The Constant Traveller
Sam Perry talks to the acclaimed American photographer Mikael Kennedy about life, lifestyle, influence and art.
Sam Perry
How’re you doing? If reports are to be believed Williamsburg is keeping you busy. You mentioned a little while back you’ve been on tour with nu-folkies Brown Bird, is the life of the folk musician something you are particularly allured to? It’s just there are elements of your work that elude to a transient and fluid sort of lifestyle, constantly travelling, meeting new people, exchanging stories etc…
Mikael Kennedy
I’m doing great, thanks. I love being on the road, that is true, I have a hard time sitting still. Folk music has always been something that I was drawn to. I like the stripped down, bare bones, fact of it. I like art that isn’t too polished, where you can hear the twang of the guitar strings, or see the rough edges and the dirt on the picture. I’ve said it often before but really what is important to me, what I think art is, is life; how you live your life. I’m fascinated by people’s lives, and by mine. I am drawn towards the story telling aspect of folk music and the world it portrays. Brown Bird is the project of an old friend of mine David Lamb, we travelled and lived together off and on for 8 or 9 years, so the stories he would write in his songs were very often the stories I was photographing, I liked that they were these two parallel visions. As for the constant travel, I figure I am only alive once, this is what I’ve got so I want to give every moment the possibility for rapture and I figure that’s easier if you are always standing on a new horizon.
SP
Aesthetically your work is distinctly divided between landscape and Polaroid. In fact I’ve noticed quite a few landscape image makers have embraced Polaroid as a more continual means to making work, is there something in the contrast between the painstaking landscape process and the instant print that may point to why this is so?
MK
In the a review of my last show ‘Saltwater River Guard’ a woman in Maine wrote that my Polaroids seemed to be sketches building up to the larger landscape work. I liked that idea, the Polaroid work originally had no intention, I just shot Polaroids while I traveled. It was almost a way of keeping busy when I wasn’t shooting another project. It was a very free exercise because there were no rules with the Polaroids I was shooting, they didn’t have to fit into any larger piece, I would take Polaroids of anything that caught my eye, where as the landscapes were much more composed and carefully constructed. There could be something in the idea that it is a way just playing around and a break from the other process, maybe that is why other landscape artists are drawn to it. There is also something so nice about the smallness of a Polaroid, it requires you to get very close and in an intimate space to view it, I feel like that is a nice contrast from the majority of the photography out there, everything seems to be getting bigger and bigger at photography shows.
SP
People are always relating your landscapes to the paintings of the Hudson River School. At first I didn’t really see the connection but then I saw Robert Havell, Jr’s View of the Hudson River near West Point, and I was like Ahhh… are these simply aesthetic coincidences or significant influences to your work?
MK
What’s funny about this is that I don’t have much of an art education, I spent most of my time when I should have been studying these things living in my car driving around the states. When I first heard the comparison to the Hudson River Painters I had no idea who they were. so I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC and started looking at all the paintings. I was really blown away, I end up going there once or twice a week and just wandering the halls for a few months. There were paintings that when put next to my landscape photographs were eerily similar. So I started reading up on them and found that their ideas on art and nature and the roles the two should play with each other were really fascinating and in line with many of my own ideas. It was a really wonderful coincidence.
SP
Let’s talk Artist Books. The thing that’s most distinct about your polaroids in published form is the text you juxtapose with the diptychs and triptychs. Where do these words and phrases come from and how d’you think this alters the whole process in printed form compared to physically exhibiting the single images?
MK
I’ve always been more fascinated with images in a series rather than the individual. Especially now with digital photography you can fire off a thousand pictures and one of them I’m sure will look great, but being able to build something bigger out of the images, to build a story is what interests me. When I am traveling I constantly shoot Polaroids, as I do this I’ll find I keep repeating a sentence or a phrase to myself over and over again until I finally write it down and it becomes the title of the series. Sometimes it will be something someone says to me in conversation, or sometimes it’s just something random that pops into my head. It’s interesting for me to flip through the old books because they are very literally a documentation of where I was and who I was with, my memory is kind of crap otherwise. Recently I took all the titles from the Polaroids and lined them up in a weird list to see how it would read to see where I had been in that way as well, what I was thinking verses what I was seeing I guess.
SP
Your work is distinctly ‘American’, by that I mean the vistas you present can easily be identified as north American landscapes, in light of this I’ve noticed there’s growing concern and debate in the art world about the visual arts becoming subject to globalisation, that so little work these days seems to be so geographically identifiable or distinct. So, how has Vermont shaped you as an artist and you’re your approach to making images?
MK
I have a friend named Pete up in Vermont who has never left, never lived anywhere else. One day last winter he took me for a hike up to a fire tower on one of the mountains in our home town, and he pointed out every town for 30 miles from the top of the tower. Every one of them was hidden in the trees but he knew them all by where they landed in the valley. He said he felt bad never having gotten out, because all of the kids he had grown up with had been all over the country and the world. It made me think a lot about the value of knowledge, he knew every creek and valley within 20 miles of his home, where as I knew a good dirt road in New Mexico that could get you up the mountain, and where to get good BBQ just outside of Austin, TX:what’s the difference really? I am oddly in awe of localized knowledge. I think as an artist or a story teller it’s important to work with your own story, to work from what you know and where you come from, it’s probably the most basic lesson you begin with when you start making art. Growing up I don’t think either of my parents ever had Passports, my step father just left the country for the first time last year to fly to Honduras to visit one of his sons. I didn’t leave the country until I was 25, but by that time I had been in every continental state at least once. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to explore the world it was that there was a lot to be explored here first, the difference between Texas and Vermont and Iowa, well they might as well be other countries. Does that answer your question?
