Passion Is All

Ralph Gibson

2010-11-13T16:21:00.017+02:00

Ralph Gibson (b. January 16, 1939, Los Angeles, California) is an American art photographer best known for his photographic books. His images often incorporate fragments with erotic and mysterious undertones, building narrative meaning through contextualization and surreal juxtaposition.

Ralph Gibson studied photography while in the US Navy and then at the San Francisco Art Institute. He began his professional career as an assistant to Dorothea Lange and went on to work with Robert Frank on two films. Gibson has maintained a lifelong fascination with books and book-making. Since the appearance in 1970 of THE SOMNAMBULIST, his work has been steadily impelled towards the printed page. To date he has produced over 40 monographs, his most current projects being "State of the Axe" published by Yale University Press in Fall of 2008 and "NUDE" by Taschen (2009). His photographs are included in over one hundred and fifty museum collections around the world, and have appeared in hundreds of exhibitions.

Gibson has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1973, 1975, 1986), a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (D.A.A.D.) Exchange, Berlin (1977), a New York State Council of the Arts (C.A.P.S.) fellowship (1977), and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1985).

He was decorated as an Officier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1986) and appointed, Commandeur de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2005) by the French government.

His awards include: Leica Medal of Excellence Award (1988), "150 Years of Photography" Award, Photographic Society of Japan (1989), a Grande Medaille de la Ville d'Arles (1994) and the Lucie Award for life time achievement (2008).

Gibson also received an honorary doctorate of Fine Arts from the University of Maryland (1991), and a second honorary doctorate from the Ohio Wesleyan University (1998).

He has worked exclusively with the Leica for almost 50 years.

Gibson currently lives in New York and travels frequently to Europe and Brazil.
(wikipedia)

An Interview with Ralph Gibson
By Chris Maher and Larry Berman
19 June 2001
Featured in the February 2002 issue of Shutterbug Magazine

Chris/Larry: Let us begin with a question about your vision. Your work has an extraordinary balance in it, a certain kind of energy to it. Can you tell us about your state of mind when you are shooting?

Ralph: Well, for the longest time I have known that photography for me is not directly linked to an external event. For example if I say that tomorrow there’s going to be an execution at 12 o’clock. You get there, we can all win a Pulitzer prize. If you get there at 12:01 you miss your shot, as it were. So, what I wanted to do, is be able to make my perception of anything become the subject itself. And for this reason I’ve attempted to take pictures of simple things, you know, like a cardboard box, or a chair, or a spoon. Very humble objects. I’m not terribly drawn towards the epic event. I’d like to make something totally insignificant into an object of importance, by virtue of how photography works.

Chris/Larry: How much of your shooting is actually planned? How much is spontaneous? How much do you pre-conceptualize what you’re going to get versus just working with the subject and the light and just responding to it?

Ralph: I know an image when I see it, but I never know what my next photograph is really going to be, necessarily, unless I’m working on a project. I have several projects currently under way. I’m working on Berlin at night on a thing called “I am the Night”. I’m also working on a project for Gibson Guitars entitled “Light Strings” with my friend the guitarist Andy Summers. This will be a book and a traveling exhibition. So, in a case of something like that I know what the subject matter will be. Or when I’m doing nudes for example, I know that tomorrow at 3:00 a model is coming to the studio. However, I’ve recently been invited by the Mayor of Strasbourg in Alsace to come this fall to make twenty photographs of the area. This will mean that I’ll be entirely at large, as they say. I’ll just be drifting around and I will respond to what I think and feel, and one picture will inform my next one, and I will follow the tone. The same thing as when I lay out a book. I make a couple of double page spreads that seem to have a certain kind of emotional tone, which I then follow in subsequent spreads.
Chris/Larry: When you’re walking around shooting, say, twenty pictures of an area, what kind of equipment do you bring with you? What is the technology you use to capture your images?

Ralph: It’s very simple. I carry two Leica M’s. I have two M6’s and I usually take three lenses. A 35, 50, and 90. And one body has color, one body has black and white. I might take a 135 in the case of Alsace because they’ll probably be some landscapes and I’ll want to flatten them. So I will use the long lens. But I really believe that the problem for me is for me to perceive something clearly, and it doesn’t matter where I am. I’ve been in Japan, I’ve been all over the world and I come back with the same photographs (laughs). It appears that wherever I go I tend to bring my vision with me.

Chris/Larry: You do capture an energy that is unique to the area. Like in your pictures in Japan, there was a certain energy that came through those, which I thought was a bit different, than in your European work.

