Kathy Cooper

By Anna Bang

I am very excited to be interviewing our exciting new discovery via Skype, as it feels very 21st Century (thoroughly modern Millie me!) and will enable me to get a look at the intriguing woman from the images. It is also free, - we like a bit of freeness. Alas, Kathy for some reason can't get the photo part of her Skype to work so remains shrouded in mystery whereas my bags, winter-tired skin and the room from Hell is open to her curious scrutiny. Great... Bet Dorothy Parker never had these things happening to her. Actually I can imagine Dorothy constructing some witty apercu around this dilemma - oh just get on with it! Jesus!

Where are you from originally and why did you choose Paris?
I was born in South Africa, in Grahamstown, a small town in the Eastern Cape; my father is of English descent, and my mother's family is Jewish from the Ukraine. I did most of my growing up in Zimbabwe, and left Harare, the capital when I was nineteen.  I initially went to Nottingham, to do a BA (Hons) Photography at the Nottingham Trent University, but left before the end of the course to do a six-month exchange at the ENSP (Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie), a renowned school of photography in Arles, the south of France.  I ended up staying in this lovely little mediaeval town for seven years!  In fact, I technically still live there, that is until I find a job in Paris. I blame it all on my father actually. Through him, I discovered photography, using successively his Nikkormat, Leica, Rolleiflex, Hasselblad and Linhoff cameras, and developing and printing in his custom-built darkroom at home.  I suppose I inherited my sense of luxury and quality from him, which explains why I waited until just this year to possess my first computer: I'd accept nothing less than a Mac!

Maybe because I know you're based in Paris your images feel very Parisian. You can tell you love Paris. One imagines from the lavish locations that you are in a succession of beautiful, bohemian Parisian apartments. Do you think you could create similar images in say New York or London, or do you think that particular energy is very specific to Paris? Would moving to Milan, say, completely change your way of working?
No, no, I can do it anywhere! I did a series of shots in Chelsea in London at the beginning of the year and I can definitely take it with me!  I do have to have the right sort of energy coming from the people I'm with and the environment I'm in; apart from that, I try to recreate a similar sort of emotion wherever I go.  Usually it's dark or quirky, always sensual.

How do you find French people versus their English counterparts?
I get much more enthusiasm and much more feedback from the English. French people can be very elitist and old school. They like to use people they know. I mean the institution: galleries, newspapers and magazines. Apart from that, people in the art and fashion world, be they French or English, generally appreciate my work and encourage me.  However, in France, I have never been published on the grounds that I am unknown.  Where to start if no one takes the risk?

I can imagine Paris is a very hard nut to crack?
Oh absolutely! I no longer want to please my father, that is over, but I want to please people that I admire, that have the same creative energy.

What is your background? Did you study photography?
On leaving the ENSP in 2004 with a first class Masters in photography, for all that's worth, I was engaged as a black & white printer by Lucien Clergue, one of the world's greatest living photographers, who is, and will always remain an Arlesien. He was a like a second father to me, and it is thanks to Lucien that I have finally gathered the courage to leave Arles to look for work in Paris. I have always been rather afraid of Paris: full of temptation and delicious sinfulness. For many years it was a hostile place when I paid it furtive visits. Today, however, it has accepted me, and we will see where that leads.  For the moment, nothing concrete has come of our liaison, but I trust that my job search will soon yield fruit and that we shall become prosperous partners in crime. I mean, art!

What was your initial work like? I'm presuming not like your current work?
Actually it's funny, I did pictures of my friends from the convent, where I did my primary and secondary school. I set up a studio in the lounge and did nudes of them. It was all hush-hush, obviously! The nuns at school would have freaked out completely. And of course my father loved those, although they were quite kitsch, not my strongest work. I did start doing self-portraits with my best friend Vera that I just developed as contact sheets, never printed up. It was interesting rediscovering them in 2006.

Who are the people in your photos? They span quite a range, from your bohemian friends from Paris to what looks like family units. How does the families feel about your sexy stuff and vice versa?
Well funnily enough they occasionally overlap! They're cool about it.

