Still

STILL

Still Magazine Chicago, IL Spring 2015 Edition Creative Director & Designer: Dianne Lombard Cover Photo: Eddie O’Keefe ‘Palm-Neon’

CONTENT

3 22 40

Interview with Stephaniae Gonot

12

Interview with Eddie O’Keefe

Paul Graham: Photography is Easy, Photography is Difficult

30

Interview with Elinor Carucci

John Berger: Understanding a Photograph

44

Interview with Todd Hido

3 STEPHA N I E G O N OT Interview by : Pauline Magnenat

Where is your studio exactly and how long have you been working there?

My “studio” used to be my living room, but I recently moved my photographic operations into a space in the fashion/ warehouse district in downtown Los Angeles. I share the studio with two super talented friends from Chicago, art director/production designer/artist Adi Goodrich and builder extraordinaire Eric Johnson.

What are the pros and cons of your studio?

Pros, we can play music as loud as we want. Cons, the car stereo shops the next street over can play music as loud as they want. Haha, but really, the studio’s in a pretty colorful area, which is both good and bad. It can be sketchy at night but we’re right next to a super crazy Mexican piñata street and just adjacent to the rad textile and flower districts, so it’s easy for me to go out and grab fun props, or just walk/ drive around for inspiration.

How many hours do you usually spend there per week?

I have a day job as an artists’ rep, so I really only make it to the studio a few nights a week and weekends. This last month has been really hectic with shoots and a photography show I curated, so studio time was sporadic, but I hope to have regular studio days now that things have calmed down.

Do you have your own daily routine within the studio?

For example, do you usually start by answering your emails then get to work etc?

I do all my computer stuff at home, so studio time is just

for shooting… and maybe drinking a beer or two. I keep my lights and backdrop set up, and I have a rack of food and other props, so I just show up with my camera and get to work!

Are there things you deliberately forbid yourself to do/ have within the studio in order to be more productive?

My area of the studio is pretty minimal, just the things I need for making pictures, so I don’t have many distractions.

When I used to shoot from home I would shoot a bit and, if it wasn’t working out just right, I would go watch an episode of something on my computer. Or I would go relax before cleaning up, which is a problem when you’re working with mounds of ice cream (I went to read a book once instead of cleaning up first and I heard a splash… Melted Rite Aid cotton candy ice cream all over the floor). Having a studio makes me get it all done at once AND clean up after myself immediately, and then I go home to edit. It’s a tidier way of working, in more ways than one.

Do you sometimes wish you had your own studio?

What are the pros and cons of sharing your workspace with someone else?

I need to have some noise and movement around me to get stuff done, and it’s especially helpful when that noise and movement is coming from others getting work done as well, so I love sharing the space! Except when I find my “art food” missing… Then I’m pissed.

What is your favorite track to edit photos to?

I love comedy and I also love jazz, so you can usually find me editing to episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia...

//2013

12 EDDIE O’KEEFE Interview by : Elliot Morgan

Eddie O’Keefe was born and raised in Terre Haute, Indiana on the 4th July, 1993. Prior to his discovery of photography, O’Keefe was a nationally renowned demolition derby driver who had won four Coors Light Trophies and a Vigo County Fair Blue Ribbon for motorsport excellence.

O’Keefe’s passion for photography was born in the wake of a nearly-fatal demolition derby accident which left him blind in one eye. With his derby dreams on hold, O’Keefe picked up his father’s old Nikon and began shooting images around his home town. He never stopped. He credits photography for saving his life.

“I was so bored in Terre Haute after the crash, I thought I might just die. Then I came to photos and it really saved my life. Otherwise I don’t know where I’d be right now. Maybe a manager at the Kroger Foods, out on Fort Harrison Road, if I was lucky.”

How did your career in film/photography begin?

Which came first?

I used to be a demolition derby driver in Indiana where I grew up. I did pretty well at that, I made a living. But then I got in a wreck a few years back, got a concussion and I broke a few bones and pretty much lost my vision in one eye and my wife made me promise once I was better that I would quit the biz and never go back to demolition sports. So I took up photos. And I was just natural with the camera I guess.

Do you think working on video and photography go hand in hand, or are they completely different?

I like photo taking more, video feels more like a job for me for some reason. Photos are freer.

What do you believe makes a good photograph?

Gotta like walking around by yourself and gotta have a good pair a shoes to do so.

What photographers/filmmakers do you admire?

Well I saw a book once by a guy named Danny Lyon and it had all these real good shots of motorcycle guys in the sixties and that was cool. I like William Eggleston a lot. I basically rip him off, that’s really what I do. I saw a Diana Arbus exhibit once at a museum and that was neat too. As far as younger dudes are concerned, I really dig Petra Collins, Kevin Hayes, Delaney Teichler and some others can be okay too.

What influences you?

I like colors. I like when the sun is blasting on something and it makes anything look good. Old buildings. Old signs. Old cars. My shadow. Interesting faces. Blood. American stuff. Old west stuff. Route 66 stuff. The sky. Coca-Cola. Louie Louie. Guns. Hot Ladies.

