Excuse me, I’m lost. Which brings me to why I’m here.

I’m sitting in a small café in Bath, Being an artist is truly a labor of next to an old man who appears to love. Most of us create without the be consuming the events of a world promise of making large sums of he no longer understands. money. As painters, photographers, musicians, sculptors and writers, And I can sympathize. we offer ourselves to the world wholeheartedly, hoping to create I, on the other hand, am staring something greater than ourselves. at him, trying to photograph his Without art we wouldn’t be able to reading habits to avoid writing this justify our lives, and without the act letter of resignation. The problem of creation there would be nothing is I’m uncertain as to what I’m for the world to profit from—no resigning from and whom I’m numbers to measure or things to addressing. I just know things can’t aspire towards. continue as they are. In a world overgrown with Some months ago, Ann commercial interests, I’ve become Demeulemeester, my friend and exhausted by compromise. I’m tired longtime inspiration, resigned of pretending that I care about from the world of fashion. For me, celebrity. I’m tired of only being able this news came not as a shock but to photograph advertisers’ clothing. as another sad sign of the times. I’m tired of talking about how Soon after, my favorite dive bar everything resembles everything in New York closed its doors, due else. And, most importantly, I’m to Manhattan’s incessant rent tired of feeling bitter about it all. increases. As I write this, more and more of the quiet corners Pausing to create this magazine has in which we dreamers dwell allowed me to make photographs are slowly disappearing into a with wide eyes and uncertainty, as corporate abyss. if I were a teenager again. It has let me forget the world we live in and celebrate the quiet corners we still have—if even for an instant.

Erik Madigan Heck 23 January 2014 Somerset, United Kingdom

Conversations on Photography Works

8 Susan Bright 1 Comme des Garçons on Classification 70 Illustrated

20 Elinor Carucci 2 Guinevere Van Seenus on Discovery 90 in The High Priestess

28 George Pitts 3 On the Subject of Flowers: on Perception 136 Remarks, Addressed to the Poet

38 Taryn Simon 4 Lykke Li on Identity 144 on Adaptation

44 Vince Aletti 5 Jerry Schatzberg on Context 152 on Family

54 Kathy Ryan 6 Waris Ahluwalia on Immediacy 164 in Haider Ackermann

62 Miranda Lichtenstein 7 Jamie Bochert on Evolution 176 in Ann Demeulemeester

8 Fashion 190 “Advertisements”

9 Yves Klein 216 Dialogue with Myself Conversations “I should like to paint the portrait of an artist on Photography friend, a [woman] who dreams great dreams, who works as the nightingale sings, because it is [her] nature... I want to put my appreciation, the love I have for [her], into a picture. So I paint [her] as [she] is, as faithfully as I can, to begin with. But the picture is not yet finished. To finish it, I am now going to be the arbitrary colorist... Behind the head, instead of painting the ordinary wall of the mean room, I paint infinity.”

Vincent van Gogh, 18 August 1888 Susan Bright on Classification

EMH: Let’s start at the beginning. photography, in whatever form it When did you first become takes, it was a revelation. I felt I interested in photography? could finally be honest, instead of pretending I was really into difficult SB: The very first photograph that video art. It was enormously ever meant anything to me was on liberating. the cover of a catalog for when the Russian gymnastics team visited EMH: It seems that everyone Australia in 1978. I was about I know has had a similar seven and it was of Olga Korbut entrance into photography, with on the beam. I was obsessed with a subconscious trigger and then 8 9 that photograph. I carried the later the “aha” moment. catalog around with me for about three years. I can’t remember SB: The epiphany moment! seeing the actual performance, but And yours was Harry Callahan? that photograph is etched onto my brain. It also reveals, very early on, EMH: My mom was looking that I had an interest in how the for a medium to transition me body is represented. back into the world from music, as she saw me locking myself EMH: Do you still have in my bedroom for hours with the picture? my records and turntables. So she presented me with this SB: I can’t find it. I’ve found a camera and mandated that very similar one, but it’s not the every Sunday I shoot a roll. actual photograph. The pictures She would drive me around and that have resonated with me over say, “Here’s a tree. Here’s a my life appeared on album covers, sidewalk, or person. It doesn’t postcards and posters, and I just matter; just shoot.” That kind didn’t consider them somehow of repetition is what started it. worthy, because they weren’t The first two or three weeks I presented as “art.” I didn’t know didn’t want to do it, but once that it was legitimate to be into that. I got in the darkroom the Later, when I gave myself immediacy of photography permission to dedicate my life to hooked me, the instant gratification coupled with the SB: Well that’s sort of like jazz, it’s extremely wide and enormously institution, but, crucially, also fact that I thought I was good isn’t it? You start off gently and complex. So that was it. My encompasses a field of knowledge at it almost immediately. So then you can get more specific. commitment to photography as a relating to the culture at large. that got me into the bookstore Actually, that is a bad analogy, as career—as an obsession, really— As a curator, I am putting searching for any and all I hate jazz. My epiphany moment can literally be pinpointed to the day. information forward and receiving photographers, and the first was seeing an Ansel Adams Other mediums fell by the wayside, it back. I am doing so in my own book I came across that really photograph—of all people! apart from literature, which I think language, with my own rhetoric. spoke to me was by Harry of like a long-term lover. Part of the process of “Home Callahan. EMH: There’s no shame in Truths” was to deconstruct, reveal Ansel Adams. It seems like EMH: Can you speak about your and assess that agency and bias. SB: So you knew that you wanted Ansel Adams, in the photo most recent exhibition and book, It’s important to say that my to be a photographer, as opposed world, has become this dirty “Home Truths: Photography and subjectivity does not demand a to me. I never had any interest in word that you have to whisper Motherhood,” which deals with certain way of looking or thinking in actually taking photographs. under your breath. perceptions of motherhood? terms of the viewer. It is my aim to yield new insights, frameworks and EMH: It was strange because SB: Of course he is a crucial part SB: The inception of this project interpretations through my curating the camera was kind of forced of the history of photography. I just leads from our conversation practice, with a rigor that does into my lap and after pushing have little to no interest in that about legitimacy and permission not foreclose on subjectivity and it away I fell in love. You wake fetishization of the print, nor the to pursue something that feels enthusiasm, and is free of anxiety. up and you’re like, “I can’t live romanticization of the American intuitively right. It was the But to get to those personal without this.” Harry Callahan’s landscape, so it’s surprising that first project I had done that issues… One: Until the age of 37, I photos were the first things that it should be Adams who made came from a very personal and never wanted children. I was really made me think of photography the penny drop. I was interning at autobiographical space, rather happy; I had a great life in London, not just as pictures, because the Victoria and Albert Museum than intellectual interest. This with my wonderful partner. There 10 11 his work was so graphic—and and opened a box in the stacks to is somewhat frowned upon in was no gaping hole, which I know seamless. It was my first get a photograph for exhibition curatorial circles, as it can be seen a lot of women experience and I do introduction to art photography, preparation. I’d never seen a as too subjective or not rigorous understand. as opposed to practical photographic art print close up, enough. Personally, I think this Secondly: I come from the photography. let alone an Ansel Adams print. It is rubbish; this accusation would generation where a lot of my was exquisite; it felt like I could never be leveled at an artist. friends don’t have kids and they’ve SB: Were your aspirations towards put my hands into it, like it was As a curator, I totally come to the point where they art? Did you want to have your three-dimensional somehow. It is acknowledge the importance aren’t going to, and they’re really pictures published? no exaggeration to say I felt like of impartiality and subjectivity. cool with that. We were told our I’d been kicked in the belly. I was Revealing my subjectivity, putting careers were the important thing. EMH: They were immediately immediately seduced. I wanted it under scrutiny and testing it I am of that generation that sits, towards art. I wanted to to know where the book was that in an exhibition—which makes somewhat awkwardly, between outdo Callahan’s work and to would tell me everything about fault lines, both stable and the second-wave feminists and a create what I thought was the photography, but of course there unstable—is the basis of testing younger generation who are now perfect composition. It was isn’t one. I also thought: This is the effectiveness of curating more flexible and relaxed about very selfish. I started looking great because photography has complex research questions and mothering, because the workplace at any photographer’s work I a relatively short history. I’m assessing how it can be done. The is more flexible and open to them— could get my hands on, but kept essentially quite lazy, so I thought subject matter of my inquiry is writ to generalize. Also, I didn’t have coming back to Harry Callahan I didn’t have to learn a huge large in the public frame, and the nephews and nieces so I had very and his perfect images—his amount of history, like painting different contexts in which it is little experience of being around symmetrical trees, leaves on the or sculpture. I thought I could get relevant means that the exhibition children. snow—and going: How is this my head around 180 years. What is not only a mode for generating, And finally: My career in so perfect? I did not factor in was: However mediating and reflecting experience photography happened quite short the history of photography, related to the works within the late. After my BA in art history, I traveled for many years and was work and engaged in a wonderful history of photography had to offer benign images of the mother as a Voluntary Services Overseas work environment, where he had me in terms of representation. Madonna. volunteer in Mongolia for two years. conversations, was challenged and It was not really until the I then returned to London to do busy. I felt torn in two. Maternal EMH: I remember speaking to 1970s that women began to claim my MA in art theory. I got my first ambivalence is key to many you a couple years ago, and the maternal as an admissible “proper” job at the National Portrait feminist writings on mothering, you had discovered a series of subject for women to work with in Gallery, as the Assistant Curator, but it doesn’t really enter popular early medical photographs... a critical way. Even then, it was when I was about 27. I felt like I culture unless it’s wrapped up in Was this the starting point, in contested and problematic for had a lot of catching up to do. So the concept of “guilt,” which is not terms of imagery? many feminists. I wanted to follow I was very myopic about my career. helpful for anyone. through on those anxieties—in I worked extraordinarily hard. I’m It was also the first time my SB: The medical photography both representation and attitudes very competitive and ambitious, so gender was made so obvious was really interesting to me as it towards the subject—and work it was a non-issue, really. and discrimination clear to me. I offered an alternative history to the with contemporary examples that So I was somewhat taken have always considered myself Madonna motif, which I consider dealt with the subject in the very aback when the clichéd biological a feminist, but suddenly personal a male view of motherhood. What widest sense, through different clock kicked. And that was it; I was experiences made me feel ashamed intrigued me was the slightly more points of view. pregnant a month later. Pregnancy I had not been more so. I’d come taboo. The 19th century medical with me was not good. I was sick, across sexist comments and photos where the women are EMH: It seems like there has and just tired. I slept through a misogyny, but I had never been hooded are just extraordinary. They been a lot of photography lot of it—I think because I was able to not leave the house or do are still a male point of view—one dealing with motherhood 37. It was like extreme pregnancy, exactly as I liked because I was has to assume the photographer emerging recently. Perhaps it’s everything was amplified. I had breastfeeding or I had to do all was male—but they show a just now being brought to my the book on self-portraits to finish, this stuff because I was female. discomfort and alternative view of attention through “Home Truths” we moved to New York and I was Relationships shift, and I felt like a an idealized mother. and Elinor Carucci’s book 12 13 terrified that I would have this baby 1950s housewife for a while. “Mother.” and all my hard work and passion I was furious. EMH: Why were the women would mean nothing. I noticed how attitudes on hooded? SB: I think once you become aware the street changed towards me, of it, it’s certainly there. There is EMH: You saw it as a career too—from sheer annoyance at my SB: I think because it was very an emergence in maternal studies death? slowness as I maneuvered a stroller difficult for a 19th century man within academia, and you just onto a bus to blind admiration to photograph a naked woman, have to look at the culture around SB: Completely, which of course because I was a mother. I was very let alone a pregnant woman. us. Artists are going to respond was ridiculous. Having a baby confused by that, because usually Pregnancy was still completely to that, but it has been given a does not mean your life becomes I would just trot around and not hidden. In a way, it was for her sort of legitimacy as well. Family polarized into one thing or the really care what people thought decency and there’s nothing really photography has always been other. But I panicked, so I lined of me. I became very unbound; I objective about this. Her stockings there, but now I think there’s a tide up all this work. Then when my had no control over my body. For a are still on so it seems like it was turning, where it can be looked at daughter was born, all I wanted control freak, that’s hard. done in a hurry, and the tension critically and not be sappy. Don’t was to be at home, in love, with I also became aware of between the photographer and get me wrong, a lot around the a big, hippie smile on my face. the celebrity obsession with subject is obvious and surreal. subject of being a mother can I had to teach and I resented motherhood, which is full of This kind of disappearance or be dreadful and clichéd. It can that. I remember sobbing on the value-ridden judgments that I erasure of a mother figure in easily fall into being too earnest, subway on the way to Parsons. I found extremely retrograde. All the 19th century was key to my because it’s so very subjective. It’s was like, “Why am I here when I this fed into my research and research, because mothering emotional and can be cloying and should be home with somebody led me on the path to “Home was perilous in the 19th century. self-indulgent. who genuinely needs me?” But on Truths.” I turned to photography Women died all of the time. This the other hand, I was resentful to help me figure out my feelings “lived experience” of women does that my husband was going to of ambivalence and see what the not square with the countless EMH: Elinor Carucci is a very thought it? A show on mothers! beautiful woman, and Hanna Nobody thought that was going Putz, another artist included to happen. in “Home Truths,” photographs many women who are also EMH: When we were at The beautiful in a traditional sense. Photographers’ Gallery in I wonder if their photographs London last month, they were would be as interesting to the saying how it was one of their public if their subjects weren’t most successful shows. as striking? SB: And I had to fight so hard to SB: “Home Truths” features get that show. It’s also important artists who have a certain to stress that while it’s about the aesthetic. That was a purposeful representation of motherhood, it’s curatorial strategy. Beyond also really about photography. Both aesthetics, I wanted to engage have equal importance. It was with documentary photography about dealing with the ideas of to make the selection cohesive. absence and loss and excess, which Documentary was engaged with are very much in photographic through a variety of strategies and culture at the moment, with the approaches, including: compulsive networked image and the loss of diaristic accounts (Fred Hüning the photographic object. and Elina Brotherus); performance documents (Janine Antoni); EMH: In a couple of reviews 14 15 seemingly more traditional art of “Home Truths,” you were documentary, which combines talking about the absence of candid moments with staged the object and how few things scenarios (Ana Casas, Elinor are printed anymore… Carucci and Tierney Gearon); staged or overtly performed SB: Exactly. That the exhibition narratives (Hanna Putz and Leigh was very artful and beautiful and Ledare); the use of vernacular the installation was site specific footage or photographs (Annu are key to this idea of materiality Palakunnathu Matthew and Ann and photographic loss. A lot of the Fessler); and real-time video work hadn’t been printed before. (Katie Murray). Ana Casas Broda’s work was The beauty element is there printed to fit that space and Fred because I wanted people to look. Hüning’s book was edited to fit that It is not there in all the pieces, space. The work in the Foundling but I am not denying it certainly Museum dealt with loss vividly plays a role. It is like baby steps, and acutely as to deal with the site I guess. I wanted to talk about a in which the photographs were subject in a way that people would housed. want to come and see. Nearly 70,000 people came to that show EMH: Not to state the obvious, top: Grantly Dick-Read. Woman in Ante-Natal Classes Exercising, 1955. in London. It was voted one of but it really seems like “Home

