Vicente, Mercedes
What is abstract?

Adam Fuss Untitled, 1998

In the work of Adam Fuss (London, 1961) the scientific and metaphysical meet. Fuss’ alchemist spirit has led the evolution of his work through a journey that has progressively brought him towards the dark space of photography. Along the way, Fuss abandoned the 35mm camera first and later the pinhole camera, to adopt and experiment with the early techniques of 19th century photography such as the daguerreotype and the photogram, replacing the camera with the language of shadows. Whether figurative or abstract, Fuss’ vocabulary has been circumscribed to nature. The strong poetic and symbolic sense with which he grants such elements as water, a snake, a baby or the human figure, suggests a metaphysical discourse regarding the mysteries of life and death, of light and darkness. In 1988, Fuss started using the photogram in abstract studies of light and color, using light metaphorically. Large in scale without being monumental, these images are radically different from the intimate size of the preceding works made with the pinhole camera. During the nineties, Fuss turned to figuration with his biological studies, in which he exposed plants and flowers on light-sensitive paper –reminiscent of William Henry Fox Talbot’s botanical studies. Also from this period is the series Invocation, in which he captured the silhouettes of babies floating in water, and the Love series, his attempt to bring together figuration and abstraction. Yet, unlike Talbot, Fuss’ imagery is less concerned with documenting the appearances of things as it is with the possible meanings behind them, thus conferring his works a sense of spirituality. The simplification achieved by the photogram challenges the deluge of images prevailing in our current technological society. For Fuss, an heir of English Romanticism, the significance of his imagery lies in the magic of the invisible embedded in the tangible world, in that which we might be able to see, yet are unable to grasp.

You once declared, “We’re so conditioned to the syntax of the camera that we don’t realize that we are running on only half the visual alphabet.... It’s what we see every day in the magazines, on billboards and even on television. All those images are being produced basically the same way, through a lens and a camera. I’m saying there are many, many other ways to produce photographic imagery, and I would imagine that a lot of them have yet to be explored.” Would you like to comment on this statement?

That quote was a reference to images produced without the camera, which incidentally are not abstract or figurative. There is a lot of confusion around that, people immediately assume that a picture without a camera is abstract, and it is not. It could be extremely figurative. But within that figuration or abstraction there is a nuance, a visual syntax that is unused, and a whole new vocabulary that because it is not used, it is not immediately accessible. Our brain is very capable of interpreting the language of shadows and the spatial nuances within shadows, but we are so used to seeing so many pictures that say “Here! Here it is!” (Shouting), and we don’t have to do anything.

Adam Fuss My Ghost, 2001

Having worked as a commercial photographer, you claimed to be all too conscious of what you call “the pervasive technological-consumerist culture”. Perhaps this explains your return to the simplest of photographic means.

This opinion is very retrospective. It is a response to a time when I had the desire to do pictures that were fresh to me, that I had not seen, and the way to do that practically was to change the apparatus or get rid of it.

So your arrival to the early techniques came from your own experiments?

It came out of one, using a 35mm camera and trying to subvert it, and two, using the pinhole camera and realizing that I didn’t need a camera, the outside world or the light from the outside world to record an image. It was a process of moving towards the dark space of the camera and a removal of the technology associated with photography, all that high-tech Japanese stuff, from the idea of an image.


Is this why you adopted the photogram and the daguerreotype?

A daguerreotype is more commonly a photograph. In fact, historically I don’t know any daguerreotype-made photogram. It was associated with the language of the camera. Millions of portraits were made and have been reproduced in books. The reproduction of the daguerreotype is very familiar, the lens and process of making the daguerreotype, but the actual daguerreotype is less known.

Adam Fuss Untitled, 2003

Would it also be the fact that this medium allows more accidents to happen?

Yes, because it is very difficult to master. I am attracted to certain things that happen in the daguerreotype process, which historically were thought of as mistakes, for instance with overexposure there is a production of a kind of blue. If you made a portrait at that time and the sitter was wearing a white shirt and there was too much light, it would turn the white, the shirt, the eyes or a shinny spot in the nose into blue. The portrait was thrown away. To me that blue is compelling.

What is compelling, the mistake or the blue color?

It is the blue, that particular blue.

What about it?

I wonder about that, because even before I worked with the daguerreotype most of my photograms were blue, when using water, powder and some of my pendulum pieces. I have wondered why the color blue.

Is it melancholic?

It is melancholic. It is also archetypical, it is the sky. I was born blue, my mother described it to me. I also had an experience when I first came to America that was connected with the UFO phenomenon and I saw a very particular kind of blue.

How do you explain that vision? Was it drug induced?

No, it wasn’t. I don’t need to explain it in technical or scientific terms, whether I was tired or someone put something in my food. To me, this is totally unimportant.

You simply take it as an image.

An image that was given, or perhaps it was a memory.

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