What I’m always hoping for with any photography that I share here or other places is that another person connects and identifies with the images, process, or individual that is featured. It’s such a great feeling. Today, I get to remind people of someone that has that effect on me. I’m reposting this ever-so-slightly updated interview with Christopher Colville that I had conducted with him about a year ago online at Analog Forever Magazine (there’s a link below). I find his work and process and being quite fascinating. It could be that it’s because I have many of the same feelings about the things that he loves and finds inspiration in. It’s also about the fact that the themes and narratives that Chris is illustrating I see more than worthy of my undivided attention and because of the way he has chosen to get his point across. My childhood recollections most likely mirror much of what he experienced. The difference is that he, upon growing up, has discovered a way of making cameraless photographs that is unique and stunningly beautiful at the same time, while I have not.

I’ve retained vivid memories of shoving firecrackers between the legs of my Luke Skywalker action figure, giggling with delight when after lighting the fuse, he would shoot up into the air and land in some unpredictable location. And dammit, if they never caused any damage to the figurine at all. That may have been the most curious part of the experience. Sure, as a young boy, I loved blowing shit up. Pretty standard at that time if you ask me. Juvenile, idiotic…yea, maybe, but it’s those ridiculous memories that I look back to with fondness. So when I look at Chris’s images, I cannot help but be reminded of those childish adventures with gunpowder (I still have all ten fingers, though, thank you very much). Again, Chris has much loftier goals in creating his art than I had with trying to destroy a toy that’s probably worth a small fortune now. What always blows me away (pun intended) is that he has taken on a way of working that is seemingly uncontrollable yet has been able to direct and manipulate the expended energy in an incomprehensible way. Maybe it’s because of my history with gunpowder that this seems so, or perhaps it’s simply the fact that Christopher Colville knows what he is doing and has a vision that myself and others gravitate to. Once you read the interview and view the photographers, this will make much more sense. What’s nice is that he has given me the time to answer my questions and done so in a way that would be beneficial to anyone engaging in the making of their art. The work is unique, and so is the man who creates it. Thank you, Chris.

Bio -

Christopher Colville was born in Tucson Arizona in 1974. He spent his formative years exploring the desert arroyos and abandoned lots developing a deep connection to the desert and desire for the unknown.

Christopher received his BFA in Anthropology and Photography from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri 1997 and his MFA in Photography from the University of New Mexico in 2003.

After leaving New Mexico, he returned to the Sonoran Desert, building a home and studio in Phoenix, Arizona. Chris has spent his time in Phoenix exploring the desert with his wife and children, forming a life and art practice informed by and connected to the desert space. Interested in the dual nature of creation and destruction Colville’s artwork explores the boundaries of the photographic medium in both traditional and experimental forms.

Christopher’s work has been included in multiple national and international exhibitions and publications. His work is held in the permanent collections of John Paul Getty Museum, Museum of Fine arts Houston, Center for Creating Photography, Princeton Museum of Art, Main Museum of Art, Wright State University, Museum of Photographic Arts, JP Morgan Chase Art Collection.

Christopher Colville is represented by Etherton Gallery, Tucson, AZ, Rick Wester Fine Art, New York, NY, and photo-eye, Santa Fe. NM.

Interview -

Michael Kirchoff: Thanks for joining me Chris, I’ve been a fan of your work for a long time. I’m eager to get a little more insight into your process and background. Speaking of which, why don’t we start there? What was your start down the road of image-making? Was photography something that had always been a place for creating?

Christopher Colville: I have always been intrigued by images and the action of looking. When I was a child my parents had a small Cannonet rangefinder and I was fascinated by looking through the viewfinder and watching the shift of split yellow form merge into one as you focused. It felt like magic as objects materialized into singular clarity and I loved the structure of the frame.

My grandfather is really responsible introducing me and my siblings to photography. He was a photo hobbyist who loved making images of his family and the wildlife surrounding his home at the foot of the Catalina mountains. He supplied our first cameras, more importantly he shared his excitement by showing new things he had seen or photographed in his back yard.

In high school I took my first darkroom classes and while I didn’t fully understand what I was doing, it felt right, the visual world intuitively made sense. The camera provided an opportunity to slow down, look and engage a sense of curiosity. I didn’t know where it would lead but, in the moment, I could be present and ask questions. It feels as though photography has always been there for me.

MK: Did you have any specific inspirations from the start, photography related or otherwise? What about currently?

CC: I am fortunate to have been surrounded by creative and engaging people throughout my life. My siblings, friends and colleagues are incredible thinkers/makers who continually inspire me.

