An interview with photographer Will Steacy

by Janna Washington

“The Forum, Philadelphia, 2008” from Down These Mean Streets

Will Steacy is an American photographer.  Born in Philadelphia, he received a B.F.A in Photography from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Steacy worked as Union Laborer before becoming a photographer.  His photographs have been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums across the country and are included in many private and public collections.  In 2008, Steacy was selected by powerHouse Books and The Center for Documentary Studies for 25 Under 25: Up-and-Coming American Photographers, and was awarded a prestigious Tierney Fellowship.  He lives and works in New York.

Steacy’s most recent project, Down These Mean Streets, which focuses on America’s crumbling cities, will be on view as part of the Tierney Fellowship Group Show at the New York Photo Festival (Tobacco Warehouse, 26 New Dock Street, Dumbo, Brooklyn, NY) from May 13 to May 17, and in New York University’s Gulf and Western Gallery (721 Broadway, first floor, New York, NY) beginning on June 4, 2009.

“Car & Trophies, New Orleans, LA, 2005”

Janna Washington: How did you become a photographer?

Will Steacy: My father is a lifelong newspaper man and so is his father. My father, back in the day, at one point used to take pictures for a newspaper and, while he is on the editorial side now, he was always taking photographs.  So as a kid I was always exposed to [photography] and I have had a camera in my hand since I was 6 years old, a darkroom in my basement since 6th grade, etc., etc.  I always hated school and wanted to drop out since first grade—how I actually went on to college, I don’t know—but in 11th grade I had a month long internship with a photographer.  I didn’t go to school for that month and instead took pictures or was in the darkroom printing all day. I still remember the moment when I was fixing a print and had the feeling like, “this is what I fucking want to do, I will be a happy man if I can spend the rest of my life doing this.”  But of course mid-afternoon daydreams as 16 year old (you don’t want to know what else I would daydream about)…being 28 now and somehow making this life happen, a lot has happened and it’s a lot of hard work living this day dream.

“Dead Sheep, Ketchum, ID, 2004”

JW: Who inspires you and informs your work?

WS: David Simon, Dorothea Lange, Raymond Carver, Mike Tyson, Paul Graham, Franz Wright, Jack Johnson (the boxer, not the musician), Charles Bukowski, De Kooning, Doestovesky, Guy de Maupassant, Cat Power, Francois Truffaut, Hunter S. Thompson, Walker Evans, Jacob Holdt, Blind Willie Johnson, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Hass, my hardworking mother and father, Miles Davis, Taryn Simon, Jim Morrison, Joel Sternfeld, New Orleans and Philadelphia, Philip Perkis, Sean Penn, 2Pac, Tobias Wolff, P.-L. diCorcia, Hank Willis Thomas, Galway Kinnell, Stuart Shils, Norman Mailer, Bill Buford, Frank (my foreman when I was a union laborer)…

JW: Much of your work requires travel. How do you decide where you will go next?

WS: Photography for me is a method of inquiry, it is a record of how I see and interact with my environment.  The camera allows me to ask questions—it exploits this curiosity in me and allows me to enter worlds that I perhaps would not normally enter.  All of my work is based on life and being alive.  [I was] almost murdered several years ago. That night changed me and the way I see the world, and so all of my work in one way or another is about life’s experiences. The beauty of photography is the translation of life onto film, and all of my photographs are an abstraction of my experiences.  So, with that said, I go to places that I am curious about; perhaps I saw a picture from somewhere or heard a story about a neighborhood, and it is simple small things like that that have me buying a ticket to Detroit or in a car to Memphis, or returning to the city I grew up in to rediscover areas I have not been to in 10 years.  I don’t think I will have time to do St. Louis for my night walk project but that is a city that I really want to go to.  Cleveland, Milwaukee and Little Rock are places I hope to explore this year as well.

“Danette Worley, Along I-40, near Waynesville, NC, 2004”

JW: What do you shoot with? Why?

