Photography

Subterms

    More stories

    • 50 Shares99 Views

      in Photography

      Photography – Apollo Magazine

      by

      Photography – Apollo MagazineAn elegy for sweaty nights of drum & bassFrom baptisms to boat burnings, life along the Thames is full of surprisesSpirit of the place – an interview with Farah Al Qasimi‘I found a Dorothea Lange who was new to me’ – an interview with Sam Contis‘The full measure of the great artist so many suspected had always been there was becoming visible’In a Morris Minor key – Michael Collins presents the lost world of family slidesSpain’s annual photography festival, in focusMoon landings and Martin Parr’s Britain – the year ahead in photographyRemembering Ara Güler, the eye of IstanbulA welcome reappraisal of Peter Hujar‘It is a strange little science-fiction period in the history of photography’ – Wim Wenders on his PolaroidsThe Barbican’s photography double bill speaks powerfully to our timesChloe Dewe Mathews looks beneath the surfaceA tantalising peek into the Archive of Modern ConflictTracing India’s modern history through photographyPosing for Martin ParrImages of a vanished worldMartin Parr gets an all-access pass to OxfordWhat not to miss at the world’s leading photography festival
      https://www.apollo-magazine.com The International Art Magazine Sat, 06 Mar 2021 09:30:36 +0100 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.3 https://www.apollo-magazine.com/drum-bass-photographs-eddie-otchere-clubbing/ https://www.apollo-magazine.com/drum-bass-photographs-eddie-otchere-clubbing/#respond Fri, 05 Mar 2021 10:44:44 +0000

      Largely lost amid the handwringing over Covid-19’s impact on culture has been discussion of the fate of nightclubs. Theatres are in terrible trouble, certainly; museums and galleries likewise. For nightclubs, which have been closed throughout the pandemic, the situation is worse. Indeed, the Night Time Industries Association recently warned that as many as 80 per cent of nightclub businesses…
      Source]] >
      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/drum-bass-photographs-eddie-otchere-clubbing/feed/ 0 featured https://www.apollo-magazine.com/content/uploads/2021/03/Web-lead-image_FINAL_KEM_STORM.jpg https://www.apollo-magazine.com/thames-log-chloe-dewe-mathews/ https://www.apollo-magazine.com/thames-log-chloe-dewe-mathews/#respond Thu, 28 Jan 2021 21:05:57 +0000

      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/?p=957317

      Shot between 2011–16, Chloe Dewe Mathews’ Thames Log traces the world-famous river from its easily missed, disputed source in a field in Gloucester to its more expansive end in the North Sea. The photographer focuses on rituals, from baptism to pagan ceremonies, and from reading the Sunday paper to teenage rites of passage, and in doing so, she suggests something paradoxical. Just as rituals are…
      Source]] >
      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/thames-log-chloe-dewe-mathews/feed/ 0 Mass Baptism, Southend-on-Sea featured https://www.apollo-magazine.com/content/uploads/2021/01/Web-lead-image_USE_mensea.jpg https://www.apollo-magazine.com/an-interview-with-farah-al-qasimi/ https://www.apollo-magazine.com/an-interview-with-farah-al-qasimi/#respond Wed, 16 Sep 2020 10:53:23 +0000

      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/?p=952118

      On 19 December 1819, British forces attacking Ras Al Khaimah at the northern tip of the Arabian Peninsula reached the last bastion of resistance – the ‘impregnable’ Dhayah Fort. Seven hundred and ninety-eight men, women and children were sheltering there without sanitation, water, or effective cover from the sun, and they held out for three days under heavy fire. When they surrendered on 22…
      Source]] >
      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/an-interview-with-farah-al-qasimi/feed/ 0 Wrestling with Spectres featured https://www.apollo-magazine.com/content/uploads/2020/09/Wrestling-with-Spectres.jpg https://www.apollo-magazine.com/sam-contis-dorothea-lange/ https://www.apollo-magazine.com/sam-contis-dorothea-lange/#respond Fri, 21 Aug 2020 13:17:46 +0000

