TRANSCRIPT

Failure

The subject of failure is one of my favourite subjects. I think failure is so much more interesting than success. Plus, it’s humbling. It also happens to be something I’m actually less ignorant about than other things.

In the end, Liquid City consisted of 40 images in total. The work is from way back in the 1990s, the days of film. So when I go back and look at how many rolls I shot over over that decade, I come up with a figure of over one thousand three hundred rolls, Tri-X in case that matters to anyone. That means I shot nearly 50,000 pictures to come up with 40 final images. One way of looking at this is that my failure rate was over 99.9%. So, fewer than one out of a thousand pictures that I shot ever made it.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s failure — massive, constant and inelegant — that was at the heart of making Liquid City. And I still consider it the foundation to all the work I’ve ever done since, including what I’ve done after I switched from analog to digital.

I’ve always told my students: make lots of pictures. Most will wind up never being seen by anyone else. That’s fine. That the next best thing to making a good picture is making a bad one. Most of the pictures I make don’t make it in the end but I learned something from every one. Every so-called failed picture helped me figure out what to do next, what direction I needed to go in to make an image somewhere down the line that was a better crafted, more expressive extension of myself. Every picture I made became a teacher. I’ve had some good teachers, but my best teacher has always been my own work. Including the failures. Especially the failures.

Speaking of teachers, I took some photography workshops at Ryerson University in Toronto and that was where Henry Gordillo first taught me this. He said, “You have to shoot more film Frank. 25 rolls a week is the minimum.” 

I actually can be very obedient when I want to be, and it’s when I took Henry’s advice that a few good things started to happen. I’ve thought a lot over the years of how much I owe Henry.

Luck

I wasn’t the first person to do this of course, but I shot all those 50,000 pictures that went into Liquid City without ever looking through the viewfinder. Mostly from my hip. 

This way of shooting started mostly because I was kind of timid or, to put it more bluntly, a bit of a coward. I was really nervous about photographing people on the street. I remember one time I was taking pictures of the display window of this store that carried all kinds of cheesy gags and novelty items. So in the window were things like this dreadful yellow rubber chicken, all faded from the sun, and a set of handcuffs, stuff like that. Anyway, the guy who owned the store — and he looked an awful lot like that terrifying prison guard in the old film Midnight Express — he sees me from inside and then I see him running out from behind his counter because he’s mad as hell about what I’m doing. I was pretty positive that he wasn’t in the mood to politely ask me to cease and desist, that he was more likely going to beat the living shit out of me. So, by the time he’s out the door I’d already sprinted down the street like a bat out of hell. Something similar happened in Germany one time when  a guy with a pit bull accused me of taking a picture of his dog without asking, which was true. He didn’t go further than that but I was thinking at the time that he might just let the dog loose on me.

So, I started shooting all sneaky, from the hip mostly, like I said. But the thing is, it turned out that doing things this way did more than just let me take pictures with less fear of being beaten into a coma. When I looked at the contact sheets, it started breaking me out of my preconceptions of what a photograph was. It challenged my conventions of framing, focusing, exposure, all those biases I had in my conscious mind. It was a way of bypassing those prejudices, a way of using luck and instinct instead. Actually it was another way of helping to get over myself, which I really needed to do.

Of course, when I got to the darkroom I’d consciously refine the images that appealed to me. But the foundation for all of Liquid City was that luck and instinct. The conscious mind is a narrow thing, a straitjacket, especially when it comes to the foundation of creative work. Nobody’s as smart as they think they are, especially artists. 

Actually, along with failure, pure dumb luck is also one of my favourite subjects. I mean, I think 80% of a person’s life is chance. Probably it’s closer to 100%, but our egos — mine anyway — keep us from going there too often and too long. If we did, we’d probably be more insane than we already are. Yeah, you’ve gotta make good friends with luck and failure.

Mess

Something else I learned from lots of failure, as well as dumb luck and instinct is that I have this almost visceral mistrust of precision. Which translates into an aesthetic rejection.

I just think it’s so obvious that the reality of life on every level is very messy. And that what we don’t know is so much greater than what we think we know…. I mistrust art work that feels like it’s telling me exactly what something is like. I’ve always disliked work that’s didactic and, sadly, there are a lot more wannabe moralists out there than care to admit it.

