Will Steacy: BOMB Interview (Uncut)
Will Steacy is like the lovechild of Charles Bukowski and Dorothea Lange. I first saw his work when he won the Magenta Foundation Emerging Photographers Award. Among the many winners, his work stood out. His writing drew me closer. The son of a Philadelphia reporter, he is the author of the first blog I was ever compelled to read in its entirety. He seems to live on an elevated, rawer, more immediate plane of existence; sometimes I’m compelled to poke the motherfucker to see if he’s real. But that’s the thing. His work embodies a kind of classic sincerity and conviction that today is endangered. When you encounter something rare and surprising, you do a double take. As we talked, my curious scrutiny melted into stone-cold admiration. He’s already a legend in my own mind.
At the time of our discussion I was climbing north, between two cities that seem in their crumbling opulence more than anywhere else to be the face of the times: New Orleans and Detroit. Meanwhile, Will watched the entirety of the twinkling continent slide under his feet, traveling by air from Manhattan to California. Upon landing, he slung his camera over his shoulder and walked, through the middle of the night, from LAX to downtown Los Angeles. While images of Bernie Madoff and AIG execs flashed endlessly on our televisions, we puffed cigars and talked about cajones, the fate of the American city, and an Atlantic City boardwalk bluesman named Sammy.
There is one word that precedes this talk: cajones. You and your work have cajones to spare. I look at a mind-numbing quantity of photographs, and yours have more balls than most I see combined. How does that happen? Where does the courage come from?
It all changed for me in 2003 when I was almost murdered in a robbery. At the time I was working in a sneaker store and two guys came in before closing and put a gun to my head, tied me up, dragged me down to the basement and robbed the place. As I lay on that floor with a gun to my head, I thought that was it, I was going to die. But as I lay there I closed my eyes and suddenly this thing swept through me, I cant really describe it in words really, but this thing told me that it was not my time to die, I had not done yet what I was put on this earth to do, I had not even begun it, and then this wave swept away as quickly as it came. When I opened my eyes the guys were gone. And obviously I was still alive.
And suddenly, your eyes are open a little wider.
That thing that I had not yet begun was my art. That night changed my life. In my eyes that night was one of the greatest nights of my life. Since then I have devoted everything I have to my art, this gift, this thing that is the reason I am alive. Shit, I was supposed to die that night. I should be dead. Coming that close to death will change a man, and it has changed me. Life has had a new meaning since then, and I wake up every day happy to be alive, happy to chase this dream, to follow this thing. But at the same time I am willing to die for it as well.
So the requisite energy and courage flow from that.
My work is about being alive. My photographs are about life. And I push it as far as I can with every photograph I take. Sometimes this puts me in some very tight situations that could go many ways. I think a lot of it is about instincts—how well you can judge a situation before it goes bad. I grew up getting mugged, robbed, held up, and I have been in that place many many times when a situation instantly goes from something not feeling right to there is a gun in my face and giving some dude my jacket that my mom bought for me. That’s what makes it interesting, you usually have to fight for the things worth having. I’m the kind of fighter who likes a little blood in my mouth before i get going.
Will Steacy, "Liquor, Los Angeles," from "Down These Mean Streets," 2009
So you’ve made it this far, and some curiosity keeps bringing you back to that edge, where things are uncertain and foreign and we’re sizing each other up, trying to determine whether we can trust one another, what’s going to happen next.
I guess what I am talking about is experience, I have been in so many of those types of situations that my instinct kicks in: “get the fuck out.” One time I was making some photographs in a community center in an abandoned area of New Orleans in which the only people who returned were really the people who never left, and most were in the drug game one way or another. Desire section, north of Florida Ave, the only entrance is over the train tracks, you know what I’m talking about.
Yes.
And as I was taking pictures in this community center I saw these two dudes roll up all shady styles, so I decided to roll up to them, was all like, whats up guys. We got to talking and telling stories and then I took one guys portrait and after I noticed a gun in his pocket. And then all of sudden all these cars rolled up and the two dudes just left in the middle of our conversation to go up to these cars. Something didn’t feel right, and I thought I was gonna get robbed or something. So just folded up my tripod legs and threw my camera in the back of my rental car and bounced. I wasn’t trying to stick around and see what would happen next.
A tightrope.
Sometimes you just know. I saw this dude the next day when I was back shooting in the same area and he was all like, yo what happened. I don’t know what his intentions were, but I didn’t trust him.
Yeah. Sometimes you just know. There’s photography in so many words. I was on Dorgenois St. two weeks ago shooting, and the people living there see you walking up and down their street for an hour, and even though I look about as innocent and white-bread as one can, everyone’s asking if you’re a cop or something. But this isn’t a bad area, and these are really sweet people, and that comes out in the resulting photographs. I was just pulled there again and again because the street is so incredibly beautiful, interesting, different. But that’s it, photography is a play of fate and magnetism, slices of the world pulling us in one direction or the other. I want to know why you’re pulled towards seedy places. Is it finding humanity in the inhumanity of it?
As I mentioned earlier, after nearly dying, my work is about life. It is about living. There are too many people out there, just going through the motions, who wake up every day without any heart, afraid to take a risk. I am attracted to life and to life’s experiences. I use photography as a method of inquiry, the camera is my tool in which I transport myself to places, situations and people I probably wouldn’t otherwise encounter. The camera allows me to ask questions, to truly see and think. And best of all, it is my connection. It allows me to penetrate the surface.
But the homeless, the dangerous, the cheap strip joints, the ugly parts of town—is it because it’s what you know, coming up how you did in Philly? Or instead, because it’s foreign?
That’s just where I am right now, perhaps it is where I have always been, perhaps it is all I know, I don’t really know. But those words can mean so much more. What might be dangerous might also be thrilling. There’s guts, heart, passion, love and death in the dangerous.
You feel like a completely different person when running on adrenaline and intuition. It has nothing to do with the person you are when you’re, you know, sitting at the computer. It’s like a glimpse into what it felt like to be a human roaming the earth three thousand years ago, instinctual, uncomfortable, unpredictable.
