Weirdland by Insituto Artes Visuales

Gregory Credwson Philip Lorca diCorcia Tom Hunter Hannah Starkey

regory Crewdson was born in 1972 in Brooklyn, NY. He is a graduate of SUNY Purchase and the Yale School of Art, where he is now Director of Graduate Studies in Photography.

seum, The Los Angeles County Museum and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

His most widely acclaimed bodies of work have been Natural Wonder, Twilight, Dream House (a 2002 commission by The New York Times MaCrewdsonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s career has spanned three decades. His gazine), Beneath the Roses, and most recently, work has been exhibited widely in the United Sta- Sanctuary. He is currently at work on a new setes and Europe and is included in many public co- ries. llections, including The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Beneath the Roses, a series of pictures that took Museum of American Art, The Brooklyn Mu- nearly ten years to completeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;with a crew of over WEIRDLAND

(Untitled) From “Twilight” Series

one hundred cumulatively—was the subject of the 2012 feature documentary Gregory Crewd- Crewdson’s awards include the Skowhegan Medal for Photography, the National Endowment for son: Brief Encounters, by Ben Shapiro. the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship, and the Aaron A retrospective of Crewdson’s work produced be- Siskind Fellowship. tween 1985 and 2005 toured European museums from 2005–08, and was accompanied by a fully illustrated book published by Hatje Cantz. The recent exhibition “In a Lonely Place” traveled to galleries and museums across Europe, Scandinavia, Australia and New Zealand in 2013. The major monograph Gregory Crewdson was published by Rizzoli International the same year. WEIRDLAND 7

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(Untitled) From “Twilight” Series

There are so many possible narratives for each of your photographs—how important is it to you that your actors share the same narrative for the moment that you do? In the film you gave actors purely physical instructions, i.e., “just open your mouth a little bit” or “move your arm to the edge of the bed,” which didn’t require that they understood your unstated storyline. You let them be lost in their own mood. Gregory Crewdson: I never know what to call the subjects in my pictures because I’m uncomfortable with the word actor. I think maybe subjects might be more accurate—or maybe even more accurate is objects. (Laughs) I’m just kidding. But what’s important to me is that there’s a necessary alienation between me and the subject. I don’t want to know them well. I don’t want to have any intimate contact with them. For all the talk of my pictures being narratives or that they’re about storytelling, there’s really very little actually happening in the pictures. One of the few things I always tell people in my pictures is that I want less—give me something less.

AR: In one of your most famous photographs, the woman sits in a motel with her baby lying beside her. Watching the documentary, we learn that the bathroom is a reconstruction of the bathroom in Psycho. Do you want viewers to recognize these symbols and be subconsciously affected? GC: Right. Well, in that particular case, for me that was the starting point. I started thinking of motel rooms, and I thought of that motel room in Psycho. But that was just a starting point, and through the process of making the picture, the picture changed. I think subconsciously we all have a connection to that imagery and a certain kind of dread. J: Do photographs naturally inspire or have more potential to inspire dread? It’s so interesting that you used that word because I’ve felt that in front of photographs before and I’ve just never put my finger on it. Is there just something about a still image?

GC: That’s an interesting proposition. I do think that dread is about a certain kind of expectation. And the fact that a picture can never resolve itself the Since a photograph is frozen and mute, since there way a movie can—maybe that’s a specific kind of is no before and after, I don’t want there to be a dread that becomes associated with a picture. conscious awareness of any kind of literal narrative. And that’s why I really try not to pump up motivation J: In one scene of the documentary, you’re just or plot or anything like that. I want to privilege the driving around scouting for a location, and you say moment. something like, “How strange, what is that?” And soon this becomes your location. That way, the viewer is more likely to project their own narrative onto the picture. That strangeness, that moment of curiosity—would you describe that as the point of departure for your J: Is projection something that you’re trying to elicit? photos? GC: What the viewer brings to it is almost more GC: That’s a good question. When we were shooting important than what I bring to it. the documentary, I was never conscious of filming except for when I was location scouting. In a I’m very moved by the fact that people are drawn way, that is the most important part of the entire into the pictures and that they do bring their process—and the most private. I’m so used to doing own history and their own interpretation to the that alone. Unlike every other part, it’s just me, photograph. I think that’s why they work in a certain alone, on location. way.