      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/?p=951205

      The California-based artist Sam Contis talks to Fatema Ahmed about ‘Day Sleeper’, her recently published book of photographs from Dorothea Lange’s extensive archive, and about her first book, a photographic study of life and the landscape at Deep Springs, a single-sex liberal-arts college near the Sierra Nevada. Dorothea Lange’s personal archive of about 40,000 negatives and a few thousand prints…
      Source]] >
      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/sam-contis-dorothea-lange/feed/ 0 featured https://www.apollo-magazine.com/content/uploads/2020/08/Web-lead-image-Dorothea-Lange.jpg https://www.apollo-magazine.com/santu-mofokeng-tribute/ https://www.apollo-magazine.com/santu-mofokeng-tribute/#respond Fri, 21 Feb 2020 11:16:50 +0000

      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/?p=943578

      Santu Mofokeng was nowhere to be found during my first attempt to meet him in early 2013. It was my first visit to South Africa. Unsure of when I’d ever be back, I decided with a friend to take an impromptu trip to Johannesburg from Cape Town, where I was staying. Jackson, a taxi driver friend of Santu’s, picked us up from the O.R. Tambo airport. My introduction to Mofokeng’s work had come just a…
      Source]] >
      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/santu-mofokeng-tribute/feed/ 0 Afoor Family Bedroom, Vaalrand featured https://www.apollo-magazine.com/content/uploads/2020/02/Web-lead-image-santu.jpg https://www.apollo-magazine.com/michael-collins-family-slides/ https://www.apollo-magazine.com/michael-collins-family-slides/#respond Thu, 18 Jul 2019 16:00:34 +0000

      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/?p=931931

      In his book, The Family Silver, the photographer and writer Michael Collins has published a selection from the thousands of colour slides he has collected over three decades. He talks to Fatema Ahmed about looking through other people’s family albums and what these images might tell us about the medium of photography. The book shows 42 pictures out of your collection of about 25,000 slides. Can…
      Source]] >
      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/michael-collins-family-slides/feed/ 0 featured https://www.apollo-magazine.com/content/uploads/2019/07/LeadImage_LAKE.jpg https://www.apollo-magazine.com/photo-espana-madrid-2019/ https://www.apollo-magazine.com/photo-espana-madrid-2019/#respond Wed, 26 Jun 2019 13:07:58 +0000

      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/?p=923621

      The scene seems innocuous enough – an old brick wall crumbles with age. Weeds spring from its dusty base, and a couple of cedar trees peek over from the other side. But the photo, from Miquel Gonzalez’s Memoria Perdida project, holds a secret. Between 1936 and 1956, nearly 4,000 people were executed at this site in Granada by Francoist forces. It isn’t obvious at first glance, but the wall is…
      Source]] >
      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/photo-espana-madrid-2019/feed/ 0 Málaga, Spain featured https://www.apollo-magazine.com/content/uploads/2019/06/LEAD_CAmerica_Joel-Meyerowitz_03.jpg https://www.apollo-magazine.com/photography-highlights-2019/ https://www.apollo-magazine.com/photography-highlights-2019/#respond Mon, 31 Dec 2018 10:22:52 +0000

      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/?p=851831

      An exhibition of some 200 of Luigi Ghirri’s photographs, curated by James Lingwood of Artangel, comes to the Jeu de Paume this February (12 February–2 June). The Italian photographer, who was an early adopter of colour, trained as a surveyor and an interest in maps and models runs throughout his many series of work. Ghirri thought hard about the photographic image and what it could represent – as…
      Source]] >
      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/photography-highlights-2019/feed/ 0 featured https://www.apollo-magazine.com/content/uploads/2018/12/Earthrise_-_Apollo_8_9460163430-1-e1545997487816.jpg https://www.apollo-magazine.com/ara-guler-eye-of-istanbul/ https://www.apollo-magazine.com/ara-guler-eye-of-istanbul/#respond Wed, 21 Nov 2018 12:31:46 +0000

      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/?p=838991

      When Ara Güler, for many the greatest photographer of modern Turkey, died last month at the age of 90, the city he devoted his life to photographing came to a standstill. Thousands of admirers, young and old, gathered to pay respects before the funeral service of a man historians and fellow photographers have called the memory, or the eye, of Istanbul. As Güler’s coffin was placed on a podium in…
      Source]] >
      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/ara-guler-eye-of-istanbul/feed/ 0 featured https://www.apollo-magazine.com/content/uploads/2018/11/Apollo_Guler.jpg https://www.apollo-magazine.com/a-welcome-reappraisal-of-peter-hujar/ https://www.apollo-magazine.com/a-welcome-reappraisal-of-peter-hujar/#respond Tue, 02 Oct 2018 09:14:59 +0000

