Issue 12 curated by Erik Madigan Heck.

Excuse me, I’m lost.

Which brings me to why I’m here.

I’m sitting in a small café in Bath, next to an old man who appears to be consuming the events of a world he no longer understands.

Being an artist is truly a labor of love. Most of us create without the promise of making large sums of money. As painters, photographers, musicians, sculptors and writers, we offer ourselves to the world wholeheartedly, hoping to create something greater than ourselves.

Without art we wouldn’t be able to justify our lives, and without the act of creation there would be nothing for the world to profit from—no numbers to measure or things to aspire towards.

And I can sympathize.

I, on the other hand, am staring at him, trying to photograph his reading habits to avoid writing this letter of resignation. The problem is I’m uncertain as to what I’m resigning from and whom I’m addressing. I just know things can’t continue as they are.

Some months ago, Ann Demeulemeester, my friend and longtime inspiration, resigned from the world of fashion. For me, this news came not as a shock but as another sad sign of the times.

Soon after, my favorite dive bar in New York closed its doors, due to Manhattan’s incessant rent increases. As I write this, more and more of the quiet corners in which we dreamers dwell are slowly disappearing into a corporate abyss.

In a world overgrown with commercial interests, I’ve become exhausted by compromise. I’m tired of pretending that I care about celebrity. I’m tired of only being able to photograph advertisers’ clothing.

I’m tired of talking about how everything resembles everything else. And, most importantly, I’m tired of feeling bitter about it all.

Pausing to create this magazine has allowed me to make photographs with wide eyes and uncertainty, as if I were a teenager again. It has let me forget the world we live in and celebrate the quiet corners we still have—if even for an instant.

Erik Madigan Heck 23 January 2014 Somerset, United Kingdom

Conversations on Photography 8

Susan Bright on Classification

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Elinor Carucci on Discovery

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George Pitts on Perception

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Taryn Simon on Identity

Vince Aletti on Context

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Kathy Ryan on Immediacy

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Miranda Lichtenstein on Evolution

Works 1 Comme des Garçons 70 Illustrated 2 Guinevere Van Seenus 90 in The High Priestess 3 On the Subject of Flowers: 136 Remarks, Addressed to the Poet 4 Lykke Li 144 on Adaptation 5 Jerry Schatzberg 152 on Family 6 Waris Ahluwalia 164 in Haider Ackermann 7 Jamie Bochert 176 in Ann Demeulemeester 8 Fashion 190 “Advertisements” 9 Yves Klein 216 Dialogue with Myself

Conversations on Photography

“I should like to paint the portrait of an artist friend, a [woman] who dreams great dreams, who works as the nightingale sings, because it is [her] nature... I want to put my appreciation, the love I have for [her], into a picture. So I paint [her] as [she] is, as faithfully as I can, to begin with. But the picture is not yet finished.

To finish it, I am now going to be the arbitrary colorist...

Behind the head, instead of painting the ordinary wall of the mean room, I paint infinity.�

Vincent van Gogh, 18 August 1888

Susan Bright on Classification

EMH: Let’s start at the beginning.

When did you first become interested in photography?

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SB: The very first photograph that ever meant anything to me was on the cover of a catalog for when the Russian gymnastics team visited Australia in 1978. I was about seven and it was of Olga Korbut on the beam. I was obsessed with that photograph. I carried the catalog around with me for about three years. I can’t remember seeing the actual performance, but that photograph is etched onto my brain. It also reveals, very early on, that I had an interest in how the body is represented.

EMH: Do you still have the picture?

SB: I can’t find it. I’ve found a very similar one, but it’s not the actual photograph. The pictures that have resonated with me over my life appeared on album covers, postcards and posters, and I just didn’t consider them somehow worthy, because they weren’t presented as “art.” I didn’t know that it was legitimate to be into that.

Later, when I gave myself permission to dedicate my life to

photography, in whatever form it takes, it was a revelation. I felt I could finally be honest, instead of pretending I was really into difficult video art. It was enormously liberating.

EMH: It seems that everyone I know has had a similar entrance into photography, with a subconscious trigger and then later the “aha” moment.

SB: The epiphany moment!

And yours was Harry Callahan?

EMH: My mom was looking for a medium to transition me back into the world from music, as she saw me locking myself in my bedroom for hours with my records and turntables. So she presented me with this camera and mandated that every Sunday I shoot a roll.

She would drive me around and say, “Here’s a tree. Here’s a sidewalk, or person. It doesn’t matter; just shoot.” That kind of repetition is what started it.

The first two or three weeks I didn’t want to do it, but once I got in the darkroom the immediacy of photography hooked me, the instant

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gratification coupled with the fact that I thought I was good at it almost immediately. So that got me into the bookstore searching for any and all photographers, and the first book I came across that really spoke to me was by Harry Callahan.

SB: So you knew that you wanted to be a photographer, as opposed to me. I never had any interest in actually taking photographs.

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EMH: It was strange because the camera was kind of forced into my lap and after pushing it away I fell in love. You wake up and you’re like, “I can’t live without this.” Harry Callahan’s photos were the first things that made me think of photography not just as pictures, because his work was so graphic—and seamless. It was my first introduction to art photography, as opposed to practical photography.

SB: Were your aspirations towards art? Did you want to have your pictures published?

EMH: They were immediately towards art. I wanted to outdo Callahan’s work and to create what I thought was the perfect composition. It was very selfish. I started looking at any photographer’s work I could get my hands on, but kept coming back to Harry Callahan and his perfect images—his symmetrical trees, leaves on the snow—and going: How is this so perfect?

SB: Well that’s sort of like jazz, isn’t it? You start off gently and then you can get more specific.

Actually, that is a bad analogy, as I hate jazz. My epiphany moment was seeing an Ansel Adams photograph—of all people!

EMH: There’s no shame in Ansel Adams. It seems like Ansel Adams, in the photo world, has become this dirty word that you have to whisper under your breath.

SB: Of course he is a crucial part of the history of photography. I just have little to no interest in that fetishization of the print, nor the romanticization of the American landscape, so it’s surprising that it should be Adams who made the penny drop. I was interning at the Victoria and Albert Museum and opened a box in the stacks to get a photograph for exhibition preparation. I’d never seen a photographic art print close up, let alone an Ansel Adams print. It was exquisite; it felt like I could put my hands into it, like it was three-dimensional somehow. It is no exaggeration to say I felt like I’d been kicked in the belly. I was immediately seduced. I wanted to know where the book was that would tell me everything about photography, but of course there isn’t one. I also thought: This is great because photography has a relatively short history. I’m essentially quite lazy, so I thought I didn’t have to learn a huge amount of history, like painting or sculpture. I thought I could get my head around 180 years. What I did not factor in was: However short the history of photography,

it’s extremely wide and enormously complex. So that was it. My commitment to photography as a career—as an obsession, really— can literally be pinpointed to the day.

Other mediums fell by the wayside, apart from literature, which I think of like a long-term lover.

EMH: Can you speak about your most recent exhibition and book, “Home Truths: Photography and Motherhood,” which deals with perceptions of motherhood?

SB: The inception of this project leads from our conversation about legitimacy and permission to pursue something that feels intuitively right. It was the first project I had done that came from a very personal and autobiographical space, rather than intellectual interest. This is somewhat frowned upon in curatorial circles, as it can be seen as too subjective or not rigorous enough. Personally, I think this is rubbish; this accusation would never be leveled at an artist.

As a curator, I totally acknowledge the importance of impartiality and subjectivity.

Revealing my subjectivity, putting it under scrutiny and testing it in an exhibition—which makes fault lines, both stable and unstable—is the basis of testing the effectiveness of curating complex research questions and assessing how it can be done. The subject matter of my inquiry is writ large in the public frame, and the different contexts in which it is relevant means that the exhibition is not only a mode for generating, mediating and reflecting experience related to the works within the

institution, but, crucially, also encompasses a field of knowledge relating to the culture at large.

As a curator, I am putting information forward and receiving it back. I am doing so in my own language, with my own rhetoric.

Part of the process of “Home Truths” was to deconstruct, reveal and assess that agency and bias.

It’s important to say that my subjectivity does not demand a certain way of looking or thinking in terms of the viewer. It is my aim to yield new insights, frameworks and interpretations through my curating practice, with a rigor that does not foreclose on subjectivity and enthusiasm, and is free of anxiety.

But to get to those personal issues… One: Until the age of 37, I never wanted children. I was really happy; I had a great life in London, with my wonderful partner. There was no gaping hole, which I know a lot of women experience and I do understand.

Secondly: I come from the generation where a lot of my friends don’t have kids and they’ve come to the point where they aren’t going to, and they’re really cool with that. We were told our careers were the important thing.

I am of that generation that sits, somewhat awkwardly, between the second-wave feminists and a younger generation who are now more flexible and relaxed about mothering, because the workplace is more flexible and open to them— to generalize. Also, I didn’t have nephews and nieces so I had very little experience of being around children.

And finally: My career in photography happened quite late. After my BA in art history, I

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traveled for many years and was a Voluntary Services Overseas volunteer in Mongolia for two years.

I then returned to London to do my MA in art theory. I got my first “proper” job at the National Portrait Gallery, as the Assistant Curator, when I was about 27. I felt like I had a lot of catching up to do. So I was very myopic about my career.

I worked extraordinarily hard. I’m very competitive and ambitious, so it was a non-issue, really.

So I was somewhat taken aback when the clichéd biological clock kicked. And that was it; I was pregnant a month later. Pregnancy with me was not good. I was sick, and just tired. I slept through a lot of it—I think because I was 37. It was like extreme pregnancy, everything was amplified. I had the book on self-portraits to finish, we moved to New York and I was terrified that I would have this baby and all my hard work and passion would mean nothing.

EMH: You saw it as a career death?

SB: Completely, which of course was ridiculous. Having a baby does not mean your life becomes polarized into one thing or the other. But I panicked, so I lined up all this work. Then when my daughter was born, all I wanted was to be at home, in love, with a big, hippie smile on my face.

I had to teach and I resented that. I remember sobbing on the subway on the way to Parsons. I was like, “Why am I here when I should be home with somebody who genuinely needs me?” But on the other hand, I was resentful that my husband was going to

work and engaged in a wonderful work environment, where he had conversations, was challenged and busy. I felt torn in two. Maternal ambivalence is key to many feminist writings on mothering, but it doesn’t really enter popular culture unless it’s wrapped up in the concept of “guilt,” which is not helpful for anyone.

It was also the first time my gender was made so obvious and discrimination clear to me. I have always considered myself a feminist, but suddenly personal experiences made me feel ashamed I had not been more so. I’d come across sexist comments and misogyny, but I had never been able to not leave the house or do exactly as I liked because I was breastfeeding or I had to do all this stuff because I was female.

Relationships shift, and I felt like a 1950s housewife for a while.

I was furious.

I noticed how attitudes on the street changed towards me, too—from sheer annoyance at my slowness as I maneuvered a stroller onto a bus to blind admiration because I was a mother. I was very confused by that, because usually I would just trot around and not really care what people thought of me. I became very unbound; I had no control over my body. For a control freak, that’s hard.

I also became aware of the celebrity obsession with motherhood, which is full of value-ridden judgments that I found extremely retrograde. All this fed into my research and led me on the path to “Home Truths.” I turned to photography to help me figure out my feelings of ambivalence and see what the

history of photography had to offer me in terms of representation.

EMH: I remember speaking to you a couple years ago, and you had discovered a series of early medical photographs...

Was this the starting point, in terms of imagery?

SB: The medical photography was really interesting to me as it offered an alternative history to the Madonna motif, which I consider a male view of motherhood. What intrigued me was the slightly more taboo. The 19th century medical photos where the women are hooded are just extraordinary. They are still a male point of view—one has to assume the photographer was male—but they show a discomfort and alternative view of an idealized mother.

EMH: Why were the women hooded?

