Léonie Hampton interviewed by Sam Contis in Too Much Chocolate's Rotating Gallery, May 2011

Samantha Contis: In your bio on your website, you mention that you started taking pictures at age 6. What first captivated you about photography?

Léonie Hampton: My grandmother and father always took pictures of us and family events. Recently I went through all the pictures they took to incorporate elements in my book ‘In the Shadow of Things’. It’s incredible, they even recorded the washing up. It made me think that perhaps all I am doing now is just an extension of what they always did - document our life.

SC: I also saw that you studied Art History, how does that inform your picture making?

LH: I only studied the degree because my father encouraged me to do anything other than photography. I’m really grateful for that now. It’s a subject that you can use to formulate your own opinions and learn ways to write and think through your ideas. I had the opportunity to study African and Japanese Art History, as well as Twentieth Century Modern Art, and although I gained a huge amount by being exposed to so much diverse visual material, I think I gained a lot just by doing the degree and forcing my mind to move in a disciplined way. So yes I do think it informs what I do, although I wouldn’t describe myself as an explicitly academic photographer.

I had the most wonderful teacher at UCL (University College London) called Briony Fer. Through her I discovered Chris Marker who’s work still deeply haunts and intrigues me. Most significantly Briony taught us about the visceral in art, as a way of expressing emotion and experience. I remember beginning to understand this through sculpture. I remember discovering the work of Eva Hesse who’s work was so personal and bodily. It’s taken me a long time to start to bring these elements into my own work. Perhaps its not so much History of Art that informs my picture making, but good teachers. People who showed me many different types of work and forced me to think about how and why it affects me.

SC: In a recent essay, Paul Graham writes that too often today straight photography is deemed a lesser “art” when compared with the carefully constructed images by someone like Jeff Wall . Do you feel that in today’s art world it is difficult to be an artist who makes images “from the world as it is”?

LH: I don’t know exactly because I’m young on this road. But judging by all the debates I think its clear that it is a problem and for sure a lot of work I dearly love seems undervalued or even unknown in the ‘art world.’ I think that the problem can be that there is a lot of lazy photography out there drowning out the good work. Photography really is something that anyone can do, not necessarily well, but it’s easy to do. I think other art forms filter out more of the lazy ones because they demand an effort and skill to do the work in the first place. So the challenge is just to keep pushing the medium of photography that deals with the real world further. Believing in it, colouring it with life and experience, and respecting great work done before but showing our time as real and strange as that may be. With my work for example, I’m not personally interested in a photocopy of what is in front of me. I try to represent a reality that is not simply external. I am interested in the forces and feelings that are inside and I like exploring that terrain through photography, using the outside world as a catalyst. I try to create images that contain those certain special moments which bring together what I see and what I feel. For me, these images end up evoking that other strange place where my imagination tends to drift off to. I think this is something that artists through history have tried to do in different media, so I don’t see why it should be any different for photographers today. I think it depends how far and how seriously you push it as to whether or not it has ‘value’ to someone else.

SC: In The Family documents different families around the world. What made you first want to photograph families? From what I can tell from your website, it seems as if you started photographing other families first and then turned to your own. Did having already made pictures of other people’s families make it any easier to start taking pictures of your own?

LH: Definitely. It gave me the courage to face my own situation. I also felt that it was right for me to do that, rather than endlessly show the private worlds of others while keeping mine hidden. However I never planned to first work with other families and then turn to my own, but something was pushing me in that direction. For many reasons I was compelled to turn my attention to my own family. Living with other families helped me see how complex and unfathomable relationships between family members can be. I found it a relief to realise that my own family was not altogether unusual, and might be valid as a ’subject.’ At the time I was being encouraged to go to more and more exotic locations to find more and more unusual families, so it was quite a shift to head to rural England and start photographing my mother making cups of tea. Eventually I found that the experiences of photographing my own family and other people’s families were very different; when photographing other people’s families I felt like I was trying to crack into an egg, constantly on the outside chipping my way in, while with my family it was the opposite: it was like trying to get out of the egg!

SC: Who were some of the photographers you were looking at when you began In The Shadow of Things? The work of Richard Billingham and Tierney Gearon seems to explore similar themes of family and mental illness.

