John Sevigny: The John Kobeck interview

I recently had the privilege to interview John Sevigny, the highly regarded artist, photographer and teacher. John’s work has been widely exhibited in the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and beyond. John agreed to answer a few questions in this short interview.

(Q)How long have you been a photographer? 


That depends on how you define the word. My father, who was a painter, sculptor and general eccentric, started putting “folder” cameras in my hands when I was like two. I have no idea whether I actually took any pictures during those rather early years :). I do know I made my first darkroom print, of a picture I had taken, when I was 11 or 12. But it wasn’t until about 1998, when I was working as a writer for a newspaper on the Texas-Mexico border, that I really invested myself in the idea of picture-taking. I was covering a lot of interesting stories and seeing a lot of new, intense things and I thought I might want to photograph them, to be able to look back at them later. It felt like the world was moving very fast, as it does when you’re young, and photography let me slow down for moments to look at the “scenery.”

(Q)What brought you into the field?

Going back to what I mentioned above, I’m kind of an outsider. I never studied this. I suppose constant exposure to art and images as a child was a big factor. Dad was an artist so we were constantly tripping over these huge canvases and sculptures at home. I remember him showing me a book of Matthew Brady’s photographs when I was probably too small to be looking at fields strewn with bodies. A lady around the corner, a dear family friend, was a wildly, talented painter. I tried to paint for a while but that didn’t work out so well. Then I was a writer. I was good at that but I found it pretty grueling. Thinking with a grin on my face that maybe photography was a last resort after having tried everything else.

(Q)What is your primary income stream?

It would be nice to have just one. Given the “new” economy, everything is fractured. I sell prints, books, do university lectures, give workshops, beg, borrow and steal to stay alive

(Q)How long did it take you to establish your position as an artist and teacher?

I don’t know how to put a date on when I became “established” or if I even have. When I started working primarily at taking pictures, and often writing about them, in about 1999, there was a definite shift in my life. Things have accelerated a lot in the past five years. But it’s still too early to declare victory, I think. It’s important to mention that moments of success and moments of being completely anonymous are both double-edged swords. When I had never exhibited anywhere, and was just wandering around Miami or Mexico taking pictures, I was as happy as I am now. I was also hungry for attention, frustrated and completely ignorant about how to share my work with people. Now, I feel satisfied that good people have seen my work and approve of it, but it’s not so free and innocent. I recently said to someone very close to me, “Whatever happened to just walking around town taking pictures?” It was a nostalgic comment and it make me a little sad. My mindset has changed and I’m now a little trapped in a cycle of photographing, traveling, exhibiting.

(Q)What do you believe have been the key factors in your success?

It’s that thing Hemingway says, and I’m paraphrasing, about how you have to last. About half of this stuff is luck and half is just sticking around long enough to figure out how to get around the obstacles that the “industry” so gleefully puts up to keep emerging artists of any age out of the competition. But even working 1,000 years wouldn’t help if the pictures weren’t special. I am very fortunate to have a group of people, scattered all over the place, to whom my pictures are very important. Someone like Steve McCurry makes tons of money and has millions of “fans” for whom his work is somewhat important. But I’m a lot more fortunate because I have this incredible support network of loving, dedicated, wacky, intelligent and fascinating supporters who really know about each of my photographs and really follow what I do. Very few of them, for whatever reason, are photographers.

(Q)Have you altered your career trajectory along the way?

Really only once. I worked for the Associated Press in Mexico for a year and hated it. I literally left in a fury of profanity and slammed doors. My story ideas were censored or just smothered at birth and the people I worked for, although very successful, were arrogant and mediocre. At least one of them, a well-known photographer, was an outright thief. So I left with the idea that somehow I could take pictures I wanted and survive at the same time. Since then I have had to work at other things, like teaching English, but I have not gone back to press work and hopefully never will, particularly not at the “high end” of journalism, which is a nest of vipers and egomaniacs.

(Q)On a personal level, do you have any long term goals?

I want to do a project on the coast and the tropics. I’m from Miami, but I didn’t grow up on Atlantic beaches, but rather, in the inglorious mangrove swamps, teeming with strange animals and stranger people, along Central Biscayne Bay. Over the years, in seeking out a word or label to identify myself, I’ve come to think that I’m primarily a coastal person, and there are certain things that coastal people have in common. We’re open. We curse too much. We tell dirty jokes. We go shirtless all the time because of the heat. We tell stories and good-natured lies and measure time with strange rulers like hurricane seasons, mangrove harvests, and tides. It’s a project I could do almost anywhere because the themes are the same, from the Pacific Coast of El Salvador to the Gulf Coast of Texas.

