Musée Magazine No. 17

MUSÉE P HOTO

NO. 17. ENIGMA

GUY BOURDIN JOHN MACLEAN

ANDREA BLANCH

SEBASTIAN BREMER

SALLY MANN RALPH EUGENE MEATYARD

ANDY WARHOL

JAMES LAXTON

SALLY GALL

DAIDO MORIYAMA

CAROLYN MARKS BLACKWOOD

MARILYN MINTER

WANGECHI MUTU

ANNETTE LEMIEUX

RICHARD MOSSE

FELIX R. CID

ARNE SVENSON

ARTHUR TRESS

MANUEL FRANQUELO

BEN ZANK

MUSÉE MUSEEMAGAZINE.COM

INTERNATIONAL EDITION NO. 17

FOUNDER / EDITOR IN CHIEF ANDREA BLANCH CREATIVE DIRECTOR SAM SHAHID ART DIRECTOR MATTHEW KRAUS

EDITORIAL ADVISOR STEVE MILLER EDITORIAL DIRECTORS ELLEN SCHWEBER, ANN SCHAFFER

GUEST CURATOR ALEXANDER MONTAGUE-SPAREY

WRITERS / EDITORIAL INTERNS AMEER KHAN, ERICA MCGRATH, JENNA MERCADANTE, CELINA HUYNH, JENDAYI OMOWALE, BAYLEE MCKEEL, TYLER AUSTIN, LEV FEIGIN, DAVID FRANCIS CONTRIBUTING EDITORS CHRISTINE LA MONTE, GABRIELLA TANA MARKETING / PR INTERNS ANNA LAZZARO, GABRIELA TAGINYA, NYRILS HINTON ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANTS TRISTYNN MERCEDES, ZORYANA GUTSULYAK, LUCY FARREL SENIOR PHOTO EDITOR HALLIE NEELY PHOTO EDITOR INTERN MAMIE HELDMAN RETOUCHERS MARGARET ERLANO, MARCIELA MAGANA WEBSITE ART DIRECTOR JOHN MACCONNELL GRAPHIC DESIGN INTERNS UDI GOLDSTEIN, EMILY MEDINA

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Cover Image: Guy Bourdin, Kodak Photo Expo, 1972. Copyright The Guy Bourdin Estate 2017 / Courtesy of Louise Alexander Gallery.

©2017 MUSÉE MAGAZINE. REPRODUCTION WITHOUT PERMISSION IS PROHIBITED.

INTERNATIONAL EDITION NO. 8 VOL. 1

MUSÉE MUSEEMAGAZINE.COM

INTERNATIONAL EDITION NO. 17

3 EDITOR’S LETTER 4 SALLY GALL

BY ANDREA BLANCH

BY STEVE MILLER

20 EMERGING ARTISTS 24 ARTHUR TRESS

BY ANDREA BLANCH

34 SPOTLIGHT ARTIST 42 BACKSTORIES

BEN ZANK

BY LEV FEIGIN

52 EMERGING ARTIST 54 ANDY WARHOL

BRANDON PETULLA

BY BAYLEE MCKEEL

66 SPOTLIGHT ARTIST 72 SALLY MANN

WANGECHI MUTU

BY BAYLEE MCKEEL

82 EMERGING ARTISTS 86 RICHARD MOSSE

DANIELLE ZAR + KAREN LYNCH

BY MUSÉE MAGAZINE

98 EMERGING ARTISTS 102 ENIGMA

ARIELLE BOBB-WILLIS + SARA CWYNAR

EMEL KARAKOZAK + JASON ISOLINI

BY ALEXANDER MONTAGUE-SPAREY

116 SPOTLIGHT ARTIST 124 DAIDO MORIYAMA

ARNE SVENSON

BY JOHN HUTT

144 EMERGING ARTISTS

COSTAS PICADAS + DANIEL ADAMS

148 ANNETTE LEMEIUX

BY STEVE MILLER

164 SPOTLIGHT ARTIST

MANUEL FRANQUELO

168 GUY BOURDIN

BY MUSÉE MAGAZINE

184 EMERGING ARTISTS 188 ANDREA BLANCH

BEYZA TOKGÖZ + LARRY ACHIAMPONG

BY STEVE MILLER

200 SPOTLIGHT ARTIST

MARILYN MINTER

206 SEBASTIAN BREMER 218 EMERGING ARTISTS

BY ANDREA BLANCH ANGELA DEANE + WENDY MCMURDO

222 RALPH EUGENE MEATYARD 230 SPOTLIGHT ARTIST 236 MICHAEL HOEH

FELIX R. CID

BY ANDREA BLANCH

246 SPOTLIGHT ARTIST 252 JAMES LAXTON

CAROLYN MARKS BLACKWOOD

BY ANDREA BLANCH

268 EMERGING ARTISTS 272 JOHN MACLEAN

BY LEV FEIGIN

SUMMAR ALSEMEIRY + LAURA LEE SHILL

BY MUSÉE MAGAZINE

292 BIOGRAPHIES

MUSÉE MAGAZINE. ESTABLISHED 2011.

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EDITOR’S LETTER b y A ndrea B la nch

“A photograph is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.”

-Diane Arbus

This is the raison d’ être for Enigma.

I was not prepared to do an editor’s letter for this issue since I felt given the theme, enigma, less is more. Each artist in this issue was enigmatic in their own way, and that was for the audience to figure out for themselves. But then I changed my mind, since I am an enigma.

A secret within a secret, a skeleton in the closet, a decaying body in a field of leaves, the images in Sally Mann’s Body Farm series give away nothing but say everything. The central figure of a photo, the bones of a once living being glare out at you, almost indistinguishable from the foliage beneath, a log echoing femur, another corpse fading into the leaves.

It is not a telling image, no hints given that you’re looking at a university’s anthropological study of decomposition, but what you get is a sense of the ethereal, of the deep connection between us and nature, an enigmatic commentary on the earth we all return to. What is it about the enigmatic that attracts us, that draws our attention? Why is it so embedded into our nature to seek out the mysterious, unfamiliar, strange oddities that we assign meaning to? An enigma sparks the imagination, excites that part of us obsessed with puzzles.

While traveling to the hometowns of the artists who inspired him, John MacLean went on a journey in his Hometown series to address the age-old question of influence, how artists cannot escape it but why would we want to? Embracing artistic influences and learning from them, re-evaluating them, creating something new from them, this is what he explored as he photographed in the likeness of others. A red seatbelt caught in a car door, a modern symbol of the technology that dominates our lives, color that pops off the page in typical William Eggleston fashion, MacLean turns the photographer’s style into his own.

Instead of producing work that derived from outside influences, Guy Bourdin created mysterious, groundbreaking fashion photographs that elevated fashion to fine art through narrative compositions that left the mind to fill in the blanks, to finish the story of a chalk-line and a pair of bright pink heels tossed under a car, legs strolling through a scene cut off at the knees. There is nothing more intriguing than an enigmatic perspective of the human body.

James Laxton’s beautiful, surrealist, dreamy work as the cinematographer on Moonlight, delves into the emotional journey of his characters while showing the audience how film can ignite an imagination just as still photography could. Andy Warhol uses a unique element of sex appeal when he created flirtatious silkscreen prints to portray mysterious pairs of lips. Each image in his Lips series pushes toward the enigmatic with the lack of identifiable mouths despite the famous faces they are pulled from. As the guest curator for the magazine, Alexander Montague-Sparey delves into the many ways photographers can embody an enigma with their varying skills, methods of creations, and the way the audience interacts with the artists’ works. There is a dynamic between the photographer, their creative process, and the audience that breeds room for an enigmatic relationship because photography as an art is able to reach far past its boundaries as a medium.

In the series Eyes, Sebastiaan Bremer pushes past the medium with his very personal process of drawing and painting over his own photographs, when he uses prints from Bill Brandt. By drawing circular and linear markings over the fine details of the eyes within the pictures, Bremer creates a perplexing filter of his own to create a piece that holds more moments in time and a deep spirituality. Daido Moriyama challenges the art form of photography using Bure Boke, his shake-no focus, shooting style. Moriyama dissects photography in order to capitalize on the organic nature of spontaneous shooting with a compact camera while examining the conundrum of making deconstructed art. The non-photographer-photographer is known for breaking boundaries, and unlike his imitators, exuding true uniqueness in his obscure artistic process.

The enigmatic appears in all of these works in our issue, alluring, enticing, showing us something but forcing us to work for it, kicking our imagination into gear. I want to thank all of the artists for contributing to this issue, and for their patience.

John Maclean, Hometown of John Baldessari, National City, California. Courtesy of Flowers Gallery, London/New York.

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SALLY GALL looking up

STEVE MILLER: I saw your show Aerial and it blew me away. No one would guess that it’s laundry. Without any context for the series, a number of people guess sea creatures first. Was that an intentional enigma?

SALLY GALL: When I started making this body of work, I thought of the clothing as being otherworldly and animalistic, and very much like creatures in the ocean (the ocean being the blue canvas of sky). When I showed some of this new work to people they responded with “what am I looking at?” which was very surprising to me. While I was shooting I kept thinking of abstract painters such as Joan Miro and his “creatures”. I was aware that I was transforming the clothing I was photographing into something other than itself and it was the act of transformation that was compelling, not necessarily the references.

STEVE: I think part of the enigma is the lack of scale and uncertainty.

SALLY: When I started the series, I was making photographs that were much more literal than abstract as I included architecture, pieces of buildings and balconies . . and clothespins . . but as I kept photographing I started eliminating context. I wanted to make the photos more disembodied. It made photographing difficult because I had to find subject matter that met my criteria perfectly – clothing not hanging too close to a building for example.

(I was mainly photographing in alleyways and narrow streets of the historic centers of small towns in southern Italy and Sicily). I photograph what I see and I compose in the field, so these are all real found situations.

STEVE: That’s interesting. It answers a lot of questions about that lack of scale and specificity. You don’t know where you are and I think that’s part of the enigmatic, mysterious and successful quality of the work.

Portrait by Nina Subin.

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Above: Sally Gall, Efflorescense, 2013; Following Spread: Squall, 2014.

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SALLY: The body of work morphed from realism into total abstraction . It started as a literal description of the laundry itself with an interest in exploring the humanity on view, the bits of buildings, and the sense of “who wore those jeans”? “Did the guy live in that building”?

“Whose nightgown is that”? “Who is the party girl” etc.

But then I started moving into abstraction and began referencing, as you said, sea creatures, flowers, botanicals.

One viewer said about one of the photos that has a number of different woolen objects (scarves, hats) hanging on a line, “It looks like the animals in the zoo are fighting with each other.”

STEVE: Most of your work is black and white, so to see this color was like looking at a different artist.

SALLY: I shot in black and white at the beginning, and I realized it wasn’t working. I love black and white photography more than anything, but this body of work is about brilliant color; eye candy. The work is all about bright sun , luminosity, and saturated color.

STEVE: The way you use black and white in your earlier work is as an intentional tool to bring it towards abstraction, to take it away from the reality factor. And now you’ve achieved the same effect in color.

SALLY: Thanks for saying that, I don’t know if I ever thought about it like that but yes, you’re right. When I shot in black and white, they looked too realistic even, which is ironic as black and white is inherently abstract.

STEVE: The color pushes it towards the abstraction you were trying to achieve with black and white! When I saw the show, I immediately thought of your book, The Water’s Edge, because this work easily slides between edges. The edges of painterly abstraction, a score of musical notes, the viewer’s emotional projection onto a Rorschach blot because we all name it the thing that we think it is based on our experience, the representation of the deep sea and the space of billowing clouds. In your mind, are any of these descriptions more accurate than another?

SALLY: You’re my perfect viewer! I was thinking particularly of the sea. I’m looking up rather than down, and I thought of the vast expansive of blue as a sky or as the sea. I thought of the imagery as sea life in the deep blue sea or celestial objects in the heavens.

STEVE: In your earlier work, you’re always traveling, going to unexplored territory ending up in a place that you knew was unexpected or unexplored. Is that relevant to this work?

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SALLY: Totally. One hundred percent. We have a bungalow in Italy where we’ve been spending summers for a while now and every year we try and go on an Italian adventure somewhere we have not been. My husband wanted to go to Sicily, so we decided to do a three-week journey driving around the entire Island. I didn’t have a notion of photographing anything specific; it was a cultural trip. One day we were in Syracuse, sightseeing in the old town. It was a beautiful afternoon and I wandered around with my camera just looking. I was walking through the super narrow streets, and as I’m admiring the ornate architecture around me, I keep seeing all this flapping color overhead. Without really focusing on it, I kept thinking, what is all that colorful movement? I had a point and shoot camera so I took some very casual pictures, and continued my way. When I came back to New York and looked at those pictures, I thought, “what is that?” And I liked it so much that I kept talking to my husband about it and he said, “Maybe you ought just to go right back there, literally get on a plane and go back to Syracuse”. So I did. I shot the initiating “snapshots” when we were in Sicily in September and in February I went back to Sicily for two weeks, to the same exact location where I’d taken those first pictures, and thus the project began. I didn’t plan this body of work ahead of time at all. If I hadn’t taken a walk on that afternoon, on that particular day, I never would have done this project. I only realized in going back and trying to reshoot it, that the day on which I made those first “snapshots”, I had the perfect conditions, a stiff wind and an incredibly blue sky on a massively bright day. If I hadn’t had that particular weather on that particular day, I would have never made those few snapshots, thus I would have never made this body of work. (And so began my frustration of trying to replicate that day which was very hard to do since I can’t plan the weather! Nor can I plan when people hang their clothing out to dry, particularly their “interesting” clothing). Aerial started by the fortuitous accidental seeing of something compelling – as opposed to having a concept or idea ahead of time . . and being able to take a journey with the seeing.

STEVE: How does serendipity play into your process?

SALLY: What I love about photography is the act of discovery and with interacting with the physical world. I like wandering around looking and discovering. I could never be a painter in a studio, as much as I love painting. And I could never work like so many photographers work today on conceptual projects that are created with Photoshop, manipulating images or using existing imagery.

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Above: Sally Gall, Red Poppy, 2014; Following Spread: Composition #1, 2014.

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Above: Sally Gall, Squall, 2014. Following Spread: Oceania, 2014.

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I like to be out in the physical world. So this body of work is a perfect example of what I like about photography; and yes, it is all about serendipity.

STEVE: How many images does it take to make a show?

SALLY: That’s a good question. In this particular body of work, I made a huge amount of photographs because I started very literally and worked through to abstraction , thus abandoning many pictures along the way.

STEVE: What are the chances of getting the conditions that you just described? That seems impossible.

SALLY: It was. When I went back in February, I went for two weeks and at least half the days there was no wind, so I couldn’t do anything. And for the other few days that I had wind, I had cloudy skies and it didn’t work. So I had two days out of fourteen that I really shot.

STEVE: So the two days that were your good days, did you get a lot of images those days?

SALLY: Only a handful!

STEVE: Fourteen days to get a handful of images. Sitting there, you must be in your process.

SALLY: I’m totally in my process, it is all about heightened looking. I went back again to Syracuse and Sicily several times over a 2 year period but I also made a few pictures in Cuba. Last spring we wanted to go someplace warm where we had never been before and I thought, I’d love to take a few more laundry pictures wherever I go.

STEVE: How were the clothes in Cuba?

SALLY: They were surprisingly tattered unfortunately . . .. . There are a couple of photos in the show which I shot in Cuba, including one of a perfectly white frilly young girl’s communion dress that looks like it’s ascending to the heavens.

STEVE: Your work has a strong connection to nature.

This body of work is compelling because of its simplicity and your ability to trap nature in a new way; you physically and metaphorically capture the wind in a series of clouds appearing as laundry. Only now nature has been recolored by cloth and a humble subject becomes a profound expression, especially because you are holding a moment as you described. Are these the connections for you?

SALLY: I love what you just said. Somebody asked me,

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“You always photograph nature, and now you’re photographing clothing, what happened?”, and that’s actually not true! These photos are about light and wind and sky; an article of clothing becomes part of nature.

I love to look at the sky and whatever is in it (clouds, contrails). I like to look up. It’s a different perspective, who looks up?

STEVE: In your book, Subterranea, I really like something that Mark Strand says. This is very interesting in terms of your new work because this is about being underground and this new work is about being in the sky.

He says, “What is beneath or within? What we think of the dark or the hidden? The other life, the one that we know exists, but with rare exceptions ever see, becomes in Sally Gall’s photographs if not entirely known, then at least familiar.” I like this quote in terms of your newer work and think it’s relevant because we are looking up women’s dresses and there’s a fascination with wondering what’s underneath all of that, especially as a kid, wondering what’s hidden there. And now it’s in full bloom and fully revealed in a very metaphorical and beautiful way. How are looking up at the sky, looking up at the surface water, looking up a woman’s dress, all related?

SALLY: Yes, there is something comic about looking up somebody’s skirt. It’s something mysterious, something you don’t always see but there it is in plain sight in my hanging skirts. The New Yorker (Vince Aletti) published a small text on the exhibition and titled it “The Sly Eroticism of Laundry on the Line”. I love that title! I love the idea of sly eroticism. My 22-year-old niece told me she felt like she was a kid in a “blanket fort”. I thought that was such a great response. It took me back to my childhood, putting sheets/blankets over a table and crawling underneath and hiding, hiding within masses of fabric.

STEVE: That’s what really makes the work successful to me because it operates on all these levels without being specific. The emptiness of the work is what makes it your most full. Is there anything else?

SALLY: I’m a photographer of the real world. Usually I choose to photograph the sensuality of the natural world, particularly places of solitude in nature. I like to go hiking in the mountains and the desert. I like the meditative qualities of the ocean. So making this body of work was very different because I was going into towns and seeking humanity. I love making images that are both dynamic and contemplative, that allow the viewer to be taken to other places.

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Sally Gall, Convergence, 2014.

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MUSÉE EMERGING A RTIST

Arielle Bobb-Willis, New Orleans, 2016.

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Arielle Bobb-Willis, Central Park, 2016

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Sara Cwynar, Top: Tracy (Grid 1), 2017; Borrom: Tracy (Grid 2), 2017. All images Courtesy of Foxy Production, New York.

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Sara Cwynar, Top: Tracy (Stepping Forward, Stepping Backward), 2017; Bottom: Tracy (One Hundred Consecutive Years), 2017.

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ARTHUR TRESS o f f the wa ll

ANDREA BLANCH: Let’s talk about the hospital series, you stumbled upon this hospital at Roosevelt Island, what brought you there?

ARTHUR TRESS: I’m kind of an urban explorer; it’s always been apart of the way I work. At that time Roosevelt Island, which was known formerly as Welfare Island, was in the process of transformation and the lower end of the island had a series of five or six hospital buildings. I was just wandering around and I found this huge building that had 500 rooms. It was a nurses’ training center and for many years the city of New York had used it as a storage facility for all of its outdated, antiquated hospital equipment. There were floors full of old x-ray machines and iron lungs and I thought it would be a great place to make a studio. Previously I had been working in an abandoned railroad station that I found overlooking the Hudson River and I made that my studio for about four years. I’ve done many bodies of work in abandoned buildings.

I did a series of male nudes from 1977 to 1981 in that building and around 1982, I decided to make giant still lifes there.

ANDREA: Why did you change to still life?

ARTHUR: I got tired of working with people. New York at that time was filled with all sorts of junk that people would take out into the street, so I gathered it all in this building and began making what I called, altars. There were some old desks left in the office and I would make altars of these various objects, I shot them mostly in black and white. I had been this self-appointed folklorist, ethnographical photographer in my early years and that became a job for a while but I just got tired working with people.

ANDREA: You say you like to express that ethnographic aspect in all of your work. How do you express that in the hospital series?

ARTHUR: I was doing these sacred altars in the abandoned railroad station and then I found the hospital buildings, which had beautiful light since the operating rooms had skylights. When I first got there I started making these strange sculptures, relating a little bit to tribal art. Then I began painting the walls, the machinery and medical equipment that I found. Gradually I moved from room to room, like an archeological dig. Some of the ceilings had collapsed so I’d find all sorts of interesting medical charts and things that had been in these buildings for fifty years.

As I was filling up the hospital with my sculptures, I felt that I was making my own mausoleum of funerary objects.

They’re funerary sculptures, like a tomb sculpture in a way, when they gather the different objects to take with them to the afterlife. A young author named Richard Green wrote an imaginary catalogue as though these were an archeology discovery on a distant planet. He created a civilization where these were rediscovered artifacts and he tried to recreate what the objects were for. The sad thing is, Richard was only about thirty years old, and he was dying of AIDS in a hospital while he was writing it. I’ve never been able to get the book published, maybe it was too ahead of

Self portrait by Arthur Tress.

