9 / 30 Your layers of the real

Jayce Salloum’s class is probably the one that I have spent most time with until today. They are at the moment in the process of finishing their prints for their final exhibition on Friday. Between several discussions with his students, I met Jayce Salloum to talk about his teaching and how it relates to his own practice as a photographer.

 

 

How is the class going?

 

I think its going good. I am mostly basing it on print reading sessions. So we would look at work and not just critique it. We rather look at it and try to understand exactly what was going on with the photographer or the student. We try to learn from the images and about the photographers: where they are at in their life, what their relationships are to other things in the world and to their photography.

 

 

You said several times that it is important for you that the people in your class understand themselves as agents in a social context.

 

For me that is the most important thing, working photographically means working with layers of the real. It means always working with your social context: where you are in society in relationship to your working. If you are doing street photography or if you are constructing images, what sense are they making? Because otherwise if it is just a snapshot for a photo album, that is fine, but that’s not what I am interested in.

 

 

Tell me more about this process of analysis. So in your class you look where people come from socially, but you also look out for their anxieties.

 

Yeah, where people come from, but also their state of their being. As a photographer I am taking pictures and then look at those pictures and I reflect upon them and self-analyse my stuff and my situation. I learn from them, trusting that the photographs are some steps ahead of me. If I am working a lot, firstly I am collecting pictures in a stream of consciousness, or rather a stream of unconsciousness, just collecting intuitively. And then I use that as some kind of a self-constructed tarot card in some way.

 

So you say that there is some kind of an anticipatory mode in the photos that you shoot.

 

Yeah they are ahead of their time. We can learn from them because they all become self-reflective: self-reflexive, self-reflective and auto-biographical. That is the thing about photography, like in painting, it is all coming from your self. However, photography has to do more with appendage. It is coming out of you through the way you are framing: how you are holding the camera, what you are pointing it at, what you are shooting. And then it is also coming back at you when you are printing it. Looking at the photographs, they are anticipatory in that you can look at them and find out where you are at. So, they are leading you. They are ahead of you. When you are working, it sometimes takes a few months to realize what is in a photograph. Unless you go back and look, you get stuck in a way of perceiving that is formulaic.

 

 

If I get you right, this practice requires very different modes of observation. A kind of observation when you take the photos and a mode of observation that comes later when you edit. How do they differ? And how would you describe these modes of looking for something?

 

I try to teach that when you are out there gathering images that you are not presupposing, preconfiguring what it is you are looking at. So that you are trying to get beyond the baggage that you are carrying with you and just repeating the same image in different setting each time. A lot of people do that and they make their fortune and fame from that, because they have made a strong set of images, but then they just keep on repeating. That is what the commercial art market loves. But if you are using photography as a tool for growth and for inquiry about the world then you don’t want these repetitions. You would think about where you are going beforehand and then just take pictures not thinking so much about that. This is also why we did this other exercise: not looking through the camera.

 

On the second day, Salloum went out to the streets with his class. The only instruction was to take as many pictures as possible without looking through the camera. Later the students selected a series of these photos to discuss them in class.

 

 

I found it fascinating how the camera, even if you are not looking through it, becomes embodied in a certain way in that exercise.

 

It becomes an appendage, like an eye at the end of your tentacle. For some people this was amazing. Even though they weren’t looking through the camera or looking at the image, there were always  images that were still quite unique to each one and some were related to their previous work. But this was leading them somewhere else and leading them to new things.

 

 

What do you mean when you say photography can be medium for personal growth? Is it about getting to know yourself better or is it also about getting to know something about the world?

 

It is both, but it starts with the self. If you don’t know who you are yourself, you are not going to be able to figure out anything else in the world. Oftentimes we need re-assurance. We need to know what we are thinking is actually happening or actually real. You know, sometimes we are so lost that we are not able to move forward. People many times in their lives are trying to put things together. They are juggling life and their work and their passions and things that they have put aside for years maybe. I think at any stage in our life we can use that process of photographing to find out things, to look at the edge of things.