CANARY WHARF, LONDON, 2002

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, 2002

[Fig.1]

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, 2002

[Fig. 2]

DENVER, COLORADO, 1984

SOUTH QUAY, LONDON, 2003

CITY OF LONDON, 2002

[Fig. 3]

PACIFIC BEACH, CALIFORNIA, 1984

[Fig.4]

SMITHFIELD, LONDON, 1999

[Fig. 5]

WHITECHAPEL, LONDON, 2002

[Fig. 6]

CITY OF LONDON, 2002

[Fig. 7]

CITY OF LONDON, 2002

[Fig. 8]

SOUTHWARK, LONDON, 2001

[Fig. 9]

GREENWICH, LONDON, 2000

NORTON, KENT, 1997

HIGHAM, KENT, 1995

Nicholas Sack

photographer

Interview with Nicholas Sack

David Hay Jones: Let's begin by talking about the photographs in the first section of your new book, the section titled 'The Man in the Street'. Many of these street scenes with pedestrians have a curiously anonymous quality. I know from the titles that the pictures were made in London, or Chicago, but there isn't much evidence of a particular identity of place. Why is this?

NS: Well, I'm not sure that what you say is true. Each picture is particular to a place, and to a moment. Most city business districts have a rather bland look about them, which I find appealing. Some might say that these areas are soulless or sterile, but there is a uniformity of architecture that excites my love of order. The office workers on the pavements are soberly dressed, and the facades and frontages don't assault the senses, as they do in the main shopping streets. There's a dignified reserve about those places that I find highly attractive.

        But you're right - I do tend to avoid distinguishing features like conspicuous signs or well-known landmarks. I like to imply the city rather than reveal it openly. It's a game of hide-and-seek.

DHJ: Are you referring to the woman and street arrows [Fig. 1]? It's a simple composition of only a few elements, yet it speaks volumes about the modern city, and the individual isolated within it. Edward Hopper would approve.

NS: I'll give you an example. In one of Garry Winogrand's most marvellous pictures, a young woman holds an ice-cream cone, her head thrown back in laughter, in front of a nondescript store-front. Down the left edge of the picture is a narrow vertical strip of space beyond the store, containing one or two out-of-focus pedestrians and the blurred outlines of office blocks. That narrow strip is all the viewer needs in order to place the picture. It says 'American city, downtown' in a delightfully economical way.

        I was playing around with something similar in the pictures of Chicago commuters [Fig. 2]. All you see of the street are the receding upper facades, above the heads of the crowd, but that's enough to convey a sense of place. Those streets, running dead-straight all the way from the lake to the prairie, are unmistakably North American. No street in Europe looks anything like that. I'm interested in how a minimum of information can describe so much.

DHJ: Your compositions are highly structured and rigorously ordered. Cartier-Bresson recently said that the only important quality of a good photograph is its formal geometry. Does everything else go out of the window?

NS: I read that interview too. I think he was being a bit mischievous, playing down his Humanist credentials. Cartier-Bresson always had a beautiful sense of geometry, but that was only one of the many facets of his work. I wouldn't want to overstate the importance of formalism. Photographers use formal structures rather as writers use grammar and syntax - to channel the flow of communication. I use my sense of composition to instil a measure of tension, a degree of urgency, but mostly these things occur instinctively. One of the reasons I enjoy looking at Winogrand is because the best of his pictures have a looseness of form, a deceptive casualness, yet they retain a tremendous intensity.

DHJ: All of your pictures are 'real', in the sense that you never manipulate your images by computer. Yet you often play with the notion of what is 'real' and what is 'unreal'.

NS: The writer Raymond Carver implored: "No tricks." In these city pictures, I am celebrating the fact that real life, in unmanipulated images, can look very odd indeed. The process of photography, of reducing the world from three dimensions to two, throws up strange and wonderful conjunctions. I like to foster a certain amount of confusion. Take the young woman in the alley, balancing her handbag on her knee [Fig. 3]. She appears to be resting her foot on the rail that runs round the building, yet our understanding of perspective tells us that she must be standing in free space, well out of reach of the rail. Of course, we don't give much thought to things like this when we are walking around the city. But photography is the perfect medium to reveal those oddities. That special, innate property of photography fascinates me.

DHJ: There are plenty of other visual confusions in your work: the woman apparently bungee-jumping from the apartment block [Fig. 4]; the peculiar dissection of space at Smithfield [Fig. 5]; the grinning head above the flyposters in Brick Lane [Fig. 6]. Lee Friedlander also plays those visual games. You cite him as an influence on your work. How did that come about?

