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Mark Steinmetz

Posted on 14 de January de 202615 de January de 2026 by nr

Feature · Mark Steinmetz
Words · Melis Özek

Inexplicable Rightness

“I think you want to show the ordinary world, but have it be fresh, and have it be charged, so that we’re not so complacent in our lives, and we notice every day.” A manifesto for his entire practice. Across four decades of work, from the streets of Los Angeles to the sidewalks of Chicago, from the deep South to Parisian metro entrances, Mark Steinmetz has built one of the most quietly radical bodies of photographic work in American culture.

Steinmetz has remained committed to something rare: attention. His black-and-white photographs hold space for uncertainty, for what Robert Adams once called “inexplicable rightness,” for the strange poetry that emerges when nothing is forced to perform. Children pausing between innocence and self-awareness, strangers crossing in a sliver of light, bodies waiting, resting, passing through.

In this interview for NR Magazine, Steinmetz reflects on the formative years that shaped his way of seeing – from a childhood darkroom and early obsessions with cinema and Nabokov, to wandering Los Angeles with Garry Winogrand, to decades of slow, committed observation across the American South and beyond. What emerges is not a theory of photography, but a philosophy of presence: a belief that meaning does not need to be manufactured, only attended to. Steinmetz remains faithful to a more difficult task: to look long enough for the world to reveal itself back.

Mark Steinmetz, *Greater Atlanta,* 1994 (1994-2009)

Mark Steinmetz, *Greater Atlanta*, 1995 (1994-2009)

You began photographing in your late teens, initially as a way to understand and engage with the world rather than as a defined artistic ambition. What did photography make possible for you at that stage, in terms of access, understanding, or a way of being in the world? At what point did it shift from interest to necessity?

I began photography earlier than my late teens. I was taking pictures as a kid, and I had a darkroom around the age of twelve or thirteen, so I was already photographing. I was always interested in photographs. My interest early on may have been more in special effects. It wasn’t until college, when I was about eighteen, and I saw a lot of movies by Michelangelo Antonioni, that I began to think more about the literary aspect of photography, more about the humanities side of it. There was always a component of it being a kind of game, trying to catch things. But as you get older, you start to want to make things more meaningful.

You have spoken about early influences from cinema and literature. How did these non-photographic arts shape your sensitivity to narrative, rhythm, or atmosphere within a single image?

I read a lot of Nabokov. It was very clever and complex. In movies, I looked at Antonioni, but also a lot of film noir, and how gangster movies can operate on another level at the same time. The formal strategies of directors, especially in the thirties, forties, and fifties before color took over, were very architectural. You see a lot of constructed scenes.

After leaving the MFA program at Yale, you moved to Los Angeles and began making your first sustained body of work in public space, a period you have often described as formative and shaped in part by figures like Garry Winogrand. What did that moment—Los Angeles, the street, the encounter—teach you about photography that formal education could not? And as you were absorbing the work of photographers such as Walker Evans and Lee Friedlander, each working within very different social and historical contexts, how did those visual histories begin to inform, or resist, the development of your own way of seeing?

Los Angeles was a difficult time. I was twenty-two. I was restless. It seemed like a simple, superficial place, not a lot of the kind of artistry I was interested in. I was taking pictures, and I met Garry Winogrand a few times. We drove around together, and it meant a lot. I absorbed something from him, especially his manner of being. It showed that an adult could do this kind of work. There is no real career as an artist, but you can survive. There was a way to share it, and Winogrand was well known.

Are there any memories from Los Angeles, particularly with Winogrand…

The last time I really saw him we were photographing at the zoo. He made a body of work there called The Animals. We were there on a weekend, photographing separately, then we met. Toward the end of the day the light was fading, and on the way out Bernadette Peters was there. She was very famous then. She had been photographed by Gary years earlier for the film Annie, directed by John Huston, for which photographers like Stephen Shore and Eggleston were also invited.

She was there with her boyfriend. They had the same curly hair and matching leather jackets. Gary zoomed in and took a picture, and she threw her head back, just like the famous ice-cream photograph. We left. He sat in my car and said, ‘Boy, you don’t know how tired you are until you sit down.’ Later he became sick. He was photographing two months before he died.

The phrase “showing us what we already know” is often used in relation to your work. What does that idea mean to you in the context of your photographic practice? What kinds of recognitions or quiet truths are you most drawn to through photography?

Maybe it’s more accurate to say that it shows what we think we already know. You want to show the ordinary world, but have it be fresh, and have it be charged, so that we’re not so complacent in our lives and we notice every day.

Mark Steinmetz, *The Players* (1986-1990)

From your earliest work onward, your photographs return to ordinary encounters, small gestures, and everyday situations. What is it, specifically, that you recognize in these moments as worth holding onto?

I’m drawn to moments of poignancy that transcend what we are accustomed to. There is a connoisseurship to photography. It isn’t people holding hands. It’s these people holding hands this way, in this light. Something very specific.

Your practice emphasizes intuition and chance, allowing situations to unfold rather than directing or staging photographic moments. How do intuition and restraint work together when deciding whether a moment becomes a photograph? You have spoken about resisting images that feel over-determined, where meaning is quickly resolved, in favor of photographs that leave space to dwell. How do you define restraint in a photograph, and what does that openness allow the viewer to experience?

I think you want to restrain yourself from being too obvious. You want to leave things open so that there is free will. Things can be implied in the pictures, but you can certainly over-imply them. Robert Adams uses the expression ‘inexplicable rightness’. So I think intuition begins when you don’t have that dialogue in your mind. You know, ‘Is this making sense? Is this not?’ It looks good, feels good to take the picture. With intuition too, there’s a lot of anticipation. You sense that something is brewing.

ATL Terminus and Greater Atlanta document the city through contrasting temporal conditions, the airport as a space of transit and the city and suburbs through long-term return. How do these two bodies of work speak to one another?

There are pictures of Atlanta taken from airplanes in ATL. To me, Atlanta is a modern city. It has some vestiges of the old South, but it is very corporate and very functional.

Greater Atlanta is about something else. It’s about fossil fuels, capitalism, and civilization. It’s about how things progress. There are pictures in Greater Atlanta that point toward prehistory, toward the land before development and before this modern system was put in place.

Mark Steinmetz, *Greater Atlanta*, 2000 (1994-2009)

Mark Steinmetz, *ATL / Terminus*, 2017 (2012-2018)

ATL is more about a state of limbo. It’s about traveling, about people moving between places. They have their suitcases. They’re passing through rather than being anchored. So the two projects are not completely yoked together. One looks at movement through the city, and the other looks at the deeper structures that shape what the city is.

Developed over nearly two decades, Summer Camp documents daily life through routine, social structure, play, and solitude. Did the project gradually become less about individual moments and more about observation itself, about how time moves through people and relationships?

Summer Camp was done over a decade from the first picture to the last, maybe twelve years, and it only takes place during a couple of months in the summer, which makes it hard to get into. For a long time in America, kids went to camps like this: you had a campfire, a lake, a dining hall, cabins with screen doors. I tried to capture how no time was really passing, a twentieth-century experience. It’s a little like Lord of the Flies at times.

Mark Steinmetz, *Summer Camp*, 1996 (1986-2003)

It connects to other bodies of work I’ve done. The Players was mostly boys, some girls, but it was about Little League baseball. That work, and Summer Camp, and even the carnival pictures, which are more teenagers, all share something: a strong setting. The baseball fields with chain-link fences, uniforms, gloves. The camp with its cabins and lake.

In all of them, the kids are more or less free of their parents. They have coaches or counselors, but they’re inside an intense activity. Baseball is about winning and losing. Camp isn’t about winning and losing, but it is about being together, about summer, about having a lot of time on your hands. In both cases I think I’m pretty much the same photographer. I’m different in something like the South Trilogy or ATL, but in these I feel very consistent.

Mark Steinmetz, *Summer Camp*, 1986 (1986-2003)

Kids and Teens focuses on children and adolescents in public and semi-public spaces, often at moments of pause or self-awareness. What draws you to these in-between states, and what do they reveal to you about looking, being looked at, and the act of noticing itself?

Physically, kids are interesting. Teenagers, their faces, their heads, and their stories are interesting. They carry this sense of prospect, of becoming an adult.

I did a lot of kids and teenagers work earlier on, when I was in my twenties and thirties and childhood was closer to me. Cartier-Bresson and Helen Levitt did great work with kids early on too. You also had more permission photographing kids than adults then. They were less self-conscious.

Mark Steinmetz, *Kids and Teens*, 1989 (1984-1992)

Later I photographed younger people in their twenties. As I grew older, my subjects grew older too. Now I photograph anything. I have a daughter who’s eight, so I photograph her a lot.

I think I did a certain kind of work that belonged to a time before. That life isn’t the same now. There isn’t the same relationship to time. There was more boredom, more waiting. You had to rely on your own resources more than you do now, when you can just turn something on and be stimulated by someone else’s production.

France 1987 presents photographs made in public spaces and revisited decades later. Looking at this work now, what does it reveal to you about changes in public life, physical presence, and social interaction?

It really seems like a timepiece. It seems connected more to the world that Cartier-Bresson and Doisneau and Atget photographed. It’s looking like a different time. That’s a big shock to me.

France preserved a more traditional way of dressing for longer. In America there were more gaudy T-shirts with sports teams, more sportswear. In France people kept wearing traditional clothes without insignia.

Mark Steinmetz, *Paris in My Time 1987* (1985-2011)

Now that’s changed. There’s more writing on people’s clothes, but it seems like an earlier time: End of a period when the present was still in touch with the twentieth century. That really gave way in the 1990s.

Your archives often sit for years before being edited or published. How does distance affect what you choose to keep, print, or release?

Time is interesting. I took the pictures then, but when I’m editing now, it feels like the work now. You have more detachment the longer you wait. You might have all these ideas in your head about what you’re doing, then years later you just look at how they work for you now. There’s this partnership between me and my present self and me and these former selves that don’t exist anymore.

You have worked almost exclusively with film and printed by hand. How does that process shape your way of seeing?

I first photographed a lot of six-by-nine centimetres. I still use 35mm as well. I was photographing this morning, actually, traffic and circulation, bicyclists and scooters, in fairly dark conditions. But in something like South Central, pretty much every picture is medium format, six-by-nine. Some are a mix, but most of them are.

I like darkroom prints. I like silver on paper. I like the process of working. I’m in Paris now and I don’t have a darkroom here, and the weather is pretty lousy. It would be great to go in and print instead of trying to make pictures in bad light, although there’s something interesting about that too, because I’m used to working in nicer, warmer light.

I use digital sometimes, mainly for commercial or fashion work if they want color. But for me film is better at capturing atmosphere, especially backlighting. I love backlighting, and I love when there’s moisture in the air. Digital tends to remove what’s in the atmosphere. It becomes hyper-clean. It creates light where there isn’t any, and I don’t really see the point of that.

Mark Steinmetz, *South East*, 1996 (1994-2001)

Mark Steinmetz, *South East*, 1997 (1994-2001)

A lot of people photograph in low light digitally and the pictures come out, but it doesn’t look right to me. Digital embellishes things. I take a lot of iPhone pictures too, but I’m more moved by a new Robert Frank picture or a new Winogrand picture. If there’s a new Eggleston picture, that can hit me too

Across your career, photography appears as a sustained practice of attention. What keeps that practice alive for you now?

Everything is up in the air because of the situation in the world. I’m in Paris. I have French citizenship. My mother was French. My daughter has French citizenship. My wife doesn’t. Our house and darkroom are in the States, so it’s America, France, Paris, somewhere else, I don’t know.

I drop my daughter at school every morning, and there’s this area, Porte de Chambert, with a lot of traffic, a rush hour, bicyclists of all kinds, people on scooters, people pushing strollers, all these different kinds of vehicles colliding. I started photographing there, which I wouldn’t have thought of a couple of months ago.

The solstice light is very dim. There are headlights now, which weren’t there a few days ago. I’ve also been photographing at La Plastique, an area with a metro stop, a cinema, a big school, a few cafes, where all kinds of people meet. People smoke outside the metro before they go in. That’s a lot of the street photography I’ve been doing.

Mark Steinmetz, *Paris in My Time* (1985-2011)

I look at photographers like Robert Adams now, in his eighties, still putting out books from the past twenty years, and they feel very alive and very wise. Maybe they’re not for everyone, but I see a really interesting photographic mind at work, someone whose pictures are dense with a lifetime of experience.