My first glimpse of the expanded possibilities of photography came from the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson. The Center was only a mile or two from my high school and I spent hours hiding out in their library and gallery. At that point I didn’t know photography or the CCP would play such a role I my life but the exposure Avedon, Tseng Kwong Chi, Robert Heniken and the wealth of work……stuck with me. I cherish the CCP and was thrilled to have work included in an exhibition there earlier this year. It felt like coming full circle.

After leaving Tucson I attended Washington University in St. Louis where I studied both art and anthropology. I was surrounded by incredibly smart students and quickly found that I was in a bit over my head. I had to work really hard to keep up. In the middle of this I took a course titled “Writing Culture.” I loved that course and it helped me recognize that visual language offered me the most fluid form of communication.

While at Wash U, I attended a lecture by Thomas Barrow. I was stunned by his dismantling of the medium. Barrow’s photograms were garish and wonderful, calling attention to the act of creation. Two years later I entered the MFA program at the University of New Mexico where I was fortunate to work with an incredible group of artists. That time was an amazing gift.

MK: What is it that you get out of creating photographs? Is there an overriding theme in your work that you feel best represents you as an artist?

CC: First, photography provides a language that works for me. I love writing but have always felt there is a disconnect between my thoughts and my ability to express them through words. I am often frustrated by the precision of text or more specifically my ability to manipulate the precision of text elegantly.

Despite photography’s own tendency toward detail precision, the images I am most interested in revel in ambiguity and transformation. Photographs can be specific and vague, enigmatic and revelatory, they are elastic and evolving. They suggest a world of complications outside of their own frame. I will often come to terms with an image I am working on in the evening and will be surprised by the image the following day. Photography’s fluid language offers me a way to engage and understand the world beyond my ability to write.

In addition, making artwork provides a connection to the world, a space to investigate curiosities, based both in the medium and life. It allows me to be part of an ongoing conversation that started long before my work. I often talk with my students about this in the sense that we aren’t creating work that is completely unique or new or without precedent, instead we are entering an ongoing conversation. If we are lucky and rigorous our contribution may influence the trajectory of the conversation.

In terms of overriding themes, I am fascinated by the dual nature of creation and destruction. I often find myself trying to find balance between consumption, violence, meditation and beauty.

Making images offers the space to express my sense of wonder, awe, and exasperation.

Dark Hours Horizon 101 triptych. Unique gunpowder generated gelatin silver prints, signed verso in pencil.

Dark Hours Horizon 98 diptych, 2017. Unique gunpowder generated gelatin silver prints, signed verso in pencil.

Dark Hours Horizon 97, 2017. Unique gunpowder generated gelatin silver print, signed verso in pencil.

Dark Hours Horizon 99, 2016. Unique gunpowder generated gelatin silver print, signed verso in pencil.

MK: I think we need to address your very unique way of making your photographs, and something that I find fascinating that you have any sort of control over. Your work is primarily cameraless, and you use ignited gunpowder on gelatin silver paper to expose the paper as an abstract image. I know that’s just from a technical standpoint, but what was the impetus for working in this way?

CC: My work oscillates between lens based imagery and camera-less work that engages the materiality of the medium. The origin of the camera-less work started with images I created using the phosphorescent light of decaying squid on large format color negatives. I was fascinated by the idea of an organism giving off light in death and in turn creating its own image through decay. From there I continued working with physical, tactile photographic objects and looking for ways to reconfigure photographic image making. In 2010 I was invited to create a piece for the Huffington post in response to a poem by Nicole Walker. Nicole’s poem “Germination” spoke to the collecting of heritage seeds while invoking visions of exploding pods. I wanted to avoid any sort of descriptive photograph and to instead create a piece that was the direct result of energy, similar to the squid.

This made me think of fireworks I made when I was a child with gunpowder harvested from my father’s shot gun shells. The fireworks I made were pretty pitiful, but their sputtering ignitions and the burn marks they left on the ground were beautiful. With that in mind, I waited until night fall to began experimenting with small controlled explosions on photographic paper. Most of the experiments resulted in over exposed burnt paper, but eventually something emerged. The first successful piece was a simple and elegant print that I still love. In addition, I found the physicality of the work was deeply satisfying. The results felt like a way of turning the photograph inside out.

MK: How has creating photographs in this way been the means for you to tell your story and drive your aesthetic? Is there a role these images play in relation to your life as a photographic artist?

CC: I don’t so much have a story to tell, instead I have questions. My hope is that my questions or curiosities open conversations and lead towards a larger dialogue and maybe even some sort of understanding. The photographic medium is an amazing vehicle for engaging the world through act of creation, experimentation and search for beauty.

