Two people. Wrapped in bandages from head to foot.

But sitting as if alive. The contours of their faces, barely visible.

But what is extremely perceptible, is the feeling of isolation and powerlessness.

An absence of expression, and yet a resolute abandon.

We are free to make of it what we will.

A site of experimentation, meditation, and transformation.

 

 

This unique work is one of the many projects, delving into the unconscious human emotion, where there is no awareness, just pure abandon and trust of the subject, put into the hands of the artist – the photographer.

 

 

She is one of the most reputed and influential photographers in the modern world. Her works deal with sensitive subjects such as race, death, and psychological and physical experimentation.

 

One look at her work, and you feel her meditative, almost sacred approach towards the human body, an unmasking of emotions that are most intimate and probably, not dealt with even privately.

 

Her latest project, THE OUTSIDER, is being published as a book in October 2017.

 

Inspired and awed, we approached her to let us in into her world and share her journey with us.

 

 

I was the editor of my high school newspaper when I was a teenager. I had the idea that I would report on our local country club, which in those days was a bigoted institution that would not allow membership to Catholics, Jews, or people of color. My father was an amateur photographer so I asked to borrow one of his cameras. I went to the country club gates to take a photo of the building, and a huge guard dog charged the fence. I quickly snapped the shutter before I ran away, and ended up with a wonderful photo of a huge snarling head of a dog, with the country club in the background. I put a caption underneath that said (sarcastically) “100% Pure” and it ran like that in the newspaper. There was lots of protest, and I was called before the Principal of the school, but I was hooked on the power of photography from that moment on.

 

I grew up in New York, but went to art school at the Royal College of Art in London where I studied with Bill Brandt. I received an MA in photography and also in the history of photography. My thesis, on 19th century portrait photography became my first photo book, The Glass-House Years.

 

My dream growing up was to be a journalist. After taking my first few photos, I realized that photography was my passion. My first inspiration was a show I saw the year I started taking pictures, of the photos of Eugene Atget. It was at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and I went almost every day just to sit in front of the photographs and absorb their timeless beauty. They still blow me away today.

 

All of my projects share some common ideas. I explore unconventional ways of making portraits, trying to show the inner emotions of people than recording outside appearances. Also, I always approach each project as an outsider, without imposing my will or directing the shots, or even speaking very much to the people I photograph. I am interested in abstract emotion, in portraits that come from within the subject, rather than from surface appearances.

 

 

I also work in contradiction to the idea talked about by the photographer Richard Avedon, who claimed that a portrait is about the relationship between the photographer and the sitter. I don’t work with any hidden agenda or try to elicit a specific reaction from my subjects.

 

For example, I watched each of my subjects in The Sleepers project from a balcony in my studio as they slept for three hours at a time. Although I arranged to take the photographs, and although the people knew before they fell asleep that I would be photographing them, they were not conscious while I took the pictures and I certainly never spoke to them or directed them while they were asleep. What emerged in each sitting was a very private, inner emotion, recorded on film while people were unconscious and unselfconscious.

 

 

I worked in a similar way, without directing or interfering, with The Narcissists and The Bound. The subjects in The Narcissists could not see me. I hid behind a two-way mirror shooting through the glass with my camera. My subjects were alone in a room with a mirror along one wall, staring at themselves for 15 minutes. What they did in front of the mirror, undressing, crying, preening, had nothing to do with me, only with them. As they stared into the mirror, alone with themselves, very private inner emotions could be seen.

The same approach worked with The Bound. All the subjects were mummified and could not see me or speak to me. Once they were bound in cloth or rope, they went very deeply into themselves to a place they call “subspace”. I had no contact with them at all. I was a witness to a moment of abstract emotion that was purely experienced by my subjects.

 

 

My favorite project is The Bound. It was probably the hardest project for me to do, as the subject matter was very dark. Also, I was not in any way a part of the community that used mummification and bondage, so I was very definitely an outsider. Since it involved a very close bond between the person who was being wrapped, and the person who was doing the wrapping, I was once again a witness to very powerful emotion, that was in some cases difficult for me to understand. Despite the difficulties for me, both emotional and technical, I was compelled to keep shooting because the beauty of the bodies enthralled me, and drawn to the deep emotion and bravery of my subjects. It was a strange, foreign world that had so many layers to explore creatively. I still don’t completely understand the project, but maybe because of that as well as the extreme beauty of it, that is my current favorite.

 

In my desire to find a way to shoot inner emotion, sometimes the people have to be semi-conscious, unconscious or even dead. As you know, I photographed a series of post-mortem portraits called The Travelers. My idea was to explore the idea of humanity, and at what moment our humanity left us. For that project I removed all the trappings of a funeral, and placed each subject against a plain black background. Each of my subjects was already beautifully dressed, as was the practice in the Southern Baptist community I photographed. I then used the kind of lighting I would use when creating a formal portrait of a living person. Even though the eyes were closed, the practice after someone dies, I believe it was still possible to see the humanity in each of these people, or, what you might call the soul. We look into windows to the soul in so many ways, mostly if we are open enough to look, really look, at the people who are in front of us without bias or prejudice.

 

 

For me, every project is different. In terms of technique, I often work with an 8 x 10 view camera, but recently I have experimented with using a hand-held Leica while shooting on the street in China. I chose the camera and format that works best for my ideas. I am about to begin a new project and there is a chance I will shoot with a digital camera for the first time, but only because it seems to right for my new idea. I will never abandon film as long as it is made, but I need to choose what best suits the idea and the circumstances.

