How Much of the Body Goes Into the Clay?

What the still image can document when the moving image moves on

I have seen hundreds of photographs of Paul Chaleff’s work and considerably fewer photographs of his hands at work. The difference intrigues me.

I recently spent a few days up in Ancram filming and photographing him at work. Film and still cameras may be recording the same thing, but they do not see the same way. Movement carries one gesture into the next. Paul bends over a vessel, reaches inside, withdraws his arm, changes his position and continues. The still camera interrupts that progression. A posture that may have lasted only a moment remains.

Looking at these photographs, I see his body as much as I see his hands. His back follows the curve of a vessel; an arm disappears inside it; his weight shifts to accommodate its size. In the wider photographs, Paul becomes surprisingly small among the objects, tools, buckets, fans and accumulated disorder of the studio. None of this seems incidental. The environment is not background. It is evidence.

Paul describes himself as working-class, as a laborer in clay. I sense something inherited in this identification, a need to locate himself through work and class. But watching his body engage with the clay gives the idea another dimension. His body participates in the making in ways that photographs of finished objects rarely reveal. If we abstract ourselves for a moment from the fact that we are standing before one of America’s foremost ceramists, we might imagine a mechanic under the hood of a car, a blacksmith at the forge, a welder on the steel frame of a skyscraper. I begin to understand the distinction he makes.

Paul speaks of clay as a living material with memory, though he stops short of assigning it consciousness. Whatever touches the clay leaves an imprint: a hand, a finger, a tool, another piece of clay. At the same time, the clay resists. It can be stubborn, pulling toward an earlier form even as the hands try to lead it elsewhere, or continuing through the inertia of a transformation already underway. Making becomes a negotiation between intention and material, between what the hands want and what the clay will permit.

There is something curious about photographing this exchange. The clay retains the memory of the touch while the photograph retains the posture of the body that produced it. One records the imprint; the other arrests the gesture.

They are not photographs of Chaleff’s work so much as photographs of Chaleff working. The distinction intrigues me, and I suspect it may follow me into whatever I photograph next.