The opinions expressed in this essay are the author’s own.
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About the PhotographerSamantha Sutcliffe (b. 1990) is a documentary artist, writer and curator. In 2021 she started Uncensored New York, an art movement dedicated to preserving transgression through distribution, free education and public programming. Her work focuses on the intricacies of the human condition, exploring topics about alienation, sexuality, beauty, and the exploitative nature of media. She is the recipient of the 2022 Creatives Rebuild New York, 2021 City Artist Corps Grant, 2021 Fotofilmic Scholarship, the 2021 Hopper Prize Finalist, the 2021 Lucie Foundation Notions of Home Prize Winner, the 2018 Medfoto artist in residence and a recipient of a 2018 International Center of Photography Director’s Cut Scholarship and a resident of the Crete Workshop led by Alec Soth. Her work was published in the 2021 Fotofilmic JRNL curated by Paul Schiek from TBW Books and featured on Atlantic Re.Think, Musee Magazine, Paper Journal and Booooooom. Sutcliffe currently lives and works in New York City. |
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In the beginning of the year, I was frequenting a porn theater on the outskirts of Queens. On my first day there I met a sixty-two-year-old self-proclaimed crossdresser named Veronica and we exchanged numbers. The theater is a big part of her life where she can explore her sexuality. She says people check their emotions at the door. A younger queer male tells me the theater is the only place where you can be yourself. There is no judgement. The space allows both anonymity and privacy from the outside world. The only requirement for entry is fifteen dollars cash at the front door. Veronica lived in the lower east side from the mid 80s to 2004. I asked her if the closure of porn theaters and other public sex sites led to a change in my generation’s sexuality and her response was that the major impact of my generation was September 11th and technology.
Wildwood, a vacation town with architecture like Las Vegas, is located off the last stop on the turnpike in Cape May County. This infamous “Jersey Shore” town has a rate of drug-related crimes higher than the average US city. A lot of kids come down from the AC / Berlin area one hour north and 45 minutes west in Camden County by the Pennsylvania border. The party I pass on the front porch of a two-story beach house is the closest thing to reality television you can get. White panels, metal railing, cheap patio furniture, and three guys wearing Hanes T-shirts. I meet Anthony, AJ, Chris, and his girlfriend Tori. They hauled here from Philadelphia for the summer to work in a restaurant. Their boss pays the rent and they’ve never been happier. Cigarettes for days, booze on the beach. Frozen drinks, sugar, lemon, sunburn, headaches, exhaustion, and sweat.
The photographs you see here are emotional encounters that reveal what’s beneath a glamorous facade. The images have a sadness. I think about the cracks in our society. Some portraits were taken of strangers in my hometown while retracing the footsteps of my youth while other portraits were taken of people I met while working as an event photographer in New York City. I’ve learned that we all suffer from similar problems.
Sexuality is more commercialized than ever by the internet. The results are a glamorous misrepresentation of reality. I grew up in the suburbs, heavily impacted by fashion and music magazines, the ones my mother subscribed to for me. Marketing and fetishization are really deceptive to me. I’ve become fixated on the lies we’ve been told. The truth is a lot of people don’t socialize. They don’t leave their homes. People get stuck in their heads. There is no community. That is the problem. Our culture promises happiness with transformation and never speaks about disappointments. Technology is pulling us away from genuine physical contact and if you look hard enough you will be confronted by a harsh reality.
Interview with Truth in Photography
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
TiP: What is your intent with these photographs? What are you trying to convey?
Sutcliffe: The most important intent is really just meeting these people. A lot of times I work with them one on one and it's a really positive experience for them. They're able to talk through things and feel companionship. So for me, the main thing is for people to feel less alone, but in a broader sense, I feel like a lot of the people I photograph you don't really see much. Like the ones of Veronica or the subject in the detransition story, for instance. You don't really see those sorts of people in the mainstream.
TiP: How do you feel your photographs connect to the idea of truth in photography?
Sutcliffe: When we look at images of glamor in mainstream media, they're often manipulated in a sense, and they're trying to sell some kind of happiness or some kind of product or trend. I take those same subject matters and shoot them in a way that's not commercialized. There are no frills. But a lot of it is also the interviews. I've been working on a lot of grant applications, and I finally made a video with the interview transcripts, and I realized the words are just as important as the images.