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its time. It’s really the way that I thought about these objects, that they would be rediscovered some day when I was gone and people would wonder what they are.

ANDREA: When you were working room by room, did you only use the objects from that particular room?

ARTHUR: I had one or two rooms that had good skylight lighting so I brought things in from the other rooms and I repainted the walls. I would often do them in several different locations in the building. I would also walk across town, finding things like old posters or electrical fans and then add them to the hospital.

ANDREA: This was part of your Walt Disney period, using color. Why did you think that doing hospital constructions in color was better suited than using black and white?

Arthur Tress, The Last Round Up, 1986.

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ARTHUR: When I began painting the objects in bright colors, it brought them to life. When you’re working with certain kinds of textures and decay, color brings out all of those details. At that time color was not so easy to work with. Color films were very slow, so I had to use a tripod, and often the exposures were two to three minutes.

ANDREA: I came across these images at AIPAD, and when I looked at them I thought they were very enigmatic, yet you think they’re very straightforward?

ARTHUR: The photographic technique is very straightforward. There’s no manipulation afterwards in the darkroom or anything else. One of my great lifetime inspirations is the early paintings of de Chirico, the surrealist painter. His paintings are full of a mysterious violence, and a certain level of anxiety. I think the mood of this hospital series is very mysterious in the sense that these are like objects from another civilization.

Arthur Tress, Throne of Bacchus, 1986.

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ANDREA: Thinking about your choice of color or black and white, if you did these images in black and white they’d be mentally heavy. But with color, they’re presented in a way that you can look at them without a sense of horror.

ARTHUR: I was playing with that idea, that these are very scary things but by presenting them in bright colors it creates an ambiguity. I love the word delirious, a surrealist word, which takes the object into another dimension. In the image, Mother Matrix, you see these things that would be attached to an iron lung to give the person more mobility. In the fifties, polio was the terrifying thing for a child, so in a way, I’m transforming these objects.

ANDREA: You like to show the vestiges from the past, you achieved this in these images by making artifacts?

ARTHUR: Artifacts, yes. In a certain way these bizarrely painted objects come together and transcend what they are.

Arthur Tress, Throne of Aphrodite, 1987.

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ANDREA: You talk about accident and chance, and that you imply that in your work. How did that happen with each collage?

ARTHUR: I work with a combination of spontaneity, accident, and manipulation. I would wonder around the different rooms of the hospital and gather different objects and materials that I’d find and then almost unconsciously throw together these assemblages. About two years previous to the hospital series, I did a lot of work with stenciling so some of the pictures are beautifully stenciled. It’s a combination of stencils and paint etc.

The Throne of Aphrodite with the chair and the string, that was the last one I did in the series. I had gone from the second floor and worked my way to the basement and then worked my way up to the roof. Back then what they thought cured TB was to sit outdoors a lot, so they had these wonderful chairs. The Throne of Aphrodite was springtime and there’s a corresponding piece called Throne of Bacchus, which is autumn. I had a very transforming experience that inspired this. I went to Egypt and a young guy opened up one of the tombs for me.

Arthur Tress, Flowers of Wonder, 1986.

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The late afternoon sun shone directly into the tomb of the cat goddess, sitting on her throne. That sense of the mysterious sacred and the chair really influenced my work for many years. As I worked, the pieces became more and more elaborate. Usually it would take me about a week or two to build these things because I would modify them as I photographed them.

ANDREA: It took you about two weeks to make each tableau, were you alone?

ARTHUR: I was always alone.

ANDREA: Your work has been described as an exploration of narrative still life, so the narrative that you’re creating in these images has to do with tomb sculpture and your experience in Egypt?

Arthur Tress, The Appointment, 1986.

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ARTHUR: Exactly. I also spent a lot of time in Mexico exploring the Mayan ruins. Before the objects in an excavation are removed it’s just a jumble of broken bits and pieces. Like King Tut’s tomb, when you look at the photographs before they cleaned it out it’s just a jumble. That broken jumble of pieces, the little fragments that stick out, that was an inspiration for a lot of this feeling.

ANDREA: So what do you want your audience to take away from this series? You say these images haven’t been shown that much, why?

ARTHUR: Well, I haven’t been shown that much. I did have an exhibit of these in Soho, in a little gallery where five people a week would visit. And they were part of a retrospective I had at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. So they have been shown and brought to art fairs but in the twenty-five, thirty years since I’ve made them, I’ve never sold one. I think a lot of my color work isn’t that well known. As an artist, you just do the things you need to do and it gets out there eventually.

Arthur Tress, X-Ray Plex, 1986.

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ANDREA: What are three words that would describe your work?

ARTHUR: Dark, wonder, and, numinosity. I call it puzzled wonderment. Say you go to the Rockefeller wing at the Met Museum and there’s an African mask. Even though it’s been pulled out of context, it radiates a certain enigmatic quality, I call that numinous. It vibrates out into your space.

ANDREA: How has your age affected your work?

ARTHUR: I guess I was forty-five when I did the hospital constructions and now as I get older, I don’t take on these big projects. Physically, it was tough; I was moving these huge things around, and I spent hours in this cold building.

Arthur Tress, The Napping Couch, 1984.

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ANDREA: You’ve had a profound influence on so many people.

ARTHUR: Unfortunately I don’t think my work was out there so much as to have that effect. Museums did shows on my project of children’s dreams, and I think that became a footnote in art history. I think my gay male nudes were very liberating for a lot of people.

ANDREA: You mean magic realism, is that where they got that?

ARTHUR: Yes, and actually I got inspired by magic realism and painting in high school.

ANDREA: I see a lot of you in their work, you’re prolific, you’re an explorer, I think you’re really fabulous and that you’ve stayed with it so long is amazing.

Arthur Tress, House of Pain, 1987

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BEN ZANK

Ben Zank, Brooke Untitled.

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Ben Zank, The Stigma.

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BEN ZANK

Ben Zank, Metamorphosis.

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Ben Zank, Tire.

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Ben Zank, VTL.

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Ben Zank, Daily Commute.

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BEN ZANK

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BACKSTORIES f ro m behind

b y Le v Fe i g i n For each of us, our own back is a terra incognita. It lives an invisible, parallel life. Until it pains, or bestows pleasure, the back is an afterthought. A zone of sensations, not sights, the back must be guarded. Its exposure is a private affair.

Vulnerable, the back is artless. It cannot be arranged like a face. It doesn’t pose, communicate, mask. It only betrays. An unreachable landscape, the back can only be discovered by others.

Photography offers many sightings of the back. Edward Weston’s back-turning nudes; Harry Callahan’s wife, Eleanor, is often pictured from behind as are Josef Koudelka’s metaphysical exiles who stand before bleak, postwar European landscapes; the backs of Jo Ann Callis’s fetishized models are drenched in bursts of light. The back abounds in photography.

But before it was discovered by the camera, it took millennia for art to catch up with the backside.

The Renaissance painting sheds little light on the posterior. Expelled from the garden of Eden, Masaccio’s Adam and Eve recoil in anguish as they turn their backs on God. Judas is commonly depicted at the Last Supper in profile turning his back to Christ, and we can see his back in Giotto’s famous fresco when the betrayer kisses the Messiah in Gethsemane.

Rembrandt’s Prodigal Son is on his knees before his father, the honeyed light of forgiveness caressing his back. In each painting, the face is still partly visible. Only the Bible’s bystanders and Roman soldiers were allowed by the Old Masters to turn their back completely to the viewer.

Until the second half of the nineteenth century, European portraiture rarely attempts to renounce the face for the back.

Arguably, it was photography that fed the inversion. In early 1850s, Eugène Durieu, a collaborator of the painter Eugène Delacroix, trained the camera on his sitters from behind. Asking his models to turn away from him, Durieu rejected the longstanding primacy of the face and discovered a new genre – the back portrait.

To capture the face was to reveal the sitter’s essence, the soul according its inner light to the dark of the pupils. To portray the back was to do the opposite: to anonymize the sitter, strip the body of selfhood, universalize it into a statuary relief.

In his studio, Durieu dissolved the sitter into an archetype, an eye-catching instance pointing to the species.

When bare, the back lures not toward the soul, but to the flesh. It invites us to stare with immunity, without the shock and repercussions of a gaze returned. But the allure of the back is also about projection. Photographed from behind, the head becomes a peg for the viewer’s fantasy. The face, which has been denied us, must now be summoned from the flesh.

Relegated to the backstage of everyday life, the back shares its unrehearsed simplicity with the inanimate. In this regard, Opposite: Jo Ann Callis, Woman with Blond Hair, 1976-1977. Courtesy ROSEGALLERY. Following spread: Amanda Charchian, Ginger Entanglement.

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it approaches a nature morte. Like a still life, the back is earnest. Its candor is genetic. Beckoning us to deduce the face, the back tells the story of a body enmeshed in time, aging faster than the persona that animates it. The skin, the hair, the back of the head – all of them have things to say.

Alfred Stieglitz’s photograph of the painter Rebecca Salsbury Strand intrigues precisely because of the tension between the whole and the part. We see only the woman’s buttocks and thighs submerged in the water, but the work’s title – “Rebecca Salsbury Strand” – insists on her social identity (she is the wife of Paul Strand), struggling to reinstate the totality of her person that is denied to her by the image.

It was cinema that influenced how the back was used in the photographic image. Hollywood has long employed the subjective “over-the-shoulder” shot to allow the viewer to look at the world through the eyes of the actor. Viewing a scene from behind the hero’s back or shoulder, the moviegoer could step inside his sensorium, to trade places, and backbones, with fiction.

Photographers often depict prominent politicians from the back to achieve a similar effect. Garry Winogrand captured John F. Kennedy from behind the podium during the 1960 Democratic National Convention, lime lights enveloping the future President in a consecrated halo. No longer an emblem of nature, the clothed back represents the collective will of civilization weighing down on one set of shoulders.

To photograph the back of the head that looks out onto the landscape is to enact this first-person point of view. Everything before that gaze, which is hidden from us, transforms into an arena of activity, a manifestation of that person’s life-world. Even a plain studio backdrop – like the one used by John Edmonds in his images of African-American men in do-rags – can become a sounding board for the interiority of the model looking at it. An atmosphere of silence pervades such pictures, but we can feel the enigma of transference between us and the sitter. As Vladimir Nabokov had once advised about books, we read these photographs with our spines.

Opposite: John Edwards, Untitled (DuRag3), 2017. Above: Andrea Modica, Pueblo, Colorado. Following spread: Left: Richard Learoyd, Man with Octopus Tattoo, 2011; Right: © Eric Chakeen; Following spread: Lisa Oppenheim, Incorrect sitting position for postural deformity and dorsal curvature cases. Scoliosis. Work in this position is harmful. 2017.

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Brandon Petulla, Shirtless Still Life Woman, 2017.

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Brandon Petulla, Shirtless Still Life Man, 2017

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ANDY WARHOL ero tic a m big uity

b y Ba yl e e M c Ke e l The sensual intrigue of the mouth, the attempt to decipher someone’s thoughts by the curl of a smirk or the turn of a frown, the lips and all of their intricacies have been a reoccurring theme in Andy Warhol’s work. Chairman Mao, Ingrid Bergman, Jackie Kennedy, and most famously, Marilyn Monroe, have all been subjects of Warhol’s silkscreen portraits with their lips outlined, superimposed, colored, and emphasized. By removing the personal features in his Lips (1975) series, and giving us the solitary mouth, Warhol heightens the allure, the mysticism, enticing us in erotic ambiguity.

The silkscreened mouths flicker off the paper with a seductive softness, a pair of softly parted lips whisper in your ear, a flirtatious smirk invites you between the sheets, three lips stacked atop one another provoke thoughts of a ménage à trois. Paradoxically intimate yet always on display, these silkscreen portraits tell our story, flaunt our desires, and betray our lies with the slightest twitch. In Warhol’s most famous self-portraits, he attests to their power, consistently hiding the lips with a pensive gesture.

Warhol created his silkscreens starting with the lips to inspire his work by using their carnality, and inert magnetism. In Warhol’s short, black and white, silent film, Blow Job (1964), the mouth is central to the content of the film. The act of fellatio occurs off-screen, while on-screen the audience watches the pleasure derived from the mouth as the primary character writhes in satisfaction. The film explores oral fixation, through the sexual act and the reactions from the young man in frame. The viewer is able to imagine the blow job off-screen while watching the main character’s reactions on-screen, while his expressions alternate between a slacked jaw, biting lips and pleasured concentration. The film ends with oral fixation as the character lights his post-sex cigarette, which further emphasizes Warhol’s focus, the mouth. Andy Warhol’s obsession with lips is not confined to one medium, or person, he is praised for his works in silkscreen printing.

Warhol’s Lips (1975) series consists of intimate, handmade collages. Warhol printed the lips on different types of tape then carefully removed and reattached the narrow strips onto a clean 8 x 8 1/2 page. His method for placement changed per piece, either maintaining rough edges and layering the tape to create a collage effect, or he would trim along the

Portrait by Rose Hartman. All images Andy Warhol, Lips, c. 1975. ©Andy Warhol/Courtesy Danziger Gallery

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edges of the printed lips to accentuate their shape. The strips were aligned and arranged by hand, producing an imperfect copy. This imperfection maintains a palpable individuality, unlike the machine precision of Warhol’s other works. In the absence of the face, the lips are all the audience needs.

These silkscreen prints, however, are not readily identifiable as the lips of pop culture icons such as Monroe, Bergman, or Twiggy. Rendered unrecognizable as the mouths are stripped of their iconic faces, the lips take on a mysterious aura that redefines our perception of them. Perhaps because of Warhol’s influence, or perhaps a factor in Warhol’s obsession, a mouth without a face has become a symbol of commercialism: a grinning mouth advertising toothpaste, or a pout selling lipstick. These handmade, carefully taped lips may differ from the polished, machinelike copies Warhol usually produces, but they show the same interest in serial and symbol, and the same importance of repetition and recreation.

Warhol’s silkscreen prints from Lips (1975) do not taunt with a glimpse of a soft outline of the subjects mouth. They are glaringly unmistakable, unhidden, and they leave nothing to the imagination except the pleasures they suggest- a passionate kiss trailing down the neck, a sultry moan, a bite mark. We are not left to think about what lies beneath. The mouth does not need to hide behind a veil to incite erotic mystery; it is alluring in full view. This is precisely why the lips are so enigmatic. Our familiarity with them lets us read into the smallest action or slightest change, and perhaps makes them even more powerful and telling than the eyes. Inextricably tied to sexuality, the lips are one of our most intimate features, yet one we cannot be identified from. Strip them of the face and they become too similar to tell apart, and compelling in their mystery. Place the lips on paper, as Warhol has done, and the product is an elusive piece of anatomy, familiar to us in form yet unfamiliar in presentation. Like a Victorian botanist, Warhol is cataloguing lips, but he cannot remove their sex appeal. Butterflies pinned to the page are still beautiful, lips stuck to a page are still sexy.

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Wangechi Mutu, Automatic Hip, 2015.

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Wangechi Mutu, I Speak Black Orchid Through My Moth, 2015..

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Wangechi Mutu, You Are My Sunshine, 2015.

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Wangechi Mutu, A Long Question, 2015.

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Wangechi Mutu, Shy Side-Eye, 2015.

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SALLY MANN a b o v e g ro und

b y Ba yl e e M c Ke e l Not many would voluntarily spend time around decaying corpses, alone, in a forest. Sally Mann, however, is not most people. Her body of work, Body Farm, captures the silence surrounding her, the heavy feel of death saturating the air, the stillness and calmness of a lifeless forest speckled with corpses. The series takes its title from the local nickname for the University of Tennessee’s Anthropology Research Facility, a program that aims to determine how human bodies decompose by studying the stages of decomposition and the various factors that affect it. Her photographs capture death as it renders the human form, every identifiable and unique characteristic, unrecognizable. Body after body is reduced to bone, and eventually withers away back to nature.

These complex images address a subject that Mann has been fascinated and confronted with for years, one that has become taboo in today’s society. Even in her photographs of her children, momento mori made an appearance in the form of a dead deer or weasel. This fascination with death was resurfaced by the shooting of an escaped convict on her farm in Lexington, and the death of her father, which brought up the nagging question, “Where did all of that him-ness go?” In her memoir, Hold Still, Mann struggles with this question of what happens to the body, the soul, the mind, the thoughts and memories of a person when they die. Body Farm quite literally confronts these issues with photographs of decaying bodies, victim to death, the great equalizer.

Using the wet plate, or collodion, process, Mann produces ghostly images that are haunting with an otherworldly haze yet, oddly familiar. A finicky process dating back to the 1800s, the wet collodion process is easily affected by environmental factors, such as hot or cold weather. Variations in either case can alter the final image, or ruin it entirely. In using this process, Mann elegantly echoes the dependency of her subjects on their environment, as the changing climate and other outside factors alter the rate at which they decompose. Each body is in a different state of decay, some with peeling skin and grease spots from the sun, or preserved from the cold, skin bursting with maggots or methane, eyes missing from a lurking vulture. This technique also allows her to gracefully capture the grotesque process of flesh falling into the earth, being recycled back into life through insects, vultures, the red-berried limbs of a common viburnum, the branches of spirea shrubs, and the stalks of pokeweed. She does not view her subjects as rotting corpses, but as the flesh of a once living being, a person who died with thoughts and memories.

Her ability to work within error is key to these ethereal photographs, which show us the twisted and bloated forms of death in a thoughtful, mystical way. The smudges, lines, scratches, cloudy veils, and corners marred by black in an accidental vignette transform these photographs from grotesque depictions of corpses to beautifully tragic and meditative images, turning static subjects into intensely moving works of art. Maggots cascading down a man’s face are turned into a wispy waterfall, a misty veil gently falling over his remains. The decomposed head of a woman, eyes taken by carrion birds and skin eroding like leather worn away by time, is shrouded by a milky film, at once emphasizing the intense and ethereal effect of the work while reminding us of its universality. Any of these decaying bodies could be us.

Mann was made startlingly aware of this when she helped a student of the university carry a corpse to its allotted spot in the body farm. A man in his late thirties, the picture of health, died in his basement while watching television. No cause of death concluded. Her photographs embody the fear, sorrow, respect, uncertainty, and the strange peace and calm that death incites. With death comes an array of emotions, sometimes one indistinguishable from the next. Mann’s work is an attempt at sorting these out, discovering, understanding, coming to terms with, and facing death. Through ethereal images clouded with gore and charged with a mystic beauty, through a fearless confrontation, Body Farm shows us death’s esoteric nature, frightening beauty and chilling elegance.

Portrait by Liz Liguori. All images 2000-2001, © Sally Mann/Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York.

In order of appearance: Fata Morgana, Body Farm; Leaf, Body Farm; Tunnel, Body Farm; Vulture Branch, Body Farm.

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Danielle Zar, Persimmon.

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Danielle Zar, Clockwise from top left: Onion, Parsnip, Mushroom, Gourd.

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Karen Lynch, Lazy Boys

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Karen Lynch, Wonderment.

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RICHARD MOSSE p a l a t a b l e h o rro r

Through the lens of Richard Mosse’s weaponized camera, the subjects are visible only as figures of glowing white light. The serial heat readings capture radiant beings amidst a dark textured landscape, emulating a negative print instead of a positive one. The finished product is shot with the latest military technology, a germanium lens on a military thermal radiation camera that records the heat of bodies from miles away. This lens is traditionally used by the military as a system for targeting and surveillance. The camera needs a laptop interface in order to operate from a long distance. Mosse was able to hook the camera up to a robotic motion-control tripod and operate it with an Xbox controller.

Mosse takes an alternative approach to using technology intended for spying on foreign territories and navigating for a bomb strike by photographing human subjects in an observatory fashion. He mastered the complex technology by combining thousands of scanned frames captured by a telephoto lens to create each of the panoramic images. The outcome of the Mosse’s technique reminds us of some classical painters like Pieter Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch, who portrayed expansive scenes upon flat canvases. The method of merging the frames and the thermal reading technology erases the fine details of the exiled individuals and creates a faint idea of what the individuals look like in reality. The lack of details gives us the embodiment of life in a refugee camp in a dissociative manner. These images have glaring similarities to the historical photos from American internment and Nazi concentration camps- the rudimentary, overcrowded living quarters and the people trying to maintain normality while living in such restricted conditions. Mosse’s artistic choice to use thermal readings with inverted light and shadows, reminds us of the black and white photos surviving from the past camps. Mosse knew the importance of understanding the camps and the people living within them, which led him to spending ample time inside the camp boundaries. Although he had help from the refugees

Portrait by Mark McNulty, 2012.

