Tanyth Berkeley is a New York-based photographer, perhaps best-known for her nearly life-sized portraits of women, both biological and transgendered, whom she sees as existing in some way outside the mainstream of contemporary culture. Berkeley meets her subjects on the subways and the streets and invites them to participate in her photographic projects and, in the way of much postmodern photography, creates a series of images that exist somewhere between documentary pictures and art photos. She is drawn to her subjects by her empathy for the circumstances of their lives, and though she has often been compared with Diane Arbus, Berkeley’s work does not balance quite so uneasily on the boundary between celebration and exploitation.

Berkeley works in video as well as photography, and her recent exhibitions include “Love Parade” (2005) and “The Muse, The Fugitive, and the Frequency” (2007), both at Bellwether Gallery in New York, as well as group shows in Denver, Milan, and Philadelphia. Her work is currently exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as part of the “New Photography 2007” show. She received an MFA in Photography from Columbia University in 2004.

Richard Turnbull: First of all, congratulations on being included in MoMA’s “New Photography 2007” exhibit, which I’m sure has exposed your work to a wider audience and particularly an audience that doesn’t necessarily engage with contemporary photography on a regular basis. You have a recent MFA from Columbia, and I’m wondering how your photographic education, both at Columbia and earlier at City College, informs your own work.

Tanyth Berkeley: I started taking photos on my own at 14 and knew I wanted to study photography. The photo program at City College was run by a wonderful man named Bruce Haebegger whose specialty was pinhole photography. Starting with nothing, he made City College a great place to learn photography. I started taking photographs in high school when I wasn’t actually in school, truancy being my best subject, and I have been shooting on a regular basis ever since, though I’ve gone through many phases. At City College, I explored the outer reaches of directorial photography. Using myself as the subject, I reenacted a few Ophelia-inspired scenes and pretended to be a kind of nude Frances Farmer fighting an arrest, being dragged away by Nurse Ratched-type peons. It was a lot of fun!

At the same time, I also dove deep into a documentary project about strippers, and I spent months in the dressing room of a high-end strip club taking photos of the goings-on among the women there and the repercussions of the choices they had made both consciously and unconsciously. I saw many things there that broke my heart and have stayed with me until this day. I remember one woman I met was dancing with bracelets that covered the bandages of a recent suicide attempt. Around that time, I also started to make planned or directed photographs, namely close-up portraits in black and white of strangers I would meet around town. At Columbia, I revisited the idea in color. Columbia was a very special time for me: I was 31 and newly sober and had never had a critique that wasn’t about mastering technical details. I forced myself to open up to the difficult process of being exposed and feeling naked, and my work was forced out of its shell, beyond my purely personal reasons for making it. I began to understand the viewer’s role. I learned to speak through my images, to speak through the portraits of the people I met and photographed.

RT: I’m assuming that you have a basic background in the history of photography (though such courses are not always required in photography programs, which is, in itself, curious). Are there particular artists/periods/styles you are drawn to or feel compelled to engage?

TB: As a kid, I remember looking through my mother’s copy of Brassaï’s Paris at Night and R. Crumb’s comics and being blown away, riveted, and moved. I got into the Beats then too, Kerouac and Kesey, then Henry Miller and Bukowski. I saw Karen Finley as a teenager at Danceteria and remember being equally energized by this wild woman in a prom gown, armed with a banana and a kind of Tourette Syndrome. I understood her deep sarcasm and empathy. I understood her anger and frustration. Prior to that, I felt an affinity towards and was moderately obsessed with the life of Frances Farmer, whose rebellious behavior left her (to my horror) lobotomized. It seemed to me that Finley fought the good fight too, but I sensed that she was victorious rather than defeated and remember being excited by the visceral effects of her performance. I mention this time and these influences because, in many ways, I think nothing’s changed. I’m attracted to independent thinkers, people who suffer and those who inspire my own humanity, but now I think ordinary people who are in fact extraordinary engage me even more. Ordinary people who operate outside the establishments of culture seem to me far more radical and heroic, like salmon swimming upstream. Sometimes these people are DIY celebrities, sometimes folks up against a great personal hardship. My work helps me deal with the existential anxiety and urban angst I feel, and photography is an excellent tool for that. I can collect “evidence” or “proof” and then put it in my own context.

