Emily Lipson Wants To Disarm

You spent a lot of your youth training as a dancer, and there’s so much rigor and process in that. How do you think time has then informed your photography?

The way I would describe it is that, with every micro movement of the body, say I'm sitting one way, I'm rolling the shoulder back, nothing else in my body changed, but with every small micro-movement there's this shift in presentation and gender. I think so much of gender is tied up in posture and gait, which you see more in movement, not so much in a still image. I got really interested in trying to capture that in a still image.

I think what's really trendy right now in fashion photography is distance. So say I'm shooting someone, but their gaze isn't on me, we're detached from the person. You see a lot of work in which there are layers between you and the subject, that distance. I'm interested in the opposite. What I love is unveiling, getting closer to someone, seeing their interiority, and getting to examine that in a picture. But a lot of fashion photography is about aspiration. It's about covering up, masking, seeming better than, pushing against what you are. It's not vulnerable.

I also feel, though, that to try and create vulnerability, or to capture a performed vulnerability, would be worse than distance, it has to exist quite naturally.

Yes, and that's why what I try to do is create conditions when I'm working where that's not a performance; it's actually just happening. But it's really hard to do, in a similar way that movie directors will create exercises with their actors, I do stuff, or I try to meet people before I shoot them, have a coffee, form real intimacy, so that it’s a real act. 

I try to be disarming. I think there's a quality to being a certain type of artist - and I'm not knocking anyone else's cadence or the way they exist in the world- but I think there's a quality of, ‘I have my sunglasses on, I'm cool, you can't access me’. I try to be really open, curious about people, and chatty. I want to be as accessible as I can be when I'm shooting people, not only to them but to everyone on set. It’s just my way of working, that everyone should feel comfortable. And from that sort of energy something very real can emerge. I've been told that I'm disarming, which I think is a good thing.

What quality in someone makes you want to photograph them?

Any deviation from what feels like something I've seen, and just being somewhat “different”, let's say there is a time and a place for mainstream beauty aesthetics, and in my work I just don't find that interesting. So anyone who deviates from that beauty standard is interesting to me. In mainstream culture our gaze is so focused on overly feminized women, and I just find it boring. I also think, more than that, that it's important to show other things that are sexy and communicate what those things are to a mainstream audience.

To me, the point of my work is honesty. Showing something beyond the surface, beyond the stratosphere in which we see people. Then the second tier to that is what I do with either set design or collage. As one example of that, I just did a book with Idea, I sold one book that I had done a bunch of drawings in from my Dykes book. I have this motif in my work right now, which is the letter T, and I wrote that on cigarette rolling paper, just ‘T’ on a bunch of my images. I've done it in other works as well, and I think it's T for testosterone, if that's not obvious. As a dyke community we have this fascination or aspiration with masculinity. 

In my first book, the focus at large is on butch and masculine dykes, and a lot of the feedback from friends was, “You zoomed in a little too much on one subgroup within dykes.” The thing is, this was purposeful. I’m trying to both examine and subvert a lot of the stereotypes, and you see that a lot in the conversation of the two pictures side by side. Something confident and tough with something blurred or soft or soft spoken. There’s so much discordance within our identities and things we think are fixed. I really try to show that in the book.

In the book there are a lot of trans-masc dykes, and dykes who have more of a masculine presentation, and there aren't really a lot of femme lesbians. I think often when we come out, I’ll use myself as an example, I think lesbians feel they need to become more butch in their presentation. There’s very much this initial urge, and I think it’s a byproduct of wanting to be more legible. But I think as you get older you start to untether from this idea. I wanted it to be the focus of the first book though for that reason. 

In my second book there will be a more femme-leaning in my casting and styling, and try to show the multitude of range of aesthetics within that. not to say that it’s a binary in any way. I think that's partly to map that onto my own chronology as a dyke. It's really hard to sort of live outside of those bounds of femme or masc but at the same time so many of us do and we have to acknowledge that gray area. That’s what I’m really trying to do in these series of books and you will start to see that more over time. 

The people you photographed in your book, how did they tend to feel about the photos of themselves? 

That's a funny one. Some of them love them, and a couple of people I don't think did, which is kind of inevitable in terms of my work. Unfortunately, it isn’t meant to be flattering. It's meant to be honest. I always say this: “If I shot myself, I probably wouldn't like the picture.” I get a lot of people talking mid word. I'm not getting your best angle, I’m capturing real emotion, and that can be hard for people to see in themselves. If anything, I'm usually surprised by how many people like the photos. A lot of the work in the book wasn't shot for the purpose of being in the book, it’s recontextualised work from commercial jobs, editorial, or even personal work. 

It actually came about because I was working on my archive, which I do periodically, and I just realised, oh my God, I've shot so many dykes. And kind of duh, because I am one, and I think photographers tend to often get brought in for jobs in that way. That’s something I’m really interested by. I think it’s the job of a photographer to take a great photo and make someone comfortable enough to take a great photo, on a very basic level. I really believe that a good photographer can manage to shoot anyone well. We shouldn't just be hired for jobs where you are that thing. 

