Excerpts from an interview with Robert Shreefter curator Off Main Gallery, Wellfleet, MA - Fall, 2020
RS Tell us something about yourself as an artist
MB I became interested in photography as a fine art in my twenties. When I ask myself why Photography the answer I come up with is because of the sheer pleasure I get from the act of seeing. It's often a sensuous experience in the same way smelling lavender or sipping wine or hearing Dvorak is.
My mind's eye has always been inclined to find relationships and create compositions. The way light embraces matter and defines shape and reveals texture and tone moves me and demands my attention. Sometimes what I see registers as "Ah, ha!" right. It may be the recognition of some thing meaningful or beautiful. I think of it as the creative art of seeing. A camera is not necessary to see this way. I have been seeing this way long before I ever picked up a camera. But when I do put a camera in front of my eye and train my lens on a subject and with great deliberation put a frame around it, that's no longer a sensory indulgence. It is now an expressive act and it says something about how I uniquely experience the world, how I understand it, and ultimately it says something about me. Not just as an artist but as a person.
RS You mention transience, loss, incongruity and paradox in your Artist Statement. Can you elaborate on why these themes make their way into your work?
MB Let's just say that I have a very low threshold for transience and loss. Probably because of losses I sustained earlier in my life. We lose dear friends; there are irretrievable, missed opportunities; the beauty and vitality of youth can no longer be claimed. My photography is not isolated from my being or my psyche. It is integrated into the fabric of who I am and I use it to work out these issues. It helps me to examine my life. To live an examined life.
As for paradox, incongruity and mystery. I love these things. They enrich our experience of life and make us marvel and in so doing coax us to reach higher and stretch the the limits of what we think we know.
If transcendence is moving from an ordinary state of consciousness to an extraordinary one then I have experienced this at times working under the dark cloth. I still use a tripod and a drape over my camera (a vestige of my view camera days). Like a horse wearing blinders everything outside the drape disappears. If the inspiration is there, and I'm lucky, the boundary between my self and the subject evaporates. It's a transcendent and liminal moment that I cherish.
RS Can you use show us some of your photographs that demonstrate these themes at work?
MB I'll share my experience of "Seed Pod" with you. I found this subject in an unruly patch of growth near the Juice restaurant in Wellfleet, When I finished composing it I had an "Ah, ha!" moment. Although I couldn't at the time put words to it I intuitively sensed its meaning. Nearly a year later a very dear friend of mine was in hospice and I was searching for poems to help me cope with losing him. I found one written by a brilliant astrophysicist while she was dying of the same cancer that would claim my friend. It's entitled "Antidotes to the Fear of Dying." In the first stanza she imagines herself eating stars "each one peppery hot and sharp." In the second she consoles herself by imagining she is being stirred into a yet unborn universe still "warm as blood." But the last stanza struck me hard and I immediately though of "Seed Pod." She writes, "And sometimes it's enough, to lie down here on earth beside our long ancestral bones. To walk across the cobbled fields of our discarded skulls, Each one like a treasure. Like a chrysalis. Thinking: whatever left these husks Flew off on bright wings.
The poem reveals a meaning aligned with transience, loss and paradox that I could only intuit at the time. The structure and texture of "Seed Pod" coincide with the text of the poem. The coarse, prickly husk of the pod is open like a coffin. The image is composed to emphasize release. And the ethereal downy beauty transcends its coffin on bright wings returning to another fertile place.
"Sarah Ascending" Illustrates the theme of transcendence. Sarah is waist deep in water. She swirls her hands under water creating ripples crowned with highlights. The ripples suggest movement. Ascension. Sarah's arms are splayed as if wings. The tree branches reach out for her from above as if fingers. And her skin is absolutely radiant and aglow. For me there is a spiritual, baptismal element to this image. It's as if Sarah is being chosen or summoned from above.