Do you have any upcoming projects?

I made a movie called Shangri-La Suite that will come out next year at some point hopefully. It’s about these Bonnie and Clyde lover types who set out to kill Elvis Presley in 1974. It’s got lots of good action and some romance for the ladies too.

//2014

22 It’s so easy it’s ridiculous. It’s so easy that I can’t even begin – I just don’t know where to start. After all, it’s just looking at things... We all do that. It’s simply a way of recording what you see – point the camera at it, and press a button. How hard is that? And what’s more, in this digital age, it’s free – it doesn’t even cost you the price of film. It is so simple and basic, it’s ridiculous.

It is hard because it is everywhere, every place, all the time, even right now. It’s the view of this pen in my hand as I write this, it’s an image of your hands holding this book, Drift your consciousness up and out of this text and see: it’s right there, across the room– there… and there.

Then it’s gone. You didn’t photograph it, because you didn’t think it was worth it.

And now it’s too late, that moment has evaporated. But another one has arrived,

instantly. Now. Because life is flowing through and around us, rushing onwards and onwards, in every direction.

But if it’s everywhere and all of the time, and so easy to make, then what’s of value of it? Which pictures matter? Is it the hard won photo, knowing, controlled, previsualised? Yes. Or are those images considered contrived, dry and belabored?

Sometimes. Is it the offhand snapshot made on a whim? For sure. Or is that just a lucky observation? Or is it just some random moment caught by chance?

Maybe. Is it an intuitive expression of liquid intelligence? Exactly. Or the distillation of years of looking seeing thinking photography. Definitely. “life’s single lesson: there is more accident to it than a man can admit to in a lifetime, and stay sane”

– Thomas Pynchon, V

PHOTOGRAPHY IS EASY, PHOTOGRAPHY IS DIFFICULT Paul Graham / 09

Ok, so how do I make sense of that never ending flow, the fog that covers life here and now. How do I see through that, how do I cross that boundary? Do I walk down the street and make pictures of strangers, do I make a drama-tableaux with my friends, do I only photograph my beloved, my family, myself? Or maybe I should just photograph the land, the rocks and trees – they don’t move or complain or push back. The old houses?

The new houses? Do I go to a war zone on the other side of the world, or just to the corner store, or not leave my room at all?

or Atget or… so you shouldn’t expect it. The more preplanned it is the less room for surprise, for the world to talk back, for the idea to find itself, allowing ambivalence and ambiguity to seep in, and sometimes those are more important than certainty and clarity. The work often says more than the artist knows.

Yes and yes and yes. That’s the choice you are spoiled for, but just don’t let it stop you. Be aware of it, but don’t get stuck – relax, it’s everything and everywhere.

You will find it, and it will find you, just start, somehow, anyhow, but: start.

Ok, but my photography doesn’t always fit into the neat, coherent projects, so maybe I need to just roll freeform around this world, unfettered, able to photograph whatever and whenever: the sky, my feet, the coffee in my cup, the flowers I just noticed, my friends and lovers, and, because it’s all my life, surely it will make sense? Perhaps. Sometimes that works, sometimes it is indulgent, but really it your choice, because you are also free to not make ‘sense’.

Yes, but shouldn’t I have a clear coherent theme, surely I have to know what I’m doing first? That would be nice, but I doubt Robert Frank knew what it all meant when he started, or for that matter Cindy Sherman or Robert Mapplethorpe

“so finally even this story is absurd, which is an important part of the point, if any, since that it should have none whatsoever seems part of the point too” – Malcolm Lowry,

Ghostkeeper.

Paul Graham

Ok, so I do need time to think about this.

To allow myself that freedom for a short time. A couple of years. Maybe I won’t find my answer, but I will be around others who understand this question, who have reached a similar point. Maybe I will start on the wrong road, or for the wrong reasons – because I liked cameras, because I thought photography was an easy option, but if I’m forced to try, then perhaps I’ll stumble on some little thing, that makes a piece of sense to me, or simply just feels right. If I concentrate on that, then maybe it grows, and in its modest, ineffable way, begins to matter. Like photographing ArabAmericans in the USA as human beings with lives and hopes and families and feelings, straight, gay, young, old, with all the humanity that Hollywood never grants them. Or the black community of New Haven, who are do inexplicable joyous crazy theatrical-charades that explode my preconceptions into a thousand tiny pieces. Or funny-disturbing-sad echoes of a snapshot of my old boyfriend. Or the anonymous suburban landscape of upstate in a way that defies the spectacular images we’re addicted to. Or… how women use

our bodies to display who we believe we should be, Or… “A Novel? No, I don’t have the endurance any more. To write a novel, you have to be like Atlas, holding up the whole world on your shoulders, and supporting it there for months and years, while its affairs work themselves out…”

– J. M. Coetzee, Diary

of a Bad Year.

And hopefully I will carry on, and develop it, because it is worthwhile. carry on because it matters when other things don’t seem to matter so much: the money job, the editorial assignment, the fashion shoot.

