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Since 2004, Lens Culture has recorded audio interviews and conversations with some of the
most interesting
and thought-provoking photographers around the world. In 2009 we began
our video series, Lens Culture Conversations with Photographers. It’s great to hear — and see
— these articulate artists speaking directly about their own work and sharing their ideas about
photography in general. Enjoy!
Jacob Aue Sobol
"Arrivals & Departures"
Summary:
Magnum photographer Jacob Aue Sobol made a trek from Moscow to Ulan Bator to Beijing in one month — often making more than 1,000 photographs each day for 28 days straight.
In this short video, he talks about making intimate photographs with strangers in different cultures, and his non-narrative approach to photography and editing.
The video includes more than 30 of his favorite photographs from that trip.
Watch the video 5 minutes
Jeff Cowen
"Photographic Works — Artist's Talk"
Summary:
Photographer-Artist Jeff Cowen spoke about his work and approach to art in a conversation recorded at Michael Werner Kunsthandel in Köln Germany, March 2012.
Cowen makes original mural-size, sculptural, painterly photographic works that are visually stunning and beautiful — and they defy easy categorization.
Art Historian Jennifer Crowley and Lens Culture Director Jim Casper conducted the on-stage interview.
Watch the video 13 minutes
Nadav Kander
"Yangtze—The Long River"
Summary:
Photographer Nadav Kander talks about the orignial idea for his project — and how it evolved over time — as he photographed along the full length of Yangzte River in China.
This work won the Prix Pictet for 2009, and was published as a book by Hatje Cantz in autumn 2010.
The interview was recorded in the Lens Culture studios in Paris.
Watch the video 8 minutes
Roger Ballen
"Disturbing Visions:
Psychology, metaphor, controversy and art in photography"
Excerpt:
Many people over the years say my work is quite disturbing, it’s quite dark … If one goes back to [psychologists like Carl] Jung, he called the dark side the shadow side. He said very clearly… that this was the side you had to open up. This was the side you had to explore if you wanted to become a whole person.
Watch the video 10 minutes
"Visual Anthropology: photography in Russia and England"
Excerpt:
I’m interested in socio-cultural issues. I want people to be in my landscapes … By rising up slightly, it opens up the entire geography … You get a much clearer sense of how people are interacting with one another and with the space.
I think it's great to create a picture that you want to look at longer … and are rewarded for the more time you look at it.
Watch the video 8 minutes
Klavdij Sluban
"Photography workshops for teenage prisoners in jails around the world"
Excerpt:
I feel concerned as a citizen by the fact that jails exist … So at one point I had to deal with it: What if I tried to do something as a photographer in jails?
A jail, of course, is something that’s hidden. We can’t really say that we know what is happening in jails. The administration’s job is to hide what’s behind the walls.
When you give the kids the cameras, the first thing they say is, "But there's nothing to be photographed here." I say "Well, let's see if there's really nothing – or at least, let's try to photograph this nothingness."
Watch the video 8 minutes
Guy
Tillim
Talks about moving away from a false sense of drama in photojournalism.
Excerpt:
Photojournalism tends to try to create drama, to look for a false drama. It tries to use photojournalistic iconography to create a moment, or the sense of a moment. What you used to end up with were these quite Inarticulate images that seemed to be so full of drama.
There's no way you could say "I am here as your witness to this subject who's going through these times." It's too arrogant. And it's not necessarily true.You can make people aware. But to what end? And how? To what depth will people understand?
What you achieve with your pictures is not really up to you. You make the images and then they're out of your hands.
Listen to the audio 18 minutes
On the idea — No photograph without longing! — and his personal methods.
Excerpt:
I don't believe in reality really, it's a bluff.
But I believe in a kind of reality that exists because of all the longing,
dreams, secrets, nightmares, mostly longings. I think no picture is
without longing. This allows you to use what you are afraid of, as a
trampoline; to channel your energy into your creativity; go inside
and open up like a sharp knife, like a doctor operating.
Listen to the audio 18 minutes
Roger
Ballen
Discusses a range of topics related to his photography and how it has evolved.
Excerpt:
[In the 80s] I worked with marginalized whites in parts of the South African countryside, who were filled with fear, anguish and anxiety over their position in society at that time in South Africa. After that, [in 1992], I started to interact with my subjects. I started to create things with them, and there was a sense of theater.
