- Hello and welcome to
the i3 lecture series hosted by the Masters in
Digital Photography program at the School of Visual Arts. We are thrilled to welcome
acclaimed portraitist Lydia Panas as tonight's guest speaker. Lydia earned a BA in
psychology from Boston College as well as a BFA from
the School of Visual Arts here in New York City, and she went on to complete her MFA degree in photography from NYU. She is represented by
Schneider Gallery in Chicago and Corden Potts Gallery in San Francisco.
Lydia's work is in the
permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Allentown Arts Museum, Museum of Contemporary
Photography in Chicago, Museum of Photographic Art San Diego, and MoMA Zendai Shanghai, among others. She is a recipient of a Whitney Museum Independent Study Fellowship, the Taylor Wessling Portrait Prize, a grantee of the Pennsylvania
Partners in the Arts, and a Center for Emerging
Visual Arts fellow. Recent publications include
New York Times magazine, Photo District News,
and Popular Photography. Her first monograph, the Mark of Abel, published by Kehrer Verlag, was named a Photo District
News Book of 2012, as well as Best Coffee Table
Book by the Daily Beast.
So please help me giving
Lydia a warm welcome to our lecture series. (Audience applause) - Um, thank you, Katrin. Should I be speaking into this thing? - [Katrin] Just casual.
- Is it too loud? - [Katrin] No, that's good. No? Thank you so much for coming.
I want to thank Katrin and
Heiner for inviting me. I'm really honored to be here, especially since I'm an alumni of SVA. I am really super excited to be here. A little nervous, but super excited.
So what I'm gonna do today is go through a little bit of a history, basically like a chronological
history of my work since about 1995, and I'm gonna start by
reading a short intro and then I'll get into it. So... Since about 2005 my work has focused on relationships and the notion of closeness. My various projects
photographing families, friendships, and
individuals often gravitate to matters of intimacy,
trust, and vulnerability.
Subjects that I think
most of us grapple with at one time or another. I don't set out knowing
where my work will go when I begin a series. Instead, the topics find me. They unfold slowly and reveal themselves in bits and pieces, showing me in the process
what matters most.
I think that we all become
artists out of a need to express how we see the world. I was a shy and reserved child, but I longed to be heard and understood. I think that we all do. It is said that making art is being caught between the desire to express yourself and the fear of being exposed.
These two opposing
feelings are very present in all of my work. In part, this comes from
having moved around a lot at a very young age. I was born in the States, where my Greek parents
were living temporarily to finish their medical degrees. By the time I was two we
had moved back to Greece, and by the time I was
five we had moved back to the States again.
I found myself in Kindergarten
midway through the year without the English
language to communicate. The differences in culture and language, and the swiftness and timing of the moves instilled in me a sense that
I had to watch people closely. I became very good at reading
people so I could fit in. I also read voraciously.
It helped me feel less
lonely and offered a window into other people's lives. Language was important, but I had difficulty putting
my thoughts into words. So after getting an undergraduate degree in Boston in psychology and literature, I went back to art school to SVA, and it was here that I discovered that through photography I could directly communicate the kinds of
things I wanted to say. For about 20 years I
worked in black and white.
I made different kinds of work, most of it of a conceptual nature and portraits were always
at the top of the list. So this is where I'm gonna
kind of move into the talk. This is a piece from 1995. This is from a series I
call the Italian Series.
I spent the summer of '95
in Italy with my sister. I was pregnant with my third child and my father had been
diagnosed with terminal cancer. And it was also a super, super hot summer, and so I made this series
of portraits of my children that I think on some level
are a kind of combination of stillness and heat and quietness. There was a sense I think I had of hope about this third child, about this life that was inside of me, and also just great despair at the thought of losing my father.
So this one is called
Anna with Pine Cones. And this one is Still Life with Pears. My father died at Christmas of 1995. In '96 we took the family to Greece and I did a series called
My Father's Lands Revisited.
Basically tracing the
footsteps and the stones that my father had walked through. And so this one is called
The Stone Necklace, and it was taken, that's my niece, and it was taken on the
beach where my father learned how to swim and where
he taught me how to swim. This is from '97. These are just excerpts
from series that I made.
This is a series I called Brazil Series. I spent some time in Brazil
with a friend of mine, the family did. This one is called Icarus, about the boy who flew
too close to the sun. And Voodoo.
So about 1999, I'm skipping a little bit. 1999, I changed from medium
format to large format film to a 4x5 camera, and my children at this point were totally not interested in being
photographed anymore, so what happened was I was using them wherever I could. I was using their limbs if they let me, their arms and their legs. This is another one from
right around that period.
