Louvriere and Vanessa-lessons for dead birds
Lillian Bassman and Paul Himmel, NY_erminal
Founded in 2003, EYEMAZING is Eyemazing Susan’s labor or love, life, and photography, a beautifully produced print magazine dedicated to the avant garde, which has published artists from Sally Mann and Roger Ballen to Bettina Rheims and Michael Ackerman. To celebrate the magazine’s tenth anniversary, Thames & Hudson has just released the incredible tome, EYEMAZING: The New Collectible Art, a 544-page feast for the eyes and soul, which includes over 423 illustrations, as well as texts by Karl E. Johnson, Steven Brown, and John Wood.
We are pleased to have this opportunity to speak with Eyemazing Susan about her vision and her dedication to a passion I share, a love for photography and printed matter. Cheers.
Miss Rosen: I am very intrigued about the ideas of a publisher, who I see as a visionary, someone who has the ability to see what is happening in many different areas and synthesize these ideas into a cohesive platform for a diverse array of narrative and ideologies. Please talk about the inspiration to launch EYEMAZING in 2003. What brought you to the idea of creating a print periodical on photography? What were your inspirations, in whatever form they might take (be it intellectual, aesthetic, production, curatorial, etc)?
Eyemazing Susan: When I left the Theatre world and stopped dancing I needed a new language to express myself. Photography was that language for me, once again just like with dancing no words were needed to get creative.
The ex-dancer going back to school. After 4 years of schooling, I worked as a photographer but never considered myself as one. I was a frustrated image maker doing commercial work to make a living and take care of my daughter, but no matter how hard I tried, after 7 years, still not able to promote my autonomous work, and so I decided to do something else in the world of photography, I knew exactly what was missing for the artists and I was going to do something about it, my idea was to create a unique platform for exceptional photography.
And so EYEMAZING was born. A unique publication made by a photographer for other photographers. Nothing like my first magazine Free Eye, with EYEMAZING I was free to do the layout, design and photo editing my way, and so EYEMAZING became a new moving gallery, a gallery-on-paper with highly collectible cutting-edge photography, an independent publication, a source of inspiration for all kind of creative people.
I love this sentence from the introduction: “As a magazine devoted to contemporary photography, it points to the three supreme states of the medium: photography as photography, photography as art, photography as life.” As the founder and editor in chief, EYEMAZING could be said to represent your worldview, both in photography and publishing, as well as how those subjects relate to the world itself. Could you speak about how you, as the creative mind behind the publication, use EYEMAZING as a bridge between these worlds?
More specifically, how does the photograph, the story around the photograph, and the act of sharing this by print create conversation, community, communion, and connection between artist, audience, and art? How does this reflect your larger vision of the place of photography and print publishing in today’s world?
Having been a dancer I always had my body to express my emotions, and it was while making EYEMAZING book for T&H, that I realized my choice of photography in the magazine had a lot to do with my back ground as a dancer, my eyes were continuously seeking for expressive, moving, physical, dynamic, pictures loaded with human emotions.
Also I always looked for reflection of humanity in pictures, being a very private person, mostly isolated with no recall of any family memories, as an outsider I looked for other people’s memories of their past life through pictures in anonymous family albums.
Curious of other people’s faces, I favored portrait photography. Today still wondering, if after dancing I became a photographer because I was a voyeur or simply a social phobic hiding behind a camera?
I am not ashamed of saying that EYEMAZING is a very selfish project, I am a control freak and I believe that the only way to posses the editorial freedom is for me to work alone. Freedom of expression above all.
Vision of one person was the key to make EYEMAZING different than other magazines, I was never busy with the fact if readers liked or not my taste in photography. As a reader, you do not need to be a photography connoisseur to be moved by EYEMAZING. You only have to be open-minded to let yourself get inspired. And so EYEMAZING became slowly my diary book?
Some gallery owners criticized me as being too stubborn by showing only what I liked? I take that as a big compliment. Why must I feature in my magazine a work that doesn’t inspire me? I refused to publish work of artists just for promotion purposes of private institutions.
Looking back at the very first issues and my latest issues, making the magazine was a learning process, biggest lesson was that when your work becomes your passion and if what you create comes straight from your heart everyone at some point will be moved by it, positively or negatively, my goal was to move readers emotionally good or bad it didn’t matter.
What impresses me about your vision is the ways in which you relate to the object of the photograph itself, the way you connect with artists whose work pushes against the expectations and constraints of the medium itself. When viewing the work in EYEMAZING, we let go of our preconceived notions about what the photograph “is” and what it “does” and open ourselves to new ideas, iconographies, symbolic languages, and narrative ideologies.
How is it, do you think, that the photograph can take on so many different applications, and what is it that attracts you to (I want to say “iconoclastic” but I am not sure this is the right word so maybe I will say “challenging”) qualities of the medium itself?
I am never interested how a picture is made.
The final result is what it counts for me, technical aspects of photography, digital or analogue honestly I don’t want to know.
But what I do know is that I am a paper fetish, crazy about printed matters.
Photography’s very legitimacy as a true art form is still debated regularly? Photography as medium? Photography as art form?
Does it even matter?
To my opinion the real question should be if the photographer is an artist or not?
Today every single person on earth is making pictures, but that doesn’t make us all artists.
For the better part of its existence, photography has struggled for recognition from the art world proper. A great many people dedicated their careers to it being acknowledged as such. What I find attractive about EYEMAZING is the way in which it builds upon this, that it takes our understanding of the “art” of photography as a given and continues a conversation of art and aesthetics within the form. What has drawn you to this aspect of photography, and where (or how) does EYEMAZING situate itself within this conversation?
With EYEMAZING my passion for photography became my way of life, and the beautiful part of it was that artists had trust in me, maybe because I was always on their site, maybe because I was one of them.
I made EYEMAZING together with the artists; I was working for them, with them, hoping to get them one step further in their carrier.
For the last decade I have been spoiled everyday with a sea of artworks submitted to me, more than 800 email a day with only images and Links to photography sites.
In 2012, with a lot of doubt, as a tryout, I made a digital version of few of my latest issues (mostly for the sake of subscribers who never received the magazine because of heavy censorship in their countries). Reactions of fans and readers were very negative and disappointing, mostly like, Oh Susan why? Not necessary for EYEMAZING to go digital, and they were right, stupid of me for having tried and even considered the digital EYEMAZING.
Printed matter will never die; well, the good quality printed matter will never die.
Eyemazing
The New Collectible Art Photography
Published by Thames&Hudson Ltd
ISBN 9780500516850
33.50 x 24.50 cm
Hardback without Jacket
544pp
423 Illustrations, 423 in color
First published October 2013
http://www.EYEMAZING.com
Sophie Ristelhueber_EveryOne
Eyemazing Susan-by Pierre Alivon at Paris Photo