Interviews

Adwomen caught up with Kyle Cassidy, artist, photographer and cultural commentator extraordinaire. Among other things Kyle talks about his work, his recent collaborative fine art travel photography project, ‘The Hive’ (http://www.inthehive.org/) and what drives him to do the things he does.

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and what inspires you? 

  
  I’m inspired by people. I see someone on the street and I start to think “I wonder if his sock drawer is a mess” or “does that woman still talk to her best friend from third grade?” I want to hear how people met, and what their grandparents did and what they believe and I want to know what they’re like. That lead me off in 2004 finding Americans who owned guns and photographing them in their houses, and it’s had me this last year finding authors and photographing them in the places where they write – I’m really fascinated by the spaces that people create for themselves..
  
  I live in a big city so there’s so much going on, so much to see and sometimes it’s just overwhelming, there’s so much you just can’t focus on one thing – so I like to go places too, to travel and see the world fresh, I think it’s easier to find a place if you don’t already know it. I’m lucky that the kind of photography I do really lends itself to going new places and meeting new people. It’s what I really enjoy.
  
  
• How would you describe your work and visual language?
  
  I’m very interested in exploring themes of “truth” and “fiction” as it relates to art in general and often photography in particular. I’m very interested in storytelling and photography’s ability to entertain as well as inform – those dual and often conflicting purposes to which it can be put. On the one hand you have things like crime scene photos, court evidence – things that are used to say specifically “this happened and this is how it happened” – and on the polar opposite side you have movies which use photography to create fabricated realities, starting with its very nature, which is to trick us into thinking that things are actually moving.
  
  A lot of my art photography is very much about fiction – while my documentary photography is very much about trying to find and tell a true story – I’m really interested in both ends of the spectrum. 

  
  
With the Hive, I was hoping to tell a very true story – the secret story of other people’s lives. If you visit Paris, and pick up a tour book, it’ll show you the Eiffel tower, it’ll show you the Louvre, and you’ll go and see these things but it’s only one part of the city – it’s a carefully constructed public front and I think that as such, it’s even a little dishonest – and this is where truth and fiction get interesting, because I’m trying to find what is the nature of a place? I want to see the places you won’t see on a tour, that aren’t in the guide book – I want to see people’s living rooms, I want to see how they do their laundry – I want to see what it’s like to be someone else. That inspired the Hive, and it inspires a lot of my documentary photography.
  
  
• What sparked Hive for you?
  
  When we pick a photograph out of a roll and put it in a frame and hang it onto a wall, we’re validating it. We’re giving it value. We’re saying “this is worth looking at, stop, give it your time and attention.” And then along came Marcel DuChamp and he puts a urinal in an art gallery, saying “hey, THIS is worth looking at” and everybody freaked out and the art world changed.
  
  He was trying to, if anything, undefine art. Before that art had always been pushed and he was, I think, saying it could be found. 

  
  
Following that, there were a lot of clever people who had things to add to that discussion and also, I think, there were a lot of people who were just hauling urinals into art galleries without putting any thought into it saying “Hey! I’m being provactive! And look, I’m adding to the discussion because this isn’t just a urinal, I put a shoe in it!” Which really isn’t one-upping Duchamp. You had Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes and you had people like Tracy Emin who dragged her entire bed into the Saatchi gallery. The good ideas are rare and there’s a lot of background noise.
  
  Sometime in there a few intrepid collectors began collecting snapshots, images by amature photographers that for one reason or another attracted their interest. They were finding art where it, more likely than not, was never intended. And then somehow there were artists who started imitating a lot of the qualities of snapshots and you had people who I think are legitimately on the cusp, like Nan Golden who was producing these very ordinary images of extraordinary things – and that lack of what we’d come to think of as Fine Art photo technique makes them seem more real – it brings the viewer closer to the story.
  
  I was in a gallery recently that was having a show of what I thought were a lot of really terrible photographs – for whatever reason the photographer had put them in frames and the gallery had hung the on the walls – and it’s the sort of thing that has to happen, it’s a gallery’s job to do that, because you need to carry the discussion on because a lot of these questions take years to answer – but I was so underwhelmed by these photos I wondered to myself “does this guy’s camera go off by itself? Does he just carry it around and it takes pictures of whatever hideously boring thing he’s doing all day?” That’s what really got me thinking about controlling a camera that someone else carried around. And of course, the question is “How is this any different? Isn’t this just another urinal in a gallery but this time with a shoe in it?” and the answer is “I honestly don’t know, but I don’t think so.”
  
  
• How did you go about producing the project?
  
  I have ideas for projects all the time – most artists probably do – and one thing, one big factor that goes into them even getting started is the likelihood that they’ll ever be finished. I’d love to spend six weeks in Antarctica doing portraits of scientists, but the likelihood of it ever happening is so slight that I’m probably never going to start applying for an NEA grant to do it. You learn really quickly which ideas to feed and which to daydream about.
  
  One of the very appealing things about the Hive is that it is, by nature, distributed, and I could get other people to do a lot of the grunt work. I have people emailing me all the time asking if I’m looking for interns and I never am because I don’t really have anything for an intern to do. Most of my shoots are really really simple. I just saw video of Anne Liebowitz photographing Sean Connery and there are, literally, there are fifteen people standing behind her and my first thought is What are all those people doing? But with this I could see very quickly that it was something that would be easy to make happen because on all of the time consuming stuff I could get help.
  