Ralph: When I think of energy I think more in terms of composition, a certain tension on the surface of the image. I’m very much the formalist in photography. I’ll take a picture of anything in an attempt to compose it within the proportions of the golden means (the 24x36mm proportion) just to see if I can compose it perfectly. And I think that the energy to which you refer to has more to do with these issues.

Chris/Larry: When you use Leica rangefinders, is there a different type of visualization because the way the camera’s viewfinder is designed? When you shoot do you crop at all, or is it all in that frame?

Ralph: I have spent forty years working with the Leica rangefinder. The rangefinder enables one to see what’s outside of the frame as well as what’s inside of the frame. You make a decision predicated on the presence and/or the absence of various aspects of the subject. With a reflex, the camera determines what is seen, and half the time it's out of focus. One could follow a reflex around the world and focus it from time to time until it came across a picture. With a rangefinder you see something, you make the exposure and you continue to look at what you’re seeing. The rangefinder is ideally matched to the perceptive act, the personal act of perception. I only use a reflex for extreme close-ups.

Chris/Larry: You have a very tight, formal kind of design to your work. Do you ever use a tripod?

Ralph: I rarely use a tripod, unless I’m in the studio with a long lens shooting a nude with a long exposure. I rarely use a tripod and I rarely crop. And even if I did, I wouldn’t admit it (laughs).

Chris/Larry: Well, when you’re actually shooting, do you go through a lot of film, or are you very conservative in the way in which you make your exposures?

Ralph: I don’t bracket, if that’s what you mean. I’ve discovered that when I was shooting Kodachrome or something that I’d have to bracket because of the extremely short latitude of material. But now, with these very sophisticated color negative materials, they are much more forgiving. There’s a meter inside the Leica. I use it in the broadest most general sense of the word. I usually center weight it and I put it on whatever color I consider to be the most important part of the subject in the photograph. In black and white I hardly pay any attention to it at all.

Chris/Larry: I was thinking of the dynamic of working with the subject. You work with shadows in an incredibly dynamic way. Shadows are very critical to the power of your pieces. Do you play with the shadow by movement and changing….

Ralph: For example if you’re going to make a drawing, you take a paper and a pencil and add lines, add marks, until you finish your drawing. It's additive. When I make a photograph, I move in closer and I take things away, and I take things away, until I get everything out of the frame except what I want. Therefore my process is considered subtractive. Now part of this subtraction has to do with casting things into deep shadow. I eliminate a lot of unwanted material, activity into the shadow area. And in so doing, create a shape. Instead of just being a variation on light, for me shadows become cut forms, they become shapes. And I discovered this by photographing primarily in bright sun and exposing for highlights, which is pretty easy to do. Most people struggle to get detail into their shadows. I was never interested in that kind of photographic expression particularly.

Chris/Larry: Your work really takes advantage of the 35mm film dynamic range, with its characteristic graininess and tonality. How has the changing of materials, the newer films with finer grain, effected you? Have you pretty much stayed with the one film and developer combination?
Ralph: I’ve used Rodinal since 1961. I use Tri-x almost exclusively but occasionally, sometimes I get in the mood to use Fuji 400. But either one is the same to me. And for my night work, I’ve been very happily working with Fuji Neopan 1600. But they’re all souped in Rodinal. I develop all my own film myself, personally. And I also base the fact that I develop my film personally means that there’s going to be certain irregularities in my agitation. And I have discovered that, in these irregularities there is some creative input. I don’t want my film to be developed too well, too cleanly, too smoothly. I don’t want that slick look. I’ve had a life long relationship with grain. You know I originally started out as a photojournalist when I was young. I’ve always felt that grain gave texture both to cinema, as well as photography. I’ve used it for any number of reasons for the entire length of my career. It’s almost harder to get a grainy image nowadays than it is to get the shot.

Alexander Bergström

2010-07-18T22:56:00.011+03:00

Official Site

Sarah Hermans

2010-07-14T13:30:00.002+03:00

1. what’s your philosophy?

I believe that what goes around, comes around. (Not that I never do or say the wrong things, but I think that when you try this, you’re already accomplishing a huge part of what Karma is about) I also don’t want to look back on life thinking anything that starts with ‘would have - could have or should have.’ And that’s a hard thing to accomplish, but I try. On another note, do you know the book ‘Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close’ from Foer? It almost felt like reading my soul, for example this line: ”I’m so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything”. It’s not a philosophy, It’s sad, but true, and I recognize myself in it. I do realize that means I should (ha there is the ‘should’) change something about my philosophy, but again, it’s not that easy.