I was also making work
with very, very little time on my hands. I had three kids, I was teaching, I was running this, I
was living on this farm. I had all kinds of, it was really, I had very little time to make work, so I started to devise
projects that I could make when the kids were napping. Just sort of on the sly.
And I did a series of still lifes. One of them was a series of still lifes. I collected three things that were kind of personal to me for two years. From 2000 to 2002.
So I collected baker's chocolate, and I collected hair
that fell out of my head when I blow dried, and I collected lint
from our clothes dryer. The chocolates I called Portions. Basically I would go to the grocery store and I would pick up a
portion of chocolate, so this might be like two portions. They had names.
I don't remember exactly, but this is maybe Nine Portions. Maybe Thirty Portions. This was however many portions it was at the end of two years. I also collected hairs
that fell from my head when blow dried, and because they were blow
dries I called the Blows, so this one is Three Blows.
What I did was every
time I blow dry my hair like hairs would fall on the floor. I would collect them. I would roll them up into little balls and put them in a box and save them. I was also very picky about the hairs.
They had to be mine. Like people were offering me hair, like all over the place. I was like oh, no thank you. This is very personal.
I also didn't use hair from vacations or on trips. It had to be hair that happened when I. Blow dried in my house. So this is, I don't know,
maybe Twenty Nine Blows, I'm not exactly sure how many.
I don't remember the numbers, but it kept accumulating. And this after two years
of collecting hair, I ended up with this. And then I also collected
lint from my clothes dryer. I called them Cycles for dryer cycles.
And they all had numbers on them. Maybe Seventeen Cycles. I'm kind of making up the numbers, but maybe Forty Eight Cycles. I was photographing these on the floor with my 4x5, turned down towards the floor.
So what was happening with the lint it was like coming up, getting closer and closer to my camera. And this was the final
number of lint cycles after two years. What was interesting to me about it is that it was a conceptual rendering of a very personal space. And since the kids didn't
want to pose for me anymore, I was still like shooting them in a way, 'cause this was the lint
from their clothing.
So I love that about it. Oh, this is an install shot. This is the way one curator hung it on this huge wall. It was really quite nice.
So after working for about
20 years in black and white, one of the things that I found was I was always like months and months behind in the dark room, and I though I can't
deal with this any more. If I go to color maybe
things will be faster. Color is easier, right? And so in 2005 I decided to try color. This was, in fact, the
first photograph I made.
It was a test. My kids, two of the kids are mine. Two are my niece and nephew and a friend. I basically just got my 4x5 camera out and I asked them to
stand and just come out of the pool for a few minutes.
Just come out and stand in front of me. I just want to see what happens. And as they stood there, I picked a spot, and I said will you guys
just stand in front of me? And each of them, what was
really interesting about it is, how each of them took a certain position in front of the camera. Like my niece in the very front, this is my little Italian niece, was kind of very much going
to be in the front and center.
My daughter in the back,
she was like yeah, right, so she pulled back. Each kid kind of had a
little different personality and it was kind of interesting. I found it sort of, it was kind of fun, but more than that when
I got the film back, I was really, really surprised to see all the tension that was going on. There were five different personalities and even though they were a
group and they were together and they shared a strong history, each of them was a little
bit in their own world.
Like each one had their own very different thing going on. It seemed to me like there
was a lot of stuff going on. So I called this one
Tatiana, for my niece. And this was the beginning
of my work on relationships.
It happened innocuously. I really didn't know what I was doing. I just had a good time
doing this so I began to invite other people to my farm. All the work is made on
my farm in Pennsylvania, in Kutztown, Pennsylvania.
And so the people that
are in these pictures are all people I know
in one way or another. Most of them are students
like the young lady in the pink, or friends or friend's kids. They're just people I know at least in one way or another. So like this particular woman, this young lady Asha, would always talk about her little sister.
She had been a Polish immigrant and she would always talk
about how much she cared about her sister, and I said you know,
Asha, why don't you bring your little sister to me one day? And what I noticed was
how much the little sister really looked up to her older sister and that's kind of what I caught. This one is a family. A father and his four kids. When I go into a shoot I really don't have any preconceptions.
I kind of just show up and
sort of see what happens. But I had a little bit of a preconception. This one, I just assumed
that the young lady would take the front position
or the star position. I figured she's got three brothers, she's the second youngest child, she's going to clearly be the star.
But instead the boy in the black t-shirt kind of went front and center. And for me one of the most
notable things about this, which I actually didn't notice I think 'til afterwards was how he
held his fists so tight, like there was all this
intensity in his fist. Almost as if having this
star position in the family somehow entailed a
certain kind of anxiety. And if you compare that, for instance, to the slack hand of his
sister, that's so different.
