Oscar Fernando Gómez

Mexican photographer born in 1970

Wout Berger

Dutch photographer born in 1941

http://www.bonnibenrubi.com/

http://www.galeriewitteveen.nl/

Zoe Strauss

American photographer born in 1970

http://zoestrauss.blogspot.com/

Catherine Opie

‘I moved from Virginia to San Francisco in 1982, where I came out as a lesbian. I can’t imagine a better time and place to have done so. It was incredible, too, because that was pre-AIDS, and then I watched AIDS happen and became part of ACT-UP and Queer Nation. During our time at CalArts, Richard Hawkins gave me a book on Hans Holbein, and when I began my series ‘Portraits’, I decided that it was important for me to look at people in the queer community not as segmented bodies but as whole individuals‘.
Catherine Opie

American photographer born in Sandusky, Ohio, 1961
Lives and works in Los Angeles, California
Education: BFA San Francisco Art Institute, 1985
MFA CalArts, 1988

Her Portraits, a series of photographs taken between 1993 and 1997, depict members of queer communities in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Since then, she has worked with a wide range of subjects: from L.A. freeways to surfers in Malibu and ice fishers in Minneapolis. She was Professor of Fine Art at Yale University from 2000 to 2001.  She has been teaching Fine Art at the University of California in Los Angeles since 2001. The Guggenheim Museum in New York staged a survey of her work in 2008.

The following interview took place just before her exhibition Girlfriends, held at Gladstone Gallery, New York, March 19 – April 24, 2010

Vice: Can you tell me about this group of photos?
Catherine Opie: They’re all from my archive. I’m working on this new body of work for an exhibition called Girlfriends, where I’m photographing kind of iconic butch lesbians, and I’m also pulling out all these black-and-white square-format photographs I did throughout the 80s and 90s, as these little moments of sexy desire and memory. It’s kind of like an ode to my former life, before domesticity and motherhood. [laughs] I’m not really hanging out in the dungeons anymore or shooting the SM community in the way I used to.

Does looking at these make you nostalgic for those times?
Yeah, it’s really fun to go through the archive. I don’t think I would have dared touch the archive like I’m doing now if it wasn’t for this exhibition that I’m planning. And also coming off of having 20 years of work being up at the Guggenheim, it gives me a different kind of permission to re-enter my work and look at things that are just part of what a voracious documenter I was. Often I decided not to show certain photos for different reasons, like following too closely on the heels of Mapplethorpe or wanting to get tenure as a teacher. [laughs] Kind of conservative reasons. Yet I’ll put Pervert out there, which doesn’t make any sense. That’s the dichotomy of me.

But how would these photos affect getting tenure?
Well, early on that was my fear, and then I realized that my fear wasn’t real. I thought, “Oh, great, they’re never going to give tenure to somebody as out and as radical as me.”

It probably turned out to be the opposite, right?
Yeah, but I didn’t know at the time. I thought, “Oh God, I’m going to shoot myself in the foot here.”

So you had all these cool photos that were sitting there, waiting.
Yeah, I have a ton of them!

They kind of remind me of the deck of cards you once made, with portraits of lesbians on each card.
Oh, Dyke Deck! That was around the same time, it’s true.

I loved that. I remember going through the deck and studying each card so closely. They were all such different, strange types of women.
I know, it was really fun to do that. I did an open call in San Francisco. A good portion of them were friends, but some were people I had never even met. They just came and performed for me, and it was so fun.

So these portraits are of friends of yours?
Yeah, they’re friends or lovers.

Who’s that one person with the crown of thorns?
That’s Pig Pen.

She’s got needles in her noodle.
Yeah, it was for a Ron Athey performance we did in Mexico City. That’s just a backstage photograph I snapped of Piggy.

You’re not involved in the SM scene at all anymore?
I still have a lot of friends involved in it, but between being a full-time professor and an artist and a mom and a partner, it’s not like I get to have that much time to go and explore and play. My partner’s definitely open to knowing that it’s a part of me, and I have carte blanche to go to San Francisco or play here in Los Angeles, but to tell you the truth, I just don’t have any time to be in that space. And also, all of a sudden when you’re taking care of a child, your brain doesn’t easily switch to “Oh, now I’m going to hurt somebody.”

