Christopher Schreck’s off kilter diptychs and determinedly partial photographs present wry, unusual and often insightful narrative interactions – tempt one toward a meaning by way of formal or tonal allusions of some kind. His pictures play around the with the circuitry of vision, by breaking open any literal expectations in the image and giving equal status to mood and form as well as what we might generically call content. Chris was kind enough to make a little time to have a conversation that touched on his interests beyond photography as well as his picture-making. One of the ideas that emerged toward the end of the time we spent talking had to do with how a diptych shifts the locus of meaning by virtue of the effect of combination and juxtaposition, so that the single image is emptied in some way, so that what arises is an exchange or an overlapping series of exchanges wherein what we might think of as ‘meaning’ (dodgy as the term may be) belongs to neither single image. Given that Chris’s pictures are deliberately fragmentary it may be futile to even think about meaning, but nevertheless his experiments with the form of the diptych zero in on the space between two pictures in a continually intriguing way, and he often unearths unexpected and compelling sympathies and complementaries between wholly unrelated subjects and places.
A Conversation with Christopher Schreck.
The Great Leap Sideways (TGLS)
Hey Christopher. Sorry, internet cut out for a moment there. I am here. How are you doing?
Christopher Schreck (CS)
Hey Stanley, things are good.
TGLS
What have you been busy with since your move from Chicago?
CS
I’m doing a few different things: I’m working as an assistant, doing some shoots of my own, trying to finish up a couple of photo projects, doing writing for this art criticism site, working on a volume of poetry, etc… Trying to keep busy with good things.
TGLS
By the art criticism site do you mean something other than Wandering Bears?
CS
Yeah, it’s a site called Art Fag City, they do fine art criticism with a focus on what’s happening in NYC. The Wandering Bears blogging has just been a month-long guest role, to cover while they were visiting the US.
TGLS
Okay, I’m not familiar with them. I’ll take a look and see. What got you interested in Art Fag City? Have you written about art for a while now?
CS
Writing about art is a fairly new thing for me, but it’s something I want to be doing more in the coming year. I view it as a means of contributing to conversations that I’m interested in, but might not be addressing directly through my photography. As far as AFC goes, I’ve been aware of them for a while, kept up with them regularly. What I like about them is that their writing is not only intelligent, but opinionated as well. Writing for an online audience is different than the more academic writing I’ve done in the past – you have to be more concise, lay out your ideas strongly and quickly. I’m trying to strengthen my writing along those lines, so working with them has been really helpful.
TGLS
Did you have it lined up before you got to NYC from Chicago?
CS
I was in contact with them, but it wasn’t lined up until after I got here. I didn’t have anything lined up before we moved, actually.
TGLS
Have you fallen in with some of the online photo community that are based out in Brooklyn? I think you’re there too right?
CS
I have. It’s been a lot of fun to meet so many photographers and bloggers who had just been these abstract online personas to me up until now. These are conversations I wasn’t able to have in person when I was living in Chicago, so it’s a real nice thing to be here.
TGLS
Must be, for sure. I find it’s in no way surprising from your photographs that you’re a poetry fan. For how long, and what kind of poetry in particular or which poets do you enjoy?
CS
Poetry’s been part of my reading rotations for as long as I can remember. I’ve written since probably junior high, published a little bit, but most of it ended up as song lyrics for bands I was in. This volume I’m working on will be the first real collection I’ll have put out there, though. I’m trying to do work that’s lyrical but not flowery or heavy-handed, like in the same the way that Kerouac and Bukowski are insightful but conversational. We’ll see how it goes…
TGLS
Where did you publish your poems, those that you had published? And when was this? Are you planning on self-publishing this book of poems you’re working on?
CS
It wasn’t much at all – just in little literary journals, local stuff back home, even something like the high school arts journal or whatever. As far as publishing this stuff, I’m not really sure – it’s pretty early into the process. I just write things when it occurs to me, so it’ll take however long it takes, you know?
TGLS
I do. I write poetry from time to time too. It’s sort of permanently on the back-burner. I’ve always felt that there’s a very special affinity between poetry and photography, kind of similar in its dynamic to the relationship between prose and film.
CS
I can see that, and at the same time, i think it’s the differences that make them interesting to me. The things I’m writing, I couldn’t capture them with a camera – and probably vice versa. There’s a kind of specificity you’re held to when you’re dealing with language that I wouldn’t assume is even possible with photography. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe you can never be sure.
TGLS
I agree absolutely. I think the similarities are of form and not of content, so their subject matter couldn’t be interchangeably dealt with by either medium. I think that’s why I enjoy poetry so much, when you talk about the specificity you’re held to by language. When you deploy words in a poetic form they can reassume their original sense of strangeness.
CS
Right. Who do you read?
TGLS
That’s also something that photography can do. It can make you look at a fence post and see menace or intrusion. There’s a great essay on poetry by a favourite poet of mine, Don Paterson – I’ve quoted it in a few written pieces I’ve done on photography or photographers because it’s so incisive and so relevant.
CS
What’s it called, ? I’d be interested in reading it.
