In the second issue of PARIS, LA (out last summer) an interview with Hedi Slimane features in the photography section. It just felt  like it was time to share it with the blogosphere, as Hedi is starting again to talk about fashion! (check his conversation with Dirk Standen on style.com)

 

 

__________________________________________________________________________________________

 

 

Hedi Slimane could be described as a genius designer and an up-to-date visionary. On one hand, he established a strong identity whilst the helm of Dior Homme. On the other hand, as a way to develop his personal work a couple of years ago, he was one of the first iconic characters to start a blog. After focusing on his art for a decade, Slimane is now an accomplished full-time photographer who succeeds in elaborating a consistent, vibrant, and appealing visual language. Now dividing his time between Paris and LA,  Hedi Slimane speaks to PARIS, LA editor, Dorothee Perret,  about his work and life, and compiled a photo essay from his archives on LA.

Dorothée Perret: I heard you’ve always been into photography. As a designer you used photographs to document your work. You also published several books and created exhibitions while you were still sharing your time between design and photography. Now that your main occupation is photography, do you see any differences in the process of making a picture and in the choice of your subjects? Or does your relationship to the work remain the same?

Hedi Slimane: Always the same, I guess. I started at age 11. I don’t think anything changed since that moment, really. Photography was always the most accurate way I had found to depict an emotional subject, a situation, or an object outside the narrative. I always thought photography was always about signs and ritual. This is pretty much how I approached design for 10 years. I never made any differentiation between those disciplines.

DP: When did you start the diary online, and for what reasons?

HS: I started it in July 2007, because I knew I was going to stop designing for awhile, and I decided I would just keep on following my ideas through photography. It was the most accurate and direct way, through my website, to discover new faces, new music, or creative minds, and to pursue what I was also doing in design, extending my work and dialogue to different fields. I also wanted to travel a lot, and leave Paris, and the diary would be a link for the people that were following my work. The diary was also one the first strictly photographic blogs on the internet. It found an audience that was not familiar, or interested in my work as a designer. I then started the fashion diary, which was more around commissioned projects, and more toward series, just because I started to do more and more commission work.

DP: I must admit I’m totally amazed by your diary, and I consult it regularly. It’s a very pleasant rendezvous with your work and a good source of inspiration. No words, only images that speak for themselves. It creates a sense of freedom that somehow a book of photography can’t really give. I guess it comes from the internet medium. You know, that sensation of checking online one day and some new images are here, and the next day it’s something different that appears, it’s like a movement. It’s an irregular rhythm that finally regularizes itself. How do you manage that movement, that rhythm?

HS: I don’t like ever to explain, and I believe a photograph can be anything you want really. You can reject it, or adopt it and make it your own, emotionally. I don’t post new images everyday, it is totally irregular, because I don’t take pictures everyday. Sometimes I don’t feel like posting photographs, let alone taking pictures. I wait. I look at the photographs again, but not that much. The diary is meant to be serial and repetitive, almost obsessional. Rhythmic is a good definition, or more precisely arrhythmic. There is a rhythm and dialogue between the images, but it is mainly a silent diary, silence after noise (the subject is sometimes about energy and noise), which explains the absence of any writing.

 

 

 

DP: Do you believe the internet has changed and is maybe going to eclipse the print edition?

HS: Yes, I totally think so. The internet will eclipse print edition, and print edition will need to focus on specifics, a sense of rarity, quality, and exclusivity (limited editions, etc.) Magazines always think printing first, internet after. I really believe it will be the other way around in the next five years. I always tell magazine publishers, a picture cannot wait three months anymore to be published. Photography is also news, it is also about immediacy, this precise moment, or instant. I end up producing a lot of my series, and post them the day of the shooting or the day after. This for me makes more sense.

DP: In the last issue, we had an interview with the writer Dennis Cooper, who also uses the internet as a way to publish. And he said it’d be impossible for him to translate his blog through a book, precisely because the internet gives possibilities that print doesn’t. What about your diary, do you think it could become a book one day?