      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/?p=813371

      Peter Hujar is one of those artists who remained relatively unknown to the larger art world in his own lifetime yet achieved much recognition from other artists of his generation – among his better-known peers are Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe and David Wojnarowicz (with whom Hujar shared an intense relationship). His reputation has, however, grown significantly since his death from…
      Source]] >
      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/a-welcome-reappraisal-of-peter-hujar/feed/ 0 Gary Indiana Veiled featured https://www.apollo-magazine.com/content/uploads/2018/09/6_Gary-Indiana-Veiled-1.jpg https://www.apollo-magazine.com/it-is-a-strange-little-science-fiction-period-in-the-history-of-photography-wim-wenders-on-his-polaroids/ https://www.apollo-magazine.com/it-is-a-strange-little-science-fiction-period-in-the-history-of-photography-wim-wenders-on-his-polaroids/#respond Thu, 13 Sep 2018 16:51:09 +0000

      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/?p=807501

      The German film-maker was a prolific photographer in the 1970s and ’80s – he claims to have taken more than 12,000 photographs – often on location and sometimes of his cast and crew. In recent years he has recovered some of the Polaroids he gave away to friends, and scanned, reprinted and exhibited them. What is it like to revisit photographs you took several decades ago? I have a hard time seeing…
      Source]] >
      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/it-is-a-strange-little-science-fiction-period-in-the-history-of-photography-wim-wenders-on-his-polaroids/feed/ 0 featured https://www.apollo-magazine.com/content/uploads/2018/09/Image-Courtesy-of-Wim-Wenders-Photo-Peter-Lindbergh-2015-e1536918392371.jpg https://www.apollo-magazine.com/the-barbicans-photography-double-bill-speaks-powerfully-to-our-times/ https://www.apollo-magazine.com/the-barbicans-photography-double-bill-speaks-powerfully-to-our-times/#respond Sat, 21 Jul 2018 09:00:29 +0000

      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/?p=779791

      In an age increasingly plagued by the overuse of the word ‘iconic’, it is salutary to be reminded of what makes an image truly deserve the tag. Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (1936) is one of those photographs in which the combination of compositional brilliance, human empathy, and political significance makes for something simultaneously beautiful and searing. As David…
      Source]] >
      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/the-barbicans-photography-double-bill-speaks-powerfully-to-our-times/feed/ 0 Untitled featured https://www.apollo-magazine.com/content/uploads/2018/07/1.-Vanessa-Winship-Untitled-from-the-series-Imagined-States-and-Desires_A-Balkan-Journey-1999-2003.jpg https://www.apollo-magazine.com/chloe-dewe-mathews-looks-beneath-the-surface/ https://www.apollo-magazine.com/chloe-dewe-mathews-looks-beneath-the-surface/#respond Thu, 03 May 2018 11:14:34 +0000

      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/?p=741291

      In 1815 Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted. It is considered one of the largest volcanic eruptions ever – bigger than Krakatoa and Vesuvius. Twelve thousand people were killed directly by the volcanic activity, but the fallout was felt far beyond the immediate area and resulted in tens of thousands more deaths. The poet Li Yuyang travelled across China documenting its effects on the climate: The…
      Source]] >
      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/chloe-dewe-mathews-looks-beneath-the-surface/feed/ 0 featured https://www.apollo-magazine.com/content/uploads/2018/05/CDM_In_Search_of_Frankenstein_007-e1525265105225.jpg https://www.apollo-magazine.com/a-tantalising-peek-into-the-archive-of-modern-conflict/ https://www.apollo-magazine.com/a-tantalising-peek-into-the-archive-of-modern-conflict/#respond Tue, 27 Mar 2018 09:33:41 +0000

      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/?p=725241

      An index is a list of names or subjects to be cross-referenced; it is a symptom, or an indicator which measures scale, value or success. Our index fingers are termed as such because they are our ‘pointing fingers’ ­– the fingers with which we single out, select, warn, admonish, unify and praise. In photography, the index is the basis of the medium’s ‘truth claim’: the assumption that traditional…
      Source]] >
      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/a-tantalising-peek-into-the-archive-of-modern-conflict/feed/ 0 Hailstones, natural size featured https://www.apollo-magazine.com/content/uploads/2018/03/8.Archive-of-Modern-Conflict_Stills-2018.jpg https://www.apollo-magazine.com/tracing-indias-modern-history-through-photography/ https://www.apollo-magazine.com/tracing-indias-modern-history-through-photography/#respond Wed, 14 Feb 2018 15:54:26 +0000