bottom: the best exhibitions of 2013 in Truths” meant an extraordinary The Edinburgh Stereoscopic Atlas of Obstetrics, Plate 82. Pendulous Belly, 1908. The Guardian. Who would have deal to you. SB: I loved working on the Cecil Beaton in 1968, which Marcus, there doesn’t seem to be quite strongly about that. It doesn’t exhibition and book. I’d never featured fashion portraits, so it intimacy at all in their photographs, always translate because it was worked on a project that mattered is not like art galleries that show but actually their process is very made as an image. It was made as to me so personally. I had fashion to be cool and bring in personal and immediate. It’s very a commercial venture to operate undergone large-scale public larger audiences. The National collaborative in the way they push on a page or a website. Fashion projects that were great to Portrait Gallery gets it. It knows their subjects. And Corinne’s photographers’ work is so beholden work on, but I was never really where portraits appear and that relationship is obviously very to advertising and branding that emotionally engaged. My first is in fashion photography. It’s a firsthand in the way she relates to it’s hard to see it out of that book was “Art Photography Now” gallery about people of the time. her subjects. It’s like she fell in love context. Their work is about the and, really, I didn’t give a shit As an institution, it wanted to do when she shot. As I was selecting, page for context, so it has to have about art photography, but I did something very contemporary. I in this sort of “panning for gold” immediate punch. If you put it up it because that was my job and had worked there, so I had a approach, the relationships that on a wall for slow viewing as art it an incredible opportunity—and it relationship with the curator and fashion photographers have to can seem enormously superficial. was fascinating, of course. What I the director. I wrote with some create and build with their subjects But now I am going to slightly really loved about doing that book ideas and was approached to became more and more apparent contradict myself: Sometimes it can was the fact I interviewed all of curate it. The criteria was, simply, and a touchstone for the selection. work. A lot of Mario Sorrenti’s work the photographers, finding out why good portraits. There was a kindness to their can be understood and appreciated people do what they do. collaborations, regardless of the in an art context. The work done I don’t really care about art EMH: How did you come to the results. None of them approached in the early 1990s was done in a photography in the way that a lot final selection? their subjects with a meanness or more fluid and less commercial and of people do... I kind of go against cruelty, like Richard Avedon and conservative environment. Doing the tide. It’s like everyone is doing SB: Through a process of Irving Penn did. Both produced the show, we were never sure if the collage and obsessed with the elimination. What people often great work by putting people in images would translate to the wall. ontology of photographic identity, don’t realize is that artists do say, awkward positions or pinning them There was always doubt. However, 16 17 and I’m working my way through “No,” to projects like this. I started up against something. The work it was completely unfounded. There the complexities of motherhood with a wish list and then had to be featured in “Face of Fashion” was was a picture of Sharon Stone that and representation. Doing “Home flexible to get the photographers about forming relationships with could have just been a picture of Truths” and it being successful who I thought would work well in a the sitters. That may be over time, Sharon Stone, but it did something has given me a huge amount of group show. I worked very closely like Madonna with Steven Klein, amazing. It was not art. It didn’t confidence. I don’t think I had with the photographers to make or for a fleeting moment in Paolo have the same intentions, the same that confidence until now, even the selection tight and right for the Roversi’s beautiful studio. So it history, but it certainly resonated though I had done rather big public exhibition. was more about an approach and differently. exhibitions and books, like “How a feeling, rather than trying to fit We Are: Photographing Britain” at EMH: It was a really interesting work into a curatorial straitjacket. EMH: I understand the Tate Britain, which I co-curated lineup, because you had pairings distinction drawn by with Val Williams, and “Face of like Corinne Day alongside Mert EMH: What do you think of contemporaries that fashion Fashion” at the National Portrait and Marcus. fashion photography being cannot exist as art because of Gallery. shown in a museum context? its intention, but I also have SB: It was, and always is, about to disagree fundamentally that EMH: How did “Face of Fashion” the work—not how big the name is. SB: For the National Portrait intention is the only driving come about? What was your The photographers featured were Gallery, it’s fine. It was very clear force defining what art is. criterion for curating it? all very different, but what came from the beginning that the images A beautiful photograph of a out when I was looking at all the weren’t being presented as art; they woman’s garment that appears SB: It’s important to state here work was this idea of intimacy. It were there as portraits. That’s the in a magazine can beg the that the exhibition was at the was a probing into manifestations difference. I think once you put same set of aesthetic questions National Portrait Gallery, not an of intimacy and collaboration that them in an art context, it gets very from its audience as a painting, art gallery. The Portrait Gallery’s threaded the selection together. tricky, because let’s face it: Fashion regardless of the intention of first photography exhibition was When you think of Mert and is fashion, and art is art. I feel the artist. I was reading an article but instead to represent photograph is of. But they are about in this past month’s ArtForum all these other things. The something much more than beauty: by Thierry de Duve on “non- idea of intention is not only what it is about. art.” In the beginning, he misleading, but can be easily It’s perfectly OK to make discusses Clement Greenberg mistaken. beautiful pictures of women. People and his relationship to the will buy them and hang them on Italian philosopher Benedetto SB: I think most fashion their walls as art—art has a huge Croce. In trying to define this photographers hope to do that sliding scale of subjectivity. But category of “non-art,” he quotes if they are allowed within the if fashion pictures want to be Croce as saying, “All reality, all constraints of a commercial shoot, considered and understood as art possibility is virtually art, not which as you know are becoming within an institutional setting, then necessarily realized as art, but increasingly less creative. But they have to have more going on virtual as art.” I think there is one really does have to consider than just decoration. I can’t really plenty of “good art” being made context. To put a snapshot on the speak for the commercial art market, by fashion photographers in wall as art would make it look which is off-radar for me, and I am editorial publishing today. It’s ridiculous. The same can be said often genuinely confused over what just dismissed because it appears for fashion images or advertising— sells as art and what doesn’t. as an afterthought to their or indeed any other photography But we live in interesting times. advertising work. that was made for a completely Now, more than ever, museum When I’m creating my different context. This does not curators are being forced to think work, even if the initial mean to say they are not great about photographic culture because catalyst for its making is a images, but they have to be dealt photography is changing so much. commission from a fashion with slightly differently when put We’re at the most exciting times company—which is no different into a context that treats art in a for the medium. History is forever 18 19 from a commissioned portrait certain way. rewriting itself. How that has painting, historically—the Art is not just of something. It manifested so far is a much wider intention and ultimately what is about something. But to refer institutional interest in vernacular the work does is explore to your point about decoration— photography, but this interest will the relationship between which I am perhaps misreading have to ricochet to other types of color, texture, form and our as beauty—Richard Learoyd is a photography outside of art and understanding of what a good example; he takes beautiful with that new ways to understand photograph is. There are so photographs of lovely women in and appreciate it. That curators many questions buried inside wonderful clothes. He takes them have tended to ignore fashion one image that have nothing on a camera obscura, which is not photography until now means to do with fashion or the fact really crucial to know but it adds that it is rich for good brains to that the color and form is a certain durational element and really reevaluate those arbitrary Susan Bright is a British curator and writer based in New York. She was bound by a garment. Even haunting quality that is intriguing. art historical hierarchies that formerly the Assistant Curator of Photographs at the National Portrait when I construct a photograph, These portraits work as art because photography adopted. So I would Gallery in London, Curator for the Association of Photographers and the process itself is more the women he photographs have say: Give it ten years, because Acting Director of Photography at akin to painting than it is to fragility and vulnerability, both curators will have to deal with it Sotheby’s Institute. She is the author of “Home Truths: Photography and photography. In many ways, its human traits that fashion models institutionally rather than ignoring Motherhood,” “Art Photography Now” and “Auto Focus: The Self-Portrait in final form becomes more of an are not hired for. This is what it or doing bad exhibitions because Contemporary Photography,” and has illustration than a photograph. makes the photographs resonate they don’t really understand it. curated the blockbuster exhibitions “Home Truths: Photography and My point being: Even though on a more universal level and tips Motherhood” at The Photographer’s Gallery, “Face of Fashion” at the the subject of the image may them into a more nebulous territory National Portrait Gallery and “How We have to do with fashion, it that gives them substance as art Are: Photographing Britain” at the Tate Britain. Bright is currently pursuing a is—in fact—not at all intended works. The viewer is immediately PhD in curating at Goldsmiths College in London and is a visiting scholar at to merely represent fashion, drawn in by their beauty: what the the Art Institute of Boston. Elinor Carucci on Discovery

