Rena Effendi Interview

From the series Chernobyl: Still Life in the Zone, by Rena Effendi.

The nuclear accident of Chernobyl occurred in 1986.  Although most of the 30km area remains restricted, about 230 people still live there in what was, and to some extent still is, a devastation.  This area is known as The Zone of Alienation.  Most of the inhabitants are elderly women who have lived a lifetime witnessing horror, including Nazi occupation and The Great Famine during Stalin’s rule.  However this is their home and that is where they choose to remain.

No matter how damaged the land is and how harsh the experience, they still call it and make it home.

Excerpt from Institute for Artist Management.

Rena Effendi visited these inhabitants and witnessed their lives for us.  As in all her work, the human essence of survival and the fragility of life are interwoven in a narrative that is as engrossing as it is empowering.

Recently shortlisted for the Prix Pictet Photography prize for sustainability, currently on show at the Saatchi Gallery, Rena Effendi is showing her true colours to a wider audience.  Though she is not new to prestigious awards having won the Prince Claus Fund Award for Culture and Development in 2011, National Geographic  ’All Roads’ award in 2008 and Getty Images Editorial Grant in 2006. Effendi has exhibited worldwide and is a key figure in documentary photography.

SB: Gender, identity, vulnerable people and those at risk are prominent subjects of your work yet dealt with in a very empathetic manner.  What is it about these nuanced issues of humanity that interests you, as well perhaps as the more obvious photojournalistic themes of war and conflict?

RE: I think that when the work is socially engaged, it becomes more compelling and therefore lives longer in the minds of the people, makes a stronger impact. I am fascinated with the human power of survival, our adaptability and our will to persevere in spite of difficult conditions and challenges that life puts in front of us. The prevalence of human spirit over any hardship brought about by war, natural disaster, nuclear catastrophe, social discrimination, rejection or loss is the major theme of my work.

Your work seems to portray tenderly the clash between delicacy and brutality. Do you think being a woman has influenced how you take pictures? 

I think that the world we live in is very fragile and this fragility makes each individual experience unpredictable. When things are going well I can’t stop thinking — but what if it’s only now and what happens next? Sometimes I think that I am in full control, but it’s only an illusion. It’s like I am walking on this very thin thread, swaying left and right, trying to balance. I think that acknowledging the fact that you are not in control is very humbling both for men and for women. Some people call it “finding God”. For me, it’s simply a fact of life. All I can do is make the best possible effort to retain my humanity. I have found that what interests me most is these tender human moments in the face of disaster or brutal life experience.  I am not the only one referencing it in my work – humanity is almost every one’s subject.

What makes you decide to pursue a project?

A theme that intrigues me, consumes me, gives me a feeling of restlessness, it has to be something that literally kicks me out of the house. Self-motivation is a difficult exercise for everyone, this is why it’s important to be truly interested in the project you are embarking on, this is why they call them – “personal”, as the work has to resonate with you first of all and then with others.

How much research do you do before you go on assignment?  How do the aspects of research and responding to the situation you are in complement together?

Each story is different, but usually it is a little bit of both. For some stories it’s necessary to do research beforehand. However, I very much like to keep it fresh and open. Sometimes it’s good to go in without any knowledge whatsoever, almost blind-folded, because then when you open your eyes the scene is more vivid. I rely a lot on intuition and serendipity. Coming in with this ‘virgin’ perspective helps you to be sensitive and have a more nuanced view of the place, notice details that you could omit or render unimportant if you overdo on your research. Not knowing also gives you a sense of courage, you dare to do more, go further, you are willing to experiment, whereas when you read and see too much about the place before you go in, you impose the invisible barriers of knowledge that may stop you from exploring the story from a fresh angle.

How do you think women can make the best of a career as a photographer if they also want to have a family and might need to stay at home more?

Tough question. It’s hard work. It’s been very difficult for me to balance my professional life with family. I am blessed with a very supportive family, but being away from my daughter as she grows up is extremely difficult. I just hope that she will understand one day that her mom has a very cool job.

What is it about your job that you love most?

Aside from the act of taking pictures, my favorite part is to look over the results and build a visual narrative. I get excited when I see good photographs and relive the moments from the story. These moments stay with me forever, they enrich my life.