SB: I think because it was very difficult for a 19th century man to photograph a naked woman, let alone a pregnant woman.

Pregnancy was still completely hidden. In a way, it was for her decency and there’s nothing really objective about this. Her stockings are still on so it seems like it was done in a hurry, and the tension between the photographer and subject is obvious and surreal.

This kind of disappearance or erasure of a mother figure in the 19th century was key to my research, because mothering was perilous in the 19th century.

Women died all of the time. This “lived experience” of women does not square with the countless

benign images of the mother as Madonna.

It was not really until the 1970s that women began to claim the maternal as an admissible subject for women to work with in a critical way. Even then, it was contested and problematic for many feminists. I wanted to follow through on those anxieties—in both representation and attitudes towards the subject—and work with contemporary examples that dealt with the subject in the very widest sense, through different points of view.

EMH: It seems like there has been a lot of photography dealing with motherhood emerging recently. Perhaps it’s just now being brought to my attention through “Home Truths” and Elinor Carucci’s book “Mother.”

SB: I think once you become aware of it, it’s certainly there. There is an emergence in maternal studies within academia, and you just have to look at the culture around us. Artists are going to respond to that, but it has been given a sort of legitimacy as well. Family photography has always been there, but now I think there’s a tide turning, where it can be looked at critically and not be sappy. Don’t get me wrong, a lot around the subject of being a mother can be dreadful and clichéd. It can easily fall into being too earnest, because it’s so very subjective. It’s emotional and can be cloying and self-indulgent.

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top: Grantly Dick-Read. Woman in Ante-Natal Classes Exercising, 1955. bottom: The Edinburgh Stereoscopic Atlas of Obstetrics, Plate 82. Pendulous Belly, 1908.

EMH: Elinor Carucci is a very beautiful woman, and Hanna Putz, another artist included in “Home Truths,” photographs many women who are also beautiful in a traditional sense.

I wonder if their photographs would be as interesting to the public if their subjects weren’t as striking?

SB: “Home Truths” features artists who have a certain aesthetic. That was a purposeful curatorial strategy. Beyond aesthetics, I wanted to engage with documentary photography to make the selection cohesive.

Documentary was engaged with through a variety of strategies and approaches, including: compulsive diaristic accounts (Fred Hüning and Elina Brotherus); performance documents (Janine Antoni); seemingly more traditional art documentary, which combines candid moments with staged scenarios (Ana Casas, Elinor Carucci and Tierney Gearon); staged or overtly performed narratives (Hanna Putz and Leigh Ledare); the use of vernacular footage or photographs (Annu Palakunnathu Matthew and Ann Fessler); and real-time video (Katie Murray).

The beauty element is there because I wanted people to look.

It is not there in all the pieces, but I am not denying it certainly plays a role. It is like baby steps, I guess. I wanted to talk about a subject in a way that people would want to come and see. Nearly 70,000 people came to that show in London. It was voted one of the best exhibitions of 2013 in The Guardian. Who would have

thought it? A show on mothers!

Nobody thought that was going to happen.

EMH: When we were at The Photographers’ Gallery in London last month, they were saying how it was one of their most successful shows.

SB: And I had to fight so hard to get that show. It’s also important to stress that while it’s about the representation of motherhood, it’s also really about photography. Both have equal importance. It was about dealing with the ideas of absence and loss and excess, which are very much in photographic culture at the moment, with the networked image and the loss of the photographic object.

EMH: In a couple of reviews of “Home Truths,” you were talking about the absence of the object and how few things are printed anymore…

SB: Exactly. That the exhibition was very artful and beautiful and the installation was site specific are key to this idea of materiality and photographic loss. A lot of the work hadn’t been printed before.

Ana Casas Broda’s work was printed to fit that space and Fred Hüning’s book was edited to fit that space. The work in the Foundling Museum dealt with loss vividly and acutely as to deal with the site in which the photographs were housed.

EMH: Not to state the obvious, but it really seems like “Home Truths” meant an extraordinary deal to you.

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SB: I loved working on the exhibition and book. I’d never worked on a project that mattered to me so personally. I had undergone large-scale public projects that were great to work on, but I was never really emotionally engaged. My first book was “Art Photography Now” and, really, I didn’t give a shit about art photography, but I did it because that was my job and an incredible opportunity—and it was fascinating, of course. What I really loved about doing that book was the fact I interviewed all of the photographers, finding out why people do what they do.

I don’t really care about art photography in the way that a lot of people do... I kind of go against the tide. It’s like everyone is doing collage and obsessed with the ontology of photographic identity, and I’m working my way through the complexities of motherhood and representation. Doing “Home Truths” and it being successful has given me a huge amount of confidence. I don’t think I had that confidence until now, even though I had done rather big public exhibitions and books, like “How We Are: Photographing Britain” at Tate Britain, which I co-curated with Val Williams, and “Face of Fashion” at the National Portrait Gallery.

EMH: How did “Face of Fashion” come about? What was your criterion for curating it?

SB: It’s important to state here that the exhibition was at the National Portrait Gallery, not an art gallery. The Portrait Gallery’s first photography exhibition was

Cecil Beaton in 1968, which featured fashion portraits, so it is not like art galleries that show fashion to be cool and bring in larger audiences. The National Portrait Gallery gets it. It knows where portraits appear and that is in fashion photography. It’s a gallery about people of the time.

As an institution, it wanted to do something very contemporary. I had worked there, so I had a relationship with the curator and the director. I wrote with some ideas and was approached to curate it. The criteria was, simply, good portraits.

EMH: How did you come to the final selection?

SB: Through a process of elimination. What people often don’t realize is that artists do say, “No,” to projects like this. I started with a wish list and then had to be flexible to get the photographers who I thought would work well in a group show. I worked very closely with the photographers to make the selection tight and right for the exhibition.

EMH: It was a really interesting lineup, because you had pairings like Corinne Day alongside Mert and Marcus.

SB: It was, and always is, about the work—not how big the name is.

The photographers featured were all very different, but what came out when I was looking at all the work was this idea of intimacy. It was a probing into manifestations of intimacy and collaboration that threaded the selection together.

When you think of Mert and

Marcus, there doesn’t seem to be intimacy at all in their photographs, but actually their process is very personal and immediate. It’s very collaborative in the way they push their subjects. And Corinne’s relationship is obviously very firsthand in the way she relates to her subjects. It’s like she fell in love when she shot. As I was selecting, in this sort of “panning for gold” approach, the relationships that fashion photographers have to create and build with their subjects became more and more apparent and a touchstone for the selection.

There was a kindness to their collaborations, regardless of the results. None of them approached their subjects with a meanness or cruelty, like Richard Avedon and Irving Penn did. Both produced great work by putting people in awkward positions or pinning them up against something. The work featured in “Face of Fashion” was about forming relationships with the sitters. That may be over time, like Madonna with Steven Klein, or for a fleeting moment in Paolo Roversi’s beautiful studio. So it was more about an approach and a feeling, rather than trying to fit work into a curatorial straitjacket.

EMH: What do you think of fashion photography being shown in a museum context?

SB: For the National Portrait Gallery, it’s fine. It was very clear from the beginning that the images weren’t being presented as art; they were there as portraits. That’s the difference. I think once you put them in an art context, it gets very tricky, because let’s face it: Fashion is fashion, and art is art. I feel

quite strongly about that. It doesn’t always translate because it was made as an image. It was made as a commercial venture to operate on a page or a website. Fashion photographers’ work is so beholden to advertising and branding that it’s hard to see it out of that context. Their work is about the page for context, so it has to have immediate punch. If you put it up on a wall for slow viewing as art it can seem enormously superficial.

But now I am going to slightly contradict myself: Sometimes it can work. A lot of Mario Sorrenti’s work can be understood and appreciated in an art context. The work done in the early 1990s was done in a more fluid and less commercial and conservative environment. Doing the show, we were never sure if the images would translate to the wall.

There was always doubt. However, it was completely unfounded. There was a picture of Sharon Stone that could have just been a picture of Sharon Stone, but it did something amazing. It was not art. It didn’t have the same intentions, the same history, but it certainly resonated differently.

EMH: I understand the distinction drawn by contemporaries that fashion cannot exist as art because of its intention, but I also have to disagree fundamentally that intention is the only driving force defining what art is.

A beautiful photograph of a woman’s garment that appears in a magazine can beg the same set of aesthetic questions from its audience as a painting, regardless of the intention of the artist.

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I was reading an article in this past month’s ArtForum

by Thierry de Duve on “nonart.” In the beginning, he discusses Clement Greenberg and his relationship to the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce. In trying to define this category of “non-art,” he quotes Croce as saying, “All reality, all possibility is virtually art, not necessarily realized as art, but virtual as art.” I think there is plenty of “good art” being made by fashion photographers in editorial publishing today. It’s just dismissed because it appears as an afterthought to their advertising work.

When I’m creating my work, even if the initial catalyst for its making is a commission from a fashion company—which is no different from a commissioned portrait painting, historically—the intention and ultimately what the work does is explore the relationship between color, texture, form and our understanding of what a photograph is. There are so many questions buried inside one image that have nothing to do with fashion or the fact that the color and form is bound by a garment. Even when I construct a photograph, the process itself is more akin to painting than it is to photography. In many ways, its final form becomes more of an illustration than a photograph.

My point being: Even though the subject of the image may have to do with fashion, it is—in fact—not at all intended to merely represent fashion,

but instead to represent all these other things. The idea of intention is not only misleading, but can be easily mistaken.

SB: I think most fashion photographers hope to do that if they are allowed within the constraints of a commercial shoot, which as you know are becoming increasingly less creative. But one really does have to consider context. To put a snapshot on the wall as art would make it look ridiculous. The same can be said for fashion images or advertising— or indeed any other photography that was made for a completely different context. This does not mean to say they are not great images, but they have to be dealt with slightly differently when put into a context that treats art in a certain way.

Art is not just of something. It is about something. But to refer to your point about decoration— which I am perhaps misreading as beauty—Richard Learoyd is a good example; he takes beautiful photographs of lovely women in wonderful clothes. He takes them on a camera obscura, which is not really crucial to know but it adds a certain durational element and haunting quality that is intriguing.

These portraits work as art because the women he photographs have fragility and vulnerability, both human traits that fashion models are not hired for. This is what makes the photographs resonate on a more universal level and tips them into a more nebulous territory that gives them substance as art works. The viewer is immediately drawn in by their beauty: what the

photograph is of. But they are about something much more than beauty: what it is about.

It’s perfectly OK to make beautiful pictures of women. People will buy them and hang them on their walls as art—art has a huge sliding scale of subjectivity. But if fashion pictures want to be considered and understood as art within an institutional setting, then they have to have more going on than just decoration. I can’t really speak for the commercial art market, which is off-radar for me, and I am often genuinely confused over what sells as art and what doesn’t.

But we live in interesting times.

Now, more than ever, museum curators are being forced to think about photographic culture because photography is changing so much.

We’re at the most exciting times for the medium. History is forever rewriting itself. How that has manifested so far is a much wider institutional interest in vernacular photography, but this interest will have to ricochet to other types of photography outside of art and with that new ways to understand and appreciate it. That curators have tended to ignore fashion photography until now means that it is rich for good brains to really reevaluate those arbitrary art historical hierarchies that photography adopted. So I would say: Give it ten years, because curators will have to deal with it institutionally rather than ignoring it or doing bad exhibitions because they don’t really understand it.

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Susan Bright is a British curator and writer based in New York. She was formerly the Assistant Curator of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Curator for the Association of Photographers and Acting Director of Photography at Sotheby’s Institute. She is the author of “Home Truths: Photography and Motherhood,” “Art Photography Now” and “Auto Focus: The Self-Portrait in Contemporary Photography,” and has curated the blockbuster exhibitions “Home Truths: Photography and Motherhood” at The Photographer’s Gallery, “Face of Fashion” at the National Portrait Gallery and “How We Are: Photographing Britain” at the Tate Britain. Bright is currently pursuing a PhD in curating at Goldsmiths College in London and is a visiting scholar at the Art Institute of Boston.