  So I posted for volunteers – I wanted ten – so I posted to my blog that I was looking for ten volunteers and the emails started coming in, I waited until I’d gotten ten and then I took the ad down off of my website – it was up for 90 seconds, but for the next couple of minutes more came through and I ended up with twenty-three. I had an assistant collect everybody’s phone number and I set up a space for them to put their photos when the project was over.
  
  I just divided the twenty-three people into two groups, which I called “hives” because it seemed like they were a bunch of bees, going out and bringing pollen back and we were going to make honey out of it. Then over the two days of the project I sent out eleven SMS messages to the phones of the people in the hive – they carried their cameras everywhere and when they heard the special “beep” they just took a photo of whatever was in front of them. I went through and picked out the good ones – two interns did all the labeling, I hired Olga Nunez to do the web page, and the whole thing was over – from idea to being on line in five days.
  
  
• Where is Hive being exhibited?
  
  The first exhibition is going to be at the Wil Jax gallery in Cleveland Mississippi, in the fall of 2009. From there it will no doubt move around a lot – it’s a show that packs up very small and doesn’t take a lot of installation so someone could pretty easily hang it in their garage. I like the idea of having something very uncomplicated and simple and unpretentious, because the whole thing is about real life, just ordinary real life, not about sacred spaces, so to speak, so I’d love to see it hanging in very every-day places.
  
  
• How do you see technology changing art and possibly culture?
  
  Well, it’s already changed in a lot of way. Probably the most important, not counting digital, which has just turned everything upside down, is the ability people have to work with, see, and discover one another. Places like Flickr and Model Mayhem are introducing people. Artists are doing their portfolios on BLURB or LuLu now so instead of spending $200 or $800 on a portfolio, you’re spending $18 on a hardcover book and you can leave them with people, so a lot of the old things have just gotten easier. And the exposure has just become so much more available – there’s been a real democratization of art.
  
  Twenty years ago if I wanted people to see my work I’d send slides out to galleries until someone decided they were going to show my stuff, and then I’d have one or five or maybe thirty images up on a wall for a month, they’d cost $150 each to frame, and if I was lucky 2,000 people would see it. Now I get up in the morning, take a photo of my cat, put it up on my website, and by the end of the week, 200,000 people all over the world have seen it. Which doesn’t invalidate galleries, because these aren’t the same people as the 2,000 who might have gone to the gallery show, but it’s a new path to the waterfall, so to speak.
  
  
• What are some of the other projects that you believe have pushed boundaries for both technology and art?
  
  There’s a lot of really interesting science that’s been happening – the Hubbel Space Telescope comes to mind with the really astoundingly beautiful images that came out of that – but it’s not new -- before that all the way back to the zoetrope, scientists are always coming up with things that take art in new directions. Motion pictures, computer animation, the Internet…. Who would have thought 20 years ago that people would be drawing on their telephones? It’s like a time traveler coming back from the not-so-distant future and popping a frozen pizza out of his sneakers, but whenever I’m standing in front of the Philadelphia Art Institute waiting for the bus, there’s some kid sketching flowers on his iPhone.
  
  
• From your fantastic body of work documenting cultures, do you have a project that has moved you most. Why?
  
  That’s a tough question because if you’re doing it right, your life will change after everything you work on. I’ve had my world shaken by quite a few projects I’ve worked on – but I think the one that affected me most profoundly might have been the kids living in the sewers in Bucharest. I wasn’t there very long, and not long enough to do it properly, but I knew that someone needed to do it and when I got back I started raising money to send a photojournalism student back to spend the summer and do what I couldn’t do. That was Scott Squire and he spent a hundred days there and really brought life to that and did a wonderful job.|
  
  But Egypt changed my life, photographing gun owners changed my life, photographing the desert changed my life. If you’re doing it properly, you never go to bed the same person you woke up as.
  
  

Kyle Cassidy
Kyle Cassidy has been documenting American culture since the 1990's. He has photographed Goths, Punks, Cutters, Politicians, Metalheads, Dominatrices, Scholars, and Alternative Fashion, in addition to less prosaic subjects.

In recent years his projects have extended abroad to Romania, where he captured the lives of homeless orphans living in sewers; and to Egypt, where he reported on contemporary archaeological excavations.

His publications include several books on information technology, as well as a regular appearance as contributing editor for Videomaker magazine. His Photo-A-Week blog (www.kylecassidy.com ) was one of the first photo blogs on the internet and now has an average of more than 150,000 visitors a week.

His work has appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair (DE), the Sunday Times of London, Marie Claire, Photographers Forum, Asleep by Dawn, Gothic Beauty and numerous other publications.

His documentary photography book Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in Their Homes was awarded amazon.com's "Best 100 Books of 2007" "Best 10 Art Books of 2007" medals. Most recently he worked on the big book of Who Killed Amanda Palmer with Amanda Palmer (go figure) and the wonderfully talented Neil Gaiman. He is currently hard at work photographing war veterans tattoos and science fiction authors desks.