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(Untitled) From “Beneath the Roses”

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(Untitled) From “Twilight” Series

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diCorcia O

ne of the most influential and innovative photographers working today, Philip-Lorca diCorcia is known for creating images that are poised between documentary and theatrically staged photography. His practice takes everyday occurrences beyond the realm of banality, infusing what would otherwise appear to be insignificant gestures with psychology and emotion. DiCorcia employs photography as a fictive medium capable of creating uncanny, complex realities out of seemingly straightforward compositions. As such, his work is based on the dichotomy between fact and fiction and asks the viewer to question the assumed truths that the photographic image offers. WEIRDLAND

Born in 1951 in Hartford, Connecticut, diCorcia attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and received his M.F.A. from Yale University in 1979. Since 2007, his work has been represented by David Zwirner, where he has had three solo exhibitions at the gallery in New York: Thousand (2009); Eleven (2011); and Hustlers (2013), which coincided with the publication of a large-scale book by steidldangin, also titled Hustlers. On view April 2 to May 2, 2015, the gallery in New York presented the artist’s ongoing East of Eden series, marking its United States debut after it was first shown in 2013 at David Zwirner, London.

In 2013, a major career-spanning survey of diCorcia’s work, consisting of over one hundred photographs from six series, was organized by the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. The exhibition traveled later that year to the Museum De Pont, Tilburg, The Netherlands, followed by The Hepworth Wakefield, England in 2014, and marked the most comprehensive presentation of his work in Europe to date. Other museum solo exhibitions include those presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2008) and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2007). In 1993, the artist’s first museum solo exhibition was organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

W, March 2000, #12 Phlip Lorca DiCorcia

Works by diCorcia are held in public collections internationally, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina SofĂa, Madrid; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum De Pont, Tilburg, The Netherlands; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Gallery, London; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He lives and works in New York, and serves as Senior Critic at Yale University.

Brian Scott, 24 years old, San Marco, California

Taken just over twenty years ago in Los Angeles in the vicinity of Santa Monica Boulevard, it features male prostitutes posing for the camera for a fee loosely equivalent to what they would charge for their sexual services. DiCorcia paid the subjects with grant money awarded to him by the National Endowment for the Arts, a bold gesture during the controversial years that witnessed censorship of NEA-supported exhibitions by Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, and other artists.

Cain and Abel Abraham, Philp Lorca diCorcia

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Ike Cole, 38 years old, Los Angeles, Philip Lorca diCorcia

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Each of his series, Hustlers, Streetwork, Heads, a Storybook Life and Lucky Thirteen caught the public’s imagination with their sense of drama and distinctive use of lighting. Works by diCorcia are held in public collections internationally, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Museum of Modern Art, New York and many more. Q: How did you work respond to 9/11?

It’s about the loss of innocence. People started out believing there are weapons of mass destruction, that they would never have to pay their mortgage back, that they could borrow against the house that they didn’t even own and buy another car, and the people that sold them these ideas knew all along that it was not true. It’s no different than the devil tempting Adam and Eve. It was a temptation and I believe that the consequence was that they were cast east of Eden. It’s a classic story and they suffered: they were meant to suffer as a result of it. I believe that the whole world suffered as a result of the economic crisis and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. And once again, the people who were most directly responsible for it didn’t take any responsibility; as the devil never does. It just seemed obvious.

