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Q1 With a writer/journalist background, how did you begin photographing?
I've been working with photographers for 20 years - since I was in my late teens - as a fashion stylist and then as an editor for magazines and newspapers, so I've always been around photography and photographers. I would often collaborate on fine art series' with photographer friends; I would design the clothes and style the shots and we'd come up with the concept and do the art direction together. I'm also a very visual writer - I see what I want to write about in my head before I put it on paper, whether it's fiction or non-fiction. I no longer work as a journalist, but I do write novels and I often tell people that writing my books is just like watching a movie unfold in my head – all I'm doing is transcribing what's in my mind. I've also worked in advertising and film, and those experiences helped me develop a language I have used to convey to photographers I've worked with what I'd like to see or, now, to explain to people what I'm doing with my own work. And since much of my work is conceptual and experimental, having that language is helpful, if not essential. After being immersed in photography in one way or another for so many years and having a very visual mind naturally, it wasn't a huge step to start shooting professionally myself. I had absorbed all the basics: light, composition, colour, etc. over the years, so it has been more a matter of inspiration, vision, determination and having a visual story to tell. |
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Q2 Where do you turn for inspiration for your shooting?
It can come from anywhere – or from anything. I'm a big vintage collector (of mostly mid-20th- century and late - '70s/early - '80s kitsch and clothing), so sometimes I'll build a photograph, or an entire series, around one piece. My series of children in animal masks, "bestia parvulus (animal child)", started that way. I had one mask – the bunny – and the shot turned out so well that it ended being the first of a series. The same thing happened with "ladies of the balaclava"; I had found a very creepy white ski mask and fashioned a mini-series of six photographs around it. Sometimes, however, it's a person who will inspire me. I saw a young woman performing in a local play and was so taken and inspired by her look that I've built a series around her that I'm preparing to shoot this summer. But my inspiration could be strictly conceptual and narrative instead, like the other series I'm working on, "puppenhaus hotel," which tells the visual story of misfit dolls living in a european hotel/dollhouse. |
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Q4 Is there an artist who inspires you the most?
There is no particular artist I strive to emulate. I certainly draw inspiration from other photographers, as diverse as Weegee, Diane Arbus, and Pierre et Gilles, but it’s often design that most provokes me, specifically vintage textile design and graphic design. I'm a huge fan of Peter Saville and the work he did for Factory Records in the 1980s and '90s, as well as much of the Brit-pop album-cover photography of the late '70s and early '80s, and I can spend hours going through boxes of vintage fabrics putting together colours and patterns. The Surrealists also figure quite prominently in my thinking, from Dali to Marcel Duchamp, as do fairy tale writers like Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm; there are hints of Japanese television and pop cinema in my work, too. |
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But what is most fascinating is when I receive email or comments about my work citing artists and photographers I'm unfamiliar with. I didn't go to art school and am by no means educated in photo history, but one of the most frequent comparisons I get is to the late American photographer, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, whose work I didn't know at all until his name kept coming up in relation to my mine. Now, I'm a huge fan of his. Sometimes, I think, it's best to be a bit naïve about these things and just shoot what you want without regard to what's been done before or whose work yours might be compared to.
Q5 Do you have any favorite camera or equipment to work with?
I shoot only analogue cameras, always with expired and/or damaged film. |
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Q7 How about when is the most difficult moment?
I don't encounter a lot of negatives regarding photography, which is one of the main reasons I continue to do it. Of course, it's disappointing when a roll of film is so old and brittle it breaks in my camera or the weather doesn't co-operate with my vision, but those are such minor things, they don't cause much stress. Probably my least favourite part of the process is the tedious job of digitally removing dust particles from my 120 prints – I'd love to have a dedicated 120 neg scanner but they're so expensive and the colours are too often off on flatbed scans, so I scan the prints and then put Photoshop to work. I have a complicated, love/hate relationship with Adobe CS3 - I don't use Photoshop much except for minor cropping and dust removal, but I spend a lot of time writing html code in Dreamweaver for my websites, which have been crucial in getting my work out there and noticed.
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Q8 What beauty means to you?
