Thursday, 28 February 2013
Thursday, 21 February 2013
self-portrait in contemporary photography
self-por·trait
/ˌsɛlfˈpɔrtrɪt, -treɪt, -ˈpoʊr-, ˈsɛlf-/ Show Spelled[self-pawr-trit, -treyt, -pohr-, self-]
–noun
a portrait of oneself done by oneself.
The long-established genre of self-portraiture is irresistible for most artists. They may not do it regularly, but they have all done so at one point. We all have – whether we are a photographer or not. The urge to photograph oneself is something of a compulsion. It’s easy now: just turn the camera and shoot. And what is more fascinating or puzzling than a picture of yourself? But what does it actually say about you? How can it be anything more than a mere meaningless reproduction of the real thing?
The most common understanding of self-portraiture is that it reveals something of your inner feelings or personality. This has been much debated in terms of post-modernist theory, but I would argue that it is still the most common understanding – especially the portraiture that deals with autobiographical elements. When we read an autobiography, we want information about that person that we cannot otherwise glean from knowing them or living with them as a personality or celebrity. We need more. We put the same expectations on a photographic self-portrait, but with even higher demands.
When reading an autobiography, we may expect some embellishment for effect or for omissions to take place. But with a photographic self-portrait, edits to exclude elements can be seen as a lack of commitment, and embellishments as narcissistic. People still want photography, and autobiographical self-portraits in particular, to deliver some kind of truth.
Visual diaries
Nan Goldin (perhaps one of the best-known artists for producing autobiographical self-portraits, most evidently with her famous image, Nan One Month After Being Battered, 1984, (shown above) in a lecture at Tate Modern in 2008, asked the audience if they still believed a photograph could tell the truth. Only two people in an audience of more than 100 raised their hands. This made her despair of photography and its percieved integrity. Now this is a thorny issue, and perhaps not one to battle out here, but it’s worth mentioning as diaristic or autobiographical approaches to self-portraiture are not only immensely popular (and increasingly common due to the ease of uploading images onto the web), but also because notions of what is public and what is private is very much a relevant issue across all walks of life nowadays.
Published diaries, especially written ones, and political memoirs in particular, are written to be public not private. Diaristic works by artists and photographers such as Nan Goldin, Ryan McGinnley, Corinne Day, Larry Clark and Araki, to name a few better-known practitioners, may reveal private moments, but are always taken with the intention of being put out into the world. In terms of self-portraiture, it’s interesting to think about how different people approach a visual diary and what effect it has on its reading.
Super Snacks, 2000-2003, by Anna Fox is shot in a style we are now accustomed to calling diaristic, by which I mean candid, raw, dynamic – the kind executed by the artists I’ve just mentioned. The individual pictures may not be “great” in terms of traditional photographic standards of composition and form, but together they form a story of an intimate part of Fox’s life. They show her drinking, smoking and snacking, and the camera was used as a cathartic tool to perhaps stop her over-indulging. The effect was actually not the one she had intended as the photographs have a melancholic humour about them, and for Fox they showed her that self-portraiture can highlight how self-obsessed a person can become. So where they might not have stopped her snacking and drinking, they did make her lighten up about it.
A diarist approach or, more accurately, style is also interesting to consider with the work of Patrick Tsai and Madi Ju. The young couple met on Flickr and through a mutual appreciation of each other’s work (and mutual attraction to one another’s portraits, it is assumed), they got together and formed My Little Dead Dick. This collaboration was a visual diary of their relationship, their travels together and their break-up. It’s interesting to consider, as although they shot in a diaristic style and posted pictures on the web to Flickr and their own blog, it is subtly different. Putting editing to one side, the pictures have a more careful composition to the fast-shot digital snaps found on similar photo-sharing sites and, in fact, both Ju and Tsai are skilled photographers and shot on film. They were actually re-creating a diarist style, rather than instinctively using one. As a result, the photographs are knowing, sometimes set up and mediated to tell a story. No less telling or truthful than Fox’s work, it was just a different way of “writing” a diary.
The web is also a fantastic outlet for Canadian photographer Jeff Harris, who uses the ease of getting his pictures out there in a slightly more obsessional style. Every day he commits to putting up a self-portrait of himself on his website. That’s not so unusual, but Harris started this project more than 10 years ago, before photo-sharing sites were established, and he was ahead of the curve in this kind of obsessive documentation on the web. Even more ahead of the curve (although his materials and presentation are distinctly old school) is the work of Ken O’Hara who, since the 1970s, has been creating exquisite artists’ books titled 365 for each day of the year that he takes a photograph. If, one day, he does not take a photograph, the project will be abandoned.
Shot on black-and-white film and assembled as contact sheets on concertina card, they are a fantastic example of how his approach to photography slices through his influence from post-war Japanese photography magazines such as Provoke and the cool approach of 1970s conceptual art. The very human and intimate scenes the pictures represent provide a strong sense of melancholy and time, and his life can be seen reduced to a pile of tiny books of moments, once fleeting, and now gone.
The memoir
In comparison to the compulsive need to photograph every day is the more elliptical approaches of artists and photographers such as Airyka Rockefeller, Sam Taylor-Wood and Elina Brotherus, who choose to produce work that has more in common with (to use a literary term again) memoir. Their work ties in more directly with memory, and focuses in on certain events or moments, rather than trying to capture the whole story. Their work tends to blur time and touches on the merging of fact and fiction in the same way that memory does.
Brotherus ties her scenes down to more solid events in earlier work, such as the Wedding and Divorce portraits (1997 and 1998, respectively), but her later work shifts slightly to become an examination of the roles of model and artist, and the questioning of traditional gender roles within this dynamic. Rockefeller’s photography in this regard is interesting to compare with Brotherus’ earlier work, as it doesn’t concentrate on specific events but instead on moments in between activities in places that are temporary for the artist. Rockefeller’s series Between or Before is a peripatetic drift through spaces, which combines memory, autobiography and space into a condensed photographic moment that teeters on the cusp of an activity. Taylor-Wood’s ongoing self-portraits have also shifted from documenting real times in her past (most famously her breast cancer with Self Portrait in a Single Breasted Suit, 2001) to more ambiguous moments using suspension, Pink and Red, to suggest certain states of mind or emotional instability. Her work is interesting in another sense, because her celebrity status means that we have access to more information about her private life than is normal for any of the other artists and photographers mentioned here.