Initially, I had no idea how to respond. It seemed a bigger issue than photography could encompass. So I didn’t even try to directly approach it. In Lucky 13, the models are all supposed to be upside down, falling. I just had an extremely visceral reaction to the people that had to jump out of the windows, from the 80th floor or something like that. I thought about “I just had an extrethis a lot. I don’t know how I made the connection to this ex- mely visceral reaccept I just connected this idea tion to the people of sex and death. In mythology they are connected as they that had to jump are in the Freudian psycholoout of the window” gy, they’re inextricable. I’m not sure Eros and Thanatos are brothers in Greek mythology Q: With your street photograbut they are related. phy, how involved did you bePhilip-Lorca diCorcia at the come with the ethics of your set-ups and of taking pictures Hepworth Wakefield of people unawares? 5 show all Q: Your most recent project, East Eden, is a response to the banking crisis. Do you have a sense of apocalypse, now?

Very few of those people ever got in touch with me. In a public place like Times Square or Piccadilly Circus, there is no expectation of privacy. How

many cameras are in Piccadilly? The idea that they were photographed without their knowledge doesn’t bother me at all. The issue in the case of the Hasidic man was that I sold the photograph and I made money from it. I have to say I wouldn’t particularly like that happening to me, just because I don’t like the idea of my face on somebody else’s wall. But I have to maintain my right to do it. Is that hypocritical: I wouldn’t want that to happen to me, but I maintain my right to do it? I don’t think it’s hypocritical. Do you remember when you first picked up a camera? I think my father bought a camera for himself but he couldn’t figure out how to use it, so he gave it to me. I was in High School. It was a Pentax, 35mm. With you series Hustlers, what made you think to choose male prostitutes as the subject matter for your first project? I had lived in Los Angeles. I was completely aware of what was going on because I had a gay friend who was always partaking of it, you might say. That was before the Aids crisis. When that happened and the

was the government repression of work by Robert Mapplethorpe, for instance. It also coincided with the death of my brother from Aids. I put a lot of things together and there was also a theoretical thing. Photography is an exchange: they give you something and you give them something. I decided to monetise that. I didn’t pay anyone before that. But a lot of people thought that it was unethical to pay people. So I got a certain amount of grief from people, not because of the subject matter but because it’s almost a documentary realm, seeking out the other side of their lives. But I didn’t really seek it out: I never went home with them; I never really knew anything about them. The whole relationship started and ended in a couple of hours. There was money exchanged and that was, I think, within the photographic community, criticised.

Q: Do you know what became of any of the subjects? Yeah, I heard a few things. No one became a senator. Usually you hear that they’ve died. Q: You’ve spoken about the Disneyfication of places like Times Square. Do you worry that the street culture is being lost in places like New York City and London? I don’t know if you could do what I did. The police would probably stop you. You are not allowed to photograph bridges or government buildings or anything that might be considered scouting for terrorism. People are very wary of that. The other thing is that these places have become tourist traps and you can hardly move.

still space for a photographer to come along with high production values and expensive lighting? You can still do expensive lighting and high production values with a digital camera. It’s the ones that don’t use digital who are going to have a problem. Right now, I include myself among them. Everything has been eliminated. Polaroid doesn’t exist anymore, Kodak is bankrupt: they are all going under.

Q: With the advances in digital technology, do you think there is

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HUNTER

om Hunter is the only artist to have a solo photography exhibition at the National Gallery. His work has also been shown at the V&A, the White Cube and the Serpentine Gallery. Ahead of a group show at Tryon St Gallery, Tom talks to us about photographing friends and taking inspiration from art history… Your work has often involved your friends as subjects. What should

you keep in mind when photographing people you know? You have a responsibility when you photograph anyone – it’s their image and not your plaything. If you take images of your friends and you take advantage of them – cast them in a bad light – that will come back to you. You can lose friends like that. My work is all about giving dignity to my subjects, so I work to keep

them involved in a dialogue. I keep to this working practice even when photographing strangers; there is little comeback, but this allows me to sleep soundly at night. What are the advantages of concentrating your artistic efforts closer to home, as you have with your long-term focus on Hackney? The best thing about working locally is that you get under the skin of

