Matt Mahurin Day 3:

Article:

Matt Mahurin is hardly a household name, but you’re probably familiar with some of his work. You may not be aware of it, but you’ve almost certainly seen it. Mahurin created one of the most controversial images of the 1990s and sparked a debate that is still ongoing.

Born in L.A. in 1959, he seemed almost destined for a career in the visual arts. Like so many of the photographers we’ve discussed in these salons, Mahurin’s first love was painting. What he liked, it seems, was the process of painting. Deciding on the subject matter, laying it out, sketching, applying the paint. He liked the ritualistic pattern of making a painting.

There was no moment of epiphany that led him to shift his interest from the process of making a painting to the process of making a photographic print. No road-to-Damascus event. Mahurin just found himself gradually moving away from painting and toward photography.

He was still primarily in love with the process of creating the image. The difference was that when he painted, he was usually alone in his studio. When he began to shoot photographs, he found it necessary to go out into the world and interact more immediately with it. "I was at the mercy of what was in front of the camera," he told an interviewer. "I had to adapt to that. When I was painting, the limitations were the limitations of my own abilities, my own imagination."

What the larger world outside his studio offered was this: raw material. Dynamic raw material. Raw material that acted and behaved according to its own rules and whims. Raw material that did surprising things.

Mahurin developed a unique tenebrous style. Dark, heavily laden with deep shadow. Full of obscure shapes, a tad threatening, emotionally distressing. Perhaps the most common term used to describe Mahurin’s work is this: unsettling. Profoundly unsettling. Looking at his work…especially his earlier work…is like being a voyeur in another person’s nightmare.

At the same time he was creating these dark, disturbing photographs, Mahurin was also doing drawing and photo-illustrations for TIME magazine. He not only illustrated articles, he created images for the magazine’s cover. He did his first cover illustration when he was only 23 years old.

Just as he moved from painting to photography, Mahurin eventually moved from still photography into video. He was asked to bring his style to music videos. He was soon directing videos for Peter Gabriel, Metallica, U2. He was still primarily interested in the process of creating the image. He’d gone from being alone in his studio with his paints and brushes to being involved with a limited number of people and a camera out in the world. Now the process required multiple cameras and "cranes and crews and Winnebagos and rooms full of computers to transfer the film."

The process became too big, too much. So he abandoned it. The film production company he’d created to make music videos—he closed it. The studio he rented in which he shot the videos—he got rid of it. And he started seeking ways to do the same work in simpler ways.

Advances in technology allowed him to do work without the massive crew, without all the elaborate post-production facilities, without all the attendant fuss. He began making inexpensive documentary films. Films like Mugshot and I Like Killing Fliesearned positive critical reviews, though they weren’t necessarily commercially successful.

During all this Mahurin continued to do photo-illustrations for TIME magazine. In 1994, former football star O.J. Simpson was arrested for the murder of his wife and another man. TIME, like all the other news magazines, chose to make the murder and Simpson’s arrest the cover story. The editors of TIME commissioned a number of artists, photographers and illustrators to prepare potential cover images. At 2 a.m. Eastern time, the L.A. police released Simpson’s mugshot. With only a few hours before the printing deadline, the editors decided to give the mugshot to Mahurin.

Mahurin applied his signature dark, menacing style to the mugshot. The resulting cover image created a perfect storm of outrage and criticism. Mahurin was tagged as a racist. The image initiated a debate about how news venues utilize photographs, and that debate continues today.

Mahurin has returned to still photography, though he also continues to shoot documentary films and music videos, as well as creating photo-illustrations for TIME. His latest work retains the dark aura of his earlier work, but is significantly more simple. "All the images are just straight, no digital anything. Prints from negatives, on paper." All the post-processing takes place in the darkroom.

In interviews, Mahurin always seems to stress the process by which he creates his images. He’s apparently more reluctant to discuss the images themselves. This seems to be a deliberate policy to avoid explaining the work, to allow…or perhaps require…viewers to form their own impressions.

