STEPHEN SHEFFIELD: IN SEARCH OF THE EVERYMAN

Impressive and stoic, this “everyman” could be almost anyone. Though he often looks right at us from close range, we can’t quite fix on his visage, hidden as it us under a hat brim or behind a cloud of smoke. This is no easy man to know; he’s both present and disguised. He suggests an existential being akin to Albert Camus’ Stranger. One might even see something otherworldly or demonic about him. But the generalized costume, the symbolic quality, is more important than the exact physiognomy. The clothing and the semiotics are more consequential than the actor.

You might not even notice—and this is part of the message—that two different models appear in the Everyman role. One is the artist himself, Stephen Sheffield. And it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to see FBI Agent Dale Cooper (from David Lynch’s series Twin Peaks) as the other figure. Like Cooper, Sheffield’s Everyman is an anomaly, an enigma, a sphinx. Does he provide answers to questions, or create new challenges? Are we being soothed, lectured to, or played with? It’s a discomfiting encounter, to be sure.

For Stephen Sheffield, Everyman embodies an ongoing fascination with what makes us human and what constitutes the surreal. The photographs are darkly humorous and simultaneously optimistic about the human condition. Mostly, Sheffield’s Everyman could be anyone, doing everyday things seen from a variety of angles. When it comes to water, though, miracles seem to happen. Hyper-buoyancy, you might say. That ladder, in particular, strikes a wondrous bell. There’s some sophisticated magic happening in these photographs.

Sheffield has not carried out his artistic career solely as a photographer. Early on, he intuited the importance of the fine arts. A Massachusetts native, he attended summer camp at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, outside of Boston. He left town to attend Cornell University of Architecture, Art, and Planning (in Ithaca, New York). The art program at Cornell in the mid-1980s was multi-disciplinary. Photography was a component of a large package of creative energy which infused him and to this day pushes him to explore and work in a variety of disciplines. He majored at Cornell in Painting and Mixed Media Art. (And also sang with Cayuga’s Waiters, an a cappella singing group mildly famous for “We Didn’t Go to Harvard,” sung to the tune of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”)

“At Cornell, the lines between photography and mixed media were very blurry,” Sheffield says. “In fact I was more of a mixed media artist during that time and then moved more heavily into photography after college and graduate school. I have worked in both areas and am very comfortable in either arena.”

After leaving Cornell, Sheffield went further afield, and did his graduate fine arts work at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

“So many important experiences took place there that directed my trajectory onward to this day. Almost too many experiences and relationships happened to mention.” Just to name drop a few: John Szarkowski, Duane Michals, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Sultan, and Carrie Mae Weems, whose “Kitchen Table” series was a major influence on the creation and expansion of Everyman.

Sheffield was influenced by and studied mural painting, and was taken by the German artist Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings of people on mountains or hilltops, looking away from the viewer and off into the distance. Friedrich referred to them as “Rückenfigur”; they had a significant impact on the way Sheffield approached photography.

During his time in the Bay Area he did a ride-along with Oakland police officers. One thing that stayed with him was a crime committed by someone using a hammer as a weapon. It was this sort of gritty detail that nudged at Sheffield’s imagination and prompted him to bring careful attention to what he was conveying in his images. He was appreciating pulp fiction by writers like Jim Thompson and Raymond Chandler, and the sensory immersion of something like a lethal hammer was a portal into the private eye milieu.

Sheffield points to several contemporaries whose work utilizes enigmatic, symbolic male figures, including Rodney Smith and Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison. Both of those bodies of work reflect fascination with tableaux that address humankind in moments of extremity. He also admires the work of fellow Boston-area photographer Arno Minkkinen, whose self-portraying images are highly attuned to point-of-view and camera positioning.

He cherishes working with the large-format 4 × 5 inch camera and film. Digital tools, he understood, would make the walking-on-water or Jacob’s ladder miracles too easy to accomplish. A little Photoshop or AI and, voila! The second coming!