I wonder if I’ll have that. I have an eight-year-old daughter, I feel fine, I still have good reflexes. I don’t know the future yet.

Credits

All images courtesy of Mark Steinmetz.
Discover more on marksteinmetz.net

Hicham Benohoud

Posted on 1 de December de 202514 de January de 2026 by nr

NR · Magazine
Published · Online

Portfolio Focus · Hicham Benohoud
Words · Melis Özek

Social Fatalism, In Frame

1980s Morocco. Museums were absent and contemporary art circulated mainly as photocopied images and thin exhibition pamphlets. For Marrakech-born Hicham Benohoud, this scarcity became a site where imagination took root precisely.

His earliest encounters with artistic form arrived through reproductions brought by teachers who themselves had limited access. As a visual arts teacher in Marrakech, he entered a system shaped by hierarchy, monotony and one-hour lessons repeated across thirteen years. It was within this compressed temporal frame that his photographic practice emerged, first as endurance and then as a mode of inquiry into authority, embodiment and fragile social negotiations.

Across landmark series such as La Salle de Classe, which received the 2025 Paris Photo–Aperture Photobook Award, and Acrobates, Benohoud stages bodies in states of tension, distortion, suspension and erasure. His images reveal what is often invisible in Moroccan society: conformity, imposed discipline, inherited moral geometries and the small ruptures beneath them.

In this conversation, Benohoud reflects on confinement, authority, distortion and the classroom as a microcosm, a space where the desire for expression confronts the weight of tradition.

You grew up in Marrakech at a time when contemporary art infrastructures barely existed. How did this landscape of scarcity shape your earliest sense of artistic possibility?

I am 57 years old now, and when I was 15, 16, 17, I was already studying fine arts in high school. In the early 1980s, 1983, 84, 85, 86, there were no museums in Morocco, no galleries. There was supposedly a gallery far from Marrakech, but I never went.

There was no internet. So where could we see anything? When my fine arts teachers spoke about a particular Western movement, surrealism, impressionism, abstraction, they brought us catalogues, art books, magazines. I do not know where they found them, but they had a small amount of documentation.

When we discussed Moroccan artists, they brought small exhibition catalogues. At the time, Moroccan art was mostly Arab expression. In the capital, there was one major gallery, but it was not run by a Moroccan. It was run by a French or Swiss woman, I am not sure. In any case, not Moroccan. So the works we “saw” existed only in photographs, never in reality.

Everything was theory. Art history from prehistoric art to American Pop was studied in books, very few images, almost no physical encounter. I had not yet imagined becoming an artist; I had no personal artistic process. I was simply a classic art student shaped by absence.

Morocco carries a deep history of social fatalism, where roles feel pre-assigned and unquestioned. How did this atmosphere shape your early understanding of discipline, authority and the body?

After high school, I earned a fine arts baccalaureate, which included art history up to the 1960s and early 70s. Then I studied for two years at the regional teaching center, an institution that trained visual arts teachers, not artists. I learned pedagogy, how to teach adolescents.

I still was not an artist then. When I began teaching in 1989, I taught technique, drawing, basic sculpture, to students aged 11 to 15, once a week for one hour. Their abilities were limited and the schedule was rigid. For thirteen years I taught under those conditions.

During those years, I lived somewhat cut off. Few social ties, few friends, rarely visiting family. The people I saw every day were my students.

From that relationship, the classroom project emerged, but I did not know it was art. Each class lasted one hour: 8 to 9, 9 to 10, 10 to 11, and so on the next day. Slow, repetitive, almost endless. To endure the monotony, I needed something to make time pass.

It felt like a kind of imprisonment. When you have nothing to do, you invent tasks so the hours move. The classroom became that for me. While the students drew still lifes, I began calling them one by one to photograph them. That was the origin of The Classroom.

As a young teacher, did the weight of authority ever conflict with something internal, a doubt or hesitation? How did that tension shape your images?

Authority is inherent to the classroom in Morocco. The hierarchy is clear, and what the teacher asks is generally done without question. When I began making these images, I was aware of that structure. I asked students to pose, and as long as no one refused, the work continued. The photographs carry the imprint of that dynamic, not as something oppressive but as a reality we all inhabited. The presence of authority becomes part of the composition, a silent force that shapes the gestures, the space, and the relationship between us.

Did you ever feel the need to escape the version of yourself the institution expected you to embody? Did photography open an alternative self-image within that constraint?

Some students were eager to participate and even proposed gestures or variations. I explained that the photographs followed a specific vision, but their enthusiasm mattered. Those who preferred not to pose, I never insisted. You can sense when someone is reluctant, and I always stepped back.

At the same time, I wanted to give space to the few students who clearly had a desire to express themselves beyond the limits of the curriculum. For them, I created a weekly workshop, almost a laboratory. There, the structure shifted completely. I was no longer the teacher. They were the artists, and I was there to support them technically and conceptually. Their projects could last a week, a month, or a year. What mattered was allowing a version of themselves to exist.

When your classroom shifted into a laboratory of gesture and image, at what point did pedagogy become a material you could shape and distort?

In this workshop, I told them that a sheet of drawing paper could be torn instead of drawn on. Tearing was also a form of drawing. It became a space of experimentation. Instead of painting with brushes, they could use branches or stones. This workshop ran parallel to my own work and it slowly dissolved the rigid role of the teacher. Pedagogy itself became a material.

You described these sessions as suspensions of curriculum. What became visible there that the institution itself could never articulate?

The workshop suspended the official program. Students experimented freely and I guided technically when needed. It was a space where imagination overtook instruction, where gestures replaced exercises, and where the institutional order briefly loosened.

In La Salle de Classe, students’ bodies seem to shape the room as much as they inhabit it. Do you see them as co-authors, or as bodies carrying the imprint of the institution?

Their presence shaped the images. Their gestures, their willingness, and even their refusals shaped the emotional space of the series. The vision guiding it remained singular.

You have said the face was never central to your images. How does removing the face reshape the ethics of representation in a society where individuality is rarely affirmed?

I express what I feel through images or painting, and interpretation is open. Covering the face is not meant to impose a symbolic reading; it is simply a way to remove identity. In Morocco, individuality is not foregrounded. One does not say “I want,” but “we want.” Claiming individual desire marks you as different, and difference leads to marginalization. Hiding the face reflects that collective erasure.

When you revisit the classroom now, do you see it as a microcosm of Moroccan society, a condensed stage where collective discipline and contradiction become visible?

You must resemble others, same religion, plans, desires, tastes. Stepping outside the collective norm is frowned upon, even punished. The classroom reproduced this logic precisely. It was a condensed version of the society around it.

Your work often returns to binding: string, posture, geometry. What does binding represent in your images and where do you locate rupture?

My work speaks often of confinement. I cover faces with fabric, cardboard, plastic, materials that obscure expression. The strings that bind or deform the body symbolize the lack of freedom imposed by religion and tradition. We are shaped and sometimes distorted by these forces; we are not fully ourselves.

In Acrobates, the body exceeds physical logic. What becomes visible through distortion that an upright body cannot express?

In Acrobates, I worked with professional acrobats whose job is to contort their bodies. Their suffering is what earns them money; people applaud precisely because their bodies exceed normal limits. It is not dance, where endurance can last an hour. These poses last only seconds, otherwise they cause injury.

I prepared the frame and light, asked them to perform the distortion and captured two or three images before they returned to a stable state.

I also wanted to show their domestic lives, with family, in intimacy, to reveal the contrast between the spectacle and the difficult social backgrounds from which they come.

Do you believe freedom can exist inside an institution or is it always partial?

In Morocco, as in many countries, people believe total freedom does not exist. The teacher-student dynamic of the 1980s has evolved; today’s children communicate differently and institutions have shifted. But the broader truth remains: the human being is imprisoned in this world from birth to death. Freedom is always partial.

Your images often point to forms of social stagnation. When you construct a visual concept, what vision of society are you choosing to bring into focus?

A concept, for me, is simply an idea. For instance, death. I might show a dead society, one that no longer moves forward, one that stagnates. When I represent society, I sometimes choose to show it as inert, unmoving. This, is the core beneath.

In order of appearance

Hicham Benohoud, La Salle de Classe, Series, 1994-2000, Marrakech, Morocco
Hicham Benohoud, Acrobatie, Series 2017, Marrakech, Morocco
Hicham Benohoud, Acrobatie, Series 2017, Marrakech, Morocco
Hicham Benohoud, La Salle de Classe, Series, 1994-2000, Marrakech, Morocco
Hicham Benohoud, La Salle de Classe, Series, 1994-2000, Marrakech, Morocco
Hicham Benohoud, La Salle de Classe, Series, 1994-2000, Marrakech, Morocco
Hicham Benohoud, Acrobatie, Series 2017, Marrakech, Morocco

Credits

All images courtesy of Hicham Benohoud.
Discover more on hichambenohoud.com

Mohamed Bourouissa

Posted on 17 de July de 20251 de December de 2025 by nr

NR · Magazine
Published · Online

Feature · Mohamed Bourouissa
Words · Melis Özek

Composing Otherwise

Mohamed Bourouissa’s practice challenges not only the politics of representation, but the mechanics of perception itself. Working across photography, film, installation, and sound, he constructs spaces where legibility is never passive — where power circulates through the act of sensing and attending. With roots in the banlieues of Paris and an enduring connection to Algeria, Bourouissa attends to the margins not as subjects to be revealed, but as structures of relation, opacity, and force. His art privileges embeddedness over spectacle, friction over clarity, and process over resolution.

From the charged immediacy of Why Did I Choose to Make Music, where sonic form becomes a site of memory, rupture, and emotional release, to the vegetal audibility of Brutal Family Roots, Bourouissa’s practice insists on listening not as inclusion, but as structural reconfiguration, where marginal forms recompose the frames. Temps Mort constructs a portrait of incarceration through text messages and mobile footage; Hara!! transforms street cries into spatial composition; and The Whispering of Ghosts listens to the unspeakable weight of landscape in postcolonial Algeria. Across these works, Bourouissa refuses closure. Instead, he makes space for the relational, the opaque, and the unfinished to resonate on their own terms.

Though frequently read through a political lens, Bourouissa resists the reductive framing of the “political artist.” For him, the political is not a message but a material condition—emergent, embedded, and embodied. His work holds open the space of listening, where marginal voices do not simply enter the frame, but reconfigure it.

In this conversation, he reflects on the ethics of proximity, the architectures of control, and the capacities of sound as a relational medium. The dialogue follows Why Did I Choose to Make Music, Bourouissa’s live performance at the Bourse de Commerce on June 25, part of the cultural program curated by Cyrus Goberville, structured around his forthcoming release on PAN and featuring Le Diouck’s Fatéouma in a shared act of sonic authorship.

Can you recall the moment or process through which you first felt drawn to art as a mode of expression? Was it instinctive, or did it emerge in response to something specific, political, personal, or otherwise? You’ve previously said, “I’m not a political artist. But it is political.” How do you reconcile that distance between intention and implication in your own work?

I think it’s a confluence of intuition and personal experience. I wouldn’t even describe it as entering a distinct “world” of art; it felt like something natural, an extension of my way of looking at things. Growing up with friends, we often had strong, critical perspectives on society, and those perspectives inevitably filter into the work. My family background, especially in relation to immigration, also shaped how I see and respond to the world.

Art became a way to speak about what was around me. My first short film, for example, was about a friend who had spent five years in prison. That experience opened a window onto issues of social impact and marginalization. Still, I hesitate to frame the work as having a direct political ambition. The political dimension arises from the subject matter, not from a manifesto.

Any artwork, even when abstract, contains a political charge. It reflects a set of decisions about what matters, what is made visible, what is given form. A landscape, too, is a political statement; it represents a choice, a position. That’s why I say I’m not a political artist, but the work is political, because my environment is political. I’m drawn to these themes because they’re part of the reality I inhabit.

In your work, sound often operates beyond language: as texture, rupture, or residue. What draws you to these non-verbal registers, and what do they allow you to express that image or text cannot?

Text has always posed a challenge for me; it doesn’t come easily. I gravitate more toward visual language because it feels like home. It originates in drawing, in how I learned to observe and translate the world. I’m not seeking to displace text or prove its inadequacy; rather, I’m operating within a modality that feels authentic to me.

Over time, I’ve begun to work across multiple forms: sound, theatre, sculpture. This multiplicity opens up new dimensions. Collaboration has become increasingly important. I value working alongside those who engage with language in other ways. It allows me to expand the limits of my own perspective. I don’t want to work in isolation. I want to inhabit a broader field of exchange.

