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Elle Pérez Works Between the Frame | Art21 "New York Close Up"

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    [CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS]
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    [Elle Pérez, Artist]
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    I love that space where
    something is a photograph
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    and not necessarily a word.
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    Or, you haven't put the words
    together for what you're looking at yet.
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    Something can live there in photography
    and not have to be definitive.
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    [Elle Pérez Works Between the Frame]
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    My cousin Alex is an
    entertainment wrestler in the Bronx.
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    I sent him a message,
    "Can I come and photograph your show?"
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    And he was like,
    "Yeah, just don't tell our family."
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    When I was photographing the wrestlers,
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    what I was interested in was
    the choreography of the wrestling match,
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    because the thing about entertainment wrestling
    is that everything is scripted
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    and everything is choreographed.
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    And there are ways that you
    would move your body
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    to look more authentically
    like you were in pain.
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    If you were hanging like
    Joe is hanging on the ropes,
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    this extended moment
    becomes more sculptural.
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    [LAUGHS]
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    I don't think there's a way to
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    involve a camera without
    immediately involving a kind of fiction.
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    All of this is about an aspiration
    toward acting.
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    [SUBWAY NOISES]
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    In a way, my work has always
    been made collaboratively.
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    Because of that, that's why
    I don't think of it as documentary.
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    Because my work had such a raw,
    visceral relationship to emotional authenticity,
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    people often would recommend
    that I would go into documentary.
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    But I could never figure out
    the ethics of it.
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    I was yelled at by the editor of
    National Geographic
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    for my photos looking misleading,
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    because they looked like
    documentary images,
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    but they actually were made
    by staging them.
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    It looks effortless.
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    They're still pretty set up.
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    [CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS]
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    Definitely the geography of
    where a lot of the pictures are made--
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    whether it's in the Bronx or Puerto Rico--
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    it's really important, and
    I don't think about it too much at all.
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    I think about them as being
    more related to people.
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    They're all made from really strong relationships.
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    But how do you show something
    that relates to a particular experience
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    without showing the spectacle of it?
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    The photograph of the hand,
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    it has such a visceral, physical feeling
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    of what two bodies could be capable of.
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    You can use photography to depict
    things that you actually cannot picture.
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    It has so much to do with identity,
    and it has so much to do with
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    how surfaces have the ability
    to contain the traces of an experience.
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    A binder is a chest compression garment that,
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    initially, it was designed for men who
    had excess breast tissue.
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    Then it got co-opted by
    the transmasculine community.
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    The photograph that I made of my binder
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    was only possible after that object
    had been worn for, like, five years.
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    It had become frayed.
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    The sweat and pain of that garment,
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    all of it is visible in the fabric itself--
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    and then in how it's photographed with
    an extreme focus on precise details.
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    The pictures focus on something like a seam,
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    or on someone's tattoos,
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    or on someone's face.
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    Then when you see it at a scale,
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    you're able to have a certain
    proximity to detail
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    that you can't have in just
    your day-to-day relationship.
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    These giant wall collages that
    I would use to draw from--
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    whether it was drawing for writing,
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    or drawing from text,
    or text fragments--
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    just looking at things and having
    them be reflected back at me
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    so that I can think about them.
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    Then things slowly make
    their way into the work.
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    Form being related to queerness
    because it's undefinable and unboundaried,
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    it has to have such a space of possibility
    within it to even be possible at all.
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    Something like a photograph is then
    like a perfect container,
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    because it is not
    actually ever definitive.
Title:
Elle Pérez Works Between the Frame | Art21 "New York Close Up"
Description:

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Video Language:
English
Team:
Art21
Project:
"New York Close Up" series
Duration:
06:23

English subtitles

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