“When I go about with my camera, I wait for my environment to fall apart, for it’s props to jostle for the role of protagonist, before they all entirely lose confidence. They help me, to trip over my assumptions, expose the flaws of my desires and leave me free to start again in the wrong position.”

Dominic Rich

A Conversation with Joel Fisher about Dominic Rich’s photographs.

Joel - Dominic, we have known each other for 20 years, and I have been impressed by the way you observe things.   I remember how you once began paying attention to optical phenomena and other physical aspects of human vision. Can you remind me of that?

Dominic - Yes, it’s been a while since I thought of that but I was really into entoptic phenomena for a while. 

An entoptic is a projection of an inverse image of some of the structure or content of your eye that plays out in your vision at about reading distance, and is often very bright and colourful, the structures are usually linear patterns, webbed, or create lines. The most everyday example would be when you look up at a blue sky and you ‘see stars’ which apparently are the inverse image of blood cells passing through the capillaries in your eyes. 

But they can be much more complex than this particularly during altered states of consciousness, brought about from exhaustion, dancing, dizziness, or taking hallucinatory substances. Research has been done to collect recordings of the imagery that people witness in these states, through simple diagrammatic drawings. 

 It turns out that everyplace where the research was done people shared the same linear forms in their experience, suggesting some kind of universal, fundamentally human experience. These linear drawings were called Form Constants. 

A Neuro-Archaeologists called David Lewis-Williams researched this phenomenon in relation to Palaeolithic cave art and existing indigenous people like the San people of South Africa, and found many examples of form constants being repeated in formal and iconic drawings and paintings, which was fascinating in its own right. 

 At the time I was thinking about drawing a lot and I was playing with possible implications of form constants as fundamental types of line making. Led by my curatorial research at the Centre for Recent Drawing, London, I was wondering whether the human construction of meaning was informed through a linear activity. I suppose I thought of meaning sprouting in lines, if you like, or as Andrew Hewish may say - Meaning is line.

I did not really think about it but there are some vestiges of this in the photography shown - one of the collections is called, ‘Form Constant’. Dom_Constant,   my handle on Instagram, in an obscure reference to this.  Looking back the interest involved a dialogue with sensory experience — the reverb of meaning making. It also makes me think that I am naturally drawn to search for the roots of things, the fundamentals. Also I seem to have held an intuition that there is some core of value to be found, that is also shared among all humans. People tend to be dubious about universals these days which is probably sensible. The assumption that my truth is that of other peoples starts to turn ugly when viewed in the context of colonialism for instance, where the truth of the coloniser supplants the truth of the colonised, in the guise of commonality. 

If motioning to some roots of humanity is a bit naive, however subconscious it may have been, maybe this was also a desire to connect people in a way that showed that we are fundamentally the same and equal, and I saw potential for this in fundamental sensory experience. Shoot me! I read that Alexander the Great: a well known coloniser, was really into the idea of making colonised and coloniser; ‘Greek’ and ‘Barbarian’, equal, to the extent that he forced Greek Macedonian’s to marry Persian and other conquered people, with the goal uniting the Oikoumene (inhabited land) into a single body. A blunt engineering of equality perhaps? Boldly naive, but perhaps it’s better than the blunt forms of social stratification that have tended to be the norm. I heard that he borrowed the idea from the Persians. Apparently fellow Greek Macedonians did not share his vision.

I dislike the word, spiritual, it makes me cringe so much. My Dad was always a hardline atheists, and would never miss an opportunity to ridicule anybody who admitted to any spiritual (religious) leaning. Perhaps I carry a little or his cynicism. But if being spiritual is simply a desire to connect to something bigger than oneself in space and time, then many pursuits which are not religious may still be spiritual, like having a connection to wider humanity, across land and time.

I’ve often thought of Modern Art as a kind of secular spiritual project-—an enquiry into experience, for values that may endure, objects and ideas to believe in and enrich us. A kind of worshiping of ‘false idols’, if you like, depends on how you look on it. So uncovering the truths that connect us has never been a thesis but maybe an intuition I can’t shake off.

