Laurel Nakadate - Artist Lecture

Laurel Nakadate was probably one of my favorite presenters to date.  She was extremely well spoken, highly intelligent, and very much at ease and quick to answer any questions that came her way.    Laurel Nakadate described or work as performance with an integration of photography and film as a creative means of capturing her performance.  This was interesting because I immediately thought when looking at all her photographic still that they tended to seem cinematic. I would consider her art to fall into the three categories that I mentioned photography, film, and performance.  I like the idea of thinking about making performance piece with the end product in mind.   I think the project I found most interesting in relation to this was the Luckytiger series.  The images of her dressed in a bikini in typical locations were very interesting on there own.   However the final images had finger marked ink smudges on them form both Laurel and the stranger, whom which she meet on craigslist.  I think that she has taken a lot of risks in her work and  that she is lucky nothing every bad happened.  She mentioned that she would probably not try some of the things today that she had done in the past.  Although there were many memorable quotes from this lecture my personal favorite was in relation to her process of making films “The world is amazing and no amount of money can build a perfect set ... trust that it will work out and it will.”  This way thinking reminded me of how I have been photographing lately.   I am more interested in the natural beauty of the world and the relationships in the scene whatever the lighting conditions may be.  I used to drag in flashes and light everything in a very specific way, while this one methodology I think it was distracting from my intentions.

1.  I notice that most of your images seem as if the use primarily only natural light? Is this true and what is your reasoning behind this?  Although not answered directly knowing Laurel Nakdate’s work I would have to say she uses natural light out of connivence of being able and free to shoot wherever and whenever she wants.  There is absolutely no set up time with natural light and with a good eye can be better than any light you could ever buy.

2. Seeing that you deal in both photography and film is there one medium you prefer more than the other?  Do you think it's important for photographers to understand film making?  After the lecture I really feel like this question is irrelevant.  She has made some feature films but the still seem to operate to me as a means of social experimentation and a performance.  She said that her work is a performance captured via film and photographs, therefor I think  her real focus is in performance and neither photography or film.  Her abilities in these two fields is merely a mechanism to display a final product which depicts in essences what happened during the performance.