This is another family. A father and mother and
their two daughters. And this one I called French Pastoral. They were two friends.
They're French, which
is why I called it that. They were very good friends
and friends of mine. The interesting thing about
them is they came separately, but when they showed up
they were both wearing sort of a similar outfit. The black and the v-neck.
And they both, what I noticed immediately, was they both had these very
long, beautiful fingers. So when they were first posing for me, because I had the camera
turned horizontally like this, I couldn't see the bottoms of the hands, just like over here with this one. So I asked them to pull their hands up. I just said would you guys
mind pulling your hands up? 'Cause I don't give a lot of direction, but I did in this case.
I said would you mind just
pulling your hands up? Which is how they did that, how we came up with the
position of the hands on their stomachs. For me this image is a
reference to friendship, and also to motherhood
and it's hopes and fears. It reminded me so much of being pregnant and how when you're pregnant you're thoughts are that
you're going to have this perfect child. And of course, nobody's perfect.
- [Voiceover] (laughing) - Well, you know, there
are disappointments, too. I mean, my daughter's
perfect, but besides that. (Laughs) Two best friends who looked so similar. They were outside playing
and I was like oh my gosh, I've got to photograph you guys.
They look so similar, but as soon as I got the camera out what I noticed that the two faces had these two very different
expressions on their faces. One of them seemed so
open and the other one seemed so shut off somehow. I called this one The Coat. These were two students of mine
who were very good friends, and the young man on this side, he used to photograph that
coat in class a fair amount, so he offered to bring it and I was like, yeah, sure.
But he was wearing a shirt underneath and the shirt kind of wasn't working. It was also like 10 below that day. And I said to him would you be okay with taking the shirt off? And he was really gracious
and he took it off. So I ended up calling it The Coat.
And for me it's a little
bit of a reference about lifestyle and sexual preference. Invincible I call this. These are four sisters. So this is the series that, I worked on this series from 2005 to 2008, and this was the series
that I made my mono, my first monograph is of, and it's called the Mark of Abel, which for me really references complicated family relationships.
Abel was the brother of Cain and Abel and I always get the brothers mixed up, But I think Abel was
the one who killed Cain. Is that the way it worked? - [Voiceover] No, the opposite. Cain killed Abel. - Okay, Cain killed Abel,
and this is the mark of Abel.
Right, right. So Abel is the one who
was the preferred brother or who brought the better gift. And he was the one who was
then killed for whatever. So there was a quote by
Diane Arbus at the Met, a number of years ago there was that show, and she had a quote
about the mark of Abel, and she said the higher
you go in terms of like, she was photographing winners and she was talking about competitions, and in the quote it said
something along the lines of the higher you go, the
greater the risk of falling, of failure, which I thought was kind
of an interesting quote.
For me it also referenced the notion of complicated family relationships, which is ultimately what
I ended up calling this and what the project
ultimately became about. This is a niece and an aunt, but they're very much
like mother-daughter. They're very, very close. And for me what was
interesting about this image was how the younger one
put this calming hand on the shoulder of the older one, as if the younger one was
comforting the older person.
It's usually the other way around. This one I'm including (laughs). When I was young, this is me and my sister
when we were little, and when we were young my
mother used to dress us in these pretty dresses. They were always matched and
she would take picture of us.
She'd be like, "Okay, now
we're gonna take pictures." And we always looked awkward and goofy and kind of a little bit like we kind of wanted to protest, but
we didn't dare say no. So this photograph reminds me so much of the
photograph of me and my sisters, except that these two young ladies are so much more savvy, and they're kind of like
not so sure they're buying the way they're being represented. (Laughs) Oh, this one is about
early love, first love, and how usually it doesn't work out. But I just had a sense about these two.
It wasn't gonna happen. (Audience laughter) (laughs) I learned to
read people very early on. This one is called
Portrait of a Young Man. This is a father and son, and for me this image is very much about the inevitable distancing
that has to happen between parents and their adult children.
And in fact, and this is
really pretty unconscious, but what I noticed is all my photographs of parents with adult children are always about that separation, and about that necessary
sort of separation. So this is a mother and her daughter. And for me what was
interesting was how strong the mother was and how
charismatic and how confident, and how the daughter next to the mom seems like she's wearing sort of
that tight kind of tube top and her arms are kind of held down, almost like she seems a
little bit restrained. But at the same time I felt like I could see in her eyes that
she was going to become, she was going to grow into
being this very strong and sort of charismatic woman, too.
It just was a matter of some time. This also, this is a mother
and a son and a grandchild. This was the one person
in the entire series I didn't really know. They had bought a piano from us.
I put an add in a paper
and then we were selling our piano and she had come to buy it. I was like wow, boy, I would
really like to photograph you. So she came back with her whole family. She had a husband and an infant.