While Boston is known as a city with some uniquely aggressive drivers, Sheffield has made a point of traversing its streets on two wheels. “I was briefly a courier in Boston in the late 1990s, and bicycle commuted for about 23 years in Boston.” And he survived. One point on his journey was the Fort Point Arts District, a relatively unrecognized but very cool neighborhood along the harbor, which has been the hub of Sheffield’s working life for nearly two decades. He now lives in Cohasset, a little further away from Fort Point and Back Bay.

Visit him and you will discover that his studio space is divided into three areas—“four if you count the TV and gaming spot for my boys”—and each serves a distinct part of Sheffield’s creative activities. One is the analog darkroom space in which he produces his gelatin silver prints like the ones in this portfolio. Another space is dedicated to digital production (he has accepted 21st century workflows). The third is something of a surprise (though it has its antecedents in the multiple modes he studied in New York and California).

He refers to it, with historical accuracy, as his “mixed media” space, and his primary purpose in it is creating collage works. Sheffield enjoys the fact that with collage he is able to produce one “non-photographic” yet original piece of work every day. It’s a practice he entered into in earnest in January 2017 when he committed to making a daily collage. “I made it to two full years without fail,” he says, “and now I still probably make between five to seven collages a week.” You can find some captivating videos online of his collage construction.

Making these pieces remains “very transformative” for the artist (and remunerative, as he makes large-scale collages as corporate commissions). He credits dancer/choreographer Twyla Tharp’s 2003 book The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life for pushing him to “just get to work instead of waiting for an idea. Trust the process and let the work lead.”

Austrian economist and philosopher Friedrich A. Hayek put it another way. “Man does not know most of the rules on which he acts; and even what we call his intelligence is largely a system of rules which operate on him but which he does not know.” In other words, do what you do and let the system follow its unique course. Perhaps this is a guideline Stephen Sheffield’s Magritte-like figure espouses.

Earlier, I mentioned that Sheffield not only created the Everyman figure, but in the later pictures presented here literally embodies him as well.

“The model I used was (is) a great friend and we were super-productive,” Sheffield relates. “He became unavailable after about three years, and I pivoted to what I had available. To be clear, I was still physically present in my photographs before that and during, but without his collaboration the work went deeper inward.”

Sheffield’s Everyman figure has an ambiguous air. Business formal in suit, tie and fedora. Quintessentially “male” in a gender-coded universe. Yet shaded, remote, impassive, anonymous. Like a sentinel, but it’s not clear whether we are being protected or kept away. Standing watch. Enigmatic gestures like the offering of a sphere or a pocket watch, and surprisingly playful moments like swinging outside the barn, assume an ominous quality. Film noir, to be sure. Absurd, subversive, enigmatic. Quirky sans whimsey. Challenging the status quo.

When Everyman rolls up his pants and scoots across the water, like a superhero of some sort, yet still dressed up like your normal Madison Avenue ad exec, it’s a hilarious yet pathos-filled moment. He could be a Bible salesman. Accountant. Private detective. Insurance adjustor. Someone distinctly out of place in a sinister Hitchcockian screenplay. The urge toward stereotypes is powerful. His moment by moment existence is comic, both absurd and transcendent. Your average, everyday non sequitur, toggling between playful and profound.

There is no hide-and-seek. No camouflage. Visibility is the point. Transparency is not. While the examples from the Everyman series we see here are not recent, Sheffield has not stopped working on the series. “I’m experimenting with expanding the idea, but no arrows have hit the bullseye yet.” That’s a pretty graphic image; one can almost envision the man in the hat with an arrow through his fedora.

Addendum

Images copyright Stephen Sheffield. Visit stephensheffield.com for a fuller dive into the Everyman series, explore his alterative process and mixed media work, artist books, price list and more. Also check out his imagery at facebook.com/stephensheffieldphotography, instagram.com/stephen_sheffield_photography and stephensheffield.wordpress.com