Robyn Cumming Interview

Interview by Davin Risk

MR: There is clearly an emphasis and a dedication in your work to detail and narrative. Can you describe your process for a series like In Place?

RC: I usually come up with a concept first—what sort of themes am I interested in exploring. My past work had been quite specific in terms of what it was I was investigating and I would have 10 to 15 images exploring one idea in slightly different visual ways. With In Place I really wanted to broaden the scope of ideas I could explore while still creating a series that was cohesive and aesthetically sound. The human condition was sort of my larger umbrella theme within which these more specific ideas fell into place.

From there I plan the visual aspects of the work. In this case I used the curtain as a unifying device, this gave me more freedom to take each image into different visual realms while still having something significant that unified them. I then decide on a few images and start sketching. The sketches thresh out basic composition, model and light placement. I choose a colour palette, costume and props and then there are days of shopping to accumulate the items and find things that work together visually. I spend days in the studio constructing the space, painting, wallpapering, furnishing and there is often something tedious involved like filling the room with bags upon bags of soil or staining hundreds of coffee cups with coffee or cutting out and soaking thousands of pictures in tea and then pasting each one to a wall.

The photograph is often the easiest part of the entire process, the actual shooting takes about 1 hour compared to a full week of construction. The little details are really important for me as I like to leave little hits here and there that add not only to the composition but to the development of the mood I’m trying to create. I really like to bring gross elements into an image, things dripping, or staining or seeping…when I think human beings I think of this sort of sour, decaying underbelly and so I always like to have a little bit of shit or dirt exposing itself in my images.

MR: How do you select models for a series like In Place? Do you see it as casting actors for roles you have written?

RC: Very much so, I’ve been lucky up until this point as my family and friends are all pretty interesting characters who don’t mind being photographed. I’ll often remember meeting a friend of a friend that would be perfect for a certain role and try to re-connect with that person. I’m beginning to run out of people so soon I’ll have to go through casting agencies or post auditions.

MR: Much of your work seems to be about looking past facades or showing both public and private in the same instant.

RC: The series often explores contradictory roles simultaneously so you’re seeing something predictable and socially definable…basically constructed representations of the environments we all know: the domestic space, the office, the natural world, the everyday. But you’re seeing these environments within a theater curtain; though the drama of each scene is of the staged and the strange, the images hold recognizable clues, cueing the viewer to a world they can identify with. In turn, each challenges the observer to consider the complex and abrasive nature of the relationship between this dramatic and strange concocted world and the obscured, concealing world in which we all live.

The frontal, almost confrontational gaze each character bears in these portraits is one intended to heighten the sense of both the sitter and the viewer feeling observed. The viewer is asked to consider themselves in relation to the characters within each photograph; pushing the spectator to think about their place within the images and by proxy, the real world.

I am intrigued by the idea of the constructed in photography. My desire is to document a concocted reality, a pseudo-reality that questions aspects of the world in which we live. The realities I’ve made only exist within my photographs; they can never be returned to for inspection or be re-made exactly as they were. One production ends for a new one to begin.

MR: Have you thought about or experimented with your tableaus in motion in video or animation? Or could you ever see them as installations unto themselves?

RC: Actually yes, I am currently planning a project which is an elaboration of In Place but explores mediums outside of photography…it’s not something I want to go into as I’m still threshing out the details and don’t want to solidify anything yet.

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Robyn Cumming is a Toronto-based photographer represented by XEXE Gallery. For more information, check http://www.robyncumming.com