Daniel Gordon Gets Physical | "New York Close Up" | Art21

[DUMBO, Brooklyn]

[Daniel Gordon, Artist]

[Daniel Gordon Gets Physical]

When I was in college, I did a couple of things

to try to understand the mechanics of a photograph.

And then, pretty early on, I hit on this thing.

I realized that I could make myself fly, through photography.

That was one very specific idea,

that you set up a camera,

you're photographing an event

where the camera kind of transforms

what's in front of the lens.

And something happens,

and that thing that was there didn't happen,

or didn't look like what it is in the picture.

It's a fiction and a truth at the same time,

and I think it was that transformation

that really drew me to photography.

I did not set out to have a studio-based photographic practice.

I developed, over many years, a process that enabled me

to attempt to do that transformation in my own way.

I was shooting with continuous lights, 8-by-10 slide film,

and they stopped making the film.

So I had to switch to strobe lights,

which is just the flash and you can't see what the shadow is doing.

And so I had to kind of paint the shadows in myself.

And then I started tweaking the colors

and kind of them more of a part of the composition,

and just getting wild.

[shutter clicking]

So, the first picture that I made using found images

was of a picture of a toe transplant operation.

When I was a kid, my dad who was a hand surgeon

made lots of photographs of his cases.

They were just like totally gory and crazy looking,

but fascinating.

Yeah, I really like this picture.

I don't know if this is a toe transplant operation,

and I don't know if my dad is this guy,

or the guy taking the picture.

And it kind of came full circle,

transplanting a toe into a thumb

and transplanting images from online into physical space.

So I thought, what if I could kind of

transport these images that probably had no other life

other than the life that they've had online,

and give them a body--

give them a form in real life.

This is my wife Ruby's silhouette,

taken two weeks ago

by me.

There's been a lot of talk about appropriation,

in a critical sense.

But I like to think about what I'm doing as, like,

an optimistic version of appropriation

where I'm kind of naive.

The images are all ground up and blended together in a way that

the history of them is not important.

What I do want somebody to think about is just the picture.

It's not that one can't have a really compelling conversation about art

in the world via appropriation,

but I do think that as I continue to make pictures

I've been allowing things to be more beautiful--

allowing those relationships

between physical things within a photograph

to kind of make meaning.

[shutter clicks]

I never really know what I'm going to get,

even though I spend so much time with it

in the process of making it.

I kind of like not knowing,

and then getting the film back and being surprised

by how it morphs from, kind of,

jumble of pretty shoddily-made stuff

into something that does have depth

and substance

and kind of turns into something real.

It's really transformed through making the photograph.

I mean, I'm happy about this

black kind of blend in

to the foreground and the background,

and have the white blend in

with the foreground and the background.

I like it.

I'm really interested in those points

where one extreme meets another extreme,

and you're not quite sure what you're looking at.

The transparency will be drum scanned,

which is just a very good scan.

And I work with Anthony from Green Rhino.

We'll do, like, four or five meetings,

starting with small prints,

just to work on the color.

We can color correct for specific parts.

So, say the reds aren't quite the right red,

we can select that part

and make it correct.

But, more or less what we're doing is just

correcting it to make it look like

what it looked like.

Looks good.

It is interesting

how I spend ninety-nine percent of my time in process--

finding images,

printing them out,

constructing them into a three-dimensional thing,

photographing that,

processing that film,

scanning it on my little scanner,

making a print,

looking at it on the wall--

and how little time

I get with the actual work.

If I'm lucky, it's in a show,

and I get to look at it

while I install it,

and spend a little time with it.

But the final thing does really matter,

and it's important that it resolves,

in the end,

as a print.