We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Charles Ingham a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Charles, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

I recently showed 26 works from an ongoing series Pastoral Scenes from the Gallant South. (The title of the series comes from Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” and is, of course, sardonic.) I took the photographs in these works on road trips and visits to family in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and North Carolina.. This is the South that photographer Sally Mann describes as “a place extravagant in its beauty, reckless in its fecundity, terrible in its indifference, and dark with memories.” Pastoral Scenes addresses the history and legacy of slavery and colonialism.

I would not wish this body of work to be regarded as in any way an act of cultural appropriation or even virtue signaling; however, the viewer can, in places, find here a form of confession or self-criticism, as well as a rather inadequate gesture of reparation. A photo-booth portrait of a twenty-something me, my head covered with a paper bag—this was some Dadaist act, a situationist prank, but how can one look at the photograph now and not find an echo of a Klan hood?

I grew up in England, and when I was a child, my father took me to the Goree warehouse in the port of Liverpool to see, set into the walls, the iron rings that had once tethered enslaved Africans. While the warehouse was named for the Île de Gorée off the coast of Senegal and was built to house goods brought from the plantations of the Caribbean, the picture of those rings that has stayed with me is, as I discovered this year, a local urban myth, part of an oral tradition. The iron rings would have secured dray horses, not enslaved human beings. “People,” my father said. “These iron rings.” The memory is vivid.

But my father and his father worked for a French West African company, and my memory of walking with my father through Manchester warehouses stacked with kente cloth is real—and a bizarrely tangible manifestation of colonial exploitation. In Pastoral Scenes, one can find photographs of my grandfather in West Africa in the early part of the 20th century. On the back of one image, he has written, “Me, the King’s daughter, and others.”

In rural Mississippi, my wife’s sister-in-law remembers being dandled on her great-grandmother’s knee, a woman born into slavery, someone who hardly spoke and, when in her nineties she finally left the plantation, would not eat with the rest of the family. That’s a long story.

Each work in this series constitutes a narrative to be “read” by the viewer, the vertical forms constituting some kind of punctuation within these narratives. I am a conceptual artist, and my photo-narratives represent a combinatory aesthetic; each work constitutes a whole made up of parts, creating something of a symbiosis. As the artist Alexis Smith says of the elements within her collages and assemblages: “It’s fused into a whole where they seem like they’ve always been together, or were meant to be together. The people that look at them put them together in their heads.” Some visual references in Pastoral Scenes are obvious; some of the bones, sinews, and other connective tissue that hold a particular narrative together work within the piece’s own logic, a logic that viewers find for themselves. Here, the artist makes the work, and that work has an agenda, but a significant part of that agenda is for the viewer to find something of (or for) themselves within these images and words; hence, the absence of titles. I, with my own baggage, hang the pieces on the wall, but the works are open, awaiting the visitor.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

At the age of ten, my parents gave me a Kodak Brownie 127 camera; at twelve, I kept a handwritten journal for a year. I took dull photographs; in my journal, I recorded the stunningly mundane. I began to think that I should have been taking photographs in New York, that I should have been keeping the journal aboard a cargo ship in the South China Sea. However, by my mid to late teens and living in Manchester, England, I started to see what the city had to offer as it began to collapse and re-invent itself. As an undergraduate and graduate student at the University of Essex, I experimented with photography, wrote, and co-edited a poetry magazine. At 30 I came to San Diego to teach in higher education. My graduate dissertation was entitled “Words in Pictures” and considered the manner in which words and lettering may be introduced into the “alien” setting of the visual artwork to achieve a substantial collaboration between the elements of conventionally distinct disciplines—literature and the visual arts. That interest in various hybrid forms has stayed with me; that is what I create.

If you want to know what the weather in Manchester was like on an October Tuesday in the mid-sixties, I can tell you. (It was probably raining.)

Is there a mission driving your creative journey?

The urgency to be original.

A magnet on my refrigerator quotes the English photographer Yevonde Middleton: “Be original or die.” (A tough assignment.) And to be original, one must know the history of art — to know what’s already been done. And to learn from that, eventually creating, one would hope, one’s own “voice.”

And I have always liked the words of the poet Ted Berrigan (a mentor and an influence) in “Personal Poem #7,” where he writes of being up all night reading William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery: “Made lists of lines to steal, words to look up (didn’t).” Berrigan’s use of “appropriation” was a small but significant part of his aesthetic (and, in fact, includes lines of my own, written during collaborative exercises with the poet!). The poet Alice Notley, Berrigan’s widow, notes that he “was interested in the fact that when he ‘appropriated’ a text he unconsciously changed it. He considered this tendency to be part of his creative process.”

Occasionally in the series Pastoral Scenes from the Gallant South, I have used a found image—photographs of my grandfather or an antique postcard, for instance, or a slave ship’s manifest. The use of the found image is, of course, a long-established artistic method; often, I will digitally manipulate the image to the point that it becomes even further my work.

As visual artists, we are all voyeurs of some kind (that’s our job) and inspired thieves, capturing a still moment stolen from the worlds that we and others have invented for ourselves. As a photographer, I feel that what it always comes down to is that question of choosing what to steal from the world and what to pass over.

Another magnet on my fridge depicts Bob Ross, the host of PBS’s The Joy of Painting, and the words, “Never apologize for your art.” Damn straight, Bob.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

As a gallery visitor, to resist the (understandable) compulsion to “understand” the art work. In one way, not to seek “a beginning, middle, and an end,” a narrative gift box, neatly tied up with a satisfying ribbon. Such an approach is simplistic.

One should, of course, know something of whence a particular art work emerged, something of its history. But one doesn’t have to fight too hard to find something that one can recognize as meaningful in a work; one doesn’t have to recognize everything immediately.

This is an impulse that comes from the fact that, in part, I have a background in so-called language poetry, where linearity and conventional logic are often abandoned, the words of the poem having value in themselves (and a certain autonomy). Here fragmentary forms and unconventional juxtapositions are celebrated, and the poem invites the reader in to find connections for themselves and to appreciate the logic that the poem creates for itself. Here, the poet has an agenda, but the poet invites the reader to find their own agenda within the architecture of the poem, before discovering the solution to any mystery that the work may present. And the reader has not “failed’ if they do not discover whodunnit. Enjoy the piece for what it is.

And then there was the unlearning and learning at the feet of the Dadaists.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.charlesingham.com

Image Credits
The photograph of me was taken by Teresa Houska.