BY LAURA LEE BRAL
© Eva Vermandel, Alice and Vicky, Stroud Green, 2015
Tell us about your approach to photography. How it all started? What are your memories of your first shots? / How did your interest in photography come about?
Eva Vermandel (EV): You could say I was born with a camera, because my father had a great interest in photography and since I was often his subject, photography was part of my life from the very start. Later on when I was old enough to hold a camera, my father would occasionally let me use his camera to take one single frame. Back in those days everything was on film and it was expensive, you couldn’t just shoot away as you do now with a digital camera.
When I was a bit older, in my early teens, he’d let me borrow his camera to shoot a whole roll of film. One of the first shoots that I remember doing was a black and white one and there are quite a few shots in there that completely fit with the work I’m doing now. Obviously they are not as sophisticated but they have the same atmosphere about them.
Despite this early introduction to photography, I didn’t study it. I went to art college doing graphic design instead. This was because I’d already done a four-year evening course in graphic design at the part time art college of my hometown Sint-Niklaas. How I fell into doing that evening course is quite a significant story: as a teenager my parents and teachers all pushed me into doing a sciences/mathematics degree course at secondary school, because I was ‘clever’, disregarding the fact that my main passion and the subject I excelled at was art. Doing this course made me feel desperately unhappy. I needed art and there was nil art in the schedule. To compensate for this lack in art subjects at day school, my parents recommended me to do the evening course in graphic design and that’s how I ended up doing that for four years, very enthusiastically. Regardless of that, I still switched from the science/mathematics degree course to human sciences/art within a week of starting secondary school, because I was going slightly mad doing it. It was an intense period that first week at school, it made me realise how essential art is for me. Without it I can barely function.
© Eva Vermandel, Howe’s House, Tucson, 2012
Once I left secondary school, it made sense to continue with graphic design in higher education, I didn’t give it that much thought. While doing that course, I soon realised that photography was really my vocation. I spent the final year of my graphic design course mostly in the photography department where one of the tutors generously taught me how to do C-type prints (colour dark room prints).
After you graduated at the Royal Academy of Arts in Ghent (KASK), you set out and moved to London. In the years that followed, you received international recognition for portraying celebrities such as Elton John, PJ Harvey, Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Ian McKellen, Matt Damon, Ewan McGregor, … and the list goes on. Is this an exciting experience as a photographer?
EV: Well, I really hate the word celebrity. A ‘celebrity’ to me is someone who is solely famous for the sake of being famous. I’m a portrait photographer and a lot of the people I shoot may be famous but they are famous for a good reason: they’re talented actors, writers, musicians, artists, and they’re definitely not in it for the fame. I’m not interested in people who are desperate to be famous.
It’s exciting to meet people whose work I admire, like Joanna Newsom, Polly Harvey, Ian McKellen, David Byrne or Sylvie Guillem, but it’s also nice to meet people I’ve never heard of and have a peek into their lives, it’s all very enriching. I love the psychology behind portrait photography: the way I can dive into someone’s head when I’m photographing them. I also like the fact that I shoot at all kinds of locations. I usually have no control over where I’ll be photographing someone and enjoy improvising on the spot. Sometimes it is in people’s homes, other times in a hotel room during a press junket (which are days of back-to-back interviews and photo sessions to promote a film or new album). The latter can be rather challenging: people tend to be jet lagged and exhausted and I enjoy trying to find ways to shake them out of their zombie-state.
© Eva Vermandel, Sylvie Guillem, Sydney, August 2015
At what point in life did you feel the need to focus on a more personal kind of photography? How did you approach this?
EV: By 2003 I had a good enough grip on portrait photography to feel comfortable whenever I went into a shoot and needed new challenges, because I don’t want to get too comfortable, it kills creativity. I also struggled with being thrown about a lot, having little control over my life as a freelancer: you can go from being very busy to having nothing to do. Getting a phone call in the morning saying you’re off to New York that evening is as destabilizing, as it is exciting, but it means you’ve got little control over your life. Alongside that, I felt that within portrait photography the focus was always on the person you were photographing, while there were certain things I needed to express about myself and the intense change the world was going through with the onset of globalisation and digitalisation. The latter caused a lot of fragmentation in life and changed our ways of thinking.
