Michael Flomen

On Wednesday, October 30, I took the train to Montreal to spend an enjoyable if hurried afternoon with photographer Michael Flomen and to accompany him on a tour through his exhibition, “NYX/1993*2013,” at Maison de la culture de Côte-des-Neiges. A week later, on November 6, I received this email from him. The first staccato sentence was a corrective to a judgement I hadn’t even made yet: “I am a painter.” As opposed, presumably, to his being a photographer. “I paint,” he continued, “with light. My subjects are interruptions that exist between the light and my photo-sensitive substrates. I am interested in making the invisible visible.”

Photo-sensitive substrates. I loved “substrates.” Flomen lives on sheets of photo-alert paper. Given what he has explained to me about his making of the vast photograms that now constitute the main body of his practice—about his tendency to ride on sheets of photosensitive paper through fields of midnight snow the way children ride sleds, or to roll himself in swaddling bands of the stuff as if he were wearing a transformative starcloak (the image of Rodin’s mighty Balzac, tautly sheathed, tight as a knish, in his plaster dressing gown keeps coming entertainingly, if irrelevantly, to mind)—there is an amusingly sublunary, comedic axis running through Flomen’s physical exertions in pursuit of his cosmically tinctured art.

The trajectory of Flomen’s work began decades ago, back within the Decisive-Moment realm of the legendary street photographers— Cartier-Bresson, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand—artists he continues to admire greatly. Its progress, however, has taken him steadily, incrementally, inexorably away from the literary particularity of an urbanized, anecdotal, sociological, journalistic approach to photography, leading him to a subject matter that has grown increasingly abstracted, inchoate, almost contextless, and which frequently traded in an exploration of the photographic informe.

Two of the earliest works in the exhibition, Crust, from 1994 and Edgescape, from 1996, are still about a kind of sharp, imagistic exactitude (albeit elusive in identity). Later, looking at a photo of Edgescape, it struck me as very moonwalk-familiar, in a dramatic, Stanley Kubrick/Also Sprach Zarathustra way. I emailed Michael: “We’re looking at the edge of what in Edgescape?” He replied in his trademark telegraphese: “Horizon line of sky and shadow…think moon photos…”

As he progressed, his photographs began increasingly to offer an immersion for the viewer that was too big and too close to work as readability. Many of the pieces from the late 1990s traded in the viewer’s innate recourse to the phenomenon usually called pareidolia, the unsought ability to discern a recognizable image or shape or form (the eidolon) in what is otherwise a miasma of pure visual possibility.

Both Terminal, 1994, and Negative Friend from 1998 are in-camera photos (i.e., not photograms), made with the 4 x 5 camera Flomen was using then—in which, in the case of Negative Friend, the negative image was flipped to create the eidolon-like “friend.” Their odd near-figuration is traceable to Flomen’s having made the photographs in one of Montreal’s typical “snow dumps”—which are vast depositories of plowed streetsnow, sometimes, according to the photographer, piled into “sixand seven-story mountains.” The snow-objects he would find there tended to look (if you embraced your pareidolia-esque impulse) like figures—or at least presences.

Gradually the field opened. Gradually the energy in his photographs— or, more accurately, in his photographic works—became less a depiction or re-creation of what was out there in the world and more a sample of it. “In every work,” wrote George Steiner in Real Presences, “something appears that does not exist.” What does not exist in Flomen’s quickly developing, cameraless work is any iteration of the original subject. On the other hand, what is palpably discursive in the more recent works are their mysterious embodiment of prey, of trophy, of evidence from the field. What is the world like out there at night, on the snow, under the stars?

Lyle Rexer devotes two pages to Flomen in his recent book, The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography. “Michael Flomen,” writes Rexer, “takes photography’s desire for the real to its literal extreme, making photographs that are in direct contact with the natural elements he seeks to capture. Working without a camera, he places sheets of black and white photographic paper in snowfields, streams and other natural settings to register the activity of light in relation to natural phenomena.”

To make a giant photogram like Pass, 2013, for example (which is 198 cm x 504 cm), he talks about packing up his supply of folded or rolled photographic paper, putting it in lightproof boxes, driving it out to the country in winter, pulling the paper out of its protective box and putting it “upside down at night into the landscape.” And at this point, he’s barely begun. “I lie on the paper,” he tells me. “Then I start gathering it in towards myself (respecting energy, place, time)…I basically embrace this increasingly crunched, ripped photo-paper, spending a couple of minutes with the wind, the night, my breath… and then I’m at one with the elements.” And so, clearly, is the paper. “After several minutes, I get up, turn the invariably torn, bent, crumpled paper over and unfold it out onto the landscape.” He does things to the paper. He throws snow on it: “I’m putting white snow on white paper in the dark.”

Sometimes he augments the fall of the world’s nocturnal light with an assist from pocket flashes, two camera flashes synchronized to go off at the same time. Sometimes he welcomes the imperfections we have visited upon nature: “Snow is highly acidic…it makes marks on the paper.” And why not? The more tossed off, the more ad hoc his sojourns in the snow, he says, the better the resulting picture. And now he’s so utterly familiar with his paper-moon, let-it-snow media, he can wield the whole chaotic cloth the way a skilful draughtsman can drive a pencil.

Lyle Rexer writes of Flomen’s detechnologizing of photography, of his deculturizing and dehistoricizing it—a procedural track that, for Rexer, constitutes the artist’s Romanticism. Yet this Romanticism comes with a difference, he notes, “because it imagines photography not as an instrument of the infinitely expanding individual consciousness or even as an instrument of self-expression but as an antidote to human-centred vision, a break on the imperialism of the self.”

Nobly put, for certain. But over against it, I see Flomen unfurling his photo-tablecloth onto the snow and rolling around like an ecstatic dog on its back. I see him, a wintery Merlin, harvesting shards (billowing tablecloths) of a pixilated world—because he can. ❚

“NYX/1993*2013” was exhibited at la Maison de la culture de Côtedes- Neiges, Montreal, from October 22 to November 17, 2013.

Gary Michael Dault is a critic, poet and painter who lives near Toronto.