2. in your ‘west usa’ series, you managed to capture landscapes and life/death with such a raw clarity, was your approach to these subjects different from your other work?

I started the trip after a few months of printing black and white and spending heaps of money, so I had no other option than using my digital camera. I did shoot one roll of film, but over a thousand digital ones in those 3 weeks. It’s easier to photograph digital, but I feel less connected to what I see, when I do so. I feel less and that’s why I stick to film. Probably because of the fact that I didn’t use film, it was easier for me to photograph, for example, that dead deer. I knew that if it would be too hard for me, I could delete it as soon as I had it. With film, it’s there, I can’t throw away film, so it would lay in your drawer, your room, your place, your life. It could be haunting in a way. Anyway, those weeks were the best weeks of my life. I’ve often said ‘let’s go somewhere unknown tomorrow’, but until january 2009 I never actually did it. It was beautiful, I’ve never been more grateful than I was then.

3. how many places have you traveled?

Not that many until last year, when I went abroad for a year. I shared a room with Sabrina and in that year I’ve been to quite some beautiful places in the US. New York was one of them. I loved the city, and admired how one could feel so at ease in such a big city. Ok, we woke up everyday by 7am to see New York awakening instead of rushing, but I still felt great there, while usually I prefere calmer places better. Another place I went to was Zion, where I forgot my heart, it’s so beautiful, the people were almost surreal. I don’t mean dreamlike, but beautifully down-to-earth, and not putting themselves but nature first, I must return there one day to pick my heart up again, and stay there for a bit. And become more like them.

4. a lot of your recent posted work is black and white. is there an aesthetic reason for this? do you self-develop/print?   

I miss colour terribly, but I just started studying photography in Sint Lukas, Brussels, and since our first year is black and white only, I barely/ don’t have time to shoot colour. I love black and white, printing it is nicer than colour, but it don’t think it’s as much my cup of tea as colour is.

5. the way you find your compositions and your light are remarkable, how often are these photos made on days that you go out specifically to take photos as opposed to days where you are just out and have a camera? do you always carry a camera with you?  

Most of them are taken on days where I accidentally have my camera with me. Accidentally, because I rarely have it with me. I wish I would take it more often, but I’m not a ‘decesive-moment’ photographer, so I’m not really needy of doing so. Unless I’m bored, or I have schoolassignments. Then mostly they’re made up in my head already, and selfportraitures. But I seem to love the ones taken on moments that were a coincidence of beauty, best. Light, discoveries of places, the clothes one wears that day, the way someone bends forward…

6. how do you feel about your photography? what part of you does it fulfill or drive?
Gosh… I like them, in that way that they’re memories. I have trouble remembering good things in life, I seem to forget them too easily. And my camera helps me with memorizing. And the images I took, whether they’re made up in my head first or not, whether they seem hopeful or melancholic or painful, they’re always about things that happened to me, things I felt or saw, and I’m happy they did, because they’re about life as I live it. I don’t think every image has an amusing story with it for strangers, but they do make me feel when I see them again. And some people seem to feel or see that for themselves, even though they weren’t there themselves. That’s fulfilling for me.

7. where do you see photography in your life in the future?  
For myself, everywhere, always. I really can’t be more specific.

8. one photographer/artist that everyone should check out right now?
Mark Borthwick

Official Site

2010-07-14T12:52:00.001+03:00

Wendy Bevan

2010-03-26T01:49:00.015+02:00

Wendy Bevan is a fashion photographer. She doesn't use £2K Canon DSLRs and arrays of flashguns. She shoots on good old Polaroid, and styles in shades of circus-burlesque. Kind of a paradox, since fashion is all about bleeding edge newness, and all of her photos look like they've been stored in an attic for sixty years. Somehow though, it works, and it's wonderful - her CV includes shoots for Russian Vogue, Italian Marie Claire, The Independent, The Observer, Nylon, V Magazine, Qvest, POP Magazine, I-D and more. Eish!

Tell me about your equipment. You shoot a lot on Polaroid, right? What's the attraction?

I have a really simple set up, and most of the time use natural light. I don't believe in overloading shoots with unnecessary equipment. The beauty is there already, and my job as a photographer is to find it and capture it within an image. That doesn't necessarily mean more equipment is needed.
I love the magic of the Polaroid, and the instant beauty that I am able capture within each sheet of film is unique every time. It allows me to work freely and express the most intricate of details subtly. Indeed I have an affection for the format. It is wonderful. The properties of the film naturally evoke the feeling of nostalgia, through its dream-like qualities.

