Experimental Photography: Asha Schechter

Charlotte Cotton:

Your installation of images printed on vinyl ‘float’ through the first gallery of theExperimental Photography exhibition. I have been calling the placement of your work in the first gallery of the exhibition the ‘decompression chamber’ – where visitors are asked to abandon their preconceptions of what contemporary art photography can be. Adhered directly onto the wall, they are a constellation of objects that are simultaneously very specific in their detailing, and troublingly generic. Can you start by telling me about the engagement and experience that you are inviting exhibition viewers to have?

Asha Schechter:

One effect of installing vinyl directly on the wall is that it allows the architecture and exhibition furniture to become very directly part of the work. This produces a viewing experience in which the standard delineation of the art and the space is blurred. The works are installed in relation not just to each other, but the particularities of that space. In regard to the preconceived idea of a photograph, part of the goal of this work is to liberate the images from the traditional rectangles and frames of photographs, to put pressure on what we accept as an image in that category. Vinyl is usually a disposable commercial material, so the work taking that form can add to that second-guessing about the value of the images on view. I am also thinking about how the technicalities of things like frame rate and quality of display were having such a big impact on the way we understood the translation of the world into images. With the constant shift in sites of reception (flatscreen to phone to billboard to gas station TV) the average viewer becomes much more aware of discrepancies in quality and feeling. I wanted to make work that invoked these experiences. For example the method of image production I used is not really designed to be output at this scale, so the work shows the failures of reproducing certain materials. And when viewed through the iPhone camera the floaty, trompe l’oeil qualities of the works are heightened, I want all these layers of mediation in play.

Charlotte Cotton:

The objects represented in the vinyl works are based on real objects but are modeled and rendered without the use of a camera. You employ work-for-hire digital labourers to make the images, and the printing onto vinyl is produced with the same production methods and a labour force that makes marketing vinyl that wraps onto public buses. Not only are you subverting the meaning and end-result of these standardized production methods but also explicitly addressing the hidden labour of both computational image-making and of art. Can you say more about these active choices and the ways in which labor is a touchstone in the meaning of the work?

Asha Schechter:

There is an interview with artist Christopher Williams in which he discussed the difference between him imitating a commercial photograph of an apple versus hiring the photographer who takes those kinds of pictures of apples to take Williams’ photographs. His argument was that in doing that – but controlling the process more precisely – his work resembled those photographs but would contain more information and descriptive clarity. When I first started working with outsourcing the labour of making 3-D models, that was on my mind. I was interested in making works that would be in the same register as commercial images. I felt like the people I should hire to make them were the same people who make those kinds of images. My budget, however, isn’t the same as Pixar so I outsourced via a website called Upwork. The gig economy that these modelers are participating in has become the ubiquitous model of employment in much of the developed world. As an adjunct teacher I am basically a gig employee for education and although my situation is more stable than many, precarity is something that is always on my mind. As I became more interested in working in an affective register I regularly worked with one modeler, Csaba Kiss, who is based in Hungary. We developed the particular language of the images together, moving away from the generic and towards complexity and specificity.

Charlotte Cotton:

The title of this exhibition – Experimental Photography – intentionally speaks to both the creative license that you and the other participating artists bring into our contemporary digital image environment but also the ‘DNA’ of photography and the terrain. How would you describe your relationship with photography’s histories, do you identify with them?

Asha Schechter:

I started out taking pictures and then in grad school moved away from that as I became more concerned with the production and circulation of images. But I teach the history of photography and that history, and of narrative cinema, inform my work. Making a compelling contemporary photograph with a camera is something that I have not tried to do in a long time, but I think of these works as explicitly photographic in their concerns. They engage with the fundamental ideas of photography, the simultaneous reproduction and distortion of the perceived world through things like scale shift, cropping, lighting, time and the transformation of all of that into material form.