My impression is that Mahurin is the Cartier-Bresson of the Bad Dream. He seems to have a sort of genius for catching the fleeting, peripheral, paranoid moment. His images strike me as the sorts of things a soothsayer might notice before pronouncing some evil omen.

I like them very much.

My Thoughts:

Matt was born in L.A., which has a lot of nice scenery. This helped influence him into drawing and painting and photography. When he was twenty-three(23) years old he got to use his skills he had learned over the years and put them in magazine covers. As technology improved he got in to filming. He had gotten offers to bring his style into music videos. This led him to directing a film for Peter Gabriel, Metallica, U2. After a while the process became too much. He ended up abandoning it; he had closed the film production company he had created to make music videos and the studio he rented to film videos. He then started looking for simpler ways he could do the same work. Matt returned to still photography, but still makes documentary films and music videos.

Citations:

-Article: http://www.utata.org/sundaysalon/matt-mahurin/

Matt Mahurin Day 2:

Article:

MATT MAHURIN HAS DONE IT ALL, FROM LANDING TIME MAGAZINE COVER ILLUSTRATIONS RIGHT OUT OF SCHOOL, TO HIS MUSIC VIDEO WORK FOR BANDS LIKE METALLICA, U2, AND R.E.M. AND AS IF THAT WEREN'T ENOUGH, HE HAS NOW TURNED HIS ATTENTION ON FEATURE FILMMAKING. HIS LATEST, A DOCUMENTARY TITLED I LIKE KILLING FLIES, IS BEING RELEASED IN THEATERS THIS MONTH.

Night Watchman: I wanted to start out by asking you about your evolution. When you first started you were primarily a painter, and then you moved to photography. Can you talk a little bit about how you started out and what led to changing the way you approached illustration?

Matt Mahurin: Growing up, my first love was painting. What I really fell in love with was the actual process of making things, the discovery and the challenge of it. For me, it wasn’t really a conscious decision. It’s not that I’d conquered everything that I needed to do in painting, because you spend your whole life developing that. But the repetition of the process of laying out, doing the drawing, painting on top of it-- the same ritual. So basically I just changed the ritual. I changed the process, which involved the camera, involved the print. That was the first transition I made that later on became repeated several times. I went from illustration and using photography in illustration to just doing pure photography. The process changed from being alone in my studio working, to when I started doing photography it involved a lot of photojournalism or location stuff. All of the sudden I would find myself in a Texas prison or an abortion clinic or mental hospital or a different country, and you give up a lot of control with that. So that’s how my process changed once I got into photography. Then I was at the mercy of what was in front of the camera, and I had to adapt to that. When I was painting, the limitations were the limitations of my own abilities; my own imagination. There was a trade-off. Because once I went out into the world I was supplied with all this raw material that I could pull from, but I didn’t have control over what was in front of my camera. I had to kind of pick and choose those moments. And then I ended up repeating that same process when the computer came along and I took that on. It started to involve painting and photographyinside the computer, so it was combining three different things. I went from painting when I was by myself, to photography when I would go out and interact with the subject, and then the third area, which was doing filmmaking, where I actually had to have a crew. So then I not only had to deal with the additional energy and forced unknowns that were in front of the camera, but I also had to have more people behind the cameras. Then it became much more of a social environment, and I had to delegate and work with people, so the process kept growing and changing. This went on from the time I got out of school and started doing paintings alone in my studio, to when I was on a film set with thirty or forty people and all this equipment and money being spent. I had evolved from this place where I was by myself in a studio, to where I had a production company and full-time people working for me. I got to the point where I had to throw everything away. I got rid of my studio, I got rid of my company, I got rid of the person that worked for me, and I basically started from the ground up again. Filling out my own FedEx forms, taking my own darkroom towels to the laundromat, washing them myself rather than having people doing all that stuff for me. It was a way of reconnecting. The process had actually come full circle, so I had to relearn those skills all over again. It was challenging and frustrating, but it was also very exciting that I was capable of letting go of all that stuff that I’d built up. So it really was about more of an attitude of process-- of changing processes as opposed to any particular medium.

