 |
Miranda Lichtenstein, Untitled #9
from Chapter 2: Coming to Terms with Place
|
|
Photographer Miranda Lichtenstein lives and works in New York City. Since receiving her M.F.A.
from the California Institute of Arts in 1993, she has shown her work in galleries and museums
around the United States. Untitled #9 is from the series Danbury Road, in which Lichtenstein
photographed the exteriors of middle-class Connecticut homes at night.
| S&W2: |
Will you explain how you came to take this shot?
|
| M.L.: |
This was one of the earliest photos I did in the Danbury Road series. It's funny because it's actually the
one photograph in the series that's not of a private home. It's a crafts store on the side of Danbury Road,
just buttressing a park. It's a converted colonial home, so it kind of mimics the aesthetic of the architecture
in that neighborhood. The landscaping around it is incredibly artificially lit, much more so than the other
homes I photographed in the series. I didn't use any additional light in making this photograph. What was
great about it is they had this florescent green light projecting up into the pine trees surrounding
[the store]. That, along with the single bench, offered ready-made cinema lighting. It would have been a
feat for me to stage [it] myself. In that way this photograph led me to discover how many homes in the area
were using this kind of light to stage their homes, to make their houses very theatrical. When I saw this
house--this mock-colonial house set up as a crafts store--with this lighting, it was like finding a perfectly
staged moment.
It's funny that this was one of the first photos in the series and that it's the one you chose, because the
rest of the series is very much about the tension between privacy and my role as the voyeur. The lighting that
people choose to illuminate their homes holds a certain tension. They're both inviting people to come
look--they're showcasing their homes--and warding off a criminal element. That's what really became the core of
my interest in that series.
|
| S&W2: |
Had you been interested in that sort of tension before finding this house?
|
| M.L.: |
Yes. I had been driving around that area of suburban Connecticut, and I finally settled on this one
area because it was much more rural and so there was something particular about the isolation of the homes
there. I had always thought that people moved to the suburbs to create some kind of community. In fact,
what I found going to Ridgefield is that it's an isolationist movement. It's about not being able to see
another human being from your house.
There is something a little menacing about these houses in the woods. Many of the articles written about
the project spoke about horror cinema as a kind of reference. That was something I was very careful to
edit out in my selection for my show because I didn't want that to be the only narrow reading of the
images. Also, I think there was already a precedent of work that dealt with the idea of the suburbs
being a place of terror (filmmaker David Lynch, for example, or photographer
Gregory Crewdson.
I wanted to be much more varied than that. I would often cast a red light in the foreground to create a
much more cinematic quality in some of the images, and then others, such as this one, are much more
classical and formal.
|
| S&W2: |
How would you describe the compositional choices that make 'Untitled #9' more formal?
|
| M.L.: |
The subject, to begin with, because the house itself is very classical. It's a colonial home. But it also has
to do with where I positioned it compositionally, how I centered the elements, the amount of sky versus the amount
of foreground. In a way I was mimicking the position of the homeowner who is trying to present a very grandiose and
formal image, in which the lights are perfectly allocated on the lawn and the bushes are trimmed "just so." It is
about a kind of classicism. I was also trying to mimic the choices around photographing a more classical house without
getting the distance or maybe even the closeness of the sense of being the intruder.
In many of the other, less formal images, I would light the lawns in the foreground with my car headlights or use
my brake lights to create a cast of red across the picture plane. [This car lighting] ended up making the image have
a more predatory nature to it. Those became much more nuanced images and perhaps more about fear as opposed to the
structure of the house. And then still others were just about the light surrounding the house versus the light in
the woods, a kind of nature/culture paradigm.
Whenever I look back on that project, I realize how much my heart would race when I was going to make these
pictures because I never asked permission. It was a very clandestine operation, and I'd realize when I printed
a lot of the images that fear was kind of palpable in some of the photographs. Untitled #9 is not an example of that.
I knew that a lot of my fear going to shoot these images was sort of irrational. I was in the suburbs. But I would be
alone, sort of encroaching on this lawn and the slightest sound behind me would make me jump. I don't know what I was
really afraid of. Occasionally people came out of the house and occasionally I was stopped by the cops, because it was
literally trespassing. I wasn't interested in trespassing as a subject in the work, but I think that the experience of
doing that came through in that project. I never used to think that that was possible. I felt as though in making a
photograph, any kind of visual art, you have to be very conscious, kind of controlling of it. This is in part because
of my schooling. To then recognize later on [that] something very emotional and intuitive that went into the work in
fact came through with the viewer was a bit of a revelation.
|
| S&W2: |
What originally made you want to photograph at night?
|
| M.L.: |
One of the first times I drove up to Connecticut, I was so struck by the homes while driving around at night.