WS: KB Canham 5x7 field camera.  I used to shoot a lot of 5x7 but every lab I have ever been to fucks up the negs and looks at me like I am handing them wet plates from the 19th century to process.  Anyway, so I shoot all 4x5 now with a 4x5 back on the camera.  There is nothing better than lugging around my heavy 4x5 camera on my shoulder for 12 hours a day, sweating under that dark cloth as i peer through the ground glass in the summer, freezing my ass off in the winter, fingers numb focusing the metal knobs, my back aching at the end of the day with a bag full of exposed film holders.

“Mrs. Blanco, New Orleans, LA, 2006”

JW: Is there a project of yours that you consider your favorite? Which one and why?

WS: I think that whatever project I am working on at the moment is my favorite. I throw myself in, all of me, everything I have, to whatever I am working on and therefore I dream about it, it’s the first thing I think about when I wake up and what I spend all day working on, thinking about, and wrestling with.

“Checks, Philadelphia, PA 2005”

JW: Will The Photographs Not Taken (“a collection of essays by photographers about the times they didn’t use their camera”) ever return? And will it ever appear in another format, i.e. book form or an exhibition?

WS: “The Photographs Not Taken” was never intended to be a blog or this Internet thing.  I set up a blog for it so the contributors could read each other’s stories and see who else was participating in the project.  I used a blog for this because a blog is such an easy and accessible thing, and when I did this I had no idea it would gain the popularity it did. The internet is a crazy place.  I have always seen the project in the book form, a book of photographs with no pictures, and I am currently working on getting it published.  As I write this I am in the beginning stages of trying to get some things started, so please please everyone just be patient, but I promise you a book soon!!!!!

“Satellite Dish, Detroit, 2009” from Down These Mean Streets

JW: I love your latest project, Down These Mean Streets. Please talk a little bit about how this project came about, and what your plans for it are.

WS: This is a project I have had in mind for many years now and something perhaps I was always too afraid to do, or was discouraged by people telling me I was a fool to do something like this.  But a lot of time went by and many ideas for other projects and photographs came and went, and this project is one that kept with me and one that wouldn’t go away.  It is the ones that won’t go away that are always are worth holding on to.  And eventually the timing was right and I applied for and won the 2008 Tierney Fellowship with a proposal for this work.

I must admit I was surprised when I got that call and my project was selected. I give The Tierney Foundation a lot of respect for believing in me and my work; without their support this project would not have been possible.  A quote by Dorothea Lange was a major influence for this work, as well as Lange’s images and the life she lived.  My good friend and mentor Anne Whiston Spirn first introduced me to Lange when I was a boy and recently published the book Daring To Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and Reports from the Field (2008), which in my eyes completely redefines Lange’s work and career.  Anyway, in a conversation from the 60s Lange said:

“No country has ever closely scrutinized itself visually that I know of… I know what we could make of it if people only thought we could dare to look at ourselves.”

These lines give me chills and reach down deep into my heart and soul.  They have inspired and influenced me in so many ways.

“Morris & His Son, Memphis, 2007”

JW: Are you working on anything else right now?

WS: I have too many projects!  I am in the beginning phases of a new project about the newspaper industry.  I look forward to shooting in daylight again and short exposures, haha!  I like to move quickly and shoot a lot and at first it was a challenging transition for me to shoot at night with 8, 10 and 15 minute exposures [for “Down These Mean Streets”], and by that time I had to keep moving and could only make one exposure of a shot because I couldn’t spend 20 or 30 minutes in many of the locations I photographed for the night work or I was sure to catch a beating or get myself into some trouble. I already was pushing it with the time I spent on some corners.  So I am curious to see how a year of shooting this way will influence how I shoot things in the future.

