Mexico Notebook: Interview with Ramón Jiménez Cuén

From the series "Migrando en el Espejo" © Ramón Jiménez Cuén

Post by Jessica Hubbard Marr

Hannah Frieser, Jaime Permuth and I are collaborating to explore contemporary photography in Mexico. We're looking at trends and how they relate to traditions; events, institutions and venues; as well as pursuing conversations with curators, academics, gallerists and photographers on what's happening currently. This collaborative project will feature a variety of types of posts including interviews, book reviews, published letters, portfolios of images and more.

Hannah Frieser is a curator, photographer and book artist and former Executive Director of Light Work. Jaime Permuth is a Guatemalan photographer living and working in New York City and a Faculty Member at the School of Visual Arts.

Today we continue this series with an interview with Ramón Jiménez Cuén by Jessica Hubbard Marr.

Other posts in this series include:
Interview with Laurence Salzmann
Interview with Diego Berruecos
Interview with Mariela Sancari
Q&A with Eduardo Jiménez Román
Q&A with Claudia Arechiga
Q&A with Nahatan Navarro
Contemporary Photography in Oaxaca
Q&A with Aglae Cortés
Q&A with Maria José Sesma
Interview with César Rodríguez
Q&A with Nora Gómez
Q&A with Melba Arellano
Q&A with Jorge Taboada

______________________________

From the series "Migrando en el Espejo" © Ramón Jiménez Cuén

Jessica Hubbard Marr: To start, what do you do? Where are you based?

Ramón Jiménez Cuén: I'm currently based between New York and Oaxaca. I have been involved with the arts since I was a child thanks to family in Seattle, Washington, where I became interested in music, photography and also skateboarding. My uncle Federico, a jewelry designer based in Venice, California, has also been a strong influence.

Now I am working as a museum consultant, in a green project down on the Oaxacan coast and developing personal projects and studies.

JHM: What was your earliest experience with photography? What was your early photographic education like?

RJC: My father was a doctor; an oncologist, who used to take slides of his diagrams to present them in his medical classes. It was a Canon FTb. I started using this camera until I appropriated it. Then I lent it to a friend and it never came back.

Four months ago, I was walking around Mercado de Abastos in Oaxaca and I found the same camera in the Friday's flea market. I love to think it is the same camera. I started taking pictures with it. It's like recovering the main source of energy that pushes you to take pictures.

As a child, I also met Ralph Bayles, a photographer from Seattle. The figure of a photographer has always been near the family. Anthropologists, musicians and artists have been always part of Christmas dinner as long as I can remember.

I studied medicine in school for about a year, but then I quit and started to do music at Escuela de Bellas Artes de la Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez de Oaxaca; at the same time, I was doing media studies at a private university here in Oaxaca.

© Ramón Jiménez Cuén

By the end of my university program, I spent most of my time in the Manuel Alvarez Bravo Photography Center (now Francisco Toledo's home on Murguia Street). I did every workshop, from platinum and heliograph printing techniques to personal essay exercises with photographers such as Joan Liftin, Mary Ellen Mark and Allen Frame. All this began around 1998.

With Mary Ellen Mark, I start working on a project called "Carnales Bajo el Puente" ["Brothers Under the Bridge"]. Allen Frame encouraged me to show my portfolio at ICP, they accepted me and offered me a grant. I had a great year in New York; ICP used to be located on 96th Street, Uptown, a beautiful space. Amazing friends and photographers came from all over the world - all with fascinating stories and different visions.

Just before I graduated, I won a grant from the Alexia Foundation who also offered me a chance to study photography at Syracuse University, an offer that I refused in order to go back and work on my marriage. I was 24 at that time.

Thanks to the Alexia Foundation, my work got published in a book call "Eyes On the World" (2006) and was part of a great exhibit which traveled around the world starting at the United Nations, and then New York, China and a few other countries.

Upon returning to Oaxaca, I founded dRamedia (2002), a studio house focused on multimedia. I also started a new rock band call Elinor, and began working for galleries, museums and other artists composing music, designing and photographing art for multimedia platforms and web sites.