LH: For sure they were there as waymarkers, but more for when I started photographing other people’s families. I went to see the exhibition ‘I am a Camera’ in London and saw both of their work and felt very inspired. It was not my reality, but I found it believable and it made me step into my own family experience. I was inspired by the idea that you could make work with what was around you, no physical traveling required, just attention: the challenge to look. I don’t really know whose work I was looking at when I started In the Shadow of Things, but I know I was hugely influenced by two workshops I did, one with Anders Peterson and the other with Antoine D’Agata. I learnt so much in the two weeks I spent with them. That’s why I went on to put time into setting up the workshop organisation Still Moving (www.stillmoving.org) to continue this way of evolving and learning. For me, workshops are a great way to stir and re-kindle my work and I enjoy encouraging others to try and do the same. I don’t know how but they generate energy. Both Anders and Antoine are in the roots of In the Shadow of Things because they taught me that most work is a form of self portraiture, and they gave me the courage to try to look into my mirror in as direct a way as I could.

SC: Your mother seems to be an important collaborator in the work. In what ways do you work together on making pictures? Do you feel it is important to allow her voice and the voices of other family members to infiltrate the pictures? Was your family willing from the beginning to be a part of your work?

LH: Yes and no. We had a plenty of debates and arguments about the work, but ultimately they agreed to share their world. I think they are very brave. In my book In the Shadow of Things there are around 18,000 transcribed words of dialogue and a large part of that is specifically relating to your question- it’s my mother and I arguing about the work, the process, the end product, my ego, or her being a ‘work in progress’ I wanted to share these dialogues because in my opinion, they are what makes the body of work more than a ‘reportage’ about a family struggling with mental illness. I think they counterbalance my very particular way of photographing and presenting my family and I hope that they introduce a form of circularity into the way you view the work. I like the idea that by reading the texts you might really try to imagine what it’s like for my mother to be photographed so thoroughly. These are the sorts of things I believe photographers need to be engaged with.

So I’m not sure about this idea of my family having a voice in my pictures, but I certainly try to let them have their voices heard in the dialogue, which takes up a very significant part of the book. I think the pictures are more my space, but its a space that utterly relies on them. And of course they had every chance to veto pictures. I would involve them in the final edit. I was not bringing down pictures as I made them, only when I made a selection for an exhibition or some point of exposure, but that’s more how I work in general. I don’t look at my pictures for months. I generally go through periods of making pictures and periods of editing.

Its also important to understand that for me the photography and the transcriptions are secondary to what was happening in our life. The primary goal over the past 5 years has been to try to help my mother get out of a rut, to spend time figuring out how we could move. On a practical level, this involved finding ways to clear the house which is incredibly complex when you suffer from OCD. My mother has huge fears about dust being disturbed that makes touching things problematic. And then perhaps more importantly we spent hours and hours talking through things. So for me the photographs read like a psychological map of this long period of time, during which we would sometimes make progress, then get lost only to find ourselves back at square one.

SC: While the pictures rely heavily on your relationship with your mother, I find that the work can be read as a reflection of you and your experiences as you try to understand and navigate that relationship. In that way, the images begin to function less as a document, but, at the same time, become all the more moving to me. How much of yourself do you see in the pictures and how important is it to you that they retain their documentary quality?

LH: That’s a hard question. I think I’m still figuring this one out. I think the pictures that most interest me are the ones that tell me things I did not know before. So they help me move on to find other things, others thoughts, other ideas and feelings that can be hard to express. The documentary quality is important to me only in that it was the way I made the pictures. But I have no desire to control the reading. Although I am dealing with people and a place and real events, I am not trying to tell a single story, because the truth is I don’t know what that story would be. The reading can be quite opposite to the way I feel about the picture or what I remember from taking it or quite the opposite from what was actually happening. All these things actually delight me. I like opposites, the idea that things are not quite as they seem, that readings are full of questions not answers.

SC: Do you ever feel that you have to be careful not to exploit your family, especially since the subject matter is so delicate and so deeply personal? Is that a concern?

LH: Yes. I would not want to exploit them. I don’t believe that I do. A lot of what I was writing about above was trying to address this question of accountability. My feeling is that it’s much harder to exploit your own family than it is someone you don’t have to spend Christmas with every year… My mother has agreed to let the work be shown because she can see that it might help other people.

I believe I share a personal world and that I encourage myself and those near to me not to be ashamed of who we are. I don’t like secrets and I don’t like closed doors. I’ve had some very interesting reactions to the work from showing it in exhibition form from people who don’t normally go to galleries, and I’m very interested to see how different people respond to the book.

SC: To me, the power of your pictures from In The Shadow of Things not only lies in the emotional content, but in the way you use light and shadow, depth of field and movement to underscore the intensity of the emotions you portray. This is different from your previous series. How much of the way your newer pictures “look” was a conscious aesthetic decision?

