Todd Watts, Canary, 1/5, 2025, Inkjet print, 66 x 46 inches

I make photographs. It is said that a photograph captures a moment in time, an event perhaps. That may be, but the source of this notion originates from the mechanical manifestations of cameras, lenses, and film. People do not capture moments of time. How would we do that? Our personal experience of time is fluid. The events in our lives do not hold still.

My pictures do not capture moments. They are photographs, but they do not depict particular events. Grace Hartigan put it this way, “One of the most difficult things of all, is not to have the painting be a depiction of the event but the event itself.” Her words are a well known mantra of contemporary art. But we don’t need to know the histories surrounding a picture to add it to our personal history. In every way, art and life are inseparable. At the beginning of each day, I can speculate but cannot know what will happen. An unexpected conversation may completely alter my assumptions or the lack of an ingredient may impact my dinner plans. It is the same when I make art.

When I make my pictures I speak to them, often out loud, and they whisper back. The work is completed when, as in any conversation, the subject changes. The conversation remains encapsulated only in the work, to be continued by myself or by anyone else. After lunch, perhaps, or during a long flight to Paris, or right now. – T.W.

“ (Todd) Watts, attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City, moved to Blanchard, Maine, in the mid-1970s to produce limited edition portfolios for Berenice Abbott (1888-1991). He has shown in a variety of venues in recent years, from Susan Maasch Fine Art in Portland to the Leopold Museum in Vienna, Austria. A master printer, he has printed vintage photographs, most recently, Bert Lincoln Call’s nineteenth-century images of the Maine woods. Watts is a consummate illusionist who nonetheless treasures the real.” Excerpt from Art New England by Carl Little.