You often work with frequencies that hover at the edge of perception: breath, distortion, cry. Do you consider your sound work a form of sensing rather than representing? In a previous conversation, you mentioned, “I’m interested in the poetry inside the streets.” How do you perceive poetry as a form of resistance or a method for revealing structures of visibility and invisibility in the urban and social landscape?

Poetry is everywhere. It’s embedded in gestures, in the mundane. The way someone walks down the street can be a kind of poem. It’s not about grand declarations but about subtle reframing. Poetry, for me, is not distant or lofty; it’s radically proximate.

It’s about attention, about the frame you impose on what might otherwise seem insignificant. A movement, a hesitation, a glance: these can carry poetic weight if you’re attuned to them. It’s a shift in the register of perception. Suddenly, the street becomes a site of layered meaning, where visibility and invisibility coexist.
This way of seeing transforms the ordinary. It resists the notion that only certain spaces or subjects are worthy of artistic or critical attention. In that sense, it becomes political. Not in a declarative way, but in its capacity to reorient how we value the everyday and how we read social space.

You often resist the notion of art as a detached, rarefied gesture. Instead, your work is grounded in embeddedness: in lived experience, in proximity to systems of surveillance, care, or control. How do you define the ethical responsibility of the artist today?

That’s a profound and complex question. Responsibility, for me, begins with personal experience. The way you live, the people you encounter, the situations you navigate: these all shape how and why you make work.

In one of my projects involving shop lifters, I faced an ethical dilemma. Initially, I hesitated to use their faces without permission. But the more I sat with the material, the more I realized that the images revealed something critical about power, surveillance, and the politics of representation.
People often conflate morality and ethics. Ethical responsibility is often more subtle, more situated. It can emerge in unexpected places, like in the ways people resist visibility, resist being fixed within systems of control.

For me, it’s about being honest with the work, with the process of inquiry. When I reflect on places like Palestine or Gaza, it’s not about adopting a position of authority or offering answers, but about staying with the questions. Trying to understand the complexity. That’s what responsibility means to me: not a grand moral gesture, but a practice of integrity and openness in how you approach the world.

In earlier works, you manipulated photographic codes to interrogate power dynamics and perception. In your sound-based practice, you seem to move toward frequencies that precede or elude language. What do you see as the limits of representation, and how do you move beyond them?

I don’t believe images have strict limits; rather, they offer possibilities. What interests me is how different languages—visual, sonic, spatial—relate to one another. When you think about rhythm, breath, and time, you begin to see how these elements move across media.

In photography, you build rhythm through composition, through the placement of bodies or structures. That rhythm resonates with music. The tension in an image might mirror the tension in a chord. There’s always this porosity, a kind of permeability, between forms.

We often try to silo practices. A painter might not see their work as musical, for instance. But to me, painting is also about music, about the unseen structures that guide attention and emotion. So, rather than seeking the limits of representation, I’m interested in the points of convergence: where languages touch, blur, and expand one another.

You’ve described art as a “means of listening.” How do you cultivate listening as both a formal method and a political stance? And how does this shift in receptivity over expression change what it means to create?

My relationship to sound began with a desire to render visible what is usually hidden. Take plants, for example. In working with mimosa plants, I sought to make their internal life—electrical activity, responsiveness—audible. Using electronic materials, I translated their signals into sound.

This process revealed something profound: we too are electrical beings. Our nervous systems function through signals and rhythms. We breathe in a pattern that is different from plants, yet connected. That realization opened up an understanding of interconnectedness across species.
European modernity often divided plants, animals, and humans into separate categories. But my work resists that. It is about exploring shared atmospheres, the invisible networks that link us.
Listening, then, is not passive. It’s an active, attentive mode of being. It creates space for other forms of presence to emerge. By privileging reception over declaration, creation becomes dialogic: less about imposing meaning, more about holding space for complexity, ambiguity, and relation.

You’ve spoken of repair, of “putting people back in movement” through your work. What does movement mean to you—spatial, psychological, historical? And how do you imagine it operating through your sound work?

Movement, for me, is intimate. It’s tied to how I’ve experienced sound: as a carrier of trauma, memory, and transformation. The cry, for instance, triggers something deeply emotional in me. It’s immediate and visceral.

As I delved into music and sound experiments, I began to understand how frequencies interact with the body. Sound doesn’t just pass through. It resonates. It imprints. It can unlock dormant memories or emotions stored in the body.

Initially, I wanted to create articulate, structured works. But music taught me to let go of that impulse, to prioritize immersion, feeling, and intuition. In that sense, movement becomes psychological, emotional, even cellular. It’s about the capacity to shift something within, to loosen what’s stuck.

Why Did I Choose to Make Music interrogates the very ontology of sound—what music can be, mean, or resist. In hindsight, what does this title mean to you now? Was it ever a question directed inward?

I don’t consider myself a musician in the traditional sense. I make music and sound, yes, but not from a place of formal training. The performance is an experiment, a way of illuminating how sound threads through my broader practice.

The title actually comes from a rapper, Bucha, whose album Timeout Tamo was significant to me. I grew up with hip-hop. Artists like Lunatic shaped how I listened, how I thought. That music offered a mode of reflection and resistance.

Now, music has become a way of mapping my journey—my personal life, my collaborations, my artistic evolution. My son’s mother is a musician, and that also shaped how I approached sound. The title is less a question than a space of reflection, a gesture of transparency about process, time, and becoming.

You’ve previously described sound as a space of repair and catharsis, particularly in relation to trauma and memory. How do you approach sound as a material of healing—not only for the self, but within a collective register?

I began working with plants, trying to amplify their presence. I wanted to make their activity visible through sound. Using tools like SuperCollider, and collaborating with Jordan Kikira, we translated their electrical signals into audible frequencies.

What emerged was a sense of mutuality—how sound mediates relationships between bodies, environments, and histories. I wasn’t thinking in terms of “music,” but of sound as material: something that engages directly with the nervous system, with the brain’s circuitry.
Sound became a conduit for transformation. It made the invisible visible. And in doing so, it created a space not only for personal catharsis but for collective resonance.

In Temps Morts, you wove a fragmented narrative out of lo-fi digital remnants: voice messages, images, mobile footage. Now, with Signal, sound becomes the structural core of the exhibition. How has your understanding of narrative architecture evolved across media?

Let me give an example through architecture. I wasn’t initially drawn to Le Corbusier, but one building changed that: La Tourette (Couvent Sainte-Marie de La Tourette), which he designed with Iannis Xenakis. Xenakis was both an architect and a musician, and you can feel that duality embedded in the space.

Walking through the building, your body begins to follow its rhythm. The windows are not uniform. They vary in size, creating an internal rhythm, a shifting visual tempo. That spatial variation constructs a kind of narrative, one that’s inseparable from bodily experience. You don’t just look at it. You move with it.

This had a profound impact on me. It showed how architecture and sound share a relationship rooted in movement, rhythm, and physical engagement. It’s similar to being part of a rave, where your body becomes part of the architecture. You’re not just in a space. You are participating in its unfolding.

With Signal, I approached the exhibition like an album: each component structured like a track, with intervals and intensities. I wanted to rethink time in a spatial sense, to explore how a narrative can emerge through sonic and architectural rhythms. It’s not about linear storytelling, but about composing an experience that moves through space like a score.

Your collaborations often stem from improvised encounters: from Beirut to Marseille, from street cries to noise frequencies. How do you navigate the space between intuitive listening and constructed composition?

My work is deeply rooted in intuition and in accidents. I don’t claim to have a fixed structure when I begin. The process often emerges from relationships, from encounters that are unplanned and relational rather than theoretical.

In Beirut, for example, I was on a residency and wandered into a flea market. I discovered people selling pirated CDs—music that immediately resonated with my family history, with certain memories and forms of intimacy. I started buying them, listening, and becoming immersed in their textures.

I wanted to dig deeper, so I began asking to meet people connected to this music. That’s how I encountered Sharif Sehnaoui, a major figure in experimental Arab music. Our collaboration wasn’t premeditated. It grew from a shared curiosity, from exchange.

Initially, I imagined turning this into a fiction film. But as time passed, the experience itself—the process of encountering, listening, being present—became more important than the film. I realized that what I’m often working on is not the artwork itself, but the conditions through which an experience takes shape.

My approach isn’t about mastering form or composing in a classical sense. It’s about allowing relationships and intuitions to generate meaning. The work is the constellation that forms around those points of contact.

In The Whispering of Ghosts (2018), shot in Algeria, you work through slowness, spatial tension, and memory. How did returning to Algeria shape your sense of place? What ghosts—personal, colonial, sonic—were you listening for in that landscape?

Returning to Algeria was layered with emotional and historical resonance. The land itself carries echoes: of colonial violence, of migration, of family stories that are rarely told in full. I wasn’t seeking clarity. I was trying to feel the opacity of the place.

There’s a specific weight in the air there, something you can’t articulate but that you feel in your body. The pace of the film, its slowness, reflects that. It’s a way of listening to the landscape, not just through sound but through atmosphere, through vibration.

I was listening for ghosts—not in the spectral sense, but in the material sense. Ghosts as remnants, as structures that continue to inform how we move, how we see, how we remember. In Algeria, those ghosts are everywhere: in the architecture, in the silence between conversations, in the landscapes that hold unspeakable histories.

Works like Brutal Family Roots and Hara!! wrestle with social textures and sonic atmospheres, often drawing from peripheral voices. What role does rupture or disruption play in your approach to sound?

Rupture is fundamental. It interrupts flow. It breaks habits of listening. In both Brutal Family Roots and Hara!!, I wanted to unsettle the sonic field, not for its own sake, but to expose something that lies underneath: a history, a violence, a dissonance that has been buried.

Disruption makes space. It cracks open the surface and allows something else to emerge—something raw, something unresolved. That’s the terrain I’m interested in exploring. It’s not about aestheticizing chaos but about revealing the fractures that already exist.

Peripheral voices, overlooked sounds—these are sites of power and resistance. By amplifying them, or by introducing sonic rupture, I try to reconfigure the listener’s position. To move from passive reception to active confrontation.

You once referenced Booba’s Temps Mort as a formative influence, a gesture that draws a through-line between subcultural archive and contemporary art. How do you view the political potential of referencing popular or underground culture within institutional contexts?

Referencing Temps Mort was a way of acknowledging lineage, of saying that my artistic formation didn’t emerge from the academy but from the streets, from pirated CDs, from lyrics that spoke to dislocation, struggle, and identity.

When this kind of reference enters institutional space, it creates tension—and that’s productive. It forces the institution to contend with forms of knowledge and expression that exist outside its canon. It shifts what is considered legitimate, what is considered worthy.

There is something political in that gesture. But that doesn’t mean I set out to make political art. People sometimes ask me, “Are you a political artist?” and I say no. I don’t make political art in the sense of having a declared agenda. What I make comes from my personal experience, from the subjects I care about—many of which are social, historical, and therefore political.

When you set out to make explicitly political art, you risk becoming institutionalized, absorbed into a system of ideological representation. That’s not my approach. I prefer to let the politics emerge from the work itself: through context, through form, through the people and stories it engages with.
Yes, my work is political, but not in a programmatic way. It’s political in how it navigates systems, how it pays attention to lives and places that are often overlooked. It’s about the conditions we live in, how we relate to one another, how we resist, how we care. That, to me, is the deeper politics of art.

At the same time, I work both inside and outside institutions. I don’t depend on institutional validation, but I also don’t reject it. For example, I’m currently involved in a project that gives children in my neighborhood access to video equipment. I’m also part of a collective working with Sahab Museum on a virtual space.

This movement between inside and outside feels necessary. Visibility within institutions can be useful, but it’s not the endpoint. The real work happens in the spaces where life and practice intersect: in the streets, in collectives, in communities. That’s where I want to stay grounded.