Elinor Carucci on Discovery

EMH: I want to know how you began photographing. What is the first memory you have of being interested in photography?

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EC: I did many other arts before I approached photography. I played the piano starting when I was five, and I studied theater and drama.

It was painful for me—especially when I entered the High School of the Arts in Jerusalem, where I was born and raised—because I realized I am mediocre at playing the piano.

Also when I studied theater I never had it in me like the other kids who were practicing five hours a day, so to discover photography was a big deal.

It started one afternoon I picked up my father’s camera— he did some black and white photography and had a manual Canon. I was wandering around the house and I went into my mom’s room. She woke up from an afternoon nap and I just started to take pictures of her as she was waking up, looking at me, not saying anything, not thinking about anything… It was a very special thing that happened, taking pictures of her. I took some pictures of me and my brother and finished the roll. I went to the lab, looked at the

work and I really fell in love. I took an afternoon class and got really sucked into it. I could suddenly be like the kids I was envious of: I could do photography twenty four-seven.

EMH: Do you think a large part of what allowed you to fall in love with photography is its immediacy?

EC: I don’t really know what it is that made me love it so much. It was a lot about intimacy, which is something I still love in my work, making a moment very pure and concentrated. It was about my mom being able to look through the camera and for me to just see my mother’s face. This kind of connection, where I could see so much more in her, was really almost addictive. When I photograph someone, it brings a whole other level to how much I know them. What I see in my work, I didn’t even notice without the camera.

EMH: That’s what your work does at its core. You reveal and strip back so much of your subject, where they’re less than naked. For me, it’s the opposite.

When I put you in front of my

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camera, there’s more of a distance than when we first meet. I suppose I prefer to illustrate how I want a person to be, rather than to reveal a truth about them.

EC: That’s why I couldn’t do fashion seriously, because I want the person to be who they are. I want to be connected to their flaws and their weaknesses in the same way I photograph myself. If I try to portray them or reinvent them somehow, it’s not working. For me, it’s more about peeling the layers back and showing something very intimate and honest.

EMH: What was the first body of work that you did? Were you shooting your mom at the very beginning?

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EC: I was shooting my family in high school, in black and white.

Then I served in the Israeli army for two years. Then I went to the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, it’s an art school in Jerusalem. It took me a while to go back to photographing my family because I came to art school, so I felt like: I can’t go back and photograph my family; I need to do important work. That’s how I did the worst work I’d ever done, but eventually I got back to photographing the family in color...

EMH: Do you think you need to go to art school to do bad work?

It’s my belief that the purpose of art school is to put you through the wringer so that you can come out of it with the ability to know what not to make.

EC: I think people need to educate themselves somehow, so it was very important for me to go to art school. I learned a lot and I had good teachers who asked me, “What is this bullshit you’re doing?” when I was trying to do the “good work.” One of them remembered the work I showed when I wanted to get accepted, which was of my family, and he was like, “It’s all right there.” So they also gave me the green light, like, “Go back to photographing your family. The intimacy, the relationship… It’s all there. It’s important enough.”

You have to get rid of what you think you have to be. You think you have to be serious. Of course I’m serious about my work, but I also had to let my intuition—the way I see the world and feel, and the freedom to play—return, to let my photography have a life. I kind of killed it by trying to be so serious.

EMH: Was your family always extremely intimate?

EC: Yes, always. My first body of work, “Closer,” is about my family while I was still living at home.

It’s a result of the way my parents raised me. They were very open, very close—especially my mom.

Everything my brother or I did she thought was amazing. We were like her geniuses, so she really opened up the process.

EMH: How did your mom react, at first, to you photographing her every waking minute?

EC: At first she didn’t react much, but sometimes she would look at the pictures and she wouldn’t like them. We got into conversations or

even little fights about what it was that I was photographing and why.

Why do I show her sometimes in not a bad light but an honest light?

Every once in a while she asked for just a pretty picture of her to be taken. So I take the pretty picture and I retouch it for her, and then we go on to the bad—not bad, but more honest—pictures. But she knows she had the right to veto if she didn’t like a photograph.

EMH: I was just speaking with Susan Bright on the topic of motherhood and photography.

I’d love for you to expand on the subject and your new book, “Mother.”

EC: The book started when I became pregnant in 2003. Of course it was a natural thing for me to start photographing the pregnancy, but something really significant happened when I became a mother. I was really photographing out of almost anger at how little we see in art and photography about motherhood—how we get so used to seeing either the Madonna and Child, beautiful works of art that I remember from studying the history of art, or celebrities.

What I felt and experienced during pregnancy was so complex. It was extremes living side by side: of anger and pain, and tiredness and joy and love, the deepest love I’ve ever felt. So even more than before, I was determined to show these two sides of photography in my work, to show that this is the same day, this is a few hours apart, this is motherhood, and this is motherhood... And it’s complex and layered.

I didn’t stay away from happy, smiling images, because they are a part of the reality. It’s, again, the greatest love of all: the love of a mother for her children, but it’s more complicated than what we’re used to seeing.

EMH: Looking at your work, I always wonder about restraint and how you’re able to capture your images. It’s hard for me to imagine photographing as you do, because when I’m really deep in a moment I don’t want to photograph anything; I want to just experience life without a camera. I wonder how you are able to have such intimate moments and freeze time to create your picture. How do you still achieve that immediacy, without it being forced?

EC: It’s both. Of course it does disrupt—it’s a physical thing. I have to set the light. I work with lights most of the time, so there is the technical aspect. I have lights open, connected to the outlets. I have the camera on a tripod, on a 20-second self-timer so things are accessible. And my husband helps me many times—in a moment like breastfeeding. It had happened the day before, and I was like, “I wish I could take a picture of this moment.” So the next day, we’ll set the frame, we’ll set the light and I’ll leave it like that. Then when I’m breastfeeding, I’ll have it set. And sometimes something completely unexpected happens. You know, my child is crying and I’m screaming, and my husband already knows to keep pressing the timer.

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Elinor Carucci. From “Mother,” published by Prestel, 2014.

EMH: I hate that feeling of not having a camera and that amazing moment happens and you have to let it go. It seems like you always capture it.

EC: No, it’s just that you don’t see the thousands of images that I didn’t get. I really don’t always get it. This is ten years of work. And I also don’t take pictures constantly. I can have a few weeks without any photo taken.

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EMH: I was also raised very close to my mother. Yet, when I look at your work I think a lot of the pictures are almost too personal. They’re uncomfortable to look at, and that’s what makes them so powerful. I remember having childhood memories that were this close with my mother, but I almost want to suppress them because they would seem inappropriate now, as a man looking back, which seems to stem from being an American raised in the Midwest. Are there negative reactions to your work? Have people ever confronted you?

EC: Some have confronted me and I have read comments, but I feel that we don’t need to suppress those moments. It’s the most beautiful thing that happens to us, and I’m not talking about sexuality towards children. I’m talking about sensuality and intimacy and love— what will nurture our children and be a part of their sexuality one day when they’re older. But right now we cover our bodies all the time. Also it is a cultural thing, a difference between Israeli and American culture. As an Israeli, I saw my parents naked. They didn’t

live their lives like nudists, but I saw them naked and it wasn’t that unusual. Also, among women in Israel, it is very common to be naked around each other. It’s more unusual here.

So when I moved to America and showed this work, I knew the work of me nude next to my father would be provocative. I was aware of that. Then I met many American women who told me they had never seen their mother naked. That was a shocking discovery. Then I realized: Oh my God, my work is even more different than I thought it was because of the difference in the culture. But I still edited. There are no completely nude images of the kids. I censored those out.

EMH: Would you ever show certain images in Israel that you wouldn’t show here?

EC: No. In Israel, my work is not being shown at all.

EMH: The homeland has rejected you! Do you now feel more American than Israeli—or do you think you’ll always be Israeli first?

EC: It’s something I think about a lot. It’s hard to really break it down and figure it out, the identity thing, when you’re an immigrant. But I think something really changed when I gave birth to the kids here in America. It solidified that this is home, for sure. I feel very American; I feel very much at home.

This is my tribe, my community, my best friends are here... But it’s still hard. I gave birth to two Americans. I’m raising two American children. It’s impossible

to be like I was before with my husband, to talk about Americans “them,” as opposed to “us” Israelis.

Now, these are my children and the public school they’re going to is in my community, so it really had to change.

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Elinor Carucci is a New York-based photographer from Jerusalem, Israel.

She is a Guggenheim Fellow and has published the photographic monographs “Closer,” “Diary of a Dancer” and “Mother.” Carucci has had solo exhibitions at the Gagosian Gallery and Edwynn Houk Gallery, and her work has been exhibited at numerous museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She is a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, Aperture and W. Along with serving as a professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York, she has taught at Princeton University and been a visiting lecturer at Harvard University.

George Pitts on Perception

GP: You enjoy making distinctions in your speech…

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EMH: I find language interesting…the many ways in which you can say the same thing with endless subtleties.

That’s what is interesting about photography. It’s the visual arm of making those distinctions.

You could photograph a body, I could photograph the same body and there are infinite ways of representing it.

GP: Does a body have much meaning for you as far as content, or is it just a pretext for your decorative preoccupation?

EMH: It’s simply a means towards articulating other ideas.

GP: So you don’t actually need the body as a constant primary motif?

EMH: The body to me is like it is to a fashion designer; it’s a hanger for color and texture.

But no, I’m not interested in humanity. I know you are though.

GP: It’s a natural fit for me. As an artist, I want to exhibit a certain fearlessness towards mankind

because—in all honesty—there are plenty of reasons to be fearful.

The thoughtlessness and the desperate craving for attention that takes place in our culture are the neurotic undercurrents of American sensibility. All these factors make me much more conscientious than I would choose to be and invariably I start reflecting on the human condition. I just find that you have to walk on eggshells if you’re fairly conscious or purport to be intelligent, because this country in some ways is very, very infantile.

I am interested in the quality of humanity that you notice in my photography. I don’t think I think about it that much, but my work and my temperament betray that interest.

EMH: Has your work always been preoccupied with the nude and representing the body in a sexual way?

GP: No, I was an abstract painter most of my life. That’s another reason why I’m totally not in awe of abstraction in photography.

I’ve done it every which way. I don’t think it’s extraordinary for photographers to explore abstraction. If anything, it has

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been covered so extensively in the practice of painting that it looks conservative to merely be preoccupied with abstraction in photography. A lot of people see it as radical and some sort of conceptual leap from having to work with concrete subject matter, when, in fact, abstraction can be as conservative as any other stylistic practice. It’s very hard to make transcendent forms with abstraction. Some would say that abstraction is as exhausted as our prevalent notions of realism.

EMH: I think abstraction was exhausted with Lawrence Weiner and the idea of the object itself not being necessary.

GP: So you don’t give much credit to the Neo-Expressionists?

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EMH: No. The closest thing to Expressionism that I give credence to would be Anselm Kiefer. I wonder, to go back, if what you said about abstraction in photography is maybe because you don’t hold photography, as a medium, in the highest esteem, because of your background in painting.

GP: There’s probably more than a grain of truth to that, but at the same time I can only do my best work with photography.

Transposing my painterly sensibility to photography is crucial to the pleasure I gain from being a photographer. It’s kind of perverse, but I would have never been able to invest this much belief in photography had I not trained for over 20 years as a painter.

That’s paradoxical, and probably

working within the parameters of paradox is just my cross to bear because I don’t have a longing to return to painting, exclusively. But I still have the highest regard for the seriousness of painting.

EMH: You think it’s more serious than photography?

GP: The world thinks so.

Increasingly photography is seen in a smaller, more disposable light, regardless of the level of achievement. I still get the impression, judging from art auctions, that the cult of the sacred, one-of-a-kind object attributed to art outdistances the perceived value of a great photograph.

