Nature Nation
Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem, 2009
May 2009
Catalogue Essay by David Brittain
Tim Simmons, Altered landscapes
Tim Simmons’ photographs belong to the lineage of Edweard Muybridge whose phased pictures of animal locomotion, published in the late 19th century, overturned centuries of naturalistic representation. With this one gesture Muybridge implicated the camera not just with “truth” but also with revelation and the fabulous. Simmons’ photographs, as analogue images – linked to their referents by the agency of optics and chemistry – stand, like Mubridge’s, as documentary evidence. But evidence of what?
Simmons’ carefully composed photographs of places as far flung as Scotland and Los Angeles are sometimes described as “uncanny”. Freud theorised the uncanny as ”everything…that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.” He listed shadows, mirrors and doppelgangers of all sorts as examples of uncanny phenomena. As a type of double, photographs possess an uncanny quality in resembling – yet refusing to embody – familiar things. The subject matter and mode of representation of Simmons” unsettling images are uncertain: nature seems estranged and unfamiliar, while the images obstinately refuse to declare their ontology or true nature.
Simmons documents nature, or rather “humanature” to use a neologism coined by the photographer Peter Goin. Goin uses it to describe a hybrid terrain of natural and man-made features such as artificial lights, plantations, landscape design and so on. Sitings of such altered landscapes began to emerge after the second world war with the coming of new suburbs, expressways, theme parks and airports. The critic Robert A. Sobieszek noted that between 1956 and 1979, the year of Tarkovski’s film, “Stalker”, “new order of landscape had taken hold of the imagination”, that was foreshadowed by T.S. Eliot. His ““abled wasteland had completely displaced sylvan pastorals and Edenic backdrop.”
The altered landscape as sublime is Simmons’ subject. Our natural point of entry to these images is not via the history of photography or art, but through the portal of special effects film-making and the “inner space” fiction of writers such as J.G. Ballard.
David Brittain is Research Associate at MIRIAD, Manchester Metropolitan University, England
Intervention
Galerie Christa Klubert
23rd April–10 June 2009
Catalogue Essay by Sally O’Reilly
We seldom check our comprehension of phenomena beyond direct experience because, well, life’s hard enough as it is without knowing we’re spinning at hundreds of kilometres an hour. Occasionally, though, we might contemplate a mountain, perhaps regarding it with awe and humbling ourselves in the shadow of perpetuity that our mortality denies us. More often, though, we travel along the surface of our planet oblivious to its magnitude in time and space, all the better to achieve our human goals, from the petty to the valiant.
Tim Simmons approaches photography as if it were a medium rooted not so much in documentation but contemplation. His images demand a gaze that takes in not only the immediate knowability of an object or place, but also its deeper connotations. His take on landscape recalls 19th-century American sublime painters, such as Frederic Church, who worked in response to a vast and mysterious continent, as well as with reference to the drama of European Romantics such as JMW Turner. For Turner, light was a great intangible force and, through the use of artificial light, Simmons too approaches landscape through the language of painting. His illuminated furrows of rock, snares of briars and hummocks of snow are revived from mundanity, transformed into pageants of potentiality that radiate with a geological half-life.
Such strangeness suggests a capacity to mutate, although this is held forever at bay. Faintly fantastical dimensions in suspended animation might seem simply cinematic or fashionably uncanny, but this alienating representation of our surroundings comes from a complex personal and political impulse. For Simmons the catalyst for this body of work was the death of his parents, prompting a profound revaluation of his principles and actions. The distractions that late capitalist society bombards us with often eclipse the spiritual, emotional or otherwise abstract dimensions of experience, and a slight pause is often necessary to shrug off our inherited remit of over-production and under-appreciation. Simmons hopes his practice to be just such a cause for pause, his imagery arresting our gaze for longer than usual, subverting our assumptions and demanding a recategorising of nature from pragmatic resource to otherworldly host. While this has obvious contemporary ecological implications, the political dimension also harks back to the basic tenets of Surrealism, where the tyranny of logic was deemed to have expelled the mystery of our interiority and the generative power of free-flowing thought. In a gesture not unlike that of the Surrealist painter, Simmons treks out to these remote places and, by administering the most ethereal of technology, coaxes out their psychical dimensions and mythological otherness. His pragmatic hope, however, is that we respond with a sense of wonderment that can then be reapplied to the world beneath our feet.
Sally O’Reilly
Transition of light
by Jesse Alexander
Falter magazine, Light Issue, 2009, Penttinen, Emma (ed)
Tim Simmons has been experimenting with illuminating the night for twenty years.
Photography and time enjoy a peculiar relationship: while accurate measure of time may be critical for a successful photographic exposure, no matter how long or short it may be, the resulting image – unlike in the moving image – only ever appears to represent a fleeting moment and never the actual duration of the exposure. For most photography this merits little consideration, yet when it comes to capturing the ever-changing and evolving external environment, this phenomenon begins to bear some relevance.
In these two very different triptychs, we are treated to a glimpse of Tim Simmons’ aesthetic and conceptual concerns. Simmons’ work places the viewer on the edge of reality, by forcing the viewer to question or simply wonder at the scene before him. Simmons’ intervenes with the landscape and the pattern of nature by carefully introducing artificial lighting, thus creating his own photographic illusions which sometimes complement the ambient light, but more often deliberately subvert and disturb any sense of visual or organic harmony.
