Artist's Statement

         My photographs are deeply rooted in the act of reading and the memory of literature.  I think of the photograph as a way to enter, and participate in, a work of fiction

         I want to transform the viewer into a reader, who can enter the narrative space of the image.  In my current work, mystery novels and notions of suspense play a crucial role.  A mystery presents a range of possibilities before its solution;  my photographs are a moment from which stories can diverge, allowing many possible interpretations.

         Because a photograph is, by its static nature, a fragment of a story, there is an element of mystery inherent in the medium.  The moment captured by a camera is literally suspended.  These photographs are like the break at the end of a chapter, which forces a reader to pause at the moment of greatest suspense.  I frequently use long exposures, which require a literal pause—this stillness echoes the narrative structure as well as the physical action of the character who is waiting, experiencing suspense.

         I hope to make the sensation of suspense a tangible moment.  Each photograph is an invitation, created to evoke the possibility and mystery inherent in the incomplete story.

                                                                                          Brittain Bright

Narratives of Location and Readings of Place

One of the great writers of Golden Age detective fiction, Dorothy Sayers, argued strongly that the location and place of the narrative should have an action and a personality unto itself. She protested against: “stories divorced from their settings:  bodies are discovered (for instance) in churches, theatres, railway stations, ships, aeroplanes, and so forth, which might just as well have been discovered anywhere else, the setting being put in only for picturesqueness and forming no integral part of either theme or plot.  To make an artistic unity it is, I feel, essential that the plot should derive from the setting, and that both should form part of the theme.” ( Sayers, “Gaudy Night” in Titles to Fame, Denys K. Roberts, ed. London: Nelson, 1937)

Setting is such an integral part of the detective story that it is easy to overlook. We have stereotypes of locations where certain types of narratives take place--we have images of what a Jane Austen story or a Charles Dickens story look like, even if in fact we’ve never read one. This instinct seems particularly strong with relation to detective stories, with their distinct typologies.  They are escapist literature;  the reader expects the world of the novel to be immersive, and conducive to the suspension of disbelief.  Situations that the reader may never have experienced are frequently strong enough in our cultural understanding to qualify almost as experience.  Though he will probably never have been in a country manor house or a dark alley in Los Angeles, the average reader has a concept of what these places are like, and what they imply about the people acting therein.

Through detailed examination of some novels and comparison of others, I am examining the role of location in these narratives.  A mystery is often located with great specificity, and the performance of the place itself is essential to the story.  The questions my research poses include, how to define place in literary terms, how it is constructed through words, and how it is understood through reading.

 When reading, the experiential and preconceived become active forces in the development of the narrative space by the reader.  In his book The Role of Place in Literature, Leonard Lutwack defines place as the first essential component of the narrative:  “The most elemental orientation of a reader to a narrative text is through its evocation of places.  Setting is immediately positive and reassuring until action and character are gradually unfolded.” (Lutwack,  The Role of Place in Literature 37)

In the last several years, locations have become central to my thought process when developing ideas for photographs.  I believe that the location itself has a narrative, so I ask myself, what type of place is it, what stories does it contain?  When I “read” the space in this way, I allow various interpretive facilities to take over.  I equate this process with the understanding of place in literature.  I become a narrator, and create a living space of fiction within an image, which can then be read in a variety of ways.

Gaston Bachelard and Ernst Cassirer, writing about the philosophy of space and modes of comprehension, both theorize that the reader is both creating and remembering. The reader produces the imagined from the familiar, and re-constructs it in a new whole.   Both develop theories related to the Kantian understanding of comprehension, which combines experience with sensibility. 