Again, keep in mind you are talking to a man who should be dead. I am not afraid of death, I would die for any picture I take, so I see things a bit differently. People have called me crazy—a madman—and some just think I am some kind of stereotype artist, but I imagine those have never stood on the cliff rocking back and forth looking down into the end.
Well, there are those people on Flickr talking about you and your work, some responding negatively, as if it’s a posture, saying, “I don’t buy it.” Although this kind of shit is par for web forums, it’s like, what is there not to “buy?” Even if you were raised in Chevy Chase, you’re defined by the work you’re doing. You have the photos to prove it. Any of the potential for bullshit, myth, or inauthenticity in your writing or photos is swallowed up by hard, tangible evidence. It astounds me that people would react this way, when real guts in art are perennially in such short supply and thus incredibly valuable.
Yeah. I know what you’re talking about. That was in response to a blog post I did a while back—people missed the point of what I was saying, choose to focus on one or two sentences, and take them out of context. But hey man, it’s the internet! A place where the big mouth anonymous, people who love to hear themselves talk, choose to hide. These guys love to serve up that haterade, and as far as I am concerned, thats great, I hope there are free refills.
I love the naysayers, the negatives, the shit talkers—its what gives me fuel and fire and motivates me. Bottom line: I’m not too concerned with what other people think about me, that’s a waste of my time. You got something you want to say to me, come up to my face and say it. Or if you see me out at the bar, on street, or at a gallery opening. If you are out of town, write me an email…just be real about it, be meaningful and thoughtful about it. I love intelligent dialogue. Other than that, I’m focused on my work and that’s it.
I can understand why people might scratch their chins at a white guy going into the bad part of town with his view camera to take pictures. But the fact of the matter is, America—and the world—is comprised of a million worlds, a million different realities. It’s what makes the world so infinitely complex and interesting, and also the source of most of our problems. So of course we’re going to gravitate towards different worlds. We’re looking for understanding.
Will Steacy, “Jack Rabbit, Memphis” from All My Life I Have Had The Same Dream, 2007.
Exactly. Understanding. I recently got into a heated fight with someone who I have known for years and years. He said he had major problems with the work I was doing, that he didn’t understand the route I was taking, and that cities were not meant to be viewed in the way I was showing them. He didn’t agree with how I was choosing to address what he called “urban decline.” He claimed that not everyone could afford the white picket fence, so why is it not perfectly fine that these areas of the city exist in the geographic regions they do? He thought I was being condescending by saying that there was something “wrong” with these places in my artist statement. I was really floored by this.
I was boiling with anger and frustration and confusion at his remarks and I wanted to punch a hole in the wall. Instead, I took a deep breath and cracked a beer. Then I thought, well, that is exactly what this work is about. There are tons of people in our country who share his point of view, who not only don’t understand what’s going on in our cities and think, well, there will always be the poor, and they have to live somewhere. It’s those people who won’t understand why I’m doing the work I’m doing. If someone has issues with the work I’m doing, that’s good, that’s the point.
I asked my friend: is there not something “wrong” with violence, drugs, no local economy, a failing public education system, awful health conditions, abandoned buildings, streets in need of repair, etc.? This does not even get into the mental effects created by these conditions! No matter what social class, these should not exist as they do in one of the richest and most powerful nations in the world. I hope that anyone who views these things as anything else but wrong will take a good hard look at my pictures and imagine themselves living in these places.
Yeah. That’s a dimension you don’t get from watching stories about violence or poverty in the news. People’s homes are here.
The route that I take is very important. I’m choosing to focus on the areas in between, “the rough part of town,” as opposed to the central business district and airports themselves. The relationship between the CBD and airport, the geographical placement of each, is very important.
And this is spurred by reading things like The Death and Life of Great American Cities, American Project, etc.
Yeah, in terms of the history of cities, how cities were built in relation to housing and neighborhoods surrounding the local factories, warehouses, mills. And how deindustrialization has impacted those areas today, wiped them out. The geographical reference of the the airport and CBD also instantly provides an understanding of where I am and what the area is like. The fact that people only vaguely know these areas and no one walks through these areas IS THE WHOLE POINT!!!!!!!
In most cities, people are instantly able to understand and visualize this area from their experience going to and from the airport. It’s an area they wouldn’t walk through. I ask, why wouldn’t you walk through it? “Because it’s dangerous,” they say, and I ask why is it dangerous…There are some corners I’ve walked by, where I’ve been scared and unsure of what might happen, but I chose to walk instead of turning around.
And what happens?
Well, one memory from my recent trip in LA was a street in Skid Row. Pitch black. There were no street lights, no store lights, no lit windows, nothing, just pitch blackness. The only visible light there was on this street was a row of at least a dozen crack pipes and the little beady eyes looking into the flame. I couldnt take a picture because it was too dark and i dont know if there was a picture that could come close to depicting the desperation on that street, I got the overwhelming sense that anything was possible when it came to that next hit.
Literally, a place where the sun don’t shine. And it’s easy to forget about, that this exists, that this is life for some people. These people are invisible— though everyone hears, vaguely, about it. Places get reputations, and we gesticulate and weave myths about the worst parts of our cities, but few see it, whether in person, or in photo or video, on the news…it’s invisible. Barely illuminated by the flicker of crack pipes.
Down These Mean Streets, my current project, examines fear and the abandonment of America’s inner cities. I am interested in the parts of the city you don’t want to be in at night; the part of town you drive through – not to – with the windows rolled up and doors locked.
The places your parents warned you about.
Yeah. The work has been fueled by America’s preoccupation with national safety, protecting our country from foreign forces, while we’ve lost sight of what it is we’re fighting for.
Will Steacy, “Ascot, Los Angeles” from Down These Mean Streets, 2009.
It reminds me of this TED talk. James Howard Kunstler is talking about kids fighting in Iraq, losing arms and legs, for communities that have been reduced to strip malls.
