Max’s Interview: Sante D’Orazio
Last week, MKC contributor, Marianna Ruiz, chatted with the famed photographer. Here’s their full dialog:
M: I’m writing a piece on you for Max’s Kansas City. Are you familiar with Max’s?
S: I’m very familiar with Max’s but I never went there. But I know everybody who did: from Warhol, to Julian Schnabel and crew, and all that. Yeah, I know about it, but it wasn’t my time yet. What year did that close again?
M: Closed in the early eighties.
S: Yeah, I was just starting out in Milan at that time, ’81, ’82, I was living there. So, yeah. I did go to Studio 54 a few times, though (laughs, then adds) as a 16-year old.
M: Ok, so let’s get started. I kind of want to talk about how, to me, your style defines ‘sexy.’ You look in the dictionary, next to the word sexy, and there’s one of your pictures of Kate Moss half naked.
Read the remainder of this interview after the jump.
S: (laughing)
M: And I want to tap into your mind a little bit and find out how it is you create, how it is you achieve such intimate moments with, whoever it is you’re shooting.
S: How did I get there or how do I do it?
M: I want to know your thought process. What goes through your mind, or how do you get to that [intimate] level over and over again?
S: Well, it’s uh, well, obviously it has something to do with me and the person that I am. It has to. If I’m shooting someone, its because I want to, and I find something beautiful or intriguing about them, so that I am visually into it.
And what I try to do, and on a set, a lot of times the picture is created before you actually shoot and that’s by creating an atmosphere of comfort, of ease, and intimacy in terms of something more private. Like, I wouldn’t shoot that Kate Moss picture, or any of those, with a crowd standing behind me. Gawking.
So, you know, I usually have one assistant who knows to be invisible. I keep everybody, sort of in the background, somewhere, where if I need them, they can just jump in.
But, usually, I shoot one girl at a time, so that its about me and her. And I usually am, generally, in awe when I shoot them, and most of all, you’ll never find me being a predator of any kind. (laughs) at lease not on set.
M: What do you mean by ‘predator’?
S: Well, there are people….there’s ways of saying things, like if you find somebody beautiful, and you tell them so, and you say it in a genuine way, like you are impressed and its real, because usually it is if I say it, it will allow somebody to feel welcome, and flattered.
But you have to say it in a way that’s trusting versus, like “Wow, baby, you are hot looking and I want you!” (laughs) If I said that, I’d get smacked in the face.
M: I could understand.
S: You think?? (laughing) But that’s just a crude way of giving you an example. And I don’t give off a vibe of, um…You know, when you’re on my set, that I’m into the pictures.
You know, when you’re on my set, that I’m looking for the best in you. I never compromise my subjects, and I always make them feel comfortable, but at the same time, I’m a man, and they’re responding to me as someone who’s admiring their beauty rather than lusting for it.
M: I definitely think that point comes across in your photos. Nothing looks forced. You can feel the whole comfortable atmosphere through the photos.
S: They end up giving me that. They end up giving it to me because I’ve created an atmosphere of trust with them, and that’s important, but I don’t think that’s something you can fake. From my part, I can say I’m sincere about it. That I know about me. And that’s because I’m in awe of beauty.
I grew up, basically trained in classical art in terms of drawing and painting nudes. I’ve been around nude subjects since I was a kid at the academy and things like that, and if a person is naked in front of me, for instance a nude, I’ll never be staring. Most of the time, their nude and changing jewelry and I turn my back.
It’s just trying to give them respect and not intimidating them in any way. You know, because you’re very vulnerable in that situation. And I understand that.
M: It could probably quickly turn into something awkward and uncomfortable.
S: Yeah, and that’s the last thing I want. And I could only assume that has something to do with me. Because I was trained in a way, of photographer also, that every picture is a self-portrait. Everything you do is a self-portrait: the way you dress, the way you sign your name, they way you handle everything about you. It’s all, obviously, a self-portrait.
