Freeman Patterson

Transcription

Tina Srebotnjak: All right. Mary Hynes, she's going to sit in her chair while... During the presentation. But I'll just tell you, as I'm sure you know, that she's the host of Tapestry on CBC Radio One. And we're always so pleased to have Mary here 'cause she's just such a fabulous interviewer, and that warmth and style and charm and great haircut. I mean, really, [laughter] what else could you ask? TS: And I'll introduce Freeman, also a great haircut, warmth, style, charm. It all sits. He's one of our best photographers, of course, of the natural world. He was born in New Brunswick. And although he has left the east at different periods in his life for New York, Toronto, Edmonton, he still calls New Brunswick home and he lives in Shamper's Bluff. Freeman Patterson travels widely to photograph and to teach. He's had numerous exhibitions of his work and has published more than a dozen books. And his newly released one is called Embracing Creation and that's the one that's on sale tonight. And it coincides with an exhibition at the Beaverbrook Gallery in Fredericton. And he's gonna show us some of his spectacular pictures now. Please welcome, Freeman Patterson. [applause] [laughter] Freeman Patterson: Bonjour to mes amis. [laughter] Bonjour. Good evening, everybody, and thank you for coming. I just want to tell you a little bit more. I'm going to talk, maybe, here for about five to seven minutes. And then I'm going to sit down somewhere here with a computer and project 42 images for you, and talk about those images. And then after that, Mary will come up and lead the program from that point on. And so, basically, what I'd like to do this evening is I have to say a little bit about the exhibition and a little bit about the book, first of all. And then I wanna talk a bit more generally. The reason I have to talk about these two is because they are both entitled Embracing Creation. And for me, as a young farm boy growing up in southern New Brunswick, and for many years, actually, the only child of my age and I was quite young. And so I didn't really have any playmates. And so my best friends were things like rocks, and potato bugs, and worms, and ferns, and rocks on the beach, and all of these things. So I had a very close and very acute association with the natural world which has remained with me. FP: And so, for me, I don't ever think of myself... Although, I see I'm called from time to time a nature photographer. I think of myself more broadly somehow from that because it is the sheer scope of the natural creation that remains my primary sense of awe and wonder. And regardless of what somebody may believe about God or not believe, what we can all agree on is that this is an absolutely remarkable creation in which we live. Astrophysicists and astronomers have been able to verify for some time now the existence of 500 billion galaxies. Now we cannot comprehend that kind of space. And on the other hand, if we look inward, we can't comprehend this space either. FP: But on the day that each of us was conceived, many millions of our fathers' sperm rushed to meet our mothers' egg, and only one sperm made it, unless you're a twin. So I'm fond of saying that in the first lotto in which you were ever entered, at odds of nearly a trillion to one, you won the only prize going. [laughter] And that's a mind-blower. It's a total mind-blower. So the sheer fact that we are here, in the six or seven kilometres of life-sustaining atmosphere wrapped around this one tiny planet in a remote arm of a fairly mediocre, middle-sized galaxy, we are here. We've got it. We're alive. The gift of life is absolutely the most remarkable thing one can ever consider. FP: Anyway, I want to switch from that and talk a little bit about art generally and about photography, sort of. But it seems to me that all art is about telling the story of who we are in some way. It's telling your story, and it's telling my story. And we often tell these stories symbolically. Most art, whether it's intended to be symbolic or not, contains a high degree of symbolism. Like our dreams do. And one of the great privileges of my lifetime is that during the course of my life, quite early actually and then much more often recently, I've had the opportunity to engage in some serious dream work. And so I've been able to see the parallels between the symbols of which we dream and the symbols that appear in our photographs, in our paintings, in our sculptures, in our music, and indeed in our dance. So this is one of the things that I want to talk about in the program, the few slides that I'll be showing you tonight. But let me tell you a personal story to illustrate this. FP: One day back in 1993, it was a December morning and I was standing at my kitchen sink, washing dishes. Above the sink is a big window. My apologies by the way to those of you who have heard this story before. Some of you have heard it more than once, but I think most of you haven't. Anyway, I was looking out the window while I was washing dishes. Now it was December and the tall grass in the filed outside the window all the way to the forest had been smashed down by early storms and it was very middle tone brown, but it was all woven together like this. And then it had snowed and melted a bit so there was snow dappled all over the brown threads of the grass. And then after that... Besides that, it was a cloudy, bright morning and there were little pinpricks, little dots of black in among it. FP: So here, as I looked, there was no shape or no line that stood out, no root of the tree, no rock, just this integration, this white mid tone brown and black with no one part of the field standing out. Anyway, I became aware after a few minutes that I had not washed any dishes for about 10 minutes and I'm standing looking out at this and I was totally fixated. So I went and got my camera and I got a fairly wide angle lens, went out on the back deck and stood there and took sections, about the size of this black platform up here or a little