We have forgotten our own cities, neighborhoods, and streets. By addressing the overwhelming loss and despair that prevail in our urban communities, I want to make a modern day portrait of the American inner city.
At night, in the light of broken up, crooked streetlights, neon, and police sirens.
I have a set routine, photographing only at night with a large format view camera, I am walking from the airport to the central business district of American cities, photographing my journey. This is a project I have had in mind for several years now, and as a recipient of The Tierney Foundation Fellowship this year, I’m able to fund it. Century after century it has been proven that art has the power to challenge and subsequently make change. Problems and issues can not be solved if they are not first identified. I believe in this work. Yes, of course it is partly about me and what I am doing, what i may or may not be risking or feeling.
And that’s essential. That’s why we’re talking, because your work has balls. You’re distinguished from the ten thousand other schmucks with cameras because you have more cajones, and it’s palpable.
And as the son of a newspaper reporter and grandson of a newspaper editor, my aim is to reveal a truth. I honor and continue the tradition and values that they lived by. Michael Mazzeo, my art dealer, said after knowing this about my father and grandfather that it makes perfect sense, and that he can see that integrity in my work. That i would fight you for a picture. Through my art I hope to raise questions, I want my viewer to put themselves on that corner in that neighborhood and really think about it. I want them to question their own fears, stereotypes and comforts.
Per stereotypes and comforts: One of ol’ Walker Evans’ famous sayings is, “I feel that art is aristocratic and an artist is an aristocrat.” One of my dearest friends, a Vietnam vet/musician, has said something similar. When either of these guys say this, it seems to ring true. But I don’t know if you’d see things the same way. Though, like most, I imagine your attitude towards Evans is one of respect bordering on reverence, much of your work seems…like a challenge to that mentality.
Diego Rivera once told Edward Weston that the artist is a worker. He admired the notion of the worker and perhaps saw himself as a worker. Whether or not he lived the life of an aristocrat or a worker is another thing. And Evans, who I admire greatly, was perhaps responding to the stark contrast between his subjects in the deep south and his contacts within the art world, which I assume was mostly of white upper class northerners. And a lot of the art crowd then and still today are educated, middle/upper class, live in the decent part of town, have their shit somewhat together, because it ain’t easy being an artist. So if that means art is aristocratic, then perhaps it is.
Yeah. Well, there’s something aristocratic about sitting around thinking about the world so much, and in giving any credence to your own view of things. Most folks say, who has time for that? But it’s easy to see people like Friedlander or, like, de Kooning as workers as opposed to aristocrats. Coz, you know, they’re getting dirty, wearing themselves out. And of course the pre-Renaissance painters were tradesmen. I suppose it’s just evolution, especially over the past few hundred years, that’s flipped the script.
I approach everything with the intensity and blue collar toughness that I learned on the job site. Art can be anything and everything, and I think the beauty of it all is in what you make of it, how you let if define your life. There is no “art is for rich people” or the privileged. ”Art” is too powerful and great a thing to be simply put into some label or classifed this or that. I have always said that my life=my art=my love. Its all the same thing. If art is anything, it is us, it is to be alive, it is the human experience, whether it is cave paintings, a guy jerking off on a canvas, or a gun to your head. It is what it is, it is too big for words. Words only complicate it. Human beings are cursed with that natural urge to categorize the world with words. Fuck words! Some things are greater than words!
Yeah. The Evans quote is striking for the very certitude with which he makes a categorization. It’s something you want to contradict and question immediately, because it’s so one-sided. I’d say the artist is simultaneously an aristocrat and a worker, and people usually focus disproportionately on one side of that equation. I mean, aristocratic as he may have carried himself, Evans had mad money problems. But I think, when you look back even to the beginning, you can conceptualize these two polarities in art moving in a V—roughly in the same direction but also farther and farther apart.
As a former Union Laborer, I tend to side with Rivera, but that is just me, and my whole life I have never fit in anywhere. The photographs from Vietnam, and today the photographs from Abu Ghraib, have shown us injustice and brutality that, even today, just when we think we have seen it all, we see something like that and it slaps you in the face. There’s nothing aristocratic about those images. But perhaps they’re not “art.” Some images end up in a white box and others end up on the front page of the Times. Why does it take fifty years for some images to go from the Times to the galleries?
Well, that’s another thing. You’re the son of a reporter. You can write like hell, and your photos are “realist.” Your work is a lot like being a journalist, and if I’m not mistaken, you’ve said so yourself. If someone told you that your work walks a tightrope between art and journalism, what would you say? Does the distinction between art and journalism have any meaning to you? Is it that you have a journalist’s heart and an artist’s eye? And is the rest of you a boxer? And, if there’s such a thing, what elevates your work “above” journalism into the province of art? Have you had to sell people on this?
I never know what to say when people ask me what kind of work I do, or when they tell me I shoot this way or that. My work is all heavily influenced by social events, and with each picture I take I’m interested in the story, the guts. And this is perhaps where my journalist blood takes over. Most of my photographs have a piece of writing to accompany them. Writing is very much a crucial part of my process and how I see. There is something that happens in the gradient between photographs and writing. The two merge into a single form, into a different medium.
Well, it’s usually amazing and illuminating to hear the stories behind images, but it also takes some of the enigma away, narrows the scope of interpretation.
Here lies my dilemma: at almost every gallery show I’ve had, the curator is not interested in the words. And this is understandable. Their focus is to sell photographs. Text for them gets in the way, becomes a distraction. And in terms of journalism, my photographs are too abstract, or deemed “too-fine art.” My work comes from both places, but sometimes feel like it’s fragmented. Maybe I haven’t yet figured out how to create a blend between the two that works, or I haven’t yet figured out a way to live with that fragmentation. Perhaps thats just a part of the game, and it’ll always feel unfinished, incomplete. There is always more work to be done, new stories, new ways to show this or that, and perhaps when it does feel finished and complete there’s no more work to be done, and then I’ll be done, and it’ll be time to put down the camera.
Will Steacy, “Sammy, Atlantic City,” from Down These Mean Streets, 2009.
