Dreaming Difference, by David Williams
Scottish Photographic Artists #2, Published by the Scottish Society for the History of Photography and Edinburgh University Press 2023. 

The first of David Williams’ series that I came across was ‘Is’: Ecstasies I-XXII.  They were in the Print Room of the Photographers’ Gallery when I came to work there at the end of the 1980s, needing exhibition and sale.  I immediately understood that they were musical in their essence – neither abstract nor factual but both.  He’d been a musician, I knew, and had been ill enough to make performing difficult, and this was perhaps a translation of something musical.  I felt they were quantum photographs or Schrödinger’s photographs which managed to be both of their subjects and not of their subjects at the same time.  This seemed to me then (and still seems to me now, so many years later) far more than a successful trick in a series of photographs: it was a big lesson to me. It was a lesson in the impossibility of keeping photographs in tidy pigeonholes. It seemed to me as foolish to look at ‘Is’: Ecstasies XIV and ask “But what’s it a picture of?” as it might be to listen to Art Tatum and ask the parallel question of the music.  Photography is very often an applied art, no doubt of that.  It does jobs for people, has uses, carries the power of messaging.  It can be solid, practical, easy to read – and when it needs those qualities, it has them in spades.  But those qualities won’t help you when you come to try to understand or even appreciate certain photographers.  David Williams is one of that group.  When I looked at those little dark pictures with their sharp scratches of light, my best chance of understanding them came from remembering how I approached music, how I sometimes felt I knew that it worked.  I had never heard the description he has remembered in this book that his fellow boarder at a Cistercian monastery once came up with, of those pictures as blues photographs – but I recognise it absolutely.   

There’s another thing. Williams has always defined the professional conventions of photography to suit himself – he is a photographic artist who has found a system that suited him, not a professional camera operator who has sometimes had the leisure to aspire to art.  To try to get an impression of what I’m suggesting, ask yourself what André Kertesz’s job was.  He sold pictures to magazines, sure enough.  He worked for Vu, for years for House & Garden.  But you don’t begin to understand what he was up to if you try to think of him as a photographic journalist.  Lee Friedlander made brilliant record covers – and nudes of Madonna! – but you won’t get far if you think of him as a ‘commercial’ photographer. 

Williams is like that.  Professionally, he has found a long gig as an academic that allowed him to do certain things.  Somebody might pay an air fare to Japan, for example.  But quite quickly, he found a place with room for him that was more radical than it seemed at the time.  As an academic practitioner, Williams is one of the pioneers of something which has become common since he tried to piece together the elements of a ‘career’.  It’s very normal, today, to see photographers who have found shelter enough in an academic job to develop their careers as pure artists.  It doesn’t even sound very radical.  It wasn’t always so easy.  There were fewer institutions with photographic courses, for a start.  Yet from 1990 to 2017, a huge chunk of anybody’s career, Williams lived according to the peculiar seasons and stresses of an academic institution. That gave him security, presumably, and he was prepared to pay the price. Had I ever been a photographer, I would have given a lot to have been taught by him, to have had his eyes on my pictures at the outset of a career.  That framework is important.  Williams needed a context and he found one.  But I think it’s essential that we refrain from thinking of each series that he has made from within that context as a ’piece of research’.  That does the pictures no justice and reduces them to the staid procession of ‘outputs’ that academic convention requires.  

So here we are.  If we are not to think of Williams’ lifetime of work as ‘applied’ photography and not to think of it as ‘research’, it becomes necessary to think a bit what it might be.  Of course it’s art – but that doesn’t get us very much farther. 

There are one or two constants which can help us understand.  In the first place, Williams has always been completely in step with the specific photographic media that he used at any one time.  Those pictures from ‘Is’: Ecstasies I-XXII are silver prints, and wonderful masterpieces of that specific technique.  They reek of shiny darkness and ooze light.  I happen to believe that it is no coincidence at all that Williams was ill around the time he made them: they are pictures that battle against the hail-fellow-well-met fairground jollity of so much photography.  Blues pictures, indeed.  Roy de Carava would have recognised them straight away.  I have no idea whether it ever happened, but I hope that de Carava had a chance to see them somewhere. And de Carava, I remind you, made a great, great book called The Sound that I Saw. Once again, we can see that transferring some of the habits of our appreciation of music to Williams’ images may help. Admiring the skill gets us started as it might with a Chet Baker or an Oscar Peterson.  Once Williams had made silver prints like that, with a loving mastery that looks very like virtuosity to me, he switched to the wonderful Polaroids of Findings, whose clarity is just out of graspable reach, like photographs of the very act of yearning.  He makes other pairs and triplets and sequences (again, the usual tools of music-making) all done with mastery.  The virtuoso lighting and making involved in Source. The lovely only-just-seen of the series Stillness-Occurrence. And so it has gone on, never stuck in a rut, always learning a new instrument, always delivering total control, mastery, and (let’s use that word again): virtuosity in the particular registers and tonalities of each new process or technique.

