A Dialog with Photographer Johanna Warwick

March 27, 2008

It is my pleasure to post here a dialog with Johanna Warwick, an emerging photographer whose work I find extraordinary. Creative, diverse and exquisite work. Her photography represents both the lived reality, and perception of relations between figures and surroundings that define a layer of reality that usually escapes our perception.

In this candid dialog she shares her background, artistic drivers for her work and her approach to photography. I am certain you will find this conversation very interesting. I like to thank Johanna for sharing her thinking and for taking the time to build this conversation.

Please tell me about your beginnings as an artist, when did you feel attracted to art?

As long as I can remember I have always been drawing, painting, making things. My older brother was always drawing from comic books when we were young, and I always did what he did. So when time came for high school, it seemed natural for me to apply to a School of the Arts - where my brother was. I don't ever recall even sitting down and thinking about what is was that I wanted to do, I just knew I wanted to do art without question.

What drove initially your interest to photography?

I went to Cawthra Park School of the Arts for high school and majored in art. It was here that I was introduced to photography. I think it began around grade eleven and I instantly was hooked. With painting and drawing I always felt a certain level of frustration that I couldn't quite get what I wanted, with photography I could. I could create pictures exactly how I wanted to.

Was there a personal influence in the family, friends?

I'm not too sure where my brother's and I artistic skills came from (he's now a computer animator). Neither of our parents are terribly artistic. The closer I can think it that my granddad loved and collected old cameras. He gave me my first camera at six.

You decided to go to art school at Ryerson University. Was this a natural progression of your interest in photography, did you feel the need to get formal training?

Ryerson was very much a natural progression - it was the only school I could get a degree in photography in Canada! For me, at the time it was Ryerson or nothing. I knew I wanted photography. I loved it.

In high school and had a lot of support from teachers and my family to pursue it. I wasn't ready to move further away from home than Toronto (I'm from 45min outside), and I didn't want to go to college because I wanted a degree to keep more options open later.

It is interesting to hear that you had so much support from the start. I see art as a very intimate experience. The early moments when the artist is exploring, when it is trying to find a language and a voice, are very "fragile" moments. They can be decisive to build or break the wit to communicate with art.

Tell me about your experience at the School. Do you think that the education was fundamental for your evolution as an artist? Were there any artists/teachers that had a particular influence?

I loved Ryerson. It was very much essential to my learning. The continual feedback from teachers and peers is priceless. It was a small community of ongoing support that gave you a safe place to try things and fail and be encouraged to keep going.

Don Snyder, Don Dickinson, Bob Burley and David Harris all made a difference to me. They were and are always available to talk and go out of their way to help students achieve. I think discussion about work is the most crucial thing in its development. Hearing what other people see and talking about it, what's working, what's not working, how to proceed - for me school was about the dialogue.

Speaking about education in photography, you have a very particular way to compose; your photography is aesthetically powerful and different. Do you think that the ability to see photographically can be taught or it is innate in the artist? Do you think that your ability to see evolved and changed while attending art school?

I do think the way that one sees is something innate in them - it can't really be learnt. School definitely helps to shape your work; I think school best teaches you how it is to successfully express how it is that you see. School takes what's in you and helps you to explore and define it. I don't think you can take a person with absolutely no artistic inclination and turn them into a great photographer, no. They may be great technically, but I have trouble believing anyone can just learn the "it factor" that is in a great photograph. Sometimes what makes a great photograph is intangible. I often have a hard time explaining why I love an image I took, there's just something there. That, I don't think can be learnt.

I don't know if my ability to see really changed in school. I just learnt better how to express or represent it. I think what I see changes in my life as things happen and time goes on, but I don't really think the way I see it changes.

One important step for an emerging photographer is the creation of a body of work that is cohesive, where single images not only hold their own aesthetic merit but also reinforce each other to create the core of a portfolio. When did you start working on projects and what were the challenges you faced?

I'm not sure it was really a challenge, more just a natural progression. When shooting sometimes you take lots of great one off images, and then sometimes you take one great image and know there is so much more to it, and that's where a series can grow. I first started doing series pretty soon after I started photography. In high school, very quickly a body of work became that expectation. I think the challenge in series is to create work where you do truly need and want more than one image.

In my final critique for “The Weight of the World” this question was posed to me -what do we gain from having more that one photograph of a ceiling?

My response was that with so many different ceilings, I hoped that it helped to convey my belief that this feeling is universal. Anyone under any of these ceilings can fee this way - as different as we (and they) all are.

In “As Lonely As This Sea”, I am very aware of working on this as a series and am purposefully trying to find a way to fit photographs of all different things into one series. I've become afraid of series in that they have come to feel formulaic. Once that first image is created, the series is easy - you now have the formula to create the rest of the images. “The Weight of the World” is this exactly. I don't think this is bad - I just need to see if I can do a successful series that isn't built this way. This is partly why “As Lonely As This Sea” is still a work in progress.

Your projects are very beautiful and creative, not only because they cover very distinct topics, but also because your approach to composition is so diverse. How do you visualize images? Do you photograph following your instincts –like an impulse- or you pre-visualize the scene before shooting? Do you have in mind to achieve a defined aesthetics for the image before making it or it comes as a discovery after the image has been captured?

Every project seems to take on its own particular way of forming. I started out shooting in a much more controlled and planned way. I would have an idea, almost story board the image and then make it. Slowly though, this has become much less the way. Projects, more so, have grown out of an image I took - and then from there I built the idea upon it and continued to shoot. Pre-visualized or instinctual, I don't believe that one way is more successful than the other. Right now I tend to work more instinctually... perhaps this occurs over time with more experience?

Let’s talk a bit about some of your projects. If I may, I like to learn more about a project that fascinates me, the “Weight of the World”. How did you come to that project ... what did you like to convey?

