INTERVIEW — Slater Bradley, to the Point by Kayla Tanenbaum
December 13, 2013
TANENBAUM: When I hear the word “muse,” I think of either Greek epic poets calling to the muses or a 19th-century painter and his mistress who lives in his apartment and he paints her.
BRADLEY: I think of more of a photography thing: Man Ray, Lee Miller. The muse as this almost like butterfly-like thing that you can’t possess, but you can capture it, and it’s fleeting.
TANENBAUM: Did these photos come about spontaneously, or did you have a project in mind?
BRADLEY: I like to make work about things that make me feel uncomfortable, and relationships that make me feel uncomfortable, and I thought it made me feel very uncomfortable to meet somebody and photograph them naked in my apartment, lit by the sunlight from the window. By then, the Doppelgänger project was like, “We’re going to shoot in the Museum of Natural History,” and there were so many logistical things—I needed to do something spontaneous and intimate. And then I started to go back into the photography thing because photography’s so difficult and so ubiquitous, and there’s so many fucking images, it’s like how do you stop? Not stop—how do you slow down the consumption of these images?
