Sebastiao Salgado By Matthew L. Wald;Published: June 9, 1991 Putting out oil well fires is a dirty, miserable, dangerous, all-absorbing business. In the Greater Burgan Oil Field in Kuwait, burning oil wells noisily spew noxious 40-foot-high geysers of oil and gas into the air. On a recent day, things are going badly, although nobody quite wants to say so. Each man at the well drifts away from the roaring geyser and walks to the newcomer, bending to shout a greeting in his ear. On the face of it, the firefighters and Sebastiao Salgado, the photographer, have little in common. But the workers take pride in telling Salgado what progress they have made and when they expect to snuff out a fire, attach a valve or reach some other milestone in their struggle to put out the nearly 600 blazing wells. Dave Wilson, an oilfield engineer and art photography collector, is perhaps the only American working there who is familiar with Salgado's work. The closest Salgado got to Kuwait before this recent trip was Iraq.
Joel-Peter Witkin Joel-Peter Witkin is a photographer whose images of the human condition are undeniably powerful. For more than twenty years he has pursued his interest in spirituality and how it impacts the physical world in which we exist. Finding beauty within the grotesque, Witkin pursues this complex issue through people most often cast aside by society -- human spectacles including hermaphrodites, dwarfs, amputees, androgynes, carcases, people with odd physical capabilities, fetishists and "any living myth ... anyone bearing the wounds of Christ." His constant reference to paintings from art history, including the works of Picasso, Balthus, Goya, Velásquez and Miro, are testaments to his need to create a new history for himself. The resulting photographs are haunting and beautiful, grotesque yet bold in their defiance – a hideous beauty that is as compelling as it is taboo.
Larry Clark Cindy Sherman: Me, myself and I I give Cindy Sherman the once-over. Then the twice- and thrice-over. I know I'm staring more than is right but I can't help myself. I'm looking for clues. Sherman is one of the world's leading artists – for 30 years, she has starred in all her photographs – and yet the more we see of her, the less recognisable she is. She's a Hitchcock heroine, a busty Monroe, an abuse victim, a terrified centrefold, a corpse, a Caravaggio, a Botticelli, a mutilated hermaphrodite sex doll, a man in a balaclava, a surgically-enhanced Hamptons type, a cowgirl, a desperate clown, and we've barely started. In front of me is an elegant woman with long, blond hair and soft features. Sherman emerged fully formed on the New York art scene in the early 1980s with a series of untitled film stills. We meet at Sprüth Magers, a tiny gallery in central London that is holding an exhibition of her new work. She smiles, and says it was always that way. Nobody in the family thought her dressing up was strange.
Interview with Raymond Depardon Manhattan, NYC, 1980, from Manhattan Out Direct To Film – Interview with Artist Raymond Depardon By Miriam Rosen, Originally Published, Artforum, February 2001 Raymond Depardon talks like he photographs, like he films, like he writes: profusely. And the torrent of words is intensified by the singular sound of his voice, always slightly hoarse, out of breath, and devoid of Parisian preciosity. Photo reporter at the age of eighteen for a leading French news agency, cofounder of the pathbreaking Gamma photo agency in 1967, member of the venerable Magnum agency since 1979, the precocious foreign correspondent and sometime paparazzo turned photographer-filmmaker now has to his credit some twenty-five books (photos and texts) and thirty-five films (long and short, documentary and fiction), not to mention commercials and public service ads. Manhattan, NYC, 1980 from Manhattan Out RAYMOND DEPARDON: With experience, I can see that they’re even more different. MR: What kinds of questions?