At that time, I got a call from Kathy Ryan, the photo editor of The New York Times Magazine. It was an assignment to photograph an international convention in Merida. I still have the voice mail recorded.

I wasn't really motivated. I decided to quit photography for a while. Something that never really happens, my archive is full of photographs, most I considered visual notes.

Going back to ICP for a minute, it was also quite confusing, because it was the year (1999-2000) when everything started to change quite dramatically in photography. Now I am really happy to be part of that generation.

© Ramón Jiménez Cuén

JHM: So you were in the generation that was on the cusp of analog and digital.

RJC: It was kind of hard to deal with that, it's still hard. Since then, I am always mixing all kinds of media, from analog to digital and vice-versa: scanning slides and then printing them in the dark room, for instance.

Now I'm quite happy, but at the time it was quite confusing because it was like I had to re-learn everything and not forget about analog in a way. Anyway, now its been almost about 15 years and I think the world is more about mixed-media; everything is an image.

After ICP, I was part of Pixel Press founded by Fred Ritchin. I learned so much during this period. He helped me to see further into the new age of post-photography, I felt released.

In 2009, I finished an MA in Media Art and Film at The New School in New York. This was a great opportunity to re-define myself as an artist. I loved it because I always had to struggle with this conflict of liking different mediums, so that made it easy to understand how everything is related in a new media world order.

I was very happy to accept myself as someone that liked to work with different media. I got the chance to understand the work of artists like Huma Bhabha and Wangechi Mutu. They were working with digital or analog and creating sculptures out of photography, mixing all kinds of elements and sources -- visual collections in all different kinds of formats.

I was very pleased to see this work at the ICP museum [in 2013] because it made me see that my path wasn't that wrong, I was playing with ideas like sound, sculpture and light. That inspired me a lot to create things with multiple types of media; unresolved projects that I still working on.

© Ramón Jiménez Cuén

JHM: I would like to look a bit closer at your first major photographic project, "Brothers Under the Bridge" (1999-2002). Can you provide a general explanation the series before I ask more detailed questions?

RJC: This project is about street children addicted to drugs living in Oaxaca, Mexico. They are in poverty, extremely hard human conditions and ignored by their own community.

In Oaxaca, I found a group of kids running without direction, living as outcasts under the city. Their families sent them to work on the streets. They cleaned the windows of cars when the red light stopped them. They used almost all the money to buy drugs. They sniffed different kinds of solvents and glue. Sometimes they used marijuana.

They were between 12 and 22 years old. Almost all have been in jail. The police were always looking for them, even when they were clean. I wanted to capture a complete vision of their situation, follow their lives until they showed me the end. I wanted to capture the essence of their lives which has been forgotten.

JHM: What camera were you shooting with?

RJC: At first, I was shooting with a Canon Rebel but the one I worked with most of the project is a Nikon F5. It's a really heavy camera, but really fast.

But, I also liked to use a Nikon FM2, Leica m6, a Hasselblad, Mamiya, everything I could experiment and learn from; I also used cameras from different cell phones.

From the series "Brothers Under the Bridge" (1999) © Ramón Jiménez Cuén

JHM: What was your initiation process [into the "Brothers"]? I remember you told me that you bonded with the leader over beers? More specifically, how did you become one of them?

RJC: "El Mitra," who is the leader of this group of kids, I kind of knew because we used to play together in our childhood in the same river, now sadly polluted. The most important thing was that I used to be part of a rock band, so I had had long hair and I was accepted right away. One of them used to play the harmonica, so I would take my guitar and play a bit with him.

That first day with "El Mitra," we connected, went to a bar, had a couple beers, and that was the beginning. That was great because he was the leader and my protector at the same time. Of course I didn’t need it, cause I was one of them after a couple of weeks, and for the next two years. Every time Mary Ellen Mark was in Oaxaca, I was shooting intensely for 10–15 days. Pretty much all of it [the series] was edited by Mary Ellen Mark.