“Golf Course, Christiansted, St. Croix, 2001”

Will Steacy

Tags: photography Interviews travel
April 30, 2009 at 6:32pm ∞

Nan Goldin’s famous slideshow at MoMA

by Janna Ireland

Ryan in the tub, Provincetown, Mass. 1976

Growing up, everyone has that hip friend. You know the one I’m talking about. The worldly girl who sneaks you your first cigarette one afternoon in the bathroom next to the cafeteria. The guy who has his own car while you still depend on your mom to pick you up from the movies. The kid who has the coolest clothes and has seen the most obscure movies and listens to bands you have never even heard of.

My hip friend made me brilliant punk rock mix tapes and introduced me to the work of photographers Larry Clark and Nan Goldin. Theirs are photographs filled with sex and drugs and guns, whiskey, fights, and nudity, and an indescribable yet palpable sense of affection for the people on the other side of the lens. They are a candid look at a world most of us will never see. Looking at these photographs, I never wanted to be friends with these people, but nevertheless I found myself unable to judge them.

Nan and Brian in bed, New York City 1983

 Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is one of the most enduring works in recent photographic history. What began in 1979 as slideshows for her friends turned into hundreds and hundreds of photos, a visual diary that is still being written today, 30 years later, as well as a book, first published by Aperture in 1986 and still being printed. The version of the slideshow acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in 2004 contains 690 slides and is 43 minutes long. Though ongoing and including photographs taken all over the world, the heart of the Ballad lies in 1980s New York, a time and place where Goldin and her core group of friends were young and looked for all the world as though they owned it.

Before visiting MoMA last week, I had only ever seen the Ballad in book form. I did not know in advance that it was on view, but, with a limited amount of time before the museum was set to close, I immediately forsook the exhibitions I had come to MoMA to see in favor of Goldin’s slideshow. Photographs I have loved for years were presented with photographs I had never seen, and stories I thought I knew well were rendered far more complicated than I had ever imagined. The Ballad opens with photographs of couples, before quickly segueing into a series of photographs of women, many of whom are undressed and alone, set to the Velvet Underground’s “I’ll be Your Mirror.” In one of the more literal turns that the Ballad’s soundtrack (which includes James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s World,” Petula Clark’s “Downtown,” and two more songs by the Velvet Underground) takes, a number of the photographs are of women looking at themselves in mirrors.

Nan after being battered, 1984

And then we are off to the races. The slideshow is organized by theme and not chronology, so photographs taken only moments apart may appear at opposite ends of the slideshow. There are the aforementioned pictures of women and couples, groups of photographs of people smoking, photographs of men flexing their muscles, photographs of children, photographs of empty beds, photographs of people shooting heroin. On one hand, these groupings call to mind the sameness of Goldin’s days—another trip to the beach, another house party, another copulating pair remarkably unconcerned that there is a photographer in the room. On the other hand, there is a beauty in the rhythm Goldin creates, and it is a shock when the show ends and you realize that the better part of an hour has gone by. 

Many of the same faces crop up again and again throughout the course of the Ballad. As the slides click past (or the pages of the book turn), we get to know Goldin’s friends, including writer and actress Cookie Mueller, childhood pal Suzanne Fletcher, and former boyfriend Brian Burchill. And then there is Nan herself: Nan looking into the mirror; Nan in bed with various lovers; Nan with tears running down her face; Nan with a bright-red dye job; Nan with two black eyes. These glimpses of the photographer remind us that she is more than an anthropologist. This is her life we are looking at, and behind every image there is something at stake.

“Variety” booth, New York City 1983

By the 1990s, many of the characters that populated the New York Goldin knew and loved in the 80s were dead and gone. AIDS ravaged the downtown landscape, and Goldin found herself a historian for a time that she had not expected to end. In an afterword written in 1996, ten years after the book version of the Ballad was first published, Goldin wrote,

AIDS changed everything. The people I feel knew me the best, who understood me, the people who carried my history, the people I grew up with and I was planning to get old with are gone… I don’t believe photography stops time…I still believe pictures can preserve life rather than kill life. The pictures in the Ballad haven’t changed. But Cookie is dead, Kenny is dead, Mark is dead, Max is dead, Vittorio is dead. So for me, the book is now a volume of loss, while still a ballad of love.