I can see how those two states don’t quite fit in together.
For some people it does. I have other friends who are players, who are parents, and they don’t have a problem with it, but it was never completely a part of my everyday life in LA. It was mainly a San Francisco-based community that I would go visit.

You don’t hear that much about the SM scene anymore. It seems like it was popular in the 90s and then it disappeared again.
Well, it’s not fashionable anymore. There was a little moment when it became very much a part of popular culture. I remember when my friends in LA opened Club Fuck. We were finally making this really cool, alternative gay club for ourselves, where we could do performative pieces in relationship to SM, and all of a sudden all the hipster coolio heterosexuals were coming to it. Then it became this whole other crowd that was just coming to watch the “freaks,” which was what we were trying to get away from.

Do you think you had a hand in the popularization of SM? I think I recall you saying that you wanted to show the SM community in, was it, a “normal” sort of way?
With more humanity. I wanted them to be very humanistic. That’s probably why I haven’t printed the black-and-white work as much as the color portrait work or even the self-portraits. These are a little grittier, I suppose. They’re also very classical and beautiful, but some of them have an edge to them that I didn’t allow to come out before, because I was conscious of what those ideas of representation begin to do.

I don’t look at a lot of porn, but my boss sure does, and he says that SM has become an accepted norm for most straight porn. That’s your doing.
I think it wasn’t just me, it was a bunch of other people as well. What happens is things become mainstream when they become imaged over and over again. Something happens in relationship to ideas of representation that makes it more palatable or digestible. I guess to a certain extent it isn’t as taboo anymore.

And then it’s like, great, what do I do now that my taboo is all boring?
I’ve been thinking about that, and I think it’s just absolute extreme body modification. People are splitting their tongues and doing even more extreme things to their bodies. I think it’s so interesting, that idea of, like, what is transgressive? How can you truly be transgressive at this point within our culture?

Well, I think you going from the SM scene to being a mom, and all your new photos are these blissful domestic scenes—that’s shocking in a way, because people want to keep those kind of separate.
They do want to keep it separate. So basically, becoming homogenized and part of mainstream domesticity is transgressive for somebody like me. Ha. That’s a very funny idea.

It is, right?
I mean, I’m not living in suburbia yet, but there could be a moment. I got rid of the minivan. I did have a minivan for a long time.

From the photos, it seems suburban.
Well, it’s South Central, but we do have a house and a yard and a swing set in the back of our yard.

Cozy.
Three dogs, a cat, a turtle, and five chickens.

Oh, cute.
I know. It’s all good. I’m not complaining, that’s for sure.

When did you know you wanted to be a photographer?
At nine years old. My first self-portrait was in a summer show at Barbara Gladstone last year—it’s me at nine years old wearing these little flowered pants with the zipper half down and making muscles in front of my house. It’s really cute. I got my camera on my ninth birthday. I asked my parents for a camera because I did a book report on Lewis Hine and then just announced that I was going to be a social-documentary photographer.

What kind of teenager were you? Were you a wild kid?
I was a quiet, rebellious teenager, without them knowing about the rebellion part. I had an older brother who was pretty rebellious and caused a lot of rifts, and I realized that he could take all the attention and I could be doing exactly what he was doing but never bring attention to myself by doing it. [laughs] My parents weren’t very parental either. They weren’t the kind of parents who gave me a curfew or knew what was going on or where we were. At 13, every meal became fix-your-own, and we lived in a totally upper-middle-class suburban environment where they let us run wild, to a certain extent.

Wow, lucky.
I know. I would be out with my friends till 3 AM, and what we’d be doing was just sitting in the car, like, talking. It was pretty safe. Our big idea of fun in the 70s was to get stoned and drive from Poway, which is North County San Diego, up to Los Angeles to look through the trash of stars. I mean, we weren’t very creative in terms of being bad whatsoever.

That sounds pretty fun.
I had a great group of high school friends who took care of each other and watched each other’s back. It was a nice group of people who mainly were interested in theatre and choir.

Were you guys all gay but not out yet?
I turned out to be the only one who ended up being a lesbian, which was interesting. All my friends turned out to be heterosexual. They’re all married with kids now.