smaller but about that size, of the field which had no shape or no line in the them, just all of this weave. FP: I made some here and I made some here and I made some there. And I was doing this and after another 20 minutes went by, I had another kind of moment of awareness and I realized that I was in a state of complete euphoria. I was just higher than a kite. And I thought to myself, what is going on? What in the world is going on? So I went back in the kitchen, made myself a cup of tea, came back out, sat on the chair that's always on the deck and said, "What is going on? You've been photographing the most boring subject matter in the world. No camera club, for example, would ever take their members to a field trip in this field because what was it?" And yet it had turned me on to the point that I'm euphoric. FP: So I sat there and I'm thinking, what does it suggest? What is it standing for? I realized there was something about it that was highly symbolic that was speaking to me. What was it saying? So anyway, you know how sometimes when we ask ourselves questions, we actually come up with the right answer but don't recognize it? We go marching right by it. And that happened to me that morning because as I stood there, at some point I said to myself, it kind of looks... The field, kind of looks like you'd like your life to look like at this point. And I went right on, ha-ha-ha, big, fat funny idea, and I went right on and then a few moments later I snapped back and said, "But it does look like I would like my life to look." FP: Because in 1993, I was no longer a young man. And as one ages, it seems to me that a symbol that becomes more and more important is the symbol of integration. You try to pull the strands of your life together into some kind of coherence, into some kind of whole and where all the parts work together. And as soon as I thought that, I had that 'aha' reaction. You've got it. That's what this is suggesting to you. And I looked at the field and sure enough, it was the integration. I just thought, "Oh yes. Wouldn't it be great if my life were like that?" FP: So anyway, from an artistic standpoint, then I went out running around looking for textures and weaves. Not long after that, I realized that by using my camera in certain ways, using it from multiple exposure, using slow shutter speeds and moving it when I was taking pictures, I could create textures in the camera that didn't exist out there. So I'm coming up with more and more. I'm looking for a symbol that matters to me. Anyway, I just used this as an example of what photographers, painters, people working in other media are also doing all of the time. And sometimes they never stop, I think, to ask themselves why. FP: I'm very fond of saying to photographers that the least important questions they can ask themselves are technological ones. And the most important questions that they can ask themselves, they are really two in number. Why am I photographing this subject matter I am at this point in my life? Because that choice matters. You're choosing that and not that, and there's a reason. And the second thing... Important question is, why am I approaching it in the way that I'm approaching it? Because that's important too. But the answers to both of those questions are highly, highly autobiographical. FP: So with that bit of background, I want to show you some photographs. And it may take me just a moment here to get myself situated. In this way, I can not only press the computer button, I can drink my wine. [laughter] Okay, we will have the lights. FP: Okay. Way back in the '80s, I made a couple of two-week motorcycle trips all by myself around South Island, New Zealand. And one day, I came across, very early in the morning, the Moeraki Boulders on the east side of South Island. Some of you will have been there. I was all alone. And these Moeraki Boulders are globes of rock emerging from the sand in the mud of the Southern Ocean and some of them are small, some of them are absolutely enormous. And as soon as I started, I saw them, I had that reaction like I did with the weaves of grass. But remember this was not 1993, this was back in the '80s. I hadn't got to the morning in December yet. And as I walked around that morning, I got totally turned on by what I was seeing. And it so happened that as I looked back sometime later over the photography that I had done during the 1980s, I discovered that that was my decade for photographing circles. FP: So you show me a rock or a circle of any kind, whether it was in New Zealand or the Caribbean or in the African deserts, you can be almost sure that I would make a photograph of it. And one day, I was photographing the great Massif at Torres del Paine in Chile, and this cloud formed and I pulled the focal length of the lens back from long to short so I could clue this massive circle in the sky. And I think as I look back now, I was at a stage in my life at that point where that common symbol of the circle, the sense of wholeness, the sense of centred-ness, the need for reaching a goal, goal-orientation, all of those things were really important to me. And quite unconsciously, I was working with circles on a very regular basis. FP: One afternoon late in the day, I was driving down the Shamper's Bluff road on which I live. And it was about this time of the year... And here's an apple tree that had lost all of its leaves but it had these wonderful circles all over it. I didn't think apples, I thought circles. And I jumped out of my little car and got the tripod and camera out of the trunk and set it up and made this image. Now, what I'm doing in all of these cases is making photographs for me. And that, I think, is essential if your art is going to amount to a hill-a-beans really. You have to do it for the person that you are at that point in your life. And if nobody likes what you're doing, it should be absolutely irrelevant to you. Someone else can say, "Okay, I can help you do what I don't like." Better, they can help you with the craft but don't