Matthew Shelley

Matthew Shelley, untitled from *Elsewhere, 2020 -2025*

Alex Yudzon: Photography has a rich history of depicting ersatz realities, miniature tableaus, dioramas, amusement parks, etc,.. the photographic mediums unique ability to blur the boundary between the real and the staged seems to lend itself to this form of subject matter, can you tell me a little about how you see your work within this context and what is it about mountains in particular that draws your interest?

Matthew Shelley: Definitely. I'm influenced by a lot of photographers who stage the scenarios that they photograph. Robert Cumming, and John Divola have both had a big impact on my work. They each photographed movie sets and took advantage of the fictional landscapes that set designers had made. I think both of those artists have a special connection to the inherent fiction of pictures. Their photographs depict things common in the real world, but their pictures are arranged in a way that invites doubt.

Looking at their work feels like a kind of limbo, because it’s easy to see both fact and fiction in the image. There's always a cue in their photos that tells the viewer that the scene is a set up. In many cases, the cue isn't very subtle, so the image is only believable at a glance. I think that relates to this project.

The pictures here are only complete landscapes for a moment. There's always something that breaks the illusion of full landscapes in these photos. Sometimes it's a feature on the rock that gives away the true scale, or it might be an impossible angle, or shapes that would never occur in mountains. I didn't want the pictures to be too convincing. I didn’t want the pictures to be reduced to illusion. It’s okay if that’s a part of the image, but I didn’t want it to become a gimmick, and so I always tried to break it up at some point.

In the Luigi Ghirri photos that you mentioned; the ones where he photographed a model landscape of the Alps in an amusement park. It’s the conflict in those pictures that keeps them interesting. At first glance, it appears to be a family in the Alps, but upon closer inspection, something is off. There might be a railing, or a sign, or some other distraction that break up the fiction of the model landscape. For me, those pictures much more alluring than landscape photos which were actually taken in the Alps.

I think that a drastic shift in scale can activate the imagination. When my mind starts to wander, I envision landscapes, or places that I'd like to be. There is a lot of pleasure in finding an object, then changing its scale, and creating a whole landscape. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and I spent a lot of time in the Mountains. Those places are part of my past, and I think about them a lot. However, if I still lived there, and could access those places, then I might not feel motivated to make these pictures. The fact that they are distant is probably part of the appeal.

AY: I'm intrigued by what you say about not wanting the work to be about deception and yet retaining the ability to intentionally, if only momentarily, confuse the viewer's sense of reality. This seems like a very subjective line to tread, can you talk a little bit about your process, how you choose the rocks, how you compose the scenes and how you work with light?

MS: I took almost all of the photos within two or three miles of my house. Some on a beach off the Long Island Sound, and others at a nearby construction site. This body of work is about fictional places, and it seemed appropriate to stay within my everyday environment for that. That limitation would force me to keep seeing the familiar as something different. The vast majority of these were taken at the same location just down the road.

I’d get a low vantage point, and set the horizon high to in order to eliminate the background of the existing landscape. Most of these were photographed with only natural light under cloudy conditions. A lot of the pictures have a flat or hazy light in them, which I think adds to the disorientation of scale. Some were photographed at night, which was very rewarding. I used a spotlight on the subject, and photographed with a narrow aperture and long exposure. I think that those might get the closest to the kind of confusion that we have been talking about. Because the form and textures seem massive, but a mountain could never be lit that directly at night. As a viewer, you know something’s off, but it takes a minute figure out what.

In a daydream, you don’t abandon reality, but you can find yourself in a trance where you see things differently. You want to fool yourself into seeing something. That’s how I wanted these pictures to work. I wanted the viewer to willingly participate in the illusion. To somehow sense that it’s staged, but to accept that and participate in it nonetheless.

As you mentioned, that mindset is extremely subjective. Each person needs a different combination of cues to enter that state of mind. There are obvious tips that suggest the true scale of the rocks. There are smaller boulders within the photo, or the texture of the flour doesn’t quite mimic snow. There were also shapes that would give the situation away. Cliffs that dropped off into nothing, or impossibly deep canyons. The base of the rock would often tilt inward in a way that a mountain never could.

It’s a difficult challenge. I was trying to fabricate a landscape, but only partially. In order to make it work, there has to be just enough of a suggestion that the rock is something else. Finding that balance, where the illusion takes hold, but only momentarily, that was the most challenging part of working on these.

