In Focus: Bill Armstrong

Bill Armstrong is an American artist based in New York.  He graduated from Boston University in 1979 Magna Cum Laude with a BA in History of Art and in 1987 with an MBA.  Armstrong’s signature blur and otherworldly style aims to conjure a mysterious tromp l’oeil world which hovers between the real and the fantastic. A world just beyond grasp, where place may be suggested, but never defined, and where the identity of the amorphous figures remains in question. It is a world that might exist in memory, dreams, or, perhaps, in a parallel universe yet unvisited.

HackelBury: What originally inspired you to work with photography?

Bill Armstrong: In the summer of 1975, when I was 23, I had the opportunity to go to South America. I thought I should bring a camera — not everyone had a camera in those days. My friend Roger Farrington, a professional photographer, gave me a crash course—under expose Kodachrome film, be aware of the magic hour. I liked the results of that trip and felt I had found my medium. And I went from there. At the time, I thought I wanted to be a writer, but I liked the idea of being a writer—living in a cabin in the woods writing the great American novel—more than actually writing. So photography really found me. I was looking for a way to express myself. Soon after that trip, I joined a B&W co-op dark room; learned how to print and started working with photography, but from the start I was interested in colour.

HB What is the power of photography for you as an artist?

BA It goes back to studying art history in college before I picked up a camera. Sitting in a darkened auditorium looking at slides of paintings must have had a subconscious effect on me. From the start, my idea of what a colour photograph should be was closely aligned to painting. If you think back to the history and beginning of photography, there have always been photographs that were not meant to be documents of reality but were expressions of a personal vision. if you think of Talbot’s bookshelves or Anna Atkins cyanotypes or even Niepce’s rooftop, the images are more poetic than realistic. That is what has always been interesting to me—to use the lens like a paintbrush.

HB Can you talk about the blurring technique which you use to create your signature otherworldly images?

BA My process is to make a collage from magazines, book or images taken from the internet and then shoot it extremely out of focus so the edges of the collage disappear, and the resulting image appears to be an integrated image that might come from the real world. Originally, I used the infinity setting on the lens, which is meant for depth of field and distance, but shot close up to subvert the documentary expectation of photography. That’s one of the reasons why I call it the Infinity series. With different and larger formats, I couldn’t always use the infinity setting and still get an image—digital camera lenses don’t even have the same settings—but infinity also refers to the dematerialised and spiritual nature of the blurred images. And it refers to the infinite gradations of the colours as the blur spread out the diffuse transitions from one colour to another.

HB What is the process for gathering the material you use to create the work? Is it intuitive?

BA There is a sort of gestural or intuitive way that I work. I have a pile of materials that I play with to create a collage and then I shoot, rearranging as I go along. Back in the day I’d shoot 8 or 10 rolls of film in a session of an hour to two, but you never knew what you had until you make contact sheets. After a while I got better at predicting how things were going to turn out, but there were often surprises and/or failures.

HB You work with material that already exists. Would you ever choose to take a photograph of someone on the street and then manipulate that?

BA No, it is all from secondary sources.  Before I started the Infinity series in the late 1990’s, I was taking pictures of found collages of torn posters on construction walls. I was already working with secondary images, taking pictures of things that were advertising photographs. I had taken to heart something Susan Sontag said, something along the lines of “all the photographs have already been taken”. Of course it was apocryphal, but it made sense to me, as it referred back to Surrealist photo-collage and to the post-modern idea of recycling existing images.

HB Are you happy working on your own without interaction with others?

BA It's true. It’s a lonely job. I’m a people person and I never thought when I was young that I’d be an artist. But there are lots of things about it that have just worked out. It's very efficient. All of my materials can fit in one closet, so I could work at home, I don’t have to go to a studio. My daughter was born in 2003, and for many years I did a lot of childcare—I spent a lot of time in the playground with others. And I’m a teacher. I taught at the International Center of Photography and the School of Visual Arts for over 20 years.

HB How has working digitally changed the way you work?

BA Well, I have a lot more control now. With analog photography I printed in the colour darkroom, in fact, that was at the centre of my social life—the darkroom at the International Center of Photography. It was a wonderful environment working side by side with photographers from all over the world. I do miss that. Now I print at home which is not as much fun, but I’ve certainly gotten used to the ease and flexibility of digital post-production.

HB Has digital photography enhanced what you're doing?

BA I've been using slow shutter speeds and time exposures in a couple of different projects, Unfixed, Falling Through History and Darshan. The process wouldn't work with film because I may shoot as many as 50 exposures before I get one that's right. You need to be able to see what you are doing as you go along—it would be very difficult and expensive to do it with film. Interestingly, It’s the fact that you can see as you shoot that makes the digital process so useful for me, not the actual qualities of the technology.