All Images courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

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Richard Mosse, Tempelhof Interior, 2016.

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to arrange his shots, the photos remain emotionally detached. People photograph as haunting white figures, resembling aliens moving through an other-worldly landscape filtered at 140fps, looking like a video game.

This Heat Maps (2016-17) series presents us with an aspect of war that we have been largely desensitized to, one that we have seen on the news, in advertisements, and on social media for years. The reoccurring images of refugees in the media have desensitized the public to the realities of people from war-torn countries. We find ourselves blind to these horrors, yet they continue to be just as inhumane and relevant.

Mosse’s camera captures the daily lives of those directly affected by war, refugees hanging laundry, conversing with each other and waiting in long lines to use the camp’s facilities. The photos portray the displacement resulting from unethical decisions made by others; the ethics of sadism, and the abstract idea of borders. Despite the image evidence of displaced persons conducting their civilian lives in the camps, their inverted thermal appearance removes individual identifiers.

The uncanny similarity between an enemy in the military’s thermal readings and the refugees in Mosse’s photos reveals the dehumanizing nature of the military lens from a long distance. This comparison of the two uses for the military lens contributes to the feeling of the inherent distance within the series.

Richard Mosse furthers his technique while maintaining the same aura of illuminating the tragic beauty of war that he had in his previous series Infra (2013), by using infrared film to photograph Congolese fighters. The soldiers of the Congo contrast the lurid landscape in the images where the greenery pulsates hot pink. The photos are breathtaking, eerie and unearthly, whether it be the teenager armed with a machine gun or the pink grass he is standing in. Heat Maps (2016-17) contains aspects of a world we are familiar with, it is not skewed but inverted. It seems Mosse intends to make the horrors of war more palatable using this new technology to alter reality. The refugee subjects of Mosse’s photos are shown as ghostly images amongst textured grayscale backgrounds. The thermal readings capture the mundane nature of being confined to a refugee camp and the task of creating a new normalcy. His series challenges the dynamic between being an audience to human interactions and diminishing refugees into statistics. When looking at Mosse’s images, we become anonymous witnesses of human lives as they are reduced to shadows of heat.

Above: Richard Mosse, Idomeni Camp, Greece, 2016; Opposite: Idomeni Camp, Greece, 2016 (detail).

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Richard Mosse, Hellinkon Olympic Arena, 2016.

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Richard Mosse, Still from Incoming #96, 2016.

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Richard Mosse, Still from Incoming #88, 2016.

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Emel Karakozak, Anatolian Thema 18.

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Emel Karakozak, Anatolian Thema 3.

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Jason Isolini, Stored.

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Jason Isolini, Untitled.

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ENIGMA

o r the im po r ta nce o f lo o king clo ser

b y Al exa n d e r M o n t a g u e - Sp a re y The Enigma theme seems very pertinent right now as artists in the field of fine art photography continue to explore the very essence of photography by pushing its boundaries both technically and intellectually. The medium has become very ‘enigmatic’, in that more and more works being produced force us to question their very nature, requiring us to look at things twice and ask very specific questions as to what makes a specific work physically possible.

I was very lucky to explore this theme in some depth at the first edition of PHOTOFAIRS | San Francisco with co-curator Allie Haeusslein, in January of this year in the context of a show I commissioned, entitled: ‘New Approaches to Photography Since 2000.’ In an exhibition at the centre of the fair exploring the works of thirty artists from the West Coast (where this theme is especially pertinent at present), the wider USA, Europe, Asia and the Middle-East, each piece in the exhibition made visitors to the fair ask themselves the question: What am I actually looking at? Which in an age where we have all become slightly jaded by images - is becoming increasingly important.

Whether it be Jordan Sullivan (Rubber Factory, New York), with his photographs printed on silk; Mehdi Abdolkharimi (Mohsen Gallery, Tehran) who applies his photographs to sculpted metal; Matthew Brandt (Yossi Milo, New York), who dips his prints into Lake Tahoe; Julie Cockburn (Flowers Gallery, London, New York, Hong Kong) who weaves thread through her works, or Wang Ningde (M97, Shanghai) who dissects negatives and shines light onto them from above... Whatever it is, magic occurs and forces us to ask the question: What is a photograph?

Meghann Riepenhoff (Euqinom Projects, San Francisco) is especially relevant here. When looking at Riepenhoff’s work, the way she makes the object becomes inherent to its meaning. The veil of mystery she creates with her unique dynamic cyanotypes is achieved by exposing photographic paper to the elements (for example into the ocean at Ocean Beach) in her native San Francisco. In this instance, what we are looking at is the chemical reaction between the paper and the sea (she also achieves this very successfully with rain and other interactions with nature). At the formal level, we are obliged as the viewer to get past the enigma behind the very things that make the work possible. These therefore become just as important as the results. These are not images that provide instant gratification because of their use of color (even if her meditative blue makes the hairs on your arm prick up) and/or a sexy/shocking subject. They become a piece of science - of discovery - and therefore make the medium evolve into something else. Her works are unique, sculptural and ultimately amazing because they almost transcend fine art techniques all together in that they rely entirely on nature and the magic that it provides.

I feel that our ability to appreciate her work has been helped by the fact that we are now 40 years into the collection of photographs and the idea that a photograph can bridge into something else -- whether it be painting, sculpture or installation art, is fascinating - and more importantly - pos-

Aki Lumi, The Garden No.6. Courtesy of Vanguard Gallery (Shanghai)

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sible. The making of a photograph and its consequent appreciation through exhibitions and the way we digest the work as a society plays a huge role in the evolution of the medium - for clearly in the twenty-first century it became very obvious that photography had to go to a new place in order for it to remain relevant. Ironically, of course, we ended up turning to the nineteenth century and going back to basics, to the beginning essentially, for this to be possible. Imagining the artist on the beach getting her hands dirty and being outside, in nature, might conjure up images of nineteenth century French photographers on their pilgrimages, essentially relying on science and ultimately maverick approaches, to record North Africa - for example.

The enigma theme can be applied in so many ways, as this issue suggests, but another element of enigma which is fascinating to me is the creation of objects which encapsulates more than one of the fine arts. Sebastiaan Bremer (Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York) is a good example here because of his use of calligraphy which he very successfully overlays on top of his photographs, thus creating unique prints. A soulful and mysterious air emanates from the works because of the fact that again, we have to ask questions rather than merely enjoy the images. It also underlines the fact that he not only is a photographer who deserves our attention because of his skill in that domain, but also because of his skill as a draughtsman.

All this in the end bodes to something very positive indeed for the medium in question--by pushing the boundaries of photography, we are forced to understand it better. We must indeed therefore be in a very healthy place in terms of the appreciation of it. Instead of asking if photography is art, we are now seeking and expecting more in order to be satisfied. By looking closer, we are taking the time again - and in a world where we are all running, sitting still for even thirty seconds more than we usually might, is a step in the right direction. That is the beauty of photography: it demands finesse from both the maker and the viewer.

Above: Sebastiaan Bremer, Schoener Goetterfunken II B, ‘Daughter of Elysium’ (Tochter Aus Elysium), 2010. Courtesy of Edwynn Houk (New York & Zurich); Opposite: Wang Youshen, Long Gauze 1 Scanning, 2015. Courtesy of ShanghART Gallery (Shanghai)

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Previous spread: Andrea Good, Es Ward - Es Wird I, Drahtwerk Bözingen VII, Taubenlochschlucht, 2011. Courtesy of Galerie Stephan Witschi (Zurich); Opposite: Alejandro Guijarro, Descent from the Cross, 2016. Courtesy of Tristan Hoare (London); Above: Yuki Onodera, Portrait of Second-hand Clothes, No.01, 1994. Courtesy of Vanguard Gallery (Shanghai)

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Wang Ningde, Two Men, 2013. Courtesy of M97 (Shanghai)

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Above: Jinhee Kim, April-005, 2014. Courtesy of Gallery Koo, Seoul; Opposite: Jiang Pengyi, Dissolution No.5, 2017. Courtesy of Burger Collection and Blindspot Gallery (Hong Kong); Following spread: Miram Böhm, Detail II, 2015. Courtesy of Ratio 3, San Francisco

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Arne Svenson, A.W., from Catch Light, 2017.

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ARNE SVENSON

Arne Svenson, D.L., from Catch Light, 2017.

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Arne Svenson, G.S., from Catch Light, 2017.

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Arne Svenson, J.D., from Catch Light, 2017.

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Arne Svenson, K.K., from Catch Light, 2017.

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Arne Svenson, M.M., from Catch Light, 2017.

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Arne Svenson, S.D., from Catch Light, 2017.

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ARNE SVENSON

Arne Svenson, D.T.., from Catch Light, 2017.

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DAIDO MORIYAMA p o int a nd sho o t

by John Hutt If you take photographs seriously, that’s the end of the story. Moriyama’s public career began in the magazine PROVOKE vol 2., in which he shot a couple having sex in a love hotel. This caused outrage and excitement in photography circles, and propelled Moriyama into the world of fine art. His theoretical grounding and backwards evolution into non-photographer-photographer began there. The first work was against convention, against taste, and against fine art and yet it was lauded as fine art and celebrated in photography circles. So Moriyama kept pushing.

Moriyama began his work as a photographer shooting scenes in his native Shinjyuku region of Tokyo, a region that he loves and where he refined his point and shoot, voyeuristic street photography into a school of his own. Bure (shake) Boke (no focus) style has been widely imitated and widely criticized. Bure Boke was Moriyama’s way of going against the accepted style, the entire reason for its existence was in opposition to the normal way of doing things. The results of this were so interesting that the opposition became his independent expression. Bure Boke was Moriyama’s attempt at destroying photography. The photo book Hunter (1972) is seen as the finest example of this Shake-No Focus style. Hunter was the beginning of Moriyama’s deconstruction of the photographic process that reached its peak in the book, Bye, Bye Photography (1972) (Shashin yo Sayonara). Moriyama’s central argument during this period was that photographs, even those that are not planned or executed well, still constitute photography. Photos are not only the images you consciously take. All photographs are equally valid and should be considered photography, and if everything is photography, then nothing is photography. To go to the limits of the medium, Moriyama would have to destroy it.

When preparing a camera to shoot, one has to press the shutter button to load the film. This action can capture whatever is around; a leg, a shoe, the wall, some blurry over or underexposed shot, these accidental images, Moriyama argued, were absolutely as important photographs as any portrait or landscape. These test shots make up the bulk of Bye, Bye Photography (1972).

Moriyama’s preferred method of expression is photo books, and his quest to destroy photography came to a head after Bye, Bye Photography (1972). Moriyama came to the conclusion that photographs, photographic skill, eye and placement were all ultimately useless. The result was seven to eight years spent not producing any work. What began as a theoretic exploration of what it meant to be a photographer ended in the realization that to be a photographer meant nothing. So, in his own words, Moriyama spent a few years “being a junkie and not taking any photos.”

It’s interesting to look at the evolution of work when the stated goal at its inception is the destruction or deconstruction of the medium. It should be noted that it’s useful to speak about Moriyama in terms of series rather than specific works due to the nature of his output - he has no interest in exhibitions. 1972 and Hunter saw Moriyama prowling the streets of Shinjyuku as a voyeur, deliberately taking the least planned, shaky pictures from his hip. Subsequently, Bye, Bye Photography (1972) took the idea to its logical conclusion. It was, according to Nobuyoshi Araki, a contemporary, admirer, Portrait and all images © Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation / Courtesy of Luhring Augustine, New York, Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo, and Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation, Tokyo. Following spread: Daido Moriyama, HIKARI TO KAGE (Light and Shadow), 1982.

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and friend (in that order) to Moriyama, one of the most influential and important contemporary photo books of the time. The influence of Bure Boke was felt throughout Japan and picked up by countless photography students keen to get theoretical and nihilistic with their chosen medium. Of course, to take a shaky, unfocused picture in downtown Tokyo is not difficult, but the age-old problem of starting first with the deconstruction of a medium before completely understanding that medium takes hold here as everywhere else. The students who imitated the style of Moriyama, without coming to the conclusions themselves, missed the point. Or even if they came to the conclusion themselves they didn’t have the commercial background, porn background or working photographer background to push against boundaries as Moriyama had.

However, on his hiatus from photography, Moriyama realized that eventually the act of not taking pictures, even if you’re doing so for artistic and theoretic reasons, is meaningless. It becomes the same as just not producing work. To the outside observer there is no difference between someone theoretically opposed to the idea of the meaningful production of art and someone who just doesn’t make art. In 1982, Moriyama’s mother died and he snapped out of his haze, found a Pentax, began taking photographs again and, to his surprise, found himself an influential and missed artist.

Throughout his career, Moriyama has been a pornographer and commercial photographer producing work that is in turn, boring and idle. The work might have been good money but it could never sufficiently satiate his interests. Moriyama is an incredible photographer, one who cannot keep a job because eventually the boredom sets in, and he needs a new project. His commercial work is always short term, but his artistic mind never ceases and his photographic career continues. Now Moriyama says he cannot say “goodbye to photography”, but if he did, photography would be fine.

What is written in almost every English language publication about Moriyama is that he considers his photography to be like Jack Kerouac’s On The Road – a beat stream of consciousness. It is always talking about Hunter, and while it is something that Moriyama has said, to classify one of Japan’s homegrown artistic philosophers as a reaction to a 1950s American author is poor justice. Rather, Moriyama is Diogenes asking Alexander to get out the way of his sun. Students and writers come to ask him what the meaning is behind his work, asking him to teach them or to make some new work.

Moriyama does what interests him, his technique is his own, and any imitators fall flat because they are not committed to it, or perhaps are not blasé enough about the conceit of photography to achieve the same effect. He wants his work to be seen – so he puts it on t-shirts, like his famous Stray Dog of Tokyo photograph splattered across every kitsch souvenir you can find. His darkroom technique is a complete mystery, one of total instinct. When his gallery wants to make prints of his work they must take pictures of prints and reproduce them as faithfully as possible. Moriyama himself has no interest in, or perhaps cannot reproduce his prints. This fits into his entire philosophy of photography. A photograph is a record of a one time event, itself an event, itself a document.

Daido Moriyama, Opposite: Shinjuku, 2002; Following spreads (in order of appearance): Strait, 1971; How to Create a Beautiful Picture 6: Tights in Shimotakaido, 1987; DOCUMENTARY 78 (’86.4 Setagaya-ku, Tokyo), 1986; Goshogawara, 1976; SAKATA YAMAGATA PREF.2, 1975 1975/1980; KARUDO (Hunter), 1971; Oct. 21, 1969, 1969/2010; Artificial Underwater Flower, 1990/2010; Shinjuku, 2002; Tsugaru, 2010.

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Costas Picadas, Top: Time Dilation 2; Bottom: Tunneling 12.

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Costas Picadas, Top: Tunneling 5; Bottom: Quark Tunneling 9.

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Daniel Adams, Imported Goods.

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ANNETTE LEMIEUX f lipped

STEVE MILLER: In the work of Sally Gall and the Glow Series by Andrea Blanch that is in the same issue of this magazine called Enigma, you don’t necessarily have to know their work…the enigma for me in their work is to figure out exactly what you’re seeing. Their images are abstract enough to mess with your knowledge of the lens capturing something about which you’re not sure of. In your work the image is clear, the enigma is in deciphering the meaning. For example, at your last show at Kent Fine Art there was a work entitled Hellos and Goodbyes, 1994 - a wall of twentytwo hands in separate frames presumably waving. Eleven were positive images, and the other eleven were the negative version of the same image. My question is what are you greeting?

ANNETTE LEMIEUX: First of all, I always think my work is very clear. It’s clear to me, apparently maybe not so clear to the viewer, and that always puzzles me...because I think I’m very clear. But, is the point to be clear at all? With Hellos and Goodbyes you use the word ‘greeting,’ someone waving to someone. For me it was that, but it was also grieving in the end...the goodbye.

‘Greeting’ and ‘grieving’ I guess. It was a hello and a goodbye to something or someone. There’s no enigma there, I thought.

STEVE: Well there is. The enigma is that you do have to decipher it. Because the next question is what were the sources of the hands waving?

ANNETTE: Many sources, from many books actually. My life was informed by the news and picture books, places that I was never physically at. They’re from all over the place. They’re from Nazi Germany, from U.S cocktail parties, from political rallies, etc., etc.

STEVE: They are displayed generally in an oval. How do you come up with the straight line, vertical, the grouping... how did that happen?

ANNETTE: That was intuitive. You say an oval, I say a cross.

STEVE: See, this is the enigma. You’re giving some clarity. This piece preceded Left Right Left Right from 1995 that’s currently on view at the Whitney. Is that correct?

ANNETTE: Yes STEVE: The Whitney exhibition was about portraits. Did you conceive that particular piece Left Right Left Right as a portrait?

Portrait by Amelia Spinney. All images Courtesy of the Artist and Elizabeth Dee Gallery, NYC.

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ANNETTE: At that time it was my observation of what was going on during the election in 1996. During the debates, observing the opposites.

STEVE: So it’s like the portrait of a moment or a portrait of a time?

ANNETTE: Exactly.

STEVE: What was the communication between you and the Whitney that led you to invert the images for the current display.

ANNETTE: Well, I woke up on November 9th at about 4:30 in the morning and checked out the news. I was horrified that Trump was now my president. My world just went upside down. I thought that my work, Left Right Left Right, that was installed in the Whitney’s Human Interest exhibition didn’t make any sense anymore. The piece was a celebration of protest or opposition, but that morning I felt defeated. So I went into school to teach that morning and all my students came in dragging their feet, they were in mourning too. There was not going to be any kind of regular class that day.

So I said to them, why don’t we all go into the seminar room and wait for Hillary Clinton to concede. So we did. While we were waiting for her to come on, I shared the thought with my students that I had that morning. I showed them Left Right Left Right and asked them what did they think of the idea to request that my work be turned upside down? They unanimously said, go for it.

So I emailed the curator, Scott Rothkopf, at the Whitney and asked if he would consider doing this. He got back to me right away, that he had discussed it with the director Adam Weinberg, and Adam said something like - yes, we’re the museum for artists. Yes, we can do this. And so the next Tuesday when the museum was closed that’s when they flipped the work. When the museum opened on Wednesday my work was upside down.

STEVE: And that was a great idea for a protest, I thought it was a really effective gesture and the first wave of artists making strong statements about the election so I thought it was a beautiful gesture.

ANNETTE: It was really from my gut.

STEVE: You were once described as a minimalist with an ax to grind - your clean presentation and your inscrutable assemblage of a complex reality certainly is relevant to the current situation. You are mixing politics, art history, misogyny, popular culture and the leveling of hierarchies. I know you’re not going to spell it out for me but am I close?

ANNETTE: You are close.

STEVE: Duchamp plays a big role in your 2015 exhibition at Kent Fine Art, as well as, Guston.

ANNETTE: Yes, there is one photo work that refers to Guston’s painting, Painting, Smoking, Eating from 1977. But the exhibition was influenced more with Duchamp and Man Ray’s collaborations.

Fumé, the other image of me smoking is after Man Ray’s portrait of Lee Miller, it’s the same exact pose. And the photo work, Duchamp Erased, is actually that. I manipulated the four Man Ray portraits of Duchamp by erasing Duchamp’s image, leaving only the backcloth that Duchamp was photographed in front of.

STEVE: Each image in that particular show seems like the piece of a larger puzzle. When I first came to New York in the 70s Duchamp was the name of the game. We were talking about conceptual art, a lot of people were…. I think the Pictures Generation has a lot to do with grabbing readymades in a sense.

ANNETTE: Well art has always grabbed at something that came before.

STEVE: With the rise of commercial art fairs, good looking (over conceptual) seems to be the name of the game ANNETTE: Yeah, big red and shiny. I don’t have the production resources other artists have, if I did, who knows what could happen.

Opposite: Annette Lemeiux, Calendar Girl, 198;. Following spread: Left Right Left Right, 1995.

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Above: Annette Lemeiux, Bad Habits, 2015; Following spread: FumĂŠe, 2015.

