Week 36: Mikael Kennedy

The rotating gallery features the work of an emerging photographer as well as an interview with him/her, and will change every Wednesday. The gallery is based off ‘collective curatorship’, where the photographer from week 1 chooses and interviews a photographer for week 2, week 2 chooses/interviews week 3, etc. There is only one stipulation to the process: Next weeks photographer has to be someone he/she has not had direct contact with yet. Ideally, this will take the gallery on a linked tour around the Internet, and exploring and unearthing new photographers as it goes.

This week, Anthony Blasko interviews Mikael Kennedy.

Anthony Blasko: Can you talk a little about your background and how it led you to photography?

Mikael Kennedy: Well, I grew up in Vermont, in an old farmhouse kind of in the middle of nowhere. It was a pretty incredible place to grow up, my parents would throw me and my brothers outside in the morning and tell us to come home for lunch and dinner, and so we spent most of our time running around in the woods. I think would explain my obsession with nature and my discomfort with cities. At some point I remember getting an old Nikormat camera and wandering around the valley below my house all day taking photos of the lines the trees made, and chunks of ice I would pull out of the rivers

AB: When did you decide that it was something you wanted to take seriously?

MK: Ever since I was little I kind of just always wanted to be a photographer. But I know there was a moment after I had first dropped out of school when I made a choice that this was going to be my life, no matter what. No matter how broke I was. (At that time I was working as a house painter on an island off the coast of New Hampshire) I left school cause I realized it wasn’t going to make me into a photographer and I started traveling and shooting. I also realized that no one was going to just find me and give me a show or anything like that so I had to create my own spaces to show my work, that was when I started self publishing books of my stuff and taught myself some web design and started making online galleries for myself and other artists I knew. I figured we had to make our own spaces.

AB: Did you go to college for it?

MK: I did. But I think going to college for art seems silly to me, to me art comes from life and living ones life, so college always seemed to be a distraction from that. I eventually went back after dropping out because the financial aid the offered me made it cheaper to be there than to have an apt and a job somewhere else.

AB: From looking at you work there is a very strong sense of exploration and travel. Do you setout not knowing where you will go or are these landscapes you are familiar with?

MK: I usually travel by going to visit folks I know and exploring the places between and around there. I had a friend recently living in an old commune in the mountains above Taos, nm so I would go out and stay with her and borrow her boyfriend’s car and just wander around all day. The project I’m working on now is really about exploration, that moment of cresting a hill and seeing the valley open up before you. Recently I’ve had people call it the new American sublime or compare it to the Hudson River school of painting. Because like I said I didn’t really take all that much to art school I had to go look up what both of those movements were.

AB: They are very lonely pictures; do you travel alone?

MK: Most of the time yeah, alone in the spaces between where my friends live.

AB: You have self published a series of 4 Polaroid books. Do you enjoy self-publishing? What has been your experience with it?

MK: I grew up with punk rock being a heavy influence on me, specifically zine culture. We all had little photocopied zines we made and distributed ourselves, most of us having our own personal Kinko’s scams and techniques to produce them. So like I said in an earlier question, I knew that we had to make our own spaces to do these things and to show our work, I wasn’t connected to any galleries, or book publishers, I was just traveling around, working and taking pictures. I got a job in a copy shop in Cambridge, MA who also had an old offset press in the basement, after working there awhile I asked them to help me print my first book. They were this really sweet couple, a family run business, who thought it sounded neat and helped me out.  That was actually my first book which I put out in 2003 I think, it was a collection of photos shot with a Holga that I called ‘Still, Not Dead’. The end result was really beautiful and surprising in it’s quality, I also kept all the metal plates from the press as well so I have these little metal etchings of the photos in the book.

As for the Polaroid series it was just a logical extension of the blog www.downorout.blogspot.com I like the idea of turning it into a series of books that people could collect as well and a friend one day told me about a print on demand service and I just started playing around with it. I’ve really enjoyed doing the books right now I’m experimenting with some other ways to produce the Polaroid book series, more magazine style, almost embracing the fact that they are not super high quality and more about the limited editions and small runs. I’d like to start printing the pages on newsprint and hand binding them, making the book itself an art piece.

AB: I’ve always though that the book is where photograph’s have the most impact, rather than a single image or even a show. What is it about presenting your work in a book that inspires you to make them?

MK: I never really thought of it much in terms of the power of the piece, it was more about accessibility but I can see what you mean. I love physical objects that I can hold and carry with me and think about in different ways the more I look at it. I always want someone to be able to take something with them when they come to an art show. That’s another thing I loved about the books was that you may come to show and like the work but not be able to spend several hundred or thousand dollars on one of the pieces but being able to buy a book of the work that is 20 bucks is really important to me.

AB: Do you have any plans for a new book any time soon?

MK: I got really behind on the books because I was traveling a ton and working on the Odysseus shows but I’m just about to finish up the next one Vol. 5 which is called “Come Home” Hopefully that will be out in the next few months cause most of the other books have all sold out.

AB: Why do you shoot Polaroid, and will you continue shooting in the same style once Polaroid is unavailable?

MK: The Polaroid question is something that I have tried to explain many times. There are always a few points I come back to as the basics of shooting Polaroid’s. I started doing it cause it was just really fun and there is not much else that compares to a Polaroid in terms of quality. Not many things look like they do. Also there is the act of taking a picture and then holding that picture in your hands as it develops. There is something very scientific about Polaroid’s to me, sometimes it feels like I am just collecting specimens while I am out traveling and then when I get home I sort through them. Now as I have been doing this for so long my ideas about the process have grown.

I think in a world of digital photography Polaroid’s become so much more important and powerful. A one of a kind photograph doesn’t happen all that often, even before digital you could make as many prints off the negatives as you wanted, with a Polaroid there is just that image, it’s one of a kind. To me they are like little paintings. Also it’s interesting to think about that Police and Insurance companies used to use them for evidence because they were unmanipulatable, what you shot was considered to be a representation of the truth, which I don’t think can be said for much photography the way it is used today. We constantly are question whether the images we see are real or if they have been altered somehow digitally. With a Polaroid that isn’t really a question, it just is.