Information — Daniel Hewitt Photographer

“When you finish anything, people want you to then talk about it. And I think it’s almost like a crime. A film or a painting—each thing is its own sort of language and it’s not right to try to say the same thing in words. The words are not there. The language of film, cinema, is the language it was put into, and the English language—it’s not going to translate. It’s going to lose.”

David Lynch

There’s a related view commonly expressed which says that a photograph should ‘speak for itself’, by which proponents mean that it should move them in some significant way and that it should be (perhaps readily) interpretable by the viewer without any help by way of commentary from the photographer. Much (if not most) contemporary/modern art seems to me to require explanation before any sensible attempt at interpretation can begin. Presumably, artists spend considerable time refining their thoughts about what their work is about. Insofar as art is not simply formalist (analogous to the way that instrumental music is) it seems unreasonable to me that audiences can be expected to attempt interpretation/judgement before engaging with an account of the artist’s intentions—ie. what the art is about. It is then open to audiences to constrain their interpretation to those intentions, or let their thoughts range more widely, even critically.

Philosophy is partly an elucidation of what we mean when we use particular words (and what logical implications follow), and partly a discussion about or argument for the kinds of things we should value or think important. There’s an instinct (if not a fundamental requirement) in ‘analytical’ philosophy to be clear, to make all assumptions on which an argument rests transparent; and to reach a well-defined conclusion. There’s an instinct among artists such as David Lynch (shared with some ‘continental’ philosophers) to identify moments of logical or moral difficulty, to problematise (to ‘raise questions about…’), or to present an interpretive challenge. Perhaps the latter is inevitable—at least in all compelling art. I hope that my work successfully involves both a degree of elucidation, of attempting to identify a problem (usually of how we value things aesthetically), and of ‘reasoning’ a way to a conclusion.

My projects tend to begin with an ‘image’—in the sense of a view of a building or landscape—which prompts me first to analyse why it interests me, and then to consider whether there is a theme that could connect it to other images. Once a project is underway, I will consciously look for ‘images’ that would further expand on that theme. Scouting and editing form important parts of refining my thoughts, as does reading books on architectural history, and culture more generally. (It’s perhaps worth flagging that sometimes logistical constraints and/or geography impede access to a preferred location or to gaining an ideal vantage point. A ‘complete’ project therefore may contain images that may not appear as compelling as others, but which are nonetheless necessary to indicate the scope of the project’s central idea.) More recently, memories of significant experiences in my life appeal to me as a basis for constructing images.