And they've just announched the Polaroid factory is going to be reopened! Hoorah! What else is going to be IMPORTANT in 2009?

World Peace!

One item of clothing to erase from history and another to cherish please.

I'm surprised that flourescent Lycra has become a trend again. It was wrong the first time round - surely we realised then? The corset should always be treasured, and heels.

Rate the following in order of importance: model, setting, pose, styling.
This is difficult! A great shoot is the combination of all of these things being perfect, and a fantastic team. But, i'd say A) Setting B)Styling C) Model D) Pose.

What's been your most interesting/weird/innovative shoot, assignment or collaboration?

In the early days when I first started shooting, I think I was probably a bit more experimental. I used to dress models in very abstract creations that I had made, and then photograph them. There is always a sense of chaos behind the scenes, which I couldn't work with out! Every collaboration turns out to be interesting and different from the last.

What are you working on at the moment?

Several projects. I am going away on a trip soon to Key West, shooting for Italian Marie Claire, which I am really excited about. The shoot is based on 50's pinup imagery.

(http://www.dontpaniconline.com)

Official Site

Todd Hido

2009-12-19T15:45:00.005+02:00

Todd Hido (b.1968, Kent, Ohio) is an American contemporary artist and photographer. Currently based in San Francisco, much of Hido’s work involves urban and suburban housing across the U.S., of which the artist produces large, highly detailed and luminous color photographs.
(wiki)

Official Site

Marco Trinchillo

2009-08-30T23:31:00.008+03:00

Ben Tour

2009-05-30T15:18:00.006+03:00

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.

The Vancouver-based painter and illustrator—who has forged a successful career translating his fascination with human behavior into beautifully dense character portraits—can best be described as a sort of visual anthropologist. For the better part of a decade Tour has catalogued and archived an oddly fascinating gallery of characters assembled from scraps of truth and fiction gathered from everyday life.

“I would describe it as a visual diary of characters and personalities,” says the 29-year-old 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.”

While viewer interpretation does play a major role in the way Tour’s work is received, personal connection is equally as important. The abundant emotional content built into each of his pieces is at once intimidating and mesmerizing. In one portrait a bald old man with squinty eyes, crow’s feet, and a beak-like nose peers out from behind a pair of oversized black-rimmed glasses. His gaze is skeptical but fixed, as though he’s sizing up an unseen adversary. Another depicts a woman, sullen, sitting by herself beside two deer and an old typewriter—crimson-colored flowers scattered at her feet. The expression on her face is cold and detached, and the bowed arch of her spine seems to reveal an excess of grief.

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.

Tour’s female subjects, however, are portrayed in a much different light. Flaws and imperfections are, for the most part, hard to discern at first glance. Pouty lips and long sensual necklines punctuate attractive, symmetrical faces. Thin arms and long slender legs appear designed intently for Fashion Week runways. But closer scrutiny, particularly with regards to the eyes, hints at a more complicated reality lurking beneath each subject’s surface.

“It’s all in the eyes,” Tour explains. “If the character is looking right at you they want your attention, look away and they take you with them. I try to make the females look strong and fragile—one emotion for each eye.

The human figure has always been my thing,” he adds. “As a kid I always started my drawings from the eyes and worked outwards—they always seemed like the most important part of a person. [Then] I got really serious about drawing [while] in high school—I was constantly doodling—and just haven’t stopped.”
(matthewnewton.us)

Official Site

Richard Kern

2009-05-29T23:41:00.007+03:00

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.

(official site)

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.

Brad Wallis

2009-05-29T23:28:00.003+03:00

Photographing nudes has provided intrigue and inspiration since I began shooting in 1991.

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)

Ellen Von Unwerth (Revenge)

2009-03-22T00:14:00.022+02:00

Last week was LA, yesterday was London and tomorrow is New York, but right now Ellen von Unwerth has a moment to speak, and sits slumped in a red 1950s armchair, long legs sprawling out across the parquet floor of her Paris office. Beside her feet are white cardboard boxes with black felt-tip markings that say things like "George Michael St Tropez Sept 99", "Interview Sheryl Crow" and "Vogue Germany Diamond Tiaras".

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."