All works courtesy the artist, Kamel Mennour Paris/London

Mohamed Bourouissa, La Fenêtre, 2005. Série Périphérique 2005-2008. Color Photography © ADAGP Mohamed Bourouissa
Mohamed Bourouissa, Why Did I Choose to Make Music, 2025. Live Performance with the participation of: Lou-Adriana Bouziouane, Le Diouck, Mehdi Anede, Cynthia Léon, Diong-Keba Tacu, Rachid-Amir Moudir, Mushy, Christophe Jacques. Thanks to Simon-Élie Galibert, Yumi Fujitani, Matière Noire and T2G. Courtesy of Pinault Collection. Photography Raphaël Massart.
Mohamed Bourouissa, Why Did I Choose to Make Music, 2025. Live Performance with the participation of: Lou-Adriana Bouziouane, Le Diouck, Mehdi Anede, Cynthia Léon, Diong-Keba Tacu, Rachid-Amir Moudir, Mushy, Christophe Jacques. Thanks to Simon-Élie Galibert, Yumi Fujitani, Matière Noire and T2G. Courtesy of Pinault Collection. Photography Raphaël Massart.
Mohamed Bourouissa, La Butte, 2007. Série Périphérique 2005-2008. Color Photography © ADAGP Mohamed Bourouissa
Mohamed Bourouissa, Le Hall, 2007-2008. Série Périphérique 2005-2008. Color Photography © ADAGP Mohamed Bourouissa
Mohamed Bourouissa, La République, 2006. Série Périphérique 2005-2008. Color Photography © ADAGP Mohamed Bourouissa
Mohamed Bourouissa, La Main, 2006. Série Périphérique 2005-2008. Color Photography © ADAGP Mohamed Bourouissa
Mohamed Bourouissa Généalogie de la violence, Extrait de la vidéo, 2024
Mohamed Bourouissa Généalogie de la violence, Extrait de la vidéo, 2024
Mohamed Bourouissa Généalogie de la violence, Extrait de la vidéo, 2024
Mohamed Bourouissa, Le Téléphone, 2006. Série Périphérique 2005-2008. Color Photography © ADAGP Mohamed Bourouissa
Mohamed Bourouissa, Why Did I Choose to Make Music, 2025. Live Performance with the participation of: Lou-Adriana Bouziouane, Le Diouck, Mehdi Anede, Cynthia Léon, Diong-Keba Tacu, Rachid-Amir Moudir, Mushy, Christophe Jacques. Thanks to Simon-Élie Galibert, Yumi Fujitani, Matière Noire and T2G. Courtesy of Pinault Collection. Photography Raphaël Massart.
Mohamed Bourouissa, Why Did I Choose to Make Music, 2025. Live Performance with the participation of: Lou-Adriana Bouziouane, Le Diouck, Mehdi Anede, Cynthia Léon, Diong-Keba Tacu, Rachid-Amir Moudir, Mushy, Christophe Jacques. Thanks to Simon-Élie Galibert, Yumi Fujitani, Matière Noire and T2G. Courtesy of Pinault Collection. Photography Raphaël Massart.

Candela Capitán and Paul McCarthy

Posted on 16 de April de 202519 de April de 2025 by nr

NR 19 Detour · 2025
Published · Print Page 063

Feature · Candela Capitán and Paul McCarthy
Words · Candela Capitán and Paul McCarthy In Conversation mediated by Andrea Bratta

Where Does a Body End

What happens when a person becomes a product? Legendary performer Paul McCarthy and new-media heroine Candela Capitán come together to dissect their work—through a series of detours on Instagram addiction, endless spinning, streaming, TikTok aesthetics., abjection, and the shifting role of irony in art and life.

Candela Capitan Do you remember I called you once?

Paul McCarthy Sure, I remember, you wanted to come here –and I said: “Yeah, sure, if you want to come, come!” Where are you now?

CC I’m in Barcelona!

PMC I think my favorite city is Barcelona—though maybe Berlin is up there too. I really love Barcelona. I was actually supposed to work on a theater piece there. It was planned to take place in both Barcelona and Madrid, but it ended up falling through. We were working on a project called A&E, Adolf & Eva, Adam & Eve and were so sure it was going to happen. It felt like everything was in motion, but then, last year, it all just collapsed. Nothing came of it. There are still some conversations happening—phone calls back and forth—but these things take so long. Once something falls apart and stays dormant for six months or more, you start to wonder if it’ll ever come back.

CC It’s so difficult to get projects approved in Spain..

PMC And it’s always a little bit painful when something doesn’t go through, who knows, maybe we’ll manage to do it.

CC Regardless, It’s such a pleasure for me to be speaking with you! I’m a huge fan. I come from the world of choreography, but I’m deeply connected to performance art. My work draws from movement, blending elements of choreography with aspects of performance. I think that’s part of why I’m so drawn to your work – I feel like we share some common ground.

PMC I actually know of your work through Instagram. It’s interesting – with Instagram, you end up following so many people. I’ll admit, I’m a bit addicted to it, but I find myself connecting with certain types of imagery or ideas that stand out. I think I probably started following you because something in your work felt familiar or resonated with me. I was reflecting on that recently. I have some close friends who are dancers and choreographers – some are part of troupes, while others collaborate with different groups. In performance, there’s often this natural overlap with musicians, actors, or other dancers. The lines between disciplines start to blur. A good friend of mine is Simone Forti, and with her, those lines are completely blurred. As a dancer and artist, her connections with musicians and visual artists have always been significant. Simone is often considered a dancer, but she’s had a major influence on artists across different fields. Dan Graham once told me she was a key influence on many minimalists like Robert Morris – maybe not Donald Judd, that might be a stretch – but definitely Morris, and artists like Charlemagne Palestine in the 70s. I remember seeing your piece where you keep rolling, and it made me think about repetition – the endurance of it, and how repeating something over and over carries its own weight. There’s a sense of irony in that too. I think repeating an action or a word or a sentence over and over for an extended period of time, for the viewer or the performer, it can become ironic or absurd. When I think about your work, I find myself wondering – how do you think about irony? Maybe that’s the first question. How do you approach irony in your work? In mine, I often turn a situation upside down. That gesture, I think, is a layer over a deeper subject or issue. I think repetition can also bring something up, something deeper.

CC I think my work might have less irony, or at least it feels that way. I see my performances as more serious – maybe because I tend to confront myself in ways that feel heavier. I’m not sure. It’s not necessarily political in a direct sense, but more about how I construct my pieces. That said, irony plays a big role in how I build movement. Without it, I feel like something is missing. For me, it’s a bit like that – if my work doesn’t have a sense of the uncanny, it doesn’t feel as interesting or engaging, at least for myself. I don’t know. I work a lot with the internet and how our generation’s imagination is shaped by it – how everything now revolves around social media and the way we absorb so much from being online. For me, that imaginary world isn’t entirely serious, and I feel like irony naturally becomes part of it. My work reflects that – there’s irony in the way I engage with this digital space. I was actually thinking about something else before this. How do you see our generation now? You’ve always worked with devices, screens, and technology, and I feel like I’m exploring similar ideas, but in the context of a generation that’s hyper-connected through platforms and social media. I’m curious – how do you feel about that now? How do you connect with this shift?

PMC I think, in some ways, it goes back a long time for me – to the 60s and 70s – when mediums/genres were starting to blur. There was this merging of dance, theater, music, film, art, painting, and drawing. I was lucky to be in a radical school at that time, but I was also actively seeking out the edges of things. Even from an early age, I felt like I was trying to leave something behind or break away from it. I wanted to make work using tape recorders, cameras, the motion picture, film. By the late 60s, I was already drawn to video because it offered something new. You could record for long periods, integrate sound, and immediately see what you were recording, see yourself on a monitor. At that time for me, all genres felt radical – painting, sculpture, drawing, dance, film, poetry. I was interested in minimalism, experimental film, performance, and happenings. It all converged. I did paintings flat on the ground as an action in the studio, without an audience, performance actions. I remember once, in 1967, I was assigned to make a kinetic sculpture in school, and I jumped out of a window – inspired by Yves Klein. That relationship between the body, sculpture, and action has stayed with me. Over the last 15 years, I’ve become deeply involved in video – recording, editing, collaborating. I write scripts that allow for improvisation, with key blocking moments but room to explore between. Sometimes we record for days, accumulating material that then traps me in the editing process. To answer your question about social media – I was interested but slow to engage with it directly. I never made a website or actively posted, though I followed what others were doing. Streaming fascinated me, but I felt too immersed in my ongoing projects to shift focus. The same happened with virtual reality – I was curious but hesitant, until someone asked me to create something, and I ended up making 30 VR pieces. Now, I’m obsessed with AI and work with it daily. Sometimes interests simmer until the right moment arises. Today, I’m performing, doing an action live and altering the recorded image through AI and then streaming the action through social media. I recognize the importance of social media and digital platforms – it’s not a lack of interest in what it is, but more about time and priorities. I don’t know where this dabbling in AI will end up.

CC What about galleries? Would you say their role, or importance, changed over time?

PMC I think possibly galleries are becoming obsolete. I think also in some cases, galleries are being run by people who are out of touch or placating collectors who don’t realize what is done, expressed, or formed by artists. I feel like there’s something happening that the art world isn’t fully recognizing. They’re not really interested in engaging with it creatively. During COVID, for example, galleries suddenly realized they needed to do online exhibitions. So they just hired people with technical skills – people who didn’t really get what artists are about. It became, “Give us the material, and we’ll handle it.” But artists struggle with mediums – we fuck with them, break them, and rebuild. That’s part of the process. So yes, I’m interested in how social media intersects with art.

CC I’m not really interested in AI. I’m not sure why – maybe I’ll understand it one day, but for now, it feels too digital to me. I love talking about streaming, how we connect with others through Instagram, and what’s happening on the internet. But I don’t feel very connected to digital imagery. I don’t know why.

PMC AI to me feels like a massive iceberg that we haven’t even hit yet. When I first interacted with AI images, it felt almost like a revelation – the fascination was immediate. I don’t think of it as a tool I need to train or control. I view AI more as a collaborator, and I’m not interested in the process of training it. Maybe I am training it, but that’s not my focus. What interests me is the layers, the speed, and the unpredictability of the images, the hallucination, or dreaming it produces. I’m not interested in the slick AI images, I’m more interested in distortion, blurred images. As an image maker, this speed and layering are compelling to me. A lot of my performance work is centered around creating an image, whether that’s a visual or a conceptual one – the making of an image and the effect on me being in it. Primarily it’s about the persona, entering another world. I think how I interact with AI is similar to painting and drawing. There’s a connection between drawing, painting, and how I engage with AI. Both are about creating something that evolves. The process is similar – I give it something, a prompt, an idea or a live or recorded input, and then I watch how it takes shape. There’s something in that, like watching a painting come to life, seeing the layers unfold.

CC And what about streaming, where does your interest lay in that?

PMC I’ve been really interested in that for a while now – not just in the traditional art world sense, but in how individuals, who aren’t necessarily part of the art scene, are using streaming platforms. These streamers can engage with thousands of people, creating a phenomenon that’s beyond anything we’ve seen in the art world. It’s a different kind of interaction, a new way of reaching a huge audience that doesn’t follow the traditional art world or tv and film world structures.

CC I work a lot with social media and streaming, but I’m always more focused on how these contexts are affecting my generation. I think that’s part of why I don’t connect with AI – I don’t think of my work as an image. I’ve never seen it that way, and I’m only realizing it now. Maybe it’s because I don’t create traditional paintings. I do work with visuals, but not in that final, static sense. I’ve always thought in terms of movement or action. I’m more connected with the action itself, the process, rather than just the image. I think a lot about how streaming is changing the way my generation lives. I even did a performance about this, looking at a sexual streaming platform called Chaturbate. Now I’m working on a project that focuses on the massive buildings in Asia where influencers and digital creators live and work. These huge complexes house rooms for influencers to do production, often at a very young age, and under intense pressure to produce constant content for platforms like TikTok. It’s like a hyper-production machine. They’re doing it all day long, creating content, doing advertising, and living under this very high-stakes, commercial environment.

PMC I think, you know, when it comes to mediums like streaming or AI, they’re just forms, extensions of something bigger. I’ve always been interested in video, film, and cameras, and in a way, streaming and AI are just natural extensions of that. I was drawn to media, especially film in the early 60s.

For me, performance is the core of it. The small drawings I make aren’t just images—they’re scripts. They’re a series, not singular. There could be 20 or 30 drawings in a series. They’re about what I imagine I’m doing or doing with others. The action, the performance, is the critical element, the core is always the performance. That’s what I care about the most.

I’m interested in streaming, I’m interested in video. I stopped performing in front of people in the early 80s and only did it in front of a camera. But now I’ve started performing in front of people again.

CC What made you come back to performing?

