Benjamin Jones
“I’m interested in the way a photograph can simultaneously represent more and less than the context of the image..”
Interview by Brooke Hailey Hoffert
Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background? Where did you study?
I was born and grew up in Reading and came to art quite late at around 18, going on to study at Bath School of Art and Design. Prior to that I was set to do a business degree and competed at sprint kayaking, so it was quite a shift, but one made just in time. I’m grateful to have ended up at a small art school, they seem quite rare now and the experience was great; as students we hosted nights and shows at a club in Bath which has since closed down, and after that time I moved to Bristol for a year long residency at Spike Island as a graduate fellow, and to work for Mariele Neudecker.
About myself, I tend to have a lot of things going on at any one time; whether that’s different books, strands of work or previously jobs, there’ generally a lot of plates spinning. I move around quite a lot, I think seven times in the last three years, and in the same space of time worked as an assistant to two artists, as a commercial photographer, ran and taught in a darkroom, been a Tech Dem at Bath School of Art and run various workshops alongside my practice whilst living in Bristol. In April 2019 I left this for a residency in Graz, Austria, which followed with a stint in London and another month in Graz later in the year for an exhibition titled Glashaus. My studio is now based in Reading.
I have a tendency to collect things; art related books primarily, but generally I’m quite pluralistic in terms of interests, tending to read/listen quite widely, from dystopian fiction to political philosophy. I’ve recently been reacquainting with Greek Mythology, and also enjoyed Olivia Laing’s recent collection of articles and essays as well as Phillip Larkin’s works. Literature feeds into my work quite heavily, introducing reference points, themes and imagery and ideas.
You have mentioned the challenge with photographic practice of being able to “open something up rather than closing or finalizing something.” Can you tell us about how you strive to keep the conversation “open” with your photography?
I think the documentary expectation of photography can often be quite overbearing. It’s tasked with telling a story, summing up or describing each aspect of an event and relying on the meaning held by a subject (communicated by text). So what I mean by being able to open or not finalise something is really in relation to that set of cultural expectations that surround the medium. My photographs tend to exist in isolation from their context, with no mention of place or time made in the works titles. I’m interested in the way a photograph can simultaneously represent more and less than the context of the image; in one sense becoming symbolic of broader themes or larger categories for organising what we see, and in another isolating itself with it's inherent muteness, reduced down to the fragmentary information contained on its surface, or inference of it’s process.
So the work I make therefore doesn't aim to address a singular subject, and in many ways I’m more interested in the cross-overs, unexpected interrelations between subjects, but also between a subject and the meaning generated by process. I avoid pinning things down to a specifically researched point, having a degree of faith that if one keeps absorbing the world it'll find its way back out in the work with some new connections made in the process. There will be things I see emerging and other things that are invisible until someone points it out. Keeping the conversation open is to a large degree about avoiding the specificity narrative, the pressure of storytelling, not tying a photograph down with information it cannot communicate itself.
Glashaus installaltion Shot
Glashaus installaltion Shot
The majority of your work is black and white. What inspired you to make that stylistic choice?
Although we can project the colour onto much that we see in monochromatic photographs, it’s visual presence would bring the work closer to realistic representation rather than the photographic interpretation which I’m interested in. When I make a ‘straight’ photograph, I’m in a sense looking to collect a memory of this thing, or the idea of it that exists as something transient with regard to my own experience, an echo of sorts, and I find that the separation from reality forced by monochromatic representation to be a useful sort of processing method. Realistic colour can bring you deceptively and comfortably close, something I rarely look to do.
My non representational work has come primarily out of experimenting with processes in a black and white darkroom, and so far I have always arrived at works which I find intriguing and exciting without the serious intervention of colour; the materiality of black and white photography providing a lot of flexibility with regard to the meaning these processes and objects can generate. I should note that the papers and chemistry I use do provide a limited colour palette of greens, purples, blues, and reds; so there's always a subtle presence or shift in one direction or another, to a degree that does impact the presence or atmosphere of a work. These non-representational strands, such as Binder or Fog for instance, tend to explore photography’s reflexivity; whether through layered exposures and actions, imprints of objects photogrammed to the papers surface, movement or chemical reactions. Light, shadow and tonality have so far provided enormous bandwidth to work with this and make photographic objects I’m really interested in, but that same methodology does certainly leave open the possibility of working with colour in future, it just has to find its logical place.
Tell us a bit about how you spend your day / studio routine? What is your studio like?