Well, so are you, right?
[laughs] Right, but I mean, I remember my good friend Steve ended up being a big money guy after college, and I went and visited him one day and my head was shaved and I was completely pierced and wearing a leather jacket. All his colleagues were like, “That’s your best friend from high school?!” They were all straighter than I ended up being.

But you kept in touch with them?
Yeah, we like each other. They all came to my Guggenheim show, which was really sweet. And friends from my grade school in Ohio came too. I’m definitely one of these people who stays in touch.

Did your own high school experience influence the series of photos you did of high school football players?
It’s an interesting question. Not so much. I did photograph the football team from my old high school, but I think that the catalyst was that I have all these nephews in Louisiana who play football. I went home to my parents’ house for two weeks in this small town, Church Point, Louisiana. It was August, and I was like, “What am I going to do for two weeks in Louisiana?” I asked my nephew if I could go photograph his high school football team and it turned into a larger body of work. Now I’ve traveled to six states and I have three more states to go. For me, the portraits contain this amazing place before they’ve become fully endowed men in society. And a lot of these football players are going off to war. It’s intense to see these young men stand before me, and I get to bear witness to them. And it’s incredible to look at the range of their faces. Some of them are obviously only playing football because their dads are making them, versus the extreme real football player, who completely embodies everything about the sport’s masculinity.

You can tell that about them?
Yeah, you can tell from the pictures who’s hyper into it versus a boy who’s just like, “Yeah, here I am.”

Do you talk to them?
Yeah, but it’s very quick. I don’t have that much time and it’s odd because the portraits don’t reveal this, but when I’m making it, the whole team is lined up after practice and just waiting for their picture to be taken. So they’re all catcalling each other during the process of it. Like, “Hey, you look like a faggot!” and I’m like, “Oh, great. Do I address this or do I just leave it alone?”

What do you do?
I don’t address it. I just go, “Hey, come on, guys, that’s not cool,” or something like that. I don’t say, “By the way, I’m a lesbian and uh…”

I assume they’re not familiar with your work.
No, they don’t know who I am.

Have they shown up to any exhibits?
So far, no. I was a little nervous about that because my Wikipedia page had my self-portrait, Pervert, on there. So I did a little editing, and put a high school football player there instead. And now I have a warning on my Wikipedia page that I’ve changed the content and I’m a bad human being. I had a Wiki war with somebody who kept wanting to change it back to the way it was. Because that’s the thing, it’s the work that everybody goes to right away, but it’s really a very small representation of the work I’ve made.

Yeah, I guess it must get a little annoying to be pigeonholed like that.
It’s always the precursor of how I’m described. I’m like, well, actually, if you look at it, it’s really just a small portion of what I think about, and I’m not a singular identity, nor do I want to be.

You’re like, “What about the icehouses?”
Like, hello!

When you had your Guggenheim show, there were a ton of ads in the subway for it. They had the sweet portrait of your son in a tutu and the title American Photographer. I kept thinking, man, I bet some Midwestern tourists are going to look at this and think, “Oh, what a cute show about children and America,” and then they’d go to the museum and totally freak out. Did you hear of anybody having any extreme reactions?
Well, it was a really popular show. They told me that probably 5,000 people went through it per day from September to January. There were lines around the block toward the end of the exhibition. I think the museum was kind of thrilled. They don’t usually give all four floors over to photography. So I anticipated, as I often do, a certain amount of letter writing and censorship possibility in relationship to some of the work. And there was none. There was not one negative letter to the museum. No “I can’t believe an American institution like the Guggenheim would show this kind of work,” nothing. And it’s always been interesting to me that I’ve been able to skip the whole censorship thing to a certain extent. I think it’s because the photographs end up being really quiet, that you get to contemplate with them. They’re in your face, but not, like, shoving it down your throat.

Right, I often see the word “regal” used to describe those portraits.
Beauty, I use beauty. Beauty is an easy thing to use. It’s a good thing that it’s there.

Interview conducted by Amy Kellner, Managing Editor at Vice magazine.

