Interview with Tom Skinner of Unveil’d

"Prick, Saccharine, Shatter is an attempt to grasp the spectrum of experiencing life through the lens of an anxiety disorder. The whole of the project is comprised of two working parts; the ebb and flow, the day and night, of laying bare the many facets of human sensuality and investigating the slippery landscape of the psyche".

TS: Freud related his early ideas of psychoanalysis and the instinctual unconscious to lenses. He compared the censorship between two systems to the refraction which takes place when a ray of light passes into a new medium. In this sense, photography and psychoanalysis are intrinsically linked. The process of photography itself brings negative to positive, dark to light and unconscious to conscious. It creates a physical document that anticipates a future viewer, perhaps revealing a new understanding of the image, its subject, environment or the photographer.

 Your ongoing series includes a scanned image of different notes, one of which reads "a photograph is a fact / an object; but the picture is an experience, not a fact for the viewer". How has your understanding of the physicality and experience of photographs informed the way you work? 

 MP:  I’m interested in the successes and failures of photography’s revelatory powers and its ability to disclose everything and nothing at the same time.  So rather than trusting a photograph to be indexical, I approach photography like I’m making a map. I’m culling the bits and pieces of information I harp over in my thought process or are an itch, and quite literally, expose them to see their manifestations. The image plane invents its own logic and language with an autonomous tension that doesn’t necessarily relate to how the tension manifests in real life. I can understand myself better when I witness how certain sentiments and curiosities materialize and shapeshift throughout a sequence of pictures. This is why I fancy the idea of calling it map making, because hopefully a viewer can access their own journey when looking at the work, whether that’s a journey with me or with themselves.

 TS: 'Tunnel vision' or vignetting is a common symptom of anxiety, a visual device which you employ throughout the series. I wonder if there is a benefit or understanding which comes from exploring this sense of reduced vision through photography, and perhaps explaining it to somebody who hasn't experienced it before? 

 MP: When anxiety is at an all-time high, it triggers the fight or flight system within you. Depending on the intensity, peripheral vision becomes obliterated or hazed so you can fixate directly ahead, either to ground your attention or to confront your body’s idea of danger. Your atmosphere can feel like a trance because there is a sensory overload. Visually, vignetting is the symptom I deal with the most, but it also happens mentally; I am not aware I’m obsessing over a detail and not taking in the full scope of a concept or event. It doesn’t register as a symptom to me anymore and I consider it my process of digesting information. I aim to create a sensorial atmosphere in a photograph, where maybe the scent or heaviness of the place is imaginable because anxiety is so much more than a mental state. Therefore, it’s imperative to have duality and contradiction in my work, not only because these are the nuances I have to accept when studying human nature and my relationships, but because there are always different shades of reality occurring even if not tangible. The darkness (visually, not metaphorically) in my work represents all the matter and revelations that haven’t come to light yet. While seemingly foreboding, for me it is where the hope and possibility lay. Additionally, when the work is sequenced together, the edges of the frames vanish into another; they become links and there is difficulty delineating which subject is self-governing. This is where photography becomes beneficial in correlating how images, mementos, and recollections exist weblike and nonhierarchical in my mind, floating around in a giant memory bank. It reveals that no thought, sensation, or fantasy is unrelated and isolated.

 TS: There are four portraits currently shared in your project, including one of you, in which each subject's gaze is very directly fixed on the lens, or the viewer. It reminds me of the nineteenth century photographer Karl Dauthendey recalling his early experience with daguerreotypes; “we didn’t trust ourselves at first to look long at the first pictures...we believed the tiny faces in the picture could see us”. How does the process of portrait-making shape your understanding of your relationships with the subjects? 

 MP:  There’s a balance of honor and renegotiation that transpires when I make portraits. My subjects are representations of a standard or core value I hold them to within myself- what unconditional love looks like, how a partner should treat me, etc. Each subject has their own purpose; witnessing my younger sister come into her body helps me reconcile confidence within my own. My mother is a guide to how nature can be transcendental if you access it through a holistic angle of a participator rather than exploiter. My first boyfriend from when I was thirteen is still my model of what respect feels like. But with anxiety, there’s a constant playback happening and when the idea of someone exists longer in your mind, it’s easy to romanticize them. Showing up with my camera was part crawling into each other's embrace and renegotiating the dichotomy of internalization and externalization, which I believe creates a simmering throughout the series. 