give up doing what other people don't like if it's really important to you. FP: In January of 1991, I was on another motorcycle trip and this one was in Australia. And I was along the Great Ocean Road along... And those of you who had been along the Great Ocean Road in southern Australia know that there are The 12 Apostles, the massive rock formations standing just off the shore. So the few other people around, looking, photographing these, looking out and photographing them, what am I doing? I'm photographing a little circle of brown mud that's having a bad hair day. [laughter] But when I looked back after that experience in my kitchen, looking out of the kitchen sink and looking at the grass that morning, two years later, nearly three years later, I realized that here is where the transition began. This was the slide that combined the circle with the first weaves. I did it unconsciously but I did it out of some emotional response. I have to do this. FP: Now one of the things, during that period leading up to that discovery morning of December 1993, I was making pictures that were loosely woven and which things are loosely woven. That red maple leaf on the lower right, I did not put it there. But what you see there is kind of a weave or a tangle of dying hosta leaves. I made this in November. My mother at the time was very frail, very weak, very pale. She looked like the hosta leaves and I remember looking back at it now. And even at the time being aware, I have to photograph this. I had a feeling associated with it. And you'll know that the weakness and the paleness and the frailness occupies most of the picture space and the vibrant colour, which I'll stake as myself, is quite tiny by comparison. In other words, I'm giving the picture over primarily to the symbol of my mother who died six weeks later. FP: My mother was a formidable force in my life, a very quiet person but a formidable force. Because in a farming community where nearly every farmer believed that the useful things were things that you could grow to eat or to wear and everything else was irrelevant, it was my mother who pointed out the beauty of curving brown grasses in November ditches and the beautiful sound of the breeze that blew through them. She pointed out the light that came off a flock of birds' wings rising. And in the process... What she was saying to my sister and me, is that the colour of grasses in the fall and the light reflecting off the wings of birds as they rise in a flock are important to your life. These things are important. So if it had not been for her emphasis on those things in her quiet way, I can tell you quite frankly, I would not have the life. I would not have had the life that I've been able to have. FP: And so I found myself in that period leading up or just after that morning in December going and looking for textures. And here you can see these are flower petals from the garden, mostly roses, but see the integration there. And the fact that there's no centre of interest, no point of focus, no point of emphasis is absolutely irrelevant. There's change and difference everywhere, and yet there's integration. And these symbols arise naturally in our lives. And one of the wonderful things about being a painter or a sculptor or a photographer, or a dancer, or a musician is that you can grasp onto these symbols and work with them. And here, again, I looked at this marsh and there was duck swimming around in it. And I said, "Would you please hurry up and fly away?" [laughter] And it did eventually, because I just wanted that sheer integration of the grasses. FP: And now here, one day in December, I'm sorry, in June 1993, I stood on my back deck and made this picture. This was six months before that morning I described to you. I can't... I think that's in focus, I'm sorry, I can't quite tell at my angle. And then six months later, I sit in the same place and made that picture. And that's what I was describing to you. I'm standing there and I became utterly fixated. It's different in every part of the space and yet there is enormous integration. And it was deeply, emotionally important to me. So then, as I say, I began to go out and make pictures of leaves and textures, where things were integrated. FP: And one morning I was going out into my porch to get an armload of fire wood for a wood stove that I have. And I saw this weave of frost on the window pane. So I raced back for my camera. I think the fire went out before I finished. And then in my barn I have this pebbled glass in a few panes, and at this point I must have 11,500 pictures of this pane. I go back and back and back. Some days I just say, "I need to photograph that pane of glass again." But it's all because of the importance of the symbol. Then another day I was photographing, there was a huge fire-fighter's hose and the water coming out of it, an enormous gush of water. And I was using a very slow shutter speed to show this long stream of water. FP: And then I caught myself and I said, "You know that's how you always do it. Why don't you use a very fast shutter speed and aim right through it and see what it looks like?" And when I got the images back... By the way, all of these are made on film and then I scan them here. They're scans made for this. So anyway, when I got the images back, I really liked the sheer integration of it. So it was quite capable, a symbol, of turning me on. FP: Now one day, I was hiking along the West Coast, I'm sorry, the West coast... The Atlantic Coast in Southwest Africa and it had been a wonderful day for hiking. It was 20 degrees, sunny, nice breeze blowing, couldn't have been better, except the sea was raging all day long. Toward evening I sat down in this cove and as I sat there, again, I was just kind of blissed out. I just felt great. So I looked at the scene and I made the composition you see here, but I didn't feel like a raging sea. I felt like sort of peaceful. So in this case I simply set my camera for an extremely long exposure after the sun had gone down and made this 