I do a series of nudes, and what I usually do is ask a girl to bring the things that she feels most comfortable, or she feels most sexy in. And whether or not, those things that she brings are top of the line doesn’t matter because those things are a portrait of her as well. You know?
She’s painting her own self-portrait when she brings in certain clothing, or shoes, whatever it is. So that’s how it works. That’s how I see it. Sorry, that’s not how it works, that’s how I see it. And we pick and choose together from the things that she feels reflect her. So, that’s just with clothing, but it goes with everything.
At the end of the day, when I edit, I find the pictures that are the most beautiful, but in a strange way, I know it when I recognize myself. And by that I mean my own aesthetic, my own inner-aesthetic. Some people might edit pictures where you get a little peek of certain areas where they might be uncomfortable with but they don’t really care. And I guarantee you that girl’s going to be uncomfortable.
So, it’s a delicate matter; you have to know how to handle it. You know, you have to know how to treat people. And respect them.
M: So what is it that still inspires you? Is it beauty? Or is there something else that continues to inspire you, and has it changed at all, since when you started up to now?
S: Yeah, no, I mean, I’ve changed a lot. I still shoot nudes. I still love them. They’re a part of my aesthetic vocabulary, they always will be.
But I’m painting again, and I’m doing other kinds of portraits and other kinds of pictures that are more, let’s say for the sake of definition, more ‘art oriented’ than fashion beauty oriented. But I think, in essence, you’ll still find that quality, in the portraits of men that I do or the paintings that I make, there’s still an essential quality in them that I recognize as me.
Me, meaning my aesthetic. And that’s the thing you’ll find throughout my work. No matter if it’s a collage, or if it’s a photograph of a man, or it’s a landscape. You know, a landscape can be equal to a nude depending on how you handle it. But its usually successful when you still see yourself in it.
M: So your body of work, what you finally choose at the end of the editing process and everything, is your own self-portrait, and that’s why it is so easy for you to recognize it.
S: Always.
M: Always.
M: So, getting specific to fashion photography, how do you think it has evolved from when you began to now? Is it a completely different world than, say 20 years ago?
S: Yeah, completely different. Completely different.
M: How so?
S: What I did, when I was, lets say at the height of my fashion career, I never really did ‘fashion.’ I was more of a beauty photographer and more of a portrait photographer, and to the dismay of many of my editors, I never paid attention to the clothing; I paid attention to the girl.
I always felt that if the girl looked great with whatever she was wearing then whatever she was wearing would look great too. Whereas a proper fashion photographer will do a beautiful photograph of whatever she’s wearing: the ensemble. And make the girl look good.
That’s where someone like Steven Meisel is the master, you know? His subject is fashion, AND he makes the girl look good. But, I never illustrated the clothing. If anything, I was always accused of removing things. Meaning like, if she came out with the blouse, the heels, the stockings, and the pearls, and whatever, I…I never liked the picture that was highly stylized.
Because the more stylized it was, the more impersonal she looked to me, and the more of an object she was. Somebody asked me about my pictures, and they, while very flatteringly referred to my genre and being part of, like, Helmut Newton and that group.
And my pictures and Helmut’s, there from that. And I said ‘thank you’ but its not true. It is true that the genre’s true, but in Helmut’s girls, they were not approachable. They were objects that you couldn’t have. And with my portraits, my nudes, my beauty, the girls were all accessible and that was a big difference.
M: Personally, I believe your style toward fashion of not ‘paying attention to the clothing’ but focusing on the beauty of the girls is a theme that is now really starting to catch on, such as the Joe’s Jeans billboards or Calving Klein with Eva Mendes billboards that we all see now.
S: Yeah, those are my pictures, basically. What’s happening now is that it’s evolved to the place that I started. I was one of the very few guys doing that at the time, and I guess that’s what set me apart. But fashion has changed in such a way that now its what ‘fashionable’ rather than what ‘fashion.’
