Interview with Emese Mucsi

While updating my website I found this interview with curator Emese Mucsi from the Robert Capa Centre. This conversation still resonates with my practice today.

“There is always a connection

– a connection with me but also

a universal connection between animal, human, and nature. ”

Emese Mucsi: In The Future is Ours exhibition you are presenting the latest pieces of your project, entitled Iri, which can be interpreted as a dramatization of the shift toward non-human stages of existence. What led you to this topic?

Ramona Güntert: My work processes are quite organic – I don’t think there is an end or a beginning, new photographs are inspired by the old ones, there is a continuation. Sometimes I start my research with a book I have read or I pick sentences which relate to an image or an image relates to something I saw on the street. It is really particular and a constant discovery.

I pick themes like physicality and the in-between state and ask questions like “What are humans?” and “What are animals?”. Sometimes I may focus on simple things like body shapes found in nature. I’m trying to explore these topics through the medium of photography. I have been doing photography for a very long time, so I’m starting to question now what it can do or what it does for my ideas. I consider photography a process. The moment I take a picture has the same value as the time when I install the final print; I wouldn’t just give an image to someone and let them print it out. I want to be in control and decide how it should look and feel.

How does this look in practice? Do you have a studio? Sometimes you need a lot of empty space, don’t you? I wonder what it felt preparing what was on show in Lisbon, did you make it outdoors?

I work as a darkroom technician so I can use those premises and I do often since they are quiet and good for printing. Then I work a lot at home where all I need is a desk, my laptop, and some books. I also have a studio. Sometimes I print things out on cheap paper because I really need to see how they look on walls to find solutions. I take a lot of photographs with my smartphone besides using my analogue camera, but I also utilize materials that I have found otherwise. Sometimes I only use a table, some light and objects placed on the surface. I don’t need much in terms of technology. I used to do commercial light setups in the studio, I know how it works, but if you don’t have the facility, you have to try other ways around. And sometimes there are just simpler ways of expressing something complex. For the work you are referring to I chose large scale as it reminds the viewers of their relationship with their body. As for me, it evokes my physical experiences of printing big images in the darkroom.

Are you staging the images?

Some of them, yes. I’ve never thought about them as staged but yes, it’s true.

How do you choose the objects you put in your images?

I find them anywhere. It could be on the streets or in secondhand shops. For example, I bought fish on a local market in East London. I am interested in the forms of fishes and how their fins could look like an eye or a limb, a part of a human body. There is always a connection – a connection with me but also a universal connection between animal, human, and nature.

I really like these body parts with that piece of foam that looks like a beehive. I’m amazed by the pattern on the top of the skin, which is repeated in the other images. I like these flashy materials which could look like an iridescent shell – this is where the title, Iri comes from. I’m interested in how these patterns fit together questioning “Is it a living thing, dying flesh or it never lived?” so there are connections like this within.

Once you said that you were constantly searching on the internet to occasionally find something which had a similar disturbing effect to what you would like to create. These are diverse images from everywhere, can you tell me something about that?

I collect images of miscellaneous things on the internet. Most of the time you won’t see what it is, sometimes it could be a close-up of a painting or some fish skin. I take a lot of images on the streets as well if I find something related or just an interesting material. I also get inspired by other exhibitions. Then I connect all. I hoarded together a huge archive from anywhere to nowhere.

I put anything in there that triggers me. I take pictures of what I wouldn’t be able to describe to you. I always find things that remind me of our anatomy, our nature, and our existence. It could be a graffiti or a folded blanket tossed on the street that looks like an animal.

In my perspective your work is very futuristic. Its relation to the human body is sometimes uncanny; the borders of the body slowly disappear on them. What is the purpose of this nowadays?

That is a very difficult question since everything has roots in the past, everything is connected to its ancient culture. Years ago science has shown us how nature is built and how its forms and shapes keep repeating. Of course new things always happen but I think the origin is always the same.

Every artist who is participating in The Future is Ours exhibition is from our generation and has some predictions or visionary approach. What is your vision of the future as a photographer? How can you imagine yourself 10 years later?

I’m more drawn to everything in the past, but Parallel platform fosters rather the future-related tendencies in this generation of photographers. My future in photography is difficult to predict but I’m excited about what’s coming next. Photography has been a part of our history for a very long time and the history of photography in itself is very interesting. There are these ideas that “Everyone can take pictures” and “Pictures are everywhere” but I still think there are people who see things differently and whose photography is still exceptional, the way we see it. Photography also has to challenge itself more. It’s not only a way of documenting something or storytelling. From my perspective, it’s more about sensations and feelings.

For the next ten years I just want to continue making art, whatever form it may take.

What led you to photography?

It was a very ordinary moment but I like thinking of it like a romantic event. I was developing a few pictures of my sister in the darkroom when I saw these eyes appearing on the contact strip and I somehow saw myself in them. Well, obviously my sister and I look quite similar, but I was astonished when at one moment there was nothing and then it just appeared on the paper. That was like ten years ago and it changed me. When I became a photographer I had to do portraits and take pictures on weddings, and I knew that I was not very good in that. I like working with people, but I was always frustrated because the portraits I took were just the ideas of that person I had in mind and not the actual person. There are amazing portrait photographers but I never saw myself as one.

So then I started doing things I enjoyed and wanted to explore and this is what came out of it. I have done all sorts of photographs throughout the years, I think it’s really exciting to understand how they all connect.

I see myself as an artist who happens to use photography but I prefer watching paintings and other forms of art to photographs.

How did you encounter photography?

At the age of eighteen we had a workshop in my school in Germany, it was really nice and really random, and I just had this impulse that I wanted to try it.

What made you decide to go to study in London?

I had a friend there, she said she was going to enroll in a course and suggested that I should come and join her, and that sounded really exciting. I looked at the courses and they had a lot to offer in photography. Honestly

I was a bit overwhelmed. Then I found this one course and that was when I decided to go and try it. That was in Rochester, in Kent, in the outskirts of London.

Did you only study the in the faculty of photography or did you focus on other specialties as well?

It was just photography.

Did you have any professors or artists who inspired you?

There were a few people who really inspired me over the years. My tutor Steffi Klenz in my BA. The way she looked at art and photography; the way she taught it; the way she managed her own research influenced my approach a lot. She is very straightforward and I liked that. It’s more productive to receive criticism.Esther Teichmann is another photographer whom I worked with for a few years. We would print together. I connect to her way of working and I am inspired and fascinated by it.

Do you have any favourite artists whose work you follow?

Actually I don’t really like looking at photographs. Many years ago I saw Joseph Beuys work, and I keep going back to him with admiration. I know he is not a contemporary artist but still. I think his performances and how he works with materials are really inspiring.

Last weekend, I saw Linder Sterling’s exhibition in Nottingham Contemporary which featured some of her photographs and collages. The exhibition was entitled House of Fame, connected to the typical house of the future, actually. She deals with topics like how females look in magazines, how they are represented.

She printed them and made a new type of collage of magazine images.

Another great artist I was inspired by is Heidi Bucher, she basically pastes materials on building walls and after it dried she peels them off and then creates a mould out of the walls.

I see mysticism in your work.

Yes I’m drawn to mystical elements – to everything that I can’t and don’t need to understand.

This was surprising and understandable at the same time that you mentioned Beuys, because he also uses these very significant organic materials.

I’m fascinated by him and his process, and he has this very strong and complex connection to nature.

You also published zines and books as a complement to your works.

I have made several books and zines though I really find it challenging to narrate my own work through a book. My next challenge will be to connect my images on pages rather than on walls and organize them a way that you could go through them on paper. I am already thinking of all the materials I want to use.

September 2018