Interviewed by Anthony Rhoades

/One/: What drives you to make photographs and what is your goal in doing so?

Larry Silver: The reasons I take photographs have shifted over the past 60 years. My work started with my growing up in New York City. At the age of 15, I set out to record what life was like, photographing the things that surrounded me. This was a documentary approach where my interests and observations guided the subject matter. Documenting the event eventually became less important, and my work grew to reflect shared interests with photographers such as Henri Cartier Bresson. This meant emphasizing a larger area of the environment I was photographing. Because I have spent many years in the darkroom, I have a great deal of control and use many methods to create specific qualities in the print—my darkroom practice has always been a vital element in enhancing the subject matter.

Ten years ago, however, I took my photography in a totally new direction where documenting and designing my images around a subject became less important. This new body of work is, in part, a response to the onset of digital photography. People were (and still are) constantly telling me that digital photography was going to replace the darkroom, and that I should be doing it. This inspired me, conversely, to take my darkroom work and produce photographs that cannot be produced digitally. This is what I have been preoccupied with for the past five years.

Now my work is less allied with documentary photography, and more in line with contemporary art practices of any medium. Today, contemporary artists often use photography as a medium. This also frees up photographers to approach the medium in ways that are more expansive. The necessity of producing a perfect print like Ansel Adams or Edward Weston is no longer necessary. This freedom has enabled me to break many of the established rules. In violating these rules I have created new photographs that are moving, exciting, and unique.

The work I am submitting includes images with and without recognizable subject matter. The images that are recognizable are older, and I have added the element of color to them. Every image started out as a photograph printed on silver paper in my darkroom, but was then manipulated using light, chemistry, pigments, and stains. Most recently, I am using my existing knowledge of the darkroom to do something that does not begin with an image, but instead treats the paper as a blank page on which I make marks using light and chemicals. I move around my work while I manipulate these elements on photographic paper. It is a physical process, not unlike Jackson Pollock’s action paintings.

/One/: What was the impetus for moving from a commercial photographer to a fine art photographer?

LS: I had a commercial studio in New York City for 40 years working freelance for advertising agencies on major accounts. While I was doing commercial advertising photography I continued my own personal work. I would use weekends, holidays, and whatever down time I had to either shoot or print, which I am doing to this very day. My current darkroom is in Shelton, Connecticut.

/One/: How has your image-making process changed with the advent of digital photography, if at all?

LS: Digital photography does not enter into my creative work. The only use I have for digital is to copy my original silver prints because curators and galleries prefer receiving e-mail or CDs rather then slides. I find that the best way to view my work is by seeing the original prints.

/One/: How do you see the progression of your works from the beginning to now and in what ways has your focus changed? Why do you think it has changed?

LS: I no longer think it is necessary to be able to distinguish a subject in an image. I believe an artist can move people by the dynamics of a picture, just like a composer does not need lyrics to move an audience. The sheer dynamics of the music can move and excite people.

I was looking to alter the image and still maintain it as a photograph because photography was always my life and I wanted to maintain the integrity of the photograph. While making my prints, I crumpled what I thought was a discarded photograph and threw it in the garbage, then turned on the lights in the darkroom and left. When I came back to continue my work, I glanced at the discarded print and removed it from the trash. It looked very interesting; it had stained and fogged, causing black streaks. The wrinkles in the paper caused a mottling effect and it actually looked more interesting than the print I was laboring over. I decided to try to re-create that effect, and I started wrinkling the paper and opening the lights. I found it very difficult. Then I started to take measures that were designed to purposely get that effect and the prints became more interesting and I decided that maybe violating the established rules of printing would be more interesting. That started me on a whole new world of photography. That happened about five years ago, and in viewing the work of other artists I realized that it is no longer necessary to follow the past. Since then I have been experimenting and not all of my attempts have been successful, but I think the usage of photographic techniques I have discovered is a new way of creating. This technique is all photographic and I believe totally out of the range of the computer. It is widely believed in the art world that in order for an artist to find a new direction he or she has to be young. I feel that because of my long career in photography at the age of 75 I am still finding new horizons.

