A Conversation with Award Winner Matthew Baum
Each year we at Castell Photography host an international juried exhibition, each one utilizing a different theme as well as welcoming a guest curator. This year’s competition, “Road”, was conceived and curated by an esteemed champion of photography: collector, dealer, teacher, writer, W.M. Hunt. “Road” is meant to include a wide range of photographs from landscape to portraiture, anything that suggests a journey. Hunt both conceived the theme, curated the 36 chosen works out of over 600 entries, and also chose this year's Juror's Choice award winner. We are so thrilled and grateful to have worked with him, and are honored to call him a collaborator and friend. Enjoy a feature on his award winner, Matthew Baum, below!
Matthew Baum, Land of Lincoln
Matthew Baum, Land of Lincoln, detail
An excerpt from W.M. Hunt's Juror's statement, in reference to Baum's work:
"The best work here is Matthew Baum’s triptych with its sweeping and epic view, limitless as it were. But it has something intangible. It has the weight of Roger Fenton’s “The Valley of the Shadow of Death”, 1855, with its a strikingly modern landscape, blank empty sky and easy rolling line of horizon, bisected by the left leading road littered with cannonballs, detritus that is mute witness to Crimean battle horror. That work is so spooky and deceptive, so simple and so potent. Similarly the Baum sees the lost testimonials worked into the brown earth which has been plowed over and over, with the erasing of histories and vectors of direction vaguely disappearing out of the frame. The details may be lost but not the spirit. The piece is cool, contemporary and chilling.
This is a wonderful photograph.
The road can be full of potential. We hope dreams will come true when we get to our destination. The photographer’s low vantage point can position us at the center of the work. We can take their place and become the protagonist: the seeker, the searcher, the traveler."
READ OUR FULL INTERVIEW WITH THE ARTIST BELOW:
CASTELL PHOTOGRAPHY: We've been looking at your earlier work, and your street photography is particularly nice. Was that your first major body of work?
MATTHEW BAUM: The Eighteen pictures are sort of the culmination of my graduate school experience, though it took me a few more years to call it ‘finished’. Really, it’s still not finished.
From the very beginning of my relationship with photography, my instinct was to wander and make pictures. It started on a long road trip after I dropped out of architecture school. I was about to turn thirty and had no idea what was coming next. I was pretty scared and not handling it very well. So I went on a road trip, which ended up lasting a year and covering 20,000 miles. Very quickly, without any real forethought, photography began to drive the trip.
When I went to graduate school and first became aware of the ‘dialog’ and history of photography, for better and for worse, it kind of corrupted the naïveté of my experience of photography. But after getting knocked around a bit, I committed to developing my interest in making pictures spontaneously in the ‘real’ world, letting the camera guide me. Of course, my attitude towards photography had already evolved by that point.
Ultimately, making pictures became even more interesting within the context of school - with more thinking about what I was doing. But when I’m out photographing and it’s one of the good days, all of that stuff drops away. I just look and shoot. My teacher and friend Philip Perkis says, ‘You can’t shoot and think at the same time.’ I know there are exceptions to the rule, but those moments when I tap into the purity of my first experience of photography are probably still the most intoxicating. Ultimately, it is important for me to have a balance between the two.
CP: The images feel like frozen moments from a play or production, are the people aware that you are photographing them?
MB: To my knowledge, no – the people are unaware of my presence – at least at the moment the picture is made. I definitely try to go unnoticed.
The work is very much in the tradition of street photography – with all that that means. I go out into the world and react to what I see.
Of course, I am doing this in the 21st century, with all that that means. Living and teaching in New York, I have been very aware of the types of work and ideas within art that have dominated the ‘dialog’, so inevitably my work bounces off that in some way. Some of my favorite contemporary photographers are people like Philip-Lorca diDorcia and Thomas Demand – artists who ‘construct’ images, or at least investigate the space between ‘real’ and ‘constructed’ images. Really, I believe all images are both real and constructed.
