Deserted landscapes and meteorological phenomena, ruins of utopian architecture. Wryly photographed minerals or subtle and enigmatic images of his children. At first glance, the world that Geert Goiris creates in his photographs seems very diverse. Photography, traditionally a medium that records the past, changes in Goiris’s hands into a medium that appears to reflect the future.
Last month he spoke about his work with Ernst van Alphen at Galerie Onrust. The conversation was about analogue photography and the importance of expectations, about the overlap between staging and recording, about creating stories. Are they in the photograph itself? Or do they take place inside the viewer’s head? They discussed the information deficit in photographs and the various forms of presentation employed by Goiris. But it was above all a conversation about time, the photographer’s material par excellence. The vastness of time and the relationship between time, fantasy and memory. Goiris: ‘I’m fascinated by timescales that transcend humankind.’
This conversation took place in the context of the Geert Goiris exhibition 28 Portals.
EvA: First a few practical questions. You work with an analogue, technical camera. Why is that so important to you?
GG: Analogue photography is based on a suspicion, and I like that. A recording made with a digital device can be viewed immediately. It’s more of a design process: you look, assess, and adjust your point of view or lighting. Photography on film is more like fishing. It has to do with anticipation and hope. You don’t go home until you feel like it’s ‘done’. You have to trust that the photograph was correctly exposed, and that no distracting elements have crept into the picture. Until it’s developed, there’s no certainty. The timespan between taking the photograph and looking at it is also important. By the time I get to see the image, it's been long disconnected from the moment and the conditions of the shot. Any expectations or intentions that I had have already partly evaporated when I first hold the developed negatives in my hands.
EvA: For the exhibition, you’ve converted analogue photographs into analogue slides. Which you’re showing on an old-fashioned slide projector. Why is that?
GG: Those projectors are hard to date and make an anachronistic impression. There’s a nice tension in the ephemeral aspect of a projection and the emphatic presence of these devices. My interest in analogue projection began in 2011 when I photographed a ‘whiteout’ in Antarctica, a meteorological phenomenon in which sunlight is filtered through a high concentration of ice crystals in the atmosphere. This diffuse light is constantly reflected by the crystals and by the snow on the ground. When the whiteout is complete, you can’t see any landscape, just a completely uniform, bright white glow. This transformation of matter into light also occurs during a projection. At the moment I take that photograph, a light phenomenon etches itself onto a piece of plastic, which I then take back with me into the wider world, to a room where a projector has been set up that sends light through it. This completes the circle. A digital projection is easier, but this feels more right. It has a different quality.
EvA: You often present your images in an enlarged form, pasted to the wall like wallpaper. How does that relate to the viewer?
GG: A technical camera works with large negatives and sharp lenses, so there’s plenty of room to capture small details. It often happens that I see things in a print that I hadn’t even noticed when taking the photo. Then it’s as if something reveals itself. You can’t take in prints on a monumental scale all at once. You start with details and slowly arrive at a complete picture. With a smaller format, it’s the other way around: you see the frame first, the composition, and only then do you start paying attention to the details. Physically, too, you have a completely different relationship to such a monumental format.
EvA: Is that also connected to the fact that you’re always presenting your work in different ways? You show it as slides, videos, framed or directly attached to the wall. Why don’t you stick to one way of presenting it?
GG: I find that a bit boring. I actually prefer to show photos in books. That’s also the way in which I absorb most photographs myself. You can take a book anywhere. It’s a wonderfully intimate way to look at images. An exhibition is public. If the idea is to give a viewer an experience, then what is shown can be quite complex. I often find it monotonous to present everything in the same format. As a viewer, you remain at the same distance from the wall, scanning the entire room at a glance. That makes you lazy. The format of the prints partly influences how you move, taking a few steps back from a large print, for example. Or stepping closer. Walking around and assuming positions also keeps your eye fresher.
EvA: At first sight, your images all stand alone. But the combinations you make are fundamental. It seems more important to look at a book of your work than to have an individual photograph. What is the impact of those combinations?
GG: Trying out various combinations and sequences between different pictures is one of the most valuable moments of the process. Making a sequence happens very intuitively. Millions of images are produced every day. What else do you need to add to that? In that sense, almost every photo is referential. Not only to the moment that’s depicted, but also to all other photos. When I make sequences, it’s always inspired by the things I’ve already seen. But I don’t theorise about that too much. I separate those photographs from the moment they were created and then loosely link them together. That order is never completely fixed, by the way. A particular sequence in a book may later appear in an altered order in an exhibition or projection. I almost always combine older work with recent images. Because I want to keep it fresh for myself and because I’m trying – and this may sound pretentious, but I do believe in it – to work on a coherent oeuvre. When I’m somewhere taking a picture, I’m already considering how the photograph could fit into the whole, as if stringing a necklace.