Joel - I also remember the ways you described observing interactions with your café customers, and between the customers themselves while being served in the cafes that you and Eva have created as focal points in your neighbourhoods.

It seems to me that in addition to your human connections your curiosity also drives the interactions between your life and your art.  I think your cafes are also art and that interests me. 

Dominic - Thanks Joel, finally somebody noticed our Magnus Opus! The cafes! Lol. I’m often asked if I do anything creative. I tell people what they want to hear; making this, writing that, but if I’m feeling bold, I may be honest and say that running a cafe is the most creative thing I’ve ever (co)done. We have to be careful in assuming that disciplines like the liberal arts are necessarily creative places and that more ordinary places aren’t.

We’ve been running our cafes for over 12 years now. They have been a good teacher. 

They are fascinating social knots, that tie and untie a multiplicity of people, all aspects of the general public, astute coffee drinkers and makers. We had no ambition to see the cafe as an art project, we respected the trade too much, that idea does not interest me. 

When we set up the cafe there was already a strong tradition of artists dabbling with cafes, based on some gimmick or other, whether that be artists serving food and drinks to the audience as a performance in a gallery, or enquiries into business transparency. Projects which are essentially, self-referential, make a novelty out of the everyday, and reify life into art. This does not just happen in art-cafe projects but in cafe marketing also. It’s such an awful cliche to hear a new cafe start harking on about the communal good (or overtly signalling their communal good). A general rule of thumb, for me, is if people are saying it they’re probably not doing it. If a real cafe is to fulfil its worth it cannot behave like this. It cannot be too self-referential. It has to do its work quietly with discipline, care and receptivity, setting the ground for social fermentation, and for the opportunity of value and meaning to occur in its visitors.

One thing a cafe has taught me is that there is something really bold about an open door.

I could talk forever about the cafes but maybe that’s another conversation. Perhaps I should just say that the cafes have made me realise that I don’t discriminate between one type of making and another. We’re all just going through a series of actions and interactions, each one worth consideration and each one with the same limitless potential whether it’s in a cafe or in a liberal arts setting, or in one of my photographic encounters, or anywhere else. Meaning and worth can emerge from anywhere.

Joel - After looking at the photographs you are offering to the public, I have some questions about the place they hold for you as created and observed images. That includes how and when you take them.

Dominic - We can start with some basics. In this particular case, I take photographs on a FujiX100v which is a rangefinder-style camera with a fixed 35mm and an F2 lens. Although this camera is very generous to me, a technical understanding of it does not mean so much right now. Sounds lazy, and it could be. Also, as much as I respect it as a broad discipline, I am not a photographer, as such. 

I’m a generalist, drawn to many ways of making in a search for value, quality, meaning. I was working in one of my cafes kitchens, making brunch and lunch and baking for about about four years, and after a while people started to refer to me as a chef. Although technically I performed the role to a degree, I was baffled by this. I thought of how chef’s used to have to learn what was called the repertoire; to be able to make over 3000 recipes by heart, to the highest standard. I certainly don’t have anywhere near that scope of dishes. I feel like taking a name like that is like stealing a crown and I feel this about a lot of names. Names like photographer or chef often come about for practical reasons but become loaded pretty quickly. I recall you wrote about ‘naming’ once Joel. I was about to say that maybe you should only be called a chef or a photographer once you’ve retired, everything before is the pursuit to this ideal, but maybe this was your idea, Joel.

I respect the specialist for their commitment to one thing, but that’s not how I manoeuvre.

The way I name the photos is for fairly practical reasons. Once you get to a certain number, you need to find a way to remember which one is which. The titles are sometimes basic, sometimes express levity, and occasionally make insinuations. I don’t want the reader to care too much about it, or assume that it offers some answer to questions that the photographs may provoke. 

Joel - What has been your relationship with photography – tell me about your past connections with photographs or photographers and what drew you toward it as a practice?