The album, as opposed to the diary or memoir, is also worth mentioning. Long discussed for its partial storytelling abilities, it has an important place in work that deals with the complexities of autobiography. Ana Casas Broda produced a significant and important body of work in book form in 2000, simply titled Album. It was an enormous body of work modelled on a family album that took 14 years to complete and dealt with intergenerational relationships and memories both fresh and repressed. Her new body of work, Kinderwunsch, Three days after giving birth to Lucio, is equally ambitious and vast, dealing with her desire to have children and her experience of mothering. It takes the photographic album less as a template, but it is infused in the work, as it is still most common to see pictures of children in this format and to associate their growing up as confined to the safety between the pages of a book. Of course, with the web this is changing, and the many pictures parents have of their children are not placed within private albums but pasted onto Facebook or specific baby websites – albeit with privacy settings. Kinderwunsch doesn’t sit comfortably in either mode and the intense and emotional photographs document both moments that would traditionally be photographed for posterity, and those that are not. Her work is dramatic, vigorous and at times her presence with her sons is overpowering as she uses photography to come to terms with her complex and often contradictory feelings of being a mother and the love she feels for them.
Self-help
It’s important to end on a piece of work that deals with self-portraiture in a confessional, autobiographical way that, like the other photographers here, chooses to reveal something personal, rather than conceal or disguise (as can be seen in other approaches to self-portraiture – most specifically those dealing with masquerade). However, this piece relies on a strong element of fiction in order to do this, and conflates all ideas of autobiography, memoir and diary into something that, in fact, tells us a great deal about inner feelings, even though it is constructed and not based on any kind of factual information processed through a photograph.
American photographer Charles Latham creates a doppelganger, an alter ego, nemesis and imaginary friend in the form of Cyrus. Cyrus appears in his self-portraits as a masked and handcuffed minion. The hand-made gaffer-tape gimp mask that Cyrus adorns and the S&M overtones of their relationship is uncomfortable for the viewer. Issues of power and control seethe through the photographs. These self-portraits were made in order to help Latham investigate personal issues without harming himself, and so in order to do this, he created Cyrus.
Through Cyrus, Latham was able to work through feelings of self-hatred in a controlled manner. For those not familiar with the levels of trust and complexities of submissive and dominant behaviour played out in performances of sexual preference, the photographs are confusing and unsettling, just as Latham’s feeling are to himself. Cyrus is an extraordinary piece of work that does as much to reveal as it does conceal, and shows us that autobiography, in photography just as in literature, is prone to storytelling and confessions, and “truth” can be delivered in oblique and puzzling ways.
juergen teller
Considered one of the most important photographers of his generation,
Juergen Teller is one of a few artists who has been able to operate
successfully both in the art world and the world of commercial
photography. This exhibition will provide a seamless journey through his
landmark fashion and commercial photography from the 90s, presenting
classic images of celebrities such as Lily Cole, Kurt Cobain and
Vivienne Westwood, as well as more recent landscapes and family
portraits.
Teller entered the London photography scene through the music industry taking photographs for record covers, it was Teller’s photograph of Sinéad O’Connor for her single Nothing Compares 2 You that marked an important moment in his career. Teller’s photographs first appeared in fashion magazines in the late 80s, and included portraits of Kate Moss when she was just fifteen years old. Teller’s images could be described as the antithesis of conventional fashion photography seen perhaps most markedly in his campaigns for Marc Jacobs.
Picture and Words introduces a series from his controversial weekly column in the magazine of Die Zeit which often provoked outcry amongst readers, and the exhibition will feature many of the letters of complaint that the magazine received. Irene im Wald and Keys to the House are Teller’s most recent bodies of work, revealing the photographer’s more personal world in his hometown in Germany and family home in Suffolk.
Teller’s provocative interventions in celebrity portraiture subvert the conventional relationship of the artist and model. Whatever the setting, all his subjects collaborate in a way that allows for the most surprising poses and emotional intensity. Driven by a desire to tell a story in every picture he takes, Teller has shaped his own distinct and instantly recognisable style which combines humour, self-mockery and an emotional honesty.
BJP: You’ve worked with [the model] Kristen McMenamy many times
over the years, do you think that makes a difference to how you were
able to shoot her?
JT: Of course there’s a lot of history there - a lot of experience and the security that you know someone so well. It was clear that there was trust there, and I showed her the photographs afterwards. It was good we’ve worked on personal projects together and we’ve also done commercial jobs where both parties earned money. She didn’t do modelling for like ten years, she stopped to have kids. So we hadn’t worked together for a long time, then four or five yeas ago I asked her to do a Marc Jacobs campaign. She had this fabulous long grey hair I was super intrigued with, and I really enjoyed the work we did together. Then maybe two years ago we did something for W magazine, and she was very intrigued about the nudes I was doing, especially my naked self-portraits, and she was very open to doing something like that.
This Carlo Mollino shoot came to me from three different sources right at the same time, it was very, very bizarre. A good friend of mine in Italy kept saying I should go to Turin and see Mollino’s place, he knows the museum’s director so he said there would be no problem [with shooting], he would let me do whatever I wanted there. Totally simultaneously, 032c asked me about Mollino, and Zoe Bedeaux, the stylist, suggested it. Literally bang, bang, bang – I thought it was such a coincidence it was meant to be. The magazine said I could do a fashion story, or photograph the architecture and details, or we could talk about something else, some nudes.
I didn’t really want to do a fashion story in there, it didn’t feel right, but I couldn’t go into Mollino’s place and do pretty pictures of girls like he did [in his erotic Polaroids]– I had to arrive prepared to do something new. I felt it wouldn’t be good enough to have just any girl naked there – I had to have this power against him, something that belonged to me. Very quickly, I knew it had to be Kristen. The pictures I did of her with the Versace heart have been quite talked about, museums have bought them, so I thought she has been like that for me.
BJP: How long were you there for?
JT: Two nights and some days. We flew there and arrived at say 5pm, and the plan was to relax and have dinner and then start the next day. Then we thought, why don’t we just go there, maybe we can eat there and just start. So we got there and started shooting and it lasted until 2am in the morning. It was pretty immediate. It’s a small place, very contained and very particular, and we worked until late them went to bed and let the whole experience sink in. It was nice to sleep well, have lunch and then start again at 3pm, and do the same thing until late at night.
BJP: Did you already have an idea of what you wanted to do or was it more spontaneous?
JT: Zoe showed me some of the clothes she had brought along, so we pretty much knew what we were doing but after that we were just playing around and trying things out. It went very, very quick and organic and playful, everyone had a very good time. It was a pleasure.
BJP: Did you feel more free because it wasn’t a fashion shoot per se?
JT: Yes, because [on a fashion shoot] you have to photograph clothes and handbags and all the scenarios; there I could just do whatever I wanted. I really believe some places have an energy and it had a fantastic energy, really special. When you’re standing on the balcony its not like you’re standing on any fucking balcony, it’s really something. It’s beautiful, the place is beautiful – there are original Man Ray prints and these incredibly rare chairs. It’s totally insane. And then in the middle of the night, it started to snow, and that was kind of amazing.
BJP: So were you talking to Kristen and saying let’s try this or that?