PMC I began performing and creating work with an actress and artist, Lilith Stangenberg, who’s deeply involved in theater and film. That led me into theater performance, which was something I had never done before. I wasn’t initially interested in it. Part of it was a rejection of what I thought of as traditional theater, the stage, the position of the audience. I was more drawn to the idea of performances, actions, happenings, taking place anywhere—whether in someone’s bedroom or on the street. A lot of the time, projects, work, happen because of an opportunity or coincidence, and then you dive in. That’s what happened with theatre for me. It wasn’t something I planned.

CC And why did you stop?

PMC I did it performances from 1967 to 1983. It was all within the context of the art world or the alternative art world. I did a performance in a gallery sometime in the 70s, but mostly it was in alternative spaces or my studio, or someone else’s studio. In the 80s, the art world started to change, and so did the alternative spaces. They became more like cabaret environments, where stages were built, rooms were painted black, and lights were set up. It changed performance art. It became more about entertainment performance. Many artists involved in performance in the 70s at that point checked out for different reasons. Some went off to explore other parts of life or moved to places like South America. The world was changing, and my interest started to shift too. I wasn’t as interested in performing for an audience anymore. Early on, I made work in a studio without an audience, just using a camera. I found myself going back to that original way of working—performing in front of a camera rather than an audience. I didn’t feel like I needed an audience. But now, over the past few years, and especially since 2019, I’ve been more interested in performing in front of an audience. Lilith and I did about 100 performances, ranging from two to four hours long, but only 15 of them were in front of an audience. The camera still played a central role, but I’m now more interested in engaging with an audience. Most of what I’ve done with Lilith has been done in constructed set-architectures that we’ve built, in nature, or existing buildings/houses, and always in front of cameras.

CC Now you can do it in front of a camera, but without an audience.

PMC I was thinking about your work in relation to these actions that are repetitive. There’s something about the process of standing up, rolling, then standing up and rolling again, and doing it repeatedly. What is happening within yourself, How long do you do it? I’ve made similar pieces where I’d spin for an hour. With these repetitive actions, there’s a connection or empathy that builds between the audience and the performer. It becomes a physical or emotional experience for them both.

CC What? I don’t remember this piece?

PMC Well, it’s similar to your continuous rolling piece. I spin standing up for an extended period of time, sometimes holding the camera. I did it a number of times. But when you’re rolling over and over again, do you get dizzy? Do you do it because of that sensation, dizziness, or is it about something else?

CC If you roll like i do, not spin, you don’t get dizzy. You just get super tired.

PMC It’s related to being exhausted. I know a number of actors, that before they start to perform, they spin. I do and Lilith does.

CC I do too. It’s a proper ritual.

PMC I think it’s a transition. It’s like you’re preparing for something. That spinning creates this kind of delirium, a shift—like when you stop, you’re not in the same place you were when you began. It’s a way to enter another world, a world of action, a world of performance. It’s a process of starting something new. In these A&E pieces we’ve done, Adolph Hitler and Eva Braun drank champagne in the bunker, and it seemed fitting to us that as part of the work, the performance, we should drink champagne. For me, in this case, drinking became a connection to spinning. Alcohol, in a way, loosens the brain, helps to enter a different headspace. I would drink throughout the performance, and there were times when I was quite drunk. It became a ritual, entering the next phase, the next world – a transformative one. It’s about leaving this world behind, shaking it off, and entering another space entirely. That’s what the spinning and drinking do—they prepare you to transition. I do think at times though, the drinking made me stupid, a true lush, a drunk.

CC My practice has a lot of that too, but maybe not exactly rolling like this. I think what I do is put my dancers—or myself—into this in-between world, this bridge world. It’s about preparing to enter another space, another reality. It’s that same kind of transition, that same ritual of moving from one world to another, whether it’s through action, movement, or setting up the right conditions for a shift. It’s about creating that moment of transformation, where you’re not quite in one place anymore, but not yet fully in the next. It’s that preparation, that threshold, where the work really begins.

PMC Do you usually work with the same dancers?

CC I work with six dancers, generally, but It depends on the specific action required or the type of performance. Some dancers are more comfortable with certain movements, while others aren’t. For the performance you mentioned earlier, The Death at The Club, some dancers were willing to stay on the floor for 40 minutes, and others were not. There’s that balance between what they want to do and what the performance requires. The rules I set are flexible—dancers always want to perform perfectly, they want to push themselves, but they also know their limits. For me, the idea of working with different types of dancers or bodies is intriguing. It’s less about perfect technique and more about the expression of movement and action, and how bodies respond to these rituals and transitions. It’s about pushing boundaries and seeing how different kinds of bodies engage with that process.

PMC Did you rehearse for this one?

CC No, no rehearsal. We just did it.

PMC So, when do you rehearse something?

CC For example, have you seen my piece with five dancers in pink? Yeah, for that one, the choreography is like a score. It has 17 figures, and the choreography is also written out. For that, I need to rehearse because they all perform the same movements, and I rehearse for months.

PMC Do you rehearse for months as a group or individually, or both, perhaps?

CC First, I always follow the same structure where I spend about one and a half to two years working on a project, but the project has different timings. Initially, I do a small piece with myself, a performance with just me, and then I do a second performance with the same concept but for a larger scenario. So in each project, there are two performances: one that I do alone, where I’m in the studio by myself, and then I invite more people to join.

PMC Once a performance is completed, does it become a piece that you can perform at different locations?

CC Yeah, I finalize the project, and then I move it. I think I’m always doing the same—I don’t like to change my projects. I move them like a dance company would.

PMC That is something that exists more in dance, in music, and in theater. But you don’t see it as often in performance art. The idea of creating a piece and repeating it in different locations isn’t as common. In performance art, you usually do it once—maybe twice or three times—and that’s it. In my case, the subject or character carries through. For example, I had a piece where I played a sea captain. I performed it four times, but it changed each time. It was never the same, but each time I was still that sea captain. It’s similar to shooting a film. If you film over 30 days, you’re that character for 30 days, but the actions shift as the narrative progresses. In A&E, Adolf and Eva’s performances would change based on the scenario. One time, they’re on a picnic; another time, they’re coming home after dinner. But certain actions were repeated in every performance. Those repetitions were rituals, their way of being. The surroundings and context would shift, repetition became critical, and I realized how much that reflects daily life. Every morning, I have coffee. The day changes, but the coffee is constant. These repetitions are part of life. I see that in my work too—there’s a similarity, a thread that carries through. I repeat it because it feels like I’ve found something I need to continue exploring. I’ve noticed that some elements in my work never seem to end. They’re internal, personal things that I keep coming back to.

CC I love when someone repeats the same thing over and over, but each time with a different perspective. It’s like they’re driven by these obsessions, you know? They keep exploring the same idea forever, but actually not quite.

PMC I can see things I’m doing now that trace back to 40 years ago. Even though a lot has changed and evolved, certain themes persist. I remember reading a while back about the death drive. This idea that certain traumas stay with you forever, certain issues you just keep repeating and repeating. The nature of the death drive is that you never escape it. It’s an addiction, and I don’t think I want to escape it.

Are you working on something new right now?

CC I’m working on a new piece, something to do with the subject of cows.

PMC Cows?

CC Not real ones. What I mean is, I’m analyzing these companies in Asia that collaborate with young influencers, and I’m connecting this with hyper-production and cows. Hyper-production of videos, streamings, content for social media. These companies contact young people to create a massive amount of content for social media platforms. And I’m drawing a connection between this hyper-production of digital content and the hyper-production of milk from cows.

PMC Are you engaging one of those companies directly? Using them?

CC No, not directly, it’s more of a territory of inquiry, a theme, in relation to younger generations, especially gen alpha.

PMC Will you use social media as part of it? Will the performance exist on social media?

CC I always create two scenarios: one for social media and one for the stage or the physical space, simultaneously. When I do it, it’s live —streamed through a platform or website. I’m kind of building two spaces simultaneously. It depends on the context. For example, in my last performance, Solas, we streamed it on a sexual streaming platform. This created two types of audiences: the real audience present in the performance space and the audience accessing the platform to see porn. On the screen, there’s a chat interface, so what’s fascinating is that the audience in the physical space and the audience on the platform chat about the performance simultaneously. For those not in the room, they receive the feed through the platform. The number of people varies depending on where I stream. For instance, on Instagram, I could have around 1k viewers. But on Chaturbate, the audience tends to be smaller because they quickly realize it’s a performance, not what they expected, so they might only stay for a short time. The platform choice really influences the type of engagement.

PMC What does the use of social media in your work represent? What is it about?

CC It’s about different things, depending on the platform. For instance, with the sexual streaming platform, the focus was on connecting two kinds of audiences. One audience came to watch dance, while the other came to consume porn—though some might not even realize they were engaging with porn. It depends on the project. For example, my next performance will involve TikTok because the imagery of my new piece aligns more with TikTok’s aesthetic. On TikTok, there’s a lot of streaming with bizarre content, like 1,000 dogs in a pool or Asian girls doing nails for 20 hours straight.

PMC I mean, there’s something about the subject you’re choosing to work with—these influencers in Asia, right? Are you trying to understand what they’re like? Or were you saying that, as humans, they essentially become the product?

CC Yeah, exactly—they become the product.

PMC I guess that’s what I’m exploring. The work I’m making seems to grapple with this proposition, though it’s not always straightforward. There’s an interest in these influencers, but I might be looking at it differently. Maybe it ties back to our earlier discussion about irony—or something close to that. But I think my focus is less on social media itself and more on something visceral. It’s about the body, the physical, and its abject existence. These mediums—social media, influencers—are interesting to me in terms of their effect on the body and consciousness. What’s happening when someone becomes a product? What happens to their body and their sense of self? That said, my work tends to circle back to the visceral, the physicality of existence itself. So while the phenomena of influencers and streamers intrigue me, it’s not just about them—it’s about the deeper, more primal aspects of existence. The subject might seem futuristic, but for me, it’s tied to something deeply physical and human.

CC I love your answer, and it was extremely interesting speaking to you. You’re so focused—almost obsessed—with the importance of the body itself, and that’s always been so fascinating to me. Your work is so important to me! Should you ever manage to do a project in Barcelona, or even Europe, and need a performer, I’d be happy to do it!

PMC Let’s stay in touch.

In order of appearance

Paul McCarthy with Lilith Stangenberg. A&E, Santa Anita Drawing Session, 2022. © Paul McCarthy. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photography by Alex Stevens.
Paul McCarthy with Lilith Stangenberg. A&E, Adolf and Eva, Dead End Hole (Picnic), 2021. KODE Lysverket Art Museum, Bergen, Norway. © Paul McCarthy. Courtesy the artist, Kode Art Museum, Peder Lund, and Hauser & Wirth. Photography by Alex Stevens
Paul McCarthy with Lilith Stangenberg. A&E VR experiment Adolf and Eva, 2019-2021. © Paul McCarthy. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Khora Contemporary.
Paul McCarthy with Lilith Stangenberg. A&E, Adolf and Eva, Adam & Eve, Picnic in the Garden of Eden, 2021. © Paul McCarthy. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Alex Stevens.
Candela Capitán, SOLAS. Courtesy the artist. Photography by Daniel Cao
Candela Capitán, MOLOKO VELLOCET, 2024. Courtesy the artist.
Paul McCarthy with Lilith Stangenberg, A&E, Adolf and Eva, Adam & Eve, Santa Anita Drawing Session, 2022 © Paul McCarthy. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.. Photography by Alex Stevens.
Candela Capitán, The Death at The Club (in 45min). Courtesy the artist.
Candela Capitán, GRANJAS HUMANAS. Courtesy the artist.

Daniel Arnold and Donna Ferrato

Posted on 16 de April de 202519 de April de 2025 by nr

NR 19 Detour · 2025
Published · Print Page 144

Feature · Daniel Arnold and Donna Ferrato
Words · Daniel Arnold and Donna Ferrato In Conversation mediated by Andrea Bratta

Dealing with the World as a Collectible Surface

Chance and love—two words that perfectly capture the encounter between photographers Donna Ferrato and Daniel Arnold. In the warmth of Donna’s NYC apartment, the two friends-photographers sit down for a candid conversation. Through the literal lens that unites them—a camera one—they reflect on their lives, the serendipity of their meeting on a summer morning walk, weaving through the intersections of love and lust, the compulsion to document, and the nature of seeing—and being seen.

Donna Ferrato Do you remember how we met? I saw the wildest couple walking down the street—the man seemed completely entranced by the woman, who had this almost ethereal glow, like a firefly in daylight, surrounded by a rainbow aura. I sat with my dear friend, Alex Paterson Jones, a brilliant designer. We were a little high, a little giddy, basking in the warm air. We spotted the man’s camera and I called out to them, Hey, photographer! Hey! I wanted to pull them in, drawn by the feeling that something was stirring, something electric. We needed them inside with us. So what did we say?