JHM: Edited in what sense?

RJC: The deal was that I was allowed to take the workshop for free, but I needed to process and develop my film and then print the selection that she decided.

JHM: Did the camera ever become a problem in any situation? Did anyone object to having his or her photo taken?

RJC: No.

JHM: Never, wow.

RJC: I was under the impression that they were happy with me because taking their photo made them feel important, a certain kind of recognition; society in general is blind to these scenarios. The camera was there to testify for them. It wasn't a problem.

At the beginning, I took portraits of them and gave them all copies. I was the official photographer for everything at the beginning so I was capturing things that were intimate and important. Then I became essentially invisible and I was taking photographs freely. I became banda, a carnal; a real brother.

No Hay Cihiivon, From the series "Brothers Under the Bridge" (1999) © Ramón Jiménez Cuén

JHM: Can you tell me about this one image, No Hay Chiivion (1999)? What is the context of the photograph?

RJC: This guy, his name is "Takanga," that’s his nickname, and he was beaten by another kid, "El Chango," and they were fighting over a bottle of glue. The attitude was very much, "It’s all okay, we are still friends." After being beaten up pretty hard, he wanted to get across that he was fine and things were cool and that they were together as friends again. That happened like the fifth day after I started photographing them. Everything worked out fine with them and I wanted to testify to the importance of that moment. That was the story behind that photograph.

JHM: You previously mentioned to me that this project had both a political and social message but was also very personal, at a pivotal point in your life.

RJC: Yes. At that moment, I felt that my feelings were projected onto this story. I was going through a separation at the time, and these kids and going under the bridge was my refuge. In a way, I projected my feelings through these kids' stories. They became like my brothers in that sense and helped me through that emotional moment.

JHM: The series also went on to win several awards and as an exhibition, it travelled the world. Was this rewarding? How did you feel?

RJC: Well, there is no better feeling than holding a silver gelatin print on your hands, after that nothing really matters.

JHM: What did you do after this project? Where did you go?

RJC: After this I went to ICP and I did a lot of things. In terms of documentary photography essays, I did a project about the migration of Oaxacans in New York, "Migrando en el Espejo" (2000).

It was like a mirror exercise, looking both at the migrants and the family that they left behind. I did that in 2000, it's in color - Kodachrome. It has a totally different feeling to "Brothers Under the Bridge."

I also did a lot of fictional photo essays, and I of course was still working on my process of divorce and separation so I did a lot of personal work where you can really feel a little bit of loneliness. A lot of that features the streets of New York and is in black and white. I was very inspired by the work of a photographer called Michael Ackerman.

From the series "Brothers Under the Bridge" © Ramón Jiménez Cuén

JHM: You showed me his work, I remember.

RJC: I love his style and was really inspired by his work. So, that’s what I was doing in New York back in 2000. I presented this work in Galería Manuel García [in Oaxaca] with Alejandro Echeverría. We did like a multi-media presentation of that. Nice exhibit.

Then the exhibition "Brothers Under the Bridge" was presented LSE where it became part of their collection. Manuel Garcia published my fist book, "Carnales bajo el Puente." (2002).

JHM: Where does your Marianna Yampolsky research and essay "La Memoria de una Lente, Miradas sobre Mariana Yampolsk" (May 2012) fit into this timeline?

RJC: Then as you know, I was selected to be director of MACO (Museum of Contemporary Art, Oaxaca) an amazing experience. I don't know why they selected me, but I am so grateful. By being there, I had all these connections with various artists. It was a great experience and I learned a lot of things.

I was invited to celebrate the anniversary of Yampolsky and be part of the panel discussion. I decided to write this essay that I really love. Some of the works that I included in the essay were photographs that she made in Oaxaca and the surrounding areas that I'm really familiar with because my family is from Tututepec, Juquila, Oaxaca. So I was very pleased and very inspired by that.

For example, Mariana's photograph, Huipil de tapar, was taken around Pinotepa Nacional and takes me to my grandmother's memory. She used to look exactly like the woman in the photograph.

