Robert Leonard interviews Yvonne Todd.
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Robert Leonard: What comes first: the title, the model, the clothes, the wig?
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Yvonne Todd: There’s no formula. Sometimes I develop the works by doing drawings in my workbook; sometimes I just see something that inspires me—like a special costume. Sometimes I am haunted, persecuted by an idea, for years, but don’t turn it into a photo until the time feels right; sometimes ideas just pop into my head.
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The clothes are never fashionable. You seem interested in vintage costume, as opposed to fashion. Is it a nostalgia thing?
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No. Nostalgia always seemed a bit lightweight to me. But I am interested in the way costumes are tied to history, the way they carry character and narrative connotations. There’s a photo I like of the young, maybe twelve-year-old, Lady Diana Spencer, taken by her father, a keen amateur photographer. She is reclining, watching some inane rubbish on TV, oblivious, absorbed, with a mousey pageboy haircut and high-necked, fussy 1970s get-up, looking sullen and slightly ruddy-faced. That’s what life’s about.
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How do you source the clothes?
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I trawl internet sites that specialise in celebrity memorabilia, vintage couture, and antique textiles. Some clothes I find locally, in second-hand shops. Often I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I know it when I see it. I never hire costumes though.
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Vagrants’ Reception Centre followed hard on the heels of your work for Mixed-Up Childhood. It made me think of American child-beauty pageants, particularly Werta in her sash.
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Those pageant children look really strange, like tiny wizened elderly women. But with Vagrants I wasn’t thinking about beauty pageants, and I didn’t really want to do another child-related series, but it was as if I didn’t have a choice: those Victorian gowns were so tiny, they were child-size.
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How did you pick the models? What were you looking for?
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I lack the fortitude to go out and recruit eleven- and twelve-year-old girls, and I didn’t have much time to produce the work. I was feeling slightly panicked. I contacted a local model agency that had hordes of children on their books. They sent me a batch of comp cards. There was no rigorous selection process. I wasn’t looking for anything specific. Certain faces stood out. I chose girls with very little or no ‘industry experience’. I didn’t want seasoned professionals. Also, I prefer to photograph introverts. They don’t overcook things.
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Ethlyn, the gloved guitarist, reminds me of Manet’s ‘studio portraits’: his female bullfighter wearing slippers and his Spanish guitar player in a pose where he clearly couldn’t play the guitar. Ethlyn‘s guitar screams ‘prop’.
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I imagined her to be a Hitler Youth member crossed with a gypsy.
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What is Fervin holding?
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A slightly soiled copy of Twenty-Four Hours a Day, the Alcoholics Anonymous bible, adding to the somewhat tenuous theme of vagrancy.
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Romanian Orphan recalls pathetic photos of beautiful refugee children moaning ‘take me, love me’. Are you making fun?
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The young model was from Romania, and I liked the idea of an idealised teary-eyed orphan. Maybe I am making fun, but it could also be utterly sincere.
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Alongside the five pictures of excessively coiffured girls you placed Wet Sock. You seem to like throwing in the odd image to spoil the mood.
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I like to include certain images to thwart the heavy femininity of the others. The wet sock is like a sad Jesus picture. An earlier series, The Bone of Jupiter, had some studies of pinecones and driftwood. There was another image that had a wheel of processed cheese and a syringe filled with Qtol, which is a cheap pink antiseptic lotion. And there’s a deadpan image of a repeater station encrusted in satellite dishes in Meat & Liquor called Porn Syntax. I wanted a totally pretentious title, suggestive but tenuous.
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Your series Sea of Tranquility, Bellevue, and Vagrant’s Reception Centre, all feature different examples of the same type of thing; variations on a theme. Other series are more heterodox, and viewers go into overdrive trying to find a common thread.
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Bellevue is the only series where I had a really singular idea from the outset. With Sea of Tranquility and Vagrants, I wanted some uniformity in the series. But usually each series feels like a runaway train. There’s no sense of predictability in the outcome.