EvA: Could you say something about the world you show in your photographs? You said in an interview: ‘I carefully record what presents itself in front of the camera without too much interference. My approach is close to a documentary style, but it lacks any claim to objectivity. I am more interested in activating the narrative potential of moving and still images to sketch the psychological undercurrents of our time. Most of my images oscillate between a documentary registration and an ambiguous narrativity which functions through an arrested enigma.’
Two words that often come up are ‘documentary’ and ‘narrative’. Documentary photography, in terms of time, temporality, is explicitly one moment. While your photographs are, in my opinion, always durational. It’s something that extends over time. So, why is it important to use that term?
GG: I get that it’s confusing and perhaps a little provocative. We understand a documentary photograph to be a document from which you can extract information about a specific place or time. My photographs always feel a little ‘out of place’ and ‘out of time’. There are rarely people in them and a lot remains unsaid. There’s already a kind of contradiction there. On the other hand, they’re accurate images, usually the entire space we see is clearly depicted, there’s no hierarchy to it. Everything is equally important and visible. As the viewer, you stand in front of an open space.
EvA: But then, what exactly are you recording? Other photographers, with a documentary kind of style, work within a fixed genre. Rineke Dijkstra makes portraits. Bernd and Hilla Becher photographed architecture. What about you? In this series, we see a child. I believe it’s your son. But it’s explicitly not a portrait and it’s not a genre scene either. I understand that one of your great heroes isn’t a photographer, but the painter Edvard Munch. Actually, you could also say about his paintings: ‘What kind of genre is that exactly?’
GG: I have a lot of respect for the work of the Bechers. But their approach isn’t part of my temperament. I always have to do something different. And there are some unspoken conventions that I want to oppose. Many photographers work in a way that’s either realistic and documentary… or very staged. There are fewer people who do both. The photograph of our son lying in the water, for example. I said to him: ‘Put this coat on and jump into the water.’ Of course, that’s staged, but at the same time it’s a real moment. I think these things often overlap and those kinds of contradictions are rather artificial. There are no conclusive answers to the question of whether something is found or staged, but it does create attention.
EvA: In your book, Worlds Without Us, and maybe in all of your oeuvre, you say that your work is a kind of record of the ecological crisis. With your work, you want to initiate a process of raising awareness in your viewers about what is happening to the world. You once said: ‘they appeal to the imagination of the viewer.’ By ‘imagination’, you mean a visual stream of thoughts, memories, associations. When you talk about narrativity, then I believe it’s not so much about that dystopian plot involving the earth but more about a series of associations, memories and thoughts playing out inside the viewer’s head. Should you locate the story there? In that case, your photographs are not the representation of a story, but you’re trying to set a story in motion within the viewer.
GG: Yes, that’s a nice description. Dirk Lauwaert, an important teacher of mine, once said that a photograph carries an information deficit within it. A photo is a slice of reality. No one knows what was outside the frame. Was it cold, warm, were there lots of people? Was it a busy place? And that information deficit, everything that you don’t see – that, he said, is the place where an appeal is made to the viewer’s imagination. I found that thought very stimulating. Then it becomes an art of omission. I try to make very detailed depictions in which you can see everything, but at the same time you feel that something is missing. That’s broader than just being about an existential crisis. But, of course, that’s part of it – we live in the times we live in.
EvA: I said earlier that your photos are never just one moment in time. Time is instead completely stretched out. You could even say that time doesn’t matter at all. Another quote: ‘Most of my images are intentionally unpinned from a specific time. They are anchored in the moment the image was made, but simultaneously point to the unknown. This reconfiguration of past, present and future dismantles the notion of linear time. You could be looking at the past or the future, these vacant landscapes could be primordial or post-human.’ You’ve also said that time is permeated with fantasy and memory. In fact, the way we measure time with clocks and calendars is irrelevant. That brings me back to the idea that the narrative is set in motion by the viewer. Can you say that, precisely because of this vastness of time, the viewer is constantly wondering whether the image is apocalyptic or depicts the time before humans existed?
GG: As a photographer, I literally deal with time. Whenever I take a photograph, I have to set an exposure time, which ranges from seconds to minutes or even hours. I find it fascinating how different timescales intertwine. My sister-in-law is a geologist – that perspective has a whole different dimension. Human presence is no more than a pinprick on the geological clock. Take Danakil Depression, a photograph I took in Ethiopia. It’s an evaporated sea. When you walk around there and think: I’m on the bottom of a sea that disappeared thousands of years ago, then that’s how you experience it, too. Your knowledge steers your perception. We all have time machines inside our brains. I can think now of a moment that happened yesterday or two years ago, or ten years ago. We can switch constantly. Photos make that tangible. A lot has been said about photography and time, but I’m still fascinated by timescales that transcend humankind. Geological time is impossible for me to comprehend. Photography has changed our sense of time. We understand time through images. Or, as you said, through memories.
EvA: But your work directly opposes that?