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Larry Silver

Larry Silver is an American born artist and was a member of the Photo League. The artist’s work resides in various museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Brooklyn Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Yale University Art Gallery and George Eastman House. Larry Silver’s artwork has been exhibited in many solo and group exhibitions.

Interviewed by Anthony Rhoades

/One/: You often explore dissociation in your photographs.

Sarah Small: Yes, I’m fascinated by themes or characters that are entirely separate from each other brought together into the same space. I contrive scenarios that combine people with distinctive visual personalities and then look for the tensions between the ordinary and the implausible. I photograph a lot of animals, too, particularly in close interactions with humans. This ongoing series of work is titled The Delirium Constructions. Usually I work with sets of models who might never meet in real life—constructing unsettling fantasies, like the elderly with people in their physical prime—who are experiencing one another’s presence in an intimate context for the first time as I shoot and direct them together. When my perception of a scene shifts all around without landing, when I see an undetermined dynamic that seems endlessly explorable, I know an image has been made. I enjoy dynamics that are hilarious and serious simultaneously. I’ve experimented with this dynamic—this feeling that cannot quite be identified—in still photography, singing, and in performance in a recent Tableau Vivant, held last winter. I brought 35 models together in various states of undress and in interactive narratives as a centerpiece for a party.

/One/: What makes this an interesting subject for you?

SS: Thinking about my upbringing, much of what occupied everyday family conversation was observing and analyzing all the absurd and mysterious contrasts within the human condition. And to this day, most casual family conversations revolve around this topic. Ideas and human themes that can contain both seriousness and silliness are endless sources of empathetic connection and laughter in my family dynamic. My mother’s father was a psychoanalyst and she grew up on the grounds of a mental institution. Through her observations in these surroundings, as well as her immersion in her own immediate and extended family, she has countless stories that are at once tragic, mysterious, and hilarious. My father’s family upbringing was also unique. His mother was a jazz pianist and his father was a colonel in the army as well as an opera fanatic. My parents are both musicians, my dad a pianist/modern composer and my mom a Renaissance lutenist. I grew up with few emotional boundaries but a long list of structural and practical rules that made little sense to me but had to be followed. I was taught by my mom to be deeply empathetic to all humans around me and not to judge anyone, while simultaneously I was offered the tools to make light of everyone and everything around me. We love to laugh. We also tend to study our surroundings closely.

/One/: What about the human condition inspires you when making photographs?

SS: Humans are unpredictable and layered with surprises at every turn. I very much enjoy working with the passion and unpredictability of human subjects. Unlike some photographers who use storyboards, I do not work with preconceived ideas. Instead my work is created through improvisation and unpredictable outcome. With or without a camera, this is what I enjoy most about being around people. I love navigating the search for truth and being a witness to all the in-betweens. I love observing people on the subway or on the streets. And I also love watching people watching other people. This is where I gain most of my personal and photographic inspiration and this is one of the reasons I love New York so much.

When shooting, my subjects and I theatrically improvise, collaborate, and experiment together. I talk a lot—sometimes nonstop—and ask a lot from my models. It is important for me to create a playful environment so that experimentation in any form is emotionally cushioned and safe. I direct models into spontaneous interactions and try to encourage the idea that anything goes. I move my subjects and myself around in the space until something sparks my attention. When an experiment takes life I start to shoot faster. The rhythm of my shoots tend to go in waves, moving from slow and deliberate to fast and frenetic, and back again.

I am just as interested in graphic expressions in humans as I am in thematic ones. I love working with models with unique facial or body structures, interesting skin textures or other textural elements which to explore.

/One/: If you weren’t an image maker, what might you be doing?