But this is the image I ultimately kept. For me it was very much about a mother and her first child as
the other ones come along. This one is called Family. This one was kind of interesting.
They got lost coming out. I live way out in the
country and they got lost, and by the time they showed
up they were 45 minutes late. And by the time they showed up I had like 15 minutes to shoot
before the sun was going down, so I was kind of overexposing
just to make sure I got something, and luckily I did. This was a family that had
been sort of separated, I guess, early on, and then
sort of reunited later.
And for me it was really
so much about the beauty, and despite all this beauty there was also sort of a certain kind
of sadness I thought. A couple who was engaged to be married. And this one I call Amy
Lubzanski and Her Sister. They're two sisters.
The one on the left, yeah, on the left, was a student of mine. She used to photograph
her sister in class. For me this image is
about what we are willing to look at and what we close our eyes to. So 2005 to 2008, three
years I worked on this.
And then I thought, I started to get like you know what? I can do this pretty easily. I need to do something different. And so to challenge myself
I decided to come up with different parameters. So I decided to change cameras.
I went from a large format camera, horizontal, like a horizontal format, to a medium format, square. From outside to inside, so the lighting challenge
was very different. And from photographing groups
to photographing individuals. It was very, kind of it
happened sort of on the spur of the moment.
My nephew and niece were
visiting again from Italy, and we were sitting at dinner one night and my nephew was wearing
this little, green t-shirt. And I had this melon sitting
on the picnic table outside, and I was gonna cut it up for dessert, only it was sitting next
to him and I thought, oh my gosh, Marge, you look
so good with this melon. We're not eating this. I'm gonna photograph you tomorrow.
(Audience laughter) So I took him into the studio. He was kicking and screaming. He didn't want to come
in, but I made this image. One of the things I
immediately noticed from going from groups to
individuals is how much more intense the relationship was for me.
Photographing one person
versus photographing a group. The other thing about
this series is that it is very much inspired by early
Dutch and Italian painting, which is kind of like the place I go. Like when I go into museums that's where I. Gravitate to first.
I'm really interested. It really interests me, the
plain black backgrounds, the fact that there are no distractions, the kind of universal
timeless aspect of that work and how you can look at
work from centuries ago and it still feels so contemporary. It's still so much about
the emotions of the sitter. You don't have to make leaps
into what they're wearing and what they're doing.
It's really so much about how
they connect psychologically, and that doesn't change
obviously through the ages. That to me is really fascinating. So I photographed my nephew and I thought wow, this is interesting. And I realized basically that
by adding a piece of food, I was adding a kind of a
different tension to the image.
Yeah, an old painting. Just a reference to the old work. I worked on this for two years. The first year, the entire
first year I worked on this, I would photograph and I'd think oh my god, I'm seriously wasting my time and film and money and
all kinds of things.
But I was drawn to it. I kept doing it. I just kept inviting people. I would have like kind
of an array of food there because I didn't know what they would wear and I sort of had to match
the food to the outfit.
I got really good at it after two years. I kind of had this
sense about what someone should be holding before they even came. For about a year I didn't
know what I was doing and it wasn't until
about a year afterwards I made 8x10 prints and I put
them out on my studio floor and as I looked at them all together I realized what was going on. I've shown these a number of times, but never in the way I really want to, which is in kind of a round room, sort of a round sort of space.
Almost as if you're entering a banquet because it's kind of like a feast. It's like there are all these participants who are bringing their
bounty or their nourishment to the table. Only I think what happens is that it's not clear if
they're actually offering it or withholding. There's this weird push and pull, which again is, whoops, which again is one of those things that I realized very much later
that I was photographing.
This is an image I just wanted to mention. This one is the combination of portraiture and still life and the notion of bringing
food into the pictures. When I was a kid I used to go to museums and these paintings used to fascinate me. It was always like they
referenced a kind of reality.
They referenced where food comes from, and they referenced the sense that there's kind of like messy things
going on underneath. Beneath the surface is messier than like your packaged Twinkies. And that's another one of these things that interests me so much. The notion of what's going
on beneath the surface.
That's like my fascination. I always want to know this. So this young lady is holding figs. In some of the images I think the model looks kind of vulnerable.
In other ones I think
almost maybe the viewer feels a little bit more vulnerable in the face of the image. It seems like they go back and forth. This is called Pink Cake. (Audience laughter) Fish.
So what I'm photographing
I think now in retrospect is that push-pull of emotions. That place where you know
you're not quite sure whether you're being received. Some of them are softer. Some of them are harder.
Some of them are easier, more difficult. I think in a lot of my work there's this sense of like
a push-pull of connections. That place in-between where
you're not quite sure. The messy place in-between
in relationships.