(Q)I know your an avid film shooter, but due to the scarcity of film in Mexico were forced to shoot digital. Has this had any change on your thoughts about the whole “film v digital” thing?

To me, clean, full-frame digital photography still looks very plastic and cold. It has no inherent flaws and therefore no inherent identity or beauty. I can make digital “work” to some degree but I am a romantic and would love to go back 15 years to when I could buy and develop Kodachrome at the drug store. Nevertheless I have to confess that owning nothing but a digital camera and a laptop is wonderfully convenient.

(Q)What advice would you offer a photographer interested in pursuing your career type?

Get whatever camera you can. You’ll suck at the beginning but you’ll get better. You don’t need to take a class. Read photo magazines and Web sites. Basic camera operation is not that complicated and you should be able to work through it in a few years at most. Then photograph whatever you want, and ignore what the market or other people tell you to photograph. Don’t fall into the trap of becoming a photographer for “the market.” If you can avoid that, you become an artist and not just someone who happens to have a camera or a nice set of studio lights. You really don’t need much. Cartier Bresson shot with just two lenses. Helmut Newton used Nikon FMs and 50mm lenses for fashion magazine shots. A basic, DSLR and a really good prime lens are enough to do almost anything. Work from the heart, mind and eyes, not so much the camera. Somehow you will survive if you stick with it

John’s work can be viewed on his blog here
As well as here
His most recent project at Fotovisura “American Travel Diary”

Photographer John Sevigny Talks to Students

John Sevigny

Photographer John Sevigny visited COD’s campus today and spent a wonderfully informative hour talking about his experiences living and photographing in Mexico.
Sevigny, a former AP photographer, is interested in how his camera can be a tool for social education. Rather than taking the stance of an activist, Sevigny says that his work is intended to help him get away from reporting and has the objective of being more personal and more spiritual.
When asked what background a student should have to become a photographer, Sevigny said that making lots of images is key. “Set a goal of making a certain number of pictures in a finite amount of time… a month, say.” He went on to say that if you try to make 10,000 photographs a month, even if you fall short of the goal, you’ll have made a lot of images and will have started to refine  your eye and your taste in photographs.
John Sevigny’s website is at www.johnsevigny.com and his blog is Gone City. He has just recently published his first book of photographs El Muerto Pare el Santo.

Talking about El Muerto Pare el Santo

Interview by Sid Walker

This project has been well received. You've shown it in the United States and all over Mexico. It was also published at Visura magazine, which is quickly becoming a force to be reckoned with in the photographic world. What do you think makes this work so attractive? 

El Muerto is my third major project and even as I'm maturing, people are coming around to what I've been doing all along. I'm a sincere photographer with sincere images and I'm not out looking to act like an artist or impress anyone. I make the work and that's it. In a world full of bullshit, slicksters and used carpet salesman, people appreciate a straight-up guy. Like Flannery O'Connor said, "A good man is hard to find." I'm not such a great guy but I don't mince my words and I don't lie about who I am. I can't be bothered to lie and pose. Life is too short.

The introduction to the project is extremely personal and also makes references to famous, unexpected artists, Caravaggio, Velazquez. How did you become interested in painting and how do you feel about revealing yourself so deeply online? 

My father was a painter. Edith Landowne, who lived around the corner in South Miami, was an astounding painter. My brother Jimmy is a talented cartoonist and animator. Noah Masterson, with whom I grew up, was always making little comic books. Non-photographic art has been part of my life since the very beginning. Growing up, I remember we had two posters in the house, one of a Van Gogh and another of a Talouse-Lautrec. But when I discovered Velazquez, I knew what I wanted to do with my life. Later, I discovered Caravaggio and felt that he was one of the few artists I could really understand. I'd had a lot of brushes with the law and so had he. I was essentially unconcerned about how people viewed my work and so was he. Lately though I've been paying more attention to Abstract Expressionism, de Kooning, Rothko and Pollock, along with a guy from Miami named Kiki Valdes, who I just met.

As for the personal stuff, there were just things I had to get out. Unfortunately, there will probably be more of that. I prefer to tell other people's stories, but I have a lot of psychological and emotional baggage to deal with, like anyone, and this is how I handle it.

What has been the difference between the reception of this project, and of Ladies' Bar? 

I think it's pretty obvious that the Mexican arts mafia, which gets its funding from taxpayer money, went out of its way to censor Ladies' Bar. After three years, and with the intervention of some well-placed friends, I was finally able to show it in Guadalajara late last year. It was a knockout. It made national press and I'm very pleased.

