I think that the more personal a work of art is, the more easily an audience can relate their own lives to the universal ideas within it.
Introduction
The work of the Colombian artist Tom Griggs draws on a variety of familiar sources. Familiar in the sense that many are part of the everyday vernacular of the snapshot, the family album, and the mass media, yet highly personal in that we each relate to these types of image through the lens of our own experience. After all, the family album may be a familiar visual trope, but my family album, my iPhone archive, is different from yours – fundamentally so in terms of what those images mean to me or to you. It is at this interface between the generic and the particular that Tom Griggs creates space of shared exploration. The images he selects are carefully edited and sequenced, sometimes with the addition of words – an observation, a quotation, a psalm. They do not so much recount a story as create the visual equivalent of a prose poem in which images are juxtaposed in ways that evoke rather than narrate. Here, what draws the viewer in is not the familiarity of the images themselves, but the familiarity of the underlying desire to reach through photographs to another time, another place. And, in this elsewhere, to seek meanings that elude us in the here and now.
A prose poem draws on the devices of one literary form to enrich another. The compression of poetic language, its fragmentation of narrative, the weight of metaphor, the complex weaving of thematic threads. In this case, the artist takes the format of a book and creates within it something that defies linearity. Each book is different, its form and content arising from its subject matter. Yet each creates a space that is both personal to the artist and available to the reader through a kind of cognitive echo. He invites us to open ourselves and feel this resonance. To re-imagine – or perhaps co-imagine – his imagery as if it were our experiences it depicted. To feel with him; to follow him in his search for understanding. To create with him an empathic space of intuited affect and meaning.
Alasdair Foster
Interview
How would describe your approach to photography?
In practice, I begin by gathering up two distinct sets of material. One involves an accumulation of project ideas, things I find potentially interesting and want to investigate further, open questions, curiosities, quotes I like… The other is an accumulation of visual material – mostly my own photographs, cell phone snapshots, screenshots, but also family archives and digitised home movies.
I begin to feel a pull between aspects from each group. It might be that a particular project idea and a constellation of photographs together begin to suggest the premise of a project. Or perhaps an open question finds an answer in a screenshot. This pull between elements of each group increases until a point is reached where it feels imperative that I work on them.
What happens next?
The initial phase takes place quickly as that attractive force pulls in everything that I might potentially use. But from there, it takes months or even years to fill in that structure: questioning, tearing down, rebuilding… going out and finding better materials. I get lost. I give up. I return. Then, the final stretch, like the beginning, is very fast. Things falls into place as I understand – finally – what the work is about. What it wants to be.
© Tom Griggs – from the series ‘Herida y Fuente’ 2017
What drives this?
I am interested in working in diverse modes. My projects follow their own internal logic and tend not to look alike. Some face inwards and build from personal narratives. Others face outwards and begin with photographs I make in the world.
To offer a concrete example of how this works… In graduate school I had a long-distance relationship with a woman I would later marry. At that time, my understanding of love was not joy, but something we suffer. This found expression in a series of photographs made using the dark tonality and colour saturation of early digital captures made in low light. The work explores love and distance in two ways: distance from the ideal and the distance of living apart from the one you love because of the exigencies of life.
© Tom Griggs – from the series ‘Herida y Fuente’ 2017
Did you always intend this work to be an artist’s book?
I built an archive without an end project in mind. The images were made in the course of my daily life, responding visually to moments and situations. The subsequent sequencing of the images required that I fulfill two criteria simultaneously: establish the visual coherence of the work while maintaining a basic narrative arc. Inevitably this revealed gaps in the sequence that required further photography and combing of the archives. I also created digital collages using the book’s dark tonality to hide the seam between images. Ultimately it was a process of sequence, assess, adjust, repeat until it became a single coherent work: ‘Herida y fuente’ [wound and fountain].
Photographs are inevitably open to interpretation. How do you find a balance between your personal perspective and that of each individual viewer?