[CONTINUED AFTER IMAGE]

NW: In the very beginning of your career you wore, like we all do, some of your inspirations on your sleeve. But it seemed like it was for such a short time that people couldn't pick out that Marshall Arisman or Brad Holland influence before you developed the heavy shadows and burned-in edges that became your trademark. Where did those elements come from? Was it a matter experimenting around until you found your own vocabulary?

MM: I think it was just a visual representation of where I was emotionally as an artist, and the emotions I wanted to express of the subject matter I was interested in. And that was the way I visually decided to do it. Also, I thought that was the way you could make things emotional or scary or unsettling. I got many, many illustrations over the years since then on the computer that are bright and colorful and focused that are just as scary or as emotional or moving as any dark, twisted, sandpaper-scored illustration I did in the past. But I think when you’re young like that you gravitate towards those kinds of emotional, moody tools. I wouldn’t call them gimmicks, because those kinds of techniques have been used by people for as long as people have been making images. But I think that was stuff that I went to, and that was permissible in the business. It was a great time because anything went in illustration. It was great. I feel like I was right at the peak of that time to capitalize on that, utilize that, explore that, and benefit from that, and it really maximized my ability to express myself. When times changed and editors changed and the technology changed, newsstand sales changed, and the Internet came out and magazines started to struggle, so I was able to adapt. I love doing that kind of work, and I love that kind of imagery, but you take whatever your favorite meal is-- you have it one night and it’s fantastic, so you have it two nights-- but after two weeks of your favorite food you get sick of it no matter how good it is. I think you just get bored with that particular thing, and I basically went through that process myself.

[CONTINUED AFTER IMAGE]

NW: I was trying to figure out when you started doing music videos. Were the Peter Gabriel videos some of the first?

MM: Yeah, those were very early.

NW: How did you first get involved in that, and how was it trying to translate your style into moving pictures?

MM: Again, I was anxious for the change-- anxious for the process and for the challenge and the technology. I went from using a paintbrush and a pencil to using this complicated camera, the darkroom and the enlarger. From that I went to a 35mm film camera, cranes and crews and Winnebagos and rooms full of computers to transfer the film-- and then you see your show on TV. I went from seeing it on the crit walls at school to seeing it on the cover of TIME Magazine, to MTV. The whole misconception is that you can’t do personal work, moody work or emotional or self-driven work, and not make it be mainstream. When I first got out of school, and even when I was in school, in my first appointments everybody said, "Your work is too dark, too moody-- it’s too personal, too obscure. Who’s going to hire you?" I did my first TIME cover when I was 23 years old, and I’ve done probably fifty of them since then. Obviously, it has to do with how hard I worked and that I had some ability, but it also had to do with the fact that I just didn’t listen to anybody who told me I couldn’t make it. And then I end up seeing these moody, dark, twisted videos on MTV. I mean, two of the most mainstream venues that you could see-- MTV and TIME Magazine-- so it’s really possible. That’s one of the things I always try to tell students or people that I see: don’t listen to people when they tell you that, because if you have something to say and it means something and it’s important, it’ll get seen. Quality and hard work and being mindful and connecting to your world around you; what’s expected of you and what’s needed and what you can supply in terms of relationships to what’s needed in the world. Your stuff will get out there, and that’s been proven to me for almost twenty-five years now. When I got asked to do my first video, I don’t know if I really even had MTV, and I’d never used a film camera or anything. So I said, "As long as I can be behind the camera and I can shoot the camera, I’ll try it." I just went out and discovered a whole new, much more complicated, much more shared process. But I spent ten years working alone or being on location or getting on a plane with a camera and going somewhere with complete strangers, and then having to come back with the stuff. I could make friends and be out there and connect with these incredible musicians and really talented people, and understand why they became talented and why they were survivors. When you spend time with Metallica or U2 or Peter Gabriel, you understand why these people have twenty-year-long careers. Because they’ve dealt with their demons and their addictions, and they’ve grown and evolved and absorbed failure-- professional failure, personal failure-- and that’s inspirational. And then you get to become a collaborator with some of the great musical artists of the day. That was very exciting to try and match wits with these people. I found that to be really thrilling, but it also became torturous and horrible after (laughs) ten years. Just like illustration did, so it was time to jump ship. That’s when I went off and made a movie [Mugshot]. Then after I made the movie, I chucked everything. That’s when my whole life changed. I got married, I got sober, I got life insurance, I got a mortgage, I got car payments, and my life got better. Those things weren’t even on my radar when I first started becoming an artist. I was just this wildly ambitious workaholic nutjob running around. But life changes, you know? I basically got rid of everything. I got rid of my penthouse apartment, I got rid of my studio in the Village. I went out and bought the house that my grandfather built on the beach, and just refocused my life. I’m 46 years old now, and I started from the bottom again. You let go of all those trappings, that accoutrement of success-- flying first class, dealing with all these rock stars, staying in cool hotels-- and then all the sudden you’re back filling out your own FedEx forms, balancing your own checkbook. But I realized the only door left for me to walk through had the word "asshole" written on it.