On that note, let’s talk about the story behind Sammy. This picture knocked me flat on my ass the first time I saw it.
I was walking along the Atlantic City boardwalk and I kept hearing some of my favorite blues songs. As I got closer I discovered a man signing over the instrumentals coming from a homemade speaker/amplifier set up, attached to a push cart. I stood for a while and listened to this man, who called himself Sammy, sing his fucking heart out. Pure heart and balls.
Wow.
He eventually took a break and I introduced myself. We got to talking about my camera—a KB Canham field camera—and at first he thought it was some sort of homemade video camera. He said he also had many video cameras which he had rigged up, fixed up and that he also made viedos of himself. I told him that it was actually a still camera for photographs, showed him my film holders, how it all went down. We spoke for about an hour trading stories about fighting and musicians and places we have been. Sammy did most of the talking and he had some great stories at first. Like how his father used to spar with Joe Louis and how he taught him as a boy to fight south paw, and how through the years he always won his fights by switching to lefty in the middle of a fight. And about the time he performed at the Apollo in Harlem. And how he isn’t homeless and he rents a room from a Vietnamese couple and they trust him and have given him a key to their place.
Wow. Here we all are, worlds colliding.
And the stories began to repeat in one form or another, but this time more exaggerated and impressive. His hat collection went from fifty-nine hats to one-hundred and ten hats, one time he beat up seven guys at one time and another time he beat up twenty-nine guys at a time. I was instantly devastated. I began to question everything he told me. As he continued on I drifted off in thought. I thought about the different realities that Sammy and I lived in. I thought about his world. Where people pass by all day either ashamed or uncomfortable, throw a quarter into your change cup, or look the other way in disgust. And how many people does he talk to a day? Who does he connect with and really have a conversation with? When was the last time someone told him they loved him? I thought about a world in which you are the lowest rank in society, people dont want you near their businesses, in front of their stores, in their bus stations, on their subways. People won’t even look at you…and what that world must be like! And I decided in that reality sometimes exact numbers don’t matter so much. What does matter is what keeps you alive, what gives you hope and inspiration, what you dream about. In a place where you’re sleeping on the streets and begging for your next meal, what is real in a world that is already unreal?
Singing the blues, in darkness, through this unbelievable DIY mic-amplifier.
He would sometimes put the wire and the microphone in this picture around his neck, so his hands were free to change songs or put change in his pocket. It looks like a noose. In some ways Sammy is so close to death. He is functioning at the most basic levels of human survival, literally just getting by. But at the same time, he is free he is truly alive and living each day to live. Whether or not he actually was a good fighter or played at the Apollo doesn’t matter, here is a man who doesn’t know where his next meal is coming from, but sang his fucking heart out every night on the boardwalk to some of the best blues songs ever written. When I look at this picture I imagine Sammy singing those songs as if he had written them and lived them, and I kinda think that his life wasnt far off from those songs. Maybe this “homeless” guy on the boardwalk wailing his heart out is really just telling us his story. And I hope that someone listens. I hope someone really listens.
Matt Siber: BOMB Interview (Uncut)
Matt Siber, Cheese, 2006, Floating Logos Project.
Matt Siber is a Chicago photographer-part of a loose movement teasingly labeled “Chicagraphy”-and an adjunct instructor at Columbia College. I identify with him on many fronts, namely, altering the supposed reality of photographs to push the exploding medium forward, and a preoccupation with visual pollution and advertising. His work imaginatively depicts the very Midwestern landscape I was reared in, and shows it for what it is, not what it was or should be. He’s sharp as a tack, consistently two steps ahead of me, and has the unique talent of condensing big, foggy ideas into intelligible single-clause sentences. We corresponded over a period of weeks and chatted at his studio until I went cross-eyed.
Why, of all things, focus on what I’ll lump together as advertising, visual pollution, and text culture?
I can’t think of anything more relevant to our culture at this moment. Yes, we are dealing with wars overseas, a world economy on the brink of collapse and an historical presidential election to twist a glimmer of hope into an otherwise bleak global outlook, but this can all be related to visual culture. The thing about visual culture is that it has become engrained in everything that affects us. We have become a population that gleans more information from visual literacy than ever before. Our sophistication in reading visual information has gotten so advanced that we no longer need text to get the message.
“Sophistication” is an interesting way of putting it. Reading visual information doesn’t require literacy in the standard sense, but a matrix of cultural awareness that we grow up accumulating.
True. I remember a huge billboard ad a couple of years ago of a close-up photo of blue athletic shorts with three orange stripes running down the side. Simply and clearly Adidas but no text or stylized, leafy logo to tell us that. When we take into account the ways in which we get our information – internet, infotainment-based news outlets, tabloid newspapers, etc. – it’s hard to ignore the relevance of visual culture. We are far more likely to get our news through short video clips and photographs than through reading in-depth literary or verbal reporting on major events.
And the clips are open-ended. We can interpret them any way we want.
I don’t think this is true-many of the visuals through which we receive our information are heavily biased and leading.
Well, you’re right. I was thinking of times when I’ve flicked idly through news image slideshows instead of actually reading the stories. Personal experience shapes the interpretation more than the journalist’s words.
Even without words, it’s such an easily manipulatable form of communication. I would love to see a press corps that presents information in an open-ended way, so that we can draw our own conclusions. But apparently we don’t want that. We want the conclusions drawn for us. Visuals are usually presented in conjunction with written or spoken word, which is used to further sensationalize and spin the story. How does this affect the way we understand our world? What is the responsibility of media outlets who submit to the ever-shortening attention span of the American public by opting for dramatic visuals over probing analysis? How do decontextualized, dramatic video clips on YouTube factor in? Most of my work to this point deals with the consumer side of visual culture, but it is all intertwined these days.
It is. Increasingly. And I’d say the consumer side is the noisiest. But is advertising the villain?