TiP: Can you complete the sentence, truth in photography is…
Sutcliffe: …not altering what’s in front of you. You could also say truth in photography is what you don't see in the mainstream. You're pointing out certain things that aren't talked about, that are hidden behind closed doors. Like with the photo of the girl in the bathing suit, she is a well-known writer who is outspoken about her experience with cosmetic surgery. The Cut desribed her as a “No Botox Moralist,” and she is portrayed in a certain way that is very glamorous. I feel that when I photographed her, you kind of see a darkness or a sadness to it. Our culture really promotes this idea of being able to buy happiness. I'm showing the other side of that.
Sutcliffe: The most important intent is really just meeting these people. A lot of times I work with them one on one and it's a really positive experience for them. They're able to talk through things and feel companionship. So for me, the main thing is for people to feel less alone, but in a broader sense, I feel like a lot of the people I photograph you don't really see much. Like the ones of Veronica or the subject in the detransition story, for instance. You don't really see those sorts of people in the mainstream.
TiP: How do you feel your photographs connect to the idea of truth in photography?
Sutcliffe: When we look at images of glamor in mainstream media, they're often manipulated in a sense, and they're trying to sell some kind of happiness or some kind of product or trend. I take those same subject matters and shoot them in a way that's not commercialized. There are no frills. But a lot of it is also the interviews. I've been working on a lot of grant applications, and I finally made a video with the interview transcripts, and I realized the words are just as important as the images.
TiP: Can you complete the sentence, truth in photography is…
Sutcliffe: …not altering what’s in front of you. You could also say truth in photography is what you don't see in the mainstream. You're pointing out certain things that aren't talked about, that are hidden behind closed doors. Like with the photo of the girl in the bathing suit, she is a well-known writer who is outspoken about her experience with cosmetic surgery. The Cut desribed her as a “No Botox Moralist,” and she is portrayed in a certain way that is very glamorous. I feel that when I photographed her, you kind of see a darkness or a sadness to it. Our culture really promotes this idea of being able to buy happiness. I'm showing the other side of that.
TiP: You certainly have a sense of deep emotion. You use that word “sadness” in your essay. How do you see sadness? What are the indicators?
Sutcliffe: There are a lot of factors. Disappointment, isolation, alienation, that's the root of it. Recently I realized alienation means no love, which is hate for one's self or hate for another. It's really simple and I think everyone can relate to that in some way or another. But sometimes I wonder if sadness can be a projection like the girl in front of the waterfall. That's taken in my hometown. I see that place, and I see that girl, and then I think of my experience with that place, being a teenager in a small town and stuff. It might just be that we are vulnerable to one another.
TiP: When you're photographing these individuals, it's clear that you're having an interaction with them. Talk about the nature of the interaction.
Sutcliffe: With some, it's the first time I meet them and if there is a connection I continue to get to know them. Like with Veronica she was a stranger that I met, we got to know each other through the lens of my camera and now she's in my life. She's part of my community. The majority of these people are in my life. So there is a strong connection, even with the sex doll, and I develop a relationship with these people over an extended period of time. Rarely are these interactions a flash in the pan.
TiP: I thought the sex doll was interesting. I must say that when I first looked at it, I didn't realize it was a doll.
Sutcliffe: There are a lot of factors. Disappointment, isolation, alienation, that's the root of it. Recently I realized alienation means no love, which is hate for one's self or hate for another. It's really simple and I think everyone can relate to that in some way or another. But sometimes I wonder if sadness can be a projection like the girl in front of the waterfall. That's taken in my hometown. I see that place, and I see that girl, and then I think of my experience with that place, being a teenager in a small town and stuff. It might just be that we are vulnerable to one another.
TiP: When you're photographing these individuals, it's clear that you're having an interaction with them. Talk about the nature of the interaction.
Sutcliffe: With some, it's the first time I meet them and if there is a connection I continue to get to know them. Like with Veronica she was a stranger that I met, we got to know each other through the lens of my camera and now she's in my life. She's part of my community. The majority of these people are in my life. So there is a strong connection, even with the sex doll, and I develop a relationship with these people over an extended period of time. Rarely are these interactions a flash in the pan.
