Being Alive Twice: a Photobook by Aidan Matthews
An exercise in paying attention.
Aidan Matthews’ practice begins at the end: unlike those who view capturing an image as the ultimate goal, the life of Aidan’s subjects only begin when he takes their photo. Through careful editing and material exploration, these subjects then transform, taking on new meanings.
His upcoming photobook Being Alive Twice can be described as an exercise in paying attention, from its contents right down to its glassine packaging. It was designed in collaboration with Aidan’s long time friend, Nicholas Schmidt. When asked about the book’s meaning, Aidan replies; “It's a lot of things at once. I was thinking a lot about photography as a tool for preservation and how I could challenge that. Such a fundamental aspect of photography is keeping track of things. With photographs I get to experience everything again and again, but differently each time.”
Being Alive Twice centers everyday objects of an ordinary life: subjects that would normally be overlooked. One of the images that stands out is of an empty plastic vinegar bottle, standing alone in its two page spread, surrounded by blank white paper. Aidan explains, “the vinegar bottle is trash really, actual trash. But looking at it, I was like, this is so interesting the way it's stained and the way the label is going to look when I shoot it through the bottle. A big part of how I'm photographing now is keeping that in mind, looking through the camera and trying to apply its transformative quality to everything.”
His strengths as a photographer come from this ability; to look at things out in the world and react to them through the camera, thus making them something worth seeing. Every choice Aidan makes from the moment a subject is found heightens the viewer’s experience of it. “Treating these things as worthwhile subjects means you get something out of them, you’re using the camera to monumentalize and to turn it into something more than what it is. Something that is worth studying, or printing really big and hanging on a wall, which traditionally would be a portrait or a really incredible landscape, something noble.”
In this way, there’s something almost psychedelic about Aidan’s work. “It's an augmented feeling, seeing more than what’s normal because you're using the camera and you're using the print and you're getting more out of the scene or the object.” He references Martin Parr; his use of flash to create images that extend beyond their original reality.
In some cases, this expansion is not to create a flattering portrait of a subject, but to subvert it. There’s an image in Being Alive Twice whose focal point is a dirty pile of snow, taken at dusk outside a church near Aidan’s childhood home. It’s a photo that’s quite striking even though it shouldn’t be. There’s a sense of looking at something unfamiliar, despite it being a relatively mundane landscape here in Quebec. Aidan explains that when he would go back to visit his parents after he first moved out, he had this jarring feeling as he saw how quickly things he had known were changing beyond his comprehension. This photo came to represent that change; the alien in the everyday.
Aidan’s subjects move beyond the banal throughout the book, but always keep the viewer feeling like you will see more if you just look hard enough. In one image, Aidan captures the backs of two friends embracing (Grabbing, the cover image of this newsletter). The photo was taken while Aidan was photographing an event at (rip) Loic. “I took this while I was photographing a party there. I really like the anonymity of it: I still don’t even know who these two people are. But looking at it you can see the emotion in the image through their gestures, the tension in the shirt, their embrace, all without seeing their faces.”
Being Alive Twice is accompanied by a text by Aidan, detailing his dedication with this eyes-wide-open kind of seeing: “I've always been fascinated with looking at things. Looking at my knee or at the window or really closely at a flower or a tree, and just seeing all the textures and everything. And the more I photograph, the more I realise that way of looking is so intuitive to me.”
When asked about his evolution past the photos in Being Alive Twice, Aidan says “It was really cathartic, to just take everything I've made as a conscious photographer in the last four years and make something of it. But now to move on and have sort of a clean slate is really exciting to me. I would really like to start making new stuff and develop my practice more. I've had all these photos for four years, I've been working on them, changing them, printing them, and reprinting them.”
Being Alive Twice by Aidan Matthews will launch on May 23rd accompanied by an exhibition at Espace Transmission, which runs until May 26th. Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the gallery throughout the weekend, with the remaining copies available online as of Monday, May 26th.
Exhibition and book supervision by Sarah Mercho.