JHM: As director of MACO, did you see any fusion between contemporary art and photography in Oaxaca? Or is it still rooted in the strong tradition of social documentary, straight photography? What changes do you see in Oaxaca in using photography in a different way?

RJC: Oaxaca has a strong tradition in surrealist moments influenced by Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Graciela Iturbide and more photographers coming to Oaxaca for its exotic and tropical imaginaries. Fortunately now that is changing, new visions, especially from local artists are taking an important place in the contemporary art scenario, the work of Edgardo Aragon is a good example.

Installation of "Tropical Sur" © Ramón Jiménez Cuén

Installation of "Tropical Sur" © Ramón Jiménez Cuén

JHM: Tell me a bit more about your piece "Tropical Sur" in the Galería Quetzalli exhibition, "Dreams and Memories."

RJC: It's a personal piece that resembles an encounter between my father and a woman called Leslie Grace. She's an anthropologist who owned a folk art gallery call La Tienda in Seattle, Washington for the last fifty years. She's a very important person in our family story, I must say, my second mother. She met my father in the 60s. Since then, we have built our life surrounded with beautiful people and life experiences. I try to manifest this in the piece throughout different elements. It's like a reconstruction of the past.

It isn't hard to represent the past, because it's still so present. The main element is a fruit from a Huanacastle (in Zapotec: "the ear tree" / "el arbol que todo lo escuha"). It is a common tree of the Oaxacan coast that is frequently used to build furniture; by cutting them down, erosion has changed all kinds of life forms. This is the type of tree I'm trying to cultivate on the coast of Oaxaca. My father and I began working on that project. He passed away six years a go.

Going back to the piece, there are mirrors printed with the fruit and three lines that I took from a book called, "I Chin," a trigram that represents the celestial father figure. Most of the piece is inspired by the lecture of a book call "The Radicant" (2009) by Nicolas Bourriad.

From "Tropical Sur" 2014 © Ramón Jiménez Cuén

JHM: How long did it take you to put together?

RJC: It took a while; it was more like a re-collection of thoughts, fruits, seeds and ideas. I have this peculiar seed that allowed me to photograph its shape in seven different manners held by it own structure. It is very particular because you can move it around and find different angles in it.

There are seven different photographs. On the mirror, I added all of these elements like the original fruit, a stone, and then some drawn lines that kind of represent the labyrinth of life but that at the end everything is connected.

JHM: Going back to going through all of your old contact sheets, are you finding images that before you didn't really know were there?

RJC: I like to archive pretty much everything, so I've found a lot of material about my personal life as well. I used to just save a lot of images for the sake of archiving, but now I think that a lot of them have a lot of meaning. I'm definitely going to include that at some point in some project. I've reprinted a lot of these images or printed them for the first time.

© Ramón Jiménez Cuén

JHM: Who are some other photographers who have influenced you or inspired you?

RJC: Michael Akerman. Larry Clark, he created one of the best documentary series that I have ever seen. ["Tulsa"] influenced me quite heavily when I was working on "Brothers Under the Bridge."

Koudelka, Sugimoto, there are so many. I love Bruce Davidson. I love the book of the subway that he did in the 80s. I like Mary Ellen Mark, especially "Falkland Road." I love Ralph Gibson, his stuff is still so provocative.

Mapplethorpe, Gursky. Uma Bhabha, Elliot Hundley and now I love the work of anonymous photographers, photos from family albums, so honest.

Library Is Suicide, New York, 1999 © Ramón Jiménez Cuen

JHM: What is next for you?

RJC: I'm very involved right now with the museum, the Museo Belber Jimenez, so I'm trying just now to curate exhibitions involving local artists, to breathe life into this beautiful space. I'm looking forward to continuing to work mixing all kinds of media.

A month ago, it was George Moore's birthday and he invited me to play and we played some blues. It had been a long time since I played in a band so I was excited to pick up an old thing. Being in New York is not just about studying, it’s also about plugging into new coordinates and other things.

