Lucas Blalock: Do you feel like there is a stable relationship between words and images or do you feel it is always being reconsidered? For instance, in your project Words become images the photograph seems to become a stand in for language or a view built out of text. Is this how you are thinking about it? Masood Kamandy: I don t want to believe that there is a stable relationship between words and images. I like ambiguity. One thing I like to do is look through image archives, and it always strikes me how a newspaper image from the 40s or 50s can have so many unintended meanings when experienced today. Obviously some images are slaves to words. The stock photograph is an example. But that s not the kind of image I m interested in. Words become images was created in the spirit of exploring the tenuous relationship between words and images, which allows me a great freedom to approach language in different ways. It is about accumulating an entirely subjective, free-associative visual lexicon using terms supplied to me by strangers. I see it as an art-making machine. Never knowing what words pop into my email inbox and what images those words conjure up for me allows me a freedom to go beyond having an esthetic or visual conceit within the project. It allows me to draw from the history of photography, as well as my subjective relationship to image making for experimentation. It was also the first project where I looked beyond photography to think about the image. Lucas Blalock: I want continue for a moment with this notion of translation. I feel like this comes up most often in your work in the space between word and image but I also feel like it might have a deeper level of resonance. Can you talk a bit about how you see this? Masood Kamandy: Translation works on one level because it means there is an input and output. But the word also implies a one to one relationship between the values of that input and output, which isn t the case in my work. I think mediation and processing are closer to the ways that I see what I do in my practice as an artist.
Lucas Blalock: I can see that. I didn t mean to imply so much a one to one as a kind of passageway between systems. Do you feel like image making has the same sort of categorical determinates we find in language? Maybe we could say a grammar? Masood Kamandy: Passageway is the perfect word. I hope you don t mind if I steal that. If you re asking if I believe in a kind of structure [or Structuralism] when it comes to an image s meaning, I m very wary of that notion. I like the idea, and as an intellectual exercise I m very interested in trying to achieve some understanding of what that mythical grammar [semiotics] might be, but at the end of the day it s just an idea and, ultimately, I believe it s an impossible thing to achieve mastery of and I m ok with that. Images are entirely subjective and the experience of art is an inter-subjective one. I believe that the art in art doesn t exist inside of the pieces we make, but in a kind of interpretive space that exists between the viewer, the artwork and, to a lesser extent, the space the work is shown in. If I were to say that there s a grammar, that implies a kind of mathematics that I think kills images. It implies that the meaning contained within the image stops at the glass it sits behind and that idea makes me very sad. My idea of the perfect piece of art is never one that is self-contained. Lucas Blalock: I am further curious how you see these images relating to technology? I feel like the use of the term keyword really opens this conversation. I am also curious if you shoot all of the submissions? Masood Kamandy: I don t shoot all of the submissions. Some day I d like to. I keep them in an index card box on my desk and pull one out when I have time to do one. Technology and the internet have shaped the way I experience and create art. More and more I find myself relating to the notion of image capture, rather than photography in the traditional sense. If I use a 4x5 camera, it is because I am interested in the control and detail this form of image-capture provides. If I am interested in a high definition moving image, then I use an HD video camera. Technology is disruptive. It forces me to reconsider the history of photography. It forces me to rethink traditional boundaries between genres. The fact that an ink-jet print is in some ways more akin to a painting than a c-print is a good illustration of how technology forces artists to reconsider so many boundaries. That same ink-jet printing technology used by photographers is now printing 3D objects. Technology forces us to reconsider how we ve specialized our skills. As a kid my passion for my
