07.08.09
Contemporary Art Landscape Photographer Simon Norfolk Interviewed
Simon Norfolk studied philosophy and sociology at university and was on course for a career as an academic when one of his tutors introduced him to photography. Seeing in photography a way to explore philosophical discussions in a more accessible way, he completed the Documentary Photography course at Newport, South Wales, and embarked on a career as a photojournalist. Since 1994, he’s described himself as a landscape photographer rather than a photojournalist.
He continues to produce photographic images for the New York Times Magazine and the Guardian Weekend magazine. His work is held in both private and public institutions worldwide, including The Getty Museum, Los Angeles, the Hayward Gallery, London, and the British Council Collection. He is currently based in Brighton, East Sussex.
Jocelyn Phillips: You’re represented by three commercial galleries, in Los Angeles, New York and London. How did your relationship with these galleries develop?
Simon Norfolk: It wasn’t really an audience I set out to address. The first gallery who represented me just asked if I would sell. After that it was very much a conscious thing on my part to get galleries to represent me, because it seemed a good way economically to support the work. It’s as a good a forum as any,
I think, and I’m very happy about it. The amount of control that you have over meaning in this arena is very important; it’s not something I have if I’m working with a magazine. In a gallery the meaning is entirely my own – I can write my own texts and explanations.
It’s the conversations at galleries that I enjoy, and the thinking about trying to drive a career forward. I’ve chosen galleries that deal specifically with photography. I suppose I could have gone with a ‘fine art’ gallery, but I’m not sure I would enjoy the conversations there.
Do the galleries you work with allow you to dictate the direction and interpretation of your work?
I wouldn’t stay with them if they didn’t give space to the ideas. The important thing is to know how to make long-term projects and how to think of myself as an artist not in two years’ time but in 20.
My gallerist in Los Angeles for example is very wise about what an artist needs to do. So, she says, if you want to be an artist in five years’ time you need to make sure you are collected by this museum and you need to think about working with this kind of publication and showing at this festival. In the US in particular, there is a healthy, well-supported museum system that is out looking to buy work.
These collections are the most important thing for me really. I want to make an impact and I want that to take place over the next 200 years. Is that a ridiculous thing to want?!
One thing I know about a museum is that they will look after the work.
But your work still appears in editorial publications, doesn’t it?
A lot of my work starts out as magazine assignments; I’d say about half of it. In order to be successful as a gallery photographer you have to be commercially successful.
A gallery isn’t going to take you on because they think you’re a nice guy. I’m quite blessed nowadays in that people know what I do.
The editor at the New York Times Magazine is fantastic: she gives me free rein. The only brief she would give me is ‘Bring me something I haven’t seen before’.
How then did you make this decision to refer to yourself as a landscape photographer rather than a photojournalist?
Is this something you did to facilitate an easier relationship with art galleries?
No, it was sort of an act of desperation really. I would rather not use any term at all, because I know what I do and why I do it.
Calling myself a landscape photographer was a way of avoiding some other label – ‘conceptual artist who uses lens-based media’, for example, which makes my skin crawl.
I’ve always objected to the term ‘artist’.
I don’t particularly enjoy the package that comes with it; I don’t want to be associated with a lot of the so-called artists out there. But ‘art’ is the best way to describe it and I put my work in art galleries so I guess that makes me an artist.
People always ask me what I do and it occupies a strange kind of half-space really, somewhere between art photography and documentary photography.
I don’t win fancy art prizes and neither do I win world press awards. But it doesn’t really bother me. It doesn’t have any influence on what I do.
If the switch from photojournalism to landscape photography wasn’t calculated, how did it come about?
I was a photojournalist working for magazines and had spent a lot of time photographing the Far Right and fascist groups. I became interested in the academic end of that movement, particularly the idea put forward by some that the Holocaust didn’t happen. I thought it would be interesting to go to Auschwitz.
I’d just bought a square-format camera so took that with me and the plan was to do a photojournalistic story about Auschwitz. All the shots from this landscape camera were very static and front on and square.