RT: Much of your work deals with issues of gender, identity, and what we can perhaps call “transgression,” and there are certain photographers—Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Rineke Dijkstra—who are often invoked in discussions of your work. Do you feel that your work is embedded in any particular period of postmodern photography (or pre-postmodern photography, for that matter)?

TB: I find myself using different modes to get at what I want to say. Sometimes I work in the close personal realm like Nan Goldin, sometimes in straight-up documentary ways like Rineke Dijkstra, and sometimes I create “image visions” that are directed or constructed like Cindy Sherman. Whatever the mode, it’s got to strike a chord, to feel true, and I suppose to reveal my idealism. For example, in my portrait series “Orchidaceae” of photos of women I met on the subway, I wanted to show the world as I see it, as I feel it truly is, not mediated by the culture’s desire for harmonious form, but as it is for the majority of people, not elegant, not generic, not artificial, perhaps in a state of pre-corruption. So, rather than show my subjects going to work on the subway, I brought them up into the outside world; in a metaphorical I sense, I “freed” them. If my idealism is viewed as transgressive, so be it, but perhaps it has more to do with the myopia of the viewer rather than my intention.

RT: You’ve talked about your mother being a realist painter and your limited exposure to modern art growing up, which I take to mean abstraction and/or post-abstract art. Is your work grounded in a painterly sensibility? Does the medium of photography function in a fundamentally different way for you than painting does? Are you basically a photographer or an artist who uses photography as a means toward some end?

TB: I’m definitely a photographer but am inspired by things I see and feel in painting, by the potential of imagination explored and expressed. Photography can be a real bore sometimes if it’s just a pure mirror. I like windows rather than mirrors, and I appreciate the subjective and created reality in the work of Robert Frank, Daido Moriyama, Francesca Woodman, Anna Gaskell, Cindy Sherman, William Eggleston, and Gary Winogrand. I love Guston, Polke, Goya, Munch, Ensor, and Bosch and feel no dividing lines when it comes to art. I don’t intend to make my own images painterly; they are simply the result of what has moved me, painting in and painting out I guess, meaning all the things I see and look at are absorbed and re-imagined in an instant to suit my frame of reference and then reveal themselves in my work. My painterly sensibility comes up a lot in discussions of my work because of the scale of my images, which is sometimes life-sized. I see scale as a tool to elicit an emotional response from the viewer. Sometimes in my work another human being stands there before you, or it may be that it’s a face larger than life, like a mother’s face, and the viewer is dwarfed by it like a child, and it creates a visceral effect [...]

Often the way I pose my subjects, especially in my life-sized work, is considered painterly. I pose people in what I believe are dignified and “traditional” ways, traditional in painting, that is. The poses are not natural but mannered, not in situ; they move the subject out of “reality.” I’m hardly trying to capture the “decisive moment” in these works, and I like how at odds the stiffness is with the casualness of contemporary dress and interiors. At life-sized scale, the pose becomes a performance, which in essence it is. Reportage too has influenced me with its intentions and its seriousness. At times, it seems to me that everything is getting smothered in image pollution and silliness—and here, I’m referring to all the images I’m exposed to on a daily basis via the computer, magazines, the paparazzi and their booty, and the relentless ad campaigns everywhere.

The idea that photography can and does change the world is heartening, like the images from Abu Ghraib, for example, or the work of people like Donna Ferrato. Her photographs from the 1980s about domestic violence made a lasting impression on me. I remember seeing her pictures as a kid and thinking, “Good God, someone help these women, these children.” She did help by raising our consciousness. This possibility of photography is why I get out of bed in the morning; it’s not for the love of aesthetics. Even though my strategies are less direct and my stories stranger, I believe I’m motivated by a similar sense of duty. I see this sensibility in painters like Goya and Courbet as well, and I believe that some of my work is a kind of hybrid form stemming from these influences.

RT: There’s been a lot of discussion generated about digital processes and whether or not they fundamentally change the way we look at and think about photographic images. Much of this, of course, has to do with image manipulation and the question of its propriety, but as a young photographer who grew up in the digital universe, how do you situate yourself in the film vs. digital discussion ... or is it even an issue for you?

