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The
Photographic Ecstasy: The Photography of Daniel Murtagh
by
Association Co-founder Christopher John Ball
A graduate from Brooklyn’s
Pratt Institute - New York based photographer and experimental short filmmaker
Daniel Murtagh credits his awakening to the creative
possibilities of the medium to his brother. He had a passion for collecting
photographs which he shared with Daniel, teaching him “to see more deeply
into images” and pointing out “all that the photograph was and what
made it beautiful.”
Drawing a sense of composition from artists such as Goya, Rosetti, Schiele and Vermeer and from cinema “an education in light,” Daniel became transfixed with the idea “that one image, a portrait no less, must represent something besides the subject matter,” and that “an emotion, rich with meaning was waiting somewhere in the dance between light and shadow and texture and facial expression and form.”
It
was whilst spending a few months photographing in Paris in 1986 that the wait
ended and Daniel first had an epiphany – a moment where something within
his soul and his eye coalesced. “I felt something happen in me, something
about myself that could bind it into a complete vision.” There followed
a prolific period of image making as Daniel spent first two years in New Mexico
and then seven years in San Francisco building up a substantial portfolio that,
in 1997, caught the eye of photographer’s agent Polly Smith.
Daniel began attracting editorial
magazine work and felt confident enough to arrange exhibitions of his imagery.
He is particularly attracted to showing his work in Café galleries. “I
love the idea of my work hanging where people can sit and drink coffee or wine
and quietly soak the work in.”
In 2002 Daniel returned to New York to resettle. “For me there was no
question that I would return to New York.” Here he started to put into
practice what he had learnt from those old movies he watched as a youth and
began to experiment with making films. Between 2003 and 2005 Daniel had made
five short movies. This would not have been a difficult transition as many of
Daniel's photographs exhibit a movement and poetry that remind the viewer of
stills plucked from art-house movies. It is as if he has selected an image from
the 24 that make the cinematic second in his quest to capture that decisive
moment.
Just as he enjoys using
female models to create much of his still imagery - Daniel predominantly casts
women in the film roles because “there is an ideal balance to be
found by expressing emotion and sensuality with woman as protagonist.”
Asked to expand further he explains that he believes that women have “a
face that looks out from some aspect of human experience I can never really
know.” Is this because he is male? Daniel answers that it is “the
unknowable part of myself mirrored in the ideal of nature and love and the need
to connect with the other, the emotions expressed that are rooted in time.”
Not content to just shoot the movie – this multi talented artist also
composes the musical score for his films. “Recently I shot my first music
video, but having scored all of my own films in some way they are all musical
as well as visual experiences.”
Daniel
delights in playing with the temporal nature of lens based arts creation as
he explores. “A time long gone that may one day come to arrive in the
form of a memory. I love the idea that I can create a past that never was in
the eyes of a person I will never know. A suspended world locked in every person,
the essence of sensuality.” Here Daniel echoes Roland Barthes famous philosophical
exploration of the photographic image Camera Lucida. Within the pages of this
book, Barthes argues that when looking at the subject depicted within the photographic
image one can “never deny that the thing has been there. There is a superimposition
here: of reality and the past…we must consider it …as the very essence,
the noeme of photography...what I see has been there, in this place which extends
between infinity and the subject (operator or spectator); it has been there,
and yet immediately separated; it is absolutely, irrefutably present, and yet
already deferred.” It could be argued that Daniel’s images are an
exploration of what Barthes called ‘the photographic ecstasy.’
Bringing
to mind the work of Jeanloup Sieff, Jean-Francois Jonvelle, Imogen Cunningham
and Julia Margaret Cameron – Daniel’s gentle imagery effectively
blends form, light and composition with a perceptive and revealing sense of
intimacy that has attracted publication in magazines as diverse as Elle, American
Photographer, Men’s Journal, Health, Soma and Hippocrates. His imagery
has graced the covers of some 14 books and has been exhibited on the walls of
galleries in Manhattan, Portland Oregon, Albuquerque, New Mexico and Saratoga
Springs New York.
Daniel is currently writing
the film score for an independent feature film and continues to shoot regularly
using good old analogue film “I have yet to move to digital. I see no
reason to change something so fundamental and for me essential.” After
viewing the results produced via his current working practice – who would
criticise him for not wanting to change?
Images (c) Daniel Murtagh
Words (c) Christopher John Ball
A version of this article was first published in PhotoIcon - Volume 2 Issue
1 2007