Then one day it will be complete enough to believe it is finished. Made. Existing.

Done. And in its own way: a contribution, and all that effort and frustration and time and money will all fall away. It was worth it, because it is something real, that didn’t exist before you made it exist: a sentient work of art and power and sensitivity, that speaks of this world and your fellow human beings place within it. Isn’t that beautiful?

Catharine Maloney

Colin Smith

Martin Parr

Chris Verene

Elinor Carucci

30 ELINOR C A R U C C I Interview by : Aaron Schuman

When did you begin to take photographs, and when did you first include your family within your work?

Have you ever found it difficult to reveal your personal life to others, or did it come naturally?

It was more or less at the same time. One afternoon when I was fifteen, I had nothing to do, so I borrowed my father’s camera.

My mom was having a nap, and I took pictures of her as she was waking up. It really got me, so I took more pictures of my mom and my family. Then, after I did the Israeli army for two years, I started my BFA at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, in Jerusalem.

It really came naturally. It’s weird because, not only does it come naturally, but also sharing those moments – even the flaws in our lives and bodies – is somehow comforting to me.

While you were studying did you experiment beyond your family, or did you continue to concentrate on them?

No, actually when I started I wasn’t taking pictures about my family at all; I didn’t think that it was serious enough. It was only after about a year and a half that one of my professors noticed that I was using my mom or aunt in all of my assignments, whether it was fashion or landscape. I’d been talking a lot about trying to bring intimacy and emotions into my work, and he remembered some of the images from my application portfolio, so he said, ‘You can bring this into your work through your family; you don’t have to avoid them.’ He gave me the confidence that it was legitimate to photograph my family, so I went back to it.

Was that the first time that someone had responded so positively to those photographs?

When I was sixteen I took a photography course in Jerusalem, and it was very meaningful. The teacher, Avi Sabag – who’s now the director of the Naggar School of Photography, and a very important figure in the Israeli photo-world – was very supportive of those images. After feeling so mediocre in the other things that I was studying – dance, drama, and so on – suddenly he responded to my photography, and told me that I was talented. So I owe him a big one.

Did your relationships change when the camera began to be a part of your life?

The situations changed – the camera was there and we responded to it. I don’t know if the relationships really changed; if anything, it made us closer and communicate more, so maybe it enhanced what was already there.

Do you feel that the resulting photographs are genuine, or are they performances for a camera?

They’re really genuine. They’re so genuine that I myself am struck by the truths that they tell me. That’s not to say that they’re not planned sometimes; I will go back to a situation or shoot in a certain light. But if they’re false or we’re pretending to the camera – which does happen from time to time – it doesn’t work, and I don’t publish them. So they’re really honest, but not always spontaneous.

There’s a long lineage of photographers who have famously focused on their family. Is that history something that’s informed your work at all?

Of course I’m aware of other people’s photographs, and I really admire their work; Emmet Gowin, Richard Billingham, Sally Mann, Tierney Gearon and so on. I can’t name one person that’s been a major influence, but I love the work of many photographers, and that includes a lot of amateur work too. I respond to family images of all sorts, professional and vernacular.

//2009

How would you define the difference between the two?

The difference is in the quality – light, composition and so on. Not just anyone can take a picture like Emmet Gowin or Nicholas Nixon; those are great photographs, even if you don’t look at the emotional content of the pictures. But you can also see a lot of what’s happening in a family within a snapshot or family album. And sometimes, because of the naivety of the image, you just believe it more because the person who was taking it wasn’t thinking about lighting, or ISO, or the gallery where it will eventually be shown. The picture was just taken, and then allowed to come through.

But the family album is certainly as much of a fiction as any other photographic construct.

Yes. But even by seeing what someone is trying to present to the camera – which exists in both professional and amateur photography – you can learn a lot about a family.

In recent years, you’ve shifted from photographing your parents and partner, to photographing your children. You must be aware of the controversies that have surrounded the photographing of children, particularly in recent decades. Was that a consideration, and did you find it difficult to resolve these issues for yourself?

Yes, it was very difficult, and it’s still difficult. It was the first time I wasn’t photographing adults and I found it very different, in that as children they cannot understand the meaning of exposing our lives, and they cannot validly agree to it. So I found that I was censoring myself a lot more than before. I also had a lot of conversations, with my family and even child psychologists, about how and what to do. Eventually we came to the perfect solution – I must continue with my work and who I am, but I also have to alter the way that I edit the pictures.

What’s an example of a way in which you’ve censored yourself in this work?

Usually it’s nudity that can be problematic, so I censor some of that out of the work. I’m completely behind everything that I’m showing, but it’s not only about me anymore, so I’m trying to do it the right way. I accept that I’m a mother and therefore my children will eventually rebel against me, but hopefully they’ll understand that we all have limits and weaknesses.

Your previous work was very much about you in particular – there’s a certain self-centeredness about it. But it seems that with the children you’ve expanded your vision quite a bit.