EMH: Are you talking from a market standpoint or are you talking intellectually?

GP: I’m talking about the populist viewpoint. Your average consumer, who is not necessarily intellectual, values painting far more highly than photography. Passionate connoisseurs or intellectuals engrossed in semiotics covet photography; but even there, they are taught to covet photography.

EMH: What about your distinction between photography and art?

Earlier you were using them separately. You said I always wanted my photography to be art.

GP: I don’t want photography to exhibit the pretensions of art, meaning that it emulates the look of painting or “art” as we know it in such a way that the photograph becomes too selfconscious. I like photography for its own unique properties.

EMH: That’s kind of a conservative view, isn’t it? You want photography to only stay in the realm of photography and to not cross into something new.

GP: I don’t like the medium of photography to be overlaid with too many of the physical mannerisms that are unique to painting. I don’t like photography that generally looks like a mixedmedia representation. I’m very sympathetic to the mash-ups of photography and paint executed

by Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Sigmar Polke and Kiefer.

But I see these works and this direction as an avant-garde form of drawing and lyrical expression that features photography as merely an ingredient in an essentially painterly activity. In their works, I don’t feel I’m being implored to contemplate the results from the perspective of photography, and I don’t really think that the pleasures these works afford have much to do with photography.

Photography is just a texture among others employed to convey sensuously material effects and a contemporary look enhanced by the presence of photographic elements.

It’s funny how painters specifically “use” photography. Now that I think about it; they allow more room for meaninglessness and sheer materiality, which are not the primary domain of photography as we know it. Suddenly I think I understand more clearly why photography is moving away from the obligation to represent subject matter and the more familiar kinds of content. I suppose it appears more radical to certain artists if the practice is more self-reflexive

and relieved of the obligation to illustrate situations involving people or genre content.

EMH: But why don’t you like photography to exhibit painterly qualities? Do you think there’s a lie involved?

GP: No, I just think it’s not drawing on photography for its greater strengths. There are properties to using film or shooting digitally that are inherent to photography, which I think are sufficient toward making a great photograph. I don’t think it has to be overlaid with schlocky mixed-media techniques to be a compelling practice. The psychological acuity, the beautiful rigors of naturalism and verisimilitude, the obsessive attention to lighting, the radical abstraction inherent in capturing reality from an inspired, nonderivative perspective, the uncanny precision or blurred formalism are just a few of the virtues exemplified by photography.

EMH: Would you consider digital to be mixed media, like an excessive use of Photoshop?

GP: It can be. In certain instances that would be problematic for me.

I’m not a big fan of the present norms of magazine retouching, where the most minuscule details of a woman’s face are rubbed away with Photoshop. I sometimes wonder what a master beauty photographer like Irving Penn thought about this tendency?

EMH: Irving Penn rubbed out the details of women’s faces in the darkroom with dodging

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George Pitts. Sovereign Syre, New York City, 2010.

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and burning techniques. I don’t actually see a difference in how photographers retouch today, to be honest—with exception to shape altering, but that’s not what you’re talking about.

There is a real stigma against retouching in the public opinion, which is misguided and rooted in ignorance. I always wonder how people can go to the cinema and see a Hollywood film and be OK with the gross exaggerations on screen, but then get upset when Vogue puts out a cover where they have retouched a woman’s face.

Nothing is real in cinema, and we’ve accepted that as a culture.

But with photography, people still expect some idea of truth, which is antithetical to the medium, because photography has always lied. And, then, look at the history of painting or sculpture and how artists have depicted women—they were always idealized. So were the men, for that matter. Which brings me to a blunt question: Do you not like my work?

GP: I like your work, but you seem to be very intentionally making something that passes for art more consciously than I am. It seems more critical for you that the first reading of your work be that it’s art, rather than photography, whereas I’m perfectly OK with photography being the initial reading of what I’m doing.

I don’t feel any compulsion to apologize for photography’s relative modesty in the face of what a great painting can do.

There are certain things that photography is really well suited

for. I don’t think there’s a better medium than photography for depicting or representing the body.

I’m still endeavoring to discover what else photography is genuinely eloquent at depicting. It’s very hard for photography to accommodate poetry, but that’s another of my personal preoccupations. I’m also really interested in the vagaries of staging, or staged narrative representation, which draws more parallels to cinema and the attributes of fiction. In the beauty of acting or postmodern performance, I get inspiration from studying how a performer works with complex material within the confines of a photograph, like say in the work of Carrie Mae Weems.

I’m finding it really helps my photography to be aware of some of the demands of performance and inhabiting a character. It seems to be a natural segue into the kind of photography I do.

EMH: How? GP: I photograph female types, but also I like to coax an authentic performance out of certain subjects, without it being apparent or obvious.

EMH: But isn’t that what we all do, as photographers?

GP: Yes, but it’s not something I take for granted because I actually want manifestations of my direction to be visible in the pictures. On one level, it’s just part of the process of interacting with a subject, but then there’s a certain level of attention you can bring to your contemplation of a subject that can lead to results that can’t

be fully verbalized. I like things that can’t be fully verbalized but are apprehended or felt. So can you see why someone like me, who does shoot human beings, would be interested in acting? Not so much a conventional theatrical performance, but the idea of inhabiting or elucidating your own being in behalf of a good picture. It sounds easier than it is.

EMH: The problem I have with that is you’re beholden to your subject. That’s too much risk. I would rather control my subject.

GP: I thought you would go there.

So that means you don’t really need an original or even accidental articulation of being? You’re fine with seeing behavior as a kind of motif that’s just one of many elements in your work. You don’t care about the uniqueness of the articulation of feeling and behavior.

That’s not critical to your work?

EMH: No, and I don’t think behavior is unique. I think that humanity operates in patterns.

Focusing on an articulation of being in the flesh is misguided.

I would rather point my lens at ideals than try to believe in the mistruths of behavior.

GP: Well, your work probably verifies that conclusion, but you know women have this expansive emotional range and that can’t help but have a great fascination for me. A great director like Rainer Werner Fassbinder relished the wide emotional range that women exhibit.

EMH: The distinction is that you’re interested in people, and

I don’t think I am. It’s ironic because I photograph people all the time. They are my predominant subject matter, but I’m always trying to erase the person from the frame.

GP: You’re more interested in adjectives like “elegance,” as opposed to nouns like “being.” You want to characterize the beauty of elegance rather than the beauty of the individual.

EMH: I think there’s more truth to elegance. I think a picture of a person acting out daily life is much less truthful than an abstraction of a person that’s elegantly done. That’s why when I see documentary photography, like Nan Goldin, or photographers who have dedicated their lives to representing a lifestyle, I find that work to be much more acting than truth. That’s why I characterize that as illustration.

GP: It’s funny you think of Nan Goldin as documentary. I think that’s a word that she might use—just to make sure the viewer is aware of the purity of her intentions and the degree of difficulty in maintaining her particular stance, rather than staging the image. I find it funny that staging is such a big issue in photography, when it has long been a staple in the lexicon of the painting practice. Everything can seem so self-conscious in photography. Whether one can use methods in photography that are timeless in painting one has to question to the nth degree. That’s why I think there’s something

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inherently provincial about photography, which is screwy.

EMH: But I think it’s more representative of our time.

That’s not to say that painting wasn’t scrutinized but, because of the way the history of art has progressed, you look at photography as an extension of painting. It has replaced it as a medium, so now painting can get away with not asking as many questions.

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GP: It affords more freedom, a broader sense of freedom and possibility, which is what one would ideally want from any art form. Photography, by comparison, is young, but the rules seem to be really apparent if you take photography seriously. There are too many rules attributed to great photography for my sense of pleasure. It’s not entirely easy to talk about those rules, but one comes up against them when one is trying to do serious photography: the limits that collectively surround the depiction of the nude, the limits of what the properties of color ought to be, what really good color in photography is… Is it naturalistic color? These little inner conflicts within the medium of photography interest me, but they seem puny in the face of the problems that painting has wrestled with. They seem petty.

EMH: I would say I use photography as a means to achieve painting.

GP: That’s totally acceptable.

And that definition fits me like a glove, too, but we draw different

conclusions about what that means.

Yet, you’re comfortable with the word decoration, right?

EMH: I am. All art inevitably is decoration in some end.

GP: Do you know why you aren’t interested in the human condition, or the interior life of a human being? Or why you don’t try to get some semblance of that in a portrait? Does it have no interest for you whatsoever?

EMH: I do encapsulate a person in my portraiture to the fullest possible extent. Yet, the veneer of my imagery doesn’t need to appear to be emotional for the sake of appearances. “I’m fine with the subject becoming a postured sculpture in profile, because that’s what we are.

GP: Doesn’t that mean at the end of the day you’re a formalist?

EMH: Yes, very much so. Speaking of, have you ever approached fashion photography?

GP: My work is profoundly influenced by fashion, but I don’t want the word “fashion” to involuntarily enter the viewer’s mind.

EMH: Why? Do you think it cheapens it?

GP: No, it just undercuts the integrity of what I am doing.

What I’m taking from fashion is the narrative length that is inherent in having ten or more pages to work with. In the print medium, the fashion story is the only story,

structurally, where one can really work out some very vital ideas that need space. I’d like to think that I’m tricking certain viewers into looking at my work by including superficial affinities with the look of a fashion story. But the “look” is basically rooted in the number of pages that are given to fashion stories. Fashion’s intention is to impart pleasure, and most of us like our pleasure drawn out.

EMH: Do you think art needs to impart pleasure?

GP: I would say all art must give pleasure, to paraphrase the great poet Wallace Stevens. That’s a necessity of art: It must give pleasure. However difficult that pleasure may be, it is a form of pleasure. That’s the great thing about art, pleasure can have attributes of difficulty, or great complexity, and still impart this sensation we call pleasure.

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George Pitts is a photographer, writer and painter. His work has appeared in numerous museum and gallery exhibitions in the United States, Japan and Canada. He is the former Photography Director of Vibe magazine, and his photographs have been published in the New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine and the Paris Review. He is currently an assistant professor and the Director of Photographic Practices at Parsons The New School for Design.

Taryn Simon on Identity

EMH: What is your first memory of photography? Is photography something you came to later in life or was it of interest to you early on?

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TS: One of my earliest memories of photography is through a photograph. My father and I used to invent elaborately constructed scenes in nature using leaves and twigs, and arrange them to form geometric shapes that were then photographed.

EMH: Your approach to photography is very unique in that it is arguably more anthropological than photographic. It seems to utilize the very origins of the medium in its indexical nature. Did you always see photography as a means to illustrate or portray a version of truth? Is it truth that you seek in your projects?

TS: I’m not sure what I’m chasing, but I know it when I’m in it. I do have a tendency to organize what I collect into systems and categories.

It’s an imposed order, which allows me to sift through chaos with some semblance of coherence.

EMH: You have spoken about the relationship between the formal, aesthetic qualities of your photographs being as important as the conceptual nature of your projects—with the two having to coexist harmoniously. Is this still true of your work, or have you become less interested in the photograph itself?

TS: I’m just interested in a different set of formal qualities than I was ten years ago. Lately I’ve been working with multiple images, so my focus is directed toward graphic design. The images have taken on a more bare, machine-like form servicing the collective view.

EMH: The first public project you created was “The Innocents.” Can you briefly talk about how this project laid the groundwork for the direction your work would take?

TS: “The Innocents” informed a study of the relationship between text and image, which rests at the foundation of all my work.

