How to look at pictures
Turbo photo talk with the visual-culture-commentary queen Emily Keegin
Welcome to Concorde — a bimonthly edition of Blackbird Spyplane where Erin takes the lead. The full Concorde archive lives here…
Our interviews with Tyler, The Creator, Jerry Seinfeld, Emily Bode, Lorde, André 3000, Sandy Liang, Daniel Arnold, Phoebe Bridgers, Nathan Fielder, Steven Yeun, Rashida Jones, John Mayer and more are here.
Visual culture … this s**t is all around us. And sometimes in this topsy turvy, hustle bustle modern world?? Visual culture can seem paralyzingly, maddeningly, violently dense, to the degree that we start to feel like little boats tossed helplessly on the raging currents of a seductive, manipulative, churning OCEAN OF PICS.
Thankfully there are people with their “visual hands” on the rudder, helping us navigate the imagistic storm … People like photo director and big homie Spyfriend Emily Keegin!!
Emily cut her “optical teeth” at The Fader, Time and Businessweek, and is also a must-follow Instagram phenomenon (320k followers, ok ma!) thanks to her sharp, vivid & funny breakdowns of trends in contemporary photography. She lets loose in charmingly typo-filled rants, dissecting and diagramming everything from how news outlets portray different politicians to Photoshop fails to what props are having a moment in fashion editorials (Yves Klein blue rugs and Thonet chairs, most recently).
Emily also happens to be one of my closest friends. She's also our neighbor and gets fits off daily. She’s been known to saunter over to Spyplane HQ wearing ill knitted boots by Bless… other times you might catch her wearing a couple of sumptuous nest Robe linen dresses at once, on her Mach 4+ layering s**t.
So the other day I (Erin) moseyed over to Emily’s place to get in some “turbo talk” about what’s happening with pictures right now, how we can begin to see them the way she does … and become expert captains of our own “boats of vision.”
Concorde: Photographers usually get all the glory, but you highlight the power of photo editing brilliantly on your IG — pointing out the ways photos interact with each other in a layout, drawing horizon and gaze lines over images to show what’s happening compositionally, like a football coach mapping out plays. What magazines are doing especially interesting things right now with print and digital photo editing?
Emily Keegin: “There aren’t a lot of risks happening in editing at the moment in magazines — the things I really love aren’t happening in layout design. We’re in a moment of being very conscious of the frame, and respecting the photo frame. In part that’s because it’s hard to break the frame online: Things come in preset squares and grids, they’re all in the same composition that’s friendly to online scrolling, vertical scrolling.
“But MacGuffin magazine is doing amazing things. They’re using photography as an equal partner in storytelling — I hate to use that word— but they use and abuse a photograph to help move a story forward. They’re thinking about photography as a tool, which I find really exciting. They smush genres all together, it’s never just portraiture. It’s never precious. It’s a portrait slammed next to still life, slammed next to close-up textures.”
“And Buffalo is really great — they change their whole structure every issue. The format and designs they choose reinforce whatever they’re doing editorially. With most magazines, the structure and templates remain the same and you have to work within them. But in art school we were taught that the art doesn’t stop once the photo is taken: The second part is how you present it and frame it, all of those choices matter. In editorial photography the same is true, but we tend to forget that. So it’s a thrill to watch people continue to work on an idea after the photo’s taken — where and how a photo is placed and contextualized makes a huge difference.”
Concorde: You’re always sharing amazing work on your Instagram — what contemporary photographers should we keep an eye on?
Emily Keegin: “Chantal Anderson is great. Celebrity photography is so f**king hard and she seems to find these really authentic moments with people. The person who I often bring up on Instagram is Sinna Nasseri. And Harley Weir is doing amazing work for Another magazine.”
Concorde: You recently texted me about how there’s a current trend toward collage in photography that you see as connected with the mending trend that’s been happening in fashion…. Expound on that for us…
Emily Keegin: “Oh s**t, yes, I think the collage and mending trends are coming from a similar place and influence. Part of collage is about this overwhelming feeling of how much content is available, and that’s not a positive feeling. Mending speaks to the same feeling, like, ‘We already have enough.’ It’s a reaction to fast fashion, and climate change, and over-consumption in fashion, along with a desire to see things made by a human hand. And they have similar histories, mainly done by women. It’s like scrapbooking from the ‘90s, which was also largely something women were into. It’s also a reaction to how clean things are online, and it’s the same instinct in fashion: we want to show patina and the sense of something that’s been worn.”
