Leica S Magazine No. 7

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BRUCE GILDEN

AMERICAN MADE

7·ENGLISH

02·2015

Editorial In my 48-year career of photographing people, I have never been interested in banal

Pictorials

faces. They’ve always had to be standing out from the rest. I need to feel an affinity for the people I photograph. It can be just some detail in them that triggers my curiosity and where I recognize a symbol that revives personal memories. Every one of us

The Bottoms

Farm Boys and Girls

Food

State Fairs

carries scars, either apparent or concealed deep inside. These scars intrigue me, and I’m drawn to the stories that I perceive in them. Each encounter brings in a new and different perspective on the ups and downs of life. This visual attraction for my subjects remains the inspiration for my personal work and

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Las Vegas and Los Angeles

the thread that links it all together, with a significant addendum: now that I see the world around me in color and that I photograph mostly faces even closer than before, I look for those who display a certain intensity in their eyes. I believe that my subjects

Texts

have always been my interpreters, and my messengers in that constant, blunt and direct conversation that I’m having with the world as I see it around me, wherever I am working.

American Made

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Bruce Gilden

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Imprint

I have spent years and years traipsing the four corners of the globe that I used to see in black and white, and now I’m photographing my own country in color. It is an inspiring, very large and challenging endeavor. Photography is a passion that constantly needs to be fed and the lifeline for all of us photographers is to have the freedom of creating new work, and, in this instance, funding is crucial. This work realized with Leica S equipment started with the Magnum project Postcards from America and it went on thanks to a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Then the Leica S Magazine offered me the possibility of continuing my cross-country travels through America. After one friendly and unceremonious meeting, it was decided that I was given a true carte blanche to do the work that was important to me at the moment. It allowed me to intensify my initial project and to expand my vision into photographing not only faces but also waist-up portraits, details, still lifes and food. When you start a new project, especially with a new camera and lens, you don’t know exactly how it’s going to turn out. As a new way of viewing the world opened up to me, I was excited and anxious at the same time. It felt a bit like falling in love: you can’t force it, either it works or it doesn’t. At the same time, the further I went down the road, the more it felt like a force driving me to try to do better than what I had done previously. As more perspectives opened up to me while photographing, I became more demanding visually and, therefore, the emotional content of my images became stronger. I now consider myself a true American photographer, and as I have been establishing an intimate dialogue with America, I realize that the common trait that links all these men and women who attract me visually is their “Americanness”. This is the characteristic that I am looking for and looking into when photographing in traditional state fairs attended by millions of Americans each year, and in large cities such as Las Vegas or Los Angeles where they live, or in run down neighborhoods where they survive. In all places, these people, and the symbols that inhabit my vision, belong to an entirely American-made world. My photography has transformed into a personal comment on the state of the contemporary American Dream, and the anxiety about an often bleak and uncertain future that I discern in the eyes of my compatriots.

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AmericAn mAde Bruce Gilden has been prowling the streets of New York for decades. His black and white pictures, that thrive on the directness with which he approaches his subjects, have brought the Magnum photographer world fame. Gilden has been working more recently in color, and American Made is the outcome of this artistic evolution. In the following dialogue, he speaks with his wife Sophie, about the ideas behind the series that was supported by the S Magazine, how the new camera has opened up new dimensions for him, and why even closer is even better.

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Sophie: Bruce, for years I heard you saying that your Leica M was like your child – this was before you had a real child –, and now for this project, you used a new camera system. Tell me about your first encounter with a Leica S. Where did you and this exceptional camera meet? Bruce: I’d worked my whole life with a Leica M, but in recent years I began to feel I needed a change. It felt like I’d been repeating myself, so I figured why not try out color with a mid-size camera. Two years ago, during the Postcards from America series in Miami, I borrowed a Leica S from Magnum. As we had two weeks to produce a large body of work, and there weren’t many people out and about, I took the S and a 70mm into the street. Then I noticed a man at a bus stop in Hialeah. The guy’s name was Juan and he allowed me to take his picture. It’s not in the magazine but it actually all started with Juan...

their picture. They talk to me and I listen to their stories while I’m photographing them. It is a very precise act and, in many instances, I have to touch their face to position it straight in the frame. We share something like a very close, almost intimate, connection. You always say that the older you get, the closer you get. What’s the idea behind that progression? When I started photography, my images were like stage set scenes and the viewer was on the outside looking in. Later on, with my Leica M in one hand and my flash in the other, I took pictures from a closer range and the viewer became a participant, involved in the speed and the energy of the city. My new portraits in color were all taken from approximately the same distance, in order to make the image as visually strong as it can be and to convey the strongest emotional content. In these monumental close ups, the subjects have a visceral presence. They’re looking at the viewer and the viewer can’t get away from them. It’s like as if they were sharing the same space. If you don’t look at these people, how would you know they exist? To me, the intensity in their eyes and the details are the most important parts of the photograph.