30-second exposure. And the waves all cancelled each other out and the texture was changed, of the ocean surface, from something that was a document of the scene to what was closer to being a document of what I felt. FP: And then I taught myself different techniques. I don't normally just learn techniques for the sake of a technique. But when I feel the need to express myself in some way and can't do it then, of course, that is an impetus to learning a new technological step. So I taught myself in the mid '90s how to do multiple exposures in the camera so I could weave things together. So standing on my front deck here, looking at a Hawthorne bush and some lupins in the field, and you see they are somehow blended together in this lovely weave. Then on a spring day, if I can dance, so can the trees and... Oops, just a second here. And you can see there is a weaving, different kinds of weaving. FP: One day driving along the roads in New Brunswick, going about this time of year actually, driving North and it was... The threads of these young birch trees along the side of the road were beautiful. I just was again attracted by the natural weave of the landscape. But then I thought, "You know, if I do a multiple exposure of these, just pan the camera up slowly while I make eight or 10 pictures, I can increase that sense of weaving or texture." And then there's this one. It's a particular multiple exposure technique that I use sparingly, but if I... Because it gets... It looks quite formulaic if you repeat it very often. But you can see here when... In this case I had these strong, the energy of the yellow with the contrasting spot of blue. So I went... I wove everything together in the way that you see here. FP: Now I'd like to switch gears a little bit. I want to talk about dreams and dream symbols. Here I've created a composite image. In the lower left corner you see a dreamer. He is clear though and 90% of the picture is occupied by the same person, but he's obscured by the bog or the marsh. The bog and the marshes are places where we are never comfortable walking. They... Because we don't know what's down there, we're always scared about walking in a bog. In this sense, the bog has always represented our unconscious. So here the dreamer is, in a sense, the conscious part of us and the rest of the image is the unconscious. FP: So I want to ask the questions of: What do we dream about? What are our dream symbols? While the most important things that we dream about is a sense of being lost or abandoned, this for me, when I came on this situation in Namibia in this house, it was instant emotional response. It could have been in a dream, it was a photograph. We dream about this. We dream about being left behind. This is not a photograph of a tumbled across or a concrete pillar or even a figure against it or of a desert without vegetation. It really suggested to me all hope is gone. There is agony for me in the shape of the human figure. FP: We dream about being imperfect. We dream about being wounded. So we dream about the same things that show up in our art. And sometimes we dream about death. Often, people who take dreams literally and have... Are scared stiff when they dream of death especially their own death, and yet sometimes, dreaming of your own death is an extremely positive thing because if you think of the snake having to shed its skin in order to grow, often the old self, we have to die to an old self in order for a new self to emerge. FP: We dream of monsters, things that we... Are horrible and things we can't explain. And almost invariably, a monster in a dream is a repressed problem or issue in our daily lives. And only in many cases when we're willing to face the problem in our daily lives, does the monster go away. Some people, and I've only been able to do it once or twice myself, can stand up to a monster in a dream and say, "I'm not going away. I'm going to face you down right now." And that's called lucid dreaming or a form of lucid dreaming. And often that confrontation in the dream has the affect of helping one confront the issue in one's daily life. And here, having confronted the monster, so to speak, it has been transformed now into something that looks like an egg or something new that's being born and reaching up into consciousness represented by the blue of the sky. FP: Now, one of the dreams that I have is a recurring dream, is of wading through deep snow up to my armpits or shoulders, struggling, struggling, struggling. And as I do this, if I keep struggling long enough in the dream, flowers begin to emerge in the snowdrifts or on the hillside, flowers all over the place coming right out of the snowbanks. And it's, literally, the dream saying to me, "The struggle is worth it." And in this case, this is not a replication of that dream, but what it's saying is, "Out of the old, you stay with the old, you work with the old, this old fabric, this old chair, this old house, and out of it, will come new and beautiful things." FP: Sometimes we look out of the window of ourselves, if I may put it that way, and see enigmatic figures we don't quite understand what they mean. And they may come back to us in dreams and back to us, changing a little bit at a time until gradually, if we work with them both in our dreams and in our daily lives, they have a clearer vision for us. And here, that same figure now has, for me, a sense of rejoicing, of reaching upward. So a transition has occurred. FP: Now in the last, I don't know how many years, 50 years or so, I've been working... Doing extreme close-up work with a very plain glass paperweight or a wine glass, plain wineglass with some water in it, and literally putting the lens with the close-up filter, so to speak, right on the paperweight or touching the glass. And I'm focused on imperfections that are in the glass or highlights in the water that are back lighted by the light of the sun. And I have these on a windowsill about a meter from my computer. So there I am pounding away at the computer and within the