Artists on Making Art  (other posts here, info/contributing here.)

My favorite thing is going where I’ve never been.
-Diane Arbus

This is one of my favorite things, too.
Every year, for the last several years, I have been going somewhere new for about a week. Sometimes it’s fairly exotic to me, like Italy, and twice now, it has been to a magical valley not too far from home, and very close to the place I lived for four years in college. Even though it is not far away to go to the Hudson Valley, I am visiting the winding, curving roads that were just shy of places I explored before, places just out of my eyesight. They are right next door, but you don’t see them if you have blinders on.

©Lisa Kereszi

Photography is about looking, yes, but it is, for me, also about that moment of discovery – the finding of the treasure chest buried in the cave on the beach, as it were. When I was a kid, my favorite movies were Indiana Jones and the Goonies. I always clung to this fantasy world in which I could seek and find the most wonderful and important thing, hidden from view for hundreds of years. Now photography is how I go about holding out that same hope. There is almost nothing better than that moment I turn a corner in a building or on a winding country road when a scene unfolds in front of my eyes that seems like it was set up just for me to marvel at – the abandoned cemetery with toppled urns and stones, the brightly colored pool floats along a high ridge and chain link fence, at dusk - the weathered Victorian turned into a bar with neon beer signs flowing in the window. These are all things that gave me that rush during my week at Mt. Tremper Arts.

Yes, there is something valuable about spending a lot of time with your subject, moving in and getting to know it intimately over time. Yes, there is something worthy about returning to the scene of the crime to see how the light has changed and sculpted a n object ro scene differently at some other time of day ro of year. I have done these things, and do them still, when necessary. But nothing can beat that first time. There is something very special to me about that moment of discovery – an aha moment – a time when I fulfill at dream and see exactly what I have been looking for – not knowing in advance, of course, what that thing is. I will have trouble articulating what that thing is exactly for the reader, or even for myself. It has to do with that decisive moment brought to light by Cartier-Bresson. It is when everything clicks into place – that subject, and where it exists in time and space at a given moment when I arrive, and it’s the the light, my position physically, my mindset open and ready and willing.

When I was a kid I also was very nosy.

I look at the banal details (a tear, some dirt, a crack) that I find with a somewhat documentary, deadpan view, but colored with emotion and desire and a longing for something greater. In a way, I am continually searching for that readymade – that object out in the world in the right light and right conditions, that tells me something more than the sum of those parts. I am looking for poetry as it might exist, unnoticed by most, right there, lying in the corner of a nightclub.
I said my work had changed. I think I am still looking for that couplet, that line of rhyme and meaning, but not inside much anymore – instead of looking in dark corners, I am looking for it by the side of the road. I go for drives and walks in my area, and have been paying particular attention to the unsung wooded parks, full of discarded underwear, graffiti and paintball evidence. I have trouble finding inspiration in the beauty of the shoreline that I otherwise enjoy very much as the non-artist.