your subject. Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re not just scraping the surface and making predictable, stereotypical images.. Spending years with the same location opens up depths and dimensions that many people overlook. Your images frequently reference art history â&#x20AC;&#x201C; either specific works or conventions of form. Why did you develop this

approach? I love history, especially art history. By taking on strategies in art practice, I can make references to different times and places. Taking photography out of the everyday and into a different context makes the viewer think about contemporary life in a more dynamic and diverse way. By putting a squatter

into a Vermeer pose [see image below], the current situation is given an historical context, which can lift the status of the squatter and make their plight become universal rather than just a tabloid headline.

A Woman asleep 1997

Living in hell,1998

Increasingly, photographers are exploring the line between fiction and documentary. What’s the relationship between the two in your work? There has always been this tension in photography; it’s one of its inherent qualities. Photography is a lie, as soon as a photographer takes out his camera the situation changes but everyone believes in the WEIRDLAND

truth of the photograph. When I create images I try to make the viewer realise the image is a construction by using devices like historical postures. It’s the same way Brecht makes you aware of the stage while at the same time suspending your notions of disbelief in his plays. So in my photographs you are taken to a real place, but then this notion is turned on its head when you learn its reference.

That’s an exciting tension. How has your way of working changed since you started out? Very little really – I’m a dinosaur, I still shoot on large format sheet film with a huge camera. I don’t believe digital is as good at producing 5ft x 4ft photographs. It’s great for magazines and the internet but large scale photographic prints in a gallery, shot on large format film.

The Art of Squatting

Katy Barron: Your new and taking. I got a bored book includes images that of ‘what lens have you i haven’t seen before, all got? of which are made using a pinhole camera. Can you explain your “I´m doing choice of the pinhole for everything that you these particular images of religious spaces and street shouldn’t do and you’re told not to markets in Hackney?

do as a photograTom Hunter: I suppose it’s pher” just trying to create an atmosphere, and showing the opposite way of working, so you are just working very slowly and [the pinhole] collects rather than grabs. You can just put the pinhole down and it slowly absorbs the scene rather than grabbing

How many megapixels have you got? How big’s your camera?’. This is just a lovely way of working with people as you have to get permission, you have to talk to people, to have

dialogue. It absorbs and there isn’t anything fancy about it, it’s not about the product. KB: The resulting image lacks the manic atmosphere [of the street market] and purifies it almost or distils it. They have a very painterly quality as the light and colour become extremely rich. TH: I’m doing everything that you shouldn’t do and you’re told not to do as a photographer. Using the wrong type of film with the wrong type of lighting, doing overly long exposures for the film to cope with, not using the lens, Midsummer night dream

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not using the flash. If you read early books about photography they advise that you have to use the flash and particular film and filters and shorter exposures. Otherwise you get these strange hues and distortions around the edges. KB: Presumably these are the effects that you are looking for in this work?

need any of those things. The image looks beautiful as it is. The irony is that this is how we see with our eye, and photography is made to try and escape all that, to make it very pure and this work is pure in a very different way. KB: Are you being deliberately anarchic? TH: Once you understand the rules of photoTH: Exactly â&#x20AC;&#x201C; you donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t graphy so well, through

teaching and being part of it, you get bored of it. If you understand the rules they become very boring and then you are in a position to play with them and understand why they are there. Actually the rules are quite dull and when you break them you can do amazing things. KB: To turn to your work