space of a meter, I can start going on a trip through the cosmos. So I don't do these, excuse me, all the time by any means. But every now and then I know I have to go and pick up my camera and I have to go and explore the cosmos that sits on my windowsill. FP: What the symbols mean, I'm not absolutely sure. But you know? As people reach the very latter part of their lives, the symbol of light, in many of the writers that I've read and so on, the symbol of light becomes increasingly important, and maybe this is a natural thing for me. Anyway, I find what happens in this paperweight incredibly beautiful. It's utterly amazing. And there it is one meter from my computer. FP: One day on one of my trips, camping trips in Africa, I was driving this vehicle and I came to this road, this road which split. I immediately jumped out and made the photograph you see here because it reminded, of course, of Robert Frost's poem, Two Roads Diverging in the Woods. And Frost said, "I took the one less travelled by." Well, I was very conscious that day that I had to make a decision and whichever decision I made, every split second of my life from that point on, would be slightly different. I mean, we have that kind of decision to make constantly. Do I have another spoonful of yogurt? You have another spoonful of yogurt, delays you getting up from the table and that affects the rest of your life. But seldom is it spent, spelled or shown so clearly as it was for me that day, a symbol written on the landscape that I had to photograph. FP: Another day, also in Africa, I was driving down this secondary highway. And it was a bright, sunny day, but the distance was obscured by mist. And I thought, "Well, isn't that like our lives? We never really can tell where we're going." And so, I got out in the middle of the road, down, very close to wide angle lens, made the composition you see here. And then I thought, but we don't really know where we came from either. So maybe I should mist out the beginning at the bottom and the misting... Keep the mist at the top as well. So I had to... I thought, "How do I mist out the bottom?" Well, I had a spare filter in my camera bag and when I'm travelling I always have a first aid kit. So I looked around and I was looking for some Vaseline to smear on the filter, couldn't find any. So ended up smearing it with Preparation H [laughter] and then took a tissue and sort of wiped out the middle part. And so anyway, but you see there... I mean I've created the symbol. It's more of a left brain image. We don't really know where we come from, out of unconsciousness then we come into consciousness for 10, 40, 80, 100 years or whatever and then no matter what you believe, into the mist again. FP: Now, that was a created image. Here is a found one. When I came across this dry lake bed, I was able to determine that the last rain to have fallen here had occurred nine years previously. So nine years earlier an antelope had walked through here and left his footprints when the mud was wet. I photographed it at the point where it had come in a straight line and then it had turn. And again, that curve became symbolic because however determined we may be, however goal-directed we may be, we all know that we wander and we have to wander. And that's what I saw there, the true story of everybody's life written in the mud. FP: Now on my back deck, it's getting older this chair now, but it sits there. It's one of five or four chairs I have either on the deck, or one on the deck, three in the forest around my house. And I go to these never with a cellphone, never in fact with a book. I will take a cup of coffee or tea, but usually I go with nothing. And I... Because I have... Obviously I'm very visually alert, first thing I do is I sit down and close my eyes. My idea is to be as present as I possibly can be in that place. So because I also have acute hearing, first thing I take in are all the bird sounds, and the hustle and bustle of grasses, and the winds, and so on, and well, like gathering in sounds from the farthest extent of my hearing. And when I can feel the winds, the breezes, the temperature on my skin, when I can smell the rich aromas of autumn or the sweeter fragrances of spring, when I can get those, then I will open my eyes and sort of add the visual. And then it becomes a kind of sensory symphony. FP: Now one of the things that I believe very strongly, and I should just speak for myself here, is that we are never happier than when we are fully present where we are. It could be in a chair like this. It could be on a stump in the woods. It could be in the corner of Yonge and Bloor. It doesn't matter. The point is being present. And with all of the advances in technology and with all of the beautiful contributions that many of these advances have made to our lives, they're also robbing us of something. Far too often I notice now that people, the minute they sit, they go somewhere else on their cellphone. They're tweeting instantly. And the idea of being present where you are is something that I notice very few people try to achieve. FP: Anyway, when we can achieve that, then I think there is a possibility of being in communion, not just in communion within a sense of community, but in communion with ourselves. This is an old window I incorporated into my house. And one morning, I went out and there were four, five of these moss lined up and I immediately saw the communion rail. It's a Christian symbol, but it's a lovely symbol; communion, community, and they were all sort of partaking of communion together. And then I said, "No. You have to be in communion with yourself." So I eliminated or I just avoided the other three or four moss and made this image which I do exhibit under the title of Communion. And that's my show. [applause] Mary Hynes: Freeman Patterson, I've come up here with my customary 463 questions, but I just wanna throw them all aside and pick up on a lot of what you've said as an accompaniment to your show. And here's what floors me, the moment when you