I'm fascinated by duality in images, in environments and in people. I shoot mostly outdoors in natural light and will often find myself drawn to locations that are very urban in a hard, grey concrete way, but have - for example - an unexpected patch of grass or wildflowers growing. The same duality exists in people – no one is all "good" or all "bad," and this is a recurring theme in all of my visual and written work. I find great beauty in complexity and opposition, in making something traditionally thought of as ugly appear beautiful. Any clash of environment or message is appealing to me and of course I love juxtaposing the theatrical and fantastical with the mundane. Whatever I'm shooting, I try to make my photographs aesthetically interesting on the surface, but upon taking a closer look, hopefully people will discover another level that challenges them, amuses them or repulses them - or if I'm very lucky, they'll come away from my work having encountered unusual beauty or beauty coming at them from an unexpected angle. |
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| Pamela Klaffke has worked as a professional writer for 15 years, taking a few detours into other arts-and-media related work along the way. She has enjoyed a varied career during which she's worked as a fashion stylist, film and video producer and media consultant. She was a founding editor of Calgary's alternative weekly, Fast Forward, and has been associate editor at Avenue magazine. Pamela worked as the pop culture trends columnist for the Calgary Herald and was the paper's literary editor for four years. Her first book, Spree: A Cultural History of Shopping, was published in Canada and the United States in fall 2003, in the U.K. and Australia in spring 2004, and in China in fall 2006. In addition to writing, Pamela also works as a photographer, shooting unconventional portraits and unusual places with analogue cameras using expired and often damaged film. Pamela's Bestia Parvulus series has received widespread media attention in Russia and the Ukraine, as well as on many arts websites and blogs, from the USA to Japan to Norway. Several images from the series were featured in the February/March 2008 issue of the Mexico City based art and design magazine, PICNIC. Three of the Bestia Parvulus images have recently been licensed to Italian fashion brand, Diesel, for use in the promotion and advertising of their annual international new music concert series, Diesel U: Music. Pamela is the founder and chief curator of the Secret Society of Analogue Art, an organization that encourages the creative fusion of analogue and digital communication and media by offering an ongoing series of participatory art challenges. The society's current projects include the Creepywonderful Gallery of the Analogue and the Dollar Store Doll Polaroid Makeover Challenge. |
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Or my inspiration could be a location or a colour or a certain type of film or alternative processing - I find it in all kinds of places.
Q3 How do you balance being a mom and running a business?
I'm lucky, because my daughter is very interested in the arts and in photography. I've worked out of my home for almost 10 years, so I have a very flexible schedule and my daughter has never known anything else. She's never had to go to day care, and it's just the two of us since I'm a single mother and she's an only child. She's seven now and has her own very definite opinions and aesthetic taste. She knows how to use my cameras and has a handful of her own. Last summer, she shot her own series of graffiti around the city. Who knows what it will be this year. My work and professional lives are very seamless. My daughter understands that I have to spend a certain amount of time every day on the phone or sitting in front of my computer. |
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| As she gets older, she gets more into her own projects – she's recently started organizing shoots for her and her friends. I let them at my vintage clothes closet and they're occupied indefinitely, and of course, they always go for the super-glitzy '80s pieces. She's also a key participant in front of the camera for me. Almost all of the "bestia parvulus (animal child)" series are of her and she continues to be a major subject in my work, though now that she's figured out that people can get paid for posing in pictures, she charges me one dollar for every shoot we do. |
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| Most of my work is shot on my Holga CFN medium format toy camera, though I do have an array of plastic 35mm cameras, including the Holga 135BC, Vivatar IC101 panorama, Vivatar Ultra Wide and Slim, three Polaroids, a couple of plastic no-name 35mm cameras and a Pentax k-1000 SLR, which I love because it's totally manual. I have never owned a digital camera (my daughter does, though) and have more film than food in my fridge and freezer. I don't have or want a studio, I don't have a light kit or even a tripod, so I'm never encumbered by gear. I like the challenge of working with crappy cameras or old SLRs and sketchy film and really having to plan and think about my shots rather than firing off a hundred digital frames and hoping something works. All of my "effects" are either done in-camera or in post-processing. I use Photoshop to remove dust from scans and occasionally crop a photo, but I like to keep my work as "pure" as possible. I'd rather do the work when I'm taking the picture than digitally, after-the-fact. |
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Q6 When is the happiest moment as a photographer?
There's that rush when you know you've got a great shot. But with my process, there's still the wait for the film to be developed – I'm not watching it on a computer screen as it's shot. But you know when you have it, and it's amazing when something is beautiful and exactly right in a way you couldn't have imagined no matter how much planning you've done beforehand. With everything I do in photography that's the risk and it's the reward. Things rarely happen exactly how I'd planned, but that unknown factor - whether it's the damaged film or the crappy camera or the light - is often what will make a shot better than good, and that's always the most delightful surprise. Plus, I get to play and create something new every day, which is the greatest experience. And I try to pass that spirit of play on to other creative people through the projects I administer through my Secret Society of Analogue Art.
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Q9 Is there anything you would like to add for your Japanese fans?
Since starting to shoot professionally, I've had great support particularly from Italy, Spain, Mexico and South America - and from Japan. I've been hooked on Japanese pop culture since I was a kid in the 1970s when my dad would travel to Japan once a year and bring back all sorts of great toys and souvenirs. As I've gotten older, my interest in Japanese style, culture and design has grown and continues to be a great source of motivation for my work. It's also heartening to know that my work is appreciated and well-regarded in Japan, especially since there isn't much interest in or support for my work in my home country. So, thank you, and stay tuned for the debut of three major projects later this year! |
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