This is an interesting issue, and I have a very definitive stance on it at the moment. In a word, my answer is no. As with gun violence, it is very easy to lay blame on the first thing we think of. I am not a proponent of guns, but I fully understand that guns are objects, and it is therefore inappropriate to assign them a moral value judgement. The people who use them are a different story. I feel that the same is true for advertising. I don’t believe that there is anything inherently wrong with the idea of advertising. In fact, I think it is 100% necessary because it allows businesses to make themselves known and it educates consumers about where to go to get the goods and services they need. We lose sight of this, but we really do need it.
Matt Siber, Untitled #34, 2006, The Untitled Project.
At a base level-imagine if advertising was outlawed and we had to find this info solely in the yellow pages, and otherwise relied on sure bets like Wal Mart and Amazon.
The base need for advertising is so that businesses can communicate difference between brands and stores to consumers. This is beneficial to the businesses and to the consumers. Why shop at Safeway instead of IGA? Why Ford over Chevy? Nikon over Canon? We ran into issues when there really wasn’t any discernable difference between products. Take ibuprofen tablets. The over-the-counter stuff all comes in the same dosage, so there is no practical difference between the different brands. The difference has to be created by the advertising. Nuprin: little, yellow, different. Not so much, really. Just because they say it’s so, doesn’t mean it is.
The problem is not with advertising itself but with the motivations behind it. They have become increasingly twisted as capitalism has grown bigger and bigger. What does advertising in is the same thing that seems to do everything else in our culture in: greed. We are never satisfied with what we have, even if we have quite a lot.
And the word “greed” sounds sinister and ruthless-my mind jumps straight to Scrooge McDuck. But usually it’s an unconscious and even innocent wanting that is partly tied to human nature and partly tied to being inescapably surrounded by things we want-or images of them-all the time.
I don’t know if it’s human nature to want more than we need. Perhaps it is, but I’m not convinced.
Maybe not wanting more than we need, but just wanting, when these things are put in front of us. I have anthropology in mind: Amazonian indigenous societies who, when first contacted by modern peoples, start demanding pots, pans, shotguns.
Either way, capitalism has had a major role in perpetuating it. The main goal of business is growth. Constant growth. No one ever talks about an end goal or a point where they are happy to keep the status quo. The growth idea in Western business philosophy has no goal. Growth IS the goal. It’s becoming painfully clear these days that perpetual economic growth is simply unsustainable.
It is this need for constant growth – which is really a type of corporate greed – that has resulted in the corruption of advertising. Rather than simply informing the public with straightforward information, they increasingly embellish, stretch the truth, and perpetuate a constant perceived need. Initially, advertising was in response to the public’s need for goods and services. Now, the public’s “needs” are largely in response to the advertising. Of course, there have always been snake oil salesmen, but they even predate modern advertising. Advertising is just one of the tools used to further economic growth and ideology. The blame should not be placed on the tool, but rather the people who use it, as well as the system that supports and drives it.
I’m still not yet desensitized to visual pollution or really able to phase it out. I’m young; I’ve only become cognizant of it and what it might mean in the past few years. Today, it usually disgusts, dismays, or depresses me. Now, the tone of your project statements strikes me as that of a critical, objective investigation, but the work itself is as deeply subversive and premeditated as any slick ad. I figured, if I have such strong feelings about your subject matter, than you must. That’s part of why I originally wanted to talk. I suspect that not only is there something deeper and more visceral that’s motivating you to make the work, but that your relationship with this subject matter is invariably more evolved than the rest of us who don’t take the time and energy to think about it so critically.
I don’t necessarily have a broad-sweeping disdain for public signage and advertising, but on the other hand, I resent the fact that our way of life has led us to this point where the right dollar amount allows anyone to erect a giant message board to tell us what to do or how to think. It is more the psychological pollution than the visual pollution that I object to.
Yes! You said it: “psychological pollution.” I don’t want to be reminded of the world that exists in billboards, commercials, radio ads, to always have that world bumping into my own very different world. But it is everywhere that humans are. It’s inescapable, and that gets to me.
What seems to irk you is when advertising starts to rub off on journalism. Because journalism, unlike advertising, is a veritable institution that, at least in a perfect world, would seem to have enough self-respect to retain its dignity and sanctity.
I’m not crazy about the visual impact either, but there is definitely a part of me that is enamored with advertising. When advertising is done well, it is smart, visually stimulating, and deviously clever. They are smarter than us. That is partly why I deal with this subject matter, to try and tip the balance back the other way a little. I don’t think that people will ever become immune to the power of persuasion through corporate marketing, but I think we can become smarter about it through awareness of how it works. My work attempts to deconstruct it so that we can better see what it is doing.
And photography is an effective, anti-pedantic, non-judgmental way of answering that broad, all-inclusive question: What are these signs, these advertisements doing?
I certainly wouldn’t call photography non-judgmental. Quite the contrary: no matter how objective we try to convince ourselves photography is, it’s clear that it simply is not. Photography has always placed judgment on things, whether it is elevating common subjects to the level of art in modernism, or post-modernism leveling heavy criticism on the world around us. Every photograph is a judgment simply by the decision to make the photograph in the first place.
You’re right-I mean that your work doesn’t strike me as explicitly judgmental. There’s a lot of photography being made and exhibited that’s less subtle with regarding consumer culture. Taking medium-format images of strip mall parking lots, of course, strikes me as quite judgmental: “Look at how self-evidently depressing and meaningless this is. Look at what America/the world is coming to.” There’s usually more to it than that, but the perceived core message can be so loud that it drowns out the other, subtler potential revelations. Your work escapes that pitfall, and I think that’s why it’s so effective and memorable. I think of you whenever I see these signs now.
I would agree with you in that my work isn’t as heavily directive as some other work dealing with similar issues. The work can fit a number of points of view. I had a student at a exhibition ask me once if I was a deeply religious person after seeing my Jesus piece from the Floating Logos project. I am definitely not religious, and I thought my approach of comparing Jesus to a corporation was a clear criticism. In her mind, I was elevating Jesus and giving Him a higher power. Call it accidental exhaltation if you like.
Wow.
