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 …matter. There are stillborn topics, where it’s apparent that the subject won’t lead very far, because it’s not historically founded or is not anchored in the present or has been previously done. Think of the Cindy Sherman syndrome. BB: That almost led me to give up, when all the girls played at being Cindy Sherman. UEZ: But is that so unproductive–the studio travesty, the role-play? Or couldn’t they do it well enough… …y unbearable.” The pixelated image has made photography unbearable, both literally as Princess Diana’s relationship to the paparazzi attests, but also metaphorically. In the work of contemporary photographers like Cindy Sherman, David Wojnarowicz and Christian Boltanski, photography is unbearable in the sense that it is sublime. The pixelated image is perhaps too contested and contradictory a medium to be sublime. As a means of image … THEORY: "Nicholas Mirzoeff: An Introduction to Visual Culture" (1999)  …. It just simply means that I am able to think better. Let’s put it that way. AC: I read that you don’t really consider yourself an environmental portrait photographer, is that true? AN: No, I think basically I am. But I hate labels. That label was placed on me by an early writer who did an article on me calling me the father of the environmental portrait, which seems to have stuck. But the Stravinsky is not an environmental portrait, it’s really…  …enting is extremely dull and journalism…I’m a very bad reporter and a photojournalist. Capa told me when I had an exhibition at the museum of Modern Art in ’46, he said no, he’d be very careful. You mustn’t have a label of a surrealist photographer. All my training was surrealism. I still feel very close to a surrealist but he said if you were labelled as a surrealist photographer you won’t go any further you won’t have an assignment … HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON: “Words by Henri Cartier-Bresson” (1973) …cy of the photographic index or on the naturalness of familiar photographic conventions. Photographic postmodernism owes a debt to both austere photographic Conceptualism and MoMA-style photographic formalism. Artists such as Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger and Louise Lawler advanced the conceptual exploration of the nature of art into a critique of the political, institutional and semiotic conditions of representation. At the same time, their work… “The Photographic Idea: Reconsidering Conceptual Photography” (1999)  …graphers interested him, he said “Araki.” We met when he came to Tokyo. I think of him as an older brother. But he’s more serious than I am. NG: Are you interested in American artists using photography, like Cindy Sherman? NA: I like Cindy Sherman’s work, which isn’t that far from photography. NG: What about Japanese photographers? NA: When I started photographing, Ihei Kimura and Ken Domon were active, but they were… INTERVIEW: “Naked City: An Interview with Nobuyoshi Araki by Nan Goldin” (1995)  …90-92 In photos like this, where a man’s alone and peering into the abyss–in this case, into the refrigerator–I always see two people, the man pictured and the man taking the picture. (If it’s a Cindy Sherman, I see Cindy behind the camera as well as the image she’s worked up.) I imagine the tone of their complicity, hear the directions being given to the subject. I inhabit the mental process of an actor, who …  …unes of Depression times, but your photographs are not critical. I find them more of a glorification—glorification of the plain and simple reality. W.E.: I’m pleased to hear you say that, because I didn’t like the label that I unconsciously earned of being a social protest artist. I never took it upon myself to change the world. And those contemporaries of mine who were going around falling for the idea that they were going to bring d… INTERVIEW: Walker Evans – “The Thing Itself is Such a Secret and so Unapproachable” (1974)  … works are ‘portraits’ of spaces, but really you could just as easily turn that around: several of the portraits in my earlier work were to a certain extent already images of ‘spaces’, as I now see them. At the same time, the label that was attached to my photos very early on is proving stubborn. The same clichés keep on turning up in article after article. Admittedly, I still don’t make optimistic, colourful pictures, but I still believe I’m doi…  …n a vernacular culture, the architecture and details of a landscape that idiosyncratically described the U.S. This became the central theme of Evans’s photography as supported by both Keller and Rathbone, who dispel the labeling of Evans as a “socially concerned” photographer. Whatever Evans’s personal beliefs were about the social conditions brought on by the Depression, he did not use photography as a crusading practice…. WALKER EVANS: “Scavenging the Landscape – Walker Evans and American Life” (1996)  … but, on taking a closer look (as these images always demand), you can see shoes from both the fall and spring collections, a simultaneity never encountered in a Prada store. Despite the fact that fashion in general (and this label in particular) is all about currency and ephemer ality, Gursky creates from it something so paradoxically solid that the image compresses “fashion” to become its emblem. Shoes aren’t the only seemingl… | ||||||||||||||
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