Joel Simpson
New Jersey native JOEL SIMPSON has been photographing since he was a teenager in the 1960s, turning pro in 2002. He is largely self-taught as a photographer. In between, he received a PhD in comparative literature from Brown (1976), spent 10 years teaching college English, French, and Italian and enjoyed a 22-year career in jazz piano. In 1999 he produced an encyclopedic multi-media interactive CD-ROM on the history and practice of jazz piano, featuring Dick Hyman’s performances, The Dick Hyman Century of Jazz Piano. He has also worked as a music and art critic (Down Beat, Horizon, The New York Art World, Photo Review, et al.).
Since 2002 there have been over 50 shows and publications of his photography in the US and abroad, including Paris, Barcelona, Rome, and Budapest. His work has been published in the US, Belgium, France and India, and he has received numerous awards. His 2019 mostly color landscape book focusing on remarkable geology, Earthforms: Intimate Portraits of Our Planet, received enthusiastic reviews plus the prestigious 2019 Nautilus Gold Award for Art and Photography, and was cover feature of the June, 2019, issue of Natural History Magazine. He was named 10th Best Landscape Photographer (along with 16 other artists) of 2019 by One Eyeland, of India. His work is currently collected by the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center of Brooklyn.
Since 2022 his work has been featured on-line in The Eye of Photography, brutjournal.com, Photo Independent (exhibition), Shades of Grey, and Inspirational Art, and published in The Hand, and Spotlight (Circle Foundation for the Arts.) His 2022 self-published book, Playgrounds for the Mind: The Surreal in the Real, combined a lifelong fascination with geology and his immersion in Surrealist art.
In 2023 he produced a longer sequel, The Surreal in the Real: The Concrete Irrational in Rocks and Ice, that mostly features images from 2022 and 2023, including a trip to Iceland in March, 2023. In November, 2023, he presented a well-received illustrated lecture to the International Society for the Study of Surrealism in Houston that outlined the geological origins of the art of Dalí and Tanguy, with forays into abstract art in rock formations of Aaron Siskind and Minor White, and included an organized survey by categories of his own surrealist creations from literal captures (no image-combining) of rock and ice formations. The present book systematizes his discoveries in the aesthetics of natural formations, leading to a tongue-in-cheek collection of fictitious extra-terrestrial landscapes and dystopian future cityscapes. Simpson lives in Union, NJ.
Joel, you’ve navigated from comparative literature to jazz piano to surrealist landscape photography — was this a journey of abandon, or one of inevitable convergence? How do these disciplines feed each other in your work, consciously or unconsciously?
Great question. I’ve always been a photographer—since the age of 13, and I’ve always aspired to art in my photography. Although this has taken many forms, including social documentary and studio photography; through all this, landscapes and especially geological landscapes have always had a special appeal for me.
Now, I feel very lucky to have been inducted into the secrets of form and the evocation of emotion in three media: literature, music, and photography, and plastic art in general (that is painting, sculpture, etc.) And even though one medium uses words, another uses time and tones, and the third uses space and visual forms, they all work on the mind and perception using the same principles of form: spacing, repetition, contrast, dissonance, consonance, tension/release, gradual vs. abrupt changes, intricacy and grand gestures, chaos and order, foreground and background, which is subject and setting. In all three disciplines I’ve learned the language of criticism, which helps not only to express my insights, but also to pose questions to myself, and to respond creatively to challenges.
I understand that serious art works in all three disciplines are carefully constructed on a number of simultaneous structural levels. The master artist is conscious of his or her formal qualities on all levels and knows how to use them to achieve his or her goal. In photography, for example, it’s usually rather clear to me how to make adjustments in my photographs for maximum effect, though it’s not always obvious at first what the subject or emotional effect to bring forth is in a photograph from the field, and sometimes it takes me a while to develop an editing strategy to make it clear. Something had hooked me out there, provoking me to capture the image. Most times it is pretty obvious, but sometimes it is not, and I have to decide during post-production editing what the (best) subject is, and then figure out how to make it salient. In photography these are separate actions. I’ve found that challenges along these lines often lead to discoveries. In other word, I can’t always visualize the finished print when I take the photo, since I’m often dealing with images no one has seen the likes of before.
