We all have secrets. Some are harmless and disappear like loose change or toenail clippings in the cushions of our couch. Others are more embarrassing, the type we’d like to erase from our memories—if of course we could do so without having our brains scrambled via lobotomy. Unfortunately, life’s not that simple. Secrets often slip from the mouths of the people entrusted to keep them safe, signaling not only the betrayal of an intimate agreement, but a ripple effect that’s nearly impossible to stop. Whether whispered at cocktail parties or transmitted across time zones during late night phone conversations, secrets travel in a manner all their own. It’s a rather compelling social phenomenon, and a perfect example of the type of scenario that piques the interest of a curious observer like Ben Tour.
Toronto-born artist, in reference to his work. “My approach is different every time. But yeah, I steal parts of different things and bring them together—interesting people both real and imagined, and animals and objects that they connect with that are visually appealing. I think my most successful work has a definite mystery to it that lets the viewer interpret their own story.”
Tour’s uncanny ability to capture these minute gestures and waning expressions with his feverish strokes and emotive lines forms the foundation of his distinctive style. Most importantly however, his choice of subjects is what intimately informs the direction of each piece. Rarely are the men in his portraits handsome or confident, instead they appear corpulent and misguided, emaciated and overwrought—too concerned with their own neuroses to be bothered by the notion of societal norms.
Richard Kern (born: North Carolina, 1954) has lived and worked in New York City since 1979. In the eighties, he produced a series of short films that now are recognized as the central works of the movement now known as the Cinema of Transgression. In the 90’s he switched to photography full time and occasionally directed music videos for bands like Sonic Youth and Marilyn Manson. Kern has published nine books and is a regular contributor to a variety of international publications.
One afternoon in 1971, I skipped my 10th grade classes to hitchhike 30 miles to a mall in Rocky Mount NC on interstate 95. Heading north to get back home, a beat-up old car full of young NYC glam girls returning from Florida stopped for me. I piled in and was immediately captivated. Theirs was a world known to me only through magazines and movies. They told me stories of rock stars they knew and had sex with. They had weird haircuts. Vinyl hot pants, cut-off shorts, halter tops and plafforrn shoes barely concealed their vitality. I sat there in the back seat; crammed between two cute "older girls" (they were eighteen or nineteen) with my mouth hanging open like the hick that I was.
I had already been exposed to photography at this time by my father. As editor of the local newspaper, his job included taking photos of the events he wrote about. -Throughout my adolescence, I accompanied him on night-time assignments to photograph rural news events like car wrecks, drownings or political rallies. In my young mind, "got to go and get a shot" meant an adventure was in the making. My father encouraged my interest by teaching me how to make a camera from a can and how to use the darkroom. I immediately began developing my voyeuristic tendencies.
Now I'm a hick living in NYC. All the photographs in New York Girls (with a few exceptions) were taken in one of the two apartments I've had there since 1979.
My first apartment / studio was a six-room railroad at 529 E.13th Street between Avenues A and B. In this building were three apartments that bagged and distributed heroin, two shooting galleries and several other young artist types like me that moved there for the cheap rent. I converted one room to a darkroom and three others to a workspace where I shot photos of all my friends for use in little Xeroxed magazines I produced. In 1983, I purchased a Super-8 movie camera for five dollars and began documenting my friends acting out "statements". I dragged my projector around to local clubs, showing my early shorts before bands or as wallpaper for huge acid parties. These films featured Nick Zedd, Lydia Lunch, Lung Leg, Cassandra Stark, Sonic Youth, Tommy Turner, David Wojnarowitcz, Karen Finley, Audrey Rose, Clint Ruin and others. We became, thanks to Nick's manifestos and my photographs, visible as the "Cinema of Transgression". The characters in my films shot up drugs, pierced or cut themselves, beat each other up, sucked each other off, killed their parents, raped youngsters, etc. over harsh soundtracks produced by my friend Jim Thirlwell. The most popular of these films, FINGERED, was also the most controversial. At screening after screening, both in the States and abroad, I was routinely booed off the stage, attacked or shut down. Yet, the first time Lydia (the star and instigator of this movie) and I sat down to watch the finished product, she looked at me and said "This isn't hard enough". To me, making these films was like taking a big, fat, smelly dump then standing back and watching people marvel over it.