Cassirer’s view is that: “Mankind attains a view of the form of things not by simply reading it off from them as though it were some determination adhering to them but by making an internal image of them and then bringing this image forth.  In this act of embodying and fashioning, the world attains a shape and bodily nature, attains borders and definition.” (Cassirer,  The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 78)

Bachelard illustrates the idea of memory itself as a house, representing the fragmentary nature of memory as the physicality of the house;  in his definition, a reader produces a space that is somehow contained already within himself.  (Bachelard, The Poetics of Space 17-19) I particularly liked his quotation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s description of place memory: “…it is not a building, but quite dissolved and distributed inside me: here one room, there another, and here a bit of corridor which, however, does not connect the two rooms, but is conserved in me in fragmentary form.” ( Bachelard  37, quoting Rilke’s Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge)  The presentation of any definite information regarding the location inhabited by the fiction is superfluous to the experience of reading.  The reader’s understanding of any space is intuitive and fragmentary, like that of a memory or a dream. In both of these instances, the creation of any new idea is at least partly a production of the familiar, contained within the memory/mind. 

In my mind, the process of reading a location, literal or fictional, is very akin to this bringing forth of ideas and memories, but also one of becoming separated from reality as such.  Reading is an immersive activity.  According to Eudora Welty, “Fiction is properly at work on the here and now, of the past made here and now; for in novels we have to be there.” (Welty, “Place in Fiction” in The South Atlantic Quarterly Vol. LV, No. 1 (January 1956), pp. 57-72) As readers, we expect to suspend disbelief and to leave our present surroundings behind.  The very indefiniteness of our spatial comprehension gives a dream-like liberation of understanding.  The way I think of reading a location is like a guided journey or dream—moments of great specificity, but the overall picture is impossible.  The same is true of the photographic moment—because there is no context, or before/after for the image, it is in a way marooned, like a memory.

The experience of reading a place is the effort to understand it and its relationships to the actions and characters therein, to parse its meanings and expose its contradictions. Entirely empirical understanding of fictional place is impossible.  It is a conglomeration of memory, fantasy, and experience that allows the intuitive comprehension, and hence completion, of a fictional environment.

So, there is one direction from which to comprehend space, which is from reality projected into the fictional, and there is another way, from the fictional into reality.  These two opposite mode characterize the two directions of my research.  My writing on the detective novel is a method of interrogating place and its fictional boundaries, whereas my photographs are expansions of fiction into real places. 

According to Sigfried Krakauer, the detective novel reveals “the secret of a society bereft of reality.” (Kracauer, “Hotel Lobby”, in The Mass Ornament, Harvard UP, 1995,  p175)  My aim is to explore the junctions between reality and fiction.  I hope to achieve a fuller understanding of the action of place, and a way of expanding the inherent narrative of various locations.

The following is a fragment of a story that I wrote in order to demonstrate the way that I hope an audience may interact with my photographs—the crucial point is the moment at which the story depends on the input of a viewer/reader.

Suspension

         “What are you looking at, darling?”Magdala asked as she came into the kitchen, where Robert was sitting at the table with a number of papers spread before him.

         She was sure it wasn’t only her fancy that he jumped slightly as he pulled the papers into a neat pile. 

         “Nothing, darling, just some business matters.” He rose, putting his papers carefully away into his briefcase, and kissed her lightly.

         “You’ve been bringing home business more and more lately.  Trouble at the office?”  She asked the question teasingly, and she was surprised to see his face turn dark. 

         “We’re making new acquisitions, that’s all.  It requires a bit more of my time than usual, but of course if you prefer I’ll confine my work to my office and simply extend my work day a little.”

         “Oh, I didn’t mean that!” she exclaimed.  “I just hope you’re not working too hard.  Of course I’m always glad to have you home every moment.”

         She stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek, but the smile on his face he turned to her didn’t quite reach his eyes. 

         “Well, you won’t be bothered with me tonight at least,” Robert replied at last.  “You can have a quiet night with Laura and get a little extra reading done.” He always found humor in how fond she was of novel-reading before bed.

“Oh, darling, of course you’re not a bother!  But I’m sure your evening at the club will be lovely.”

          “Just boys and cards, dear. I’ll be off now.”

          After he departed, Magdala went up to the nursery for early dinner with three-year-old Laura, then curled up in her sitting room with her book.  The house was quiet.  She was conscious of the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall downstairs, and the soft wind outside.  She didn’t grudge Robert his evenings out with the boys, but she wished he hadn’t gone tonight.  It was the first time in years she had felt him so distant, almost as if she didn’t know him.  He had really been so odd with those papers, as though he was hiding something from her. 