All of the men I photographed were victims of misidentification, resulting from a “text” or history

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Taryn Simon. Excerpt from “Chapter XI, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII.” c. Official Adolf Hitler postage stamp and Hans Frank imitation stamp. The Hitler stamp was printed in 1941 for the second anniversary of the founding of the Generalgouvernement and was in circulation until the end of the Second World War. A replica of the Hitler stamp, with Frank’s image, was produced by British intelligence and released in Poland to provoke friction between Frank and Hitler. Henry Gitner Philatelists, Inc., New York. e. Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine, taken by German troops from the Czartoryski collection during the Second World War. It hung in the Wawel apartment of Hans Frank and was later brought to his family home, Schoberhof. After Frank’s arrest, the painting was returned to the Czartoryski Museum, where it now hangs across from the empty frame for Raphael’s missing Portrait of a Youth. Czartoryski Museum, Krakow. f. Rembrandt’s Landscape with the Good Samaritan, taken by German troops from the Czartoryski collection during the Second World War. One of only eight oil landscapes painted by the artist, it was returned to the Czartoryski Museum upon Frank’s arrest. Czartoryski Museum, Krakow.

7. Frank, Norman, 06 Mar. 1928. Bavarian television facilities director (retired). Schliersee, Germany.

8. MJK, 24 May 1958. (Information withheld). [Sent clothing as representation.] © Taryn Simon. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

being associated with their image, which was false. The power of a photograph and its associated narrative, in tandem, had the potential to lead to a death (on death row). This left an indelible mark on my view of the medium.

EMH: What is the relationship between exhibiting your work in a gallery and how it appears in book form? Do you feel your work needs to exist in a gallery setting?

TS: My work is primarily viewed in institutional settings. I’ve always preferred to see my work in a public space. Books have always been primary. I love the art of bookmaking. It’s something I spend an enormous amount of time on.

EMH: Do you ever find exhibiting work in the museum or gallery setting to be limiting, considering your subject matter?

TS: For me, the setting has only challenged the work to take on different forms. My most important exhibition to date was one in which I had to respond to space and re-shape a work, allowing it to function in Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie, which has no walls. I took the bookshelves from the basement (built by Mies) and constructed them on steroids.

The works from “A Living Man Declared Dead” were embedded in these structures that became a part of the work. It changed everything for me moving forward.

I no longer look at space the same.

So, no, I don’t find it limiting.

EMH: With your most recent body of work, “Birds of the West Indies,” you have moved into a more abstract space, dealing with cinema, literature, fiction and real people simultaneously. What led you to the James Bond book?

TS: James Bond represents the most successful fantasy production series, economically, with adjusted dollars over a long period of time. I wanted to look at the components of this desire, which is founded in a contract between the viewer and the franchise. The viewer knows the narrative before entering the door and has certain expectations with every new iteration. This powerful, Western male lead figure is surrounded by certain accessories in substitution, which support the fantasy: women, weapons and vehicles. They function like trading cards, in constant replacement for one another. This idea of substitution leads back to the character’s name itself, as it was taken by Ian Fleming while writing his novels in the West Indies. The original James Bond was an ornithologist who constructed the most important taxonomy on birds of the region.

Fleming took his name to represent his lead character, who he saw as “a blunt instrument in the hands of the government.”

Taryn Simon is an artist and Guggenheim Fellow whose mediums consist of three integrated elements: photography, text and graphic design.

These tools serve as the principal instruments in her pivotal works: “Birds of the West Indies” (2013-2014), “The Picture Collection” (2013), “A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII” (2008-2011) and “Black Square” (2006-present). Her photographs and writings have been the subject of monographic exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate Modern and Neue Nationalgalerie.

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“A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters” (installation view). Exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie, 2011. © Taryn Simon. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photograph by David Von Becker.

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Switzerland (detail). From “Birds of the West Indies,” 2014. © Taryn Simon. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

Vince Aletti on Context

EMH: How did you first discover photography?

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VA: I grew up with a darkroom in the house. My father made one in the attic, so I still have this lingering romance about the darkroom and the red light and the chemical smell—and watching a picture come to life. My father had a regular job, but photography was something he really liked to do and his framed photos were on the walls in our house. So I grew up seeing photography in that context, not just in a magazine. I saw it as something that people did and worked at—not something abstract.

EMH: What did he shoot?

VA: Portraits, still lifes…what I think of as “camera club” subjects, nice landscape-y stuff. They were actually good; he had some talent. He took pictures of my sisters and me. We have incredible documentation of every Christmas and Easter. He died when I was ten, in a plane crash, but he left behind this whole archive of U.S. Camera Annuals. That also really affected me, because they were kept on shelves in my room. I would look through them and, of

course, at a certain point started focusing on the nudes—I was ten or 12 years old. But in the process of that kind of adolescent obsession, I discovered Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and their pictures really made an impact. It was that connection to photography as an art form that made a big impression on me. Then I began absorbing photography in magazines, especially the fashion magazines my mother got, and that became a serious interest.

EMH: When you first started looking at photographs, were they just that: photographs, or were you already able to see them in a broader “art” light?

VA: I appreciated them—and I still do—as pictures on a page.

Sometimes that’s where they belong and that’s where they look great.

They don’t need to be taken out of that context. Then, I developed this interest in graphic design and magazines and the whole look of a magazine. All of that was in the back of my mind when I really started looking at photography in galleries, which was in New York in the mid ’60s, when there weren’t very many photography galleries.

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Richard Avedon. Harper’s Bazaar (cover), April 1965.

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that was kind of casual. I wasn’t thinking of myself as a photo critic at that point; I was just somebody VA: The Witkin Gallery, when it was who enjoyed writing about photography. on 57th Street, which was mostly 19th century and late 20th century EMH: How critical were your classics available in bins and lots of reviews? boxes of ephemera and stereo cards and things like that. Then Light VA: They were critical, not Gallery, which was much more contemporary. And I remember just teardown critical, but they were going out and looking at stuff, going not uncritical. They gave me a way to develop a language and to train to art galleries and being obsessed myself. I didn’t study photography; I with Andy Warhol and that approach to pop culture, which—for studied it by going out and looking me—was very based in photography. at everything. I’d been looking for 20 years before I started writing All of that had a lot to do with my about it, but never with the idea background, because I didn’t really that I was honing in on the subject. start writing about photography At the Voice, I also started a until the late ’80s, when I was at series of profiles of photographers, the Village Voice. which gave me a comfortable way to transition into writing longer EMH: How did you transition critical pieces. out of writing about music into writing about photography?

EMH: Who was the first photographer you profiled?

VA: It probably would not have happened had I not been at the VA: I think it was Dawoud Bey, Village Voice, where you were who was living in Brooklyn at the really encouraged to follow your time and who had his second show. interests and where I was writing I was more comfortable writing about black pop and dance music about people who were just getting and music videos, and things started, rather than someone who that helped me make a transition had a long career that I had to between music and photography. catch up on. It came mostly from Around that same time, I decided my interest in or curiosity about I really wanted to write about why they did what they did and something besides music and the how they made a living, because reviewer who was writing regular there weren’t that many places to photography exhibition reviews go with your work. Even if you had decided to move on and gave me a a show, you weren’t likely to make spot to move into, in the centerfold calendar section. That’s what I was a lot of money from it. The people I was speaking to did have a show really happy to do. It’s kind of like at the time I was writing about what I’m doing at The New Yorker them, but I wasn’t focused much on now, just really brief reviews of success. It was really just about current shows. It gave me a way being a creative artist, at that point. to get into photography journalism EMH: Which galleries did you go to?

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In the beginning, I profiled Barbara Ess, Neil Winokur, Andrea Modica, Fazal Sheikh, Adam Fuss. I did Sally Mann relatively early. That was kind of how it all came about, and during that process I moved away from music so much that I just couldn’t write about it with the same intensity again.

EMH: I wanted to talk to you about fashion photography, because it’s rare for people to consider it as more than just pictures that sell clothing.

Did you first get involved with it through your love of Penn’s work?

VA: Through Avedon, actually. In 1965, I bought a magazine that turned out to be his anniversary issue at Harper’s Bazaar. It was this major Pop Art issue that was so much about that particular moment in pop culture. There were pictures of the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jean Shrimpton and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then still a teenager named Lew Alcindor).

There was art by Roy Lichtenstein and George Segal. It was this incredible time capsule and every picture was taken by Avedon—and every picture was spectacular. I remember fixating on it, tearing the cover off and putting it on the wall in my dorm room, and tearing out all my favorite photos.

EMH: Do you still have an issue, not torn up?

VA: Yes! Years later that cover image was something I carried around with me. When I moved into this apartment, it was one

of the first things I push-pinned to my wall. But then I thought: I should have this whole magazine.

At the time there were a number of backdate magazine stores in New York, mostly unorganized. So I started looking for it and I didn’t find it, but I found a lot of other magazines that seemed pretty amazing. So I started buying some of them, little by little: covers that I’d seen in magazines and things that just looked great. Mostly it was a lot of Penn and Avedon and Horst and Cecil Beaton, kind of everybody. In searching for this magazine, I realized how important seeing those pictures in context was. For example, seeing “Dovima with the Elephants” with another picture from that same session, on the opposite page, that was part of this long Paris collections piece... It went on for like 25 pages.

EMH: It’s interesting that everyone knows that picture…

VA: But not how it fits! That’s how I got hooked. The more I saw, the more I wanted to see and the more I realized that this was the essential material.

EMH: Were there other pictures from the series that are as profound as “Dovima with the Elephants?”

VA: Yes. All those Avedon Paris series were extensive. There were usually at least five pictures in each that Avedon chose to reproduce later as exhibition prints and that became famous Avedon pictures.

He did the Paris collections for almost every year of the ’50s, in

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Richard Avedon. Dovima with the Elephants, August 1955.

September. It was the September issue with an Avedon cover and Avedon pages. Even back then September was the key issue, and each issue was more extraordinary than the last.

I worked on “Avedon Fashion: 1944-2000” at the International Center of Photography in 2009 with Carol Squiers, and she did the research on that period of Avedon and his work. This was after World War II and Paris was devastated.

It took a long time for the city to get back on its feet. Fashion was important, and the idea of bringing Paris fashion back was crucial to creating this romantic idea of Paris.

EMH: It was like rebuilding the city, physically and emotionally.

VA: Exactly. Avedon was creating these fantasies and incredible narratives with men and women making scenes and gambling and whatever. They were so convincing and so beautiful. They are little film stills, little fictions.

EMH: That is what I think of when I think of fashion photography. It’s illustration.

It’s illustrating an idea, which is very opposite of a lot of fashion photography now. I grew up looking at Avedon as well, and that’s where I got a lot of my early inspiration. I’ve always wanted the most romantic idea, not reality. That’s what fashion does: It gives you an escape to some fantastical...

VA: …some place that seems not real, necessarily, but better than anything.

EMH: How do you view fashion photography now?

VA: That’s a little difficult, because I’m never one who thinks of the golden age as the past. It’s always just changing. Part of what was interesting when we did the Avedon show was his post Harper’s Bazaar work, when he was at Vogue. By the time Avedon was at Vogue, Penn was at his height, and for the first time they were sharing a magazine. That was very interesting, to see how that played out.

EMH: Were they fierce competitors?

VA: Yes, but not enemies. I think they saw each other as very different characters. They knew they could coexist, because they did very different things, but I think they also knew that they were both at the top of their game. They both wanted to be number one. So for them to be at the same place at the same time showed how distinctive each of them was. They could do very different things in the same space, but after a certain mid ’60s point—when Diana Vreeland was at Vogue—little by little they became the old guard. The new guard was Guy Bourdin, Helmut Newton and Deborah Turbeville. Penn and Avedon became the establishment that needed to be overturned. I think Avedon was much more conscious of keeping his position. Penn, I don’t think, cared as much in that same way because he was less and less interested in fashion.

EMH: And his work speaks volumes to that.

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VA: Really, his fashion work in the late ’60s and ’70s was fairly routine.

EMH: In my opinion, most people think of Avedon as a fashion photographer, and most people think of Penn as a photographer who sometimes did fashion, whether or not that’s accurate. He was seen as a photographer who did portraits of different groups of people and dabbled in fashion.