I also remember a conversation with my father, who is a scientist and a Modernist through and through. He has a more optimistic outlook than I do in that he believes that science and progress will ultimately save us from ourselves. He maintains that there is no inherent critique in my work and that he sees it as more of a celebration of all this stuff than a negative critique. A lot of the interpretation has to do with what the viewer brings to the table.
Interesting. While I could see that for the Floating Logos, I certainly wouldn’t for the Untitled project.
I don’t believe photography’s effectiveness lies in it’s perceived objectivity but rather in it’s close relationship to a form of visual reality, or even hyperreality, to quote Baudrillard. Photography is indexical. It automatically gets the viewer thinking in different ways than if they were looking at a painting, even if they know the photograph is manipulated or impossible. We are better equipped to talk about the world with photography because it looks a lot like the world in the first place. As a culture, we have also been conditioned to see photography as a way of relating information about world events. It’s a communicative medium with a close visual relationship to the world around us, but don’t confuse this with objectivity.
I grew up in the Midwest, driving back and forth under these huge signs. In college I wrote poems about aliens arriving on earth and misinterpreting them as board game-like markers of conquest and dominion. As if McDonald’s and BP were competing for territory and staking their claim with immense, eternally glowing signs.
I love that-aliens mistaking signs for a giant strategy board game. Like little flags staking out their claim in a super-capitalist fiefdom. Although there are aspects of the Floating Logos project that could allude to extraterrestrials or science fiction, I don’t feel that this phenomenon is alien at all. To me it is distinctly human, and therefore extremely relevant.
It is. In August I interviewed with a local company that’s responsible for negotiating with zoning boards to put up bigger and bolder signs just like these all over the country. An employee just a few years older than me was talking about the thrill of winning negotiations and the sense of pride he had driving around and seeing signs he had helped to erect. “Hey, that’s pretty cool, I’m responsible for that big sign being there. I did that.”
Humans have been using these kinds of public displays since way back. Think about flags and other items that are meant to publicly pronounce ownership or allegiance. Shields and plumage on medieval knights also come to mind. As a species we seem to want to make these public displays in order to communicate with our fellow humans. The advertising is just an extreme extension of that. It plays right into your idea of aliens mistaking signage for symbols of political influence or ownership.
Matt Siber, BP, 2004, Floating Logos Project.
And now you’re photographing these signs, restructuring things, and making your own new kind of sign with a very different message to communicate. How did the idea arise in the first place?
I started The Untitled Project in 2002, in graduate school, as a way of exploring ideas of power relationships between large groups of people. I was reading Foucault and became very interested in his ideas about power. Public signage seemed like the perfect subject matter to target for this idea so I began by simply removing the language from photographs of urban landscapes.
It must be purging to make some sort of meaning from this jungle of text and image that seems so oppressively meaningless.
At the time, I truly felt that this would be a relief for people, that I was lifting the burden of this barrage of public messages. As soon as I finished editing the first piece I realized that much of the communication was still happening in visual form. The text pieces didn’t come into play until six months later when I decided to do something with all the text I was removing. I tried a number of methods before deciding to base the text composition directly on the photograph. The solution was to flatten perspective. It creates more of a map of the existing text than an exact overlay. That method also allowed me to present more textual elements, as some signs were at such extreme angles that they would appear illegible if presented in perspective.
And the Floating Logos seem like a natural extension.
Floating Logos was started while I was working on The Untitled Project. I was already looking at signage and the Midwest is full of these really tall ones that didn’t really exist where I grew up in New England. I started just by photographing them but didn’t think the images would get people’s attention. I really wanted people to consider these things but they are too commonplace for a simple photograph to make them take notice.
You’re right. It’s an elegant solution to huge problem, and not only to photographers. Many of the most relevant and pervasive issues you can tackle photographically also happen to be mundane and visually unremarkable. Even though lots of people are doing it, and even getting validated for it, straight photographs of this stuff just don’t cut it.
Yes-I felt that by floating them by removing the support structure, people would be compelled to look at them, perhaps reconsider them, during the next encounter. It also helped that the idea of a floating sign could take on all kinds of conceptual implications. If we think of the signs as symbols representing the corporations that put them there, disconnecting them from the ground gives them a power higher than us. It’s interesting to think of this now while so many of these companies are failing. Would it be too cliché to bring up Icarus?
No, no, I did some “non-straight” work like this a few years back. Kids falling from the sky. The support structure I removed was the trampoline they were bouncing on. Talk of America’s imminent demise, our fall from greatness, was and is so rampant. And the inheritance we’re passing on to future generations, to our kids. Even if you’re 17, 18 years old, you get the sense that Rome’s burning.
With contemporary culture already hyper-stimulated, complete with sound and visuals, how would we feel if we didn’t have all this stuff to look at anymore? Would we breathe a sigh of relief or would we freak out? Given the choice, I would definitely choose to eliminate, or at least tone down, this aspect of visual culture. We may have visual withdrawal for a time, but I think we’d get over it pretty quick.
Removing the text from a cluttered photo and re-contextualizing it…it’s such an elegant, clear, effective idea. I would say the same of Nathan Baker’s wonderful Occupation series. It’s incredible that more people aren’t doing this kind of work. Or that work like this doesn’t come to one’s attention as much as you’d think. Did the aesthetic of this project arise partly through an imperative to consciously evolve and distinguish yourself?
I’m teaching a seminar at Columbia [College] called “Digital Media and A New Photographic Document.” It deals with the idea that we can make work that has the quality and spirit of a document without using straight, through-the-lens photography. I love the documentary aspects of The Untitled Project because I’m not really taking away anything that was there. I’m only presenting it in a way that a straight photograph can’t.
You can probably imagine that this idea still makes some people uneasy. I’m not actually trying to challenge the notion of traditional documentary photography-I am interested in expanding this notion of document. I do make a distinction between “a document” and “documentary.” The term documentary comes with a whole set of implications about an age-old photographic tradition that, although problematic at times, is still very important and relevant.
Do you still practice much straight, classical photography, or would doing this feel, like, neoclassical to you?
