An Interview with Phil Underdown by Antone Dolezal

“The landscape as subject is a tricky road to navigate for a contemporary photographer. Considering the medium’s short but prolific history, and the stigma attached to the thousands (millions?) of cliché landscape images — in this day-and-age a photographer needs not only to have the ability to take a striking image, but also the capacity to weave together an absorbing narrative that makes for a captivating story.

As a photographer who looks to the land for artistic inspiration, I have thought a lot about the pitfalls of landscape photography. When feeling the constraints of the genre I try to keep my finger on the pulse of what is going on with the medium as much as I can – and there are a few photographers keeping me on my toes to see what they do next.

Phil Underdown is one of those photographers. His work weaves seamlessly from one body to the next, building upon his own relationship with a landscape that isn’t grand, but takes a fair amount of time to thoughtfully digest. His images are sincere, dealing with specific aspects of man’s mediation within the land. Whether this mediation comes from others or his own, the honesty illustrated in his photographs show not only human intervention with the land, but also the land’s ability to transform within this intervention.

The evolution of Underdown’s work is what resonates most with me. His project The Field started as a documentation of a hay field near the property he resides on in the Adirondack Park of upstate New York. The field, no longer being cut to produce an annual crop — became overgrown with minimal maintenance required. Slowly a new ecosystem developed that lead the photographer to turn his camera in a different direction. The project developed into three separate portfolios, The Field, The Trapper’s Lament and a developing body of work focusing on a single tree of tent caterpillars.

Similar to The Field is Underdown’s body of work Grassland, focusing on a 500-acre expanse of land that was once a wetland until the 1940’s, where it was leveled to create an airstrip. An artificial grassland was born and eventually the airstrip was abandoned, becoming the Shawangunk Grasslands National Wildlife Refuge. Attempting to revert back to a wetland, the SGNWR is now seeing another kind of human intervention, man’s physical removal of the airstrip’s runways. Once again, Underdown is re-examining the evolution of this landscape with a new series of images entitled Grassland 2.

Underdown’s unique approach to photographing the landscape and the mindful analysis of his own work intrigued my interest to approach him for an interview for this issue of Finite Foto. A selection of Underdown’s images from The Trapper’s Lament are included in the book Earth Now by curator Katherine Ware and are on view at the exhibition of the same name at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe opening April 8th. The full portfolio of The Trapper’s Lament is showcased at the end of this interview." — Antone Dolezal

AD: Phil, you have several bodies of work, Grassland and The Field, where you navigate as the eyewitness to a particular landscape’s evolution — photographing fleeting moments in the observation of a greater time line. In Grassland the viewer becomes aware of man’s intervention, while in The Field, it is a lack of intervention that draws upon the viewer’s relationship with the land. What draws you to photographing these hybrid landscapes and how has your own awareness to the land you photograph shaped these particular bodies of work?

PU: In both these examples it’s specific details of the human interaction with these spaces that interests me. In the case of Grassland, it was the level of interaction or management that was needed to maintain this human-produced environment as a functioning part of the region’s natural ecosystem that really held my conceptual interest. Visually, it was a very striking space as well, and walking in its 500-acre flatness was always an arresting experience. I would say that with Grassland, my awareness of the land really developed alongside the work. During this period, I was having a lot of my unexamined myths of the rural landscape challenged by the practical experiences that my wife, as a newly-elected town board member, was going through. The landscape was no longer a collection of nice vistas of empty fields, but rather a more complex patchwork of owned parcels, policies, plans, and regulations. Much in the way that small town politics mirrored politics on the national level, with all its vitriol and controversy, so did the environment of Grassland, with all the various forces shaping its expression, begin to seem a microcosm of our larger, national environment. The work provided me with a window through which to see more clearly all these forces shaping the land and our perceptions of it.

