The living room was pitch black. I fumbled for the light, flipped the switch…nothing. Remembering that the bulb had blown days before I, once again, acknowledged it would likely never get fixed due to a household passivity regarding daily tasks.
As I peered around the room trying to find a lamp, my eyes slowly adjusted to the dark. That’s when I saw him. Sitting silently on the couch, staring at me with tiny, beedy, evil black eyes. I rea—
“Hey,” light filled the room. I spun around. Court was behind me in some sort of pastel slacks outfit. “I just bought that. How d’ya like it?”
“It’s awesome—totally freaked me out,” I said looking back at the picture of the stoic, iridescent old guy.
“I know, I love it. By some photographer—Dave Batterman.”
Dave is an Atlanta-based artist whose work typically appears in surrealist, thematic series that detail the lives and environments of those in which he’s enmeshed. The image stalking me from the couch was of Dave’s grandpa Eldo for his series, Alabama Portraits.
Dash: How do you choose the subjects of your pics?
DB: It’s a fifty/fifty divide between ideas that come to me versus things that just unfold naturally due to circumstances. As much as I love bringing a whole idea from infancy to fruition, the everyday random things jump out and grab me.
Dash: You often shoot a conceptual series of photographs—what does this lend to your work as a whole?
DB: It’s difficult for me to flesh out an idea in its entirety in just one photograph. Most of my series come from very specific concepts that I want to explore, so doing multiples I think lends to a better translation.
Dash: I liked the Pine Magazine show at Picaflor when you photographed your subjects in their homes and had audio of them talking.
DB:: I did a series last year called “Friends and Their Backyards” and it started me on the idea of static portraits of people in their surroundings. I liked the idea of capturing people in their homes; in the places that they choose to build around them. And it also started me thinking about my first memories of “home” and the idea of how those two things—the present and the remembered past—work in conjunction with each other. Overall, I think it turned out the way I wanted it to. I actually have a lot more to work on with it, trying to get up to around twenty or so images total.
Dash: For all them dweebies out there, what kind of equipment do you use?
DB: I shoot only digital nowadays, although I cut my teeth in college and high school in the film era. There’s definitely been a huge change, but I can’t deny liking the amount of control and other more nerdy elements that the digital process allows. I mainly shoot a Nikon D90, with just a couple of lenses and some speedlights. I like to keep it simple.
Dash: Many of your pics are very surreal, is that how you see the world or would like to see it?
DB:: I’ve always been fascinated by the cut ups that Burroughs and Gysin did, this concept that our perception is constantly being interrupted and fragmented. I’d like to think that my work shows these small details – these fragments—in a static way that enables us to observe them individually and not as the jumbled [mass], which is the way we normally see. Time is the result of a series of innumerable events all crashing into one another, so I think the surreal nature of our lives is readily self-evident to those who want to see it that way.
Dash: You often orchestrate your shots, creating a composition. What, no action shots? Why?
DB: Oh, I love the action shots as much as the next person. But I guess a lot of my subjects tend to be static. Honestly, I haven’t really thought much about it until now. Hmm.
Dash: We really dig your mirrored images. The one of the deer makes me feel goosey. Where’s the genitalia?!
DB:They’re a lot of fun. I always love symmetry in things so it’s my way of forcing a symmetrical form onto distinctly asymmetrical things. As far as deer genitalia, I don’t think they have them. I hear they reproduce by sneezing.