They do look like cool artistic families! Not like...MINE! I can't see that go down well at all chez famille Bang!
No, no...they all know about my other work and they are fine about it. It doesn't mean they'd strip off as a family; not at all, but they know what I do and accept it. Which is quite gratifying. I don't want to hide myself. When I was at the convent back in Zimbabwe I would have been expelled if I'd been found out. My father delighted in the duality of being one thing in this extremely conservative Zimbabwean society, and then on the other hand, taking nudes but not showing this work to anyone. To me that was anathema, it simply was not on. Your work HAS to be shared.

You never mention your mother?
Well that's because I lost her when I was two. She committed suicide. My therapist is convinced that's the basis of all my problems! But I never knew her. So I had a really close relationship with my father, till it all started going wrong anyway. Well, it's made me what I am! I never really knew her, so I can't regret it.

Do you draw inspiration from other female photographers who've used themselves as models? Obviously both Emma Summerton and Cindy Sherman spring to mind.
Well actually no. Funny enough. People sometimes bring up Francesca Woodman, who committed suicide quite young and who did auto-portraits. It annoys me when people compare me to these photographers, so no, I don't.

Yes I noticed you didn't mention any female photographers as your inspiration - which is fine! You get a certain type woman who always thinks something is noteworthy because a woman has done it which I see as a kind of inverted patronizing, whereas I'm more interested in do I like this or not and the sex of the artist is rather irrelevant, frankly. I feel you're the same way, you're inspired by whomever you're inspired by, you don't give any nods to whether they're female or male.
I'm quite anti-feminist. I could have mentioned Annie Leibowitz, Sally Mann, Ellen Von Unwerth or Diane Arbus. I'm quite influenced by my father, whether I like it or not; quite male influenced; Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin are strong influences. I suppose I want to please men with my work! But all my gay friends also love it so I think it's gone beyond that. But when I took my first pictures it was totally to please my father.

That must have been quite stressful!
Not really because I was completely obsessed by him...so no. But at college I got really hammered for doing that, which confused me. So I didn't shoot anything for ages. They were saying he was wrong. Then I started hating him, our relationship went bad and that meant that I didn't have anyone in the back of my mind to do pictures for any longer. Then I got into the whole gay scene in Paris, through this underground clubbing scene. That was in 2006, when I'd reached a crisis point and was on the verge of marrying a Zimbabwean tobacco farmer and moving back to the bush to be a farmer's wife! Completely crazy!
All the images on my website are literally from 2006 up to the present; before that I was in a total creative slump.

Wow! To think you could be a Southern African hausfrau right now, five kids clinging to your skirts, with some oafish husband bellowing for his dinner. What a sacrifice you've made for your art, Kathy!
Yes...I could have been chained to the stove as we speak! But discovering the gay underground club scene made me aware that I had a lot more to do; it really opened my eyes. It's very important to be instinctive, to be in the moment. I realised I hadn't felt like that since I was 15-16 and just shooting for the hell of it, where you feel there is something to your images because they're instinctive. So I just pray that stays with me! You should never think when you're being creative. In fact, my best pictures recently have been after sleepless nights. One of the most important things to a successful picture is feeling beautiful enough to be able to completely forget yourself.

You mention the influence of muses a lot, which obviously leads me to ask, who is yours? Do you have just the one or a succession of muses?
I try to have just the one but they always disappoint me in one way or other. My one muse that has been constant, at least intellectually, is my best friend Vera from Zimbabwe. She has been trustworthy and supportive throughout my creative career. She has not let me down; not gone through drastic change; which is an amazing thing to me, whereas some of the others have been rather disappointing. I have several at the moment.

Muses are always traditionally female. You wonder why a man couldn't be a muse for a change. Why do you think that is? Are men too competitive? Not able to surrender their own creativity in order to support an artist?
Along with Vera I have my gay friends Frank and Craig as muses...  Yes, they're definitely my muses. And as Cocteau put it, there's nothing more virile and manly than a gay man, so definitely men as well!

If you weren't a photographer, what could you see yourself doing instead?
When I was petite, I wanted to be an actress. My father said it was a world full of homosexuals, and where you had to have sex to get anywhere. So then I wanted to be a writer, but I could never get beyond the first chapter. Now I am a photographer, and funnily enough, it has turned out to be like acting after all!  I think one should always stick with one's first instincts...  If I were to be offered a role in a film, I wouldn't say no!

Your images have a very painterly quality. Do you use film or digital, and which do you prefer?
Film!! I have never possessed a digital camera, though I do love scanning my negatives.  To me, there is nothing like a negative, Polaroid or transparency.

