IMAGES OF LOSS, TIME AND MEMORY
A CONVERSATION WITH PETER WATKINS
by Chloe Davies
Peter Watkins is a visual artist based in London. His artistic practice explores photography, time and temporality through a profound autobiographical work that originates from an inner exploration of traumatic loss. This conversation focuses on his series The Unforgetting, which explores the artist's German heritage that he uncovers through storytelling and the activation of archives. The photographic series reflects on the methods of archiving and remembrance, and how certain material are preserved or lost through processes of memorialisation.
In your works, you create a seamless intertwining of multiple temporalities in which photography engages in an investigative process about subjects such as memory, trauma and reality. What made you choose photography as a medium for your practice?
My father took a great deal of photographs of us growing up, as did the German side of my family, which were neatly organised within photo albums. When I was eight years old my parents were going through a trial separation, and I moved to Germany along with my mother and brother. On one of my father’s visits, he gave me a little plastic yellow and black 35mm camera, which I was extremely proud of. Shortly after this, my mother’s mental health spiralled, and soon after, she died, taking her own life in Zandvoort, in the North Sea – a location equidistant from where I’d grown up on the South Wales border, and where we lived in Germany at that time; my mother’s hometown. I think photography had started meaning more to me after all this, as it was the way I could refer back to a time when we as a family were together. I later moved back to England and, for the most part, struggled through school. At the age of fourteen or fifteen I remember watching a series of late-night documentaries on photography, which I recorded on VHS, and this opened up the idea that photography could mean much more in terms of self-expression and finding meaning in the world than I’d considered previously. Later I took up an A-level in photography at school, and took unremarkable photographs of light and shadow, attempts at street photography, and photographed musicians at gigs in legendary alternative music venues like Newport’s TJ’s. It somehow got me hooked.
I’d say that there isn’t one reason why I chose photography; perhaps it’s more accurate to say that it chose me, or that I fell into it by this series of circumstances. During my studies at the University of Westminster, which prided itself on a theoretical emphasis and rigour, I came to understand the specificities inherent to the medium, which define it as unique in terms of its relationship with reality and time, and what sets it apart from any other art form. I later went on to study an MA at the Royal College of Art where I tried to refine some of the ideas and research I’d been developing over the years. I guess that growing up I was looking for some kind of outlet, and for something that would explain the pain of loss and the trauma and the sadness that I’d buried, and photography seemed like a tremendously rich and nuanced medium to explore these themes. That said, it took me time to get to grips with how I could fit with photography, and it was really only after the loss of my father during my BA studies in 2006 that I started exploring the themes still prevalent in my practice today.
Index of Time was created through a collaborative process with Tereza Zelenkova and Oliver Shamlou. You create these photographs inside this historically rich cave, attempting to unveil traces of existence that paired with the stories from archaeologist Jindřich Wankel. I’m fascinated with your curiosity about time, temporalities, memories and the meanings of these which flow through your works. Can you discuss more broadly what it is about storytelling and these traces of existence, of an idea of truth, that inspires and challenges you?
Index of Time (2011) was first and foremost a collaboration between Tereza and myself. We photographed intensely over two weekends, descending into the cave mostly by day, and spending time around the campfire with the speleologists by night. There is an out-of-time and otherworldly feeling to spending that much time within a cave. The temperature and humidity and smell and atmosphere remain the same, and the passage of time is impossible to gauge. When you emerge, your senses are flooded by the smell of fresh air, and the nature around you, and the experience is totally disorientating. In our research, we recognised certain historical inaccuracies and assumptions that had been built around this historic cave, and we wanted to work with that.
The cave represented a seemingly unchanging space, where memory and time flowed non-sequentially. It was covered in traces of its past, and the people who had explored its cavities before us. The objects, which we photographed were replicas of those found within the cave, created by a local locksmith, who also has a thing for building miniature replica guillotines. He arrived in an old Saab, opened his boot and allowed us to document these objects. After this weekend of shooting, our borrowed VW Passat was stolen along with some of the film we shot and a Hasselblad camera when we parked it near a police station in Prague. The car, the film, and the camera were later recovered, all intact.
Oliver and I have known each other since we were sixteen, meeting in the darkroom at school. When we were barely into our twenties we started Shrug Magazine, an early online arts magazine, somewhat akin to Believer Magazine, but more low-fi, early-form, and experimental. It married photography, fiction, poetry, illustration, and anything we found interesting at the time. We carried out interviews over email, one question at a time, and collaborated with illustrators to create portraits of our contributors for each issue. It survived a few issues, where we managed to convince contributors from all over the world to participate. It was a wonderful moment.