The work I do like is stuff that expresses something of the chaos that we all have to live with, inside and outside ourselves. I like art that shows how difficult it is to get a grip on life. How impossible. I like work that shows the artist’s struggling and striving to engage the worlds we encounter, the way we all struggle and strive.

So one question becomes, how to convey and express this. Well, for me, I had to neutralize my own internal filters as much as I could and try to find a way to let the world come to me, more on its own messy terms than my hopeful ones. To let the pictures find me rather than me going out and making the pictures. And then — it seems like a paradox, but it’s not — using aesthetic control in the process after that, like in the darkroom, to highlight and strengthen that sense of messiness and ambiguity. It sounds like a paradox, but really it’s not; it’s what artists do all the time.

One

It’s been more than 20 years since I finished the last Liquid City picture. People will still ask me what I think the pictures are about. And though I’m not so sure whether that matters a whole lot — I’m actually more curious personally about what other people see in the pictures — it’s still something I can think about.

When I look back at these pictures, it looks a lot to me like they’re about isolation. And loneliness, which I consider isolation’s fraternal if not identical twin.

Of course, these pictures will mean something different to you because you’re a different person. Obviously, you see these images through your own history of experience. Which is obviously just fine. More than fine. Every viewer recreates each work of art that they encounter, because every viewer processes it through that personal lens. I’ve always said that if a spectator engages a work of art seriously, they’re also engaging in a creative act. An artist, their work and their audience becomes a stream of micro-collaborations.

Going to back to the subject of isolation. It’s not only the old woman gripping her hands tightly in the train station. Or the street musician who plays the trumpet while the bystander turns his back. Or the woman holding out her Watchtower magazine. Even where there are crowds, to me the figures look like they’re disconnected from each other. And of course, crowds are a great place to feel lonely.

For sure, I was lonely when I was making Liquid City. There’s no shortage of lonely artists. There’s no shortage of lonely people, period. There are a few people who might claim not to be, but my bet is  they’re lonelier than they let on.

And while cities can be places where people connect, they’re also places that really underscore loneliness and isolation. Nothing like feeling alone in a crowd to feel like you’re drowning in loneliness. 

The other thing is that when I’m lonely and sad I have trouble staying still. The clinical term is “agitated depression.” More to the point, the tangible outcome is that when I feel this way, I need to move, to feel my body moving in space. I want to walk and walk and walk, and, since I’ve never owned a car, I also ride the subway, I ride buses. Sidewalks, buses, and subways — that’s where Liquid City was waiting for me.

Here’s an aside: the best book I’ve ever read on the subject of art and loneliness is called The Lonely City by Olivia Laing. What a fantastic book. She got this terrific sensibility and this gift for writing about art that’s just so beautifully human.


Darkroom

You know that Netflix series 13 Reasons Why? Apparently younger viewers were asking their parents  what that red light was in the scenes showing the character Tyler working in the school darkroom. As someone who’s spent I guess hundreds of hours in a darkroom that made me laugh.

Now, it seems like darkrooms are making a bit of a nostalgic though limited comeback these days. But, still, it’s been a very long time since the most common way to make a photograph was to stand for hours sloshing around smelly chemicals in a windowless room dimly lit by a red safety light. 

I only miss it sometimes, but I did love my darkroom. It’s was a solitary cave which I didn’t find lonely because I had work to do. And I could hear my own thoughts clearer than usual. Also, after a while of doing things that were often repetitive and being still, these feelings I barely knew I had would drift to the surface. All of that helped me engage with myself and, in turn, with the images. And there was time, lots and lots of it, with much less of the curse of easy distraction. 

The darkroom also taught me patience, and I needed that because I was a very impatient person.

It was also great place to listen to music. I’d listen to this Panasonic boombox  playing old cassettes. Nirvana Unplugged. Philip Glass, especially the theme from the film Mishima….

Favourite

Occasionally people ask me the question, Is there a Liquid City picture that’s your favourite? The easy reply is that they’re all my darlings, but I don’t want to give a wishy washy answer like that.

