@ArtistLisaYuskavage
Many years ago, I began a series of images in primary colors. They were fabulous!
When I say fabulous I don’t mean good. I mean that when you create something that strikes at your heart it is as if a pod of whales invited you to join them performing pirouettes naked atop the oceans vastly episodic waves. Exhilarating!
There are so many truths that are revealed in my tales. Sometimes I have a hard time differentiating between tales and truth. Memories through the years can do that.
One day, maybe 1988 or 1989 I realized that my moments photographing artists: Miro, Warhol, and thousands more had
contributed greatly to my vision as a photographer.
Their mere presence and generosity enlightened me. It was a compelling moment to realize that the lives of others had dramatically affected my creative vision.
I felt that I needed to give something back to those who made such an enormous contribution to my photographic vision. The only practical way, was to attribute my photographs to the artists. My idea was to make my future photographs about their work, their colors. I began with red.
Red seemed logical. Red is a power that drives us. Red is a moon, a face, Led Zeppelin album covers, a storm, the book Red Badge of Courage, the movie Red River and thousands of ways of identifying a power. Miles Davis’s red trumpet created notes that race through our central nervous system. The aforementioned is how I understand red.
Like all of your “firsts”, I remember my first “Red” photograph. It was that single moment when I realized the shackles of expectancy had been lifted. For years and years I was under the misconception that I needed to receive a seal of approval from a cabal of powers. I stood face to face with my reflection and finally felt a measure of my own identity emerging.
Artist @Annhamilton
I stood with an artist in this huge Soho art gallery. I was plugged in to all of my juices... and I snapped. All five to seven frames lived up to my expectations and beyond.
The course was set for the future. I made portraits about my subject and the colors of the art world for years to follow. It was never that I wasn’t satisfied with my past work.
The early years were about my experiences, but what was about to develop was the
realizing why I became a photographer, to make images that spoke color to me.
Here (in this blog) I am sharing my attempts to reckon with understanding my soul as a photographer. I look back at the files, and I count the hundreds of subjects ( Norman Foster, Gordon Parks, Ellsworth Kelly, Claes Oldenburg/Coosje van Bruggen, Hans Hollein, Philip Johnson, Peter Zumthor, Joan Didion) who looked around at my colored spaces I manipulated and nodded to me, nodded for me to continue.
All of these years later I realize that those early primary color photographs were my saviors. They allowed me to be me.
When I eventually followed up with my blues, yellows and merging colors, I was at peace.
Artist David Salle