Manchildblack & Moku, Bedstuy, 2011
Close to five years ago, a young photographer left Boston to make it in the big city.
Since then, Devin Elijah put in some time here at 3rd Ward and landed gigs for big-name fashion houses like Isaac Mizrahi and Marc Ecko--where he's now a staff photographer. In addition to working with the big dogs, Eljiah's gone ahead and published a book: A Chronicle of Love & Loss in Sickness & in Health, a truly stunning collection of Polaroid portraits. We recently caught up with him via email to learn a bit more about the collection and were delighted by the expansive openness of his responses. Unprepared for the wellspring of heavy spirituality and philosophizing we'd tap into with our questions, we've opted to leave Elijah's responses largely unedited.
Full interview--along with some relatively NSFW images--after the jump.
Angyl Valantino, formerly Antino Angyl Crowley, Brooklyn, 2011
With your book, which came first, the title/concept, or the images?
I had a modest premonition the other night. I was lying in bed unsuccessfully trying to disunite my conscious from the world and fall asleep, confident that the tireless efforts of the earth's axis would dutifully spin me back to myself before long, and with a new day as it's ever-consistent offering. I was engaging in the typical imaginary conversation with you in my head, in the way we all rehearse forthcoming repartee, general mental preparation for our intended interview the next day. In forecasting your possible questions I got up and grabbed my Moleskine, the eloquent innocence of its Le Petit Prince illustration adorning the leather-bound cover, acting as both a shelter and a paradox to the journal's confessional doctrine--a rorschach of daily catharsis, and shorthand as description for the long days spent in our city of a hundred million artificial lights.
"L' essentiel est invisible pour les yeux" or "What is essential is invisible to the eye" Along the conduit of my thruway in life, attempting to articulate my own place in the world- if just for the sake of self identifying with an acceptable version of sanity, unlike the Little Prince I'd clung to the idea of simplicity buried at the core of complexity and not the other way around. I sat down with pen and page and foretold your forthcoming question "Which influenced the other, was it the title of the series or the images themselves that came first?" My response to myself: "I've long been a fan of the much too long, of the self- indulged and grandiosely- unreticent title, the title that still manages a genuine poetic fluidity, though notwithstanding the figurative burdens of melodramatic, self awareness" 'A Chronicle of Love & Loss in Sickness & in Health' The challenge of the actual work to live up to it's eponymous moniker, it seemed might only be balanced by the clear evidence of self deprecation, or otherwise a magnificently naive faith in the power of it's exaggeration.
Flash back to last spring, and the series was lingering at thirty-odd, images, an allocation of them reinforced for critique and others still acting as nothing more than visual garnish. At the time, I was still in need of affirmation that concentrating in a vintage medium circa 2011, when the average cellphone app was capable of a comparable photographic artifice, wasn't a drastic creative misstep. I was studying an assemblage of eight Polaroids, conjointly acting as the tangible means to an end of three inherently doomed romantic relationships, at one point inexplicably intertwined in each others consummate volatility, and it was then, within the diameter of this interval that the title of the series presented itself, bringing with it the epiphany that self-censorship wouldn't have a cohesively thematic place in the future of my maturing visual monograph.
So it was the early part of the series that served as the initial inspiration behind the eventual title, and the title itself that forced me to envision a more ambitious creative bar. Flash forward to present; the following day being given our interview's first question, it became clear that the night prior I had already intuitively answered it.
Frank G, Brooklyn, 2010
Why did you choose Polaroid for this series?
If I'm telling it straight I'd have to say Polaroid chose me. It sounds very trite, like the stuff of which cliches are made. In a burgeoning career feeling rooted in realism and an oft-stifling need for visual perfection, Polaroid enabled me an impressionistic view of the people rotating in and around the orbit of my life. I was working for Time Out New York during the early part of last year when my then photo editor gifted me a pair of vintage Polaroid cameras. He'd established a part of his own career through a similar devotion to analog, and it felt to be the passing of a significant torch--one that, without question, needed to be needed in order to burn, to become the true, graceful sum of it's intended value. Taking those early Polaroids I felt possessed, imbued by the spirit of an 18-year-old me, discovering that the view through his 35mm camera was not impossibly abstract as was the view when putting it down. Any element of our lives that authorities the ability to transport us back to moments we'd assumed the tidal of many more moments had since washed over, is to be regarded for exactly what it is: salvation.
