Mark C Rupert

 

A life in Photography

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I received my first camera as a gift from my grandparents when I was 10 years old.

It was an inexpensive bluish colored plastic camera with a plastic lens with the name "Debonair" stamped on the face just above the lens. I still have this camera, and I still take it out to use for special projects every once in a while.

 

This simple gift, followed by the jet black 35mm Nikon that my parents gave me for my 16th birthday, sent me down a long road through two college degrees, many miles of photographic field work, and 25 years of teaching that culminated in 2019 when my role as the Photography Department Head at Oregon College of Art and Craft came to an end when the school permanently closed it's doors after standing as a pillar of the art and craft community for 112 years.

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Though it may seem like a strange thing to say, I have always felt a bit uneasy about the nature of the photographic image.

Perhaps it has something to do with my belief that the origin all forms of image making are deeply rooted in our shared genetic memory passed down from the evolving brains of the earliest humans who tried to make sense of their existence by making pictures of their world that we are left to contemplate today.

 

Whether picturing a fragment of time plucked from the continuum of time with a digital camera, or a distorted version of events created through longer exposures, pinhole cameras, and other manipulations, the photographic image remains, for me, a static and unyielding representation of the temporal world. 

 

Over the years, this discomfort has led me to explore the nature of images through printmaking, film making, installation art, mural prints whose scale overwhelms the viewer, and ‘one of a kind’ photographic objects such as tintypes and ambrotypes as ways of activating the image through various manipulations of the physicality of the photographic object. 

 

Recently, I’ve returned to making large-scale panoramic images that physically engage the viewer by calling attention to the movement through space and the passage of time required to view the work in its entirety.

 

In addition, I find myself becoming more interested in the evocative potential of loosely articulated narrative sequences and images that provide the impetus for the viewer to create a narrative of their own, or perhaps, to reconsider the implications of the work long after they’ve seen it.

 

These are beginning to take shape as smaller image-objects that require a more intimate viewing space, again, calling attention to the physicality of the work while activating the mind in different ways.

 

While I remain uneasy about the inherent nature of the photographic image, it is this discomfort that keeps me engaged with the process and continually searching for new ways to explore the medium.