TB: I’m not that young; I grew up in the age of analog and prefer the hands-on aspect of it to the labor-saving ease and quick-edit options of digital. For me, the transition has been slow and not something I’m that excited by. I feel like I’m being forced to change by the market, and I don’t like that my choices grow fewer by the day. For the most part, I shoot onto film and print the images myself in the darkroom. Sometimes I work with Oliver Wasow, my digital partner and artist friend, who has all the stuff and the expertise to help me use it. I’m thinking about getting one of the new digital Nikons to do my street work, to save money. I do really like the choices that digital provides in regards to the look of my work and will occasionally add a cigarette butt on the ground or some minor detail for fun, but I like to keep it all as real as possible. The work comes from the moment, not after. I like the idea of images having a life online and am creating a work, an online slide show of sorts that feels like stop-motion animation made up of various single images that won’t be made into objects or separated from one another. Once you press “go,” you have to watch the whole show. The images are from point-and-shoot snapshots that I’ve made over the past six years.

RT: Do you see yourself at least partly as a documentary photographer? There is a documentary quality in many of the portraits of the extraordinary people you’ve met and photographed. At the same time, you’ve noted that your portraits are not necessarily about the subjects you’ve chosen but rather about what their appearance activates in your own sensibility. Do you have a sense that in much contemporary photography the boundary between documentary and art photography has eroded?

TB: I definitely see myself working as a documentary photographer at times, but I do all sorts of projects and different kinds of story telling, which is why I think I love Werner Herzog so much: I feel an affinity to his working process, which involves slipping in and out of fiction. I’m working on a portrait series about child beauty pageant contestants but I may not exhibit it as a documentary survey, as in, “Here’s contestant number one, here’s Johnny, what’s little Janey got to say?” I like the idea of mixing up the stories with what appear to be documentary images. I believe that this manipulation—creating contrasts—can reveal more than the straight story. I’m really bored with a lot of the Documentary 101 work out there, and I think there’s just a real lack of imagination in the medium and always has been. By that, I mean that the relative ease of making a photograph has seduced more people into making photos out there than there is actual talent.

I have made some deliberately didactic work. I consider Pink and Blue more in the documentary style than some of my other works. Basically it throws all your assumptions, or at least what I think are widely-held beliefs of what transgender women are supposed to look like, out the window. Only the title suggests that the women are trans while the women themselves just sit on their beds topless, revealing breasts that they are proud of, challenging the viewer. The intent here is to diffuse any impulse toward discrimination and elicit empathy instead. By looking, we see that there is nothing to be afraid of. I created the piece because I saw so many transgendered women discriminated against and hurt. In my research, I was invited to attend trans support groups and met many truly brave women. It’s an outrage that in our society a person can be killed for being transgender, that violence against them is almost acceptable in some communities.

RT: You seem drawn to certain subjects/models in your work. What qualities in your subjects act as points of visual activation for you?

TB: I’m drawn to alternate forms of beauty and reject the privilege and vanity that are generated by fake and shallow commercial representatives of beauty. I find the world promoted in an incessant stream of magazines and shops and on TV to be oppressive and destructive, and many of my choices are based on this rebellion and disgust. People often appear to me as great and heroic stories that mirror my interests. Of late, I have started to see the female form as representative of the natural world in crisis. I think about how people suffer and are brainwashed by images from consumer culture. Nature too, like women, has been dominated by patriarchal/consumer culture systems and can only be healed by people devaluing those systems. Sometimes my work tries to devalue and undermine corrupt commonplace imagery by offering an alternative to the models that serve as empty vessels for commerce. My concern for women is linked to my concern for the natural world. I like to depict folks who embody gentleness, naturalness, or the desire to be feminine. My portraits of trans women are a good example of this. Being feminine is, to me, one solution to many of the world’s problems: be softer, be gentler, be kinder, be more compassionate towards the earth, women, rivers, oceans, animals, oneself, and learn how to care for people, places and things. I’m interested in ecofeminism, ecopsychology, pagans, and Zen Buddhism; I think if you look for it, you can see those ideas in my work.

While the “natural world” is of interest to me, I’m also interested in those things that I perceive as existing in its opposite. I mentioned earlier that children’s beauty pageants fascinate me, as do prostitutes, strippers, and other victims of patriarchal/consumer culture, those who are laid waste in the fallout and those who are just beginning to get sucked in. I’m inspired when I can relate to a person’s struggles and am often motivated by empathy. Sometimes my interest is visceral and draws from pure, raw energy, from the sexual powers that a woman possesses, an energy she seems empowered by, a kind of confident exhibitionism. Or again, it can be the opposite and subtler; for example, a model’s fragility or innocence can be of interest to me as well. I like it all: the siren, the goddess, the nymph, the milkmaid, the mother, and the crone.

