I stopped going to therapy
because I knew my therapist was right
and I wanted to keep being wrong.
I wanted to keep my bad habits
like charms on a bracelet.
I did not want to be brave.
I think I like my brain best
in a bar fight with my heart.
I think I like myself a little broken.
I’m ok if that makes me less loved.
I like poetry better than therapy anyway.
The poems never judge me
for healing wrong.
An image that is probably a part of my Sacred and Profane series, tbd.
There’s a lot going on. I’m preparing for Hanjo in Tokyo in September, Hoppers in Amsterdam in October, and of course the Sacred & Profane project continues to take up all my time. I hope to show it for the first time next April.
My new approach is working well conceptually, but what I’m not clear on yet is the physical presentation of the work. I crop out elements that will be the primary focus visually, but conceptually the focus of the work will be elsewhere, harder to find at first glance. The cropped parts are full color whereas the other parts of the image are very colorless. I also print on different materials, and mount the color images in indentations within the overall frame, thus going through several layers. It gives me the creative elbow room to revisit certain images created earlier in the life of this project, and see how I can integrate them into this newer approach.
I’m shooting today, and it’s different than when the project began. I don’t have a storyboard sketched, and I am relying on the talent of my favorite models (and some new ones) to help me improvise some images. For now, I am creating new work that relies on the landscape of the body within my Caravaggisto light language.
From the Sacred and Profane series.
Loving does not mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person; it is rather a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become a world, to become a world in himself for the sake of another person.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters To A Young Poet
From the new Sacred & Profane series.
Before you fuck up and call her anything less than her name, before you grab her by the arm you need to know the trigger that you are pulling at. You need to know that the safety is never on. You need to know her history before you tell me that this isn’t my business. You need to know that her history is my history. See, she and I, we come from the tribe of raw knuckled little girls who call our father by their first names and wear their mothers like bruise-colored war paint under eye. We grew thick skin before we grew permanent teeth. We learned to piece together our own families in the backyards of rented duplexes where we promised plastic faced babies better things in soothing tones that we mimicked from TV. We do not have daddy issues even though our daddies have issues. We have piercing eyes and promises to keep. We grew up to be nomads surveying domestic war zones with black eyeliner binoculars, always refusing to camouflage. We threw our heads back and laughed at oncoming explosions, never flinched, absorbing shrapnel, never letting them see us cry.
We do not dream of boys who will save us from towers. We dream of boys with courage caked under their fingernails. Boys with hands rough enough to wipe metal tears from our faces but warm enough to mold them into stars. Boys with vertebrae strong enough to lock with ours so they can sleep sitting back to back with us and keep watch. And these are the boys, these are the boys who will find love under our armor. These are the boys who will find that we love selectively but we love fiercely. These are the boys who will learn that we love in ways that leave claw marks down the baseboard before we ever let go.
So do not think she doesn’t know how you fear her absence – you should. Your cage is not stronger than her will or her smile. Do not think you are good enough to tame her. You aren’t. And do not think you are the first to try because I have already closed your eyes and crossed your arms before your body hit the floor. And you think she deserves better than you. You are right. So be better than you.
Be thankful that she knows your name and be careful never to forget hers.
– Rachel Wiley
Taken a long time ago in my apartment in New York.
We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we never do. A work that’s finished is at least finished. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbor who’s crippled. That plant is her happiness, and sometimes it’s even mine. What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That’s enough for me, or it isn’t enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life.
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
An image from my Color Room series.
Last week I conducted an online interview with Enrico Tabacchi, a fellow photographer as well as blogger based out of Milan.
You can read the whole interview at his site including some of the images that he selected from my Color Room Series as well as my Hopper’s Americans Series.
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Yoram Roth is a Berlin-based photographer. I love his work and for this reason I wanted to interview him. His photography is a constant reference to classical art but with the addition of a modern aesthetic.
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Three Adjectives to Describe Yoram.
Focused, concept-driven, gregarious.
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How would you describe your photography?
Pensive, deliberate, beautiful.
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What is photography for you?
An opportunity to tell little visual poems, and to create a launching point for stories that unfold in the viewer’s imagination.
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What would you do, and who would you be if photography wasn’t part of your life?
I would be a Guy in a Suit, probably doing real estate deals, with some minor creative outlets on the side… and a small combination of pain, anger and shame for lacking the courage to do what I really want to do.
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Your hard disk fails. You can save 3 photos. Which ones to do you hope to preserve, and why?