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VA: I think that’s accurate on some level. Certainly Penn’s heart was more in still life and the portraits and the “Worlds in a Small Room” series, and those things… Any time he did anything outside of fashion, it was just amazing. At that point, in the ’70s, Avedon started “In the American West” and started doing lots of outside projects. He did that series called “The Family” in 1976 for Rolling Stone, all the portraits of politicians in Washington DC...

He just threw himself more into portraiture and did less and less fashion.

EMH: Did he see himself as an artist?

VA: Yes. He wanted to be seen as an artist. He took the position that his fashion work was not as important. He didn’t disown it, but he downplayed it at a certain point.

EMH: To be accepted by the art world?

VA: Who knows? I don’t think that it would have kept him from being accepted, but maybe he thought it would be a problem. When the Whitney gave him the retrospective

in 1994, there was almost no fashion featured in it. I thought that was a huge mistake. He’s a great portrait photographer, but he is the great fashion photographer, as far as I’m concerned.

EMH: Is that one of the first evidences of the art world rejecting fashion?

VA: No. This was not the art world; this was Avedon. It was his own inability to understand how important his fashion work was. I think he saw it as something that would be perceived as less important, that the other work was more crucial. But he’d already had a major show of mostly fashion work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the mid ’70s and he’d had a lot of recognition for that. Maybe he just felt that he wanted to focus on other stuff. I never really asked him point blank about that, but he did go through a period where he tended to downplay fashion in favor of other things that a lot of times were less interesting. Toward the end of his career, he did very little fashion outside of commercial advertising for Versace and occasional shoots for The New Yorker.

EMH: Is that the age-old dilemma: You want to shoot fashion, but you also want to shoot art? This kind of distinction isn’t really talked about in the open. What are your thoughts? Why is there such a divide? Even someone like Juergen Teller is shown in a gallery, but still is never really perceived as an art photographer.

VA: I tend to disagree with that.

Juergen has such a strong gallery presence that I think there isn’t a problem. There is less of that these days, because there are so many people who have participated in fashion, serious photographers who made great fashion work.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia, for me, is a great example.

EMH: To me, he’s kind of the exception. What he did with W is some of the best fashion that magazine has ever printed. I think it makes sense to see it in a gallery because it is a perfect marriage, but often times that doesn’t work.

VA: I agree. I really value fashion photography so I really have a problem with people who say, “Oh, it’s only fashion.” When you look at history and you look at Horst and Beaton and George Hoyningen-Huene and Baron Adolph De Meyer, and great historical fashion work, it is just incredible. It should not be seen as lesser because it’s about clothes.

There is enough perspective at this point to see it that way. There’s perspective on Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton. It’s difficult for people to see current work in the same perspective, but I think Steven Meisel is equal to all of those people, and no one is paying attention to him.

EMH: Where would you want to see fashion photography going?

VA: I’m just happy to see it changing, to see people absorbing street work and all kinds of influences. I love the theatrical

stuff that Steven Klein does and that Meisel does every once in a while. I’m happy to see things develop in a natural way. Where would I like to see fashion going?

Somewhere more avant-garde.

Most people don’t feel comfortable with that, and there aren’t as many creative outlets. Even though there are tons of magazines, I don’t feel like a lot of them are pushing their photographers. There was a period, not that long ago, when it seemed like magazines were looking for interesting photographers outside of fashion to do fashion work.

It really ended up pulling a lot of people in, in a way that was invigorating. Every once in a while that still happens, but I’d love to see that more regularly.

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Vince Aletti is a writer and art collector.

He reviews photography exhibitions for The New Yorker’s “Goings On About Town” and pens a regular column for Photograph. He also contributes to Aperture, Artforum, W and Document— and was a regular contributor to and columnist for Creem in the 1970s. Aletti is the winner of the 2005 Infinity Award for Writing from the International Center of Photography, the museum for which he co-curated “Weird Beauty: Fashion Photography Now” and “Avedon: Fashion 1944-2000” with Carol Squiers, and served as the sole curator of “This Is Not a Fashion Photograph.” His photography and art archive has been featured in prominent publications and monographs.

Kathy Ryan on Immediacy

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EMH: Once you create a bold aesthetic stamp that’s all people want you to do. After the second Mary Katrantzou collaboration came about, everyone wanted me to photograph florals and patterns on pattern. Now, if I desaturate my color, people react as if it isn’t my work. It’s strange. I think people just want you to stay in a certain place.

And so now you’re “the shadow person,” aren’t you, Kathy?

KR: I am the “shadow person.” The good part of it is you come up with something that you get obsessed with for all the right reasons. You go on this subconscious, unplanned artistic journey. You’re exploring something. In my case, it’s the light and shadows that are created by the wonderful white ceramic rods that sheathe the New York Times building, creating a beautiful light in the office. So you have this thing that drives your work and people are drawn to that. That’s fantastic.

Then the other side of that is they expect that from you.

The great thing is you’re having a dialogue. With Instagram, you can have this automatic, instantaneous dialogue. Prior to Instagram, this did not exist. You

did not have visual people making images and sending them out into the world immediately and getting immediate responses. It’s playful and interactive. It’s seductive. You want to feed that appetite for “likes” from your followers. On the other hand, you have to not fall prey to trying to create something that you know will get a bunch of likes.

Sometimes you can guess which picture will be a crowd pleaser and that’s fine. Often it’s because it’s the best picture that you’ve made—or it can be, because it’s more easily digestible. The whole point of being an artist is to break new ground or go somewhere you haven’t gone. That will sometimes mean making less appealing pictures that will get fewer likes, but they might ultimately be more important for whatever you’re exploring.

EMH: Do you think likes are democratic? I’ve found with Instagram that if I put up a photograph or painting that I know is really strong, it tends to get more likes. So in the most elementary sense Instagram is a barometer of: Is it good? The crowd decides.

KR: I couldn’t agree more. The crowd decides and the crowd is often right. If you have a really powerful picture, they’re going to see it. It’s interesting to realize how quickly the crowd knows it. You might not be so sure, but if immediately it’s getting a tremendous response, it is because it actually is a very dynamic, arresting image. In that sense it is a good barometer.

EMH: When did you first start using Instagram?

KR: I started in the fall of 2012. I made a couple of pictures, and then the moment I made one at the New York Times of a zigzag of light going up the staircase there was no turning back. That was the moment I fell in love with the medium. It was just so much fun. It was as if my eyes had just been completely opened. I saw crazy, beautiful, extraordinary things happening with light all over the place.

On the east side of the building, where my cubicle is, the light comes pouring in first thing in the morning. Late in the afternoon or early evening, if I go upstairs to the west side of the building, I get dramatic light of a different sort. And that was it. I just got overcome with an urge to make a good picture. Something I had never had. Then I’d post it as quickly as I could. So it was kind of like a triple threat: See it, make the picture, edit it. And post it quickly.

I always felt there was something less legitimate about posting it later. Then I got to the point where I was making more pictures and I was taking more time to edit and it was interfering a bit with my work.

So I had to accept that if I did them in the morning before work, I’d have to wait until lunchtime to steal a few minutes to edit and post.

And sometimes I might not have a chance to look at them and post them until that night. I was usually racing to get them out quickly. I liked the dare and the challenge of having to edit at top speed and post quickly, without having a chance to reflect on: Is it good or not? I like that about Instagram. In a way, it’s liberating. You post a bad one: So what? It’s still more fun to just send it out there.

EMH: But you do probably selfedit now, without even trying.

KR: Yes. I’m undergoing the same thing I think artists and photographers do, where you make a certain kind of picture for a while because it’s exciting to you. You have to make it; you can’t not make it. Then the bar rises and you can’t repeat yourself. You do, however, because you’re drawn to something.

You’re drawn to vivid, bright color— explosive color. That’s a palette that’s uniquely yours and you have to work with that. It’s the thing that makes you special, but within that you face a point where you have to keep reinventing it, giving it a twist and working it in different directions. It’s interesting for me to have to undergo that process. Now, I’ll get an urge to make a striping light picture in the office. Then my inner voice says I’ve already done it, but if I really want to make another one… Why not?

EMH: Would you say Instagram has made you a photographer?

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KR: I still feel uncomfortable calling myself a photographer. I feel like it’s a claim I can’t quite make because I only make pictures with a cell phone, which I think is legit. If it makes an image, it’s a legitimate tool. I never had any issues with that. Think of the SX-70 Polaroid. It was easy, automatic and anybody could do it, and it became a valuable tool for people like Lucas Samaras and Andy Warhol. So of course artists are going to make amazing pictures with a cell phone. It allows you to make a certain kind of picture you might not have been able to make before. It’s so easy; it’s in our pocket.

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EMH: Especially with Instagram and the preset filters.

I’ve heard both ends of the spectrum, where people will lament that it makes it so easy for people to make a photo; it evens the playing field. I feel like it’s almost harder. If everyone has the same tools to make something, it pushes your creativity that much further to make something impactful within your limitations.

KR: I think that’s right. Initially, it’s entrancing and people fall in love with it because it is so easy.

Then, very quickly, if you realize that so many people are making a certain kind of square image with a vanishing point at sunset then you realize: Oh, wait a minute, there’s no point in doing that because so many other people are making the same one. So the question is: What can I do with it that no one else is doing? The ease of it is the challenge of it.

We sponsored the first-ever Instameet at the New York Times, where we invited photographers to come join us for a night at the New York Times printing plant in College Point, Queens. Hundreds applied. We looked at all of their Instagram feeds to choose 25 to go on the trip. We saw many pictures of the Williamsburg Bridge in the feeds. I would say it would be very difficult to shoot the Williamsburg Bridge on Instagram in a way that’s unique. I’m not saying impossible, but the bar is high. There are certain things like bridges and sunsets that the filter and square format render quite beautifully, but there are a million ways to use that wonderful format to make original pictures.

In my case, I realized nobody celebrates the office life. Huge amounts of people work in offices and at the end of their careers they don’t have any pictures of themselves at work. It seemed like territory that wasn’t well trodden.

It wasn’t even that conscious of a decision. I was just doing it out of some primal urge to make pictures and capture the incredible light in the building.

EMH: You’re describing exactly what others have described with their first introduction to photography, that “primal urge.”

I always think light is the first chapter in photography. When I was in high school, I was obsessed with shapes and light.

I think it’s really interesting, knowing your background—the fact that you’re the Director of Photography at the New York Times Magazine, which is one of the most powerful

photography positions to hold—to hear you talk about photography in this way that’s very innocent and like, “I just had to do it.”

KR: Something just happened where these things came together.

The introduction of the iPhone camera made it easy to make a picture very quickly and to share it. That combined with the extraordinary quality of the light in the building got me going. I get grumpy on cloudy days when the sun isn’t out and there is no light and shadow.

EMH: Well, maybe that’s what you need to do next: push away from the highlights and go to the grey tones.

KR: I’ve thought about it, but the strange thing is my heart beats faster when there’s that intense bright light. When it is full on and intense, I see pictures everywhere.

If the light is not there, it becomes a different kind of narrative picture. It’s about content and storytelling. The “Office Romance” series is about falling in love with the way something looks for a moment, or setting up a picture to take advantage of the light. It’s a very personal and playful engagement. The New York Times is a newsworthy place. There’s history being made there—all sorts of stories are happening. Sometimes I wonder if I should push myself into a more documentary mode, so I have a better record of the people and the work that goes on. Being a journalist, part of me does want to have something that has meaning.

In a perfect world, I’d have both: the poetry and the beauty of it, as well as the documentary, narrative content.

Photography, by definition, is fairly specific. So if a picture is specific and it’s clearly a picture of so-and-so at a given moment of time doing something, it has a value as the years get layered on it that a more abstract picture might not have. A more abstract picture might be more pleasing on a purely visceral, visual, sensory level. The downside is that, if it’s lacking specificity, it might have a little less meaning as a document years later. There’s a tension between those things.

EMH: And that raises the universal question: What is photography, how does it function? Does photography need to function as art? That’s kind of what you’re speaking to. You’re making art right now with your “Office Romance” series, instead of really making pictures.

