Mark Powell – Mexico XXI

When we began discussing the content of insig.ht, we all agreed that we should be looking outside our own group for both written and photographic material. We intend to make interviews a key part of the site. We’re delighted that our first featured photographer is Mark Powell. American born but based in Mexico, Mark’s photography stirs up a strange brew of emotions in the viewer – one moment complete joy, the next confusion and even shock.

When I first discovered his work, it was like being taken by both shoulders and shaken – I had never seen anything like it before and it took me a while to really work out what all the fuss was about. However the more I explored Mark’s vast archive of images, I found threads appearing, and a strange rhythm in the photographs that urged me to keep looking. We’ve tried to ask Mark questions that reveal some of the methodology behind his practice. The interview is based around a new body of work called “Mexico XXI”. We’ve featured some of the photographs from this series in the interview, but you can see a wider edit over on Mark’s website.

First of all, can you give us a brief insight into your photographic history and how you came to be a photographer?

In 1986, I spent a year as an exchange student in Vereeniging, South Africa, a predominantly Afrikaner city south of Johannesburg. Coming from Michigan, it was altogether another planet for me. At the time, it was at the end of the Apartheid era, everything was still censored and tense. I would ride in the black-only sections of trains, police were everywhere, and dark clouds of smoke rose up from burning tyres from the violent clashes in the segregated township Sebokeng just outside of Vereeniging. Meanwhile, I lived with my rich white host family who lived in a very privileged almost unreal bubble. The whole experience gave me a rebellious and messed up feeling and changed my world view—I knew then I wanted to be a photographer. I started taking my camera most places and having adventures. When I got back home I enrolled myself in a photography courses at a local community college with a fantastic photographer and teacher named Linda Menger. She showed me lots of work of other photographers and really encouraged and mentored me to take my work to the next level.

(Hin Chua) How do you go about assembling your images into a larger body of work? To my eyes they appear to be of a relatively open-ended nature. What themes and guiding principles informed your choices during this process?

I know more what I don’t want than what I want in a photograph. It is a growing search, I am collecting, editing down. I put my photographs into “number ones” and then all the rest. A number one is when I really hit on something and I think about that photo for awhile. The photographs I am working on right now are for a new book tentatively called Mexico XXI. It is a mixture of portraits, mostly a cast of male characters and sprinkling of straight scenes and landscapes taken mostly in Mexico City. I like to start with one picture and build upon that mood or feeling, pictures with hopefully long shelf lives–because a lot of pictures just putter out and I don’t want to look at them anymore.

(Ben Roberts) Are your influences photographic or from a different sphere such as literature or film? Can you specify any of your influences?

Of course, I love looking at photographs. My favorite photographer in Mexico is Enrique Metinides, a photographer who worked for the “Las Nota Rojas” the violent working class newspapers in Mexico City. I just learned last week that he is basically housebound now and sets up backdrop pictures of fires and explosions, bloody crime scenes, then re-shoots scenes as lego-like fantasies, just as if he was out photographing like before. It is a little heartening because he can’t stop his photographic impulse, like a cat chasing a string. He now develops all his film cheaply at Costco stores too. That is pretty cool. I admire his non-self-conscious style, his pure eccentric passion, with no real art intentions except to make pictures.

I also have a big regard for movies made from the late 60’s to early 80’s, movies like Badlands, El Topo, The Mechanic, The Getaway, Straight Time, The French Connection, Westworld, The Shining. I am content just to enjoy seeing movies and not consciously take anything from them– The best inspiration is when it is slippery and unclear, though people tell me over and over my pictures give them a movie still feel, so yes it may come from my joy of movies.

(Hin) The scenes that you photograph, indeed your entire viewpoint, appear off kilter, unreal and larger than life; yet in some way they still represent a version of reality. How do you go about seeing this way?

I think my photography is driven foremost by my personality. I’ve got a pretty critical eye and I immediately try to take the obvious out, I like it when something is in front of me and I can’t quite see it just yet. I let the camera do some work and later a nice result of the unexpected comes through. So there is that initial inkling and it is important to recognize that first feeling that something could be there—where to point the camera, who to approach, what things to say, how big my smile is– all those small game changers that allow for imagination to enter and make interesting pictures – and they either workout or they don’t…

(Ben/Hin) Following on from the previous question, do you actively seek out people and situations that suit your vision, or do you feel that your photographs are an accurate cross section of the geographical area in which you shoot?

I am pretty active in seeking out people. Just yesterday, I met a lady in the street who had a collection of gaudy, colorful knitted yarn bags used for carrying pop bottles. She looked quite young but had all white hair, very blue eyes. There seems to be law of attraction and people respond in an immediate spontaneous and real way when I take an interest in them. I got her number and plan on calling her up because I didn’t have my camera with me then. Maybe it will be an easy picture, maybe it could be a little too direct and too “charactery,” but for sure would make a nice adventure. She is definitely whiter than most Mexicans, “una guerita.” (I just called her house, no answer). Who knows what other pictures could come out of it? I imagine her as kind of scary, colorfully knitted spinster, like Sissy Spacek’s mom in the movie Carrie—Ok, there is a movie reference. I tend to go for those contrasts of what is usually not expected from Mexico, or how people should look like here, maybe because they stand out a lot more. Recently, I have been seeing Tarot card readers and getting my fortune read then I take a portrait or something—the fortunes are equally cool! But, I still rely on the day to day unexpected meeting of people I find in the street.

