closed doors, meaning: you see this well dressed executive on the street, he appears to be a well educated proper gentleman, and then he goes into his house, his private realm, and he likes to get fucked in the arse with a baseball bat, something you would never presume from his public presence. You seem to bring those guarded impulses into your work, so the whole world can see them. Polly: (Laughs) Yes. Ignacio: Do you think there is a direct reference between your last work and the fact that you have moved from London to Los Angeles? Polly: I definitely think this work is very LA influenced. I would generalise and say with most artists that there’s a heightened sensitivity to the environment or one’s own environment, and you interpret that environment as I said I was doing from a very early age. Then there is also what’s going on for me on the inside, so it’s my own. I think this work is very much about LA but it’s also very much about where I’m at at the moment, who I am, what I’m going through. Ignacio: What do you think about the contemporary art world, and what’s your relationship to it. How do you position yourself? Polly: Well I don’t really position myself because I feel like I’m still a newcomer so I try not to analyse it. I don’t look at a lot of stuff, because when I do, I tend to get disappointed by what I’m looking at. I feel that most of it’s not very interesting, to tell you the truth. There is some work that I really like but not a lot, which I suppose is probably normal for most, but I think there’s a lot of crap being made out there, it just seems cynical and jaded to me. Ignacio: It is funny that you call yourself a newcomer. You have by now acquired an extensive body of work. I understand you won’t recognise your commercial work as artistic, but some of us do. You’ve done some really interesting commercial work with a distinguishable signature; for example, some of your LP covers are great pieces. Polly: I recognise it, I have. Admittedly my influences were people like Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon, and really I modelled myself on that school of artist; they do portraits, they do magazine work, they do a bit of everything. They’re so distinctive in their vision that you know each informs the other, each assignment or each area of photography becomes as valuable on an artistic level as each other. But for me, the portrait
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work came easily and so creatively, it began to feel restricting. I had to leave it behind. I just felt that I wasn’t creatively engaged or developing. I didn’t go to art school to be taught how to be an artist, I’ve made it up as I’ve gone along, and it’s because my role models were people like Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Larry Clark, and Weegee. I would argue that all their commercial work transcends the constraints of why it was produced, they’re working on a different level. Now whether I’m doing that or not, I don’t know. I don’t know if I have achieved that. I’m obviously not nearly as well known as Richard Avedon or Larry Clark. I only do what I do now because I enjoy doing it, there is no other reason. Once upon a time there was a certain amount of ambition involved, whereas now, it’s because it’s the thing that keeps me vaguely sane. I love it and I always loved it, but sometimes that got a bit perverted by the desire for recognition. I no longer have that. It’s the least important thing to me now, almost. It’s the work itself that’s important, and the people that I love appreciating it. Ignacio: “It keeps me vaguely insane”, that goes in for sure, that’s a good one. One thing that I... Polly: Insane, did I say, or vaguely sane? Ignacio: Vaguely sane, sorry. One of the things that I also find fascinating is that people like Diane Arbus or Weegee actually took pictures of what we don’t normally want to see, feel repulsed by, or try to ignore on a more physical, tangible level: death, abnormality, etc. The difference here is that you seem to portray, again, the “deviancy” in all of us, but there’s an evolution from your last work, from Smudge to Pupa. I see a kind of theme, which not only relates to LA, but to sex and pornography in more a direct fashion. Polly: I do think it’s all interconnected and, in a way, Pupa is definitely a follow up to Smudge. It wasn’t intentional, a lot of it was circumstantial. I didn’t really know anyone in LA so I decided early on that the elements I wanted to use were some mirrors and I would make my own dolls. I live in a house with a lot of mirrors so I didn’t have to find a studio and I could make my own dolls. They would be substitute people and what followed on from there was the work. The way I’ve made the dolls is very Smudge-esque, all stocking and stuffing. Then Liberty Ross came into my life. She wanted to collaborate with me on something for her, a film, and I said ‘well I’d like to take photos of you for my work.’ I basically did two days with her and didn’t push it as far as I would have liked to. She had gone away on holiday for three weeks and I texted