Shortly before I turned 18, I moved to New York, setting up shop in an NYU dorm room just blocks from the Lower East Side bars and apartments where much of the Ballad is set. I came to this city chasing not Goldin’s overall experience (I have never had much of a stomach for drugs or violence or death), but the romance of drag shows and Velvet Underground songs played late at night in run-down apartments. For a while I even shot slides myself, projecting them once a week so my friends could see themselves as I saw them. Ultimately, what I fell in love with was my own New York, filled with long walks in Brooklyn and Sunday morning brunches, but I will always carry Goldin’s New York with me.

No matter how old I get, Goldin will remain that hip friend, older and cooler and a little dangerous.

Cookie and Vittorio’s Wedding, New York City 1986

Heart-shaped bruise, New York City 1980

Suzanne crying, New York City 1985

Hey, Slow Century is dead these days, but lots of people are still reading this article, which is pretty neat. I’ve considered updating this (I’ve seen Nan Goldin speak since I wrote this piece three years ago—she was wonderful!), but have decided to keep it the way it is for posterity. I’m still writing at my own blog, itsjanna.tumblr.com and posting my own photographs at jannaireland.com. Thanks for reading.

-Janna Ireland 3/27/12

Tags: photography museums MoMA
March 15, 2009 at 8:35pm ∞

by Janna Washington

I love a good piece of design almost as much as I love a good movie. It only makes sense, then, that a brilliantly designed movie poster is to me a work of art on par with anything I’ve seen in a museum.

The people at the Criterion Collection understand the value of both good films and good design. In designing boxes for their DVD releases of films they have deemed “important,” they strive to create packaging worthy of the content inside. Inspired by a post by Well Medicated’s Andrew Lindstrom, here are 50 of my favorite Criterion boxes.

My criterion (sorry) were as follows: 1) I have to have seen, and enjoyed, the film; 2) I have to like the box art enough to hang it on my walls. This means that outstanding box art for films I did not like or have not seen has been excluded, as has boring box art for films I adored.

Four of the films star Jeanne Moreau, two star Monica Vitti, and two star Giulietta Masina. Certain directors (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jim Jaramusch, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Francois Truffaut, Michelangelo Antonioni, Akira Kurosawa) pop up more than once. I’m sure there are others I am missing. I may be a snob, but at least I am a loyal one.

Tags: film posters design
February 11, 2009 at 12:07pm ∞

Photographer Morgan Levy’s images of Iceland

Interview by Janna Washington

Upon graduating from the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in May of 2007, photographer Morgan Levy was awarded the Daniel Rosenberg Fellowship. The fellowship was established in 1989 by Irwin and Civia Rosenberg in memory of their son Dan, who received his BFA from the Photo Department in 1988. The fellowship enables one graduating senior to pursue a project involving travel, which will later be shown in a one-person exhibition at Tisch.

With the fellowship, Levy was able to return to Iceland, which she had visited and photographed once before. The body of work she created there, entitled “A Strange Sound In The Deep Silence,” may be viewed on her website.

JW: Most of the projects of yours that I’m familiar with center around people, often children. What moved you undertake an extensive landscape project?

ML: While, yes, much of my work centers around portraiture, landscapes have occupied a part of my work for quite some time, either serving as backgrounds for portraits or as separate entities. [Regarding my work with children,] those were the images I showed more often. I had difficult time making sense of my landscapes and my first trip to Iceland changed that. I went initially as a tourist with a camera and knew quickly after arriving that this was a place I had to return to. Fortunately, the fellowship afforded me the opportunity to make a second trip to do some more serious investigating.

JW: Do you see these landscapes as an extension of your portraits of humans?