EMH: I want to know how you work and I really fell in love. I took began photographing. What is an afternoon class and got really the first memory you have of sucked into it. I could suddenly be being interested in photography? like the kids I was envious of: I could do photography twenty four-seven. EC: I did many other arts before I approached photography. I played EMH: Do you think a large part the piano starting when I was five, of what allowed you to fall in and I studied theater and drama. love with photography is its It was painful for me—especially immediacy? when I entered the High School of 20 21 the Arts in Jerusalem, where I was EC: I don’t really know what it is born and raised—because I realized that made me love it so much. It I am mediocre at playing the piano. was a lot about intimacy, which Also when I studied theater I never is something I still love in my had it in me like the other kids who work, making a moment very were practicing five hours a day, pure and concentrated. It was so to discover photography was a about my mom being able to look big deal. through the camera and for me to It started one afternoon I just see my mother’s face. This picked up my father’s camera— kind of connection, where I could he did some black and white see so much more in her, was photography and had a manual really almost addictive. When I Canon. I was wandering around photograph someone, it brings a the house and I went into my whole other level to how much I mom’s room. She woke up from know them. What I see in my work, an afternoon nap and I just started I didn’t even notice without the to take pictures of her as she was camera. waking up, looking at me, not saying anything, not thinking about EMH: That’s what your work anything… It was a very special does at its core. You reveal thing that happened, taking pictures and strip back so much of your of her. I took some pictures of me subject, where they’re less than and my brother and finished the naked. For me, it’s the opposite. roll. I went to the lab, looked at the When I put you in front of my camera, there’s more of a EC: I think people need to educate even little fights about what it was I didn’t stay away from happy, distance than when we first themselves somehow, so it was that I was photographing and why. smiling images, because they are meet. I suppose I prefer to very important for me to go to Why do I show her sometimes in a part of the reality. It’s, again, the illustrate how I want a person art school. I learned a lot and I not a bad light but an honest light? greatest love of all: the love of a to be, rather than to reveal a had good teachers who asked me, Every once in a while she asked mother for her children, but it’s truth about them. “What is this bullshit you’re doing?” for just a pretty picture of her to be more complicated than what we’re when I was trying to do the “good taken. So I take the pretty picture used to seeing. EC: That’s why I couldn’t do work.” One of them remembered and I retouch it for her, and then fashion seriously, because I want the work I showed when I wanted we go on to the bad—not bad, but EMH: Looking at your work, I the person to be who they are. I to get accepted, which was of my more honest—pictures. But she always wonder about restraint want to be connected to their flaws family, and he was like, “It’s all knows she had the right to veto if and how you’re able to capture and their weaknesses in the same right there.” So they also gave me she didn’t like a photograph. your images. It’s hard for me way I photograph myself. If I try the green light, like, “Go back to to imagine photographing as to portray them or reinvent them photographing your family. The EMH: I was just speaking with you do, because when I’m really somehow, it’s not working. For me, intimacy, the relationship… It’s all Susan Bright on the topic of deep in a moment I don’t want it’s more about peeling the layers there. It’s important enough.” motherhood and photography. to photograph anything; I want back and showing something very You have to get rid of what you I’d love for you to expand on to just experience life without intimate and honest. think you have to be. You think you the subject and your new book, a camera. I wonder how you have to be serious. Of course I’m “Mother.” are able to have such intimate EMH: What was the first body serious about my work, but I also moments and freeze time to of work that you did? Were had to let my intuition—the way EC: The book started when I create your picture. How do you you shooting your mom at the I see the world and feel, and the became pregnant in 2003. Of still achieve that immediacy, very beginning? freedom to play—return, to let my course it was a natural thing for without it being forced? photography have a life. I kind of me to start photographing the 22 23 EC: I was shooting my family in killed it by trying to be so serious. pregnancy, but something really EC: It’s both. Of course it does high school, in black and white. significant happened when I disrupt—it’s a physical thing. I Then I served in the Israeli army EMH: Was your family always became a mother. I was really have to set the light. I work with for two years. Then I went to extremely intimate? photographing out of almost lights most of the time, so there is the Bezalel Academy of Arts anger at how little we see in the technical aspect. I have lights and Design, it’s an art school in EC: Yes, always. My first body of art and photography about open, connected to the outlets. I Jerusalem. It took me a while work, “Closer,” is about my family motherhood—how we get so used have the camera on a tripod, on a to go back to photographing my while I was still living at home. to seeing either the Madonna 20-second self-timer so things are family because I came to art It’s a result of the way my parents and Child, beautiful works of art accessible. And my husband helps school, so I felt like: I can’t go raised me. They were very open, that I remember from studying me many times—in a moment like back and photograph my family; I very close—especially my mom. the history of art, or celebrities. breastfeeding. It had happened need to do important work. That’s Everything my brother or I did she What I felt and experienced during the day before, and I was like, “I how I did the worst work I’d ever thought was amazing. We were like pregnancy was so complex. It wish I could take a picture of this done, but eventually I got back to her geniuses, so she really opened was extremes living side by side: moment.” So the next day, we’ll set photographing the family in color... up the process. of anger and pain, and tiredness the frame, we’ll set the light and and joy and love, the deepest love I’ll leave it like that. Then when I’m EMH: Do you think you need to EMH: How did your mom react, I’ve ever felt. So even more than breastfeeding, I’ll have it set. And go to art school to do bad work? at first, to you photographing before, I was determined to show sometimes something completely It’s my belief that the purpose of her every waking minute? these two sides of photography unexpected happens. You know, my art school is to put you through in my work, to show that this is child is crying and I’m screaming, the wringer so that you can EC: At first she didn’t react much, the same day, this is a few hours and my husband already knows to come out of it with the ability to but sometimes she would look at apart, this is motherhood, and this keep pressing the timer. know what not to make. the pictures and she wouldn’t like is motherhood... And it’s complex them. We got into conversations or and layered. 24 25

Elinor Carucci. From “Mother,” published by Prestel, 2014. EMH: I hate that feeling of live their lives like nudists, but to be like I was before with my not having a camera and that I saw them naked and it wasn’t husband, to talk about Americans amazing moment happens and that unusual. Also, among women “them,” as opposed to “us” Israelis. you have to let it go. It seems in Israel, it is very common to be Now, these are my children and the like you always capture it. naked around each other. It’s more public school they’re going to is in unusual here. my community, so it really had to EC: No, it’s just that you don’t see So when I moved to America change. the thousands of images that I didn’t and showed this work, I knew the get. I really don’t always get it. This work of me nude next to my father is ten years of work. And I also don’t would be provocative. I was aware take pictures constantly. I can have a of that. Then I met many American few weeks without any photo taken. women who told me they had never seen their mother naked. That EMH: I was also raised very was a shocking discovery. Then I close to my mother. Yet, when realized: Oh my God, my work is I look at your work I think a lot even more different than I thought of the pictures are almost too it was because of the difference in personal. They’re uncomfortable the culture. But I still edited. There to look at, and that’s what are no completely nude images of makes them so powerful. I the kids. I censored those out. remember having childhood memories that were this close EMH: Would you ever show with my mother, but I almost certain images in Israel that you want to suppress them because wouldn’t show here? 26 27 they would seem inappropriate now, as a man looking back, EC: No. In Israel, my work is not which seems to stem from being shown at all. being an American raised in the Midwest. Are there negative EMH: The homeland has reactions to your work? Have rejected you! Do you now feel people ever confronted you? more American than Israeli—or do you think you’ll always be EC: Some have confronted me Israeli first? and I have read comments, but I feel that we don’t need to suppress EC: It’s something I think about a those moments. It’s the most lot. It’s hard to really break it down beautiful thing that happens to us, and figure it out, the identity thing, and I’m not talking about sexuality when you’re an immigrant. But I Elinor Carucci is a New York-based towards children. I’m talking about think something really changed photographer from Jerusalem, Israel. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and has sensuality and intimacy and love— when I gave birth to the kids published the photographic monographs what will nurture our children and here in America. It solidified that “Closer,” “Diary of a Dancer” and “Mother.” Carucci has had solo be a part of their sexuality one this is home, for sure. I feel very exhibitions at the Gagosian Gallery and Edwynn Houk Gallery, and her work has day when they’re older. But right American; I feel very much at home. been exhibited at numerous museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, now we cover our bodies all the This is my tribe, my community, New York. She is a regular contributor time. Also it is a cultural thing, my best friends are here... But to the New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, Aperture and W. a difference between Israeli and it’s still hard. I gave birth to Along with serving as a professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York, American culture. As an Israeli, I two Americans. I’m raising two she has taught at Princeton University and been a visiting lecturer at Harvard saw my parents naked. They didn’t American children. It’s impossible University. George Pitts on Perception

GP: You enjoy making distinctions because—in all honesty—there in your speech… are plenty of reasons to be fearful. The thoughtlessness and the EMH: I find language desperate craving for attention that interesting…the many ways in takes place in our culture are the which you can say the same neurotic undercurrents of American thing with endless subtleties. sensibility. All these factors make That’s what is interesting about me much more conscientious than I photography. It’s the visual arm would choose to be and invariably of making those distinctions. I start reflecting on the human You could photograph a body, I condition. I just find that you have 28 29 could photograph the same body to walk on eggshells if you’re and there are infinite ways of fairly conscious or purport to be representing it. intelligent, because this country in some ways is very, very infantile. GP: Does a body have much I am interested in the quality of meaning for you as far as content, humanity that you notice in my or is it just a pretext for your photography. I don’t think I think decorative preoccupation? about it that much, but my work and my temperament betray that EMH: It’s simply a means interest. towards articulating other ideas. EMH: Has your work always GP: So you don’t actually need the been preoccupied with the nude body as a constant primary motif? and representing the body in a sexual way? EMH: The body to me is like it is to a fashion designer; it’s GP: No, I was an abstract painter a hanger for color and texture. most of my life. That’s another But no, I’m not interested in reason why I’m totally not in awe humanity. I know you are though. of abstraction in photography. I’ve done it every which way. I GP: It’s a natural fit for me. As an don’t think it’s extraordinary artist, I want to exhibit a certain for photographers to explore fearlessness towards mankind abstraction. If anything, it has been covered so extensively in working within the parameters of EMH: That’s kind of a and relieved of the obligation to the practice of painting that it paradox is just my cross to bear conservative view, isn’t it? You illustrate situations involving looks conservative to merely be because I don’t have a longing to want photography to only stay people or genre content. preoccupied with abstraction in return to painting, exclusively. But I in the realm of photography and photography. A lot of people see still have the highest regard for the to not cross into something new. EMH: But why don’t you like it as radical and some sort of seriousness of painting. photography to exhibit painterly conceptual leap from having to GP: I don’t like the medium qualities? Do you think there’s a work with concrete subject matter, EMH: You think it’s more of photography to be overlaid lie involved? when, in fact, abstraction can serious than photography? with too many of the physical be as conservative as any other mannerisms that are unique to GP: No, I just think it’s not drawing stylistic practice. It’s very hard GP: The world thinks so. painting. I don’t like photography on photography for its greater to make transcendent forms with Increasingly photography is seen that generally looks like a mixed- strengths. There are properties abstraction. Some would say that in a smaller, more disposable media representation. I’m very to using film or shooting digitally abstraction is as exhausted as our light, regardless of the level sympathetic to the mash-ups of that are inherent to photography, prevalent notions of realism. of achievement. I still get the photography and paint executed which I think are sufficient toward impression, judging from art by Robert Rauschenberg, Andy making a great photograph. I EMH: I think abstraction auctions, that the cult of the sacred, Warhol, Sigmar Polke and Kiefer. don’t think it has to be overlaid was exhausted with Lawrence one-of-a-kind object attributed But I see these works and this with schlocky mixed-media Weiner and the idea of the object to art outdistances the perceived direction as an avant-garde form of techniques to be a compelling itself not being necessary. value of a great photograph. drawing and lyrical expression that practice. The psychological acuity, features photography as merely the beautiful rigors of naturalism GP: So you don’t give much credit EMH: Are you talking from a an ingredient in an essentially and verisimilitude, the obsessive to the Neo-Expressionists? market standpoint or are you painterly activity. In their works, attention to lighting, the radical talking intellectually? I don’t feel I’m being implored abstraction inherent in capturing 30 31 EMH: No. The closest thing to contemplate the results from reality from an inspired, non- to Expressionism that I GP: I’m talking about the populist the perspective of photography, derivative perspective, the uncanny give credence to would be viewpoint. Your average consumer, and I don’t really think that the precision or blurred formalism are Anselm Kiefer. I wonder, to go who is not necessarily intellectual, pleasures these works afford have just a few of the virtues exemplified back, if what you said about values painting far more highly much to do with photography. by photography. abstraction in photography is than photography. Passionate Photography is just a texture maybe because you don’t hold connoisseurs or intellectuals among others employed to convey EMH: Would you consider photography, as a medium, in engrossed in semiotics covet sensuously material effects and a digital to be mixed media, like the highest esteem, because of photography; but even there, they contemporary look enhanced by the an excessive use of Photoshop? your background in painting. are taught to covet photography. presence of photographic elements. It’s funny how painters specifically GP: It can be. In certain instances GP: There’s probably more than EMH: What about your distinction “use” photography. Now that I that would be problematic for me. a grain of truth to that, but at between photography and art? think about it; they allow more I’m not a big fan of the present the same time I can only do my Earlier you were using them room for meaninglessness and norms of magazine retouching, best work with photography. separately. You said I always sheer materiality, which are not where the most minuscule details Transposing my painterly wanted my photography to be art. the primary domain of photography of a woman’s face are rubbed sensibility to photography is as we know it. Suddenly I think away with Photoshop. I sometimes crucial to the pleasure I gain from GP: I don’t want photography to I understand more clearly why wonder what a master beauty being a photographer. It’s kind of exhibit the pretensions of art, meaning photography is moving away from photographer like Irving Penn perverse, but I would have never that it emulates the look of painting the obligation to represent subject thought about this tendency? been able to invest this much belief or “art” as we know it in such a way matter and the more familiar kinds in photography had I not trained that the photograph becomes too self- of content. I suppose it appears EMH: Irving Penn rubbed out for over 20 years as a painter. conscious. I like photography for its more radical to certain artists if the details of women’s faces That’s paradoxical, and probably own unique properties. the practice is more self-reflexive in the darkroom with dodging 32 33