Dominic - I have a camera and I can point and shoot, and that’s awesome, that’s enough of a draw. As I say, I don’t have an interest in calling myself a photographer. This is not modesty, just a knowledge that I may work with different unspoken rules, assumptions and curiosities than trained professionals. A simple example would be perhaps unwritten rules of focus. Clarity and precision is favoured. Out or focus or soft focus has it’s appeal but only if it is clearly an intentional decision. The infinite degrees of focus in between are more unstable making it difficult to believe in their worth. This space may be just as appealing to me. There is no rule.

My camera does not produce analogue (film) photography but digital, both of which have their accompanying freedoms and shortcomings. Shooting on film today is fairly exclusive as it’s expensive, so it tends to be used in a lot in industries with big budgets, like fashion advertisement and marketing. Over twenty years ago you could snap away with film, with almost the abandon that digital affords today. So in someways digital allows for a similar creative mode that film photography once had.

Seeing an exhibition by Chris Killip, a photographer whose work (not exclusively) is a form of social documentary, made me realise how much the drama of the image is a construct. It could be easy to assume that photography that deals with social documentary may involve a fairly passive framing of immediate truth- some transparency. However,  in Killip’s case his construction or idealisation often continues well after the photograph has been shot, and plays out among the chemicals of the darkroom. Realising that freed me up a bit from the sanctity of film and allowed me to be a bit looser when dealing with passivity and construction in the taking of photos. I became more comfortable with less control. My construction is digital and post editing is fairly negligible, used only to counter the dulling that can occur in the printing process. Between film and digital photography, I doubt if either offers a faster route to truth, transparency, authenticity, rigor or sincerity, if indeed that is the goal. 

Joel - I like what I have seen of Chris Killip’s images, but they are dramatic and seem to have a sociological, even historical, subtext. Yours are not dramatic, and perhaps even peaceful.  

I think all the photos are from Greece. Is that right?

Dominic - Yes and No. Almost all the photographs in my website, were taken in Greece. This fact I have not made explicit. The purpose is not to take photos of ‘Greece’. They are photos that occur without a prevailing narrative. 

Joel -  They convey something relaxed.  Perhaps when you are in Greece you are less pressured than in London running a café?

Dominic - Relaxed, perhaps. They allow the eye to rest, and slow down. The slowing of eyes on an image is more time spent with it. It’s within these times that the image and the viewer can open up. It’s true to say that the subject of Killip’s photographs along with his technique offer a lot of drama, drama being the playout of conflict in the works subject, aesthetic decisions and occurrences and the viewer. I would not describe my photos as dramatic in that sense, but I think, aesthetically I see everything as a series of relations and tensions, harmonies and frictions, so there is always a drama however small.

As you know, I’ve spent a lot of time in Greece over the years, with Eva. I also read a lot about the Country too. History, mainly modern, old travel writing, literature, poetry. Unfortunately only in English at present. Which is obviously a huge barrier. Some of what I’ve read has been insightful, well intended, ambitious and some historical works have been remarkable undertakings that leave you mesmerised, not just by the history but by the faculty of the author, and makes you thankful that they have given you some access to the complexity that is the mess of the past, without the wanton shaping of it into an agenda. Mark Mazower is really good. Other books have sent me reeling, embarrassed to be an English speaker, ashamed to think we can even pass comment on Greece, and ashamed to have paid for their book. Sometimes the more I have tried to read about Greece, by English speaking authors, the further I have felt I have departed, instead I’m confronted by astonishing levels of ignorance. It’s then that you begin to realise that a lot of these authors move in the same circles, and this condescension is a byproduct of being incubated in the higher echelons of the British Empire — these are fairly old books — But the Occidental arrogance, blinding exceptionalism, is still there in more recent writers. There is a tradition of wealthy Western Europeans seeing themselves as the inheritors of Ancient Greece and tried very hard to turn Modern Greeks into a kind of contemporary ‘Barbarian’. J.P. fallmerayer may be a good example of this, with his discontinuity theory of the Greek ‘race’ finding no link between Ancient and Modern Greeks.