Needless to say it's a different project entirely. It's separated from Ladies' Bar by three or four years. It's not a documentary story at all. It's about life and death and surviving in between, which is the hard part. I am very pround of that project and think it's one of my best. And to some extent, it's been given the attention it deserves, which was not the case with Ladies' Bar.

What was shooting the project like? 

It was done very quickly. I was traveling a lot at the time and I worked on the Gulf Coast of Mexico, in Monterrey, and Saltillo. If it took six months I'd be surprised. The basic idea was to move away from portraiture somewhat and do something with portraits, landscapes, and sort of strange still lifes. I see a lot of art history in the project, from the photograph "posts," which in some ways reminds me of a dark and strange Richard Diebenkorn, to a piece called caress, which is pure Caravaggio done on film. There's another photograph called "Bridegroom to be" that comes straight out of my lifelong love affair with Diego Velazquez' work. Teresa Parker, a curator from Chicago, was very much the producer or creative director of the project. It would have been something completely different without her help and guidance.

Nota sobre la exposicion "Insurgencia sobre papel"

Insurgencia sobre papel

• 23-Diciembre-2009

Tags Relacionados: arte, papel, saltillo, Casa Tiyauhi, Roberto Castañeda

Artistas locales e internacionales unen su obra en una misma exposición Eugenia Flores Soria

• 
• Foto: Vanguardia

Recomendarvotar ahora

En las paredes de la Casa Tiyauhi viven unas singulares imágenes. Algunas fueron creadas con pincel y colores. A otras las raptaron directamente de la vida cotidiana a través de la cámara. No importa si son dibujos, fotografías y demás. A todos los cuadros los une la misma causa: alzar la voz.
“Insurgencia sobre Papel” es una exposición libre donde distintos artistas tienen la oportunidad de exponer su obra. “Estamos cansados de la mafia que controla las artes en Saltillo. No necesitamos permiso del gobierno para montar una exposición”, comentó John Sevigny, artista y organizador del evento durante la inauguración. “Yo creo que Saltillo tiene bastante potencial, hay mucha gente creativa aquí. Pero faltan dos cosas: lugares para exponer que sean independientes, y falta contacto con artistas desde fuera para ampliar las visiones. Estamos aquí con una buena mezcla de artistas locales y de otros lados”.
La selección de los artistas, según comentó Sevigny, fue a base de invitación y no de un “jurado”. “Creo que salió bien. Es una buena exposición y buen ejemplo de lo que se puede hacer cuando trabajan juntos”, finalizó.
Los cuadros, tan distintos entre sí, forman un colectivo rico en cuanto a ideas, propuestas y creación. Abarca desde el aspecto lúdico, pasa por el urbano, cultural, y llega hasta los terrenos de la fantasía.
En las fotografías de Roberto Castañeda aparece un señor de pie dentro de un autobús, o un hombre descansando acostado en su motocicleta. Esta vez el joven no utilizó su cámara profesional, sino su celular que siempre tiene a la mano: “con él  capto el Saltillo urbano en camiones, en la calle, en donde ande. Lo que me gusta es que algunas personas se dan cuenta, otras no. Es divertido andar tomando fotos así y a parte creas algo nuevo”, confesó entusiasmado.
Justo en frente están las fotos de unos simpáticos cabritos, o un carnicero con una aparente cabeza de puerco como rostro. La autora, Daniela Martínez, se “enfocó” por esta vez a “lo chusco”, como ella le llama: “Traté de buscar un poquito de lo chusco, del aburrimiento de la ciudad  y me encontré con las fotos. Me di cuenta de que a pesar de ser una ciudad pequeña, puedes encontrar  muchas cosas. Me gusta fotografiar aspectos un poco crudos pero que reflejen la realidad”, comentó.
Iván Alcántara Tamez  presentó parte de exposición anterior titulada “Pintura Outsiders”, que fue concebida en el penal: “Me dieron la oportunidad de exponer aquí y pues vine a ofrecer mi obra”, comentó el pintor, quien tiene como deseo vender sus cuadros.
La obra de Teresa Parker se forma de líneas claras en fondos oscuros. Las figuras parecían salidas de un sueño, pero al observarlas mejor, expresan tintes de realidad.
También están algunas pequeñas fotografías de Susana Veloz de la serie “Polaroid”, en donde resalta una muñeca casi consumida por un pantano. Si se le mira de lejos parece un triste cuerpo humano abandonado en medio de la nada.
Las imágenes captadas por John Sevigny miran a los ojos. Unos hombres boxean en una plaza pública, pero su lucha va más allá de un simple deporte… En otros cuadros están las vías del tren. ¿Cuántas historias no sabrán? Unos viajeros esperan el tren. Sus rostros están cansados y miran con anhelo.
Danzas folclóricas, máscaras, y alegorías, habitan en las fotografías veracruzanas que, junto a las de Guillermo Medina, contrastaban por la alegría y color de de las imágenes de Galindo, con la oscuridad, sombra y sutileza de Medina.