      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/?p=704651

      On 15 August 1947, 33-year-old photographer Homai Vyarawalla squared her lens on a beaming Lord Mountbatten, his right arm waving over the crowds that had gathered at Parliament House in Delhi. As an employee of the British Information Services, Vyarawalla was no stranger to photographing the British viceroy of India, but this was a uniquely felicitous occasion – after nearly 100 years of Crown…
      Source]] >
      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/tracing-indias-modern-history-through-photography/feed/ 0 Shravanabelagola, Karnataka, India 1981 featured https://www.apollo-magazine.com/content/uploads/2018/02/Mitch-Epstein-Shravanabelagola-Karnataka-India-1981-in-italics-Courtesy-of-Galerie-Thomas-Zander-Köln.jpg https://www.apollo-magazine.com/posing-for-martin-parr/ https://www.apollo-magazine.com/posing-for-martin-parr/#respond Tue, 09 Jan 2018 11:24:48 +0000

      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/?p=688051

      Martin Parr is unexpectedly good at barking. A gruff noise, more ‘ruff’ than ‘woof’. His bark is directed at a permed white dog who is a bit too excited by the occasion to sit still long enough for Parr to photograph it standing between its two owners. Man, woman, and dog stand in front of a yellow and blue patterned screen: the two owners still and a little nervous, the dog excited and restless –…
      Source]] >
      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/posing-for-martin-parr/feed/ 0 The Lane Family featured https://www.apollo-magazine.com/content/uploads/2018/01/PAM2017070G003061-e1515495223352.jpg https://www.apollo-magazine.com/images-of-a-vanished-world/ https://www.apollo-magazine.com/images-of-a-vanished-world/#respond Thu, 07 Dec 2017 10:40:13 +0000

      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/?p=673271

      In 1962, Latif Al Ani, two years into his stint as lead photographer for Iraq’s Ministry of Information and Guidance, turned his camera to a familiar subject: Jewad Selim’s majestic Monument of Freedom, which spans Baghdad’s central Tahrir Square. Just a short walk from the Tigris river, Selim’s 50-metre-wide bas-relief had been completed in 1959, and became Iraq’s first piece of public art…
      Source]] >
      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/images-of-a-vanished-world/feed/ 0 Tahrir Square, Baghdad featured https://www.apollo-magazine.com/content/uploads/2017/12/Al-Ani-Lead-image-web.jpg https://www.apollo-magazine.com/martin-parr-gets-an-all-access-pass-to-oxford/ https://www.apollo-magazine.com/martin-parr-gets-an-all-access-pass-to-oxford/#respond Thu, 21 Sep 2017 08:48:38 +0000

      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/?p=639231

      Between 2014 and 2016 the documentary photographer Martin Parr turned his wry gaze to the University of Oxford. The resulting exhibition and book present a photographic portrait of the university today; laying bare its hidden stories and eccentricities. Speaking at the launch of ‘Martin Parr: Oxford’ in the Bodleian Weston Library, the artist expanded on the contradiction at the heart of the city…
      Source]] >
      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/martin-parr-gets-an-all-access-pass-to-oxford/feed/ 0 Wadham College. Queerfest featured https://www.apollo-magazine.com/content/uploads/2017/09/LON164831-e1505918186168.jpg https://www.apollo-magazine.com/what-to-see-at-les-rencontres-darles/ https://www.apollo-magazine.com/what-to-see-at-les-rencontres-darles/#respond Mon, 24 Jul 2017 12:22:09 +0000

      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/?p=613401

      There are few better places to be than Provence in July. The sunflowers are in bloom, the region’s cherries are in season, the Tour de France passes through, and there are a number of arts festivals: performing arts in Avignon, classical music in Aix-en-Provence – and world-class photography in Arles. Founded in 1969 by Lucien Clergue, Michel Tournier, and Jean-Maurice Roquette, Les Rencontres…
      Source]] >
      https://www.apollo-magazine.com/what-to-see-at-les-rencontres-darles/feed/ 0 Camel Coat Couple in Street Steam, New York City featured More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Photography