ML: I don’t think of my landscapes necessarily as an extension of my portraits but I certainly don’t think of them as entirely separate either. For a portrait, my model’s role is to serve as a metaphor or idea, and in Iceland I fully understood that I could exploit the landscape in a similar fashion, but to an even greater extent. Though the subject matter varies, my interests are relatively consistent throughout both my portraits and landscapes, and ultimately I strive to convey similar ideas. Confronting personal fears is predominate in both veins of work, as well using fantasy and alternative realties as methods of escapism from those fears. Though there is a lot of overlap, I think of my landscapes and portraits existing parallel to one and other, informing one and other, occasionally intersecting, but ultimately on different planes. For now at least.

JW: Why Iceland?

ML: Iceland is a natural fantasy world. Only a mere five hours from New York, upon landing you feel immediately transported to a place light-years away from home. The quality of light is unlike any daylight I have experienced otherwise. It’s as if a thin coat of silver glazes all of the surfaces. It enhances the pervasive magical feel of the country. There is little semblance of the familiar and one must quickly surrender control to the natural geological forces at work. I have issues relinquishing control, and a trip to Iceland is a good exercise in letting go. On my last night I climbed to the summit of an active volcano due to erupt within the next year.

JW: How did you get around?

ML: I rented a car (really two because I tore out the rear suspension of the first car trying to ford a river) as it’s really the only way to fully explore Iceland. Certain parts of the interior are only accessible by car and, as I learned twice, should only be attempted with a serious high-rise 4x4 vehicle. The Icelandic Mountain Guides rescued me twice. When photographing on Vatnajokull, the glacier, I had an incredible mountain guide, Einar, who taught me to walk on crampons and use an ice pik. But otherwise, just a map and tent, no guide.

JW: To which parts of the country did you travel?

ML: I made a full loop of the country, including the Western Fjords, and I also drove the Kjolur Route which cuts through the interior of the country.

JW: Any plans to go back?

ML: Sadly I have no immediate plans to go back despite my strong desire to do so. To console myself I have been fanaticizing about jumping on a plane and going for a long-weekend to see the snow and the darkness, and justifying this irrational act by telling myself it’s cheaper there now due to their own serious economic crisis.

JW: What did you shoot with?

ML: I traveled with four cameras: a large format field camera, two 6x7 cameras—one more conducive to shooting in precarious situations, and a small digital point-and-shoot for fun.

JW: In your artists’ statement, you talk about “geology as a metaphor for psychology.” Can you talk a little about the psychology of Iceland, and how you think your project reflects it?

ML: I don’t think that Iceland has one predominate “psychology” as you’ve stated it. What I hoped to convey in my statement is that Iceland is a place where I was able to project my own psychology and it is a place that elicits a different response from everyone. The way I would discuss the “psychology” of the country would be a projection of my own thoughts and sentiments. But so it won’t seem like I’m dodging the question, I’ll answer thus: I think Iceland has a frenetic and malleable personality. Because of the constant changes and shifting below the surface the country always seems to be in a moment of transition. Each region of the country, topographically speaking, seems to have its own identity as well. Nothing ever appears to be the same.

JW: How did you become a photographer?

ML: The story of how I became a photographer: Age nine: go to family friend’s house. The daughter shows me a video of her and her friends smoking. Become convinced that making videos of friends hanging out is incredible. Beg for video camera. One year later receive said camera, make videos of dog and baby sister. Get bored. Decide still-images even better yet. Another year spent pleading for camera. Age thirteen go to used camera store with Dad and proudly go home with a Cannon AE-1. Have been photographing ever since.

JW: Which artists (photographers, painters, writers, whoever) inspire you and inform your work?

ML: For various projects I find inspiration in different places. Before going to Iceland I read a lot. I spent a lot of time with the Prose Edda, a historical document, which recounts much of Icelandic mythology. I read W.H Auden’s account of his trip to Iceland. I reread Freud’s essays on the uncanny. I purposefully did not look at others’ photographs of Iceland before or after my trip. I mostly read for inspiration, but Rodin and Frida really get under my skin and inspire me to make work.

Tags: interviews photography travel
January 19, 2009 at 8:26pm ∞