AB: Do you dictate the poses of your subjects at all? How do you feel posture and eye contact play into your theme of a community spectrum?

Oh, yeah. I pose all of my subjects. I’m very controlling in the studio, incredibly controlling. It usually takes 40 to 45 minutes for a sitting because sometimes I change the light a little bit, you know so some things are a little longer. When I did the pierce thing, it takes a little longer to take the needles out, and [other] photos where it takes longer to dress [my subjects] but it’s pretty quick. I work with people pretty quick. I don’t overshoot things.

AB: How do you see West Coast photography evolving as the process becomes continually more accessible?

I think it’s a universal conversation. It doesn’t have a binary East Coast or West Coast. My colleague James Welling is seen as one of the forefronts in abstract photography, but he was living in New York all that time before he began teaching on the West Coast. So I have to say that the East Coast is more process-oriented, ultimately. There was experimenting on the West Coast, but I think on the East Coast, you can even go back to surrealism and Man Ray. If you took the history of photography and charted it out, basically the conversations are going on in all places.

AB: Being UCLA faculty, how has that didactic influence shaped your photographs?

Yeah, in relation to knowing what the younger generation is thinking. It’s really interesting. It’s a good thing to be doing. Also, when you are talking about other people’s work all the time and questioning it, in relation to critiquing it, you have to bring more self-critique to your own work. You have to figure out what you are asking of them, and what you have to ask of yourself for a little bit. It creates a very powerful dynamic of being able to look at one’s own practice of also looking through the lens of being a professor.

AB: Do you think grad school is important?

For the right people it is. I think it is important to have that time in terms of having the ability to talk to people one on one about the work and moving your work forward beyond an undergraduate degree. But you have to decide to either go into debt if you do not have parents who pay for it, and it is a big commitment and that even if you get an MFA, it doesn’t mean that it is all going to work out for you as an exhibiting artist. It is still a very competitive field that seems hard to figure out how to enter sometimes. If you go in it because the work is the most important thing for you, and not the idea of the career, then those are the right decisions to go to grad school because it’s all about what you’re trying to do with your work. It does help going to good schools, but it has to happen from the work first. Grad school is different. You have a studio, a peer system, everyone’s a bit older, you have gotten out of undergrad and are not doing that same course work. It is two years of intensive dialog and conversation and critique about your work, and then at the end you have to have a thesis show. That is how you end up working, if you are fortunate enough to be able to continue to make work that people want to show. You are on a two-year cycle. Every two years, I have an expectation to have an exhibition up at one of the galleries that represent me.

AB: Do people who study with you come out looking like Catherine Opie?

At Yale they look like Gregory Crewdson. I teach them how to light. So, sometimes their lighting looks like mine because I’m teaching them what I know in lighting. [Otherwise] no, I would say that Jim [Welling] and I do not have a singular identity to the program, and we are very careful of not having that. What we actually really like to see in our careers as professors is to mentor their own ideas within their work, not to mold them to be like us. We are not interested in that.

AB: When you got out of university, you started supporting yourself as an artist right away?

Oh, God, no. When I graduated from San Francisco Art Institute with my Bachelor’s degree, I stocked produce at Rainbow Grocery for 40 hours a week. To get myself through CalArts, I loaded trucks during a swing ship for UPS. After I graduated, before I even got my degree, I walked around to all the camera shops and put in a resume and I became rental manager at a camera store that doesn’t exist anymore called Pan Pacific Camera.

AB: Were you doing your work during this time?

Always, always. You never don’t make your work. The key to it is always to make your work, even if you have a crappy 40 hour-a-week job, that the work comes first always.

AB: What advice would you give an emerging photographer?

Make it about the work, your ideas, and look at what’s around you, but don’t feel that you have to make work that reflects a contemporary discourse. Allow a contemporary discourse to seep into the work because of your own interest. It has to really come out of a place from where you have a lot of desire. You must have a relation- ship to your explorations that you can be married to for a while. It is a marriage, in a certain sense of the word. It is also something that I can’t have, legally anyway. I do have a marriage; it’s just not legal. It is that dedication and perseverance.

AB: Your work finds profundity with ache and haunting. Does that same emotional connection follow your goals and personal relationships?

No, not really. I’m much more humorous in life. The human condition is about all of those other nuances, which are definitely internal things within me. This latest body of work comes out of a very internal place of getting control of my body, in terms of physicality, during menopause. It’s about bleeding, blood, and saying goodbye to your blood. It’s a love story to a kind of human emotion and people that I want to look at. Dave has blood all over his hands because he’s bleeding for me. He’s my trainer; I’ve been working out with him for two and a half years.

AB: What young photographers currently captivate you and why?