In terms of The Field, I definitely see it in much the same way, however I would say that my lack of intervention is actually a form of intervention, in and of itself, and that is what really interests me here. The majority of this upstate property had been hay fields when we moved in. A farmer, who had been given use of the field in exchange for keeping it in a managed state, wanted to change over to growing corn to feed his dairy cows. Seeing our field as an island of grass, a refuge for birds, bugs, and butterflies, in a sea of surrounding cornfields, we declined. We basically have to mow it down every two years to keep it as grassy fields. We are now managing our own little grassland. Our winding mowed paths take us through the grasses as they are growing out and filling in with a multiplying mix of weeds and wildflowers. As I spent increasing amounts of time walking around and photographing, I realized that my own aesthetic consumption of the field was a worthy topic in and of it self, not just a form of artistic navel gazing.

We were recently communicating via email and you had shared something I found interesting about your process. You mentioned working on several larger bodies of work, Grassland/Grassland 2 and The Field, both of which took place on significant expanses of land. But while working on these projects, The Trapper’s Lament came into focus as well as another project you began working on documenting tent caterpillars residing in a single tree. I am interested to hear you indulge a little more on how your focus has expanded to documenting these microcosms of the larger environment.

The areas covered in these projects range from 500 acres for Grassland, through the 60 acres of The Field, down to a subset of that at maybe 7 acres for the area covered by The Trapper’s Lament, to finally one single tree in the field for the tent caterpillar images. Although the areas covered differ, I spent a lot of time going back to each place, photographing over a span of years as my awareness of their individual qualities developed. I think the time span makes up for any limitations in the size of the area I’m observing. Of course, all of these locations can be seen as microcosms of a larger environment, but in the case of the tent caterpillar and The Trapper’s Lament images, it is nice to be able to situate them in the larger context of the field, whereas in Grassland the wider world is only hinted at. With Grassland, once I began to visualize it as a separate land that I was making these little expeditions to, I could envision the book as the report back from my travels in this land, even though it was really just this place near my house. In the same way with the interrelated field projects, I have found that I don’t need to do the big grand project where I travel to distant places, piecing together a grand narrative.

I often wonder, when I’m walking in the woods or driving down the highway and watching the scenery go by, why does this landscape look this way, why these trees, why this field, this wall? There is a history of uses expressed in the landscape, but I don’t always know how to read the signs. The various traces in Grassland, the paths, shrubs, wildflowers, and other signs of our management choices in The Field, the broken dams and overgrown lodge of The Trapper’s Lament, are all evidence of various choices made in the management of our environment. The son of a historian and the grandson of an archaeologist, I have inherited a fascination with finding and interpreting hidden details. In both the ongoing Grassland project and The Trapper’s Lament, I get to see a process in its before, during and after stages. I have watched the tent caterpillars in a single tree, over the course of 5 or 6 years, slowly overwhelm its defenses, which will perhaps soon leave a dead tree standing otherwise unexplained in the field.

The Trapper’s Lament is a little different than the projects mentioned above. With this project you were not only the observer… you were also an active participant in the shaping of this particular environment. Would you talk about your involvement and decision in this case with becoming the one who intervenes in the environment?

We watched, over the course of a few years, as a colony of beavers made its way down the creek that winds through our neighbor’s field before meandering across ours. Because there were more trees surrounding the creek on our property, they really got established before we even knew they were there. Eventually they dammed up the creek in 5 or 6 spots and started felling the trees, with the big tall aspens being their favorite. One night, we heard a tree fall outside our bedroom window, and we started to feel like they had us surrounded. It became clear that we would have to do something, that they weren’t going to get bored and move along on their own. We were forced to confront a dilemma that we really didn’t know how to resolve. The beavers were part of the nature that we loved, and had moved to the Adirondacks to be a part of, but then, when push came to shove, we killed them. This contradiction occurs all through our culture. Often, our well-meaning beliefs about nature and the environment get pushed aside as soon as they start to clash with or inconvenience our daily lives.

Living here was no longer going to be a naive act. We destroy the thing we desire. In moving to the country, we contribute to its demise.

Was your decision to photograph the aftermath of the beavers’ removal one of reconciliation or conceptual observation? And how did the thought process about your decision evolve alongside the project?

