In this engaging interview, Christopher Bucklow, the renowned British photographer, shares insights into his artistic evolution and the conceptual foundations of his work. From his early experiences with traditional photography to his pioneering use of light-sensitive materials, Bucklow discusses how his practice has transformed over time. Bucklow delves into his exploration of the relationship between light, space, and the human form, and how these elements come together in his distinctive photographic creations. Bucklow also reflects on his artistic inspirations, the role of technology in shaping his work, and his unique approach to creating immersive photographic experiences. Through this dialogue, Bucklow’s thoughtful, innovative approach to contemporary photography comes to the forefront, offering a glimpse into the mind of an artist pushing the boundaries of the medium.
Luntz: Your fascination with and love for nature began at a young age, which cemented the idea of nature itself becoming a pinhole camera – a sort of revelation that created the foundation of the series. Could you please elaborate on how this came to be and how you exercised this core memory from your childhood when creating The Guests?
Bucklow: This love of nature actually has another side of the coin, which is the neglect of human nature. The whole Western mindset neglects the non-material aspects of the universe, including what, in traditional terms, one would call ‘soul.’ There are a whole lot of difficulties that a young person growing up in a Western, scientific, rationalistic, materialistic society negotiates. One is brought up in school with this kind of materialistic philosophical outlook. But if you truly lived the implications of that kind of outlook, you would find that you thought of your psyche and your soul as being non-real.
Unfortunately, I think I lived that Western mindset until I was in my late twenties. I didn’t train as an artist; I trained as an art historian. I worked in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and I was an intellectual through and through. I was also interested in science, so I was living that rationalistic life, having to somehow ignore the damage that it was doing within me. But during my twenties, it gradually caught up with me, and my beginning to make art was my own psyche’s attempt to self-heal.
Luntz: How did you transition into making art? Did you feel like it was a need growing inside of you?
Bucklow: It just happened one day. We were in Italy and I woke up in Assisi on the 8th of August, 1989 after I’d had a dream that I was making sculptures. When I got home, I started to make those sculptures. But I was very unconscious of what was happening to me. I didn’t understand it. I just followed the instructions in the dream, I guess. It took me years to discover what was driving me and to say: ‘Ah! That’s why you are doing all of this stuff.’ But this was all several years before I started to make photographs.
Luntz: Could you walk us through the technical process when creating the images?
Bucklow: It was firstly remembering a question I asked when I was a child. It was about the dancing circles of light you see on the ground under trees. And being told by a teacher that they were all images of the Sun’s disc. And that was when I was fourteen or so. I thought it was an amazing phenomenon, and of course I wasn’t making art at that time, but that memory got lodged in my mind.
Twenty years later, when I began to make art, I wanted to make paintings of clusters of suns, almost like a galaxy of stars. But I had this thought that it could be done better photographically, though you would need a camera with thousands of tiny lenses. And then it hit me, a pinhole camera need not have just one pinhole. I thought: ‘Let’s use a thousand pinholes and see what happens. Let’s try twenty-five thousand pinholes!”
I made some black and whites, but how to record that in color? The technique I use is that wonderful positive-positive paper originally called Cibachrome, which then became Ilfochrome classic. It was discontinued about ten years ago. I still have several rolls of it. I started to make the silhouettes I call The Guests. After a couple of years I started asking myself: “Why am I choosing these people, what links them?”, and I realized that one of the things that connected them all was that they were people I dream about.
![Christopher Bucklow, Guest [S.D.] 4:27 pm 9th September 1994, Cibachrome photograph](https://s3.amazonaws.com/holdenluntz.com/wp-content/uploads/20241029170202/BC-B2401-738x1024.jpeg)
Luntz: Who are The Guests? Are they silhouettes of people you know or are they created out of your imagination?
Bucklow: They are always figures that are deeply significant to me. Either in a positive sense or a negative sense. Pretty much all of them are people that are featured in my dreams. I had started to record my dreams when I was in my twenties. It began because I had a mysterious dream that I just couldn’t ignore, so I wrote it down. I think the entity within us that creates the dreams kind of screen grabs things that it notices during the day…things that it thinks are metaphorically or symbolically useful to it to create the message that is encoded in the dreams. It was the first one I ever wrote down. That was in 1986. Since then, I’ve recorded over a thousand dreams. That’s how The Guests are connected, as a series.
Luntz: Perhaps the most recognizable feature of the series is that they appear to be ‘lit from within’. Could you elaborate on their appearance and your way of describing them as a ‘feeling of wellbeing’?
Bucklow: The wellbeing felt like a jail break. It’s as if I experienced a release from the intellectual mindset of my academic life. The moment that I ceased to be just an intellectual and to become something more, something wider than an intellectual… that felt like my psyche cascading down to the rest of my body. Instead of the psyche being contained within the skull, it felt like it was pushed down into the whole body. The experience of that was like light. It’s interesting that the Sun is the unit that I use to create those figures. And the Sun in Western culture has obvious symbolic associations with Logos, the linguistic self. But for me it’s the whole of the psychic self… all the lit-up Suns are permeating the whole body.
Luntz: The Guests emanate a sense of physicality while also giving off the effect that they could vanish with a light breeze. Why was it important for you to reflect the lightness of being?
Bucklow: I don’t really think it through. It seems inevitable that it should be the way that I do it. I don’t plan my work in advance. It just seems to happen. So the fact that they look kind of material and kind of immaterial at the same time? There’s something in the way they look that is very appealing to me in terms of them being porous, as if the breeze could blow through them. They’re not closed off to the rest of the universe. For me it’s important that there’s kind of an edge to them, but you also feel like anything that wanted to get in could get in, and anything that wanted to come out could easily come out.
