Lauren Lyon interviews Kate Fowler

L: This is Lauren Lyon interviewing Kate Fowler

K: Hello….

L: About Kate as a human, as an artist, as a thinker, as a lover…

K: Interrupts a couple times and giggles.

L: So you’re married, right?

K: I’m married. To a man named Robert Scott.

L: How long have you been married?

K: One year as of September 24^th, that’s our wedding anniversary.

L: How long were you together before you got married?

K: Five years before we got married.

L: That’s a long time…

K: That is a long time.

L: You’ve taken a lot of pictures of Robert.

K: Naked, clothed, laying in the grass, laying on the beach, laughing, crying…

L: Crying?!

K: No, there are no pictures of him crying.

L: This is supposed to be honest!

K: There are picture of him swinging, though.

L: What are your favorite pictures of Robert?

K: Hmmm… I like this one picture from Finland where he’s laying in the bed and the sun is coming in over his head and he looks really sleepy. And I like any pictures where his eyes are close because he’s got this really distinct black line from his eyelashes and its really pretty and kind of like a curve. There’s this picture of him where one hand is over his face like this and he’s smiling and looking down and you can only see half his face and it’s the cutest picture. I took that on my Pentax point and shoot camera. Its terrible, but I love it.

L: Have you ever thought about doing a series about you and Robert?

K: No. Laughs No I haven’t!

L: Well I know you’re doing your anniversary photo every year…

K: Yeah, I know, but I just…

L: Do you feel like people who make work about their relationship always do it about something sad or complicated?

K: No, I think there’s really beautiful work. Like, I’m really curious about Sally Mann’s work that she’s been making with her husband. Its been like 5 years that she’s been working on it, but I think its more about the connectedness and the unity between them. Rather than discordance. But no, I’m just not interested in it. There are pictures of Robert and I together that I’ve taken with the self-timer.

I, in general, have never thought about making a project about myself, visually.

L: Hm… Well, you made a project about your family… Family ties?

K: Yeah, but its not about, like, physically—me. Or the idea of me, either.

L: Why not?

K: I’m more interested in the people I’m connected to. I don’t know, because I understand myself. I’m not interested in myself, really. Its not very exciting to think about myself or ponder myself. I don’t feel like there are any gaping holes in my awareness of myself that I need to discover. I kind of know who I am.

Nothing—there’s nothing to be found. I wouldn’t be very happy looking at pictures of myself.

L: Yeah, but you sort of did when you made work about your relationship with your [twin] brother—that’s also about you.

K: Yeah, I think a lot of work is about things connected to myself. But not directly about me. I mean that work is more about the idea of space than about either one of us.

L: The idea of space in terms of being separated from him? Distance?

K: Mhm. Or that weird kind of phenomenon of loving a person when there’s nothing that really should connect the two of you emotionally other than family ties.

L: What’s the weirdest dream job that you have that no one would suspect? That has nothing to do with what you do now? Or even, like, a photography endeavor that’s totally different. Like mine, would have been aerial cinematography.

K: Really!? But I would suspect that! So you’re lying…

L: I tried.

K: Could it not be photography?

L: Yeah.

K: I think it would be really great to open a Bed & Breakfast. That’s something I’d really like to do when I’m 55, 65 years old.

L: What would it be like?

K: I want it to be in the mountains.

L: Where?

K: Ya know, in my brain its in Rappahannock County, VA. But I think its just because its what I know. Ya know. I hope I kind of reach out farther, but the idea of being that far away from family permanently is weird. I want it to be and old, yellow farmhouse, and I want to live there and I want people to have to come downstairs and eat dinner with us. That would be really fun. I could teach people how to cook.

L: That’s cool. Cooking lessons…

K: Robert and I have talked about how it would be cool to open up a place like the Tea Bazaar in Charlottesville. It would just be kind of like a cool, fun place to own.

L: You guys like having people hang out in your living space. Its funny that you can feel alone while living with your partner. Because you feel alone right now when you’re not living with three other roommates.

K: Well, because Robert and I kind of function on the same schedule most of the time. We come home at the same time, we leave at the same time. Its weird when you come home and you can feel that the space has been empty. When you know that for like 10 hours nothing has happened. And you don’t smell food, the lights aren’t on, the heat’s not on. Its just an empty vacant space and your animals are lonely. And they’re sad.

I like coming into a space and seeing people working on stuff. Their homework, or whatever. They’re cooking food or talking. Just hearing it makes me happy, even if I have to be in my bedroom focusing on something.

L: You’re going to have a big family. Maybe…

K: Yeah I hope so. I don’t want like, 5 kids. Three kids maybe. Two and one adopted.

L: You have a good relationship with your mom. And its always really cool for me to see you talking to your mom about your work. And you guys understanding each other.