I later collaborated with Oliver a few times on personal projects, and at the time we had been interested in what we saw as the precarious relationship between image and text: how to overcome photography’s inherent capacity to illustrate, and concurrently, how to unpack the written words propensity to explain the image. Oliver writes fiction, so it was a collaborative effort based around storytelling and fiction, more than the postmodernist image and text experiments of the 80’s and 90’s.
Oliver wrote the stories to accompany the project, which took on three distinct periods from the cave’s history as their starting point. With photography one is always skirting around the precipice of truth, always within our grasp but we’re never quite able to touch it, and our approach was really to explore how we could expand the limits of the imagination, the allegorical and metaphorical associations, and communicate something fundamental of our experience of this seemingly unchanging microcosm of the cave.
© Peter Watkins, The Index of Time, 2011.
Photography has the power to shape our perception of the past but also acts as a tool to explore and make sense of it. Through imagery and constructions, we are offered a chance to experience a past that we will never touch or understand in its entirety. How have you found your experience working with such complex issues?
Photography offer’s us that distinct possibility, as you rightly point out, of exploring and attempting to make sense of reality, and it’s an incredibly malleable tool to consider the past, given its inherent indexical bond with time and the world around us. We all have an intuitive idea of the power that photography holds, and its peculiar relationship with reality, and nowadays, more and more we understand it as a construction of reality. Artists purposefully and wilfully use this language to their own ends, yet we still want to believe in what is being presented before us, for the most part, as something depicting truth. It’s uncanny really how despite our better judgement, this is our default position. I can attest to how widespread this belief is/was/probably still is, by recalling the amount of post-graduate painters and sculptors arguing the case that photography is not a true art form, in a particularly heated seminar, as “all it does is present us with reality.” This was at the Royal College of Art in 2014, it was really unbelievable to me at the time the level of ignorance, particularly at that level of education, but of course, it’s not really surprising, as this is the illusion that photography presents us with.
Time and the journey through time that you embark on throughout your practice, is a recurring theme throughout your works. What is it about time, and its uncertainty, that interests you?
It has a lot to do with my own largely unprocessed trauma from childhood, my attraction and simultaneous antipathy towards the nostalgic, and trying to make sense of my own history within a wider context. I think photography is the perfect (painful) companion to explore this territory with.
The photograph of Super-8 was a turning point for me in my attempt to translate personal memory and narrative into some kind of universal image. Reels of home film footage containing images of my mother as a child were placed before the camera. The images they contain are fascinating in and of themselves, and personally insightful, but here their treatment was reduced down to a singular, uniform image. There is a push and pull between being offering access to some personal remnant, and the opacity of its subsequent photographic representation, which points us towards a more universal reading. There’s a conflation of temporalities inherent in this image, and a monumentalism built around the material and aesthetic structure of the depicted objects themselves. This is at once a photograph of my family Super-8 footage, but it is also an image about the myriad possibilities that this now-defunct technology represents. It’s an image about images. The universality of this photograph speaks about time and its uncertainty, and about truth and the representation of happiness and the functions of nostalgia, and in the back of our minds we can all see and feel those fuzzy over-saturated 1970’s colours, but without actually seeing them. And to somehow not answer your question straightforwardly: this interests me.
Your pictures appear to arise from old memories or dreams, but their aesthetic relates to an ethereal nightmarish feel. Could you comment on that?
I’ve based a lot of my work on trying to make sense of the past, trying to find meaning in objects or spaces that are personally charged, and also in the stories that I’ve collected or that have been handed down to me by my family. I try to tread lightly and with respect, and often this has been a difficult process to negotiate, as the terrain is uncertain and affects not only me, but those close to me. I’ve never thought of the work as “nightmarish,” but I understand that there is a spectral and unsettling quality to quite a few of the works, and by association, they can be interpreted as inhabiting the space of dreams or hallucinations.
There’s a particular work that I talk about in this way, which is the photograph of the floating christening dress entitled Taufe (2014). The dress is a curious object. I saw a certain circularity, and spectral presence to the thing. I wanted to photograph it suspended, and in exhibitions it appears glazed behind yellow glass, by which I was thinking about the associations of colour – how it’s a wash that floods the work, how it brings colour back into all the works that surround it, but also the associations of light and warmth, death and decay, the space of dreams and hallucinations. The dress was yellow, so the glass is also about putting colour back into the black and white photograph, but this is a false colour, a wash, and in this sense I was thinking about the function of memory and the falsity of it connected with truth. In terms of the circularity, I was thinking about the baptismal act and about my mother’s ultimate suicide by drowning. I was later told that they used to put transparent yellow film on shop windows to protect the displayed objects from discolouring under the UV light from the sun. As all of my studio works in The Unforgetting were made in my Grandmothers old shop, this gave me an additional layer of meaning and context to think about.