Also the culture has changed tremendously. I guess because of the Internet, and what people get to view and see, that sex, and sex appeal, and just sex, raw sex is in fashion. I mean, I just picked up a couple magazines like POP and S Magazine, and Purple Magazine, oh and Love Magazine, don’t know if you saw that recently, but basically these girls are totally in the buff, in your face, frontal nude, I mean, throwing it all at you.
It’s Kate Moss, it’s Lara Stone, it’s Naomi, but we’re talking about pictures years ago that Playboy wouldn’t publish. You know, pubic hair and the details that a gynecologist might blush from (laughs.)
M: So culture is just now more accepting of this ‘no holds barred’.
S: No holds barred; none at all. Its more, right now actually, geared toward my work now than it ever was before. I’m planning on, because of it, working with some of these magazines again, because I stopped for a while, because I know my work, not that it fits in, but that it can stand out and be accepted more than ever before.
M: So how do you keep your photography and the stories that you tell through your photos new and fresh and interesting and relevant?
S: Well, you have to take some chances; you have to try new things. You have to be inspired by your background –not your background, sorry, your environment: your photographic environment, artistic environment. And sometimes, you know, you have to stop.
And that’s what I did. I felt at one point a couple years back that I was just repeating myself and I was depending on my past rather than moving forward, and I stopped completely.
So I was no longer doing any magazine work, and I was sitting by myself, dormant. Because nothing I did was fresh to me, and so I had to walk away from it. And during that time, you go through changes in your own life, then somehow or other something starts to click.
Like, for instances, a couple years ago, what I did was, well, can you imaging all the naughty pictures I must have? After 30 years of working? And they were always great pictures; I always loved the pictures. Right now, those are the pictures that could show up in these magazines and actually blow some people away –but I could never get a release for, because they were famous people, and you know, they’d kill me.
But they were always great pictures, and in my frustration, one year, I said fuck it, I took all the negatives and scratched everybody’s face out. And they became better pictures. Yeah, much better pictures, because it wasn’t about who they are. You’re forced to look at the picture now: the composition, the muse, the this and the that.
And I created something that had so many meanings on so many different levels that it went far beyond anything I had done before. For me. And they became works of art, for me.
Then along side that, I was doing a series of pictures, because all of my friends are artists, and I was in Venice with Ed Ruscha, and we were walking around and there was a calendar of priests. And it was one of those mock-calendars of gay priests.
And it was funny. We had a good laugh, and I said to Ed, “Imagine I get all of my artist friends to dress as priests and do a calendar like this. He goes, “It’ll be great. I’ll be the first.”
M: Mr. January?
S: So I shot Ed as a priest with the long frock and everything. And then from there I shot Jeff Koons, and then I shot Damien Hirst, Matthew Barney… So I did an entire series of priests.
Now, if you don’t know who the guys are, their very, very beautiful portraits of priests and they come from a tradition of art that goes back to the renaissance of portraits of Popes and Bishops and patrons of the art. But as far as a meaning goes, these guys are the creators of our modern day objects of worship, in the art they create, so there is that term, “The High Priests of Modern Art.”
It’s a little tongue-in-cheek. And so I have the portraits that are life-size of priests, but they’re all artists. And I had an exhibition in Dusseldorf, at the NRW-Forum, it’s a museum, and I had these life-size priests in one room, and the other room had all these scratched-out, semi-porn pictures, that were all scratched out. The contrast of a little bit of Heaven and a little bit of Hell, so to speak, the sacred and the profane, well, it worked. So that’s how I’ve changed. Those are my own projects, not by commission. And so, recently, also, I have a friend of mine, Neville Wakefield, who’s a curator at PS1, and he had done a series of artists doing short films, short ports, in their own style, and he asked me to participate.
And so, Matthew Barney and Richard Prince did one, and Larry Clark, and I finished one a couple months ago and what I did was I took a ‘70s porn I had found and frame-for-frame I scratched out everybody’s face and private parts out. And these scratches leave a black mark with a white rim around them. And so 24-frames-a-second, these things move fast, and what I did was actually create a moving abstraction.