Daniel Arnold I looked up, slightly confused, and you told me to get up there! Kay and I had just been at the diner around the corner, and I was walking her to her studio a few blocks away in this totally ridiculous way, like a big cartoon strut, twisting together as I held her at the waist.

DF I can spot someone strange miles away. And, as expected..

DA We were deep in our own rhythm when we suddenly heard a woman call down to us—”Hey photographer!” We looked up, and she said, Get up here. We were feeling impulsive with nowhere particular to be, we just looked at each other and went, Okay, okay. And so, we headed upstairs.

DF You get into the building, you know it’s a little odd, you’re going up the stairs, it’s kind of dark, there’s the woman from the fire escape calling you in the hallway. Keep coming, Come on, come on in there, one more flight. And then they get into the house, the two of them. It’s like we started dancing around each other trying to figure out where we were.

DA The “what is this, who is that dance.”

DF You had a Leica, right? So I knew he was a photographer. I wanted you to know straight away that as soon as you stepped foot into my house, you could take pictures of anything you wanted, because I would have been taking your picture whenever I wanted. I guess that gave us a direction to follow in starting to understand each other, and that’s how it all sort of started, but still, you were very shy about it in the beginning.

DA I wouldn’t say shy, necessarily. Just.. It was all super impulsive—we walked in totally blind. I was just feeling it out, taking the temperature of the room. Not in a hesitant way, I was definitely up for it, but more like, Okay… what’s going on here? Where am I? Who is this person? Can I trust her?

At some point, I noticed more than one copy of a Donna Ferrato book lying around, and it clicked. Oh… wait. This is Donna Ferrato’s place. I knew your work—I was familiar with it—but I had no idea what you actually looked like. I mean, I live in New York, but that doesn’t mean I know everything. I just knew you were a big deal.

DF You didn’t know how friendly I was?

DA I just had to walk up the fire escape to find out! It’s not that I found you unfriendly, I just didn’t know anything about you, the human. And now we’re old friends.

DF We had a ton of pastries, plenty of good stuff to eat, and we just settled in. Then he told me his name, and weirdly enough, I remembered an assistant I had a couple of years back mentioning him—said they were friends. That caught my attention. At the time, I didn’t really know Daniel Arnold’s work. I had looked him up once and thought, hmm… interesting, but it was totally outside what I was following back then. Over the years, though, I kept seeing more of his stuff, and we ended up following each other on Instagram, sort of orbiting each other from a distance. But in that moment, when he said his name—when I realized who he was—it suddenly hit me. Oh. This is something special.

DA Perfect coincidence.

DF And your girlfriend, Kay, she is so whimsical. She doesn’t even realize she has so much strength, she’s like shards of glass, yet there’s something so powerful in her being. She has experienced so much in life: She’s young, but she’s also ancient, and suddenly she was there, showing me who she was. I was on my knees, I tell you. I was so humbled by her.

DA Oh, she knows. And yeah, you were clearly kind of intoxicated by the whole thing. It was great—just the energy of it, the time we spent together. I actually have pictures of you taking pictures of her. And the pictures of us—I don’t know if I ever showed you—but we had them up in the apartment for a while. I had to take them down because of some work we did, but for a time, they were hanging like a mobile from the light fixture. There was just something about them—the way you put it all together, the text on the back, the tape—it turned into this beautiful object. So we let it spin.

DF You gotta show that to me. This is what I like about you, Daniel—you’ve got this very cozy, straightforward vibe. Just a simple man, you know? No pretentious talk about photography, no blah, blah, blah—just the real thing. And I like your life, at least from what I’ve seen. Never been to your place, though. Maybe one day, who knows?

DA We met this spring, it was April, right?

DF Yes. Makes you think of how chance works. Speaking of working, I think we never speak about work, per se.

DA It’s interesting—leading up to this conversation for what, two months? I’ve been quietly, maybe a little neurotically, thinking about it—thinking about my work in relation to yours. I knew the magazine was interested in your Love & Lust series, and over the past month or two, we’ve talked a bit about intimacy—how it plays into both your work and mine. It’s been an interesting new angle, one I wouldn’t have necessarily applied to my own work if not for overthinking this conversation. It made me reflect on how love and lust show up in what I do—not just in the experience of intimacy but in the pursuit of it. And honestly, you could probably take that lens—Love, Lust, Intimacy—and use it to break down any two people, because really, what deeper common ground is there?

DF Than love? Let me tell you something: The majority of people don’t really carry the lust with whoever they love. It’s very rare.

DA Yeah, I had a long thought about this today on my way here. In my model of the world, which I am learning isn’t exactly like yours, lust is really just seeking love—whether it’s intentional or not. Lust is an avenue to love. And I think that, in a healthy, long-term way, love has to go looking for lust too. It’s like this snake consuming itself—lust leads to love, and then love needs to seek lust again. Because, you know, lust is of the body, and love, I think, ends up being more of the mind. It’s a choice, a sacrifice, an agreement. And I think part of maintaining that agreement, part of keeping it going, is that you have to go in pursuit of lust. That makes me think not only of my relationship but also of my work. It connects in a way I hadn’t fully considered before.

DF Without lust, there’s no human sexuality.

DA But I also think that lust is not just about sexuality.

DF To me, lust equates sexual life force. That’s why women’s empowerment and liberation is extremely important. Our lust and pleasure drives are ours to balance. There was a time when men could control women’s drive. No more... Women’s desires can’t be confined and of service to men anymore.

DA Wouldn’t you say that lust can also be expressed elsewhere? When I think about it in terms of work, I kind of see myself in it. Remember when we were talking about your dad and how he wanted—he wanted to take pictures so badly. At the end of the day, he’d stick his camera in the windows of strangers’ houses just to keep taking pictures. I totally get that, that first intense lust for taking pictures. It’s like, you need more, to have more, to capture more. And then, at some point, you move past that. Even though there’s still a muscle memory of it, you go from that intense lust—where you can’t go to bed because you need more pictures—to a place of long-term commitment, where you’ve got to search for that lust again, something that keeps you wanting to work, to keep putting your camera through the window. It’s interesting to think about how that evolution works. And funny, thinking about how the two—lust and love, work and life—fit together.

DF We dovetail together very well. And that all, I think, comes from our fathers. Both of our fathers were brilliant men who both suffered a lot. And we, the children, have suffered too.

DA Well, I’ve got to say, having been exposed to that in my life—in a sort of defanged, up-close, practical way—I also grew up in a world where experiencing the very high and the very low together just feels so natural to me.I think it’s kind of a more honest, more permissive relationship with the world. Yeah, of course I’m depressed sometimes; Of course, I’m having a month where I can barely drag myself out of bed. It’s part of it. And the highs can be just as extreme. You can go too far in either direction.

DF There’s a lot of conversation these days about how, especially the newer generation, seems to have less of a sex drive and a more complicated relationship with pleasure in all its forms. It’s not just about sex and desire, but also about how people relate to their extremes, whether that’s lust or pleasure. The suffering, you know, the human suffering, the cruelty, the barbarism, and the lack of empathy—it’s all killing our sex drive. Where’s the love? We don’t see it in front of us anywhere. It also ties into the relationship with one’s work and the enjoyment of it.

DA What does making work look like for you, nowadays, Donna? What do you shoot?

DF I channel, or rather shoot, my rage through other women’s bodies, women I meet and photograph. Even with Kay’s body that day, when she just took her skirt down in the middle of the house—it’s a place where women come to express what they’re going through, their fears, their rage, and they feel comfortable doing so. It’s been like that for 30 years. But when she did that, capturing that moment—that’s what my work is all about. Being with her in that moment and witnessing it. It was incredible.

DA Was she showing you the tattoo on her back?

DF Yes. It was the tattoo. Then she showed me what the hospitals had done during her surgeries. That was really powerful. But this is what I do all the time. I’m also working on stories about domestic violence. I mean, if I put the word out there, inviting women who’ve been through hell to come and stay with me, they come.

DA How does that part happen?

DF It’s a very private and delicate process. Sometimes they come stay with me for a week or two. I want women to come here and live with me. I feel a deep kinship and trust with these women, like we’re all part of the same story. If they bring their child, that’s fine. If they bring a kitten, that’s fine. It all just flows from one thing to another. I always tell them, “From now on, you photograph me too, because I’m going through hell, and I want the world to see it—just like I’ll be photographing you.” I know I can be intense. Did I scare you a little when we met the first time?

DA No, I wasn’t scared. Maybe cautious, but that’s just how I am, despite running up the stairs. I’m observant. But not scared.

DF Good, good. So you feel safe with me. You know, we’re alike—that’s what we realized today. That’s why we were also so late for the interview. Sorry guys.

DA We caught a spark of friendship from the jump, but we never managed to take the time to sit and swap lore. So we had to take a little extra time rolling out the good stories.

DF Family, craziness, and being honest about it is what brought us closer.

DA Gotta be honest! My idyllic Midwestern beginnings worked like a force field, something I carried with me that eventually had to be broken. I’ve never wanted blinders, but it takes a while to figure out which parts of your life are fantasy. I’ve always pursued reality, always been curious about chaos. And strangely, I think that raw, unfiltered living–though it might feel crazy–it ends up giving you a more grounded existence.

DF Does that have something to do with finding love in your life?

DA Yeah, definitely. That young, idealistic love-seeker in me had to be dismantled—not by me, though. I can’t take credit for that. I just threw myself hard against a lot of brick walls and learned the hard way that Disney life wasn’t available to me. At first, I had that naïve phase where I wanted to turn everyone into the love of my life, for the rest of my life—which, let’s be real, is a tough dream to bring to New York. Then, for seven, eight, maybe nine years, I swung completely in the other direction. I told myself, “No one can have me.” I poured everything into work, compulsively, obsessively. And it delivered. At some point, I realized I was experiencing the feeling of being in love—but alone. Not in love with myself, just in love. Chemically. I was consumed by work, by what I was putting in and getting back. It felt just like love.

DF Amazing. You know, in that way, we’re total opposites. When I came to New York, everything felt possible. I could find love easily and work like a beast at the same time—doing my own projects while hustling like a little street rat, picking up assignments with local downtown newspapers. It was all within reach. I was constantly throwing myself into relationships, wild love affairs, sneaking into the craziest clubs—Paddles, Chateau 19—dressing up, playing with men, making everything part of the experience. That’s how Love&Lust came together, all tangled together in the thrill of it. Photographing swingers, going to orgies, meeting Elizabeth and Bengt.

DA You’re the cautionary tale! I’m kidding, but there’s such a low hanging metaphor-microcosm here, with you swinging off the fire escape inviting me, a stranger, into your home, and me coming up and being cautious, and you wondering if maybe I’m afraid!

DF Here you were, with your girlfriend, and me begging you to take pictures.

DA Think about the way we work. It’s very telling. I have a much more cautious, guarded relationship with the world. You dive in deep, right up to someone’s belly button while they’re in the middle of having sex. Meanwhile, I’m slipping by unnoticed, catching a shot on the street without anyone even realizing I’m there. I’m gone before they can say hello. And I think both approaches have their own truth. They seem, to me, opposite expressions of the same itch—just different personalities finding their own way of coping, dealing with the world as a collectible surface. What I do on the street—while it’s what I’m publicly known for—has also been my education. I had this insatiable desire to document, to collect. Coming to this city with my little Milwaukee mentality, I felt like I needed to take everything home with me. That desire propelled me through an education I didn’t even realize was happening. At first, I didn’t know how to use the camera—I just pointed it at things I wanted. But as dissatisfaction with that grew, I learned. The camera became an extension of my body; I know it inside and out now. And along with that technical evolution, there’s always been the internal work—the work around my family, my home, my relationships. Even though that’s more private, I approach it with the same intensity. Just as you shot your domestic violence work, I document my own home in that same deep, personal way.

DF You see, that’s beautiful—truly beautiful.

DA It’s been a way to make sense of the early hiccups in a relationship, when you don’t fully know where the other person stands. My absent-minded, work-obsessed way of being could have easily felt like neglect, like not caring enough. But I had to point it out—look at how I live my life, look at the time, energy, and attention I pour into this. The three cameras on my desk next to the bed, the way I treat our existence as something worth keeping, collecting, studying. It’s not detachment—it’s devotion, just in my own language.