GG: I don’t know, I’ve made a lot of photographs with very long exposure times. Photographic time is usually short, a hundredth of a second or something like that. Even an hour is very long in photographic time. If a camera is open for an hour, in principle every leaf that moves will be captured. The changing colours of the light will also be included in that image somehow. And yet we don’t always experience it as such. We can understand that abstraction, but we can’t feel it.
EvA: Critic and photo historian Steven Humblet has called your photographs restless. I like that description because, from a formal point of view, they’re not restless at all. They have a clear centre, like that dead cactus. That’s a classical composition, but because the image prompts so many questions, there is indeed something restless about it. The image seems, to quote you, ‘out of place’ and ‘out of time’. It is never explained on the basis of the context. I said before that your work doesn’t belong to a clear genre. That, too, is a source of restlessness. How does this restlessness in your images come about?
GG: That’s an interesting question. The use of such a large, bulky camera almost presupposes a slow way of working. All the photos were taken with a tripod. I always keep the camera level – that’s a sort of anchor. Lots of people think I just wait. But if the light’s good and something presents itself, then I take the photos very quickly. They’re all pretty ‘simple’. There are no brilliant angles or anything. There aren’t many frills. It is what it is, and everything is sharp. And at the same time, you’re thinking: What is that? What am I looking at? That’s not because of strange perspectives or optical confusion. It’s more of an ontological confusion – it’s there but at the same time it’s not. You can almost grab hold of it, and yet it remains out of reach, because it’s an image.
EvA: You often photograph landscapes showing bizarre or rare meteorological phenomena. Unusual clouds, for instance, or that ‘whiteout’ in Antarctica. But it’s not the spectacular or the sublime aspects of those meteorological phenomena that interest you. So, what is it?
GG: You were just talking about the question of whether we’re looking at something primordial or at the future. That applies here, too. Those mammatus clouds, for example – clouds of that kind have been around for a long time. They’re older than photography. Just like a rock formation that’s a million years old or a pyrite mineral that no one can date. Is it 100,000 years old? Or 600,000? You can’t get a grip on it, and that fascinates me. It also ties in with my fascination with wilderness. Wilderness is not a characteristic of a place. It’s a cultural construct based on our identity as human beings. It says: ‘This is not us. We can’t survive here. It’s not suitable for us.’ When you’re in the wilderness, lots of things about the place you come from also become clear.
EvA: Just as the Surrealists often used to go to flea markets, you often visit Eastern Europe. What’s the attraction?
GG: I studied in Prague, and I have a soft spot for Central European culture. I’m a child of the Cold War, raised with a very vague and yet controlled image of what was going on behind that Iron Curtain.
As if it was something completely different. And certain things are really different. At once familiar and yet far away.
EvA: Your photos sometimes have a science-fiction-like quality. That’s especially true of the ones you’ve taken in Eastern Europe.
GG: They often have a different way of dealing with the past there. In Belgium, the past is disappearing very quickly. For example, you can hardly find any trees that are older than a hundred years. A lot of modernist buildings are disappearing. In Central Europe, I experience a different historical awareness. Partly because of their pride and partly because of a lack of money, you can still find a lot of things that are old; they’ve been spared from speculation and capitalism. Eras are far more intertwined.
EvA: Is that particularly true for architecture? Because you often photograph bizarre architectural buildings.
GG: Yes. We’re experiencing an unprecedented loss of biodiversity and are in the midst of a climate crisis. Our expectations of the future have been eroded, to say the least. That’s why I like to look at relics of modernism, when the future still looked very different. But of course, some of those buildings are now ruins. That’s an interesting paradox.
EvA: You’ve described your work as ‘traumatic realism’. I find that a very appropriate term. What exactly do you mean by it?
GG: In the medical world, ‘trauma’ means a fracture. But in our everyday language, trauma is often about an unprocessed shocking event. I found the notion of a fracture interesting: you’re taking a photo somewhere, so you’re very present, but at the same time you’re not there, because you’re focused mainly on the camera. That action detaches you, something breaks. There’s also the fact that a trauma is recognised only in the future, by a subject who is looking back. That’s an aspect of photography as well. You make something that remains unused for a long time because you don’t yet see its importance. Sometimes it only falls into place years later, when you take a different photo that makes the first one relevant. I can’t explain why it works that way either… it’s a question of feeling. Things gain meaning when you put them in a particular context.
In the connection of realism with trauma, a clash occurs. Realism stands for clarity: descriptive, not too much distraction. The documentary photographer who feels responsible for recording something accurately. The traumatic manifests itself in the freedom that I want to claim. Something like, ‘Yes, I’m going to go and do what I want to do myself.’ I don’t feel like photographing just water towers. I don’t want the city of Amsterdam as a theme. No, I want to make a work that might develop very slowly, gaining meaning that’s not entirely clear even to me during the process. For me, that’s closer to life.
Esther Darley
Translation Laura Watkinson