Catherine Opie is represented by Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Gladstone Gallery, New York.
http://www.regenprojects.com/
http://www.gladstonegallery.com/

Andrei Tarkovsky

Russian filmmaker, writer, film editor, film theorist and opera editor (1932-1986)

Tobias Zielony

German photographer born in 1973

Aral-2, 2004

BMX, 2008

Disco, 2008

Garages, 2008

Entree-2, 2003

Krista, 2007

Style, 2007

The Opening, 2005

Zigarette, 2003

Three Women, 2008

Ride, 2008

Zgora, 2008

Netto-1, 2004

Ocean, 2007

Tobias Zielony is currently exhibiting at Kunstverein Hamburg. For further information:
http://www.kunstverein.de/ausstellungen/aktuell/20100605-zielony.php

Al Vandenberg

American photographer born in 1932

London 1970’s series

North America 1960’s series

China 2006 series

Hereford, UK series

http://www.indigojones.co.uk/alvandenberg/

Rinko Kawauchi

Japanese photographer born in 1972

Untitled, from the series AILA, 2004

Untitled, from the series Cui Cui, 2005

Untitled, 2008

Untitled, from the series AILA, 2004

Untitled, 2007

Untitled, from the series Hanabi, 2001

Untitled, from the series AILA, 2004

Untitled, from the series AILA, 2004

Untitled, from the series the eyes, the ears, 2005

Untitled, from the series the eyes, the ears, 2005

Untitled, from the series AILA, 2004

Rennie Ellis

Australian photographer (1940-2003)

Lifes a Parade, Melbourne, 1985

Barry Humphries, Cathedral Rock, 1981

Snake Lady, Babe’s Disco, 1980

Alan Bond, Perth W. A., 1985

North Melbourne Fans, Semi Final, MCG, c.1983

My Son Josh Learns to Swim, 1972

Berlin Party, Inflation Melbourne, 1980

Cab Driver, Kings Road, 1970-71

Boys with Surfboard, Burleigh Heads, QLD, 1978

Night People, Middle Park, 1975

Dressing Room Security Guard, c.1985

Cosmetics Salesgirl, Toorak Road, c.1970

Surfer, Gold Coast, QLD, c.1986

Dino Ferrari, Toorak Road, 1976

Carlton Bluebirds getting ready, MCG, c.1983

http://www.rennieellis.com.au/

Tuca Vieira

Paraisopólis. Courtesy of Tuca Vieira

‘I have published this picture many times. I like it because it symbolises the worst about this country, social unequality.’
Tuca Vieira

His work is linked with cityscape, architecture and urbanism, more specifically in São Paulo, his hometown.
São Paulo is known for its helicopter fleet, a sea of traffic, architecture and a multitude of skyscrapers. It officially became a city in 1711 but had lacked any city plan before 1889, and no zoning law was passed until 1972. It is now the largest city in Brazil and the third in the world in number of buildings (more than 5000), losing only to Hong Kong and New York City.

Some describe Tuca Vieira as a urban landscape photographer. His São Paulo series, widely published, shows the gigantic city from different angles, quite often standing back from the urban bustle.
Maybe the urban landscape is the real subject of his work. We notice the photographs depict only a few characters, more often they are in the distance or pictured by a shadow. It seems they are swallowed up by the city’s thickness.

Architecture plays also a major role, with repetitive patterns such as floors or windows. In a way, they contribute to give the impression that the picture sometimes becomes some abstract geometrical canvas. Two pictures I have seen on his website are good examples of this. They were taken from above, one is showing people at a zebra crossing (Paulista Avenue) and the other one is an outdoor market with blue tarpaulins making some kind of mosaic (Concórdia Square).

Tuca’s photographic work embraces both colour and black & white. The shooting viewpoint is quite often in the distance and tends to picture the city as a sprawling entity, possibly scary. Center (see below) is a panoramic view of São Paulo from some building floor which illustrates perfectly this impression, it is as we would look at the metropolis through some skylight.

As a final word to this short introduction, I would like to add that Tuca Vieira is also a sky photographer. I just looked at the images published in this review, as well as the ones displayed in his website (http://www.fototucavieira.com.br/).
I was struck by the fact that the sky is definitely a key element in Tuca’s photography. Either he is pointing the lens of his camera at the sky (see below Washington). Or he is standing in high level when he is taking the shot. It contributes to give some dizzy or breathtaking feeling when we are facing the images, like with most of Andreas Gursky’s work. However the huge difference between them is that Tuca is not so distant with the subject of his photography.

