An Unobstructed View
*****
I remember a discussion I had with a girlfriend several years ago at a museum in Los Angeles. We were looking at a painting by Cy Twombly, and I remember feeling uneasy. "I don't get it" is what I was thinking, and "I feel stupid because I don't get it" is what I was feeling. But because I was in love with her and she was intelligent and ethereal and capable of thinking on a much deeper level about this sort of thing than I clearly could I looked on in frustration.
Eventually She asked me what I thought. I started to flounder around with my answer, trying not to sound like a complete retard about why I didn't care for the painting. In a transparent attempt at saving face I switched gears and began talking about something I did like (a trick I learned in the Marines). Hoping this would allow me to walk out of there without my girlfriend thinking I was simple and dumping me for some quiet yet verbose, preciously sensitive art-history major with a thing for bouncy girls who hang out at museums (the best!).
So that's when I started to talk about photographs. I mentioned how they were probably my favorite purely visual medium. I had never really thought about why, but I found the reasons came very organically and without hesitation. Maybe because photography is ostensibly the least subjective art form. If you looked at Renoir's Danseuse and said, "that looks like a painting of a young dancer and she looks like she's about to undergo a traumatic sexual experience with a family friend who lost an arm in an industrial accident and as a result has gangrene and you can tell the girl dancer is fucked up because her mom treats her like shit because she's secretly jealous of her youth and vitality and blah blah blah ..." we could rightfully say to you, "What the fuck are you talking about, you pretentious asshole? That's not what Renoir intended. Have some more Nyquil and go back to sleep." BUT Nick's picture of messy hotel bed #53? Oh man! Can I imagine some stories about that! And now I'm onstage ... in Stockholm! And wait! At this very instant I'm with this band after the show. I didn't know that an overhead shot of breakfast could stir up so many emotions and remind me of that time I was with Darcy and Todd and that girl from Barcelona at the Waffle House and T.J. locked himself in the women's restroom and called the radio station from his cell phone and then the cops came and ...
I can look at a photo of, say, six people shot from behind, waiting on a train platform, and make up my own story about who they are, what's happening, what's about to happen and why. I can speculate as to the relationships they have with each other and their surroundings and what their status is to each other, and I will not be wrong even if I am. I am God when I look at that photo, my judgments are never too harsh or undeserved. It is whatever it is, was, and will be forever, fact and fiction! And this is what I like in particular about young Nick's photographs. They are evocative and lonely and inclusive and hopeful and specific and universal all at the same time.
-D.C.
Santa Barbara, 2005