Eternal Ephemeral,
A Coexisting, Contradiction
The photograph is about capturing an instant in time, making permanent that which is not. Unlike painting or drawing from life, which represents an average of hundreds of glances and looks overtime, the photo snatches one of those images and preserves it in all its brutal unreality.
In his technique Kim Taylor takes this idea of a momentary glimpse of reality and pushes it even further than the release of the shutter. At the beginning of a session with one of his models, Taylor may have absolutely nothing in his head. Starting with a background, a light and a body he begins to explore shape and shadow, looking for something, anything that pulls at his attention. In a way he surrenders to the thoughtlessness of the unconscious, and allows his eye to guide his hand and his voice. Taking hundreds of images he searches for the ephemeral moment where the light, the model, the camera and his reactions come together to produce what you see in his art.
Taylor relies heavily on his models, working with them repeatedly and asking them for ever more fantastic shapes, yet he does little to direct them, believing that only the combination of their awareness of their own body and it's position in the light with his reaction to that interplay will give them the image they're looking for. "If I knew what I was looking for I would have painted it years ago and been done with it" says Taylor, who began taking pictures at 7 with his mother's Box Brownie "but it's not an image I need, it's a process, every one of my photographs is a part of the whole mechanism, yet they must not be taken as a body of work. Two or three, maybe 6 or 7 images can be grouped together but what really matters is the single image that sticks in your head, the image that represents the resolution of the clash between culture and genetics." In other words, it's the single work that is important, that single moment, not the average of the thousands of photographs he's taken over the years.
Taylor believes he's looking for the same thing the surrealists were searching for, the answer to the mystery of the Venus of Willendorf, that peculiar, abstract little nude woman who held our attention for thousands of years at the dawn of our culture. "The brain is no more capable of recording life over the long term than a movie is capable of recording anything but single images that we then use to fool ourselves into seeing movement. Think back, what do you remember of your childhood? I see a girl on a beach, the sun and the water behind her, she's in mid-step as she walks toward me, I can smell her skin, I can feel the warmth of the sun and the sand, but I don't see her hair move in the wind, I don't see her breasts bounce up and down like a slow motion sequence on Baywatch. It's a single image that has shaped my life ever since". Taylor claims this image isn't an average of all the girls he ever saw walk across the beaches he grew up on, but the single, ur-woman, the instantaneous image that we all carry in our genes and through our culture. It is not just a girl, it's THE girl, the one he saw the instant he was conceived.
Through this eternal instant, these ephemeral images fixed in time, Kim Taylor continues to look for what makes him tick.