Conversation: the Fourth

Thanks for your patience, Fellow Readers. For our fourth installment, we asked a few questions (ok, five) to multifaceted artist Jorge Colombo. Mr. Colombo is an acclaimed photographer and filmmaker, but is most recently known for his series of magazine covers for The New Yorker made completely with the Brushes app on the iPhone. Animations showing his process are available at the New Yorker website here. His prints of his sketches can also be found at his artist page at 20x200.com.

1. I was very impressed with your series done with the Sketches app for the iPhone. New York and San Francisco have been the settings so far, are there other locales that you have in mind for this series?

Anywhere I go, really. I just haven't travelled that much since I started this project. There is stuff done in Vermont, in Connecticut, in Utah, in Las Vegas, some nice ones in San Francisco, but that's about it. I look forward to trying new locations this year, home and abroad. They don't have to be famous places, either: it's just as interesting to capture the uniqueness of some spot on the map no one has ever heard of.

2. How do you go about collecting images for a series? Do you start with a theme in mind and then create or do you view the images you've made and group them afterward?

A lot of art is not planned, wouldn't you agree? People do it, THEN they figure out what they were actually trying to say. Your question mentions "themes" and "series." One could see those as an artificial roping of pieces into corrals. But that is important to me, since I see individual works as words on a phrase, and believe that the right group/sequence can yield a more interesting phrase or poem. It's a matter of looking at your own work with the eye of a curator or an editor, if you are so inclined. To answer your question, in my case I do the grouping afterward.

3. I have noticed that, most notably in your photos, that use of light or the lack thereof seems to be an integral part of the subject. What are the differences that you see in using natural light such as in daytime outdoor shots as opposed to artificial light in the studio such as your Glow series?

In my case, it's always about adopting some sort of voluntary handicap and seeing how I can get away with it. Outdoors lighting can be very random (unless you control it off-camera with reflectors or strobes, none of which I use) but I have fun trying to making it work, rather than devising a winning environment. As for the Glow images, they are shot with a very inadequate light source, a fluorescent lightbox, problematic enough to be stimulating. (And creating just enough areas of mystery.) I wouldn't hold my approach as ideal, I'd advise others to learn and use correct, time-tried ways to do things. But I get more fullfilment from an inconvenient approach. Hey, I've been drawing NYC on a 3" x 2" screen for an year now.

4. Your short films are fascinating, they capture everyday life in such an interesting way. Are there any plans for long format movies as well?

Only if I manage to make them with the same casualness and lightweight setup of my short pieces. (I invariably use a point-and-shoot photo camera for my movies.) Movies fascinate me; the monumental logistics behind most features, not so much. It's an issue of conventioned team scale. One assumes a painting is done by an artist working solo, a song can often be crafted by a whole band, a movie requires a streetful of trailers with an army inside... But it doesn't always have to be like that! There is room in the world for poems created by a collective -- or for some filmmakers working as alone as a novelist.

5. I recently watched Manhattan for the first time. Watching that first sequence of scenes made me wonder why it took me so long to see it. It was truly a visual love letter to Gotham. I now have a better understanding of the inspirations behind your iPhone Sketches series. What are some other films or works of art that serve as inspiration for you?

The Woody Allen/Gordon Willis opening for "Manhattan" is just one way to approach the city. Cassavetes, for one, wasn't that impressed. The accuracy of a portrait lies more than often in the eye of the beholder. But those images managed to catch me at the right time and leave a mark. Behind my NYC drawings is also the influence of the great wandering photographers: Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Raymond Depardon (but also more recent ones, such as Martin Parr or Paulo Nozolino or Todd Hido.) There's also a bunch of graphic novel artists, all of them European and most of them from the 70s/80s: Tardi, Denis, Loustal, Avril, Dupuy-Berberian, Mariscal, Javier de Juan, all of them with a very strong sense of location. And, of course, countless movies.