Midsummer night dream

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that was recently in the National Gallery exhibition Seduced by Art. How far do you feel other photographers, apart from yourself, have made work that is so deliberately based upon paintings from the canon of Western art?It was as like a Communist revolution, stating ‘we don’t belong to the past and we have no relationship with it, and photography must be seen in its own right’. And they tried to sever the link, because photography in the 19th century was very much linked to painting, which they did very successfully. It came to a point in the 1990s when some practitioners became frustrated that photography could only be one way of looking at the world; 35mm hand-held. People began to question this and started looking back and re-interpreting photography so that it became more experimental. KB: It seems to me that young photographers don’t position themselves within the history of art WEIRDLAND

and don’t feel that they are part of a trajectory. I think that you do and are happy to use the past to inform the present in the creation of something very contemporary but few photographers are comfortable with that connection. TH: There are a lot of photographers who are scared of the word ‘art’ or ‘artist’ and have taken up photography because it doesn’t have those pretentious connotations. There is an idea that art is un-masculine. KB: But you are very happy to be associated with Art?

“Photography in the 19th century was linked to painting, which they did very successfully” TH: Absolutely. I just see photography as another tool to express yourself and to represent the world around you. Artists have done it through cave painting etc and then the camera came along, then moving cameras came

along, then video came along. To put photography in this small ghetto has always worried me. Photography to me is important. I love the medium, and it is unique in that it’s the only medium where everyone thinks it has a direct relationship to reality, an unfettered relationship. I believe that it has got an indexical link to reality in some respects but its always monitored and edited through the human mind and hand. Everyone thinks they can judge a photograph, take a picture, view a picture. You can take the best picture in the world as a five-year old kid. You can walk down the street, trip up, press a button and just in front of you there’s a policeman lying on top of someone with a knife in their throat. If the same person tried to accidentally make a sculpture or painting or to write about it, it would be very hard to do.

Midsummer night dream

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Midsummer night dream

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Hannah Starkey B

ritish photographer. She studied in Edinburgh at Napier University (1992–5) and at the Royal College of Art, London (1996–7). Starkey’s earliest work, produced in the mid-1990s, suggested a conventional documentary approach and was often characterised by a preoccupation with the resonance of ordinary objects. In her later work she began to capture more portentous scenes, recording activities with an almost theatrical character. Untitled – March 1999 (1999; see Frieze, Sept/Oct 2000, p. 89), part of theUntitled series begun in 1997, is typical of her mature work, both in its ostensible subject of two women and in the enigmatic mood of the piece, which is set in a public lavatory with a series of mirrors multiplying perspectives. Untitled – January 2000 (2000; see

2000 exh. cat., pl. VII) also takes as its subject two women in an urban setting, this time a video store, while again a dramatic perspective is established through the architecture of the interior. Often, the young women in Starkey’s photographs seem bored and melancholic and appear to be waiting for time to pass; she has described her work as ‘explorations of everyday experiences and observations of inner city life from a female perspective’. A number of her photographs have been set out of doors, sometimes seeming to carry with them a quasi-religious symbolism or a sense of the artificiality of nature, as in Butterfly Catchers (2000; seeFrieze, Sept/ Oct 2000, p. 89)

DC Could we start by discussing ideas about time in relation to your photographs? Although photographs depend on time and the exposure time of a photograph can be longer than the running time of a film, photography isn’t a temporal art. If you close your eyes in front of a photograph, you don’t - unlike film - miss part of the work. Even if one works in these ‘cinematic’ or ‘directorial’ ways, this is a defining constraint. The result will be a static image, even if it implies a narrative.

HS Yes.

DC These are all things that give the works in this show a certain internal coherence that is punctured by those that show a person who has been caught mid-step. People then appear awkward in ways they don’t when they’re composed and still. HS The moment is more contained in a way.

DC Right, but it’s also more expansive. You could almost imagine the works as short films in which characters don’t move… HS Yes, yes absolutely. I think what this also does is direct your attention to the inner life of the subject because they’re not actively doing anything. When we are in repose we’re not animated. I find this more interesting; it’s more contemplative, meditative even. It’s introspective in terms of the character’s meaning, though the location that you’re developing gives you information that may or may not allude to her psychological state. So I suppose in some ways she becomes a vessel for all that reading of information.

