INTERVIEW: Lydia Panas

From The Mark of Abel © Lydia Panas

I am so thrilled to have the opportunity to share this interview. Lydia Panas is one of my favorite portrait photographers. She possesses such a strong ability to capture natural beauty in environments, but mostly in the people she photographs. Like many of you she focuses on people she knows - utilizing the lives and relationships of her friends and family.

I recently wrote to Lydia to tell her how much I admire her work and to find out if she would be willing to do an interview. Not only did she say yes, it turns out she is a huge fan of The Girl Project... and an admirer of YOUR work.

From The Mark of Abel © Lydia Panas

INTERVIEW:

ke: Your work features adolescence... not exclusively but in large part. What is your interest or curiosity in that age or time in life?
lp: I am interested in adolescence. Not exclusively, as you note, but I am fascinated by the years when we are almost adults, though not fully formed. Adolescents are still open to learning who they are, and still impressionable. They are not set in their ways at that age. They still have the capacity to listen (if there is something worth listening to). I see this in my college students. This capacity seems to disappear as people get older. Adolescents’ feelings are delicate. I find this endearing. I love the ambiguity of this time period, and the fragility of it. They are desperate to be someone, just not sure who that someone is. Adolescents are fragile, vulnerable and strong at the same time. This mixture of emotions is what makes me want to look closer and understand what lies beneath. I look for these qualities in the adults I shoot also. It is more rare in adults.

ke: What was your childhood like... your teen years?
lp: My family immigrated to the US, so I spent part of my youth in Greece, part of it moving around the northeast, and finally settling in southeastern PA. I was a lonely kid. Different. An outsider. Fairly quiet, I read a lot. I was the oldest of three, and artistic, from a family of doctors. Not a great fit. In school, I loved literature, poetry, and art. Through these subjects, I began to find explanations of the human condition. The rest of the subjects were of no interest to me at the time. I was focused on the emotions that had meaning to an adolescent girl, with little confidence. I never really found a comfortable niche during my school years. Leaving home, and finding photography was extremely liberating.

From The Mark of Abel © Lydia Panas

ke: Tell me about some of your projects. Lets start with The Mark of Able.
lp: The Mark of Abel. With this project, I am investigating the idea of relationships. How we see ourselves within relationships and how they affect us. I began this project in the summer of 2005. My niece and nephew were visiting, along with a few other kids. I made the photo entitled “Tatiana”. I began to think about how relationships can be depicted through photographs. I have always been interested in Nicholas Nixon’s work, especially the pictures of the groups, and the series of the sisters. They are both formal and casual. They contain so much if one looks closely. I ask people I know, usually friends or acquaintances to pose for me. I am closer to some than to others. I select models based on a sense I get about them, that they are wiling to show me something about themselves. I may have an idea that I want to see through in a photograph, other times I just wait to see what transpires. My assumptions/ expectations are not always correct, but that is part of the fun of the process.

Interior Portraits (2005) was a group of images I made of a high school girls’ basketball team. After I photographed the girls on the team, I was still intrigued by the photos so I invited more teenagers to sit for me. It ended up being a series of images, in which the teenagers are all looking straight into the camera. I look at them and they look back. The kids look strong. There is a lot going on in their personalities, and they look back at the viewer with a great intensity. They are a lot about “looking”. You can see some of these portraits at www.galerie-poller.com. (click on “artists”, then on my name, then on Interior Portraits 2005.

From The Divine Bysantine Crypt © Lydia Panas

The Divine Byzantine Crypt. I started this series two years ago when it was too cold to shoot outside. They are more domestic than The Mark of Abel. This series is shot at home, with my own family. Moments of our lives that I want to hold onto. Most of the images are of my youngest son, as he is home the most.

ke: What kind of equipment do you shoot with?
lp: I use a Horseman Woodman 4”x 5” camera. I use Kodak’s Portra Color film. This is a large format view camera that takes sheet film.

ke: Has anyone ever told you your work shares a romanticism with/like Sally Mann? I also see your work in Alessandra Sanguinette especially in The Adventures of Guille and Belinda.
lp: Some people have compared her work to mine. She inspired me originally because of the similarities we shared: three children to raise and the need to adjust to and combine art and home life, while raising them. I think my photographs are concerned with very different issues however. My photographs are also beautiful to look at, but with less romance. More about looking than orchestrating. My subjects pose less and look more. My work is about different questions than Sally Mann’s. “No tricks” was how one critic described the pictures in The Mark of Abel. I like Sally Mann’s work, but I think mine is different.
Also Allessandra Sanguinetti. I am happy to be compared to her. I really like her work. I see more similarities with her work.