______________________________

Jessica Hubbard Marr is a specialist in photographic imagery with a focus on Latin America, an interest that developed thanks to many nights in the Manuel Alvarez Bravo/IAGO library in Oaxaca over the years. As a result, she subsequently received her M.A. in The History and Theory of Photography at Sotheby's Institute of Art/University of Manchester in London in 2011; Marr previously earned her B.A. in English from Kenyon College in 2005. Prior to working in the photography field, Marr worked with the non-profit, 'Friends of Oaxacan Folk Art' from 2008-2010, as both a photographer and cultural liaison. 

Since 2010, she has worked for TransGlobe Publishing in London, researching and writing about contemporary art and photography in locations ranging from Brazil to the Middle East. In 2012, Marr was appointed to the Global Nominations Panel for the Prix Pictect Photography Prize as a specialist in Latin American Photography. Her original essay, "A Glimpse into Enduring Moments" was featured in the catalogue of photographer Nadja Massun's solo exhibition, Alice in the Land of Zapata, at the Hungarian House of Photography in Budapest in 2012.

Marr resides in the US after spending the past six years studying and working abroad in Oaxaca, Quito, London and Mexico City. She credits these experiences to both expanding and deepening her appreciation for and knowledge about the photographic medium across cultures. 

She works as an independent photography consultant, researcher, writer, editor, and art advisor for both art/photography professionals and practitioners between Mexico, New York and London. 

Marr's photographic work has been published internationally in a variety of art and literary journals. Her first published photograph was taken in Oaxaca in 2008. 

Coney Island, 2012 © Ramón Jiménez Cuén

The Image: Mike Peters, Man with hands behind back at the Easter Parade, NYC, 2010

© Mike Peters, Man with hands behind back at the Easter Parade, NYC, 2010

This was taken at the Easter Parade on 5th Avenue in New York City in 2010. I had never been to this event before.

Immediately before making this photo, I had been speaking with Mary Ellen Mark who shoots here every year. We lamented the state of the business and congratulated each other for continuing to use film. My photograph of her on Flickr continues to get looked at every day here.

Like the Halloween and Mermaid parades in NYC, this is generally an event where people get decked out in something outrageous so they can be the center of attention for a little while. And, like most parades, I found those people who wanted to be photographed, the least interesting.

So, not being at all interested in the people wearing the outrageous costumes and posing for all of the other photographers, I did what I always prefer to do, which is to troll the periphery. And, within about 2 minutes of concluding my conversation with Mary Ellen, this gentleman, whom I had seen from a distance earlier strolling by, was stopped and looking at someone to his left. As I raised the camera he turned to look at me.

His posture and the forward jut of his chin fascinated me, as did his hat and glasses. The hands clasped behind the back, as they had been earlier, left him open to the world as it was unfolding in front of him. He struck me as a man from another time, an earlier New York City that seemed to be a haven for men who looked like this. His chin held high, his hat crumpled just so, his mustache and even his pants so high up on his waist seemed to describe a real character to me.

But it's his glasses which shroud his gaze a bit, but not too much, that intrigue me the most. They hint at what I imagine to be a deep reserve in which he holds himself back. In short, this man seemed very dignified and real to me, unlike the posers waiting for a crowd of gawkers. To me he is a man onto which I could graft any number of imagined stories. He was here to see the spectacle just as I was, and in that, we were the same, and in his steady gaze I saw myself.

Interview: Elinor Carucci

Interviewed by phone in New York City on May 4th, 2011

New York City-based Elinor Carucci (b 1971) is an Israeli-American photographer. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002 and the NYFA Award in 2010. She was chosen by Photo District News as one of its "30 Under 30" in 2000 and won the International Center of Photography’s "Infinity Award" for Best Young Photographer in 2001.