So the subject is actually these scratches that are moving, that come in, they go out, they get larger and smaller and they dance around the frame to a background of a porn. It’s actually PG because you don’t see anybody or anybody’s private parts. What I did was created a moving painting. And its exciting because its successful; I’m working on my second one now.
And so, that’s how I’ve changed. And then, at the same time, I then took this scratched out idea and started finding newspaper clippings that I liked, and I scratched everybody’s face out. And then I scanned them, and I put them on canvas, and then it allowed me to find compositions to paint around. I painted with some out, I painted and left things in, but what I was doing was using that base, that subject, like I did the porn, to paint around to create an abstract painting. You see? And I had that whole series, and that series led me to my most recent series: which is cutting out things from popular magazines.
And whether it’s a jewelry ad, or Cartier, or it’s a cartoon figure, from let’s say, a Japanese porn, I used all the things that right now, the artists have been doing, so I’ve actually used them as subject matter.
Like Murakami, I’ll cut up a Japanese porn picture, you know the cartoon ones with the pretty girls that Murakami uses? and then I’ll take jewelry ads, a Rolls-Royce, and diamond rings and logos from Cartier to Louis Vuitton and I create a collage in abstraction, using those as my subjects: pop symbols.
Pop symbols could be from the logo from Chanel to some image that some artist, like Murakami, might have used. So those are my references, and I put them together, create abstractions from them, and now I’m putting them on canvas. And I’m finding them very, very successful, I’m very happy about it. And so, along side that, I’m working on good nudes.
But you see how one thing can lead to another, away from what you know and then you come back to it. You see, by doing all of this, also it allows me a great deal of satisfaction as an artist. And now that I’m on this roll, and I’m going in this direction, its satisfying for me now, to go back, possibly, to doing some of the magazine work again because I know I got this other stuff going on, and that other stuff is what I always wanted to do.
M: And the magazines are now catching up to what you’ve been doing for years.
S: Yeah, now they’re open to what I did, so many years ago. And still do. I’ve always done those nudes, I just never had a form for them, except maybe an exhibition or my books.
M: So as much as you have evolved with your style, you’ve also held on to something of a very particular vision that you had from when you started; you’ve been able to maintain that, and everybody else is playing catch-up now.
S: Yeah, and once I’ve been given the chance, because I’ve only begun to reach out now to these magazines, that I’m talking about, if I get the chance to shoot for them, I think they’ll be ready for something new, because I will do it in a new way. It will be new for them. For sure. And it’ll be different, because that’s the one thing you have to look at…The problem now is that there’s so many magazines than ever before, and I’m finding that, strangely enough, they’re all resorting to ‘who can be the most explicit.’ And now it’s a nude picture with Kate Moss with, you know, her bits out, that’s on the cover, so everybody’s buying that. You know? So if you put a model on the cover with a big quaf, no one’s going to pick it up as much as they’re going to see Kate with her bits out. (laughing) I mean, its ironic but that’s what we’ve come to.
And again, the culture has changed because the kids growing up with computers and the Internet, were all sneaking off and watching the most pornographic of things at the earliest of ages. I think most kids have learned about sex from watching porn on their Internet today. Nobody goes and explains the ‘birds and the bees’ you just go and Google something and, boy, is it in your face.
M: It’s all over television as well.
S: It’s all over television! It’s all about sex. The things is, I’ve always used this one quote, well not a quote, it’s a line from James Joyce, his first book, ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ and he defines pornography, and his definition was any art that is created to arouse desire in an object, as a tangible object, is pornographic. Because that’s what the explicit porn is, they’re trying to arouse your desire in that object.
But then, under that definition, so is a Vogue cover. So all the ads you see, Eva Mendes in Calvin Klein, Tom Ford shaving a girl’s pubic hair into a “G,” you know. Where’s the clothing? No, I don’t see it; I just see her pubic hair is a G, for Gucci back then, you know? So therefore, our entire culture, under that definition, is pornographic, when you think of it in that way.