SS: I actually do spend quite a bit of time not being an image maker, and I don’t think I’d feel happy or complete without creating both photography and music. When I’m not photographing, I spend my time singing, performing, and composing vocal arrangements with my a cappella quartet, Black Sea Hotel. When I discovered Les Mystere Des Voix Bulgares in college, I became entranced immediately and started playing the one album I had all the time. Shortly after moving to New York, I saw an ad on Craigslist about auditions being held that same day for a start-up Bulgarian Women’s Choir. I was the last remaining founding member of that choir before forming into my current band, Black Sea Hotel. Now we rehearse out of my kitchen and perform at rock venues, bars, parks, and the occasional concert hall. We create contemporary arrangements of traditional Balkan folk songs (mostly Bulgarian, but some Macedonian, Romanian, and Greek). I recently realized that my sonic compositions are not so far away in intent from my visual constructions in photography—uneasy, sensual, and on the edge of dissonance, while also being simultaneously playful and densely harmonic.

If I wasn’t image or music making, I think I would be doing some form of social work or psychology. No matter what, I’m sure it would involve interacting and collaborating with other people in some capacity. I have also considered acting. I took an improv class last year, but it was more challenging that I could have ever expected. I was sort of terrified in class, trying to come up with catchy methods on the spot for captivating myself and those around me. I thought I’d be great at it because I’m rarely nervous around people in real life, but I was wrong. If I wanted to go into acting, that would be a vastly different professional trajectory.

/One/: I’ve read that you go into a photo session with only a vague idea of what you wish to get out of it. Essentially creating an atmosphere, setting the stage so something interesting may transpire. In the end, how much is you and how much is the collaboration of your subjects and the environment that you’ve created for them to interact in?

SS: It really is a collaboration. I create the environment in which to explore my models interacting and I set the tone through a combination of directing and simply waiting and watching.

I love my models so much. It is their trust in me and our trust in our collaboration that make my work possible. And the more I work with the same subject, the more synergistic our collaborations become. Generally my repeat models become close friends.

/One/: Your parents are artists and musicians. Do you think that your upbringing has had an effect on your art, or exposed you to a side life, so to speak? If you were raised by an accountant and an insurance salesman, how might your images be different?

SS: I’m sure my images would be totally different had I been raised by different parents. I may not have even become an image maker or musician. They instilled in me curiosity about people and generated in me an openness to endlessly explore human behavior. Also, my mom and grandmother were both photographers, so maybe the passion is in the genes, too. I think my mom is an amazing photographer and wish she still took as many pictures now as she did when I was growing up. Like me, she loves observing people and capturing emotional moments.

It’s funny to think of someone in my family as an insurance salesman. I don’t know anyone who does work like that in my entire extended family. I kind of wish I did… I think.

/One/: Tell us something we don’t know about Sarah Small.

SS: In Fall 2010, I will again bring to life The Delirium Constructions as a living, breathing image. This will be my second Tableau Vivant of The Delirium Constructions, preceded by several work-in-progress mini tableaus with question and answer sessions. etc. for which to workshop the final vision.  As referenced above, last spring, I arrayed 35 models in various stages of undress into interactive narratives on platforms as a centerpiece for a party I threw in Brooklyn.

I brought the models together into improbable, close interactions to examine the social and graphic contrasts of youth and experience, hysteria and discipline, tragedy and hilarity, and sexuality and desexualization. The next tableau vivant will continue on the same path but will be on a grander scale and with new axes of experimentation. Tableau II will feature 120 models, a larger audience, and will introduce musical elements in collaboration with singer Shara Worden and my a cappella group, Black Sea Hotel. Using original vocal arrangements, we will provide live soundscapes interplaying harmony and dissonance within the visual experience. I am so thrilled for this event.

I wear black and gray mostly but I have a bubblegum-pink bedroom with a chandelier and frilly pink things everywhere. My sister Rachel has red hair and freckles and is going to school for forensic mental heath counseling. I’m kind of scared of dogs but love cats. I will travel to Tanzania at the end of the month. I dream about bears a lot and collect them around my house. I’ve taken a self-portrait Polaroid every day for 13 years.