Do you mean that using the S, working on portraits and now this project for the S Magazine started back then? It’s a major change in your work. You’re saying, all the elements of this change came together in the S Magazine project? Yes, all of it started in 2013, and the project I did for S Magazine is a continuation of this new work. When I saw the results with the Leica S, I was ecstatic. So the project came at the right time. I was very appreciative of the fact that the S Magazine’s editors called from Hamburg and were willing to come and meet me in London. I’d just come from the Midlands where I was working on a commission for Multistory. I liked the idea that the magazine was not interested in publishing a retrospective of my work but wanted to give me a whole issue where I could develop an idea that was important to me. We agreed that I would work in the United States and that the photos would mostly be portraits of people. Later on, I added some portraits from the waist up, and some still lifes.

How would you describe your experience working with the S? What was completely new to me is that previous to using the Leica S, I almost exclusively worked with film, but there is no doubt that if the S were not digital, I wouldn’t have been able to do this project so successfully: my pictures are all full frame and since the faces occupy almost the whole frame, sometimes while I’m taking the picture, I crop part of the ear, or I’m not satisfied with the look that the subject has in the eyes. It is imperative for me to see the image right away. There is not much time since I usually encounter my subjects while walking on the street and when they say yes, I do the picture. My assistant holds the flash according to my instructions. We light the person so as to have no shadow on the face. The sharpness and color separation are unbelievable. For the best results, all these images should be printed at least 4 Feet by 6 Feet. This camera allows me to do elegant and very strong photographs so it suits my needs perfectly even if it’s is quite heavy and doesn’t fit in a small bag like my dear old M did!

This new work certainly is a big change in your approach to photography… In one sense it is a change and in another it’s not, because I’m still interested in the same types of people. Previously, when I was taking my candid portraits in black and white in different places around the world, I didn’t usually speak to the people I photographed. For the face portraits, I ask their permission before I photograph them. Obviously the ones in the magazine said yes.

So that’s the technical part. What led you to choose the specific places you went to take the pictures? I was looking for places where many people congregate, so I chose to go to state fairs. Obviously the more people you can find in a place, the more chances you have to find people who are visually interesting.

How did you go about convincing them? I have a talent for talking to to strangers and making them feel comfortable. If I decide to photograph someone it’s because I’m interested in them and they feel that. Many people are happy that I notice them and am interested in taking

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Are there a lot of people that you would call visually interesting? Do you take a lot of pictures once you have found the right spot? I shoot very little and I’ am a tough editor of my work but I’m quite intuitive about my selection. I know right away whom I want to photograph. The persons I select fall into three categories: in category #1 are the people that might make a good photograph; category #2 is the ones that have a pretty good chance of making a good photograph, and then the rare category is what I call “The Killers”. In this category, all the person has to do is to accept being photographed.

What do you mean? What does the food stand for in your eyes? At the fairs I saw two groups of food. In the first group there is the staple sweet stuff such as frozen bananas with sprinkles and chocolate and cotton candy. it’s all sugar, usually pink, fluffy and pretty looking, made to attract the customers. To me cotton candy and bananas symbolize America having fun. In the other group are the total American creations such as pizzas with unbelievable toppings that look like charcoal or chocolate. Then you have these turkey legs that are five times the size of a normal turkey leg.

Is it really as simple as that? Of course not. There is a lot that goes into making a good photograph even of someone in the “Killers” category. Between the moment I see the person and the moment when I’m holding the camera and I take the photograph, I have to make quick decisions and changes. For example, sometimes I don’t find the look in the eyes of the subject intense enough so I ask them to not look directly into the camera. I’m looking for something and I direct the session the way I need in order to find it.

It’s seems you really liked the Bottoms. What was it about the district that was so special? I got there because the Ohio state fair was not particularly crowded and one day, on our way to lunch, we met a guy sitting on the stoop in front of his house who told us to check out the Bottoms. The first day we went there I met the man with the snake and we made an appointment the next day at his house to photograph the snake. I tried to take a picture outside in the grass but it kept on moving. Have you ever tried to photograph a ten foot snake in the grass? It’s not easy, so I asked the guy to carry it to the concrete. Also in the Bottoms I met Bonnie, She was sitting on her porch with a nurse (she is diabetic). We explained the project and the nurse encouraged Bonnie: “You should do this!”, she told her. So Bonnie got her kitten. We went out on the street and here she is.