I’m not sure how much of one and how much of the other, but it is definitely both. For my own personal reasons, I felt the need to look at this aftermath and figure out what it meant to me. I made an effort to accompany the trapper one day, when he shot one of the last beavers that had gotten into the pond and plugged up the overflow pipe. I realized afterwards how many of these types of relationships we have in our modern existence, where some one else does our dirty work for us, removing us from seeing and feeling the consequences of our actions. As he and I sat and looked out over the pond, with the reflections of the mountains and setting sun in our eyes, and as a beaver quietly swam towards us, I was completely unprepared for the gun shot. It struck the beaver but didn’t kill him, causing him to writhe at the water’s surface, until finally his up-stretched paw sank below the surface. It was a very cinematic moment that I completely failed to capture on film, frozen by what I was seeing. A few minutes after disappearing beneath the surface, it crawled out of the water at my feet, at which point the trapper promptly shot it again and then in a very matter-of-fact way, stepped on its neck to make sure it was really dead this time. It was absolutely horrifying. And yet we benefit from these kinds of horrors constantly in our daily lives in relation to the food we eat, the home we live in, the clothes we wear…

What strikes me when I see the photographs in The Trapper’s Lament are the small subtleties– a dead snapping turtle or bloated beaver blend into a landscape where they no longer inhabit, but the reminisce of their community is still there. In the photographs, your awareness and honesty to the significance of your decision is very apparent. What is your process as photographer in telling such a complicated story while keeping the imagery subtle?

While I was taking these images I really didn’t know how I felt about the whole situation, but I was hoping they would help me figure it out. I found that it was best to put myself in the right place to photograph, the scene of the crime as it were, but then to step back a little emotionally while taking the pictures, so that I didn’t impose any premature judgments in the act of shooting. I think this also results in less forced images overall—think about where you need to be to take your photographs but don’t over-think it while you’re there.

As well as not really knowing what the relevant details were to include in the photographs at the time they were taken, I also had a desire for these details to exist in the context of a larger scene so that the viewer could find them as they took in the larger whole, rather than just being presented with close-ups of specific details. This was my experience while walking about as the photographer, and I want the viewer to have a feel for that as well. I want the images to feel like pieces of the world, like dioramas. There are so many little details competing for our attention, how do we know which ones are important…

Perhaps some of the subtlety comes from some of the more intangible things I was trying to show, the sense of sadness and confusion that was in me, not the landscape, but the expression of which I was trying to find laid out in front of me. Time heals all wounds but it’s a slow process, and every year the area around the beaver dams changed as this interrupted landscape went through it’s cycle of re-growth. Perhaps my guilt will ease as the signs of the crime disappear. As the landscape grows over, the evidence of my intervention begins to fade, which makes me wonder how many other interventions are hidden by the passage of time, what subtle signs are actually the reminders of unknowable histories.

There is also an underlying sense of a emptiness in The Trapper’s Lament. It is apparent this is a project meant to convey a connection with the consequence of intervention in the environment. You have taken the creative control to not only document this consequence of intervention… but to also tell a narrative in a manner that explores an underlying sense of gloom. How do you view photography’s importance in portraying a story that speaks about environmental concerns, but also keeps the artistic integrity within the story-telling process?

We are saturated with images of environmental devastation in the media, and it is easy sometimes for our senses to become dulled to their impact, for us to feel removed from these overwhelming narratives. Telling a slightly less well-defined, personally-identifiable story might just engage some other thought muscles. Photography really gives you a way to show people something you want them to see—like bringing someone to a certain place, pointing their head in a certain direction, and then telling them to open their eyes and look. The problem is, we all bring different assumptions to what we see, and the landscape does not always tell its story through immediately visible details. So the ability in a book to try to fill in some of what’s missing, to provide some of what informs the work for you, to frame it a certain way, all help bring the viewer’s mindset just a little bit more in sync with yours when they are viewing the work.

Last year you self-published a limited edition print-on-demand title that sold out relatively quickly for your project Grassland. You had mentioned to me a while back that you are now working on an artist’s book for The Trapper’s Lament. What is your process when deciding a project is ready for the book format and do you see this as the final step in the completion of the work?

It really depends on how you envision a piece of work in its finished state. I have always consumed photography primarily through books. I love seeing work on the walls of galleries and museums and I have a few treasured photographs on my wall, but I have hundreds of books on my shelves that I can look at over and over again. The book just seems the logical end product to me, with the gallery or museum a place to see the work in another way.

