Interview from Purple:
You started at only eighteen. How did it happen?
Actually, I started taking photographs kind of by chance. I wanted to make images. Ten years ago, magazines were the most accessible medium for me, or in any case, the one with which I had the most in common (magazines like I-D, The Face and Purple Prose were changing things). My experience at Purple Prose opened up a terribly exciting world for me, which was close to my generation and my sensibility, and, most importantly, I was able to publish my first photos there. There was also Tillmans’s book (Taschen), which I discovered when I was in high school. It was a revelation that overturned my idea of photography. Of course, I already knew some superb books by Irving Penn, Newton, Blemenfeldt, but these were too sophisticated, I wanted to see the world in which I was developing, and in Tillman it was palpable, spontaneous.
So I thought that it was possible to make images, or at least that I’d found something to use as a gauge, not counting what was clumsy, and could go from magazines to CD covers, exhibitions and advertising (indispensable). It’s amusing to see that today what persists is a taste for staging, for the unreal and mystery. You have to make use of good examples, those who covered all the fronts without any snobbishness or moral dilemmas: Guy Bourdin, Bruce Davidson, Outerbridge, Man Ray… And even if I like magazines and exhibitions, they’re too ephemeral. Now I’d like to do a book.
Your images embody moments of sophisticated intensity. How do you choose and “clothe” the objects, people, animals that you photograph?
Even if I’d like to think that I’m magnetically attracted by the subjects that I photograph, above all I’m guided by a momentary sensibility, the beauty of the object, girl or animal, as well as its potential for telling a story. I choose each subject knowing that it’s going to enrich my world, be able to inscribe itself in a kind of mythology, like the characters in a novel. More than anything, it’s the light that plays the role of “clothing.” The strange atmosphere is due to the composition, the staging, the juxtaposition of situations and improbable associations. In some way I make the objects take on an enigmatic character, and some can become secrets, a bit like the fictional elements of a cabinet of curios. I often think of film and painting, but my way of positioning subjects in a scene is more closely related to theater. It’s the set and the imagery of the spectacle that interest me—Erté’s decors and costumes, Veronesi’s marionettes, the clownlike nudes by Walter Boje and Lon Chaney in Laugh, Clown, Laugh. Maybe it’s because of them that the girls I photograph have a bearing that seems silent, frozen. As for the animals, they have a weird bestiary quality because I linger on the “texture” of their eyes, which immediately evokes the strangeness inherent in the relationship between humans and animals. The flood of references and interior impulses are there to serve the image, and inside me, they play on different styles: danger, desire, fascination, anxiety… Among them you’ll find Jean Ray’s gothic tales and also those of Mervyn Peake, which are more eccentric, such as the Gormenghast Trilogy, as well as Werner Rohde’s self-portraits and the affected and rather aristocratic voice of Anne Clark mixed with a synthetic sound, already dated.
In what way is your photographic world decadent, magical, occult?
It consists of a vision of the real that you could qualify as being at the edge of the fantastic, a vision filtered by a photographic language that is relatively unhampered. That world functions as the revelation of an invisible cosmos, which is not to say that it alters reality. It accomplishes this without any other device than staging, a concern for style, the play of light/shadow. In fact, I’m borrowing from the imagery of the unconscious and dreams, from the art of vanitas, from magic, mythology, from an inner experience having to do with the bizarre, with fear, with the irrational, with love, while offering, especially, a personal experience of beauty. And in this parallel, fictional world, I have discovered a precise way of seeing and have retained the best of reality. People often see my world as dark and depressive despite the fact that it contains all the romanticism of youth and hope.
The possibilities for change remain limitless. We must keep expanding, opening, hiding, revealing and unfolding ourselves, and each other. Leaving our eyes open and lips apart, yet always touching.