So I started shooting my own projects, focusing on counteracting this sense of fragmentation by finding a sense of rooting, the diametric opposite of the disposability that comes hand in hand with the hyper-capitalist consumer culture we live in. I travelled across the world to visit the friends I’d made over the years, spending time with them and documenting this with my camera. This body of work is called ‘The Inner Room’ and was shot with a Fuji 6x9. On the back of that, I got the commission from the Douglas Hyde Gallery to shoot ‘Alabama Chrome’ (2006), which also dealt with the hyper capitalist society and the impact of the Celtic Tiger when it was at its peak. That same year I started working on ‘Splinter’, one of the key series of photographs I’ve produced. That’s when I started my search for the linear way of processing thoughts and ideas, in opposition to the modular way information is being processed now. I continued working on ‘Splinter’ for another six years until 2012 and in 2013 I published the book on this series with Hatje Cantz.
In ‘Splinter’, portraiture quietly intertwines with unanimated still life and landscape. How would you describe the relationship between objects as part of an environment and the people living in it?
EV: There’s no portraiture in ‘Splinter’. Everything you ‘see’ in Splinter is secondary to the thoughts behind the work. Whether it is people, objects or landscapes, they are all just vessels to transfer the ideas behind the work that I’m bringing across. It’s about the emotional impact of the photograph, not what’s actually on display.
© Installation view ‘Splinter’ at Cecilia Hillstrom Gallery, 2013
In capturing those serene moments in between everyday preoccupations, your images often evoke a kind of deep stillness and serenity that is mostly associated with painting. In what way do you feel a resemblance to this medium?
EV: I’m much more influenced by painting than photography. I’m not a big fan of photography to be honest, I find it often too focused on the surface – surface as in: ‘what is perceived by the eye’. I’m not interested in a body of work that you can explain in one simple sentence, for instance, ‘teenage girls in their bedrooms’ or ‘rundown seaside towns’. It can be a strong body of work, I don’t want to be disparaging about it, but it’s not what I want to see in an exhibition. If I go to a gallery I want to be challenged and I want to see work that is multi-layered, so I can take my time peeling off the different layers and along the way immerse myself into the work and through it gain insights into my life and the world around me.
I think all art should be a reflection of its time and the era we live in is turbulent to say the least. The extreme shift in thinking that came with the onset of digitalisation is at the core of what I explore in my work. Doing this through photography can be challenging: it’s quite an inflexible medium. A medium like painting gives you more freedom to express the emotional core of what you perceive with your eyes. Cutting through this ‘what is there to see’ and focusing on ‘what is there to feel and think’ lies at the heart of my work. I often feel like a painter disguised as a photographer.
© Eva Vermandel, Pj Harvey, 2007
Are there contemporary artists or photographers that have influenced you in some way?
EV: Yes, there are loads. There is Michaël Borremans, whose influence is visible quite clearly in my work, but I also love Neo Rauch, Miroslaw Balka, Lindsay Seers, Alice Neel and Peter Doig, though I’m not overly keen on the work the latter has produced since he moved to Trinidad. When talking about contemporary photographers, I find the work of Wolfgang Tillmans incredibly strong and inspiring. Whenever I go to one of his shows I come out and see the world afresh again.
In terms of the classics, I’m influenced by the work of Bronzino, which you can see in my portraits. I love the Flemish Primitives and the German and Italian early renaissance (Cranach, Paolo Uccello), and 19th century European painters like Ingres, the Danish painter Christen Købke and Courbet. I love Munch as well, Picasso in his blue and rose period, Matisse, Balthus … there are so many. I also like Corneille de Lyon, a Dutch Renaissance painter who did these beautiful small portraits. Stunning work, it’s just endless. In photography, I love Julia Margaret Cameron, Imogen Cunningham and Francesca Woodman, not so coincidentally all women. I think photography as a medium works very well for women because as a woman you’re a lot less intimidating when you walk around with a camera than as a man. I think it is a huge advantage being a female photographer.
© Eva Vermandel, Flowers, Living Room, Stroud Green, 2010
What are some of the techniques you use to improve the aesthetic quality of a photograph? How big a role does altering images with Photoshop software play in the process of creation and how does this relate to the aesthetics of your work?
EV: In terms of the overall colour palette it is all very subtle, I don’t do major things: the key lies in the way I use film and how I expose it. I don’t like digital cameras so I don’t use them as a primary source to shoot the work with. That said, I’m not at all averse to digital as a medium for printing; I scan negatives and output them as inkjet prints, treating them as ink-on-paper, more akin to etching than photographic printing. I keep firm control over the whole printing process as I’ve always done all my own printing, either in the dark room or as scans from negative. And if you work with scans from negative, you get an even greater control on dodging and burning and colour correcting than in the dark room. I also have no problem whatsoever with cloning bits out of a photograph that shouldn’t be there. I’m absolutely no purist in that way – I’m not a documentary photographer.