Around 1987, my lifestyle caught up with me. I got rid of most of my possessions, gave up my apartment and fled to San Francisco. One year of hiding from myself and running around every night with various scary petty criminals sent me running back just as quickly to New York.
Since 1988, I've been living on 3rd Street between Avenues C and D. One thing I'd managed to hang onto throughout my "dark period" was my cameras. I began doing construction work in the daytime and shooting photos whenever I could. Film Threat Video picked up the films I'd been self distributing for years and made them available all around the world. The notoriety I'd established with these films helped me when it came to finding new models to work with. Most of the photos in this book trace me "re-claiming my camera eye" as I've tried to find a replacement for the blood spattered imagery I'm generally known for.
I eventually began producing movies again and made a few rock videos but realized that my true interest is in taking photographs. For me, nothing compares to the experience of building an environment with light then adding a living person as an unknown to make a temporal image. All photographers take pictures so they can tell themselves "I was there". New York Girls shows where I was for the last fifteen years.
The models are New York girls by my definition. At some point, they have all lived in Manhattan, drawn by that yearning for excitement and lifestyle intensity that motivates everyone that moves there. I don't think that there are any Manhattan natives in this book. Some of the women came from nearby Long Island and some arrived from as far away as Japan but they all became New Yorkers by spending time in the downtown scene looking for fun.
Richard Kern in conversation with Matthew Higgs: New York 2004.
MH: I believe your father was a photographer?
RK: Not exactly. My father was the managing editor of a daily local newspaper in North Carolina. He was someone who took photographs out of necessity: all the reporters doubled up as photographers, my father included. So calling him a photographer would be, I guess, a stretch. He would simply go on an assignment to cover a story and have to take some photographs whilst he was there. I grew up in a very dull paper-mill town in the South: a place with just one movie theatre, so my father being both a newspaper editor and occasional photographer seemed, at least to a child, like an exciting job.
MH: Did you accompany your father on his assignments?
RK: Yeah. He would take me along from time to time. I spent a lot of my childhood sitting around waiting for him to get finished whilst he was took pictures of people at the local Moose Lodge. Occasionally there were a few interesting trips: like the time he took me to a drowning, or to car crashes, and the time we went to a Ku Klux Klan rally.
MH: How old would you have been?
RK: Around six or seven years old.
MH: Do you remember having any interest in photography as a child?
RK: When I was in Fifth Grade, as part of a science project, my
father showed me how to make a pinhole camera. He showed me how to load and process film, and how to take pictures. As a kid I always built model cars, which I was always winning trophies for! I would photograph scenes as if the models were racing down a road, except it was just a set up on the rug in my bedroom, so they weren't really that convincing, but when you are a kid it really looked like the real thing!
MH: What music were you listening to?
RK: The Stooges, The Velvet Underground, and then later the The Ramones. At that time you would go to a party with your Ramones record and put it on and the other people would want to kill you! That kind of reaction just doesn't seem possible now, but at the time it was for real.
MH: When did you move to New York?
RK: Around 1978, or 1979. I had an eight month lay-over in Philadelphia , where I continued putting out the fanzines. Which, when I think back on it, was a direct extension of what my father was doing: he was basically doing a 'fanzine' for my home town - which is what a local newspaper was. When I eventually got to New York it was a whole different thing. I still made fanzines though: I would just leave them lying around everywhere, and people would just stumble across them. The only contact information was a PO Box number.
I suppose I grew up with the same dream that a lot of boys had, to become a Playboy photographer.
