KELLY WRITERS HOUSE
Soliman Lawrence
PHOTOGRAPHIC COMPOSITIONS
ARTIST STATEMENT
In much of my photography I ignore the common rules for making the
interpretation of cultural meaning as effortless and obvious as possible.
Thus if it is hard to read some of my photographs it is because I have
reject the language of interpretation that prioritizes title, place, date.
If the content dominates, the form may go unnoticed. If there is no subject,
if the setting seems too ordinary, or if there is symbolic incoherency, this
forces the viewer to look at the photograph differently, perhaps to see the
intersection of form and content. Thus I mean to draw out the forms (spaces,
tones, composition, etc.) that are normally only the architecture of
photographs.
Yet I am not an abstract photographer. Shapes or composition in the abstract
means nothing to me, they must be found in the world that is common to us
all, therefore I am deeply wedded to the content of photographs. It is my
goal to bring forward the form so that it occupies the place of the subject
equally alongside that which is culturally intelligible. It is this
reciprocal relationship between the forms that can be built into content and
the content that can be seen as only forms that photography is unique in
being able to capture and what is for me how I, when a photographer,
primarily approach the world.
Not all the work displayed here will conform to this understanding. It isn't
the case that all the work here attempts to emphasize form over content. In
fact some of it will emphasize the content. Yet this is the general
heuristic with which I understanding photography, even if I decide at
different times that it is either one extreme or the other that is in need
of emphasizing.
In photography we are presented with objects, people, buildings, and symbols
that require little abstraction or intentional interpretation to recognize.
Objects are always brought into association with our own experience: the
chair is for something, came from somewhere, has a particular meaning in
human culture. A person is always doing something, feeling something; we
infer their identity, their perspective, their condition. We bring to a
photograph a lifetime of cultural, conceptual, and historical knowledge with
which to understand its content.