 

Usually I have the idea, and then I figure out how to make it happen. For example, with The Sleepers, I started to shoot people sleeping in beds, with rumpled pillows and bedding. Then I slowly realized that I should pare things down, and I removed their clothes, and put them on a black cloth, and began to see an emotional state emerge. When I finished shooting the project, I began to feel that it was too realistic, that the viewer saw a nude figure, not the inner emotional state I wanted to portray. That’s when I had the idea of projecting the photos onto ancient stone, which removed the more realistic and journalistic aspects of the project, and took it into a more abstract realm.

My projects seem to have a life of their own and guide me forward step by step.

I prep my subjects by telling them not to think too much, and not giving them any guidance.

 

 

 In 2014-2016 I made four trips to China to photograph the Chinese making portraits of each other. As a foreigner in China, I struggled to find a way to create portraits there with any degree of authenticity. I know very little about the experiences of the Chinese people and don’t speak their language. I felt reluctant to impose my Western view on another culture, like so many of the 19th and early 20th century photographers did on their first visits East. I decided to observe and photograph people taking photographs of each other. That would be my way in.

 

After having so much control in the studio where I usually work with an 8 x 10 view camera, working on the street with a hand held camera felt liberating. No one paid any attention to me, so I wandered through massive crowds of people and waited for an intimate moment.

 

I never spoke to anyone.

I felt invisible, like an unseen ghost.

 

 

I call the project, THE OUTSIDER because I was on the outside both as a stranger in unfamiliar physical and emotional territory, and also as a photographer. It’s not so much the inverse of what I’ve done in the past but that I am giving up my role as part of the photographer/subject relationship.

 

The rituals of the Chinese amateur photographers fascinated me. They shoot incessantly, often with family members looking on and directing, and with an intimacy with their environment and with each other that seems unique to the Chinese. Their obsession makes perfect sense. Very few Chinese possess family photographs from the past. During the Cultural Revolution, family albums were destroyed, either by the Red Guards, or by the families themselves who were wary of appearing bourgeois. The photographs the Chinese create now, the seemingly endless pictures of friends, family, and of moments together, may be making up for what was once lost.

 

Be true to your ideas. Don’t censor yourself because something seems silly or stupid. Most good ideas start out in a very basic form and then develop in ways that are hard to predict. Also, don’t be afraid to make mistakes. In my opinion the best way for a project to develop is to go down the wrong road and then figure out what went wrong and what you need to do to make it right. And finally, don’t copy other artist’s work. It’s easy to imitate and safer but it is so much more thrilling to do your own projects. Even though it’s often scarier that way or you get a lot of criticism to begin with, your original ideas are what make you unique.

 

 

I don’t think there is any right or wrong time to make art. Some people thrive in chaos and others need peace and withdrawal from the world. I hate blanket statements about what is right or not right for artists. Art is about self-expression and what moves us as individuals.

 

I don’t think any subject, sincerely and respectfully dealt with, should be off-limits to an artist.

 

– The Travelers In Conversation: Elizabeth Heyert and Stacey D’Erasmo

 

Martha Webb

Born: April 1941

Norfolk, Virginia

Died: January 2004

Harlem, New York

 

French Perry

Born: September 1924

Kittrel, North Carolina

Died: September 2003

Harlem, New York

 

Daphne Jones

Born: August 1954

New York, New York

Died: October 2001

Harlem, New York

 

James Earl “Jay Moe” Jones

Born: February 1982

New York, New York

Died: March 2004

Harlem, New York

 

 

“The Narcissists is the final part of a tendentious trilogy that aims to capture the primal emotion of a person when they are totally self aware and self-conscious. Situated in a room surrounded by a two-way mirror and stark black walls, the sitters were left alone for fifteen minutes to do as they wished. What Heyert witnessed was not a beautiful moment of intimacy as she had suspected but a shockingly lonely and alienating moment of self-absorption that quickly turned serious and melancholy…Humans and humanity function on interaction. With that stripped out the world is a lonely place. The prospect of a cold empty gaze as your only chance to love is limited, frightening and desperate.”

– The Narcissists by Susan Bright

 

 

“Why do these people look as if they are engaged in some profoundly arduous, weird and heroic task? Why is it so mysterious when it’s where we were last night and tonight and tomorrow night—until the Big Sleep. You watch these pictures with great care. Sir James Frazer says in the Golden Bough “It is a common rule with primitive people not to waken a sleeper because his soul is away and might not have time to get back.”

– The Sleepers: Kind Assassin essay by John Guare

 

 

“How do they bear it? Literally. Ropes burn, cloth constricts, latex suffocates. More than instruments of desire, they are technologies of expectation, or so they seem, or so they seem to me; we are invited to interpret these images with such openness that we might, ourselves, burn, gasp, suffocate, imprisoned in ourselves, radically unopposed by the consciousness of another. How do they bear the weight of our gaze? How do we bear the weight of our own gaze, a weight we are unaccustomed to feeling? It’s as if one suddenly became aware of gravity. You might say, I’m not into bondage, but the images don’t bind or ask to be bound. Instead, they reveal what binds one to oneself, what is, in other words, holding you together.”

– The Bound: Suspension by Stacey D’Erasmo

 

 

“During the Cultural Revolution, family albums were destroyed, either by the Red Guards, or by the families themselves who were wary of appearing bourgeois. The photographs the Chinese create now, the seemingly endless pictures of friends, family, and of moments together, may be making up for what was once lost.”

– Elizabeth Heyert, In Conversation with Mudart