[brother s] Apple IIe and programming in BASIC came before my passion for cameras, and I m now most excited when those two interests collide. Lucas Blalock: I think I am personally invested in the idea of photography, in ways of bringing its history and legibility forward in new practice but I also think that image capture makes a lot of sense in the way you are talking about it. I find myself always trying to close out the endless possibilities of the image to come to a specific experience of the thing that I feel it always mediated by the apparatus through which it was made. Is this something you are thinking about? Masood Kamandy: Absolutely. I m invested in photography, but equally invested in a kind of theoretical game: I ask myself what can a photograph be? Is a 3d scan a photograph? If we define a camera as a machine that captures information with a light sensor, then the answer might be yes. It seems arbitrary that just because the 1s and 0s are arranged in a different way, we choose to call something a photograph. It s all information. As I said earlier, technology has forced us to reconsider traditional boundaries and, even what a photograph is. I think that s incredibly exciting for the medium, but then it s a medium that has always been in flux and I think that s my attraction to it. Photography doesn t just involve taking photographs. It involves post-production like editing, retouching and printing. I m most excited by things that are happening in photography in this area. My interest is in exploring what an image can do and be after it has been taken. Traditionally, post-production strives to be as invisible as possible. From photography s beginnings, manipulating the viewer and creating the impossible was one of the prime goals of photography. We can do that. Henry Peach Robinson did it in the 19th century. That s what draws me to your work. There s a kind of ethics and honesty involved in your photographs. The way that they were made is a part of the end product and they don t try to hide behind illusion or mimesis. You show your hand and I can relate to that impulse. Lucas Blalock: I also wanted to ask specifically about your turn to video after an earlier time making mostly still work. I feel like the videos like Video Portrait I and II really play on the nature of the medium and I am interested in what your motivations were as you moved from one to the other?
Masood Kamandy: Unspoken Portrait I and II are about the act of editing, or to put it more aggressively, cutting. I wanted to create a portrait of a person and cut out all of the words. I wanted my role as the editor to be obvious, so I made it clear by leaving the beginning and ends of words. I wasn t present during the filming and I edited the words out moving backwards, so I have no idea what they were saying. Part of it was motivated by a basic questioning of what kind of information is transmitted by a visual image if I remove the verbal content. In that sense it was an experiment, but then that s how I see all of my work. The turn to video just represents one more way to explore the meta-narrative of my work. To be honest, cinema and music videos were the first forms of art that I was ever exposed to that I felt truly passionate about and I can t help but think that this influences my desire to work in the medium. Moving outside of the medium of photography (not only into video, but words, bookmaking, sculpture and installation as well) is about having more freedom to explore the ideas I m working with. You could call it a kind of conceptualism. Letting go of medium-specificity and embracing an interdisciplinary approach allows me to focus on the ideas behind my work rather than reinforcing or working within the various histories of one medium. Lucas Blalock: Lastly, I wanted to ask a rather personally motivated question. Could you talk about how moving to Los Angeles last year (something I am on the verge of doing myself) has affected your work? Masood Kamandy: Los Angeles is an amazing place. People love to hate it. Angelenos even love to hate it. There s this charming self-deprecating quality that the city has about itself, and let s face it, it s not the most beautiful city we could imagine a city to be. If you think of a city as beautiful skylines with soaring buildings, crowded streets and people jostling into one another, you ll be disappointed, i.e. it s hard to be a flâneur in LA. There are few great boulevards for walking up and down and people watching is something that happens more in shopping malls than on the streets. That said, I find the culture here fascinating. It might be representative of a lot of things about American culture that are problematic like car culture, isolation from one another, endless rows of single-family homes, and pollution (although the air is cleaner now than it s been in a long time). But it s also emblematic of the type of American optimism that created Los Angeles in the first place. People were looking for paradise in all its various imaginary forms, so they made it. It s entirely fake. The
palm trees aren t even from here. It s a city of contradictions that constantly keeps me thinking. I m working on a project right now that revolves around the idea of Los Angeles being imaginary, a site of projection, through various post-production interventions with stills and video footage of the city. In Los Angeles I spend more time in my own imagination than the imagination of the city, and I think that is making me a better artist. I think you ll like it here. And I think you ll love UCLA. If I m wrong I ll take you guys out for dinner. This interview was originally published July 2011 on toomuchchocolate.org. Reprinted with permission of the artist.