Questions & Answers
Who said “ The camera gave me the license to strip away what you want people to know about you, to reveal what you can’t help people knowing about you”, and when was it said?
Diane Arbus, in the early sixties.
Do photographers tend to prey on vulnerable people?
Yes, photographers tend to pick out marginalised subjects, and it has been of great controversy in recent years of the scholarship of photography. People who are exposed culturally, socially, economically.
Who is Colin Wood?
Is a young, skinny, 7-year-old boy, who had his photograph taken in Central Park in 1962 by Diane Arbus. The image is funny, tragic and ghastly. She took many photographs of him that day, but she chose the photograph of him with the grenade.
Why do you think Diane Arbus committed suicide?
She desperately didn’t want to be herself, she would photograph people she would see own anxieties and vulnerabilities in. She wanted to be anyone but herself and trying on everyone else’s skin through her photographer. Photography was her world, and it couldn’t sustain her.
Why and how did Larry Clark shoot “Tulsa”?
He was a kid hanging out with a camera, he was one of ‘them’, the neighbourhood photojournalist, it was a part of America that nobody had bothered to see, especially that close up, he was taking pictures of his own life, taking drugs, shooting guns and getting laid. He wasn’t finding a scenario like other photographers, he was there already, he was almost recording like a diary, which is something he pretty much started. He opened up a whole new genre of photography, the impolite genre, a new nasty thing that nobody wants to know about. He initiated the whole idea of diary photography, which is an intrecal part of contemporary photography today.
Try to explain the concept of “confessional photography”, and what is the “impolite genre”?
Confessional photography is where the photographer tried to break the shell of the sitter, putting them onto a pedestal to instead of letting them be photographed in the way they want to be seen, photographing them in a way that they actually are, revealing something private about them. Impolite photography is modern portraiture, it drew people in to an uglier post war world rather than the pre-package portraiture like there is with celebrity photographs, even now. Impolite photography is also diary photography, nobody wants to see it, but its recorded and it can be nasty and shocking but is a massive part of contemporary photography today.
What will Araki not photograph, and why?
He doesn’t shoot what he doesn’t want to remember, otherwise he will shoot everything. He does this because photography is a way of remembering.
What is the premise of Postmodernism?
Is that we now live in a culture so saturated in media imagery and media models of how people live, that our idea is how one lives ones life of who one is, is made up by that media myth. And a sense that negates the idea of portraiture, the idea that you can dress up and go to studio and somehow reveal your strengths and character or your inherit humanity, but you don’t have that in the world of postmodernists analysis of things, we’re all these composites of myths and narratives written by other people.
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