 However, after seeing the totality of the portraits, all I could see was how much I avoided looking at myself. I felt it was unfair to ask others to solely carry the responsibility of a looking glass when I wasn’t willing to have an honest look at myself. I thought I could explain myself through others and it would be enough.  I was internalizing how I was raised— to not speak out unless it was absolutely necessary and poignant — especially as a female, and this affected the projection, or lack thereof, of myself. I wanted a powerful portrait to signify my emergence, not in the work but really into myself as a woman. It was such a hard task when there’s the barrage of images I consume daily— the conflation of influencers on social media casually radicalizing portrait making with their sleek, film photographs advertising fashion brands, with the historical photographic canon of portraiture I’m very familiar with. I got fed up forcing strong, statured body language that attempted to demand commandance with my slow, large format mode of working, so I grabbed a crappy point and shoot camera.  To me, an “honest” look was capturing how someone might see me, right before blinking, in an intimate moment. These transient but very real moments are the most authentic parts of knowing the whole of someone and what I hang on to when I’m with another person- the in-betweens, subtleties, and slippages someone else might not get to witness. 

 TS: There is a sense of mysticism and magic throughout the series, mainly photographed in the east coast landscapes you grew up in. I'm curious if re-visiting these landscapes has granted you an agency over them, or your experience within them? 

 MP: Definitely an agency over them. There’s a Gregory Conniff quote in his essay about beauty where he says, “Whether or not the place we live inspires affection, we are nevertheless influenced by its physical nature, our evolved responses bathing our minds in their own reactive chemistry....to love a place as home is to develop roots. This means, in part, a sensory relationship with a landscape that has individual character and mystery.” Prick, Saccharine, Shatter were the first real photographs I had made on the east coast since moving away for college in California when I was eighteen. Every time I came back to visit, I was very hyper-aware of the skins I had shed and the toxic conditionings I unlearned. For example, at eighteen I could define feminism as a vocabulary term but I didn’t know what it meant to be a feminist. I discovered freedom and how to advocate for myself through listening to punk bands, mostly non-male. I remember hearing Blueprint by Fugazi and Dry by PJ Harvey for the first time and how rage, assertion, and a confidence in vulnerability were tangible and could unashamedly coexist. I wanted to convey how natural it is to experience these notions simultaneously, but I can’t write songs, so I made photographs. When I moved back for graduate school, the mysticism of these landscapes was haunting because of the lingering familiarity. I was trying not to be tricked into falling into old patterns and forgetting who I had become. The impetus to photograph was to confront the spaces I never got to enjoy because of parental and media’s implications of assault. I needed to rewrite these narratives. I learned how to transform the dangers of these landscapes into what constituted its magic, by continuously showing up with a camera, and then I relished in it- the damp, post-rain summer air along the river at night and its petrichor, the continuous laughing of an animal deep in the woods down the road.  

 TS: Though there is a tension in many of the images, a tarantula creeping into the frame along somebody's arm for example, there is also an overarching sublimity. There are moments of light and peace such as the lily framed amongst the shadows. Has making this work shaped or changed your view of living with anxiety? 

 MP: Making any body of work can be draining and it’s a whole different ball game when it comes to framing a disorder. I was constantly rehashing old wounds and ideologies I worked so hard at breaking down or rejecting. But with anxiety, life can be so overwhelming that you don’t want to deal with it, and photography was my way of unearthing and purging a lot of troubles I kept bottled in. A lot of what I thought was true to my core, wasn’t. I radicalized the ideas about myself and those around me. So even though the conditions were heavy, it was self-preservation and cathartic more than anything. I have a horrible memory as well, which is due to the disorder. So as cliché as it sounds, I just wanted proof I can look back on in twenty years that I existed, through the joys and breakdowns. Being patient with making photographs has taught me how to be patient with myself, which I think is the reason for the sublimity amongst the apprehension- a reminder of survival.