Nick Blumenthal is a photographer and recent graduate from the School of Visual Arts. Interested in nostalgia and memory, Nick creates portraits of individuals through objects and spaces of significance. Relying on the, now “old school” art of film photography, Nick uses varying exposures to create scenes influenced by Romantic painting and his own life experiences. Recently, he has begun a series of portraits of trans men from all walks of life and all stages of transition. Nick gives insight into and explains his reasoning for photographing these subjects as a cisgender, gay man.
Interview by: Annie Malamet
A: So, we were just talking about how you shoot on large format. I guess that would be my basic first question: why that medium?
N: I think it sort of happened really organically that I ended up in large format. I’ve used every format, whether it be range finders or Mamiyas. I’m not a technical person really, which is funny because I do shoot in 4×5.
A: Which is really hard.
N: Yeah it’s a technical camera. One comment that was made to me in undergrad was that I shoot a 4×5 like its 35[mm], which is kind of accurate. I like the process of it more than the formalism of it. I don’t really believe in formalism over content. So for me it slows me down in a way that helps me… especially for going into this body of work [portraits of trans men], where it was really about intimacy, … Going into an intimate situation with a stranger, just coming in and rattling off [photos] especially with digital [cameras], where you’re aware of everything that you’re shooting and you can look at it, that is something I definitely want to avoid. It makes it less commercial.
A: You like the surprise.
N: I’m not a purist in the sense of technical[lity]. I over expose, I under expose, I pull things, sort of on a whim sometimes, sometimes it happens by accident. But I really like that chance and a lot of the time what I end up using is chance. Although I don’t really base my process off the idea of chance. I want to have some sort of idea for what I’m doing. At least for myself, not for the viewer. …But I always surprise myself. I actually shot my first subject since taking a hiatus last week, and I was surprised just by looking at my photographs, how much they had changed.
There are other reasons also. It is partially because I do like to reference painting, so naturally larger, not in the sense of the commercial value of a photograph when you sell it either in a gallery or commercially, but they just reference something else. I really don’t look at that much photography anymore. I probably should, but I haven’t been to a gallery in awhile. I feel that I am much more informed lately by illustration and painting than I am by photography.
A: Do you make your own prints or do you scan negatives?
N: I started doing C prints. I had done a bunch of self-portraiture, probably about a year and half ago, and it’s been an ongoing thing. … I like the idea of chance [before shooting] but afterwards I want to be able to control my results. So I have been scanning [the negatives] and I print them on fiber paper. So they’re all digital output but everything is analog before that. Which, initially I had some hesitation towards because I was a little bit more of a purist. But now I’ve gotten more into contemporary work and I actually like that combination. I think its an interesting one because I think people tend to sway more towards one or the other, at least nowadays. You’re on one side of the digital fence or you’re completely going analog and printing in the dark room.
For me it’s all just tools. Whatever works at the end of the day and you can make a beautiful print out of it. I limit the amount of prints I make because I want to reference painting and have less. So I would rather have three really stunning prints than twenty mediocre darkroom prints that I may not have spent as much time on.
A: How do you see your work relating to the history of painting?
N: …I always painted when I was in high school and I think that’s where the reference comes from aside from the Romantics. I mean Caravaggio is reference I get all the time. …I wish I could elaborate more on the specifics. …My interest in photography has so much to do with memory and the past and its relationship to the present. So painting has this feeling of being inherently related to the past because it has to be made and then shown afterwards, so there is a before and after. With photography, it’s a little bit less apparent, and people don’t think about it in that sense because [we] always think of photographs as the truth, whereas painting has the artist’s hand in it.
…In terms of what I started doing with my own painting, I would take photographs I took, not from my large format camera, but from my phone, just snapshots. [So I would use these] as references for my paintings. I would sketch them out and probably about half to three-quarters of the way through laying down the paint, I would take away the photograph so then I started working from memory. I’m really interested in the gap between what the memory creates and what it forgets and what is really there. So I think inherently in my work, that’s a huge influence or theme.
A: Going back to memory, in your series Oakwood and Sanctum, spaces and objects carry significance. You describe them on your website as holding memories and reflecting the scars of the people who carried those objects or inhabited those spaces. Can you elaborate on techniques you use to illustrate how an object or a space can become something living and organic?
Wood Panels, 2012, from Oakwood series
N: …Lately now I’ve been thinking about the gendered object and the way objects become charged and spaces become charged by things that happened in them. …In art school you’ll have someone who will bring in photos of objects that are sentimental to them, and that’s always the hard part is staying away from being overly sentimental. The objects I’ve always photographed have had to have some kind of charge or subliminal meaning to me.
