Stephane Sednaoui — Coming Home

From the series
“Anthroposexomorphic”
2000

Stephane Sednaoui — Coming Home

A conversation with Stephane Sednaoui

The interview has been subsequently edited for clarity

Artworks Stephane Sednaoui
Interview & Words Katharina Korbjuhn

Stephane Sednaoui is in the Nagano mountains in Japan as we speak. Born and raised in Paris, France there is nothing conventional about him. If his life as a photographer, filmmaker, and artist — starting over in many different places — doesn’t feel transformative enough: I catch him in the midst of what seems to be yet another transformation — one more personal and a sort of home coming a circle closing.

His larger-than-life career gave birth to master-pieces like Björk’s “Big Time Sensuality” and Red Hot Chili Peppers “Give it Away.” One can only guesstimate Sednaoui’s influence on pop-culture. A trip to Romania during the Romanian Revolution in 1989 changed the course of his career irreversibly and gave way to more personal series, depicting the raw, pure, ugly — the transformation of life and death in the making.

Katharina Korbjuhn: Where are you right now?

Stephane Sednaoui: I live in Tokyo, but presently I am staying near a village in the mountains of Nagano, alone for a few weeks to focus on a new art project.

KK: Let’s start with who, or what were your early influences?

SS: If I stick to my early favorite artists, and leave aside Matisse and the Surrealists, they would be William Klein, Andy Warhol, and Francis Bacon. I connect them together for a strange reason. Each picks on what is perhaps the most sacred to him but with a cruel twist: Klein, capturing humankind with an aggressive playfulness, Warhol, mythmaking, then paradoxically demythologizing icons ad infinitum, and then Bacon, daring to mutilate bodies and disfigure the faces of his loved ones. Although they are different in their methods, what speaks to me is how they use the brutality of their approach — stripping out the egos — to relate their attraction for subjects and question wider issues.

KK: Have you met some of them?

SS: Yes! I was lucky to work with Warhol once at the Factory. I posed for him. I had my camera with me but was too shy to photograph him. It was in August 1984, when I was twenty-one years old, I thought I would see him again. A month later, I met also William Klein at Jean Paul Gaultier’s studio, as he prepared Mode in France, a feature film on French designers. After I had shown to him my first photos, he offered to me the job of casting director for his movie. I had discovered him just three years before through his Aperture monograph, and he was already my hero. It was amazing that he took me under his wing and entrusted me with his movie when I was just barely turning an adult. It was a booster for life! I have always since kept in contact with him, he is very precious to me.

KK: Like William Klein, you have covered a lot of different ground. Your work has spanned pop culture, from magazines, record covers, and directing music videos, to photojournalism and art. How would you ultimately define yourself?

SS: I started out with art projects in my twenties. They structured me, it is where I felt, and still do, most at home.

KK: Do you see a logic in the way you shifted from one world to the other? You remind me of a Peter Pan in your attitude: no attachment and free-spirited.

SS: Funny you say that. Just recently a friend reminded me, that in our early 20s when talking about our future and multiple passions, I had said that everything I would normally do, I would do the opposite. I found it more exciting to push beyond my known boundaries and embrace the unexpected. And actually, I did follow half-consciously this modus operandi ! ‘Rapture in rupture’ may not be a good motto, but that is the source of my drive, my logic. Hence re-occurring themes: alienation, uncertainty, and disconnection in my artwork.

From the series
“Tensity”
2002

KK: When and what was your first project?

SS: It was in 1982, after seeing a photo of a young inmate in a French newspaper. He had been the survivor of a jail riot in a foreign country. His face was identical to mine — he was my double. I similarly photographed myself and put the images side-by-side. He was perhaps twenty years old, I was nineteen we had opposite destinies, yet I saw myself in both photographs, to the point that I could not imagine they were two different people. It is a project I now want to return to and finish. This older, other me, and me being this other him. Funny that he has accompanied me all my life, yet I do not even exist for him.

KK: Distortion, invisibility, no identity, death — there are dark themes running through the work we picked for our Permanence issue. Why did you focus on these?

SS: These art projects are how I transformed experiences of vulnerability and crisis into uplifting expressions. For example, working on projects that address loss has helped me to accept it. I changed my focus from the tragedy of death to the simplicity of non-existence. Whatever we are before conception, in what form, is not a matter on which we ever are sad about — so I started to think about what is after death with similar equanimity. It also allowed me, when a family member, leaves his or her stories with us after death, to consider these not as memories, not as traces tied to the past, but as live materials having an independent relationship to us and the present world.