AY: Imagining places or daydreaming seems like something that happens accidentally; As you said, you drift into it without realizing that it’s happening. However, these pictures feel pretty clear and deliberate. The focus is sharp and the formal aspects of the pictures seem carefully arranged. How did these pictures develop aesthetically?

MS: That’s a good point. I wonder if making the pictures feel less structured would get closer to the feeling of drifting into an imagined place? I can’t say that I explored it from that angle.

In the summer of 2020, I was out walking, and I started noticing the contours of these coastal rocks. I came back with my camera later on and started photographing them. Once I put a format around the subject and had it cropped, the rocks became pretty convincing as mountains. Looking back, I realize how essential the camera’s viewfinder was in allowing me to imagine these rocks as full landscapes.

I wanted to see the rock at a different scale, and I think the camera helped me with that. Looking through a viewfinder helped me further the experience of imagining a place. After that was accomplished, I slowed down and started building the pictures more carefully.

I arrived at the subject by accident, but once I started working with a camera I was looking for formal qualities as much as looking to stimulate my imagination. These photos were prompted by shape, contrast, and texture as much as anything else. I try to be very attentive to how things are arranged. That is my favorite part of drawing and painting. The compositional design of these pictures was very important to me. Out of the hundreds of photos in this projects, I selected the ones for the book almost solely based on visual design.

AY: The idea of an artwork operating like a daydream reminds me of Romanticism, specifically the way nature, and mountains in particular, are venerated as expressions of the sublime by artists such as Caspar David Friedrich. This has a direct connection to the Hudson River School and later to the photographs Ansel Adams made of the national parks. Can you talk a little bit about how you see your work in relation to these movements?

MS: I think there’s definitely a connection to Romanticism and to artists who deal with the sublime. I remember that stuff had a big impact on me as an undergraduate. Their imagery certainly worked on me. I loved the way those paintings made me feel. I don’t know how much I thought about their intentions, or the intellectual aspects of their work back then. In art history I learned about Romantic themes and the general definition of the sublime, but I never really unpacked those ideas. It wasn’t until later that I understood that the grander of nature is just one expression of the sublime.

I suppose my interest in scale would connect me to the Romantics and the sublime. The magnitude of nature, and the feeling of vulnerability that extreme scale can elicit is something that I love thinking about. Trying to create that feeling by photographing something small is an amusing contradiction.

It’s hard to say how directly I was thinking about those things. I have worked with alpine imagery since graduate school. Back then, I was drawing pictures of mountains, and so I approached these photos the same way. All of those themes about solitude, insignificance, and the indifference of nature are on my mind, but there are other things attached to the mountains. I don’t know if my intentions here were the same as the Romantics?

Back in Oregon, I didn’t live around epic mountains, but I would see them on road trips. They were somewhat familiar, but at the same time pretty exotic. My connection to those landscapes was positive, but they were also intimidating and I definitely thought about their more severe side. I had a fascination with their remoteness and isolation. Those themes were present in this project, but there was also an acknowledgment that the imagery is a set, that it’s not real, and that changes the dynamic a little. I doubt that you could have a sublime experience if you know the set up is only fantasy.

However, Like you mentioned, imagination, fantasy, and the irrational were all common themes in Romanticism. All of the artists that you mentioned have had an impact on me. Frederic Edwin Church, Caspar David Friedrich, and the Hudson River School all impacted my views on landscape.

AY: Perhaps, the difference between "being there or imagining being there" is not such a great one, at least your work seems to suggest that it's not, that what's vital is the depth of the experience not the scale of its cause. Has working in this manner changed your perception of other things, has it altered your photographic approach in ways that have been unexpected or surprising?

MS: I think that’s a great perspective on the project. I haven’t thought about it in exactly that way. It’s a good question to frame the work in; how does an imagined experience differ from reality, and which is more valuable? I can’t really say.

In some ways, I feel more immersed in imagined experiences than reality. When I stop and engage with something very simple, and allow my mind to wander, I feel more present than when I am somewhere that is really impressive. In an epic environment, there is so much pressure to take in the scenery, and to make the most of each moment. When I’m in those places, I find myself rushing to keep up. During the actual experience, I’m trying to pay attention, and make sure that I don’t miss anything. It’s a privilege to be in such places, but it brings about a different kind of pleasure than something imagined.

I have wondered before if I value the memory of those places more than I value the actual experience of being there. Time spent in the mountains passes pretty fast. There’s no way to freeze the experience. But the memory of those experiences, that’s something that can be revisited, and in the memory there is an element of fiction, which makes it both familiar and strange at the same time. A lot of the artwork that I appreciate has those same qualities.