DF To be able to share a life with someone who understands and connects with this, it’s a beautiful thing.

DA When I think about it in relation to your work—the sex, the domestic violence, the big headline stories like Donna Ferrato—it’s obviously a different subject matter. I’m not documenting violence or abuse, but still, thinking about it alongside what you do gives me a new perspective on my own work. I’ve cultivated this relationship with my home where I can be completely in it, fully present and lovingly invested, yet still maintain an outsider’s perspective—feels meaningful. It allows me to step back and say, this matters, we need to keep this. I had such a juicy thought about this. When we were talking before the interview—yeah, the story of your dad. She told me about her father, this compulsive, insatiable photographer, always reaching for the camera, always capturing. Sticking the lens through a window at night, photographing everything, every moment.

DF You know, sharing these things with people—especially family—creates a bond like no other. I have a relationship with my ex-husband, Johnny. He’s been through everything with my parents, my brothers, and me. The street is just the surface. Home is where everything truly unfolds, where you see the raw, unfiltered truth. That’s where the real shit happens.

DA I don’t want to over-tell your story, but your dad experienced something profound—sitting in his home as an old man, watching his betrayed wife destroy all the work he had ever made. We call that a tragedy. A triumph for your mother, a tragedy for your father. But in that moment, I also thought—maybe it’s perfect. Because it clarifies the real core value of it all. You take away the work, and at first, it feels like erasure, like his life has been undone. But because he made that work. Because he cultivated that part of his mind and arranged his life around it. He lived in a way that can’t be erased. Those pictures existed because he saw, thought, and engaged with the world in a certain way. And that—his relationship with the world—means so much more than any legacy ever could, more than any proof ever could. It was his life. It was the world. Having all your work disappear, it’d be heartbreaking—but only for a moment. The life that created it, the experiences and state of mind behind it, can never be taken away.

DF Think of the Palisades—through the fires, through the loss. Everything is dust to dust. We’re not in control. Photographers, filmmakers, musicians—losing everything they’ve ever created. But they still have themselves.

DA It might be an insensitive time to think this, but there is a version of losing everything that might actually be a gift.

DF It’s about resistance. So many are just waiting to see what happens—but if you’ve been paying attention, you already know. We’re breathless, always bracing for the worst. Without collective action, we’ll all end up like Metropolis—faceless drones, marching back and forth, stripped of individuality. In fact, we may already be there. Resistance is all we have left. And somehow, we have to build it together.

DA Well yeah, you said something a little while ago—what can you do to be good? You be of service. You bother to see who’s around you and you do what you can to help. When we’re at risk of becoming drones, that’s a powerful guiding light, even without revolutionary upheaval. That’s one of the great things about New York, especially for photographers. You can’t help but tune into the idea that being of service is everything—it’s the way out of any darkness. Maybe that’s naive, maybe it’s not enough for what’s coming. But it feels like the right place to start, community. It connects you to your humanity in a sort of smelling salts way. Wakes you up.

DF Build relationships. In the subways, they say, Don’t be someone else’s subway story. But the truth is, I am the story. I’ve been creating and telling these stories for a long time—through my own lens, my own voice. My father used to say, If it wasn’t for you, Donna, men would still be getting away with beating their wives. You showed the world how ugly it is. You made men feel guilty—at least for a while. Who knows? Do you think New York still has its own creative language?

DA New York is a place where, no matter when you show up, you always feel like you just missed it. There’s so much I missed, that I’ve come to fetishize. But the creative language of the city—it transcends generations. I think New York does something to people. Whether it’s meaningful—-or getting better or worse, I’m not sure—but it taps into something deep.There’s an undeniable thread through hundreds of years—people who come here and fall into the same obsessive relationship with the city, trying to articulate their own special connection. When I found out Leaves of Grass was about walking around Manhattan, looking at the people, I went nuts. It’s so far back, it’s not even photography. It just feels like such profound time travel to find it all alive in myself. New York still has that essence. Being in this place, in the mess of people making their mythology—it’s like a constant. It hits people in a way that’s traceable through time, and it doesn’t change that much. You really feel impermanence pressed on your throat here. Every store, every restaurant is built on the ghost of 500 others, and you look away for a month and there’s an entirely new city. Everything is so fleeting. It makes you want to catch every face, every train, to hold onto the moment. It intensifies the instinct to value the passing moment because everything moves so fast, and you’re confronted constantly with your impermanence and your insignificance. My story is as good as anybody else’s, because I can see we’re all going to end up erased. So whatever, might as well enjoy the ride.

DF I think that’s what it is about New York—it’s always had this sense embedded in it, even before this feeling became so widespread.

DA Yeah. It’s a very New York thing that has infected the world. We shouldn’t be surprised –we’ve been trying to infect them forever.

In order of appearance

Donna Ferrato, Daniel Arnold & Kay Kasparhauser, 2024
Donna Ferrato, Swingers So, CA 1999
Donna Ferrato, Studio 54, 1980
Donna Ferrato, Studio 54 Poppers, 1980
Daniel Arnold
Daniel Arnold
Donna Ferrato, Kay Kasparhauser, 2024
Donna Ferrato, Kay Kasparhauser 2024
Donna Ferrato, Dad Open Heart Surgery. 2008

Joel Meyerowitz

Posted on 14 de April de 202519 de April de 2025 by nr

NR 19 Detour · 2025
Published · Print Page 118

Feature · Joel Meyerowitz
Words · Sara van Bussel

Memory, 35mm

Considered to be the pioneer of color photography, Joel Meyerowitz (1938) discusses his artistic path, his transition from painting to photography, the will of capturing every single aspect of reality through art and the picture he wishes he had taken but didn’t. This interview offers profound insights into Joel Meyerowitz’s artistic journey and the history of photography as a medium, delving into the impact of the practice on his personal life and on art in general.

Sara van Bussel You have a long lasting career, and your practice is very rich, with works that span from portraits, to street photography, to landscape, even reportage (911 memorial series). If you had to describe the single thing that they all have in common, what would it be? How would you describe your gaze, in toto?

Joel Meyerowitz I would say that my overall and general way of looking at the world is curiosity.

I am interested in things that have photographic problems at their heart, such as, how does one find invisibility on the street, so that one could be free enough to make interesting pictures out of the fragmentary conditions that form contemporary urban life. But I also ask the questions: what is a portrait? Who is it of? How does one go about making it, or a landscape, or a still life? How does one take on a tragedy the scale of ground zero, the 9/11 destruction of the towers? How does a single person do a reportage on something as big as that?

So I think all along questions about the essential nature of the medium of photography have been what has motivated me to continue searching and responding. If I hadn’t had that kind of open heartedness about the medium itself and I made the same kind of street pictures over and over again for 60 years I probably would have run out of energy after 10 years. Because when you look at the history of photography many great photographers had merely 10 years more or less of active dynamic connection to the medium and then moved along. So for some reason this dynamic medium gave me an opportunity to reframe the question for myself so that I could stay interested.

SVB In the documentary La peau des Rues directed by Philippe Jamet, you talk about how the world of advertisement changes the perception of reality: shaping a fictitious one, tailor made to the consumer. I am fascinated by this idea of reality in general: is a captured reality more ‘true’ than a constructed one? Is picking a fragment out of a scene from daily life less staged? What is in fact, ‘’truth’’ in photography?

JM There are photographers who use a kind of mise en scène to make their work. They create an environment, whether they build it or they use a found environment and they bring actors in and they have some kind of idea about a subject that they’d like to talk about or visualize. I’ve seen quite a few of those kinds of pictures, and what always astonishes me about them is how boring they are, how flat footed, how lacking in real human connection those tableaux vivants really are. They feel staged, as hard as they try to look like the real thing in a real place they always feel like overdramatized but under imagined in some way, whereas working on the street in the tradition of Cartier Bresson, Robert Frank or even Eugene Atget in his way and my own work, these are moments of pure perception, we could say, fleeting consciousness. When I am out in the street I am watching the panoramic movement of everything on the street in front of me, and I am trying to stay loose and open in such a way that when my senses tell me that there is something emerging from the flow of life around me. Relationships that are spread across the street and have nothing to do with each other but to me, from my perspective, where I could put a frame around the piece of the street and join a couple or a trio on one side and a single person somewhere else, if I can see that there is some fleeting meaning, something that is almost indecipherable but when you see it as a finished frame it seems to hold a kind of electrical energy, because it’s reality in the moment of transcendence. This may sound a bit Buddhist and spiritual in some ways but if you do it as I have for 60 years you begin to recognize that there are truths, and they’re really your truths, they are not about truth in general. The fact that I can see certain things because they are my response mechanism, they are in a sense the flavor of my life, they are almost like poetry.

What we love about poems is that if we read the work of one writer from poem to poem there are consistencies, points of view, reverence of life, understanding of nature, a connection to the human endeavors. There is a philosophy at work, and I feel that street photography, or ‘outside in the world photography’ that relates to your own sense of what’s important, and tests that day after day with a slow building up of images, manages to bring up all of this. Over a lifetime there may be 30 or 50 images in all that carry something of who you are and how you see the world. And so it’s this kind of essential distillation of the fragmentary quality of life in the 20^th and the 21^st century that is put on film or in pixels and held there for people to look at in the future, to understand something about who that person was, who existed in that time frame, and what was it that they saw that gives us some sense of meaning about that time.

I understood that from looking at Robert Franks book ‘The Americans’, which was made up of all these fragments – 70 pictures – all of them adding up to 1 or 2 seconds of life, and yet they carry with them an incredible meaning.

SVB You talk about the idea that photography to you is capturing a time, freezing History as it unfolds in front of our eyes. As a medium, photography has immediacy as a fundamental power. A picture manages to capture something in a split second, Instead of a painting, which for example takes months if not years. How do you take this into consideration when you work? Since I know you originally started as an abstract painter, I am curious about this switch you made.

JM Re reading this question I realize that my answer to the previous one also relates to this. The only thing I would add here is that I had been a painter, an abstract expressionist painter of the second generation. I started painting in the 50’s and abstract expressionism was already a flourishing concept in painting back then, I was trying to find my way out of that when I returned to New York to take up a life as an artist. But it became clear to me once I discovered photography in 1962 that I really much preferred the reality of the everyday world, and that pushing around blue into a magenta wasn’t really enough for me to stay interested in. It was an argument that no longer had meaning for me. On the other hand photography had a major argument in it. It was not accepted as an art form, it was considered commercial or amateurish, particularly in color, so my big argument was how do I break through the wall of resistance that only black and white was art in photography and try to convince the photography world that color was equal, if not more important, than black and white.

SVB When talking about your work, it is impossible not to come across the so called ‘question of color’, since you are recognized as one of the first to use it in photography. If I understood it clearly, however, the use of color in your practice is a very logical choice, since you see photography as something that, quoting you: ‘’has to document reality to its fullest’’. Following this statement, I was wondering if you had ever considered film, since it includes all of the element that reality is able to offer: its people, their movement, color nuances. I then discovered you did indeed experiment with film, by producing the movie ‘pop’. How was this experience? What was the fundamental difference with your photographic work?

JM Working with still color film requires a commitment to making thousands of photographs, to really understand the way color works. Black and white is an abstraction and a reduction, and at the time the kind of understanding of photography was that if you pick up a camera and you press the botton what you see in front of you is just the description of what’s there. Description was and is a very important asset to photography. I felt, as a very young photographer, that if description is what photography is really all about but it’s in black and white then is losing the full emotional range and content that color brings to it.

So my first argument was to try to revise this understanding, and you know, youth is the real avant garde because you don’t really care about what came before, you may love it and learn from it but you have to push away the past in order to make way for the present. So I was looking to not only educate myself but to educate the viewers that I was able to show this work to ( limited, believe me, back then in the 60s) by advancing the sense of what color can do, in the way it describes atmosphere, and skin tones, and the local radiance of the way light bounces around off of surfaces or reflects off of corners and the floor. How variant all of these tonalities are and how artistic this really is, in ways that we don’t actually describe when we look at pictures, we search for the meaning of the picture but yet the color is embedded in the meaning, it lifts the picture up because it renders everything. It’s like the full tonal range of an orchestra, that’s what color I think adds.