When I came back I made all the prints and it seemed, when faced with a subject like Auschwitz, that the photojournalistic pictures were rather ‘shouty’ and telling me something I already knew – ‘It’s a bad place, a terrible place, and you must feel this’. Then I had this other set of prints – rather static and quiet – and I felt they had more to say. They were an invitation to think about what it might be to be in this place now, with this history.
I’d never done that before as a photographer. You don’t have to scream and shout and do all these tricks – wide-angle lenses and fill-in flash – and all the things you do as a photojournalist. Suddenly it seemed to me the only way you could approach these subjects; I think it’s a much more intelligent approach.
You’ve talked about being fortunate enough to be able to do both now – commercial work and your own. How do you navigate the path between economics or business sense, and photography for photography’s sake? Do you have to choose one over the other nowadays?
I think a business sense has always been there, but those who appeared to be doing photography for photography’s sake were adept at hiding the commercialism.
A photographer like Rankin is a businessman primarily and I think he’d be quite happy to say that. His great skills are as a businessman, but you don’t look at him and think that.
You think: ‘There’s a very clever photographer who has built a great career for himself’.
Can you tell in advance whether an image or series is going to be a commercial success for you, even while you’re working?
Sometimes I’m quite surprised by what people like. Mostly I keep quiet and I find that the image which is the good one in a series is the one that sells most. With some I think people find what I find in the picture.
Then there are others where I think ‘Why do people buy that?! It’s rubbish.’ There’s one picture I shot recently where
I thought ‘ah, that’s a crowd pleaser’. It’s a good picture and fits with the project and tells the story right.
Then when I made the print – absolutely gorgeous! It looked like it was made out of gold. I thought: ‘That one will sell hand over fist’; and when it came out we sold all of them.
Sometimes I find that I can make quite an ordinary picture, but my personal experience in making it is the important thing for me. I think in terms of the courage that it took to do it that day, when I was actually quite afraid and most of me wanted to get on a bus and just get out of there.
What do you admire in other people’s work?
It’s not so much particular images or projects, rather it’s a sort of intellectual ruthlessness that appeals to me: people who have the tenacity to follow an idea for a period of time.
I don’t like someone who first does one thing and then, when that’s sold out, moves to something over there just because it will sell just as well. I want to see people who are passionate about their work.
When you’re passionate, you can’t just stop, walk off and start somewhere else. There’s a lot of sensational work around that is really gorgeous, and when you go to an art fair you see it from 50 metres and you think ‘Wow! Look at that down there!’ But it’s just flashing lights and showbiz and I absolutely believe that, long term, none of that stuff will persist. An artwork has to have a real persistence and a real traction to it.
And that can only be in the ideas which the photographer is trying to articulate in the work. I think we should have a program where we take graduates from art school to work in a refugee camp for six months.
Then they can tell me what it’s like to live, what it’s like to be a human being and to want things. Then they’d have a lot more power in their battery packs.
Are other people’s interpretations and labels a source of frustration to you?
My hope is that one day we won’t have all these categories; we’ll just have the category ‘Is it interesting?’.
I don’t really care what we call it. Does it move you? Does it inform you? Does it make you think about the world? That’s all I care about. For me art is just a medium for me to talk about the things that interest me.
I think a lot of this ‘is photography art?’ thing is really a ‘can I justify charging this amount of money for this?’ thing.
My feeling is ‘You want to spend £5000 on one of my photographs? Fantastic!’ And if you pay £5000 for one of my photographs, then you’ll probably look after it.
And maybe, if you look after it, you’ll engage with the ideas in it; maybe it’ll be around in 100 years’ time and people will have a dialogue with the ideas in it. I want people to look at my pictures in years to come and find these works interesting. Whether or not my work is ‘art’, I don’t care. My entire life is making these things.
If I couldn’t get paid to make them, I’d just do them in my own time. If no one would exhibit my work on the wall I’d use superglue and stick it to the pavement. Similarly if I couldn’t do it through photography, I’d dump it tomorrow and take up trapeze or something, if I thought I could do these things through the medium of trapeze.
Photography is just the only way I’ve found to do these things so far.
So are you looking for other ways?
No, because after 20 years as a photographer I haven’t even scratched the surface.
Simon Norfolk was speaking with Jocelyn Phillips
To see examples of Simon's work visit www.simonnorfolk.com
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