What I realized as I grew older and started taking my own shots is that's really not how most of us are. We aren't perfect, we don't always wear jewelry and high heels and there are actually men
in the world who are sexual beings too.
What I began to find fascinating was the amount of vulnerability that people felt comfortable sharing with me when they took off their clothes for my camera.
I think it surprised me at first. A glance of lust here, a glimpse of pain there. It soon became what I tried to capture with my photography, the reality and vulnerability of the people who chose to reveal themselves to me.
When I started finding models who felt comfortable opening up to my camera sexually it was like a fountainhead, a great, untapped resource of primal human emotion that spoke to the deepest parts of my soul. Here was a place where all the facades of civilization were stripped away leaving only the raw, pulsing core of our beings.
Here was communication without the need for words. It is a place where our senses take over and the mundane aspects of our day to day lives wash away like dust in the rain leaving only the true and honest essence of our deepest, most primal selves.
These are the things I see and these are the things that I try to capture.
Sometimes I succeed and sometimes I just take pretty pictures.
(from official site)
She's wearing black cords, Reebok trainers and a beige fake-fur cardigan thingy. Her off-white peroxide curls shoot out of dark roots, the blonde frizz giving her a slightly madcap look. Her frame is still girlishly thin, and her conversation is enhanced by her long white hands which flap around like demented puppets. When she laughs (often, and very loudly) you notice the large, goofy teeth which, back in her modelling days, framed by lipstick and shot by Helmut Newton or Oliviero Toscani, metamorphosed into a dazzling smile. And when she stops laughing the overbite gives her a subtle but permanent pout; on little details like this, successful modelling careers are made or broken.
In Von Unwerth's case, most definitely made. German-born, she posed for the world's greatest photographers in the most exotic locations, made a packet and worked continuously for a decade. And then, with infuriating ease, she picked up a camera, started taking snaps of the other girls on shoots, and became one of the top fashion photographers. On the way, she and her French partner Christian, a DJ and radio programmer who also acts as her business manager, had a daughter and moved to New York. But the family soon returned to France where they now split their time between a large apartment in Paris's 15th arrondissement and their country house in Normandy.
You almost certainly know her work, even if you've never consciously studied it. Most recently you would have seen the sly and subversive "Africa- print" campaign for Diesel, featuring only black models loafing around in jeans, jewellery and halter-neck tops, and overprinted with faux African newspaper headlines such as "Africa Agrees to Financial Aid to America".
Over the years you will have seen her sexy, playful images in US, Italian and British Vogue, Vanity Fair, Interview, The Face, L'Uomo Vogue, Dazed & Confused and i-D, and just about any other major fashion magazine you can name. Her advertising campaigns include Guess Jeans, Diesel, Chanel, Katharine Hamnett, Miu Miu, Bluemarine and Adidas. Older male readers may even remember seeing a young Carrie Otis and Claudia Schiffer in the Guess campaign of the late 1980s - both shot, of course, by Von Unwerth.
But wait, we're getting ahead of ourselves. We haven't even talked about the circus yet! As if her life didn't already read like a teen girl's fantasy, at the age of 18 Von Unwerth saw the Circus Roncalli in Munich, fell in love with the ringmaster, and joined the troupe. It was a "very poetic" and arty type of circus, created by a bunch of Austrian singers and poets. "As soon as I saw it, I said, `I have to join!' It was so romantic." Her duties included assisting the clown and handing the blades to the knife-thrower. It was while working in this circus by night and studying by day that she was spotted - aren't they all? - walking along the street, minding her own business. She'd just come out of college when a photographer rushed up and said... well, you get the picture. And, of course, until then she'd never dreamed of becoming a model, right?
"Actually, I was already thinking about it that time, dreaming about it," she says with refreshing honesty. "People had started to say I should go into modelling. But I didn't expect anything. It was Bavaria, and when you're skinny in Bavaria, well, that's not beautiful. In Bavaria they like the girls to be..." Her hands cup a pair of large invisible breasts, "...you know, quite round, big ladies." Her laugh goes off like a firecracker.