So there is interaction in these photographs of these subjects and movement and light. And each time you snap the picture, you create another essence.
I guess you choose the photograph that has the most heightened essence, the most integrated essence, the most piercing essence, the most intense essence. That’s the picture you look for.
Listen to the audio 18 minutes
On discovering and using the Holga camera and other "toy" cameras.
Excerpt:
The standard of photography is rectangles, straight-edged images. It's just an arbitrary standard. The way I print mine,
and the way the Holga sees, is not that way. So I am playing on that
even more by cutting them out in this round way and trying to open people
up to different ways of seeing the world and presenting photography.
But also to me, the Holga, the way these images are, that
they are sharp in the center and they vignette in the corners is more
how we really see. When you're looking at the world, you're not seeing
a scene that is sharp all the way to the edges and bright all the way
to the edges and has straight lines. You're seeing something sharp in
the center and then the rest of it is all kind of blurring out.
Listen to the audio 13 minutes
Talks about his large-scale camera obscura images, the delights of color, and his future projects.
Excerpt:
The major [turning point in my photography] was
having a son, being a father and having those responsibilities and turning
inward. That turn towards this private experience made me start to
look at things for longer, with more love, tenderness and interest. I changed
cameras. I went from a 35 mm to a view camera, making long exposures
of milk bottles and things like that.
That was a huge change for me.
I started paying attention in a way I hadn't before. The work before
was very much about the anxiety of the street, the decisive moments ....This
new work is really about living with the things in front of me and paying
attention to things that still exist in this moment.
Listen to the audio
9 minutes 30 seconds
John
Blakemore
On his beginnings, nine years of tulips in his daylight studio, print tonality, and process.
I think that through my photography I attempt to create the world that I would like to inhabit rather than the one I do.
I stopped working in the landscape because I could no longer see the point of making — or the ethical position of making — Edenic pictures of a landscape that my species was busily destroying. So I stopped working in the landscape, but found that I could live with the notion of a fictional landscape. I mean, all photographs are constructions.
Listen to the audio 12 minutes
Joan
Fontcuberta
Discusses image-making, the role of photography, media, reality – and propaganda.
Excerpt:
I am a Spaniard. I was born in 1955, and this means that for the first 20 years of my life I was suffering under dictatorship in my country: lack of information, propaganda, censorship. So this probably created a sense of fighting against the rules – of distrusting the official media. To be skeptical regarding how the authority, the power, was distributing messages and information.
I think that my work is a sort of rebellion against repression, against this lack of freedom, against this lack of democracy, against this authority. I’m anti-authoritarian in my work.
I try with my work to discuss the concept of truth, the concept of credibility – which is inherent in photographic messages. The heart [of my work], the quintessential, remains the questioning of photographic truth. Be careful, be critical, doubt, and filter the information you receive. This would be my advice.
Listen to the audio 22 minutes
Edward
Burtynsky
On his large-scale photos documenting China's race toward hyper-capitalism.
Excerpt:
I had been interested in Asia since the early 1980s, and traveled quite a bit there, but never on mainland China …
Then I heard about the Three Gorges Dam project, the largest dam project ever attempted by man, and that piqued my interest in terms of going out and photographing it, especially the notion of the kind of urban transformation that had to occur to make that dam happen.
They were moving anywhere from estimates of 1.5 to 2 million people to make way for the reservoir, and that seemed phenomenal in and of itself. So I wanted to photograph those cities in transformation from being flattened to being rebuilt.
Listen to the audio 13 minutes
William
Christenberry
On using photography to trace time and change, and how it relates to his other art.
Excerpt:
I only make photographs on average once a year, and that is usually in the heat of summer when I go home to Alabama. Most of my time in the studio I am painting, or drawing or making sculpture.
I started out with a little Brownie camera in 1941. A simple camera as you know, with no focus device, and I loaded it with color film, because I was beginning to question the total non-objective nature of my painting. I loved non-objective art, I loved DeKooning. DeKooning was a big influence, Klein, Pollack, and the others. But I wanted to come to grips with the landscape with which I was so familiar.