Perhaps it all comes down to empathy. She clearly loves the girls she works with, and they trust her. "Her pictures are sexy with a nice sense of humour," says Eva Herzigova. "It's not vulgar, it's always funny. She was a model before, so she knows what it's like to be in front of the camera." Herzigova's fellow model Karen Mulder agrees: "You always have a good time and she takes pictures while you're having fun. Actually, she makes it very easy." And even super- stern Anna Wintour, editor-in- chief of US Vogue, has a kind word: "She has a much looser approach than the more standard photographers. And I think her wit and looseness are part of her charm."
Another of her gifts is the way she can get pretty girls to open their legs for the camera and appear blissfully unselfconscious while doing it. They're usually wearing underwear, so the pictures could hardly be described as obscene or pornographic, though some are undoubtedly provocative and, sometimes, unsettling. Generally, though, it's all good clean fun, a sanitised hedonism with lots of black stockings, high heels and lacy panties, lashings of champagne, masks and other elements of erotic fancy dress, and the occasional swish of a riding crop to keep the senses keen, the flesh alert. All of this is often played out amid the faded grandeur of hotels or chateaux or Parisian boudoirs, on sweeping lawns or in vintage limousines.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

http://www.staleywise.com

Lars Botten

2009-03-20T13:42:00.047+02:00

http://www.larsbotten.com/

Mikel Marton

2009-03-19T19:36:00.024+02:00

Mikel Marton is among the newest faces in the field of male nude photography. With a stimulating blend of male eroticism and the simulated gloss of editorial fashion photography he delivers a unique and dreamy style, testing that sensitive line that separates art and pornography: "My critical community sometimes can't decipher what I'm going for, and I fucking love that. That fine line (art vs. porno) excites me, and challenges me to cross censor boundaries while still producing work that is artistically pleasing."

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

(book The Nude Male: 21 st Century Visions)

http://www.toxicboy.net/

Cornelie Tollens

2009-03-19T17:31:00.061+02:00

Cornelie Tollens (The Netherlands, 1964), represented by both her autonomous work and fashion photography, works for Elle, Dutch and Blvd., among other magazines. Raucousness and vulnerability vie for precedence in her deliberately composed photographs. She makes sophisticated use of the seductive power of colour and light, which can give her work a strongly erotic undertone. Tollens frequently employs elements from the plant and animal world, using them to refer to fundamental urges in human existence - eating and being eaten, reproduction, power - which form a counterweight to the outward beauty of the photographs.
http://www.c orneli etolle ns.com/

Nan Goldin

2009-03-19T13:03:00.040+02:00

Nan Goldin (1953) is an American fine-art and documentary photographer.She is represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York.
Boston.Goldin was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in an upper-middle-class Jewish family in theAfter attending the nearby Lexington High School, she enrolled at the Satya Community School in Boston, where a teacher introduced her to the camera in 1968; Goldin was then fifteen years old. Her first solo show, held in Boston in 1973, was based on her photographic journeys among the city's gay and transsexual communities, to which she had been introduced by her friend David Armstrong.Goldin graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts Univercity in 1977/1978, where she had worked mostly with Cibachrome prints.
Following graduation, Goldin moved to New York City.She began documenting the post-punk.She began documenting the post-Stonewall gay subculture of the late 1970s and early 1980s. She was drawn especially to the Bowery's hard-drug subculture; these photographs, taken between 1979 and 1986, form her famous work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency — a title taken from a song in Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera.These Snapshot Aesthetic images depict drug use, violent, aggressive couples and autobiographical moments. Most of her Ballad subjects were dead by the 1990s, lost either to drug, overdose or AIDS; this tally included close friends and often-photographed subjects Greer Lankton and Cookie Mueller.In 2003, The New York Times nodded to the work's impact, explaining Goldin had "forged a genre, with photography as influential as any in the last twenty years.In addition to Ballad, she combined her Bowery pictures in two other series: "I'll Be Your Mirror"(from a song on The Velvet Underground's The Velvet Underground and Nico album) and "All By Myself."
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.
Goldin lives in the New York and Paris - one reason the French Pompidou Centre mounted a major retrospective of her work in 2002. Her hand was injured in a fall in 2002, and she currently retains less ability to turn it than in the past.
In 2006, her exhibition, Chasing a Ghost, opened in New York.It was the first installation by her to include moving pictures, a fully narrative score, and voiceover, and included the disturbing three-screen slide and video presentation Sisters, Saints, & Sybils. The work involved her sister Barbara's suicide and how she coped through a numerous amount of images and narratives. Her works are developing more and more into cinemaesque features, exemplifying her graviation towards working with films.
She was the recipient of the 2007 Hasselblad Award.
Some critics have accused her of making heroin-use appear glamorous, and of pioneering a grunge style that later became popularized by youth fashion magazines such as The Face and I-D.Goldin herself called the use of heroin-chic
(wikipedia)

Your approach towards photography is very personal. Is not it a kind of therapy?

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.