While I am not afraid of being enigmatic, I do not want to create work that is so opaque that people are unable to enter it. An artwork needs enough translucency for the viewer to move around inside it. But it should not be so transparent that the viewer follows a single, easily identified path through the work. I do not think that makes for an art experience that lasts, that keeps us thinking. Drawing one back into it. Beyond that, I try not to control the experience of my work or shape it in anticipation of viewer response. Each individual will bring their life story, personal knowledge, and perspective as they make their own meaning.
© Tom Griggs & Paul Kwiatkowski – from the series ‘Ghost Guessed’ 2018
‘Ghost Guessed’ is a collaborative project made with the photographer and writer Paul Kwiatkowski. How did this begin?
Paul and I started sharing late night Skype calls – beers in hand – while he was on a road trip across the US. Those early conversations ranged from personal life stories to ideas about the state of culture in the US. I recorded those conversations and we began to clip out parts of the audio that we felt we could use. We worked on a Google text document together and shared images in PDFs… back and forth…
How did you bring this together conceptually?
Over time, the more general analytical conversations about media and culture became grounded in two specific events: the disappearance of flight MH370 [the Malaysia Airlines passenger plane that disappeared over the South China Sea on 8 March 2014] and the personal story of my cousin Andrew Lindberg who had disappeared while flying a light aircraft over central Minnesota five years earlier. The project explores the cultural zeitgeist of those two moments, as well as our thoughts on media and technology that arose during those initial Skype conversations.
According to the NTSB [the US National Transportation Safety Board] report on Andrew’s crash, he experienced spatial disorientation while flying into a storm – losing his sense of up and down –resulting in his disappearance. That is the core metaphor we used for the life of the narrator of the book.
Given two of you collaborated on this book – whose voice is the narrator?
We borrowed freely from both of our lives to create the book’s fictional narrator. We smoothed those experiences into a single voice through many rounds of polishing the text until even he and I have forgotten who originally wrote what.
How did you create a sense of cohesion when borrowing images from such disparate sources?
I do not think that working with images from different sources creates particular demands on editing and sequencing. It’s still about balancing visual flow that carries the reader through. Part of the approach was to build an argument for using images from multiple sources directly into the text. We have a chapter in which we explore how we not only understand ourselves through the content of an old family photograph or home movie, but also through the aesthetic of those sources. The grain in a home movie; the colour palette of Kodachrome…
How do you use personal stories to address more universal ideas?
I think that the more personal a work of art is, the more easily an audience can relate their own lives to the universal ideas within it. Generalities don’t bring viewers into connection with our personal narratives, details do. For me, the meaning of a photograph comes from both the experience of making and the experience of sharing. Acts of isolated creation may have meaning for the maker, but wider meaning is forged in the heat generated between author and audience. That said, it is important that photographs are shared inside a unifying conceptual frame defining the space in which to explore the mutually constructed meaning between maker and viewer that completes the circuit of communication.
Your most recent book is ‘A Creature Obeys a Creature That Wants’. How did this begin and what is it about?
The book is one of my inward facing projects. When, in middle age, my own life hit turbulence I began the process of trying to better understanding my father’s life. The roots of his struggle with depression and our family history of the disease. As we discussed earlier, the materials kept accumulating on both sides – ideas and images – until it felt imperative to work on it.
Why did you select this title for the work?
The title is an adaptation of a quote from [the eighteenth-century French political philosopher] Montesquieu. It suggests the concept of a duality, something fundamental to the book itself. After engaging with the book, a natural question for the reader to ask is: who or what are those two ‘creatures’ in the title? God and man? Father and son? Mind and heart? As the reader explores the book further, I hope they might come to their own understanding of this dualism.
What ideas and feelings are you exploring in this work?
The core idea is the question of how we construct our sense of self – in this case through the frames of family, religion, and depression. It goes on to ask what happens to us when the forces that shape our lives leave us in a state if imbalance. Can we actively reshape our identity?