      Spirit of the place – an interview with Farah Al Qasimi

      by

      On 19 December 1819, British forces attacking Ras Al Khaimah at the northern tip of the Arabian Peninsula reached the last bastion of resistance – the ‘impregnable’ Dhayah Fort. Seven hundred and ninety-eight men, women and children were sheltering there without sanitation, water, or effective cover from the sun, and they held out for three days under heavy fire. When they surrendered on 22 December, just 177 were identified as fighting men. The surrender of Dhayah Fort marked the start of British rule in Ras Al Khaimah and the surrounding sheikhdoms, which became a British ‘protectorate’ until 1971 and the foundation of the United Arab Emirates.
      The ignoble history of British and, before that, Portuguese dominance in this region is narrated in Um Al Naar (2019), a 40-minute ‘comedy-horror’ by Farah Al Qasimi. In the film, Um Al Naar (‘Mother of Fire’) is a jinn, a pre-Islamic spirit, who’s based in Ras Al Khaimah and the subject of a programme on a reality TV network. Bemoaning her loss of power and influence, Um Al Naar describes the nation from its occupation to the present day, accompanied by fast-changing documentary footage and a snappy line in graphic design. A separate series of stills, Arrival, draws on this video, depicting scenes said to be drawn from the jinn’s world.
      S Eating Watermelon (2015) from the series Arrival, Farah Al Qasimi. Courtesy the artist and The Third Line, Dubai; © Farah Al Qasimi

      As such, Arrival is a worthy addition to Photoworks Festival 2020, which runs from 24 September–25 October in Brighton, UK, online on the Photoworks website, and as a ‘festival in a box’. Subtitled ‘Propositions for Alternative Narratives’, the festival programme includes work by artists from China, South Africa, India and many other countries, who all come from a new generation of image-makers. Al Qasimi, who was born in 1991 in Abu Dhabi, resists the mantle of educator (in previous interviews, she’s suggested people could look these things up online), but she agrees that showing Arrival in Britain might make audiences think. ‘There are certain hints of British imperialism in the Gulf that are visible through aesthetic decisions or aspects of public space,’ she says. ‘So maybe that slight familiarity will provoke questions about the lasting influence Britain has had over so many parts of the world.’
      Al Qasimi says her work isn’t about the UAE per se but rather ‘about many different things that converge in this one specific site’. She is half Lebanese, half Emirati, and educated in the United States (she has a BA from Yale and an MFA from Yale School of Art); her photographs and films share a wider concern with invisible rules we live by, and their absurd, contingent nature. The jinn in Um Al Naar represents ‘hysteria, curiosity, spirituality – a desire to be expressive and untethered,’ Al Qasimi says; her video Everybody Was Invited to a Party (2018) uses the 1980s Arabic version of Sesame Street to explore the unfixed nature of language and letters.
      Bedroom (Baba) (2018), from the series Arrival, Farah Al Qasimi. Courtesy the artist and The Third Line, Dubai; © Farah Al Qasimi

      In earlier projects this interest skewed towards identity, in series such as More Good News (2017), which gave an alternative view of Arab men to the violent stereotypes often perpetuated in the West. The World Is Sinking (2014) included images of Al Qasimi herself, handed over to retouchers of various nationalities with the instruction ‘Make me beautiful’, and duly altered to fit various ideals. Elsewhere in this series women seem to be literally engulfed by their surroundings, blankets covering their bodies or their clothes blending into the background.
      Al Qasimi creates alternative narratives with her images, which are always beautifully appealing but often quite startlingly oblique. The series Back and Forth Disco (2019), which was shot in New York City, mixes images photographed on the fly with scenes she saw, but didn’t take at the time, instead reconstructing them in the studio later. ‘Sometimes I re-photograph things I have seen in public, so I don’t step on anyone’s toes or violate anyone’s privacy,’ she says. ‘I think the photographs all contain truths, and what matters is what you see in the frame.’
      Dragon Mart LED Display (2018) from the series Arrival, Farah Al Qasimi. Courtesy the artist and The Third Line, Dubai; © Farah Al Qasimi

