The Arresting World

By: Interview by Jamie Brisick | Ryan McGinley | February 10, 2010 | Profile

Much of your work appears to be in the midst of having lots of fun. Are you able to participate, or are you more fly on the wall? Maybe you could talk a little bit about the observer versus the participant dynamic.
I like to be removed from the situation to a certain extent. My camera is a barrier. It’s like how I grew up with so many brothers and sisters, and there was always so much activity swirling around me, and I was young and wide-eyed, and I would just sit back and observe it all. I do the same thing now. I group people together and watch things unravel. I mean, I’m a director. And I tell people what to do, but I also like the unexpected.

What photographers inspire you?
I love to image hunt. I look at a lot of blogs, and one of my favorite things to look at online is Tim Barber’s TinyVices.com. He has these sections called “Various” where he posts a collection of random images that people submit to him or just that he finds, and I love the grouping of them all. I also have a collection of U.S. Camera Annuals from the 1930s to the 1980s. Every year, they would put out a book of the best press photos from that year. I spend a lot of time looking at those. And I think lots of weird nudist publications are interesting. When I go through magazines, I tear out photos and make scrapbooks of my favorite images. So I guess for me, it’s not really about specific photographers; it’s groupings of random, more non-obvious imagery because I like that it’s not one specific vision. It’s like curating my own vision through anonymous work.

What has been the most pleasantly surprising thing about making a career in photography?
Getting to see people naked. I’m endlessly fascinated by naked people. If you’re naked, you have my undivided attention.

What about the most disappointing?
Well, you don’t always get to fully participate in things. You’re always half removed from it. Sometimes when I’m editing, I’ll look at a photo and be like, “Oh wow, I forgot that this happened.” Like I was so focused on getting the shot that I missed the actual excitement of the moment.

Any unforgettable experiences from the field that you can share with us?
Where do I even start? Something unforgettable happens at every shoot. One time we got caught in an electrical hailstorm in the Great Sand Dunes in Colorado and had lightning strike several feet away from us, and we had marble-sized bruises all over us from the hail. We got shot at by some rednecks in Humboldt County right before we were going to go naked bungee jumping. I watched my friend Dakota tongue-kiss a 450-pound black bear. Or being in a cave with an underground lake in it and seeing a 10-foot-long paddlefish, which is a really primitive fish, swim right by me — they’re really creepy looking. Getting busted by the cops while we were doing a nude shoot on Jet Skis and breaking every law possible; towing someone on an inner tube with a rope, going 70 mph (the speed limit was 30), no license, no life vests, and everyone was naked.  Those are just a few of the ones that immediately come to mind.

If you were a young, hungry, fledgling photographer, how would you go about moving your career forward?
You have to have very specific interests, and you have to be obsessed with them. You have to devote your life to it. Every aspect of your life has to be about photography. You really have to have a sort of unhealthy obsession with pictures. It’s not something you can strive toward; you just have to be like that and dream it all the time. And you have to be able to observe life as if you were a camera all the time, constantly looking at light and the way that things are placed and the way people hold themselves. You need the ability to see something in someone or something that no one else really sees and be able to bring that to light. Basically, you have to be an obsessive crazy person.

What cameras/formats/films do you shoot with? Could you talk a bit about your process?
It’s funny because this is the question I get e-mailed to me the most. Almost every single day someone e-mails me through my Web site asking me about my film and equipment. I shoot Kodak 400 Vivid Color, and Fuji 1600 film when the light is low, like at dusk. I use a Leica R8 SLR. It has a motor winder so I can shoot rapid-fire. But shooting my most recent cave series was really different from how I’ve always shot before. I’m usually all about movement and action in natural light, but the cave photos were a very different and slow process. The photos are long exposures, so the models have to hold perfectly still for several minutes. And the lighting is very meticulous — it’s like making an opera. I use Brinkman spotlights and colored gels. There were two spotlights: one for the background and one for the foreground, and we tried out all the colors of the rainbow. And then I chose the final colors based on how the walls of the cave absorbed them. It was a real test for me to see if I could make photos in such a slow way. In a way it was like preparing myself for making films in the future, where you have to set up the shots so precisely. I plan on doing more film projects, and now I know both sides: how to work slow and how to work fast.

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