Carmen Winant: Hi Zoe! Thanks for agreeing to talk with us.  In your latest series, LA-Like: Transgressing the Pacific, you photograph real and fictional sites of disappearances into the Pacific Ocean. With descriptive titles like Where Natalie Wood Disappeared off Catalina Island, there is no distinction made between historical figures and invented ones. For instance, you document the Marina Del Rey site where the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson really died in 1983, alongside the location where John Voight’s character drowns himself in the 1978 film Coming Home. Can you address the choice to include real and unreal figures in the series?

Zoe Crosher: Yes. My practice deals with photograph as a tool of fiction of documentary. I have long been interested in thinking through the ways that memory operates through photographs on the basis of the stories that we ourselves write. Also, Los Angeles has a unique and specific relationship to fiction—truth and imagination are easily conflated here—so I am particularly interested how I can use documentary photography to the same end. Ultimately, no matter how adept we have become in reading photographs, there is still the traditional assumption of an overarching “truth” in our approach to documentary work, which I hope to complicate.

CW: I’m drawn to this notion of departures, of heading west to find one’s destiny—and when that cannot hold, even further west—into the ocean’s depths, as the case may be. There is something so tragic and poetic about the idea that the border of the coast cannot hold you. I saw that you wrote about the conundrum of Manifest Destiny: “the endless promise for once you reach that unreachable place, and then you have arrived, there is no where to go anymore.” There is something so fundamentally lonely about that. Can you address this idea of containment, of reaching forever farther, even if it means one’s own demise?

ZC: All my work certainly has a darker backdrop, a kind of impossibility of knowing, but I never look at the work as being lonely. It has cathartic potential, perhaps. And it certainly is concerned with trauma. Joan Didion addresses this sense of Manifest Destiny so well in her books and essays, as a schism between a promise of something and what it actually may turn out to be.

The lore of moving west—what happens when you hit the border or reach the shore, when you can’t push any further—this is a very loaded threshold. Even Lewis and Clark couldn’t believe it when they hit the Pacific, as if the continent should in fact be never-ending, endlessly unfolding. If you live in LA, a frequent question is, “Where are you from?” It implies, of course, that no one is really from here, that the city holds those that sought it out.

CW: You use a medium format camera, which I tend to think of as a nostalgic and self-contained format.

ZC: I’ve always shot with a square format. The square complicates presumed ways of looking. When I started photography seriously in college, I was immediately trying to interrupt what was presumed “real.” For this project I used a Bronica camera, and a tripod and a flash when shooting at night. I only shot film. The final photos are printed on Fujiflex paper, which has a very glossy, reflective surface. In the gallery they are hung fairly low, creating a sense of falling into the water.

CW: How much research went into uncovering the spots where these people disappeared? Or are these locations their own fictions?

ZC: The research took many forms. I had a great intern working with me—Jason Underhill—and together we did newspaper research, looked at police reports, and watched the movies over and over. We found three different articles about Natalie Wood’s death in the Pacific in 1981, but only one mentioned that she was wearing a red down jacket. These selective details are exactly what I am interested in, how we choose to selectively document the past. Some of these places no longer exist; Aimee Semple McPherson faked her own disappearance at the Ocean Park pier, which was halfway between Venice and Santa Monica, and is no longer standing. The final scene for the film Coming Home was in Manhattan Beach, but it was a fantastic goose chase to find the spot, which I originally believed to be in San Diego. There were other issues: The Long Goodbye was shot on Robert Altman’s private property at Malibu Colony, and so on.

Ultimately, this is the point. It was a project that relied on and tested the mimicry of my own memory. History is all estimations, which is effectively a major component of my work.

CW: My next question is about the paradox of marking the SPOT of a disappearance. It strikes me that the idea of being “disappeared” implies that the person vanishes without a trace…do you feel that in some way marking the location lends a certain gravity, much like a gravestone might, to an otherwise mythical action?

ZC: I don’t think it detracts from the disappearances themselves, which, as I mentioned, are still very much my interpretation. I am inspired by crime scene photography, but I can only photograph the moment of crossing, not its finality.

There is something to be said for marking that which refuses be marked. I have been trying to figure out a way to photograph the Santa Ana winds. This idea is so interesting to me—not the expectation of failure, but the expectation of impossibility.

The truth is that everything—every body and every event—is located in space. This process of insisting on a moment that did happen and has a physical reality, the insistence of being a witness, is very important to my practice.

CW: I am interested in discussing this series in light of some of your other LA-Like series, specifically, LA-Like: The Pools I Shot Series and the Michelle duBois project. They both seem tied to place and perception, and the qualities of surface. Can you discuss the relationship between them, perhaps beginning with your interest in water? And, in regards to the duBois series, a kind of desperation to document oneself for consumption by others, and in doing so, creating a kind of vacuum of self?

ZC: Again, all of the work is concerned with testing the limits and constructs of the documentary. The Michelle duBois project is ultimately about the possibility of not knowing oneself—she pretends to be so many versions of herself, taking thousands of photos, all in which she emulates a different persona. She is creating her own kind of destiny in a way, a life constructed on impossible fantasy.