      In fact, her images often deal with the shiny surface of things, attractive both in appearance and in content. Commodities and products are an ongoing preoccupation. Al Qasimi has included images shot at Dubai’s Dragon Mart mega-mall in more than one series – it pops up again in Arrival, which will be shown on billboards in Brighton – while Back and Forth Disco focused in on immigrant-owned small businesses and was displayed in bus-stop ad slots. It’s partly down to growing up in the Emirates, Al Qasimi says, because ‘malls are where you go when it’s boiling hot outside and you want to stay entertained’. But it’s also linked to her almost anthropological interest in societies. ‘I’m interested in the promise of shopping – an object doesn’t just represent itself; it represents the possibility of a life in which you own it,’ she says, ‘and what that may say about your values and place within the world.’
      Photoworks Festival 2020: ‘Propositions for Alternative Narratives’, takes place from 24 September–25 October in Brighton, UK, online, and as a ‘festival in a box’. More

    • 200 Shares129 Views

      in Photography

      ‘I found a Dorothea Lange who was new to me’ – an interview with Sam Contis

      by

      The California-based artist Sam Contis talks to Fatema Ahmed about ‘Day Sleeper’, her recently published book of photographs from Dorothea Lange’s extensive archive, and about her first book, a photographic study of life and the landscape at a single-sex liberal-arts college near the Sierra Nevada.
      Dorothea Lange’s personal archive of about 40,000 negatives and a few thousand prints is at the Oakland Museum of California. What led you to the archive, and how this book came about?I moved to California in late 2012 – I live in Oakland – but it wasn’t until the summer of 2017 when I saw that the Oakland Museum of California was doing an exhibition on Dorothea Lange. I’ve long loved Dorothea Lange, so I went to the show and discovered that they [the museum] were the keepers of her personal archive. I was simply curious what that meant, and so I emailed and made an appointment […], with no project in mind other than to satisfy my own curiosity, and it was there that I saw pictures of hers that I had never seen before and that I was really excited about.
      I had no idea that when Lange first moved to California in the first few years she opened a studio and really spent the first decade of her career as a portraitist. There were beautiful pictures of her family that I had never seen before, and hand studies of her first husband, Maynard Dixon, who was a painter. I think I had had a very limited view in terms of not realising that the government work really spans a short period of time in her life. For example, the FSA [Farm Security Administration] photographs are only four or five years of work. I was excited to find an artist in the archives who was new to me.
      Dorothea Lange, from Day Sleeper by Dorothea Lange and Sam Contis. Courtesy of MACK and the National Archives, Washington, D.C.

      The only reason I know that the archive is in Oakland is because the museum organised a show that travelled to the Barbican here in London and then went to the Jeu de Paume in Paris. The title of that exhibition was ‘Politics of Seeing’. It was a big show, but what’s so interesting about your book is that it presents not a different photographer, but images made in very different circumstances. When did you know that you wanted to put them in a book?I was going home from the archive and telling friends and other photographers, ‘I just saw the most beautiful Dorothea Lange pictures that I’ve never seen before’. I had wished there would be a book of these pictures, but it wasn’t immediately obvious that I would be the one to do it. Then I started talking to Sarah Meister, the curator of the exhibition that’s on right now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York [until 19 September], and they’re doing a different sort of Dorothea Lange show from the Jeu de Paume/Barbican show, one that focuses on works from MoMA’s collection. It was through those conversations that the book came about; book-making is an important part of my practice, and that felt the natural way to allow other people to see a lot of this work.
      You used the word ‘beautiful’, and that’s a really striking aspect of some of the pictures. They’re also surprising. One of the things that Dorothea Lange does, and maybe you do it in some of your work, is that she can make bodies quite sculptural or parts of bodies quite sculptural, and then make inanimate things look full of life.I think that’s where I saw a strong kinship or correlation between the way we work, the way we approach the world photographically – the ways that the landscape or these inanimate objects can look like the body and the body can have this sense of the landscape in it. That really struck me and – just to go back to your note about the ‘Politics of Seeing’ show – one thing I wanted to emphasise in the book is to look at these more personal pictures, for example the family pictures, next to work that’s more overtly political or work that was made on assignment for the government; to have those kinds of images more strongly co-exist together, to get rid of chronologies and to allow the images to be removed from their original context and have these new relationships emerge. There’s the same artist in all of these kinds of pictures – just because you’re on assignment doesn’t mean you’re suddenly going to look at the world differently. […] So I’m glad you’re seeing trees become bodies – or the veins, for example, in a pair of hands start to look like trees.
      Dorothea Lange, from Day Sleeper by Dorothea Lange and Sam Contis. Courtesy of MACK and the National Archives, Washington, D.C.