KR: A part of me thinks I’m making art because I’m just doing it for purely personal reasons, for no other reason than my own obsession. Part of the charm and joy of this is that I don’t have to do it. It just comes from some other thing. When I start to think about doing something for a little bit more of a record, then I have to work at it in a different way.

Because if my journalistic instincts come into play and this is a record, then I need all the editors of the magazine. Right now, most of the people in my pictures are the ones closest at hand, the photo editors and designers.

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Kathy Ryan. From “Office Romance,” 2013-2014.

EMH: Once you start thinking and conceptualizing the work, it becomes something different.

You’re experiencing the angst of what it is to be on the other side of the image. Some of the best art has come out of the place of “I have to make this,” with no conscious thought in the moment—all action.

KR: It has to be semiconscious.

You make it because you’re compelled to make a certain kind of image and you don’t quite understand why, and you don’t actually want to stare that down.

EMH: And all the decisions you made up to that point have lead you there. You didn’t just stumble upon it, even though you also have to just stumble upon it.

Last question: After so many years of working with photographers, how does it feel to become one? Is it conflicting at all?

KR: You know, all the years of looking at pictures and thinking about pictures clearly informs the images I’m making—no matter how semiconscious they may seem. They come from a prepared mind that has dealt with issues in photography for years. I don’t find a conflict. In some ways, I think it’s a good thing for the picture editor side of me, because looking at something so furiously—the light in my office—has strengthened my visual sense. My muse is the very office I work in.

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Kathy Ryan is the Director of Photography of the New York Times Magazine. Since her appointment in 1987, she has been lauded with advancing visual boundaries by blurring photography’s borders, cross-assigning war photographers to shoot portraits and landscape photographers to capture close-ups. Her unconventional approach has helped the magazine win a number of prestigious industry awards, with Ryan herself receiving the first annual Lucie Award for Picture Editor of the Year and a lifetime achievement award from the Griffin Museum. Her Instagram project “Office Romance” is her first public entrée into photographing.

Miranda Lichtenstein on Evolution

EMH: What was your first memory of photography?

ML: My brother, who is also a photographer, built a darkroom in our bathroom when I was ten. So I was introduced to photography at a very early age.

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EMH: What was the first series of images you created? Do you still have them?

ML: My closest friend in high school was a muse for me, and I photographed her constantly—well into my twenties. I came across a box of these prints when my mother sold her house this year and, although I would never show them, they are now in my studio. I also made a series of multi-media collages that I applied to graduate school with, called “Golden Ads of the ’80s.” It was very influenced by artists from the Pictures Generation. I might have two of these left. They looked much better in slides than in person.

EMH: How do you use photography now?

ML: I remain faithful to the heterogeneous nature of the

medium, but I’ve been primarily shooting in the studio for the past three or four years. I’ve been working on a series that feels endless in its iterations, which is very satisfying. I’m interested in calling attention to the construction of the photograph, with an emphasis on its surface.

EMH: You seem to be very project oriented, with your work morphing from one project to the next, aesthetically. What is the thread that binds it all?

ML: Light, and the mutable and myriad possibilities inherent to the medium.

EMH: You are both a photographer and a professor of photography, yet—in my experience speaking with you over the years—it seems you prefer to not over-intellectualize photography. How do you talk about photography to your students? How do you reconcile being a contemporary artist without dressing your work in “artspeak?”

ML: It’s interesting that you say this because I think I have a

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Miranda Lichtenstein. Ganzfeld, 2005. C-print.

very different reputation where I currently teach, at Rutgers University. I would say that I don’t discriminate and I’m comfortable straddling different approaches and attitudes when it comes to teaching. When we worked together you were different from many of the students, in that you were working with fashion.

I worked as a photo editor and researcher at magazines for many years before teaching, so I’m comfortable in this realm and take it on its own terms. I suspect I tailored our conversations in this way since it seemed natural, and I respected the work for not trying to be something it wasn’t. It’s a mistake to try to bend one’s work in a way that’s not true to itself.

You need to own what you’re doing and if that means you are allergic to what you call “artspeak” then I think it’s better to not go there and to be direct.

EMH: You currently have a show at the Gallery at Hermès of your four-by-five Polaroids from 2002 to 2013. Can you speak on your latest show? How did it come about, and what do you wish your viewers to take away from it?

ML: The exhibition was put together by Cory Jacobs, a photo editor and curator at Hermès, whom I’ve known and respected for years. She approached me about doing a show a year ago. She had seen some of my Polaroids at the Hammer Museum in 2006. I thought Cory’s idea to look back at my Polaroid work over the past 11 years would be a great opportunity to bring together work

that I hadn’t shown simultaneously and to unify the pictures through this specific format. I was also interested to show in a space that is dedicated to photography, a new context for me. We decided that I would go through my work from the very beginning, when I first started shooting with a four-by-five Polaroid, until the present. I liked the idea of doing a show that culminated in, what will most likely be, some of my last Polaroids, because the film is no longer manufactured. Since the project was coming to an end, it made sense to have it all put together as a group.

I hope that viewers will allow for a slow read. A lot of the ideas in the work circle around misrepresentation and failure, but because of the small scale the viewer might have to work a bit to see this.

EMH: Are you interested in beauty?

ML: No. Not as an idea, or ideal.

I do think I’m attracted to things that have a certain amount of pleasure, but this is not across the board. My work is often called “beautiful” and this makes me a little uncomfortable, because I fear it can trump meaning. But I would never go out of my way to make something less “beautiful” for the sake of it. I hope if someone finds the work beautiful it will encourage them to keep looking.

EMH: What do you want from photography?

ML: I want it to continue to open up and be multifaceted, while

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Screen Shadow No. 17 (For Maya), 2010.

Archival pigment print.

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still being considered on its own terms as a medium. It is constantly being labeled as “documentary,” “experimental,” “amateur,” etc., which I hope we can get past.

László Moholy-Nagy famously said, “The enemy of photography is the convention, the fixed rules of ‘how to do.’ The salvation of photography comes from the experiment.”

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Miranda Lichtenstein is a photographer and professor. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the UCLA Hammer Museum, Whitney Museum at Philip Morris and Gallery Min Min. She has also participated in group exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and has work in the permanent collections of a number of international museums, including the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the Neuberger Museum of Art. Lichtenstein has taught at Parsons The New School of Design and Rutgers University.

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Untitled #20 (Palucca), 2008.

Archival pigment print.

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Guinevere Van Seenus in The High Priestess

3 TO THÉODORE DE BANVILLE Chaleville, Ardennes, Auguest 15, 1871 ON THE SUBJECT OF FLOWERS: REMARKS, ADDRESSED TO THE POET

To Monsieur Théodore de Banville I There, bordering blue black skies Where wavecrests tremble gold, Lilies stimulate evening ecstasies, Enemas thrust between bardic folds.

After all, times have changed: Plants now labor—aloe and rose.

Lilies arranged in bunches Decorate your religious prose.

Kendrel disappeared behind them In the Sonnet of eighteen thirty.

Poets are buried beneath them, In amaranth and carnation flurries.

Through grassy banks and wooded ways Feast your shutterbugging eyes.

What they seize on sure amazes: A monotony of pretty lies.

The real trees support

Why this mania for floral wrangling?

Why does it prompt such turgid lines?

Low-slung hounds with bellies dangling French poets are tickled by muddy vines.

If decadent decoratio that looms To prettify your pages question’s clear: Is this riotous, ceasel of blooms Worth a seagull’s turd

As if the lines weren’t bad enough, Consider the pictures they adjoin…

A first communion? Either option’s rough: Sunflowers or Lotuses? Flip a coin.

I think I’ve made my A poet in his far-flung Draped with Persian You resolutely keep th

Can French poets resist an Ashokan ode?

Can addicts resist a bag of blow?

As if butterflies take the high road, To avoid shitting on daisies below.

And then describe the Of flowers, ignoring b This sort of thing—so Keep it up, and drive

All this greenery is becoming mulch.

Blossoms plucked to raise the stakes.

Salons bedecked like a flowery gulch Better for beetles than rattlesnakes.

Grandville’s sentimental sketchings Fill margins with mawkish blooms, Caricatures of flowery retchings Evening stars the dark consumes.

Saliva drooling from your pipings Is all we have for nectar: Pan now dozes.

His song has become mere guttersniping About Lilies, Ashoka, Lilacs, Roses.

IV

Heard of the notion o Your efforts until now Enough of this milk-f Try describing tobacc

Why not render Pedro And the dollars his ca Let sun brown skin, y Describe the shit on s

III

Yes: the Sorrento sea But an ocean of crap Are your stanzas equip Are there hydras in th

Why, even when you bathe, Dear Sir, Your sallow-pitted gown must bloom With morning breezes: sleeves confer High above forget-me-nots in swoon.

O White Hunters: your barefoot excursions Trample the pastoral into derision; Shouldn’t your flowery poetic diversions Exhibit a modicum of botanical precision?

Thrust quatrains into And report the news Expostulate on sugar Whether pansements o

Yes: our garden gates let lilacs pass.

But such candied clichés have a cost: Pollinating spit on petals looks like glass But is still spit. Our poor flowers? Lost.

You deploy Crickets and Flies indiscriminately Conflating Phylum and Genus. Rio’s gold And Rhine’s blue are switched inadvertently, Poor Norway becomes “Florida, but cold.”

Your job? Deliver trut Such as what covers Is what crowns them Lichen, or eggs from

And when you get your hands on roses, Windwhipped roses red on laurel stems, Their effect upon you one supposes Irresistible: bad verses just never end.

In the past, Dear Master, Art may have settled For the alexandrine’s hexametrical constrictions; But now, shouldn’t the stink of fallen petals Rotting, make a clean sweep of our ambitions?

O White Hunters, we You find us perfumed Nature nurtures, we g Dye trousers our infa

BANVILLE’s roses fall like snow, Their whiteness flecked with blood.

A pricking feeling readers know: Incomprehension chafes and rubs.

Our botanically challenged bards forever bungle: Mahogany is “a flower found in the country”: Who could imagine that in the Guyan jungle

Lilies, lilies. So often mentioned, So seldom seen. In your verses, though They blossom like good intentions As sinners’ resolutions come and go.

II

Find flowers that loo At forest fringes dead Unpack oozing botan Ochre ointments that

Find calyxes full of fie Cooking in aestival ju

t armies of monkeys?

In meadows gone insane with legs: Pubescent insects Spring seduces.

on is the answer

s, the larger

less, vomitation

d or one candle’s tear?

point: sitting there, g bamboo hut, rugs in the Sahara he shutters shut:

e sands as full barren dunes: disgraceful—is bull. poetry to its doom.

of “keeping it real”? w have been rotten. fed literary veal: co and cotton.

o Velazquez’ face ash-crop brings; your pallor erase, swans’ white wings:

a is full of feathers, floats there too; pped for all weathers? he waters with you?

o the bloody woods that we need. r and durable goods or rubbers that bleed.

th on these matters, s our tropical peaks; m like snow-scatters insectoid beaks?

really must insist madders’ hues; gather: fat fists antrymen abuse.

ok like muzzles, d with sleep; nical puzzles, t they leak.

ery eggs uices

Monsieur and Maítre,

For once—Sad Jester—just serve it up; Lay our table with a purple platter.

Fill it with a lily stew’s sweet syrup: Fill our spoons with the heart of the matter.

Perhaps you recall, in June of 1870, having received a hundred or a hundred fifty mythological hexameters for the provinces entitled Credo in Unam? You were so good to respond!

The same idiot is sending you more of his stuff, this time signed Alcide Bava— Sorry.

I’m eighteen. —I still admire Banville’s poetry.

Last year I was only seventeen!

Am I progressing?

Alcide Bava A.R.

V

Find cottony thistledown in bunches By which donkeys’ vision is impaired.

