The Talks
Inez & Vinoodh: “What is reality?”
Inez and Vinoodh, in your opinion as photographers, is reality important when we’re thinking about art?
Inez van Lamsweerde: Not in our opinion! We’re not excited by reality, we never were. The idea of a photograph as a purveyor of truth, for us, was always questionable, because you point your camera and you decide to take the picture of something and not to take a picture of something else, you’re already manipulating reality.
Vinoodh Matadin: And if you think about it, reality always changes. So, what is reality?
IVL: Exactly. When we started working with the computers in the early nineties, we realized that we can form reality into whatever we wanted. We’ve shot girls in a studio and then put them on a beach or in a disco. We love this uncanny feeling that makes you look at a work of ours and go, “Wait — I'm seeing something real, but it can't be real. Something is strange here.” There is a joy in being able to disrupt reality, to shoot it and then through digital manipulation, change it again.
If, as you said, photography is not the purveyor of truth, what is it the purveyor of?
IVL: For us, it’s love. We always talk about Simone Weil's statement that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity — this is how we experience taking a picture. Someone will come into our studio to be photographed, and immediately we are thinking, “Okay, what does this person need from me right now? What lifts them up? What constructs them anew? What is the thing that's so magnificent about them that we want to heighten?” We are trying to ask ourselves: how do we truly see this person in our view? And then it's that interaction, these sort of arrows of energy that go to that person. And then what comes back through the lens to us is this beautiful exchange of trust and attention and collaboration.
“To have those magical moments, the ones that require real trust or bravery or letting go, you’ve really gotta swing for the rafters! You’ve got to try and hit it out the park — although you might miss. You’re always trying to hit it into the rafters, and damn the consequences if you don’t make it.”
“My goal when I’m in front of an audience is to perform the piece and fill it with meaning. On stage, I concentrate on rationality and empathy, since the singer must feel a certain amount of emotion, but not too much.”
“There is something in leaving this place better than where you have left it, working on yourself, doing things with other people, there is something in that that feels right, deep in your core. I go with that.”
“Somehow at the end of the day doing something that actually resonates with people is quite rewarding and keeps me going.”
“If I should be fortunate enough to make another film, it would be exactly what I have settled upon as what is right for me. I feel that these days, I understand a little more what the cinema is.”
“I think I will stop working when I am finally satisfied… And I cannot see that in the foreseeable future. The urge to do better and even better than that is what pushes me forward.”
“If I want to make a movie and I can at 62, I will. But I want to leave the ring triumphant. I want this guy, this guy you see right now, I want him to be the guy who makes the movies, not the autumn dude.”
“When I swing and miss with a movie or a play, it’s life or death for me. I feel I don’t have any value, that there is no reason someone would want to be friends with me, that kind of thing… I think that is something that’s not going to change, so I try to use it as motivation.”
“Making a movie comes with a great deal of joy, an incredible amount of hard work and equal amounts of stress, pressure, fun, and anxiety. But ultimately it’s extremely rewarding! I have the best job in the world.”
“I started a very nice career, became quite successful, and at age 40 I won this prize. But when I got that prize, I realized that I hadn’t yet found my own language of cooking. So I got on my knees and gathered all the tools from my childhood and started working very hard on that. And that’s how it started.”
“I think at a certain point, you arrive to a kind of maturity that allows you to swim more freely. And when you touch that state, playing with your unconscious, it's very beautiful when you when you experience that moment.”
“I always want to take a human portrait. My goal in life is always to enter into everything with great care and with great humanity.”
“Once I commit to an idea, then I just move forward with it, no matter what. And that's always how I've operated when it comes to my art. I'm kind of tenacious in that way, even if it takes a lifetime, eventually I will make that thing.”
“One day, if you have a little bit of talent and a lot of hard work, you’re going to find out who you are.”
“It’s the rollercoaster ride of doing something creative: when it goes well and you enjoy the process then it’s a high and you just want to keep on doing it.”
“I think it’s just been a long slow burn. I’ve worked fairly consistently, and I’m really grateful — even for the years of not getting so many acting jobs because that means I really appreciate being able to do what I love now.”
“I am not that interested at the moment to work for the sake of others, I’m not interested in doing commissions. I'm way more interested in creating art for art's sake and in order to do that I have to believe in myself.”
“The bottom line in the end is to grab the heart of the audience and talk to them directly and tell them: "I share with you my soul and my heart."”
“As a photographer, as long as I remain truthful with myself in the transaction, as long as I maintain a level of empathy for my humanity in that process, then what is being translated back is honest and the transaction is not objectified.”