I really do feel that I have expanded – physically, visually, and mentally. It is something different. They are all of me. It’s really hard to explain, but every parent will understand. It’s just what happens with motherhood, and I’ve followed what happens naturally. So I’m glad it shows.

How do your children respond to your photographs?

It’s such a part of their lives, so they’re really used to it. I had an opening in New York a few months ago, and many people said to them, ‘Congratulations on the show!’ So they came over to me, and were like, ‘Mom, there’s a show going on somewhere. Let go find the show!’ I tried to tell them that people were referring to the images on the wall, but because I’m a very silly mom and behave like a clown with them a lot of the time, they looked at me and were like, ‘Mom, you’re so silly.’ So they don’t really understand, and they haven’t yet discovered that other children don’t do the same thing. The beauty is that if they’re crying with a runny nose, it’s not something they want to hide. It’s a part of life, and when we’re looking at the pictures I tell them that I’m trying to capture the whole spectrum of emotions – our lives as they are, with both the good and bad moments - and hope that they’ll understand.

What’s it like to be in a relationship with another photographer?

He went to school with me for photography, but he doesn’t do photography for a living. That said, he’s a very big part of what I do, and I couldn’t imagine sharing my life with someone who wasn’t as involved. He’s the one person who sees the work before it’s edited, and for me, that’s really seeing me naked. He sees everything – the bad pictures, the ones that look false, those with bad light or bad exposures – all the horrible images I take. It’s a part of our togetherness. He also sees the whiny side of me as an artist – all the complaining about this and that, which is not the most noble side of me and what I do.

Do you think that there is a difference in the way that male and female photographers make work about the family?

There’s definitely a difference in the way that men and women parent they’re children. And what having a child does to a woman is very different from what it does to a man. But because I want to keep my male friends and avoid arguments with husband, I’m not going to go into this too deeply. It’s a different thing for men, so their work about it is different. For a woman it’s a total kind of experience; it really takes all of you, from your body, to your mind, to the erotic and sensual parts of you. It all goes to the children. So I think that it’s just more extreme for women, and it shows in their work.

You became very successful at quite an early point in your career. Have you ever felt any pressure from the expectations that have been placed on you as a young artist?

I don’t know, because I put so much pressure on myself that I don’t know exactly where the pressure is coming from, and it’s not necessarily connected to success. It’s just a pressure to do better, in that I really want to make images that are honest and meaningful; I want to capture those moments that I feel so strongly, before they’re gone forever. Of course, inevitably some of the pressure comes from the ego too – I want to have more shows, I get jealous that people are doing better than me, and so on. I’m an artist, and I’m a competitive person. So I guess that there’s the artistic pressure and the career pressure. Also, there’s the fact that I’m female and Jewish, and I guess that Jewish women tend to demand a lot from themselves; it’s part of the way that I was brought up. So it’s a mixture of all of these factors.

You have an upcoming exhibition in London that includes selections from throughout your career – Closer, Crisis, Pain and now My Children. Is this the first time that they’ve all been grouped together?

Yes. It’s a big gallery, and it feels like a little retrospective to me, with sixteen years worth of work represented. I feel old all of a sudden!

Do you consider your various projects to be separate bodies of work, or do you consider them all to be a part of one, lifetime project?

There are periods in my life that seem like complete chapters. I have Diary of a Dancer, which is my belly-dancing work, and that’s gone; it’s not in my life anymore. I have Crisis and Pain, which was a very painful period, and now that’s totally gone too. And in My Children, I’m a totally different person and have a completely different life. So they do seem separate. Of course it’s all my life – one long visual diary – but they do fell like different bodies of work.

You do quite a bit of commercial work as well. How does that relate to your personal work?

The commercial work that I do is very meaningful to me; it’s not something that I do just to pay the bills. It pushes me out of my zone – I’m not sure it’s a ‘comfort zone’, but it’s a zone – and forces me to take portraits of other people. I really like the fact that someone sends me to meet a stranger, and I have to find a connection with them in forty-five minutes. I keep it honest and truthful, and maintain as much integrity in my commercial work as I do in my personal work.

When you talk about your images, you often use words like ‘honesty’ and ‘truth’. Those are quite strong words to apply to photography, and difficult to justify in this day and age.

I know; people always tell me not to use them. But for me it’s pretty simple. I want the work to be honest and to tell something real, even if it’s limited. Something authentic happens, and that’s what I want to capture, however hard it is. I use these words a lot because, like any other photographer, I take a lot of images that are not very good or interesting, and it’s really hard to capture this thing; but when I do, it’s real. Even if it’s not ‘true’, it’s real. That’s the challenge, and ultimately, that’s what I’m after.

40 For over a century, photographers and their apologists have argued that photography deserves to be considered a fine art. It is hard to know how far the apologetics have succeeded.

Certainly the vast majority of people do not consider photography an art, even whilst they practise, enjoy, use and value it. The argument of apologists (and I myself have been among them) has been a little academic.