So I just put together a book. I'm putting out a second book now. This is a self-published
one that I'm calling Falling from Grace, which is actually the title of the series. So the next slide then
is from another series I did I started in 2011.
I started to realize that
my work was very much about love, intimacy, vulnerability. And I titled this Something Like Love. I think I got the name, some blogger wrote about my work and kind of talked about
it as something like love and I thought, yeah, you know, he's right. It really is about something like love.
So this one is called Summer
'cause that's their last name, the mother and daughter. I was going back outside again, again changing the format of the camera, changing the parameters. That's my niece and nephew. That's Tatiana from the
cover girl with the bra.
That's the same girl a few years later. This is two sisters. While I was doing this I was also asking my models three questions. I asked them what do you long for? What do you regret? And what are you afraid of? I would ask them after the shoot, after they would go home.
I would write them a
thank-you note in an email and I would say if you're willing, would you answer these three questions? And I got the most
beautifully, poignant answers. It was really stunning. I think if I ever put a book together I'm going to include some of them. Anonymously, 'cause they're so personal.
This is a father and daughter. Okay, and this is moving
into my next series. I had been reading at the time, this book about this painting. There's a book, maybe you've read it.
I think artists like this book. It's an entire book about this painting, which is a John Singer
Sargent painting called The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit. It speaks to the strength of this painting that someone could write an entire book about these girls, about their mother, about the family. It was fascinating.
They were like these sort
of Boston socialites. And so what I did is I went up to Boston to see the painting. I was stunned by it. The actual painting is I think bigger than what you're looking at here.
And if you've never seen it in person, it's really stunning. It's also in the middle of a room of all these Sargent paintings. And what really strikes me very
much about this painting is, is the space and how kind
of lonely the image feels, and how these girls, there's a kind of unsettled
quality about these girls. They're painted in a foyer, which is unusual for that time period for girls of such wealth and privilege.
In the room in the Boston
Museum of Fine Arts, to the side of this
painting is their mother, and she's grand. She's sitting in this
chair and she's wonderful, and it's such a contrast. And it was amazing to
me to see how Sargent literally picked up on this at this age. In the book it goes through their history, and you know, it's a little, well, they didn't become
like their mother.
They're very different. So I happened at this same
time also starting a new series and I called it After Sargent. Not because my photographs
look like Sargent's at all, but because I am so
interested in the psychology and watching people and
how they interact together, and it is something that fascinates me. So these are outside, these images, even though they look like they're inside.
They're all taken outside. So these are two very best friends. These are twin sisters. I did singles and doubles, but there were a lot of doubles.
These are sisters, but there is a lot of doubles. Also outside. And as I did this series
I was so interested in the answers I was
getting to my questions that I continued to ask them. So like for an example, some of the answers
were, like for instance, Summer, the mother and daughter that I showed you back there.
One of the things she said was, the answers were all very poignant and really kind of not similar, but everybody wanted to be loved. Everybody wanted to be accepted. Everybody wanted to feel useful. Everybody wanted to do
something that they would maybe, I mean not everybody, but these were the answers
I was finding all over.
So one of the answers
that that mom said was what I wish I could leave behind me something like even two
or three great poems, truly great poems. She wanted to leave something memorable. Another answer from this series was I hope to be someone who does
something good in this world. I don't want to be someone
who just takes up space, but I really want to be
someone who will leave something good behind.
That's not an exact quote,
but it's something like that. So moving into something
a little bit different. The work I'm showing you is chronological, so this was about I think 2013 maybe, something like that. When there's nobody around
and the light is beautiful and I really want to shoot, what I do is I take my
fabrics that I shoot people in front of and I take the backdrop poles and I load them onto this
little tractor I have.
It's like a Gator. I put my big rubber
boots on and I drive out, and my cameras, and I
drive out into our fields, and I look for a place to photograph, mostly 'cause I just really,
really want to shoot. And I basically shoot the fabrics. And what was really fascinating is how they became subjects for me.
I ended up calling these Ghost Portraits because they're for my father. So a little bit of background on that. We moved from New York
City a number of years ago. We moved from New York City to this farm in Kutztown, Pennsylvania
to raise our children close to the land, through
the public school system, with nature.
And we ended up moving
very close to my parents. And this farm we lived on
generally out in Pennsylvania, maybe everywhere in the
States, I don't know, but they kind of raise the field. They get rid of all the trees, and what we did was we
reforested this property. We left it in partial land.
It's still being farmed,
but it's partially farmed and partially forested. And so every year my father, my husband, and my two toddlers when they were babies, the two older ones, went out every fall and we
planted a thousand seedlings, and we literally reforested
the 70-acre property. And for me the hope was that by the time my children had reached high school it would be beautiful
and they would be proud. They'd bring they're friends
and it would be gorgeous.