      Dorothea Lange once said that she’d learned to move in a certain way so that people wouldn’t look at her when she was doing a lot of her work. I wonder whether you noticed anything particular about how she was working.It’s very physical making photographs, and she was quite a small woman and had suffered polio as a child. I think even the way she moved as a result of polio changed her relationship to the world dramatically, and the way she was just able to move physically through it. In spite of that she often carried three cameras. She would have two large-formats and a medium-format camera – and this is very heavy, laborious equipment.
      I’m somebody who also works with a handheld camera and a large-format camera, which fits on a tripod; and you can see in some sequences of images when she’s working with a camera on a tripod – a large-format camera where she’ll put the camera down in one place and stay at a distance where she’s able to observe. That’s the interesting thing with a large-format camera, you can’t not be seen. There’s no way to remain invisible, but there is a way to allow yourself to become part of the scenery and, over time, if you set up and allow people to get used to your presence, then when you move through it with a bulky camera people don’t notice you as much.
      I saw her sort of starting at more of a distance, seeing exactly what she was interested in but then slowly moving closer and taking a few photographs along the way. It almost felt like a warm-up exercise, a conversation with the subject as she slowly got closer to what it seemed like she was interested in all along.
      Dorothea Lange, from Day Sleeper by Dorothea Lange and Sam Contis. Library of Congress/courtesy MACK

      Are there any images that you were particularly pleased to have found or were surprised by?There are some beautiful portraits. She was known for her portraits but, for example, there’s a portrait of a young girl where she’s raised her hand to her mouth and she’s giving the camera quite a provocative look. I was floored when I saw that picture. Every time I encounter it, I feel like I’m stopped in my tracks. There’s also this beautiful, tender little photograph where she’s photographing her daughter-in-law cutting her son’s hair.
      The book focuses on California, so when I was talking about the personal and political, this is all in the state that she’s made her home, where she’s living and working, and a lot of the pictures in the book aren’t very far from her house. There is a picture that I really love of a man in a coverall suit wearing a hat and these dark glasses. He’s working in a port in Richmond, which is actually right next to Berkeley, so again that’s definitely a picture that was made a few miles from her house.
      You write in your afterword that she seems to be very interested in hands.There is a passage that I’ve included in the notes of the book, where she talks about an early childhood experience. I think a lot of artists, or a lot of visual artists, have these profound visual experiences early on, and in some ways the work you make is a constant reflection of that. She talked about as a child going to church with her mother, because her mother was interested in listening to the music. She was too small to see the musicians, but what she does remember is above the church crowd the hands of the conductor waving wildly. In a way I feel like she’s seeing those conductor’s hands for the rest of her life – but with her interest in labour, too, the hands are a great reflection in some ways, even more than a face, of a person.
      Dorothea Lange, from Day Sleeper by Dorothea Lange and Sam Contis. Courtesy MACK