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Joan Kroc is an imaginary portrait of a real person.
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The title didn’t arrive until after the shoot. I was originally going to call the photo ‘Joan Cork’, but later realised ‘Cork’ was ‘Kroc’ backwards. Joan Kroc is the late billionaire widow of McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc and a much-loved philanthropist and patron of the arts in San Diego. Of course the money came from a distasteful despicable source, that makes people fat. The dress is 1970s Ungaro couture (formerly owned by Liza Minnelli). It’s austere yet glamorous. My dealer Peter McLeavey compares my Joan Kroc to Joan of Arc. Both women, he claims, were surrounded by dark forces.
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Joan Kroc is a somebody and a nobody all at once.
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I’m always more interested in history’s peripheral characters, like Liz Taylor’s husband Larry Fortensky, the builder she met at the Betty Ford clinic. I’m more interested in Priscilla Presley than Elvis. These peripheral figures never had much talent but somehow managed to have their moment of fame before being consigned to history’s rubbish bin. But I remember.
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You did a Self-Portrait as Christina Onassis.
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Another historical bit part. Christina Onassis is the forgotten daughter of Aristotle Onassis, the shipping magnate who married Jackie Kennedy. I was interested in her because she was extraordinarily wealthy, the sole heir to his billions. She was a deeply unhappy woman, addicted to amphetamines, and battled obesity most of her life. She had a string of failed marriages and died of a heart attack in a bathtub at thirty-seven.
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Why do it as a self-portrait?
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Sometimes I don’t have the strength to find models, and for convenience’s sake I use myself. I knew I could alter my appearance easily enough by dyeing my hair black, using fake tan and wearing brown contact lenses. I studied photographs of Christina Onassis—the small poor-quality black-and-whites in her biography. It became an obsession. There was often a pained expression on her face. I wanted to replicate that look. I’m interested in the way method actors become absorbed in their roles, like Val Kilmer while filming The Doors. He was so ‘in character’, people had to call him Jim.
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Springtime is your third anorexic picture. It seems more idyllic somehow—almost pretty.
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It’s a take on the idea of springtime—new life, flowers, lambs. I needed to plant something ghoulish and skeletal in the picture, in a frolicsome green polka-dotted frock.
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Do you ever not use wigs?
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Wigs are an integral part of my repertoire. It harks back to my time working sole charge at Wig World in an Auckland shopping mall. I have fond memories of that shop. I used to try on the wigs, especially the grey permed granny ones, and fall asleep on the floor of the changing room. No one ever came in. Sales were a rare thing.
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I love Gynecology. It’s so New Agey. It reminds me of ads for 1-900 psychics. You said that dress belonged to Carol Channing.
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Yes, Carol Channing, that Love Boat guest stalwart. The gown is a Bob Mackie. I was imagining she was a member of a sci-fi Christian cult whose members celebrate conventional Western beauty. The model was pregnant, which wasn’t part of the original idea, but it worked out, especially since the gown has a vulval slit on the belly. I like the idea of a chilly unfeeling non-nurturing mother spewing forth infants in a remote pocket of the universe.
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Eye-Vein Rose harks back to another rose picture, Chlora from Asthma & Eczema. What’s your position on kitsch these days?
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I’ve never enjoyed having my work described as kitsch, because I don’t believe it is. I like to think I peddle in cliches; that I can move from one to the next with no sense of shame or embarrassment. Of course, there needs to be a twist, otherwise it would be boring.
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Speaking of cliches, The Gutteral Flower has a forlorn girl brandishing a browned sunflower. How can a flower be gutteral?
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I saw some large, freshly-cut, orange sunflowers for sale at the supermarket, wrapped in cheap cheerful foil paper. They seemed huge and oppressive, looming Triffid-like. Too big and monstrous to be flowers. I bought some and took them home, but they disturbed me. They had an air of surveillance about them. As for ‘guttural’, I don’t know. Maybe the centre of the flowers reminded me of the Sarlacc pit in Return of the Jedi. That was rather guttural.