There is a great scene at the start of Theo Angelopoulos film ‘O Megalexandros’ (1980) set in 1870 where a bunch of British aristocrats are introduced to an older man, an eminent Greek. The leader speaks to him in his stilted and schoolish version of Ancient Greek. Unsurprisingly the old man is baffled, having no idea what the aristocrat is saying. They chortle at his confusion, choosing to believe that he can’t speak Greek. The British go off on their way, to the bewilderment of the old man, who was only being hospitable. I feel that the sentiment of this scene is on constant loop whenever I hear things said about Greece in the English language. Without spoiling it, I’d say this is a revenge film by Angelopoulos for him and his people.

The poet George Seferis’ wrote in his Nobel lecture, in reference to continuity of his people, “I will not say that we are of the same blood, for I abhor racial theories, but we have always lived in the same country and have seen the same mountains slope into the sea.’  What more would you hope to inherit, what more could connect you?

Joel - Even in England we can see that a lot of attitudes have changed in the last 50 or 60 years. Older books can’t update themselves which means that they will always be preserving an air of the past, and older attitudes, and make us aware of changes that we might not notice otherwise. 

Dominic - Yes, and maybe they create a sort of access. Perhaps reading terrible opinions got me to my destination a little quicker; If you are outside of your habitat, in an unfamiliar place, lots of new thoughts are provoked, and you may say them out-loud, if you’re foolish, and all your words will be wrong. Having the humility to engage with your wrongness may lead to dismay at first but it can also be freeing.

To know you are wrong is really interesting place to be. It’s so open, but you need to find some new modes of access. 

Joel - In many situations we are best when trusting our own perceptions, because they have not been packaged by someone else. Also, we may be familiar enough with our own conditioning and prejudices to strip them away and discount them. When I only get reported information about what someone said – a summary instead of hearing the original words, I suspect that I would have heard something different. Anyway, I have always preferred primary to secondary sources.

Dominic - Yes it’s the same with gossip and hearsay. So the question, especially in the context of these photos, is how do I access Greece. Maybe it is by not talking about it, but by seeing it. And to return to your question about my photos being about Greece, yes, I have photographs from other places, most of which I don’t show, but perhaps Greece is in me and so it’s in those photos too.

Joel - Are there non-visual, or even invisible things that get recorded? Is that possible?  

Dominic - I guess physics has been telling us that reality is invisible for over a hundred years. We know there’s dark matter, by it’s gravitation, not it’s luminosity.

The visual is a mere slither of reality that constructs as it is absorbed by us into our accumulations and infinite reconstructions of our experience.

Our visual faculty and that of a camera both have their limits, peripheries of what they can register, but I doubt those edges end abruptly but perhaps fade out a little. It’s said that birds and horses become animated around dusk because of the intensity of the ultra violet rays that they can see, and are yet invisible to us. I think there are certain types of light that can allow us to believe that we are seeing a bit more than usual. I recently painted the front of my shop a bright blue, that’s both calm and pops at the same time. It’s blue but it’s warm. A customer described it as periwinkle blue which is not far off. The official name was ‘sea blue’, and like looking at the sea it offers a non static experience.

When the eye cannot rest it may provoke the feeling that something greater than the apparent is being witnessed.

My visual experience is synaesthetic, which can certainly offer a feeling of something non visual being made visual. It could be the smell of blue heat, the hum of kalouri or the wafts of surf. My sensible side tells me that these things are not there but the intensity makes me want to assert their existence all the same. This kind of experience can also plunge you into memory, being in one place can send you spiralling into something too familiar. Looking can pull into you.

Visualisation is always selective, so in someways, what is in front of us can get pushed into invisibility. Things that are undesirable, like, waste, rubbish washed up on a beach, cigarette butts, dirt and grime, we can edit them out of our experience very easily, and as tends to be the trend: out of our photographs.

I don’t trust a photo without a bit of dirt, sediment or decay in it, it feels necessary these days.

