My friend Matt Lutton has been working on a series of photos of New York City for the past couple of years, titled "I See A Darkness" after the Bonnie 'Prince' Billy album. He recently set up a show at an epic photo supplies/rental store here in Seattle called Glazer's and is putting together a book of a few photos from the series with another friend of ours, Louise Foster, who is a pretty great designer. I wrote the introductory essay for this forthcoming book, so I naturally feel the need to post it here.
I promise I'll write something that's just for Existential Media soon. Promise, I say! For the time being, check out Matt's photos on his website. The Kosovo: On The Edge series is my favorite.
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I have a very vivid memory of being in Belgrade with Matt Lutton as he photographed light. We’d just finished having coffee and were walking down Knez Mihajlova, a major pedestrian street, when I spotted an ATM and headed off to get some cash, leaving him in the middle of the street. As I waited in line, I turned around to see if he was still there. He was, of course, but now he had his camera at the ready and was fanatically taking photographs, which (I figured) were of the fountain in front of him. When I walked back to meet him, he didn’t lower his camera; instead, he held up his hand to stop me, and started taking photos of me and my shadow. “The light’s great right now,” he explained, “do you mind sticking around here a little longer?”
I didn’t. So we stayed around the fountain for a few more minutes, and as we walked to catch our bus, Matt kept his camera near his face, stopping us every now and then to catch some whispers of light sifting through buildings as people walked through them or as they continued to the pavement. Every now and then, Matt would say to me (without turning away from the viewfinder): “Do you ever wish you could freeze time?”
Matt will always tell you that he’s a photojournalist, but after that afternoon at the fountain, I always refer to Matt as a photographer or a visual artist. Sure, he has the ability of a photojournalist to capture a contemporary issue in a single frame, but he has an additional bizarre quality - captured through detailed attention to lighting, or otherwise - which makes many of his photographs reach a level of timelessness that journalism can’t.
That aside, let’s be honest: a few people before Matt have photographed the eternally enigmatic New York City. Though we can all agree that the City will continue to inspire young artists for many ensuing generations, it is extremely difficult to find yet another new angle on this ground that has been so heavily covered. Even in considering Matt a photojournalist-slash-visual artist, the initial viewing of “I See a Darkness” comes with a residue of skepticism. We see photographs of crowds in parks, policemen in Times Square, sleeping youth on subway cars, images of American flags: if you take only a quick glance at these photos, you have to wonder: what does Matt have to tell us?
Somehow, though, Matt found an underlying narrative which suits his photographic vision, which largely comes from an intersection between Americana and Russian literature. The “I See a Darkness” series is wed to a quotation from Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and the Margarita, where the devil in disguise says to a Levite: “Think, now: where would your good be if there were no evil and what would the world look like without shadow?” In considering this quotation and its context, there’s suddenly an extra layer of that infamous Russian convolution that pulls us in and makes us gaze at Matt’s photos for an extra second. We look again at the sleeping kid on the subway: he looks familiar, we’ve seen others like him before, but suddenly we react to the photograph. The shot is framed so closely on his face that suddenly we feel invasive. We may feel like we know him, but we don’t: we’re outsiders, we’re not a part of his life even though we may feel like we do. His proximity to our own faces makes us feel claustrophobic, even nauseous, disoriented, but our realization to our own invasiveness makes us feel lonely.
And then we notice the shadows.
In our sensory reaction, we begin to make sense of each photos composition. In most of them, there is a significant presence of darkness created by a person. We acknowledge it; we don’t really have the choice not to. Each time we move onto a new photo, we go through the same process: we notice something familiar, and suddenly the shadow knocks us off balance. Matt’s photos never let us rest. In our acknowledgement of the darkness, we constantly reevaluate the way we’d seen the photograph in our initial glance.
Thankfully, Matt’s photos also intersect with music, and in this case, the work’s soundtrack is Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s “I See a Darkness.” It’s in this supplementary music that the combination of the familiar images and mind-bending darkness begins to shape itself into a narrative. In the album’s title track, Will Oldham sings:
“Well you know I have a love, for everyone I know / And you know I have a drive, to live I won't let go / But can you see this opposition, comes rising up sometimes / That is dread full imposition, comes blacking in my mind / And then I see a darkness.”
Even in the most passionate lives, we still have our moments of despair. These moments, though disorienting and sometimes nausea-inducing, don’t take away from the beauty in our lives, but instead, they accent the beauty and give it new clarity and value. Oldham continues:
“There's a hope that somehow you / Can save me from this darkness.”
The same way we sometimes sing along to lyrics (such as Oldham’s) and suddenly find ourselves saying, “What the hell am I singing along to?” Matt’s photos get us to believe in the unfamiliar. When we start to believe, and to evaluate the new darkness in the beauty of familiarity, we begin to make up stories for these individual moments that Matt presents to us in this series.
It’s here that Matt’s photos become intensely personal, and why they matter. In all his originality and success in alienating the viewer, he now pulls them back in. We’re no longer outsiders. We do know these people. Not personally, maybe, but on a fictional level we’ve sat near to that boy on the subway before, and we can feel where he’s going next.