© Peter Watkins, The Unforgetting, 2011-2017.
In the same work, you document specific materials that appear monumental and totemic in their structures. They appear to provide clues to a particular history that we want to understand but can only grasp. Do they emerge from a symbolic mental state?
My work on The Unforgetting was incredibly time-dependent, as it was wholly photographed either at my Grandparent’s house in Germany, or the village where they lived. I felt like at the time I was in a race to try to understand the circumstances and collective memory that my family had of this shared traumatic event, and to somehow put the pieces together in a way that allowed me to meditate on the subject in a meaningful and long-lasting way. In that sense, I think the process became a kind of pseudo-therapy of sorts, whereby I created a system of approaching difficult issues with both the distance of the camera, and the closeness that comes with thinking long and hard about the mutability and profound nature of objects, the past, and the function of memory itself. That seemingly forever unchanging cosmos of my Grandparent’s house with its myriad of objects has now vanished, and the things are scattered, removed, and in many cases lost forever. I am still coming to terms with this new reality. Those objects were selected and photographed because they either held a deep symbolic value to me, or came through that period of great intensity thinking about how best to build this body of work. There was a lot of intuition, then periods of thinking and editing, and then re-photographing. I was thinking of them as these temporary memory-monuments or structures, and they were built solely for the camera. Take one step to the left or the right, and the fragile illusion of their construction would be obliterated.
© Peter Watkins, The Unforgetting, 2011-2017.
In regard to The Unforgetting, you state that ‘somewhere in the conscious act of retelling, a certain degree of dilution seems to occur.’ In connection to this dilution, the story keeps changing its form every time it is retold. Could you tell us about the story, or your story, behind this work?
The work began as an attempt to come to terms with my mother’s untimely death when I was still a child. I began in 2009 or 2010 by trying to make a film about her suicide, and the circumstances that led up to it. After my father had passed away in 2006, I realised that we had never discussed what had happened, and that the opportunity had passed us by. I, therefore, carried out a series of interviews with my German family to try to better understand this collective loss we had all suffered, and the factual occurrences as best they remembered. When I sat down for these interviews, it occurred to me that through the passage of time, their recollections had taken on a uniformity that I hadn’t expected. Like the time and the conscious act of retelling had diluted their memory, and that their recollections had become part of a narrative structure. I was also aware that the memories that I had kept to myself all those years, would ultimately become altered by the process I was undertaking and the questions I was asking.
I visited the beach where she had entered the sea, and approximated the place where she had died by aiming the camera towards the sea and filming at dawn. I filmed my Grandfather and I chopping wood, and my Grandmother baking in the kitchen. I filmed the clouds from a boat, and the clouds from a plane, and the sunlight passing through those clouds. I filmed the village where my mother had grown up, and how the snow covered the ground. All this felt necessary, but when I came to edit the film, there was something so open and raw and painful about it, that it just didn’t feel right to put it out there in the world. I started to change my approach when I made a self-portrait of myself with cupping marks on my back, the only photograph in the project not to be made in Germany. My acupuncturist had told me that the darker the marks the greater the tension or pain beneath the surface. I liked the idea that these marks were a physical manifestation of one's inner life, of one's pains and traumas and memories, and how the body and mind is one interconnected structure. I realised with this picture that there was far more power in the allegorical than in my previous more straightforward documentary approach. From there I started creating still life works with object assemblages, which also worked to obscure as much as they disclosed.
© Peter Watkins, The Unforgetting, 2011-2017.
Since its invention, the photographic medium has been thought of as a means of evidence or truth. Although this idea has been already refuted and we now understand photography as a constructed reality, I’m interested to hear your thoughts on the current state of photography as a source of information. How do you view photography today and how do you see photography contributing to the construction of our perception of the future?
We’re at a peculiar apex for photography, where the still image is becoming perceived as slower than ever before – a little like how painting became perceived after the invention of photography. We are of course creating images at a monumental rate – that’s not news – and the hidden use of images within industry outside of the arts and social media structures is another monumentally unfathomable part of image production in itself. I think that those camera club conversations of digital vs analogue that we suffered for so long have grown to become quite quaint in the face of this new age of artificial intelligence, 3D facial recognition, and the potentially terrifying possibilities of “deep fake.” All this is quite overwhelming, and ultimately stems from photography. I hope that we will continue to take a considered and critical approach to photography and visual culture in the future, and move a little quicker with the times. Photography has enormous and unquantifiable power, and will continue to have moving forward, and artists will undoubtedly continue to grapple with this peculiar medium far into the future.