JT: No, I think we’re both very good at understanding each other. There doesn’t need to be a story like ‘Oh now you need to be like a little cat’. We moved from one corner to another and it was very organic, both of us reacting to little details. I might say ‘No I don’t think that’s so good, let’s be more calm and so on’ but really we were just shifting around.
BJP: Were you surprised that the shoot became so controversial? Even 032c’s distributors were unhappy about it.
JT: Yes, well they described it as pornographic. I don’t mind, I don’t really care. I wasn’t surprised, obviously I thought there would be reactions, but that’s a good thing and I never thought they were pornographic. They’re not.
BJP: Do you think some of the reaction was because Kristen is an older model – we’re used to seeing younger models naked in fashion and art but not so much older women?
JT: Possibly but one has to ask these other people what they think. I don’t understand why [they had a problem]. “I think she looks amazing, she’s completely in control and very powerful. She knows exactly what she’s doing; we enjoyed each other’s company, as well as these pictures. She has a certain secureness of being a woman, of saying, ‘I’m like this; I’m content with myself; I’m not going to have plastic surgery.’ You feel that very strongly, that this person is content in her looks; I think it’s wonderful to show. It’s her, that’s the whole thing and she has a raw sexuality. I would never ask a person to do something where I wouldn’t feel it’s right. She was very, very excited when she saw the pictures. She said it was really the core of her, and was very proud and happy to have been involved.
BJP: You’ve worked with other models who are older and shown them in a sexual way, is that something you’re interested in exploring?
JT: Not necessarily, only when it makes sense. I’m not looking out for older women who would be great to photograph, it’s just because I’ve known Vivienne [Westwood] for such a long time I’ve photographed her, and now I’m doing all the campaigns for her, and I’ve known Charlotte Rampling for a long time too. I’m not looking on the internet for who would be good to work with. And it’s certainly not the only thing I do. I just did a book of the Suffolk landscape because we’ve got a house there now, I photograph my children, and I just worked on a cookbook with an Italian hotel called Il Pelicano. It’s not my only corner, I’m just interested in life.
BJP: Do you think it’s interesting though to have pictures of older women in fashion magazines?
JT: Anything could be interesting, you know, I would be bored out of my mind if I would just photographed 15-year-old girls all the time. I just used Helena Bonham Carter for a Marc Jacobs ad, but for Marc by Marc, the younger line, I used the actress Elle Fanning [who is 13]. I know through my daughter, who’s 14, that girls that age have an interest in clothes. They go to Topshop and everything, so it does make sense. But at the same time, I would be stupid to say a 55-year-old wouldn’t be interested in fashion and clothes. So why not show them in a beautiful, fashionable, questionable, interesting way?
BJP: Is it something you’re more able to do, because you’re well established and have so much clout?
JT: Well, I was young once too and I didn’t do that [work with only young, mainstream models]. You always have problems and things to fight against – what you believe in, you have to push for. But yes, obviously now it is easier for me because I have all this body of work and people trust me and very much like the result. It would be awful if they didn’t like them.
BJP: Is it quite good for you and the magazine if you do something a little bit controversial though, because you get publicity?
JT: I never think about it in these terms, I just want to do good work. I intellectually and intuitively felt it was what I should do. But it was very good for the magazine, and it is good for me too because it gets noticed – everybody looks and tries to get hold of this magazine. It was brave of the magazine to publish it, there wouldn’t have been many that would have done so. I feel really grateful that they were very brave. But that didn’t matter to me either. Whether they wanted to publish it or not, it had to be done. If I published it in a book or showed it in a gallery, the images would have found a way of coming to life.
BJP: 032c published lots of pages, far more than the average story – was that clear form the start?
JT: Yes, I won’t schlep over there to Turin unless it was clear there were numerous pages. But even then, they could have stopped after 26 pages but they really left it as how long the story should be.
BJP: Was it difficult to do the edit?
JT: It was very difficult because Kristen is an excellent model. She gave me a lot. I shot a lot of film and spent a lot of time printing and editing, and reduced it and reduced it. The layout took a long time. I presented 032c with it and then they came back with certain ideas, some of which I didn’t like and some were very helpful. Sometimes you work so hard, shooting, editing and laying out, you get too close to it. It’s good when you can put a shoot aside for two months and then look at it again, but in a magazine context you don’t have that much time. So it was good that people from the outside looked at it, the magazine and my wife [gallerist Sadie Coles].
BJP: Did you always know that you would have a front cover too?
JT: Yes, but it doesn’t really interest me. I don’t shoot for a cover shot, it’s much more important that you’re in the scenario with the model and working on what you’re doing, not thinking what would be good in two months’ time on the cover. But certain things that would never be a cover, so it had to be one of the pictures where you don’t see so much nudity.
BJP: Was the magazine worried when you presented them with the images?
JT: Well they know me, and they know Kristen, so they kind of knew what they were getting into. It didn’t come out of the blue. But they were amazed, like ‘Oh my god we’re going to get into so much trouble publishing these, but we really like them, we’re going to do it’.
BJP: Did you have to fight to keep some of the more explicit photographs in? For example, the picture of her behind.
JT: That picture had to be in, with everybody. That wasn’t the fight. But they were like ‘Let’s use that one instead of that one’ [replacing a picture in which Kristen’s genitals are visible with a similar image in which they are not] and I was like ‘No’ [in the end they used both]. I wanted to open with the portrait of Kristen wearing my coat, but they wanted this [the shot of her with a stone horse’s head]. In other photographs, where she looks much more ugly, I lost the battle. There’s always a different take.
But if it didn’t go generally how I want to have it, I wouldn’t give them the pictures. There’s no reason for me to do it. I would be stupid if I took out this picture and this one [points to the graphic images] and just ended up with this one and this [the safer photographs]. There has to be a balance. But it was pretty extreme [on the shoot] and she is pretty extreme. There were pictures where she was cutting herself – it wasn’t me telling her to do it, she was doing that herself, and I was like ‘Um maybe we’ll take those ones out’.
BJP: How much have you worked with 032c in the past?
JT: Not so much but a bit. I like them. I did some little things for them – they asked me to photograph Richard Hamilton like six years ago, which was great. The big turning point was when they asked me to do an exhibition. They have a really excellent office, you go up in a lift and the lift opens and there’s a huge glass vitrine, which is absolutely pristine, that they have exhibitions in. I had a show there in January and it was really a success, and that was when they said they’d like to do something bigger. Also I like it because it’s a German magazine – I’m German, so it’s nice for me to be doing something not only with British or American or French magazines.
BJP: Do you still enjoy working with magazines, even though you have so much success with books and exhibitions?
JT: I do yes, it gives you a different audience and it has a bigger print run. If I publish a book it’s an edition of between 500 and 10,000; they have more, so more people see it because it’s cheaper and more accessible.