KK: You say that photographing the Romanian revolution of 1989 was a counter-experience. In what way?

SS: At 26 years old I went to Romania to record history in the making, the fall of a dictatorship, but part of what I brought back changed my view on the representation of reality. I’d had a thirst to capture unfiltered events, something tangible and true. However, once I returned to Paris, it turned out that the mass graves I had photographed in haunting detail were, in fact, a sordid staging to fool the media. So the shock of having seen those real corpses remained, but I could no longer hold on to photo-reportage to feel at least useful by reporting a tragedy. It was fake, yes, but those bodies were dead for real. A part of the horror was a lie, and another part of it was true. This created a kind of short circuit in my head, and from then on a new awareness about how easily reality is manipulated, and therefore corrupted by the notion of spectacle.

KK: Do you think you became more aware?

SS: Yes definitely. It was probably the biggest learning experience I had, and it took me two decades to process it and see clearly what it did to me. In a strange way raised awareness made me more detached, and I think I now express my reality more accurately through abstract rather than direct means.

KK: Did this experience make you pessimistic about life?

SS: I definitely lost a certain naïveté. But I am an optimist.

From the series
“Premonition”
1999

KK: You describe “Anthroposexomorphic” as a de-construction of the glossy magazine work from the previous decade — why the need to do this?

SS: After the Romanian experience, I moved to the US and jumped into a new life in the entertainment and pop culture world. It was fun and acted as a great distraction, but the recollection of those decomposing bodies stayed with me for years. No matter what type of job I did, often it was there in the back of my mind, as disturbing memories against which my happy moments had to be measured. For example, on a music video or a fashion shoot I sometimes looked at my team, and thought to myself, how candid and free in the moment they were. I had a need to express a darker side of life, but something in me kept holding me back. In 2000 with “Anthroposexomorphic”, I finally felt okay to break free from self-censorship, to dismantle those beautiful models’ bodies, by surrealistically turning their skins inside out to show the flesh and bones, as if revealing the shadow side we all share. It was a cathartic experience to be artistically destructive. As a young teenager when I saw the film Un Chien Andalou, with the scene of the eye being slit, I was both fascinated and inevitably freaked out. “Anthroposexomorphic” brought me back to that moment, confirming that violence can be expressed artistically, and at the same time be liberating and pleasurable.

KK: Did you have a specific artist in mind that you relate to when you did this project?

SS: I immediately think of Hans Bellmer, but when I did the series it was George Bataille’s book Story of the Eye that was still echoing in my head.

KK: Can you explain a little bit about your work “Premonition”?

SS: “Premonition” attempts to illustrate those indefinable feelings that arise when our inner sensors are on high alert. I captured these images of New York unexpectedly in 1999. I especially love it when a technical malfunction surprises me. It was the beginning of the digital era, and my camera was not working properly, and I felt that these images were echoing a period of my life that I could not grasp. There was some uncertainty and apprehension — of me escaping reality, or reality, me. So instead of fixing the camera, I kept shooting. That was the feeling I had that day… and probably the entire year.

KK: What technique has remained important in your latest work?

SS: Accidents, like the one I just mentioned, which is not a technique, strictly speaking, it is more like a general attitude, a philosophy of life, but nevertheless an approach I have been pushing and provoking since the start. For example, in the beginning, I did not look in the viewfinder. I wrapped the camera strap tight around my wrist and took my pictures at arm’s length, finding my means through accidents that I liked. Since I had not planned to become a photographer it gave me total freedom to explore, like someone who does not want to be a guitarist and yet finds something interesting by hitting the strings with drumsticks. Creating without intentions feels like a shortcut to my unconscious, to cognitive patterns beyond my knowledge.

KK: How was the Ground Zero experience different from the previous Romanian tragedy that you had covered? And what would you want to share about the “Reflective Ground” series?

SS: Being a volunteer surrounded by a community of rescuers, searching, digging through the rubble, documenting, and communicating our efforts, I definitely felt useful at Ground Zero, at least as much as I possibly could. As a result, contrary to my previous experience in Romania, my brain was able to process the unthinkable. Photographically speaking, what immediately came out of those images was photojournalistic in nature. But then, ten years later, when I re-opened the box of contact sheets, I was drawn to a series of accidentally blurred images from the first roll of film, they didn’t appear to me as re-discovered failed photos anymore. Instead, there was a dynamic shift, in that these particular images expressed something new, alternative moments not related to what was happening when I took the photos. That’s why I called the series “Reflective Ground”.