          But surely that was overactive imagination.  Robert had no reason to hide anything, especially in business.  He had always been such a success.  Her father, astute businessman that he had been, would never have left him the company otherwise, son-in-law or no!  She shook her head and returned to the story. 

          She was very fond of thrillers, and she was immersed in the story of a lady’s search for her missing elder brother, when the striking of the clock reminded her that it was after ten.  Robert was surely quite late tonight.  Not that it was entirely unusual, when he was playing cards.  He was frequently out later than ten.  Somehow, though, that blustery evening, it seemed very late indeed. 

          She rose from her chair, and padded downstairs in the silent house to get a cup of cocoa.  She was still feeling ill at ease, and if she was to sleep she must have a little hot soothing drink. 

          In the kitchen she clattered the pots rather more loudly than usual, for a bit of company.  She found herself wishing intently that Robert would come home to drink cocoa with her, companionably in the back of the house, as they used to do so often.  She added the sugar, and stirred meditatively.  Glancing toward the table, she noticed that Robert had left his briefcase on the side chair.  She would take it to the hall when she finished her cocoa, otherwise he would never be able to find it in the morning, and would raise an almighty row. 

          She sat down at the table with her cocoa.  He must surely have been abstracted, she thought, to leave his briefcase in the kitchen.  In thinking of it, she wondered why he had been in the kitchen at all.  Surely it was a very unusual place to work.  The sitting room was much more comfortable and better lit.  Only she had been sitting in there this afternoon. 

          Was there actually something he did not want her to see?  Was he really more worried than he pretended?  Could that be the explanation of his odd behavior?

          Not even believing herself capable, she reached slowly for the case.  She pressed the lock, and to her slight surprise it yielded.  Then he couldn’t be hiding anything, not in an unlocked case!

          Nonetheless, she glanced at the paper on the top as she smiled at her own suspicion.  Then she suddenly realized what she was looking at.  It was a financial report.  For all that she had never been in the business world herself, Magdala was her father’s daughter.  She saw at once that the company was in serious danger, if not already lost.  In horror, she turned over the pages and read the whole story in the figures there.  There had been aquisitions, indeed, too many.  The company was overstretched and in a financial rut.  They were surely ruined.

          Why had Robert not told her the truth?  Did he think that she couldn’t bear it? 

          Then she came to the bottom of the briefcase.  There, under all the graphs and pleading letters and dire figures, was a single sheet.  It was a letter from the life insurance company, refusing him an advance on her policy.

          With shaking hands, she replaced all the papers, and put the case back as she had found it.  She washed the cup and the pot carefully and put them away.  If he should come in tonight, he must not know she had seen.  He would be so embarrassed to be caught in such straights!  But surely something must be done…

          The question preoccupied her mind as she ascended the stairs.  How could she help pull Robert out without him knowing he was being pulled?  He would never allow that.  She reached the hall, and as she turned to go up to her room, she heard something from the garden.  Not a fox, a kind of odd scraping noise. 

          She stopped, frowning.  What could that sound be?  As she paused, it came again.  She stepped into the drawing room, her heart pounding.  Her brain was in a whirl.  It all belonged to her, really.  The house, the business, everything.  Robert was responsible, but it was all hers.  That was why he was trying to keep it from her that all was lost.  Or perhaps, having given up on the advance from the life insurance company, he was trying to get the money to save himself another way…

         Of course.  She froze in her tracks.  It was so easy.  No one would ever even have to know.  With her out of the way, Robert could pay the debts, and also he would own it all, completely. 

         But she was being absolutely ridiculous, letting her thrillers carry her away.  She shook her head, and turned to go back to the hall.  Then there was a distinct tap on the window. 

         It must be the wind.  This sort of fantasizing would not do if she ever hoped to get to sleep.  She walked back toward the window.  As she put out a hand to the heavy curtain, she saw how it was shaking.  She took a deep breath and pulled the curtain aside.