Justinus Pieper trifft ... Bruce Spear

Professor Dr. Bruce Spear ist einer der überraschendsten Photographen in Berlin. Seine handwerklich perfekt gemachten Bilder sind voller Tiefe und Poesie. Professor Spear lehrt an einer renommierten Berliner Hochschule, u.a. "The Art of Critical Thinking".    

The Man behind the Camera 

globe-M: Professor Spear, why did you become a photographer?  What do you photograph? And why?

Bruce Spear: Photographing is the one thing I do for myself. When I photograph, I leave my worries behind to work creatively with light, form, memory, and feeling. Like many, I make zillions of digital snapshots and share them on the web, but when I go out to make my art I slow down and work, basically, like a painter. I like to line things up carefully, so I use a tripod and middle-format cameras and look for that one spot where the formal relationships fall into place. I also work with film, because its responses are comparatively old-fashioned and predictable. Maybe the most important tool is the tripod, because it invites me to step back and forth, left and right, working slowly and carefully, to find that spot — the spot you are invited to find as well when you view the picture. This is actually a figure from Roland Barthes, who argued that photography’s essence was better understood as chemistry, and not optics, because the lens only focuses the light: it is the film that “captures” the light, responds to it, and when we view the print we are tied in to this initial, chemical response. Out of this, and using a photograph of a U.S. Civil War about to be executed, Barthes identifies an additional paradox: we are invited to see, at one and the same time, an image of someone who is about to die and someone who has in fact long been dead.   

His sources of Inspiration  

globe-M: Had there been any other photographer an important source of inspiration for your work? Whom of your colleagues might you have taken as an example? And if so, why? Has this faced some changes over the years perhaps? 

Bruce Spear: Among photographers I’ve long followed Walker Evans for his combination of modernist form, anti-modernist content, and his curious (if not perverse) irony. Many others have gone wonderfully beyond this work, but by going back to such masters I would connect more deeply to the tradition. In recent years I've spent more time looking at the painters, especially Matisse and Hopper, because I think they examined things more profoundly. I look at these painters as they would offer me solid advice on how differently to bring things up onto the picture plane and work with color, light, and design. I’m also a fan of Pierre Schneider’s book on Matisse as it connects me to the devices of phenomenological description which I think describe best what happens when go after this work and get into the “flow”. To prepare, I often look at art before going to bed, under bright light, and with the idea that I am burning the work of the masters onto my eyeballs and brain. I then often enjoy those images in my dreams, wake up with them as if old friends, and see the next day in good company.   

The Art of Photographing  

globe-M: Do you recognize any differences within the spectrum of the art of photography in Germany and the U.S.? 

Bruce Spear: I look mostly for similarities in form, design, and sensibility. Hopper was obsessed with film, for example, and the film noir he craved was strongly influenced by German Expressionism. Much of the business of staging, lighting, camera movements, and editing was in fact done by German émigré’s. And to this day, Goerz and Zeiss lenses are favored by many of the photographers I admire for their unique optical qualities. Do you miss anything in this respect here? At a certain point I had to choose, and I chose not to be homesick, but to live more deeply where I happened to be: to stop being a tourist and start being a resident, here, in Berlin. That was when I returned to photography after having left it (to study literature) for 16 years, I set out the plan to visit and photograph every neighborhood in Berlin and along the way find my German side, as my reference to the film-going “American” Hopper suggests. As it happens, my great-great-grandparents were married in Berlin. And in 2003 I traveled to where they came from, Wroclaw, Poland, and there I found my main subject in the dark hinterhof, the killing fields of World War II, which I photographed mostly at dusk and dawn. The German painter I’ve ended up feeling closest to is Caspar David Friedrich, surely not for his nationalism, but for his sense of light, dark, and allegory.  

globe-M: As a photographer, do you like to bring about something to the world? 

Bruce Spear: I indulge in a rather old-fashioned Romantic aesthetics, because it speaks to an emotional sensibility that I find deeply gratifying, and at the same time work with modernist problems of form. In my photographs of abandoned buildings and odd corners I am after a feeling of “presence”, and just as I had to position the camera carefully to create it, so I invite my viewers to position themselves carefully so they might see it, too. I am presently working less in the abandoned places and more in the city, seeing how I might add yet another level of complexity and challenge.     

Professor Spear was interviewed by Justinus Pieper.  

To get at least a short glimpse of his marvellous work