INTERVIEW WITH PHOTOGRAPHER HENRY AVIGNON

Is Henry Avignon your real name or is it a pseudonym? It reminds one of Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

I woke up in April of 2008, locked up at Strong Memorial Hospital, from what was intended to be my last wine and cocaine binge. It was a drug overdose, and the state considered me a danger to myself. It was the end of a 13-year marriage, which I had destroyed. It was the beginning of a great hardship I caused my children. But it was a real chance to recover. I spent several months in rehab. During those long days, I decided I would choose a new name and start again. “Henry” is for Henry Miller’s rogue spirit, and “Avignon” is for what Picasso represents (not the man but art as primary and primordial processes for living through -not against- a constancy of transformative change on unknowable levels. )

How did you become a photographer? Do you have any formal training or are you self-taught? What is your professional background?

I have no formal training. Frida Kahlo began to paint while she was ill and bedridden from injury. I love her above all other artists as a symbol for how one should live. I believed that art would help me grow again. I believed I needed a relatively healthy daily confrontation to keep from more destructive ones I was abandoning through recovery.

When I got out of the hospital, I met a young lady (Stephanie) who was a graduate student of photography at Rochester Institute of Technology. We loved each other’s trouble! In the beginning, she suggested that we should communicate by exchanging the odd pictures we took throughout the day. Occasionally, I was complimented for my compositions, and I valued her opinion. Besides, I was desperate for maintaining a focus.

I have intimacy issues. It occurred to me that close attention to nature might help encourage new habits. So I decided officially to utilize CELL photography as a tool for creating sustained moments of attention that I hoped would evolve into experiences of intimacy. I could not afford a camera, and that is how Henry Avignon “The Photographer” came to life – to avoid death. My subjects have all mirrored my state of mind. I see what I show you. My art is not a product of interest in techniques of craft. I push until what I have to show is what I see in my heart. I aggressively pursue what haunts me, chasing the pain or anger, sadness or anxiety until it is cornered and I can see enough to capture the primary detail of the balance of the light and darkness, life and death, and the animal flesh and the “god-force”.

My father bought my first real camera in July 2009. The first year of work on Facebook was all taken on a cell phone. It was my dirty secret. I am embarrassed.

I was a painter for years. I am passionate about the medium of Picasso and Kahlo, Kandinsky and Bacon, who have historically managed to document the psychological evolution of man. I see the history of art as a psyche profile of strong evidence for our inevitable extinction. I realize today that my decision to quit painting more than a decade ago was the flowering inadequacy of a medium to articulate, on equal playing ground, the time and the place of the world today. We are in a full technological state of being, mind, spirit, and place. I gravitated to photography (as a painter) because I sensed I could develop a fundamental system for functioning creatively at comparative exponential growth rates as society. My professional background is in the fine wine industry, which I can no longer pursue.

Do you recall the first photograph you took and that made you feel proud of yourself?

The first was of a crack in a wall taken in July 2008. It was a self-portrait. A landscape. It was a vision of mankind. It was a prophecy. It was a crack in the wall.

Under your work titled Scraps for Toth in the Hit and Run magazine, it says: “Henry Avignon is a Deconstruction Song sung by the ‘Fat Lady’ in the parking lot outside the opera house, by barrel fire and overturned wreckage of police vehicle.” As far as I know, you were born in New York in 1972. What’s your personal story and how do you define yourself as an artist?

That’s correct, 1972. I have two lovely children whom I must protect for the time being. I prefer to open a new chapter – one that is sensible for my children to read. When they are grown, if they’re still interested, I will share the rest.

Your photography has a fine art style. What is your photographic vision? How do you describe your style as a photographer?

I decided I am a “photosculptor” because I mostly create environments to shoot. I consider the value of my compositions as I would a block of marble. This tendency to create comes from my painting days. I also tease a composition into place because the hunt for images that speak to my visions is not a succinct process. It doesn’t happen without enormous effort.

I am hyper-focused on a dilemma of extremes: the light and darkness are my subjects. The balance or imbalance presented is the absolute duality; the light and darkness equate in me as spiritual (or spiritless) texture.

I consider symbolic language (light and all that it exposes) to be textures of information. Our senses work to experience the concrete and/or purely symbolic textures. We are animals of symbols. We are animals of language. We are animals of transformative potential. We are meta-minded animals that possess a capacity for higher brain functioning, which is so powerful that it has overcome all our ancient regimes of primordial instinct.