She is currently working on a body of work about her children. Previous bodies of work include Closer which was published as a monograph in 2002 by Chronicle Books and republished in 2009 with a forward from Susan Kismaric. A second book entitled Diary of a Dancer was published by SteidlMack in 2005. Her work is included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Jewish Museum (New York), the International Center of Photography, The Brooklyn Museum of Arts, The Houston Museum of Fine Arts, The Museum of Israeli Art in Ramat Gan, Israel, the Herzlia Museum of Contemporary Art and The Haifa Museum of Art.

In this interview, we have tried to add to the already extensive number of interviews with Carucci that exist online. Among the best of the many interviews are those with Rachel Been on Slideluck Potshow, the community interview with Matt Johnston on A Photo Student that features a selection of student questions and also two video interviews, one a film by Christian Klinger on amadelio and a second produced by artis in 2009. A Google search will turn up another dozen.

After reading through those interviews, we decided to focus this interview on areas of her life and work less covered previously: the role of Israeli culture in her work, questions about the images themselves that complement questions in previous interviews and also on her role as an educator.

THE ROLE OF ISRAELI CULTURE IN HER WORK

fototazo: Elinor, people often talk about your work in terms of intimacy, family and also your own life experience, but as I was looking through your images, it also seems to me your work is just as much about your culture. How much do you think your work is a reflection and commentary of being Israeli in terms of family dynamics, comfort with the body, parenting...

Elinor Carucci: Yes, when I started to take pictures, I didn't think about it at all, because I took for granted who I am, and who my family was, but especially after I moved to America, I realized that a lot of this is cultural. A lot of it is how, as you were just saying, how much more easier we are with nudity, and how intimacy is being expressed, especially among women in the Middle East. I realized that even though I wasn't intending to talk about Israeli culture, or Middle Eastern culture, my work ended up reflecting this culture because it's who I am and where I'm from.

f: Do you think you would be making the same images, or similar images, if you were still living in Israel full-time?

EC: Nope, no. I mean my work reflects my reality and today I have two children that were born and raised in America, they're Americans, and I'm photographing much more outside, so the New York streets [are] in my images, and also I'm a little different. So my life is different, and if my life is different, then my work is different.

f: Have you found a difference in how you're thought of as a photographer in Israel and in the US? And in the critical response you've received between the two countries?

EC: I think I have been better received in America. And I, even though I try to understand why it happened, I haven't figured it out...yet. Sixteen years here and I haven't figured it out! In America and in Europe my work gets a lot of attention, I have a lot of shows and good reviews, and in Israel it's been a struggle, I don’t know why.

f: Maybe it relates to the previous question about culture - that you have something to share in the U.S. and Europe that people are less familiar with that adds a charge to the work. Maybe in Israel, the world and life you show is something more common and the work is related to differently.

EC: I don't know. I mean I know that in Israel it's a smaller market, and the market is more conceptual. I definitely think some of it is trying to be seen as very sophisticated, and because we're a small country, maybe the art world wants to show that it's as good as America and Europe, and it's trying hard to be very conceptual, very sophisticated, and ends up being much colder.

It's coming from insecurity actually, so you see a lot of like, weird conceptual installations, and people think they're really cutting edge, and they will not accept work that has simplicity, and my work has...I don't know if it's simple, but it's straightforward. So it's seen less as like "fine art." But I'm trying not to give it a lot of thought, because it makes me angry.

QUESTIONS ON THE IMAGES

f: I would like to ask some questions about your work as well, starting with beauty, the body, and taking images. How important do you think your body and your beauty is to making images? Do you think you would be able to make, or be interested in making, the same images and statements with your work if you weren't so blessed?

EC: A. Thank you and B: My recent work, which you've just seen very little of on my website because I haven't showed it yet, I am not showing my body in a beautiful way at all - after pregnancy and the stretch marks and the sagging breasts, and all kinds of not really beautiful things. I think Closer was me in my twenties with a more beautiful body, but it's changing and my body's changing and I'm aging.

