Avery McCarthy is 24, received his BFA in photography from The School of Visual Arts in 2008 and makes work about the ways that people explain the world around them.

MOSSLESS: I’m interested in your series Theory of Everything. How did you take these pictures?
AVERY McCARTHY: The Theory of Everything is a unique project. It was created just as I was leaving school, and I had spent the vast majority of my time there working with analog darkroom processes. Until that year I had been a complete purist, rejecting the digital method entirely. Recently, I had given in and printed my color film digitally and it became clear at that point that digital was not only able to compete with analog work in terms of quality, but also had become the absolute standard for all things photographic. Many of the criticisms leveled at digital work became fuel for this and later projects: “Taking thousands of pictures is very different than taking one very slowly.”, “There are so many options, it overwhelms and the work just ends up colorful and pretty.”, and mostly, “There is no life or character to digital prints.”

One day I began looking through my archive of images that I capture off of Google, I pulled out some of the more symbolic ones that looked like they could have been sculptures. I had been reading a book called “The Elegant Universe” by Brain Greene about string theory, and so the idea of large and small objects being equivalent was floating around my head at the time. The whole portfolio came together in one moment, with one idea, which was that I could work this project in reverse: I could make traditional silver gelatin prints from these digitally appropriated images. The approach borrowed from the best of both worlds, a limitless and incredibly malleable source of content, and a printing process that imbued the works with the nostalgia and gravity of traditionally created photographs. 

I set about isolating the images, creating digital negatives on transparency paper, and then printing them. It was the last project I produced in the darkroom, and kind of ended up marking the transition to working digitally for me. 

ML: What can you tell me about the picture Dark Matter in that series and why did you portray it like you did?
AM: Each image in The Theory of Everything is presented as an equally sized object in a black void, except for Dark Matter. In my reading and research that led to the project, dark matter seemed to be particularly interesting because no one can see it, we don’t know what it’s made of, it is only evidenced by it’s gravitational effects, and yet it makes up about 80% of our universe. That’s an overwhelming number. When I began researching what it looked like, or how it was distributed, I started finding images that looked like spiderwebs made of electricity. I thought they were incredibly beautiful to say the least, so I capped them. When I was going through my images to pull potential works for The Theory of Everything, those images stood out as a potentially profound statement to add into the mix. Here was this concept, proven and visualized through purely mathematic means, that makes up almost everything in existence. That just blew my mind. It deserved to be in there, and the idea of having it be the only piece that stretched edge to edge seemed appropriate.

ML: Your series X=? feels quite personal. How does this work tie in to your personal beliefs?
AM: X=? is quite personal, it is my answer to the question “How do people explain, understand, and control the world around them?” 
I have been thinking for a long time about what I have to say as an artist, because I constantly feel that I dont have enough information on any subject to make an informed artistic statement. The more I look around, the more I’ve come to feel that no one has enough information—people piece together conclusions, link together observations, and trust systems that are already in place in order to assist with the extraordinarily difficult task of navigating through the thing we all call life.

The ‘What Is?’ Project is a series of interviews I conducted that ask people for their answers to life’s biggest questions. What is love? What is happiness? What is your goal? What is time? I have spend hours and hours interviewing and reviewing answers to these questions in an attempt to create some sort of index of opinion on them. During that process, I began pulling photographs that explored my answers to these questions as a sort of personal answer to these largest of questions of life. It seemed a natural progression: observe the biggest, smallest, most epic things in existence; ask people to explain their feelings on the biggest, smallest, most epic questions; then explore the implications of those findings in photographs. 

What I ended up with was a group of images that were shot over the course of the past year and a half that are about exploration and the search for understanding. Religion, science, art, math, philosophy, and business are all manifestations of the same desire: to explore, understand, and control the world around us. This body of work observes the beauty in all of those equally valid approaches. 

ML: How did you get so interested in the universe at large?
AM: I used to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation every day growing up, and it made a huge impact on how I perceive the world, and how I conduct myself in it. The show presents a future in which humanity has come together and used our intelligence and resources to eliminate poverty and now seeks to better our understanding of the universe. The characters use technology as a means to understand and explore, but what is truly important is personal integrity. This gave me a sense of purpose and a respect for the power approaching life as an explorer. As I got older, I became more interested in science and art as ways to explain what I saw around me, this lead more or less directly to the work that I am producing today.