I try to address this absolute power that has corrupted us. A return to animal nature is physically impossible, but we are capable of positioning the symbolic meaning and inevitable consequences hierarchically in our system of consumption and limitless growth. Having just begun to navigate my fears and ideas, I see more darkness and death than lightness and life (around man). My art is anti-political, my stance is anti-heroic, my faith is in the ANTI to persevere. Death is the anti-hero par excellence. Death is everything. For this reason, I see no other important stage of living to invest my energy. Death is the key. Death contains all mysteries. Is it the inverse of birth only.

My images are more glyphs than pictures. I like an image to be felt like a line of poetry. I like to spell out a stanza with five related glyphs. Light and dark balances and imbalances are phonetic referents. Colors equate to tropes; line and depth of field to textual tonalities. To equate texture, color, dimensionality, formal line, and shape character as pure energy-substance, believing this substance to possess physical and metaphysical properties necessary for creation.

What inspires you the most and stimulates you creatively?

The balance and imbalance of light and dark is my muse – all subjects are vehicles for delivering this metaphor of everything. My children. Nature.

What are the three most important qualities you have as a photographer?

1. Sight.

2. Belief in meta-processes. “One’s art is ones truth” is a core belief. The camera is about velocity, agility and adaptability. The camera is only a tool, another type of brush, an extension of consciousness.

3. Einfall – the character trait of letting go into the moment, a free-falling to consequence and subsequent outcomes without the fear of death.

Most of your photographs are vibrant with colors. Is color the essence of your painting?

Color is often the subject or what the subject is wearing.

What type of camera do you use? Most photographers have an obsessive relationship with their cameras, and they always have a favorite. Do you have a special one you can’t do without? And which equipment is indispensable for you?

Nikon 300D – A gift from my father in July. Before then, it was a Samsung Omnia Touch 5mp camera phone. Camera is incidental.

What do you think about digital manipulation? Do you do edit your photographs? If you do, which software do you prefer?

I manipulate light values to achieve what I see. This manipulation of the balance of light causes in the final poem what thickness of oil paints achieved in the visual language of Van Gogh. There must be a transcendence of our obscurantist human limitations. As I work toward achieving areas of absolute black in a composition, I clean away all remnants of white. I use elements of Photoshop that add and subtract light. That’s it.

Which photographers have influenced you the most? What about painters, writers, poets?

Man Ray, I guess.
Artists;  Picasso, Matisse, Kahlo, Duchamp, Kandinsky, de Chirico, Gorky, Bacon, Redon, Ernst, Debuffet, Hirst, Rodin, Giacometti, Brancusi, Bourgeois…
Patchen, Picabia, Blake, Arp, Lorca are extrodinary examples of crossing over mediums; of fusing writing and art.
Writers; Henry Miller, Paul Celan, Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Transtromer, Trakl, Miguel Hernandez, Raphael Alberti, Octavio Paz…
Robert Bly and W. S. Merwin as poets and translators…

What’s your relationship to Picasso’s art?

Strong. He is my Saint Christopher.

What do you feel about abstract art and deconstructionist art?

Abstract is everything we don’t own as knowledge and so cannot strangle with opinion. Deconstruction is close reinterpretation.

When you search for textures, what do you look for? What are the places that inspire and influence you the most? Do you have any favorite locations?

Refer to how I approximate individual images as glyphs, which manage to accumulate poetically. I operate in and around poetic craft to achieve a poem built from visualized language. There is a synaesthetic modality present in my preferences. I am after planes or dimensions of potential to create texture and symbolic register.

I think of what I see before me as a metaphysical depth of field. I particularize each available field of symbolic import and shuffle them. All signs are capable of vertical/non-linear progressions/transformations into the metaphorical realm. Texture is the umbrella-word for the entire phenomena of captured (made available as knowledge) or articulated dimensions of the image.

I’m inspired by damage, by entropic forces, by the chaos of instances. I appreciate organic patterns and structures that establish extension, doubling and redoubling through sequential means. I appreciate the appearance of randomness. I appreciate any environment that grandstands light or dark to such an extreme that it becomes impossible to ignore as a subject.

My favorite places to date are junkyards, boat yards, abandoned industrial places, and large cities.

Writers sometimes suffer a writer’s block? Is there such a thing as a photographer’s block? What is the cure?

No. The only block for me is laziness or fear. I can overcome both on any given day if there’s adequate desire.

Are you scared? Angry? Or do you feel peaceful? Have you come to terms with the idea of dying? Is it possible?