LA-Like: The Pools I Shot is a kind of mapping; LA is, of course, tied up with the history of water. I wanted to merge the poetics and the medium. I took pictures of the sun reflecting in pools, and slightly burned the photographic paper in the printing process.

CW: I noticed that the press release for your show includes a quote from Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. This struck me as a really apt literary source for your work, as Didion so persuasively investigated the profound emptiness and power of celebrity. I was also reminded of her looking at your swimming pool series, specifically her line from The White Album: “A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye”. And beyond that, Didion’s interest in probing the qualities of mourning, or grappling with disappearance. Have you read much by her? Cinema has obviously influenced your work, but does literature do the same?

ZC: I have read almost every book Joan Didion has every written, and I consider her a great influence on my work. Didion did for writing what I am interested in doing for photography. She collapsed fiction and documentary, confusing the terms of reception and context to great effect. She was a journalist who questioned the very structure of journalism, which ultimately was inextricable for her own reportage. I am working on a book of the entire LA-Like series, and I would love for her to write the introduction.

Didion also encapsulates a version of 1960s California. She’s about my dad’s age, and they both attended Berkeley. So, her work also resonates personally with me; it feels familiar. Didion describes a California that I remember as a child but that no longer exists. Or at least, I think it existed.

Ger van Elk, "The Co-Founder of the Word O.K.-Hollywood," 3 color photographs, 1971.. Courtesy the Artist and Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: by Brian Forrest.

The first time I visited downtown Los Angeles, I was surprised by its bareness. A friend and I, both of us art students, had driven in from Claremont for an opening, tackling the congested Santa Monica freeway for the first time, too. A fellow student and L.A. veteran had warned us that, even if we experienced smooth sailing through Covina, we’d hit an out-of-nowhere stand still once we’d “cleared that hill and past the Westfield [mall].” He was right, and we slowed to a laborious crawl 20 miles from the city. Braving traffic felt like initiation and we were proud of ourselves. However, once we arrived in the city proper and exited the I-10, all the people seemed to evaporate. The galleries we wandered through may have been well-populated, but, otherwise, downtown felt weirdly gutted of life.

At one point, my friend and I stood outside a café, staring up into the windows of what looked like an abandoned warehouse. A transient stopped to stare with us. “Amazing how they built this city up, huh? There’s no space left nowhere,” he commented, misinterpreting the source of our awe. We agreed, however—it was amazing that a city that had been so recently and extensively built up and out could feel both congested and desolate at the same time.

A comparable sense of lived-in bareness characterizes The City Proper, an exhibition of contemporary photography of SoCal’s urban landscape currently on view at West Hollywood’s Margo Leavin Gallery. Curated by James Welling, known for translucent and prismatic photographic experiments with color,  the show mainly features L.A. artists and loosely responds to New Topographics, a now seminal exhibition that first appeared at the Eastman House in 1975 and was rephrased by LACMA in 2009. The photographers in New Topographics, among them Lewis Baltz, Frank Gohlke (who also appears in City Proper), and Robert Adams, were preoccupied with man-altered landscape and replaced the humanitarian poetics of the West’s earlier documenters—think Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, or Dorthea Lange—with calculated, uninhabited aloofness.

Zoe Crosher, "LAX Courtyard by Marriott," Lightjet print, edition of 5, 2005. Courtesy the Artist.

The City Proper is perhaps less aloof than coolly curious. It includes an array of angular buildings, empty city streets and urban nooks and crannies. Ger van Elk, an artist whose fascination with man’s role in modern landscape once led him to travel a canal via a small rubber dinghy and, later, navigate the Atlantic, has contributed a series of three color photographs, collectively titled The Co-Founder of the Word O.K.-Hollywood (1971). Each image has that vintage, William-Eggleston-worthy orange-heavy coloring, and each shows van Elk posed in profile to the right of a framed bubble letter “O.” He has propped up against a pole, column or building facade, and raised his own arm and leg to turn his body into the letter “K”–so he is “O.K.” on a residential street, outside a convenience store and a block from the Hollywood Colonial. Though cars line the streets and colorful signs interrupt the skyline, few other bodies appear in the shots. It’s as if van Elk is a pioneering tourist in a man-made but barely occupied amusement park.

Zoe Crosher’s series of LAX prints also have a vintage ambiance to them, though they were made between 2002 and 2005. They depict slightly gaudy hotel rooms near the airport, which means seas of cars and the occasional ascending plane can be seen from the windows. The camera always looks out—out the window, or out the sliding door—and the result is a vague feeling of yearning, but since there is no specified subject to attribute the feeling to, it just floats languidly on the image’s surface.

Brandon Lattu‘s  angular, faux-minimalist boxes take bareness into three dimensions, presenting squares or rectangles covered by a solid color except for the murky photographic images of palm trees or city drags that peek out from the boxes’ edges. A similar nonsensical formalism characterizes Shannon Ebner’s Fixed Knot Fence, Los Angeles (2010), which shows a chain link fence crowned by barbed wire standing in front of a bare white concrete wall. Dry knotty tree branches create a formal frame around the perimeter of the image, making the scene geometrically, romantically rustic.