It was like a live theater. I found it very beautiful and incredibly cinematic. Like so many photographers that
came before me, I was finding something in the banal or the quotidian. Driving through a town during the day,
you don't necessarily pay attention, unless you're a real estate developer or house hunting. But then at night
it's entirely switched, by virtue of the way the homes are lit against the darkness of the sky. There are also
very few streetlights in these areas, so the contrast becomes that much starker.
Prior to that, I had done a series using found light. As I say, light is a found object in the city. When I first
got out of graduate school and got a job as a photo editor at Interview magazine, the only time I had to shoot was
at night. But I picked up my camera and would always have it on me when I would walk home. I was completely struck
by the walk I'd make in the morning, the streets teeming with people and these buildings you don't even notice, and
then I'd walk home at night and the streets would be dead. And there were vestibules illuminated with both florescent
and tungsten light. I thought they were formally interesting but they also reminded me of film noir. It provided for
me a kind of fictional fantasy, a kind of Raymond Chandler story. When I went to Connecticut, it did seem like a
natural extension to be interested in the way light transforms a space.
|
| S&W2: |
It would be interesting to see those projects juxtaposed against each other.
|
| M.L.: |
Yes. I'm interested in the way [that] so many suburban or exurban environments function as a getaway.
The landscaping [makes it] particularly pastoral and almost painterly. But [the terrain] has also been so
[managed] and so shaped that it has a kind of fantasy quality to it, for me, because it functions as this
escape from city life, but then it's incredibly manicured and there's nothing really natural about it.
|
| S&W2: |
You spent time in Southern California while at Cal Arts. How would you compare the feeling of
the suburbs in Connecticut to those in California?
|
| M.L.: |
L.A. is like one big suburb, and I kind of hated it when I was there. It's only starting to grow on me when
I go back now. I felt very alienated in that environment. And I think that was why, when I moved back to New York,
I picked up my camera again. I physically had such a different relationship to the city suddenly, in terms of being
able to walk and stop and take something in and make note or make a photograph. There's a sense of never being
"there" in L.A. You're always en route, always in transit, going from point A to point B. And when you get to point A,
that's all there is. There's no room for discovery in between.
|
| S&W2: |
Could you talk a little bit about the technical process behind this image?
|
| M.L.: |
I work with C-prints. I make all of my own prints, and I make a lot of decisions in the printing process.
I'm not a purist at all about the way I work with the negative. I know a lot of people want to be true to the
negative and don't crop it. I make decisions in the darkroom all the time about how I want to crop an image,
but also in terms of tone. I happen to like very dark images, so a lot of the time I would choose to make a print
much darker than a lab might if they were trying to do it true to life. You can also play around with tone,
through color choices, in terms of making it warmer (more yellow) or colder (more cyan).
In this case I photographed the house at dusk, when there is a deep, deep blue color. That light lasts only for
about seven minutes; it's a short window of time to try to capture. The amazing thing is that people often thought
that I had manipulated the photograph in postproduction, but it really has to do with the contrast of the tungsten
light against that blue dusk. And it highlights it and makes it incredibly rich.
Someone once said they think of me as a cross between [Gregory] Crewdson, whose work is entirely staged, and
[William] Eggleston, who could be considered a casual observer. I seem to fall somewhere in between a casual observer
and a staged photographer. What I do is find a moment in which I think the stage is already set. In that way I fall
into the casual observer camp. Then there are other times when I bring something I've seen outside inside and redo it,
so I guess I go both ways.
|
| S&W2: |
How do you decide what size you want an image to be?
|
| M.L.: |
It's a struggle. Deciding size and framing is the complication of my life. I'll go back and forth every day:
the brown frame? the white frame? no frame? just mount it? It changes the image. It's a radical decision.
Size is also important.
In Danbury Road and Lovers Lane, the series that followed it, I printed all the images at 30 x 40. I had a uniform size for them.
I decided to make them that big because they are quite cinematic, and there's a certain monumental quality that was enhanced by
making them larger. I was very particular about making the size the same, in part because I had been influenced by the German
school's work with typologies. I really wanted all of my bodies of work to fit into a kind of system. And it marked each body
of work as a kind of series.
Since [those two series], I've got much looser, and I've found that in fact I don't need to make images all the same size.
I try not to automatically make the photograph big anymore. I think there's been this tendency in photography in the past
few years to just go bigger and bigger and bigger to kind of side up to [Andreas] Gursky and [Thomas] Struth. A lot of people
make photographs four feet by five feet, and it's entirely unnecessary for the image. So I always try to check myself and ask:
Could this image work well at a smaller scale? And if I think it does, then I go with that scale. But if I think the image
actually has some kind of detail that would work better being larger or if there's a kind of dramatic quality to the lighting
or something about the image that I think needs to be blown up, then I do that. So that means my shows have all different
sized photographs in them. The last show I did was in L.A., and there were photographs that were 11 x 14 and 30 x 40 and
48 x 60. And it's a nice way to play with the relationships of images by switching scale.
|
|