In 1977, at the encouragement of one of my dear friends, Lee Friedlander, (actually, he was insistent), that I try a more sophisticated camera, I graduated in one fell swoop from a Brownie camera to an 8 x 10 view camera. I’m still learning.
Listen to the audio 17 minutes
Describes his start in photography and his methods creating movement in still pictures.
Excerpt:
When you walk down the street your eye darts around,
you follow this woman down the street and your eye goes to her shoes,
to her hair blowing in the wind, her derriere swinging, and it it circles
around.
I want to keep some of that movement in my photos. So
by ripping them in these areas... it forces your eye to move around
the image more like when you're walking down the street. So there will
be a rip making some kind of oval around the legs, and then around the
head. It also creates movement in the image.
Listen to the audio 5 minutes
On her photo-based installation project Drifting Away, about the "disappeared" of Columbia.
Excerpt:
My idea is to represent the metaphor that has been
used by the Colombian press, that the rivers of Columbia are
the biggest cemetery in the world.
Lately they have been finding lots of bodies and pieces
of bodies in the rivers. They are trying to identify the bodies. These
are people who have been missing over ten years, nine years, and even
recently, three years, two years.
I am talking to the families of the victims and asking them
to lend me garments or objects that represent that person and I am submerging
those objects into the water. My idea is to make the turbulence of the
water a part of the image.
Listen to the audio
7 minutes 30 seconds
JR
Talks about his often illegal, guerilla-activist photography and urban installations.
Excerpt:
Recently I did Face-To-Face in the Middle East, where I took photos of Israelis and Palestinians making faces, playing on their stereotypes of each other.
You know, the Israelis think that all Palestinians are terrorists, so I asked the Palestinians to really play a crazy man, with a crazy face, so they all played on the caricature. When you tell a Palestinian he is a terrorist, he really laughs.
There was a lot of reaction from the people there, debate in the street. They had to discuss between one another to make a story out of [each photo]. They all made a different interpretation of it. But they all laughed first.
Listen to the audio 16 minutes
On moving beyond time, place, fashion and culture in her photographs of nudes.
Excerpt:
I'm interested in working with the body as an element
of culture, not so much as a gender element. I've been doing this work
mainly in France, because in France people are very casual about being
naked.
So in a way, when I photograph people, I look at composition
and I look at the relationships that we have. Rarely do I see that
they are naked.
The reason is because I don't want to be
working with clothes, I don't want to be limited by time. I want them
to be a little bit more timeless than fashion allows you. I want to, in a way, grab a little bit of the human inside of them. The
body is a place where our mind resides, and that's what I'm photographing.
Listen to the audio 13 minutes
Offers insight into the making of his 52-portrait series, "Obama's People".
Excerpt:
I was very struck by how young and informal, charismatic and smart these people were. I thought it would be an older crowd, and a much more experienced crowd when it came to photography.
Most of them were like [normal people] you'd meet at a barbecue, really nice people, telling me about their kids, very informal, and very inspiring in this way. And obviously full of Obama fever. Terribly clever people.
I was very aware that I was taking pictures that could never be taken again. These people were at the beginning of something and time would really change the way they would hold their public face for the camera.
I was very adamant that these sessions, unlike most of the sessions I do, that these sitters would be the authors of their own pictures. I didn't want to fabricate anything for them.
Listen to the audio 12 minutes
On his series revisiting the work of a seminal photographer: Rephotographing Atget.
Excerpt:
Atget has always been my favorite photographer, [for] his mixture of really detailed documentary description, combined with a magical, poetic vision of a longer timescale. He's not interested in the fleeting things that happen in a human time scale. He's interested in something that would stand still for long enough for a tree to notice it!
In 1989 I was in a park he had photographed, Saint Cloud, and I turn around and here's this spiral-topped gatepost that I know— that he has a beautiful portrait of. 70, 80, 90, 100 years later and it's still here! So I photographed that, from memory, and I photographed some other images that I knew really well that were in that park, and I thought to myself, I need to turn this into a project. This is fascinating that this stuff is still here.
Listen to the audio 14 minutes
Martin
Parr
On irony, vulnerability, the secret history of photography, and more.
