Phil Bergerson Interview

MR: You were already thinking about juxtapositions between images but that turning point was in beginning to think more about the juxtapositions within a single image. You’ve almost got three real layers within the work in the book which are: the sequence as whole going start to finish, the paired images or short threads of images, and then within each image there are sometimes stark contradictions and sometimes happy little accidents of things being side-by-side.

PB: The last 5-6 years, I’ve been on a high from just engaging my work. What I had started out wanting to do, that is making something significant, and I had made something significant just for me. So I’d moved something in terms of my own experience of my own work, my own intellect, every aspect of myself. I’d moved that into a whole other plane. And so I had won already. I also realized that I’ve got something that can speak to at that upper level and wow it’s a win, win, win situation. It’s the guts of what it is to make things. All the other stuff of being well known, or making a lot of money, all the things that come with what we see as the quote successful artist are not the core of the beauty, I’d just hit that core.

With the book, I see it as not so much a body of work it is this sequentially structured thing. It isn’t these photographs that I have exhibited in some place put into a book. It’s not the collection of my best photographs. That’s what was inspirational to me when I suddenly realized, I’m actually not just doing this monograph but I actually can create this form that most people aren’t actually working with. For me my greatest interest was in the structure of the traditional one out of Robert Frank’s The Americans and things like that. And it is read. People are reading that. The greatest thing is I have friends who have kids and they keep telling me that their kids are looking at it independent from them and wanting to talk to them about it. That’s such a lovely thing for me. And I know people who don’t know about photography, who are not interested in art so much, are really interested in the book because it somehow speaks to them at their level. And their level not being inferior from the other, it’s just very different.

MR: You said that at one point you were still shooting people as part of this process and in the final result there is a clear decision not to, directly at least, photograph people. There are people reflected in many of the shots, yourself included, but when and what triggered that decision to focus on the things people make, the things people have done, or even the ephemera of humanity as opposed to direct views of people?

PB: That was a huge decision at a certain juncture. The photographs of the early people were pretty good I thought as I was going along and accumulating and looking at them. They quickly got separated into a whole different grouping. I kept them separate and kept looking and trying to understand the same things as I was about the other but what kept happening was that the character of the particular individual was what I was photographing. The nuance of who this person was; the garbage collector standing beside the garbage truck a beautiful photograph, a beautiful guy who gave himself to me in the instant we were talking and as I photographed him. I went to the curator of the National Gallery and was showing him some work and as he began to look at the photographs of the people he said, “You know what? Let’s go look at some work I’ve got.” So he pulls out these August Sander photographs, great great portrait photographer, and they were about the culture of 20’s - 30’s Germany. When I looked at them, I just realized that power that was there that I was nowhere near in terms of my people photographs. But the power in my other ones seemed closer to anything that I’d seen. So that was still rippling forward as I continued to work but at a certain juncture I realized that the amount of energy and time I’m spending on this and that, I’m so far down the road that I think I should make a decision. And when I looked into the photographs that had no people in them, there were more wonderful things talking about humanity there than in the others. I saw that I could still do something in terms of the photographing of people but it was taking a certain amount of time on every trip away from the other. So I decided to stop doing that and the more I then focused on the other the greater clarity there was there. And the greater sense of creating portraits of the people who had made the displays that I was photographing - the quality of portraiture of people who weren’t in the pictures. And that was intellectually engaging on a variety of layers.

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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