TGLS
It reads: “When we allow silence to reclaim those objects and things of the world, when we allow the words to fall away from them – they reassume their own genius, and repossess something of their mystery, their infinite possibility. Then the we awaken a little to the realm of the symmetries again, and of no-time, eternity. The poet’s specific talent: when the things of the world (in which we should very much include our own feelings, ideas, and relations with one other) that we have contemplated in this wordless and thoughtless silence reenter the world of asymmetrical concept, of discrete definition, of speech and language – they return as strangers; and then they declare wholly unexpected allegiances, reveal wholly unsuspected valencies. We see the nerve in the bare tree, we hear the applause in the rain. These things are, in other words, redreamt, they are reimagined, they are remade.”
CS
Very nice – I can definitely see how you could apply that to photography. Is Don Paterson a contemporary poet?
TGLS
It’s about vision really, and naming. Don Paterson – yeah. He’s writing and making music as we speak. www.donpaterson.com. But I think that the capacity to name things with word or with camera, within a framework that you have constructed, can allow mystery back into something we assume to be or experience as resolutely ordinary. That’s one of the original gifts of both poetry and photography I think…
CS
Definitely. Reminds me of Man Ray adopting Atget’s photography.
TGLS
I can see how it might bring him to mind. It’s an idea that stretches nearly everywhere really. That’s why I love it, and he’s a writer that has a profoundly nuanced sensitivity to the way that poems work, which is one reason why I love him. But in answer to your question, I read Sharon Olds quite frequently. Li Young Lee. Philip Larkin. A friend put me on to Philip Levine. I tend to revisit Seamus Heaney pretty frequently. I love a lot of Louise Gluck too. It’s a long and haphazard list, but I find that one of the pleasures of doing Great Leap is that occasionally a photograph suddenly seems to call out for a particular poem I’ve read, and I remember the poem as a picture when that happens – so that the image is calling up another, written image, in a weird way… It’s fun to be able to play with offsetting pictures and words in that way, and the photographers whose work I’ve used to do that seem to enjoy it too.
CS
Yeah, that’s beautiful. Now, do you photograph as well?
TGLS
Yup.
CS
I didn’t know that, I’d love to see your work.
TGLS
You should reserve judgement on that…
CS
Hahaha! Ah come on, we’re all doing what we can.
TGLS
Speaking of pictures though, I’m curious as to how come you came to making them latterly? If I’ve read around correctly you only started relatively recently?
CS
Well, I started taking photos about two years ago. I went to school for sculpture, I do collage work as well, focused on music for a while, so I’m always doing something… But with photography, I didn’t pay any attention to it until I was traveling a few years back documenting what I saw, as you do… But I was really excited about the shots I took over there. Then, once I got back, I started experimenting more, started looking at photography online, reading up on things. It felt really exciting to me. I didn’t have any training, but I didn’t have any baggage, either, so I just dove in.
TGLS
Your pictures seem only tangentially concerned with an objective circumstance: ‘spending time with Fred’, ‘going to the store with Sarah’ etc… They seem much more interested in how small corners of those activities, when set within the frame, can allude to or evoke emotional and psychological responses. I’m guessing that’s why you like to allow distortions into the picture plane?
CS
Generally speaking, I like taking photographs that exist outside of the context in which they were shot. I think what you said is accurate – they all may still evoke those “spending time with Fred” stories for me, but a host of other things too… But it’s not important to me that anyone else takes that away from the images. If anything, it would be detrimental.
TGLS
Right.
TGLS
The descriptive obligations of the picture are not in any way literal in your work.
CS
I think that’s right. Too literal and it gets pretty stale.
TGLS
I’m interested in that for a number of reasons, but partly because it allows you as a photographer to recompile and reprocess and reimagine your own everyday history as a kind of fiction
CS
That’s true – certainly the recompiling, that’s a major part of my process, accumulating these images and combining them later in a way that makes sense.
TGLS
Well I suppose the reprocessing and reimagining occur when you make the diptychs, right?
CS
Definitely. But i think that will be true for the work I do moving forward as well.
TGLS
So when Paterson is writing about letting things uncover unexpected valencies, that must be something you’re aiming towards when you put together your diptychs right? Not merely a formal, but a psychological complementarity of some kind, or a dissonance that’s evocative… Snakes and pipes, for instance.
CS
Right. I mean, that quote you wrote out earlier is at the heart of what those diptychs are doing – or at least what I hope they’re doing.
TGLS
It seemed like it was. What attracts you to that discursive space between two pictures when they form a diptych?
CS
On a formal level, it’s interesting to me to observe certain elements presenting themselves in different ways as I go through my day. But more than that, it’s this weird electric change that happens when you place the right two images together and suddenly neither image is what it was before. They’re strange and redefined and blank in a way.
TGLS
I very much like that notion of them being made over, made blank by the exchange…
CS
I do too. My hope in achieving that effect, though, is that the blankness doesn’t result in just a formal similarity. I do hope something approaching a narrative arises, but I wouldn’t presume to know what those might even be. Personally, they mean different things to me at once. I hope the same goes for other people.
TGLS
It does for me at least.
CS
I’m glad to hear that.
TGLS
Would you ever chance your arm at triptychs?
CS
Sure.
TGLS
My guess is that the degree of difficulty doesn’t go up proportionately, but exponentially.
CS
I mean, the same principles would apply, so whether it’s two or three or however many… That’s probably true – I could see it opening things up in a way that makes it almost easier, though.
TGLS
I’ll look forward to seeing some of your experiments with them then!
CS
We’ll see – as long as it’s exciting to me, i’ll keep pushing forward with it.