Before We Begin

When I photograph someone, I am often also making a request. I ask them to stay, face the camera, say it again, or become someone else for a while. How they answer, and what I do with that answer, will affect what happens next. The camera records the answer, but it is already part of the request.

This is where this book begins.

P4 is where I have continued to work with photography, theater, and moving images. Shoot Self with You brings rehearsal, performance, and the process of working together into a film. Its participants perform, and they also comment on the performance. Some ask to go on; others want to stop. The title of director falls to different people. What is being performed and what is happening press up against one another. To distinguish them, we need to look more closely than the question ‘Is this real or fake?’ allows.

I am interested in how art changes the conditions under which people meet. A role can enable someone to say something they ordinarily find hard to say. A shared task can bring strangers into one another’s company. A piece of cloth can turn leaving into an action everyone can see. These arrangements do have uses. They allow certain things to happen, but they cannot determine what those things mean to each person.

This is also where the questions become difficult. If I have given my time to an encounter and arranged a form for it, does that give me more reason to expect the answer I want? If I have kept an image of someone, do I understand them better than other people do? If an experience finally becomes a film, does that prove that everything that happened was worthwhile?

These questions concern my own work first. It is easy for an artist to put their wishes into someone else’s task, then take the completion of that task as a response to those wishes. What filming leaves behind may be less than that, or something quite different.

In this book, ‘the formation of relations’ names a concrete change: through a shared activity, people gain, lose, or change the positions from which they can act. Someone who could only answer begins to ask questions. Someone who was carrying out a task begins to revise it. Someone being watched asks the person watching to explain themselves. The changes are sometimes small, yet they can make it impossible for the next step to proceed as before. I am interested in how these changes happen, and how framing, sound, and editing turn them into a film that unfamiliar viewers can understand.

Writing about relations therefore also means writing about form. The complexity of an event cannot defend a film on its behalf. Viewers were not at the rehearsal, do not know everyone involved, and do not owe the filmmaker as much time as the event itself took. Whatever the film wants them to see, it must do the work of making that visible.

I hope this book can retain both demands: to make clear judgments about a work, while leaving the people in it room to go on living. The openness of a person’s life cannot excuse loose form; nor should a finished form be used to declare a person complete.

The nine chapters that follow begin with photographs. First, I look at how someone enters the frame, then at how roles and tasks bring people together, and finally at how these experiences are edited into a film. There is no need to accept a set of terms in advance. The judgments in this book should be legible in the photographs, words, bodies, and objects themselves.