And then in the spaces going back to specifically Oakwood and Sanctum, [the latter] happened after the passing of my grandfather. I originally, when he was dying, I thought that was going to be who I photographed. But… to photograph someone who is on the brink of dying is a really charged moment and some people are into that but I feel I’m a little too nuanced for that, I feel like it would have been too direct. I don’t know if it would have even worked in retrospect. But I started making those images [in Sanctum] in retrospect as a response to how I identified with my grandmother who lived in this space. And it had more so to do with how I identified with her rather than the objects, and they serve as a commentary and reflection on her. One of the images called Mother and Child was a reference to a pietà and it had to do with grandmother as the nurturer of my grandfather who was dying. When you’re life becomes based around this idea of caring for someone, and then all of a sudden its gone, and that’s where those objects came in, they were more about an echo or evidence of her identity.
In Oakwood, that whole body of work started originally as a documentation of this space that I’d grown up in. It started as a generic photo school project because the house I grew up in was being sold and I wanted to photograph it. I originally started with 35[mm] my sophomore year, and then I went back. Thinking about the charge of spaces and how things feel, its interesting when you go back six months later after you’ve photographed it and you get something completely different. Especially depending on your format. In particular the one really interesting thing about large format is that it sees more accurately than the human eye does so the things it picks up are more subtle. That whole body of work had to do with light and dark, so when it came to really nuanced things that you normally could pick up with your eye but wouldn’t translate into an iPhone photograph, your large format camera will pick it up.
It was a way of addressing being closeted in a suburban environment. That’s where I came to the conclusion at the end of that body of work that it was all a metaphor for unrequited love, in a way. I spoke about scars and metaphors for the people who occupy the space, and that body of work was the first complex work I did where it wasn’t about one subject and one person in the way that Sanctum was, which was very directly about my grandmother. When I started Oakwood, it became much more open and it had to do with my mother and being alone in this huge six person house.
A: Speaking of hidden and revealed, I can’t help but draw a comparison between your work and Francesca Woodman. Which, I’m sure you’ve heard before.
N: It’s funny because I think about it all the time and I never get the reference, but I’ve always identified with her. I guess everyone does at some point. Especially when I did the self-portraits, people immediately threw that reference out. But even the work that doesn’t have figures in it, the atmosphere still has the reference to it. And in her work, there were images that were lit darkly, but even the ones that weren’t and were very evenly lit, still had a weight to them and a darkness and that’s something I’m really interested, the weight of the space. And in printing larger, it allows you to be enveloped in this space versus looking at a smaller print where you feel like you’re outside of it. I love really playing with the psychology of spaces and how that affects people looking at them.
A: Yeah, she also deals with absence and memory, but I feel that her work is more interested in the human body and the interior that reflects that, while your work is more concerned with how the interior reflects the human body. What do you feel is the relationship between body and space in your work?
N: …My interiors have more to do with cultural reference and looking to the past. I’m always looking at spaces that are more antiquated or have been worn down. It’s very rare I’ll shoot a brand new building or an apartment… That was something that was spoken a lot about with Oakwood and Sanctum, was how they became metaphors for mental space more than they were physical spaces. Like you couldn’t tie them to a specific time or location. Especially because of my interest in objects and how certain objects trigger ideas and memories for people, and that’s always been something I’ve loved about photography in general, or art in general.
My work, for me, is in some sense pointed back at me because it all comes from a personal place. I don’t ever really start a body of work saying, oh I’m interested in, for example, statues in Brooklyn. I don’t have any personal relationship to them so I don’t necessarily have an interest in photographing them. Whereas everything I’ve photographed thus far has had some sort of introspective relationship to me and I think that’s really important. And at the end of the day whether the person looking at the photograph gets exactly what I see, or they have a different reaction to it, is fine with me. As long as they walk away with something and are changed by it. The one thing with my work is I would never want someone to walk into a gallery and be bored by it…
A: Your color palate is very somber and melancholy. Your Landscape series almost reminds me of Romantic paintings, being in awe of and also saddened or terrified of nature. There’s something melodramatic and romantic about all your work, does that speak to you at all, are you consciously using melodrama and melancholy?
N: It’s not something I intentionally do, I think I’m just naturally drawn to [that sort of thing]. Even films like Douglas Sirk films, the melodramas of the 50’s about the American family. You’ve probably seen Far From Heaven, which is a remake of his film All That Heaven Allows. Formally and technically a lot of those references have informed my work. But also, I grew up in a suburban area and my mom’s side is Italian and they always had tchotchkes around so I always had [sentimental] things, I’m kind of a hoarder. My older sister when I was in kindergarten gave me a carnation for Valentine’s Day… I still have that. It’s sentimental to me. And I’m just sort of obsessed with the role memory plays in society. Some people feel that’s an overworked topic and I disagree. I think people assume that it’s not multifaceted.
Bust, 2012, from Sanctum series
A: Never listen to people who say you can’t make work because its been done before.