Excerpt:
I'm a populist. I want to try to make work that's accessible. So I try and sometimes use irony — I wouldn't say my pictures are just funny. I'm interested in being a mischievous ironist. Photography is a very democratic genre and medium, and that's what I like about it. So naturally, I try and use that, and I try to make pictures that have an accessibility cross-culturally.
Obviously the country I've photographed most of all is Britain. One of the few things we do very well in Britain, still, is to have a sense of humor. Our sense of irony is a national treasure, and I'm very happy to be part of it.
Humor and irony is about finding vulnerability. I'm looking for the vulnerability in society. For me [those are] the most revealing moments.
Listen to the audio 10 minutes
Talks about the Terminal Mirage images from his Black Maps series.
Excerpt:
The facts of these places are disturbing alone. The fact
that there are cyanide leaching fields that cover entire mountain tops;
that's disturbing. The fact that this lake has been drained and the
bacteria stains whatever water remains this incredible blood red. It's
disturbing because it happens and it's disturbing because of what it
looks like. And I don't expect the viewers of these pictures to necessarily
understand what they are looking at, or why it has happened.
So in a way I am using these environments to set up a
psychological parallel world. The pictures are not the thing itself.
The pictures are separate. They're related, but they aren't the same
thing. This is not Owens lake, this is not the Great Salt Lake. It's
using those places to create another reality.
Listen to the audio 25 minutes
On her photographic experiences and on her theories of photography.
Excerpt:
For one assignment, Minor White took us to the top of Coit Tower on top of Telegraph Hill in San Francisco and said, "Okay, photograph what's here." We were supposed
to bring just one print to the crit. And I said, "But it's 360 degrees
and 180 from side to side, so how can you do that?" I realized that what I tended to do was symbolize.
The person who took the best photograph just looked, and just took
a picture. [The image] didn't do 360, but just looked. It had one of those binoculars
in the corner of the frame, and a little corner of the parking lot
and the view, very simple. It was just a picture of what was there.
That was a transformative understanding of how we abstract things all
the time and how seeing is about trying not to do that; at least initially.
Listen to the audio 12 minutes
Chris
McCaw
Talks about making platinum contact prints from photos taken with handmade cameras.
Excerpt:
I used to shoot 35mm, shoot seven or eight rolls
very quickly and then dig through the film trying to find a couple images
that were cool. When I finally did make an image it was
like, "Oh, yeah, that's all right." It felt like I hadn't
thought it all the way through yet.
Doing this [platinum] with only four sheets
of film, you really have to think about it. I'm here in this scene,
how do I want to capture this? Also,
I don't pose people. There are a lot of shots where I get what I want
and then all of a sudden people just start having a water fight and
they flee the scene just when I am about to hit the shutter. And sometimes
I click the shutter anyway, and it's cool.
Listen to the audio 10 minutes
Stephen Mayes
On photojournalism today, from his address at the World Press Photos 2009.
Excerpt:
I wonder if World Press Photo is peeling away from reflecting the media as it is, and is rather reflecting the media the way we wish it were. Of the 376 images awarded prizes this year, I would be curious to know how many have been published in a paid-for context. Maybe all of them. Maybe. But the overall impression that I’m left with from the 470,214 images that I have seen entered into the contest in the current decade, is that they reflect a form of photojournalism that is now more romantic than functional.
The overwhelming impression from the vast volume of images is that photojournalism (as a format for interpreting the world) is trying to be relevant by copying itself rather than by observing the world.
As one juror said this year, “90% of the pictures are about 10% of the world.”
Listen to the audio 49 minutes
Tells us about traveling with her portable studio to photograph the tribes of Ethiopia.
Excerpt:
Every different tribe has different ways [of proving valor]. The [Suma] men have scarifications, and every line of scarification means that they have killed an enemy.
The scarifications are in one way intimidation – [the scars] mean that they are brave and they can kill. In another way it means that they have suffered, and they have suffered the pain of making the scars. And it’s also a way of seduction, of dressing themselves.
For the women, because they don’t kill, [scarification] is a way of seduction, a way of saying "I am really brave to have this made on my body."
Listen to the audio 10 minutes
On documenting the traces of war and his experiences working in war-torn locations.
Excerpt:
These designs and patterns that are left in our
landscapes are more often than not designs and patterns that were created
by the need to fight warfare.
