Thomas Lowe Taylor -- Shooting Doubles

Thomas Lowe Taylor
Interview by J Lehmus

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You told me previously about your photo work, that you expose each roll of film twice, so that each frame is transformed into a kind of “meta-image”... For how long have you been doing this kind of photography?

there have always been mistakes, but about 5 years ago, i found myself bored by the images i was making and one day said, oh well, i’ll shoot the film again to see what happens, and so i did, trying to pay some small attention to what was covering what. at first, i couldn’t line up the frames at all. the earliest images were fascinating, like little visual poems without even trying. they are on the website [http://anabasis.com], even some black and white images. after many rolls of film i began to get a feel for what i was doing, like having a kind of double memory strain going on all the time. my lady friend gave me the mask which had been made for her by another potter, and in a piece of writing called Horndog (on site) from about ten years ago, there was a piece called “The Mask of the Beloved”, and eventually my brain put the two things together, along with “The Hand” which has been a theme for some time as well, so i think the exotic quality of the images comes from what i’ve invested into them by way of these two thematic threads, which as you know only generate more variety as you pursue them. i don’t try to consciously layer these images, but i’ll always shoot one or the other (the mask or the hand) usually after the first layer has been made. i don’t know if anyone else is pursuing meta-images, or images beyond imagery. i find the black and white images are more doubled but less exotic.

And your camera equipment, please tell something about it.

at the start, some forty years ago, a friend gave me an old minolta autocord 2-1/4 twin lens reflex, and i was off and running, same as you, getting other people to process my stuff, until i found out how simple it is, and at the same time worked with a student (this was on my first teaching job) who’s dad was a kodak representative, and who himself went on to become a producer of advertising film as well as a shooter. i had boundless energy. he showed me how to print, and gave me hundreds of sheets of outdated paper, and i’d go on these marathon printing sessions, sometimes making a hundred prints in an evening. just a few months ago, i rented time in a darkroom at the art center where my lady friend lives and in four 4-hour sessions made about 250 b/w 5x7 prints, which i can then scan and tweak variously, but you’re right, it’s kinda mindless, and i get very routinized and go as fast as i can, trying for mid-grade prints. i generally try to shoot for the machine, that is, do work that the photolabs can handle at a minimum of expense, and so i go to mystic color lab or photoworks and get double 5x7 prints for maybe ten dollars for a 24 exposure roll, and when put into a large mat, say, 4 inches around the image, they look quite cool

but i’ve had a bunch of cameras, a minolta sr101 i loved, an old beater i can’t remember, lots of point-and-shoots, and now the olympus om10. i have two bodies, one of which needs some work, and i use a 50 mm, 100 mm, 17-28 wide angle and a doubler. it’s interesting to mix lens values when shooting the doubles, wide angle around close up, and so forth. the eye/mind scoots back and forth trying to read the image.

i think the film does the work, the camera is almost unimportant, as long as the lens is ok.

the key is how to deal with the asa of the film. i was told to just double it, and set my meter at 200 if i had 100 film 800 for 400 etc, but that didn’t blend right for me, so last winter in a brainstorm, i set the meter at the max at 1600 for all film and had the best results with 100 film with decent light. the answer lies in the great lattitude that print film has. no results with slide film worth mentioning, although i can send my film in to photoworks.com and get prints and slides back and so can digitize the slide images (positive images) etc. this is very important-to max out the built in meter. whatever the film.


Have you ever been asked why aren’t you doing this photo manipulation work with a computer? Modern photo editing applications with their seemingly endless possibilities for combining and layering images may appear very suitable for the kind of thing that you do, but I have the feeling that there’s some really vital element missing in the computer-based work. It is very difficult to imitate chance with the computer. Also, the magical instantaneity so inherent with the traditional cameras plays only a minor role in the digital creation. Do you agree with this?

it’s almost impossible, in my limited experience, to achieve the blending digitally that i can achieve with the negative, and i don’t fully understand how light competes for space within the negative and i don’t really want to. another big part of it is that i’m a lazy dog, but i expect to take what i’m doing into the digital realm when i can get time invested into photoshop.

plus, i’m a shooter. i love walking and shooting when its texture pattern and corners and edges, focii of attention, like i said, the image is an event, and the event of the shooting is magical and lost and reaching into the void and all that.