There are a lot of queer people in the dyke community. And that might sound like a “duh” statement but in the book there are bisexual / pansexual women, some of them have husbands or boyfriends. This was important to me. There is a lot of bi-erasure in queer communities and I wanted those people to feel included in the work and that they are and should be welcome in dyke community, dyke spaces, and dyke life. The same is true for trans and non-binary dykes. They are part of dyke community and I tried to show and celebrate that in the book as well. We are not just a community of cis het women dating women. Not at all.

But then, what would you say to someone who is in a specific community who feels uncomfortable with someone outside of that community documenting them? 

That's absolutely fair. I think that's a good point, and I think a lot of this conversation came about because of white men being an overly represented category within the photography industry. They represent the highest tier of photography by a large percentage, and I think we do lose something in what we can convey within fashion imagery because of that. That's an amazing thing to try to dismantle. 

However, I also think there's a case to be made for over-indexing on that. I think you get into that a lot with race and a lot with certain niche communities that want to be represented by that niche community. That's, in a sense, what I did with the book, and there is a value to that, and I do not discredit that at all. I just think we need to be able to hold multiple truths. 

I had the confidence to make the book because I had this “Aha!” moment when I was putting together my archive. I thought, I have plenty of work here and if not me, who? 

Not to say there aren't many dyke artists and photographers, I'm not the only one. It was also, in fashion photography there's so much androgyny in women and models. As an actual dyke, sometimes I see it, and I think, ‘I can tell this was put on by the straight gaze’. That isn’t necessarily good or bad, I just wanted to do something that was a little more real, in the sense that it’s for gays and by gays. That’s why the casting was an important thing, there’s a lot of photos I love in the book that were styled. It’s not just how these people dress. So some of it was conversing via the images, trying to collage the aesthetics of masculinity and femininity.

Zooming out to your photographic practice more broadly, how has it developed over time?

I've always approached my work with a sort of nascentness, that every time I'm new to this. I think we have this tendency, not just as artists but as people, to start to feel like your mastery of something should lead the way. But I’m always experimenting with different cameras and light, trying to create an image that doesn't feel cut and paste of other points in my work. 

Maybe that’s to the detriment of building an aesthetic. I feel aesthetically very free in my work because I look to themes to be the common thread versus aesthetic.

In Dykes, one of the big things is collage. A lot of the work was shot on film. A lot of it was shot on digital. Some of it was edited with a lot of different modalities. AI was used. Throughout the book, if you zoom out I'm doing a lot of different things aesthetically, but that's the point because I was trying to show thematically that we can't flatten ourselves to one thing. 

I think I'm trying to also, in the next phase of my work, put myself in it more. A really beautiful thing about Michael Bailey Gates' work is that he’s involved. He’s in it a lot, and I'm not so much meaning that for myself, but you feel that it's his life, in this really beautiful way. I've been really siphoned off from my work, but I want to sort of enter it myself in real time.  in the sense that I don't really shoot documentary, I predominantly am re-engineering things and setting up shoots. If something happened in my intimate life, I might re-engineer something inspired by it, or I might pull styling references from raves, or from situations I've been in. But I want to try to be more engaged in making in real time, because I think that would breed more honesty in some of the work.

It's acting, and that's my photography style as well.

I'm really interested by that idea of re-engineering.

If you’re a director who’s directing a film, there's a script, and in the writers' room for that script, they’ve pulled from anecdotes, pulled from life, pulled from a myriad of things to make a story. Then when it's being filmed and the actors are acting this thing, it's actually just reengineering. Those aren't the authentic moments of those things. It's acting, and that's my photography style as well. You see a lot of emotion and it feels candid, but it's actually not. It's like scripted ideas. 

The crux of my work is raw honesty and emotion, and that's the thing that I'm trying to present. So I've really had to think about how I am actually going to get the best result. Even the way I work, when I do my personal, commercial, or editorial work, there's a call sheet. We're on. It's a setup shoot. There are other people. It's not just me behind the camera. I think all those layers do the photo a disservice a lot of the time. Things can feel overproduced when there's too much professional energy around it, and that's actually really difficult to manage as a photographer. We’re kind of making our work in this fishbowl where people are watching you do it, and so many of those people are collaborating inside of it. There is something about the way that shifts the intimacy that you can get from a subject. 

Shoots are such interesting things. I often say this, but I think having a shoot is like throwing a party; you need to host energy and the kind of environment you are creating, and there's so much nuance to that. I think we have this built-in industry standard of how a shoot day should be composed, which is really weird to me because it’s a cut-paste, one-size-fits-all approach to image making. But being on set with a producer is a completely different experience to shooting a friend with no set. I can't get as technical of an image that way, and I struggle with where to blur those things: because the drawback of creating an overly technical picture is that the conditions can be too stiff and the drawback of shooting run and gun on the fly is I can’t make the light and the composition as specific and high level as I want it to be but the emotion is there.

I'm thinking of atmosphere as well, a lot of what you're doing is creating the atmosphere, which is also what you're then capturing.

Right. Do you know the super famous Avedon Versace ads with Shalom Harlow in them? A bunch of supermodels were in them, and they're dancing in these pictures in such a way that I have this idea of what it would be like on set. It's really loose energy and free. They're super animated, doing this energetic posing that feels so alive. I guarantee the on set feeling was like you're at a party, people are super comfortable and experimental. That’s what I’m trying to do in my work, create the conditions for aliveness to happen.