said, "We're here. We've got it. We're alive. Each of us present in this room has won the lottery of all lotteries," has this been a lifelong sense for you? When did you first... When did this first kick in for you, this feeling of, "Oh, my God. It's amazing to be here"? FP: Excuse me. I think I consciously expressed it to myself about 40 years ago, for the first time. MH: About 40 years ago? FP: Yeah, I think so. MH: So, you were a young man. You didn't... FP: Well, I'm so ancient now. [laughter] Then I was middle-aged, let's put it that way. MH: Okay. And was it a bolt out of the blue? Did it come on you gradually? FP: No, no. It was something that just came gradually and I think it came about because I really feel... Like, I'm a tree-hugger, okay? I mean, I talk to trees every now and then. This is a beautiful tree and I say, "Thank you for being." And that's... It was in a moment like that, that I just suddenly... Kind of a quiet epiphany. MH: I want to ask you about a time... Now you were a young man because it was 50 years ago. You were at Divinity School in New York... FP: That's right. MH: Earning a degree and you wrote a thesis called "Still Photography as a Medium of Religious Expression" which is really quite a profound thing for a very young... What were you, 20, 21? I mean, that's a very profound thing to express to the world. What was it about photography that so clearly spoke to you as a kind of spiritual expression? FP: I'm not sure at the time that I... Maybe the thesis wasn't a project in articulating what it meant. All I knew was that when I worked with this medium, I was deeply excited. It had the capacity to energize me again and again and again and again, and to enable me, when I worked carefully, to see things with a clarity that I hadn't known before, and that then I could leave... Take with me when I didn't have the camera. So working, I think, with photography really sharpened my general vision. MH: One of the striking things about listening to you is that you conjure up as much of a thrill from the porch of your home in New Brunswick as you do for some of these locales in Africa, Australia, Chile, the ends of the world, from this starting point. How do you find that magic in literally your own backyard? FP: You don't look... Anyone who has done a workshop with me would have heard me say, "Don't ask where's a good place to make pictures. You're there." Where you are is the best place in the world to see and to make good photographs if you want to make photographs. But we're always saying, "Over there, somewhere else," which is not being present where we are. And so one of the exercises I give in my workshops is the first morning, I give it to myself. I'll take my camera and my tripod and let's say you were with me. I'll say, "Mary, give me a number between 20 and 50." And you'll say, "Oh, I don't know, 36." And I'll say, "Do you want me to go straight ahead, left or right?" "Left." So I go left, 36 steps, put the camera down. MH: Photo roulette. FP: It is. And then I will make a minimum of 30 good, different compositions without ever moving the tripod, just moving the camera on the tripod. MH: But is any of this available to a thoughtful person with a good camera or is it reserved for the likes of someone of your stature? FP: I wouldn't use it in classes if I didn't believe it was the most useful exercise anybody can do. And it's great fun for a couple of friends to go out. They stand on the street somewhere along St. Clair, back to back. And one says, "18," and the other says, "44," [chuckle] 18 that way and 44 this way. And they stand there and they make pictures until they've... And then they'll see St. Clair. MH: Yeah. Yeah. Do you find the camera is an aide to being present for you? FP: Yes. MH: In what way? How does it anchor you to the present moment? FP: Well, the nice thing is it does have parameters. You sort of are within a space. So a photograph is kind of like a sentence or maybe a paragraph. I'll say a sentence. I mean, in a sentence, many sentences, we're working with a noun, a verb, an adjective and an adverb, and then we have arranged them. And then we're not happy with what we've written, so we change the noun and the verb around, and it says it a little differently. MH: But the structure remains. FP: The structure remains, exactly the same thing with the photograph. Now instead of nouns, and verbs and adjectives and adverbs, it's line and shape, and texture and perspective. And you say, "Yes, this is what I'm feeling, but... " You move a little bit this way or you take a camera position where the line falls away and the shape becomes more important, this kind of thing. MH: We've just seen this collection of amazing art, these gorgeous images. So I was taken aback, to reading your new book, that you want people to "transcend the picturesque." And that's a direct quote from you. What's wrong with the picturesque? What's wrong with just aiming for sheer beauty within a frame? FP: There's absolutely nothing wrong with it. And there's no question that lots of time, I'm attracted by the purely picturesque. But the thing is that the purely picturesque can, unfortunately, deteriorate often, whether it's in photography or something else, into sentimentality, into... Or a false sentimentality, or into a lack of thought, and so on. If something makes you stop, if something calls you, I don't care if you go to photograph with your cellphone. It said something to you, whatever that was, if it was two pebbles and a bit of kelp, it said something to you. And therefore, if you say something to me, hopefully, I will pay attention and answer you. And that's how I feel when a subject matter makes me stop. It demands the same response. MH: Did you just give a kind of a blessing to someone doing that with a cellphone camera? I'm sure that's what I heard. Is that okay? FP: Sure! FP: Because you're very fond of saying, "Can we all remember Michaelangelo did not have Photoshop, [chuckle] and Di Vinci did not have this array of, like, desktop futzing