Today we’d like to introduce you to Charles Ingham.
Every artist has a unique story. Can you briefly walk us through yours?
Born and educated in England, I received my undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Essex, where I had to unlearn everything that I had learned in my private high school (Hogwarts without the magic) and where I learned about the world of ideas and how to step off the edge of that world.
Between graduating and accepting an offer to teach part-time at SDSU, I taught at Essex and was employed in a variety of jobs, from factory work at Kellogg’s to hospital operating-room orderly. I also spent extensive periods of time traveling in Europe and Africa. From SDSU, I moved to a full-time teaching position at Palomar College.
I have been stoned by small children in a mountain village in Morocco; I have been placed in handcuffs by the New Orleans PD; I have had a burglar reach over my bed while I slept on Manhattan’s Lower East Side; I have won an Honorable Mention for a diorama made of Spam at the Del Mar Fair; I saw the Clash, but I have not seen the Wizard of Oz.
Please tell us about your art.
My photo-narratives are hybrid forms, transgressing distinctions between the verbal and the visual: the image as text. They explore invented spaces, alternative histories, and visual fictions, sometimes incorporating altered, appropriated images. These narratives may be based upon specific historical events or figures: the anti-lynching campaigner Ida B. Wells, Joan of Arc, Plessy v. Ferguson, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Others can be read as murder mysteries. The form of the murder mystery lends itself to my work: In the detective novel there are always multiple interpretations (suspects), and the reader/viewer is expected to find meaning before the narrative itself discovers the “truth.” Finally, putting two images (or indeed two sentences) together immediately creates a tension for the viewer that the viewer wants to find/interpret. One doesn’t have to make the viewer do this. And the viewer will find a narrative in the visual and verbal texts that “explains” the narrative of the particular piece. Sometimes this may be a self-referential narrative: The work itself has its own logic — plus the logic that the viewer finds there. Viewers may be challenged to find their own narratives in each work.
I am fascinated by human behavior, by selfless acts of kindness, by extraordinary acts of cruelty, and by human responses to success, failure, surprise, and accident. I am fascinated by the quirks and the earthquakes, the repeated histories of human beings and their relationships to other human beings and to the world about them.
I am curious; I am nosey; I am alert and awake; I have no choice other than to make art out of all this. Through photography and the photo-narrative, there are so many characters, so many stories to document and to invent. I want to delight and entertain the viewer, but I also want, if only in some small way, to remind the viewer of what they might have forgotten, of who we are, and who we might be, for good or ill.
We often hear from artists that being an artist can be lonely. Any advice for those looking to connect with other artists?
Take art/photography classes; go to gallery openings and talk to the artists; look for an artists’ collaborative to join; join online artists’ groups; if you can afford it, rent space in a studio or artists’ building.
How or where can people see your work? How can people support your work?
I show my work at the gallery Distinction in Escondido (317 E. Grand Avenue). People can support my work by dropping by on Second Saturdays and talking to me about it. And, if the fancy takes them, by buying it!
People can also find my work on my website: charlesingham@gmail.com
Contact Info:
- Address: Distinction Gallery, 317 E. Grand Avenue, Escondido, CA 92025.
- Website: www.charlesingham.com
- Email: charlesingham.art@gmail.com
Image Credit:
All images copyright Charles Ingham.
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