BACK TO THE BONE - Part I
A Conversation with Todd Gray and Carrie Mae Weems, 1996
CMW: Just a few minutes ago I went over to my CD player and popped in Bobby McFerrin’s music. Just as I turned it on, I realized there’s a connection between what he’s doing as a musician and what you’re doing as an artist/photographer. With his amazing voice, Bobby McFerrin, this sort of crazy, kinetic human being, is playing with, in, and through the classics, bending them, making chamber or orchestral music something very different; he’s playing with the classics. I thought: Wait a minute. Todd Gray is playing with the classics. You’re playing with popular iconography, in terms of American pop culture, playing with the figures that we all grew up with. For the last fifty years we’ve been innundated with this material. Suddenly you’ve taken this pop material and flexed it and made them into something new.
TG: When I teach, I often tell my students to think of the camera as a musical instrument, like a guitar. You can play it as you’ve been taught, or you can go off in your own way and use it as an interpretive instrument. I’ve applied that to my thinking, working in a hybrid way to create a combination that mixes fine art and pop art. I think that’s where my images work in people’s minds, because they have to reconcile what they’re looking at with the reaction they’ve learned to have to a particular pop culture experience.
CMW: These recent images of yours are very painterly. They make references to photography, and they are photographs, but they could also be airbrushed paintings.
TG: They break away from the traditional photograph. They resist that reading or they call it into question. They may actually share a lot more surface issues with painting than with photography. They suggest a dialogue between the two.
CMW: In terms of your formal approach, Todd, you began five years ago working with the silhouette form. Where did that come from?