But in Paris they like their girls slim and leggy. So Von Unwerth, born in Frankfurt, moved to the French capital, where she signed for the Elite agency, which in those days lived up to its name. It was 1974. She was 20.
"I wasn't one of those young ones like they have now. They're too young these days. I sometimes think they should be playing. They should be with their friends, having fun. Not in that harsh environment."
Aha! So, as a photographer and the mother of a 12-year-old girl, she would agree some of the girls we see in magazines today, girls in their mid-teens, are too young to be sexy?
"No, a girl can be sexy when she's 14."
But surely we shouldn't be looking at girls and saying they're sexy when they're so young?
"You shouldn't say it to them, but they can be. Often they are. That's natural, they see that everywhere. They want to see what other girls look like, they want to be sexy a little bit, like the girls in the videos and the magazines."
But is that natural?
"Well, I think girls grow up much faster now, but I think it's natural. But I wouldn't want my daughter to be a model... I don't think it's a very fulfilling job. I think it's not creative. I was doing it for 10 years and I wasn't very happy with the way that people judge you just for your outside, the surface. It's kind of... a bit of a waste of time. It can be fun, too. But, basically, I'd rather she does something that is more creative."
"I think she could. But she grew up with it, so she's not really interested at all. Because her mother was a model, and for a while I was doing lots of pictures at home so there were always models coming to the house, so modelling is a very normal everyday thing for her, she doesn't find the idea exciting. Actually she's a little bit against it. When she sees models on TV she says, `Oh, you know, modelling is really a stupid profession, isn't it?'"
How do you feel, I ask, when she says that?
"Well, I have to agree a little bit you know. I love fashion, but seen from the outside there is something a little bit ridiculous about it when you see the girls going down the runway," she says brightly, not at all phased, "looking like soldiers. And you know, they have to do that silly walk..."
She didn't have to walk like that in her modelling days, she says, because it was a different era and modelling was more relaxed. "I was dancing up and down the runway. It was more fun then, the whole thing was less mediatisee. The supermodel thing made it very serious. But actually, now the supermodel thing is almost finished again. Apart from Kate Moss, who else is so famous and still working on the runway? I mean, someone who really touches the public in the same way, like Claudia and Linda did?"
One of Von Unwerth's great talents is her ability to spot a future star. In 1992 she made a short film called Inferno! which featured a largely unknown Kate Moss. Either side of that, she brought Claudia Schiffer and then Eva Herzigova to public attention almost single- handedly. Most recently she was the first to find Natalia Vodianova, the top girl right now, and the first to do a really big campaign with her. How does she pull it off? It's always accidental, she says, there's no systematic search. "Something always pushes us together. With Claudia Schiffer some magazine called me and asked me shoot her. I wasn't so excited about her. But when I looked at the pictures - wow, she looked like Brigitte Bardot! Yeah! And then we did a session to push that look, and people went crazy about her. But I didn't expect that."
This is certainly the case with Revenge, her latest photo book, with images revolving around a camp tale of feisty but naive young lovelies falling into the clutches of a sadistic baroness, who makes them do vile things like clean out the stables wearing only their undies. The text, based on an idea of Von Unwerth's, but written by novelist Harland Miller, borders on the farcical: "Extract from the secret journal of Emily: it has all been a horrid trick, our invitation here was one into slavery. The beastly chauffeur whose attentions I can't believe I encouraged, smirked as the Baroness ripped off our clothes. Now we are forced to work in shameful underwear and very high heels that make a dash for the road impossible. Also the locals are all in-breds and to throw oneself on their mercy wearing only frou-frou bra and panties is to invite disaster. One would rather stay here and be whipped!"
