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, so you have these very mysterious ominous-type looking photographs of long houses around dusk. 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. A lot of those aesthetics speak to my desire to look at loss and sadness, and to help to accept loss as well, because there’s been the loss of language, in my case, the loss of family, the loss of a community. However, when I got to loss of community, I realized it’s actually adaptability. Nothing’s been really lost. People have adapted to certain situations. So what’s really interesting me now is how they adapt. What have they brought from the traditional long-house ideals, and how has it been melded with Christianity? How have people used these rituals and these ceremonies? When I was younger, in the late ‘60s and early ’70s, with the Christian home ceremonies, the home visits, the testimonials, how did those things help elevate the mind? Because in Mohawk, to elevate the mind is a literal translation. The word for Chief doesn’t exist. It means “of the good mind”. So once you realize where you come from, as Mohawk, where I come from, once I realized that, then it all started to fall together.The broadband, intermedia – and it is an intermedia, really; it does lie between ourselves and what we’re aesthetically used to: film, fibre-based prints, all of those things – but I think also, too, it can be a little bit manic.What the newer materials, new media, have allowed me to do is to discover the fact that I do love film, and I have seen a lot of film, and I grew up watching 70’s video, TV. So, I’m shooting some video, I’m not shooting in HD because I want it to look like video. I want it to look like “Chico and the Man”. I want it to have that aesthetic quality that drew me to it. I was a summer student at the Woodland Cultural Centre in the late 70’s for two years, and all I was doing was shooting video on these huge video cameras, and the decks were this big, and I fell in love with those images. The reason I picked up photography when I was younger, I knew it, I was very shy, and it allowed me to have a role, in high school, on my reserve, and then later, when I started exhibiting full time in ‘89, I had to ask myself: who am I without the camera? But it was the fact that also, too, my mother was a librarian when I was quite young, and one summer she did take myself around, and we did interview all these older people on Six Nations. Between that, and living and growing up with a lot of older people on Six Nations, I really got a sense of a community that existed. I was on the cusp of that agricultural community that was just ending in the late 70’s. I heard and I got to see that window of that community, and to document, to make an archive, to have this archive of these photographs of these people. And actually, I gave them back to the family. Was that reciprocity, also? Being a photographer or giving something back.I think my frustration is that sometimes when I’m looking at videos or new media, to fully transfer the unspeakable the wordless. That’s why we make images. For me, they represent these words, these thoughts and emotions that I cannot and don’t have the language at this time, or maybe they’re too painful or too joyous. I just can’t find the words. I think my desire, frustration, trust, vulnerability, all that stuff, lies in the fact that: how do I make this new medium do that for me? Where do I stop? Where do I self- disclose? Trusting myself; that’s always been the biggest challenge. It’s a sense of, you know how you can express yourself publicly, but still have these private documents that you’re giving out, and I think that’s probably the biggest — I just got you know, hair just stood up — so, that, for me I think is the biggest joy: mixing the public and the private. That’s were the balance comes.