I’ve been really enjoying the conversations I have been having with Lucas Blalock about photography. He really understands the history of it and has been a student that I have had to really think about his practice. He is so good at what he does. That’s been really inspiring to work with because he is also exhibiting and doing really well career-wise while he has been getting his masters degree. And I’m impressed with how he is trying to figure it out. I’m also interested in Liz Deschenes, and I really love Luisa Lambri’s work as well. I have been teaching at Chicago Art Institute and I have been on the panel at Yale, so I am constantly looking at student’s work and talking to them about it. I am also constantly going to other schools to do lectures and also doing studio visits. I am just impressed that people still want to be artists! I am impressed that they’re continuing to move the dialog forward in relationship to the possibilities for and the potential of this medium.

AB: How does hetero-normativity, and the queer resistance to it, sculpt your concepts of community?

I think that in some ways, the queer resistance is always bringing focus to the queer community. My deciding to use it as a subject is about compassion and creating a history. When I started making the earlier portraits, I liter- ally thought, “Okay, I’m fucked, I’m not going to be able to ever get a teaching job, never going to be able to show in any galleries, the work is going to be too radical.” The opposite happened. Don’t question, make what you feel is innately really important to you. Hetero-normativity is lessening now. My 11-year old son can sit and watch Glee and watch The New Normal and Modern Family and have representations of gay and lesbian families on TV, which is literally like a miracle to me. Opinion is changing. Hetero-normativity is not the new normal! We are becoming more open as a society in relationship to it. For the most part, everybody has somebody that they know who is a member of the LGBT community. It would be very strange to meet someone who has never met a gay person at this point, which you couldn’t say 30 years ago because people weren’t out.

AB: Who is another high profile person that has also contributed to that?

Robert Mapplethorpe is huge. So important. Those culture wars, for it to go all the way to court in Cincinnati and or the images not to be removed from the museum, that was huge. That was really huge. There were other people whose work was only known within the community. Keith Haring was as well. Act Up and Queer Nation did an enormous amount in relationship to the politics of visibility and grand theory. That created an ability for me, as somebody who was a part of those movements, to decide to go ahead and move my work away from only doing work like nude topographies to doing work on my own community. It was too important to be a part of this discourse in that moment of time.

AB: Do you think women artists have a responsibility with their art to make art that doesn’t procure more of the male gaze?

There is a big difference between the way a woman looks at one of my photographs than Greg Crewdson’s photographs. I love Greg’s photographs, but they are of the vacant woman staring off that embodies nothing. My women embody space, they look back at you, they look off at you. I’ve always treated women in relationship to holding a sort of power within the frame and a lot of male photographers photograph the woman only as object. My portraits are never about objects, they are always still about a person. I never think of the body as an object.

AB: As you’ve evolved through the S&M culture through surfing and football, the concept of communal violent play still remains in your art. Do you see that as a vital component of our society?

The S&M community was a very important part of my life through the 90s and I chose to photograph it because I didn’t like the way it was being represented. Often, when I make things, it is in relationship to creating a representation of that [and] what I feel needs to be in the world. I’m just fortunate enough that it actually got to go out in the world. The other aspects of community are in relationship to the ideas of quality. Why would I give myself permission to photograph my own community, but not actually go to the site of a high school football field? There’s no contradiction within that, I have every right to bear witness to any group of people as long as it is done with humanity in mind and also humility. I have always felt that I have never been tied down to a singular identity, so why should my work? We are much more complex as people in relation to our thoughts and politics and how we go about the world. Why should the work not also have that breadth?

AB: What about nudes in general? What do you think the nude informs us of?

With David, his body is so unbelievably beautiful. When I did the back of Diana, it is just her swimsuit marks. I like skin. I never think of nudes, I just think of bodies, and I think of skin and as a substance that is part of our being. Nudes to me imply this classical sense or the idea of the nude in relationship to the history of photography, like Bill Brandt titling them ‘Nudes’. I never think about it that way, I think about it as skin.

AB: If I say the word nude, what comes to mind?

Classical Edward Weston photographs and Brandt and this kind of male observation of the female body, in terms of nudes.

AB: And if I say the word naked?

Naked for me is just wearing no clothing and baring your body to the world.

AB: How does living out essentially the idyllic American domestic life make you reflect on your own work?

I am very happy with my life. I have an amazing relationship, and we have two amazing kids. I do not ever think that I have everything that I want, but I do know that I’m very fortunate to have a public that has followed my work for over twenty years now, and that I have an amazing support system around me, and an incredible partnership with an amazing person who’s also a brilliant artist. I have worked incredibly hard. I have really worked hard at this. I travel a lot. I think a lot. I try to influence. I try to be a really caring and responsible professor. I don’t take my status for granted in this system. I think that it could all collapse on me at any moment. I try to keep pushing the work forward, not only for myself, but also for the audience that has followed me. I feel a sense of responsibility to that. I think people think that the idealist American dream is that at some point you can just rely on your position of what you’ve created for yourself. I don’t think that I, as a woman artist, can rely on that to be honest. I don’t think that women artists can rely on it in the same way.

Check out the rest of our interview in Musée Magazine Issue No. 6 Vol. 2