Generally, I see life as difficult for many, many women for myriad reasons, and I think women should be put on pedestals, photographed, and at least responded to. For example, my amazing model Linda Leven challenges my own ideas about “natural beauty” and is often regarded as a transgender woman when she is, in fact, a biological woman whose physical aesthetic was formed as a child by the ballet Swan Lake. She is a trained dancer and actress and appears to me very grand. She has survived breast cancer but is full of life, making her an amazing “model,” as Bresson called his actors. She enjoys our collaborations. The charge of exploitation is sometimes leveled at my work, but I work with willing adults in an age when the cult of celebrity is very strong. Many people I work with want to be noticed and photographed. I’m interested in their desire for attention, and I respond to it. I never have to coax a model; they either want to have their photo taken or not [...] What many people don’t get in my work is that I’m as much a part of my models’ dreams as they are of mine.

RT: It’s quite revealing to see a selection of your work in the photography galleries at MoMA. Since the museum’s reopening in its new building, the curators seem to have struggled with how best to present some version of the history of a young but incredibly rich medium in a still very finite space. The galleries at the museum have alternated between a survey-like history with one image per “important” photographer and looser didactic groupings of small series of photos taken by the same photographer. In your own work, do you tend to think and see in series or in autonomous single images? Is what we might call the photo-essay in fact the natural form of the photographic document?

TB: I feel that the way my work is displayed in the MoMA show and even in gallery installations has its limitations and often serves only as an introduction. Showing work is one of my biggest challenges because I’m not inclined to privilege some images over others. The work in my last show, “The Muse, The Fugitive, and The Frequency,” felt too disparate to some viewers who thought the connections between photos were too obscure, but I enjoy the chaos of acknowledging different points of view rather than creating a more focused and tidy package. Tidiness of course presents its own uptight challenges, and sometimes I like the tediousness of that approach too. My first show, “Love Parade,” was a tight presentation. I do like to work in series but may not always show images in that way. I like to change my tack and look at questions about beauty from different perspectives. Sometimes multiple projects get morphed into one as I work on them. Right now I’m engaged in a project I call “Fire in the Hole,” images about female sexuality that bring together the subcategories of women I meet from MySpace with people I’ve met at parades in midtown. Who knows where it will end up? I do have some long-term projects in mind though, for example concentrating on just one model in her home. Working in series is a way to go deep into an investigation, to probe and discover. I think my project “The Frequency” works well on its own; it’s 170 candid photos of passersby in Times Square, and some images are more interesting than others, but it’s the sum of the parts that informs each image. Taken out of context, any one image loses its meaning, like taking a word out of a poem. I often reflect on one of my favorite paintings, Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, and I love all the little details: the bunny, the white giraffe, that great guy with flowers blooming out of his ass. I’ve been working on putting together multiple images into a single wall piece, and I use that painting as a reference. I’m excited by the results so far. In general, though, I think my photographs lose power and meaning when taken out of context, when they are removed from the installations or presentations I create for them. My work is slippery and operates best when consumed whole.

RT: In 1967, the novelist and metafictionist John Barth wrote a controversial essay about what he called the “literature of exhaustion,” in which he declared that all fictional tropes and possibilities had been depleted and wondered what novelists were supposed to do in the face of that depletion—and of course we’ve heard many times since then about the “death of the novel” and the “death of the short story” and the like. Does photography ever seem like it too is approaching a state of exhaustion? And to put it more personally, are you fairly sure that you’ll still be making photographic images in, say, twenty years? Do you have any sense of your own work moving on or changing radically or is that asking you to predict the future?

TB: I feel like there are still a lot of things that I want to try, a lot of things to react to, a lot of fun to have and people to meet, so much beauty to discover and reveal, but I also ask myself: “Does the world need another image?” Maybe it needs an organic carrot more than another photograph. Probably I’ll embarrass everyone by worshiping the sun and the moon and by being more reverent to the cycles of life and death. I need to believe in and create from a place where there is hope, progress, and renewal, not nihilism, so from that perspective, there is no “end” or lasting deaths, only transformations; it’s the same in art as it is in life.