It now seems clear that photography deserves to be considered as though it were not a fine art. It looks as though photography (whatever kind of activity it may be) is going to outlive painting and sculpture as we have thought of them since the Renaissance. It now seems fortunate that few museums have had sufficient initiative to open photographic departments, for it means that few photographs have been preserved in sacred isolation, it means that the public have not come to think of any photographs as being beyond them. (Museums function like homes of the nobility to which the public at certain hours are admitted as visitors. The class nature of the ‘nobility’ may vary, but as soon as a work is placed in a museum it acquires the mystery of a way of life which excludes the mass.)

Let me be clear. Painting and sculpture as we know them are not dying of any stylistic disease, of anything diagnosed by the professionally horrified as cultural decadence; they are dying because, in the world as it is, no work of art can survive and not become a valuable property.

And this implies the death of painting and sculpture because property, as once it was not, is now inevitably opposed to all other values.

People believe in property, but in essence they only believe in the illusion of protection which property gives. All works of fine art, whatever their content, whatever the sensibility of an individual spectator, must now be reckoned as no more than props for the confidence of the world spirit of conservatism.

By their nature, photographs have little or no property value because they have no rarity value.

The very principle of photography is that the resulting image is not unique, but on the contrary infinitely reproducible. Thus, in twentiethcentury terms, photographs are records of things seen. Let us consider them no closer to works of art than cardiograms. We shall then be freer of illusions.

Understanding a Photograph John Berger / 72

Our mistake has been to categorize things as art by considering certain phases of the process of creation. But logically this can make all manmade objects art. It is more useful to categorize art by what has become its social function. It functions as property. Accordingly, photographs are mostly outside the category.

transparent and comprehensible. Thus we come to little-understood paradox of the photograph.

The photograph is an automatic record through the mediation of light of a given event: yet it uses the given event to explain its recording.

Photography is the process of rendering observation self‐conscious.

Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation. A photograph is a result of the photographer’s decision that it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen. If everything there existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless. A photograph celebrates neither the event itself nor the faculty of sight in itself. A photograph is already a message about the event it records. The urgency of this message is not entirely dependent on the urgency of the event but neither can it be entirely independent from it. At its simplest the message, decoded, means: I’ve decided that seeing this is worth recording.

We must rid ourselves of a confusion brought on by continually comparing photography with the fine arts. Every handbook on photography talks about composition. The good photograph is the well-composed one. Yet this is true only when we think of photographic images imitating paintings. Painting, is an art of arrangement: therefore it is reasonable to demand that there be some kind of order in what is arranged. Every relation between forms in a painting is, to some degree, adaptable to the painter’s purpose. This is not the case with photography. (Unless we include those absurd studio works in which the photographer arranges every detail of his subject before he takes the picture.) Composition in the profound, formative sense of the word cannot enter into photography.

This is equally true of very memorable photographs and even the most banal snapshots.

What distinguishes the one from the other is the degree to which the photograph explains the message and the degree to which the photograph makes the photographer’s decision

The formal arrangements of a photo essentially explain nothing. The events portrayed are in themselves mysterious or explicable according to

Stephen Shore

the spectator’s knowledge of them prior to his seeing the photograph. What then gives the photograph as photograph meaning? What makes its minimal message – I have decided that seeing this is worth recording – large and vibrant?

What varies is the intensity with which we are made aware of the poles of absence and presence. Between these two poles photography finds its proper meaning. (The most popular use of the photograph is as a memento of the absent.)

The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.

One might argue that photography is as close to music as to painting. I have said that a photograph bears witness to a human choice being exercised.

This choice is not between photographing x and y: but between photographing at x moment or at y moment. The objects recorded in any photograph (from the most effective to the most commonplace) carry approximately the same weight, the same conviction.

A photograph, whilst recording whats been seen, always and by its nature refers to what is not seen. It isolates, preserves and presents a moment taken from a continuum. The power of a painting depends upon its internal references. Its reference to the natural world beyond the limits of the painted surface is never direct; it deals in equivalents. Or, to put it another way: painting interprets the world, translates it into its own language.

But photography has no language of its own.

One learns to read photographs as one learns to read footprints or cardiograms. The language in which photography deals is the language of events. All its references are external to itself.

Hence the continuum.

A movie director can manipulate time as a painter can manipulate the confluence of the events he depicts. Not so the still photographer.

The only decision he can take is as regards the moment he chooses to isolate. Yet this apparent limitation gives the photograph its unique power.

What it shows invokes what is not shown. One can look at any photograph to appreciate the truth of this. The immediate relation between what is present and what is absent is particular to each photograph: it may be that of ice to sun, of grief to a tragedy, of a smile to a pleasure, of a body to love, of a winning race-horse to the race it has run.

A photograph is most effective when the chosen moment which it records contains a quantum of truth which is generally applicable, which is as revealing about what is absent from the photograph as about what is present in it. The nature of this quantum of truth, and the ways in which it can be discerned, vary greatly. It may be found in an expression, an action, a juxtaposition,

a visual ambiguity, a configuration. Nor can this truth ever be independent of the spectator.