Both: (laugh)

MM: And I wasn’t about to go through that, so I had to make some very important choices.

NW: You had to ground yourself again?

MM: Yeah.

[CONTINUED AFTER IMAGE]

NW: I’ve always been curious about Mugshot, the first movie you made, but I’ve never been able to see it. Is it similar in style to your music videos? Is it dark like that?

MM: It has darkness to it, but it’s not... one of the reasons I made the movie was to try and tell a story, tell my own story, and also to learn filmmaking and make my mistakes and have control over that. So I did that, and then I went off and got married and rebalanced these other parts of my life, and I decided I wanted to make another movie. But what had happened was that I got sick of writing these scripts and showing them to people. I was really anxious to just get behind a camera. Since the time I got out of doing music videos the technology had changed, and people were telling me, "Oh, now you can make a movie on your computer. You don’t need the processing lab or the 35mm $100,000 camera. You don’t need a crew of people or all these post-production facilities. You can basically shoot something, transfer it to your computer’s hard drive, and get a program to cut it right there. Output a movie." So I decided I was going to do that, and that’s how this documentary came about, I Like Killing Flies. That’s what I really wanted to do; I wanted to return to working on my own and by myself. And I thought, "Boy, can I really apply this technology to make an entire feature-length film and shoot it and do the sound and edit it myself?" And I could, but what I had to do was strip away all those things that I have. No 35mm film camera. It was basically a little Sony DV [digital video] camera. It wasn’t an army of people and a sound guy with a boom mike. It was basically me holding the microphone up so I could hear. With all those kinds of things I had to give up-- again, like giving up my studio, my apartment, my assistants, my company-- I also gave up all those other kind of stylistic elements that I had from music videos, and I returned to pure storytelling. Pure, simple, direct storytelling. Which is basically me and a camera and a subject. I went back and filmed this guy’s life, this story, and I followed it as it unfolded. Then I went into the dark for months and cut this thing together, and I came out on the other end with a movie that was in Sundance and has played at the Museum of Modern Art. It’s going to be released in fifteen cities.

NW: Great! So it did get picked up?

MM: Yeah. It got picked up by this company called ThinkFilm, which did Born Into Brothels and Murderball. I just made this conscious decision that I wanted to get into the film world. I went off and wrote a script, and we just got the money for that. It’s under a million dollars, and it’s going to be shot in October in New York. I’m kind of reconnecting to that social world. I retreated back into myself when I got married, got sober, got a house, and all that kind of stuff. I really was preparing myself for the next creative phase of my life. I’d seen too many people burn themselves out and become workaholics; being discontent and making tons of money, but just being miserable. On paper or in a magazine it looked like everything was fine, but I couldn’t keep it up in that way. I realized there were other things that were equally important, and some things were actually moreimportant. Once I went back and retreated from that world there was no guarantee I was going to come back out and try and re-emerge, but that’s what I decided to do. And having the time to do that made me really clarify what it is that I wanted to approach next, which is that I wanted to tell these stories. I had this story in my life about this restaurant, and I believed in what this guy had to say. His philosophies about life and death and sex and politics and food really transcended the four walls of this little bohemian enclave in West Greenwich Village. I believed in that, like I believed in my dark, moody, weird stuff that I was doing when I was in school. I put the required amount of work and risk and anxiety and enjoyment into that process to create this thing, and it worked. That led to meeting other people. But it took a super-conscious, very awake moment to say, "I’m going to go back out into that world, and I know what it’s going to take. There’s no guarantee. I have to be prepared for the failure, but I also have to be more prepared for the success. If I fail, I just fall back into the same place I was with the same hole. But if not, that means I’m up in the light." I have to address that and see that through. That’s what led to this film, and that led on to this other script that I decided to write, a script that was totally doable. I stuck it out with some people and found some people with money that really believe in it. So that’s the next step. I’m back in that same boat. I’m 46 years old, and I was 23 years old when I did my first TIME cover and moved to New York and kind of made it. So it’s almost like my life is bisected by that moment. And now I’m kind of starting again after twenty-three more years to re-emerge doing these movies and getting my images out on a whole different scale.