BJP: Do you work in a different way if you’re shooting for a magazine than a book?
JT: It depends, but for this shoot I worked in the same way. Certainly I am moving more and more away from conservative, conventional fashion magazines to give my account of a fashion story. That doesn’t interest me so much at the moment because I’m doing so much fashion advertising, where the client is giving me a lot of money to photograph their product. If a magazine calls up and says ‘Do you want to do a Tom Ford story with Tom Ford clothes’ for nothing, in fact I pay for it, I’m thinking ‘Why the fuck would I want to do that? If my clients give me so much money to do something for them?’ It also protects my client, so I can give something special to them where I get reimbursed.
BJP: Is that also because fashion magazines have changed though, so now you would do a Tom Ford story, with only Tom Ford clothes, whereas in the past you wouldn’t have used just one designer?
JT: I guess so, yes.
BJP: Are you more interested in shooting portraits now than fashion?
JT: No I just do my own thing. I very much enjoy photographing fashion, I get a lot of pleasure out of it. There are many, many excellent, very creative people you can work with, like Vivienne [Westwood] or Phoebe [Philo] at Celine or Marc [Jacobs], and they do really create something that’s wonderful. I see fashion as a sort of fantasy one should have fun with clothes, it should be pleasurable, with a sense of humour. Even if it’s a serious business – and it is a serious business, people make a lot of money from it – these creations are abstract and wonderful and one should show them like that.
I like to dress up in a suit sometimes, and when my wife gets dressed up in the evening, it’s something that should give me pleasure. I enjoy getting dressed up. Even when my daughter gets dressed up for Halloween, it’s wonderful. It’s something to photograph, this wonderful creation and what these people think about proportion and body shape.
BJP: Are you interested in shooting fashion film?
JT: No, I don’t really understand it. I find it rather laughable what all these photographers say ‘Oh I’m shooing a movie’ and all you see is the model blinking. It’s dumb as hell. If it’s a good fashion photograph, you see the meaning of the clothing. you get so much perfect information out of it. You understand everything. All that they do [photographers who shoot fashion film] is they involve cutting editors and some crazy movement and some sort of edit. I don’t need to do it. I’ve never felt I need to do what other people are doing, I just please myself.
It's an irreverent observation, but it's typical of Teller. One of
the world's best-respected fashion photographers, he's wary of being
'clamped down by commercial restraints' on magazines and refuses to
shoot 'clean cut, money-driven advertising shoots where I just sell
product'.
Instead he works with left-field magazines such as W and designers such as Vivienne Westwood, Helmut Lang and Comme des Garcons, who give him complete creative freedom. 'I work with designers who are masters of their own universe,' he says. 'It's not like working with some big company with a CEO, an art director and God knows who else. I only answer to one person, and they have a very clear reason why they chose me so they trust me.'
Marc Jacobs
His most fruitful partnership to date, and the one that's rewritten the rulebook for creative advertising, is with Marc Jacobs. It's lasted 11 years and 52 campaigns so far, which have now been gathered together by Steidl into a book. Jacobs and Teller were friends long before they started working together, meeting through Teller's then-partner (and early collaborator), stylist Venetia Scott. They got talking 'about art and music, this and that', and when Sonic Youth guitarist Kim Gordon started wearing Marc Jacobs on tour, it seemed natural for Teller to shoot her. The result was his first Marc Jacobs ad. 'It's the only photograph I've done (with Marc) where I wasn't 100% in control, because she was on stage and I couldn't say, "Hang on a minute, hold your guitar a little further down",' says Teller. 'I just went and did it.'
Then an opportunity came along to shoot Sophia Coppola, swiftly followed by Claudia Schiffer, and the collaboration went from there. 'At the beginning it came very fluidly and easily because we had all these friends we wanted to shoot, then after a few years we ran out of friends,' Teller laughs. 'Then it became more complex and we started exploring different scenarios of who we'd like to work with. We always start with a very open discussion.
'Sometimes I suggest someone, sometimes he suggests someone, but if I'm not sure he always says, "Well, if you can't see it, you can't photograph it". We have enough common ground to make it exciting, and after that it's down to me. The way it looks, the typeface, everything. He gives me very nice control.'
Over the years Teller's shot Charlotte Rampling, Cindy Sherman, William Eggleston and Victoria Beckham, among others, but it's fair to say that the subjects are all celebrities, and the ads always state who they are. But Teller says he and Jacobs aren't motivated by the cache of celebrity, arguing they use artists, directors and musicians because they're interested in what people do, not what they look like.
'I'm not thinking "Oh my God they're so famous",' he says. 'That's not the point. Everyone's just normal human beings. Old, young, ugly, beautiful, I'm interested in everyone, not just generic 18-year-old girls. William (Eggleston), is an iconic figure, and of course it gives me power to get him in because he wouldn't do it for anyone else, but I also think he looks fantastic and love his work. The captions are partly to personalise the story but also because often people were doing us favours. Giving them a credit was just like giving something back.'
Sly humour
Teller certainly treats everyone equally irreverently, playing on Kate Moss' rock chick fantasies and cropping Coppola almost entirely out of frame to focus on a squirrel. His shots of Victoria Beckham skit her relentless self-promotion, depicting her as a product in a giant shopping bag, but he probably went furthest with Charlotte Rampling, a personal friend, who he asked permission to fondle. Rampling smoked a long cigarillo before agreeing.
'It's really exciting what you can get people to do,' says Teller. 'Imagine you're going to a barbeque, everyone sits around eating their sausages and having a very nice time. Nobody does anything weird, right? But in photographs you can make people do something really amazing. It's a little bit like going to a kids' party, every one suddenly does stupid things. It's fun being open, not being in this restrictive everyday world where you can't do anything and everything has to be politically correct. But I wouldn't ask someone to do something totally inappropriate, just what fits into the parameters of their personality. Victoria Beckham was in on the joke, she thought it was really funny.'
When he worked with Cindy Sherman he decided to shoot her interacting with someone else because she's so often alone in her own work, but he rejected the idea of hiring an actor on the grounds it would add another layer into her play on identity. Gradually it dawned on him he should be the other character in the shot, and the pair of them used Jacobs' clothes to often hilarious effect.
Fine art
The images testify to Jacobs' open-minded willingness to ridicule his own clothes, but they also - like the shots of Charlotte Rampling - tap into Teller's interest in self-portraiture. 'Photographing myself is the best thing I've ever done,' he says. 'I realised how far you can push things. There's no discussion about "Oh it's a little bit cold outside" [when you're photographing yourself]. It really doesn't matter.