N: Maybe people think anyone who is making work about memory and the past is just really nostalgic and needs to move forward and make something new…But I don’t make projects based on what will be “cool.” Or what will entertain an audience.
Naturally it happens [melodrama] when you use anything dark. I think something that has always interested me has been work about dark subject matter but hasn’t been physically dark. Like work from Sophie Calle, that has this strange nostalgic sense to it, especially the work where she was following strangers in the streets as if they were lovers. That was fascinating to me the psychological aspect of it. I was originally going to be a Psych Major before I went to art school.
A: So its very much about drawing out the psychology of the subject matter.
N: Yeah, it’s not about what the photograph is of but what it’s about.
A: That makes sense, you’re more interested in content.
N: It’s much more about the underlying layers and subtlety. I don’t really like to make photographs where you look at them and you go, oh ok this is a descriptive photograph of a…Ginger Ale can in a Brooklyn apartment and I can tell the demographic that probably lives here, especially based on the date and year and the format its made in, those type of things are less interesting to me. I try to keep my work as loosely descriptive as possibly.
A: Timeless, would you say?
N: Yeah …and I feel in some sense that I was born in the wrong time period, maybe that’s what it is. …I’ll never include something that you can [pin to] this modern day.
A: I find that’s really the case with people who still shoot with film. That makes a lot of sense, because it is timeless. There is something that definitely places a digital photograph within a time and place.
N: Even the fact that it’s embedded in the file. It’s good for archiving. But there’s nothing more satisfying than going back through negatives you took a year ago and you find something [new]. Like six months ago this wasn’t interesting to me, but now it has a different context. I’m a firm believer in what you did will identify what you’re going to do, or at least help you get there
…I really believe in that idea of unrequited love has a lot to do with it and the work isn’t necessarily about my own relationships or identifying those people, I’m not interested in that Nan Goldin descriptiveness of, oh this is my boyfriend during this year, etc. Sanctum was about my grandmother in her space, but it was also about my identification with her place at that time in her life. And Oakwood was the same, it was this beckon call for a relationship that didn’t exist in this suburbia and I was closeted so it had a lot to do with my own personal relationships up to that point. And now, the body of work I’m working on now, with the trans men, has been strange, but I don’t want to make that sound derogatory. It’s been a journey because I really had no idea where I was going after Oakwood. I wanted to portraiture, but I had no idea what I was going to do. And being a gay photographer, or- a gay man that’s a photographer is how I actually want to phrase it, because being a gay photographer makes it sound like I’m putting a dick on a wall all the time. For some people that works.
[As for how I started photographing trans men:] I had two friends who lived in Arkansas, one of which I now know in person and lives in New York, the other I still have not ever met. At the time, [I was using] Myspace, and those other platforms that people used to communicate with strangers when the internet blew up, [and] I had this crush on this kid I was friends with and he-I still don’t know how he identifies because he’s always dating women and getting engaged to them every six months- he’s always had drug issues, and so he’s always been in and out of my life. …And how this whole body of work started was that, years passed, and it was never a serious thing, and I was always attracted to this kid and I thought one day I was going to meet him because I’d met his friend. And you figure you have this tie and you’ll come here and I’ll meet you, but we still haven’t and we still communicate.
One day, we got back in touch after he went on one of his post-drug rehab stints. After all this time, [he] explosively came out as a trans. Not that he was going to start transitioning, he came out as in: Here’s a photograph of me holding my breasts, without a shirt on, not hiding anything. And me, as a gay man, [I] was really interested in this dynamic of my attraction to him before knowing this. And it made me question my perception of …male identity in general, and ideas of maleness and masculinity, which are problematic issues to begin with. But I was kind of shell-shocked. It had nothing to do with repulsion or disgust or that my attraction had changed, it was just that I was never aware of it beforehand it, and it made me question whether or not it mattered. That’s how I found my first subject. I was like, well, if I want to start shooting portraits, I didn’t want to photograph men I was sleeping with because it made reference to Jack Pierson. I wanted to avoid that sentimental I’m-a-gay-man-photographing-naked-men vibe that can happen so easily. I was also really disinterested in the sexual aspect of it. I think there is something about sexuality in my work even though my work isn’t inherently sexual. So I was looking for someone to photograph, and now I had an idea, so I posted an ad on Craigslist and that’s how I found my first subject, Stephen. It was a weirdly intimate experience for strangers because, unlike now, where I meet everyone beforehand and get coffee with them and explain everything…we met up and I photographed him and he didn’t have his binder with him so I ended up binding him with scotch tape.
First Encounter, 2012
A: That is very intimate.
N: Me being a cisgender gay man… because I’ve been doing this for a year now, I’ve become much more politically aware [of this], so I know more now how to handle things, but at the time I was so naïve. I was never interested in exploiting anyone or insulting anyone-
A: Or fetishizing.