K: laughs

L: That’s really rare! I don’t talk to my family about my work at all.

K: Really?

L: Nothing… barely anything.

K: Your mom, I bed she would.

L: This isn’t my interview…

K: Your mom wants to know about your work. My mom is funny—it makes sense that she would talk about it because she the most overly romantic woman in the world. I got an email from her the other day that slightly pissed me off, made me jealous, and made me laugh all at the same time. Because it was like, “My Dearest Kate, I write this as I sit overlooking mount Olympus in Greece. The fog is lifting and its beautiful. I’m drinking wine, the people are great…” She’s in Greece right now and everything she writes, its as if she’s William Faulkner. Putting this down to go into the history of a southern lady traveling to Greece and writing to her daugher thousands of miles away… Its very romantic.

L: Ya’ll are both romantic.

K: Nu-uh! I never say those things, I’ve never wrote like that a day in my life!

L: You… are. You do romantic things, and take romantic pictures.

K: I’m scared that I’ll be like that… WHAT!?

L: Yeah. Its true. The bad scans, all the dust, the lens flare…

K: Hey, man! I was 18 years old! When you don’t know how to use a camera those things are really exciting, you kind of rely on them when you don’t have much going on, otherwise.

L: Its magic. We’re at ten minutes… I’m trying to think of something I might not know about you…

K: Hmm… That’s gonna be hard! Laughs

L: What project are you most excited about right now? What project would you most want to work on if you had unlimited amounts of time and money?

K: Well, Nitro.

L: If you could work on any project ever—your dream project. That’s Nitro?

K: Its hard to think in that way, because I don’t have some like “big huge thing” that I’d really want to do if I had a lot of money. Because its mostly centered around where I live—the things I’m most connected to. So I wouldn’t have to fly very far. But I do want to work on this, and I’d like to work with other people on their projects.

L: What do you find more fulfilling about this project than others?

K: Its really challenging for me. Its a completely different mode of working than I’ve ever experienced. I mean to just go to a place and have to start from scratch. And literally meet people on the street and try to form connections. And also, so much of the information is completely new to me and so much of the legal practice and trying to figure out what it means is new to me. So its kind of like detective work at the same time, which is really fun. Its exciting. And I’m passionate about the topic, and so many people I’ve met—I care about them a lot. They’re good people.

L: You, more than anyone I know, likes to form close relationships to the people you make work about.

K: Haha, its probably not a good thing! Because I always make sad work. So its like witnessing terribly things happening to the people you’re increasingly feeling more at home with. I hate the thought of something happening to Mike, God… I mean, how could you not form a close relationship with those people?

L: Some people aren’t good at that.

K: Yeah.

L: You’re really good at—you’re a very warm and accepting personality and I think people could easily find themselves drawn to you or very comfortable with you at least. And that’s definitely a strong point. I don’t think many people have that.

K: In some ways…

L: Some photographers are notoriously cold.

K: I was thinking how different the work would be if I didn’t really care what the person would think if they saw it.

L: How would it change?

K: There was one girl that I took a picture of for the abortion project. The girl standing by the river.

L: Describe the photo.

K: It’s a picture of her wearing her bikini. It was not my idea. But she wanted to wear it because she had just been pregnant and had taken pennyroyal in order to terminate the pregnancy on her own. And thought that it would still be visible, that she had been pregnant, which is really scary because I think it was a later term pregnancy.

L: What’s pennyroyal?

K: It’s a poison from a plant extract. Its something women have used since the 1700’s to induce abortion.

L: Whoa.

K: Yeah, its really scary. And I think she ordered it on the internet. You basically poison yourself in small doses over a two week period. So she had just done that and I had a hard time talking to her because I didn’t agree with her mentality in a lot of ways. But, when I took the picture, I knew that she really wouldn’t like it, and it’s the first person that I haven’t been in touch with to discuss which picture they would prefer. Because I just knew when I took the picture that that’s the one I really wanted to use. Its pretty different from the one she’d prefer, which is the one where her boyfriend is hugging her and leaning against a tree.

L: Two very different photos… haha. They’ll make you think completely different things about a person.

K: Mhm… I still think she looks strong in that picture.

L: In a way…

K: Yeah, but I’m definitely not close with any of the subjects in that project at all. Like, distinctly separate from them. And I think you can tell because with all the women I photograph, there’s this slightly odd juxtaposition with their landscape. There’s something just a little bit off balance about it. Which is weird, because it makes it seem like its not a very empathetic project, when it really is a subject matter that I feel [strongly about]… Which is interesting because it seems like I don’t really want to hear these people’s stories, personally, because they make me upset. But in theory, I support their right to have them.