If I had to pick it would come down to a couple, Untitled no. 1 and Untitled no. 93, which were printed seven years apart. 

Untitled no. 1 shows a man climbing a stairwell. He’s bent over, he grips the handrail. You can see the word “Herren” which means “Men” in German so I figure I must’ve shot it walking down to the men’s room in some Berlin bus or train station. It reminds me of Duchamp’s drawing of that figure laboriously peddling a bicycle uphill. But more than that it’s always made me think of my father — alone and lonely, getting old, struggling against gravity itself, against the forces of life. Maybe, in more recent years, it makes me think more and more about myself as I get old. Why not?

And then there’s Untitled no. 93. A little girl in a frilly dress, her mouth gapes open in what looks like a silent scream, she cranes her neck into this void. She’s got hands like paws, as my buddy Stephen Perloff said years ago. I mean, what’s that all about? I still shake my head.

The backstory to no. 93 is that I shot it at the Toronto Zoo. I know this not because I remember, but from checking the contact sheet. I actually don’t have any specific memory any of those 50,000 images. 

Anyway, the little girl in no. 93 was some kid standing next to the glass in front of the tank that lets visitors see the polar bears swimming. Maybe she was turning to look at her parents at the moment I pressed the shutter, more than twenty years ago. Who knows. 

Nostalgia

Until this show in Washington, it had been a while since I exhibited Liquid City and longer still since I printed the last image. So when it came to making this exhibition, I was kind of curious to find out how I’d feel looking at the images in detail all over again.

It’s kind of gratifying that I still like the images quite a bit. And it’s a relief. 

They still look like an extension of me, of who I am or was or both, though none of us are the same person we were decades ago.

In fact, I'd say I like the images more now than I did back then. Maybe that’s because years have gone by and I’ve pissed out a lot of  that bullshit around career and “making it.” Life has a way of knocking the crap out of you and for me there’s been a lot of good in that, whether I’ve liked it or not.

I’m also saying this during the COVID 19 pandemic where millions of us are hunkered down at home, if we’re lucky enough to have one and lucky enough that we don’t have to go out and work. Time feels different these days. Life is pared down. There’s less chatter to get in the way, at least when you go offline.  

End

Until this show in Washington, it had been a while since I exhibited Liquid City and longer still since I printed the last image. So when it came to making this exhibition, I was kind of curious to find out how I’d feel looking at the images in detail all over again.

It’s kind of gratifying that I still like the images quite a bit. And it’s a relief. 

They still look like an extension of me, of who I am or was or both, though none of us are the same person we were decades ago.

In fact, I'd say I like the images more now than I did back then. Maybe that’s because years have gone by and I’ve pissed out a lot of  that bullshit around career and “making it.” Life has a way of knocking the crap out of you and for me there’s been a lot of good in that, whether I’ve liked it or not.

I’m also saying this during the COVID-19 pandemic where millions of us are hunkered down at home, if we’re lucky enough to have one and lucky enough that we don’t have to go out and work. Time feels different these days. Life is pared down. There’s less chatter to get in the way, at least when you go offline.  

Coda

One last thing: About the titles, the numbers. The images run from #1 up to #123, with lots of gaps since there are only 40 pictures. The chronology is based on when I first printed them not when I shot them, so there’s no order in terms of when the events in front of the camera actually happened.

And as for the numbers? I just picked those at random. Just pure chance.

One last thing. I was just watching a documentary on Garry Winogrand. There’s been a lot made of the fact that after he died he left a whole pile of images unprinted, even undeveloped. Hundreds of thousands of negatives. I don’t know how important that really is, maybe more so to the people who are trying to figure out what to do with them than the rest of us.

Still, it got me curious about how many rolls of Liquid City I never developed. And in my basement, it turns out there’s a box containing about 150 rolls, so that’s about 5,000 negatives, which at my success rate of 0.1% means that there might be ten or so Liquid City keepers in there somewhere. 

But I’m almost certain the film will just rot away if it isn’t already. The runway for me to do anything, not to mention everything, is getting shorter.

I mean, everything ends. It’s just that nothing’s ever finished.

— Frank Rodick, April 2020