Less assured hands would make a pig's ear of this silk purse, but what elevates Von Unwerth's photos above tasteful smut is the sense of playfulness in her work; her models look at ease with themselves, relaxed. This loose, unstructured, yet very intimate approach is seductively easy on the eye (and the conscience, for that matter), and devoid of the grasping, possessive quality found in so many of her male contemporaries - who often photograph women with a butterfly collector's eye, as if pinning exotic specimens to a board.
"Yeah, I know what you mean, I see those pictures all the time. I don't know, maybe they don't enjoy their work," she says, flashing that smile again. "I enjoy photographing people. I try to make them feel comfortable and relaxed. It works - most of the time."
Her favourite working method, she says, is to invent a loose storyline and work fluidly, using the standard fashion photographer's equipment: a Mamiya, Contax or Nikon M6. She prefers black and white because of its "magical" properties, finding it more "emotional" and "dreamy". Her trademark blurriness is often a happy accident.
"My pictures are quite instant, I don't have people posing, I try to capture something," she says, snapping her long fingers loudly. "So you have to feel it, anticipate it, know when something's going to happen. That's why I like girls who move, who come up with things, who play and enjoy themselves and have fun, not just sitting there thinking, `Oh, I'm so pretty.' I want to be surprised, I want to follow something, some energy or emotion. When it's too static I get bored in a matter of seconds. It's like, OK, I got it. Now what?"
Often, she says, a special picture will present itself in the last few seconds, when the day's work is officially over. "At the end of the session the models relax and it's often then you get the best shot. You have to wait until they let their guard down." And when your life story reads like Von Unwerth's, you can probably rest assured that something magical will happen, sooner or later.
The Independent on Sunday
Dec 8, 2002
by Alix Sharkey
http://findarticles.com
How do you go about selecting your models?
They find me a lot of the time. It’s hard to approach somebody and be like ‘I want to make you into a clown with an erection, with helium balloons attached to your testicles. Would you mind?’ It’s hard for me to be subtle, even when I try. So people have to see my work first, and then they come to me. I rather have people get it, and share a piece of my obsession. Then of course, I have to see them nude and decide where and if they fit into my vision. My photos start as illustrations, and if they are the type of boy I would pen out of my head, then I will probably end up photographing them.
Do you think that the proliferation of social networking sites has made people more exhibitionistic and therefore more likely to model for nude photography?
Absolutely. The young have definitely inherited the Earth, and are far more self aware of their sexualities than ever before. The Internet has unified this awareness into one diverse voice. Definitely an exciting time to be doing erotic photography and network with a group of people who are no longer afraid to express themselves.
Do you ever have to seduce your models out of their clothing?Pshaw. They are dying to undress for me.
In your online bio you mention that you’re inspired by mythology. What kind of mythology are you trying to create with your work?
I’m a terrible nerd, and mythology is another obsession of mine. I like to amplify the spirit with the flesh, in much of my work. That’s what mythology is all about– These avatars of spirit, shaped into these naked, gloriously beautiful beings, and representing aspects of both heaven and earth alike. I love to create my own gods, and my own mythology; I see great parallels with sexuality and spirituality, and am fascinated by the idea that they might be the same.
How is the artistic community in Montreal?
It’s quite varied. A bit “Scene” for me at times, but relatively open to my sort of work.
Do you travel to NYC very often?
Not as often as I would like… But for specific projects, yes, especially when travel expenses are included.
It looks like you’ve had a number of non-photography related projects recently. Tell us a little about what’s going on beyond the lens.
My beautiful partner, and designer, Colin Seymour and I have founded a burlesque troupe of a sort, aptly christened, “Bad Taste Burlesque”. It’s a bit new wave, and a hot combination of sexually varied performance art with often offensive inspirations. We want to annihilate what one would expect when going to a burlesque show, while still making making it both entertaining and arousing. It’s not “Gay Burlesque”, but it’s definitely not straight. We’re currently working on our second production with a rather controversial theme– but that’s going to have to be a surprise.