Jasper James, Brooklyn, 2010You've got an impressive portfolio of fashion and celeb portraits. Do you have a different approach when shooting someone who's used to having their picture taken than you do when shooting ordinary civilians?
I approach every individual subject individually, as if a quantum component of a unified struggle, to find and remain connected to those who intrinsically understand us. I comply with the inarguable truth that in striving to manifest our improbable destinies, there has to be an appreciable form of solace along that path. Simply put, there is no one person exempt from the inherent, virtuous nature of human sensitivity, each of us carrying an unflinching reciprocal need for that exact sentiment. With these thoughts regarded, I approach each subject as if I'm shooting a self portrait- a photograph of them as filtered through my consciousness, and with that, the belief that my need for them is a direct derivative of their need for me.
So no, absolutely not. Whether a plain-clothes subject or one of celebratory status, their deservedness to be in front of the lens is only equivalent to their degree of acknowledgment, of the transcendental potentialities of the medium of photography.
What's next? What are you working on now?
Very next is "A Chronicle" occupying its first solo exhibition, opening in April at Canada's La Petit Mort Gallery, and aside from that, I'm actually beginning to spend some quality time in the digital realm again. Considering that I likely surpassed the quota in breaking down contextual motives related to my art--I think I managed to pull a 1,400-word essay out of a four-question interview, which probably displays not-so-subtle signs of an acute, egodystonic reality (there's a word we can all google) So in lieu of explaining the entire back-story of my next series, which will be a strictly digital affair, I'll offer up the title with synopsized explanation. The series is titled "All the Real Kids." Each one of my subjects, however adult in age, in a way are really all my children, whom I genuinely love in expansively varying degrees. They all, in their individual ways, continually show me that my own innocence is still present, however tainted by sex, drugs and indie rock it may be.
Everyone comes of age according to his or her own ideals, and in regard to the personal timeline that fits in the space, which those ideals allot to them. I spent the last four-plus years filling in plenty of hours that were devoid of inspiration, inheriting the dark and cozy comforts of various dive bars. Mid 90's jukeboxes and mid 30's go-go dancers, the ones that always seem to be, at a certain point still twirling even once the music fades, like a flesh colored kaleidoscope of peripheral ornamentation. Along with them, the congregations embodying these lonesome sanctuaries, poetically making both idle and philosophical conversation sound as one. Many times over I've met the brother, the father and the grandfather, as apparitions ubiquitously occupying barstools on either side of me, alternately, in place of the formality of unworn familial ties. These transient figures whom still, enigmatically I knew so well, ironically existed as each of the aforementioned genealogical- bridges, leading to someone else's past or to their future, each as structures engineered with vastly, divergent degrees of regard.
Imagine the bittersweet aura cocooning two intoxicated strangers, if for just a few hours in their mutual life and times, their nightly objective- to commiserate on the single most regrettable, nevertheless inalterable human commonality: The passing of time…and we carry on, drinks in hand as if we know that it's all ending in the very same occurrence that it's beginning. These are the moments both subtly and explicitly suggested in the overtones and in the undertones of my work, whatever rest between the two opposing timbre belongs to the viewer, and therein lies the work's subjectivity. In youth and in age, in the tug of war that's the embrace or the denial of human mortality, is where we find or where we lose our own reprieve.
I'm certain that some day any Q&As and autobiographical writing on my over-interpretation of my own work, will be collected in the Psychotherapist Handbook, illustrating the definition of paradoxical intention, and stating it as inherent to any one of three definitive personality types: sociopaths, creative geniuses, and just plain fucking assholes. I've got to be one of the above right?
Angyl Valantino #3, Brooklyn, 2011
Safa Ali, or Erick Kubak, Inwood, 2011-- Layla Schlack
Nov 17, 2011