(Hin) Did there come a time when you knew that “VIP” was complete? What have you learnt from VIP
? (note – “VIP” is Mark’s monograph from 2006 – you can read more about it in this article on 2point8)

I was discovering digital then and everything was new, I was getting my feet wet, meeting strangers, I mainly used my little 4 megapixel Canon G2 camera and a 1 megapixel Rollei d7. I knew I was going to do something with them one day, but was just photographing everyday not thinking too much about when I would finish. In the end, I really couldn’t take any more pictures because my cameras had fallen apart. It took about a month to edit about three years of work for the eventual book. Though the characters themselves fit well with the Very Important Person theme, I think I learned that to make photographs is an important choice. In the end, you say something more about yourself than about the people you are photographing. Because the people and things we are attracted to probably say something deeply about why we are attracted to them in the first place. We all chisel out the world into our own little VIPs and everyone has a different kind of list. I had to go through those attractions in VIP in order to get to the people and circumstances I am photographing now.

(Hin) How strongly connected do you feel your work is to Mexico and Detroit? While the locations are obviously deeply infused within your images, do you feel that they are integral to your process? Do you have a desire to make work in other places?

By my own circumstances I have made pictures from Detroit and Mexico City. I don’t think they are integral to my process. Though these two cities have definitely given my photographs a certain feel that I don’t think I could get from any other places. I would love to go to Los Angeles and make pictures. I have never been there and a lot of people tell me there are things in common with Mexico City. Here in Mexico, I want to spend more time in Acapulco, Merida and Tijuana. I would love to eventually go to Brazil too. I hope that my pictures remain consistent no matter where I go and you could tell that I made them.

(James Hendrick) You are working across divides of culture and nationality. What are your thoughts on photographing Mexico as a foreigner? Does it constrain or Liberate you? Does having the ‘outsider perspective’ provide a unique value?

I think I feel pretty much at home in Mexico now – next year I will become a Mexican citizen, though I am sure I will never shake that otherness, outsider feeling I get here – heck, I feel that same feeling in Detroit too, and really anywhere I go. Taking pictures makes anyone into an instant outsider, looking through the glass. I think that is an important grasping point when taking pictures. You don’t need to be traveling or be a foreigner to have an outside perspective, but certainly that point of view has to be turned on at some point and that is perhaps when traveling and living something different is a great tool and button to push. Because when you go back home you gotta “hit it while it is hot” before the illusion of familiarity seeps back into view and creates a visual stupor of sorts. So it is always nice to brainwash yourself into seeing things as if they were for the first time or take trips. Plus that is a good way to keep you sharp.

(James) Have you found differences in how you are regarded as a photographer in Mexico, versus in the US? Have these differences helped you or challenged you?

Well in Mexico I can make jokes with my accent in Spanish and pretend to be the stupid Gringo. Back home in Detroit I can be the funny weird white boy in the hood. Both give me some degree of advantages. In that way photography is definitely a hustle to get the shot.

My dad is a life insurance salesman and I learned from him how to put the foot in the door. It is very manipulative and a little deceitful. In Mexico you can always be the tourist, so maybe it is a bit easier here. But in the States people really like attention while Mexicans can be are generally little more shy and reserved. But of course there are always exceptions.

(Ben) In Mexico XXI, there seems to be a few story strands woven amongst a larger whole – represented by repeated motifs. One theme that jumped out at me was that of people sleeping – but I couldn’t help linking this in my mind to the issue of mortality in the context of Mexico’s current atmosphere of violence. The place that these people (usually men) choose to sleep are streets and sidewalks; they make the viewer question momentarily whether these are violent images or merely people sleeping. was this intentional?

Society out there is pretty destructive in really direct ways and we see this splattered on the headlines on a daily bases, with the drug wars and all the decapitated heads found in coolers, the kidnappings, the general apocalyptic, deathly smog, now influenza scares–chaotic world which is Mexico City. But, I think there are a lot of sleeping lions in everyday experiences in Mexico and where we can’t quite see that sensational bite.

I honestly don’t want to directly photograph the heads rolling per say, the violence— I am content to try to find the less direct pictures or the quiet-violence or the pictures that go up against the everyday saying of “no pasa nada,” “nothing ever happens.” It seems that Mexico is always on the verge of pulling itself from failure, yet eventually sinks again into a dark and unsure time, slumbering into a world that tries to make everything seem fine again.

There are hints of this in my picture of the football team lying down meditating before a game which approaches something like a massacre but isn’t and then there is the very real picture of a long trickle of blood flowing from under a sheet that covers a man, footprints still there from when he arrived to work that morning and not knowing he would fall that day from scaffolding while painting a sculpture of a giant horse.

I kept on thinking that day how unfair and absurd that was and I thought of his family and how overpowering and how unforgiving a city can become; of course that picture wouldn’t be the same if you could see the dead body.

(Raoul Gatepin) There’s an image in your Mexico XXI series of two women holding brooms. It’s an odd scenario; did you direct the subjects in this photograph?

I wanted to take picture of the maids that were cleaning the sidewalk outside a residence. I asked them if I could take a picture of their brooms. The said ok and they unpredictably faced each-other in a mirror-like way. They were both very shy. Fantastic, I thought, and I took the picture.

(Raoul) Do you rally against setting up portraits, or are you comfortable with it?

I am very comfortable approaching people to ask them if I can take their picture. A lot of the portraits I do are done very quickly, under a minute sometimes, I like working in a rush because I don’t get too familiar to what is in front of me and fail to react to odd special moments —ultimately, the environment, background and situation inform choices as well. Approaching someone is unpredictable – people exert their own particular gravity and move in their own universe. Unexpected things happen when you are in this space photographing with someone. So the setting up process is allowing for unexpected things to happen. When people ask me if I set something up in a picture, I tell them that I really just don’t have that kind of imagination.

If you have any further questions for Mark, or think you would like to expand upon any of his thoughts, please follow up in the comments. We’d like to thank Mark for his time and patience in answering our questions. As part of the PhotoEspana 2009 festival, Mark is showing his work at the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid. All photographs in this interview © Mark Powell