I’m beginning to see that making a book is like filling in a crossword puzzle. As you figure out certain things, locking in the format, or the number of pages, it enables subsequent decisions to be made until the final outcome seems inevitable. Likewise with editing. Each image you choose leads to others and rules out still more. Each choice or decision you make narrows down the field of choices remaining.

When I think of the photographs in The Field, I can’t think of them without also having The Trapper’s Lament, and tent caterpillars work in my head. Rather than combine them all into one thing I like the idea of a trilogy of books that belong together as a set. The Trapper’s Lament happens to be the first one ready to be put together. As I work on The Trapper’s Lament, it also clarifies how I will approach The Field and tent caterpillar books.

In the case of Grassland, the book was an attempt to force myself to bring to an end something that was threatening to overwhelm me. I shot over 300 rolls of film as I slowly circled around the difficult process of locking in to a certain final form. Settling on the specific book form that I chose imposed a number of limitations that forced me to come to terms with and narrow down the possible edits.

You have stated before that John Gossage’s The Pond and Mark Power’s 26 Different Endings, among other projects, influenced you. Regarding the concept of working on a project close to your own backyard, your connection to their work seems apparent after spending time taking in your photographs. How do you approach finding new projects… or maybe a better phrase would be how do projects find you?

I feel that all the projects I am working on at the moment have found me. They have grown out of a relationship with places that are part of my daily life, that somehow stimulate my desire to photograph. Then over time, through the act of photographing and editing, and photographing some more, I start to hone in on the ideas that make the piece resonate in a way that interests me conceptually as well as visually. I don’t think I can rush this process and this is why it is good to be working on multiple things at once.

The Tent Caterpillar, Trapper’s Lament, and Field images all feed off each other, and are really dependent on the other bodies of work for their full meaning to come out. I see them as one large triptych, with three parts that play off each other to create a sum greater than the whole. Each individual book is free to explore its own specific issues, but always with the context of the other books to fill them out. Taken together the three bodies of work are all concerned with an organism shaping its environment to suit its needs, whether human, beaver, or caterpillar. When I started photographing the tent caterpillars, I really didn’t know where I was going to go with it, I was just really drawn to certain visual aspects. I spent a lot of time photographing the field and the tent caterpillars, before the collision with the beavers brought it all into focus. With Grassland I photographed there for a long time before it started to come together, and then when I thought it was done a whole new part of the story has dropped in my lap with the tearing up of the runways, and in that case I can see clearly much of what I want to do before I even start shooting there again.

There is not a lot of landscape photography that resonates with me in a way that holds my interest both aesthetically as well as conceptually. For me, your landscape work is different than most in that it holds my interest in both of those ways. In your opinion, when considering contemporary landscape photography, what are the components that make for a strong narrative?

When I was in grad school in the early 90’s, we viewed everything through the lens of post-modernism and while I absorbed much of the theory, I found a lot of the work dry and un-involving. I like visual art to be compelling in the way music is. You have your favorite album that you can listen to again and again and you just love the way it sounds. The message is there but it’s not hitting you over the head.

I like work that you can look at over and over and keep getting something from. Work that, like you said, is engaging both conceptually and visually. This is what I like about Mark Power’s 26 Different Endings, which you mentioned earlier. He defined a landscape conceptually, as he did also in his earlier book Shipping News, and then set out to find its manifestation through photographs of real places. Apart from loving the photographs, I appreciate the creative thinking that went into trying to reinforce the sense of these places as neither-here-nor-there places…connecting them by their status as outliers on the London A to Z road atlas, a sort of topological indifference that extends to the way these places look and are perceived. It brings something else to the act of seeing these landscapes that goes beyond their surface appearance.

I would also point to Raymond Meeks as someone whose work I really enjoy and find myself pulling off the shelf repeatedly. His approach to book making has had a huge impact on how I think about my own upcoming book projects.

Considering its deeply rooted past, do you see contemporary landscape photography as having a lasting value within the context of the medium as a whole?

With the changes being brought about in our environment as the result of climate change and our ever-expanding footprint, there is such a huge roll photography, and visual art in general, can play in helping to interpret and make visible these changes. Not just documenting what is disappearing, but also helping us to see where we are now and where we are headed.