Also, I have a background in architecture, which influences the way I see and construct the frame, and think about light. Even before I had any idea what I was doing, people asked if I had staged some of my street images. The combination of these and other influences, including a love of movies, made me interested in trying to make pictures that sort of flipped the ‘constructed’ photography thing upside down. That is, one of my interests was to make observational pictures in the ‘real’ world that look as if they have been staged.
Making the Eighteen pictures really got me to think about a lot of issues, and I hope the work connects with different people in different ways. Ultimately, I want the pictures to reflect my emotional and visual connection to the world. I think that at their best, the pictures relate something of the contradictions and complexities that I, and I think many people, experience in life.
CP: Tell us about the transition from Eighteen to your more recent landscapes.
MB: Actually, I’ve been working on the landscapes for 5 or 6 years, but only recently made them my primary focus. The work has taken a long time to develop, both visually and conceptually.
As usual, the pictures began during my meandering road trips, as a record of where I’d traveled. I would stop at every ‘scenic overlook’ or ‘vista’ and take a picture. I thought that these deliberately constructed views were kind of funny and odd: ‘Look here!’ They’re like the little mouse feet you’re directed to stand on at Disney World so you can make the perfect picture of Cinderella’s Castle. It made it easier to decide where to stop and make pictures, which can be difficult for me when visiting new places.
When I travel by car, I get a really acute sense of the changes in landscape. I am fortunate to have seen a lot of the United States this way, and many of the places are very beautiful and epic, screaming to be photographed, so there are designated overlooks everywhere. But sometimes they are just bizarre, like the one in Kansas that overlooks a cattle feedlot. I forgot to close my door when I was shooting, and when I got back in there were a million flies in the car.
I eventually decided to open the project up to all kinds of places that had some significance – whether personal or official. This developed into the Overlook series.
The Civil War photographs are really a sub-set of the Overlook work. Gettysburg is on my favorite route out west, and over the years I keep going back. It took me a long time to begin to understand why, and it has become a very complex project for me.
The work has brought me back to my days as an undergraduate history major.
My friend and teacher, Charles Traub, is also a Civil War-buff, not to mention a talented raconteur. After a few road trips through the South with Charlie, I’m a full-fledged Civil War nerd.
CP: Do you miss the human presence when making the newer work?
MB: There actually are people in some of the pictures, but their presence is subtle and takes on a different kind of importance. One of my favorites is from the Civil War group, taken on Little Round Top at Gettysburg (image, below). It has my dad walking through the middle. Usually there aren’t people in the pictures, though.
Matthew Baum, View of Big Round Top from Little Round Top
Matthew Baum, View of Big Round Top from Little Round Top, detail
Most of the Overlook pictures have been taken on long solitary road trips. There are many reasons why I love to go on the trips. Living and working in New York, I find it’s really important for me to leave the city for extended periods as a way of gaining perspective and getting my bearing. Also, I become dulled to my surroundings visually if I don’t get out. So as much as I love seeing different places, it also helps refresh the way I see my usual surroundings when I get home.
When I am on the road, I always relish the emptiness of the places between cities and off the main highways. Once you get out there, there is a lot of space between people, and it affects everything. Traveling by myself much of the time, I experience the aloneness very acutely, and it encourages a particular sensitivity to both the outside world and to my inner dialog. I want the pictures to convey some sense of that ‘aloneness’ I feel when on the road, which is different than the ‘aloneness’ I sometimes feel in a crowd.
With the Civil War series, I usually prefer to visit the sites off-season. It is the history of human presence in these places that I am most interested in. So I think it helps me to reflect on the ghosts when I am by myself.
Matthew Baum, Blackfeet Reservation
Matthew Baum, Blackfeet Reservation, detail
CP: Why divide the landscape? And specifically, why into 3 parts?