Tell me about yourself.
I am from typical Brazilian, urban, middle-class family, descendant of European immigrants. There are many books trying to define the Brazilian identity, I fell myself somewhere between Bolivia and Italy, let’s say so..

What are you looking for when you process an image?
I am always trying to understand where I am, what things mean and the camera is a wonderful tool for this. Photography has something to do with possession. When I have a good picture of a place, it is like to have the place for myself, or even better, to understand the place. If I can communicate this feeling to another person, then I think I have a good picture.

Do you have criteria for choosing the composition?
After choosing an interesting subject, I try to find the best way to translate the feeling I have in front of this subject. It is a rational and slow process and it is a consequence that some of my pictures have a rigid composition. I try to find a balance, with a good framing everything is important and nothing is missing, every corner has its significance.

What is a typical day of work?
After some years in photojournalism, working on the streets every day, now I find myself most of the time working in office, editing, sending pictures, making computer work, dealing with bureaucracy, etc… I spend less than 30% of my time shooting. It looks boring, but I do think that the less I shoot, the better I shoot, especially in this moment of photography when images are everywhere.

What are your projects?
Now I am editing the pictures I‘ve made in Berlin last year during a three month artistic residency. I wish I could make a book! It was a deep, very intense experience that really changed the course of my photography.

Berlin, 2009. Courtesy of Tuca Vieira

How did you choose to work while in Berlin? Was your interest in the buildings somehow linked with the history of the city? (the Nazi era, the Wall era, the recent rebuidings etc.)
A city like Berlin has a kind of ‘collective memory’. The city means something for everybody, even if you have never been there. In Berlin it is hard to avoid the history behind every building, it is like a historical laboratory of the 20th century. I decided to shoot at night to create this ‘memory city’ but also to explore the new possibilities of color in digital photography. Before digital, we had to use daylight films to shoot at night and everything had a yellow/orange color. I ask myself many questions about digital but this is a good advantage.

How important is art in your life?
It is just like food, I can’t live without art.

Could you review your work in a critical way?
It’s difficult to me. I am a very critical person but I try not to criticize too much my own work. I am afraid that too much self-critic could block the creative process. But (so far) I think I have made a contribution to the photography of São Paulo.

What is your dream?
To create some beauty.

What do you see for yourself in ten years?
I hope I can make more of what I want than what people want me to do.

What epitaph on your grave?
“Diz que fui por aí” (the title of a brazilian song, something like ‘tell them I went for a walk‘).

Office, Rio de Janeiro. Courtesy of Tuca Vieira

Oscar Niemeyer is one of the persons I admire the most. Not only for his art, but also for his political views.

Viaduto Santa Ifigênia. Courtesy of Tuca Vieira

This is in São Paulo Center. To me, it’s like a metaphor of this city where some beauty is possible over the chaos and ugliness.

Baikonour, Kazakhstan. Courtesy of Tuca Vieira

I went to Kazakhstan to cover the story about the first Brazilian astronaut.

London, 2007. Courtesy of Tuca Vieira

Nothing against clichés…

Rio de Janeiro, 2006. Courtesy of Tuca Vieira

There is nothing like to walk in a city with a small camera. Images are everywhere. One of the things I like in photography is to create beauty from this kind of object.

Copan. Courtesy of Tuca Vieira

Copan is a 1954 building by the architect Oscar Niemeyer. It’s a landmark in the city, where 6000 people live, with they own postal code. I live one block from Copan, in São Paulo Center. This is the back facade, hard to see from the street level.

Centro. Courtesy of Tuca Vieira

From an apartment in Copan building.

São Paulo, 2008. Courtesy of Tuca Vieira

Sad and common scene in São Paulo. Sometimes a composition makes the difference.

Washington, 2004. Courtesy of Tuca Vieira

André Kertész, one of my favourite photographers used to say: ’simplify, simplify’.

Tuca Vieira
Born in 1974.
Lives and works in São Paulo.
Became professional photographer in 1991.
Studied Language and Literature at the University of São Paulo.

http://www.fototucavieira.com.br/