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The model is wearing beige, as are the models in Joan Kroc and Goat Sluice.
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I like austerity, but grey and black can be too severe. White has too many connotations that I’d rather avoid. Beige is the answer. I would describe it as a numb colour. It’s muffled and bland.
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Why is January carrying a sugar cube?
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January is the female protagonist in Jacqueline Sussan’s bestseller Once Is Not Enough. She’s a morose young Park Avenue heiress, obsessed and in love with her father (killed when his millionaire lesbian second-wife’s private jet explodes). She takes acid and has group sex at a party then disappears forever from a sand dune in the Hamptons leaving behind only an LSD-laced sugar cube. The sugar cube is the key to all this degeneracy, in an otherwise frugal, but maudlin portrait.
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Do you want us to see your women as pathetic or heroic?
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I’m angling more for the pathetic. I respond to stoicism and piety, deflation and disappointment. I avoid hideous words like ’empowerment’ or anything else in keeping with the heroic.
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You can lurch from a picture like January, which is quite moody and affecting, to Hazel, The Forbidden, which is not. Some pictures call forth a sympathetic response, others, like Hazel, have a touch of Schadenfreude.
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I photographed Hazel when I had infected shingles. I think some of the viral toxins had taken hold that day. Hazel was inspired by an American website where a seamstress markets ‘modest Christian clothing’ and uses her flock of plain homely daughters as models. The photographs look like specialist pornography.
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So you see a connection between your work and pornography?
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Not with the obvious X-rated kind, but perhaps the more obscure, specialised and, to the non-afficionado, quite boring, obsessively repetitive stuff: the pornography focusing on mundane tan-coloured pantyhose or matronly brassieres and flesh-tone petticoats.
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Your images seem at once pervy and prim. I’m reminded of Vertigo. Scottie is obsessed with Madeleine in her grey business suits. Primness became erotic for him.
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I love primness. Vertigo is one of my favourite movies. Scottie gets really animated when he makes-over a sexy twenty-something Judy into a stern ‘forty-something’ Madeline. His excitement is palpable.
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Christianity keeps popping up. You styled the women in Sea of Tranquility after Mormon pastors’ daughters. Fervin seems to be holding a Bible.
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I have Christian Envy. I want to belong. I want to be special. And I like the trappings of zealotry. The more fervent end of the scale, of course. People like Gramma Cherbear, whose fanatical religious instruction for children is accompanied by poorly-executed line drawings of animals that look really scabby and squalid and fucked-up. I’m intrigued by her disinterest in aesthetic finesse, along with the plainness of those girls modelling their mother’s dowdy home-made garments. I want to recreate some of that.
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Goat Sluice, on the other hand, is demonic.
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I was aiming for the Evangelical meets the Satanist. A wholesome toothy blonde clutching a tabby kitten. To hammer home the feel of animal sacrifice, I originally wanted to have her holding a baby goat, but my newly-adopted SPCA kitten kindly agreed to be a stand-in.
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There’s usually a match between the location or background and the subject, but in Frenzy they are at odds. The girl reclines in a concrete block basement.
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I wanted to do something ludicrous. I saw the dress for sale on ebay. It’s plaid taffeta, in an elaborate ruffled faux Victorian parlour style. When I saw it, the first thing I thought of was the basement under my house. It was like the most rudimentary mathematical equation: 1 + 1 = 2. It just made total sense to me. I knew the dress had to be photographed in the basement.
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What is it with the big teeth?
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I like large and prominent teeth. Again, it’s part of the repulsion / thwarting system. There has to be something wrong every time. Frenzy‘s teeth, in particular, remind me of the eyes of a spider.
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[IMAGE: Yvonne Todd Springtime 2006]