HS: It has been a question for a little while with publishers. The answer is pretty much the same I gave on the print edition. The diary had to start on the internet, for immediacy, and can become printed material as a second thought, and to materialize digitalization. So this might happen, for collectible purpose. Also all my books, until now, are limited in edition, and not reprinted.

 

 

DP: Well, I must ask you a stupid question: why do you mainly do black and white photography?

HS: Really, I don’t know. But I guess it is for clarification, and because I must think everything in black and white. Everything around me has always been like that.

DP: There was a time, when you look at the history of photography, that black and white film was the only process for making a picture. Nowadays with photoshop and digital techniques, there are almost too many ways, too many possibilities. Between the fake and reality, the balance is fragile. Where do you position your work in that infinite universe?

HS: Precisely, the idea of a certain archaism, or a certain academism is really important to me. Black and white is a convention in photography. Simplicity, and direct impression. You cannot play around, and you need to forget the software. But ultimately black and white or color, photography, in general, is always about the subject, and an individual vision. The rest is pure formalism, it does not really matter, to some degree.

DP: As you said before, you don’t really make any differentiation between designing clothes and making an image. At Dior Homme you built a clear and impressive vocabulary, and you did the same in your photography. And apparently you extend that natural endowment into some other creative fields, like curating, filming. Can you tell a bit about those projects?

HS: I assume it is a necessity for me to develop a diagonal approach, without any preconceived idea about the field of intervention. I respond to the projects I’m proposed to do, if they tend to help me to extend my vision. Curating is somehow interesting, but it has been quite challenging to produce in New York, and get artists to feel committed equally toward an idea. Exhibiting is not my most favorite thing. I am not really keen on it, unless I have some feelings for the space and the person that commissioned me. I now tend to go back to strict photography, and stay in that discipline. The exhibitions planned for next year will certainty be quite straightforward with this.

DP: Postmodern photographers in the late twentieth century appropriated images instead of trying to go out on the streets and capturing “real life.” And it feels you belong to that tradition of images makers such as Robert Frank, Richard Avedon, or Lee Friedlander. Where photography has become a modern tool to develop a vision where beauty is one thing, and engaging visual images maybe another one. Do you feel close to that way of photography?

HS: I always felt close to this tradition of “photojournalisme” photography, and I slowly evolved toward isolating and diverting a real subject from the street to a plain non-narrative/ descriptive photo studio. Photography comes from my teenage years, and I somehow kept that format with me, a derivative classicism, inherited I guess from reportage, and portraiture, and transposed within a reduced approach, a semiotic transposition almost. I also have to speak about the really specific tradition of rock photography, which had disappeared somehow, and emerged again. Through the years, I invented my own formal vocabulary and conventions within this field. I always thought it was too random somehow, not restrained enough. I tried to depict that sense in which rock obeys to the same ritual all over again.

DP: By the way, who are the photographers, the artists that inspire you today by their approach, by their work?

HS: I am a little old school, I have to say. I relate to photo reportage mostly. But I also like this idea of web photography. I guess blogs, myspace, etc. keep defining a certain aesthetic in photography. I find it interesting how amateurism is taking over.

DP: In the photo essay you sent to be published alongside this interview, you built – with your archives on LA – a sharp, convergent, and finally almost mute story. Only close-ups. No air, no space, no horizon. It’s quite beautiful, but it also puts you in an uncomfortable, confusing situation.

HS: This is precisely what I was explaining. I always refer to signs and “mute” impressions, when my subject is mostly about noise. Los Angeles is one of the most visually codified city in the world. It is also a chromatic and chaotic space. I always see a pattern though, like a system which organically repeats, reduced to black and white. The sense of repetition (et de mise en abime), the visual vacuum, and the personal sense of isolation the city implies is my subject.

