| Cynthia Leung: Your 2006 show Please Lie Down and Take a Nap With Me in My Grave was all color photographs, eerie because of their content: landscapes both beautiful and mundane. They read like experiments in nature photography or thoughts on suburban nature. On one hand you had dark images swimming pools, kitchen lights, and a hot pink field of palm trees; on the other hand there were exquisite “nature” images in works like Sun Traveling Past Tree or Winter Solstice. As these works are totally devoid of humans, there’s a sense of melancholy. What do you hope to convey in the photographs and what do you feel “comes back” in these landscapes? |
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Mariah Robertson is an artist based in New York and Cynthia Leung is a freelance arts and culture writer based in New York. They recently met to discuss Robertson’s show Nudes, Still Lives, and Landscapes, on view at Guild + Greyshkul from November 3 to December 8.
Cynthia Leung: Your 2006 show Please Lie Down and Take a Nap With Me in My Grave was all color photographs, eerie because of their content: landscapes both beautiful and mundane. They read like experiments in nature photography or thoughts on suburban nature. On one hand you had dark images swimming pools, kitchen lights, and a hot pink field of palm trees; on the other hand there were exquisite “nature” images in works like Sun Traveling Past Tree or Winter Solstice. As these works are totally devoid of humans, there’s a sense of melancholy. What do you hope to convey in the photographs and what do you feel “comes back” in these landscapes?
Mariah Robertson: I would say that I’m not trying to convey anything by the images themselves—that these are the few plucked from the many results generated by simple processes. These processes being “limitations,” to use certain techniques and equipment that you could classify as old, antiquated, sub-professional, and importantly from the an age of extinction: films, chemistries, and equipment are being discontinued. Even Kodak stopped making black-and-white paper. Other companies like Fuji and Ilford have pledged to never stop making certain products, but it’s a dire situation. It’s like standing on the polar ice cap watching it melt around you.
CL: And the idea of an already-dead practice carries over into the title, as if photography was speaking from the grave…
MR: That was the idea when I began the “Grave Nap” series of photos. They are inspired by the “pro-sumer” level of literature, and “how-to” photography books of the 70s and 80s, a pre-Photoshop time. There is a great level of ingenuity and homemade-ness even on the part of professionals doing editorial work.
CL: You mentioned a few of the titles of these books that you were using, like Take Better Photographs or Kodak’s Here’s How series. They all reminded me of conceptual art titles, or even directives. There’s an unintentional, deadpan humor. But the landscapes and domestic interiors that you shoot are clearly not commercial photographs, although they employ the same techniques. There’s this unruly strand of personal information that comes through—like in 100 Suns.
MR: I’m not going for psychedelic or sad, and I’m not trying to make a picture where cars look happy. I guess for the 100 Suns piece I was thinking of a certain John Baldessari piece where he throws 4 oranges into the air with one hand and takes a photo with the other, and sees how many times the camera can catch them in a square formation. I also thought of when Gregory Crewdson told me that a fundamental of “good” photography was that you not take a photo of the sun at all—and I thought, what would it look like to have 100 photos of the sun, all on one piece of film? There is a part of me that’s a super ego, the one that uses a kind of Cal Arts conceptual lineage, and there are parts of, say, the id that guide the projects intuitively
CL: In your new show Nudes, Still Lives and Landscapes, you continue investigating erstwhile photographic techniques like solarizing, amber types, and negative collage that have fallen out of practice, even Photoshopped away.
MR: I was interested in using alternative, historical processes from photography’s shadowy beginnings with Victorian chemical hobbyists in the early 19th century right up to the early 1950s, a span of time where the flower of photography bloomed so fully. I was interested in the subjectivity inherent in the passage of time. You do this with hairstyle also. The average person is usually trying to style their hair in a way that looks nice, flattering, etc. But we can look back at 14-year-old pictures and say, “Whoa, so 90s.”
CL: Is the investigation of past techniques a kind of nostalgia?
MR: I suppose it’s more about memories. My goal was to try to make the “now” seem a little odd, or mix the now and yesterday in a way that might provide the clarity of hindsight for the present moment. Like the tiny wetplate glass negative Still Life with Skull and Nudes, with the skull and the 70s naked chick book. It’s 1850s technology used to picture something from a later cultural moment, and the classic vanitas element of the skull, dumbly mixed pictures of women who are probably now in their 60s, all taken right now, in what is a time of wide decline but, for some, resurgence of outmoded processes.
CL: You collected certain kinds of objects to shoot: plants, shells, pitchers from a collection, what about the male nudes? You never see their faces, are they also collected “objects?”
MR: Ah yes, those dazzling, hypnotic creatures. Rather than objects or people, I view them more as forms. I don’t mean to dehumanize them, but maybe I depersonalize them. They are friends and acquaintances. Man Ray and other historical photographers I was looking at were really into nudes: sometimes technique and subject matter go hand and hand. I used to get angry about macho photo dudes who did “sexified” women books. It’s often a bearded guy with his camera/phallus on the back cover, and all women inside. You can tell which one is the girlfriend because she appears more than the other models, even when she is aging and still wearing outfits that make her look unnecessarily old and out of place. But once I was talking to a male friend about it and he said, “Oh, but when I was thirteen those books saved me.” And then I thought of sweet, good-hearted little boys with their tender, budding, starved sexuality, and then the books didn’t seem 100 percent bad anymore. Still, I’m not trying to have a “male gaze” on these bodies or feminize them, or homoeroticize them. It’s still very classical, with a potted plant and a nice carpet. I just let loose with my gaze and try to achieve an image in between any concrete interpretation.