i started with a technology and it’s hard to give up what gives you results. i had migraines and tears over learning to use the beginning word processing programs, i had to leave the page which was conceptually infront of me and with which i had an almost thoughtless ease, even to throwing the carriage back and forth, and then ten years later, i got my old smith corona portable down out of the attic and i could no longer hit the keys hard enough, but that’s not about digital photography and the manipulations you can get with it.

also, i spent many years playing on the copier machine, and find that a lot of the scanner skills carry over. i find the programs for manipulating images a little cumbersome, but i think this really gets back to foot-dragging over moving ahead and still being able to get results with the procedures i’m currently using. i wait to grow and expect to.


There's two recurrent themes in your photography: the mask, and the hand. The mask is turned towards the viewer, yet she stays mysterious and reluctant, never returning the gaze. The hand, your left hand, is reaching out into the distance, into the image, reaching out to touch the mask? there is also a severed hand in some of the images -- it looks like a double of your real hand -- abandoned, alone, lost somewhere in the image. I have observed that there's a tendency for the mask to fall in the left part of the frame, how controlled is this? I’m asking this because I imagine that there must be some technical difficulty in realizing this composition when the frames by necessity do overlap at least in some degree.

i try to shoot the masks before or after i shoot the other pass. some times i’ll make a conscious effort to shoot it both ways straight away, no hesitation. last year, though, i shot about 12 rolls, and then added the masks after, with no recollection of what was where. results mixed. right now i have 4 rolls of 400 film i preshot out west, the mask and the hand and the american flag wrapped around the hand. i’ll try to shoot them in coconut grove florida next week. treatments were varied. sometimes they’re not. mask on left side is my lack of control, lack of concern for control, both. there has to be plenty of room for what pynchon calls ‘leakage’ or ‘error’ to others.

the mask and the hand i try to take right out of my studies of depth psychology and ancient symbols. we all wear the mask, the beloved especially wears the mask of our self and of who (she) is. the hand is the ancient sign for the self or the soul. the rubber hand is from a mannikin, my lady friend bought for me for $1.50 from a mountain man who worked for her at her pottery. i’ve pursued other themes. in the sixties i made around 300 b/w images of windows. (i was on the inside looking out). the window is the world. but the mask and the hand seem to have come to me out of my poetry as well, since in some ways these are no longer the kinds of images i’ve found in my perusal of photographic art history, the big names and all that jive. i shot my ass off and tried even to make bad photos, but just shot shot shot, just as i wrote 875 pages of couplets over a period of 3 years, as you pursue a theme, it seems to open out into its own mythology and content/intent which you only discover by repetitious exercises (when the pursuit becomes mechanical). the i ching says ‘repetition is the teacher’, as we all know. but repeated treatments of a thematic ikon or focii only attenuates it into all of its variety and it becomes a mandala of potentiation and hopefully a visual equivalent of one’s self realization, perhaps even as a visual subtext, an invisible teaching.

About the "emptiness" of your photographs. In my own experience, viewers usually react differently to pictures with people and pictures without people. The ones without people are seen as "empty" pictures, and thus uninteresting, except when the scenery etc is so outstanding or beautiful that it is accepted as a "valid" subject in itself. I have the feeling that the people featured on most of your double rolls are strangers, is this correct? I think that this intensifies the emptiness of many shots. Can you say something about the symbolism involved here?

my long-standing feeling about occupation is as follows:

there are compositions which fill and compositons which by their very nature "empty". when confronted by a moment of "occupation" or attachment of interest by a composition which by its very nature is "empty", it is the nature of the beast to "fill that void" -- that since "nature abhors a vacuum", that the unconscious, when thus engaged, will provide its own information to that end. thus, syntaxes and compostions which are of an emptying nature will only provoke the unconscious (or that part of the response-mechanism which is initially appealed to) to provide its own information, to 'fill that void'....

two afterthoughts: not to confuse emptiness with absence. And (I Ching) if you want to compress something, you must first let it expand.

