Interview with Susan Metzger

An Interview with Susan Metzger

by Ben Potter 

Ben Potter: You recently moved to photography after many years as a painter. Does your long engagement with painting influence your photographic work?

Susan Metzger: I’m sure it does but not necessarily in the conscious, everyday kind of way.  As an artist, I have a particular aesthetic that carries across varying mediums, but what drives the content and more formal issues such as composition, etc. also carry over.

BP: How does your sense of place direct your work?

SM: ‘Sense of Place,’ that can be tough to describe in the bigger sense of it. I have always been lucky enough to live near the coast, and that brings in lots of other meanings. The coastal landscape is also an edge, a threshold. It’s liminal – it forms a margin- and in doing so creates an actual state of ‘in-betweenness.’  The tidal zone is a threshold of land, a distinct place between high ground and water; it is in-between and what lies on the other side can be unpredictable, and dangerous, and beautiful – it can be everything. So those connotations inform my work.

 

 

BP: In particular, why are you interested in your local fisheries?

SM: That’s complicated I am interested in how people make a living using the immediately local ecology.  I love the idea that one’s work is dependent on natural rhythms, tides and weather, and the scarcity or plenty of other creatures – all dictated by the environment.  I also was not conscious of an underlying current that was driving me in the background – that my father was an obsessive fisherman and would sometimes take me with him as a kid.  His life ended in a tragic way but while I was working on my own project I sort of suddenly and unexpectedly realized I understood his obsession.

BP: You use vintage film cameras to make your negatives. These are then adjusted and printed digitally. What are your thoughts about the use of old and new technologies?

SM: This is where it gets a bit political for me.   I grew up during the sixties and the Vietnam War was a dark presence in our family – my brother was there, and the rest of us would watch people like Walter Cronkite read the names of the fallen and it was somber – we’d see these incredible photographs by people like Larry Burrows and we trusted it. We trusted the information and the people delivering it. Journalism had a kind of dignity that is now lost.  It’s devastating to me, really, what’s happened to media and how it’s now manipulated and the feeling that you can’t believe anything anymore.  So, in that sense, it’s personally important to me that my photographs simply show what was in front of me at the time.

BP: Do you see your work as a type of antidote or example?

SM: It’s certainly an antidote for me.  I only create work for myself, not thinking about how it might be received.  It’s a way of working out things that you may not even be conscious of at the time. I always- absolutely always – find that by the time a body of work is completed, it tells me what has been on my mind under the surface.  It ends up informing me.

 

BP: Anything else you would like to add?

SM: Thanks for the opportunity to show my Up River series and I hope your young students will get out and VOTE. And if they are artists, I hope they might consider the idea of making work about what is true for them.  I’d like to include some notes I learned from a wonderful photographer and person named Keith Carter. These don’t only have to apply to photography:

“Tell the truth about what you know.
What’s your story?
What do you want to say?
Who do you want to say it to?
How do you want it to look?
What is your relationship to the subject matter?
It’s not what you see, it’s the significance of what you’re seeing.
Make friends with uncertainty.”

INDENT
[Keith Carter]

 

 

 

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Susan Metzger is a painter and self-taught photographer living in Maine. She studied painting at the Museum School in Boston and has been the recipient of two fellowships; from the Wurltizer Foundation and the K2FF Arts in Sustainability Grant. At this time she is practicing a documentary style of analog shooting that is strongly place-based.

Ben Potter was born in 1970 and grew up in Tennessee.  He majored in Art and Biology at Williams College. He received his M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing from the California College of Arts in 1998. He lives in Belfast, Maine, and is a Professor of Art at Unity College.  

Debra Small: Habitat Lost

Debra Small

 

Habitat Lost:
Negative Effects of Suburban Sprawl on Ecosystems

INDENT
The wild landscape of the western United States is being rapidly converted to a built landscape due to suburban development. The destructive nature of these large-scale developments immediately disrupts the ecosystems. Even after these developments are completed, they continue to destroy the adjacent environment in the wild-land urban interface due to human-caused wildfires, habitat fragmentation, enhancing invasive species migration, surface and groundwater pollution, soil erosion, and pesticide impacts on wildlife. Habitat Lost: Negative Effects of Suburban Sprawl on Ecosystems is a response to this uncontrolled ecological destruction.
INDENT
The work is comprised of large 20” x 30” black and white, digital, high contrast prints of the constructed environment. Furthering the dialogue of environmental loss from suburban development, small kallitype prints on fabric, encased in encaustic wax, of the lost wildlife and habitat, are hung in front of the large black and white images. This body of work relates both to western society’s desire to replace natural land and environments with contemporary construction and developments, as well as photography’s desire to replace the historical with the digital photographic prints.
INDENT
The environmental impacts from suburban developments are pervasive, widespread and not easily resolved. Changes to zoning requirements, community planning, and the use of infill development can provide short-term mitigation to the onslaught of environmental damage from rampant over-development. However, long-term preservation of biodiversity will require us to embrace the moral principles of ecocentric thought, accepting that all living things have intrinsic value and are interconnected. This conversion of ethical thought will not occur overnight, but failure to move in this direction will continue to adversely affect our ecological sustainability, leading to further disruption of habitats and the extinction of species.

Bombus californicus California bumble bee, 2018, Archival pigment ink / kallitype encaustic, ©Debra Small

 

Branta canadensis moffitti Great Basin Canada goose, 2018, Archival pigment ink / kallitype encaustic, ©Debra Small

 

Buteo swainsoni Swainson’s hawk (2), 2018, Archival pigment ink / kallitype encaustic, ©Debra Small

 

California oak woodland savanna (1), 2018, Archival pigment ink / kallitype encaustic, ©Debra Small

 

Cygnus columbianus tundra swan, 2018, Archival pigment ink / kallitype encaustic, ©Debra Small

 

Eremocarpus setigerus turkey mullein, 2018, Archival pigment ink / kallitype encaustic, ©Debra Small

 

Erodium sp. stork’s bill, 2018, Archival pigment ink / kallitype encaustic, ©Debra Small

 

Sceloporus occidentalis western fence lizard (3), 2018, Archival pigment ink / kallitype encaustic, ©Debra Small

 

Trichostema lanceolatum vinegar weed (1), 2018, Archival pigment ink / kallitype encaustic, ©Debra Small

 

Trichostema lanceolatum vinegar weed (2), 2018, Archival pigment ink / kallitype encaustic, ©Debra Small

 

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Debra Small is a fine art documentary photographer, based in Sacramento, California, whose work explores environmental issues. Her current body of work is a response to the wildlife and habitat loss from suburban development. She is pursuing her Master of Fine Arts in photography from New Hampshire Institute of Art.