My aesthetic desires are organic and evolving, they often engage a desire for beauty and the sublime, particularly in the dark space of the unknown. I am drawn to things I don’t understand and because of this my images continually evolve directly in relation to experience.

In recent years the work has become darker in reflection of my disillusionment with the continuous cycle of violence in the United States. There is a real problem with the culture of hate propagated by the current administration and our collective inability to agree on reasonable gun safety reforms. I am not an overtly political artist but there are serious discussions that need to happen and I am deeply concerned about the safety of my children. This work is challenging for me and at times I want to step away from the ugliness, but it in my core it feels important.

MK: In addition, there is a close association with the desert environment that continues to evolve and inform your work, am I correct? Are your latest works still following this path?

CC: The Sonoran Desert is my home and the few times I have left it has called me back.

Years ago I wrote, “Life in the Sonoran Desert is both miraculous and tenuous. The harsh realities of desert resonate with the extremes of human emotion, providing experiences that escape the confines of language and instead rely on a wonder that comes not from naïveté, but from a willingness to experience the world as a mystery.” I feel this statement is still at the heart of my work.

Works like the Dark Hours Horizons are in a way, a love letter to the desert, a meditation on my personal connection and desire for open desert space.

The newer work from Beyond Reckoning engages the violence and cultural rage imbedded in the landscape. The images are made with targets collected on desert hillsides, abandoned by recreational shooters. The targets include iconic bulls-eyes, life-size human forms, mannequin heads and wedding photographs, as well as crudely drawn political caricatures. The objects contain the fear, frustration and uncertainty of divided country. The work is conceptually fraught and a reflection of our times. I admittedly have a love hate relationship with this work and need to do other things to find balance.

For this balance I also look to the desert for solitude beauty and the promise of rebirth. This landscape holds a history that has formed my understanding of the world.

It holds a history of violence and beauty and will always inform my work.

Fluid Variant 2, 2015. Unique gunpowder generated gelatin silver print, signed verso in pencil.

MK: I have to ask a couple obvious questions, and ones that a lot of people have probably already addressed, but how do you maintain and control exposures with something that doesn’t seem to have any control? Have there been any accidents? I can only imagine you out in the field with goggles on and bandages all over your hands. The learning curve must be immense, not to mention something that has to improve with each subsequent body of work.

CC: Working experimentally in these ways is certainly a learning process and I have had to embrace surprise and failure as critical to growth. There have been many surprises along the way and I believe the unexpected is really what we all desire, even if working in the most traditional and controlled ways.

In terms of exposures, I loosely control the explosion by placing objects on the paper’s surface, repetitively making incremental changes to the combinations of combustibles, pressure on the paper, and development, but even with these incremental changes the results are often surprising and unpredictable. I imagine myself a conductor orchestrating and refining small performances, embracing chaos, while maintaining a reasonable understanding of the materials. Through the process, continually refining an evolving vocabulary of mark making. On a good night the prints lead me, and through repeating the steps over and over again I follow the work until the image feels complete. Many nights I will work repetitively without finding the balance I am looking for in a print, but the vocabulary expands and inevitably informs the next steps.

In terms of safety I have only had a few blunders. Aside from burning the hair off my legs and a strange encounter with a hawk carcass I have kept things pretty safe. It can however be quite a spectacle and my young boys love watching the process. For large prints I compress the blast by standing on top of steel plates covering the exposures. The pressure from explosion lift me slightly and I am engulfed in the smoke and heat of the experience.

MK: Admit it, you’re just a firebug, right? There’s a little boy still inside that loves playing with fire.

CC: Absolutely, in my core I am the same kid running around in the desert on my bike making fireworks, but now I am a bit more directed and more careful.

MK: Has working in a strictly analog way always been how you’ve done things? I know your current works require it, but has it always been this way, and will it into the future?

CC: No. While I am very much drawn the physical processes and the nature of analog print, I won’t limit myself to one way of working or thinking about photography. We need to use the tools that best support our ideas and work. I love photographic objects and my nature will generally lean towards analog photography, but if different tools better serve my practice in the future I will use them. There is a lot of exciting work being made with new technology and I am excited to see how photography continues to evolve.

MK: How do you know if you’re ever really done with a specific body of work? Do you ever go back to revisit images or collections to improve upon what you felt was previously finished?

CC: It is funny that you ask that, I just finished a project, I think, but there may be one more piece. Most projects are finite. I look at them as meditations or variants on a theme and like to keep the number of prints small. Other projects like the Citizens, which are images made from life size human targets collected in the desert, gain strength with multiplicity and may go on for years. As I collect more life size targets the mass of citizens grows and the quantity is an important aspect. I want to fill a space with these revenant forms.