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STEVE: Regarding issues of production, I did notice that all of your photographic editions are miniscule. You make those pieces kind of unique and special, they’re like one over three with an A/P. In your case, I see the small editions as a sign of personal integrity to your work. Do you want to comment on that?

ANNETTE: Hmm, if I do a benefit photograph for an institution there can be an edition of 25-50, because it’s benefiting them. Maybe I’m not thinking of benefiting myself, but maybe I should.

STEVE: Early in your career you had an association with the Pictures Generation.

ANNETTE: Well you start somewhere and then you branch off on your own. I was actually roped in with the Neo-Geo group because I was making some paintings that were geometric. I am thinking now of Ashley Bickerton - what he’s making now compared to what he was making then. You just can’t stay somewhere for no reason. Imean if you stay in that place where you’re put, then you’re not making any work, you’re just making stuff.

STEVE: I think it’s interesting that you say Ashley, cause I interviewed Ashley and I think of you and Ashley as very similar, you’re sort of like, you’re loners. You’re out there doing your own thing and it’s much more to do with what you need to do internally.

ANNETTE: Yeah, Ashley doing it in boring Bali and I in exotic Brookline, MA. STEVE: The title of your 2015 exhibition at Kent Fine Art was called Everybody wants to be a catchy tune - for me that was an interesting title, the show was more like a display of solitude than about being the popular kid in high school.

ANNETTE: Yes, that title either comes from Duchamp, himself or Robert Pincus-Witten.

STEVE: When I saw the work Companion Piece, from that same exhibition of an image of a sled with a real sled my mind went to the name of Kane’s sled uttered in the movie Citizen Kane . . . “Rosebud.” It also reminds me so much of the Guston image, you smoking alone. It’s the solitude . . . it’s the being alone and it’s comparing the reality with the image...presence and absence.

ANNETTE: Exactly, and that sled is mine, with a photograph of is its unattainable partner.

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STEVE: With Calendar Girls from 1987, what were your criteria for making these selections?

ANNETTE: Well there are twelve images so it’s sort of like a calendar. It actually was inspired by one of my favorite songs called “Time” on a Tom Waits’ album called Rain Dogs.

For me these Hollywood pin up girls weren’t so happy...they’re women in bad situations, every month, every day.

STEVE: Mon Amour from 1987 seems like your most overtly political piece. I assume the source on the left is what I think is a horrific scene from the WWII, correct?

ANNETTE: It was Hiroshima. What was horrible was on the right side there are bathing beauties having a splendid time on what looks like a stairs that reflects the stairs in the image from Hiroshima. Both situations could have happened on the same day. So, it’s two different realities happening at the same time.

I think all this comes from a very early place...meaning early observations. I come from the very lower middle class, just above the worst situation. I would walk to school and would pay attention to the neighborhood bum, which was very upsetting to me.

STEVE: How old were you?

Previous spread: Annette Lemeiux, Hellos and Goodbyes, 1994; Above: Mon Amour, 1987.

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ANNETTE: I could’ve been six or so. I saw prejudice when I was in kindergarten. I knew what I witnessed and what I was taught was wrong. I came from a place where persons had few experiences outside of small towns or outside of the country. I just knew that there was something wrong with the place, with this type of mentality...

So that fuels the work and the news fueled the work and current observations fuel the work...it’s not a pretty land.

STEVE: Is the current political situation affecting the work you’re making now?

ANNETTE: Oh yeah, it’s killing me. I’m working on an exhibition for the MFA Boston and in the beginning the work was inspired by scenes or objects in films like To Kill A Mockingbird and Fritz Lang’s M, among others...so I’m working on this show that’s due in the fall and now Trump and this political climate has swayed the work in another direction. And I can’t ignore what the work needs now, I can’t stay with the purity of just working with my original ideas that came from these films...I never felt this so strongly before, how much our present landscape is changing the work. I don’t want it to change my work but it is…. or the concept. So it’s pretty challenging and I think it’s really hard to make work, but making work is somehow an optimistic act. As negative as the content can be, it’s also an optimistic act.

STEVE: One of my all time favorite pieces from you is The Great Outdoors, 1989, with an Adirondack chair and Adirondack table with a lamp in front of the picture that is from an old postcard. It makes me love the nostalgia of the postcard image but also the loss of the primary experience in nature and being replaced by a substitute. Photography is some form of a visual stand-in for a past action and the Picture Generation movement was about filling up the empty vessels among the multitude of images and giving them new meaning. Are you still collecting images for your work right now and what kind?

ANNETTE: I’m collecting images from the movies I’m watching or the films I’m interested in for my up coming show. I’m thinking more words and symbols after this election. It’s like in some way I have no words to say, maybe the words I say are documents...more documents of something said and less of me saying something. I don’t know if that makes any sense.

It’s like looking at what symbols are supposed to be but what they are now...possibly. They are once again based on looking at something that is vulnerable as we are very vulnerable right now...

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Manuel Franquelo, Things in a room (Untitled #6), 2015. Courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery.

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Manuel Franquelo, Things in a room (Untitled #7), 2015. Courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery.

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Manuel Franquelo, Things in a room (Untitled #1), 2013-2014. Courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery.

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GUY BOURDIN genius

When Guy Bourdin was trying to establish himself as an artist, he was doing so as a painter. In 1950 he met the iconic surrealist photographer, Man Ray, and became his protégé. This chance meeting would forever change the course of his artistic career, launching Bourdin into his true calling. While his passion for painting persisted throughout his life and instilled in his images the intentionality of a brushstroke and saturated his work with bold color, it was through photography that Bourdin would inextricably shape visual culture. In the post war consumerist context, he merged his unique approach to photography, one created by a painter’s eye and forged through surrealist images, with a bourgeoning consumer culture. This seemingly odd medley produced advertisements that stunned, shocked, and enticed. Full of tension, and the unfinished narrative, Bourdin brought an entirely new edge to fashion photography, continuing to do so well into his fifties and early sixties.

Charged with psychological energy, his photographs play on the inner most desires for fantasy, sensuality, and alluring mystery. His bizarrely brilliant compositions changed commercial photography from selling prestige and status to one wrapped in narrative and fantasy. His photographs, meticulously planned, precisely staged, and flawlessly executed, quickly became synonymous with companies such as Charles Jourdan. It was thought by many that Bourdin never exhibited or published his work, remaining unknown outside of the fashion circle for most of his life, feeling that once his images breathed life through the pages of the magazine, they had fulfilled their purpose. By publishing in a work perishable in nature, and misleadingly known for destroying or mutilating many of his negatives, the photographer remained pure and elusive in his medium, adding even more intrigue to his enigmatic photographs.

Guy Bourdin, Self portrait and cat drawing, 1953.

All images Copyright The Guy Bourdin Estate 2017 / Courtesy of Louise Alexander Gallery.

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Guy Bourdin, Charles Jourdan, Autumn 1974.

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His son, Samuel, has recently contested this ephemeral narrative of his father’s work, saying instead that he hoarded his sketches, drawings, paintings, photographs, everything he ever did. Bourdin studied to perfect his art when he wasn’t behind the lens, continued to paint throughout the years, kept an extensive library of philosophy, art, cinema, music, and poetry, and was as much an intellectual as he was an artist. Samuel’s revelations attest to his father’s complexity, humility, his disdain for the spotlight and his aloof nature. Had the son not spoken up, the popular narrative of Guy Bourdin splashed across magazines and websites would continue to be the only one. Along with disillusioning the belief that the photographer destroyed his negatives, Samuel exhibited black and white images that for years remained in the shadow of Bourdin’s luminous color photographs. A family secret according to his son, the incandescent color is striking, but the poetry of his art, the stunning compositions and subtle humor of his black and white photos are as radiant as any color.

Images for the Charles Jourdan shoe company show Bourdin’s mysterious eroticism and his ability to produce highly stylized images decades before the advent of digital retouching. His dedication to the perfect image pushed models to their limits, often placing them in unnatural poses. Bourdin, in an analogue age, did not use any techniques to alter his images once they had been taken, putting pressure on his models to contort themselves into the poses, and kaleidoscopic scenes which he created. In certain minds, these high expectations have marred the photographer as an artist who looked down on his models. Quite the opposite, this demanding environment required an intimate relationship between model and photographer. Bourdin was interested in pushing the boundaries of not only his models, but of photography itself.

This meant that an understanding, a close connection and symbiosis had to exist between the person in front of and behind the lens. He worked exclusively with models such as Nicolle Meyer, who shared this understanding and knew that it was equally up to her, as well as Bourdin, to achieve perfection. Bourdin was indisputably a fine art photographer in a commercial setting. He entered every job as an artist, never agreeing to something unless he had complete control.

Even in his images for the Charles Jourdan shoe company, his artistry soaks the pages, spilling over them and pouring out through the seams of the magazine. Bourdin achieved the perplexing paradox of placing the product in the foreground and background at the same time. Captivating the viewer with an ominous scene, forcing them to fill in the blanks, he simultaneously places the shoes in focus, and in the corner of our eyes, permeating our vision in every detail.

A faceless woman falls over an indeterminate red ledge, thighs in the air and shoes splayed against a vibrant crimson and gold. Her position suggests a sexual narrative yet our eyes are only drawn to the glean of the pumps. Two women lean against a sink, pressed into one another as they dress or undress, hand clasping the ties of a bikini, a pile of pumps lie in the sink, comprising half of the image and distracting us from the intimate scene to the left. Serene landscapes showcase shoes as legs stroll through, detached at the knee, disembodied and seemingly out of place, searching for something, lost. A crime scene, marked with a crudely drawn chalk line and splatters of blood, with a car parked hastily to the side and a door left ajar, displays two pink heels tossed on the ground. In all of these, the shoes dominate the mise-en-scene, demanding our attention against the debauchery, the strangeness, the fiery colors. His images provoke thought, wonderment, and an occasional hysteria (both comedic and horrific, sometimes simultaneously).

Guy Bourdin, French Vogue, December 1976.

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Guy Bourdin, Charles Jourdan, Spring 1978.

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Guy Bourdin, Charles Jourdan, Spring 1975.

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Guy Bourdin, French Vogue, February 1973.

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Guy Bourdin, French Vogue, August 1981.

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Guy Bourdin, from Guy Bourdin’s archives.

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Beyza Tokgรถz, Remember.

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Beyza Tokgรถz, Die.

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Larry Achiampong, Glyth (5 of 19).

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ANDREA BLANCH intrepid

STEVE MILLER: How did Enigma come about?

ANDREA BLANCH: Actually talking with you.

STEVE: What guided you in choosing artists for the enigma issue?

ANDREA: A lot of shoe leather. Trolling the net, active discovery, museums, art fairs, galleries, and speaking to friends. The first artist that was chosen was Sally Gall. I went to her exhibition Aerial, and thought it was fantastic-- I didn’t know what I was looking at, which immediately made me think that she should be in the issue. The second artist was Richard Mosse, after seeing his work in Jack Shainman’s gallery months before his exhibit, I knew it would be a perfect fit for Enigma. Once it was decided to include fashion photography, since fashion imagery is inherently enigmatic, my first thought was Guy Bourdin. When I saw Annette Lemieux’s article in New York Magazine regarding her work at the Whitney Biennial, it intrigued me and I knew I had to have her in the issue.

STEVE: Let’s talk about your photographs. My first response when I looked at those images was “What the hell am I looking at?” I actually didn’t know, couldn’t figure it out, I had a sense of New York and the street but not much more than that ...was that intentional from the start or a byproduct of circumstance?

ANDREA: I was taking a walk and unbeknownst to me, at the time, I ran into the Deutsche Bank fire. I was using a digital camera.

After my first shot, I noticed the reflective tape on the firemen’s uniforms glowed, it was visually and aesthetically captivating. I was transfixed, so I just kept shooting. When I got home and saw the images on the computer, the glow of the reflective stripes made me want to push it further and create something more abstract. However I could enhance the glow, that was my intention.

STEVE: So what I’m hearing is that you’re really gutted, rooted in intuition, and being in the moment, as opposed to having premeditated thoughts like, ‘this is so deconstructive and I’m breaking down the image and there could be a conceptual practice behind this’. Knowing your larger practice you probably gave me these images from the direction of visual mystery and the aesthetics of the street. Any thoughts about this?

ANDREA: The Glow series began with intuition, and evolved with intention.

STEVE: Have you used this specific kind of manipulation before?

ANDREA: Yes, in another project I did for breast cancer called Unexpected Company. In my commercial work, all the time.

Portrait by Marsin. Following spread: Andrea Blanch, Glow 7, 2009.

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When I started in fashion photography and working with Vogue, we didn’t use retouching. Once digital photography came about, retouching became more pervasive in the fashion and commercial sector of the business.

STEVE: You’re a fine art person that went into fashion and now you’re coming out of fashion and through the magazine getting back into fine art. I think that’s an appropriate trajectory of what’s going on, and the magazine has become a vehicle to explore some of the issues in contemporary photography.

ANDREA: I never thought about becoming a fashion photographer, until the moment I saw Richard Avedon at work.

When I became a part of his studio as a “trainee”, I started taking fashion photographs. I think fine art gives me more room to explore and expand, as Paul Cavaco once told me, “you must find fashion very confining.”

STEVE: For you, there’s lots of precedence. I think you’re definitely more in the realm of someone like Wolfgang Tillman that can do commercial, advertising, fashion, documentary, ambient world, and abstraction. But for example on Artspace, you sell mostly your fashion pieces.

ANDREA: Its fashion! That’s what they want and they say it sells, so I’m giving it to them. Thank you for including me in the same realm as Wolfgang Tillman, that’s a big compliment.

STEVE: It seems like you want to ride the line of fine art and fashion more and more going forward.

ANDREA: I do. I’d like to do more things like the Deutsche Bank fire photographs because I’m excited by the results.

STEVE: With the ubiquity of the camera phone, now everyone’s a photographer. How do you locate your practice in this fluid image world….or how does anybody?

ANDREA: I don’t think it matters. For instance, it has taken me a while to get accustomed to the iPhone camera. The framing is awkward for me, but the more I use it the better I get. As long as you get a good image, it doesn’t matter how you get there.

STEVE: You’ve organized the magazine around themes like enigma which addresses this issue of categories. Which seems useful in this age of endless aesthetic boundaries because there has to be some kind of container in which to have a discussion and you’re container is constantly shifting. How do you contain photography for a useful discussion and do you personally have boundaries and categories for your own practice? You obviously do because you just told me that you’re giving artspace fashion. So fashion is one of your containers. Are there many categories?

Andrea Blanch. Opposite: Glow 2, 2009; Following spread: Glow 5, 2009.

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ANDREA: Regarding the magazine, I chose to have issues with themes for pragmatic reasons. I felt it would help with the layout of the magazine and it would also give emerging photographers more parameters to work with. The results have been extremely stimulating for me. I like what the magazine has achieved and where it is headed. We have received a lot of positive feedback. As far as categories for my work, it would be fine arts, portraits and fashion.

STEVE: The reflective stripe on the fireman’s jacket looks more like Times Square at night or the neon of Hong Kong, then it has the grounding individual reality of a newsworthy event such as a New York City fire at night. Nonetheless I see the interest, your interest in lighting and how that can have an emotional effect. So I’m going through your website looking at everything that you’re doing and I was trying to look at Glow and see how it was different or similar to your other works. I understood how much care you take in lighting, so do you want to talk about the importance of lighting in your work?

ANDREA: Photography is all about light, either in a series like Glow or photographing a beautiful face for fashion or commercial photography. It’s about using the light to fully realize your vision.

STEVE: The enigma on the surface of the image of the fireman allows the work to reference these really diverse worlds that are outside the image, from neon lights to flying saucers and ghosts. The first visual impact of the image stands out as distinctive and open ended in both interpretation and the movement towards abstraction.

ANDREA: With Glow, I began with documenting an event, then taking it further by enhancing the glow. At the time I didn’t realize how serious the fire was, but by making the images more abstract, it made the subject more palatable. I’ve always been attracted to light that appears otherworldly, like a poltergeist. When I look at light like this, I feel like it’s taking me on a journey, I’m being pulled towards it.

STEVE: Do you have your camera with you at all times?

ANDREA: Yes... My iPhone is with me at all times.

STEVE: So going forward, I have a feeling you’re gonna go into something more experimental and different.

ANDREA: From looking at so many artists for the magazine, I’ve been introduced to many different processes and new techniques which somehow I’d like to incorporate in my own work. It is a new and challenging frontier, something exciting. An enigma, a puzzle to be solved.

Andrea Blanch. Opposite: Glow 1, 2009; Following spread: Glow 3, 2009.

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Marilyn Minter, Thigh Gap, 2016.

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Marilyn Minter, 28, 2017.

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Marilyn Minter, Ginger, 2016.

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Marilyn Minter, Tangle, 2013.

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SEBASTIAAN BREMER c o n n e cting the do ts

ANDREA BLANCH: Where are you from?

SEBASTIAAN BREMER: I’m from Amsterdam, I moved to NYC when I was twenty-one. In Amsterdam I studied at the Vrije Academie, and I studied at Skowhegan School of Art and Sculpture in Maine. I currently reside in Brooklyn. My art practice is a spiritual one. You make magical objects, about something you care deeply about, which is bigger than anything you can understand or control. You have to have faith when you create something. At my son’s Bar Mitzvah, he proposed an eleventh commandment: “if thou shalt practice religion, thou shalt be tolerant of all other beliefs.” Then the Rabbi asked him, “Tobias, is there a twelfth?” He said, “if you practice religion, thou shalt have a sense of humor.” I found a lot to embrace in this!—Art is not a linear practice: you have to give yourself over. It’s a dirty little secret that I think a lot of artists are shy about.

ANDREA: Thinking that way or saying it?

SEBASTIAAN: Talking about it. But for me, it’s the way my life has been moving.

ANDREA: How does this thinking relate to your work, your practice?

SEBASTIAAN: My process is playful. There is no clear plan or story I am trying to tell. I manipulate photographs which evoke a familiar feeling—something I have a deep connection to. As I draw on these photographs, a story is told—something seen through my eyes, an intrinsic human response to emotion and to memory. What I create are visual manifestations of my ideas.

ANDREA: During your early years you meticulously reproduced photographs using paint, now you paint directly onto photographs, changing them instead of reproducing them. How did this transition come about?

SEBASTIAAN: I have always drawn, and I took up painting after high school. I used photographs as my source material. I began to realize that my paintings were constrained by the limitation of the photograph I was referencing.

During my residency at Skowhegan, I took a risk and rid myself of all the conventions of painting to create something that would not stifle me. The challenge was to make something that was complex and interesting. I began drawing on top of photographs that I felt connected to, creating complexities and new stories.

Working like this allowed me to create more because I was able to roll my drawings up and bring them to work. For a time, I was working as a producer on commercial photo shoots—a job which involved a lot of waiting around—which allowed me to create my work.

ANDREA: Commercial photo shoots for advertising?

SEBASTIAAN: Correct. The photographers were very good friends of mine, and still are. They’re on the cutting edge of fashion photography and art—the photographers are Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, now known as Inez +Vinoodh.

Portrait by Andrea Blanch. All images © Sebastiaan Bremer/Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York.

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ANDREA: So you worked this way for four years?

SEBASTIAAN: Yes, but I also assisted other artists, worked in construction and I worked in a video store. My wife, a choreographer, traveled a lot and I could bring my work wherever we went together. That kind of happenstance also defined my incremental process: I like to work slowly, with detail, and I don’t enjoy limbo. Waiting is best doing something that you enjoy—then it’s not waiting anymore, it becomes a meditative process.

ANDREA: Photographs capture specific moments in time; by altering them are you commenting on the temporal nature of photography?

SEBASTIAAN: Yes, a photograph is literally a slice of life or a captured moment. If you start adding to that, in any way, you expand the moment, you layer and stretch it. The reality is altered. It’s like time travel—you can insert yourself into another moment, or revisit a memory.

ANDREA: Memory’s a funny thing.

SEBASTIAAN: Yeah, and other people’s memories become your own as you start telling their story.

ANDREA: So what comes first, the idea or the photographs? Do you seek out images for a specific project or do certain photographs inspire the projects?

SEBASTIAAN: Both.

ANDREA: You had an obsession with comic books and worked in a comic book store when you were younger, did this influence or inspire the pointillist technique you use in the series of eyes?

SEBASTIAAN: No, it didn’t. The little dots are something that came out of a tentative way of inserting myself. I felt that adding lines on top of a photograph created a mesh to see things through. Whereas if you’re inserting yourself into little microdots and you put them next to existing dots in the photograph then they co-exist side by side and it’s more nebulous. You let the voice of the picture underneath speak in relative strength to the drawing that you do on top. I want to emanate what’s in the photograph, as well as, my mark making: I wanted the relationship to be mutually beneficial.

