three questions for carmen winant, part 3

part three of three questions for Carmen Winant. (thanks again, Carmen! come back and visit anytime.)

Subjectify: What are you looking for when you photograph a subject?

Carmen Winant: I think that contemporary photographers are inclined to posture their subjects as either completely aware or unknowing of the camera’s gaze. (I always think of how Hellen Van Meene’s young subjects rarely acknowledge the camera. Even when they do, their gaze seems hazily unfixed and unspecific.) But of course there is a liminal space—between the manufactured nature of Gregory Crewdson’s work and the sincerity of Robert Frank’s—and that is what I am continually striving to tap when taking pictures of the people in my life. Because the two poles can be quite seductive, it is easy to overlook the substantive and interesting ground between the performed and the unstaged. I think several interesting young photographers right now, like Gilda Davidian and Amy Elkins, are exploring that grey area of representing subjectivity without much distance or irony.

Richard Avedon said that he wished there could be no camera at all, that his eye could be his only mechanism of transferal. For me, however, the camera is a protagonist in producing strong portraits. I shoot film with a Hasselblad 501c, and it requires a deliberate set-up, a relatively long time to focus (which I sometimes consciously extend to increase the slight discomfort of my sitter), and an almost violent, gun-like release. I want a contrived and a sincere subject, and it doesn’t seem to me that the two have to deny each other.

Concerning the difference between a portrait and a biography, my friend, poet Geoffrey Hillsebeck wrote to me once:

A portrait doesn't make a claim while a biography does. That’s often the difference between visual art and the written word. Do portraits always present what is mysterious in the subject; do they always confront you with the impossibility of the enterprise? Can one know Madame X or Rembrandt better by standing in front of the paintings longer, the way one gets to know friends better by spending more time with them? Rembrandt said he wanted to get at the "deepest inward emotion" of his subjects. Biographies never try to do that. They are always supremely conventional, in structure, organization, approach. They are works of history usually, not imagination.

three questions for carmen winant, part 2

part two of this week's conversation with emerging photographer Carmen Winant.

Subjectify: Your mother seems like a remarkably willing subject. Does she enjoy being photographed by you? Is she central to your project Close?

Carmen Winant: I have always admired photographers who photograph their own families in earnest – Sally Mann, Tina Barney, Larry Sultan, and Elinor Carucci, among many. They make it look so effortless. It is a classic motif, but in some ways it’s harder than photographing strangers. In my case, I am most interested in exploring the tension (and uncomfortable overlap) between familial and erotic intimacy.

My mom doesn’t always enjoy sitting for the camera, but she has been incredibly generous. I regard my mother lending her body to my work as a gift, and am really encouraged in her own belief in the power of picture-making. She is also really striking, which certainly doesn’t hurt in creating a compelling image.

I have taken lots of images of my family that I cherish but that they understandably find too personal to promote in the world. So, I really admire my mother not only for allowing me to take the images, but to show them.

three questions for carmen winant, part 1

shortly after i first saw Carmen Winant's portraits featured on Conscientious, i got an email from her out of the blue. she had just started a new process of engagement, if you will, pledging to post a photo online every day for a year at daily afterthought--and she wanted to talk blogs.

although i liked many photos in the portfolio that Jörg had linked to, they didn't suck me in as complete projects. it was Carmen's written voice that compelled me, and the single, out-of-context images that she was posting up each day at daily afterthought that reeled me in. (i mean, how many people have a fresh and good new portrait every day? even dipping into their archives?) though she's still playing with different approaches and themes, Carmen has a pretty consistent vision. her best photographs, to my eye, are unexpectedly sensual and deeply emotionally engaged. consider me seduced.

i'm pleased this week to offer three brief questions / discussions with this emerging photographer about her work and her confrontation of the subject.

Subjectify: In many of your portraits I feel that your compositional eye has a way of closing in on, or immobilizing the body. As objects, the bodies are posed, perhaps, but particular, imperfect and unsentimental. Are there specific things you are trying to express in your work about bodies and their relation to spaces?

Carmen Winant: My photographs have always been concerned with the body. Before I began photographing, I was a very technical illustrator, and all my illustrations also took on the body exclusively. I was a competitive distance runner from age 15 – I ran track and cross-country for UCLA – which I think informed my fascination with the physicality of the body. And then, as I became a feminist and concerned with debates around identity politics, I became open to seeing the body’s potential in art to manifest critical gender issues.

I am of course always thinking about the body’s relationship to context and space. But beyond that, I am interested in the body’s relationship to the absence, or denial, of space. This is most overt in my ongoing series Dark Matters, in which the space becomes a reductive, recessed vacuum. I was attempting to make a series of pictures that were both classical and radical by oversaturating and overexposing to the point of total darkness. Usually I go too far, and the negatives are often way too thin to use.

In addition to removing referents, I tend to narrow in pretty tightly on the bodies of my subjects. In fact, I was repeatedly asked in UCLA critiques why I didn’t just back up already and give the viewer some space to breathe. I think this is really evident in the series Close. And thinking about it now, it’s telling that I chose to shoot environmental portraits (the At Home project) in cramped New York City apartments, that wouldn’t afford me the space if I wanted it. So, the spatial confinement is always a component. It can feel a little claustrophobic, so I try to be careful about not overloading my images with information. If an image is successful, the body will serve as the only punctum.

Finally, I tend to photograph my subjects’ backs quite a lot. My mom has a theory that my preoccupation is due to my own medical diagnosis at age 17 of severe osteopenia, which requires me to get my spine density tested and monitored with some regularity. I like to think that it is another (more deliberate) method of drawing in the viewer with an intimacy that is very carefully and tentatively measured. A turned back can represent several conflicted signals of bodily power. It clearly indicates a loss of control for the sitter, who is perhaps being looked upon without their knowledge. Yet a turned back is also a refusal; ultimately, the onlooker is the one being denied or powerless. Also, I am interested in the notion that the audience enters subjecthood through a turned back, as in, we can only be absorbed into the subject through the back of their head. I feel that all successful and complicated portraits have to have this element of emotional incongruity.