Newspaper announcement for Chicago talk

Calendar: Event Information

Nomads and Passengers: Central American Immigration Across Mexico Tuesday, 02-Feb-2010 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM International Speakers Corner

Phone: 630-942-3079

Presented by photographer, John Sevigny.
For several years, John Sevigny worked as a volunteer for the Catholic Diocese of Saltillo, in Northern Mexico at the Belen Posada del Migrante, a shelter for Central American immigrants crossing Mexico to come to the U.S. From 2007 to 2009, he participated in two documentary photographic projects on the difficulties Central American immigrants face. He will discuss immigration issues as they relate to human trafficking, extortion of Central Americans by Mexican law engorcement agencies and organized crime rings in order to shed light on some lesser know aspects of the immigration phenomenon.

Sevigny teaches photography and is a photographic artist. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, Sevigny has lived in Mexico for 10 years. He studied at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, worked as an Associated Press journalist, and has exhibited his personal photographs across the United States and Mexico.

Location:
SRC 1450a
College of Dupage

Sevigny on Caravaggio: Guernica Magazine

On Canvas, authority unleashed

In 2002, I spent a night in jail after getting swept up in a raid on a tiny Mexican bar. It was not the first or last time I was locked up but it was the most memorable.

The operation was spearheaded by some 40 riot police with shields, ski masks, and machine guns. Cops outnumbered patrons five-to-one and most arrested were unsavory but harmless drunks. We went down on weapons possession charges, and for vague crimes like "association with criminals," an offense I commit every time I take a photograph of a gang-member, or some businessman who hasn't paid his taxes. After much verbal sparring with detectives in a stinking, overcrowded jail, the charges were mysteriously dropped and I was cut loose. But the impression of dozens of cops in body armor storming a claustrophobic cantina is not easily forgotten.

Anyone who has been in close quarters with heavily armed police or soldiers will feel the physical weight of the law pressing down on the figure of Jesus in the 1602 painting, The Taking of Christ, by Michelangelo Merisi, better known as Caravaggio.

Arrests are rarely civilized affairs, and besides details like weapons involved and laws cited, little has changed since the early 17th Century, as Caravaggio's painting testifies. Police actions provoke panic, and street cops working with shady, paid informants -- in this case Judas - are capable of atrocities that would boggle the minds of human rights advocates.

Christ, who the Book of Mark says passively accepted his arrest, appears crestfallen and a bit afraid in the painting. He is soft, human, and common, nothing like the Messiah many imagine. Two soldiers in black, well-worn armor lean toward him; worried he might try to escape. Jesus the Criminal's hands, with their intertwined fingers, seem to await handcuffs. Judas not only poses to kiss Christ, but also places a strong hand on his shoulder, as if to help detain him.


Caravaggio doesn't just offer us the moment of truth, as it were. The implied violence of the scene foreshadows the future. No routine arrest, this is a brutal takedown, ordered by the highest authorities, of a cult leader whose teachings threatened the social fabric of one of Rome's occupied territories. Because we know the story, and because the tension in the work is so tangible, we know what's to come: interrogations, brutal public torture, and of course, execution.

Caravaggio was no stranger to run-ins with the law. Accused of killing at least two men and having done several stints in prison, the painter put his own multiple arrests on canvas when he interpreted this Biblical episode known to every Sunday school student.

But Caravaggio's telling of the tale is not for children.

It contains, within a common religious scene, the brutality of an age, according to Peter Robb, author of M : The Man Who Became Caravaggio.

"In a time of inquisition, censorship, spying and torture in the Christian world, secret betrayal, anonymous denunciations, nocturnal arrest and of exemplary public whippings, humiliations, beheadings and burnings alive for crimes of opinion and morality, the arrest of Christ ... was peculiarly charged," Robb writes in his 1998 book.

Compositionally, it is a cramped work, with all the faces in the piece facing left, except for Christ's, which faces right. It was meant as a reminder for the faithful that the most popular figure in religious history had gone against a doomed, uncivilized world as he led his ministry through the cities and villages of the desert. Now, he would pay dearly.