From The Mark of Abel © Lydia Panas

ke: What photographers inspire you?
lp: Diane Arbus, whose straight-forward approach to people was unflinching. You feel her psychological presence in the pictures. Through her photographs, we can “see” what Arbus feels so clearly. Robert Frank. Again, when I look at The Americans, I think I know Robert Frank. He so clearly showed us what it must feel like to be in his head. I love that about those pictures. Both of them, Arbus and Frank, were not afraid to show us the hurt and anything else they felt. I think Katy Grannan does this too. She goes somewhere most of us will not venture. She is not afraid to show the stuff we don’t want to talk about. I like Rynecke Dykstra, for her interest in psychological intensity. I like her very consistent methods of investigation. For the same reasons, I am attracted and inspired by Sophie Calle and Hiroshi Sugimoto. Calle for her psychological intensity and openness, and Sugimoto for the meditative quality of the work. He works in a linear fashion I find interesting. I like the repetition and the uniform quality of each project. The work is thorough and disciplined in a manner that I admire. Calle, too, is clear where her obsessions lie. In both instances, though they are different, I am fascinated by the process.

From The Mark of Abel © Lydia Panas

The Girl Project at SCOPE Miami

Dec 3-7 The Girl Project was featured at SCOPE Miami, an international contemporary art fair in Miami Florida. 150 photographs, by 57 of you, were displayed as one large piece measuring 25 feet long. Thousands of people saw your work and the response was incredible!



Please keep in mind that this is NOT the end of the project and that the 57 photographers featured at SCOPE Miami are not necessarily going to be in the book or final traveling exhibition. This was just one, of hopefully many opportunities, that we had to show our hard work! The project is still underway and cameras continue to go out and come in daily.







CONGRATULATIONS TO:




I thought you would enjoy seeing some other work from the fair - by the likes of acclaimed artists such as Mr. Brainwash, Julia Fullerton-Batten and Shepard Fairey.

INTERVIEW: Christa Parravani

© Christa Parravani

Christa Parravani's Spoon River is an enchanting collection of images based on a book of poems by Edgar Lee Master's called Spoon River Anthology. Based on the fictional small town of Spoon River, Master's free form poetry details the observations and experiences of the dead, told by the dead themselves. Christa Parravani explores these character's and their stories in beautiful and sometimes haunting photography.

© Christa Parravani

INTERVIEW

ke: Community seems essential to Spoon River. Describe the community you grew up in.
cp: My life was spent in many ways trying to find a community. After my mother and father divorced she remarried a marine, and my identical twin sister Cara and I moved with them to Jacksonville, North Carolina, where we lived until I was thirteen. We had a difficult time finding base housing on Camp Lejune and spent our first years there living in a trailer park, The Pines. There were a mix of interesting people among us, though mostly young marines of lower ranks who seemed to miss home. My mother always invited a group of them over to have Thanksgiving and Christmas with us.

ke: That is amazing. I must say, not the answer I was expecting. Am I right to assume it had a profound affect on you?
cp: I think many people are really surprised by this. I have had the opportunities of an Ivy League education and have studied with the best photographers alive. Mine is a story of struggle and success. My desire for success was the need to create art and writing and nothing was going to stop me. It is just this voice that got me the hell out of there. I am not so optimistic that I believe anything is possible but with a certain amount of feistiness and tenacity it really is. I grew up in a home without books, but instead with catalogues of regular objects that turned into weapons. I will never forget the infamous umbrella that became a machete with a simple stroke of the handle, or the machete that became a hatchet if something larger was required for street combat. If I am honest about this, this sort of upbringing made me paranoid.

© Christa Parravani

ke: When did you begin shooting?
cp: My story as a photographer begins the summer I turned 20 across the ocean in a tale of missed connections, French brothels and haunted chateaus. While a student at Bard College in 1997, I enrolled in a photography program in Lacoste, France, the medieval town in Provence that the Marquis de Sade called home during the 18th century. Transportation to Lacoste depended on a precarious chain of transfers between planes, trains and automobiles. On my first night in France I got no further than the second link. After spending the night in Marseille’s red light district, I made it to Lacoste late, and, in the age-old tradition of summer camps, got the last and least desirable bed. At night, while my classmates slept peacefully, I was singularly plagued by swarming insects and visions of lovelorn ghosts. During the day I roamed the streets, snapping black and white photographs.

ke: I saw your work before knowing the connection to the anthology .... and I must say that even without knowing the background of the project, the work reads. It feels like a poem. Do you see that as well? Was it intentional?
cp: I actually majored in poetry as an undergraduate at Bard College. I am an extraordinarily verbal woman and I think my approach to image making is not unlike my process for writing poems, which I still do. The reason I decided to become a photographer and put writing aside for most of my adult life (I have now just picked it up again) was because I felt very much as if I was trying to say the same things in my poems that I wound up saying in my photographs with much less pain in the process. I found that the major narrative and personal tones of my photographs were those exactly of the poems. Loss, longing, my relationship with my estranged father, sexual objectification and desire. So it was not as intentional as much as instinctive. I wrote poetry as a young girl because the words would come into my head and stay there until I wrote them down-- lines of rolling images that would eventually start writing themselves. Being a photographer is much the same for me in that way. I get a piece of an image--a forest canopy or an expression I catch myself or someone else making. I save those images up and piece them together in my mind and then I go out into the woods and find it waiting for me.