N: Yeah exactly, that wasn’t the place it was coming from it was coming from a place of my own nostalgia, looking for this lover I never had. So I think after that, it happened organically. We hung out for hours that night and I photographed him and we had this experience together. …I became much more aware of other people working within similar subject matters once I had been making the work. …It was like stepping into a new room where I knew no one. It was super uncomfortable for me. I was not trying to make anyone feel uncomfortable or exploited.
A: Did you receive any criticism to that effect?
N: From my subjects or outsiders?
A: Outsiders.
N: Not as much as I would have expected. There was only one issue [where a subject didn’t want his face shown because he wasn’t out]. And at the end of the day this is a community I’m not a part of, and a community that has been more than welcoming, which I’m so grateful to and humbled by. Most of the subjects I photograph, because I handle it so delicately, are grateful for that and realize it’s coming from a place of love and not exploitation. …I think in the work, like I said before, there’s a call and return, seeking out something, in a non-fetishizing way; it is about that individual and my relationship to him as a man.
I’m so disinterested in having the photographs be descriptive in the sense of physicality. It is by absolutely no means about transition. Because that could be done in so many ways and there are people who could do it a lot better than I could. That for me is way too literal. The images started off being really moody and ambient because they were about hiding. And I was hiding this physical element to it because I wanted to avoid exploitation. I photograph [the subjects] in different locations, often in bedrooms and hallways and now, I photographed my last subject in the kitchen, which is really interesting because it relates to this domestic idea.
It’s one of those things I think about every day and I think that’s the beautiful part about making artwork, if you’re really paying attention to it will show itself to you, what you should be doing.
A: You’ve been talking about this since we started talking about this body of work, but of course I have to question. I question when white people go in and starting shooting People of Color. Like, why? It’s not that it’s not okay, it’s just that there has to be reason. And you talked a little bit about this in regards to your friend. But I guess I’m still a little unclear as to: why trans men in particular? You’ve talked about a lot of things, about masculinity and gayness. But I guess I’m still unclear as to why these subjects?
N: I guess I’m still figuring it out. Because that is part of the way I work, I’m figuring it out as I go along. But that is something I always think about. Especially when you’re talking about work, people will always ask so you never want to say I don’t know.
I think when I came out of that friendship, I was really interested at the time in the idea of the male gaze, especially in relationship to gay artists and how there is a lot of work that’s overtly sexual. I was interested in my role [in that]. There is this complex triangle going on with it where I’m a cis gay man, who has been attracted to trans men without knowing it, and then afterwards realized that it didn’t matter knowing it to begin with…and I think it also had to do with the male gaze and sexuality. Especially with women, there has also been this thing with men photographing women [of] male desire. And I think it’s really complex when you have a gay cisgender man photographing trans men, because of an individual at the time identified as a cisgender straight man.
A: It’s almost like you’re talking about the gay male gaze in relation to trans men and how that manifests. That makes more sense.
N: Exactly. It’s definitely not a fetishized ideal…I’ve photographed trans men in every stage of transition. Men who don’t plan on transitioning at all, who aren’t on T [testosterone], don’t wear a binder, that’s just who they are as men. And I’ve photographed men who have had operations and been on T for years, and everything in between. And that’s what’s really complex and interesting to me.
A: It seems to me that this series, and all of your series, is ultimately about self-discovery. I’m looking at these photographs, and I don’t see anything problematic in them. I think they are really beautiful images and I really enjoy them and that’s part of why I wanted to interview you is because I really enjoy your work. That is a question that you’re going to get, though, just, why?
N: That’s something I was thinking about, now that you mention all my work being about self discovery. In some way every artist is a bit of a narcissist. I don’t think there is anyone that makes work that doesn’t have something to do inherently with themselves. To some degree I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
A: I don’t think there is anything wrong with it either as long as you own it. To be perfectly honest, it is a bit problematic [thematically] that you are using trans men to talk about this one experience you had with one trans man to talk about trans men as a homogenous, monolithic group. I know that isn’t what you’re saying. But that is problematic. It’s fine to make work that’s problematic and questions people.
The trans body is this site where people project what they want on to it, because they’re these people that are fluid or who have completely changed their bodies, or who have a fluid identity. And I think that it’s easy to project onto the trans body this idea of the past and change. I think that you’ve been getting consent from your subjects and that’s great and they seem like they’re really on board with it, and I also think you are showing them in a complex and nuanced way, which is the most important thing.
N: And that’s why I said I’m disinterested in a physical description of transition because I want to avoid that idea of “oh this is what a trans person looks like according to this photograph of one trans person.” That to me is what I’m avoiding.
Eden, 2012
To see Nick’s work, visit http://nickblumenthal.com/