As far as going back to completed projects, they are always in my mind, and the lessons I learned through the process inform new work, but I don’t want to repeat myself. It is important to keep the work evolving.

MK: Does a body of work ever begin to form strictly through the editing process? Have you ever changed the direction of a body of work midstream?

CC: I have been working on a set of images for the past three years and over this course of time I have made hundreds of prints exploring the infinite possibilities of a singular form of mark making. The coiled form I am working with references the Ouroboros, an ancient alchemists symbol of a serpent eating its own tail. As the serpent consumes its own flesh it is said to reference the continuous cycle of life and death, creation and obliteration, destruction and regeneration. The outcome of this hyper repetitive print making is a mass of material, literally hundreds of images that I have edited down to limited number of variant prints that I hope will hint at the infinite possibilities of this form.

After working through and finalizing the edition, I found the wealth of remaining material demanded more attention. I am now in the process of transforming the remaining prints into larger serpents, cutting and building coiled forms from the discarded bodies, in a sense generating new life from the refuse. The evolution of the larger serpents has been thrilling as their scale and complexity grow. I hadn’t imagined this path and it serves as a reminder to remain open and allow the work lead the way.

MK: Once you’ve achieved finding your particular style or voice, do you ever feel the need to break out and follow a different path?

CC: Change is always important and I feel we need to remain open the shifts in work that lead to new discoveries. Strangely enough some of the paths that seem the most wildly divergent lead us back to the core of who we are.

MK: Do you collaborate with like minded individuals on projects, or do you find it more productive to handle everything yourself? Are there any collaborations in the past that have been particularly beneficial?

CC: I love the idea of collaboration and often look at teaching as a collaborative act. I also love discussing the expansive possibilities of work with friends, colleagues and students, but most of my work is a solitary experience. I am however very thankful to have people I can trust for honest and insightful critique.

MK: Once you have maintained a successful career as a photographer, is there ever any pressure to outdo yourself or continue to prove yourself?

CC: I feel very fortunate that the work is finding an audience and hope the audience will continue to grow. I don’t know that I specifically feel a need to outdo myself but it is critical for the work to grow, evolve and take on new challenges. I love what I am doing now but expect that ten years from now I will be exploring different territory. This does of course produce a bit of anxiety, but that anxiety fuels the desire for discovery.

Christopher Colville Installation, Etherton Gallery, 2017

MK: I always like to ask those with a lifetime of experience in photography if they have any thoughts or advice for those willing to take the plunge into photography as a career. Any words of wisdom?

CC: Own what you do. My youngest son Oliver is incredibly creative and I made the mistake of asking him if he wanted to be an artist. He looked at me with all seriousness and said, “Dad, I AM an artist!” I underestimated his resolve and love his response. I meet a lot of students who say they want to be an artist, are trying to be an artist or are hoping to be artists. Make the commitment to your work and own it. You will have to make a lot of difficult decisions and take on unrelated work along the way, but if being an artist is in your core you will figure it out. Also build your community and support your colleagues. This is not a competition, we can’t do it alone.

Oliver, Fourth of July 2020. Unique gunpowder generated gelatin silver prints.

MK: What’s next for your photography? Any new projects you have in the works?

CC: That’s a tough question. These are strange times. My family, like family’s all over the world, is trying to figure out how to function in this state of uncertainty. We are learning how to home school our children, create work, and provide a sense of normalcy.

My family is fortunate, we live in the desert southwest where we are spoiled with space that at this moment offers strange freedoms not afforded more densely populated areas. The noise of traffic in our neighborhood has quieted and been replaced by the sounds of families in their yards. Children loop through the neighborhood on bikes negotiating friendships at a safe distance while parents converse from opposite sides of the street, hungry for conversation but reticent of contact. In the evenings I sit with Melanie, taking pleasure in time afforded by the pause of our normal busy schedule but we never let go of the worry for our children, parents and grandparents.

All of this is influencing the way I think about work in this moment. I am stepping away from the more violent work for a bit and instead thinking about the ways we negotiate fear loneliness and beauty. I have found it difficult to be extremely productive, but I have kept my hands busy finishing up a few large pieces as well as focusing on a small group of family portraits. I am not sure where they will lead but anxious to see where they take me.

MK: My sincere and enthusiastic thanks to you for taking time out of your busy schedule to do this with me, Chris. I appreciate every moment and look forward to watching your continued success.

You can find more of Christopher's work on his website here.

*This interview originally posted in its entirety at Analog Forever Magazine, April 20, 2020, here.

Interviews on the creative process, from photographers with vision, expertise, and knowledge to share and inspire.

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