michel szulc krzyzanowski
conceptual photography
Interview by Denise Woerdman
Fotolab Kiekie
2017
To what extent does your free lifestyle influence your photographic work?
The free lifestyle is a result of my photography. In order for my photography to flourish, to give it all the space it needs, I have to live the way I do now.
I am a conceptual photographer: ideas and plans come from my creativity.
Creativity is a delicate aspect of the mind like the flower in the garden. If there is not enough rainfall, the flower withers.
My creativity flourishes when I live in ultimate freedom: when I have to live in limited freedom I waste away.
I experience it as an obligation to create that context for my creativity: I have a certain talent, as everyone does, and I feel responsible to respect that talent and give it all the space it needs.
So that results emerge that can be of value to a worldwide audience.
That gives meaning to my life.
I have actually been applying this formula for living completely freely from an early age.
I couldn't do it any other way….
How do you view photography today?
A lot of photography is taken, but we don't see most of it. Especially since mobile phones can also take photos, billions of photos are taken worldwide.
But of course you mean photography as it is published in magazines, on websites and presented as exhibitions.
However, I have little interest in that and I will explain why.
There are creative photographers who make work, but the question is whether we see it.
Because between the photographers and the audience there is a layer of people who are not photographers themselves but who decide and determine what the audience sees.
So we shouldn't look at the photography presented and have an opinion focused on the photographers and their work. We must look critically at how the layer of people who determine what can be discussed do their work.
It is of course remarkable that this layer of people themselves are never assessed on how they do their work. They are in the position of a judge and decide for the public what they will or will not see. But whether they make the right choice is never up for debate.
Especially because the photographers let it get to them and do not dare to be critical of curators and picture editors for fear of being condemned as pariahs with their work.
I have had all kinds of experiences with curators and picture editors and it is often a joy and sometimes a drama.
Especially curators who are permanently employed at a museum, for example, act like goddesses.
For example, there is a photography curator at a museum in the Netherlands and she trained at the Social Academy. So not qualified or trained at all to assess photography. She looks at photos that are eligible for an exhibition by turning them over at breakneck speed. Each photo 1 to 2 seconds! Yes, she says, I have experience looking at photos….
But there is also a curator who, thanks to an excellent education at Leiden University, has a historical awareness of photography, a beautiful ego with integrity.
So as a photographer it just depends on who you deal with.
What I always keep in mind as a photographer is that it is only about one thing: not to let the incompetence of others slow me down in my life, but to always move forward at full speed with my photography.
It occurs to me what is really important photography that others make...
Do you still make documentary photography?
Of course ! Last year the project “Paradise on Earth”. Went looking for a couple whose husband should be called Adam and the wife Eve. Not to be found anywhere in the world until I received a tip that a couple with those names lived in Soest. I followed them for a while in their lives to show what actually became of the earthly paradise.
I like to use an aspect of sequences in my documentary photography: when I go to the beach with my camera I don't know what will happen. It is always a surprise what the result is.
This is of course different if you, as a photographer, make a portrait, for example: you already know in advance that it will be a portrait...
I didn't know beforehand what kind of people Adam and Eve would be in Soest and I like that surprise and the challenge of making an interesting series anyway.
I am now working on a project in the US to track down women who live in a village that has the same name as themselves. Like Dana in Dana and Helena in Helena.
It's the world turned upside down: a photographer first wants to know whether someone is interesting enough to photograph. But I'll ignore the anecdote. Everyone is interesting to me as long as I know how to use my photography optimally.
It's the same thing with sequences. They are made on the same beach in Mexico every time. No conventional photographer would choose to do this. What on earth is there to photograph there?? There is only the beach, the sea and the sky! For me, however, it is just a setting in which I can make something visual happen. So it is freedom from the dogmas that exist in photography.
What made you switch from black and white sequences to color?
In the period 1970 - 1985 I experimented with sequences in different ways. Working with a large format camera, making sequence clips with a video camera and also making color sequences.
But in the end I was most satisfied with the photo series taken in black and white with a 35mm camera.
That was the time of analog photography and now we are digital. That offers many more options and possibilities and I gratefully take advantage of that.
One of the options is to have an image either in black and white or in color.
It is easy to compare these and judge what comes across best: which image is the strongest?
What can we expect from your new solo exhibition at Eduard Planting Gallery? What will we see there?
It will be very exciting how the new sequences are received and experienced. Because these are very different from the sequences from the last century. Many dogmas have been broken. Like the vintage sequences, the dogma is that the photos are in black and white, all the same size and neatly lined up next to each other.
I was able to break free from that, among other things.
Obviously I cannot say what can be expected: how can I speak for others in this?
The only thing is that I have worked very hard on the new sequences and both my gallery owner and I consider the results to be such that they deserve a presentation to an audience.
It is then of course up to each visitor to experience it as they wish.