Sometimes we may feel that what we see is deceptive, the eyes are not to be trusted. Such was the supposition of a lot of radical theory. To dig, excavate, go to the root of an idea, incident, occurrence, to go upstream, is definitely a worthwhile process, to read what you see via the structures and systems at play. But if you’re not careful it can come with its own kinds of blindness, rendering the immediate invisible. You start to see with your mouth, like that Jasper Johns sculpture. I’ve seen radical theory make smart people very stupid, it has certainly done that to me at times. It is best to treat it as a feather in the bow. It may only help you see more clearly if you also have a deep wide range of knowledge through other disciplines of thought, rather than be considered a discipline in its own right.

The normative can be a fertile ground for invisibility, in other words fitting into the everyday can be a place to hide. Conforming to one trend and then the next, instead of making you stand out can give you anonymity, just put on the right jacket and change your hair and no one will see you. Hide in plain sight.

Joel - Light only reveals what it falls on, and only in those situations when it does.  Different times of day records color differently. I sense you have a preference for late afternoon rather than early morning light. Maybe you are not free to walk around until then? The light in many of your images is on the warm yellowish side.

Dominic - Absolutely, yes sometimes I think it’s only about light.  Light is a big deal in Greece, writers like Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller viewed it as unlike any other. Miller, I believe, felt that the light made every object he saw stand as the original version of that object, which sounds ridiculous but I can totally relate to it. Objects assert themselves there.

I think I’ve always had a sensitivity to light, so I wear sunglasses a lot when I’m there. I’ve heard that sensitivity is common for people with blue eyes. We can thank a mutation from the Black Sea 30,000 years ago. We’re mutants Joel! 

Joel - What changes in your experience through dark glasses? They seem to me to shift color relationships as they integrate and readjust the world. I have read that for many people they actually help them to see.  I am thinking that your photographs themselves are filters. 

Dominic - My sensitivity to light may be why I screw my face up a lot. I was half-deaf up until I was about eight years old, so I probably relied a lot on looking, observing, and also drawing what I saw. Being hard of hearing, made me loud in general, and my scowl probably made me come across as a bit wild, which may be why I was befriended by the toughest, naughtiest kid in school. My hearing is ok these days, but like many I find that sunglasses can come in handy when in Greece. Yet wearing them, inevitably, adds a filter to our perception. They tone down whites, embolden shadows, thicken dark edges, perhaps allow colours to appear more saturated, and if we’re stupid, encourage us to stare at the sun. Shade, shadows have an allure.

Joel - Tell me more. 

Dominic - When I was a kid, I used to go to car boot fares and spend my pocket money on old portable black and white televisions. You could buy them for between ten and one pound. I had quite a few of them, usually with coat hangers for aerials. They had dials rather than buttons, so you could get graduations of reception. Erm, I just realised you can probably remember when these were objects of the future, or am I just being rude? 

Joel - When we are old enough, we get to experience how the world has changed. And remember more and more things that no longer exist.

Dominic - True, and I wouldn’t say I was fascinated by the abstraction process that comes with this, but I was chiming in on a sensorial level. Static, ghosts, flickers, wobbling lines took on a narrative of their own. I was so into it. Shadows became shapes, autonomous objects, overcoming the advert or show that the TV was hopelessly trying to deliver. That energy still exists in shadows for me.

I remember, as child watching films like Desmond Davis’ Clash of the Titans (1981)  which used dark filters to give the illusion of nighttime for scenes shot in daylight. It was an unsuccessful illusion, even to a child, but aesthetically rewarding, offering a simmering intensity. Mixalis Kakogiannis film Iphigenia (1977) based on Euripides' Tragedy, seems to offer a less intense version of this, but no less intoxicating. 

I think through the process of looking and searching with the camera I found myself leaning into the use of dark filters, so I could stay with that experience. I wonder if it is this that give the sense of a golden hour, a feeling of the afternoon. It’s also important to note that the colour of light is sometimes heavily affected by the colour of the surroundings and can be illuminated to a great intensity, with little encouragement from me. 