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Sarah Small

Sarah Small was born in Washington DC in 1979 into a family of musicians and writers. She fell in love with photography when she was 13. In 2001, Small graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and currently lives and work in Brooklyn, photographing, singing, and teaching at Parsons School of Design.

The Delirium Constructions is her current and ongoing body of still photographs exploring disassociated characters brought together into the same space. Small brings her models into improbable, close interactions to examine the social and graphic contrasts of youth and experience, hysteria and discipline, tragedy and hilarity, and sexuality and desexualization.(www.sarahsmall.com).

In Fall 2010, she will gather together 120 models in various stages of undress into suspended interactions to create a large scale Tableau Vivant of The Delirium Constructions. (www.livingpictureprojects.com).

Since 1997, Small has taken a Polaroid of herself everyday. She plans to pursue this project for life.

Her work has appeared in publications including Life Magazine, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times. It has been exhibited at Exit Art, The Corcoran Gallery, and The Australian Center for Photography. Small has also been the recipient of several awards and was recently named by American Photo as one of the “ Top 13 Emerging Photographers” working today.

When she is not photographing, Small sings, arranges music and performs in Brooklyn’s Balkan Vocal Quartet, Black Sea Hotel (www.myspace.com/BlackSeaHotel).

There are times when you capture something you see and other times when you know what you’d like to see. David Sacks told us how this image came about.

“The truth is that I composed this image in my mind while on my way to Nagongera, Uganda.  I knew that I wanted to photograph a young girl in a white dress running away from the camera.  Once I found the right girl, I asked her if I could photograph her running.  She said yes, and I ran behind her with my camera held low, shooting dozens of frames.  She was only about 7 years old, but was incredible fast…I was out of breath in no time.”

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David Sacks

Eighth grade was full of ups and downs for David Sacks. Up because he got his first girlfriend that year. Down because her name was Buffy. Up because she kissed him. Down because it happened to be the day that he got braces on his teeth. Up because she had braces, too. Down because she abruptly dumped him the following month. Up because he received a used 35mm camera for his birthday.

With no girlfriend around to lock braces with, David took pictures. He photographed neighborhood cats, flowers, bugs, relatives, and the family dog. A lot. Any money he made from mowing lawns or shoveling snow went towards one of two things: film or processing.

He went to Lehigh University for architecture in 1986, and was thinking about grad school in Hawaii when a friend with dreads and sandals suggested he take a photography course to fulfill a necessary elective. “Dude,” he said, “you have to take a photo class! It’s awesome! There are no tests or papers to write, you just take pictures, dude! Everything looks like art when it’s in black and white!”

David followed his friend’s brilliant advice, and watched his architecture grades begin to slide as he spent days and nights in the darkroom when he wasn’t out shooting. He just couldn’t help it. Photography was all that he wanted to do with his time. He soon discovered that not every black and white photograph was art.

Thanks to his wise and shoeless photo professor, Doug Mason, David decided that he probably would make a pretty mediocre architect, and decided to pursue a career in photography immediately after graduation in 1990.

Success came quickly with an 8-page assignment in New York Magazine, which lead to more magazine work. In 1984, he made the transition to advertising photography, and has never looked back. Campaigns for companies like Merck, Bank of America, GlaxoSmithKline, Delta Airlines, and Epson just kept coming in.

He has won photography competitions sponsored by Nikon, Photo District News, Communication Arts, Graphis, and others. He continues to shoot all over the world for advertising agencies, design firms, and companies of all sizes.

Now in his 40s, he has shot in 27 countries and uses frequent flier miles to travel with his wife and 3 children and also to shoot for philanthropic organizations. He loves his job, and does not expect that he will ever retire. He also enjoys writing about himself in the third person from time to time, even though it feels a little strange.