ANDREA: You mention a need to record time, how do you feel that your work achieves this?

SEBASTIAAN: I sit with my drawings for a long time and incrementally make marks as I go. A whole series of events transpire while you’re doing this. Just like a seismograph or an audio recording, it’s a registration of waves of events that occurred. If you make a recording of sound, it’s just a gibberish of lines without a device to play it back— which is what Edison invented. With art, you have this recording technique, in a sense, but where is the playback instrument? If you make something with certain intent, a certain idea, other people can see it and they start relating a story or an emotion. It’s actually remarkably close to the intention that you had in the beginning. It’s magical. That’s really a gratifying part of my artwork, because I like to communicate.

ANDREA: You usually take your own photographs, but the images from the eye series are all from other people, why use found images for this series in particular?

SEBASTIAAN: Because I was mirroring myself. These were all pictures taken by Bill Brandt. I was intimately exposed to his work because his work is represented in New York by the same gallery as where I show, Edwynn Houk Gallery. His prints were made for publication—meaning that the contrast is perfect for printing—but if you see the real thing you see that there’s a lot of mark making on top with pen and ink. All photography has been retouched to a certain degree. And that was really interesting to me, because what I do is a bit sacrilegious. I draw and paint, with my hand, on a photograph—all this stuff you’re not supposed to do. This is all photography itself, retouching and mark-making and doing whatever it takes to get the image right. But it used to be that the object of the photograph was not important

Sebastiaan Bremer, Eye #5, 2012 (After Bill Brandt’s “Louise Nevelson’s eye, 1963”),

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to photographers, it was really the book that it went to, it was about the reproduction; it wasn’t about the one magical print. So I saw Bill Brandt’s pictures and the painterly component of it, and then he had this series of pictures where he took the details of these portraits and focused on the eyes of all these artists. Those eyes seem to me like a playback device that stores what it has seen. Since these are all artists, they’re all trying to figure something out, they’re all trying to make sense of this world. The brain behind it adds another layer and their spirituality adds something else, and then as artists they’re pushing it out into the world again with their hands or by other means. I felt at that moment a need for fraternity and kinship. I thought that if I drew what I saw in those photographs, maybe I could represent some of the magic of these characters.

ANDREA: How did you get permission to do that?

SEBASTIAAN: You can draw on photographs, but in this case, it was the grandson of Bill Brandt who takes care of the estate and he gave me permission through the gallery. It’s actually one of the few times I had proper permission! But what I do is so transformative of the pictures that there’s not really a problem with issues of copyright. Also because I don’t use it for reproduction—it’s an original piece which I change and create.

ANDREA: They’re unique pieces right?

SEBASTIAAN: Yeah, my works are unique pieces. There’s a three-dimensionality to them too that is not common with photography. Also, a photograph is usually a multiple, but in my case it’s the opposite—which has its drawbacks. For instance, if I wanted to do a retrospective, I would have to borrow back a lot of pictures from their owners. You need the original object. Photographers often have exhibition prints ready, so they can sell ten or twenty, and can still use the exhibition print.

ANDREA: Eyes are often said to be the window of the soul, after doing this series would you agree?

SEBASTIAAN: I’ve gone back and forth with that a lot, but yes.

ANDREA: I’m looking at your eyes as we’re talking and I’m thinking, what are his eyes saying to me? You have very friendly eyes.

SEBASTIAAN: People have said that to me before! You really connect with people by looking them in their eyes.

ANDREA: Your photographs of the eyes, they are so powerful.

SEBASTIAAN: That might actually be a bit of a problem. They are so present, and so confrontational; it might be a lot to deal with on a daily basis. But I think it’s impossible to know what people are going to gravitate towards. And you can’t fake things. It just doesn’t work. If you’re going to set out to please other people, you will fail, because you’re not pleasing yourself. You have to care about what you’re doing because otherwise, it’s pointless. It’s a real quest, and sometimes you end up making things that might seem to you like too much, too intense, and people won’t like it, but you have no idea. It might actually be the very thing that everybody responds to: I really love that horrible violent thing; it’s going to give me a lot of peace.

Conversely there are images, which, like these flowers, could easily be thought to be superficial or pretty. They actually come from something very different than what you would think—there’s a story behind it that is not as pleasant as a picture of a flower suggests. Their origin has more to do with war and immigration issues than it has to do with pretty flowers.

You can never second-guess your audience, or your heart. You have to just go with it.

ANDREA: I agree, but so often I hear: I could never hang that because my wife wouldn’t want that and my kids shouldn’t see it, so on and so on.

SEBASTIAAN: That’s not the only place that art ends up, but the majority of it does end up in private collections, yeah.

ANDREA: Where would you want to be?

SSEBASTIAAN: I would like it to be loved. I’ve been very lucky in that most of the people that bought my work end up

Sebastiaan Bremer, Eye #1, 2012 (After Bill Brandt’s “Max Ernst’s left eye, 1963”).

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keeping it forever, so it’s not like a bargaining chip. And I like to communicate a lot so, of course, it’s great if it has a lot of eyeballs seeing it. I prefer meaningful communication over a large communication. It’s fine if it’s just one person who really spends time with something. It’s like a conversation. You can speak to a hundred thousand people and not have any joy from it, or you can have a conversation with one person and it’s much more meaningful.

ANDREA: It’s about intimacy.

SEBASTIAAN: And quality communication and reaching other people and not being so damn alone.

ANDREA: Separating the eye from the context of the face was a popular surrealist motif; do you consider yourself a surrealist?

SEBASTIAAN: Partly, yes. They have all these rules, and I don’t believe in rules, so in that sense I’m not a surrealist at all. But I plumb the unconscious, to my greater benefit.

ANDREA: The gaze is a dominating element in this series, why is this significant for you?

SEBASTIAAN: Because I really like to look at things. Like you said, looking into other people’s eyes is a really intense, powerful thing. There’s also something really sad about those pictures in that sense because they’re inert, most of them are not alive anymore, and there is something that you cannot reach anymore. Also because they’re so disembodied.

ANDREA: They’re very powerful.

SEBASTIAAN: It’s fascinating to me that you’re interested in those pictures because it’s something that I made a few years ago, and it’s kind of an odd outlier. But something that my father taught me was–if you think of something, do it.

ANDREA: We often assign intimacy to eye contact and look away from strangers on the street, are you challenging this convention by forcing viewers to stare into the eyes of strangers?

SEBASTIAAN: I can’t say that I set out to do that but I like that idea very much. Yes, I’ll support that, that’s good.

ANDREA: In painting on the images of eyes, you change the way we perceive them. What do you feel this says about vision, are you trying to change the perception?

SEBASTIAAN: Yeah, it can be hard to discern if it’s really an eye or not, but then you get this weird thing where you think things are unintelligible to other people. Sometimes you’ve done something to a picture, and I always know what’s underneath, so I have one particular way of looking at an image, but other people can come to it very differently. And still it’s remarkable how often people catch the sentiment you thought you’d hidden so well. Communication is much easier than people think, and it crosses more cultures than one may give credit to.

ANDREA: Those are the ones that are the most successful.

SEBASTIAAN: Yeah but what a universal thing is, you don’t know. Again, you can’t set out to do a universal thing. You really have to follow your instinct, your own conscience to get to these truths. If you set out to discover any specific truth you’ll be proven wrong. Any kind of pretention or hubris is so transparent. You have to be light and not take yourself too heavily, but at the same time you have to take everything very seriously. Love has to be very well taken care of, but you also have to be honest, it’s all very complex.

ANDREA: How significant do you think chance is in your work?

SEBASTIAAN: Very much. Chance is a tricky word. I find things moving on in a particular direction and very often I have a picture that I really like and I’ll keep it. Maybe I’ll then misplace it, and think it’s lost forever. Then it will suddenly reappear fifteen years later and it’ll be just the right time for it. But where chance comes in, I really don’t know. Maybe I just didn’t care for the picture at the time—things appear significant depending on your interests—so it’s hard to say.

Sebastiaan Bremer, Eye #2, 2012 (After Bill Brandt’s “Jean Arp’s eye, 1960”).

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But what often happens is that since I work with my hands and I’m pretty organized—though not in the traditional sense of being neat!—certain accidents take place. Miles Davis says a nice thing about that talking about “wrong notes;” it’s not that a note itself is wrong—it’s the note you play next that determines if it’s a mistake. I don’t go back, and this is why I like working by hand with objects, and not on a computer. Things happen as they occur and sometimes there’s a big boo-boo somewhere that places me on a trajectory, and then I have to do the next thing, and it’s going to be very exciting. Sometimes things go horribly wrong and you have to throw the thing away entirely. But more often than not, I transform it into something I like.

ANDREA: What about fate, chance or fate?

SEBASTIAAN: I think those two words are interchangeable. I think what you need to do is pay attention. If you find yourself calm enough to pay attention to what’s happening around you, then you can make choices that will be good for you. If you’re not paying attention then sometimes you can go much further along with something which actually makes you uncomfortable. But I think you can always say those things that are uncomfortable are lessons that will benefit you in the end, so it’s very hard to say. I don’t think there are any wrong choices.

ANDREA: You’ve been doing work for twenty something odd years?

SEBASTIAAN: Yeah, I’ve dedicated myself to making images since I was eighteen, and I’m forty-six now, so that’s twenty-four years.

ANDREA: You have a lot of different styles, do you see a thread running through your work?

SEBASTIAAN: Yeah, even when I was making paintings I almost imagined it as one very long shot in a movie, where I would have more details of bodies, then I would zoom out to a landscape, then I would go back to a certain detail. There’s definitely a sensibility that runs through all these things but it’s not visually apparent. But it’s hard for me to judge how other people see my work; I don’t really know what it would look like through somebody else’s eyes. I do see a lot of parallels. More and more I’ve come to the conclusion that not everyone is entirely linear. I work on the flower project continuously while working on other projects. Since I’ve done four exhibitions in museum galleries, I try to combine the different modes of working with a performative aspect in the museum space.

ANDREA: Where did the idea for your book, To Joy, come from?

SEBASTIAAN: Making a book is kind of an archaic process in the twenty-first century because it’s not flexible. Once it’s done, it’s done. Christiaan Kuypers (the designer as well as very good friend) and I tried to do things that we could only do in a book and to tell the story in a way that also had visual puns and a cohesive textual narrative where I didn’t repeat myself too much. It’s very confrontational and very embarrassing because it’s really your own words. It’s nobody else’s fault, it’s your own ideas.

ANDREA: Was that the most challenging thing you’ve worked on?

SEBASTIAAN: Like all really good things, it was very challenging. But the exhibition I made right after my son’s Bar Mitzvah was also one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done. Just a few weeks ago I did something completely insane—and challenging on many levels. It was also the most pleasurable and delightful experience I’ve ever had in my life.

ANDREA: What was that?

SEBASTIAAN: I turned a church into a playground for artists. There was a PA system for live performances, a huge screen for showing movies, a smoke machine and snow machine, and a complete lighting rig, like in a theatre. That was the “toolbox,” plus there were also three permanent art installations. But when it was time for Mass, you could flip a switch, change the lights, the smoke disappeared, and it was a church again. And when you flip everything back on—boom you have a magic castle. A church is smoke and mirrors—it can be a magical place—but sadly churches have not really done that properly for the last fifteen hundred years. For it to work, it had to be done right—and it had to Sebastiaan Bremer, Top: Eye #4, 2012 (After Bill Brandt’s “George Braque’s eye, 1960”); Bottom: Eye #11, 2012 (After Bill Brandt’s “Henry Moore’s eye, 1972”)

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interest me and entertain me. I knew I had to get a PR agency, and have professionals do the lighting and sound, because if you invite Meredith Monk, you need to make sure the sound is perfect! It was called Sanctuary, and we had twenty days of programming. Many people questioned my sanity because I also needed to raise money for it! But we ended up raising money for RAINN (the coalition against violence towards women) and for the homeless program run by the church. It was really a non-ego based art project which had nothing to do with money—it was progressive and political in a subtle way. One result was that ninety percent of the artists involved were women!

ANDREA: Would you want to do something like that again?

SEBASTIAAN: Yes, I’m doing a project in Nashville—also called Sanctuary. It’s another collaboration with my former roommate, musician/ composer Josephine Wiggs—from the band The Breeders. There’s a hotel chain called 21c in the South and the Midwest. Their curator invited me to do a permanent installation for their newest hotel in Nashville, and I suggested doing a permanent “Sanctuary.” It’s basically an artist space with two adjoining rooms. One is a playground for myself, with a bed, table, easel, pens, inks, and inspiring pictures and books—I’m basically building a version of my studio. The other part, created and installed by Josephine, is a music making room with guitars, amps, shag carpet, records, a record player. I’m building an altar too, I’ll bring some sage and we’ll see what happens!

ANDREA: It sounds like a playground, when you describe everything that was happening in Sanctuary.

SEBASTIAAN: For me religious traditions have been held in magnificent buildings and have good building blocks in terms of liturgy and the history of how we have interpreted humanity over time. It’s nice to bring the magic back into this tradition. Sanctuary was an expensive but a relatively low profile project. We didn’t spend a lot of time promoting it—whoever shows up, shows up. One example is that a friend of mine, Alix Lambert, who has a background in art and journalism, organized a talk which was a conversation with Richard Behar. He’s an amazing guy—an investigative journalist who used to work for the New York Times and now writes for Forbes Magazine. His focus is on finance. We only confirmed three days before, so who shows up at two o’clock in the afternoon on a Wednesday? Five people. But he is a super heavyweight, so when I introduced him I said, it’s going to be a small audience, but I’m really interested and so is everybody else here. I asked him if he wanted the smoke machine and he said yes. So they’re sitting on the altar, in smoke, and he says, for this small audience we can do something that normally I wouldn’t do: If everybody promises not to record anything and not make notes, I’m willing to talk about everything that I’m working on right now, which isn’t yet ready to print. He opened his on-going investigations on Putin and the twenty-seven murdered journalists in Russia. He talked about Trump and his felon friends. These are projects he’s working on right now—and he was answering questions about it.

ANDREA: What’s going to happen? Is Trump going to be impeached?

SEBASTIAAN: It was a very enlightening experience. Measured by attendance numbers this talk was something that you could argue was a failure. But it was so special and therefore a success, especially because there were so few people there. That’s what is really exciting about art making in general; you have to have faith.

ANDREA: You’ve lived in Brooklyn since 2001, why do you like it so much?

SEBASTIAAN: I don’t, I just live here. Of course I like it very much but it’s more the people that I like. I find if you live in a place, you should make it better. If you live on a street you should pick up the garbage in front of your house, you should sweep. If you want to plant a flower or spend time in a room you better make it enjoyable, because you’re going to spend time there.

ANDREA: So what’s next?

SEBASTIAAN: Sanctuary 21c opens at 21c in Nashville on May 4th, and I’ve been working on Ave Maria which opens at the Edwynn Houk Gallery on May 3rd. It’s a bittersweet narrative—like everything else in the world. If you’ve been together with somebody for twenty-three years, we are not the same people anymore—she’s not the same, I’m not the same, and we’ve changed each other, for good and bad. I wanted to put an altitude map with height lines of mountains to see where she is, where I stop, and where I enter.

Sebastiaan Bremer, Ave Maria 9, 2016.

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Angela Deane, Lie Back, 2016.

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Angela Deane, Ghost Choir, 2016.

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Wendy McMurdo, Clocksise from top left: The Robot Workshop III; The Robot Workshop II; The Robot Workshop V; The Robot Workshop I; 2010.

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Wendy McMurdo, Natural Disaster, 2014.

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RALPH EUGENE MEATYARD a l l t h e wo r ld’s a sta g e

b y Le v Fe i g i n The critic Roland Barthes once wrote that “photography touches art not through painting but through theater,” reminding us that before Daguerre presented his silver-coated plates to the French Academy of Sciences, he was known as a proprietor of a Diorama theater, a popular Parisian spectacle of lights and painterly backdrops. The dramatic stage is implicit in the camera’s frame. Its shutter curtain lifts to immobilize the human face into a mask, the gesture into a pantomime.

Barthes’ words are useful to keep in mind when looking at the work of Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Few twentieth century photographers have explored the elusive connections between the photographic image and theatre with such haunting poignancy.

Meatyard was born in Normal, Illinois and lived in Lexington, Kentucky where he plied his trade as a full-time optician. In 1950, he bought a camera to photograph his newborn son. A self-taught photographer, Meatyard would continue to call himself a “dedicated amateur”, even after his photographs were exhibited alongside those of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston.

By the time of his death, in 1972, Meatyard would produce a vast body of work, thousands of extraordinary images, from Zen-inspiring abstractions to his surreal take on the Southern Gothic.

Working six days a week, Meatyard took pictures on Sundays. While the rest of Kentucky attended church, the Meatyards – his wife, Madelyn, two boys, Michael and Christopher, and little Melissa – packed into the family car and drove all around the state in search of abandoned houses and creepy stretches of forest where they could perform their illusions. They brought with them a miscellany of props: dolls, masks, dead birds, even rubber chickens.

Meatyard staged the photographs like primitive theatrical rituals. The family scouted for a setting. The father composed the scene through the viewfinder and then positioned his subjects, telling them how to stand and where to look.

The children stooped in tall grasses in empty front yards, leaned against broken doorways in clean, white T-shirts as they faced the lens looking forlorn, cowering, casting glances at derelict corners of domestic ruins – their hands juxtaposed against weathered planks of wood. They peered from the crosses of window sashes. They sat on empty porches,

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Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled [Self-Portrait], ca. 1964-65.

All Images © The Estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

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Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Lucybelle Crater and bakerly, brotherly friend, Lucybelle Crater, 1970-72.

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crouched and closed their eyes among shafts of sunlight. They became blurs. They morphed into silhouettes while black paint smears on the walls hung over them like the Grim Reaper.

In 1959, Meatyard bought Halloween masks at the local Woolworth’s. With flayed, peeling skin, wrinkles, idiotic grins, and macabre expressions, the masks were a marriage of Japanese Noh with Hollywood horror: disturbing psychic states frozen in blubbery latex.

In Untitled, his daughter, Melissa sits cross-legged on the rocks. Her small, childish hands prop up a woman’s mask as if holding her own adult persona. Hollow portals into the uncanny, the woman’s eye sockets are as black as Meatyard’s doorways: the shadows and the highlights meticulously placed in the darkroom to enhance the dramatic effect.

Locked away inside their father’s fictions, the children and their mother donned the masks among dejected ruins and sunless forests. In “Romance (N.) From Ambrose Bierce # 3,” the family sits on abandoned Little League bleachers in their disfigured masks. In the front, a blond woman (Melissa) with two teeth and a crooked hag’s nose spreads her legs; to the left, a short man (Christopher) with half of his face flayed off, keeps his hand on the thigh; in the center, a taller man (Michael) with a cleaved forehead and nose slouches with an air of resignation; at the top, a troll (Madelyn with a mask on her thighs) leers with an off-kilter grin. Numbers, one through five, run up the benches, quantifying the ineluctable.

The lens transmutes the children and their mother into allegories of isolation and mortality. The scene emanates an emotion that is not easy to name or locate in the masks themselves. The figures exist on the threshold to another preternatural order, which they have been called to guard. Their bodies betray the actors under the guises, but the dramatic hybrids of children/adults, whose recognizable selves have been conflated with the masks, distill an uncanny sense of disjunction.

Meatyard never subscribed to the notion that photography can strip the veil of appearance to reveal and objective truth.

As a friend and mentor, Van Deken Coke, had once pointed out, Meatyard “was a picture maker, not a picture taker.” To the veil of appearance, he brings more veils. Behind his masks, there is always another mask – or nothing at all.

In Untitled (1957-58), a man sits in a boat listing in dry grass and removes a woman’s mask under which he is wearing mascara and rouge. The boatman is missing an arm; his shirt sleeve is folded over the stump. A broken mirror – Meatyard’s leitmotif recalling René Magritte – reflects a cloudy sky. The sitter is the photographer Cranston Richie, who had lost his arm to cancer. The image is like a Zen sermon told in a dream.

Meatyard began his final major series, the Family Album of Lucybelle Crater, just before his own diagnosis with terminal cancer in 1969 and continued the project until his last days. The sixty-four image cycle shows his wife, Madelyn, in a witch’s mask with a rotating cast of friends and family. The series was published posthumously in 1974.