NS: Friedlander was certainly an early inspiration, when I was at university in Birmingham more than twenty years ago. I can recall the first photograph of his that I saw: it was of a woman passing behind a shrub on the sidewalk of a New York street in the 1960s. It was a perfectly ordinary scene, the likes of which we all witness dozens of times each day without batting an eyelid. But Friedlander had fired the shutter at precisely the moment when the woman's body was obscured by the vegetation while her head remained visible. Her worried expression, and a slight tilt of the camera, gave the impression that the shrub was sucking her in, devouring her. My God, they have man-eating shrubs in New York! Friedlander noted this small drama, and the city continued its mundane routine. His pictures were a revelation to me.

DHJ: Tell me a bit about your way of working. You explore cities on foot ...

NS: I'm an enthusiastic urban walker. I view the streets as stage sets, or tableaux, waiting for choreographies. I'll find an interesting spot, then wait for something to happen, or for the right arrangement of people to form in the viewfinder. I work quite methodically. It might take several visits. I've done a lot of loitering on street corners!
        There is a large public square off Leadenhall Street, right in the centre of London's financial district, that is refreshingly clear of urban clutter - no statues or sculpture, no plantings or fancy paving [Fig. 7]. It is slightly sunken, with steps along the sides where office workers sit to chat and eat sandwiches at lunchtimes in summer. The square is traversed by people hurrying from their desks to the shops and bars - it's a blank canvas for a continuous stream of human movement. Nothing much is happening, but everyone is watching. I like that. Central London is my patch, my beat. I've lived nearby all my life and am still discovering new things there.

DHJ: The Italian photographer Andrea Barghi said that your pedestrians look like toy figures, apparently carefully placed by your own hand ...

NS: Well, I do take care with my people! They are just as much a part of the urban landscape as the architecture. It gets increasingly difficult to exclude people emblazoned with slogans or carrying garish plastic bags - these are conspicuous distractions. In the city pictures, I'm not interested in people as individuals with personal identities, but more as types or constituencies. And sometimes I like to mock them just a little, as with the line of figures in Fenchurch Street [Fig. 8]. The human figure can look quite absurd, especially when walking. Lowry knew that.

DHJ: Let's move on to the final section of your book, the unpeopled scenes. Some of these photographs take on abstract qualities. There is no clue to the context or scale of the Southwark wall [Fig. 9]. It's quite a puzzle.

NS: I like both representational art and abstract art, and I'm interested in the point where the two disciplines meet, or overlap. I like things that are rooted in the real world, yet are made other-worldly by the photographer's peculiar vision. Aaron Siskind's wonderful studies of walls succeed as abstract expressionism, and they allude to grander themes, yet they remain recognisably walls. Minor White looked for transformation and transcendence throughout his life. It's a mind-set - sometimes the significance, the identity of things disappears, and I am left with abstract shapes, surfaces and spaces in the viewfinder. That excites me, that's when things start to look good.

DHJ: All of these urban and rural scenes are unpeopled, yet evidence of the hand of man abounds, in weathered walls, empty roads and ploughed fields. These photographs strike me as being profoundly sombre.

NS: Well, I hope some humour comes through too. Left to our own devices, to photograph what interests us, it's inevitable that a part of our character will show. You could ask two photographers to look at the same thing, even from the same spot, and the results would be quite different. What I'm talking about is not 'style', which implies a sort of fickleness, but more a signature of authorship that evolves through experience.

        Natural landscapes are the most difficult places to photograph successfully. People rush off to the mountains and the deserts in search of the 'spectacular' and the 'breathtaking'. Many photographers resort to cliches as a way of making sense of the vastness, the disorder, of natural landscapes. I am more interested in a feeling, a mood, than the grand gesture.

        Walker Evans said that a good photograph should transcend the thing photographed. Raymond Moore understood this; he vested everything he looked at with an aching poignancy. I'm thinking of his picture of a corner of a Scottish graveyard. There are three polished black headstones, a gravel path, an expanse of mown grass, a low stone wall, and a tool-shed partly screened by a stand of conifers - all under a pale, featureless sky. The art historian Ian Jeffrey called it the most sombre photograph in the history of the medium. That picture, like all of Moore's, was made with a sure-footed economy of technique, and is totally devoid of style or affectation. That's the sort of photography that interests me: pictures that move the viewer quietly, and by stealth.

David Hay Jones is the author of 'Night Times and Light Times', and the founder of True North Publishing.

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