TM: The first camera phone (the Kyocera Visual Phone VP-210) was released in Japan in 1999. Over the next two decades – the same 20-odd years tracked by your exhibition – the way photographic images are created, circulated and consumed was utterly transformed, owing in large part to the mainstream adoption of this technology. To what degree does ‘Gegendlicht’ reflect on this transformation? How do you as a photographer locate your practice in a world where billions of people carry a device in their pocket that can take, edit, share, and receive feedback on photographic images with unprecedented ease?

NS: My practice consists of an ongoing exchange between craft and theory. This process is often slow, and is to a degree empirical, containing various analogue stages. In that sense I’ve not been too affected by the mass market’s fast-sharing culture and re- categorisation of images as multi-platform assets. My 2012 book ‘Third Life’ set out to explore aspects of that then-emerging evolution. Now I’m mainly interested in the challenge of creating photographic work that resonates in an ongoing, expanding manner, suspending the viewer’s troubled attention span.

TM: That’s a fascinating idea. Several contemporary painter friends have spoken to me about their desire to make works that at least temporarily recalibrate the viewer’s visual attention, eliciting a ‘way of seeing’ that’s much more mindful than our acquired habit of scrolling and swiping through mass culture imagery. In short, a kind of ‘slow painting’. Do you practice ‘slow photography’?

NS: Yes. Obviously, my images aren’t made to be presented within the template of a social media app. Then again, no contemporary visual artist can escape from becoming potential scrolling bait! Nowadays, the ubiquitous modus operandi for experiencing art is obviously the on-screen display. This is can often be an issue for the work – the compressed scale erasing the subtlety of the details is just one example. Not to sound too archaic, but for me the ideal presentation for most photography is the printed form.

I find your term ‘slow photography’ very interesting. It’s very much reminiscent of experiences I had while working on my current project ‘The Nature of Nature’, which is in part a collaboration with a Bonsai master from Fukushima in Japan. Some of the images in the series are the result of 5-10 minutes exposures at night – one could say the opposite of a snapshot. The Bonsai master’s appreciation and understanding of time is completely different to anything I’d encountered before, and it made a very deep and lasting impression on me. While I was exposing the images, in complete darkness, it became clear to me that my approach might be a subconscious response to the seemingly infinite time line of the master’s practice of sculpting the Bonsai. This reflection on the meditative aspect of the Bonsai work is in its own way a version of ‘slow photography’.

TM: There’s some interesting things going on, here, with time. Seeing our image reflected back to us in the mounts, we become aware that the faces of previous visitors have been mirrored in the Perspex before we stood in this corridor space, and those of future visitors will be after we leave, almost as though the installation was a surveillance system, like the black box of a flight recorder. Then there’s the way in which it disturbs the temporality of photography. If the still image is a frozen lake, then these reflections are anomalous ripples on its surface...

NS: In his book ‘The Ongoing Moment’ Geoff Dyer creates a fictional narrative where various famous photographers would constantly encounter each other through the subject matters they photograph, creating an ongoing, never-ending thread of meaning. This inspired in me the idea that a photograph should not be seen as a hermetic representation of a frozen moment, but a resonant vessel, with ever-expanding meaning. By working with the Perspex, we added a reflective membrane between the viewer and the surface of the print, in order to draw the outside world (and with it the viewer) into the image, a ripple of another layer of reality. Might we consider this a form of osmosis?

 TM: Your show features a music video you directed for UNKLE’s 2017 track The Road. Here, a camera fixed to a drone swoops over a highway that slices through a nocturnal American desert landscape, dotted with boulders, scrubby trees, and a collection of derelict buildings and abandoned trailers – all that remains of the ‘ghost town’ of Cisco, Utah, a location that features in Richard C. Sarafian’s 1971 movie, Vanishing Point. One of the most striking things about this footage is that the lights attached to the drone – which have the feel of both a police helicopter’s search beam, and a UFO scanning the Earth’s surface – illuminate this landscape in such a way that it feels more like a meticulously fabricated model than a genuine location. Was this intended? There’s an interesting tension between the diorama-like appearance of Cisco in the video, and the track’s repeated lyric: “Is it real / I believe it when I feel”.

NS: My initial idea for the video was inspired by the title of the song. I wanted to work with an archetypical American landscape, use it as a backdrop for a post-road movie and challenge traditional perceptions of the ‘road’ being a trajectory towards freedom. By chance we came across a guy in Utah, USA who had developed a drone carrying the equivalent of a 10k HMI (a very strong light source used, for example, to light up whole streets in movies). We decided to go and see him in Salt Lake City. Once we started testing the light with him we realised that, pending the angle of the camera fixed to the drone, a tilt shift effect occurred, which created a drastic compression of the landscape, deducting any scale references. In another bout of luck, while scouting for locations in Southern Utah, we came across Cisco – the cathartic final location of Vanishing Point, one of my favourite road movies.

TM: Landscape is, of course, an abiding preoccupation in your work. What draws you to the locations you photograph? How do you position your landscape pieces in the genre’s history?

NS: I’m inspired by portraying a ‘natural’ environment, a landscape, by submerging it in a subtle layer of artifice. This can happen through lighting, a sense of illumination, or by re-staging narrative elements already present in a location. The aim is to show familiar concepts in a non-literal way, to find moments in-between reality and fiction, between the tangible and one’s imagination.

TM: ‘Gegendlicht’ features a single abstract – or seemingly abstract – photographic work, Debase (2020), which at a distance might be mistaken for a modernist painting, or else a corrupted image file. Can you tell how this piece came into being?

NS: Debase is part of a body of work consisting of ‘corrupt’ images. What interests me about the idea of digital errors is that they present a contradiction to the idea of the machined perfection of the digital process. Can one regard this type of ‘accident’, the mere randomness of it, as an act of fate? Or possibly even read it as a transcendent analog intervention caused by a ghost in the machine? It’s also worth considering the potential of parallels to analog photography. There, chemical compounds or a light spill would cause the accidental abstraction.