I fucking hate Paris, France ©Madeline Zuzevich

Words & Images by Madeline Zuzevich

Interview by Hannah Roberts

What inspires you to pursue image-making?

It’s much more natural for me to watch the world than participate in it. And I find a lot of things beautiful—most recently the blue on the BedStuy little league’s baseball uniforms. And I want people to understand that beauty. It’s not so much that I’m interested in “sharing the moment,” and more like I want to point people toward a feeling, or an epistemology, rooted in the unremarkable. That’s what inspires me—the blue—and the possibility of another’s tenderness toward it. Actually, I read this quote in a piece by James Lasdun, and it said that, as a writer, he felt he could only offer the “few distinct realities [he] felt to be present inside [himself],” and I think this translates well to visual art.

Describe your creative process in one word.

Pathological.

If you could teach a one-hour class on anything, what would it be?

The history of sports. There’s something medieval about it.

What is your creative process for your self portraits?

The self-portraits are impulsive, almost ad hoc. I usually take them when I’m crying, or angry, or very sick. I incorporate movement within my work for two reasons; to instill a sense of abstraction—for the viewer—but also engender a sort of catharsis, for myself. It’s like dancing; there’s this release. In this way it’s palliative, and I like to sweat. The work I did in Brussels is a lot of jumping on the bed, and my self-portraits in Paris are mostly me pulling my hair in the mirror. Sometimes the motions remind me of painting, and I tend to lean toward a distracted composition that almost looks watery, or blurry—there’s this nucleus that is soft.

What was the last book you read or film you saw that inspired you?

Mirror by Andrei Tarkovsky changed me in a lot of ways. I had a 103 fever when I watched it for the first time, and I remember the purple in the Russian countryside looked so much like a bruise. I learned the Russian alphabet after that, so now I can pronounce words I don’t understand. It’s really strange. Anyways, I think his relationship (Aleksei) to isolation is similar to mine, as well as his sentiment toward dreaming, memory, and illness—that they allow us to access this other side of ourselves. Anytime I watch Tarkovsky, and the most recent is Andrei Rublev, I feel raw and human and ready to make things.

Nancy’s Foyer, San Fransisco ©Madeline Zuzevich

What advice would you give to people just starting out in photography?

Take pictures of everything. It’s so stupid, I have 118,000 pictures on my phone. Also—there’s some sort of relief in being new to things. Lead with that.