“The planet must echo with our ghosts, and all the things we did and wanted still to do.”
—Eiren Caffall, from The Time After

Earlier this year photographer Doug Fogelson released The Time After, a book that considers humanity’s troubled relationship with the natural world through an exploration of lifecycles and time signatures, which he visualizes using overlapping exposures created in-camera. His process yields complex images in which the subjects—people, urban architecture, street scenes, plant life, clouds, deserts and oceans, photographed in different locations around the world—intermingle and interact.

Fogelson worked with Tim Hartford to edit and design the book in a way that adds another layer of reference to Fogelson’s temporal and environmental themes: The book begins with multiple-exposure views of the sky and clouds, then turns to the urban environment before moving into the natural world, finally ascending back into the night sky, suggesting the passage of time—from day to night, from the birth to potential death of civilization. Environmental writer Derrick Jensen, writer and musician Eiren Caffall, and art historian Bridgette R. McCullough Alexander contributed texts that further explore the themes of humanity’s relationship with nature.
    
PDN recently spoke with Fogelson about his unique photographic process and how it helped him create what he calls a piece of “soft activism.”

PDN: The book’s title and its content suggest a reference to the fleeting existence of humanity. Is that the intention?

Doug Fogelson: It is. It’s about different time signatures; you’ve got seasonal time, cosmic time and human time, and then within each of the exposures, where they’re overlapped, you’ve got different time signatures as well. When I do the overlapping process it may take ten minutes to shoot one image or it may take an hour, where I’m waiting for traffic lights to change. It could be an intercontinental flight where I’m taking pictures out the window waiting for some interesting clouds to come by. There are different time signatures in the shots themselves. But I try to be really careful in lining up the shot; though there may be an hour in the image it all seems to be the same instant.

PDN: How did you develop the process you used to make these images?

DF: The photographic process was the first thing that drew me to photography in the late Eighties and early Nineties, so for years I’ve been doing alternative processes. I came to [this particular] process by collaging film and then scanning it onto a very rudimentary scanner, and then found a way to do this overlapping [in-camera]. People from the [Illinois Institute of Technology] days when [László] Moholy-Nagy was teaching here in Chicago [1937–1944], people like Harry Callahan and Barbara Crane and others, were doing similar stuff, and that was around the year of cameras of that I use, in which the shutter and the winder are not always connected. So they, being creative people, exploited that for various ends and also [made similar images] under the enlarger. I use a medium-format rangefinder camera of a brand I’m just going to keep to myself, that has a winder that’s disconnected from the shutter, and I can control the aperture and shutter speed unlike a Holga. I take the first picture thinking about the first moment on the roll of film, and then I compose each shot thinking about the left right and center of each of the pictures, and then advance [the film] different amounts with a pretty good degree of control. I’ve got different sized cameras, too. I have square ones, six-sevens, six-nines; the amount of image space that I’m advancing on can change.
    
I think if you try to do this technique by shooting a bunch of pictures and then sitting on your computer and collaging them, it would come out a whole lot different. But you’re out there, you’re impacted by all the stuff that’s around, everything has its own kind of energy and time signature, so I’m affected by that, it actually effects the amount that I overlap it, how the composition goes. A lot of times it doesn’t work out. The question is, “Can you pre-vizualize what the roll is going to look like,” and the answer is “No, I can’t.” But this isn’t just arbitrary—making pictures and shooting a roll of film, putting it back in the camera and shooting it again—it’s more about being in the space where the action is happening and using that as the impetus for the advancing of the film.



PDN: What about this technique and the visual language you are using do you think lent itself to this particular subject?

DF: Well some of it is pretty banal—pictures of trees, pictures of people in public spaces, and then obviously more ephemeral things like waves or clouds. The process and subject matter combine together to bring the viewer into a direct cognitive consideration of the subject matter. If you’re looking at a picture of trees, you’re not thinking, “This photographer used this technique,” or, as with traditional single-shot photography, “What is it about this tree or the composition?” But with this, the in-between of time and space, the mechanical evidence of the camera, the bands that are in the shot [where the exposures overlap], bring the viewer into a consideration of their own relationship with that subject.
    
With the subject it’s always about a reverence for natural forms. When I’m looking at people it becomes a little more psychological or sociological. If you have a picture of an old person with a young person walking through their chest, or you have a person with an ear on somebody else’s cheek, people are basically touching each other in the photos where they wouldn’t be in a public space. Often times they’re ignoring each other and coincidentally they end up bleeding through each other. You get a cool visual out of that, and you also get an interesting deconstruction or decoding of the public space and the semiotics of public space.     
    
It’s cumulative in the book as well, because I can take all these pictures of trees and I can take pictures of these intersections around the world, and when combining them this way with the essays and calling out those quotes in the book, it ends up becoming a soft activism piece, trying to get people to slowly consider through art something that’s happening that’s a hot topic right now—climate change—and think about it in terms of time and mortality and appearance and lifespan—tree lifespan, ocean lifespan, earth’s geological time signature, even just a cloud’s formation and dissipation. Even the time you spend walking across the street.

PDN: A number of artists are currently working with this human/environmental subject matter. What brought you to it and what about your particular approach do you think is unique?

DF: Aside from my technique, it’s the theme that just continues to be part of my art making. Since the beginning it’s been about this human/nature balance and it’s been expressed through working with things that are architectural or manmade or built, and things that are natural, decay and entropy and things like that. I was born in 1970, the year of the first Earth Day, and growing up as a kid you learned about the greenhouse effect, you learn about these things, and as you grow and live you end up faced with climate change in 2009. It shouldn’t be coming as a big surprise to people. So there’s a little political thing there: “How come we haven’t been better at dealing with this problem?” I’m constantly trying to read and learn, get a little better handle on the great debate about it. But at the same time I’m just an artist who loves to do the work and I find that working with my photography in this way is very fulfilling.

PDN: The images in the book are esthetically beautiful, yet we know by reading the book as a whole that there’s a darker underlying message. What affect do you think this dichotomy of beautiful images that refer to dark or tragic themes has on the viewer as opposed to more literal documentary images?
 
DF: It sort of speaks to values. When it comes to nature images most of the earth has some nearby evidence of humanity’s destructive influence, so I often make the choice to visually edit that out. What I end up with is a tableau (or a kind of a document) of the natural things themselves, a depiction of something intended to be “pure” with the emphasis on placing a value there. In this book I feel it’s important to underscore something of value more than showing actual documentation of the ruin of the planet. But that’s a choice, and I hope that it translates to the viewers, who can have an interaction with the subject of the prints and decide for themselves if it matters to them personally.

For instance, when looking at photographic prints of a jungle I’m hoping that the viewer will become compelled to suspend disbelief and get caught up in this nether region of time and space and binocular vision. Sort of putting it together in a new personal dimension and then suspending disbelief that they’re not just seeing a flat thing, but looking at, remembering, or feeling the subject. This is hopefully easier to do because of the process I employ with the overlapping multiple exposures.

It's certainly not my intention to create more clichéd “flower porn”, as I like to call it, where nature is treated so similar to a centerfold….
           
With The Time After part of the intention is to have the viewer get a sort of latent image of people/urban vs. natural/elemental/cyclic and together with the design and writings come away with a kind of perspective on the larger theme of our destructive impact on the planet and also each other.

The Time After is currently available from Front 40 Press.