I am all of these things (everyday). But there cannot be terms: first, there is life and then… death? I don’t think so! Death may be sequentially viable as a bridge to the unknowable but symbolically whatever else we understand it to be. My personal philosophy is that birth and death are the same. A string of light signifies a single lifetime. A speed faster than light is the speed of darkness, or gravity. Death has gravity. Death travels at the speed of gravity. But notice how two subjects dropped from the womb at exactly the same time do not travel toward death at exactly the same rate – this is chaos. What feels like a random act of insistence by death is death’s poetic functioning; death is sourced from the same universal well as duende (the poetic logic of god-force first articulated by Federico Garcia Lorca). So I am being articulated by light and a sentenced structure. Death is my poetic logic. Death is my perception of time.

Are you spiritual? Are you experiencing a new level of awareness because of your illness? What was is that you learned the hardest way?

I am spiritualized like the evocations manifest in jazz and the water sounds of rivers and oceans. I have lost my barriers and lostness has become my way. Often, I am ill with depression because I allow everything to enter but I cannot figure out how to be open without suffering these attacks.

It is logical that we cannot see the light without the dark. If nothing else, death is our god. But most important of all, there is a natural force acting for and against all matter incessantly.

You’re quite transparent about your illness. You have a blog titled Dead Henry.

“Henry is meant as critique of dying; another random act of identity in a crises of kindness toward fellow sufferers. Forgive in him the putrefaction of words.”

Why and how do you experience your illness so openly?

My greatest act of goodwill should be judged against how successfully I argue against the importance of identity as a criterium for progressing as a species. Individuation above all other human capacities has brought us to the brink of mass extinction. I fight each day to realize myself how “I am” can best be reduced to “I is.” This must be our first step. The objectivity of science alone could save us from ourselves. There is no “I am” in this immaculate system that will succeed to blossom. “I am” is a cellular corruption that begins to split at conception until the host dies of cancer. “I is” what? The “I” must transition back to nature. I as Nature!

Death is what sets us free, and still death is what imprisons us for a lifetime/a death time. I choose to document my expression of compassion for the human fear and ignorance of death.

How has your photography developed after you found out you were ill? Was there a radical change? Can you compare your art before and after illness? Did it in any way cause you to break up routines and old patterns?

The photography began after the hospital stay in 2008. It has been a juggernaut of influence on every aspect of my life. It has become my whole way of life, day in and day out. Images as poetry and poetry…

What do you think about the relationship of art and illness? What about art and healing?

Art for art’s sake is illness. Art for evolutionary change is instinctive expression of a unique animal. Both save and kill. Everything depends on the constitution of the one who endeavors.

You wrote The Listening Trees. So who is your listening tree?

The children, although they pretend not to be listening, they are my earth.

You are very prolific? Were you always like that?

No. Before the hospital, I had not written or painted since sometime in 1998.

In what direction is your photography going?

That is complicated. I am process-oriented and do not deviate into conjecture. I have discovered that the greatest path to growth is diligent attention to the process as it functions in the moment at hand.

Do you have any new projects that excite you?

My publisher Michael Annis at Howling Dog Press has agreed to work with me on Art/Poetry project “34 Lamb(p) Skins” after my first collection of poetry/art Dirty poem is finalized for a Spring 2010 debut. There will be several writers including myself involved on what I believe to be profoundly important: to carry on the torch of witnessing genocides past and present.

I’m working toward showing my work in galleries and earning a living to support the work environment. My mental health is such that organization and basic management skills are exceedingly difficult. But for months now I have been building an online portfolio at henryavignonart@viewbook.com and next, I will develop an official website and storefront to begin selling small and large format prints and limited edition sets.

What advice would you give to an aspiring photographer?

To be fair… I am not advocating photography but expression at all costs. I can only speak to individuals who are desperate to show what is… Nature is not the “other.” Nature is not indicative of otherness in anyway – don’t be fooled. We are an animal that by painful strides can become a very old man(kind) with enormous (green) wings or not.

Henry Avignon

Born in 1972, Henry Avignon is an artist of language who finds poetry and  photography in everything. He believes “God Force” is an accumulation of sentences, information inspired by layers of unanswerable questions, nothingness, and primal curiosities. He believes that “God is language” and a universal system of sustenance and  creation. His book, Dirty Poem, and an anthology of Holocaust literature for which he will be co-editor, are both forthcoming from Howling Dog Press in 2010.

http://henryavignonart.viewbook.com/

http://henryavignonart.viewbook.com/portfolio/extractions

http://deadhenry.blogspot.com/