Putting religion aside, the painting is a dramatic, visual explanation of what is meant by the common phrase "full force of the law," particularly when applied by legions of government-paid killers in places like Waco, Texas; San Salvador de Atenco, in Mexico; and perhaps, right now, in Iran, Honduras and Pakistan. For this is not a painting about Jesus. Its subject is the sheer force of authority applied to the destruction a single man who might be anyone, from Che Guevara to Malcolm X.

Caravaggio is mostly remembered as a rogue genius with high-placed patrons; a man who bullied his artistic rivals, killed others, and roamed the streets after dark looking for fights only to get bailed out by his contacts. Indeed, if art history texts are to be believed, Mike Tyson appears tame alongside Caravaggio, rape conviction and all.

One contemporary wrote of the painter, " ... when he's worked for a fortnight he goes out for a couple of months with his rapier at his side ... looking for fights or arguments."

He died before he reached the age of 40, allegedly of a fever, but possibly killed off by enemies.

In spite of his image as a criminal -- probably half-truth and half fiction spun by artistic rivals -- two things are worth noting about Caravaggio, his work, and his impact on the history of art.

He painted The Taking of Christ less than 40 years after Michelangelo Buonarroti died. The younger painter's style - realism and high-contrast lighting directed with dramatic precision against haunting, black backgrounds - changed art forever. His work made the Sistine Chapel's figures and religious scenes look like clumsy, antiquated, cartoons.

In an age of intolerance, Caravaggio almost single-handedly killed off traditional religious art and made money off the Church in the process, all the while behaving like a savage.

It must have been a wild dance and it produced wild art. Caravaggio never made preliminary sketches, preferring to paint only from life, a radical technique at the time. He used male and female prostitutes, crooks, alley thugs, and his rich-kid hooligan friends as models. Art critic Robert Hughes wrote, "There was art before him, and art after him, and they were not the same."

Moreover, if delinquency, midnight street brawls, killings, arrests, prison time, and the threat of the Inquisitionall met by the painter's self-destructive defiance could inspire the gut-punch of The Taking of Christ, the 21st Century could use a Caravaggio to slash into the creeping morass of passionless art that has plagued us for decades. For artists are not obligated to be law-abiding citizens, as Jackson Pollock or David Alfaro Siqueiros could attest.

But each must push hard against the constraints of the Age, or be forgotten, like many of Caravaggio's more timorous contemporaries.

The View from Down South, by Steve Doniche

Those of us who live in the complacent affluence of the United States of America often find it hard to remember that we share the continent with a different United States, Los Estados Unidos de Mexico. Though increasingly entwined with this poor relation both economically and culturally, we scarcely give a thought to the lives and struggles constantly going on south of the border.

Confronted with the problem of immigration, both legal and otherwise, we are content to consider thousand mile fences as a possible solution, and to look the other way when Texas vigilantes decide to defend their own property the old fashioned way, at the point of a gun.

We need someone like photo-journalist John Sevigny to be our eyes and ears, as well as our conscience. John, whom I've known since he was born, used to cover Mexico and the American border towns for the Associated Press. He learned his Spanish on the streets, and his Mexican wife says he speaks it "like a thug." Now he's out there on his own, snapping the shutters of his film-loaded non-digital cameras to capture the sights, the faces, the textures, and very nearly the smells of that "other" America that supports us like an overloaded beast of burden struggling under the weight of a bloated master.

As you can see for yourself on his photo-blog, Gone City, he has walked the tracks and dusty roads, descended the stairs into basement brothels, traced the passage of the migrating poor, recorded the faces of the lost, the abandoned, the homeless, and those who simply survive. All of this is done with the sensitivity of Steinbeck and the unflinching gaze of Walker Evans -- and I think also a touch of Jack Kerouac's love for what he called "the fellajin," the good natured simple souls who just slug away at living and do the best they can. If ever anyone has captured an image of the hooker with the heart of gold, it is probably to be found in these pages.

Some years ago he traveled to a small Mexican town to interview the families of some migrant workers who had died as they tried to get across the border. His purpose amazed the people there -- no one from the USA had ever expressed an interest in anything but drug smugglers before. It is just as true today as it was back in the 1940's when Woody Guthrie wrote his song about it that such people, when they die, are "called by no name but Deportees."

Recently John's interests have turned back to Florida, where he comes from, because of the increasing incidents of slave labor here affecting workers largely from Mexico. That this issue has raised its ugly head again within miles of our homes is a powerful reminder of how intimately our nations are bound together, and how culpable we are in our ignorance and negligence.

So I'm glad to note John Sevigny's updates as they come in like postcards from the edge. They keep me in touch and remind me, as we all should be reminded, to remain human. Buena suerte, amigo. Keep up the good work.