The Sherman and Rampling shoots both evolved into personal projects, and are also published as monographs by Steidl. In fact Teller is a successful contemporary artist but while he accepts there's a big difference between presenting an image as an ad and displaying it as fine art, he has no preference. 'Seeing a photograph in a gallery or seeing it in a magazine on a bus are very different things but they're both interesting,' he says. 'There's no hierarchy. I take a gallery show in New York equally seriously as the next Marc Jacobs campaign. It's not like there's just a bit of money making on the side that I'm just going to whack out. It's all about doing good work, that's the important thing.'
Teller entered the London photography scene through the music industry taking photographs for record covers, it was Teller’s photograph of Sinéad O’Connor for her single Nothing Compares 2 You that marked an important moment in his career. Teller’s photographs first appeared in fashion magazines in the late 80s, and included portraits of Kate Moss when she was just fifteen years old. Teller’s images could be described as the antithesis of conventional fashion photography seen perhaps most markedly in his campaigns for Marc Jacobs.
Picture and Words introduces a series from his controversial weekly column in the magazine of Die Zeit which often provoked outcry amongst readers, and the exhibition will feature many of the letters of complaint that the magazine received. Irene im Wald and Keys to the House are Teller’s most recent bodies of work, revealing the photographer’s more personal world in his hometown in Germany and family home in Suffolk.
Teller’s provocative interventions in celebrity portraiture subvert the conventional relationship of the artist and model. Whatever the setting, all his subjects collaborate in a way that allows for the most surprising poses and emotional intensity. Driven by a desire to tell a story in every picture he takes, Teller has shaped his own distinct and instantly recognisable style which combines humour, self-mockery and an emotional honesty.
Juergen Teller on his controversial 032c shoot
caused a storm this summer with a shoot for 032c magazine, showing Kristen McMenamy in Carlo Mollino's house. Following Mollino's edict that "anything is permissable as long as it is fantastic", the shoot pushed the boundaries but it wasn't deliberately controversial, says Teller. BJP has published a piece on it in the November issue, out on 02 November, but here's the interview in full.
JT: Of course there’s a lot of history there - a lot of experience and the security that you know someone so well. It was clear that there was trust there, and I showed her the photographs afterwards. It was good we’ve worked on personal projects together and we’ve also done commercial jobs where both parties earned money. She didn’t do modelling for like ten years, she stopped to have kids. So we hadn’t worked together for a long time, then four or five yeas ago I asked her to do a Marc Jacobs campaign. She had this fabulous long grey hair I was super intrigued with, and I really enjoyed the work we did together. Then maybe two years ago we did something for W magazine, and she was very intrigued about the nudes I was doing, especially my naked self-portraits, and she was very open to doing something like that.
This Carlo Mollino shoot came to me from three different sources right at the same time, it was very, very bizarre. A good friend of mine in Italy kept saying I should go to Turin and see Mollino’s place, he knows the museum’s director so he said there would be no problem [with shooting], he would let me do whatever I wanted there. Totally simultaneously, 032c asked me about Mollino, and Zoe Bedeaux, the stylist, suggested it. Literally bang, bang, bang – I thought it was such a coincidence it was meant to be. The magazine said I could do a fashion story, or photograph the architecture and details, or we could talk about something else, some nudes.
I didn’t really want to do a fashion story in there, it didn’t feel right, but I couldn’t go into Mollino’s place and do pretty pictures of girls like he did [in his erotic Polaroids]– I had to arrive prepared to do something new. I felt it wouldn’t be good enough to have just any girl naked there – I had to have this power against him, something that belonged to me. Very quickly, I knew it had to be Kristen. The pictures I did of her with the Versace heart have been quite talked about, museums have bought them, so I thought she has been like that for me.
BJP: How long were you there for?
JT: Two nights and some days. We flew there and arrived at say 5pm, and the plan was to relax and have dinner and then start the next day. Then we thought, why don’t we just go there, maybe we can eat there and just start. So we got there and started shooting and it lasted until 2am in the morning. It was pretty immediate. It’s a small place, very contained and very particular, and we worked until late them went to bed and let the whole experience sink in. It was nice to sleep well, have lunch and then start again at 3pm, and do the same thing until late at night.
BJP: Did you already have an idea of what you wanted to do or was it more spontaneous?
JT: Zoe showed me some of the clothes she had brought along, so we pretty much knew what we were doing but after that we were just playing around and trying things out. It went very, very quick and organic and playful, everyone had a very good time. It was a pleasure.
BJP: Did you feel more free because it wasn’t a fashion shoot per se?
JT: Yes, because [on a fashion shoot] you have to photograph clothes and handbags and all the scenarios; there I could just do whatever I wanted. I really believe some places have an energy and it had a fantastic energy, really special. When you’re standing on the balcony its not like you’re standing on any fucking balcony, it’s really something. It’s beautiful, the place is beautiful – there are original Man Ray prints and these incredibly rare chairs. It’s totally insane. And then in the middle of the night, it started to snow, and that was kind of amazing.
BJP: So were you talking to Kristen and saying let’s try this or that?
JT: No, I think we’re both very good at understanding each other. There doesn’t need to be a story like ‘Oh now you need to be like a little cat’. We moved from one corner to another and it was very organic, both of us reacting to little details. I might say ‘No I don’t think that’s so good, let’s be more calm and so on’ but really we were just shifting around.
BJP: Were you surprised that the shoot became so controversial? Even 032c’s distributors were unhappy about it.
JT: Yes, well they described it as pornographic. I don’t mind, I don’t really care. I wasn’t surprised, obviously I thought there would be reactions, but that’s a good thing and I never thought they were pornographic. They’re not.
BJP: Do you think some of the reaction was because Kristen is an older model – we’re used to seeing younger models naked in fashion and art but not so much older women?
JT: Possibly but one has to ask these other people what they think. I don’t understand why [they had a problem]. “I think she looks amazing, she’s completely in control and very powerful. She knows exactly what she’s doing; we enjoyed each other’s company, as well as these pictures. She has a certain secureness of being a woman, of saying, ‘I’m like this; I’m content with myself; I’m not going to have plastic surgery.’ You feel that very strongly, that this person is content in her looks; I think it’s wonderful to show. It’s her, that’s the whole thing and she has a raw sexuality. I would never ask a person to do something where I wouldn’t feel it’s right. She was very, very excited when she saw the pictures. She said it was really the core of her, and was very proud and happy to have been involved.
BJP: You’ve worked with other models who are older and shown them in a sexual way, is that something you’re interested in exploring?
JT: Not necessarily, only when it makes sense. I’m not looking out for older women who would be great to photograph, it’s just because I’ve known Vivienne [Westwood] for such a long time I’ve photographed her, and now I’m doing all the campaigns for her, and I’ve known Charlotte Rampling for a long time too. I’m not looking on the internet for who would be good to work with. And it’s certainly not the only thing I do. I just did a book of the Suffolk landscape because we’ve got a house there now, I photograph my children, and I just worked on a cookbook with an Italian hotel called Il Pelicano. It’s not my only corner, I’m just interested in life.
