Why I Press the Button

The impulse to photograph came to me in September 1979 in a hotel room in mid- town New York City. We were surrounded by photographers, girls from Manhattan who encircled us with big black cameras, oversized lens and exploding flashguns. They were fast and vigorous in their work and we willingly obeyed their commands… I was seduced by their sexy camera handling and the stark monotone imagery they made. Their pictures stirred memories in me, the wave of so many films I had watched with rapt attention as a teenager in my hometown. I had been what might be called a cineaste in those early years as I was devoted to films and the work of Truffaut, Fellini, Bertolucci, Godard, Varda, Kurosawa, etc.

I was hooked on music, but that unending flow of film was like a drug, and the attraction to visual imagery was never to leave. So, in New York I bought a camera, and with a brain stuffed with film and drama I hit the streets with Cartier Bresson’s ‘Decisive Moment’ as my guiding philosophy. From that point on the camera was my constant companion as we travelled the world with our band and I tried to get it all onto film. As I became faster with the camera, more obsessed with photography I found that I was not really interested in the idea of the photograph as documentary evidence but rather as an act of the imagination making the real – unreal.

I was struck by the work of Man Ray and De Chirico, and their work brought me to an ongoing study of Surrealism. This was a breakthrough moment for me because now I consciously tried to look for the surreal, the abstract, the strange in everyday life. This idea was more parallel to my ideas about music, and there was a certain logic to this as in trying to make music with the camera. Chasing surrealism led me to make many crazy pictures in American hotel corridors and bedrooms very late at night. Maybe I would be on stage playing a song like Roxanne and at the same time pre-visualizing a surrealist tableau in the corridor outside my hotel room. Making crazy photographs was a release
from the high roar of a screaming crowd of kids. That energy dis-assembling into a weird camera shot in a pastel-colored corridor at 2 am…

Sometimes it seemed to me that the accident or the mistake were what I was really after as if the unconscious were at work - making the metaphysical manifest. The idea of working or playing with no-mind was very appealing to me. Not that it always worked but sometimes you hit it. As an improvising musician making up musical lines in free time or space was something I was used to, so why not in photography? As I grasped these thoughts and the juxtapositions of surrealism everything changed. What was once the door to the bathroom or the escalator to the hotel lobby, now changed into… the door to the bathroom or the escalator to the hotel lobby…

Andy Summers January 2024