around." FP: Right, they didn't. MH: Are you hostile to that kind of manipulation? Are you concerned about people doing that kind of post-production messing around? FP: No, I'm not at all concerned about people doing post-production. And there are whole ranges of it. Because I'm shooting, still, primarily with film, I attempt to do everything as well as I can do it in camera. And then if I scan something in Photoshop, it's zip-zip-zip. I check levels. I check colour balance and check contrast... Or sharpness. And... But for some people, that is the beginning. And so they use the initial capture to go far, far beyond. But... And there was a gentleman who he actually did two workshops with me. He made photographs in order to work with them, and the final image that he got was like the difference between here and Tibet. But they were brilliant. But he could never have reached that if he hadn't paid attention to where he started. MH: You have this lovely saying, "All of creation is a sacred text." Can you think of a moment when that has hit you very forcefully, either in your travels or on your porch when you've been... You use the phrases "blissed out", "turned on". When have you been "blissed out" by this thought that, "Oh, my God! I'm looking at creation and it's a sacred text as much as any holy book is a sacred writ?" FP: Sure. It was the original Holy Book before we got the language and before we started writing things down, and it's still the best one in my view. But... The... Oh, it happens a lot. I mean, all I have to do is walk out in the field behind my house. It's constant for me. And yet... I mean there are special places. And we had a bit of a discussion, Mary and I, just before we began. And one of the places we were talking about was my going to the northwest corner of South Africa, The Richtersveld, which is part of the Namib, the Great African Desert. And... I don't know. It effects me viscerally. And I cannot explain it, and I don't care to explain it. I just know that I'm, for me, on holy ground. MH: You've had, almost, the sense of wanting to lie down on that ground in that corner of Africa and, in your words, "Just take me." FP: Yeah. MH: What is it about being in the landscape that's so primal, that speaks to you so deeply? FP: What is it? I don't know, except that maybe I have that connectedness from a very early age. And so it's kind of, I don't know, built into me, in a way. But I relate to the natural world. As I said, I don't think of myself as a nature photographer. But I do see... And I photograph people as often as I photograph any other species. So there's a... You know, I... To me there's not really a difference. And of course, I love reading around the fringes of quantum physics. A physicist I am not, but boy oh boy, reading around the fringes of quantum physics, and you begin to... It really impinges on everything we're talking about and the connectedness. So, and I get very excited when I'm reading books like that on information theory and so on. I just, "Ahh... " I'm sitting in a rocking chair, a comfortable easy chair and I'm turned on like I am hiking through the desert. MH: Wow, and not just through the words on the page... FP: That's right. MH: And the story being told. FP: Yeah. MH: You sit here as a man who has come through two liver transplants and an induced coma lasting more than a month. How does being that close to death shape the way you go on with your life? I mean, for the benefit of people who haven't seen this in your book yet, you had a surgeon say to you, "Congratulations, you've just one Lotto 6/49 five weeks in a row." FP: Right. MH: You're not supposed to be here. FP: No. MH: In his words. FP: Isn't that amazing? MH: That's unbelievable. [applause] MH: Yeah. [chuckle] FP: Thank you. But it's like being born in the first place. [chuckle] MH: So it's no more extraordinary to you. FP: It's no more extraordinary. MH: Than the first birth. FP: It happened to me twice, that's all. [laughter] I mean, think about it, winning Lotto 6/49 five weeks in a row, that's about the chance of getting conceived. [laughter] MH: I think some of us are having one of those mind-blowing moments you referred to a minute ago. [laughter] I'm interested in the way break down certain elements of photography and viewing the whole pursuit as a kind of communion and a kind of spiritual exercise. Can you tell me about the act? I don't wanna get too esoteric on you but you can handle this I think. The act of looking through a viewfinder, is that a moment of communion for you? Is there something special going on when you see the world through the viewfinder? Can you tell me about that a little bit? FP: Well, maybe I can tell you a little story. This may not quite answer your question but my previous teaching partner... For workshops, I always had a teaching partner. My previous one was at my house one day. She had her camera and tripod and I had mine and we were both photographing away and paying no attention, I thought, to each other. Suddenly, I heard her giggle. I didn't really pay any attention much. Then she giggled again five minutes later. And the third time she giggled, I turned around to her and I said, "Doris, what's so funny?" She said, "Well, you are." I said, "I am? Why am I so funny?" And she said, "Well, every three or four minutes, I hear this 'umph umph', and she said, "It sounds to me as if you've been having a series of mini orgasms all afternoon." [laughter] MH: What was going on in that photography session? FP: Yeah. And I said, "Well, I have been. That's exactly what has been happening [laughter] because that's the moment of rightness." In other words, I'm engaging the subject matter visually, but also emotionally. And when I feel that sense of rightness 'umph' then you press the shutter of course. [laughter] MH: Okay then. [laughter] Is that the moment of pressing... FP: More than you asked for there. MH: Yes, much more than I asked for, but would that... [laughter] Would that be the moment of pressing the shutter or would that