DP: Often people from New York hate LA. They only see the suburban side of it. And they easily suffer from the lack of speed and rush. To me LA is all about space and freedom. Being remote and focused, without too much distraction. What about you, how do you interact with that city?

HS:Yes, I totally agree with you. I guess the suburban convention is quite attractive to me, and a certain idea I have of America. The sense of being remote is one of the most interesting assets. I put everything in perspective when I’m there.

DP: What I also love about that city is the scene. It’s quite young and dynamic, with this DIY ethic. Have you been to the Smell, or heard of it? It started with bands like No Age, Mika Miko, Abe Vigoda. We could compare it to the Pop In in Paris. There is also the Mandrake where you took pictures of LA artists, that is a good place to go. Where else do you go?

HS: Smell is a really specific downtown micro-scene, just like the Mandrake, a world of its own. It is precisely what I like about LA. That sense of micro-communities, auto sufficient somehow. Los Angeles makes it technically impossible for a sub scene to develop to an extent that it would instantly in London or NY, and take over the energy of a city. It is meant to stay singular, and protected.

DP: What about the artists you’ve been working with on the project ART LA. I remember you did a kind of similar work with portraits of NYC lower east side artists. Not to compare the two stories, but still you can see the differences. LA artists seem much more tender, struggling less than the NYC ones.

HS: Yes, I did a project around some of my friends in NY, a few years ago. That particular scene was emerging and getting vibrant, just like the rest of the city, within this speculative tension of NY in the last couple of years, before it all landed abruptly. You certainly feel this restlessness in the NY portraits, it is much more abrupt, and tight. LA project was much more quiet, and peaceful, a much more smooth process, even with two portraits in a day. I wanted to do this for a long time, as a long-term project, starting with emerging artists, going toward institutional ones. LA art project is the first series.

 

 

 

DP: Now I’d like to talk about the West Coast in general. I love the West Coast mostly because of the myth of absolute freedom it embodies. It was the farthest region that people reached for and only real adventurers and free outlaws went there. It’s quite fascinating!?

HS: Again this idea of being remote, on the edge, turning your back to Europe. I always like that feeling that the whole city feels like decor, and any scene, a cinematic impression.

DP: As someone who thinks in black and white, you must feel close to this culture where it’s quite about this kind of duality. Have you ever had, and still do have, American heroes?

HS: I do have American heroes, too many I guess to list, and I do like this notion to live around forgotten Hollywood mythology. Flamboyant and sad at the same time, sometimes tragic. It is happening everyday really. In a restaurant, on the street. The highest concentration of individualities, desperate or golden heroes stuck in their own time, still within the illusion of their high days. Fascinating. Some sort of a mirage on a dead-end street.

DP: I feel here in Paris it’s sometimes hard to find energy, and it is challenging as an independent. It’s hard to keep up, and keep moving, and you can easily be stuck between the institutional and the politic. But in the US you find more alternative, more freedom, and much more space to express yourself.

HS: Well, I know a thing or two about Paris’ institutions and politics. It is sometimes better to take a distance, and preserve your affect for the city. I was raised and born in Paris, but to live partly in Los Angeles helps a lot to find the right balance of energy. I could not do without London on a different note. I don’t think it is about making choices anyway. A couple of suitcases are enough.

DS: When I spend time in LA, I sometimes end up missing the elegance, the delicacy, and the sophistication Paris is able to gather very naturally. And the contrary is true too, when I spend too much time in Paris, I get tired of that extreme sophistication! How do you handle the back and forward relation between Paris and LA?

HS: They are different worlds, and it is a necessity to have perspective. I can stay two months in a row in LA, and of course Europe becomes attractive again. Mixed feelings. You know when it is the time to go. I am lucky enough not to be stuck anywhere. But LA is now a little bit my home.

Interview conducted by Dorothée Perret.

Photography by Hedi Slimane realised between the years 2005 and 2009.
Courtesy of Gallery Almine Rech and Art & Commerce.