BJP: Do you think it’s interesting though to have pictures of older women in fashion magazines?
JT: Anything could be interesting, you know, I would be bored out of my mind if I would just photographed 15-year-old girls all the time. I just used Helena Bonham Carter for a Marc Jacobs ad, but for Marc by Marc, the younger line, I used the actress Elle Fanning [who is 13]. I know through my daughter, who’s 14, that girls that age have an interest in clothes. They go to Topshop and everything, so it does make sense. But at the same time, I would be stupid to say a 55-year-old wouldn’t be interested in fashion and clothes. So why not show them in a beautiful, fashionable, questionable, interesting way?
BJP: Is it something you’re more able to do, because you’re well established and have so much clout?
JT: Well, I was young once too and I didn’t do that [work with only young, mainstream models]. You always have problems and things to fight against – what you believe in, you have to push for. But yes, obviously now it is easier for me because I have all this body of work and people trust me and very much like the result. It would be awful if they didn’t like them.
BJP: Is it quite good for you and the magazine if you do something a little bit controversial though, because you get publicity?
JT: I never think about it in these terms, I just want to do good work. I intellectually and intuitively felt it was what I should do. But it was very good for the magazine, and it is good for me too because it gets noticed – everybody looks and tries to get hold of this magazine. It was brave of the magazine to publish it, there wouldn’t have been many that would have done so. I feel really grateful that they were very brave. But that didn’t matter to me either. Whether they wanted to publish it or not, it had to be done. If I published it in a book or showed it in a gallery, the images would have found a way of coming to life.
BJP: 032c published lots of pages, far more than the average story – was that clear form the start?
JT: Yes, I won’t schlep over there to Turin unless it was clear there were numerous pages. But even then, they could have stopped after 26 pages but they really left it as how long the story should be.
BJP: Was it difficult to do the edit?
JT: It was very difficult because Kristen is an excellent model. She gave me a lot. I shot a lot of film and spent a lot of time printing and editing, and reduced it and reduced it. The layout took a long time. I presented 032c with it and then they came back with certain ideas, some of which I didn’t like and some were very helpful. Sometimes you work so hard, shooting, editing and laying out, you get too close to it. It’s good when you can put a shoot aside for two months and then look at it again, but in a magazine context you don’t have that much time. So it was good that people from the outside looked at it, the magazine and my wife [gallerist Sadie Coles].
BJP: Did you always know that you would have a front cover too?
JT: Yes, but it doesn’t really interest me. I don’t shoot for a cover shot, it’s much more important that you’re in the scenario with the model and working on what you’re doing, not thinking what would be good in two months’ time on the cover. But certain things that would never be a cover, so it had to be one of the pictures where you don’t see so much nudity.
BJP: Was the magazine worried when you presented them with the images?
JT: Well they know me, and they know Kristen, so they kind of knew what they were getting into. It didn’t come out of the blue. But they were amazed, like ‘Oh my god we’re going to get into so much trouble publishing these, but we really like them, we’re going to do it’.
BJP: Did you have to fight to keep some of the more explicit photographs in? For example, the picture of her behind.
JT: That picture had to be in, with everybody. That wasn’t the fight. But they were like ‘Let’s use that one instead of that one’ [replacing a picture in which Kristen’s genitals are visible with a similar image in which they are not] and I was like ‘No’ [in the end they used both]. I wanted to open with the portrait of Kristen wearing my coat, but they wanted this [the shot of her with a stone horse’s head]. In other photographs, where she looks much more ugly, I lost the battle. There’s always a different take.
But if it didn’t go generally how I want to have it, I wouldn’t give them the pictures. There’s no reason for me to do it. I would be stupid if I took out this picture and this one [points to the graphic images] and just ended up with this one and this [the safer photographs]. There has to be a balance. But it was pretty extreme [on the shoot] and she is pretty extreme. There were pictures where she was cutting herself – it wasn’t me telling her to do it, she was doing that herself, and I was like ‘Um maybe we’ll take those ones out’.
BJP: How much have you worked with 032c in the past?
JT: Not so much but a bit. I like them. I did some little things for them – they asked me to photograph Richard Hamilton like six years ago, which was great. The big turning point was when they asked me to do an exhibition. They have a really excellent office, you go up in a lift and the lift opens and there’s a huge glass vitrine, which is absolutely pristine, that they have exhibitions in. I had a show there in January and it was really a success, and that was when they said they’d like to do something bigger. Also I like it because it’s a German magazine – I’m German, so it’s nice for me to be doing something not only with British or American or French magazines.
BJP: Do you still enjoy working with magazines, even though you have so much success with books and exhibitions?
JT: I do yes, it gives you a different audience and it has a bigger print run. If I publish a book it’s an edition of between 500 and 10,000; they have more, so more people see it because it’s cheaper and more accessible.
BJP: Do you work in a different way if you’re shooting for a magazine than a book?
JT: It depends, but for this shoot I worked in the same way. Certainly I am moving more and more away from conservative, conventional fashion magazines to give my account of a fashion story. That doesn’t interest me so much at the moment because I’m doing so much fashion advertising, where the client is giving me a lot of money to photograph their product. If a magazine calls up and says ‘Do you want to do a Tom Ford story with Tom Ford clothes’ for nothing, in fact I pay for it, I’m thinking ‘Why the fuck would I want to do that? If my clients give me so much money to do something for them?’ It also protects my client, so I can give something special to them where I get reimbursed.
BJP: Is that also because fashion magazines have changed though, so now you would do a Tom Ford story, with only Tom Ford clothes, whereas in the past you wouldn’t have used just one designer?
JT: I guess so, yes.
BJP: Are you more interested in shooting portraits now than fashion?
JT: No I just do my own thing. I very much enjoy photographing fashion, I get a lot of pleasure out of it. There are many, many excellent, very creative people you can work with, like Vivienne [Westwood] or Phoebe [Philo] at Celine or Marc [Jacobs], and they do really create something that’s wonderful. I see fashion as a sort of fantasy one should have fun with clothes, it should be pleasurable, with a sense of humour. Even if it’s a serious business – and it is a serious business, people make a lot of money from it – these creations are abstract and wonderful and one should show them like that.
I like to dress up in a suit sometimes, and when my wife gets dressed up in the evening, it’s something that should give me pleasure. I enjoy getting dressed up. Even when my daughter gets dressed up for Halloween, it’s wonderful. It’s something to photograph, this wonderful creation and what these people think about proportion and body shape.
BJP: Are you interested in shooting fashion film?