[CONTINUED AFTER IMAGE]

NW: Wow, that’s really amazing. You’ve become extremely successful in everything that you’ve done: illustration, photography, music videos. And you’re always willing to give that up to start again.

MM: But I’ve also become a has-been (laughs) and a burnout in every one of those fields, as well. I’ve failed in those fields and I’ve made mistakes. I tried not to stay any longer at the party than I was meant to be, and move on to the next party where I can make a fool out of myself all over again.

Both: (laugh)

MM: Make new friends-- whatever. I try to do that as much as I can, too.

NW: One last question, and I have to bring it up because it’s always hard to find information on illustrators. The people that I have always been into and craving information about are these faceless illustrators that you can’t find any interviews with, and you can’t find anything else about them.

MM: (laughs)

NW: But when you look up "Matt Mahurin", especially on the Internet, most of what comes back is about the O.J. Simpson cover [for TIME Magazine].

MM: Oh, yeah. Well, I hope that’s not all you see.

NW: No, but there are so many articles examining it and about how people perceived it. And I’m not asking you to defend the piece because it doesn’t need defended. I mean, the things that people bring up about the look of it was just you applying your regular style to this mugshot. I just wonder how does it feel to have your name associated with the controversy?

MM: Basically, my view on that is that all it did in the end was just reaffirm my belief in the power of images. When I did that image, the real tragedy was that if you looked at my cover which had this dark, moody image of O.J. Simpson on it, the headline on it was "An American Tragedy". If you look at the Newsweekcover, I mean, they ran that cover image straight, but the words say "A Trail Of Blood". So which one is more accusatory? By the combination of words and image, to me, "A Trail Of Blood" is much more accusatory. What I was doing was really about packaging, and I felt like this was a dark, moody subject. If you were doing Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the darkest moment, when he’s standing there with the skull, you wouldn’t have spring blossoms blowing through the thing. You’d have to address the scene visually in a way that suits it. What you said is really important, that really does go right along the lines of the way my other work was. I used the example where they had trading cards of O.J. Simpson where they took pictures of him on these dark, moody days where he’s running through the snow. They print those things down. The photograph they took in the courtroom, where he’s got the overhead fluorescent lighting and his head is kind of cocked to the side, it’s the tragic fallen hero, and it’s all dark and moody. Then you’ve got other pictures, like the Newsweek one, and I think it was a new time. An image like that would never happen now because of the lessons that were learned from that. I know I’m not a racist, so it made you answer those questions about yourself and it makes you grow. What happened was, it educated TIME Magazine. The problem was that there wasn’t a person in a position of power to make the decision that was central to that kind of an issue. If there was a... they don’t even have to be black, but if there was a person of color or an enlightened white person in a position to know what could happen here, it wouldn't have happened. Someone to say, "Look, we know we're not racist or a racist organization, but what we need to see is that this could be misconstrued." I ended up doing this radio program... in fact, I remember once being on a plane going out to California, and this stewardess was taking care of me who was black. She was talking about what I did when I brought up the O.J. Simpson thing, and she goes, "Oh, let me tell you..." she was a very dark skinned black woman, and she goes, "...let me set one thing straight, the last thing I want to be is white. But when I was growing up in high school, all the light-skinned black guys-- and it didn’t matter if they were the star athlete or whatever-- but they got the light-skinned black women and they got the white women. The darker your skin was, as a black woman, the less desirable you were to men." And I went on this radio program, and I went on not knowing the host was black or that this guy really kind of set me up, but he also enlightened me in a way. He said, "Matt, have you ever heard of a thing called 'color coding'?" I said, "No." And he said, "Well, back