For the man with a Polyfoto of his girl in his pocket, the quantum of truth in an ‘impersonal’ photograph must still depend on the general categories already in the spectator’s mind. All this may seem close to the old principle of art transforming the particular into the universal.

But photography does deal in the constructs.

There is no transformation in photography.

There is only decision, only focus. The minimal message of a photograph may be less simple than we first thought. Instead of it being: I have decided that seeing this is worth recording, we may now decode it as: The degree to which I believe this is worth looking at can be judged by all that I am willingly not showing because it is contained within it.

Why complicate in this way an experience which we have many times every day –the experience of looking at a photo – experience is wasteful and confusing. We think of photographs as works of art, as evidence of a particular truth, as likenesses as news items. Every photograph is in fact a means of testing, confirming and constructing a total view of reality. Hence the crucial role of photography in ideological struggle. Hence the necessity of our understanding a weapon which we can use and which can be used against us.

44 TODD HIDO

Interview by : Daniel Augschoell and Anya Jasbar

Shooting a specific image often means to complete a complex process after a deep investigation. The photographer is supposed to find the subject following too many signs. Those signs are often inside us, many of them come from our past. How is it possible to recognize those signs? Is it possible to explain how every feeling, every memory, can be put together in one single image?

A firstly let me start out by saying that I completely agree that the signs you are looking for, many of them do come from your past.But no, I don’t think that’s possible to put it all together in one single image. If it were then this would not be a lifelong pursuit? A body of work does not even do it sometimes.

I have noticed that within my own practice that often adding a genre, or another way of taking pictures, often adds an extra layer that complicates things more deeply. I believe that all those signs from your past and all those feelings and memories certainly come together, often subconsciously, and form some kind of a fragmented narrative. Often you’re telling your own story but you may not even know it.

One of my most valuable bits of feedback for me came from an art therapist that I did an independent study with when I was in graduate school. He taught me that I was on the right track with my subject matter and gave me the confidence to pursue it. What a gift that was in retrospect. He looked at the beginning of my houses at night, the beginning of my foreclosed home pictures, and the beginning of my portraits—all back

in 1995 when I had just two or three of each, and he told me that I was right in the midst of telling the story of my life and that my photographs clearly represented that.

You often choose the vertical format over the horizontal one. Is there any particular reason (formal or narrative) for choosing this kind of frame?

Yes, I do often use the vertical format. With the houses I do it quite a bit, and the reason for it is that often times I just wanted to get a single home in the frame.

The place seems more isolated that way. Also it was easier to focus the viewer’s and my attention onto a single home. I also like that it shows lots of the sky and lots of foreground and that tends to flatten out the scene and utilize the negative space more.

You frequently have photographed interiors. How did you find the places, do some of them have a special meaning for you?

Yes, I love to photograph interiors.

They often add another layer of narrative to a sequence of photographs.

And I really like what that does—it sort of brings the viewer inside of the home.

Even though none of the interiors are what is inside the homes they are often juxtaposed with.

It is all just implied.

//2011

I found the interiors in a few ways. Some of them are the childhood home that I grew up in. I grew up in Kent, Ohio. There’s a picture of a single pillow on the bed. “#1447-b”, And there’s also a big console TV that has the light blaring out of it, “#1952”, those are both my childhood spaces, where I spent most of my time. Some of the other photographs are motel rooms that I have stayed in and photographed.

The third place that I find interiors were from a project that I started back in 1996 of foreclosed homes. This was way back before anybody was talking or thinking about foreclosed homes. I have added a few new ones to the group recently and hope to do more. I am very much interested in the loss that happens in the spaces. Walls do talk.

I was interested in the family drama that had occurred. A lot of my work is really about home and family. In these spaces I often recognize something of my own unstable childhood in them. Many of the places and people I photograph, resonate with me.

You curate very carefully every aspect of your books and exhibitions. Could you tell us a little bit about your approach when it comes to creating/editing a book and how different it is in comparison to preparing an exhibition?

Thanks for noticing how careful I am with those things. It is nice to know that someone sees it. Yes, I think about every single detail of my books, as those are something that I can for the most part predominantly control its outcome. A book is an enclosed and encapsulated medium that you can actually come pretty damn close to perfecting. I also tend to think that the book is sometimes more important than the show, as the exhibit is a temporary thing, often hanging for a month or six weeks and then it goes away. Maybe a couple of thousand people see it?

But a book is something that I always say is on your “permanent record” and it never ever goes away—so you better get it right! And I am blessed to have a publisher, Chris Pichler of Nazraeli Press, who allows his artists to do what they envision and to be involved in each detail of the process. With shows there’s always many people involved and you’re dealing with several different places, as each and every gallery space is it’s own unique thing.

Often the gallerist who is in that space every day is the one that

knows it the best.

They know how people walk through a space. What wall the start at, what the site lines are from room to room, etc. They also know the audience who comes in.

So sometimes, they are the one’s that layout the shows.

