Geoffrey Agrons Member's Gallery

Artist: Geoffrey Agrons

Xenharmonic

The ruins of the 59th Street Fishing Pier, Ocean City, NJ. Archival pigment print on hand-made Japanese paper, 14" x 11". The title of the series "La Belle Indifférence" derives from the classical psychiatric phenomenon where patients display a paradoxical absence of concern for their symptoms. The work serves as a metaphor for the de facto apathy in the face of global climate change and rising seas. The photographs span a gamut that includes the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy in southern New Jersey, historic flooding in Western Ireland in 2009, recent sunny day flooding in a public park in La Crosse, Wisconsin by the backwaters of the Mississippi River, and scenes from a floating fishing village in Cambodia.

Exiled From Our Past

Not long after relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area I discovered Blake Garden, a landscape laboratory and public garden teaching facility in Kensington, California. As a photographer, I had grown deeply interested in the episodic shifting of light and mood produced by the dense coastal fog peculiar to the region, and began to explore the shrouded garden paths through medium format and infrared cameras. My walks led to unplanned encounters with enigmatic installations that invited contemplation, but did not immediately speak to a coherent narrative or purpose. I would later learn that these “interventions” were part of Revealing the Landscape, a project of students in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning of the University of California, Berkeley. The student’s work, which seemed to echo the paradoxical language of dreams, appealed to my fascination with incongruous intersections of nature and human activity. The fog added poignancy to their delicacy and transience. On my return to Blake Garden after several weeks, I found the installations had been removed without a trace.

Moths

"Milieu Intérieur: Diary of a Recluse", a photography project roughly spanning 2011-2014, evolved during a period of personal and professional retrenchment and, I confess, mild agoraphobia. The title is an oblique homage to the French physiologist Claude Bernard, who coined the phrase Milieu Intérieur to refer to the protective stability provided to living organisms by the extra-cellular fluid environment. My pressing need to feel enclosed, sheltered, and consoled by life indoors was somewhat incongruous, since previously I had concentrated on landscape photography. At the same time, I had grown dissatisfied with my long exposure photographs made at the water’s edge, finding them overly derivative and sterile. I was eager to establish a photographic vocabulary of my own that felt honest, pared down, and free of artifice or mimicry. I began to make photographs that were informed by my immediate response to the quotidian, to observe the ordinary trappings of the environment within.

Hospice (The Eastern Light)

From the series "The Memory Floor".

Needle and Thread

Platinum-palladium print on hand-coated Arches Platine paper.

Artist Statement

In her polemic "On Photography", Susan Sontag argued that the proliferation of images in the modern era fostered a passive "chronic voyeuristic relation" to the world around us. As a diagnostic radiologist, I spent my workdays interpreting "photographs" of the human interior. Each study was approached as a puzzle with a potential solution, and each analysis was a quest for certainty. Through concise language in a written report, I sought to minimize ambiguity. The images were presumed to hold meaning for the patient and their physician, and often that meaning resulted in intervention on the patient's behalf. In this narrow sense, at least, Sontag was wrong.

In time I came to recognize that an unspoken aesthetic appreciation of diagnostic images was deeply entwined with the rigor of anatomic analysis, logic, and problem solving. But I grew interested in a different relationship with photography, one that separated an immediate emotional response from vigilant interpretation. I acquired a camera and began to explore the world beyond the darkened radiology reading room. The still camera became my modality of choice for affective diagnostic imaging. In the process, I found respite in feeling rather than thinking.

The uneasy coexistence between human populations and the natural world interests me as a photographer. I am intrigued by transition and impermanence, and favor material that leaves an inchoate emotional residue-that haunting suspicion that we may have forgotten something important in our inattention to the sensual realm. I suppose most of my photographs are mementos mori (although I've come to think of them as "melancholigraphs").