How long did you work on this project ? I have been working on it two years so even if the S Magazine project itself took approximately 40 days of shooting, it fitted in my current work. Some of the places where I went were better than others – even the state fairs –, and when they weren’t as good, I usually found a solution. It forced me to think out of the box, and things worked out well.

This is a very amusing anecdote and illustrates your way of working. Can you give us another example of a random encounter? The first day we arrived in Las Vegas, my assistant and I went to the supermarket to get some groceries and all of a sudden in an aisle we spotted a very interesting person. We were tired so after shopping we went back to the car but then I said why don’t we ask this person if I could do a portrait? So we went back into the supermarket to look for this person. I went one direction and my assistant went the other but no luck. Then we turned and we spotted the person right behind us. We spoke and Amber agreed to meet two days later in a parking lot for a portrait.

Like the series on the farm boys and girls? I had been to many fairs in the past but I had never chosen to photograph the young people who exhibit their animals in the state fair barns. For some reason, at the Iowa state fair and then at the Minnesota state fair, they caught my eye. I was curious about these kids. They have a different background than mine, they are not into rap or tattoos, they have a real passion for their animals. I was quite interested in finding out what they are going to do with their lives. I was amazed – especially me coming from New York City and them from middle America – that almost everybody was so accepting. I had a good time with them and their parents.

You always like to say you have a ‘bulldog mentality’. How does that apply to the way you go about your working? In sports a player with a bulldog mentality is tenacious and plays very hard. Since I was a good athlete, I couldn’t agree more and it does apply to my working method: I walk and walk again, going back to the same spots over and over and once in a while, I get something because I know what I’m looking for. Perseverance is the key, but to have a vision is essential.

The food pictures are another example of “thinking outside the box”. What led up to that? This was in Minnesota and I was totally burnt out: three state fairs in a month would wear anybody out, so I decided to photograph the food that they sell at the fair. I think l must have had this somewhere in my mind after having seen and smelled all these “specialties”, from one state fair to the next, and now was the right time to do it. It’s my conceptual homage to American state fair gastronomy.

TexT

Sophie Gilden

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The BoTToms I went to Colombus, Ohio for the state fair at the end of July 2014, but it was not as interesting as I thought. Fortunately I met a guy on the street who told me to check out this neighborhood, the Bottoms. It’s called that way because it is located at the bottom of the hill in Columbus, but it’s also a neighborhood at the bottom of the economic scale. It is an assortment of low-income, working class people, prostitutes, alcoholics and junkies, and one large yellow snake. My assistant got sick and we had to go back home earlier, but hopefully I’ll be able to return one day.

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Far m boys and Girls I had walked through the areas of livestock barns where various farm animals are displayed before, but it was only at the Iowa and the Minnesota state fairs that I started the series on farm boys and girls. Almost everyone accepted to be photographed and the parents gladly signed releases for their underage children. I think they have very distinctive looks, much different from the city kids I’m used to. Most of these rural teen agers are going to college, majoring in agriculture. They have a passion for their animals. They grow up with them, close to the natural cycle of life and death.

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Food At the first state fair I went to in Milwaukee, I could not believe what people were eating – not only unhealthy but also unappealing. At that time I did not photograph the food, but two summers later, at the Minnesota state fair – my third in a month –, my assistant and I took a white piece of paper, laid it on the ground and improvised a studio right there to photograph the food. It was not easy because there were so many people passing through. In some of the pictures, we took a bite off to make it more realistic.

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STATE FAIRS State fairs are traditional American summer events going back to the 19thÂ century. People from all over the state come to be entertained on the fair grounds near the capitals. The Wisconsin state fair in Milwaukee, where I went in August 2013 for Postcards from America, was my first. It was manna from heaven: 1,012,552 visitors in 11 days! I thought that I had done good work and it gave me the impetus to go on. After that, and in the summer of 2014, I kept on going: Mississippi state fair, then Ohio, Iowa and Minnesota, which counts 150,000 visitors a day. Some events were more interesting than others, but at least there was variety.