LH: I think the style of my latest work is built on my previous work, but due to the constraints of shooting in one house over such a long period I was able to really push it, and I was much more emotionally involved with my own family than I’d ever been with anyone else. I also had the advantage of playing with a digital camera. I was able to shoot and shoot like a maniac to find a language that began to feel like my own. It’s so hard to take your own pictures and not mimic others. When I first started photographing seriously I did that, but with time it became frustrating because I was aware that I was using a borrowed language. In my own work I am constantly battling to find images that ring as authentic to me. Sometime I love a picture I’ve taken but deep down I know it is not my own. In aesthetic choices I know I play with light: night time can look like day and vice versa, but that’s more about destabilising what you’re looking at, making things appear opposite to what they are.

I think it’s important that documentary photography tries to work in a poetic way. To do that an image has to be stripped down to it’s bare elements so that the feelings within can resonate. I remember Antoine D’Agata looking at a picture I had taken on his workshop and saying ‘Too much information’. The paradox of In the Shadow of Things is that I tried to use a sparse and constrained language to describe a subject that is all about stuff. I think that’s why I experimented so much with extreme shadows, focus, and colour.

SC: What is your working process like? I feel that it’s always difficult to make work at home because life inevitably gets in the way. Do you feel like you have to differentiate the time you spend at home as a photographer and the time you spend at home as a daughter and a sister?

LH: Photography and life are intertwined for me. My studio is in my home. I only pick up the camera when I feel like it. I spend most of the time with the camera well and truly packed away. So when I take it out it’s the result of a decision and I am then a photographer. I don’t find it too difficult to switch. Perhaps working in all the other families helped me learn how to do this. If you’re with people all day for weeks on end you can’t be shooting all the time. You get exhausted.

The odd and obsessive thing that I’ve been thinking about recently is that maybe I never wanted my mother’s house to change and that it’s not just her that was stopping things from moving on. Perhaps in our family, we all play a part in stopping the change. Maybe change frightens us. Better to stay as we are. The place we know. What a terrifying thought! I think I needed to photograph everything so that I could cope with the potential change.

Photography can be cathartic in this process of letting go. “I have a picture of it, now i’ll let it change” It’s a peculiar thing but I like the fact that I have found a way to channel my own obsessive tendencies into photography, and that such personality traits can actually help me be creative, but I also have to be careful that they don’t become destructive. I find that striking the right balance between between being obsessive (while shooting and editing) but then being prepared to let go (when it comes to showing the work) dominates my working process.

SC: You have your first book out. How has the process of making a book of In the Shadow of Things made you think differently about the pictures? I haven’t seen the book yet, but from what you’ve said it incorporates family photographs, transcripts of conversations and your own photography. In this way, Larry Sultan’s book “Pictures From Home” springs to mind. Do you feel like the book form is the ideal way to show this work?

LH: Yes absolutely. I love to explore work through book form . But I think an installation is of equal merit, but different. In an installation, especially with slideshows and sound recordings, you can control time much more than in a book. You can give the audience only a certain amount of time to see a picture, or hear a sound. With a book the viewer chooses how long to spend with each picture, each word. Books are a perfect place to share a private world. I like the tactile quality as you read a book, the intimate proximity to the pages and photographs. Reading creates a quiet, private and internal space that I think is suited to my work.

I found it difficult to make the book; having to bring all the work to an end point, a full stop. No more possibility to change things. With installations they go up and come down, they exist and then they don’t, you can afford to make mistakes. The finality of a book, the prospect that it might live in someone else’s bookshelf for years to come, makes every decision that much more nerve wracking! Luckily many people helped me through the process including the excellent and very experienced photography book designer, Stuart Smith, who helped me through many of these tough decisions, and I believe has done an incredible job.

SC: I noticed some video collaborations on your website. Do you want video to become a bigger part of your artistic practice?

LH: Yes definitely. I am planning my next project which will be a film.

SC: What’s next for you?

LH: Well I plan to get up early and to do 45 minutes writing as often as I can. I recently discovered/remembered that with creative writing you can quickly go to places in your mind and imagination that would take forever to get to with photography. I hope to find a way to work with text and image that occupies a similar emotional space to my recent work. But I need to practice writing for some time to see if I can do anything decent! I also plan to organize some more workshops and events with Still Moving, and I intend to apply for workshops and residencies myself to help fuel new ideas.

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