George Pitts. Sovereign Syre, New York City, 2010. and burning techniques. I don’t for. I don’t think there’s a better be fully verbalized. I like things I don’t think I am. It’s ironic actually see a difference in how medium than photography for that can’t be fully verbalized but because I photograph people photographers retouch today, depicting or representing the body. are apprehended or felt. So can all the time. They are my to be honest—with exception I’m still endeavoring to discover you see why someone like me, who predominant subject matter, but to shape altering, but that’s what else photography is genuinely does shoot human beings, would I’m always trying to erase the not what you’re talking about. eloquent at depicting. It’s very hard be interested in acting? Not so person from the frame. There is a real stigma against for photography to accommodate much a conventional theatrical retouching in the public opinion, poetry, but that’s another of my performance, but the idea of GP: You’re more interested in which is misguided and rooted personal preoccupations. I’m also inhabiting or elucidating your own adjectives like “elegance,” as in ignorance. I always wonder really interested in the vagaries being in behalf of a good picture. It opposed to nouns like “being.” You how people can go to the of staging, or staged narrative sounds easier than it is. want to characterize the beauty of cinema and see a Hollywood representation, which draws elegance rather than the beauty of film and be OK with the gross more parallels to cinema and EMH: The problem I have with the individual. exaggerations on screen, but the attributes of fiction. In the that is you’re beholden to your then get upset when Vogue beauty of acting or postmodern subject. That’s too much risk. I EMH: I think there’s more puts out a cover where they performance, I get inspiration from would rather control my subject. truth to elegance. I think a have retouched a woman’s face. studying how a performer works picture of a person acting Nothing is real in cinema, and with complex material within the GP: I thought you would go there. out daily life is much less we’ve accepted that as a culture. confines of a photograph, like say So that means you don’t really truthful than an abstraction But with photography, people in the work of Carrie Mae Weems. need an original or even accidental of a person that’s elegantly still expect some idea of truth, I’m finding it really helps my articulation of being? You’re fine done. That’s why when I see which is antithetical to the photography to be aware of some with seeing behavior as a kind documentary photography, like medium, because photography of the demands of performance and of motif that’s just one of many Nan Goldin, or photographers has always lied. And, then, look inhabiting a character. It seems to elements in your work. You don’t who have dedicated their lives 34 35 at the history of painting or be a natural segue into the kind of care about the uniqueness of the to representing a lifestyle, I sculpture and how artists have photography I do. articulation of feeling and behavior. find that work to be much more depicted women—they were That’s not critical to your work? acting than truth. That’s why I always idealized. So were the EMH: How? characterize that as illustration. men, for that matter. Which EMH: No, and I don’t think brings me to a blunt question: GP: I photograph female types, but behavior is unique. I think that GP: It’s funny you think of Nan Do you not like my work? also I like to coax an authentic humanity operates in patterns. Goldin as documentary. I think performance out of certain subjects, Focusing on an articulation of that’s a word that she might GP: I like your work, but you seem without it being apparent or being in the flesh is misguided. use—just to make sure the to be very intentionally making obvious. I would rather point my lens at viewer is aware of the purity of something that passes for art ideals than try to believe in the her intentions and the degree more consciously than I am. It EMH: But isn’t that what we all mistruths of behavior. of difficulty in maintaining her seems more critical for you that the do, as photographers? particular stance, rather than first reading of your work be that GP: Well, your work probably staging the image. I find it funny it’s art, rather than photography, GP: Yes, but it’s not something verifies that conclusion, but you that staging is such a big issue whereas I’m perfectly OK with I take for granted because I know women have this expansive in photography, when it has long photography being the initial actually want manifestations of emotional range and that can’t been a staple in the lexicon of reading of what I’m doing. my direction to be visible in the help but have a great fascination the painting practice. Everything I don’t feel any compulsion to pictures. On one level, it’s just part for me. A great director like Rainer can seem so self-conscious in apologize for photography’s of the process of interacting with a Werner Fassbinder relished the wide photography. Whether one can use relative modesty in the face of subject, but then there’s a certain emotional range that women exhibit. methods in photography that are what a great painting can do. level of attention you can bring to timeless in painting one has to There are certain things that your contemplation of a subject EMH: The distinction is that question to the nth degree. That’s photography is really well suited that can lead to results that can’t you’re interested in people, and why I think there’s something inherently provincial about conclusions about what that means. structurally, where one can really photography, which is screwy. Yet, you’re comfortable with the work out some very vital ideas that word decoration, right? need space. I’d like to think that EMH: But I think it’s more I’m tricking certain viewers into representative of our time. EMH: I am. All art inevitably is looking at my work by including That’s not to say that painting decoration in some end. superficial affinities with the look wasn’t scrutinized but, because of a fashion story. But the “look” of the way the history of art GP: Do you know why you aren’t is basically rooted in the number has progressed, you look at interested in the human condition, of pages that are given to fashion photography as an extension of or the interior life of a human stories. Fashion’s intention is to painting. It has replaced it as being? Or why you don’t try to impart pleasure, and most of us like a medium, so now painting can get some semblance of that in a our pleasure drawn out. get away with not asking as portrait? Does it have no interest many questions. for you whatsoever? EMH: Do you think art needs to impart pleasure? GP: It affords more freedom, a EMH: I do encapsulate a person broader sense of freedom and in my portraiture to the fullest GP: I would say all art must give possibility, which is what one possible extent. Yet, the veneer pleasure, to paraphrase the great would ideally want from any art of my imagery doesn’t need to poet Wallace Stevens. That’s form. Photography, by comparison, appear to be emotional for the a necessity of art: It must give is young, but the rules seem to sake of appearances. “I’m fine pleasure. However difficult that be really apparent if you take with the subject becoming a pleasure may be, it is a form of photography seriously. There postured sculpture in profile, pleasure. That’s the great thing are too many rules attributed to because that’s what we are. about art, pleasure can have 36 37 great photography for my sense attributes of difficulty, or great of pleasure. It’s not entirely easy GP: Doesn’t that mean at the end complexity, and still impart this to talk about those rules, but one of the day you’re a formalist? sensation we call pleasure. comes up against them when one is trying to do serious photography: EMH: Yes, very much the limits that collectively surround so. Speaking of, have you the depiction of the nude, the ever approached fashion limits of what the properties of photography? color ought to be, what really good color in photography is… Is GP: My work is profoundly it naturalistic color? These little influenced by fashion, but I don’t inner conflicts within the medium want the word “fashion” to of photography interest me, but involuntarily enter the viewer’s mind. they seem puny in the face of the problems that painting has EMH: Why? Do you think it wrestled with. They seem petty. cheapens it? George Pitts is a photographer, writer and painter. His work has EMH: I would say I use GP: No, it just undercuts the appeared in numerous museum and gallery exhibitions in the United photography as a means to integrity of what I am doing. States, Japan and Canada. He is the former Photography Director of achieve painting. What I’m taking from fashion is the Vibe magazine, and his photographs have been published in the New narrative length that is inherent York Times Magazine, New York GP: That’s totally acceptable. in having ten or more pages to Magazine and the Paris Review. He is currently an assistant professor And that definition fits me like a work with. In the print medium, and the Director of Photographic Practices at Parsons The New glove, too, but we draw different the fashion story is the only story, School for Design. Taryn Simon on Identity

EMH: What is your first EMH: You have spoken about memory of photography? Is the relationship between the photography something you formal, aesthetic qualities of came to later in life or was it of your photographs being as interest to you early on? important as the conceptual nature of your projects—with TS: One of my earliest memories the two having to coexist of photography is through a harmoniously. Is this still true photograph. My father and I used of your work, or have you to invent elaborately constructed become less interested in the scenes in nature using leaves and photograph itself? 38 39 twigs, and arrange them to form geometric shapes that were then TS: I’m just interested in a different photographed. set of formal qualities than I was ten years ago. Lately I’ve been EMH: Your approach to working with multiple images, photography is very unique so my focus is directed toward in that it is arguably more graphic design. The images have anthropological than taken on a more bare, machine-like photographic. It seems to utilize form servicing the collective view. the very origins of the medium in its indexical nature. Did you EMH: The first public always see photography as a project you created was “The means to illustrate or portray a Innocents.” Can you briefly talk version of truth? Is it truth that about how this project laid the you seek in your projects? groundwork for the direction your work would take? TS: I’m not sure what I’m chasing, but I know it when I’m in it. I do TS: “The Innocents” informed a have a tendency to organize what I study of the relationship between collect into systems and categories. text and image, which rests at It’s an imposed order, which allows the foundation of all my work. me to sift through chaos with some All of the men I photographed semblance of coherence. were victims of misidentification, resulting from a “text” or history being associated with their image, EMH: With your most recent which was false. The power of body of work, “Birds of the West a photograph and its associated Indies,” you have moved into a narrative, in tandem, had the more abstract space, dealing with potential to lead to a death (on cinema, literature, fiction and real death row). This left an indelible people simultaneously. What led mark on my view of the medium. you to the James Bond book?

