Interview: Tod Papageorge by Richard B. Woodward (link)

Photos by Tod Papageorge

W Are the mistakes that your students are prone to now the same mistakes that students were prone to when you were teaching back in the late ‘60s?

TP No. I think now that, in general—and this includes a lot of what I see in Chelsea even more than what I see from students at Yale—there’s a failure to understand how much richer in surprise and creative possibility the world is for photographers in comparison to their imagination. This is an understanding that an earlier generation of students, and photographers, accepted as a first principle. Now ideas are paramount, and the computer and Photoshop are seen as the engines to stage and digitally coax those ideas into a physical form—typically a very large form. This process is synthetic, and the results, for me, are often emotionally synthetic too. Sure, things have to change, but photography-as-illustration, even sublime illustration, seems to me an uninteresting direction for the medium to be tracking now, particularly at such a difficult time in the general American culture. All in all, I think that there’s as much real discovery and excitement in the digital videos that my students at Yale are making as there is in the still photography I see either there or in New York, perhaps because the video camera, like the 35 mm camera 30 years ago, can be carried everywhere, and locks onto the shifting contradictions and beauties of the world more directly and unselfconsciously than many photographers now seem to feel still photography can, or should, do.

He is very revealing on the attractive difficulties of photography which he likens to poetry:

RW You said the goal with Garry always was process. Not exhibition, gallery shows, or sale of prints. Did you absorb that mentality pretty much?

TP This may go way back to your first question: why no book until now? I don’t photograph for exhibition, but to engage in this process of understanding photography itself. I started to photograph because poetry was impossible for me, not realizing that photography was at least as difficult, and also not anticipating how, as with poetry, that difficulty can, in itself, create an addiction in those people who see this kind of creative test as something monumentally attractive. We all have to deal with our strengths and weaknesses, and while I guess my strength is my willingness to engage repeatedly with this deeply difficult problem of making coherent pictures, my weakness is an equally strong tendency to want everything in my pictures to be part of a perfect web—not a very healthy or often-satisfied ambition when trying to clarify such complex chunks of the visual world. But that’s my problem, and maybe something I can’t escape.


Posted 2 years ago

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The Rise and Fall of Annie Liebovitz (link)

Photo by Annie Liebovitz

The influence of celebrity culture is perversely powerful; perhaps more from the inside than the outside. This is exactly the type of photographer I have nightmares about becoming. Well, not really, I’d manage my money better and become filthy rich bitches! And I do want to give commercial work a go (just like I want to give all forms of photography, except concert and cat photography, a go).

Liebovitz seems to have the brains of a half baked potato. It certainly shows up in her banal, pandering imagery. But she is a hard worker. Proving again that for success that’s the only thing that matters. Of course, the question then becomes, what kind of success do you want?

Click on the link in title.


Posted 2 years ago

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Helmut Newtown Interview with Frank Horvat (link)

Photo by Helmut Newton

Frank Horvat : I don’t know much about your life, but I remember the impression you made on me in the fifties, when we first met. You were a very regular guy, very disciplined. You did the work you were supposed to do, and you did it well. We used to hand jobs to each other, when one of us was too busy to accept them. Then, in the late sixties, you started something that was unmistakably your own, working with phantasies which had been taboo until that time and which were becoming less taboo. This became very successful, because sexual liberation was in, but also because you were treating the subject with a certain chic, that allowed you to get away with it where others wouldn’t. Then you had a heart attack, and this was a turning point. You decided that you didn’t have the time to please “them” any more, that from there on you would only please yourself. That was where you turned the tables : by pleasing only yourself you got more recognition and made more money than any commercial photographer would by trying to please his clients.

Helmut Newton : I am still very disciplined.

Frank Horvat : I know. Sometimes I think : “Here he photographs nude girls, but he could just as well photograph vintage cars or football games, he would do it with the same imagination and the same discipline”.

Helmut Newton : This is why I continue accepting commissions, even though economically I don’t have to. Because making money gives me a kick, but also because 1 think it’s important for me to have the discipline, to work for somebody within a given frame. At least from time to time.

Frank Horvat : But you also apply this discipline to your personal work.

Throughout, Newton sounds like a man who has gotten his way with the world. He is used to being childish and he knows that the world will accept it. That, in fact, the world has politely requested only his juvenilia. It is amusing, if a little bilious to see how the culture of selling can appropriate, protect, and encourage whatever it needs to survive. (Better than the torture chambers and perpetual civic anxiety and boredom of totalitarianism at least). It’s not particular as an organism in this regard.

There is a weak acidity in Newton that comes from being seduced then raped by that world. Amongst those who choose money, and who have real ambition, there is always this familiar regret. Like a persistent, scratchy sore throat.

It’s comforting however to see such honest, clear criticism that only two artists can do to each other. Real critics are real bad because most of their time is spent disguising their motives. Most of their efforts are wasted on trying to convince you that they are trying to do it for the betterment of the public. Trying to hide that everyone is essentially for and by themselves. Critics are inefficient. Someone who creates knows what’s filler, and knows what is new in the work, as he can see how it was put together. Only the very best critics can do that, and they usually started out as, or are, makers themselves (Szarkowski, James Woods, etc. etc.)

This is a healthy interview in the Nietzchean meaning of that word.

Click the link in the title.

Note: On a second reading of the interview, I’m not so sure anymore that he has a sore throat. ‘Because making money gives me a kick.’ Just because I don’t get that doesn’t mean he doesn’t.


Posted 2 years ago

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Thomas Ruff Interview with Daniel Birnbaum (link)

Photo by Thomas Ruff

No. Cologne was really developing more and more into a party town and a place where artists could show their work and make money. For most of us it was a kind of parallel universe that we looked on with some skepticism, because the galleries in Cologne in the mid- to late ’80s still showed very little interest in what we were doing. But one cannot really go out and party every night, so we weren’t tempted to move to Cologne. Of course we would go to openings there.
…
In the very late ’80s I started to sell a lot of work. But none of the things that one associates with the art world of the ’80s really came to Dusseldorf. My photographer colleagues and I really didn’t have commercial success until the ’90s. It’s easy to project things back onto the ’80s, but the truth is we went rather unnoticed through most of the decade. Sometimes I think it was probably a good thing that we were left alone to develop our work without being too disturbed. I had jobs on the side and never thought that I would be able to make a living from art.

The photographs naturally appeal to my aesthetic as a viewer, but I wonder about how limiting the style is. Also how easy. I think everybody and their cat have been doing this kind of work for the last twenty years. And although the best of the work has a still tensility, what can you actually say with it? They could argue, why are you so intent on saying something? On verbalising through an inherently silent medium? They would probably tell me to go make films if I want to tell stories. The time for photography to do that is over now. I don’t believe that yet.

This also bought up my old ideas about minimalism which I was very into five years ago and that has affected many aspects in my life. That simplicity in the way I dress, try to live, architecture, furniture and art that I like. I’m not sure how I’d reconcile the generosity of the medium of photography, the abundance of detail in the world, with my taste for simplicity. But it’s a grand mistake to assume a resolution is always necessary. It isn’t. Often the unresolved ideas are the most fertile soil.

Also, I feel as I’ve gotten the hint of the easy sterility that minimalism can fall into, and through the Danish furniture makers have learnt that it can be life affirming, soft, and humane.

Click the link in the title.


Posted 2 years ago

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© Adnan Chowdhury 2011