I’m not sure if these photographs have altered the rest of my work? I did try and recreate the same scale shift in other subjects, but it hasn’t worked out yet. I’d guess it has something to do with my relationship to the mountains as subjects. I think about mountains so often that it makes sense that I would see them in something else. Maybe the ease of imagining that kind of scenery is what made these photos possible? When I tried to take the approach to other subjects it didn’t really coalesce.

AY: I’m intrigued by your use of the square format. When I think of landscape photography I think of panoramic vistas which have an almost cinematic drama. Yet, with only a few exceptions, you deliberately chose a format more closely associated with portraiture, can you talk a little about what led you to this choice?

MS: I suppose part of it comes from my background in drawing and painting. I studied at University of Oregon, and at American University in Washington DC. My focus in each program was drawing and painting. I don’t have any formal training as a photographer. The way that I set up photographs is based on the compositional principles that I learned in drawing. The subjects that I photograph are an extension of my drawing practice, which is probably why they’re always related to landscape, or still and never moving. I tend to select subjects and compose them as though I were going to draw them.

As an undergraduate, when I was taking basic drawing courses, I had a professor who encouraged us to use square formats. His particular approach to drawing was very structured and he really dissected compositions in class. Studying with him was when I started to develop compositional awareness. To this day I tend to want to frame things in a square, or something close to a square.

I hadn’t given the square format here much thought until you mentioned it, but I agree that it’s an important part of the work. The pictures would have a very different character if they were panoramas. There is an isolated rock and a single peak in each picture. I tend to imagine the path to each peak, and the conditions on the summit. That path seemed to disappear when I arranged the compositions to suggest a mountain range.

I did shoot a lot of these in other format ratios and only a few of them worked in the end. I have several antique cameras that shoot in a square format. The square format probably gives the pictures a slightly vintage aesthetic. That’s also something I may have wanted without realizing it.

AY: After seeing this body of work, one has the sense of having experienced a mental landscape as much as a physical one. Going forward, will you continue working in this vein, or is this a stand alone series that has a definite end point?

MS: That’s a good question. I’m not really sure. I am still working in this way, and adding to this group of photos all the time, so it’s ongoing. I have been making these images for about five years. I set the photos up a little different than I did in the beginning, and my criteria has shifted a little. I think the themes here could continue to evolve and morph into something else.

I’d say that most of my work represents a mental landscape, so in that way it is not an isolated project. I’ll always be interested in the highly subjective experience of looking at pictures. I believe that’s true of any picture. Photographs as well as paintings and other artistic media. Our mind expands and completes any image that we look at. When we look at an image I think that we move beyond what is depicted and complete the picture in a variety of ways; visual and non-visual. We might imagine sound, or temperature, or create a narrative that builds off of the image that we’re looking at.

I was reading an essay by Robert Adams the other day about 19th century photographs of the American West. In the essay, he writes about the space that surrounds the scene even beyond the borders of the photo. He writes that our feelings about those images depends on the vast and unpopulated space that we imagine to surround the picture.

A few months ago I took a picture of a field next to a freeway in California. The photo feels very remote and picturesque. To look at the picture, one would never know that the scene was disturbed by the noise of the freeway right behind me. To Robert Adam’s point, my photo has this quiet and pastoral feeling because the viewer imagines the scene depicted to continue beyond the borders of the image.

After that I thought about how the pictures in this series have this remote and isolated feeling. Obviously, that’s something we associate with mountains, so that’s part of it. But at the same time, it’s a feeling that we’re bringing to the image because of the assumed space around the picture. That space beyond the format is completely fictional in these photos. There is no way to visit these places or hike into the locations photographed. The reality is that these pictures were taken in very populated public beaches here in Connecticut.

That was part of what gave this project meaning to me. In making these images, I realized that I don’t need to travel to remote places to make images that have the feeling of deep isolation. Of course, photographers achieve the feeling of isolation through all kinds of genres and different approaches. You could achieve that feeling through street photography or portraiture.

There is an ongoing theme of space is all of my work. In this body of work the space is much larger than usual. In that way, I think it’s unique to other things that I have done. There is a deep space in these pictures that sets them apart from my other work. It was motivated by a desire to connect with a places that are difficult to get to. These landscapes are remote and would be difficult to approach even if they actually existed, but because they’re staged closer investigation is impossible.

Dean Smith

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