      If we come to your own work, can you tell me how you got interested in Deep Springs, the subject of your first book? For readers who don’t know it, it’s a tiny liberal-arts college in California on a cattle ranch. It’s still an unusual college, but it was even more unusual when you were taking photographs there…It had been single-sex for 100 years and has just recently gone co-ed. Initially when I heard it was going to go co-ed, that set up my desire to approach it as a place, but it was a place that I had heard about probably five or six years before I started making pictures there. I think my interest in it was a larger interest in the West and thinking about how the West has been gendered.
      We’ve seen certain depictions of masculinity in the visual culture of the West and there’s a long photographic history, too. I’m interested in pushing back against certain established views, whether it’s around a single person or maybe a larger culture. I was interested in the myth of the American West and the iconography that has emerged through that mythology and had come, in my eyes, to be a sort of dominant visual reference for the West – particularly as I had recently moved to California, and as a woman trying to think about my place within that larger history of the West, and even just in terms of that photographic history, I was interested in asking questions around what it meant to be a woman making work in this landscape. That physical space, the college and Deep Springs Valley gave me a place to explore those ideas.
      When I approached [Deep Springs] I thought perhaps I might only have, say, a year to make the work, that it might go co-ed more quickly. But then I ended up spending almost five years there – it was a long, drawn-out process for them to go through – but I was happy to have a longer period of time to explore. I wanted to explore what it actually felt like to stay in this space and see the landscape change over seasons, and work with the young men who were students there over longer periods of time.
      There are two strands in the book that speak to each other really well – you combine archive photographs with your own pictures. Were the old photos of Deep Springs and the landscape part of the plan from the beginning, or were they something you came across once you were there?I had no idea those images existed until I had actually visited a couple of times. Most of those pictures come from old personal photo albums that have been given back to the school [for its] archive. The pictures weren’t meant to service an official document in any way, but they were made as personal pictures by some of the first students at the college. I was really interested in looking at how they were looking at themselves at that time and how a lot of them were coming to this place, like me, from somewhere else. They weren’t native Californians necessarily, and so what it meant to find themselves in this landscape and what it meant to use photography – for them it was a new tool, and I was really struck by the way they were using it.
      The college is a very physical place – the students farm, they look after animals – but your pictures are very gentle in many ways and the people seem very comfortable being looked at. There are hardly any with people who are looking directly at you – and then there are some extraordinary ones, like the guy who’s sprawled out reading on a sofa or a bed, and he’s naked. How did you get to that level of closeness without them being fussed about your presence?That picture that you mention, that felt like a dialogue with the young man in that picture and it was made after I’d known him for a couple of years. I wanted to feel, in a way like I described Dorothea Lange slowly moving through the landscape, I wanted to get to the point where I was just there, like a piece of furniture, or a tree in the landscape, but we could interact as much as they or I wanted to. That sort of relationship, I think, develops over time. I wouldn’t just drop in for a day or two – it’s actually quite far from my house, and in some weather it’s a nine-hour drive, so I would go for weeks at a time. It’s a very close-knit community and so it was important for everybody, including myself, to feel really comfortable.
      You talked about being interested in ideas of the West, which are almost created by our collective image banks. There’s also a domesticity in the pictures because of the tasks that people are doing and have to do, so it seems very masculine but also very pastoral.It’s not necessarily an all-male community – it’s an all-male college, but there are women present like professors; for a long time the ranch manager was a woman. But because it’s a work college the young men are asked to do different kinds of tasks, ones that might traditionally be gendered as more feminine tasks and some that might be more traditionally gendered as masculine tasks, and they do both. They’re milking the cow, they’re hanging the laundry, they’re cooking for each other. They’re also raising and butchering animals, they’re collecting eggs. […] I really wanted to reveal the fluidity in the work that they did in that environment.
      With the archival photos, do you think people had images in their head that they were responding to? Were they deciding to frame something in a certain way because of something they’d seen, or is it much fresher than that?I think they probably had certain images in their minds. There was a lot of painting of the West, and they were there in the early 20th century – they started to take pictures in the teens and early 20s and in the few decades before that – but photography was invented around the time that new settlers in America started migrating westward. Photography really was used as a tool to sell a certain version of the West to get people to move west and to get these settlers to come […] to sell as an idea of Come West, start over, reinvent yourself. That idea of the West has always been synonymous with photography because it came into being at the same time.
      Practically, most of your photographs are black-and-white, but there are a few colour images. What kind of choices were you making both when it came to taking them and including them?Originally, I wasn’t sure what my photographic approach would be in this place, so I wanted to keep an open mind and approach it more experimentally. I was working with different kinds of cameras, different formats of cameras, and different films, black-and-white, colour; I was also using digital cameras. Initially I thought I would choose one to tie it all together, and then I realised pretty quickly that what was interesting to me was working in different ways and making different kinds of pictures, from landscapes to portraits and maybe closer studies. But then having this multitude of formats, and colour and black-and-white, and then when the archival pictures came into the mix – they’re technically black-and-white photos but they have a certain patina of time and the time has a colour to it – that also became a helpful way of linking the black-and-white and colour in my mind.
      I wanted to be able to speak out in these different registers or languages and I felt like the colour was really important. It was really important, for example, if you see the red blood on a sheet that came after a slaughter and to see the colours of the land, the colours of the flesh. But the black-and-white images were equally important as a way of referring to the history and the way we see this landscape, and blurring the lines in a way between the past and the present.
      Day Sleeper: Dorothea Lange – Sam Contis and Deep Springs: Sam Contis are both published by Mack.
      ‘Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures’ runs at MoMA until 19 September. More