© Eva Vermandel, Brothers, Heath, 2006
For ‘Splinter’, and for most of my other work within my art practice, I use inkjet as a medium for printing. With its similarity to classic printmaking it suits my work more than C-types. The printing for ‘Splinter’ was rather complicated because the work is dark and the inkjet technique was still in its early stages when I started producing the prints. Translating an image from screen to paper is not straightforward: you go from a lightbox with endless colour options to a limited colour palette as ink on opaque paper - building the right colour profiles was key to this. Also, I often print on Photo Rag paper and any kind of scratch on it ruins the print. But once safe behind glass they look wonderful and provide the perfect colour palette and texture for my work (for the ‘Splinter’ series anyway, I use other papers for other bodies of work).
What do you think about photography in the era of digital and social networking? How do you see the future of photography evolve?
EV: On the one hand, I really like it that people have the possibility now to display their work freely, that you don’t need a gallery anymore. Everyone can build their own website and promote their work online. The internet is a great research tool (if used critically). On the other hand I very much distrust social media and digital corporations like Google. These companies offer ‘free’ services so they can gather our personal information and with this information turn us into ‘consumer groups’, commodities, as interchangeable and disposable as the products they try to flog us.
People tend to say that with the overload of images it is hard to see the wood through the trees but I disagree with that. We’ve been overloaded with images for years, even before the onset of digitalisation, and I think it is actually much easier now to spot good work, because as soon as you see something good it just jumps out through the fog of crap.
© Eva Vermandel, Boy with Pink Aerosol, Stroud Green, 2006
I don’t know how the future of photography will evolve long term. The thing I hope is that Kodak keeps producing film and Portra 800 in particular, because that is the one I use. If they don’t, I might even pack up completely, because film is absolutely vital for me.
But for now, I think we’re pretty safe and film will continue to be produced, because there has been a massive resurge in film recently. People are starting to realise more and more that digital is just shit, especially in most daylight situations. Even if you are using a Phase One or a Hasselblad digital camera, the top end cameras, the result is still nowhere near the quality you get with film. In some situations, like studio photography, it can work fine because you’ve got good control over the lights, but as soon as you are using daylight, problems like chromatic aberration arise, and you also get horrid artificial reds, greens and blues that are impossible to tone down in post-production. In ten, twenty years time we will be looking back on digital photography produced now and we’ll wonder how on earth we accepted that level of quality. So until there are better quality digital cameras, I’m firmly sticking to film.
What are the projects that you are working on now and do you have any plans for the future?
EV: I just finished a major project for the Sydney festival, which went up in January this year. They got in touch with me last year (2015) to ask if I could do 40 portraits of people who collaborated with the festival over its 40-year history. They gave me a wishlist of 120 potential subjects to choose from. Half of them were people based in Australia and that part of the project was going to be organised by the festival team. The other half was based in other parts of the world and I did all the production (making initial contact, organising a place and time for the shoot if they said yes and booking my travel) as well as the photography. I had four months for the whole project, including post-production (handprinting in the colour dark room, overviewing the reprographics and checking proofs), from June till October. Everything went swimmingly and we got access to high profile artists like Robert Wilson, Sylvie Guillem, David Byrne and Joanna Newsom.
© Eva Vermandel, Joanna Newsom, billboard installation at Sydney Festival, 2015
When the Sydney Festival director first approached me about this project, I was very interested in doing it, but also quite vocal about my reservations of showing portraits of famous people in an exhibition context, due to my dislike of the ‘Madame Tussauds’- style famous people voyeurism. To counteract that they came up with the idea of showing the portraits on billboard posters, which I loved right away. It fits completely in my way of thinking: alongside the democracy of showing work this way, keeping it firmly down to earth, it also created a striking contrast between my portraits, stripped back from all artifice, and the ads for high end perfumes etc. that normally grace these sites.
© Eva Vermandel, James Thierree, billboard installation at Sydney Festival, 2015
I’ve also been shooting new work continuously. I’ve got two major bodies of work that are virtually ready to go up but I’m waiting for the right situation to show the work in. One of these projects is shot on a 35mm point and shoot camera and is much more classically ‘photographic’ than anything I’ve done before. It doesn’t have the painterly quality that defines my other work. In that project I’m doing things I shouldn’t be doing technically, like using a flash in situations where you shouldn’t. It’s not on my website yet, because it’s a project that I want to show installed in an exhibition. The other new body of work I’ve produced is on display on my website and is more in line with ‘Splinter’. It’s called ‘Water’ which is short for ‘We stood with the light with water on our faces’, a line taken from the novel ‘The White Peacock’ by D.H. Lawrence, who has been a strong influence on my work. I can’t stop reading and rereading his work. What he expresses through literature is exactly what I want to express through my art.
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LINKS
Eva Vermandel
Belgium