I mean, in my work, I'm trying to talk about many different things, and not all of it has to be beautiful, but, I have...and I don't think I'm beautiful at all, so...this question is funny to me! But I think the work is about the body and intimacy and the weaknesses and the flaws of the body, but I don’t know, I am who I am and the family that I am, so...

f: If you start with beauty, and then you show stretch marks and you show the passage of time, than maybe starting with beauty allows for tension in the images, that you see the change affecting beauty and that makes the images successful. Maybe if you started with a different body, showing damage wouldn't have the same tension and the same impact, the same success, perhaps, as an image.

EC: I don’t know. I'm trying to photograph my own experiences, but I think a lot of what I'm photographing is very universal and for every woman it's a painful process - with all the joy of having a baby - to lose the old body that you had. I think it's a painful process. For some it's not so bad and for some it's worse, and it also depends if you have twins, how your body is reacting to childbearing and pregnancy, but I think we all are beautiful when we are 18, and we're 30-something after pregnancy then birth. No matter what kind of body we started with, it's a difficult, painful process.

f: I also want to ask you about the history of your images and if you're strategies for, and ideas about, image-making have changed a lot over time.

EC: The more you learn and are exposed to more imagery and more artists, it's more absorbed in your life...I think I'm much more clear with what I want today with my work than I was twenty years ago, or fifteen years ago.

f: So that clarity has also been a process within your own work and looking at other people's work and living with your own images?

EC: No, I think the clarity comes from age and experience. I would have been more clear in what I think and what I want to say whether or not I'm an artist. Because I'm an artist it ends up in my work. I think when you're 40, and I'm almost 40, you are a different person than when you are 20 and 24. So I think I'm more opinionated today in many ways. I know what I think, I know what want, I know what I want to say.

f: Has becoming clearer in thoughts and ideas with age changed the images formally?

EC: I see the changes as I look at my work in retrospect. I see changes that happen as a result...even light, there's not much in the Manhattan apartments in New York, so I started using a lot of artificial light. I am more indoors here because the winter. I think I came to loosen the work up, it used to be much more controlled, and now I try to give more room for things to just happen. And also, you know, the point of view. I'm a mom, I'm a mother of two, I've immigrated from one country to another, which can be a very painful experience, and a very complicated one. So it's a combination I guess of many different things that I'm not even aware of at the time.

f: I was reading in an interview with you that with time you've accepted staging images more, and become comfortable with the truth and the kind of the reality that that can show. Have you ever felt that if you're going to stage the images, you might look at making medium or large format images? Why have you decided to stay with 35mm?

EC: I know that was written, but it was a little...I guess people misunderstood me, I don't really stage images. I sometimes maybe arrange them more...so also maybe it's my lack of better English.

f: Well, we can correct the record in this interview!

EC: [laughs] I never stage an image completely, but I'll sometimes just slightly interfere with the situation or bring a light, but the images are not staged, they're not staged. And I need to be able to hold a camera and hold the baby in the other hand and so the quickness and the lightness of the 35mm was good for me, even though some of my work was done with a 4x5 camera, and today I'm using the MarkIII which is not really 35, it's heavier.

But to work exclusively with 4x5 I couldn’t do it because many of the images that are happening in the moment while I'm in the moment, I need the immediacy of the 35.

f: You talked in one interview about Mary Ellen Mark being a strong, early photographic influence. I wanted to ask you about what influence film, music, literature or other creative sources have had on your work.

EC: I'm mostly, I guess, aware of photography, but also I think that film directors have influence on me, but it’s hard to connect it directly to my work, but there's people whose work I just love. Doug Lerman, the film director, and Matilde Matilde, and the Israeli director, Ari Feldmen, just people whose work really touched me...and maybe influenced me somehow.

f: And this is a straightforward question: why do you take pictures?

EC: Yes, I don't know. I mean, I don't know why. It's this thing that makes me feel so alive. You know, I can tell you what it makes me feel, but I don't know why photography I guess. It's like asking a woman why you fell in love with this man. It's this very mysterious thing. I love taking pictures, it helps me see my life and see the world around me and it just makes me feel...alive as I said, but I don't really know why photography and not painting or sculpture or...or working as a financial consultant. I don't know. It's just what I love to do.

f: Do you ever have an interest in or kind of a fantasy of being another type of photographer? Do you look at images by certain people and wish you were the photographer that could take those?