The second constant is both more obvious and harder to rationalise.  Many photographs (and the proportion only increases as the perpetual flow of imagery online gathers ever more volume) are made to be seen just once.  You glance, you get it, and you move on.  In the olden days before digital, nobody much bothered to pin a newspaper photograph to a wall the better to understand it (a few did, of course, but everyday readers did not). Nobody now, in the same way, much bothers to revisit a photograph seen on Snapchat or on Instagram, still less to print it. Williams’ pictures simply can’t be appreciated in that way.  He asks precisely the same effort as musicians routinely get:  you have to look many times at his pictures, to revisit them, to savour them, to allow your pace to be reset by them.  He works, in effect, not by stories or commissions – but like the musician he still is – by moods gathered together in albums.  What results is an invitation never merely to see the things that Williams has seen, but to really to absorb them and to see the wonder that he wants to show.  The title of the book is a clue.  Williams doesn’t really believe in difference.  He rejects the binary oppositions of conventional thinking, and by extension he rejects the glib this-against-that of so much photography.  He’s interested – in the lovely phrase found by Sara Stevenson for the introduction of this book – in the ‘inextricable links between difference and sameness’.  

I find I can discern all sorts of photographers with parallels to elements of David Williams’ pictures.  He mentions many himself, peppered through Dreaming Difference : Paul Caponigro, Minor White and so on, all respectfully adduced.  You could think of David Hockney in the Japanese temples, although where Hockney broke the image almost like a Cubist into dozens of fragments all seen from shifting positions over rapid time, Williams preferred a more formal break-up into much slower repeating tropes.  The thought of Japan takes me naturally to the great émigré Japanese photographer Tomio Seike and his astounding series Overlook (nominally of dog walkers on Brighton beach, but in fact not at all to be limited to anything so humdrum as subject-matter); much of Seike’s thinking comes close to several different aspects of the work Williams has done around the beaches at Portobello. I could go on and on – there are echoes of Markéta Luskačová’s work with schoolchildren in the very early Pictures from No Man’s Land, or of Richard Misrach in that steeply plunging view from the land down to the sea.  The point is not to compete in a referencing contest, of course.  The point is that Williams throughout his career has deliberately and knowingly placed himself in the context of those others.  He is not just a guy making pictures with a vaguely Zen or Eastern interest.  He has volunteered to put himself in the crossed lines of descent of many predecessors, and that is a kindness to his viewers – it makes it infinitely easier for us to understand and appreciate what he has done.  

So.  What have we here, in this late career book of a photographer who has never been fashionable, but has been quietly and lastingly influential?  We have a definite case made for slow steady seeing and for seeing, specifically, that doesn’t stop at the nominal subject.  For Williams, the visible subject is a metaphorical springboard to thoughts often far beyond.  It can take you to a philosophy if you want to follow him that far.  Separately, we have the triumph of virtuosity, where the prints themselves (if you’re lucky enough to see them and not just their reproductions in the book) have the loving specificity of process that gives a material feel and size and even a smell that guides our understanding of what the images contained within those prints might point towards.  And finally, we have an artist who invites us to make less of his originality, his topicality or his specificity at any one time than most photographers do.  The pictures gathered here are not about what happened on the day they were made. That is an extraordinarily courageous stance to adopt: it’s a photograph, he seems to say over and over again, but don’t look first at what it’s of. Look (if you can) at what it’s about.  And that will be worth your while.

I make sense of all that by imagining that David Williams has remained a musician all his career, even though he chose to use cameras rather than the sitar and other instruments which might have held him all this time.  That seems to be the way he makes sense of his own work, and it works for me.