I met Lady Tarin a few months ago in Milan, during a workshop she held for the Italian online magazine Cosebelle. I was really curious about her photographs and glad to talk about them with her in person. I’ve been always surprised by the way she sees women through her pictures: girls are posing mostly naked in front of her camera, yet she manages to avoid the set-ups and pretensions of the genre and to tell a personal story from an intimate point of view. Her work is much appreciated: Lady Tarin has worked with different magazines – including GQ, Dossier, PIG, Dust, Sang Bleu, I Love Fake and Novembre – and her project on nude has been published on LE DICTATEUR n°3 special edition for No Soul for Sale, Tate Modern London. We got together for a special dinner made of wine and homemade piadina, after a very long and stressful day: we relaxed and I asked her more about her work. Here’s what we talked about. (Interview by Alessia Marchioro)
I’d like to go straight to the core of your work and talk about your nude photographs, but maybe it’s better to start from a different aspect – that it to say, your favourite photographic technique. I think a lot can be understood from it.
I’d say so, since for my commercial work I use digital while for my personal projects, especially the nudes, I employ film and Polaroid.
Why?
Because they’re two completely different things. When I take a photo on film, that’s it, that’s the picture and you don’t have anything else to do, everything happens while shooting. If I take a photograph in digital, instead, there’s a necessary post-production work. Post-production is an actual work, very functional for some assignments. Moreover, the way in which skin is depicted on a physical support is different, more natural and concrete.
Looking at your photographs, I often wonder what sort of interaction is there between you and the girls who are the protagonists. How do they act in front of you? I don’t think everyone is immediately comfortable.
Actually they happen to be comfortable, because they’re free and also because there isn’t a set-up: I don’t ask them to do anything in particular, except taking back their body. A woman’s body is often not hers: because of the way in which one is brought up, because of cultural issues, there is always a request.
Why?
We still are in a situation in which the woman is not free, for many reasons. And my intention is to portray a woman who, besides being more free, can also show her personality. A nude is the most immediate thing for me: maybe a portrait as well, but a nude is the strongest thing.
The nude is sometimes what coerces the woman in certain canons and attitudes. Exactly because there is an aesthetics structured in a very masculine way of how a woman is or should be. You want to set her free, but in the end you still expose the body to the male gaze.
When I began doing this job, I wouldn’t have thought about doing nude. Then I understood I could represent a different type of imaginary, more feminine. We grow up surrounded by pictures that give us a very strong idea about how we should inhabit our body. Often, when I start taking pictures of a girl, I also have to strip her of a constructed attitude, which is not hers. I propose a natural attitude, without construction.
It’s exactly your point of view that reveals a very intense relationship with the female body. Even if it’s just a detail, it’s there and it shows.
Well, women are objectively beautiful.
I think so too. The female body is very beautiful. It’s exactly like saying something is beautiful and something is not. Something is harmonious and something is not. That’s how it is for me: the female body is beautiful and harmonious, the male body less so.
You notice a woman, before you notice a man. You notice her on the street. The nude photographs that are proposed and go around in general create an imaginary in men and women and therefore a strong scheme.
Sometimes I think that’s a scheme impossible to affect.
Indeed, in the end the girls who grow up with that sort of imaginary take on those unnatural poses. In my case, instead, they are natural: if you see that picture, you recognize yourself, you somewhat identify with it, maybe because of the skin texture or a flaw. I think it’s very different, not because it’s not real, it doesn’t belong to that scheme: the naked body of a woman with all its personality can’t even be compressed in a digital file, it’s something that has all the right and the strength to imprint the film. When I had my last show (at Le Dictateur in Milan, a one night show in late May), all the girls who saw those photographs came to me and said “I want you to take a picture of me too!”. They were not afraid, even though the photographs were very big in scale and showed naked women in very explicit poses.
In my opinion, it’s because you’re a woman. One thinks that with you she’s safe and can let go. With a man it’s different.
The imaginary surrounding us is masculine and we grow up in it because for the most part the photographers influencing this communication are male. Simply, the feminine imaginary didn’t come out because often not even women know what is the feminine imaginary. Most of the nude pictures shot by men are anti-erotic to me, just as porn which is notoriously a male-dominated industry. I do not recognize myself and in my opinion people don’t even see how normal this has become.
So normal that maybe you can’t even tell the difference anymore. I think of photographers like Anna Gaskell that through her projects manages to investigate the sometimes strange and morbid relationship between young girls. I believe a man could never understand and reproduce this sort of dynamics.
Yes, I believe it’s like that. However, some male dynamics are hard to understand for us too.
I have the impression that women have more complex dynamics, though. Among women there’s always more empathy, more altruism, you can put yourself in the other’s shoes.
But men are able to collaborate better, and that’s why they rule the world. For women it’s hard.
When it happens it’s very beautiful, though.
[As we finish discussing this, Tarin turns on the computer to put some music on]
Do you put music on, when you take pictures?
Always, rock or punk. Something strong, mostly rock.
The first photograph you’ve ever taken in your life?
A Polaroid. The camera is that one, it doesn’t work anymore. It was my first toy.
Have you always wanted to take pictures?
I’ve always taken pictures, but I wanted to draw, to paint: I attended the liceo artistico (in the Italian school system, a figurative arts oriented high-school) and then the Academy of Fine Arts. Actually, when I was there, I started to be keen on photography. I began to print in b/w and to develop the negatives… and that was the moment in which I understood what I wanted to do. I had always shot with a Nikon, for mere passion, though.
Is there anything or anyone you really don’t want to photograph?
Children [Tarin laughs], I don’t have a passion for them.
How come? Do you find them disturbing?
No. Maybe I’ll change my mind. You always end up changing your mind. It’s possible that something we don’t do today, tomorrow will be at the center of our thoughts and projects.
I always hope change is possible.
Yes, I think it is. In fact, one of the things I like to do is to shoot the same girls in more occasions, because I change and they do as well. So the shoot is always different, even if it’s always a few months later.
If you had to shoot a portrait of a famous person, who would you like?
Juliette Lewis. I like her a lot. A very good actress since she was a young girl. For example, in Cape Fear. I think she has an outrageous personality and I find original and somewhat odd her evolution in rock music. Another one I find very particular is Lou Doillon, but now she’s more of a fashion icon.
Contrary to many female photographers I know, you don’t like taking pictures of yourself. Why is that?
In most cases, I find it a boring and merely narcissistic operation. I like it when the project is actually strong, such as the self-portraits from the 70s onwards by Cindy Sherman. I exist in the moment in which I create the image: the picture is made by two people, thanks to the interaction with the subject, it works like in a relationship. But in the end there’s me who signs the image and therefore there is no reason for me to be present in the image too.
