This Thursday, February 25th marks the opening of the Brazilian Zouk Photo Exhibition at Lava Gina in the East Village. I recently sat down with Alen to discuss his life, some of the challenges that a photographer faces working in the digital age, and his recent fascination with Zouk.
Born in Dublin, Alen MacWeeney began his international career at twenty, in Paris, as Richard Avedon’s assistant. Across a half-century, he’s become especially known for his ability to artistically photograph interiors, countrysides, portraits, and even people’s inner lives. His work has appeared in LIFE, The New Yorker, Vogue, The New York Times Magazine, GEO, Fortune, Harper’s Bazaar, Smithsonian, Esquire, American Photographer, G.Q. His pictures are in many private collections and in the permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the George Eastman House, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and others.
Part I
| NB: | The Ireland today is very different from the Ireland you grew up in. I wonder if we could start by talking a little bit about what it was like when you were a boy. |
| AM: | The Ireland I grew up in was much emptier, much fewer people living in the country than now. It was very dispersed. I was the only photographer walking around the streets of Dublin. People would wonder what I was doing now and again, but most of the time people left me alone. But I’d never see another photographer, where as now every other person is a photographer or if not photographer they’re a model. If they’re not a model, they’re the parent’s of the model of the photographer looking at them. |
| NB: | What initially attracted you to photography? |
| AM: | Well, I was faced at the age of 13 looking at the future and I had no idea what I wanted to do. I thought I wanted to be an Air Force pilot, I thought I’d do that, I thought that would be interesting, or my parents thought I should go into hotel management. And that certainly didn’t appeal to me. And I became with another friend in school very interested in photography. And at the age of, I guess, 12 or 13 we were the youngest members of the photographic society of Ireland and we would enter competitions. These were very formal competitions so we went from the C group to the B group to the A group, which was the advanced photographers. And then we entered photographs in the Irish Salon of photography and they were exhibited, and that was quite a great coup for us to do. We would take pictures at night time of cars moving and make patterns in the film and process the film in our bedroom, underneath the bed clothes, loading the film into a tank, developing it and printing it. From that I thought, well, this is really difficult and I think I’d like to try this. And I got more interested in photography and more magazines and books on photography came into Ireland. |
| NB: | I’m curious as to how you made the transition from an amateur photographer, someone who was just taking photos for fun, to a professional photographer? |
| AM: | I worked initially for a photographer that had been an old time photographer using a daylight studio with a skylight for lighting and a chair that we would photography subjects would be something like a dentist chair with a headrest so they couldn’t move. He was now moving into the newer age where he was taking pictures of school children putting them into little frames made in Japan and selling them back to the families of the children. And I was processing this film in a damp basement, and processing the film in a couple marmalade pots. And doing that for a while and then I got a job at the Irish Times, a national newspaper. And then after about a year I was made a photographer. So I was now at the age of 16 thinking I’m going to go off on murders and interesting projects. When the actual fact I was usually photographing something like the annual general meeting of the rotary club, which had about as much to do with personal expression as snagging turnips. |
| NB: | I understand there is a connection between you and Orson Welles. |
| AM: | I photographed Orson Welles. Someone had said to me that if you do a photograph of somebody well known I’ll get you a job at Vogue in London. So Orson Welles was in town, and I took up my courage, phoned his secretary and went down to a photo shoot. And being the egocentric kind of individual he loved the photographs that I showed him and ordered big, big prints which he put up all around his dressing room and then gave me a commission to photograph something else for him. |
| NB: | Eventually you came to be an assistant to Richard Avedon. How did that come about? |
| AM: | It had to do with the fact that I didn’t feel I knew enough about the kind of photography I wanted to do. I was very impressed by the fashion photographs of Richard Avedon. And I did fashion photographs in my time. I did fashion portraits and theater photographs. Very much similar to what he did when he was at a young age. So when I was twenty I wrote to him. To my surprise it took me a lot of time to compose this letter. And I think I spent six months in fact composing this letter with various people helping me and me saying no, no, that’s not what I like, I don’t want that at all, that’s horrible. And anyway my letter impressed him, but my photography did not as he wrote back. So I met him in Paris for an interview and I was employed there and I stayed there when he did the Paris collections in 1961. That was the year Nureyev defected from the Soviet Union. We went to the Ballet Russe, and it was very exciting. I appeared in actually one of many of his pictures as a stand in, model or a cameraman or something. |
| NB: | How long did you end up working for him? |
| AM: | I worked for him for a year and he was sort of really a mentor to me, as was another person named Marvin Israel, who was a painter, but also the Art Director of Harpers’ Bazaar. And I also studied with Alexy Brodovitch in New York. |
| NB: | So you originally come to New York to work for Alexy Brodovitch. |
| AM: | I originally came to New York to work for Avedon. And after that year of working with him, I said, well, now it’s my time to start out on my own, again. So I returned to Ireland with an idea of photographing the people, the men and women who ran the Catholic church in Ireland, which, looking back on it, I wish I had really done because it was possible at that time to photograph the nuns, the priests and the monks in their habitats. And I did do some. I went to Glenstal Abbey and photographed there, but I was twenty one or twenty two now, and it required to many letters of introduction, and there was too much red tape. I couldn’t get a grant from the Arts Council, which I tried, and so I took to the streets and started photographing on the streets of Dublin. By now I had shifted my allegiance from Richard Avedon, whom I still admired greatly, but I didn’t really want to pursue a life of fashion photography and the kind of commercial photography that he did even though he was brilliant at doing so. I was more impressed by the photography of Robert Frank, and that was really essentially street photography. |