JT: No, I don’t really understand it. I find it rather laughable what all these photographers say ‘Oh I’m shooing a movie’ and all you see is the model blinking. It’s dumb as hell. If it’s a good fashion photograph, you see the meaning of the clothing. you get so much perfect information out of it. You understand everything. All that they do [photographers who shoot fashion film] is they involve cutting editors and some crazy movement and some sort of edit. I don’t need to do it. I’ve never felt I need to do what other people are doing, I just please myself.
Stellar Teller
'As much as it can be very beautiful, a handbag in itself is just a handbag,' says Juergen Teller. 'What makes it interesting is if a woman walks around with it. That's what life's about.'
Instead he works with left-field magazines such as W and designers such as Vivienne Westwood, Helmut Lang and Comme des Garcons, who give him complete creative freedom. 'I work with designers who are masters of their own universe,' he says. 'It's not like working with some big company with a CEO, an art director and God knows who else. I only answer to one person, and they have a very clear reason why they chose me so they trust me.'
Marc Jacobs
His most fruitful partnership to date, and the one that's rewritten the rulebook for creative advertising, is with Marc Jacobs. It's lasted 11 years and 52 campaigns so far, which have now been gathered together by Steidl into a book. Jacobs and Teller were friends long before they started working together, meeting through Teller's then-partner (and early collaborator), stylist Venetia Scott. They got talking 'about art and music, this and that', and when Sonic Youth guitarist Kim Gordon started wearing Marc Jacobs on tour, it seemed natural for Teller to shoot her. The result was his first Marc Jacobs ad. 'It's the only photograph I've done (with Marc) where I wasn't 100% in control, because she was on stage and I couldn't say, "Hang on a minute, hold your guitar a little further down",' says Teller. 'I just went and did it.'
Then an opportunity came along to shoot Sophia Coppola, swiftly followed by Claudia Schiffer, and the collaboration went from there. 'At the beginning it came very fluidly and easily because we had all these friends we wanted to shoot, then after a few years we ran out of friends,' Teller laughs. 'Then it became more complex and we started exploring different scenarios of who we'd like to work with. We always start with a very open discussion.
'Sometimes I suggest someone, sometimes he suggests someone, but if I'm not sure he always says, "Well, if you can't see it, you can't photograph it". We have enough common ground to make it exciting, and after that it's down to me. The way it looks, the typeface, everything. He gives me very nice control.'
Over the years Teller's shot Charlotte Rampling, Cindy Sherman, William Eggleston and Victoria Beckham, among others, but it's fair to say that the subjects are all celebrities, and the ads always state who they are. But Teller says he and Jacobs aren't motivated by the cache of celebrity, arguing they use artists, directors and musicians because they're interested in what people do, not what they look like.
'I'm not thinking "Oh my God they're so famous",' he says. 'That's not the point. Everyone's just normal human beings. Old, young, ugly, beautiful, I'm interested in everyone, not just generic 18-year-old girls. William (Eggleston), is an iconic figure, and of course it gives me power to get him in because he wouldn't do it for anyone else, but I also think he looks fantastic and love his work. The captions are partly to personalise the story but also because often people were doing us favours. Giving them a credit was just like giving something back.'
Sly humour
Teller certainly treats everyone equally irreverently, playing on Kate Moss' rock chick fantasies and cropping Coppola almost entirely out of frame to focus on a squirrel. His shots of Victoria Beckham skit her relentless self-promotion, depicting her as a product in a giant shopping bag, but he probably went furthest with Charlotte Rampling, a personal friend, who he asked permission to fondle. Rampling smoked a long cigarillo before agreeing.
'It's really exciting what you can get people to do,' says Teller. 'Imagine you're going to a barbeque, everyone sits around eating their sausages and having a very nice time. Nobody does anything weird, right? But in photographs you can make people do something really amazing. It's a little bit like going to a kids' party, every one suddenly does stupid things. It's fun being open, not being in this restrictive everyday world where you can't do anything and everything has to be politically correct. But I wouldn't ask someone to do something totally inappropriate, just what fits into the parameters of their personality. Victoria Beckham was in on the joke, she thought it was really funny.'
When he worked with Cindy Sherman he decided to shoot her interacting with someone else because she's so often alone in her own work, but he rejected the idea of hiring an actor on the grounds it would add another layer into her play on identity. Gradually it dawned on him he should be the other character in the shot, and the pair of them used Jacobs' clothes to often hilarious effect.
Fine art
The images testify to Jacobs' open-minded willingness to ridicule his own clothes, but they also - like the shots of Charlotte Rampling - tap into Teller's interest in self-portraiture. 'Photographing myself is the best thing I've ever done,' he says. 'I realised how far you can push things. There's no discussion about "Oh it's a little bit cold outside" [when you're photographing yourself]. It really doesn't matter.
The Sherman and Rampling shoots both evolved into personal projects, and are also published as monographs by Steidl. In fact Teller is a successful contemporary artist but while he accepts there's a big difference between presenting an image as an ad and displaying it as fine art, he has no preference. 'Seeing a photograph in a gallery or seeing it in a magazine on a bus are very different things but they're both interesting,' he says. 'There's no hierarchy. I take a gallery show in New York equally seriously as the next Marc Jacobs campaign. It's not like there's just a bit of money making on the side that I'm just going to whack out. It's all about doing good work, that's the important thing.'
ryan mcginley
Ryan McGinley
'People fall in love with Ryan McGinley's work because it tells a story about liberation and hedonism,' wrote Ariel Levy in New York magazine in 2007. 'Where Nan Goldin and Larry Clark were saying something painful and anxiety-producing about kids and what happens when they take drugs and have sex in an ungoverned urban underworld, McGinley started out announcing that "The Kids Are Alright", fantastic really, and suggested that a gleeful, unfettered subculture was just around the corner - still - if only you knew where to look.'
And yet, despite all this, McGinley remains solidly identified with youth. 'Photography is about freezing a moment in time; McGinley's is about freezing a stage in a lifetime,' wrote Jeffrey Kluger in Time in last year. 'Young and beautiful is as fleeting as a camera snap - and thus all the more worth preserving.'
But that's all right by McGinley. 'I use young people to illustrate my pictures because of their spirit', he says. 'It hasn't been broken yet. They are at a point where anything is possible and I think that spirit comes through in the photographs. They're wide-eyed and up for anything. Teenagers are my ideal viewers. If the kids know who you are, then you're good.'
Early acclaim
It's fair to say he started young. He shot to fame in 2003 with his Whitney exhibition, the youngest artist ever to get a solo show there, and American Photo Magazine promptly named him Photographer of the Year. In 2007 he picked up the Young Photographer title at the ICP Infinity Awards.
