San Francisco-based visual artist Sean McFarland’s work is grand, yet equally small: landscape polaroid photographs that embody space and time through ambitious, captivating imagery of landscapes, mountains and, more generally, nature. McFarland works across the spectrum of light-sensitive materials, which includes cyanotypes, gelatin silver prints, and archival pigment prints to create powerful, visceral and, purposely, compositionally ambigous images.
We speak to the artist and share some exclusive work.
What five words best describe your work?
Describing the world with pictures.
What is your creative process like? Do your photos happen organically or do you “seek” them out?
Sometimes I go out walking to make new photographs, but much of the work is made in the studio by looking through boxes of pictures, and making notes and sketches. I use a graph paper journal and large pieces of newsprint. For me, the process of being in the studio, making messes and cleaning them up, reveals relationships between images that are difficult to discover when working from a prescribed viewpoint. I suppose I’m always “seeking out” photographs, I’m just not always sure what it is I’m looking for.
Spatial arrangement is important in your work. Does the creative process dictate the final composition?
Composition creates context and builds a framework for dialog between the viewer and the pictures—an abstract image next to a figurative one can allow a figurative picture to be seen for its form, and allow an abstract image to allude to a real object source.
Your photos blur the line between fiction and reality, illusion and mystery. What do you aim for your photos to convey?
Yes—fiction, reality, illusion, and mystery exist in most my photographs. They’re wonderfully slippery, making them endlessly fascinating to decode and create. In my pictures I don’t aim to reproduce nature as seen by the early photographers of the American Landscape, but in the landscapes created through their images. The subsequent alterations of photographic representation, cultural shifts, and environmental impacts that have resulted from their pictures have forever affected our relationship to the earth, concept of wilderness, and relationship to image.
What drives you?
Mostly, it’s the privilege of learning as long as I can and as much as I can while hopefully making a cultural contribution along the way.
Which currently living artists inspire you?
As far as currently living artists, there are too many to mention and the list changes constantly. But on a daily basis, my hardworking students, friends, and colleagues are always inspiring.
For more on Sean, visit www.sean-mcfarland.com
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A version of this article appeared in the print edition of NO TOFU magazine.