'What Lies Beneath' by Catherine Jarvie

19 June 2017

James Dean Diamond’s taut, densely woven photographs are the antithesis of what is commonly defined as documentary photography. For all that his work is a record of the artist’s journeys through London and other cities they – and the collections they sit within – build their power in subtle layers of tone and shadow in a manner that is at odds with the understanding that what you’re viewing are, on the surface at least, cityscapes. Look closely and, yes, you may well make out a figure, a bicycle, an umbrella, but that is not the point. For Diamond, his ‘subject’ serves merely as a skeleton. The urban environment is the set upon which he builds the ‘abstract visual language’ that threads through bodies of work that take up to four years to complete and whose real subjects are the themes and triggers that inspire them.

‘It’s more a state of mind than a state of place,’ he agrees. ‘I like the idea that with the camera you’re not actually photographing the object, or the street or the house, you’re photographing the light coming off it.’

Light, to Diamond, is not about the simple casting of shadows or crafting a collage in chiaroscuro. An earlier career as an electronics and mechanical engineer has left a deep love of science that informs every aspect of his practice. He refers to photons – the tiny elementary particles that light is made of – as his ‘pigment’, comparing his manipulation of them to that of a painter’s way with oils. As such, the images he captures – transitional, liminal, fragmented as they are – offer a multi-layered summation of the wider ideas and influences behind his work – anything from a piece of classical music (in Dreaming of Le Gibet) to the astrophysical discovery of dark flow in the series of the same name.

As the above examples suggest, behind it all is a fascination with science and technology, and how each subject parallels and compares with art. Both disciplines share a ‘sense of invention, that sense of looking for something new’, that appeals to Diamond’s own endless desire for exploration. He delights in the manner in which the former’s rigour and rational approach necessarily contrasts with the more creative debates art theory offers and, he says, the ‘drive and intensity to come up with something; reach that eureka moment’ that is common to practitioners of both.

Time – in the broadest and narrowest sense – is a particular area of fascination (‘To us it’s everything,’ he says, yet also, ‘all we’ve got’), forming the subject of his latest, forthcoming series, Short Stories from Station 39, which, he introduces simply as about ‘time decaying’.

In what sense? ‘We’re here because we’re matter and anti-matter,’ he explains. ‘Scientists can never understand why it doesn’t cancel out because anti-matter takes slightly longer to decay than matter, so that’s where the differential is.’ But of course it’s not as simple (or indeed complex) as this. On a more personal level, the dual experience of witnessing his parents grow older and starting a family of his own has made the artist ‘really conscious of time’, of how precious it is. Of his own awareness of ‘time disappearing’, he says, with each passing year.

This duality – the focus on the small and the epic, the personal and the profound; the layering of ideas in the manner that he layers multiple images within a single frame – is the thread that runs throughout every piece of Diamond’s work. ‘I’ve never been an artist about single issues,’ he acknowledges. ‘To me there’s always a bigger picture.’

Diamond’s endless pursuit of that bigger picture is one of the reasons for the long-term nature of his projects. Working on a single body of work over the course of years gives him, he says only half-jokingly, ‘plenty of time to think’. Because thought is a huge component of work that continues to evolve throughout the period of its execution. ‘A new idea might come on board which takes it in a new direction,’ he explains, ‘so the whole concept and theory, the things that you’re learning – and how it affects you – grows as the body of work develops.’

It’s a prolific, all-consuming approach. Diamond shoots most days, layering image upon image, frame upon frame. ‘I just shoot, shoot, shoot,’ he says of his technique. ‘I might have more than 100 images on the one frame all layered together, which I might then take and layer it with another similar image I had in mind.’

Diamond calls this ‘a combination of complete planning and complete chance’, likening it to playing a shot in tennis: ‘You know where the ball’s going, you know what you’ve got to do to carry the racquet through to make contact and make the ball go where you want it to go – but that doesn’t mean it’s going to go there, does it?’

This element of chance – of shooting in a manner that forces him to cede ultimate control, is carefully deliberate because it’s often during that process, he says, where the magic happens. ‘You need the accidents,’ he explains, ‘because if it’s too in control it loses tension. That's why I shoot in such an experimental way. The whole idea of experimenting is to create things that wouldn’t otherwise happen.’

And is that tension there to be resolved or explored? He pauses. ‘A bit of both I think. But in the end just go with the flow. It’s too big,’ he says with a smile. ‘Just hop on and go for the ride.’

To a point. Happy accidents are one thing, but Diamond’s arrive within the framework of an otherwise rigorous methodology. There is a clear artistic and narrative thread running through each series, none of which is complete without hours of editing of both individual pieces and the series overall. ‘I create the images within the camera and then I layer them together [digitally],’ he explains. ‘So you reveal bits, you take off bits; it’s a little like following painting conventions but using it optically instead.’ Diamond estimates only roughly twenty per cent of his total output ever sees the light of day and whole projects’ worth of work have been known to be consigned to the bin (or a long-buried hard drive) if he comes to the conclusion that something isn’t working.

As might be expected from someone who spreads his passions equally between art and science, this blurring of the lines across technologies and techniques is an essential part of his practice. Diamond credits a period working with a digital camera as getting him ‘back on track’ after hitting a creative wall several years ago. ‘It started to teach me new techniques that you can visually see [as you work],’ he says. These days, he shoots in film, yet manipulates and edits those images using digital processes onscreen, employing hands-on darkroom methods such as split-toning to bring the luminosity and depth of hand-printed photographs to the more ‘synthetic’ wash of his digital prints.

Such a carefully considered, multi-levelled approach invites a high level of engagement. Surely it’s important to him that anyone viewing his work understands the depth of its detail? ‘I like it either way,’ he replies. ‘One of the functions of abstract art is that it can be very open. It can represent different things throughout your life. You get different feelings, different emotions, different memories triggered.’ What really counts, he says, is that ‘It lives with you.’