In terms of my own process, I have set no specific parameters for how I work. The Mr. + Mrs. Smith Go to Paris project is all straight photographs. I have no problem using straight photographs. Sometimes they make the most sense and I am often annoyed with work that seems to force itself into some sort of contrived installation or presentation. It all needs to make sense together.
Matt Siber, Mr. + Mrs. Smith Go to Paris, 2006.
But the twenty-two straight images in Mr + Mrs. Smith comprise one piece, which is a bit of a curveball. It is conceptual, pointed, critical-not something as broad or universal as, you know, The Family of Man, where a singular image is making a directed but open-ended statement bout, you know, the human condition.
I’ll admit, my attraction to and interest in straight photography is not what it used to be. Like most people working in the photographic medium, “the decisive moment” was what drew me in in the first place. The more historical work I saw, the more I realized what geniuses these people were. How do we top the work of Bresson, Levitt, Evans, Friedlander, etc.? We don’t. We can continue in their tradition and approach new subject matter but that act of making photographs remains mostly unchanged. I realize this comment alone opens me up to a flood of criticism from traditional shooters, much of which is perfectly justified.
And that calls to mind two things: the relative youth of the medium, the unforeseen possibilities, invisible but still lingering, and the turns photography has taken since the advent of digital, Photoshop, Flickr, etc. etc. It’s the craft and distribution sides, really, that have become democraticized, and I think people who aspire to the condition of artists are going to be obligated to broaden their ideas of how to make, use, and propagate photographs.
I am more concerned with the ideas being presented than the way the artist chooses to present them. In successful art, the approach will agree with the idea. Sometimes the approach is the straight photograph. When it is, we have this huge wealth of history to draw from. How can you make street photographs without taking a page out of the books of the Modernist mid-century photographers? Of course, we will emulate their strategies, but now the strategy can no longer be the idea.
Spot-on. You said it. But one thing I can’t get away from is giving equal consideration to form and function. You said you’re more interested in the ideas being presented. I think a good third of stuff out there concerns itself with a relevant idea, but is visually uninspired. Another third is beautiful but vapid. The stuff I like and find interesting, I guess, falls in the area of overlap. If I put it this way, do you still give precedence to the function side of the equation?
Of course, you’re absolutely right. I didn’t mean to imply that the technique or presentation isn’t important. It’s more important than ever. To me, the best art is a combination of conception and execution. It is the idea in conjunction with the way it reveals itself to us. The great thing about visual art is that it can say things that words alone cannot. By this token, the appropriate technique and presentation is paramount to communicating an idea in an interesting and provocative way. I guess what I am less enamored with these days is photography for the sake of photography. We already know how to do this and what it looks like. Now, how are you going to show me something new?
Individualized Major Program: Retrospective Statement
Between 2000-2004, I pursued a self-designed major in Indiana University’s Individualized Major Program called “Horizontal Integration in the Arts.” The following is my retrospective statement, the paper I had to turn in summarizing my program of study in order to finally graduate. I post it here because it answers, in depth, that oft-asked question: “What kind of major is that?”
In short, “Horizontal Integration in the Arts” is an integrated study of film, music, art, design, and writing. Most people immediately ask for an explanation upon hearing the strange title of my major. A crude example will clarify: in the same way that the appeal of an entertainer like Miley Cyrus or Will Smith works through TV, movies, music, and video games, so can an artist’s ideas translate throughout disciplines. The title of my major initially referred to realizing aesthetic ideas and making connections throughout disciplines, finding the most appropriate mediums through which to express those ideas, and conceptualizing artistic movements from idiosyncratic angles. Naturally, it has ended up being much more than that.
The admission statement into this program began with a quote from Voltaire: “All the arts are friends, since they are divine. Whoever would separate them is far from knowing them.” My major was largely an extended investigation of whether or not this was true. Unsurprisingly, I have found it to be very much so. Though the ways I regard each artistic discipline have evolved significantly since my freshman year, my relative partiality towards one or another has not. When talking about art for art’s sake, I still see the various disciplines as tools for conveying something greater, not cloistered practices that naturally exist separately from one another. Some of the most salient inspirations of my major–Goethe, da Vinci, Robert Rauschenberg, Brian Eno, Wim Wenders, Buckminster Fuller, and even Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin–ostensibly shared the same sentiment and worked beyond disciplines.
Creating this program of study was a necessary, practical, simplifying response to the way I think. It imposes order on a mind interested in just about everything. The creation of this major began with an honest appraisal of how I work best, and will help me move forward in a culture inclined towards specialization and categorization. I hope to see myself not as a photographer, or writer, or musician, but, more simply, an artist in the broadest sense of the word: one who creates. My major allowed me to hit the ground running in our rapidly evolving creative culture, and prepared me to thrive in it.
In a practical sense, interdisciplinary awareness is the bread and butter of any artist. While the primary task of an novelist is to write good novels, to actually be read and get noticed, the writer needs a dynamic website and a well-designed book cover. Filmmakers interpret novels and plays, design sets, and work in teams of individuals from disparate disciplines and specialties. Designers work for a wildly disparate clientele, from businesspeople to musicians to other artists, and require the ability to empathize with varied clients. Visual artists, of course, regularly collaborate with other artists in other disciplines, if only in conversation.
In our “internet age,” effortlessly transitioning between multimedia is a matter of course. My interdisciplinary bent was fostered by being raised on computers, the internet, hyperlinks, and cracked copies of multimedia software. Within a handful of programs, one essentially has a music studio, design workshop, photography studio, and publishing house on a single computer. Twenty five years ago, it was simply not possible to work in these disparate arenas; they were cloistered and cost-prohibitive. Now, what was once impossible is commonplace: today one may work in all of these environments simultaneously. Self-publishing and self-promotion—themselves examples of a trend towards an individualist-minded brand of vertical integration—are overtaking 20th century models of distribution. There is a widespread democratization of artistic production happening in the world today, and my major was designed partly in response.