The old lady trying to sell teas in that picture, she’s trying to arouse your desire for that tea, so under that definition, its pornography. So therefore, we’re all pornographers! (chuckles)
M: So that’s how you describe pornography to yourself?
S: Yeah, I’m trying to get you aroused to purchase me. Whatever that ‘me’ is. And that’s what a prostitute does and that’s what pornography does. And I use that definition and that’s what we’ve come to. That’s what a fashion magazine that says it’s a fashion magazine but has all these top models showing their bits, um, what the hell’s the difference? And everybody’s buying that magazine rather than the one with the girl with the quaff. It’s all about like, what could we do to shock everybody into buying our magazine?
So its now, all about that. So, I’ve used pornographic images lately, in the film, and all in the scratched out pictures, but basically they’ve become a portrait of the culture we live in. That’s what great art does. The themes are always the same: life and death; love and hate; whatever going back to cave man. But what makes something significant is that you’ve used the symbols of your day, or your time to describe those ancient themes.
M: For everybody to be able to relate, today.
S: Right. Basically, like Marilyn became an icon, especially after her death. And she was an icon that the culture embraced and made her an icon, you know, she didn’t make herself an icon. She was a symbol of that time. You know, I did a book on Pam Anderson, and some people think Pam Anderson’s an icon, but she’s been embraced by that culture as divine feminine of our time, and that’s what Marilyn was.
Because back in 1961, if you would have mentioned this about Marilyn, they would have said she’s a bimbo. But she became an iconic graphic symbol of that divine feminine that is ancient. That Mona Lisa and Marilyn portraits –Warhol’s Marilyn, da Vinci’s Mona Lisa- are the same thing, symbolically: they’re representative of the divine feminine. And then you go back to the Madonna, and then you go back to Venus and Isis, Diana. So, every culture has to find their symbol of those ancient themes.
M: And you feel Pam Anderson is today’s icon?
S: I did my book on Pam. And, you know, Jeff Koons has done Pam images, Richard Prince has done Pam images, there’s something to it. Now, today we’re evolving, so we’ll find one. It’s easier in retrospect to see it. So today, I found Pam. And that book came out a couple years ago. And Glenn O’Brien wrote about it, and then we show you some Jeff Koons portraits of the blond holding the Pink Panther: the symbols of our culture, and the popular symbols most of all.
That’s important to know. Because basically, Richard Prince taking pictures of other pictures in magazines, what he’s doing is actually photographing the landscape of the American psyche. We see our landscape now through our magazine world. And so instead of going out into the world, taking pictures of real landscapes, he went in and photographed the magazine.
M: Basically making a perspective of our own perspective.
S: Yeah, and our cultural psyche. Where are we at? What are we worshipping? Worshipping Gucci and Chanel, worshipping Madonna, worshipping Pam Anderson, whatever it is, we’re worshipping these popular subjects and they’re replacing ancient symbols, but not everybody is conscious of it. But every generation has to identify their own symbols.
M: Very interesting observations. So last question, tapping into the heart, what (or who) is the greatest love of your life?
S: The greatest love of my life is art. I’m consumed by it. I live it. I breathe it. It’s a language I’ve come to know, that basically sometimes reveals secrets, inner secrets. Like an alchemist mixes base chemicals to create gold, he has a language that, ok, its not just about mixing those chemicals but becomes a philosophy, and that philosophy guides someone through life, like a shaman.
You know, like a priest. And that’s what art does for me. It moves me and tells me things without words. It’s a language of the abstract, and the real, but the thoughts, the solutions, the answers are poetic, and they reveal things to you that you can’t translate literally. And so there’s another language and another side of ourselves that becomes fulfilled in pursuing art. And that really is the greatest love of my life. I need it. I want to be a part of it. I want to be a part of it because it helps me discover myself more.
You know, you read books on self-help, on philosophy, on meditation, this and that, well, I find my answers in art.
M: Thank you so much for your time. This has been awesome.
Posted on February 22, 2010 at 3:26 pm
I am actually thankful to see others posting more about this artist. Too many good artists just don’t know how to last.