Everyone in the portraits is named Lucybelle Crater. Madelyn wears a mask of a hag with two teeth and a crooked nose.

Her companions wear the mask of an old man with deep wrinkles and narrow, squinting eyes. The name of Lucybelle Crater is inspired by Flannery O’Connor’s short story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” about a mother and her deaf-mute daughter who are both named Lucynelle Crater. But the images are far removed from either the Southern Gothic of O’Connor or Meatyard’s earlier dark fairy tale realms. The Lucybelles stand among emblems of American suburbia – shiny station wagons, houses with white siding, chain-linked fences, driveways. The looped repetitions of masks and names impose an uneasy sameness on different bodies and backdrops. The normalcy of middle class America is contorted by the presence of masks. The ironic titles scribbled under each portrait, such as “Lucybelle Crater and her 40 year old husband Lucybelle Crater,” cast the images further into the realm of the absurd.

Meatyard’s friend and photographer, Roger May, called this series his “last sermon on the use of the mask.” The figures look tender and are often touching. If not for the masks, the portraits could have been snapshots from a real family album. Their matter-of-fact quality heightens the enigmatic effect. The masks are donned to say goodbye. Behind them is the spirit of Meatyard himself, a bookish, brilliant artist obsessed with literature, painting, philosophy, and Zen, whose truthful illusions explore the meaning of things beyond words.

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Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled, 1957-58

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Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Romance (N.) from Ambrose Bierce # 3, 1962

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Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Lucybelle Crater and bakerly, brotherly friend, Lucybelle Crater, 1970-72

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Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled, 1970-72

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FELIX R. CID

Felix R. Cid, Bullfight, 2012.

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Felix R. Cid, Untitled (Paris).

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Felix R. Cid, Untitled (New York, Monegros Desert).

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Felix R. Cid, La Tomatina.

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MICHAEL HOEH american, innovative, thoughtful

MICHAEL HOEH: One thing that drives me a little crazy with AIPAD is that dealers bring way too much and there’s not enough curatorial thought. Several are filled with random collections of photographs, which can give it a bit of a flea market feel. Making the venue bigger with bigger spaces, while impressive, made it feel more that way, this year. Some of the most important photographers working today aren’t represented by photo dealers, and that’s becoming more and more the case. Think about how many great photographers don’t show with a photography dealer, so the AIPAD fair doesn’t have works by artists like Walead Beshty, Gregory Crewdson, Nan Goldin, Catherine Opie, Wolfgang Tillmans, Ryan McGinley, Marlyin Minter, etc.

ANDREA BLANCH: What is the difference between a photographer being in an art gallery and a photo gallery?

MICHAEL: Photographers who are in contemporary art galleries tend to have more focus on artistic concept and message. They tend to be artists that use photography as a tool to make their art. They generally make small editions, or frequently, one of a kind works. There’s only one size because they value the relevance of size to the image.

Frequently, I feel photographers represented by photo dealers are more in the printing business; they make large numbers of prints in each edition, with several different editions in “any size you want.” It’s more about numbers and sales than art concepts. Ryan McGinley, for example, doesn’t show at a photo dealer, his work is only available in one specific size for each image because it’s relevant to that image. Currently, I won’t collect new work that’s available in multiple sizes, or in editions over ten. It just raises the question, ‘Why is the artist doing this? Isn’t the size important?’ Artists like Paul Graham have done entire bodies of work about this issue, where there’s a sense of punctuation using image size. Images are in certain sizes and in a specific order because it’s important to what Graham is saying, as an artist with photography.

Portrait by Andrea Blanch.

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ANDREA: They had more wall space to fill, so what is the difference?

MICHAEL: They didn’t have to fill every inch of it. When you go to a contemporary art fair, not every inch of the booth is filled. I guess it’s a different business model for photographers who print in many editions with huge numbers of sizes versus an artist who produces a single work of art. It’s mass consumption versus something unique and special.

You don’t see the museums in New York City showing contemporary artists that go print crazy. At the Guggenheim Photo Committee, we rarely collect work that is available in more than one size with large print runs. As a collector, it’s important because it speaks to why the artist created this image, and the concept behind it. I really worry when photographers don’t care about the size or how their work is mass produced. Wasn’t it Ansel Adams that said, ‘The negative is the score and the print is the performance?’ It’s that concept of the physical object that is so important.

ANDREA: So what is your criteria for collecting?

MICHAEL: It has to be something original and special. In this mass photography world where anybody with a digital camera can take a nice sharp picture, and you can push a button to print it perfectly twenty times, you see a lot of common, banal work. It’s difficult for a photographer to do something new, to have a signature look and feel an original concept behind their work. I also have to be attracted to the physical object. It has to be something worth looking at every day. With great photography, the longer you look, over months or even years, you see different things. Your relationship to that special object will improve overtime.

ANDREA: For instance, let’s take somebody like Jack Pierson, who decided he’s not going to manipulate his pictures anymore. It’s just a camera and him. Since anybody could’ve done that, what’s the criteria for that being art?

MICHAEL: With Jack’s work, it is super personal; his 2003 Self-Portrait series was brilliant, and totally original. Taking photos of beautiful young men, and calling them self-portraits was conceptually ground breaking. Lately, I’m drawn to the “constructionist” work by Daniel Gordon, Matthew Brandt, Letha Wilson, John Chiara, and Erica Baum. They’re doing so much in terms of making art where photography is the just the tool.

ANDREA: Raymond Learsy says he doesn’t have to like a piece, but it has to leave an impact on him, do you also feel that way?

MICHAEL: I have to like some aspect of the image. There are plenty of great images that have impact but they are too difficult to put on the wall. Sometimes these are artists whose work I love, but the images are too difficult to hang. I definitely own some confrontational imagery. We’ve had some Nan Goldin work on the wall and they have to be balanced out in the room if you’re going live with them.

ANDREA: Do you ever sell?

MICHAEL: No, I’ve never sold a single image, I gave one item away once.

ANDREA: How long have you been collecting? How have you managed to broaden your horizon with everything that has changed over the years?

MICHAEL: I’ve been collecting for over twenty five years. The medium is changing so rapidly, that’s one of the reasons I started collecting photography. This is the medium of our lifetime. It’s wild to live in the era of this photographic revolution. For example, art history was hard to study without color photography. If you ask anyone today if they know the Mona Lisa, most people will say yes. But they’ve probably never stood in front of the actual painting. The study of art history has changed, the moving image and the computer/internet image— that’s all changed. I’m not even 50 years old, and so much has changed within my lifetime. So when I first started collecting, I was only collecting black and white, mostly New York street photography. It was a starting point, and color photography has clearly come into its own since the seventies. I started with Stephen Shore, and Joel

Nan Goldin, The Hug, NYC, 1980 © Nan Goldin. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.

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Meyerowitz. It’s really incredible that you can still meet the legends of color photography and hear them talk about their work first hand. That was one of the main reasons for collecting photography, and like you said, the medium has changed, and because the medium has changed my collection has broadened out to include painting, video and sculpture, but it is still almost one hundred percent connected to American photography.

ANDREA: When all these things were evolving, did you ever have a difficult time accepting it?

MICHAEL: Not really once I started collecting color work. It really started with a love for Nan Goldin’s work. I quickly found appreciation for digital photography as well as Simon Johan. He was really early to digital work. Yossi Milo is a friend, and I love his program. He has a great sense of cutting edge work where his artists are doing some great original work that is new and exciting. It’s really amazing to see contemporary artists today who are going back and researching early black and white photography. Lisa Oppenheim is a perfect example, she is farming all the old WPA images, and creating new work that has thoughtful and interesting things to say about photography. Interestingly, her works only come in one size, where the prints size is an important aspect of the object.

ANDREA: When I saw Cindy’s work online, I thought it was ok, but when I went to the gallery and saw the prints I was captivated. They were so luminous.

MICHAEL: Yes, they were large and had great presence. The prints are amazing objects, but it’s also when you’re in the physical space. Some of these almost life size works were big enough to be confrontational to the viewer.

They’re not just on a screen. That’s my point. The relevance of the size is inexplicably connected to the work that Cindy does. I thought the recent William Eggleston show at David Zwirner was a total flop. They took these epic historic images that are so much about the nuanced spatial relationships of items to each other and they thoughtlessly blew them all up into poor quality massive billboard size prints, it completely killed the work for me. It was almost like you took a Chopin Piano Concerto and played every note with the exact same super loud volume; it was painful and fell super flat. Unfortunately, that was probably a decision made by the estate and not the artist.

I think they did irreparable harm to William Eggleston’s legacy by creating these enormous poor quality Frankenstein prints. They just didn’t make sense.

ANDREA: Do you make studio visits?

MICHAEL: Yes, as much as possible. It gives me a better insight into why they’re doing what they’re doing.

ANDREA: What about the food chain of the art world, how one thing affects another? What are the functions of museums, galleries and art fairs? Do they feed each other, or not?

MICHAEL: With cuts in school arts programs, museums have really become important centers of education. They are a platform that hold artists up, showing the public artworks that need to be seen. The Aperture Foundation does this as well, but through photo books, as well as many other New York art charities. They’re all fighting with making it a sustainable business model, since operating in this city is so expensive. You’ll see the Guggenheim doing challenging shows that are meant to be educational; they’re putting their stamp on an artist’s career and saying this work is unique, important and needs to be paid attention to. The museums and art charities in New York do an outstanding job. But, they have to be accessible too. The big New York contemporary galleries have filled in a lot of that space as well. Many are actually doing thoughtfully researched books and shows. I’m frequently amazed that some New York art galleries take on the expense of concept shows for the purpose of education and allowing their artists to take risks.

Photo dealers tend to not do enough of this.

ANDREA: How do the galleries survive?

MICHAEL: The art fairs help, but they have that delicate balance between feeling like a flea market and an art show of new and exciting work. But even the art fairs compete with several websites that sell art. This added a new dimension to the art equation. There used to be a quick feverish sales pace at the start of an art fair, but art selling websites are starting to dilute that excitement. You can also see it with the auction houses; both Sotheby’s and Christie’s now have large online sales.

Letha Wilson, Painted Hills Concrete Bend (Red White Blue) 2017. Courtesy Letha Wilon & GRIMM.

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ANDREA: Do you work a lot with the auction houses?

MICHAEL: Yes. In fact, I recently attended an auction house talk, which included a new, hot selling photographer.

He’s a commercially successful photographer, selling lots of work with a huge following. I found the work simplistic and unoriginal. Maybe one out of a hundred images was thoughtful. When he was talking on stage, they were asking him questions about how his work tied into some of the vintage work that was up for auction. Then he said he’d never heard of Muybridge before and just saw his work today. It made me realize, an art photographer can be successful selling photographs at a gallery, but not have a knowledge base. That’s the difference between Wolfgang Tillman’s work, when you think it’s random, but it’s totally not or Paul Graham or Jeff Wall where it’s never a random snapshot. The more you look at their work, the more you realize there’s so much behind it. Even Alex Prager, when you see her work, the more you look at it, the more you realize how there’s this eye of hers that clearly comes from photographic history. In her work, you see Robert Frank, Norman Rockwell, Edward Hopper or even Alfred Hitchcock. It’s all intentional.

ANDREA: She is young, do you think that she possesses all of that knowledge?

MICHAEL: I do yes, definitely Alfred Hitchcock from her LA upbringing, but there are Edward Hopper references too. You look at her images and some pieces are just mesmerizing. You start to say, oh that part of the image looks like Robert Frank’s New Orleans trolley image, other parts look like Eggleston or Walker Evans. It’s deliberate; she may not have initially planned at making those references. But, in the process, her photographic eye got there. Alex Prager is a really impressive artist; I look forward to seeing where she goes next. I’ve heard her talk and she definitely has spent a lot of time looking at historic photography and art films. When you see some of her video work, so many references come to mind, like Alfred Hitchcock and film noir. She’s been working for a while and clearly has developed her own new look and feel along the way. What makes it great art, is that the viewer can appreciate the work on multiple levels. You can appreciate it for the straight on attractive imagery but also you see all this other meaning.

ANDREA: For you, what is the criteria between an artist who has lasting power and an artist of the moment?

MICHAEL: That’s hard to say because we’re in an era where artists are constantly being rediscovered. An artist of the moment is someone making lots of sales. A friend of mine is an abstract American painter, and he took me to a restaurant where there were several Bernard Buffet paintings. My friend immediately told me he thought they were tacky. I said yes, but they are also worth $100,000 each. We ate dinner and then the next morning I researched auction history, and found out I was totally wrong. The Buffet paintings were worth closer to half a million each. I was reading through a press release and there was a line that said, “at one point in history these were viewed as the apex of bad taste.” That’s how horrible people regarded theses paintings – these were the tackiest things to ever be produced. But as time goes by, art impressions clearly change. While I’m not a fan, I don’t look at Buffet paintings as being completely terrible. Things come back in style. As history moves we find new ways to see. Some artist’s careers only survived a blink of an eye, but they can be rediscovered at any point.

ANDREA: What makes a piece of art thoughtful?

MICHAEL: Art that says something.

ANDREA: Look at this the whole brouhaha about the painting at the Whitney, that is very disturbing.

MICHAEL: Although Dana is very smart, she is definitely not an artist of the moment. She is a super thoughtful artist whose images are not random. They are very methodically created. I thought her answer she gave The New York Times about why she felt they were relevant and why she had the right to put them out there was perfect. She’s a mother, she has her own opinion about it because she’s coming about it from her own experience. It may not be an African American experience but being a mother and the gravity of losing a child. I think the fact that people are reacting to it is great, because when people have theses visceral reactions, that makes a great piece of art. And it’s still humanity, the loss of a child. I thought Dana’s answer was completely sincere. It was coming from the heart. I don’t think she made the painting to be controversial.

Daniel Gordon, Portrait with a Yellow Shoulder. Courtesy the artist and M+B Gallery, Los Angeles.

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ANDREA: I concur.

MICHAEL: You could argue that artists like Andres Serrano and Dash Snow made art just to be controversial as well. Andy Warhol was the master of media manipulation. His work at times was viewed as commercial junk. In fact, there is a 1980’s article where they conclude that Warhol was just a commercial hack. It’s crazy how the narrative of history changes. Andy was criticized in his day for being a sugarcoated candy artist. And now he’s become the model of many contemporary artists such as Jeff Koons. He wasn’t regarded as an intellectually thoughtful artist. But now he’s a god. We now see his intention in all of his pieces— and his impact is clear.

He changed all media and what we define as art.

ANDREA: Do you think Jeff Koons will be regarded in the same way as Warhol?

MICHAEL: Maybe not. But, Koons has definitely pushed boundaries in some of the same ways as Damien Hirst. He has redefined art media with his huge sculptures of puppies, flowers, etc. These huge metal objects that are created with laser like precision are amazing. Jeff Koons was one of the first to do some of these big commercial sculptures.

ANDREA: What three words describe your collection?

MICHAEL: American, innovative, and thoughtful.

ANDREA: The art world is sometimes referred to as a cathedral. How does one enter?

MICHAEL: Just like churches, the art world is open to everyone, but just like religion it takes study, time, self-reflection and devotion. Your opinions are just as worthy as anyone’s. As a collector you are buying work that ultimately reflects you and your beliefs. So, you are buying yourself over and over again. It’s similar to religion, where everyone has their own take on it. As we grow, our beliefs on religion can change, similar to our opinions on the art we see and buy.

ANDREA: Have you ever had a bidding war?

MICHAEL: Definitely ANDREA: Which piece comes to mind?

MICHAEL: It happens in painting more often. I

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remember I was trying to buy a Pat Steir painting and it just got way out of my price range. When the Seagram’s Photography collection went up for auction, they had a very extensive collection put together by John Szarkowski.

My appreciation for photography largely stems from him. At Dreyfus, we had great photo work all over the office.

We had Robert Frank, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind and many others. I was living with these photos everyday and I got to know John Szarkowski a little bit. I started to understand the corporate collection. To think he was helping with the Seagram’s collection at the same time. The new owners of Seagram’s didn’t want it and put it all up for auction at Phillips. I remember going to this auction when I was still pretty new at collecting and trying to buy some of Robert Frank’s American pieces and putting bids on everything. Of course I regret not taking the risk because now those pieces are worth so much more.

ANDREA: You think they got away?

MICHAEL: Yes, now Frank’s Americans works are going for much higher prices.

ANDREA: Let’s talk about video. How do you decide what to show in your house?

MICHAEL: I struggle with the medium because it is so transitional. It’s hard as a collector, because the longevity of the pieces is very tough to predict. It’s difficult to make an investment in video art due to the difficulty of conservation. I have Genesis P-Orridge’s video, Blood Sacrifice, but due to its graphic nature, it might offend certain people. There is such a big problem with conservation of video art, which makes it much harder to judge the value of the work.

ANDREA: How do they price?

MICHAEL: It’s tough. I love Kota Ezawa’s work, I own several of his still works and I wanted to buy some of his video works but the prices seemed irrational. I believe one of his video was over $60,000. He did a great video work of the OJ Simpson verdict, which was shown at MOMA. Although I loved the work, I would not be comfortable investing so much money for a new video. The Clock by Christian Marclay is an amazing video work, but the prices were really extraordinary and there is such a small secondary market or reference prices to judge the value of video work. I have these videos that are presented physically in a cool custom two screen package made by the artist. But if/when either of the monitors blow out, I don’t know what we’re going to do. What happens when these integral parts of an artwork breaks?

ANDREA: You have to learn how to adjust what the value is, because the value is in the idea behind the work. Technology will always be changing, unless you want something archaic.

MICHAEL: Yes, for example the work of Nam June Paik where the work is meant to be seen on these small green TV screens, which can’t be easily replaced. What do you do? Photographer, Kevin Cooley does these really interesting works where he makes time-lapse photos at night. He’s also been doing these pieces of stacked old televisions. They are provocative living sculptures, but what do you do with this when the television no longer works? These are difficult conservation issues to think about as a collector.

ANDREA: What other interests do you have besides art and photography?

MICHAEL: I love modern furniture. That chair is by Hans Wegner, the tables by Paul Evans. I love the sculptural aspects of it. My partner and I spend a lot of time looking into mid-century design. We went to the George Nakashima studio in New Hope, PA the other day. George Nakashima died in 1990, but his daughter Mira is keeping the studio running.

ANDREA: What do you read?

MICHAEL: I sadly have so little time for fiction. As a trustee, I try to read all the new Aperture Foundation photobooks. I just finished Gordon Matta-Clark: Experience Becomes the Object, last weekend, he was a fascinating artist.

Catherine Opie, Trash, 1994. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

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MUSÉE SPOTLIGHT A RTIST

Carolyn Marks Blackwood, He felt old. He knew he would never be loved again. He was wrong, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and The Von Lintel Gallery.

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CAROLYN MARKS BLACKWOOD

Carolyn Marks Blackwood, The car turned onto the road behind her. There was no place to hide. 2016. Courtesy of the artist and The Von Lintel Gallery.

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MUSÉE SPOTLIGHT A RTIST

Carolyn Marks Blackwood, The house was abandoned, but voices from her childhood echoed in her head. Courtesy of the artist and The Von Lintel Gallery.

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CAROLYN MARKS BLACKWOOD

Carolyn Marks Blackwood, She walked 10 miles to get there, with the little one in her arms, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and The Von Lintel Gallery.

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MUSÉE SPOTLIGHT A RTIST

Carolyn Marks Blackwood, He was gone. It was her first night alone in over fifty years. Courtesy of the artist and The Von Lintel Gallery.

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CAROLYN MARKS BLACKWOOD

Carolyn Marks Blackwood, She knew she had to leave or her soul would be crushed. Courtesy of the artist and The Von Lintel Gallery.

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JAMES LAXTON b o nds tha t bind

ANDREA BLANCH: Why Moonlight? It has resonated with an incredibly large audience, but what does it mean to you?

JAMES LAXTON: I guess there are two answers to that question. What does it mean to me as someone who can sit back, watch the film, and enjoy the story? Or, what does it mean to me as a cinematographer, someone who has played a role in the creation of the film?

ANDREA: Number 2.

JAMES: I feel like the journey, the process of making Moonlight, was an opportunity for me to find my voice. Finding a project like Moonlight was a gift because it enabled me to really express myself in a way that I felt very personal about.

I imagine that’s true because of how personal it was to our director, Barry Jenkins, and the entire cast and crew as well.

It was a personal journey for all of us, and Barry, as a director, really pushed everyone involved to take it so personally.

