Introspection Imagined: Kyle Thompson’s Conceptual Surrealism

Kyle Thompson makes wildly intriguing photos that were born of a recreational pastime roaming around and exploring what’s possible in the suburbs of Illinois. In just a few short years since he first picked up a camera, these photos and the online following he’s garnered since (he has more than 100,000 followers on Tumblr as of now, and more than 250,000 likes on Facebook) have solidified him as a full-blown organic conceptual surrealist photographer, a niche genre he defines as reinterpreting the ordinary in an unconventional way. He was even picked up by the award-winning Paris-based photography agency VU’ last year, and he will undoubtedly continue to catapult to serious popularity.

On the other side of that coin is his reputed reserve; a characteristic Thompson is the first to acknowledge—as he’s written on his Twitter page, “Hi, I’m Kyle Thompson and I’m a photographer. I’m really bad at thinking of things to say.” Yet this emerging photographer managed to allow this part of his identity to quasi-contribute to his initial piqued interest in self-portraiture and photography at large.

As a curious 19-year-old college student working as a pizza delivery driver with half-hearted plans to pursue psychology or advertising, Thompson found solace exploring and teaching himself how to take pictures in the rural areas of his native Lisle, Illinois. “I started exploring abandoned houses near me. I’d drive through the countryside and look for broken windows and overgrown lawns,” Thompson explains. “I didn’t know who to take photos of, so I’d shoot myself.”

He soon upped the ante, committing himself to a “365 project” on Flickr, wherein he took one conceptual photo every day and posted it online. And though he “barely knew how to use” his camera at the time, no one was the wiser. Using his Canon 5D Mark II and 50mm f/1.8 and 35mm f/2.0 lenses, Thompson is especially intrigued by the once-civilized emptiness of drive-by landscapes. “Abandoned houses allow me to reconstruct someone’s life without ever meeting them,” he says. “Like a photograph, abandoned houses produce a frozen moment in time.”
Thompson’s exploration of the stagnant is offset by his photos of rousing near-death scenarios, such as being enshrouded in flames. “Fire is so passionate and destructive,” he says. “Being engulfed allows me to release the emotions I work to capture.”

Photography is absolutely an emotional outlet, Thompson concedes, and self-portraiture allows him to explore something more personal. “It’s hard for me to express myself with other models sometimes, because you have to be able to relate,” he explains. “I prefer using self-portraiture for more introspective work and other models for more story-based images.”

Yet it would be safe to say that all of his photos tell a story—or at least they give you the first few lines of it, inviting you to fill in the rest. Thompson seems fascinated by the inherent juxtaposition in the conceptually surreal, between the strict documentarian role that photography plays and the imagined scenarios that can be created from it. “Photography is usually very factual, and conceptual work kind of breaks that barrier,” he says. “It allows me to think more abstractly.”

Thompson identifies his conceptual surreal photography as organic, because though it is not necessarily founded in the surreal, he creates unreal scenarios from conventional objects. This is especially evident in his more minimalist portraits, such as that of him standing in a waist-high river with red balloons floating around him, their strings pulled down into the water, or the one of his head half protruding from a puddle of water. Yet he is no stranger to the technically complex, such as the eerie image of arms reaching and grappling from the depths of a creek.

A broader look at his work reveals another curious trend: Thompson hardly ever shows his entire face or the faces of others, and if he does, eyes almost never meet the lens. The viewer may not see a face at all; perhaps Thompson’s head is covered in cloth as the fabric’s loose end whips and swirls in the air around him. Other times he plays with the viewer, such as when he “accidentally” obstructs his own face as he walks toward the lens through mysteriously foggy darkness.

At the close of his 365 project, Thompson had dropped out of college (as the first of his family to do so), quit his pizza delivery job and set his sights on a new, full-time endeavor: to travel the country taking photos and turn them into a book. The introduction of this new project was very well received; it became more than doubly funded on Kickstarter, so last year, Thompson hit the road for the unexpected.

“I spent six months driving around and living with strangers and out of my car,” Thompson says. “I slept in a ghost town on the cleanest bed I could find and climbed on the supporting structures under a bridge in Baltimore and smoked on rooftops in New York City.”

He spent his days taking conceptual photographs of himself and the people he met along the way, including those who contributed the most to his Kickstarter campaign. “The book is basically a travel memoir showing the strain of experiencing the unfamiliar,” Thompson explains. “The trip really showed me how to embrace the temporary; the images are so fleeting, like the moments and memories used to create them. They exist in a brief moment where they remain, like a small looping section of a story without context.”

The road trip affected him in more ways than one. Earlier this year, Thompson moved to Oregon, his favorite state he visited on the trip, to live with some other photographer friends and continue shooting. As his book is in the final printing stages, Thompson takes no pause before moving on to his next project; he’s working on a new series called “Ghost Town,” and he plans to produce a few short films this year, too. Thompson’s self-published book, an 11 x 13-inch, 120-page hardcover called Somewhere Else, will be available this spring.

See this story in the Digital Edition.