EMH: What is the relationship TS: James Bond represents the between exhibiting your work in most successful fantasy production a gallery and how it appears in series, economically, with adjusted book form? Do you feel your work dollars over a long period of time. I needs to exist in a gallery setting? wanted to look at the components of this desire, which is founded in TS: My work is primarily viewed a contract between the viewer and in institutional settings. I’ve the franchise. The viewer knows always preferred to see my work the narrative before entering the in a public space. Books have door and has certain expectations always been primary. I love the with every new iteration. This art of bookmaking. It’s something powerful, Western male lead I spend an enormous amount of figure is surrounded by certain time on. accessories in substitution, which support the fantasy: women, EMH: Do you ever find exhibiting weapons and vehicles. They 40 41 work in the museum or gallery function like trading cards, in setting to be limiting, considering constant replacement for one your subject matter? another. This idea of substitution leads back to the character’s TS: For me, the setting has name itself, as it was taken by Ian only challenged the work to Fleming while writing his novels in take on different forms. My the West Indies. The original James most important exhibition to Bond was an ornithologist who date was one in which I had to constructed the most important respond to space and re-shape taxonomy on birds of the region. a work, allowing it to function Fleming took his name to represent in Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s his lead character, who he saw as Neue Nationalgalerie, which has “a blunt instrument in the hands of no walls. I took the bookshelves the government.” Taryn Simon. Excerpt from “Chapter XI, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII.” from the basement (built by Mies) c. Official Adolf Hitler postage stamp and Hans Frank imitation stamp. The Hitler stamp was printed in 1941 and constructed them on steroids. Taryn Simon is an artist and for the second anniversary of the founding of the Generalgouvernement and was in circulation until the end of Guggenheim Fellow whose mediums the Second World War. A replica of the Hitler stamp, with Frank’s image, was produced by British intelligence The works from “A Living Man and released in Poland to provoke friction between Frank and Hitler. Henry Gitner Philatelists, Inc., New York. consist of three integrated elements: Declared Dead” were embedded photography, text and graphic design. e. Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine, taken by German troops from the Czartoryski collection during These tools serve as the principal the Second World War. It hung in the Wawel apartment of Hans Frank and was later brought to his family in these structures that became instruments in her pivotal works: home, Schoberhof. After Frank’s arrest, the painting was returned to the Czartoryski Museum, where it now “Birds of the West Indies” (2013-2014), hangs across from the empty frame for Raphael’s missing Portrait of a Youth. Czartoryski Museum, Krakow. a part of the work. It changed “The Picture Collection” (2013), “A f. Rembrandt’s Landscape with the Good Samaritan, taken by German troops from the Czartoryski collection everything for me moving forward. Living Man Declared Dead and Other during the Second World War. One of only eight oil landscapes painted by the artist, it was returned to the Chapters I-XVIII” (2008-2011) and Czartoryski Museum upon Frank’s arrest. Czartoryski Museum, Krakow. I no longer look at space the same. “Black Square” (2006-present). Her photographs and writings have been the 7. Frank, Norman, 06 Mar. 1928. Bavarian television facilities director (retired). Schliersee, Germany. So, no, I don’t find it limiting. subject of monographic exhibitions at 8. MJK, 24 May 1958. (Information withheld). [Sent clothing as representation.] the Museum of Modern Art, New York, © Taryn Simon. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Tate Modern and Neue Nationalgalerie. 42 43

“A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters” (installation view). Exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie, 2011. Switzerland (detail). From “Birds of the West Indies,” 2014. © Taryn Simon. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photograph by David Von Becker. © Taryn Simon. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery Vince Aletti on Context

EMH: How did you first discover course, at a certain point started photography? focusing on the nudes—I was ten or 12 years old. But in the process of VA: I grew up with a darkroom that kind of adolescent obsession, in the house. My father made I discovered Irving Penn, Richard one in the attic, so I still have Avedon, Henri Cartier-Bresson, this lingering romance about the and their pictures really made an darkroom and the red light and impact. It was that connection to the chemical smell—and watching photography as an art form that a picture come to life. My father made a big impression on me. Then had a regular job, but photography I began absorbing photography in 44 45 was something he really liked to do magazines, especially the fashion and his framed photos were on the magazines my mother got, and that walls in our house. So I grew up became a serious interest. seeing photography in that context, not just in a magazine. I saw it EMH: When you first started as something that people did and looking at photographs, were worked at—not something abstract. they just that: photographs, or were you already able to see EMH: What did he shoot? them in a broader “art” light?

VA: Portraits, still lifes…what I VA: I appreciated them—and I think of as “camera club” subjects, still do—as pictures on a page. nice landscape-y stuff. They Sometimes that’s where they belong were actually good; he had some and that’s where they look great. talent. He took pictures of my They don’t need to be taken out sisters and me. We have incredible of that context. Then, I developed documentation of every Christmas this interest in graphic design and and Easter. He died when I was magazines and the whole look ten, in a plane crash, but he left of a magazine. All of that was in behind this whole archive of U.S. the back of my mind when I really Camera Annuals. That also really started looking at photography in affected me, because they were galleries, which was in New York kept on shelves in my room. I in the mid ’60s, when there weren’t