The historical traces that are left behind in language
and landscapes and architecture, I think are really interesting.
I think a photographer's job is to hold it, stop, and
demand that you inquire a little bit longer than you would otherwise
in that fleeting passage of the way we live our daily lives.
Listen to the audio 15 minutes
Patti
Smith
Explains how photography helped her deal with grief, and rediscover her creativity.
Excerpt:
I started taking Polaroids very seriously in 1995 after the death of my brother and husband and some of my friends.
I felt so weary as a human being. I was unable to concentrate, to write, to draw. I was emotionally and physically unable to express myself in any way that took a lot of concentrated energy.
Taking the Polaroid because it's simple, and immediate, gave me an immediate response to a creative need.
Listen to the audio 2 minutes
Talks about his self-published book, which explores personal and environmental issues.
Excerpt:
I do landscapes but also very personal photography
and I've now combined the two subjects in a handmade book.
Some people get a bit nervous about the content, because some images are
quite explicit. It's really about the death of my father. Also it is diary-like: meeting my wife, and then the birth of our child
— and also the making of the child.
In the meantime I am looking at the Dutch landscape, the way we are
dealing with animals and nature; which are two important subjects in
the book.
Listen to the audio
5 minutes 30 seconds
On his eclectic cultural influences and creating
photos of surreal human dolls.
Excerpt:
I admire Hans Bellmer very much... He went into exile during Nazi times to Paris and joined the Surrealists. He made impossible dolls with wood. And then
with his girlfriend, he made some pictures, like a doll. I wanted to continue his tradition. I used a body
as my material and transformed this body, this human being, into a
doll.
Listen to the audio 5 minutes
From a talk and slideshow presented at the San Francisco PhotoAlliance.
Excerpt:
I like to use all kinds of formats. I like panoramics
more recently. Certain pictures feel like they would look better in
a Holga for instance, in a square with vignetted edges. And some
pictures feel better long and narrow. So I carry color and black
and white and six, seven, or eight cameras; some light ones and some
heavy ones. But I am cutting back.
Listen to the audio 8 minutes
On collaborating with a German painter and a Turkish musical composer to create art work.
Excerpt:
There is a synthesis really, of painting and photography,
and also with elements of the history of art
and classical portraiture.
They are not portraits
of a specific person. They are portraits of representational people
drawn from the past and painted
but interpreted through the lens of photography.
Listen to the audio 7 minutes
Simon
Roberts
Gives insight into his one-year trek across Russia and the resulting series, Motherland.
Excerpt:
I felt that 15 years after the fall of communism the debate about where Russia was hadn’t really shifted. [The country] has moved on, but I didn’t feel that photographically it had moved on. So this was a great opportunity to explore that idea, of a “new Russia” – maybe not so much new, but a journey into places that hadn’t been seen before.
Our preconceptions of Russia are informed by Hollywood movies, by propaganda. I wanted to look at how I could move beyond that.
Listen to the audio 24 minutes
On why people destroy photographs, and photo-genetic engineering.
Excerpt:
The [Bilder von der Straße] images show you the role of photography in everyday peoples’ lives. Many of these pictures were intentionally destroyed and thrown out, not lost by accident. Quite often you see traces when a lot of energy was spent on destroying the pictures...
Photogenetic Drafts is a series of 32 portraits of non-existent people. Portraits of people who are young and old at the same time, and male and female, and black and white. It’s a photographic equivalent of genetic engineering – I’m creating photographs of non-existent beings by using fragments of information that are [from multiple photos].
Listen to the audio
11 minutes 30 seconds
René
Burri
On his current projects, beginnings as a photographer, and digital photography.
Excerpt:
I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to [be a photographer] when I was in art school. I wanted to make films ...The person who finally threw me into the water was David Seymour (Chim). He gave me assignments. He just sent me to Czechoslovakia, and he sent me to the Suez Canal, and I almost got shot, and, so I became almost overnight a photojournalist.
What I had in me was a curiosity. I felt trapped in Switzerland, so I was always climbing mountains looking where there was another horizon and there were always more mountains. So, finally I stood, in 1955, in the Libyan desert and I came out of a barracks and there was nothing on the horizon, so I screamed! You have a moment when you realize that the world is round.
