Greg Staats

The photographs that I make are personal documents, actually, and they go into a realm of visual narrative, a personal visual narrative that deals with mnemonics, personal aids to memory, and the technique is there of straight photography of the fine print, but they also move into personal documents.

I did a series of lithographs in response to Oka in 1991. It was called “Positive Distinct Forward Movement”, and the only time I actually used text with my work. They were photographs I took of a reconstructed Iroquois village in Akwesasne. The words “positive distinct forward movement” from that point on became my own personal aesthetic. How is it positive? Am I moving? Is it distinct? Is it an original thought? Is it too easy? You know, all these questions from that standpoint. As well as every so often I look at what I’ve been doing and I answer my own question: why do I do what I do? Who am I without my camera? And why do I do what I do? So with those types of questions that I ask myself, that’s where I draw my own personal aesthetic from. And when I also look at other works, be it Native or Non-Native, conceptual, traditional, modern, architectural, there has to be a connection to an organic, an honesty and a type of feeling.