Aglaé Bory Interview

Aglaé Bory from the series Corrélations.  www.aglaebory.com

I fell in love with this work a while ago when I was just starting to think about making my daughter the subject of my new series, Edelweiss.  I got the book for Christmas and found the portraits entirely compelling.  The light, the colour tones, the subject matter, the intimacy, the tension, the domestic, the carefully calculated composition and the mirroring or reflection of the daughter on her mother and vice versa.  I wanted to find out more from someone who successfully made a series on motherhood that was neither corny or clichéd but also to go into more depth about the projects scope as a piece of photographic art.

By retaining control of the cable release and including it in the images Aglaé both slows down our reading and determines the mood of the images. Locations, positions and clothing are not left to chance but down to the deliberation of the artist.  By making us aware of this control Aglaé reminds us that she is a creator, not simply responding to daily happenings but in some sense performing them for us, allowing us to see what she wants us to see.  In this simple but crucial act she confuses the viewer with what is fact.  She makes us question what is really there each day and wonder why she has chosen to include it in the frame.  What reality has she decided to let us see and therefore why?  What does she want to communicate through these images?

I love the very composed and deliberate nature of these images that take place in the everyday.  The restrained background noise doesn’t inhibit the reading, in fact every component adds to it, like part of a mis-en-scene familiar to cinema where the director uses props and locations to enhance the essence of the story.  From the surrounding elements, like fruit, play parks, painting utensils, we can deduce information about the existence of the subjects but they aren’t just clues, they are also symbols, characteristics and idiosyncrasies of their life together.  Things that we all have equivalents of.  What is your apartment block?  Face-mask?  Sleep routine?  This project is about one mother and her daughter but it is also about all of us.  What are your childhood memories?  What do you do or not do with your children?  What would you like to do or have done?

Aglaé Bory is based in Paris.  Her series Correlations has been exhibited widely and received honourable recognition including second place in the Terry O’Neill Award and inclusion in the Voies Off Festival.

SB:  What excites you about photography and why did you begin taking pictures?

AB:  It was like a call. When I was 15,  I was impressed by the mystery of photography.  I think I felt the tension and the strength created by the frozen frame.  Through photography I discovered one can look at things and people with emotion.  Now I still love the power of the frozen frame and the relationship it has with time.

Who / what are your influences?

There are many photographers I love, like Jeff Wall, Rineke Dijkstra, Diane Arbus, Paul Graham, Taryn Simon…  They are all working between reality, document and fiction.  I relate to this approach very much.

I discovered photography through Edouard Boubat, Arnaud Claas, Henri Cartier-Bresson and other classics of black and white photography, but with high emotion.  They taught me how photography can speak and create meaning, through centering and especially through off-camera which has been very important for me.  Now though my photographic language has moved far from these photographers.

I only take color photographs and the definition of my way of taking photographs could be “decided moment”, not the Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment”.*

Apart from this I find important influences in literature, like in Marguertite Duras’s work.  She used direct and strong words, and wrote with an awareness of the necessity to express things using specific words.

Photography shows and freezes things, I try to see what is invisible, to show what is hidden, to freeze what is volatile.  I especially love doing this because photography is dealing with tangible reality so I try to explore the power of photography by approaching it’s boundaries as a medium.

What is your favourite aspect of Corrélations? 

The process was very important and very exciting.  But so was the topic.  There were many things to include in this work, and I’m really happy to have integrated them all together.

First, this work was a necessity. I strongly felt the compulsion to make these images.  I thought it was impossible that all these ‘small’ but determinant moments should be left untold.  I wanted to show all those little intimate and harmless things that we are repeating every day and which we choose to call life. I felt the need to photograph them in order to be displayed, to be seen and to be looked upon as an attempt to make an inventory of time.

In all my work I try to create meaning with images.  That’s why I’m a photographer.

The process was also very important.  The cable release in my hand is visible, so the moment-of-shooting itself is visible too. I like this.  These photographs are self-portraits, so I was ‘blind’.  I had to imagine the postures, to see not with my eyes, but with my mind.  It helped me to go inside myself and reach interiority.

The closeness of your relationship with your daughter is very apparent in your work.  When I’m photographing my own daughter sometimes she resists the camera and I have to find the balance between respecting her desires and getting a good shot.  What is your experience of this and how did you overcome or strike a balance?