Do you believe in God, Tom?

after all the drugs and reading everything i could find, i go back to an experience during my last ‘episode’, whatever you want to call it, breakdown...in 1994

i was dragging around like a sack of nothing, and was moving my furniture into a garage in vancouver WA. going along on the freeway, i said to no one in particular, ‘if there’s a god, give me a sign’, and seconds later i felt something twinge inside INSIDE my heart, something unasked for. now that’s no paul on the road to tarsus, but it amounted to something coming out of nothing, which is what i go back to, matter emerging from the void.

all the bookish stuff led to the notion that the monstrosity of the universe cannot be a solipsistic mirage which will evaporate upon my demise, and i am an evolving evolutionist. joseph campbell radiates a kind of uncomfortable wisdom in his televised lectures, so i’m not sure about him, and the ’experience’ of seeing my own death during my vision quest (if so it was) put me into a kind of sympathy or parallelism with established info, as i had come to it, but the spirit in the poetry, (it speaks and i write it down) as well as All Of It Added Up Together leads me to a kind of faith, informed however by a steady dose of skepticism and fear, all of which makes me ‘feel’ human in the face of the absolute, which we call spirit or consciousness.

You have talked about getting ideas or themes for your photography from your writing, or through the writing. But you have said nothing about the effect or inspiration that the photo work has had on your writing.

this is correct. it’s like an omission in my behavior, now that you point it out. i’ve always noticed that the poetics inspired the images and that the poems had no images (or so i thought), and you make me realize that this is a shortcoming in what i’ve been doing.

you see, i felt like i’d made a commitment to myself as far as my artistic work went, and that i had to make a choice and therefore treated photography like a hobby, though i never wanted to use that word, it’s like trivial.

nonetheless, the image-making was and is strong in me, and i made drawings, made xerox images with overprinting, and now you’re making me think differently about the whole thing.

images of emptiness and photographs of emptiness are two different things, maybe. surely, emptiness and silence are two spiritual states which precede understanding or ‘passage’. i think i felt in myself that images were beyond lingo and that lingo was beyond interaction with imagery, and so the business of integrating the two (which is what ‘visual poetry’ wants to be about) has come late to me.

at the start i was filled with the ‘history of photography’, like, looking at ansel adams and robert frank and virtually all of them, i didn’t want to be a primitive about it- i wanted to fit in. now that’s less important as i see that we’ve all entered a phase where the past is unimportant, to a certain extent, and that we’re the living artists and we’re the ones who are making our ways to something that embodies our experience. just read edward weston’s notebooks!

i know i’ve kept text matters and visual thought separate for some time, but i think there’s been a crossover about which i’ve been (or pretended to be) unaware. the more i’ve focused on imageless texts, broken sentences, odd juxtapositions, i would always say in the back of my head, oh well, when i want to do images i’ll get out the camera. that’s not too good an answer, but i do remember the thought and the process.

only now do i try to integrate text and image. writing text over an image is not an integration.

we have image in text, image on text, image through text, we can have it any way you want and it’ll still be of a different character, but visual poetics wants a newer manifestation to take place, if that’s not too glib a point. i thought for some time of image with text beneath it like a caption, totally unrelated except by the chance of their contiguity, will still interact to make a new whole.

You have used your photographs to illustrate your Anabasis chapbooks. Have you had your photo work published or exhibited elsewhere, along the years?

in the mid sixties, i was involved with 4 other photographers in a short lived co op gallery, in the course of which each member had a one man show. mine later traveled to rutgers university where it had a month in a building hallway (some 50 prints); i published a few in a midwest university art/lit mag.

later in missoula montana i had a one man show-'74 i think, in the basement arcade hallways adjacent to bitterroot film processing, early doubles, with one next to the other.

in the 80’s i won several ribbons at the oregon state fairs 3 or 4 years running; and a first place in a los angeles show with a $100 prize.

in the nineties, dan raphael printed 5 photos in his magazine nrg along with accompanying text (later reprinted into “relimn”)

here on the peninsula, i was active in the local art club and got several ribbons in their shows until i got bored with them.

i’ve sold a few over the years. one man shows here in two ‘better’ restaurants

a modest resume, not entirely inactive. a closet with thousands of drugstore prints (4x6 size) which can be scanned and i hope will be at some time. thousands of slides in notebooks.

i’ve spent the last 2 years researching art/craft fairs for a market for the photos and have been in one show this year (2002) and two more at least coming up-where i have a couple of hundred from 5x7 to 20x30 matted and wrapped. mostly it’s over their heads-all Mask of the Beloved stuff.