Simmons creates a typically uncanny response to a benign set of boulders on a beach in the Rock triptych. We end up with the sensation of being able to witness from a safe distance an almost unearthly presence moving through the scene. Light – which should instinctively be a symbol of security – becomes something altogether more alien.
Simmons’ introduction of light is more discrete in the Cave triptych, where he subtly adds to the naturally iridescent tableau. From this vantage point, the viewer is almost mediating upon these primordial elements – the ocean, the cave and the fire – as the daylight, and finally the campfire sputters out under a canopy of stars.
Simmons’ technique of representing our landscape is untypical in his techno-centric methods and apparent irreverence of nature’s cycles. Yet it is with the aid of these mechanical apparatus that we can overcome the ever-changing external world, appreciating it literally in a different light, and revel in it for a mere moment.
Deliberately Unnatural
by Jesse Alexander
Source Magazine, Issue 55, Summer 2008
Tim Simmons, Intervention: Snow
Tim Simmons has been experimenting with illuminating the night for twenty years.
He is an established commercial photographer with an extensive portfolio of clients who want to place their products within one of his out-of-this-world landscapes. Alongside these commissions, Simmons has developed his own projects working almost exclusively at night, photographing vignettes of suburbia, forests, quarries, and in this latest series, the snow-covered Norwegian countryside.
With their extensive production values, Simmons’ exotic images engage the viewer and prompt an initial rejection of their photographic veracity. The saturated tones, high contrast, and deliberately unnatural lighting are reminiscent of video games, and instantly take the viewer into another dimension: a quarry becomes the surface of another planet; a seaside rock-pool becomes a lake surrounded by mountains. In addition to their resemblance to images from popular culture, his technique of multiple, yet unidentified light-sources, disorientates the viewer and prompts a sense of the uncanny. Simmons’ earlier photo-roman, Brief Encounters reveals the full extent of his passion for science fiction. However, this Snow series, comprising 12 images, holds-back from the melodrama of his earlier work: slightly less production, with a familiar ‘straight’ documentary-style camera angle creates a more considered tension which has a mystique, far beyond simply a novelty value.
Intervention – Tim Simmons
by Louise Clements
Next Level Magazine, Next Level 13, The Symbolism Edition, 2008
‘The job of the artist is to deepen the mystery.’ Francis Bacon
The photography of Tim Simmons prompts us to dream, to contemplate time and eternity. His works expound the spirit of the place, from the mundane to the magnificent. Landscapes from the back yard to the snowfield are the sets of his eerie, haunting, enigmatic photographs. Created as seamless, modest yet elaborately orchestrated tableau. Meticulous in their poise, composition and lighting – Simmons is a master technician, an illusionist. By using a technique refined over the last 25 years, he reconfirms that the camera can do much more than capture a moment in time. Interventions are animations of frozen time worked to elevate landscape, (imagined as an indefinite subject between dream and reality), above history and legend. His pictures suggest the bizarre yet beautiful surrealities behind deceptively familiar locations, empty and lonely territories become simultaneously poetic and seductive. Dissonantly lit in their isolation at once recognisable they draw us into exploring a transformation of the urban landscape after dark – cold grey concrete, a carport and anonymous steps – usually banal and disregarded, take on altogether new and classical meanings in this estranged context.
Nocturne is a natural subject for artists who exploit the metaphysical dynamic that manifests during the dark hours of day. In their work they manipulate emblematic representation to amplify the emotional impact, this is employed in Simmons’ revelation of the world, instilled with a heavy silence and an anxious glow. Conjured during the diminishing hours of day and deep into the night when the uncanny and otherworldly manifest, rendered with concentration and subtleness these fleeting moments endure. In each image the enchanting narrative unfolds suggesting a yet unrealised transformative potential. Within eerie states of stillness they possess a silent and extraordinary magical beauty.
Validating or evidencing the inexplicable is an ongoing concern that runs through the series. Shot at night or at the time just bridging twilight, a mythical zone when the veil separating this world and the next is at its thinnest. They bask in the loss of light which accents the glow that persists, emanating from an unknown source. The most significant sense from the works is an overriding feeling that evokes the notion of interlude and aftermath. An atmosphere within the works causes an exhilarating unease, a nervous excitement, a shift in perception, the unknown is about to appear or has just left. Photography is a essentially a fictive medium, able to create realities, the experience of which poses complex questions about how we attribute meaning, how we define the ‘real’, how we think and how we indoctrinate norms and collective signs. Without heavy handed intent the image becomes a Rorschach for a system of reading signs and symbols.
Described by materiality, then illustrated by their relational depths each photograph in the series uncovers and documents a covert environment. Not filled with romantic longing but an aesthetic and technical objectivity. In a climate of image saturation and predetermined experience, photographs nevertheless trade on the underlying facticity of the subject depicted. Interventions plays on our trust in photography’s totemic devices to pertain to or evidence ‘the truth’, allowing belief in the image and momentary suspension of disbelief. Despite cynicism all of us crave something beautiful and transcendent in our lives. It is through this conveyance of ideas, concerning nature of wonder that the symbolic architecture of meaning is able to build and take root. Simmons’ photographs offer a glimpse of a hidden mystery, triggering us into an imaginative reverie. Fascinated with the mythology of space and potential traces of life in absence, Simmons’ imagery does not attempt to offer a single answer to a complexity of questions but acts toward contributing to the mystery of life and in reconfirming the elusivity of a tangible didactic.
Louise Clements (Senior Curator at Quad)