DC So there is something significant about the fact that most of the images don’t depict movement, right? HS Yes.

“Though the characters of the subjects are quite generalised and you wouldn’t relate to their experience as an individual so much”

“When we are in repose we’re not animated” HS From my perspective this is the challenge, because you have to build the image so that it can allude to movement. I suppose this is naturally how we think about narrative. I have to make it so that the picture isn’t a set of contradictions. It has to be nothing and everything. It’s a fleeting moment, yet it’s a scene that is so still that it seems to continue. It’s trying to get the balance of those contradictions into the single image that evokes some of the references to film, or painting I suppose.

DC This would be one very clear difference between your work and Jeff Wall’s, say, in which there are often pictures, like Diatribe, where two people are walking down a dirt road speaking to each other. That’s also something you don’t do - depict speech. WEIRDLAND

DC ‘She’ being whoever the sitter is?

HS Right, because it’s almost always a ‘she’…I think it is as simple as trying to capture a different type of interaction with the everyday, one that’s slowed down, motionless even, and just observed. Though the characters of the subjects are quite generalised and you wouldn’t relate to their experience as an individual so much.

think of smoke in the same terms as you think about the mirrors?

DC Let’s talk about some of the other themes of the work; perhaps we could start with mirrors and windows and what sort of work they do in the images?

HS And reflections - it’s interesting to play with the law of optics. Sometimes there will be something uncomfortable about a picture, something that interrupts your acceptance of the image.

“There are many variables that determine what occupies the space of the mirror”

HS Yes, probably.

DC Because when I look at the images, smoking is a bit of a theme in your work.

DC So what is it, then, that prevents us accepting an image? What makes an image uncomfortable in such a way that when we look at it, it doesn’t seem right?

HS Well, that’s two things, actually. Even with the laws of optics and physics, surfaces like mirrors, reflective surfaces and HS If you think about how we look at smoke, they’re all fluid. And because of all pictures, how we look at the composition, the variables like exposure, time... how our eye travels through the picture: DC Focal length, depth of field? the area in the picture that is a window or a mirror is a route of escape - I mean for the HS ...yes, and movement. We know, subconscious mind travelling through the picture. We know the properties of a mirror, even given our expectations of the reflechow it reflects. But there are many variables tions, that there are also areas beyond our that determine what occupies the space of understanding and preconceived knowledge. the mirror. Because it’s not a concrete space within the picture, it allows abstraction into the picture. It’s a vehicle for allowing abstraction into the everyday. The same with smoke. There are certain materials that have a very fluid quality. They are open to interpretation. With so many variables: wind, condensation, all those sort of things, they remain open-ended...

“There are also areas beyond our understanding and preconceived knowledge”

DC That’s really interesting. So you WEIRDLAND

DC Right, so it’s a lure of some sort?

leads the eye into the right areas.

HS Yes, it’s where you move into projecting your own ideas or thoughts of the image or the situation

“Mirror reflections for me are a really good analogy for my photography”

DC You mean there’s always something more to see? HS Yes, absolutely. Given the nature of smoke there’s always something more to see. It’s hypnotic to watch. And when you’re making a static two-dimensional image it’s interesting to allude to movement, or to a presence that isn’t actually in the space pictured, but in a reflection. It’s also very interesting to control how a reflection or shape in the smoke then works into the composition of the image and

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DC Two thoughts I had about the mirrors, and I don’t think this is in any way novel, is that they are almost figures for photography in the work. They are pictures in the work, and they are pictures that picture by capturing the world’s reflection.

HS Mirror reflections for me are a really good analogy for my photography because they picture the interior and exterior on one plane. DC Interior and the exterior in the sense of what’s outside the image reflected in the mirror? HS Yes. What surrounds the person. Mirrors, reflections more generally, are the only way we see ourselves in the world outside photography.

“Mirrors are the only way we see ourselves in the world outside photography”

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THE OTHER SIDE OF LIFE