Nature never pulls her punches, Some flowers even look like chairs.

Yes: find in the heart of dark divides Flowers that look like precious gems; Pistils and stamens the darkness hides But crystally encrusts with faceted hems.

My address: And, of course, we now arrive at love: Surely it should be the poet’s thing.

Yet Renan below and Murr above Avoid all Dionysian blossoming.

Monsieur Charles Bretagne, Avenue de Méziéres, Charleville, for A.Rimbaud.

Put your perfumes to good use: Scent our stink of torpid lust; Redeem the wanting we produce, Lift us heavenward on verbal gusts.

Let practicality be a poetic criterion, As for any Soldier, Psychic, or Salesman.

Awake us from thiopentalic delirium Like rubber trees, tear us open.

Let strange fruit fall from stanzas, Prismatic light refract from verses; Black wings, lepidoptric memorandas, Flutterings full of electric purpose.

An Age of Hell is now upon us: The earthly body pierced with spears.

Telegraphic poles limn each Gowanus Helplessly broadcasting silent tears.

Spin, my poet, tales of early blight, Exalt, somehow, in the potato’s sorry life; Rhyme all ruin to make wrong right Feed your poems of terrestrial strife— Whether in Babylon or Bayonne— Let them ramble, let them range Over paper like low moans: Graze the poem: make it strange.

Alcide Bava A.R. July 14, 1871

Published in “I Promise to be Good: The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud Complete, Volume II,” (translated, edited and with an introduction

by Wyatt Mason, Modern Library, New York, 2004), pp. 48-54.

140

141

142

143

144

145

“The right to laugh belongs only to those who know how a matter truly stands.”

Giacomo Casanova, “The Story of My Life”

4

Lykke Li on Adaptation

148

In this magazine, Lykke Li appears as a timeless beauty, captured in black and white. The photograph, taken by Erik Madigan Heck on the eve of the release of Li’s third album, “I Never Learn,” wraps the musician in a tidy veneer of serenity and contemplation as constructed by a solitary male gaze—or, simply, the necessarily two-dimensional lens of a photographer.

This representation neither confirms nor contradicts the ongoing, frequently clashing public narratives of Li that began in 2008 with the debut of her freshman album “Youth Novels” and evolved with “Wounded Rhymes,” released in 2011. She has regularly been described as childlike, introverted, interchangeable and depressingly emo. And her music has been pronounced pop, indie, electronic and gothic garage rock. Depending upon the source, it is confessional and bittersweet, danceable and dirty.

In person, the musician is softspoken, intense and quietly polite.

She exhibits a gravitational pull more analogous to that of a black hole than an orbiting sun. Which is to say, rather than possessing the fragility to which she is so often ascribed, she reveals a convinced, raw and decidedly somber character. It is devoid of common pretenses and layered with morbidly magnetic complexities.

These dissonant characterizations may be cultural; Li’s family is from Sweden, where frank communication and a sober temperament are typical. Or, she suggests, it may be an inborn state. Li’s recent interest in neuroscience has taught her that some people just produce more serotonin, whereas she has always

been markedly melancholic and intensely sensitive. As far back as she can remember—as documented in poems written at the age of ten— she has felt misunderstood, sought relief from the persistent pain of life and viewed art as a bridge to something better.

Her pursuit of “better” has evolved into a nomadic life lived on the knife-edge of expression and escapism, a balancing act colored with self-described selfdestruction. If her past albums have been exercises in exorcising this damage, “I Never Learn,” despite its contrary title, distills the wisdom these encounters have imparted. As Li explains, “I embarked on this journey years and years ago and I’m still on that path, digging deeper and deeper and trying to find the bare essentials. That’s also age and maturity. You could liken the album to a really complex wine; it only has a few subtle tones and it took me a long time to get there.

I always felt more than I could deliver. This time it is a little more cracked open and vulnerable.”

Like Li’s previous releases, the album remains rich with questions of love and loneliness, but the songs are no longer vengeful battle cries.

They are bereft ballads of surrender, questioning societal expectations of partnership, happiness and womanhood: a preoccupation at the forefront of Li’s mind. She has embraced the productivity of the suffering and sadness experienced after losing “safe love, unconditional love, beautiful love… not the fucked up or unrequited love I felt deeply as a teenager.”

Devoid of the nostalgia and fetishization of an ingénue, “I Never

Learn” is a slow striptease, revealing the growth demanded by the weight of truth. It is, Li says, the result of a sort of epiphany that is eloquently expressed by a quote often attributed to the author and poet Anaïs Nin: “The day came when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

By developing beyond the restrictions of public perceptions, by peeling off the superfice of safety and by laying naked her failures and fantasies, Li has evolved her artwork from an acoustic selfportrait that can be easily digested and captured—by a profile, picture or preconception—into an alchemic mirror in which the listener is invited to confront his or her own biases and dark demons.

by Erin Dixon

149

150

151

154

5

Jerry Schatzberg on Family

156

I met Jerry Schatzberg for lunch at a French bistro uptown, near his apartment on 86th Street. As it had been nearly four years since I last saw him at his studio, I had forgotten how soft-spoken he was. This made it challenging to hear him, let alone document our conversation.

Over lunch we discussed a number of topics, including his old farm near Cooperstown, in upstate New York. It turns out, two years prior I had photographed a series of landscapes practically next door to his property.

After the meal we retired to his apartment, where I asked to see his archive—to validate if I had, in fact, been trespassing on his land. The following images are a selection of what I saw, personal photographs from this expansive landscape taken during the 1970s.

They are presented publicly for the first time in this magazine.

Jerry Schatzberg. From the artist’s archives.

166

6

167

Waris Ahluwalia in Haider Ackermann

Jamie Bochert in Ann Demeulemeester

8

"ADVERTIS

SEMENTS"

Giambattista Valli

Thom Browne

Antonio Marras

Altuzarra

Dries Van Noten

Etro

Stella McCartney

Oscar de la Renta

Tsumori Chisato

Valentino

Aganovich

Erdem

Yves Klein Dialogue With Myself

218

First published in “Le dépassement de la problématique de l’art” (La Louviére: Éditions de Montbliar, 1959).

Quoted from “Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writing of Yves Klein,” (edited and translated by Klaus Ottmannn, Putnam, Conn.: Spring Publications, 2007), pp. 137-173.

The title “Dialogue With Myself” [Dialogue avec moimême] was assigned posthumously in 1983 to what was, in reality, a tape-recorded stream of consciousness made one evening in 1961 by Klein in his apartment in Paris. The recording begins with a short excerpt from the “Monotone Symphony,” then Klein begins to speak: The tone is solemn, the words choppy, often interrupted by silences. The translation followed the transcription made by Marie-Anne Sichére and Didier Semin.

9

But in the process of creating something, by oneself…the main thing is to know in sum the truth does not exist. Only 219 honesty exists. Honesty is always in bad taste since, after all, honesty is so human; it is only…a collection of laws, of learned ways of seeing, etc. etc. But honesty does sometimes go beyond a human framework; then it becomes, even in humans, something greater. It becomes life, life itself, a power, that strange life force that belongs neither to you, nor me, nor to anyone. Life, it is life.

All that I said there, all I just said is trying to bring myself closer to what I wish to do this evening, but which I have not yet accomplished. All that I have said is feeble; it’s a farce.

I’m blathering on to myself. No, it is quite difficult to hear oneself dream, to dream while awake. It is quite difficult to pronounce thought. I attempt this experiment, deep down, because I wish to avoid writing. Writing, curiously, is rather precise, deep down; it makes one think better, dream better, and put marks on paper, inscribe, write. But in speech one hears, one articulates, one pronounces. It’s quite curious.

I don’t understand very well what is happening yet.

222

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs by

Erik Madigan Heck — Erik Madigan Heck is a photographer, filmmaker and writer. In 2013 he received an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography for his work. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, W and Harper’s Bazaar UK. He is the founder of Nomenus Quarterly and No Photos Please, and is the author of “January to August.” Heck is included in the forthcoming exhibition “Don’t Stop Now: Fashion Photography Next,” opening July 2014 at the Foam Museum in Amsterdam, with an accompanying catalog published

by Thames & Hudson.

224 Thank you to:

Brianna Karen Killion Heck, Shelly Madigan, Paul Heck, Katerina Simonova, Jenn Cress, Michael Aberman, Ariel Collin Stark-Benz, Michael Dos Santos, Erin Dixon, Matt Occhuizzo, Andrew Bennett, Justin Troust Michael Della Polla, Matthew Hise, Kathy Ryan, Susan Bright, George Pitts, Vince Aletti, Jerry Schatzberg, Elinor Carucci, Taryn Simon, Miranda Lichtenstein, Guinevere Van Seenus Lykke Li, Jamie Bochert, Waris Ahluwalia, Ann Demeulemeester, Haider Ackermann, Yana Kamps Jordan M, Deanna Melluso, Rebecca Ramsey, Ali Kavoussi, Michele Montagne, Gagosian Gallery, Elizabeth Dee Gallery

Contributors —

Comme des Garçons Illustrated Clothing: Comme des Garçons

Guinevere Van Seenus in The High Priestess Fashion Editor: Yana Kamps Makeup: Deanna Melluso at Magnet Hair: Jordan M at Susan Price Digital Tech: Matt Occhuizzo Clothing:

94

95

97

98-99

Jacket and shirt by Antonio Azzuolo.

Vest, turtleneck and pants

by Antonio Azzuolo.

Veil by Gigi Burris.

Top by TOME. Shirt by A.F. Vandevorst.

Dress by TOME. Pearls by Encore a la Mode.

Dress by Houghton.

100-101 Dress by Femme d’Armes.

Capelet, vintage.

102-103 Shirt by A.F. Vandevorst.

Pearls by Encore a la Mode.

104 Dress, model’s own.

106 Coat by A.F. Vandevorst.

107 Dress by Houghton.

Mohawk by Gigi Burris.

108-109 Jacket by Emilio de la Morena.

110-111 Dress by Karen Murphy.

113 Coat by 5:31 Jerome. Dress

by Francesco Scognamiglio.

114 Top by Brandon Sun. 117 Top by TOME. Shirt by A.F. Vandevorst.

118 Dress by Karen Murphy.

Pearls by Encore a la Mode.

120-121 Dress by TOME. Socks by Wolford.

Pearls by Encore a la Mode.

124-125 Cardigan by A.F. Vandevorst.

Veil by Encore a la Mode.

126 Dress by Sonia Rykiel.

Gloves by TOME. Socks by The Sock Man. 128-129 Dress by TOME. Jacket by Maison Martin Margiela (vintage).

93

Jacket by Emilio de la Morena.

Dress by Karen Murphy.

132-133 Jacket by Emilio de la Morena.

Dress by Karen Murphy.

135 Dress by Alessandra Rich.

Brooch by Chanel.

130-131

Lykke Li on Adaptation Fashion Editor: Lester Garcia Makeup: Osvaldo Salvatierra Hair: Jordan M at Susan Price Digital Tech: Will Wang Studio: Shio Studio, Brooklyn

Waris Ahluwalia in Haider Ackermann Makeup: Deanna Melluso at Magnet Set Design: Andrea Huelse

at Art Department Set Assistant: Jerry Toussant-Baptiste Digital Tech: Will Wang Studio: Shio Studio, Brooklyn Clothing: Haider Ackermann

FW 2014 Menswear

225 Jamie Bochert in Ann Demeulemeester Scans: Duggal, NYC Clothing: Model’s own

Ann Demeulemeester (vintage).

Fashion “Advertisements” Fashion Editor: Rebecca Ramsey Model: Ali Walsh at

Major Model Management Hair Sculptures: Tomi Kono

at Julian Watson Agency

(using Bumble and bumble) Set Design: Andrea Huelse

at Art Department Set Assistant: Jerry Toussant-Baptiste Digital Tech: Will Wang Studio: Shio Studio, Brooklyn

All post-production:

Versatile Studios