When I started this work she was 2. So she saw this like a game.  I asked her to stay still, which was not that easy at first!  But she quickly felt that there was something strange, something that was important for me. So she brought herself to do it, to be serious, and to listen to what I said to her. Then she discovered that something was happening between her, me and the camera.

She resisted sometimes but more because she had to stop what she was doing (playing) than because she didn’t want to be photographed.

When I was taking the pictures, I didn’t speak to her with the same tone of voice and she sensed that.  At this moment I was more a photographer than her mother.  Creating this sort of distance was important to separate the work and the family life.  I think it also helped this work to be what I really wanted it to be: not trivial but emotional and photographic.

This project is not solely about you and your circumstances and motherhood, there is a wider narrative at play.  What are your biggest hopes for your viewer?

This is right.

This work is, more than anything, a photographic series which questions the photographic rules and roles.  The photographer produces the images before choosing which one he wants to show.  This is an artistic gesture which exists to establish a dialogue through ideas, images and the photographic tool.  Even though the camera is a tool which takes it’s aim on reality, it does not work of it’s own accord.  It is a tool to establish relationships.

The question to ask oneself is what kind of relationship is to be established, through which medium and for what purpose?

The work relies on personal aspects which I hope add meaning and reveal the potential and the peculiarities of photography.  I questioned the relationship between time, space and the people and I wrote this relationship with the light.  The light brings a timelessness to these moments.  Once chemically condensed and stripped of insignificance, they stop being the substratum of everyday life and acquire the status of archetypes.

With this fictionalised approach the viewer can easily identify fragments of their own experience, recognising parts of their own lives.  Ideally though, they would abandon personal perspectives and embrace the collective flux of memories.

What does your daughter think of the photographs?

She likes them.

But I let her stay away from what the pictures I take end up becoming.  She knows there have been exhibitions and she saw the book, but we don’t often speak about it. I explained it to her in simple terms and she understands that is an artistic work, not a family album.  This is my business so it was important for me that she should stay in her child’s world.  On the other hand, I think we will discuss it again when she is older, because there are personal emotions and feelings involved.

What impact has the series had on your relationship with each other?

We did something unusual which questioned the bond that exists between a woman and her child.  It was an experience of life.  Now things have been said and many things are easier to feel.  It was like a silent discussion.

Are you working on anything new / what’s next for you?

Yes, I’m working on different projects.

One about “Inner sees” and another one in my native land, both exploring the relationship between landscape and emotions.  And I continue my work in the press, for newspapers and magazines.  However I do continue to show “Corrélations” in different places.

What advice would you give to women balancing a photography career and bringing up young children?

I think it’s not easy sometimes because we have to balance it with family life and because being a photographer, as artists, doesn’t stop at a fixed hour in the day.  It’s not a job that has schedules.  And for creating projects, ideas, pictures, we need time, we need sometimes to be alone, to be free of obligations.

But women are still managing the everyday life and this is true for any woman doing any kind of job.  The bond with children is indefectible and it is not easy to find a good way to manage all these different feelings.  But the more the children grow up the easier it becomes.  These situations can be interesting for our work because we are faced by a lot of emotions that feed our creativity and make us stronger.

* ”Photography is not like painting,” Cartier-Bresson told the Washington Post in 1957. “There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative,” he said. “Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.”  This is what became known as The Decisive Moment.

Prepared for publication with the assistance of Lena Aliper.

Clare Gallagher Interview

www.claregallagher.co.uk

Clare Gallagher’s series Domestic Drift resonated with me instantly as a new mum dealing with chaos on a daily basis.   Instead of getting through the day waiting for the ‘good bits’ Clare has managed to achieve the discipline of seeing beauty in the mundane. Quite an accomplishment in a world of distraction and dissatisfaction.  I wanted to find out more about her way of seeing and how the project evolved.

The everyday is complex terrain. It is always there, readily and universally available; surely it is so obvious that it needs no unveiling. And yet, it is also shrouded in haze, our sense of it dulled by familiarity and habit… We are at risk of missing out a significant portion of our experience that is ever-present yet escapes attention.

Inspired by Guy Debord’s Theory of the Dérive, I began by following his directions:
In a dérive, one or more persons during a certain period drops their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and lets themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.                                                                                                                                   Clare Gallagher

Clare has exhibited in New York, Houston, Delhi, Dublin, and London, and she was shortlisted for Saatchi New Sensations.  The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston recently acquired one of Clare’s images for their permanent collection.