be the moment of nailing the view in the viewfinder? FP: I think nailing the view. MH: Jeez! [laughter] I'm gonna just stop [laughter] and hide. FP: You're getting into trouble. MH: You're trouble. No, you are trouble. I'm gonna be careful with my words here because you make a distinction between taking pictures and making pictures. FP: Right. MH: What's the difference to you? FP: Well, superficially, it's a casual thing. Taking a picture is click, click, click, click. You know, grab it, grab it, grab it. Sometime maybe you look at it a few minutes later or two days later, whatever. But to make a picture is to construct something in conjunction with the subject matter, however much it may resemble the subject matter in the end or may not resemble the subject matter at all. Where the subject matter is just the potters clay, as it were. MH: But the subject matter can have a say? FP: It does. It always has a say. A photographer, unlike say a painter, always begins with something out there. You confront something in the world. Well, the documentary photographer, one of the great traditions of the medium, is saying, "I value you for what you are and I'm going to try and show you for what you are and keep myself out of it." And that is a sign of respect for that. So in that way, you are engaged. Or at other times, like I'll look at a beautiful autumn scene, but what I'm really feeling is the energy, the sheer... The vibrancy and everything. So in a case like that, I might very well make an image in which I have moved the camera, I've literally danced with the camera, done this with the camera. So what you're getting is just a whole blurry dance of colour, but it's not a literal description of there at all. MH: But what I find fascinating is the element of autobiography that comes into this for you. That it's almost a reciprocal thing with what is out there. Can you tell me a little bit about that, how your own... As you saw, the day you had the cup of tea in your kitchen, saying "Why am I so... Why am I freaking out over this?" And it was telling you something about the way you wanted your life to be. I mean, has it been autobiographical for you for a long time? FP: Yeah, it has been for a very long time. I realize that... Well, we're, all the time, in everything we do, we're writing our own life story. But I think that a person working in any artistic media, from song to visual to, you know, visual performing arts, whatever, they're writing their own life story in relationship to the world around them, and that's a beautiful thing to be able to do. And I love... I don't think you have to do it professionally. And sometimes, professional artists are constrained by the fact they have to make money with their art. So, in many senses, the amateur photographer or the amateur painter has a freedom to be, that a professional artist may not always have. And so, I... Amateur photographers whom I know, I think they have an enormous opportunity... Often in the process of learning about the craft, they become too rule-oriented and start following what other people have suggested they do, which is a great shame because what they should be following is their own heart and their own emotions. MH: There's something you've said in the new book which I find fascinating, that your sense of what the divine is underwent a shift when you were in divinity school, when you were earning that degree in New York. How did that change for you? FP: Well, I came out of a... You know... I don't know how to put it. I think most of us conceive of God initially in the way we conceive of our parents. God is a replica of our parents, and so I had, and particularly in my case, I had a very controlling father, and so God was a big controller. He was kind of a super farmer who made things. You know, he was like my father, only bigger and better at it. MH: The super farmer. FP: Super farmer, right. And so I found it very restrictive, very restrictive. And somehow when I went to divinity school which was Union Theological in New York, I mean, it was wonderfully ecumenical. We had people from all faiths and denominations, many countries, and there was an enormous sense of community. Everyone left you alone, everyone supported you, just like a good relationship, distance and intimacy. And somehow, my whole sense of God changed from this authoritarian figure to something much more like sustaining love. And Paul Tillich who had been at Union just before I went, and... He defined religion, and I've never heard a better term or better definition, as ultimate concern. MH: Ultimate concern? FP: Concern about ultimate things, being deeply and profoundly concerned about meaning, the meaning of your life in relation to the world, in relation to other people. To me, a non-religious person would be someone who, I don't know, just repeatedly, you know, never... Oh, I don't know, just comes home and grabs a beer and sits there. Three hours later, they've watched 16 reality shows and go off and sleep off the beer and are up and at whatever they're doing. In other words, they're escaping life not confronting it. Anyway... MH: Yeah. Yeah. And does the camera continue to help you in that way? Are you... I'm curious about the photography equivalent of the guy having a case of beer and then watching 19 reality shows. Are you ever tempted to just shoot a roll for the hell of it and not have it be akin to a memoir... FP: Oh, yeah. Sure. MH: An autobiography... FP: Every now and then, you just go up and say, "Hey, let's breathe. Let's... " I mean, that's sort of... It's kind of free brainstorming. Let's see what I can... Just let's go... Let's... Sure. But I don't make that a habit and, in other words, it's not a way of life for me. In other words, if you're not engaged, how can... Life can't have any depth, it seems to me. I mean, it's in being engaged, really engaged. MH: And the depth is all for you. FP: It is. MH: Freeman Patterson, thank you so much. It's fascinating. Thank you. [applause] FP: Thank you. MH: It's lovely. Thank you.