As for feelings… if the text is working as I hope, it generates a mood appropriate to the subject that is both consistent and palpable. But let me focus here on the way the book uses visual aesthetics to generate feeling. Imagine a song with no lyrics. A good song without words still makes us think and feel things. The same with a text–image book. The text conveys ideas and feelings, but if we were to remove the text, the visual presentation should also have ideas and feelings implicit in its form. My hope is there is a sensibility here that viewers might connect with and feel.
Given this is a book about memories, relationships, and the mirror one generation holds up to another, were you able to involve you father in its creation?
In the early research phase I recorded conversations with him about his hospitalisations, his childhood, and his relationship with his parents. The book is divided into ten chapters, all but one of which involves a colour. As the project progressed, I asked my father to write about the associations each colour evoked for him. Some of his text found its way into the book, either as a word or a turn of phrase. It was a way for me to include his way of using language.
At the end of the process, I also gave him the book PDF for final approval.
© Tom Griggs – the book and an image from the series ‘A Creature Obeys a Creature That Wants’ 2023
Physically and visually, this is an elaborately constructed book. What kind of working relationship did you have with the publisher, Mesæstándar?
There is a current trend of publishers wanting to be a ‘creative partner’. With Mesæstándar it was quite different. I first shared my work with them as a polished PDF, the result of a long solitary effort. By then, I had run into my limitations as a designer and exhausted my ability to make improvements. Miguel and Juan David looked at what I was trying to do and helped me do it better. Their knowledge helped take the work beyond my limitations in things like type design, text layout, and cover concept. I deeply appreciate their collaborative approach through which they work to bring forth the artist’s voice, rather than considering themselves ‘co-authors’ of the book.
I believe ‘Creature’ is the most fully realised of my books… on all levels, from my text and sequencing to their design work. I would also add that the printery in Medellín, Artes y Letras, did a superb job with what was a very difficult book to print.
You have said that time functions differently for you as an artist; that you may need extended periods alone. Yet you often work collaboratively and make work about the poignancy of separation. I am interested in the ebb and flow of this duality and how you negotiate it…
In my practice, the core activity of creation is solitary and comes first. Once there is material to be shared, others may be brought in. This might happen repeatedly during the course of a collaborative project, as it did with Paul. In other projects, such as ‘Creature’, the collaborative stage with Mesæstándar began when the period of solitary work ended.
As for separation, I would also add loss as an important, related theme, especially in ‘Ghost Guessed’. Creation takes place within an intimate space of connection to ideas and materials, but it is also a way to step back in order to understand concepts like separation and loss more objectively. That interplay between the intimacy of thoughts and emotions and the clarity of their presentation is how the process of artmaking feels to me.
In making these bodies of work, what have you learned about yourself that you did not previously know or understand?
As a maker, I definitely have a clearer idea of my strengths and limitations. I’m good at sequencing images, for example, but maybe not so good at the finer points of design.
I would add that making art helps me better understand the constellation of qualities that make me ‘me’. I have a stronger sense of how I connect with the world, the particularities of my sensibility, and my own ways of negotiating what life brings.
Biographical Notes
Tom Griggs was born in Manchester, New Hampshire, USA, in 1974. He holds a bachelor’s degree in American studies from Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT (1997), a fine art bachelor’s degree in painting (2002), and a fine art master’s degree in photography (2009), both from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA. His work has featured in twenty-six solo, group, and collaborative exhibitions in Colombia and internationally in Croatia, France, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Russia, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the USA.
His work is held in prestigious public and private collections including La Biblioteca Pública Piloto, Medellín, Colombia; Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City; The Photo Library Collection, PhotoIreland, Dublin; and, in the USA, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX; the Henry Luce III Center for the Arts and Religion, Washington DC; and the permanent print and picture collection of the Free Library of Philadelphia, PA. He has published three monographs: ‘Herida y Fuente’ (Mesaestándar 2017), ‘Ghost Guessed’ with Paul Kwiatkowski (Mesaestándar 2018), ‘A Creature Obeys a Creature That Wants’ (Mesaestándar 2023). Tom Griggs lives and works between Medellín and Mexico City.
This interview is a Talking Pictures original.