My studio is centred around my darkroom. Moving around has meant not making a full committment to a specific place and with the pandemic I’ve held off making the financial committment on a larger space, though will look to set one up towards the end of the year to prepare for upcoming shows. When making large work however I use the darkroom of a generous friend in Graz, Austria, as you need quite a particular set up for working at scale and she’s developed an amazing space in which to do it, somewhere I can work with total freedom. It’s located in a space called Schaumbad Freies Atelierhaus Graz which is a studio complex and gallery (with a former life as a Coca Cola factory), and so I can travel out there to work for a couple of weeks at a time and ship the prints back. The longer term plan is to set up a space like this in the future, effectively a big darkroom you can let some natural light into when working on non light sensitive things.
My routine is currently centred around printing photographs from my archive which I’ve not previously given time to. This happens in a semi intuitive way rather than being systematic, so after mixing/setting up the chemicals for the day, I’ll work on whichever negative to achieve a good print and let that image prompt the decision for the next one; I can go through anywhere between three and five photographs in a day. When committing to setting up the chemicals, that really defines the whole day. Other days are totally different, perhaps involving going out to make a photograph of something I’ve noticed, travelling to make images for a larger work I've been planning, doing some reading and writing around the work, testing combinations of work for upcoming shows or publications.
Binder 3
Binder 4
Glashaus installaltion Shot
What artwork have you seen recently that has resonated with you?
Nearly all of the artwork I have seen recently has been in my books, and at the start of the lockdown I was reading a lot about Calder's sculptures, which fortunately I’d seen a number of in a show the year before last. I felt a lot more aware of spring this year and his sculptures really resonate with that sense of change that takes place in the nature around us, that everything is balanced and in motion. I also look at Jochen Lempert’s photographs on a regular basis, and am consistently in awe of his ingenious observations. He notices natural occurrences in a deeply poetic way, making photographs that I’ve really not seen the like of by any other artist. He is led to his subjects by scientific knowledge however subverts the crisp sharp objectivity we expect from scientific imagery and nature documentaries. His work feels very connected to the nature it depicts.
I’ve also been following Amelia Bowles work and over the last few months, and have found her diptychs really engaging. There’s a text Tacita Dean wrote for a book about Roni Horn where she refers to the significance of pairs and repetition in Horn's practice. She reflects on how we see, hear and touch in stereo whilst thinking, feeling and speaking in mono; an observation I feel echoes with Bowles paintings. They’re not taped and precisely measured, so whilst each pair appear to be identical, they have individual characteristics evocative of our bodily symmetry. Dean goes on to elucidate her point more expansively but to condense it here; she speaks of perceiving the difference between a candle held to a star when they take on the same intensity set at a certain distance in the landscape. For me, Bowles diptychs and Dean’s text resonate rather strongly with one another.
Could you tell us about how you have coped during the COVID-19 Pandemic? Have you managed to do much work?
The pandemic immediately halted most of my income being self employed, and so it was a tricky period of adjustment initially. In the beginning I worked on a conversation/email exchange with Reinhard Braun from Camera Austria which was published online a couple of months ago in place of an exhibition I was meant to have with them around that time. I also passed many many hours experimenting with an artist book, which ended up with five or so draughts that without the pandemic I wouldn’t have had the time to do; so that was a great experiment and I’ll look to self publish that as a small edition later this year or next. As well as this I designed a catalogue for my joint exhibition Glashaus from last year, to hopefully be published later this year all being well. I only set my darkroom up around six or eight weeks ago, as it was hard to find the right enlarger (I was trawling ebay daily for months), so I’ve been working in there from the point at which that was set up. I’ve certainly felt immensely busy, and done work I wouldn’t have otherwise done, and now other projects seem to be getting moving again. During the midst of the lockdown I had been due to spend a month making some new work in Graz, but that has been put off for the moment. Coping-wise I've played a lot of chess; read some great novels, poetry, essays and monographs; worked on the aforementioned projects and spent a lot of time walking, cycling and making calls (less video more phone).
Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?
I’ve started working with a gallery in Milan, a collaboration that will be announced properly in September, followed by a show next year pandemic permitting. I have a photobook project with a small press that again, is yet to be announced and is at a very early stage, but also plan to self publish the artist book I previously mentioned late this year or at the beginning of next. The Glashaus catalogue will also go to print in the not too distant future, and I’ll be heading over to Graz to launch it there as well. During that trip to Graz, I’ll spend a few weeks working on some new large scale pieces and have secured a grant to facilitate that, though again can’t quite be sure on the timeline.
Robert Luzar and I are working on a collaborative show we’ll present at 36 Lime Street in Newcastle next year. I’m also collaborating remotely with an artist based in Thessaloniki, Ilektra Maipa, and I’ll spend two weeks in residence there mid next year putting together our exhibition at Gonzo Unit, a project space in the city I showed with back in 2018. That’s about it!
All images are courtesy of the artist
Date of publication: 02/09/20