Much of the real, nitty-gritty work toward my major was self-guided, independent, and un-credited. My studies were geared toward absorbing a lot of texts—at one point I had 262 books on loan from IU’s libraries—comparing and contrasting books, music, films, and visual art works, and using the resultant analogies to streamline further investigations of the varied disciplines. My course work within the major was extensive and in a range of departments, but most of it was within specific disciplines: twelve hours of film, eighteen hours of writing, nineteen of art, fourteen of music, and nine of explicitly interdisciplinary courses. The relatively few hours of this last group may sound curious, but most of the real “integrating” went on through taking classes in disparate disciplines with a focus on synthesizing what I was learning in each.
To finally gain acceptance into the program, I had to do a lot of cutting. I wanted to study everything: entrepreneurship, history, languages, anthropology, psychology, religion, biology, botany, ecology. It was after meeting and befriending composer, author, and interdisciplinary arts scholar Prof. David Ward-Steinman that my interests were brought into tighter focus. During my junior year, I received a grant from the Honors College to be his teaching assistant for the class “Connections: Music, Art, Poetry,” in which I had been a student the previous semester. This interdisciplinary class, more than the others, embodied the kind of comparative work I was interested in doing. His clear, concrete deconstruction of aesthetic forms and art movements throughout the disciplines created an immediate leap in my perception. At the end of the course, I was able to teach a class. I compared similar aesthetic impulses in films, music, and literature, equated the instrumental hip hop of J Dilla with the collage work of Robert Rauschenberg, and broke down the production of music and photographs into fundamentally analogous processes.
Perhaps the best example of extra-curricular “integrative work” involves the musical group I drummed and sang in throughout college. My major gave me the tools I needed to make sure the aesthetic message of the group was consistent throughout everything we produced. When we planned music videos and designed promotional posters, a website, and packaging for our music, the cohesiveness of supplementary materials with the music and lyrics was far greater than what could have been achieved by comparatively uninvolved third parties. Meanwhile, I was drawing on my design and film classes for inspiration in producing the videos and promotional materials themselves. Modern popular music is not self-contained. It is dispersed not only through an album alone, but also promotional materials, live shows, videos, and packaging; the proverbial “whole shebang.”
Only through hindsight do I realize how much unintentional emphasis on history this program provided. When I first applied, I wished to focus only on contemporary art, and said something to this effect in one of my proposals for admittance. My interest has since meandered back in time. Presently, I can say that my undergraduate years gave me a good understanding of the aesthetic zeitgeist in western society since the end of World War I, and in independent study I continue to dig farther back in time. I did not take history classes as an undergraduate–perhaps outdated textbooks from K-12 have left a bad taste in my mouth. But, from such varied reading, and especially as a result of a tutorial internship at the recording studio of a history-buff Vietnam veteran— a living, breathing link to the culture of the generation that preceded mine—my appreciation for being engaged with and by history has exploded. This is why I use the word “zeitgeist” so much—it has connotations of history, evolution, and what’s simultaneously shared by all disciplines.
The final credit of my undergraduate tenure was earned through a two-month trip to research Brasilian popular music on a Hutton International Experience grant. While my initial interest in Brasilian music was purely visceral, the parallels that between 1960s Brasilian and American music and culture are what I ultimately found so extraordinarily, irresistibly compelling. Throughout college I regarded study abroad as an essential component of a well-rounded education, and was ecstatic that it could occupy the pinnacle of mine. Through meeting a great number of musicians in my travels, and taking a course with Prof. Luiz Lopes, a Brasilian composer in our music school, I was able to delve into Brasilian music and culture about as deeply as a twenty-two year old non-native possibly can.
The final crux of my major was my BOMB internship. Though this is described in great detail in my separate internship statement, it is worth re-emphasizing how much of a paradise the magazine is for someone with my interests. Not only does it feature years of artists having cross-disciplinary conversations, but it tends to promote artists who operate between or through varied disciplines. My major and BOMB were intertwined from the start: BOMB was part of the initial inspiration to create my major, my major prepared and qualified me to work at BOMB, BOMB added depth and breadth to my awareness of the arts, and continued study in the IMP prepared me to converse with artists myself after completing both my studies and the internship itself.
The Individualized Major Program was truly a haven for me. It allowed me to follow my nose, respond to the rapid evolution of culture in an increasingly hyper-technical age, meaningfully integrate diverse learning experiences from outside of the classroom, and operate freely between related disciplines. The program is invaluable to students with the gumption to blaze their own trails, and I see nothing in its future but growth.
Freshman Major Courses:
The Critical Issue: Philosophy, Film, & Music
Creative Writing: Fiction
Fundamental Studio: Drawing
Intro to MIDI/Computer Music
Intro to Media
Fundamental Studio: 2D
Piano I
Honors Seminar: Making Meaning Through Stories
Honors Seminar: Reading & Writing Contemporary Poetry
Honors Seminar: Media & Society
Sophomore Major Courses:
Authorship in the Media: Alfred Hitchcock
Graphic Design I
Honors Seminar: History of Japanese Cinema
African Music & Movement
Connections: Music, Art, & Poetry
Junior Major Courses:
Creative Writing: Poetry
20th Century Art: 1945 – Present
Honors Interdepartmental Colloquium: Fact, Fiction, & Film
Independent Tutorial in Modern Fiction
Independent Tutorial: The American Road Trip (uncredited)
Senior Major Courses:
Latin American Popular Music
Connections: Music, Art, & Literature
Honors Seminar: Leonardo daVinci & Michelangelo
Independent Tutorial in Studio Recording
Independent Tutorial in Arts Writing
Black Religious Music
History of 20th Century Photography
Contemporary France: Film & Culture
Independent Tutorial: Study Abroad in Brazil
South Bend, IN, places nearly last in the nation for quality of life
As far as the local paper goes, this is one of the most incredible articles I’ve ever read.
South Bend Tribune: How does your life rate?
The quality of life in my congressional district, according to a Gallup survey, is ranked 417 of 435 in the United States. I bet we would have at least cracked 400 sans Charlie Weis.
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