would look through them and, of very many photography galleries. Richard Avedon. Harper’s Bazaar (cover), April 1965. 46 47 EMH: Which galleries did that was kind of casual. I wasn’t In the beginning, I profiled Barbara of the first things I push-pinned you go to? thinking of myself as a photo critic Ess, Neil Winokur, Andrea Modica, to my wall. But then I thought: I at that point; I was just somebody Fazal Sheikh, Adam Fuss. I did should have this whole magazine. VA: The Witkin Gallery, when it was who enjoyed writing about Sally Mann relatively early. That At the time there were a number on 57th Street, which was mostly photography. was kind of how it all came about, of backdate magazine stores in 19th century and late 20th century and during that process I moved New York, mostly unorganized. So classics available in bins and lots of EMH: How critical were your away from music so much that I I started looking for it and I didn’t boxes of ephemera and stereo cards reviews? just couldn’t write about it with the find it, but I found a lot of other and things like that. Then Light same intensity again. magazines that seemed pretty Gallery, which was much more VA: They were critical, not amazing. So I started buying some contemporary. And I remember just teardown critical, but they were EMH: I wanted to talk to you of them, little by little: covers that going out and looking at stuff, going not uncritical. They gave me a way about fashion photography, I’d seen in magazines and things to art galleries and being obsessed to develop a language and to train because it’s rare for people to that just looked great. Mostly it with Andy Warhol and that myself. I didn’t study photography; I consider it as more than just was a lot of Penn and Avedon approach to pop culture, which—for studied it by going out and looking pictures that sell clothing. and Horst and Cecil Beaton, kind me—was very based in photography. at everything. I’d been looking for Did you first get involved of everybody. In searching for All of that had a lot to do with my 20 years before I started writing with it through your love of this magazine, I realized how background, because I didn’t really about it, but never with the idea Penn’s work? important seeing those pictures in start writing about photography that I was honing in on the subject. context was. For example, seeing until the late ’80s, when I was at At the Voice, I also started a VA: Through Avedon, actually. In “Dovima with the Elephants” with the Village Voice. series of profiles of photographers, 1965, I bought a magazine that another picture from that same which gave me a comfortable way turned out to be his anniversary session, on the opposite page, EMH: How did you transition to transition into writing longer issue at Harper’s Bazaar. It was that was part of this long Paris out of writing about music into critical pieces. this major Pop Art issue that was collections piece... It went on for 48 49 writing about photography? so much about that particular like 25 pages. EMH: Who was the first moment in pop culture. There VA: It probably would not have photographer you profiled? were pictures of the Beatles, Bob EMH: It’s interesting that happened had I not been at the Dylan, Robert Rauschenberg, everyone knows that picture… Village Voice, where you were VA: I think it was Dawoud Bey, Jasper Johns, Jean Shrimpton and really encouraged to follow your who was living in Brooklyn at the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then still VA: But not how it fits! That’s interests and where I was writing time and who had his second show. a teenager named Lew Alcindor). how I got hooked. The more I saw, about black pop and dance music I was more comfortable writing There was art by Roy Lichtenstein the more I wanted to see and the and music videos, and things about people who were just getting and George Segal. It was this more I realized that this was the that helped me make a transition started, rather than someone who incredible time capsule and every essential material. between music and photography. had a long career that I had to picture was taken by Avedon—and Around that same time, I decided catch up on. It came mostly from every picture was spectacular. I EMH: Were there other pictures I really wanted to write about my interest in or curiosity about remember fixating on it, tearing the from the series that are as something besides music and the why they did what they did and cover off and putting it on the wall profound as “Dovima with the reviewer who was writing regular how they made a living, because in my dorm room, and tearing out Elephants?” photography exhibition reviews there weren’t that many places to all my favorite photos. decided to move on and gave me a go with your work. Even if you had VA: Yes. All those Avedon Paris spot to move into, in the centerfold a show, you weren’t likely to make EMH: Do you still have an issue, series were extensive. There were calendar section. That’s what I was a lot of money from it. The people not torn up? usually at least five pictures in each really happy to do. It’s kind of like I was speaking to did have a show that Avedon chose to reproduce what I’m doing at The New Yorker at the time I was writing about VA: Yes! Years later that cover later as exhibition prints and that now, just really brief reviews of them, but I wasn’t focused much on image was something I carried became famous Avedon pictures. current shows. It gave me a way success. It was really just about around with me. When I moved He did the Paris collections for to get into photography journalism being a creative artist, at that point. into this apartment, it was one almost every year of the ’50s, in September. It was the September EMH: How do you view fashion issue with an Avedon cover and photography now? Avedon pages. Even back then September was the key issue, and VA: That’s a little difficult, because each issue was more extraordinary I’m never one who thinks of than the last. the golden age as the past. It’s I worked on “Avedon Fashion: always just changing. Part of 1944-2000” at the International what was interesting when we did Center of Photography in 2009 the Avedon show was his post with Carol Squiers, and she did the Harper’s Bazaar work, when he research on that period of Avedon was at Vogue. By the time Avedon and his work. This was after World was at Vogue, Penn was at his War II and Paris was devastated. height, and for the first time they It took a long time for the city to were sharing a magazine. That get back on its feet. Fashion was was very interesting, to see how important, and the idea of bringing that played out. Paris fashion back was crucial to creating this romantic idea of Paris. EMH: Were they fierce competitors? EMH: It was like rebuilding the city, physically and emotionally. VA: Yes, but not enemies. I think they saw each other as very VA: Exactly. Avedon was creating different characters. They knew these fantasies and incredible they could coexist, because they 50 51 narratives with men and women did very different things, but I think making scenes and gambling and they also knew that they were both whatever. They were so convincing at the top of their game. They both and so beautiful. They are little film wanted to be number one. So for stills, little fictions. them to be at the same place at the same time showed how distinctive EMH: That is what I think each of them was. They could do of when I think of fashion very different things in the same photography. It’s illustration. space, but after a certain mid ’60s It’s illustrating an idea, which is point—when Diana Vreeland was very opposite of a lot of fashion at Vogue—little by little they became photography now. I grew up the old guard. The new guard was looking at Avedon as well, and Guy Bourdin, Helmut Newton and that’s where I got a lot of my Deborah Turbeville. Penn and early inspiration. I’ve always Avedon became the establishment wanted the most romantic idea, that needed to be overturned. I think not reality. That’s what fashion Avedon was much more conscious does: It gives you an escape to of keeping his position. Penn, I don’t some fantastical... think, cared as much in that same way because he was less and less VA: …some place that seems interested in fashion. not real, necessarily, but better than anything. EMH: And his work speaks volumes to that. Richard Avedon. Dovima with the Elephants, August 1955. VA: Really, his fashion work in the in 1994, there was almost no VA: I tend to disagree with that. stuff that Steven Klein does and late ’60s and ’70s was fairly routine. fashion featured in it. I thought that Juergen has such a strong gallery that Meisel does every once in was a huge mistake. He’s a great presence that I think there isn’t a a while. I’m happy to see things EMH: In my opinion, most portrait photographer, but he is the problem. There is less of that these develop in a natural way. Where people think of Avedon as a great fashion photographer, as far days, because there are so many would I like to see fashion going? fashion photographer, and as I’m concerned. people who have participated in Somewhere more avant-garde. most people think of Penn as a fashion, serious photographers Most people don’t feel comfortable photographer who sometimes EMH: Is that one of the first who made great fashion work. with that, and there aren’t as many did fashion, whether or not evidences of the art world Philip-Lorca diCorcia, for me, is a creative outlets. Even though there that’s accurate. He was seen rejecting fashion? great example. are tons of magazines, I don’t feel as a photographer who did like a lot of them are pushing their portraits of different groups of VA: No. This was not the art EMH: To me, he’s kind of the photographers. There was a period, people and dabbled in fashion. world; this was Avedon. It was exception. What he did with W not that long ago, when it seemed his own inability to understand is some of the best fashion that like magazines were looking for VA: I think that’s accurate on some how important his fashion work magazine has ever printed. I interesting photographers outside level. Certainly Penn’s heart was was. I think he saw it as something think it makes sense to see it in of fashion to do fashion work. more in still life and the portraits that would be perceived as less a gallery because it is a perfect It really ended up pulling a lot and the “Worlds in a Small Room” important, that the other work was marriage, but often times that of people in, in a way that was series, and those things… Any time more crucial. But he’d already had a doesn’t work. invigorating. Every once in a while he did anything outside of fashion, major show of mostly fashion work that still happens, but I’d love to it was just amazing. At that point, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art VA: I agree. I really value fashion see that more regularly. in the ’70s, Avedon started “In the in the mid ’70s and he’d had a lot photography so I really have a American West” and started doing of recognition for that. Maybe he problem with people who say, lots of outside projects. He did that just felt that he wanted to focus on “Oh, it’s only fashion.” When you 52 53 series called “The Family” in 1976 other stuff. I never really asked him look at history and you look at for Rolling Stone, all the portraits point blank about that, but he did go Horst and Beaton and George of politicians in Washington DC... through a period where he tended to Hoyningen-Huene and Baron He just threw himself more into downplay fashion in favor of other Adolph De Meyer, and great portraiture and did less and less things that a lot of times were less historical fashion work, it is just fashion. interesting. Toward the end of his incredible. It should not be seen as career, he did very little fashion lesser because it’s about clothes. EMH: Did he see himself as outside of commercial advertising There is enough perspective at this an artist? for Versace and occasional shoots point to see it that way. There’s for The New Yorker. perspective on Guy Bourdin and VA: Yes. He wanted to be seen Helmut Newton. It’s difficult for as an artist. He took the position EMH: Is that the age-old people to see current work in that his fashion work was not as dilemma: You want to shoot the same perspective, but I think important. He didn’t disown it, but fashion, but you also want Steven Meisel is equal to all of Vince Aletti is a writer and art collector. He reviews photography exhibitions for he downplayed it at a certain point. to shoot art? This kind of those people, and no one is paying The New Yorker’s “Goings On About distinction isn’t really talked attention to him. Town” and pens a regular column for Photograph. He also contributes to EMH: To be accepted by the about in the open. What are Aperture, Artforum, W and Document— and was a regular contributor to and art world? your thoughts? Why is there EMH: Where would you want to columnist for Creem in the 1970s. Aletti such a divide? Even someone see fashion photography going? is the winner of the 2005 Infinity Award for Writing from the International Center VA: Who knows? I don’t think that like Juergen Teller is shown of Photography, the museum for which he co-curated “Weird Beauty: Fashion it would have kept him from being in a gallery, but still is never VA: I’m just happy to see it Photography Now” and “Avedon: Fashion accepted, but maybe he thought really perceived as an art changing, to see people absorbing 1944-2000” with Carol Squiers, and served as the sole curator of “This Is Not it would be a problem. When the photographer. street work and all kinds of a Fashion Photograph.” His photogra- phy and art archive has been featured in Whitney gave him the retrospective influences. I love the theatrical prominent publications and monographs. KR: I couldn’t agree more. The So I had to accept that if I did Kathy Ryan crowd decides and the crowd is them in the morning before work, on Immediacy often right. If you have a really I’d have to wait until lunchtime to powerful picture, they’re going to steal a few minutes to edit and post. see it. It’s interesting to realize And sometimes I might not have how quickly the crowd knows a chance to look at them and post it. You might not be so sure, but them until that night. I was usually if immediately it’s getting a racing to get them out quickly. I tremendous response, it is because liked the dare and the challenge of it actually is a very dynamic, having to edit at top speed and post arresting image. In that sense it is quickly, without having a chance to a good barometer. reflect on: Is it good or not? I like that about Instagram. In a way, it’s EMH: Once you create a bold did not have visual people making EMH: When did you first start liberating. You post a bad one: So aesthetic stamp that’s all people images and sending them out into using Instagram? what? It’s still more fun to just send want you to do. After the second the world immediately and getting it out there. Mary Katrantzou collaboration immediate responses. It’s playful KR: I started in the fall of 2012. I came about, everyone wanted and interactive. It’s seductive. You made a couple of pictures, and then EMH: But you do probably self- me to photograph florals and want to feed that appetite for “likes” the moment I made one at the New edit now, without even trying. patterns on pattern. Now, if from your followers. On the other York Times of a zigzag of light I desaturate my color, people hand, you have to not fall prey to going up the staircase there was no KR: Yes. I’m undergoing the react as if it isn’t my work. It’s trying to create something that turning back. That was the moment same thing I think artists and strange. I think people just want you know will get a bunch of likes. I fell in love with the medium. It photographers do, where you make you to stay in a certain place. Sometimes you can guess which was just so much fun. It was as if a certain kind of picture for a while 54 55 And so now you’re “the shadow picture will be a crowd pleaser my eyes had just been completely because it’s exciting to you. You person,” aren’t you, Kathy? and that’s fine. Often it’s because opened. I saw crazy, beautiful, have to make it; you can’t not make it’s the best picture that you’ve extraordinary things happening it. Then the bar rises and you can’t KR: I am the “shadow person.” The made—or it can be, because it’s with light all over the place. repeat yourself. You do, however, good part of it is you come up with more easily digestible. The whole On the east side of the building, because you’re drawn to something. something that you get obsessed point of being an artist is to break where my cubicle is, the light You’re drawn to vivid, bright color— with for all the right reasons. You new ground or go somewhere you comes pouring in first thing in the explosive color. That’s a palette go on this subconscious, unplanned haven’t gone. That will sometimes morning. Late in the afternoon that’s uniquely yours and you have artistic journey. You’re exploring mean making less appealing or early evening, if I go upstairs to work with that. It’s the thing something. In my case, it’s the light pictures that will get fewer likes, to the west side of the building, I that makes you special, but within and shadows that are created by but they might ultimately be more get dramatic light of a different that you face a point where you the wonderful white ceramic rods important for whatever you’re sort. And that was it. I just got have to keep reinventing it, giving that sheathe the New York Times exploring. overcome with an urge to make it a twist and working it in different building, creating a beautiful light a good picture. Something I had directions. It’s interesting for me to in the office. So you have this thing EMH: Do you think likes are never had. Then I’d post it as have to undergo that process. Now, that drives your work and people democratic? I’ve found with quickly as I could. So it was kind of I’ll get an urge to make a striping are drawn to that. That’s fantastic. Instagram that if I put up a like a triple threat: See it, make the light picture in the office. Then Then the other side of that is they photograph or painting that I picture, edit it. And post it quickly. my inner voice says I’ve already expect that from you. know is really strong, it tends to I always felt there was something done it, but if I really want to make The great thing is you’re get more likes. So in the most less legitimate about posting it another one… Why not? having a dialogue. With Instagram, elementary sense Instagram is later. Then I got to the point where you can have this automatic, a barometer of: Is it good? The I was making more pictures and I EMH: Would you say Instagram instantaneous dialogue. Prior to crowd decides. was taking more time to edit and it has made you a photographer? Instagram, this did not exist. You was interfering a bit with my work. 56 57 KR: I still feel uncomfortable We sponsored the first-ever photography positions to In a perfect world, I’d have both: calling myself a photographer. I Instameet at the New York Times, hold—to hear you talk about the poetry and the beauty of it, as feel like it’s a claim I can’t quite where we invited photographers photography in this way that’s well as the documentary, narrative make because I only make pictures to come join us for a night at the very innocent and like, “I just content. with a cell phone, which I think New York Times printing plant in had to do it.” Photography, by definition, is is legit. If it makes an image, it’s College Point, Queens. Hundreds fairly specific. So if a picture is a legitimate tool. I never had applied. We looked at all of their KR: Something just happened specific and it’s clearly a picture any issues with that. Think of Instagram feeds to choose 25 where these things came together. of so-and-so at a given moment the SX-70 Polaroid. It was easy, to go on the trip. We saw many The introduction of the iPhone of time doing something, it has a automatic and anybody could do pictures of the Williamsburg camera made it easy to make value as the years get layered on it it, and it became a valuable tool Bridge in the feeds. I would say it a picture very quickly and to that a more abstract picture might for people like Lucas Samaras would be very difficult to shoot the share it. That combined with the not have. A more abstract picture and Andy Warhol. So of course Williamsburg Bridge on Instagram extraordinary quality of the light might be more pleasing on a purely artists are going to make amazing in a way that’s unique. I’m not in the building got me going. I get visceral, visual, sensory level. The pictures with a cell phone. It saying impossible, but the bar is grumpy on cloudy days when the downside is that, if it’s lacking allows you to make a certain kind high. There are certain things like sun isn’t out and there is no light specificity, it might have a little of picture you might not have been bridges and sunsets that the filter and shadow. less meaning as a document years able to make before. It’s so easy; and square format render quite later. There’s a tension between it’s in our pocket. beautifully, but there are a million EMH: Well, maybe that’s what those things. ways to use that wonderful format you need to do next: push away EMH: Especially with to make original pictures. from the highlights and go to EMH: And that raises the Instagram and the preset filters. In my case, I realized nobody the grey tones. universal question: What is I’ve heard both ends of the celebrates the office life. Huge photography, how does it spectrum, where people will amounts of people work in offices KR: I’ve thought about it, but the function? Does photography need 58 59 lament that it makes it so easy and at the end of their careers strange thing is my heart beats to function as art? That’s kind of for people to make a photo; they don’t have any pictures of faster when there’s that intense what you’re speaking to. You’re it evens the playing field. I themselves at work. It seemed like bright light. When it is full on and making art right now with your feel like it’s almost harder. If territory that wasn’t well trodden. intense, I see pictures everywhere. “Office Romance” series, instead everyone has the same tools to It wasn’t even that conscious of a If the light is not there, it becomes of really making pictures. make something, it pushes your decision. I was just doing it out of a different kind of narrative creativity that much further some primal urge to make pictures picture. It’s about content and KR: A part of me thinks I’m to make something impactful and capture the incredible light in storytelling. The “Office Romance” making art because I’m just doing within your limitations. the building. series is about falling in love it for purely personal reasons, for with the way something looks no other reason than my own KR: I think that’s right. Initially, EMH: You’re describing exactly for a moment, or setting up a obsession. Part of the charm and it’s entrancing and people fall in what others have described picture to take advantage of the joy of this is that I don’t have to love with it because it is so easy. with their first introduction to light. It’s a very personal and do it. It just comes from some Then, very quickly, if you realize photography, that “primal urge.” playful engagement. The New other thing. When I start to think that so many people are making a I always think light is the first York Times is a newsworthy about doing something for a little certain kind of square image with a chapter in photography. When place. There’s history being made bit more of a record, then I have vanishing point at sunset then you I was in high school, I was there—all sorts of stories are to work at it in a different way. realize: Oh, wait a minute, there’s obsessed with shapes and light. happening. Sometimes I wonder if Because if my journalistic instincts no point in doing that because I think it’s really interesting, I should push myself into a more come into play and this is a record, so many other people are making knowing your background—the documentary mode, so I have a then I need all the editors of the the same one. So the question is: fact that you’re the Director better record of the people and magazine. Right now, most of the What can I do with it that no one of Photography at the New the work that goes on. Being a people in my pictures are the ones else is doing? The ease of it is the York Times Magazine, which journalist, part of me does want to closest at hand, the photo editors challenge of it. is one of the most powerful have something that has meaning. and designers. EMH: Once you start thinking and conceptualizing the work, it becomes something different. You’re experiencing the angst of what it is to be on the other side of the image. Some of the best art has come out of the place of “I have to make this,” with no conscious thought in the moment—all action.