Brandon Lattu, "Random Composition 12-105," Pigment, polypropylene, paper, polystrene, and wood, 2010. Courtesy of Artist and Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Brian Forrest.

In his quietly sentimental book, Why People Photograph, Robert Adams, one of the first to train his lens on the man-altered landscape, tells a story about a friend, a photographer who remains unnamed. This friend used to take pictures along country roads by sticking his body up through the sun roof and steering with his feet. No one could convince him to abandon this practice, because, to him, the view felt so right and so real. I imagine the resulting photographs showed little direct evidence of the recklessness that made them. In fact, they may have been as austere as Adams’ own images, or as uninhabited as the images in The City Proper. But when Adams says his reckless friend inspired him to take “grand, unsafe pictures,” he more or less means he wanted his images to feel right, to capture the mood of a space as uninhibitedly as possible. The photographs in The City Proper are insouciant, open, and characterized by a certain bravery. They show the cityscape to be a technological, gridded construction that, while made by humans, does not necessarily need a human presence to sustain it, but they also seem bent on conquering the city in a way that suggests urban impassivity can be subverted by those determined to understand it.

Mariah Garnett, "Encounters I May Or May Not Have Had With Peter Berlin," a 16mm installation

“What I advocate is threatening,” said Peter Berlin in 2004, talking to Butt magazine about his fondness for wearing nylons under tight, tight white shorts. The artist/porn star, who emerged in the 70s sporting a blond-ish pageboy haircut, explained he’s always running from police who claim he’s wearing only underwear. What does Berlin advocate? A certain breed of exhibitionism, a self-love frightening because of its frank completeness? Or an edgy artifice that’s some offshoot of camp? He often describes the moment he first really saw himself in the mirror and realized his image turned him on, but he doesn’t confuse self and reflection: “when I say image, that is different than me.” “Really,” he said, “the only compliment that I want is to walk on the street and see at least one other Peter Berlin, but I’ve never seen one.”

Six years later, Mariah Garnett paid Berlin that compliment. The L.A. artist performed him in a video, dressing, posing and turning as he would have, and playing with double exposures and self-photography just as he did. “Doesn’t she look like me?” the now-reclusive Berlin asked when Garnett met him to show him what she’d done.

The original video of Garnett as Berlin, the video of Garnett showing Berlin Garnett as Berlin, and the video of Garnett imagining meeting and making it with Berlin were all on view in Encounters I May Or May Not Have Had With Peter Berlin, an installation at Human Resources L.A. up for only a week. While these reflexive narrative plays were compelling, the installation’s highlight was even more so: a disco ball onto which two 16 mm films of Garnett as Berlin were projected. In the dark gallery, the ball reflected a flickering army of miniature mirror-like images. If you looked up at the reflections closest to the ceiling, you’d see Garnett’s head and chin, as you looked progressively lower, you’d be looking down her jauntily rotating body. She wore a leather jacket, white, well-packed undies, and not much else. When she turned to the front, and you saw her breasts, they didn’t break the façade or necessarily seem that feminine. Even if they had, Berlin-style masculinity was more an exaggerated attitude than a gender, and that blond bowl of hair could never be anything but androgynous.

Zoe Crosher, "The Unveiling of Michelle du Bois," Charlie James Installation view, 2010.

While Garnett’s installation closed the second week of October, another experiment in obsessive reenactment opened just down the street: Zoe Crosher’s The Unveiling of Michelle du Bois at Charlie James Gallery and the Dan Graham project space (a third component opens November 6 at Emma Gray Headquarters in Culver City, and even more du Bois is on view at the California Biennial). Crosher has inhabited an imaginary archive of an imaginary woman, who changed identities at will and tried her hand at being everything other than satisfied. Du Bois moonlighted as aspiring flight attendant, sex worker, housewife, socialite, etc. (or so I’m inferring), and so Crosher (or at least Crosher’s image), through du Bois, moonlights as all these things as well. As the story goes, du Bois photographed everything—all the changes in her guise have been documented. Photographing yourself performing yourself: du Bois resembles Berlin. Photographing yourself performing someone preoccupied with performing him/herself: Crosher resembles Garnett.

Zoe Crosher, "The Unvieling of Michelle du Bois," Emma Gray Headquarters, Installation view, 2010.

Jenny Holzer, feminist queen of expository, public self-searching in decades past, has become a sage-like twitter presence of late (though the artist isn’t actually behind the tweets). A recent post: KNOWING YOURSELF LETS YOU UNDERSTAND OTHERS BETTER. Crosher and Garnett, women artists of a different generation, might switch it up: UNDERSTANDING OTHERS LETS YOU KNOW YOURSELF. They might even drop the “your” and the “understanding”: OTHERS LET YOU KNOW A SELF. And that’s where their project becomes just as threatening as Peter Berlin’s self-image is when it parades in tight white shorts. If the goal isn’t some sort of gripping self-knowledge, than what is it? Can being others be the same as knowing others, or is inhabiting another’s body and using it to move through the world the definition of loneliness?