ANDREA: What was personal about it for you? Give me an example of how that came through for you.

JAMES: I can’t point to a scene. For example, my personal life doesn’t reflect the film’s narrative story. I didn’t grow up the same way that Chiron grew up in Miami. I grew up in San Francisco, in a middle class lifestyle, very comfortable, there was always food and shelter and things like that. I had a family that was very supportive. So I wouldn’t say that the film was personal in a narrative way. For me, it was personal in an expressive way, in terms of the kind of images, the strength of images, the way in which the images represent the people depicted. Those things are very personal for me in their honesty and authenticity.

Let’s look at it from a different perspective. If I was a cinematographer on a film that was asking me to present a visual language that was for a comedy or a science fiction film, those two genres traditionally take you, as an audience, to a place that is not familiar to your own life. Because it’s science fiction, it’s meant to reflect an outer, different, impersonal journey, instead of one that resembles you, as an audience’s own life. But Moonlight did want that. Moonlight wanted the audience to really see themselves in the character. We had to create an authentic, honest visual portrayal of those characters so that the audience responded and saw themselves in Chiron.

Portrait by Mona Kuhn. All film stills by David Bornfriend, courtesy of A24.

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ANDREA: You talk about authenticity as something that you’re always playing with, can you talk about how that comes through in the film?

JAMES: Authenticity’s a really personal thing; I think maybe that’s why I say that the project was personal. Authenticity means something very different for me than it might to you or someone else. Images that feel real to me might not feel the same to someone else. It’s weird to say real or authentic, because the irony is we didn’t necessarily set out to make a film based in realism.

We wanted to create an experience, something that resembled the emotional perspective of Chiron and not a documentary. But at the same time, we wanted to anchor this experience in something that you digest as truth. That was the line we were walking throughout the project, visually speaking. Presenting images in light, in camera angles, in lensing that reflected something that was truthful but not necessarily real. Authentic can sort of mean both things, but truthful imagery is something different.

ANDREA: In certain parts of the film there is a dreamlike, surreal aura, which is beautiful and intriguing. Why this stylistic choice?

JAMES: I think you’re describing the times we went deep into Chiron’s personal journey as an emotional character in the film. We hoped to not just depict Chiron in this world, but to place the audience inside Chiron’s emotional arch. That is where we hoped to find that emotional truth, which he’s processing as he’s growing up. That aura is not to depict Chiron doing things or having things happen to him, that’s what we see narratively speaking. You’re narratively walking through Chiron’s life, and you’re seeing what happens to him and what the results are from the experiences that he’s having. But visually speaking, we wanted to identify deeply with the character. The concept was to not just depict those things and photograph him going through that experience, but to visually present what he’s feeling inside. Hopefully then you’re able to feel what Chiron’s feeling, and then digest that in your own life. That’s what I do when I watch the film, and I feel more of what Chiron is going through on an emotional level. In that way, I’m able to truly identify with him as opposed to just watching him. I identify with his struggle and his process because of how we’re depicting and presenting his emotional journey, and less so just the narrative journey.

ANDREA: It’s done really well.

JAMES: It’s sort of a strange take on it. I think we’ve all watched films that depict these neighborhoods and communities and attempted to present realism. I think in a strange way, if you don’t come from those communities you end up watching the scenes, the film, the characters, and the idea of judgment comes into play. You start judging these characters as opposed to empathizing and feeling what the characters are going through. I think it has a lot to do with how the photography is presenting the material.

ANDREA: I think that’s why Moonlight resonated with so many people. It emotionally affected a lot of people; it had such a wide audience because the photography made you empathize with the characters. I did. Wouldn’t you say that’s what contributed to its success?

JAMES: I think it definitely helped, that was the goal anyway.

ANDREA: You also talk about the idea that the medium being present is a good thing, for instance, in the swim lesson scene when we can see the water lapping against the camera. Why do you think it’s important to be reminded we’re watching a movie?

JAMES: I remember watching movies when I was a child, films like E.T., and they were always able to present images, stories that kick-started my imagination. They did things visually that made my mind work. I think part of what happened in cinema in the last, say, five or ten years, with how we’ve gone to hyper-real, visual effect type of films where we present such realism and such beauty in our images- the fire looks real, the space looks real, the way the planes fly through the air looks real. When you take a look back at eighties films or seventies films, there was a tactile-ness to special effects. Even Muppets, for example, or puppetry in general- Jaws is a good example of this as well- I don’t know that you’d ever look at an image and say, “that looks real” in the 1980s. It never looked real, but the tactile-ness, how you saw the medium within the images, made your brain work a little bit harder and made your imagination kick into gear. And once your imagination’s working while you’re watching a film, all of a sudden you’re engrossed in it, you’re present, you’re working as an audience towards something as opposed to letting it give you everything so your brain doesn’t need to work and just absorb images. On some level, the less perfect something is the water lapping on the lens, the occasional soft focus in the film- things that we would today point out as mistakes, and technically they might be one. I

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don’t mean to argue with the idea that they’re not mistakes, but sometimes I think these mistakes end up feeling genuine and engage you with the film. It lets your imagination kick in and start working for the film as well. That’s what I mean when I say seeing the medium, feeling the medium, can sometimes be a benefit to the experience.

ANDREA: I liked seeing the water on the camera.

JAMES: Yeah, it’s weird, I’m still sort of struggling with that. It’s a weird thing because we all as cinematographers and filmmakers, as a technical profession, we’re generally striving for perfection. That never happens obviously, but you’re working towards it. And I’ve started to feel like it can get in the way of the imagination, and the imagination is way more important than technical proficiency.

ANDREA: It’s interesting to hear you say that getting the audience’s imagination working is an important goal of yours. What else in your opinion makes a good cinematographer?

JAMES: A good starting point is communication. I think truthfully eighty percent of what I do is communicate with the actors, with directors, producers, the writer. All of these things revolve around communication. I was given some stage advice by a camera operator once when I was just coming out of college. He sort of said, ‘you’re not hired because you know the equipment better. The guy at the rental house that rents you the camera and the lenses, that person’s always going to know the gear better than you will, it’s the job. You’re hired because of how you collaborate and communicate with the people around you.’ There are a lot of things that go into making a good cinematographer, but I think being able to communicate and collaborate in a way that is conducive to the creative process, that’s paramount. You need to have that.

ANDREA: Well you definitely have an edge with Barry; you’ve had a relationship with him for years.

JAMES: Yeah, that’s helped a lot. We communicate very well on set and in postproduction to where I think we know how to get the best out of one another. It’s harder when I’m meeting a director for the first time and I’m about to start working with them, it’s hard to find that communication. It takes awhile, but it’s really important, and the quicker you get into it, the quicker you can become friends, the faster you can start to have open dialogue in terms of how you want to create the images for the film, and the better the film will be.

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ANDREA: Do you think film school should be a requirement for an aspiring cinematographer? For example, you met Barry in college, you meet a lot of people in college, and then you can carry forth those relationships. What you learned, is it necessary to go to film school to learn that?

JAMES: No, that’s the short answer. The longer answer is, it helps a great deal, and it helped me a lot. It provided me with a really wonderful, supportive community that I was able to go to for those two and a half years of my life. I felt like I was getting what I wanted out of the experience. But everyone is different. Some people create differently, and absorb the world differently in a way that maybe they don’t need it. For me it was really great, I loved meeting Barry and some of the other collaborators on Moonlight. The access to equipment, the environment that we were given to learn our craft, that was paramount to my process. All of those things were really important for me. But that’s a very personal thing, some people don’t do well in school but yet still find ways to become fantastic filmmakers. Knowing what you need as a student, think about that. Think about how you learn best. I learn best when I’m in an environment like film school. But it’s a personal thing.

ANDREA: I want to go over this question you’ve been asked a thousand times about the film stock and your choices.

As a photographer myself, I find that very interesting.

JAMES: Let me just remind us of the idea that these are postproduction film stock LUTS, because we shot the film and then we placed film, LUTS, they’re called, and used different ones on each chapter. I just want to clarify that it wasn’t shot on film, it was shot on the Alexa.

ANDREA: Are they like filters in post?

JAMES: Yes, correct. They’re basically like filters. They’re reverse engine geared, by taking scans of each film stock and then scientifically designing how colors react on different film stock to different light, color, and shadow. They’re actually very sophisticated tools that people have really gotten deep into in terms of reverse engineering: how film stocks react to different things. It’s not just like placing a film grain over something; it’s actually more nuanced than that and much more specific. That’s why we were able to choose specific film stocks for each chapter of Moonlight. For example, the first act being a Fuji stock. Traditionally, Fuji stock has an enhancement of the greens and blues. We chose that because as a child, Chiron is in awe of the natural landscape of Miami. The greens and the blue water, things that as a child your eyes would pop at. That’s what we were thinking about when we made those choices, using a film stock which then changed the hues and the texture of each color choice in accordance to the character’s emotional journey.

ANDREA: You talk about the diner scene in story three being a favorite of yours, why?

JAMES: It’s a very subtle and still scene and a lot of planning and thought went into how to photograph that portion of the film because it’s just two people talking in a room, which can sometimes be visually redundant. We chose when to shift from dolly to handheld to a steadicam outside, and used these different tools to get at the tension of these two characters seeing each other for the first time in a long time. Where do these two characters go at this point in their lives? We were visually building to this question throughout that scene in a way that I’m very proud of. It’s sort of ironic because visually speaking it isn’t the most flashy or bold stuff going on, but there’s a lot of precision and a lot of subtleties in the choices in light and in angle of our lenses that I think help build to that point.

ANDREA: Was that the most challenging scene to shoot?

JAMES: The one on the beach was the most technically challenging. I think we put the most thought and choreography into the diner scene to make it function on a visual level. But the beach scene was, on a technical level, definitely the most challenging. Photographically speaking, I think that nighttime beach scenes are one of the hardest things to capture because you’re photographing a place that should never be able to be photographed. It’s a black void. There’s no light on these beaches, there’s no spill from the ambient hotels and things like that. There’s a lot of technical work to get that to a place of exposure that speaks to the emotional tone the scene needs and also a genuine, authentic version of what light looks like when there is no light. It’s a hard thing to navigate as a cinematographer.

ANDREA: There was a film called Barry Lyndon, he shot with low light and he apparently made lenses where he could shoot like that.

JAMES: From the story that I remember, he found them at NASA. NASA helped him find these lenses and I think those

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opened up to a T1. Unfortunately, even with a T1, it still wouldn’t have been enough. That’s how dark it was.

ANDREA: Now let me ask you something, if the person you were shooting was white, would that have made it easier?

JAMES: I think it would’ve been harder. This won’t apply to every film, but with Moonlight, the way that we wanted to represent dark skin was to give it a reflective quality. So we were able to put up lights, larger lights in this case, and most of it was bounce light, or LED lights that had a lot of diffusion on them, and what that did was create a very reflective quality in the actors’ faces. It was the reflection of the light more so than the actual light absorbing into their skin, which is something you can really only do with folks with dark skin. I’m a white guy, you can’t photograph me in that same way. You have to put enough light out there to have me exposed because my skin will absorb it differently. So in a weird way, it was actually easier because the lights we were using just needed to reflect as opposed to put out so much light to expose differently.

ANDREA: That’s interesting, it’s difficult in the still world as well but so different.

JAMES: There are a few things that put us in a box. That’s honestly why more equipment is often needed with motion pictures to get light to look a certain way. I think that’s also why still sets are a little smaller, traditionally anyway, than motion picture sets. Because of the specificity, because of the shutter angle, there’s a lot more effort sometimes involved.

ANDREA: What do you consider good cinema now?

JAMES: I go to the theatre to see a lot of different genres for sure, a good movie could mean a lot of different things.

I think what I look for in a film is a film that presents its story and its experience in a way that makes me believe that it really existed. That doesn’t mean that it needs to be a realistic movie but I want, as an audience member, to be taken into an experience that has an emotional impact. Nine times out of ten, for me anyway, that’s a film that has honest and believable presentation, which can be in how it’s photographed or the story. I want to believe the spaces and believe the film. I know it sounds simple but the truth is that it’s hard to come by these days. I think we’re in a place, cinema wise, that some people and some filmmakers just aren’t interested in that. And that’s not a big deal, there’s room for all of it obviously. But that’s the kind of film that I like or the films that I enjoy going to see.

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ANDREA: With all the success of Moonlight, I would imagine that you are in demand. Has it changed your career?

JAMES: Yeah, there’s no way to say that it hasn’t. Of course it has, it changed my life. It’s changed how I think about a lot of different things, on a personal level, but in terms of the career, absolutely.

ANDREA: How has it changed something on a personal level?

JAMES: The experience, in both the movie itself and the experience of making the film. It was deeply impactful for me to visit these communities and have people come out and introduce themselves to us and to meet people from these areas and these places that I don’t come from. I think the personal touch of meeting people and experiencing the community in a way that I didn’t before has definitely changed how I move forward and how I open myself up in a way that I didn’t before.

ANDREA: And your career, it’s probably spurred confidence in terms of the choices that you make moving forward, no?

JAMES: Definitely, for me how the audience receives my work has an impact. Some people just do what they do and it doesn’t matter how anybody thinks of them but that’s not who I am. There’s no way around the idea that when someone likes my work it means something to me.

ANDREA: They used to have rushes everyday; since your situation is digital, do you have that? I’m curious how that affected the film making process, if it has? Looking at it everyday or every minute and thinking, maybe we should do this instead of that.

JAMES: We do have what we call dailies or rushes, they still exist. In decades past the crew or at least the key department heads would go back and watch the day’s work and talk about that as a communal experience. Now often what happens is, on our AR Pads or on our laptops, we’re given links to see the footage from the day before. So we’re not watching them with people. We still have them but they’re delivered differently and therefore digested differently.

ANDREA: I think there’s something about film that’s magical and it takes that kind of magic away when you have all these people around talking.

JAMES: When we used to shoot film, really no one knew what the end product was going to look like with the exception of the cinematographer and maybe the gaffer. Now, with monitors on set, everyone sort of gathers around them and broadly speaking we’re all watching what the movie looks like then and there. You can talk about that in a way that’s negative, but there’s a power to that, which I think is a good thing. There’s a power to the digital medium in a way that didn’t exist before that is worth recognizing.

ANDREA: I agree. When you watched the finished film for the first time, was there anything that you thought, maybe I should’ve made another choice?

JAMES: I see technical errors in the movie that bother me to this day, I can’t lie about that. But, do I wish I had done something differently or approached something differently, not really. I recognize that a different filmmaker would make different choices.

I think in terms of the choices we all made on set, they were ones that I would never give back or trade in for something different. I think that, especially the way in which we made the film in terms of how fast we were moving and how quickly we were making choices, choices that came from a very personal, gut level, I don’t know if there’s a way in which you can go back and say, I wish I didn’t feel that way about the image on that day. That’s saying on some level, I wish I was a different person or I wish I was a different filmmaker. I can only be true to how I felt about things on that day, and how I felt about that light on that person we were shaping. I don’t know how to train my brain to think like- I wish I did that five other different ways.

ANDREA: I have some good news for you, Viviane Sassen just came out with a new book.

JAMES: I did not know that and I will rush to the bookstore today.

ANDREA: Yeah, it’s called Roxane II, she’s photographed her before. She’s influenced you, along with Henry Roy and one other person. Who is it?

JAMES: Earlie Hundall Jr., I think is who I referenced before and someone I think is really, really striking. When I

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think about references for film and when I’m pulling ideas for a look-book or a mood-book, I don’t tend to draw strict parallel lines from one image to an image that I want to create. I just pull things that speak to me on some level. Viviane’s work, Henry’s work, Earlie’s work, they all had something in them that shaped different parts of choices that we were making on set.

ANDREA: I was going to ask you if we could see those choices in the movie.

JAMES: I don’t know if you can, I’d be curious. I’m sure someone could figure that out. That would be a hard thing for me to do because like I said, I don’t think I looked at this one picture of Viviane’s and said, ‘oh this will represent how I’ll look at scene five.’ I’m responding to general color, posture, how close the lens is to the subject, and what that means to me on an emotional level. It’s these concepts that were striking to me that meant something emotionally that then influenced and inspired me to create on Moonlight.

ANDREA: Let’s talk about your signature look. I’m looking for a cinematographer, why do I come to you?

JAMES: First of all you’re looking for a collaborator whose going to work with you as a filmmaker to create a unique language for your film. That’s what I’m really interested in. I’m looking for a collaborator that wants that, and I would imagine that the collaborator would want that out of me too. I’m very open to new languages and new ways of representing story. But, within that obviously there has to be a thorough line for who I am as an artist and who I am as a cinematographer. That’s the hardest thing to get at, but I imagine you could use words like honest, genuine, bold. Those are a few words that you could talk about in reference to me and definitely with Moonlight.

ANDREA: Let’s talk about your bread business; are you still doing it?

JAMES: I am, I set my starter this morning when I got up to make coffee.

ANDREA: Why did you start to make bread?

JAMES: I realized that in my life I was spending a great deal of time looking at images that were a departure from being present in my day-to-day life. I was on my phone a lot or on my computer looking at artwork, watching videos or

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movies. The hope was to get back to this idea of craft, of physical craft, something tangible that’s real and in front of me, that I can feel with my hands and my fingers.

ANDREA: Maybe I should start baking bread.

JAMES: Yeah, you have to make active choices and really get in there. We’re all susceptible to patterns I think.

ANDREA: I just have to ask, let’s talk about the Academy Award blunder. I just want to know what you felt.

JAMES: Obviously there were two feelings, one was disappointment and one was elation. I think when you’re shocked in moments like that, they’re really emotionally confusing. In that moment, I think I was just confused to be honest. I don’t know that I really digested it in a way that made me go one way or the other on the emotional spectrum. Later on I started to think about what it meant for me. But in that moment particularly, it was just shocking. The first idea that we didn’t get it and then the idea that we did, both things were equally as shocking.

ANDREA: If I were the loser, I’d be much more upset than if I were the winner. The producer handled it gracefully.

JAMES: He did, absolutely. His real, truthful self came out in that moment and it was a real beautiful, human thing for him. I think it spoke to who he is as a person in a way that was really truthful and honest, which I thought was wonderful.

ANDREA: James, what’s next for you?

JAMES: I don’t have the answer. The only one I know right now is the project that I am currently in preproduction for, which is a television pilot called Here, Now. It’s being created and directed by Alan Ball who created Six Feet Under and also True Blood, and this is a new series that he’s developing. We start shooting in a couple weeks. I’m very excited about that, obviously. After that I really don’t know. The hope is that Barry has some films he wants to make on the horizon.

Hopefully I’m lucky enough, and I intend to be there for those films and those projects.

ANDREA: Thank you and good luck on the new project.

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All images © Summar Alsemeiry.

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Laura Lee Shill, The Showgirl and the Professor

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Laura Lee Shill, Irresistible You.

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JOHN MACLEAN t h e lo ca tio n sco ut

MUSÉE MAGAZINE: In your Hometowns series, you talk about the artist’s personal vision and how he or she must embrace artistic influence without loosing sight of his or her own sense of self, what do you think is the line between imitation and originality? How does one balance it without falling off?

JOHN MACLEAN: I think originality can grow from imitation. We learn by imitating our parents when we are children but we still manage to become distinct individuals as adults. There comes a point when we feel we have learned enough through imitation, then we rebel. It’s more difficult to become an individual as a photographer, because the machine we use is the same: so we are trying to personalize an impersonal medium. But the great thing about being an artist is that both our strengths and our failings can contribute to what makes our work original. We often hear people say: ‘Everything has been done before,’ my reply is always: ‘Yes it has, but if you do it again in your own way, you can make it new.’

MUSÉE: You studied mathematics, physics, and geology before turning to photography, how, if at all, do you think this has influenced the geometric, abstract style of your work?

JOHN: I wouldn’t say that it has influenced my work in a visual sense at all, but it’s difficult to say. I would say, though, that I have remained the pragmatist that an education in the sciences instilled in me: I set myself a problem and then try and solve it (photographically) with an ‘aim—method—conclusion’ type of formula. Perhaps the abstraction in my work is consistent throughout because I am interested in human perception. All photographs are abstract in the sense that they are nothing more than a few million colored dots on a piece of paper—it is only through our perception and experience that we recognize them as images with meaning. I prefer the viewer to experience a delay before the content of one of my photographs reveals itself.