Can you see a backlash against digital? It's so dominant right now and invariably, when something becomes so very popular, people move away from it.
I think it is already happening.  One thing I have learned from Lucien is the value of real silver.

As the expert fine art printer that you are, do you feel a lot of the soul of photography has been lost because people are using digital and resorting to excessive retouching?
I have nothing against it, in others. I admire the prowess certain of my friends have in this domain.  However, I have never been able to sell a digital print, on principle. Usually, I print my own work, be it colour or black & white, or if it's tranny, I use Roland Dufau, one of Paris' few remaining real printers, who still uses the Ilfochrome (cibachrome) technique. For colour, I use the amazing lab at the ENSP.  They have a former-student-friendly policy, and allow us to return and spend magical days using their HK horizontal enlarger, which allows one to make prints up to 140cm wide, by projecting onto the wall. Heaven!

Your themes of your images vary from the sexual through family pictures to nature and fashion. Which do you find the most inspiring?
I love the organic nature of family and group pictures. I love people, the way their expressions change, and the amazing chemistry that happens in front of the lens that one only sees afterwards.  I love seeing where my direction and their personalities will lead us visually.  It is very important to feel beautiful and confident when taking pictures of people.  I am a very solitary person - an only child - and am in awe of the power of human interaction. It is one of the things I have discovered in the past year. I was in hiding before. My Paris circle has allowed me to open up to an incredible extent. I have become more sociable, and can really say that I love people, even when they're detestable!

You frequently feature yourself in your images, always looking very strong and in control. Is that the real Kathy Cooper or a fantasy alter ego?
Partly Kathy Cooper, partly a front. In reality, I tend to be much plainer and I thrive on other's input. I am in constant need of being besotted with people, and creating images to please them. However, I am a real bossy boots!

Who inspires you right now, be that as a photographer, in design, fashion, people you know or want to meet, music and art?
Survival, on one's own terms. I look at Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton, who succeeded in forcing their vision on the world. Mere talent is not enough: you have to be able to grab people by the guts and thrust your vision of beauty at them, so that they cannot ignore it, one way or the other. And you have to be really strong and well entoure in order to do this.

What does entoure mean? Ballsy?
No, no. Well-surrounded! I am very lucky to have great friends, a fantastic network of people who support me.

What's happening next in the world of Kathy Cooper?
This summer I will be following Christian Lacroix, who will
be curating the July Rencontres d'Arles. I would love
to do a set of portraits of him and his eternally grey-
haired muse Marie Martinez, who still works with him.
Yet again, what interests me is to capture their
relationship, their interaction, on film.  He is an extremely
shy and private man, so this will be a
challenge! If this is a success, I would like to do a
whole series on fashion designers, painters, and
photographers together with either their partner or
their models. I am a firm believer in Muses. No one
has ever got anywhere alone; there has always to be
an inspiration, a driving force, something! I am also
launching out in the family portrait line. I intend to be
the next Ron Oliver, but without the nudity. I don't
feel this is necessary. Beautiful clothes and
accessories are so much fun! But they have to be
luxurious and expensive and outlandish! Also, (more
realistically) I want to catalogue my gorgeous and
interesting friends. A sort of rogue's gallery.
I just hope my new agent will get me paid commissions to
finance all these projects!

Finally, any advice for anyone inspired by your way of life?
It is not easy...you have to be pushy and cheeky. I do find it difficult, but you just have to do it, or else you don't get anywhere. Recently I went to the Prêt A Porter shows to see Christian Lacroix, and I felt awful having to be pushy to talk to him, I could see he was exhausted, yet surrounded by everyone wanting some time with him and I had to be one of the people grabbing at him. He's a great man, really shy, very natural.

On this note we finish, although Kathy very flatteringly offer to do a shoot with me (sweetie, there's not enough surgery in the world that would make that a feasible option but thanks anyway!) as she has to meet some friends for drinks at a neighbourhood bar and I have to go to work. I briefly imagine Kathy all glittery in a bar, smoking Vogue cigarettes, surrounded by her laughing friends while I set off in the cold rainy grey London early evening and I do feel a fleeting pang of jealousy...

'Rebecca at home in the Marais, Paris autumn 2007' by Kathy Cooper. To see more of her work, please go to:
www.katblog.canalblog.com