This series came out of finishing up school and entering a definite question mark period in my life. I was searching and it came naturally to create work reflecting on this. I really wanted the images to have the feeling of being lost, in a way that hopefully viewers would recognize and relate to. Staring up at the ceiling is what I was doing. Laying and being lost, staring off into space. Once I got to think about it, that's where the work came in.

Your new project, “As Lonely as the Sea”, is still in progress. It appears to be a very intimate experience for you, a sort of discovery of your roots and culture.

This is certainly one of the most personal bodies of work I have done, and I still haven't figured it out yet. I immigrated to Canada as a child and have always had certain nostalgia for my first home, England. I never really went back and visited much, so it always held an air of intrigue and longing for me. I went back in 2006 and started this work photographing in Brightlingsea. For me the pictures fit together in their feeling - but I'm not sure how to talk about this yet. The photographs seem to have the ability to be about closeness and distance, nostalgia and separation, familiarity and loneliness. To be honest, I think I still need to understand more of how I feel, to understand this work.

Perhaps the project that surprised me the most is “Gray Area”. It is an example of photography without subject. Only the essence of pure visual experience is what drives the project. You have an ingeniously humorous manner to find relationship between seemingly unrelated things. Is this an approach you like to explore more in the future?

I definitely want to continue this approach. How to make photographs that are about something intangible - a feeling? a thought?

I think all of my work really is trying to do this. Gray Area was certainly my most abstract attempt at it. It's what the title says - trying to represent that gray area! The things that are between everything else.

See ... I'd still like to be able to talk and photograph it in a more cohesive way than I do!

The series “In Place” looks like a "game" where you are playing with a visual imagination of what can be discovered without really knowing what to expect; beautiful series of images of yourself; beautiful perspectives, lighting, tonality.

This project has always kind of amazed me - this is one that came completely out of intuition. It was out of frustration or not knowing what to do next, and just locking myself in a room with my camera. It was a complete experiment, and it took me a very long time to realize that the project itself was about the experiment.

When I first tried to write about it, I was plagued with trying to figure out what these images "meant". Not until recently, that I realize that their meaning is in what I was doing. I was trying to figure out how to control and represent my body without seeing it. I was completely challenging myself to compose a photograph without seeing it. I had to become both the subject and the photographer when I shut myself in that empty room.

The other series, untitled, are totally different, both beautiful and interesting: indoor spaces and portraits. Is portraiture a field you intend to explore more in the future? What are the differences between approaching to photograph a person versus an object?

I first started out always shooting people. It was all I wanted to do. But honestly, I grew so tired of it! I hated being dependent on others, arranging shoots, organizing models - it really was making an ordeal when I simply wanted to take pictures. I've learnt since that I love to take photographs when by myself. So, when I began the “Gray Area” series it was a very conscious decision to make a body of work without people. And it was a new challenge.

How to make meaningful work out of inanimate subjects? I had no idea.... and I think that it is what took me to photograph the "in-between" in “Gray Area”. I didn't know how to photograph meaningfully an inanimate object, so I focused on a meaningful inanimate subject. It was what I could photograph once I ruled out people and objects.

I like to ask you one question about composition ... it is assumed that the key aspect of a good composition is to exclude the elements that are not necessary. I think this idea ignores a key step of the composition: the action of including rather than excluding. Often times, it is more difficult –contra intuitive- to include some elements rather than exclude them. Adding unusual elements can create very unique compositions that surprise and intrigue. What are you thoughts about this? What do you find easier for your compositions, the act of including or excluding?

I don't think I've really ever thought extensively about this? Perhaps this is something that comes intuitively in my work. It has always seemed a natural conclusion for specific bodies about what to include or not.

Say for the series “That, Which is Between Us”. This was a very specific series that I did story board out, and knew very carefully what I wanted to include in the image. I put visual hints to the relationship between the figures, their uneaten dinners, the TV being on, the broken glass. Very clear visual elements that I included purposefully.

But in “Gray Area”, it was a decision in what not to include. Obviously any details to location, or really any signifiers to what these abstract images were (especially the pool photographs). So, I suppose in answer I don't find it easier either way - its more just dependent on each individual work.

What comes next for you? Are you planning to explore the fine art market as a key priority for your work or perhaps you intend to drive your career into commercial/advertisement and editorial?

Currently I am in the process of interviewing for Grad school. I'm hoping to end up either in London (University of Westminster) or Boston (MassArt). I want to do my MFA to further develop my practice, as well as become better at writing and speaking about art and photography. Eventually, I would love to be able to teach. My main focus in my work now is definitely exploring the fine art market, but editorial work is always great to do along the way! For me, my photography has always been about ideas and trying to express/question things. Editorial work is much more about the process of creating the photograph (by someone else specifications). I think it is great to get to do both!

I always find interesting when artists describe the work from other artists that they find particularly creative. Would you mind to refer a photographer (or any other artist) whose work you find particularly interesting?

I recently saw the work of Nicolai Howalt at a gallery in New York and I am fascinated by his work. The piece in New York was How to Hunt, which he did with Trine Sondergaard. This series, along with his other works, are so incredibly beautiful. They are large scale prints that are layered multiple exposures representing a hunt.

I think what I'm drawn to with this series, and his others (especially the Boxers) is the duality he creates between the beauty and brutality of what his work is about.

The boxer series is incredible. Howalt capturing these young boys before and after a match and seeing how they change - even through the slightest difference in their glare. His work has an incredible subtlety that I would love to achieve.

I like to thank you very much for this candid dialogue. I am looking forward to following you career and seeing your wonderful pictures in the coming future. Best wishes for your next steps.

Miguel Garcia-Guzman

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