MUSÉE: In your past work, such as Neighbourhood and Two by Two, you explore temporality and stepping outside of a single image. In Hometowns, as you return to these places decades after the artists would have experienced them, is this something you continue to experiment with?

JOHN: In Neighbourhood, I had become frustrated because I wanted to photograph a series of subtle, natural phenomena that occurred in my immediate environment—such as a cloud moving across the sun, snow melting or the planet we stand on rotating, and that seemed impossible to achieve within one frame—so I used two. I was reminded of Diane Arbus describing a similar frustration when she wrote, ‘How do you photograph the sound your father makes in his throat when summoning the maid?’

By contrast, in Two and Two, my initial intention was to elevate my decision-making process to the position of subject matter, by offering an alternative to every photograph I took (in the form of a diptych). I hoped this would also be a means of cataloguing and exploring photographic rhetoric.

So, whilst I agree with you that both series may offer some thoughts on how or why we perceive time in the way we do, it wasn’t my primary concern. I would say that temporality was even less on my mind in Hometowns, because I actually felt, as I photographed the childhood environments of my art heroes, as though I was there when they were there.

Portrait by Rick Pushinsky. All images © John MacLean, Courtesy of Flowers Gallery, London/New York.

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John MacLean, Previous spread: Hometown of Ed Ruscha, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; Above: Hometown of Gabriel Orozco, San Angel, Mexico City

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John MacLean, Hometown of Takashi Homma, Ottowa, Tokyo.

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MUSÉE: You say that artists “absorb existing ideas, re-energize them, make them new, and pass them on.” Why do you feel this is so important to the creative process? Could an artist evolve without being exposed to other artists?

JOHN: I don’t mean ideas from other artists specifically but ideas in general. I think artists evolve in the way languages and countries do. That is, they can’t develop in isolation. A country that closes its borders suffers in many ways, but culturally it might suffer in a similar way to an artist who locks themselves inside their studio.

MUSÉE: Some could argue that an artist is not established in his own identity until he can pull away from this recycling of ideas, how would you argue with that?

JOHN: I don’t think there is such thing as a truly innocent gaze. Can you find me an artist whose work doesn’t bear a lineage from other artists? I don’t know of one. In fact, artists are generally very proud of their shared ideas and connections with others, and often openly make works directly in homage to their predecessors.

MUSÉE: I love what you said about the creative desire always looking forwards yet; ‘original’ art always, at least in part, is an encoding of work from the past. How do you work within this paradox?

JOHN: I love paradoxes! I revel in them. But I don’t think that looking forwards and backwards at the same time is a contradiction. It’s just like digging downwards to construct a house’s foundation before building upwards with bricks.

I think the most positive thing we can do is to consider the ‘encoding of work from the past’ as something to celebrate rather than feel anxious about.

MUSÉE: Hometowns addresses this paradox by looking at the pasts of certain artists. It’s complicated with many nuances, this tangling of past and present, influence and originality, can you explain your inspiration for this series and why you felt it was important?

JOHN: In a way, all my projects are based on the kind of questions that keep me awake at night! Broadly they are: What makes us who we are? What is reality? Am I in control? How do I decide? Who will we be?

You are right, Hometowns is complicated and I would never claim that it is a project that is fully resolved, nor is it one without flaws—it’s quite human in that respect. But it was made at a point in time when I felt it was important to make a firm acknowledgment of my artistic influences—because not to do so would be a betrayal.

MUSÉE: This work is all about how artists’ hometowns influenced them growing up, how about you? If we went back to Buchinghamshire, or Canada, what would we see?

JOHN: I can’t be certain if or how the artists in my series were influenced by their hometowns—that’s where the fantasy element overrides the documentary in this work: I’m imagining or projecting what might have been. It’s the same in my own case, I’m not sure how my hometown influenced me, but perhaps time will tell.

MUSÉE: You traveled to twenty three towns and cities for this project, including visiting multiple countries, how long did it take to put together the series?

JOHN: About a year and a half. Quite quick really-- when I have an idea in my head it bugs me until I follow through on it.

MUSÉE: You chose twenty five artists for this project, what were you looking for? How did you come to choose these twenty five specifically?

JOHN: It was quite easy really. I simply looked at the books on my shelf and pulled down the most dog-eared, most re-read, most faded books I owned. These books represent the way I ‘got to know’ my art heroes and they form a kind of supportive network of ‘mentors-by-proxy’.

MUSÉE: From Hamilton to Friedlander to Kandinsky, your work in this series implies a variety of artistic mediums, when did you become interested in photography specifically?

John MacLean, Hometown of John Baldessari, National City, California.

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John MacLean, Hometown of John Gossage, Staten Island, New York.

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John MacLean, Above: Hometown of Richard Hamilton, Pimlico, London.; Following spread: Hometown of Robert Cumming, Mattapan, Massachusetts

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John MacLean, Hometown of Robert Frank, Wipkingen, Zurich.

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John MacLean, Hometown of Rachel Whiteread, Muswell Hill, London.

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JOHN: I became interested in photography through my father. He took photographs during a family trip across America and I watched him work… and then I looked at the images after they had been printed—in the next big town we stopped at.

MUSÉE: You’ve referred to Hometowns as a “fantasy documentary”, how so? Why this approach?

JOHN: There is a combination of research and imagination that come together to bring my images to life. They are not formed on the basis on a rock-solid, scientific thesis. But then, I would argue that all photography is fictional to a large degree anyway.

MUSÉE: You say of this series that, “unavoidably perhaps, I photographed each hometown through [the artist’s works] afterimage.” This imitation wasn’t intentional? When did you realize that each artist was inherently influencing you through his town?

JOHN: I’m photographing through the afterimage of my artistic influences all the time. It’s unavoidable. In Hometowns I make a concerted effort to acknowledge this in a positive way, so these photographs situate themselves much closer to the work of my art heroes than before.

MUSÉE: Once you were aware that you were channeling the artists, did you have fun with it and challenge yourself to see their town through their eyes?

JOHN: I wouldn’t say that I was channeling the artists, definitely not. I just tried to take photographs using the lessons I’d learned by looking at their work. And I added some biographical research, and then my personal reaction to the place itself—again, with the knowledge that great works of art had been made by people who grew up there.

MUSÉE: This series implies an importance of place, that certain locations carry with them different auras, or artistic atmospheres. Would you agree with this?

JOHN: For me personally, I wouldn’t agree with that. I think people give places significance. Without people, places have no significance. If I’d made a mistake in my research and, say, thought Lee Friedlander grew up in Montreal not Aberdeen, I would have still photographed Montreal vicariously—because I would have given it significance by believing that this young, jazz loving, iconoclastic photographer grew up there.

MUSÉE: These were the artists who influenced you the most as a bourgeoning photographer; did you discover anything new about yourself, artistically or personally, as you traced their steps?

JOHN: I think that learning more about each of them (through my research) made me realize that my connection to them is as much about the spirit in which they worked, as the images they made. They all took a brave decision to leave their hometowns in an unusual direction towards a career in making art, and somehow they got that brave spirit into their work, which is amazing really.

MUSÉE: How do you feel that Hometowns as a whole, speaks about you as an artist?

JOHN: I think the most rewarding reaction I have had to the work (and one that I hadn’t anticipated) was that my photographs coalesce to form my own photo-hometown, in a way. Read into that what you may.

MUSÉE: What do you want viewers to take away from Hometowns?

JOHN: I’m happy if they enjoy the photographs enough to compel them to look into the work of some of the artists they might not have heard of.

MUSÉE: What’s next?

JOHN: More new work. Always. The hardest thing is starting, so I’ve decided that I can avoid that by never stopping.

John MacLean, Hometown of William Eggleston, Sumner, Mississippi.

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John MacLean, Hometown of Robert Rauschenberg, Port Arthur, Texas.

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John MacLean, Above and following spread: Hometown of Wassily Kandinsky, Khamovniki, Moscow.

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MUSÉE FEATURED A RTIST BIOGRAPHIES

Andrea Blanch is a New York-based award-winning fashion, fine art and conceptual photographer. Blanch began her career as a photographer’s assistant to the legendary, Richard Avedon. She is referred to as “the woman who knows how to capture a woman” and has been involved in the world of photography for over twenty five years.

Her award-winning work has been published in numerous other Condé Nast publications worldwide including G.Q., and American Vogue. Her work has also been shown in Elle, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, The New York Times Magazine and Rolling Stone. Blanch has lectured for the Smithsonian Institute and has been interviewed by the same, the BBC & E. Exhibitions include; International Center of Photography fall 1997, The Art Director’s League fall 1997, The Humane Society 2006-2007, Friends In Deed 1996-2006 and Project Hope 2006. Italian Men: Love & Sex, a book of portraits and interviews by Blanch was published in 1999 by Rizzoli USA. In October 2006, Blanch had a sold out one-woman show, Unexpected Company at the Staley-Wise Gallery. Her photographs are owned by collectors worldwide.

Blanch is also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Musée Magazine. In addition, Blanch currently teaches at the International Center for Photography and is a member of APA. Andrea Blanch currently lives and works in New York City and previously attended NYU Film School.

As an iconic member of the pop movement of the 1960’s, Andy Warhol gained fame and recognition for his depiction of recognizable objects and individuals, from brand name products, to faces of the rich, famous, and powerful.

The camera served as an indispensable tool for Warhol in the production of commissioned portraits. He would take several packs of film at each sitting, and then select his favorite image to be silkscreened onto canvas by his assistants. The resulting image became the ground and basis of each painting. Proving that the simplest tools are no impediment to creativity, Warhol’s Polaroids are both a celebration of fame and an intriguing look at the cleverness behind the façade Warhol so often used to disguise the intelligence and innovation of his work.

Within the tight rectangle that the camera dictated, and behind an implement that provided a necessary barrier between himself and his sitter, we see Warhol finding numerous ways to create memorable, varied, and iconic compositions. They may be small in size, but Warhol’s Polaroids serve as vivid portraits and artful time capsules of an era.

In recent years, Warhol’s Polaroids have gained attention and respect in exhibitions and books, both for their centrality to his portrait practice and as works in their own right. While Warhol is not best known as a photographer, he loved the medium, an apt one for the artist due to its repetitive, mechanical nature and its ability to illuminate the sense of star-power Warhol felt when faced with his famous subjects.

Since her early work, It’s a Wonderful Life Annette Lemieux has incorporated narrative in the form of self-doubt, personal vulnerability, along with an awareness of the absurdist political/religious/economic histories we accumulate as a civilization in a never-ending current. Following the legacies of Rauschenberg and Cage, she works to narrow the gap between “art” and “life.” Resisting the traps of a “signature style,” Lemieux’s work surprises us, challenges her audience to keep up, and resists the conformity of the brand. As stated by Peggy Phelan, “For Lemieux, the art object offers her thoughts and feelings a way to travel . . . Art is her way of responding, both publicly and intimately, to the ongoing predicament of our lives.”

Arthur Tress was born in 1940 and began his first camera work as a teenager in the surreal neighborhood of Coney

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Island. Tress is best known for photographing in a mode of “magic realism” combining elements of actual life with staged fantasy that became his hallmark style of directional fabrication.This approach was shown in his early books Dream Collector, Shadow, Theatre of the Mind and a recent collection of homoerotic fantasy, Male of the Species. In the mid 1980s, Tress began doing a series of color still lifes that were later published as Tea Pot Opera and Fish Tank Sonata. Tress has exhibited widely beginning with his first one-man show at the Smithzonian Institute “Appalachia People and Places” in 1967 to his recent 50 years retrospective at the Corcoron Gallery of Art – Fantastic Voyage. He has received grants from the NY State Council in the Arts and the National Endowment of the Arts.

Daido Moriyama (b.1938, Osaka) is one of Japan’s leading figures in photography. Witness to the spectacular changes that transformed post WWII Japan, his black and white photographs express a fascination with the cultural contradictions of age-old traditions that persist within modern society. Providing a harsh, crude vision of city life and the chaos of everyday existence, strange worlds, and unusual characters, his work occupies a unique space between the objective and the subjective, the illusory and the real. Moriyama’s use of a small hand held automatic camera gives his images a loose and casual aesthetic, undermined by a forceful and decisive point of view. His work has been collected by numerous prominent public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Getty Museum, Los Angeles, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and The Centre Pompidou, Paris. Moriyama has had major solo shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris, The Fotomuseum, Winterthur, Switzerland, The Folkwang, Essen, Germany and the Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Tokyo.

Born in France in 1928, Guy Bourdin is best known for his highly experimental fashion photography. Predominantly working in color Bourdin was a key contributor to French Vogue from 1955 to the end of 1980’s, pushing the boundaries of fashion photography, presenting bold often provocative images with a unique contemporary aesthetic.

Shot in France in the 1950s, Bourdin’s early experimental work bridges the gap between surrealism and subjective photography, simultaneously drawing on the past while at the same time adopting current trends.The past in his case is the influence of surrealism, which can be seen in the way in which Bourdin approaches still life and portraiture.

This surrealist influence in his work is often attributed to his close relationship with Man Ray, who in 1952 wrote the catalogue forward for Bourdin’s first solo exhibition.

Famed for his suggestive narratives and surreal aesthetics, Boudin radically broke conventions of commercial photography with relentless perfectionism and sharp humor. Guy Bourdin was an image maker.

James Laxton is an American cinematographer working in feature films, television, documentaries, and commercials. He began his career shooting writer/director Barry Jenkins’ first film, Medicine for Melancholy (IFC), for which he was nominated for a Spirit Award. He acted as director of photography (DP) on another of the most acclaimed writing/directing feature debuts of recent years, David Mitchell’s The Myth of the American Sleepover (IFC) which had it’s world premier at SXSW 2010 and went in to play at the 2010 Cannes International Film Festival.

Some of James’ additional credits include Peter Sattler’s Camp X-Ray (Sundance 2014/IFC), Kevin Smith’s Tusk (A24) and Yoga Hosers (Sundance 2016). Most recently, he shot Barry Jenkins’ sophomore film and 2016’s best picture winner at the Oscars, Moonlight, for which he won “Best Cinematography” at the Spirit awards and was nominated by the ASC and the Academy for “Best Cinematography”.

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MUSÉE FEATURED A RTIST BIOGRAPHIES

Although born in Buckinghamshire, England, John MacLean spent most of his childhood in Canada and the United States. He began using a camera at the age of fourteen when he discovered the book, American Images, featuring the work of Lee Friedlander, Lewis Baltz and John Gossage. After studying mathematics, physics and geology he changed direction and studied photography at the University of Derby (UK) under Olivier Richon. He subsequently worked at The Royal College of Art for four years. John has been a London-based, independent photographer since 1998. His 2010 exhibition Two and Two was a solo show at Flowers Gallery. John has had work published in Camera Austria, The British Journal of Photography, Source, Photoworks, Yet Magazine, 1000 Words, SeeSaw and IANN Magazine, to mention a few. He has published nine photobooks; New Colour Guide received two ‘Best Photobooks of 2012’ awards. His project Hometowns was exhibited at Unseen, Amsterdam in 2015. Hometowns was also awarded Best International Photobook of 2016, judged by David Campany, Dewi Lewis and Lucy Moore. It will be exhibited at Format Festival, Derby 2017.

Michael Hoeh regarded by Art+Auction Magazine as one of the “New Guard” of savvy contemporary art collectors in 2010, he is an Aperture Foundation Trustee, and member of the Guggenheim Photo Acquisition Committee. Mr. Hoeh was the author of the groundbreaking art blog, Modern Art Obsession, which was listed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, and The London Times as a top online resource for contemporary art.

Michael has organized gallery shows on contemporary photography, and been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian Magazine, TimeOut, and The Brooklyn Rail about the state of contemporary art. Mr. Hoeh has guest lectured, and his collection is frequently visited by graduate classes around the US. Working professionally as an award winning investment manager, he is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University, and has an MBA from NYU’s Stern School of Business.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925–1972) lived in Lexington, Kentucky, where he made his living as an optician while creating an impressive and enigmatic body of photographs. Meatyard’s creative circle included mystics and poets, such as Thomas Merton and Guy Davenport, as well as the photographers Cranston Ritchie and Van Deren Coke, who were mentors and fellow members of the Lexington Camera Club. Meatyard’s work spanned many genres and experimented with new means of expression, from dreamlike portraits—often set in abandoned places—to multiple exposures, motion-blur, and other methods of photographic abstraction. He also collaborated with his friend Wendell Berry on the 1971 book The Unforeseen Wilderness, for which Meatyard contributed photographs of Kentucky’s Red River Gorge. Meatyard’s final series, The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater, is cryptic double portraits of friends and family members wearing masks and enacting symbolic dramas.

Museum exhibitions of the artist’s work have been presented at the Art Institute of Chicago; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the De Young Museum, San Francisco; the International Center of Photography, New York; Cincinnati Museum of Art, Ohio; the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; and Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas. His works are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, SFMOMA, J. Paul Getty Museum, George Eastman Museum, and Yale University Art Gallery, among others.

Richard Mosse’s photography captures the beauty and tragedy in war and destruction. Mosse has shot abandoned plane wrecks in the furthest reaches of the planet and the former palaces of Uday and Saddam Hussein, now occupied by US military forces. His Infra series captures the ongoing war between rebel factions and the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

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MUSÉE FEATURED A RTIST BIOGRAPHIES

Mosse was born in 1980 in Ireland and is based in New York. He earned a postgraduate diploma in Fine Arts From Goldsmiths, London in 2005 and an MFA in Photography from Yale School of Art in 2008. Mosse has exhibited work at the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence; the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro; the Bass Museum of Art, Miami; the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris; the Dublin Contemporary Biennial; FotoMuseum Antwerp (FoMu); FOAM, Amsterdam; and the Tate Modern, London.

Sally Gall...Originally from Washington D.C., Sally is an artist that now lives and works in New York City. She exhibits widely, and has recently mounted her ninth solo exhibition (2016) with the Julie Saul Gallery, New York. Her work is in numerous museums and collections worldwide, and she has published two books of photographs, The Water’s Edge, Chronicle Books, 1995 and Subterranea, Umbrage Editions, 2003. She has been awarded several prestigious fellowships which include two MacDowell Colony Fellowships and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency.

Sally Mann’s rich and varied career as a photographer has seen her focus on architecture, landscape and still life, but she is known, above all, for her intimate portraits of her family, and in particular her young children. Her work has attracted controversy at times, but it has always been influential. Since the time of her first solo exhibition, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., in 1977, she has attracted a wide audience.

Sally Mann lives and works in Lexington, Virginia. A Guggenheim fellow, and a three-times recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Mann was named “America’s Best Photographer” by Time magazine in 2001. She has been the subject of two documentaries: Blood Ties (1994), which was nominated for an Academy Award, and What Remains (2007). She has been the subject of major exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.. Her photographs can be found in many public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Sebastiaan Bremer (Dutch, b. 1970) is renowned for transforming ordinary snapshots into grandly baroque and surreal tableaux by a careful process of retouching and enlargement. Since his first solo show, in 1994, he has exhibited in venues such as the Tate Gallery, London, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, and the Aldrich Museum, Connecticut. He has been based in the United States since 1992.

Although Bremer has always been interested in photography, it wasn’t until the late 1990s that he began to draw directly on the surface of photographs. He has been inspired, in part, by nineteenth century spirit photography, and fin de siècle Symbolists such as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and painter Odilon Redon, but his methods partake of advanced photographic techniques. Often he will begin with a simple snapshot of friends or family or familiar places, and after enlarging it far beyond conventional dimensions, he will begin altering and embellishing the image with India ink and photographic dye. The result is an image that seems to literally vibrate with hidden consequence, as if the subject matter has sent cracks across the surface of the picture. Whilst Bremer’s choice of images inevitably grounds his work in his own biography, his imagery also makes reference to alchemy, art, and the occult, establishing unexpected connections between ordinary life, history, and the unconscious.

Sebastiaan Bremer lives and works in New York. He studied at the Vrije Academie, The Hague, and Skowhegan School of Art and Sculpture, Maine. He has published two major catalogs: Monkey Brain (2003), and Avila (2006). His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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SPECIAL THANKS TO SHAHID & COMPANY & THE MUSÉ E TEAM

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SUBMIT YOUR WORK TO MUSÉE NO. 18: HUMANITY 1. Submit high resolution images.

2. Please do not include watermarks.

3. Use ‘Issue No. 18’ as the email subject.

4. Include name, photo title and contact information that you would like to see published.

5. Deadline for submission is September 5, 2017.

6. To submit, please visit www.museemagazine.com or send your work to submit@museemagazine.com.

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