Concorde: I’ve long loved collage, and you put me onto Sara Cwynar a while ago, who’s incredible. What are some of your other favorite examples of collage in photography?
Emily Keegin: “Sara Cwynar is the head of the pack. Hannah Höch is a great example from the 1920s and ‘30s…
“It all started around that time with the surrealists. They began doing collage and removing the horizon line, and then they entered the editorial world because they got hired by Condé Nast. They brought with them the concept of collage, and that brings the white background into the editorial space.
“And it’s come full circle: One of the biggest trends in the last 10 years has been collage in photography. The barrage of imagery that we get online, and the lack of context… How images are re-contextualized when seen next to random images on the internet. It’s incredible how non-linear the images become. It’s almost algorithmic.”
Concorde: There’s a weird inadvertent beauty to Google Image Search — it can create a collage where you get these random adjacencies from around the internet. Ok, let’s talk about flash in photography. It’s back? Is it an ‘indie sleaze revival’ thing?
Emily Keegin: “It was back. I don’t know. It might be going out. It came, saw, conquered and left the building. Lighting in interior photography is looking different than portraits right now. Interior is a lot of golden light, which is the long tail of a return to film. But film became really expensive, so what we are seeing now is the digital representation of a film look.”
Concorde: It reminds me of the gray-toned “wet putty” car color trend we wrote about … You recently called out a contemporary mode of interior lighting, saying “everything is mud.” Do you think this lighting looks “off” because the human eye can tell the lighting isn’t real?
Emily Keegin: “Yes, that’s why it feels so heavy. If you were to shoot on film, you would have a warmer quality of light, so that’s what people are trying to recreate. Our lighting is also mimicking old lighting right now — the light bulbs we use in our homes are trying to mimic that incandescent glow, and mostly failing. That doesn’t feel right to my generation, but it might become the norm to younger people who are literally growing up with different lighting.”
Concorde: Something a lot of people might not know — like those who only know you through your IG stories — is that you have great style and are always dripping. Are there any stores that photograph their clothes in interesting ways?
Emily Keegin: “Stand Up Comedy is my go-to. The models are always in some random office building in Portland.”
Concorde: You have an incredible library of photo books and magazines — defunct, vibey and small-print publications like Wet (a magazine about “gourmet bathing” from the ‘70s), Feminist Baseball (a Seattle-based zine from the ‘90s), and George (JFK Jr.’s politics-as-lifestyle ‘90s mag), etc. Where do you find them?
Emily Keegin: “Mostly eBay but also…. Micamera, Printed Matter, The Concern Newsstand, Bonanza, David Campany, Foam, Ideabooks, Sha sha sha, Setanta, Mack, High Valley, photo-eye (it’s a mess but I love it).”
Concorde: Finally, we like to ask people to share a special cherished possession, and I know that will be hard for you to narrow down, since you have amazing objects all over your home… so feel free to share a few things…
Emily Keegin: “This silver candelabra (2 above) was made by an artist friend of my sister’s, and she gave it to me on my wedding day. We use it in the winter to light our family dinners — and to light my friends’ faces. Another thing I love is this dog sculpture by my aunt Lynn Landor (3). She calls it a ‘birddog’ because it’s part bird and part dog. It looks bronze but it’s made of clay. The same aunt gave me these Joss paper shoes (1). They’re meant to be burned as offerings in China and at funerals. I like how the sun has bleached them. Oh, and I just got this stained glass (4) off some auction site, but don’t know anything about it.”
Concorde: That is sick. You always manage to find treasure on auction sites. But no mention of your incredible collection of combs? I’m always ogling them when I come over.
Emily Keegin: “We just moved, so my favorite comb is in a box somewhere, but this is my second favorite (5). This is the one that actually began the collection. It was in a dollar store in Brooklyn, and I just love it so much. Look how beautiful the scalloped edge is. Stunning! It’s like the idea of a comb.”
📸 Emily’s website is here. She’s on Instagram here.
📸 We got into “turbo graphic design talk” with Teddy Blanks here. Photography came up when we interviewed Michael Stipe, who showed us Andy Warhol’s Big Shot Polaroid camera, which he owns.
Yesssss Emilyyyyyyyyy!!!! 💗
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