And it is, it is, it's beautiful there. It is reforested, but my
father didn't make it. As I mentioned before, he didn't make it. And so I call these Ghost Portraits, and they're very much
about my time with my dad and sort of the spiritual
connection he gave us, he gave our whole family, kind of like learning to
work with him on this farm.
My dad came from a farm in
Greece when he moved here, and so it was in his background. So they're Ghost Portraits. I think what's kind of
interesting about them is how they end up connecting
with my other portraits in the sense that they have this presence-absence thing going on that all of my work tends to have. But they're also kind of
ghostly at the same time.
And I name them things like October Gold or January Gold or whatever. Those are all the titles. Oh, this is an installation
view of this work. I'm not framing this.
I had put this up, I had a show of this and I put them up with magnets. And so the prints are
like this really thick, kind of almost like a watercolor paper and they just hung like fabrics. And in this particular space they actually almost felt like ghosts rising. It was like the perfect space for them.
So what I've realized now also is that I have two kinds of projects. I have my outside projects and I have my inside projects. And my outside projects tend to be, what I'm doing is
photographing mostly groups. And in my studio projects,
which would be this one, which is inside, this one and the Falling from Grace image, the work with the foods.
What I realize is that it's
all about relationships. It's all about connections, but when I'm photographing
the outside shoots, I'm watching people and I'm
watching how they interact. But when I come into the studio what I'm doing is I'm literally watching my interaction with the model. So there's this intimacy that's going on and they're literally
about why I'm shooting.
They're literally about my intentions. And as an artist and as an artist who makes work with a camera, and as an artist who
makes work with a camera and makes portraits, I think it's, I figured this out, that it's all about connections. It's all about connecting. It's all about being close.
It's all about longing to be close. And that's simply and mostly what this project is about. So what I did in this image then is I paired everything down. I've been sort of pairing things down.
And so in the inside portraits they're sort of against
a black background. In the food ones of
course they had the food which had this kind of striking color, but I took all of that
away in this project and basically I asked these women, this is a project that's all women, and it's all women wearing black and really plain, black. I asked them to not wear any jewelry and as little makeup as
they were comfortable with. And I just looked at them.
And it was all about staring. It was all about looking at each other and seeing what would happen. And so ultimately it's
really about longing. Longing to be close.
But I think it's complicated, is that while I find myself photographing and wanting to be close, what I actually capture
is a sense of boundaries. There's like these boundaries. It's almost like boundaries
and approachibility. Like all of that is kind of
caught up in these images completely unconsciously.
I didn't plan it. I didn't mean it. This series is also very much taken from these old paintings. It's meant to be seen
in a way all together.
I think all of my series are kind of meant to be seen as a series, but this one particularly, sort of like the Falling
from Grace series, it's an experience. And this experience is kind
of an emotional experience. I think if you see them all at once. Especially big.
The prints, when they're large, they're kind of intense. I think one of the other
things I tend to capture in almost all of my
portraiture is a sense of, it's almost always like
they're always kind of caught between what is expected of us and who we want to be. Seems like there's a sense of tension that's always there. This kind of push-pull
about wanting to kind of go and something kind of holding us back.
This combination of like
intensity and restraint. I feel like if you look
at my portraits closely it's actually visible in all of them. A project I'm doing right now. I'm calling this one Holding On.
It's sort of about what we hold onto, who we hold onto. Our hopes, our fears,
our past, our future, our whatever. So I invite people to bring
someone they are holding onto and I ask them to hold on. So these are two very best
girlfriends from childhood.
These are twin sisters. These are two very good friends. Three roommates. Again, everybody I know on some capacity.
So this one on the left was my student and she brought her best girlfriends. These are roommates. Brother and sister. Mother and daughter.
Boyfriend and girlfriend. Mother and daughters. Mother and daughter. And when she saw this she's like, "Oh my gosh, this is so
much me and my daughter "and my daughter pulling away from me "and me trying to hold on." (Laughs) Mother and daughter.
Three sisters. This is a mother and daughter. Ah, two daughters, sorry. Two sisters.
So when they leave, I was really fascinated
by this question thing so I made up another question. I asked them what does
love feel like to you? Not what do you think it should be. Not the pretty answer, but what does it really feel like? I'm getting less answers on this one. People are a little less
willing to answer this one.
And I'm going to leave you with a project that is just percolating in my brain. I'm not sure where it's going, but I believe at this
point that it's about childhood dreams and expectations. So as I photograph, I try to put as little
distance as possible between the model and myself. "I stare," as Walker Evans so aptly wrote, "out of curiosity to see what I can see.