Any plans for another show in NYC sometime soon or maybe a book for our coffee tables?
Other than currently working on my own book, I have select works coming out this fall/winter in David Leddick’s Nude Male Next, and in Grafucked, a compilation of erotic art in a “coffee-table book”. As for more details on these and other publications/exhibitions, you will just have to check my website, or blog when I can give out more information.
Anything else that you’d like our readers to know?
The frenum of my cock has been pierced since I was 14 yrs. old, and it just fell out!
And on that note, I think we’re out too! Thanks Mikel
Goldin's work is most often presented in the form of a slideshow and has been shown at film festivals; her most famous being a 45 minute show in which 800 pictures are displayed. The main themes of her early pictures are love, gender, domesticity, and sexuality; these frames are usually shot with available light.She has affectionately documented women looking in mirrors, girls in bathrooms and barrooms, drag queens, sexual acts, and the culture of obsession and dependency.
Yes, photography saved my life. Every time I go through something scary, traumatic, I survive by taking pictures.
You also help other people to survive. Memory about them does not disappear, because they are on your pictures.
Yes. It is about keeping a record of the lives I lost, so they cannot be completely obliterated from memory. My work is mostly about memory. It is very important to me that everybody that I have been close to in my life I make photographs of them. The people are gone, like Cookie, who is very important to me, but there is still a series of pictures showing how complex she was. Because these pictures are not about statistics, about showing people die, but it is all about individual lives. In the case of New York, most creative and freest souls in the city died. New York is not New York anymore. I've lost it and I miss it. They were dying because of AIDS.
You decided to leave the United States because of the effect the AIDS epidemic had on the community of New York gay artists and writers?
I left America in 1991 to Europe. I went to Berlin partially because of that, and partially because one of my best friends, Alf Bold, was dying and I stayed with him and took care of him. He had nobody to take care of him. I mean, he had lots of famous friends, but he had nobody to take care of him on a daily basis. He was one of people who invented the Berlin film festival. This was also the time when my Paris photo dealer Gilles died of AIDS. He had the most radical gallery in the city. He did not tell anybody in Europe that he has AIDS, because the attitude here was so different than in the United States. There was no ACT UP in Paris, and in 1993 it looked very much like in the US in the 1950s. Now it has changed, but at that time people in Europe told me: 'Oh, we do not need ACT UP. We have very good hospitals'.
Your art is basically socially engaged...
It is very political. First, it is about gender politics. It is about what it is to be male, what it is to be female, what are gender roles... Especially The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is very much about gender politics, before there was such a word, before they taught it at the university. A friend of mine said I was born with a feminist heart. I decided at the age of five that there was nothing my brothers can do and I cannot do. I grew up that way. It was not like an act of decision that I was going to make a piece about gender politics. I made this slideshow about my life, about my past life. Later, I realized how political it was. It is structured this way so it talks about different couples, happy couples. For me, the major meaning of the slideshow is how you can become sexually addicted to somebody and that has absolutely nothing in common with love. It is about violence, about being in a category of men and women. It is constructed so that you see all different roles of women, then of children, the way children are brought up, and these roles, and then men, then it shows a lot of violence. That kind of violence the men play with. It goes to clubs, bars, it goes to prostitution as one of the options for women - prostitution or marriage. Then it goes back to the social scene, to married and re-married couples, couples having sex, it ends with twin graves.
Could you please tell us something about the people, the artists who have influenced your art?