As far as making film, when I made the film about my father it was done for an emotional and social purpose first of all. My father was living with Alzheimer and memory loss, and that felt to me, as it did for many in the 90’s, like it was the scourge that was happening to all of our parents. People who had lived through the Great depression and suddenly as they were aging this disease was showing up. We do not know what it is that brought this huge wave into the population of the world, and I thought as a conscious and loving son that if it escaped me as it was actually happening to my father how many millions of people are facing this. So I thought I am going to take my father out of this assisted living environment he was in, take him off his medication and see if I could shake him back into a normal existence and render that on film. It was really a road movie of my son, my father and myself, three generations of the same family, and the idea was to see how does this guy who is so infantile deal with world at its large? Is there something we can learn from seeing this so that we could be better caregivers to our parents or grandparents or whoever was suffering from this illness?

That trip with the three of us from Florida up to New York City back to the Bronx was almost a month long adventure, it was thrilling to see what happened to my father and the way he managed his own illness, the way he could cover it up and how he could still relate to people. The beauty of it was, it is shot on video, broadcast quality cameras of the 90’s, it showed a kind of everyday all through the day kind of life, of how it was like to live with somebody with this affliction and I truly learned a lot from it.

I am now my father’s age from when I made that movie and fortunately for me I don’t have the same disease, but I hope that what I did for him – I actually know that the film was seen by over forty million people worldwide – that it was helpful to understand the predicament he, and other people, found themselves in.

SVB Connected to this question is also the idea of post production and the re-working of images. You worked analogically, was there ever manipulation of the image during the printing process? If not, how do you see this aspect in relation to contemporary photography?

JM I’m a very early user of the digital world. I had one of the very first photoshops in 1991, it was almost a beta, I had a digital print exhibition, the first of its kind in any museum at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1993 and even before that in 1968- 69 I had the color enlarger in my own darkroom in NYC, printing 35 mm color and later on shooting 8 by 10 large format. I was making contact prints, I made probably 30.000 color prints myself. So I was an early advocate, because after all technology is what’s moved photography along, it’s a science as well as an artform so when the science aspect of it keeps on adding new devices to it it’s important to pay attention to those things. And I don’t mean just getting new cameras all the time, but in its larger form, how does this medium keep getting better and more interesting. So my 40 years of being in the darkroom gave me the tools to work in digital, I use photoshop exclusively now, I have given up the darkroom, 40 years of chemistry, chance and dark was enough, I prefer to sit at a big monitor and make my adjustments, just as I did in the darkroom, because there you interrupt the stream of light with your hands or filters, in photoshop you do the same thing. I am so deeply connected to a kind of critical sense of the reality of things that I don’t exaggerate, I shoot in a very flat way with a full rendering of what’s in front of me because I want it to be believable, I want the viewer to trust that what I am showing them is the beauty of the everyday world, not some kind of fantasy realm where I pushed things to make them overdramatized. That’s the kind of thing that, when I see it in other people’s work, I think why are you subjecting us to this kind of falsity.

So I am very disciplined in my use of digital materials and tools.

SVB Relating to our current time, I remember reading in one of you interviews about the naivety that belonged to the sixties, in which fame was not something everyone could get, and thus the role of the photographer was different from today. I would like to explore with you the idea of control: with the rise of selfies, of an aesthetic narrative that we can construct ourselves though social media, where is the role of the photographer? How does he-she navigate this new possibility given to literally anyone?

JM There is a big difference. Carrying a camera on your phone and using it is not the same discipline as someone who carries a camera around, using it by looking through the lens, setting exposure. It’s a very serious endevor and it takes a kind of discipline to work with it and to believe that what you are seeing and what you subsequently say will allow you to make a print as big as you want, 6 or 8 feet, to be in that moment of time creates each time a specific picture.

It’s really about being there and being conscious in the moment whereas there is a sort of generalizing product that the phone makes. The phone in itself is imperfect, people move it while holding it, the edges aren’t precise etc. While with the camera, that frame is an articulate space that you are filling with your identity, and after all photography is a search for your persona, your character, and your poetry, is not a generic device like a smartphone which you wave around and click. A real photo takes a real intelligence, one that you do know, and you deepen, and select a picture and then print it. There is an ongoing discipline that allows for the photographer and the photograph to become one, so that when people see a thousand of your pictures they can say ‘that’s a Cartier Bresson’, they recognize the way of looking at the world. And that is truly, where the artform is positioned.

The clarification of your own sense of meaning, the understanding of the reality of the time you are living, these are all a combined integrated effort on the part of the photographer.

SVB What do you consider a precious advice to offer to emerging photographers today?

JM I would say that we human beings have as part of our species intelligence and instinct.

If your instinct is to respond when you are out in the world, when something makes you turn your head, that is your instinct speaking directly to you, the person next to you will not have the same response, you have to learn to recognize and respect your instinct as a measure to your own identity.

Learn how to listen to it and turn your camera there at that moment, that is the path towards understanding who you are and how photography can be yours precisely.

SVB Last question. Is there a picture you wish you would have taken but never did?

JM Yes there was.

In 1996 I spent a year in Europe. I was driving through Ireland and I was on some country road with hedgerows as tall as 12 -14 feet, driving in a car that had American steering in it. I was going around a blind curve and above me, on top of the hedgerows, a man leaned on the wooden fence and vaulted over the fence flying the 10 feet down to the road with his arms extended and his coat flapping.

I was coming around the corner and had the camera on my lap, because I photographed from the moving car, but I couldn’t manage the turn, the traffic and the camera on time.

He was Christ like, in the way he descended to the ground and he landed absolutely beautifully, arms out.

He is forever mid flying in my mind, I hold him there dear, as the one picture that I did not manage to take.That’s my sense of a lost moment.

In order of appearance

Dominique, Provincetown, 1981
Chuckie, Provincetown, 1979
Paris, 1967
New York City, 1963
Barcelona, 2015
Along the Banks of the Yanngtse, 1978
Achill Island, Ireland, 1966

Daidō Moriyama

Posted on 14 de April de 202519 de April de 2025 by nr

NR 19 Detour · 2025
Published · Print Page 005

Essay · Daidō Moriyama
Words · Daisuke Yokota

Daisuke Yokota on Daidō Moriyama

In 2006, after graduating from a vocational school, I wandered aimlessly without a job, but I continued taking photographs.

At that time, there was a lot of debate about digital vs. analog, a typical binary opposition that arises during transitional periods. Being a darkroom enthusiast, I was completely on the analog side, thinking I would never use a digital camera in my life. But to be honest, there was no clear reason behind this; it was merely an attachment to what I had been doing and a kind of small faith in the photographers I admired.

I had plenty of time, but I had no idea what to do or how to move forward. The only thing I could do was submit my work to competitions.

During my time at school, Kōtarō Iizawa visited as a special lecturer and advised us to apply to as many competitions as possible. If we got no recognition at all, we should reconsider our path. Being a relatively serious student, I followed his advice and applied to as many competitions as I could. I thought at least one of them would accept my work, but in the end, I was rejected from all of them.

For about two years, I remained unemployed, living at home, and calling myself a photographer without any achievements or connections—plenty of time to feel anxious about the future.

I realized that something had to change. So, I decided to educate myself by visiting museums and bookstores in Tokyo. But I had no money, so I couldn’t buy books. Instead, I collected flyers from bookstores, taking multiple copies—one for myself and one to give to friends. This was a nostalgic habit from that era, something I rarely do now.

I can’t remember where I found it, but I still clearly remember the flyer. It was unusually long and horizontal, with a symmetrical mirrored photograph printed on both sides. The deep black image was vague and abstract, carrying an eerie atmosphere. It read: “Goodbye Photography, reissued early 2006!”

“Goodbye Photography” (Shashin yo Sayonara) was a legendary photobook that had always been displayed in the glass cases of secondhand bookstores. I don’t remember the exact price, but it was definitely not something I could afford. I was too timid to ask the shop clerk about it, so I have never actually seen a first edition copy in person.

When I learned that this phantom-like photobook was being reissued, I got excited and came up with a personal plan:

I would go to the book signing event at NADiff in Omotesando, get Daido Moriyama’s autograph, and use that as a turning point. I would completely abandon my analog film style and start anew with a digital camera.

Like many photography students, I had unconsciously developed an absolute standard of what “Moriyama-esque” photography should be. Attending the event was my way of breaking free from that influence—my own symbolic farewell to Daido Moriyama.

Although the idea may seem foolish or even rude, to a young man struggling with his future, it was not a joke. It was a small ritual for independence, something I took seriously at the time.

I don’t remember whether there was a talk show at the signing event; I was too nervous. As I waited in line, I watched Moriyama greet each guest with a few words and a handshake.

What should I say to him?

I must have been desperately thinking about that. When my turn came, I stood there speechless.

In my panic, I stretched out my trembling hand and, without meaning to, gripped his hand too tightly. He must have noticed my tension because he firmly squeezed my hand in return. I was deeply moved.

I decided not to open the book I had just bought. Since I had gone there to sever my ties with Moriyama’s influence, allowing myself to be further affected would have defeated the purpose. In the end, I didn’t look at the book for more than ten years.

Now, I realize something surprising—I don’t own any other Moriyama photobooks besides “Goodbye Photography.”

Back when I was most obsessed with his work, I had no money, so I only read his autobiographies and essays. For photobooks, I relied on browsing at bookstores, borrowing from friends, or visiting libraries.

By the time I started buying more photobooks, I had already performed my farewell ritual, and naturally, I distanced myself from Moriyama’s work.

Why didn’t I buy them?

To young photographers who are debating whether to buy a photobook: if you can, I strongly recommend making the effort to get it.

One more memory just came back to me—there was a photobook called Hokkaido that I used to contemplate buying at the secondhand bookstore Hyakunen in Kichijoji.

It was a large book, expensive, and a bit heavy to carry home. Every time I went to the store, I told myself, “Maybe next time.” I kept putting it off until, eventually, I missed my chance.

Moriyama was around 40 when he shot Hokkaido. Now that I’m almost the same age, I can’t think of a more fascinating book for me at this moment.

I was worried that I might not find a copy anywhere, but after checking, I discovered that a few bookstores still have it. I’ll order it immediately.

And with this, I’ll take another deep look at Moriyama’s work once again.

Jalal Sepehr

Posted on 15 de March de 2024 by nr

NR · World
Published · Online

Portfolio Focus · Jalal Sepehr

Credits

All images courtesy of Jalal Sepehr from the Knot (2011) and Water & Persian Rugs (2004) series.

Jalal Sepehr (b. 1968) is a Tehran based self-taught photographer who has been doing photography since 1994. He is known as a fine art photographer locally and internationally. His photos has been featured in many prestigious publications. He has been founding member of the Fanoos website whose aim was promoting contemporary Iranian photography (2003-2007). He is an active member of Virtual Arts of Iran Association and Advertising & Industrial Photography Association of Iran.

Luna Lopez

Posted on 26 de February de 2024 by nr

NR · World
Published · Online

Portfolio Focus · Luna Lopez

Through staged photography, Luna Lopez works with the emotional, the psychological and the erotic. Lopez infuses her photographs with contradictory elements, which makes her work both unsettling and arousing at the same time. She explores the dynamics of intimacy and violence, the calm and aggressive, as well as the strength that exists within the vulnerable and uncomfortable. Lopez stages and constructs photographs that don’t provide any fixed reading, but only hints about what’s beneath the seemingly obvious.

The underlying erotism that recurs in her pictures, manifests itself in what is not shown. Lopez interest in human connection is not only apparent in how she presents her work to the viewer, but also in how she identifies the nuances in a face expression or the gesture of the body when photographing.

Whether it’s a feeling of emptiness or a spirit of connection, Lopez captures these moments for her viewer to play part in. With the artisanal skill of darkroom printing and an acute eye for shape, texture and color, she has managed to create her own visual atmosphere, one imbued with a highly-attuned sense of tension and composition.

In order of appearance

Untitled (Arched Woman)
The Practitioner
Attachment and Separation
Brush of Censorship
Metallic Object I
The Spot (Eternity)

All images courtesy of Luna Lopez

Luna Lopez (b. 1996) is a Danish-born artist, currently living in Gothenburg, Sweden. Lopez completed her BFA in photography at the University of Gothenburg in 2021 and graduated from Fatamorgana, the Danish School of Art Photography in 2015.
Her work has been shown at Oblong, Copenhagen (2023), Oslo Negativ with MELK gallery, Oslo (2023), Göteborgs Konsthall, Gothenburg (2023), Galleri Thomassen, Gothenburg (2023), Galleri Cora Hillebrand, Gothenburg (2022), MELK gallery, Oslo (2022), Gallery Steinsland Berliner, Stockholm (2022), Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg (2021), The Print Space, London (2019) and Copenhagen Photo Festival, (2018).