MB: In the beginning, it was a matter of practicality. I wanted to make panoramic photographs but didn’t have a panoramic camera. I initially tried to merge them in Photoshop, but didn’t like the results. Quickly, though, I began to like the format for a number of reasons:
First, it systematized things, so that many decisions are made before I even find a place to shoot. It’s always nice to have a set of parameters to work within. Otherwise, there are just too many choices to be made. Sometimes I impose these rules on myself so I can stop thinking about work and get something done. Of course, even within parameters there are infinite possibilities and choices to be made. This is one of the complexities of photography.
Over time, I realized that the consistency of the frame – like in the Bechers work or Sugimoto’s Seascapes – allowed the pictures to more effectively become a typology of the physical landscape. So while the approach is very ‘photographic’, it also allows the focus to be on the landscape, itself, rather than the choices I make in framing it.
Coming from an architectural background, I am always thinking about the relationship of two-dimensional and three-dimensional space in photography. Architects are trained to imagine three-dimensional space in two dimensions – blueprints, auto-cad, etc. Photographers are trained to compress the three-dimensional world onto two, usually paper or a screen. Because I pivot from a central point when I make the pictures, the illusion of space becomes even more complex. The depth is not only front-to-back, but also side-to-side, which creates very interesting geometries in the images. Actually, I’m currently building some frames with hinges that will allow the work to be viewed both flat on the wall and ‘surrounding’ the viewer.
Matthew Baum, Center of the Confederate Line
Matthew Baum, Center of the Confederate Line, detail
CP: What lead you to focus specifically on civil war sites?
MB: It is a combination of so many things. At first it was the stories, the particular mythology of the Civil War. People with names like Ambrose Burnside and Don Carlos Buell battling at places called ‘The Hornet’s Nest’ and ‘The Bloody Angle’ is pretty compelling in and of itself.
On another level, I think I’ve been drawn to these places because of the sacrifices that were made there. I feel very detached from war. I personally know very few people of my generation who have served. I realized the choice to enlist is both socio-economic and regional. I never considered serving in the military and thankfully, never had to. I think as someone for whom war is abstract, even when it’s happening everywhere, there’s always a lingering question: What would I have done if I’d been put to the test?
In the case of the Civil War, I hope that I would have fought willingly for what is right. In my opinion, what was essentially at stake in the Civil War was the soul of the country. Emancipation institutionally reset our moral compass. Unfortunately, in practice, this imperative is not always followed. The legacy of the Civil War, in both its success and failures, defines the fundamental issues that resonate through our society today.
One of the reasons I love photography is that it’s led me to think about these types of things. A good photograph is almost always both a window and a mirror. For me, this work continuously proves that. Making pictures is an endless wormhole, like Alice down the rabbit hole.
CP: Do you carry a musket around when making these photographs?
MB: No, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I sometimes carry my tripod like one.
CP: Is street photography something that you plan to revisit or is that something that you're still doing?
MB: As much as possible, I carry a camera with me wherever I go. When my camera is on my arm, I am a much more visual person – just having it there reminds me to look. And when I look with intensity, I see pictures everywhere. Most of them are not very good, but when one fulfills that proverbial Cartier-Bresson criterion – that a good picture will represent an alignment of the eye, mind and heart – it’s pretty f’ing great. Also, it’s a way of keeping a journal and of thinking visually.
‘Street Photography’ is hard to define, but for me, it’s just part of the process of looking with a camera. So I hope and think I will always do it. But I also hope my pictures and ideas will continue to evolve.
Matthew Baum, Matthew's Hill
Matthew Baum, Matthew's Hill, detail
CP: Lastly, who are your photographic influences?
MB: I have many influences, and to make a list would inherently be exclusionary. But I will offer this: If I could have only one book of photographs on a desert island, it would be an album of pictures of family and friends. If I could have two, the second would most likely be by Andre Kertesz.
Baum's works + all works from the 33 artists included in Road can be seen on our web site under the exhibition portfolio, and you can view more of Matthew's work at www.matthewbaum.com. Please direct all inquiries to [email protected] or [email protected], or by phone: 828.255.1188.