"I look for that most human of places "where the model and
I are both vulnerable. "Where our fears and secrets overlap "and our strengths as well. "The process is intimate, intense, "and very present, and
incredibly satisfying. "For a few moments we
understand each other perfectly, "and in the end I have the photograph.
"A record of our connection." Thank you. (Audience applause) - [Katrin] Thank you.
- Thank you. - [Katrin] We have a few
minutes for some Q and A. Questions and answer.
I'm gonna ask you to
speak into the microphone. It does not project your voice, but it's for the videos that we edit and then put out on YouTube,
Vimeo, and iTunes U. - [Voiceover] Hi, thank you. It was a very good lecture.
I was really interested that you spoke a lot about the titles of your work, and can you talk a little bit about that? How you decide what your
title is going to be and why you go in that direction? - (Laughs) That's a hard question. I'm hard with titles. Titles are really hard for me. They're very much about how I feel.
They may not, like The Mark of Abel, nobody ever knows why I call it that. They're always asking me. I think I explained that one. I don't know if you want me
to explain that one again, but that one was more about complicated family relationships.
The whole notion of
titles for me is very much about what I'm feeling
while I'm doing that. And so Falling from Grace, for instance, the series with the food, is really very personal. Falling from Grace for me is very much about kind of what I said later. What is expected of us and how we get to that place.
So Falling from Grace is really about leaving those expectations, leaving everybody else's
expectations behind and finding your own grace really by doing your own thing. - [Voiceover] And if you
didn't put a title on a work, what would that mean? Or is every work titled? - I title them mostly because
they need to be categorized so when people ask me for
like I need to see this work it has to have at title, and numbers get really complicated. Like the Ghost Portraits,
it's very complicated. I call them October Gold and then I photograph the next October, and I do another gold piece and it's like, okay, October Gold two.
It gets very hard. I would prefer not to title them myself, but my titles are getting
more and more bland as I go. - [Voiceover] Okay, and I
have a technical question. I noticed that in a
number of the portraits, especially the earlier
ones and the Ghost ones, that the center of the photograph
is very sharp and clear and then it gets very fuzzy all around.
Could you describe that? - How I do it? - [Voiceover] Yeah, and why you do it. - It's just a 4x5 camera,
so it has a bellows. - [Voiceover] And it
just does it naturally? - Well, not naturally. You can make it happen
or not make it happen, but a 4x5 camera is like a box camera and it has like the film is back here, the lens is in here, and in-between there's a bellows and basically you can
move the planes of that.
You can move the back
this way and this way and this way and this way, and you can do the same
thing with the front. It can move this way and this way and this way and this way. Every time I change
those things I can make, I can make my picture blur at any moment. I mean, at any particular spot.
So in the Ghost Portraits, for instance, those I'm actually focusing, especially if you see them live, on very, very tiny areas. And a lot of them, and the rest of them, are kind of out. But it's just a technical
thing you can do with 4x5, which is one of the
reasons I like 4x5 so much. - [Voiceover] Oh, and one last question as I give up the mic (laughs), and that is I noticed also
in a lot of the portraits of people it's not centered.
Sometimes you'll see
like half of the person out of the frame, or arm or leg or head chopped off. Is that deliberate? Or you're just capturing a moment? Or how does that work for you? - In the 4x5 especially I
think that happens more. 4X5 camera, when you're looking at, it's the kind of camera you put like a black hood over your head. You're literally looking at your image upside-down and backwards.
That's what I'm seeing. I think when you've got a group of people in front of you and you're looking upside-down and backwards, partially I'm so focused
on their expressions that sometimes I just don't see it, but that's not a really good answer. I think unconsciously on some level I must see it because it's
a very specific style, but I'm seeing it as a design. I'm not seeing it as like, I'm seeing it as a composition really, and I think that's how
it ends up happening.
- [Voiceover] How long do you stare before you start taking a picture? Because when I put people
in front of my camera, they smile, and to get them to be themselves and get that expression, if I stare at them for 15
minutes would that happen? - No, I got a technique. I'll fill you in. Remember the little girl
in the very beginning? That little blonde girl with little hands sticking out? It was a black and white photograph. Well, I'll tell you the way that happened.
My daughter who is now sitting in the back who's a grown-up was like this high, and I used to drive them
home from elementary school, and I used to drive this little girl home 'cause her mom worked. And I used to bring her
home so she could then pick her up from there, and every time we'd be in the car I'd say Stephanie, I really
want to photograph you. And she'd be like okay. And then my daughter would go no, no, no.
Don't let her. It's really boring. Don't let her do that. Finally one day she defied my daughter.
