Week 37: Mandy Lamb

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, Mikael Kennedy interviews Mandy Lamb.

Mikael Kennedy: Where are you right now?

Mandy Lamb: Somewhere where everything is grey, except for my yellow raincoat. There are whitecaps and it is terribly windy, the kind of wind that knocks dogs off their feet.

MK: Your work constantly blows my mind, specifically your Polaroid self-portraits. What in gods name are you doing? It seems like you are building up to something big with it all. Do you know where it’s going?

ML: I’m thinking about calling it “far too many pictures of me”.  I certainly don’t know what I’m doing or where it’s going, which is true for my life as well as my photographs. There are literally hundreds of these self-portraits.  When I’m upset taking Polaroids is my best way to calm down.  And it has been a tough couple of years.

MK: Wait back up, maybe it is actually important that you talk about where you are from, where you grew up.

ML: Harvard Massachusetts is a tiny old town where computer programmers pretend to be apple farmers.  It is quaint and beautiful in a very deliberate way.  My childhood was picturesque and genuinely happy.  Since I left home I have moved quite a bit.  I thought I was a nomad before, but now I am really a nomad.

MK: Shooting Polaroids right now is part of a final countdown, someday soon, in theory, you wont be able to do it anymore.

ML: I suppose, but I just bought another hundred packs.

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MK: So how do you choose the one moment that has the weight that deserves a Polaroid? Is it that precious to you? I guess I mean what makes you take a picture of a girl leaning down to pet a dog? Because when you do it becomes this holy moment to the rest of the world.

ML: It doesn’t really matter if Polaroids are precious or not, if I have film I’ll use it.  I like girls and dogs, if they are doing the right sort of thing and I can get them in the frame how I want them.  It’s not a matter of the perfect moment.

MK: Tell me more about “of deer and unicorn” I’ve been looking at this series for months and haven’t been able to put my finger on exactly what it is. I have some ideas or guesses but I really would like to hear your vision on it. Looking at it now in grid form I begin to see a narrative, but maybe I am just reading into it too much.

ML: Last year I made some new friends, and with them came untried activities that I was always irrationally obsessed with, but had been a poser about.  These things included snowmobiles, guns, archery, and hunting.  “of deer and unicorn” is an amalgamation of fine art, editorial, and documentary photography spanning one hunting season with the Morrow family in Maine.  The trouble is, I really need at least two more seasons with them for it to feel complete in any sort of way.  That along with the fact that no animals where ever harmed in my presence makes the series a little problematic.  On a technical level, with the rumored end of Polaroid I decided to go back to film.  I was trying to photograph differently.

MK: How does photography intersect with your life? Is it as simple as a reaction you have to things around you or do you go hunting for these things?

ML: I take pictures wherever, as long as it is overcast out.  I do hunt the images.  I’ll set off with my sx70 and stalk my surroundings.  I am not going for the big-picture, I am going for the very, very small.  I started thinking that way when I moved to Richmond Virginia and my neighborhood was just begging to be photographed because it was so ironic and strange.  I couldn’t take any pictures there because it was too easy, it felt so obvious.  That was a problem I was able to overcome by looking in a more intimate way, and by being charmed by trash and filth.

MK: By the way I think you are brilliant. (I’m not sure that counts as a question)

ML: No, it does not.