Other people's questions
The first in a series of posts where I will take on the answering of questions posed at other people. These questions come from an interview with Magnum photographer Martine Franck at ArtInfo.com (from Personism)
I am very struck by how often you return to images of people who are either alone or who are different in some way. Do you see photography as a tool for describing difference?
RD: Photography appropriates the world. I present an imagined context. Ambiguity and anxiety from outside the border of the image is an editing choice.
Let me put it another way, do you see photography as a means of exploring the differences that one encounters in the world?
RD: No. Photographers want to be something else - a witness, too often a witness that can't be cross examined. If anything I am trying to explore the lies we tell oursleves. Or at least the lies I tell myself.
Someone once said that taking someone’s photograph is rather like meeting them on a train.
RD: I encounter alot of people on the New York subways that I would not want to meet. So that is true for me to the extent that it is in passing and I will tell my own stories about them. I am not interested in telling theirs.
Your work portrays both sadness and happiness, but it seems to me that there’s always something melancholic about your portrayals of happiness.
RD: I was an altar boy for many years when I was younger and witnessed the cylce of life - baptisms, weddings and funerals. I think that there must have been some days that I served at all three. In looking back I have come to understand how melancholy and hapiness can attend the same events. It must have had some effect on me and ultimately my work.
Would you say that your work is about the fragility of the human spirit then, or about its strength?
RD: I would rather say that the work speaks to how we get on with what we have to do. We live most of our lives in the middle. In these ambiguous and indecisive moments we find ourselves.
What would you say to the suggestion that the key balance in your work is between curiosity and compassion?
RD: Compassion is a big word better to be applied in smaller circles than society at large. Curiosity yes - but the kind of curiosity that make people rubber-neck - watching people consume themselves and then get indigestion. I think the balance lies in the contradictions. I am a man of many contradictions and in those contradictions I hope I find a truth.