My biggest influences are my friends. Bruce was one of first persons that introduced me to slide shows in the 1970s. I started doing slide shows because I left school. During school I went to live in Provincetown, a gay resort three hours away from Boston. It is the farthest point in America's east coast. It is beautiful. It is a little community of artists. Norman Mailer lives there. A lot of painters and writers live there. In the 1970s it was really wild with Waters, Cookie, Sharon, and Sharon's son. It was incredibly wild. Later everything has completely changed. In Provincetown we used to live in small groups. I took lots of pictures of my friends, like "Bruce in the snow". I've known Bruce since 1972. We lived together with Bruce, Sharon, and Cookie. I was at the School at the Museum of Fine Arts. Those days the school was that teachers sat in the parking lot and drank. Literally. This was before the 1980s. We were told that we will never make any money on art. Now, the students that I teach, at Yale particularly, all they want to know is what gallery they could have a show in or could I help them to get a show. They go right from the graduate school to the big galleries. It is all a career move. When I went to art school, I never heard of Artforum. Never. I took classes in Russian literature, in Faulkner, whom I love. I took writing classes, I took the history of film, I took drawing to be able to see better, because many photographers cannot see anything.
I actually became very influenced by Rothko. I love the work of Richard Todd, but I cannot say he was an influence. Anything that I see and I love is an influence, but I never try to replicate somebody else, like I never tried to make a Rothko. I love Caravaggio, but I never studied Caravaggio. I never made any Caravaggios. Some of my pictures of boys having sex, they have the same sense of light as Caravaggio. Caravaggio also knew all the people that he painted. They were his lovers or hustlers. Pasolini used boys from the street that he loved that he desired. Fassbinder only used people he knew. Cassavetes used the same people over and over, so I am not the first one to do that, but I think that people have forgotten how radical my work was in the 1980s, when I started, because nobody was doing work like that. Now, so many people have done work like that like Wolfgang Tillmans, Juergen Teller, Corinne DayÉ Now people think I am just one of many who've done that. They do not understand that The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was so radical when it came out.
I was very influenced by film, because I did not go to high school. I went to the movies. Sometimes I went to the movies two or three times per day. I saw every movie from the 1940s and the 1950s. I saw every movie where all those goddesses were... Every movie with Marlena Dietrich, every movie with Bette Davies, every movie with Barbara Stanwyck, every movie with Marilyn Monroe. Then I saw an enormous amount of Italian movies with Antonioni, Pasolini, de SicaÉ I was very influenced by Cassavetes. When I am influenced, unlike many other contemporary photographers, I would never take a scene from the movie. I was very influenced by Fassbinder and Kie¦lowski. I saw his "Ten Commandments." How do you pronounce his name? Yes, he is very important to me. Also Fassbinder was important. I saw all his works.
Did you make any movies?
Yes, I made two documentaries. "I'll Be Your Mirror" was made with the BBC. It is about my life. The other was made with Joana and Aurele. It is about AIDS and it is called "Ballad at the Morgue." He has AIDS and she does not. It is about a couple, about a relation of a couple, where one person is HIV-positive and the other is not. The film has only been shown in Turin.
What about music?
Yes, it is very important to me. Now, I am very influenced by Nick Cave. He saved my life, literally.
Some of your pictures are blurred. You did it on purpose?
Actually, I take blurred pictures, because I take pictures no matter what the light is. If I want to take a picture, I do not care if there is light or no light. If I want to take a picture, I take it no matter what. Sometimes I use very low shutter speed and they come out blurred, but it was never an intention like David Armstrong started to do what we call, he and I, "Fuzzy-wuzzy landscapes." He looked at the back of my pictures and studied them. He started to take pictures like them without people in them. They are just out of focus landscapes. He actually did it, intentionally threw the camera out of focus. I have never done it in my life. I take pictures like in here when there is no sun or light that I think all my pictures are going to be out of focus. Even Valerie and Bruno and whatever I take, because there is not enough light, and so I use a very low shutter speed. It used to be because I was drunk, but now I am not. The drugs influenced all my life. Both good and bad. I heard about an artist in Poland, Witkacy, who wrote down on his paintings all the drugs he was on. Depending how many drugs he took, that is how much he charged for the portrait. I saw his portrait at the National Museum, a kind of German expressionism, and I loved it.
Interview by Adam Mazur and Paulina Skirgajllo-Krajewska 13 Fabruary 2003 Warsaw.