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LAS VEGAS AND LOS ANGELES On one same trip, I spent eight days in Las Vegas and four in LA, two iconic and symbolic American cities. To me they both convey this idea of a land of dreams inhabited by people who never found their dreams. In Las Vegas, I wanted to photograph in a run-down area with cheap motels and prostitutes, but when I got there the area was on its way to becoming gentrified. I decided to photograph workers at the casinos and people on the street. In Los Angeles it was more difficult because, except in West Hollywood, there was hardly anybody on the street, even on a Sunday.

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Portrait

Maximilian Motel

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Bruce Gilden For more than two decades Bruce Gilden only trusted in film, now he has embraced digital. His world was all in black and white and now he has added color to his palette as another option. “Sometimes I see in black and white, other times, details strike me more in color, but overall my vision has not changed.” Above all, Gilden is Gilden. His photography doesn’t follow any other path than the one commanded by his intuition. It comes from somewhere in his “gut”, as he explains hitting with his fist a mysterious zone somewhere deep in his stomach. As to defining what draws him to photograph one particular stranger over another, he gives a laconic answer: “I have to see something that separates them from all the rest.” This is a kind of Gilden characteristic – a je ne sais quoi – that resounds in his “gut”, an instant encounter with a feeling of a certain degree of “kinship”. Bruce Gilden is generally not interested in capturing the strange, the bizarre or the grotesque; he is in search of something that he recognizes within himself. It’s hard to explain. And why explain? It’s him, it’s them, it’s how he sees them. The face to face work, that Bruce Gilden took on two years ago and continued for the S Magazine, is monumental. Sharp, Intense and powerful – his portraits are truly quintessential Gilden. The photographer has never been so close to his subjects and he has never been so close to himself: “In the past I used to confront my subjects, now they confront me. I can’t, you can’t get away from them.” Of course there will be lots of strong reactions and more controversy. This has not changed either and the photographer is used to it. “Like my uncle used to say, it’s when people stop talking about you that you have to start worrying!” Gilden says with a laugh. In any case, detractors have never deterred Bruce Gilden from pursuing his art with his own unique approach. What interests him is “finding new things that inspire me and figuring new ways to look at those things”. It has kept him “fresh”, he says. What counts for him is to photograph and take “good” photographs. “I can understand that people have trouble with my images and more so now in color, because they are so realistic compared to the abstraction of black and white, though I don’t understand why,” Gilden says. “I judge photography by what’s good, irrelevant of subject matter, irrelevant of anything else,” he adds.

TexT

Sophie Gilden

Take it or leave it was the name of the online show where he reviewed photographs … This is how art and photography differ from the average way of thinking and looking at the world. We take things at face value while artists face the world and see ahead of the curve. In this American-GildenMade project, you find a genuine assortment of collective “Americanness”: lots of blond hair, peculiar hairdos, cheap red lipstick, sun-carved wrinkles, extra-large bodies and fast food, teenagers badly bruised with acne, sadly worn out with drugs or young kids with a defiant gaze … But their riveting eyes, reflecting either personal hardship or the blues of a certain social status in a nation, carry deeper meaning. It goes well beyond reaction. It provokes emotion. Bruce Gilden, the American photographer fond of “underdogs like himself” has authenticated the faces and eyes of his compatriots with his unique style, for us to get closer to them as he does. “There are more things I want to say with the faces of these people,” Gilden insists. In this project they are Americans; but Gilden has seen their relatives in many parts of the world. They are part of a melancholic family drifting away from the new global society of the “haves”. Gilden gets animated when he raises this point: “They have nothing to offer, nothing to trade and, if we ignore them, if we don’t want to look at them and let their eyes talk to us, how can their situation in this world change?” Some of Gilden’s faces tell stories of younger days, many bear their scars in the open. Their personal stories are not as important as what their compelling eyes are saying: what are our chances in a society where preconceived opinions are the criterion for success? Should they be blamed for their appearance? Should we blame the photographer for noticing them and giving them such a predominant position in his imagery? Why should it be so difficult to look into these eyes? It could be that they hit us so hard and so deep in our “gut” because they reveal more hidden secrets about our own personal story than theirs. It is indeed much more comfortable to look at glamorous selfies or at cute kittens. By the way, there is one kitten among the images in Bruce Gilden’s American Made project. It has wild, scared eyes, just like those of the woman holding it. Neither are pretty, they are beautiful.

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Imprint S Magazine

Editor-In-Chief

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Bruce Gilden used a Leica S with

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Elmarit-S 45mm f/2.8 ASPH. (CS) to Creative Direction

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