She's like no, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it. Only I didn't love what
she was wearing that day. That's how that one photograph came out.
I'll go back to it. So I put this plastic thing over her 'cause I wanted to kind of obscure this. So she stood in front of
me in front of the camera. She went like this, and I'm like, oh, Steph.
I said you know what? We don't smile for my pictures. She goes like this, which is actually, that's
the expression on the face. But when this girl went
like this my daughter, who's sitting there, she goes, Oh my god, you never say that's per. No, I said, Steph, that's perfect.
And my daughter goes, well you never say that's perfect to me. So to defy me she got up on this chair that I had this fabric hanging over and she stuck her hands in it. At that point I said to my daughter, you know Anna, that's perfect. That's a little bit of a joke.
That did happen, but what I do now, this
is the other trick I do. The grown-up trick. When I invite someone to photograph them and they say yeah, yeah. I'm like, you know what? Go to my website.
Before you say yes go to my website and just check it out. So by the time they
come to me, they say it. They're like, so you don't
want me to smile, right? And I'm like, not really. So I never have to say it.
- [Voiceover] So how long
are you staring at them? - I don't stare. I mean, I'm photographing. I waste a lot of film. I know, it's expensive, but I get them comfortable.
I make them comfortable so it's literally, I mean, I'm staring through my camera. - [Voiceover] It's
cheaper with digital, too. - Yeah, I don't do digital. I don't do digital.
It's a whole different ballgame. I don't do digital. For me, part of what happens is that I am actually shooting film. It's part of the process that I don't know what's happening.
I just did a project and I
got a thing going right now, this public art project
where I shot digitally. Like a whole different process. Film is slower. I'm using bigger cameras.
It's slower. I have a limited amount of film, so I have to, like my whole
head is intensely thinking about this image. It's like a different process completely. Yeah, no, digital is cheaper, but I get what I get because of film.
- [Voiceover] (drowned out by Lydia) Before you start getting serious? - I take a few. (Laughs) - [Voiceover] Thank you. I like your stuff. - Thank you.
(Audience laughter) - [Voiceover] So I was wondering about the film-digital thing
'cause at some point when you're printing, you're
scanning, and you're editing. How much time do you have
between like the shoot and when you do it? Is it weeks? Is it months? Is it years? - On the scans, you mean? - [Voiceover] Yeah, when
you make a decision. You shot and now you're
gonna like edit and print. How much time do you allow yourself? - It varies.
If I'm shooting a lot it can take months. If I'm kind of like in a slow period it can be like the next week. All of a sudden I'm going like oh my gosh, I know
exactly which one I want. It kind of varies.
The ones, the Holding On ones, I actually started
making them in triptychs. I'm kind of changing my mind about it. That's really hard. That takes me months and months because I have to
literally pick three images that are all three good and
then all three work together in a certain order and that, and I do my little scans
on my little scanner, but then I end up sending
them out for drum scans.
So that can take months. The decision is hard. I find it hard. You know, narrowing it down to something.
It is hard. - [Voiceover] So you said that
when you photograph people, you often are looking
to form a connection. So when you're at the end of the process and you're choosing what
photos you want to print, are they often the ones where you did form a connection with
the subject or didn't? Which are more interesting? - Oh, yeah. You know what? The connection is actually
like when I'm photographing, I literally fall in love with my models.
That's the connection. I feel like I know them. When you look at someone through a camera, it's so different from
like talking to someone in real life, because you're allowed to stare. So the connection for me, it's like a personal connection, it happens in that hour
that we're shooting.
I'm like exhilarated. I feel like I've had
this amazing experience. I'm exhausted. The images themselves, that comes from the editing.
I don't think anymore about connections. At that point I think I'm just thinking wow, this picture, like I just want to keep
looking at this picture for some reason. And I think really that
sometimes I pick the ones where the connection's really nebulous. I think it's almost like, it's like I think I photograph
to make connections, but I print to show the
messiness of connections.
Something like that. - [Voiceover] Cool, thank you. - I mean, I know I do this
stuff so unconsciously, and it kind of shows me what's going on. I don't tell it what's happening.
It really tells me. - [Katrin] I think that
really came out in your work, that you allow the process and the time to sort of teach you
and enlighten you, too, which I love that vulnerability. And many times we don't
give ourselves the time or the openness to do that. - Yeah, I think that's what
makes it scary in a way.
It makes every time I
have a shoot I'm like, oh, god, what if I don't see something? What if it doesn't work? But ultimately it's
the exciting part of it and what makes me I think keep doing it. - [Katrin] Well, I'd like to thank you. I think we're all inspired. - Thanks so much.
- [Voiceover] Appreciate
you very much for coming. (Audience applause).
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