We met for an espresso (double) in Belfast where we chatted fondly about Northern Ireland’s oddities, art education, family life, talking art with the folks and the terrible necessity of ‘getting your work out there’ (shudder).

SB: Well done on Domestic Drift.  What is your greatest sense of accomplishment with the series?

CG: Thank you. I’m really happy to help get the ordinary into cultural discourse and pleased that my work is resonating with a wider audience than I thought it would.

Do you feel you have found your voice with this project?  

I’ve always tried to work with the idea of fragmentation, trying to overcome the sense of there being hierarchies in the ways we experience the world. Domestic drift surprised me though by feeling so political – I wanted a revolution of everyday life! I began it very timidly, worrying that no-one would be interested in seeing what some woman was doing with the most mundane, obvious bits of home life.

Seeing the good things in the everyday really resonated with me.  How did it click with you that instead of waiting for the ‘good’ stuff to happen you should start to see them in the vernacular?

When I took the image of the penguins I had a real turning point – I had been trying to avoid looking at the mess and the work, photographing ceilings and windows and the like. I went home one evening and saw the kids’ room was like there’d been an explosion of toys and clothes and books, put the camera on the floor and focused on the first thing in front of it. Amidst all of what looked to me like chaos and chores, the boys had left these two little penguins, like two brothers chatting away. It was so touching!

Has your project helped you to view life differently?

I’m hoping it doesn’t sound like therapy but yes, I don’t feel so constricted by the constant bedlam around me. I can see home more clearly without the persistent filter of action. I try to appreciate the transience of all the aspects of home life instead of waiting for it all to be ‘just right’.

In your work the hint of other worlds is imminent.  How did that evolve?

Part of learning to respond to my surroundings differently was trying to see from the kids’ perspectives and be fascinated by the ordinary. It had a lot to do with relearning how to make do with what’s there instead of feeling dissatisfied with what we have or how things are and learning to really notice things through all the senses.

What’s it like being a regional artist after living in England for so long?

It’s a really exciting time for photography in Ireland – there are two new photofestivals, a number of new photo magazines like Prism and Supermassiveblackhole as well as the long-established but as-relevant-as-ever Source. The University of Ulster has great BA and MFA photography programmes with fantastic lecturers like Magnum photographer Donovan Wylie. Gallery openings are more fun here too – great craic!

Elinor Carucci Interview

www.elinorcarucci.com

Elinor Carucci has become synonymous with the private turned public.  Her revealing and intimate images of motherhood make a family album that subverts the cliché.  Born in Israel and currently living in New York, Carucci’s work has graced the establishments of MoMA, Houston Museum of Fine Art and has been featured in the New York Times and Aperture.  Her awards list includes the International Centre of Photography’s Infinity Award for Young Photographer and she was generous enough to answer the questions that trouble me every day.

SB: Obviously children come first, but as a photographer sometimes photography has to come first.  How do you manage to strike this balance as a committed mother and a professional and serious photographer?

EC:  It is tough and requires a lot of hard work, and managing my time well. I decided to devote all my time only to the children and work.  I had to give up my social life entirely until the kids are a little older, and other things.  I just make my life about those two really major things.

In what ways do you think these two ‘jobs’ work well together? And what is the biggest difficulty in making it work?

You have to REALLY love those two jobs and have the motivation to find the energy to do both.  The biggest difficulty is making sure I get enough sleep… if I do, then everything feels more possible.

As a mother, my children are good at helping me to see things differently.  How does your role of being a mother help your creativity?

I feel that as a mother the realization of how short our time is in this life gets much stronger and clearer, and makes me feel like I need to say what is really important to me right now.   Also, everything feels 10 times stronger…the love, the worry, the notion of time, the pain, the compassion…so there are much more emotions to put into my work…and this is a good thing!

Hellen Van Meene Interview via Twitter

I asked Hellen Van Meene via twitter what tips she would give to women trying to balance a photography career with bringing up young children.  Her advice in a succinct tweet was as follows:

1. Pick a subject close to home.

2. Combine work with family holidays.

Good combo.

 

http://hellenvanmeene.com/