TiP: I thought the sex doll was interesting. I must say that when I first looked at it, I didn't realize it was a doll.
Sutcliffe: Yeah. I feel like the sex doll brought this project to another level, because I've been working on this for probably ten years now, and it's taken on many different forms. At first it was about isolation in the suburbs. Then there was my friend who detransitioned, and it became about gender expression. And then I met the lady at the porn theater who started exploring her gender later in life. So there were all these threads of gender expression and sexuality and alienation and all of that, and after encountering the sex doll I started looking through portraits of people I've taken who are considered influencers, and I thought, this is actually about beauty and alienation and how media has impacted us. How we are sold a certain image.
TiP: So much of the way we perceive an image is based on the way in which it's framed, the lighting. How do those factors affect your work? Sutcliffe: I photograph in a way that makes everything look really glamorous. It's intentional. The black and white flash creates this Hollywood vibe to draw people in. And it's almost like you then get slapped with the truth, or the reality of it. That's how I like to describe it. You're lured in by the tones and then you see the reality of it. |
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TiP: So, you want that brightness, that presence, because in a sense, it undermines what your expectations are in terms of what you're seeing.
Sutcliffe: Yeah. I think at first, it wasn't a conscious choice. I started shooting this way in college. I feel that with black and white, there are less distractions. You can really focus on the subject matter rather than being distracted by the color. The tones and the textures of black and white, create more of a darkness.
TiP: Where do you see your work going from here?
Sutcliffe: I'm going to continue working on it. This project's not done. I feel it's going to take another five years, but I'm going to try and exhibit it in different ways, with the audio component, and then hopefully make a book of everything one day. But right now, I'm applying to different residency programs and different grants to help expand it. I would like to photograph more in the Midwest. I visited this past January and started exploring smaller towns in Arkansas on the border of Missouri where one of my family members lived briefly. It's going to take a while to finish. But I do want to bring it to some spaces to show, mixed in with other mediums as well, not just traditional photography. I feel there's a lot of limitations with traditional photography. And now that I understand specifically what it is I'm trying to say, I can build off that in other ways.
TiP: What are the limitations for you, that you see in traditional photography?
Sutcliffe: It's the lack of hearing the person's voice. With photography, where we're at right now, it's been so commercialized that you never know what's real or not and there are so many images out there that most get lost. Being able to hear someone's voice creates more of a truth to it, because when people use their voices they have more agency and I’m no longer telling their story. Like in Jim Goldberg's project Raised by Wolves there is this really raw video footage of him interviewing this man at McDonald’s, and the guy talks about his life. It's completely casual. You hear his voice, and you know it's not staged. He's not acting.
Sutcliffe: Yeah. I think at first, it wasn't a conscious choice. I started shooting this way in college. I feel that with black and white, there are less distractions. You can really focus on the subject matter rather than being distracted by the color. The tones and the textures of black and white, create more of a darkness.
TiP: Where do you see your work going from here?
Sutcliffe: I'm going to continue working on it. This project's not done. I feel it's going to take another five years, but I'm going to try and exhibit it in different ways, with the audio component, and then hopefully make a book of everything one day. But right now, I'm applying to different residency programs and different grants to help expand it. I would like to photograph more in the Midwest. I visited this past January and started exploring smaller towns in Arkansas on the border of Missouri where one of my family members lived briefly. It's going to take a while to finish. But I do want to bring it to some spaces to show, mixed in with other mediums as well, not just traditional photography. I feel there's a lot of limitations with traditional photography. And now that I understand specifically what it is I'm trying to say, I can build off that in other ways.
TiP: What are the limitations for you, that you see in traditional photography?
Sutcliffe: It's the lack of hearing the person's voice. With photography, where we're at right now, it's been so commercialized that you never know what's real or not and there are so many images out there that most get lost. Being able to hear someone's voice creates more of a truth to it, because when people use their voices they have more agency and I’m no longer telling their story. Like in Jim Goldberg's project Raised by Wolves there is this really raw video footage of him interviewing this man at McDonald’s, and the guy talks about his life. It's completely casual. You hear his voice, and you know it's not staged. He's not acting.
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