EC: I love what I do and I think wishing for doing other things is really fulfilled by shooting a lot on assignment. I shoot for magazines and I've been doing so for the last decade. So I'm [exposed to] many different assignments and different kinds of people. It does fulfill the need to do other things and be inspired by other ideas - and great photo editors push me out of my comfort zone.

TEACHING AND ADVICE

f: I would like to ask you about your role as a teacher. How do your roles as a photographer and educator interact and overlap, what do you get from teaching and also what does it make you give up?

EC: I don't sacrifice anything because I'm not a full-time teacher. I think some of the problems of teaching are the fact that it takes so much of someone's time. I just teach once a week right now and I give workshops every once in a while...so it's not like I devote myself to teaching.

I think the downside of that is that I don't have a full-time position, I don't make income I can rely on from teaching because I'm an adjunct professor. The great thing for me...[is] that it forces me to get out of my work and myself and really think about my students, how they think and how they create. For me this is the challenge. Every time I see someone's work, I don't really know at first what needs to be done in order to help them progress. It's a process. In this process I have to realize who they are and how they think and how they create, and then to try to help them that way, and for me this is the biggest challenge.

f: I thought we could ask a few questions about the general advice you give your students while talking about your role as a teacher. Do you have advice received or learned over the course of your career that you would pass along to them?

EC: Someone once advised me to really go with what I think in terms of editing my work, and what kind of work I'm doing and then, he said, it will be easier to embrace your failures. And this is so true because there are a lot of failures along the way, when you choose to be an artist, photographer, creative person. And to me if you know that you are walking your way, what you do reflects who you are, then if you fail, it's easier to deal with it than if you're trying to chase some kind of idea or trend of what kind of work you should be doing. I think it was a good advice. To just - not "just" because it's not an easy thing - to be me and take the decisions that are right for me.

f: Do you have any advice on starting projects?

EC: Yeah, they should do whatever they feel is right to do. I mean, you can always look at the trends. I don't work this way, some people do and that's fine for them, and sometimes, you know, seeing what has been done around you and trying different things is not a bad thing - but I've given advice because it's a very personal thing.

f: What about on the other end of a project, thinking about how to put these images, that come from different times, different places together, do you have any thoughts about sequences and creating a larger body or work, any thoughts to pass on?

EC: No, I feel it really depends on the work, on the context, on where it is going, and if it's a group show, if it's a book, if it's a page or two pages or eight pages for a magazine, if you want your work to be read as a narrative or not, as a conceptual project or not, so it's not something that generally you can I think you can have one advice for.

f: Do you think that a photograph can tell a narrative?

EC: Yeah, I think it can tell a narrative. I don't know if it can reflect reality as it is, but it can tell a narrative, it can be a narrative that is from the photographer's mind, but it can tell a narrative.

f: Do you have any thoughts about the gallery-museum world and strategies for having successful relationships with them?

EC: I think my only advice is to be really flexible and not to be entitled. Galleries are struggling almost the way we do, you know, you have to take it one step at a time. So I think if you're selling a lot, or if you just got a lot of critical attention, then you can ask for more from the gallery, but you can't ask the gallery to be your parent, you have to be realistic in the fact that these are businesses, they need to make a living, they need to pay the bills, you have to be realistic in what you ask from them. So for me to be flexible and realistic, and not be kind of the whining artist that I sometimes was, that I wish I'd learned earlier on.

f: The last question is to ask you if there's anything you would like to add or to see if there's something you've always wished an interviewer would ask you.

EC: No, I've been asked I think everything!

f: I was surprised how many interviews there are with you online. Hopefully the interview will add a little bit to the existing content about you as a teacher, a little bit more about the role of culture in your work and a little information about images themselves to complement what's out there.

Thanks, Elinor, for your time!

Edited for length, sequence, and clarity.