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

EMH: And all the decisions you made up to that point have lead you there. You didn’t just stumble upon it, even though you also have to just stumble upon it. 60 61 Last question: After so many years of working with photographers, how does it feel to become one? Is it conflicting at all?

KR: You know, all the years of looking at pictures and thinking about pictures clearly informs the images I’m making—no matter how semiconscious they may seem. They come from a prepared mind that has dealt with issues in photography for years. I don’t find Kathy Ryan is the Director of a conflict. In some ways, I think Photography of the New York Times it’s a good thing for the picture Magazine. Since her appointment in 1987, she has been lauded with editor side of me, because looking advancing visual boundaries by blurring photography’s borders, cross-assigning at something so furiously—the light war photographers to shoot portraits in my office—has strengthened my and landscape photographers to capture close-ups. Her unconventional approach visual sense. My muse is the very has helped the magazine win a number of prestigious industry awards, with office I work in. Ryan herself receiving the first annual Lucie Award for Picture Editor of the Year and a lifetime achievement award from the Griffin Museum. Her Instagram project “Office Romance” is her first Kathy Ryan. From “Office Romance,” 2013-2014. public entrée into photographing. Miranda Lichtenstein on Evolution

EMH: What was your first medium, but I’ve been primarily memory of photography? shooting in the studio for the past three or four years. I’ve been ML: My brother, who is also a working on a series that feels photographer, built a darkroom in endless in its iterations, which is our bathroom when I was ten. So I very satisfying. I’m interested in was introduced to photography at a calling attention to the construction very early age. of the photograph, with an emphasis on its surface. EMH: What was the first series of images you created? Do you EMH: You seem to be very 62 63 still have them? project oriented, with your work morphing from one project to the ML: My closest friend in high next, aesthetically. What is the school was a muse for me, and I thread that binds it all? photographed her constantly—well into my twenties. I came across ML: Light, and the mutable and a box of these prints when my myriad possibilities inherent to mother sold her house this year the medium. and, although I would never show them, they are now in my studio. I EMH: You are both a also made a series of multi-media photographer and a professor collages that I applied to graduate of photography, yet—in my school with, called “Golden Ads experience speaking with you of the ’80s.” It was very influenced over the years—it seems you by artists from the Pictures prefer to not over-intellectualize Generation. I might have two of photography. How do you talk these left. They looked much better about photography to your in slides than in person. students? How do you reconcile being a contemporary artist EMH: How do you use without dressing your work in photography now? “artspeak?”

ML: I remain faithful to the ML: It’s interesting that you say heterogeneous nature of the this because I think I have a very different reputation where that I hadn’t shown simultaneously I currently teach, at Rutgers and to unify the pictures through University. I would say that I don’t this specific format. I was also discriminate and I’m comfortable interested to show in a space that straddling different approaches is dedicated to photography, a and attitudes when it comes new context for me. We decided to teaching. When we worked that I would go through my work together you were different from from the very beginning, when many of the students, in that I first started shooting with a you were working with fashion. four-by-five Polaroid, until the I worked as a photo editor and present. I liked the idea of doing researcher at magazines for many a show that culminated in, what years before teaching, so I’m will most likely be, some of my comfortable in this realm and take last Polaroids, because the film it on its own terms. I suspect I is no longer manufactured. Since tailored our conversations in this the project was coming to an end, way since it seemed natural, and I it made sense to have it all put respected the work for not trying together as a group. to be something it wasn’t. It’s a I hope that viewers will allow mistake to try to bend one’s work for a slow read. A lot of the in a way that’s not true to itself. ideas in the work circle around You need to own what you’re doing misrepresentation and failure, and if that means you are allergic but because of the small scale the to what you call “artspeak” then I viewer might have to work a bit to 64 65 think it’s better to not go there and see this. to be direct. EMH: Are you interested in EMH: You currently have a beauty? show at the Gallery at Hermès of your four-by-five Polaroids ML: No. Not as an idea, or ideal. from 2002 to 2013. Can you I do think I’m attracted to things speak on your latest show? How that have a certain amount of did it come about, and what do pleasure, but this is not across you wish your viewers to take the board. My work is often called away from it? “beautiful” and this makes me a little uncomfortable, because I fear ML: The exhibition was put it can trump meaning. But I would together by Cory Jacobs, a photo never go out of my way to make editor and curator at Hermès, something less “beautiful” for the whom I’ve known and respected for sake of it. I hope if someone finds years. She approached me about the work beautiful it will encourage doing a show a year ago. She them to keep looking. had seen some of my Polaroids at the Hammer Museum in 2006. I EMH: What do you want from thought Cory’s idea to look back photography? at my Polaroid work over the past 11 years would be a great ML: I want it to continue to open Miranda Lichtenstein. Ganzfeld, 2005. C-print. opportunity to bring together work up and be multifaceted, while 66 67 , 2010. , 2010. Archival pigment print.

Screen Shadow No. 17 (For Maya) Screen Shadow No. 17 (For still being considered on its own terms as a medium. It is constantly being labeled as “documentary,” “experimental,” “amateur,” etc., which I hope we can get past. László Moholy-Nagy famously said, “The enemy of photography is the convention, the fixed rules of ‘how to do.’ The salvation of photography comes from the experiment.”

68 69

Miranda Lichtenstein is a photographer and professor. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the UCLA Hammer Museum, Whitney Museum at Philip Morris and Gallery Min Min. She has also participated in group exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and has work in the permanent collections of a number of international museums, including the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the Neuberger Museum of Art. Lichtenstein has taught Untitled #20 (Palucca), 2008. at Parsons The New School of Design Archival pigment print. and Rutgers University. 1

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s a ’ t Guinevere Van Seenus in The High Priestess

Through grassy banks and wooded ways The real trees support armies of monkeys? In meadows gone insane with legs: Monsieur and Maítre, 3 Feast your shutterbugging eyes. Pubescent insects Spring seduces. What they seize on sure amazes: If decadent decoration is the answer Perhaps you recall, in June of 1870, TO THÉODORE DE BANVILLE A monotony of pretty lies. that looms Find cottony thistledown in bunches having received a hundred or a hundred Chaleville, Ardennes, Auguest 15, 1871 To prettify your pages, the larger By which donkeys’ vision is impaired. fifty mythological hexameters for the Why this mania for floral wrangling? question’s clear: Nature never pulls her punches, provinces entitled Credo in Unam? Yo u Why does it prompt such turgid lines? Is this riotous, ceaseless, vomitation Some flowers even look like chairs. were so good to respond! ON THE SUBJECT Low-slung hounds with bellies dangling of blooms The same idiot is sending you more of OF FLOWERS: French poets are tickled by muddy vines. Worth a seagull’s turd or one candle’s tear? Yes: find in the heart of dark divides his stuff, this time signed Alcide Bava— REMARKS, ADDRESSED Flowers that look like precious gems; Sorry. TO THE POET As if the lines weren’t bad enough, I think I’ve made my point: sitting there, Pistils and stamens the darkness hides I’m eighteen. —I still admire Banville’s Consider the pictures they adjoin… A poet in his far-flung bamboo hut, But crystally encrusts with faceted hems. poetry. A first communion? Either option’s rough: Draped with Persian rugs in the Sahara Last year I was only seventeen! To Monsieur Théodore de Banville Sunflowers or Lotuses? Flip a coin. You resolutely keep the shutters shut: For once—Sad Jester—just serve it up; Am I progressing? Lay our table with a purple platter. Can French poets resist an Ashokan ode? And then describe the sands as full Fill it with a lily stew’s sweet syrup: Alcide Bava I Can addicts resist a bag of blow? Of flowers, ignoring barren dunes: Fill our spoons with the heart of the A.R. As if butterflies take the high road, This sort of thing—so disgraceful—is bull. matter. There, bordering blue black skies To avoid shitting on daisies below. Keep it up, and drive poetry to its doom. Where wavecrests tremble gold, My address: Lilies stimulate evening ecstasies, All this greenery is becoming mulch. V Enemas thrust between bardic folds. Blossoms plucked to raise the stakes. IV Monsieur Charles Bretagne, Salons bedecked like a flowery gulch And, of course, we now arrive at love: Avenue de Méziéres, Charleville, After all, times have changed: Better for beetles than rattlesnakes. Heard of the notion of “keeping it real”? Surely it should be the poet’s thing. for Plants now labor—aloe and rose. Your efforts until now have been rotten. Yet Renan below and Murr above A.Rimbaud. Lilies arranged in bunches Grandville’s sentimental sketchings Enough of this milk-fed literary veal: Avoid all Dionysian blossoming. Decorate your religious prose. Fill margins with mawkish blooms, Try describing tobacco and cotton. Caricatures of flowery retchings Put your perfumes to good use: Kendrel disappeared behind them Evening stars the dark consumes. Why not render Pedro Velazquez’ face Scent our stink of torpid lust; In the Sonnet of eighteen thirty. And the dollars his cash-crop brings; Redeem the wanting we produce, Poets are buried beneath them, Saliva drooling from your pipings Let sun brown skin, your pallor erase, Lift us heavenward on verbal gusts. In amaranth and carnation flurries. Is all we have for nectar: Pan now dozes. Describe the shit on swans’ white wings: His song has become mere guttersniping Let practicality be a poetic criterion, Lilies, lilies. So often mentioned, About Lilies, Ashoka, Lilacs, Roses. Yes: the Sorrento sea is full of feathers, As for any Soldier, Psychic, or Salesman. So seldom seen. In your verses, though But an ocean of crap floats there too; Awake us from thiopentalic delirium They blossom like good intentions Are your stanzas equipped for all weathers? Like rubber trees, tear us open. As sinners’ resolutions come and go. III Are there hydras in the waters with you? Let strange fruit fall from stanzas, Why, even when you bathe, Dear Sir, O White Hunters: your barefoot excursions Thrust quatrains into the bloody woods Prismatic light refract from verses; Your sallow-pitted gown must bloom Trample the pastoral into derision; And report the news that we need. Black wings, lepidoptric memorandas, With morning breezes: sleeves confer Shouldn’t your flowery poetic diversions Expostulate on sugar and durable goods Flutterings full of electric purpose. High above forget-me-nots in swoon. Exhibit a modicum of botanical precision? Whether pansements or rubbers that bleed. An Age of Hell is now upon us: Yes: our garden gates let lilacs pass. You deploy Crickets and Flies indiscriminately Your job? Deliver truth on these matters, The earthly body pierced with spears. But such candied clichés have a cost: Conflating Phylum and Genus. Rio’s gold Such as what covers our tropical peaks; Telegraphic poles limn each Gowanus Pollinating spit on petals looks like glass And Rhine’s blue are switched inadvertently, Is what crowns them like snow-scatters Helplessly broadcasting silent tears. But is still spit. Our poor flowers? Lost. Poor Norway becomes “Florida, but cold.” Lichen, or eggs from insectoid beaks? Spin, my poet, tales of early blight, In the past, Dear Master, Art may O White Hunters, we really must insist Exalt, somehow, in the potato’s sorry life; II have settled You find us perfumed madders’ hues; Rhyme all ruin to make wrong right For the alexandrine’s hexametrical Nature nurtures, we gather: fat fists Feed your poems of terrestrial strife— And when you get your hands on roses, constrictions; Dye trousers our infantrymen abuse. Windwhipped roses red on laurel stems, But now, shouldn’t the stink of fallen petals Whether in Babylon or Bayonne— Their effect upon you one supposes Rotting, make a clean sweep of our Find flowers that look like muzzles, Let them ramble, let them range Irresistible: bad verses just never end. ambitions? At forest fringes dead with sleep; Over paper like low moans: Unpack oozing botanical puzzles, Graze the poem: make it strange. BANVILLE’s roses fall like snow, Our botanically challenged bards Ochre ointments that they leak. Published in “I Promise to be Good: The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud Complete, Volume Their whiteness flecked with blood. forever bungle: Alcide Bava II,” (translated, edited and with an introduction A pricking feeling readers know: Mahogany is “a flower found in the country”: Find calyxes full of fiery eggs A.R. by Wyatt Mason, Modern Library, New York, Incomprehension chafes and rubs. Who could imagine that in the Guyan jungle Cooking in aestival juices July 14, 1871 2004), pp. 48-54. 138 139 140 141 142 143 4