This is not a fun answer… but that would never happen to me. I am so crazy about back-ups and data storage that it will never happen… because I have already twice lost image files. Once shooting with a good friend who was not a photographer but wanted to explore it with me, and once after a week-long trip to Tokyo in preparation for “Hanjo.”
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You win the lottery. You have enough money to buy three paintings of your choice, by any artist, which ones would you choose?
Jeff Wall, “Siphoning Gas”, 2008
I would have never thought so, but when I stood in front of Jeff Wall’s “Siphoning Gas” I was moved to tears. The story that unfolded in my mind connected with every single part of my life, and I actually cried a little. I hope to own this piece some day, even though it is not beautiful in a conventional way.
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Artemisia Gentileschi, “Judith slaying Holofernes”, 1618
I would love to own Artemisa Gentileschi’s second version of “Judith slaying Holofernes” which I saw at the Uffizi recently. I consider her the greatest of the Caravaggisti, and this painting is technically spectacular. I love the attention to detail, such as the beautiful bracelet. When you stand in front of it, you realise that there is blood spray sprinkled across the canvas, and you can imagine her finishing the painting by flicking red paint from her fingers on to the face of a painted man who in her mind deserved to die.
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David LaChapelle, “Flaccid Passion”, 2010
I plan on owning a large print of David LaChapelle’s “Flaccid Passion” from his Earth Laughs in Flowers series. It is extremely erotic, beautiful and elegant all at the same time. One thing all of these pieces have in common is that you don’t realise how powerful they are until you are in front of them. On a web site, or in a book, they don’t work, you need to see the real thing.
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Reading your blog I’ve noticed that you like poetry. Do you think that there is a link between photography and poetry?
There is for me. The poems which I like capture a mood or a feeling without describing it directly, and that defines a great image as well. I actually once created a photo workshop that took a poem and asked the photographers to capture that feeling photographically.
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I love your Color Project, how did this idea come to you?
I actually tell that story on my blog. My work over the last couple of years has often been inspired by artists that have gone before me. About two years ago I developed a school-boy crush on a Danish artist named Vilhelm Hammershøi, a contemporary of the Skågen School of painting. He worked around 1880 - 1920, and used a wonderful soft light. The rooms he depicted were almost always his own house.
I had just finished my Hopper’s Americans but still loved the creative process of building set-rooms and telling stories within them. I decided to create a set that looked a lot like Hammershøi’s house, and to shoot a project that used his soft light, different than I had been in my previous work. The project failed almost immediately. I had a good model, but the clothes made it virtually impossible to tell the kind of stories I like. She was drowning in heavy fabrics, and they give little opportunity for
physical nuance. Instead the images came out looking like something from the cover of a fancy candy box, something that Sarotti or Quality would put on their biscuit tins. Worse, I had given my stylist very little guidance, and we ended up with looks that were way to exaggerated for the subdued images I wanted to create.
I got so mad at myself that I went to my studio at some point on a Saturday night, got out a very large bucket of grey/blue paint, and blasted Joy Division while repainting the whole set a solid color. I used a big fat bushy brush to slather the entire set, covering the walls, the decorative sconces, the chairs and tables all in a dark tone that reflected my mood. I was embarrassed, because the new project I had hoped for evaporated in front of me. I knew I should have focused on quieter images, more pensive poses.
Now I realize that it is not where I wanted to go creatively. I love the light. But I am so intrigued by the visual language of motion, which is utterly out of place in such a project. I admire Desiree Dolron’s most recent work, but it is not the kind of images I wanted to create at that moment. They are too static. I wanted something with heavy motion.
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You’ve worked on several projects, which one do you think is the most important and why?
I know this sounds like every parent in the world, but I love all my “children” equally. Of course I am the most proud of the one getting attention at the moment, and right now that is my first series. I shot
“Hopper’s Americans” almost four years ago – before a lot of other photographers began copying Hopper, I would like to point out :-) At the time it meant a real life change for me, and it is reflected in the images I created. I didn’t know what was coming next, whether it was a good or bad thing, and I felt like I was suspended. Those ended up being the strongest images, and they define that series. I am also extremely proud of “Hanjo” which I will get to introduce at Tokyo Photo in Japan between September 27 – 30, 2013.
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I know you are working on a new project called “The Sacred & The Profane.” Do you want to show us something? What are your plans for the future?
Right now I am showing very little about that project. I am not really sure where it is going. It started as something very different, but its meaning to me has changed. For some time I was very focused on traditional Judeo-Christian religions, but I am less interested in that now. It has become more about the Feminine, and I’m not afraid to use the language of Beauty while pushing into topics that are not easy.
Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences. That solves a lot of problems: we don’t have to argue whether photographs are art, or whether performances are art, or whether Carl Andre’s bricks or Andrew Serranos’s piss or Little Richard’s ‘Long Tall Sally’ are art, because we say, ‘Art is something that happens, a process, not a quality, and all sorts of things can make it happen.’ … What makes a work of art ‘good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you — so the value of the work lies in the degree to which it can help you have the kind of experience that you call art.
– Brian Eno
I believe that Magic is Art and Art whether it be music, writing, sculpture or any other, is literally magic. Art, like any magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words or images, to achieve changes in consciousness… Indeed to cast a spell is simply to manipulate words, to change people’s consciousness, and this is why I believe that an artist or a writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world to a Shaman.
— Alan Moore
Another test from my new Series. Starting to formulate a visual language.
He imagined he could see the very faces of the stars; pale, they were, and smiling gently, as if they had spent so much time above the world, watching the scrambling and the joy and the pain of the people below them, that they could not help being amused every time another little human believed itself the center of its world, as each of us does.
Neil Gaiman, Stardust
An abstract crop taken from an image in my new Sacred & Profane series.
If this blog is to have any value at all, I need to have the courage to write honestly. There are phases in my projects where I feel incredibly disheartened. I accept that the creative process is more than simple execution. The Sacred and Profane project has been with me for over a year now, and it continues to shift. What I thought initially to be a very strong direction now turns out to be a simple starting-off point. I mean that technically as well as creatively. The images I hoped to produce were reinterpretations of classic imagery, baroque in language but filled with a contemporary approach. After shooting like this for several months, I have found that I need to go beyond that.
I tried increasingly complex arrangements and settings, but I can’t seem to make that work, because they do exactly what I have always avoided – they are too expository, meaning they leave little room for interpretation; they tell a story, rather than serve as a doorway to the viewer’s own narrative.
But there are interesting details in each of these images. I am tearing them apart now, and pulling out the snippets that distill the idea. These crops are reduced to the essential elements, and lack the broader context of the original image. But my concern remains that I will be misunderstood, and I need to get over that.
There is an incredible desire to let my viewers know about the internal dialog which I find surprisingly intense, and the research I have done into this topic. These are not simple images that play with art history. I have never been able to separate my feelings from my thoughts. This has proven to be as much a strength as a weakness, but it has been the survival tool on which I have based my entire life as part of overcoming addiction, and illness. I need to be aware of my feelings so that they don’t take control of me, and over time I have come to take a certain pride in my emotions. I try to let them enter my images, not as the raw unprocessed vibe that paints every day a slightly different color, but rather the refined results that I’m able to arrive at after sifting through thoughts, concepts, and a general understanding of myself – and the people around me.
Yes, I know what that sounds like, but it works. There’s a reason I shot the Hopper’s American series the way I did at the time – each image reflects a moment just before or after something might have happened, and it’s unclear whether that is a good or a bad thing. That was very much on my mind at the time. The Hanjo story is a reflection of the choices people think they’re making about love when in relationships, and sometimes you have to accept the smaller loss over the bigger one… never knowing whether you will really know which one was the right choice.
So if the Sacred and Profane images are now veering into sexualized images that focus on parts of the body, it’s not because I want to make fetishistic close-ups of arm pits, breasts, feet and shoulders, but rather because that is exactly where the vulnerability can be found. Those are the Achillian heels, the gateways to what is left of the Feminine in a visual language that to this day has been shaped by patriarchy.
But I need to accept that the images will be interpreted by my viewers as they choose.
More complex is the desire to create work that justifies itself intellectually, while still using a language of beauty. It still seems anathema to a large swath of people that those two elements are mutually exclusive. And a concept which can be grasped easily is suspicious to that same crowd.
I am disheartened right now. I feel like chucking the whole project, because I can’t come to terms with it… I can’t see the final project in front of me – the sizes, the paper types, the production, and whether it works at all. I look longingly at conventional fine art photography… those clever images shot in lonely locations that make me want to go on long trips by myself, or intimate moments caught amongst loved ones that make me wish for people in my life that would allow me to take their pictures. I want to work without large teams that need direction, I second-guess the people around me and wonder if they are committed enough, or creative enough to help me realize the images that are right behind my eyes, but that I can’t seem to articulate.
But that’s momentary. Believe me, these are not rare moments. They stare me down every time I need to select images after I shoot. But… they go away just as quickly, replaced by excitement for the next image and a new idea.
I have some new ideas, and they will be shot a week from now. There will be flowers and butterflies and sex and beauty.
YR 