HBThere is a Rothko-esque element to your work. Can you talk about the influence of modern and contemporary artists?

BA One of the most crucial moments for me was in a modern painting class in college when the professor, Dan Rosenfeld, started showing Rothko’s. I was, like, what are these? Then the way he explained it just totally made sense to me, how they were meditative, spiritual pieces. I really got it. This was 20 years before I started the Infinity series, but that was a moment that stands out.

HB What made you choose the camera over the paintbrush?

BA It's simple. I don't know how to draw

HB There's a strong sense of spirituality that emerges in your work. Can you expand on this?

BA The Infinity series is meant to be an ephemeral and dematerialised parallel universe. The Mandalas, Blue Spheres, Buddhas and Darshan refer specifically to Eastern spiritual practice. So the process creates images that may be seen in the context of spirituality and the subject matter may refer to spirituality as well, so it operates on two different levels. I have made some videos on Islamic tiles which I haven't really shown. I would like to do a project about Hinduism.

HB You have a series of works titled Apparition. What's behind the idea of the apparition for you?

BA They were made using reproductions of Roman sculptures. I felt that they were ghosts of ancient Rome appearing to us in a dream, ghosts coming back to warn us, to remind us of what happened to them. But also, I made that series soon after my father died and I was halfway through it before I thought “Wow, I’m making pictures of ghosts of old men”. The fact that the motivation was subconscious seemed important, that I had been trying to communicate with him through the medium of light-sensitive materials. This evidence of the power of subconscious motivation was a revelation to me.

HB You talk about the human condition in your work. I am interested in the book Quarantine which you published during Covid, looking at how other artists dealt with isolation and deprivation. Can you talk about that?

BA That was a specific project that I did in a month of quarantine. The day before New York went on lock down, my daughter and I went to a remote farm in Massachusetts and we didn't really see anybody for over a month. So that project was very specifically about that experience.

HB Do you think the experience made you more reflective and spiritual?

BA I don't know. The quarantine was really interesting, and not a bad experience for us, living on a farm in the woods. When I came back to the city it was very quiet. It was strange but you could cross Fifth avenue without looking—there was no traffic. Some things about it were nice. I was lucky, as I wasn’t badly affected by it, and I didn’t get sick.

HB How did you research the people who feature in it?

BA It was all done on the internet.

HB Do you have any daily routine or ritual which helps you find structure in your work?

BA No, I don't shoot all the time. I'll get involved in a project and then I'll work on it for a month, two months, six months, however long it takes. Then I'll work on trying to get it out into the world — that’s the hard part, the marketing…. awful. And then I'll start over again. But it's not very regular. I try to produce at least one portfolio a year, but lately that’s become more irregular. It gets harder and harder, when so many of the good ideas have already been taken.

HB What kind of impact would you like your work to have on people?

BA I want to have people fall into my work and have some kind of meditative experience

HB Where do you feel most at peace?

BA In nature. 

HB Interesting that nature hasn't really entered into your work. Is there a reason for that?

BA Maybe because the natural world is much more beautiful.

HB Are there any particular photographers who have had an influence on your work?

BA Yes, Aaron Siskind is very important. He was both an abstract modernist and realistic and concrete at the same time. Also Rauschenberg and his photo-collages. Henri Cartier Bresson was my favorite photographer for a long time. Ernst Haas was important to me in the beginning because he had so many good experimental ideas about colour. I’m also interested in the 19th century Spiritualists. There are two groups— there are those who were hucksters creating fake photographs of the deceased, of ghosts. Then there were people who actually believed that photography was going to be able to capture images of ghosts. There was a big Spiritualist movement across New England at this time, and a lot of it centered around the area where I grew up in Massachusetts, so I kind of relate to it.

HB Are there any writers and poets who have influenced you?

BA I am a reader, or at least I used to be before the lure of the cell phone captured me. I used to read a lot of mysteries. Reading Raymond Chandler was important, Kerouac and the beats when I was in high school. I loved the Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell then too. So many books. As far as poetry goes, well, Bob Dylan, of course, I’m a big Dylan fan.

HB Have there been any childhood influences or cultural experiences which have impacted on your work?

BA Well, I was a hippie in the late 60 ‘s early 70’s I still hold a lot of those values - so that may affect my point of view.

HB That must have been an amazing time to have lived through

BA Yes, the psychedelic experiences were important. And I’m lucky I survived.