KK: Does the fact that these photos are of a historical event change anything?

SS: Yes, I think so. The fact that everyone knows the event, makes the alternative readings, the imagined moments, even more intriguing. I like this alteration of perception induced by the blurred image. It is this possibility of the loss of meaning of an event, even a historical one, that I find interesting. How the brain uses the shapes and colors to project its own vision on the images, rather than decipher the content.

From the series
“Reflective Ground”
2001

KK: Would you tell us more about the series “Clues”?

SS: The trigger for this series was a carte blanche project commissioned by SAM Art Projects foundation in 2013. My mother had passed away four years prior, and I had inherited an old, black travel trunk, that throughout my childhood had always been in my bedroom. No matter what apartments we had lived in I had been its keeper. With my kid’s eyes, from time to time I would open it, puzzled by the mass of neglected family photos, and the loose entangled strips of films. So for the project, I started by pulling out — alongside those from my own archives — images that gave some kind of clues about myself and my family. As markers of our journey, mirrored events, consistencies, or not, between both archives. Then I decided to purposely leave out any sense of time. And this intertwined information grew into something new.

KK: Can you describe what permanence is to you?

SS: I think that almost all the projects I discuss here, deal with notions of permanence and impermanence. I prefer the poetry of impermanence, the idea that everything is in a process of movement and transformation. I remember a dear friend Eugenie Vincent, years ago —who liked to add a humorous twist to everything — wrapping with paper, my Heraclitus book Fragments, and jokingly re-titling it ‘A Dirty Book’ as if it was one of those novels that you must hide in public. Thanks to her I have remained super discreet about this kind of reading (laughs). I must confess I also loved reading Parmenides. When I think of infinity, I think of him, and if on the universe, the world we live in, it would be Heraclitus. So my ‘dirty thought’ on those naughty matters is that permanence is a state where all events exist at the same time, together as one, while impermanence is the state in which we create our own chronological path amongst those events. Both are not opposite concepts, they exist as two formulations of the same thing.

KK: Do your film and photo projects titled “Tensity” also deal with those notions of permanence or impermanence?

SS: From a different angle. I made this project a few months after two opposing events happened back to back. I saw horrified, the attack and fall of the twin towers from my roof, and then a few weeks later — still paradoxically in a state of emergency — joyfully watched my daughter come into this world. This film is a metaphor for life, with the end connecting to the beginning in a dreamlike form. It shows a woman floating in pitch-black surroundings, in what could be a mother’s womb, the bottom of the ocean, or the far depths of the universe. She is going through emotional transformations, her body and facial expressions continuously changing between conflicting states of serenity and chaos. The photos series is a bit different as it focuses solely on one aspect, her struggle not to be swallowed by complete blackness.

From the series
“Clues”
2013

KK: Can you please share with us your thoughts on your title and series: πριναπόδύοχιλιάδεςτετρακόσιαενενήνταχρόνια

SS: It means, ‘Two thousand four hundred and ninety-nine years ago’, and refers to Heraclitus of Ephesus and through him the other philosophers of that period. At the start of the project I had no pre-defined character or time, but depending on the settings I was applying to the ghostly silhouette, the grains of the film emulsion dispersed as if they were alive. As I played with this, a comment my high school philosophy teacher made came back to me. She had explained, that as the atoms of an individual are counted in the billions of billions — after Socrates’ death, his body would have returned to the greater cycles of nature, and therefore it was possible that at any given moment in time, we might breathe in an atom of Socrates. I loved this vision. For this project I created a series of five images, showing the disintegration of an ancient philosopher, the transmutation of his atoms into another philosopher, then another after that. They are all different, but carry a continuous thought that evolves through each one of them. So here we are again — permanence in impermanence.

KK: You told us that you are in Nagano working on a new project, can you tell us more?

SS: It is an abstract large-scale series of photos, which — because of its cosmic allusions — is particularly uplifting to me. The starting point was a series of pictures I took during the summer of 2018 in the streets of Tokyo, and it has evolved into an odyssey towards the limits of space-time… to put it humbly (laughs). There are scientific and philosophical aspects to it but it is mainly fueled by my photo experimentations and thoughts. Looking at this series I want the viewer to believe that the key structure of the cosmos is not solely to be discovered millions of light years away, but maybe right here, in the streets or in our kitchens, surrounding us, hidden in its quantum state within everything.

From the series
πριναπόδύοχιλιάδεςτετρακόσιαενενήνταχρόνια
2015