© Christa Parravani

ke: Do you dream?
cp: I dream nightly. My dreams are mostly products of the anxieties of life. I have recurring dreams that I have missed the chance to take the perfect photograph, and one where I have a studio visit and enter into a room of brilliant images that I didn’t take and have to pretend that I did. I dream constantly of making a place to live in home improvement stores and of cutting up my negatives. My most longstanding dream is that I am sitting on a beach, looking at the ocean, and a tidal wave begins to form. The wave grows to be 100 stories high and is filled with the most fantastically frightening fish and ocean life. I wake up before the wave has a chance to swallow me.

ke: So dreaming for you is a way to work through real life issues, rather than say an escape from real life?
cp: I think this can be said about most people. It is really just the desire to pay attention to the ways that images keep repeating throughout life that makes it easy for me to talk about and remember. One of my dearest people, Jedediah Berry, just wrote a novel about a dream detective, and he encouraged me to keep a dream diary. I recommend this to all artists because it allows us into often impenetrable places to expose our greatest fears and joys to ourselves.

ke: Clearly poetry and performance inspire you. What photographers inspire you?
cp: Clarence White, Julia Margaret Cameron, Arbus, Timothy O’Sullivan, Wegee, Meatyard.

ke: How many years did you work on this project?
cp: I spent 3 years taking the pictures for Spoon River and my entire life preparing my subconscious mind to allow access to my deepest secrets without being gratuitous.

ke: Deepest Secrets... tell me more.
cp: Anyone who knows me well can see that in the work. For now I think I will leave that, well, secret.

ke: Ok - so tell me about your process before shooting. Do you have a script of sorts? Set-design?
cp: It was my goal to make images that were not directly narratively linked to the Spoon River Anthology itself, but rather an illustration of the literary idea of the pathetic fallacy (treating inanimate objects as if they had human feelings or thoughts). So I spent many years reading the anthology and thinking about gesture, landscape and costume (which I will get to later here) that were suggestive of the inner lives of the "inhabitants" of Spoon River. I wanted the poetry and the images to inform the other and not be directly illustrative. The process of making the images was sometimes painstakingly slow and other times so quick it was like documentary shooting. I let my imagination go freely by the end, and trusted that my knowledge of craft would lead me into photographs that, although not scripted, would express directly my own anxieties, and in a larger way represent the viewer’s own emotional life through a connection with my subject, through the device of a lush landscape.

ke: I know Master's anthology takes place in the Midwest - but when I look at your photos I get transported a bit... to some far off place. From your perspective where are we? What country? What year is it?
cp: Edgar lee Master's Spoon River Anthology is a book-length set of poems, consisting of 244 elegiac monologues written in 1914, all of which are told by citizens who have risen from the dead to tell the stories of their demise in the mythical Illinois town of Spoon River. Given that the town Masters creates is fictional but also specificaly his, in that these were the places, the landscapes where he became a man, I needed to follow his emotinal lead. I believe strongly that place, in its ability to fill a person with the deepest pleasure and pains of one’s life, would be important in this series because I needed of course to turn Masters’s work into my own. I used New England in my version of the Anthology. Had I used North Carolina, the place where I grew up, this series would be wildly different. I became a woman in the woods of Massachusetts. This is a story not only about me, but one of my sister’s and its manifestation in me. On an October day in 2001, my sister was raped by a stranger while she was walking her dog. She was nearly killed in the eight hour attack, but convinced her assailant that she didn't believe in jail and he let her go. After this Cara was afraid to leave the house at all. She bought a treadmill for exercise. It was during this time that I began making a series of portraits of us, entitled Kindred, that got her to leave the house. I made them in the forests nearby her home and in many ways I believe that it helped her reclaim some agency as a woman and to confront a place in the world that nearly ended her life. Sadly, Cara succumbed to her depression and died in 2006. I do not find the circumstances of her death as important as I do the reason I feel it happened. The reality of being attacked, raped, robbed of her sexuality, and thus unable to go into the world with the shame this creates. My need to undo this event fuels my need to control subjects and landscapes, and thus infuses them with an affect of terror or of being caught, or just illustrates my need for meticulous control. This I feel is probably the one area of my life where my pathos has been most deeply explored. The far off place where the viewer is transported is not physical so much as it is emotional. I am looking for Cara in those spaces, hoping to give her one last moment where she might hike a trail without fear, or find herself defended with an axe or a seductress by her own control. I dedicate this project to freedom and our ability somehow to find it in the real world.

© Christa Parravani