So to answer your question, I place great demands on getting the form right to make the emotional message clear and rich. I’ve learned how to do this in photographic editing, and I’m still learning. And incidentally, the digital darkroom gives us much more control over formal elements than Ansel Adams had in the chemical darkroom. And that control is available more easily and more quickly to put into effect.
Your concept of “psycho-geological photography” suggests a deep collaboration between nature’s randomness and the artist’s unconscious. Do you believe that true creativity always emerges from chaos, rather than conscious design?
“Collaboration” is key here, but the dichotomy you’ve set up will not yield an answer. First we must understand the nature of the unconscious image bank that all of us carry around, derived from all the images we’ve ever seen in our lives. These come from fine art and pop art, from science, cooking, mechanics, medicine, comics, etc. “Chaos” is a convenient term, but it really designates the apparent disorder of the rock or ice surfaces before we’ve meditated on them and allowed our perceptions and buried image memories to sort them out. These vast surfaces in apparent grand disorder or randomness, then allow us to hook on some of the configurations, which begin to appear to carry significance, either abstract or figurative. Note that the abstract ones may activate a connection to an unconscious emotional symbolism, such as a conflict, a contrast, a metamorphosis, some general process that accounts for relationships among emotions, which we may not be consciously aware of, but which we sense are governing some life challenge in the real world. But it is not necessary to know what they are to appreciate intuitively an interesting abstraction.
In "Faces in the Rocks," you name formations — breaking a kind of traditional taboo about “leaving interpretation open.” Why did you choose to intervene so directly, and what does this reveal about the role of the artist versus the role of the viewer?
As I say in the book, the photographers who took their cues from the Abstract Expressionists and started finding similar configurations in nature—rocks, bark, asphalt, rust, torn posters, beach patters, ice—knew only of a rather limited number of locations in which to seek them. Explicit figurations were rare, other than the well-known ones that appealed to the popular imagination and acquired names via a folk tradition. These became the subject of popular pareidolia, the technical term invented in 1866 to describe this well-known phenomenon. But when I started investigating such heavily eroded sandstone and mudstone environments as Valley of Fire State Park (Nevada), Fantasy Canyon (not a park, Utah), Little Finland (also not a park), Nevada, none of which was known by Aaron Siskind and his generation, I found figurations that not only smacked me in the face as obvious and undeniable, but that were more bizarre, more outlandish, more seductive, and more frightening than I could have imagined on my own, and whose emotional and allusive range extended far beyond the popular imagination. I realized that not naming was to miss an opportunity not only to connect with the viewer (who saw them readily in my photographs), but to amuse the viewer and often add a clever allusion to some other cultural trope or a note of irony. As for naming abstractions, I usually stick to formal descriptions (e.g. striations, tafoni, leaning stack, etc.).
Also, I don’t see “the role of the artist” and the “role of the viewer” as being necessarily in opposition. My titles are often “winks” at the viewer, invitations to smile along with me, or to think of some artwork outside of photography, like a line from a poem, a style of ceramics, a sculpture or a painting, that the photograph evokes for me. This both enlarges the scope of the experience and situates photography squarely among the fine arts, which have always deployed webs of cross-references. And photography’s subject is actually the real world!
Surrealism thrives on the tension between the real and the irrational. In your geological work, do you ever feel that the more you try to capture the irrational, the more rational and structured your own process must become?
The “irrational” is usually a condition of mind upon first encounter with an uncanny object. Phenomenologically, it is our experience of a thing that we encounter for which we have no pre-conceived context or explanation. This can be stimulating, inspiring, or unsettling, but in any case, it is a completely subjective designation. To hypostatize it, that is, to make it into an essential thing-in-itself, will take us in a very erroneous direction. If our minds are open, we will always experience a tension, a surprise, or an incongruity between our habitual world, our familiar memes, and what we encounter, led on by our curiosity, in the outside world, natural and manufactured. If my photography provokes that sense of incongruity or surprise, I hope it takes the form of revelation or pleasure. After all, these are just photographic images. Since my images surprise me, I assume they will surprise most viewers—and they do—so I feel I am using the irrational factor as a provocation to pleasure and revelation. Could I ask for anything more?