Listen to the audio 5 minutes
Christine
Spengler
Tells us about her life as a war photographer in Chad, Northern Ireland, Vietnam, and beyond.
Excerpt:
I discovered my vocation, photography, and war photography, in a few seconds, when my brother Eric and I were in Chad, in the heart of Africa, and I saw this incredible thing: two rebels fighting barefoot with a Kalashnikov against a French helicopter.
[Later] I said to Eric, "I have discovered my vocation. I have been born for testimony. I will learn my job on the fields, and I will be the testimony of just causes."
All my life, I have always chosen to be on the side of the victims.
Listen to the audio
Chapter 1: 13 minutes
Chapter 2: 19 minutes
Jules
Spinatsch
The BMW Prizewinner at Paris Photo 2007 discusses his series, Temporary Discomfort.
Excerpt:
The intellectual background of this idea started with the first Iraq war. There was only one side producing images. There were the video clips, the green Baghdad shots, but no independent journalists were allowed.
Then at the end, they called the Magnum guys, and they said, come and take cool pictures of the dirty oil workers extinguishing the oil spills. They were called to make the hero shots. They did not realize how they were instruments for the victory of one side.
Listen to the audio 10 minutes
On her photographs of young American soldiers on temporary
leave from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Excerpt:
I wanted to see the faces of young men and women
who had seen more than they should have seen, who have had an experience
that would mark their lives.
I asked everybody to put their heads on the table, and
during those photographs I didn't talk at all, because I feel like sometimes
you can just talk it away. If you talk too much with somebody about
what you're doing it's not as magical somehow. So there is sometimes
this unspoken communication between the photographer and the subject.
I
think of it as a performance. They put their
heads down, it takes a while, their minds may wander, and I take the
picture. They're not relating to me in the photograph.
Listen to the audio
10 min 30 seconds
Alexey
Titarenko
Describes documenting the changes in 90s Russia with his series of long exposures.
Excerpt:
At the time I was working on my series about Soviet reality. I was walking around, and all of a sudden I realized that I was working on something completely different — that “reality” was changing, and I was not dealing with it.
I realized that other cycle of work was over. Around me, I saw people were rushing around, standing in lines, using food coupons. It was a period of economic catastrophe. I realized it was as if I was in a kingdom of shadows. The people were lost, and I was lost.
And the day came to do something about it, to express what it was, their reality.
Listen to the audio 12 minutes
Massimo
Vitali
On scale, detail, and social documentary in his series, Landscapes with Figures.
Excerpt:
My pictures are all about scale. I’m very interested in details – I want to see every detail of every person. So in a way the pictures are landscape, but they’re also portraits. And every person is like a single portrait. So I want to have the detail you expect from a portrait.
So you can look at the picture as a whole, or move in and start creating the stories. People should look at the pictures, go back and forward, and start making their own stories.
Listen to the audio 6 minutes
Michael
Wolf
Talks about his Architecture of Density photographs of modern-day Hong Kong.
Excerpt:
Most of these housing estates are middle-class dwellings. People want to live there. They’re clean, there are guards. There’s always a very good subway connection.
And you have malls, you have everything. And if you live high up, on the 54th or 56th floor, you have a tremendous view.
They’re quite expensive – for 800,000 bucks you get two shoe boxes in Hong Kong. Yet structurally they’re worth nothing. After 20 years you can basically throw them away, they’re just concrete. It’s pure madness.
Listen to the audio 11 minutes
Munem Wasif
Talks about documenting the water crisis in Bangladesh caused by shrimp farming.
Excerpt:
[In Bangladesh] we are living in a country of rivers and water. I never imagined that we could have such a huge crisis that women would have to walk three hours, two hours, five hours for a bottle of fresh water. For me it was absurd. The most paradoxical thing was that you see water everywhere, but it's salted, it is salinated.
Listen to the audio 14 minutes
Discusses the exploration of identity through bodies, movement, words and visual forms of language.
Excerpt:
We try to illustrate the importance that words have in our definition of our
own self and psychology... We are assuming that reality is a projection of the self
on the external world. This is the reason why we call the work Body
as Dream. It's based on the idea that perception of our body
is an elaboration built internally through experience but also through
words.
Listen to the audio 4 minutes
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