in the slave days, when they would get the slaves they would line them up from dark-skinned to light-skinned." Basically, the darker your skin was, the more you were perceived as an animal, and therefore you were considered more dangerous. You were thought to have more brute strength, to be more simpler in the mind, so you were put out to do the mindless tasks, like working out in the field. The lighter your skin was, the more you looked like a white person, so you got to work inside the plantation and be around the people. And since you had to wait on these people and be in their proximity, you got to bathe and wear clean clothes because these people didn’t want to be around stinky, sweaty people. And so within the black culture racism existed. So there was racism within racism. And so what I surmised from this, what I gathered from this, by me doing this cover-- I didn’t tap into racism necessarily between whites and blacks. I’m sure that also happened, but it also happened within their own culture, and I brought up those kinds of things. I mean, I had everyone from Jesse Jackson to whoever calling me a racist and all that kind of stuff. What I did is I saw people take this image and this mistake or whatever, this misjudgment, and everybody cultivated it and twisted it to motivate their own cause. Newsweek used it, as well: "Oh, TIME Magazine is down! Let’s kick them!" The first guy that called me to get me about this wrote this big article in The Washington Post, which is owned by the same company that owns Newsweek, so it’s all interconnected. Everybody uses it to suit their own needs. More power to them. But in the end, it totally made me think that a picture is worth a thousand words. Nobody remembers the words that were on there and they were much more slanderous, much more accusatory. But people do remember the image. In the end, the way I sum it up is, I wouldn’t have wished this on anybody, what I went through. But I wouldn’t have traded it for anything, either. So you get both of those sides. That’s what happens when you put yourself out there and you risk things. That’s the price you pay, and it has come back to me in many ways. Ten times, a hundred times, countless times over I’ve been rewarded for the chances I’ve taken and for my feelings or point of view or my ideas about things that I’ve put on the line. You have to stand by everything you do.

[CONTINUED AFTER IMAGE]

NW: It always boggled my mind that it was taken so out of context. All that anyone would have had to do is hold up two other pieces of your artwork next to it, and it’s so obvious that’s your style. That just drove me insane.

MM: As time moves on we go through things that will fade, and people become more sensitive and more conscious of it. And just like everything else, that will fade away and become just another little lesson that was learned along the way. For me personally, it’s just one thing that I did that was really fascinating. But it’s not who I am.

My Thoughts:

As Matt grew up he fell in love with painting. He loved the idea of how you have to go through a process. After repeating that process for a while he changed the process. He changed it by involving a camera and print. He got into photography because of how when he went out into the world he was supplied with raw materials that he could pull good photos from. Dark, scary, and emotional or moving were the visual representations of where Matt was as an artist emotionally. They were also the emotions he wanted to express through his images because he was interested in them.


Matt Mahurin:




Citations:

-Article: http://www.tlchicken.com/view_story.php?ARTid=3345

-Matt Mahurin Portrait: http://artofvisualthinking.blogspot.com/2012/11/illustrator-of-week-matt-mahurin.html

Matt Mahurin, Day 1:

Gays In The Military was taken by the artist Matt Mahurin. The photo shows a soldier walking in a graveyard. He is showing respect by visiting his soldier friends that have died. Matt Mahurin uses  foreground, middle ground, and background. In the picture there is a tombstone in the front closest to the camera, which would be known as foreground. He also puts most of the focus on it by using aperture. The middle ground consist of the soldier, rows of tombstones, and part of a tree branch. The background is the sky and a tree. Mahurin uses the tree and part of a tree branch as framing devices to help the audiences' eyes move smoothly around the photo. The photo is also kind of dark. This is because it shows the darkened state that the soldier is in because he has lost friends.