Luntz: The Guests are figures that have appeared in your dreams, but did you also dream about how they would be seen photographically? Did you visualize their movements or bodily gestures?
Bucklow: Not at all. When people from The Guests series appear in the dreams, they are clothed, are interacting with their environment, and are in motion. When they are in the dreams, they are like actors in a drama. But when they appear in the photographs, it’s as if I want them to be in the wings and not on stage but waiting to come on. When they’re standing still at the side of the stage, they’re feeling themselves bodily in preparation for becoming on stage.
Luntz: Could you please speak a bit about your relationship with the figures, and their relationship among each other? In the late 90s for example, you’ve said that The Guests began to interact with one another.
Bucklow: Yes. Something in me was wanting The Guests to come on stage, finally. I created big, panoramic photographs, with several Guest figures in each. However, I felt like the essence of the series was changing. And I realized that I actually needed the photographs to be single figures. But I still wanted narrative in my work, so I started to make films and then started doing the paintings that I’ve been doing for the past twenty-five years. But I haven’t stopped making The Guests. As I dream of new people, then I make a new one. The whole process is such a joy.
Luntz: Is there a relationship between the hour of the day, hence the way the sunlight appears and the feeling or character you like a certain guest to reflect? For example, some works appear piercingly white while others have a more romantic, orange color reminiscent of the sunset.
Bucklow: Again, this isn’t thought out, but I’ve noticed that certain characters never appear at noon; they always appear at sunset. There are several male characters who never appear at any other time than sunset, when the paper fails to register the sky and the sky-field looks black like a nighttime shot, and the suns look like they could be moons. I’ve also noticed that my wife is also a nighttime figure; she’s always mysterious. My wife and I, our lives are tied up with this whole creative transition. When we met, I was still a museum curator, and within a couple of years I became an artist. She was the catalyst.
Luntz: Did your move to Venice, Italy, which coincides with the beginnings of the series, influence the way you worked?
Bucklow: That was 1995. It’s a great place in terms of light and atmosphere, which gave variety to the way The Guests could look. But nowadays it’s more of a question of, “Why did we choose Venice?”. The thing about Venice is that it’s very symbolic, metaphorically, because it’s a city that’s married to the sea. The dry land and the ocean are married. For me, in that metaphor, I was the dry land and my wife the water.
Luntz: Are there any other artists you take inspiration from?
Bucklow: My gods? (laughs). The people that I’ve written about the most must be the ones that I’m most interested in. The earliest one was almost my father in my imagination. I was in love with Alfred Sisley. He’s an Impressionist, and I was fixated on this one painting by Sisley called The Floods at Port-Marly. When I was fifteen or sixteen this painting pierced me in the heart. I think it was the melancholy of the painting that captured me. And because the streets are flooded, it looks like Venice. Years later I fell in love with William Blake, and then with Philip Guston. Francis Bacon as well…
Luntz: Where do you see yourself in relation to the greater photographic practice?
Bucklow: Well, I think every artist does what they need to do psychologically to suit their own nature and their needs. I respect everything that people do. People are always fascinating. Photographers that have meant a great deal to me? Eugene Atget, Edward Steichen, Lee Friedlander, Saul Leiter, Garry Fabian Miller, Susan Derges, Adam Fuss… But I wouldn’t necessarily call myself a photographer. That’s not because I also make paintings it’s more because I wouldn’t even call myself an artist. So, what am I? I suppose I’m really just a person who investigates human nature in various ways. To quote Philip Guston: “They call it art afterwards”.
Christopher Bucklow is an acclaimed British artist known for his innovative photographic and conceptual artworks that explore themes of identity, consciousness, and the passage of time. Bucklow’s distinctive style often merges personal introspection with scientific and spiritual inquiry, inviting viewers to engage with the complexities of perception and memory. Central to his practice is his use of the pinhole camera technique—particularly in The Guests series, where each photograph captures a luminous, life-sized silhouette. These works are not just portraits but metaphorical renderings of individuals drawn from the artist’s dreams and imagination, with thousands of pinholes representing a transfer of energy and essence.
Bucklow’s background in art history and his early career as a curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum have profoundly influenced his aesthetic, leading to a practice rooted in a blend of the historical and the contemporary. His work moves fluidly between photography, drawing, and video, and often incorporates philosophical elements, referencing ideas from cosmology, Jungian psychology, and Eastern philosophy. In addition to his visual artworks, Bucklow has delved into writing, reflecting on creative processes and the intersection between science and art, making him a multifaceted figure in the contemporary art landscape.
His works have been exhibited in several major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). Bucklow’s pieces are held in prestigious public and private collections worldwide, including the Guggenheim Museum, the High Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In addition to numerous solo exhibitions, his work has been featured in thematic shows that explore photography’s relationship with time and subjectivity. Among the books published on his work are Christopher Bucklow: Photoworks (2004) and This is Personal: Christopher Bucklow’s Dreaming Self (2013), which delve deeply into his artistic vision and its evolution.
Bucklow has enjoyed many solo exhibitions worldwide, and his work is included in many prestigious collections, including:
- Museum of Modern Art, New York
- Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
- Guggenheim Museum, New York
- Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
- Phoenix Art Museum
- Henry Art Museum, Seattle
- The British Council, Israel
- Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth
- Dallas Museum of Art
- Victoria & Albert Museum, London
- University of Texas, Dallas
- Honolulu Museum of Art
- Herzliya Museum of Art, Israel
- High Museum, Atlanta
- Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
- Akron Arts Museum
- Blanton Museum of Art, Austin
- Cleveland Museum of Art
- Yale Center for British Art, New Haven
- Miami Art Museum
- Norton Museum, Palm Beach
- Perez Art Museum, Miami
- Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco
- L.A County Museum, Los Angeles
- The National Portrait Gallery, London
- The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
- Southampton City Art Gallery