At the Stephen Wirtz Gallery—which is my home base in San Francisco, I have always been very involved in selecting what I show and where each piece goes. Since I live here, I am able to go in and lay my photographs out in the space while I’m actually midway through making them, so I am able to get a feeling of how it will look, and be able to better choose the sizes and layout that I will exhibit there. But I also have to say there is definitely value in letting go and having others select your images and exhibit them. It’s always curious to me what other people come up with.

As far as putting together the books, I spend hundred & hundreds of hours shuffling around my photographs, making dummies, turning pages, and switching them around and all that. To me that is really the only way to do it, to print the pictures out, paste them in a physical blank book dummy, and turn the pages. {Oh, and smoke cigarettes, drink wine, and listen to loud music.

Very important.} But seriously, that feeling of turning a page and what happens there is something that you cannot simulate on a computer while you are doing the design. It is just not the same.

Also another incredibly important aspect of a successful book is, of course the graphic design. I have always been very fond of excellent graphic design and I have worked with the same designers for all of my monographs, Post Tool Design in San Francisco. I work mostly with Daya Karam and Gigi Obrecht these days. David Karam chimes in with his mastery on occasion. {In the past Herb Thornby, Meredith Bagerski, and Kim West have been there and worked on my books too.} Post Tool and I have had a great long-term relationship that goes back to a tiny newsprint catalog they made for a group show 15 years ago. We are able to really flesh out the details, find the very best fonts and typographic treatment that matches the style of the pictures and the mood I want to convey for the book.

One other thing that is important is that when it is time to do new book we start by lining them all up in chronological order, and make sure we are building on to this body of books, and consider all that we have done as a whole, before making the next move.

But I think most importantly we push each other. I push them to do new things, and they can recognize that even though I have never studied design, that I can still walk in, and immediately call it out when it needs to be tweaked more. On their end, they push me to be open to new ideas as well. Like pink end sheets.

It really works.

Some of your photographs have been used as cover images for Raymond Carver’s books. Do you feel that your work is somehow related to his writings?

I feel very, very fortunate to have my photographs on the cover of what will ultimately be a whole suite of Raymond Carver’s books.

And yes, I do feel that my work is somehow related to his writings.

There is a kinship. I often read his work and I “see pictures” and think

of things I want try to make. In fact, in two of my previous books, “Roaming” and “Between the Two’, I had selected Carver poems to be in included as I felt like there was something in those poems that really extended my selection of photographs. They didn’t literally illustrate them, but what they did I thought was open to them up.

I was deeply flattered when his designer & publisher contacted me about using my photographs to be on the covers of his books.

Larry Sultan has been a friend and mentor as well as one of your teachers at the California College of Arts in San Francisco.

Would you tell us something about your experience with him?

Larry Sultan truly was one of the most remarkable people that I have ever known.

I was so fortunate to have been able to study under him and also become his friend and colleague. He was so incredibly articulate about talking about pictures and I learned so much from him about what photography can do and how it can mean something that extends way beyond what you are picturing in your images.

I remember when I first got to CCA back in 1994 he was very happy because myself and a couple of other graduate students at the time were good, old-fashioned photographers. He always said that was very excited about that because ultimately he was too, but he had been doing lots of Public Art at that time, and he relished being surrounded by people that cared about photography so much.

He missed it, making pictures, going out and “getting the loot,” he called it.

I can certainly trace moments back in time to graduate school where Larry said something or saw something in my work that really influenced the path that I am on now. I very much miss him and so do so many, many of the people that knew him well or had him as a teacher. He was such an influential figure, especially out here in the West Coast, where many people were able to directly have contact with him on a regular basis.

You once told that you had the chance to see Emmet Gowin’s darkroom and how he made his wonderful prints in such a simple space situated in an extra room of his home. What does your darkroom look like?

My darkroom is extremely basic, in fact it’s probably archaic but it works. As with much else in life, it’s not really about the tools but how you use them.

I rent space in a commercial photography lab and I use it after hours. I usually go there a couple nights a week and print with my assistant Lance Brewer, and we just print as much as we can for five hours.

In your series “A Road Divided” you photographed through the windshield of your car. Even if we can’t see clearly through the glass, we get a perception of vastness, infinity; we try to look beyond the blurry parts of the window.

The images consist of two parts, on one hand there is the landscape, which is somehow exterior, and on the other hand the windshield of the car that creates another (interior) space.

Do you think that this aspect influences the viewer in his photographic perception?

Yes, I do think that influences the viewer because, as you mentioned, it’s not just a photograph of the landscape but it is a photograph from my personal perspective. I’m somehow in the picture in

a way. That is my breath fogging up the window! It has more of an intimacy I think. It has a subjective, diaristic quality and now that I really think about it—it’s the opposite of something like an “authorless” objective view, which is most often seen from a higher, uncommon viewpoint.

All the images in “A Road Divided” are defined by an open horizon, a view that leads to infinity. Do you think that making the photographs in a different landscape (for example in the mountains) would change the meaning of the series?

