Interviews:
Including: Interview by Ian Ruffino
Interview is a series of photographs that frame conversations with the people I find interesting. An invitation is sent with a date and a topic, the living room in my apartment is arranged with two chairs, a table between, and two glasses of water all directed towards an empty area where an audience would normally be seated. The self-timer on my camera is set, a photograph is taken and then reproduced in a magazine with a title such as: Interview #1 Mark Van Fleet, editor Married Life. Using the interview format I am able to remove the dialogue from the casual: bus stop, hallway, dinner party type occurrence that would normally contextualize such an event, and firmly insert it into a place where preperation and responsibility weigh in giving the topic more substance. However, no matter how interesting the exchange ends up being, no effort is made to record or transcribe the discussion. Therefore it remains unfiltered by the pressures of public language. The idea is twofold, one to have a discussion where I engage with people in a way that is otherwise restricted in a hope to find answers to questions that have no platform to be asked, and two to set up a situation in which upon viewing the photograph the question of what was talked about is posed. Hereby, activating a space in which one engages in the speculation of a sort of cross-pollination.
ian ruffino