“I knew what felt instinctively right for me, and I pursued that throughout my entire career. It’s the way I live; it’s the way I work. Everything that I’ve done and everything that I have is an extension of my personal taste.”
“I don’t pander to anybody. I don’t care who it is. I just do the picture I do.”- “Every time you hear a piece of music that you’ve written, you remember the joy of it. Even if you don’t remember exactly what the writing process was like, there’s a moment where you hear it and your heart is full. It’s a similar emotion like when you are in love with someone, you feel that internal joy.”
“When you are in a very, very tough moment of a day and have a lot of frustration because nothing is happening right—but you don’t give up—and suddenly that happens! That’s almost a transcendental thing.”
“The game of basketball means everything. This is love. Definitely love. I had to practice and I had to make sacrifices, but basketball has given me so much.”
“As a director, what I hope is to create situations where the actors will be able to be alive like real people even in the context of something that is quite manufactured.”
“I live from my heart. I am not a cerebral person. I will never be. I am 55 years old. I will continue doing things the way I have done them my whole life.”
“You’ve got to actually write it. You’ve got to actually sit there and do it, it can’t just be about the experience. Lots of people have fantastic experiences in life, but don’t have any inclination to put pen to paper.”
“I think we've all lived through the pandemic and it has awakened in all of us a concept of time, and how fleeting our time is and can be... I want to apply my energy doing good and creating and hopefully not squandering that. That's what I live for.”
“I think the best you can do for yourself is let your subconscious drive you, instead of doing things because you want to achieve some sort of glory.”
“It's important for a novelist to use the imagination like a musician, a composer or a painter would, in a kind of non-logical way. I think it’s very important for me to not just become a kind of intellectual writer.”
“I’ve been very fortunate, and I don’t know why, but my shoes don’t have a special time period. I don’t design them with that in mind but it happens: timelessness. I have been absolutely gifted by that.”
“The entire aim of my work is to elevate the human spirit.”
“My work is integrated completely into my life and vice-versa – I’ve been working since I was 16. My work is my life and my life is my work. It made me who I am.”
“I struggled a lot. That was the reason I became a champion. A lot of people give up, a lot of people feel sorry for themselves. But I didn't.”
“I’m using my skills to create architecture that serves humanity. I’m talking about creating space for you so that you can feel comfortable, space that supports your work and activity.”
“To do something no one else has ever done, it’s satisfying, but the thing is nobody else is really playing the game of free solo climbing, so it's easy to win when no one else plays, you know?”
“I hope the scale of my works is way bigger than what you see. I hope they live in you.”
“I think the final circle in being an artist is connecting, making some conversation to the world you’re in. I think if you have that feeling of why you need to do something, you’ll find a way. And I think that really takes you forward!”
“You can catch ideas at a deeper level when you start meditating. Intuition grows, and intuition is the number one tool for an artist – feeling and thinking combined. The ideas are flowing, and the feeling that you can get it to feel correct. You know what that is. It’s a knowingness that grows. It’s really beautiful.”
“I think it comes from my desire as a kid to do something artistic that would amaze people, you know? I wanted to do nothing less than that. Those are the projects that I love: figuring out what might just be possible but hasn't been done yet.”
Autumn Durald Arkapaw: “It’s an out of body experience”
Ms. Arkapaw, as a cinematographer, how did you develop your taste in the visual?
It started probably with my grandparents on my mother's side. They traveled a lot, and they took a lot of photographs, my grandmother had tons of photo books that I remember we would always look through. I had a relationship with photographs when I was growing up, it was a way that I could connect with family members or see the world, see where they traveled. Then I started doing my own photography in high school, I wanted to do my undergrad in art history so that I could become a curator or get an internship at Sotheby's. That was the path that I was on. But then I went to LMU and took a film genre course and I started to understand films. We watched Broadway Danny Rose, Raging Bull, stuff like that… So the visual medium has always been on my mind.
What other films sparked inspiration for you visually? I read that in college you and your roommate would re-watch Trainspotting and Heat — two pretty different ends of the visual spectrum.
Yes, we would literally watch Trainspotting or Heat every day because there's just so much energy and excitement in those films. They made us feel, they kind of woke you up. To watch something multiple times, I mean, obviously you enjoy it, but also every time you find something new. It's a very visceral experience.
Joachim Trier: “I’m going for it”
Jessie Buckley: “There’s nothing I let go of”
Paul Thomas Anderson: “We continue to move forward”
Adolpho Veloso: “It puts you in a different state”
Flying Lotus: “Music is a spiritual experience”
Fiona Crombie: “Every choice has meaning”
Lachlan Bailey: “Just focus on that moment”
Kate Hawley: “It’s the push and pull”
