Keegan from Lise Sarfati’s recent work in NY Magazine’s article “The Waiting Room.”
I was in a waiting room a few weeks ago, leafing through the magazines, when I saw Magnum photographer Lise Sarfati’s name printed at the bottom of some really good editorial work. It also made me stop to read the article. Lise’s sensibilities have made her one of the people I most admire in photography today, ever since I first looked at her book The New Life and read about her process in Aperture. And whether it’s Alec Soth in W, Katy Grannan in the NY Times Sunday Magazine, or Lise Sarfati here, I like seeing my favorite art photographers lend their voice to writers or new subjects in magazines for a wider audience. I assume it’s more open now than ever before. In the heyday of print, there certainly were big names who worked both sides of commerce and art (Arbus, Penn, etc.), not to mention the more famous documentarians and editorialists who blurred the lines over and over (Frank, etc), but lesser known artists have traditionally had less access to mainstream media before the digital era.
Which is why, even though she’s a member of Magnum, Lise is one of my favorite hybrid outsider/insiders. Her editorial photos are first-rate and almost traditional; more than illustration, they are meant to be a counterpoint or an illucidation for the text, like with “The Waiting Room” and Lise’s pictures of claustrophobic sensuality and forced emotional stasis. However, they also glow from her unique personal attention to the individual subjects and their soft-shells of purposeful inhibition, but with nothing too saccharine or, contrarily, indemnifying. Like Hellen van Meene, she has an outsider’s eye for the spirit that lurks within a timid or awkward subject and an excellent sense for complimentary ambient lighting. That’s rare. Typically, small story editorial photography in magazines demands an off-putting and blunt manner (I think of the endless redundant Esquire from the 60’s imitations), so the temptation is to just add to the glut of similar iconography that’s already out there or cop out with a forcefully mannered concept piece. Lise jumps off the page in contrast-for now. I think New York Magazine is very aware that they need to co-opt outsiders. As marketing goes, the best pandering is to appear as if you aren’t pandering, knowing that we all tend to react better to subtle underdogs with a comercial outsider’s perspective. The marketers can keep this up as long as there are outsiders that are inclined to survive the hybridization process. That’s the process where commercial clamdiggers look into the tidal zone (between too-outsider and the accessible fringe) and they carry back their findings to sell us for the supper table.
And yes, the title of the article was also a bit funny to me because I was sitting in a little room being force fed a diet of new age music.
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