Research File: Photographers

RESEARCH FILE: PHOTOGRAPHERS

Lauren Barnes Fashion Brand Management AD6606 1819758

MICHEAL TULLBERG “In those days—very much the analog days of film—I was shooting most of my work with a mid-60s Honeywell Pentax Spotmatic (with screw-mount lenses!), and larger stuff with a Mamiya 645 Pro. I developed several different photographic techniques for my rave scene shooting, with the purpose of getting that incredible rave vibe on the film. That fluttering, buzzing, proto-psychedelic ambiance that had been so missing in most nightlife photography up until that point. I was looking to build visual overload on the film, and in the best of cases, I succeeded.

I started out using high speed film, but the truth is at one point or another I used practically every kind of film that could be found, including color negative, color slide, black and white, and even color infrared at times. I would often do very long exposures, and combine that with camera movement to create great swoops and swirls of color. I would use multiple strobe units with colored gels on the flash heads, so as to add even more color to a scene that was already often on the verge of visual overload. I would create stroboscopic effects with my flashes, and combine that with camera rotation to create vortex-like patterns. On occasion I would do light painting with a hand-held laser.

All of these could lead to light and color streaking, bleeding and exploding all over the place on the film…just like at the party. It was all about expanding the palette and pushing the boundaries, so that someone not involved in the rave scene could look at the photograph and understand what was really happening.

I have always felt that the time period of the rave scene is one of the most critically overlooked peri-

ods in American pop culture. I felt that way about it back then, and I feel the same way about it now. I genuinely believe that the rise of the rave scene and electronic music is the most significant cultural movement in American music and pop culture since the founding of hip-hop. I also believe it has been one of the most unfairly maligned music movements to come around in living memory, and that it deserves to be treated as part of the grand American music tradition just as much as jazz, swing, rock & roll, and the blues do. This is one reason why I wrote DANCEFLOOR THUNDERSTORM—to give those people the attention and respect that they earned, one incredible party at a time” (The Phoblographer, 2019).

MARC VALLEE Marc Vallée is a London-based documentary photographer whose work on contemporary youth culture has spanned over two decades. From his early years as a skateboarder and punk within the city’s queer scenes, his political involvement with photojournalistic work, to documenting graffiti writers for the past seven years, Vallée’s work has consistently explored cont¬¬¬¬emporary counterculture narratives and personal experience.

Today, Vallée’s work predominantly focuses on the lives of people that navigate the margins of the nocturnal landscape, and those often at odds with the structured flow of neoliberal cities. His subjects are often young, male social transgressors; from graffiti writers and sex workers to activists and urban explorers, they disrupt the capitalist system while in pursuit of their own desires and identities.

The fleeting way in which these individuals drift in and out of Vallée’s lens is a testament to his empathetic eye as a documentary photographer. He himself is found at the heart of his photographs; relationships and friendships manifest in the autobiographical nature of the images, where private and public worlds meet.

Were you photographing the political landscape of London back then as well? How did your work shift into more of an activist practice?

It was all very autobiographical at the beginning, documenting my world. I remember doing an interview at the time and was asked, “Why isn’t your work political?” I said, “Of course my work’s political, it’s contemporary youth culture.” It got me thinking and soon after I started photographing the anti-war protests during the Blair Era. I started photographing it as a participant who happened to have a film camera, which didn’t really work, so I switched to digital with the aim of documenting protests more

seriously.

That went on until about 2010, during which time I documented hundreds of protests, mainly in London but also in other parts of the country. That work pushed me into a photojournalist frame of mind. I was filing pictures for editorials and newspapers but also working on investigations for The Guardian and The Financial Times about police surveillance and secret police databases on journalists, protestors and environmental activists (Elephant , 2020).

LARRY CLARK He has in the past said his early influences were W. Eugene Smith and Dorothea Lange, but his images are a far cry from the technical purity of those photographers. There is little hope or compassion exhibited in the “in your face” sensibilities of a Larry Clark. Even “Teenage Lust” lacked any sentiment,…but it was exactly that demeanor which is what made his work exciting and delicious at the same time. Kind of like a man with diabetes living on a diet of cotton candy (Anatomy Films , 2021).

Much of the confessional, documentary-style depictions of ‘90s youth—Day’s, McGinley’s, and Goldin’s photographs among them—were sparked by Clark. In his breakout 1971 photobook Tulsa he bared his own teenage life in the mid-’60s; No shots of sex, violence, or pals shooting up speed hit the cutting-room floor. But it was his 1995 cult film Kids that came to define an era of youth culture in New York City, bringing unseen teenage nihilism to the silver screen. The film follows a group of underage, sex-crazed skateboarders on a 24-hour spin through Manhattan at the height of the AIDS crisis, drinking, smoking weed, and deflowering virgins in what has become known as the definitive portrayal of a troubled ’90s youth. The photos above were taken while scouting the film, like the profile of a 19-year-old Chloë Sevigny, the decade’s undisputed it-girl (Gottschalk, 2016).

REFERENCES Anatomy Films . (2021, February 22). Retrieved from Anatomy Films: https://www. anatomyfilms.com/larry-clark/ Elephant . (2020, August 11). Retrieved from Elephant : https://elephant.art/marcvallee-turns-his-lens-on-the-anti-establishment-11082020/ Gottschalk, M. (2016, July 21). Artsy. Retrieved from Arsty: https://www.artsy.net/ article/artsy-editorial-these-8-photographers-captured-the-youth-culture-of-the90s/amp The Phoblographer. (2019, May 19). Retrieved from The Phoblographer: https:// www.thephoblographer.com/2019/05/19/michael-tullberg-taking-on-the-role-of-arave-historian/