Photography Essay

Heath Ledger

I recently watched a documentary on Heath Ledger and in between the acting and great achievement was a bit of photography that he had done and it turns out he was a huge photographer and only did this become apparent after his death. Heath was a freer Dickinson, never revealing his creative color except for in his films. I was fascinated that he would spend time on a secret art. When the documentary actually got to his pictures it was apparent that he was one of the rare people that felt and fought to be free. His photography is often filtered with his playful multimedia touches or should I say scratches. There is a deep and true youthful action and movement in his images because of the style of multimedia but also what he does with it. Ledger utilizes scratching off ink from paper and sharpie doodlings to ornament his already emotionally vibrant pictures. No fantasmal amount of skill or unattainable tools, only a quarter used to scrape at the print and a couple pens. This is expression, the unarticulate but completely inspiring expression of a person who is already expressing in other manners such as in his films. In his images there is a sense of anti-technique that lends itself to the idea that human expression, human existence is dirty, over exposed and blurred but the colored in bits, the invented magic makes the beauty. There is an ambiguity of his images that adds to the playfulness of it all: the duality of the wild whim creations with the defined emotion and meaning. Heath Ledger’s history in terms of his photographic career is fairly unknown. Although we see his work and see him in his movies that is about the extent. He never gave artist statements and didn’t even publish his work which adds to that mystery of it all but also to the intrigue and depth of his work. This itch of his to create visually has inspired me to move and his ignorance of rules and standards has inspired me to melt and mold as I see fit. There are collections upon collections of Ledger’s work that are undocumented and unpublished which is a shame but it matters less than the fact that he created them in the first place. The philosophy he maintained of mumbling his feelings through babbles of ink flowing over desolate paper and the obvious individuality of rule breaking and heart warming has inspired me just as much as the actual products he has created. I chose him as my photographer to write about just like I chose Walt Whitman as my favorite poet, they are artistically equal in their own free verse, counter traditional fashion.