Having spent years documenting the spontaneous ‘art’ of nature, what is your view on photography that is heavily manipulated or staged? Is it merely another kind of ‘fiction,’ or does it betray the essential mystery you seek to honor?
Staged photography and composite photography are their own art forms. Like any art form, they can be used to express profound insights, or they can be trivial, sensationalist, or empty performances. It all depends upon the depth of understanding and skill of the artist.
Photography often suffers from being viewed as an “instantaneous” art form — click, done. Yet your work demands slow looking, patient decoding. How do you think your background in music and literature trained you to resist the culture of the “quick glance”?
The culture of the “quick glance” may inure would-be viewers to the depth and complexity of an image; in other words, they risk missing the point. But that is their failing. Any visual work, if it is powerful enough, can have the power to transfix the viewer, holding her gaze as she experiences the pleasure that the artist has captured or created. It’s up to the viewer to avail herself of this richness. Many choose not to.
The time to create a significant photograph is comparable to that required to create a rich and meaningful painting. It just may be spent in other activities: travel (often long and laborious), intuitively capturing scores of images to find one good one (like the spawn of an octopus, or any number of creatures that birth hundreds so that one or two may survive), and then working the image until it is ready to be printed. The raw materials are different; the interaction of reality with the mind takes place on a different stage, with reality playing a more literal part, and not necessarily passing through the artist’s mind before it is committed to the display medium. But there is a deep analogical connection between the two different medial.
The Earth, as you present it, becomes alien — playful, ominous, otherworldly. Do you ever worry that by aestheticizing natural formations, we risk forgetting the environmental degradation happening to these very landscapes?
Edward Burtynsky confronts this very problem even more explicitly in his recent book, Extraction/Abstraction. In it he finds beauty in many of the polluting and destructive processes of industry on the environment, and he confronts this conundrum overtly in the text to the book.
I have less commerce with the destructive forces upon the environment, although my image, Coral Cadaver Head, is a direct reference to them. I take solace in the fact that my images deepen the connection between our inner selves and wilderness, so that viewers, hopefully, will end up treasuring them more and being more willing to take measures to protect them.
Your imagery challenges the classic notion of the "sublime" in landscape photography. Instead of vast, heroic vistas, you dive into the crevices, the hidden textures. What do you think we are psychologically running from when we seek only the “grand” view?
Great question. I believe that landscapes, for all their beauty—or maybe because of it—is fundamentally an escapist art. A powerful landscape will draw us into it; we will wish we were there—although the final image may not have been experienced directly by the photographer. As you imply, I think my art may redress this imbalance to some extent.
here are certainly enough factors in our daily lives for us to need some relief in escape. But my work sends the viewer back inside himself, rather than to an idealized Elsewhere—to memories, fantasies, and dreams.
You’ve worked across many cultural spheres — academia, music, art criticism. In your experience, who understands and responds to your work most deeply: scientists, artists, musicians, or writers? Or is real understanding even necessary?
It’s impossible to generalize at this distance from the individual. The question presumes an automatic, even mechanical conditioning by any one of these disciplines upon their practitioners. There are members of all of these professions who are indifferent to my work, but it seems to reach most people who actually look seriously at my images, whatever their training. Perhaps the difference lies in their relative ability to say why they like them, but this is separate from the emotional impact these images have on them.
If future archaeologists unearthed your photographs without context, what do you hope they would conclude about 21st-century humanity’s relationship with nature and imagination?
This depends on whether anyone follows in my footsteps. To go out on a limb, if my work inspires a school of followers, the approach will enter into the culture and condition 21st-century humanity’s relationship with nature and imagination. If not, they may see me as an unheeded prophet or just an outsider.
But I think your question is relevant to my contemporaries. I’m trying to connect nature and the imagination in new and perhaps deeper ways. If enough people see my work and it catches on, it might become a reference point or provocation for a deeper connection between humanity and the terrestrial environment. Our bodies, our fundamental existence, is a long-term product of the earth. If we can recognize that our minds are connected to it, or are still connected to it in this overbuilt environment (as it was, intimately, in pre-industrial times), we may have a better chance of continuing the species for another few millennia.