| NB: | How does street photography differ from the kind of photography you had become used to shooting under Avedon? |
| AM: | Avedon’s photographs were directed in the studio to create an image or a style or something of a mood about a woman or a man or both. But they were very much directed pictures. Street photography is a synthesis of many things happening. It could be the relationship of one thing on another and perhaps a third. For example many of Franks photographs would have one person, one thing playing against another and the third might be the observer. So it was much more involved. But to do this in the street you don’t interfere, you can only take the picture. |
| NB: | Your role is the non-partial observer. |
| AM: | Yes, you can’t suddenly say, “now turn around or move closer.” And in a way it becomes very difficult. You become much more like a hunter or a fly fisherman trying to capture something. And you can’t capture anything beyond what your own maturity in your mind’s eye can see. Where as in directing a picture, you can exceed what your mind’s eye has because the person your photographing is, essentially, as much a part of having the photograph come out as you are. You’re not just taking a photograph of something or someone. They are participating with you and it is their reaction to you and the camera in a setting that causes the picture to become alive. On the street you have to do it all on your own and see it and capture it, so you have to be, essentially, in the right place at the right time and be able to do it. And it’s not a matter of you having the camera loaded and be ready to take a picture. You have to be that way all the time, so in a sense your concentration has to be extended, not from a couple of hours, but over a period of your life, over a period of days. So from that, I then came back to America because I thought it was the place for photography. It was the perfect medium. It was mechanical, it was quick, it was, at that time, cheap. Cheaper than being a sculptor and having to buy big stones every time you want to do something. And it was a thing you could do alone. Unlike filmmaking, where you need a team of people working with you, still photography still has that quality where you are kind of like a poet with a camera. |
| NB: | Are you a loner by nature? |
| AM: | No, not really. I much more like company. But I think it’s essential to be alone to do photography. I mean, you can’t really do much if you’re constantly chatting, interacting. |
| NB: | You’ve been shooting long enough that you’ve had to make the transition from film to digital. Was it a difficult transition to make? |
| AM: | It was a forced issue on me. I wasn’t really taken to digital photography. I liked the darkroom, I liked processing my film. Well, I didn’t really like it, but I thought it was an interesting experience and I would be very frustrated. It would be under exposed or over exposed. I’d be cursing this way and that. I’d make prints. The process in the darkroom of being alone with the photograph you’ve done, they do become like your babies. I mean, that’s just silly, but they are like your babies and you sort of nurture this one or that one. You make a print, it doesn’t work out, you try the other way, you make a different print. The whole process is the process of making a picture, it’s not just sending it off to the camera shop to get a print made. You see something but you can add a lot more to it in the way you emphasize it or the way you control it rather like a piece of music. The conducting is done in the darkroom. And so when I went to digital it was simply because I had lost my darkroom, and someone showed me a little digital camera that I really enjoyed taking pictures because ideally it was very small and produced really pretty good pictures. |
| NB: | What kind of camera was this? |
| AM: | It was a Cannon G9. I used it on jobs. And every picture I took came out, which is unlike with what happens with film. Then the building in which my darkroom was in was sold, so I had to put the darkroom into storage, where it’s been for the last couple of years. At that point I became more fixed as a digital photographer. |
| NB: | Do you have a preference between the two, film or digital? |
| AM: | I would prefer film, It has a more luminous quality to it. And I prefer black and white over color. Color has a problem, it’s so transitory. It doesn’t have the same meaning. Black and white has everything. It has the meaning of black and white, day and night. It has everything in those tones. Whether you’re preference is more toward dark or light, you can express much more through that than you can through color film. Because color film is just film, it’s just a color. You can adjust the color a bit, but you’re still stuck with this thing, what does green mean? What does blue mean? Whereas a painter can infuse the color with texture and other things that a photographer can’t. A photographer is limited to the technical results of that particular dye or color. |
| NB: | And yet, when you shot the Zouk dancers you chose color. What about the subject dictated it be shot in color over black and white? |
| AM: | That’s a good question. I did the Zouk dancers in color because if you photograph in color digitally you can change it back to black and white and you have a better range of tone shooting in color. And also I think in some ways color is much more sensual than black and white, in the color and tonality of skin. And with Zouk being dancing so sensual and erotic it seems to suit color. It also seems to suit the fact that we were in a little club, Lava Gina, a great name. It carries the weight of emotion and passion in a way better than black and white, people’s bodies sweating, dancing. |
In Part II of the interview Alen and I discuss some of the challenges he faced when trying to capture Zouk dancers on film, and the decisions that had to be made in the staging of the upcoming Brazilian Zouk photo exhibtion at Lava Gina.
Thank you Nicholas for your good interviewing style. Though I am inclined to go on a bit aren’t I? Reminder to compress and condense thoughts, I think.
Almac
enjoyed this very much. thanks, guys!
natalie
Hello Alen!
Remember me, from Avedon’s studio in the early 60s, and from the studio I shared with Houghton in later years? I’ll never forget the time you convinced us to use a compendium hood on our Hasselblads and Nikons, which really improved quality, or the time you were active in trying to form a photographers’ guild in connection with the ASMP. If you have a moment please visit my website, http://www.AssistingAvedon.com.
Cheers,
Earl