that it’s the fact that this icon is so powerful I would just shoot the thing itself “Boom!” and think I had something. But I was just sort of recording, “This thing exists.” Boom! And that made me understand more about the other pictures that were working so well on many levels. They were working that way because they had so many levels; there were more relationships between elements inside them. So then I was able to actually apply that to the process of photographing Jesus. When I found one I would think, “Is it even worth photographing if I’m just going to copy it? No. So what else is around?” And the more I did that, the more I brought that sort of intense kind of scrutiny to bear on it, it elevated those 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