Interview with Keith Sharp
How did photography begin for you?
Luckily, my high school had a black and white darkroom. This is where I first became interested in black and white photography. In and around the same time, I then set up my own darkroom in my parent’s basement. I also began using color film and photographing in color as well. These I had to take to get developed.
And a little about your background beyond photography?
I have always had a deep connection with nature that came about from my childhood with my parents taking my family camping. I enjoyed being in the woods, looking for critters in lakes and streams. My parents also enjoyed gardening and I also helped my dad build a greenhouse. Grown up now and living in a condo, I don’t have a yard, but I do keep plants indoors. I love all kinds of strange and exotic plants. By keeping plants I feel alive especially in the fall and winter when everything has died outside and its dark and cold out. I work as a public school art educator, teaching.
What specific things have most influenced your work?
All kinds of things have influenced my work, both other photographers, such as Bernard Faucon, Vik Muniz, Joseph Jachna, Teun Hocks, Ken Josephson, Duane Michals, Arthur Tress, Henry Wessel; as well as artists, such as Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Robert Gober, Andy Goldsworthy, and Rene Magritte. I also enjoy movies, modern dance, and the theater.
Your work is consistent yet always unique and refreshing. What has been the key to keep your work so dynamic?
It’s hard to work full time and to be a full time artist as well. I have always tried to work as a collaborator with my work and with the process. I allow my creativity to flow and to dictate what direction my work will take. One project has always seemed to flow into the next.
I really appreciate how immediately accessible and thought provoking your work is. It’s more often I come across work that requires me to think hard before I really get it or work that is so obvious it’s not as impactful as perhaps it could be. Is this something that you are conscious about when creating your work?
Many people have commented on this fact of my work being very accessible to all viewers and not just art speak or people in the art world. I am very much interested in having everyone connect with my work. I like the fact that the work is simple but yet complex. I have always enjoyed things that are simple but yet at the same time are complex in nature. I like for my work to be poetic and to speak of life in a metaphoric and surrealistic way.
Are there specific things you look for when creating a photo? Something that stays consistent regardless of the subject or series?
I like to work with ordinary and everyday life that I transform and that I attempt to make the viewer do a double take or look twice at. In undergraduate school I also read a lot of existentialist literature and philosophy as well as about phenomenology. If there were some truisms that I go by then I would have to say the following – Not everything is what it seems, there’s more beneath the everyday surface, and we should not presume what we are looking at even though we think we recognize and know what we are looking at.
From what I’ve read it sounds like you often sketch out your idea for the photo, much like a movie storyboard I presume? Could you tell us a little about that process?
I do this with all my work now. After I get the general idea for a series, I then begin to sketch out what I think the images might look like. In the past, up until about 4 years ago, my process was still non digital. I was creating props that I would then position in real scenes and would then photograph. My work was like that of a performance artist in which I was photographing the performance set up and arranged. Now, I work digitally. Instead of creating the props and finding the scene to photograph the props and myself, I now photograph them separately – either in the studio or outdoors and then I collage them digitally on the computer. Even though I have sketches of what the images might look like. I always allow myself flexibility to work with the materials and many other variables that cause the work to change.
In your series “Same While Different” did you have the specific juxtapositions in mind or was this a little more of being able to keep in mind the photos you already had and photos that might juxtapose nicely against them?
Many people have asked me this. Sometimes I would think of one image and then the other to compare it to would come later, while other times I had both images in mind. It was sort of a wild goose chase. In that I knew that I had seen that object before but I had to go through the files in my mind and think of where it was that I saw it so I could photograph it. This is where I first began staging my work.
What are you working on now?
I have no idea why, but I have been taking a lot of night images. I am not sure what the final outcome will be just yet, but I am interested in mixing the day and night images so that you can’t tell what time it is in the photos.
If you were to recommend another artist work for others to look at who would you recommend?
Thanks so much to Keith for participating. Please visit Keith’s site to see much more of his work. There are 9 different series available on his site each with great introductions.
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