“The right to laugh belongs only to those who know how a matter truly stands.” Giacomo Casanova, “The Story of My Life” In this magazine, Lykke Li appears been markedly melancholic and Learn” is a slow striptease, revealing Lykke Li as a timeless beauty, captured in intensely sensitive. As far back as the growth demanded by the weight on Adaptation black and white. The photograph, she can remember—as documented of truth. It is, Li says, the result of taken by Erik Madigan Heck on in poems written at the age of ten— a sort of epiphany that is eloquently the eve of the release of Li’s third she has felt misunderstood, sought expressed by a quote often attributed album, “I Never Learn,” wraps relief from the persistent pain of to the author and poet Anaïs Nin: the musician in a tidy veneer of life and viewed art as a bridge to “The day came when the risk to serenity and contemplation as something better. remain tight in the bud was more constructed by a solitary male Her pursuit of “better” has painful than the risk it took to gaze—or, simply, the necessarily evolved into a nomadic life lived blossom.” two-dimensional lens of a on the knife-edge of expression By developing beyond the photographer. and escapism, a balancing act restrictions of public perceptions, This representation neither colored with self-described self- by peeling off the superfice of safety confirms nor contradicts the destruction. If her past albums and by laying naked her failures ongoing, frequently clashing public have been exercises in exorcising and fantasies, Li has evolved her narratives of Li that began in 2008 this damage, “I Never Learn,” artwork from an acoustic self- with the debut of her freshman despite its contrary title, distills portrait that can be easily digested album “Youth Novels” and evolved the wisdom these encounters and captured—by a profile, picture with “Wounded Rhymes,” released have imparted. As Li explains, “I or preconception—into an alchemic in 2011. She has regularly been embarked on this journey years mirror in which the listener is described as childlike, introverted, and years ago and I’m still on invited to confront his or her own interchangeable and depressingly that path, digging deeper and biases and dark demons. emo. And her music has been deeper and trying to find the pronounced pop, indie, electronic bare essentials. That’s also age by Erin Dixon 146 147 and gothic garage rock. Depending and maturity. You could liken the upon the source, it is confessional album to a really complex wine; it and bittersweet, danceable and dirty. only has a few subtle tones and it In person, the musician is soft- took me a long time to get there. spoken, intense and quietly polite. I always felt more than I could She exhibits a gravitational pull deliver. This time it is a little more more analogous to that of a black cracked open and vulnerable.” hole than an orbiting sun. Which is Like Li’s previous releases, the to say, rather than possessing the album remains rich with questions fragility to which she is so often of love and loneliness, but the songs ascribed, she reveals a convinced, are no longer vengeful battle cries. raw and decidedly somber They are bereft ballads of surrender, character. It is devoid of common questioning societal expectations pretenses and layered with of partnership, happiness and morbidly magnetic complexities. womanhood: a preoccupation at These dissonant characterizations the forefront of Li’s mind. She may be cultural; Li’s family is from has embraced the productivity Sweden, where frank communication of the suffering and sadness and a sober temperament are experienced after losing “safe love, typical. Or, she suggests, it may be unconditional love, beautiful love… an inborn state. Li’s recent interest not the fucked up or unrequited love in neuroscience has taught her that I felt deeply as a teenager.” some people just produce more Devoid of the nostalgia and serotonin, whereas she has always fetishization of an ingénue, “I Never 148 149

152 5 153 I met Jerry Schatzberg for lunch Jerry Schatzberg at a French bistro uptown, near on Family his apartment on 86th Street. As it had been nearly four years since I last saw him at his studio, I had forgotten how soft-spoken he was. This made it challenging to hear him, let alone document our conversation. Over lunch we discussed a number of topics, including his old farm near Cooperstown, in upstate New York. It turns out, two years prior I had photographed a series of landscapes practically next door to his property. After the meal we retired to his apartment, where I asked to see his archive—to validate if I had, in fact, been trespassing on his land. The following images are a selection of what I saw, personal photographs from this expansive landscape taken during the 1970s. 154 They are presented publicly for the first time in this magazine. Jerry Schatzberg. From the artist’s archives. Jerry Schatzberg. From

164 6 165 Waris Ahluwalia in Haider Ackermann

7 Jamie Bochert in Ann Demeulemeester

8

"Advertisements" Giambattista Valli Thom Browne Antonio Marras Altuzarra Dries Van Noten Etro Stella McCartney Oscar de la Renta Tsumori Chisato Valentino Aganovich Erdem Yves Klein 9 Dialogue With Myself

But in the process of creating something, by oneself…the main thing is to know in sum the truth does not exist. Only 216 217 honesty exists. Honesty is always in bad taste since, after all, honesty is so human; it is only…a collection of laws, of learned ways of seeing, etc. etc. But honesty does sometimes go beyond a human framework; then it becomes, even in humans, something greater. It becomes life, life itself, a power, that strange life force that belongs neither to you, nor me, nor to anyone. Life, it is life.

All that I said there, all I just said is trying to bring myself closer to what I wish to do this evening, but which I have not First published in “Le dépassement de la problématique de l’art” (La Louviére: Éditions de Montbliar, 1959). yet accomplished. All that I have said is feeble; it’s a farce. Quoted from “Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writing of Yves Klein,” (edited and translated by Klaus I’m blathering on to myself. No, it is quite difficult to hear Ottmannn, Putnam, Conn.: Spring Publications, 2007), pp. 137-173. oneself dream, to dream while awake. It is quite difficult to pronounce thought. I attempt this experiment, deep down, The title “Dialogue With Myself” [Dialogue avec moi- même] was assigned posthumously in 1983 to what because I wish to avoid writing. Writing, curiously, is rather was, in reality, a tape-recorded stream of consciousness made one evening in 1961 by Klein in his apartment in precise, deep down; it makes one think better, dream better, Paris. The recording begins with a short excerpt from the “Monotone Symphony,” then Klein begins to speak: and put marks on paper, inscribe, write. But in speech The tone is solemn, the words choppy, often interrupted by silences. The translation followed the transcription one hears, one articulates, one pronounces. It’s quite curious. made by Marie-Anne Sichére and Didier Semin. I don’t understand very well what is happening yet. 218 219

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shio_adlayout.indd 5 3/4/14 11:56 AM 220 Unless otherwise noted, all photographs by Contributors 130-131 Jacket by Emilio de la Morena. Erik Madigan Heck — Dress by Karen Murphy. 132-133 Jacket by Emilio de la Morena. Comme des Garçons Illustrated Dress by Karen Murphy. — 135 Dress by Alessandra Rich. Clothing: Comme des Garçons Brooch by Chanel. Erik Madigan Heck is a photographer, filmmaker and writer. In 2013 Guinevere Van Seenus he received an Infinity Award Lykke Li on Adaptation in The High Priestess from the International Center of Fashion Editor: Lester Garcia Photography for his work. He is Fashion Editor: Yana Kamps Makeup: Osvaldo Salvatierra Makeup: Deanna Melluso at Magnet Hair: Jordan M at Susan Price a regular contributor to the New Hair: Jordan M at Susan Price York Times Magazine, The New Digital Tech: Will Wang Digital Tech: Matt Occhuizzo Studio: Shio Studio, Brooklyn Yorker, W and Harper’s Bazaar Clothing: UK. He is the founder of Nomenus 93 Jacket and shirt by Quarterly and No Photos Please, Waris Ahluwalia and is the author of “January to Antonio Azzuolo. 94 Vest, turtleneck and pants in Haider Ackermann August.” Heck is included in the by Antonio Azzuolo. Makeup: Deanna Melluso at Magnet forthcoming exhibition “Don’t Stop Veil by Gigi Burris. Set Design: Andrea Huelse Now: Fashion Photography Next,” 95 Top by TOME. at Art Department opening July 2014 at the Foam Shirt by A.F. Vandevorst. Set Assistant: Jerry Toussant-Baptiste Museum in Amsterdam, with an 97 Dress by TOME. Digital Tech: Will Wang accompanying catalog published Pearls by Encore a la Mode. Studio: Shio Studio, Brooklyn 98-99 Dress by Houghton. Clothing: Haider Ackermann by Thames & Hudson. 100-101 Dress by Femme d’Armes. FW 2014 Menswear 222 Capelet, vintage. 223 102-103 Shirt by A.F. Vandevorst. Thank you to: Pearls by Encore a la Mode. Jamie Bochert Brianna Karen Killion Heck, 104 Dress, model’s own. in Ann Demeulemeester Shelly Madigan, Paul Heck, 106 Coat by A.F. Vandevorst. Scans: Duggal, NYC Katerina Simonova, Jenn Cress, 107 Dress by Houghton. Clothing: Model’s own Michael Aberman, Ariel Collin Mohawk by Gigi Burris. Ann Demeulemeester (vintage). Stark-Benz, Michael Dos Santos, 108-109 Jacket by Emilio de la Morena. Erin Dixon, Matt Occhuizzo, 110-111 Dress by Karen Murphy. Andrew Bennett, Justin Troust 113 Coat by 5:31 Jerome. Dress Michael Della Polla, Matthew by Francesco Scognamiglio. Fashion “Advertisements” Hise, Kathy Ryan, Susan Bright, 114 Top by Brandon Sun. Fashion Editor: Rebecca Ramsey George Pitts, Vince Aletti, Jerry 117 Top by TOME. Model: Ali Walsh at Schatzberg, Elinor Carucci, Taryn Shirt by A.F. Vandevorst. Major Model Management Simon, Miranda Lichtenstein, 118 Dress by Karen Murphy. Hair Sculptures: Tomi Kono Guinevere Van Seenus Lykke Li, Pearls by Encore a la Mode. at Julian Watson Agency Jamie Bochert, Waris Ahluwalia, 120-121 Dress by TOME. (using Bumble and bumble) Ann Demeulemeester, Haider Socks by Wolford. Set Design: Andrea Huelse Ackermann, Yana Kamps Pearls by Encore a la Mode. at Art Department Jordan M, Deanna Melluso, 124-125 Cardigan by A.F. Vandevorst. Set Assistant: Jerry Toussant-Baptiste Rebecca Ramsey, Ali Kavoussi, Veil by Encore a la Mode. Digital Tech: Will Wang Michele Montagne, Gagosian 126 Dress by Sonia Rykiel. Studio: Shio Studio, Brooklyn Gallery, Elizabeth Dee Gallery Gloves by TOME. Socks by The Sock Man. 128-129 Dress by TOME. Jacket by Maison Martin All post-production: Margiela (vintage). Versatile Studios Issue 12 Curated and Photographed Special Edition by Erik Madigan Heck

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DESIGN Michael Aberman

EDITING Erin Dixon

POST-PRODUCTION Versatile Studios

PRINTING Die Keure, Belgium

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Creem Staff 224 PUBLISHER Todd Edinger

EXECUTIVE EDITOR & FOUNDER Jenn Cress

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Katerina Simonova

ART DIRECTOR Ariel Collin Stark-Benz

ONLINE DIRECTOR Kelli Carlson-Jagersma

SOCIAL MEDIA COORDINATOR Jake Freeman

INTERNS Amanda Brohman, Jensen Turner, Melissa Gordillo