I’m definitely interested in that open horizon. It’s basically the landscape I grew up with in Ohio. That openness and those open roads are the kind of roads I’d ride my BMX bike down going to the next town over.

As for making the photographs in a different landscape, it certainly changes, but not as much as you would think. I have been most recently making that kind of photograph back in the suburbs and shooting homes again with the same kind of treatment. It is exciting to make images that combine elements from two groups of pictures.

You recently worked on a project initiated by Harvey Benge and the publishing house Kehrer Verlag called “One Day: Ten Photographers”. Like the title says, ten selected photographers had to take pictures on one single day. Could you tell us a little bit about this experience? How was it for you to make photographs in just one given day?

At first when they asked me to participate in the project I was a little bit worried, as I’ve often said to my students “you can’t make great art on demand”. Great stuff can’t be forced and those kinds of situations often turn out poorly. But it was such a great group of people I could not decline participating. So what I ended up doing was planning it out and re-visiting areas close to where I found good photographs before, so I was not wasting my time driving and just hoping I’d discover something that would work. That is what I usually do, is just drive, and drive, and I enjoy that search a lot but that does not work if you have to come up with a book that can hang with Rinko Kawauchi and John Gossage in just one day.

I also worked with a really great model that I had recently shot with so I knew just what to expect from her.

One thing that I did that was very different was to use a couple of assistants and a professional hair & make up person. I usually work totally alone in shooting my art, but in this case I had to maximize my time so I could vary the looks of the model quickly, so it looked more evocative, and more narrative, like more time had passed.

It was the most planned out shoot I have done to date and I have to say I was really surprised and happy with the results.

Your latest publication “Nymph Daughters” has been published by the Japanese publishing house Super Labo, How did this collaboration come about? Could you tell us something more about the project?

Yasunori Hoki, who is the publisher of Super Labo, contacted me.

He had done a few small books by other artists that I found were interesting, especially one by a favorite artist of mine, Ed Templeton.

The books are almost ‘zine like and small editions of 500.

I had really wanted to do something that was much more loose and experimental and take chances and risks in a way that you would necessarily do with larger scale projects. What I ended up doing was exactly that. I revisited some of the sequencing experiments that I had done in a class with Larry Sultan called the Narrative Workshop.

This was back in graduate school, where I would combine found photographs with my own photographs to sort of broaden the story in a way. Larry was teaching us about how to use an archive of images and to make something else completely different out of it, very much based on his experience with his classic book with Mike Mandel, “Evidence”.

For “Nymph Daughters” I started with a typical 50’s studio portrait of a woman who seemed to be a mother to me. And then I had a 1950’s newspaper photograph of the immediate aftermath of an automobile accident. I put the mother at the front and the car wreck in the back and set out to bridge the gap between those two photographs. In doing this I worked off the 1950’s theme and style present in the found pictures and had dug up an old pulp fiction book called “Nymph Daughters” I owned that had a great cover—all it had on the it was the title and I just scanned it and represented it.

Altered a bit by me with pencil.

For the interior I weaved together a sequence of some 126mmsnapshot photographs that I had recently taken, plus others that I have mostly never shown before, photographs of homes and models and a few other twists that I was excited to work with. Including spray paint. It is racy and ends in tragedy. I think there is a lot of meaning inside of it. I could see many of these elements popping up in other work of mine.

If you would have to choose ten photographs (by ten different artists) for a little book/slideshow, which images would you select?

It’s funny that you asked that as I recently edited “Witness #7” that is published by Nazraeli Press & JGS, which is a journal that comes out a couple of times a year where one photographer is in charge of the entire contents of the book.

In the back end I made a section that is just what you mentioned— photographs by other artists put together in a sequence in a book. I ended up photographing books from my own library that are really important to me, and books that I live with, and have often left open to the specific pages that I really liked best.

What are you working on right now?

Right now I am getting ready for show in New York of some of my recent portraits and nudes. It will be at Bruce Silverstein Gallery in early 2011.

I am also working on shooting new images that incorporate figures into landscape. That’s something I’ve not that much, to photograph people outside, and I find that to be quite interesting at this point in time.

I also made a photograph earlier this year that is at the edge of the water, which is usually a place that I don’t shoot much but I’m quite captivated by this picture. I could see myself going and doing many more.

That is how things always start for me—I will make one or two photographs that I don’t necessarily fit with my other ones and then I go out and try to build on them.

Slowly it adds up into something.

Thank You. baldessari.org toddhido.com martinparr.com chrisverene.com stephenshore.net eddieokeefe.com elinorcarucci.com stephaniegonot.com catharinemaloney.com ahornmagazine.com/issue_6/interview_hido/interview_hido.html fiascoplus.com/2014/10/photography-focus-eddie-okeefe aaronschuman.com/carucciinterview.html macobo.com/essays/epdf/berger_understanding_a_photograph.pdf americansuburbx.com/2009/07/theory-paul-graham-photography-iseasy.html rocketscience.tumblr.com/post/62248542625/a-studio-visit-withstephanie-gonot