I heard Your Whistle Through The Trees

John Savoia

Interview by L. Valena
July 23, 2023

Can you please start by describing the prompt that you responded to?

Yes, I responded to a short piece of text called “I Imagine Love Growing.” I read it a few times, and I walked into it trying not to think about what I was going to make. I just wanted to read it and let it wash over me a little bit. But before I could even get through the first reading, I was already picking out words and phrases and visuals in it. I very quickly knew what I wanted to make. It hit me really quickly, not just from specific images in the text, but from the tone of the text really. It spoke to me and I knew how I wanted to respond to it immediately.

What were the things that stuck out to you?

There's a lot of talk of leaves and petals, which brings to me color and texture and literally these green spaces. Then we get a little further in and there's more talk of flourishing, deep color, radiance, bloom, bold, bright, all these very evocative words. Here in Boston, we’ve had both a very hot and wet summer, so the plant life is very dense and very verdant. There's just so much of it and it's really thick and it's hot. I just wanted to get into the plant life and depict this growing of emotion through the addition of color to greenery.

I thought that was such a cool thing about your piece. These three panels with this color slowly coming in. Can you tell me about how you did that?

Yeah, a lot of the work I do involves artificial light, lighting a scene with more than just the natural light there, but with flash and often colored flash. Pink is one of the colors I use most often. To me, this text seems clearly about love blossoming. Love is typically depicted in red, but red can be a little violent, a little dark, a little bloody. I knew that I wanted to pick a magenta, something that really seemed appropriate to how the words made me feel, the way I was reading the emotions of the piece. I have a flash with a little pink piece of cellophane over the light.

The idea of a triptych came to me pretty quickly. I knew I wanted to do more or less the same shot three ways: one with just natural light, really embracing the green of nature right now; a shot with full-on pink everywhere, that final flourish where love has blossomed; and then something in between. I ended up doing light coming from below, the light literally placed on the ground and shooting up through the leaves, as a transition between the absence and the presence, the blossoming to describe that motion.

That's so cool. I think it's really interesting to think about love coming in as having motion to it. It seems like something that, in my experience, happens through time and depth, and I wonder how that translates to motion. It’s cool to think about it that way.

I think that a passage of time or an action or narrative can be a tricky thing to express in a still photograph. It's certainly doable to show in a single frame, but I immediately knew that I wanted to do more than one shot. At first I was thinking of doing just a diptych, like before and after, but I realized that three pieces would be the way I wanted to show a transition, a welling up of these feelings.

Nice. I also love the title of your piece. “I Heard You Whistling Through the Trees.”

I don't often title my work. I actually never title my work. And I make a lot of work. In photography, there are certainly people who make few photographs; I make a lot of photographs. I'm more interested in how the visuals make someone feel than adding to or changing that perception with the inclusion of a title. Technically, everything is “Untitled,” but I don't even like that. There's just no title. That didn't feel appropriate for this. Given the nature of the way Bait/Switch operates, I think that having a title, having that little bit more for the next person to go off of, is important. I want a little bit of my intention and a little bit of my read from the previous piece to show through. So I had to give it a title.

And where does that title come from?

I have a body of work, which is all about nature and often includes me using colored light as an addition to it, that I call “Whistling Between the Trees.” This piece isn't a part of that, but it felt like it was speaking both to the piece I was responding to and to my experience making that body of work. So I wanted to reference that in the title as well.

So it's really speaking to how this relates to the rest of your work.

Yes.

That's cool. I want to hear more about this colored gel idea because I know it's something you've explored a lot and I'm curious. Do you remember how you discovered that?

I applied to grad school in 2016 and got rejected and was feeling very bummed about that. As a bit of getting back on the horse/retail therapy/consolation prize, I decided to pick up a flash and a few other accessories. I thought that, since I’d been let off the hook of spending many thousands of dollars on grad school, I would spend just a tiny fraction of that on a few extra things, so that I’d be ready to make work that I hadn’t had the equipment for. One of those things was a flash and one of the common throw-ins that people get for flash are colored gels.

Typically they're not very many colors. It's usually just like a light, medium, and very saturated orange, as well as a light, medium, and very saturated blue. Those are used to match the color of light that you're shooting in. A lot of times, people want the flash to be the same color temperature as the natural light. So if you're shooting in the evening, that light is very orange and you need to add some orange to your flash, so that they match.

Anyway, I got just a smattering of random colors. I picked a green one, which I thought would never get much use as color correction. It's really sort of a sickly green. It’s just clear, colored cellophane, so I cut a little snippet off and just taped it to the built-in flash on a little point-and-shoot camera. That way, when you would put the flash on and take a picture, it would bathe you in green. I took some photos with that and liked the effect, but I didn't love the color. This was during the summer, and if there’s a lot of green out there, what’s a good complement to green? The opposite of green would usually be red, but red is a very dense color and not a lot of light gets through, so the next choice was pink. I put pink on and immediately fell in love with the effect. I just could not stop taking pictures that had pink flash on them. That immediately became a really strong throughline in a lot of the work that I've made in the past seven years.

Wow, how rare when something like that just clicks! Beautiful. What's next for your work?

Good question. The peak of summer, where I'd say we are right now, is always a little bit of a lull just because it is so hot and a lot of the work I do is outdoors. A lot of times, I have a camera over my shoulder when I'm on a bike ride or just going for a walk. And that's not super pleasant this time of year. We've had a very, very hot summer, so I'm sneaking in photos where I can and trusting that I'm doing enough to carry myself through. I don’t want to lose the habit of making photos for when cooler temperatures arrive and I'll just be diving back into making work again. Oh, I'm excited to do some long exposure work later today. I’m actually going to a birthday party and I'm excited to take some photos there.

Yay! It's been a while since you've contributed to Bait/Switch. Thank you so much for coming back.

My pleasure.

Do you have any advice for another artist approaching this project for the first time?

Yeah. In the past, I did not spend enough time with the piece before immediately rushing into “All right, what am I making, what am I going to do??” I didn’t sit down with the piece and let it wash over me. It’s funny because I sat down with that intention for this piece, but the inspiration just hit me like a ton of bricks. But I still forced myself to sit for a few minutes, reread the piece. It's very short, so I read it like ten times and really made sure that what had come to me initially was what I wanted to do and not just the first thing I thought of.

Enjoy the piece for what it is. Enjoy the piece of art as if you were seeing it on the wall of a museum or a gallery, or like a friend showed it to you and said, “Hey, I made this.” It is a prompt for you to make work, but just appreciate it first.

Call Number: Y109PP | Y111VA.saI

John Savoia (b. 1986) is a fine arts photographer born and based in Boston. His work explores the self, his neighborhood, and small moments in between the bigger ones.