In my own experiments with double exposure, I wanted to be led by chance as much as possible, trying to get rid of conscious guidance like "there was a good shot somewhere around #15, I want to keep it intact." Do you feel sometimes that a great shot is "ruined" by the double exposure?

i think i've tried every way of going about it. one of the best experiences was also one of the first rolls. i was in canada visiting a friend, and went out to try shooting an ancient gnarled tree that everyone in the town revered as a spiritual presence, as much as they could, and i shot the first pass with the 17mm lens and the second with the 50. the results were truly exotic, "itself through itself", as olson put it, the same coming through itself in a fusion rather than an overlay. dog at the film eventually, but i have prints of most of the roll in my possession. also on that trip, i shot a landslide of fragments of granite from an immense rockslide from the past, a momentous event which left these slides of small slivers of granite about ten inches long and 3 inches thick. there, also, it was a confusion of things coming through themselves.

at one point, i tried to shoot without looking through the viewfinder at all, no framing! i calculated (sort of) the focal length and the depth of field and shot within those parameters, and got good results.

after i figured out how to rewind the film and rethread it so that it was starting on the same frame, i got better coverage, but there was (is) something interesting about having the black bar down the middle of the image where the two frames don't meet, but i wanted to get more fusion than distance or separation. it's best when the two images or passes create something which is in itself a single image beset with depths and suggestions.

now i have a 2-1/4 mamiyaflex on which one can simply recock the shutter without advancing the film, as the more expensive cameras will let you do, but i don't even try it. that size film doesn't lend itself to cheap mail processing labs, which is ok with me, i just want it to be common and simple as a technique.

what i've decided to do is to just go out and shoot what i'm shooting in the old way, but FAST, bang bang, they're called grab shots, cause you just trust your machine and bang away. what i find is that i shoot a whole list of personal preoccupations, like leaves textures intersections patterns and so forth, as well as images with centers and images without centers (detail found in the corners, for instance).
i try to use a personal zone system that i've figured out, in which i imagine the 35mm rectangle (i usually shoot horizontals) with an x from each corner to it's opposite, and a fairly large circle (target) in the center, so there are within that schematic various zones of interest or focus (nope unintended) so that the center receives interest (it's usually where the eye falls) and the corners, which are matters of interest created by the rectangular format of the camera itself, as well as matters which find themselves into the corners.

for instance, when shooting flowers, it's sometimes difficult to distinguish the separations as one flower flows into the next one. really, when i'm shooting, it's just like the poetry, it's jazz composition and i hear some kind of music in my head.

mainly, i've decided, i'm just coming back to familiar preoccupations and familiar compositions and when the result is seen (always a surprise, believe me), there's a kind of enrichment to the meeting of preoccupations, you might say.

when i consider your last question, is a great shot ruined by doubling, you've got to ask yourself what you mean by a great shot, it's something that fits into a specific aesthetic, the single point perspective which is a single thought aesthetic. what i'm trying to do is escape from the single point and work from two moments which is exactly what creates the "meta" quality of the images, and which gives them their poetic quality. and since i'm always shooting my own preoccupations or geometries (simply following what feels comfortable or elusive or engaging), the opportunity for a "higher" unity is always presenting itself.

when i shoot purely by chance, like, turning and snapping, trying not to frame anything, etc etc, the results are true to That aesthetic. even "noise" is interesting when it's contained within some sort of framework. using the mask or sticking my hand in is just another leitmotif. i'll tell you this, it's getting difficult to look at single point perspective images, they're so precious, you know.

again, there's been some occasions when i'd shoot the mask first, 24 times, and then go out and look for stuff to stick onto it, under it, whatever. i think they're still good, but to me they have less vitality.

and finally, i don't think it's possible "to get rid of conscious guidance" as you put it. remember tzara and company staying up for days at a time to see if mere exhaustion could provoke the unconscious into bursting through the exhausted screen of conscious attention? it's something like that, but you can never take the divine out of the present, even though you try to absent yourself one way or another, getting drunk, taking drugs, whatever, still a choice has been made which reflects something back upon yourself.

finally, the more you fuck around with this idea, the more experimental you become, the medium really suggests itself. if you don't get too serious, then you're on the way. still, i want to work with a nude model, flesh upon flesh, flesh inside the landscape, and so forth.

i could go on