Some photos taken of parched ground, stone and dried grass, emanate a yellowish hue, like the ‘Ismael’ collection or the ‘Crowned’ photograph. I rarely take photographs that are bleached out. Seeing a bleached sky feels like death to me, it’s also a hallmark of corporate styles of marketing, but I guess any style can and will be consumed by this.

Joel - By being on the cusp between two sensibilities you neatly blend the mediated and unmediated world, the fast and the slow…

Dominic - I am fairly impatient when taking photos, by the time I’ve got my camera sorted the desire to shoot has been burning for too long. This may mirror a lack of care that may come with say, holiday snaps, but that may be presumptuous, I’m sure some people put in a lot of effort. 

I’m no expert on this but I believe the initial growth and popularisation of photography in the 1840s is very much tied up with the Grand Tour. Daguerreotypes of the Acropolis in Athens were taken by affluent Western European visitors very shortly after its invention, and no doubt helped develop its popularity. They were viewed as secondary to more traditional forms of documentation like written description, painting and various kinds of drawing. 

Opinions on photography as an art form have expanded since then and we’ve found ways to value some photographs more than others, and these values are upheld and protected, by cultural guardians like arts institutions and museums, to the point that they become belief systems, where artefacts act like icons. These belief systems compete in a hierarchy, supported by their benefactors. In this context perhaps the holiday snap may be overlooked or underestimated for its artistic worth. Its value is not protected.

It sounds like a vulnerable position but perhaps a low regard given to casual snaps is protective and offers some freedom to the image.

Perhaps it allows us to see it for ourselves, which may be where real potential can occur- when the image starts to work on us and like a magic trick functions as an artwork.

. 

These photos can’t really be confused with holiday snaps because they are usually personal, maybe sentimental or they can be brought home as symbols of our hard-earned leisure time; proof to others that we’re achieving idealised aspirations. Holiday snaps often include people and recognizable landmarks, as a form of biased documentation. 

I rarely photograph people or landmarks. I don’t shoot with the purpose of documenting but I’d say, my images have a bias. With every photo I am asking the viewer to look at what I saw, and if they look long enough I expect that an emergence may occur.

Joel - Who is your target audience?

Dominic - I have not signposted how they are to be understood, or associate them with a focused discipline or industry, or targeted who should view them, or what sort of person you need to be to get something out of them. This is probably a terrible marketing mistake. Why have I done this? I suppose the fear is that if I would do that I would limit the potential of the images to connect. The viewer will stop looking, and I would have served the image poorly. My images have the potential to connect anywhere and to anybody, in hotels, peoples living rooms, on a website. The work choses the audience.

I often think about people who live under religions or with a deterministic worldview, and how rich their experience with their environment must have been. Landscape, the changes of the seasons quilted in God’s signals, his praise, his punishment. Everything happens, moves on his decision, like you’re living with a poltergeist. That kind of experience has to be intense, but maybe we live in different formulations of this today.

What we see always seems to be quilted, whether it be with our needs or desires within prevailing ideologies, and I wonder what may happen if the seams of that quilt fray.

Joel - I like your concept of a quilted image.

Dominic - When I go about with my camera, I wait for my environment to fall apart, for it’s props to jostle for the role of protagonist, before they all entirely lose confidence. They help me, to trip over my assumptions, expose the flaws of my desires and leave me free to start again in the wrong position.

I once watched a schizophrenic man, of a particular demeanour —you know when men look like walruses — well he looked like that. Ginger, greying, balding, whiskery, in his 50s no doubt, he was a nice man. I watched from my cafe as he giggled in a state of ecstasy, staring quite closely at a large reddening hedge outside of the hospital, that waved its leaves gently on the wind. He stayed there for twenty minutes, just breathing in the euphoria of the hedge, its patterned motion. He seemed at one with it. Not to make light of how serious and debilitating and terrifying schizophrenia must be but at this point he seemed to be in a good place and I could not help but wonder about the richness of what he was seeing and his experience.

Thanks to Joel for the conversation. Dx