Eric
Zeigler

Still Photographs

I am motivated by surprises. When I go out to make photographs, I start with few set conditions for what I will encounter. Remaining open to everything is paramount to my process. I photograph many things and often, and then I sort through that work to find the interesting pictures. The work is then sifted—sometimes dozens of times—until themes emerge and then I can see what I was after the whole time. With Still Photographs, I photographed memories, death, and humor. Not easy subjects to sit near each other. I found them inseparable however, and the results filled with enormous tensions—tensions describing the humor we must have to participate in world that we exist in.

The photographic documentary genre has proved to be a limited medium for describing the entirety of real life, contrary to its historical claims. By combining documentary style photographs together in diptychs, I am able to show tensions that would be otherwise unphotographable. Photography relies on subjects to be in a single frame with relations to one another, but the tensions I depict are strung through the space between meanings of the individual photographs.

I created combinations to reinforce the unknown in the pictures. When we are shown one photograph alone, it is much easier to let that photograph’s assumptions dictate the meaning. But when we are living in the world, we do not always see individual events as separated from everything else. Our emotions, thoughts, and memories of events are formed and changed as the result of other information asking for our attention at the same time. These diptychs are my way of reinforcing the range of possibility and surprising interaction that exists in the world is also possible in a documentary style photograph.