He started shooting stills and video of his skateboarder friends while in his mid-teens, focusing on the in between moments when they were just 'being silly and playing tricks on each other'. The youngest of eight children, he built up a close-knit gang of friends when he moved to New York's Parsons School of Design to study graphic design in 1995, his Lower East Side apartment becoming, as he puts it, a 'flop house'. His friends took drugs, had sex and generally hung out, and were happy to be photographed throughout.
'His subjects are performing for the camera and exploring themselves with an acute self-awareness that is decidedly contemporary,' commented Sylvia Wolf, the former curator of photography at the Whitney who organised his show, in an article in the New York Times 2007. 'They are savvy about visual culture, acutely aware of how identity can be not only communicated but created. They are willing collaborators.'
McGinley's connection with Wolf started in 2002, when a copy of his first book, The Kids Are Alright, ended up in her hands. McGinley produced the book himself with an Epson printer, binding the pages together with double-sided tape and making about 100 copies in total. He sold around 30 copies of it at a self-produced exhibition of the same name in New York in 2000, then sent the rest out to galleries and publishers he admired. Another copy ended up with Jesse Pearson, then-editor of Index Magazine, but soon to become editor of Vice. A long and fruitful relationship was born.
'Jesse sent me over there and Vice was one of the first magazines to publish my photographs,' says McGinley. 'They published my first cover, which was a photograph of (artist) Dash Snow. They would let me do anything and I used to curate their photography section. I started their annual photo issue and brought in a lot of people who now are a staple there - photographers like Roe Ethridge and Richard Kern and artists like Dan Colen.
'I was organising a portfolio of a photographer's work each month for two years, and Vice would run 10 pages of the person's work. Tim Barber became the photo editor after I left and he brought a great aesthetic to the magazine. I don't know if it's a "movement", but we've all been working together for so long, we're a family.'
Barber now runs the influential online gallery, TinyVices.com (and curated an exhibition of work from it for the New York Photo Festival in 2008), and McGinley is a keen fan. 'I put all my work on my website and on TinyVices.com, so everyone can see it. Some art people can be snobs, but that's not my scene. I think the work should transcend on all levels.'
Close friends
McGinley stands by his title, The Kids Are Alright, but sadly two of his closest friends and favourite models from this era overdosed on drugs - Dash Snow and Lily Woods (she was buried with one of McGinley's shots of her). Heroin is one drug you need to stay away from, he says, but he adds that drugs haven't been a part of his photography since 2002. And although his long associations with magazines such as Vice continue, his work has evolved along the way too. After the Whitney show he headed into the great outdoors, and nature has been a theme in his work ever since. He's inspired by the sense of scale he gets from the vast American landscape, dwarfing his human subjects, but he also likes the idea of the extended road trip, and has organised an outing every year since 2003.
'I admire photographers who have travelled America, like Robert Frank and Richard Avedon, but it's also linked to movies like Easy Rider and books like On the Road,' he says. 'It's like a band touring the US, pulling over to the side of the road and finding something. Meeting locals and depending on the kindness of strangers. My brother passed away from AIDS in 1994 and since then I've always believed in living every day like it's your last - really having adventures and feeling alive. My work is more about escapism. Never not working and always having fun doing it. Always in a different state, in a cave, jumping off cliffs, flying through the air, in an airplane, looking for new models to shoot.'
The trick is, he says, to find the right balance between something half-staged and the spontaneity of a moment. 'My lens is a shield. It removes me enough to be an observer. I also have to be an insider. I have to know my subjects inside and out to know what kind of performance I can get out of them, what they are capable of doing. I work in the same way a director of a movie works. My work is well thought-out. I do a lot of research and try to find the right people to work with far in advance before a project. I also work with some friends I've been shooting for several years.
'When you have a great model it becomes a collaboration and they can always offer you something you never would expect. They also set the stage for the other models who are new as to how far they will go with me to make a new and exciting image. I also do a lot of image research beforehand to find the landscapes and locations that interest me. But I'm also interested in letting people run free. I don't want to make work that is too much thought out. Losing the idea of adventure or surprise would be boring. It's exciting to go searching for new people and places.'
And, he adds, he still subscribes to the rebellion of youth. 'I've always felt the word "alternative" relates to me,' he says. 'Being gay is automatically alternative. I feel that everything I do, in my life or in my photography, is unconventional. I love breaking rules and norms. I wouldn't want to be friends with anyone who is "normal". I like the element of surprise and risk and danger and excitement. Aren't all artists alternative? Making art is alternative. Aren't we all the freaks, geeks, and weirdos? I signed up for that lifestyle a long time ago.'
Cave art
For his latest project - which goes on show at Alison Jacques Gallery in London on 11 September - he's shot friends exploring caves, setting up a camera on a tripod to maximise the little light there is (or light that he creates). It's an abrupt change of direction technically speaking - his earlier work often focused on movement, and he says he used to shoot hundreds of rolls of film per day running alongside his models with his Yashica T4 or Leica R8, in search of 'that one image where the light, the gesture, and the composition meet up'.
'Movement will always be a big part of my work - if someone is in motion, I'm happy,' he says. 'But I wanted a challenge so I decided to do the cave project because I needed to slow my film. Shooting the cave pictures was like directing theatre - I had to pay attention to every little movement.'
His images, particularly his moving shots, draw on the 'snapshot' aesthetic popularised in the US by titles such as Vice and photographers such as Nan Goldin. McGinley has stated that he likes this style because it's so accessible but, he aims to combine its energy and spontaneity with 'all the elements that make up an artful, sophisticated photograph'.
He takes a similarly understated approach to colour and image-quality - a fan of grain, he shoots on ISO400, 800 and 1600 speed film, and he tries to emulate the distinctive colours of 1960s and 70s emulsions. 'In the cave photographs I tried to bring that back - that colour you get from Kodak Ektachrome film and dye-transfer printing, the kind of colours you see in a Paul Outerbridge or early William Eggleston photograph.'
He doesn't say it, but the colours are also reminiscent of 1960s porn and naturist magazines, another inspiration. His own work invariably features nudes too, but he says this is down to a spirit of liberation not prurience. 'I don't consider my work to be sexual,' he says. 'Maybe sexy, but not sexual. I only mention old porn because they couldn't show too much sex in the 1960s, so it's all just photos of nudes, and I like the look of people back then - they're natural and wholesome looking. I also love vintage nudist publications. Normal people doing everyday things in the nude makes me smile. I'm sure I'll do different things in the future, but I'll always love seeing people naked. If someone is nude they have my undivided attention.'
And, as he points out, nudes are much harder to date than clothed portraits, giving his images a certain timelessness. For as much as he's interested in freeze-frame action, and as much as he shoots the fleeting beauty of youth, McGinley also has one eye firmly fixed on the long term. 'I try to make a photo that you couldn't place in any time period,' he says. 'The cave series is the ultimate timeless backdrop because it hasn't changed for millions of years.'
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