You are a favourite photographer for bands like Sonic Youth, Black Dice, Cat Power and magazines like Purple, Index, i-D, Self Service. Do you still collaborate with them?
Less. It’s a good time to give new photographers, other people a chance. Cause they're so generous with you all the time, they give you 20 pages, 30 pages. Other people need those pages. I did, I had my turn. Cause otherwise if you keep using the same people, it's all the same.

 

Which photographers do you find interesting now?
Anders Edstrom is a photographer that I really like. He's also a very good friend of mine.

 

And magazines?
You know… I’m really not interested in magazines. I’m sorry to say.

 

You think something is missing?
The commodity, the material… Magazines are always wants and wants, needs and needs. And I don’t think magazines give you or open you up to anything. To be honest I like reading… when I was on holiday… A very good friend of mine is Argentinian, the greatest man in the world. He’s name is Carlos. He has this place in Tulúm, called Tierra del Sol. His girlfriend is argentinian as well. He has five rooms. There’s no restaurant but they cook for you everyday.

 

Where’s Tulúm?
Mexico, there’s Cancun, and this is an hour ride from there. We were there in the summer. We were having breakfast and there were all this magazines people left. And there were these science magazines... And I was always picking those and I understood that I don’t want to read about things that I know. And there’s no really anything that I really want to know. But I was surprised reading about some of this articles, incredible articles. I also enjoy reading about music. I like Wire, the English music magazine. Just because again, I’m curious and I get the opportunity to hear about things that existed at another time, and you feel they exist now, then you kind of interconnects with everything that we’re doing.

 

You have some solo records. Now you're part of the band Usun?
Yes, with Isham Akira Bharoocha, Dave Aron and Scott Mou. It's improv music and all accoustic. So... if I go on holidays I take the last copy of Wire. But on holidays I want to read a book, I don’t want to read magazines.

 

What books have you been reading lately?
I read this really heavy heavy heavy book. It was all this documents, theory documents on surrealism. And then I started to read Caetano Veloso’s one called "Tropical Truth: Revolution in Brazil ", which is beautiful but I stopped. I’ll finished reading it another time. Then I read all the cinematic book of Guy Debord, a book that just came out, which is just mindblowing.

 

He’s kind of heavy too.
Yes… but I like to read that kind of stuff on holiday. You’re so relaxed and your mind is just clear. Some of that always seems so relative. I went to the St.Marks table where everything is four bucks and I got the Guy Debord book and the surrealism one. It’s called something like "Le chavellier du Surrealism" and it’s this guy who wrote these essays, so students understand the basics on surrealism.

 

We don’t seem to have that in art these days, the radical movements. Everything seems so fragmented and individualistic. What’s your opinion on the art world today?
I think it doesn’t exist anymore, if the art world is a boutique and its like a Calvin Klein boutique in Chelsea. That you go there to buy, a material item to shop, you go shopping, it's tax-rights off, its an investment. You can feel that. Nothing that’s material is that way, unless if you're a believer in fulfilling yourself in with need and wants, if that’s what makes you feel good. Some people in the arts lost the goodness in their souls a little bit. But on the other hand I think it’s a very excit-
ing mood. I think it’s great to take it out of context. A person from the news was asking me the other day: You’re an artist. And I don’t feel like an artist and I don’t know what that label means. It’s not like you have an ego that wants to say: I'm a photographer, I'm a cook, a painter, a writer. That means you're an artist? What is that mean? I like to give things, share things. That’s a really great beginning right now, and I think that’s were we are, it’s really open, and where we’re all sharing this experience together, we're vibrating together in the same sphere somehow. That feels really good. The Dada show is really interesting for that. That was supposedly the first movement that took art out of the context, of the commodity of product. Took painting out of the context and brought it to the streets, with performances, and it was radical. You could piss on the floor and it was art. And it was true, anything could be art. So for me, if I take pictures of my son, it's art. But my son is not a piece of art. He happens to be someone I study everyday. He’s a part of me, and makes me feel so good to document him, to be part of his life. But then I realize that if they’re pictures of him on the wall they are material objects that people can buy.

 

And what do you think of that?
That’s the great thing, you have to have the hability to not to think about it. I don’t sell work so I don’t mind. But it's hard to talk about yourself, your work. Because the work is just the way you feel. But to share it… we’re given the opportunity to feel the way other people feel. I remember the first show I had in Tokyo, these young Japanese kids just seemed so simple, so wise, so straightforward, just because they felt it. Before I even attached myself to the feeling of what it was about, they felt part of the pictures, they fitted into the pictures. It was their world, it wasn't that they wanted to become part of that world, it was already their world. So the softness, the gentleness of the pictures, I guess just let people in. Which to me… I think that taught me a lot, because there is another way of getting people’s attention, and that’s creating work that people can react to, which is something I never wanted to do. You don’t know how other people are going to interpret what you’re doing. People want to say things are more radical than they are. That’s the problem too today, cause people try to reinvent theories without existing, because there is no theory behind the feeling. It’s just something that feels good. Do we have to label everything?

No. We don’t, right?

 

Like starting to lose the direct contact with things?
I think that’s what’s interesting with Dada too, so many people tried to reinvent that… whether it was through the punk movement, or through fashion, or Alleged gallery in its moment… But it’s such valid proof that we’ve gone so far, we have fallen out of track.

 

You think that’s what happened?
Yeah, completely. Where they put it out of context, we've put it back into context, what was art had to become material, like this solid object, that we consume.

 

But some people are trying to find a way out of that.
Everyone is struggling to find a common view, but also they are in their own seeking personal path. People are continuing looking for the way and then they don’t realize this is the way. This is the way. We don’t have to fill it with all these theories. This is the way, right here right now. Why question it? There isn’t an answer, so why confuse it. In the same way, with this friend of mine Carlos in Mexico, we played this little game, it always felt so good… The second or third day there, I said to him on the beach: "Carlos, today is the day!" and he said: "Mark you are right. Today is the day!" So everyday when we saw each other in the morning for breakfast he would say: "Today is the day!" That's it, right? That’s the way, cause there isn’t another way. If you're looking for a way, you're always going to be looking for a way.

 

It reminds me of Buddhism, to live in the present moment.
Maybe indirectly, because it's something I never studied. But I would enjoy, later on to learn more about Buddhism philosophy. But again, I think I have a problem with deciphering information, I’m not a big literary reader. I'm dyslexic.

 

And how do you deal with New York, where there’s information all the time, when you walk down the street or you get into a supermarket?
I’ll tell you… it’s beautiful. I think I’m so happy to be here, that it doesn’t bother me. It’s true. That’s just my way of being, there’s nothing that’s going to bother me here. And I’m not going to entertain anything that is going to initiate an certain fear or worry. But… you have to get there… that place. When we lived in Manhattan with Maria I think we really wanted to leave. It was too much, everything was too much. Maria was working a lot, I was working a lot, then my kids are busy, everyone is busy, non-stop. But I understood really quickly that this wasn’t working for me anymore, I couldn’t live my life like this. That’s the reason why I first stopped being a fashion photographer. Because I didn’t wanted to participate in the industry, that first of all, I didn’t really believed in, and secondly I don’t believe it’s a contem-porary industry. I’m really interested in the word contemporary, just as a being participating with people within a space. Because I think the fashion world has lost it’s context in so many ways. Without even thinking about it, we’re in a position where we’re living in the now, and that’s contemporary thinking, that’s great. And I thinking having the luxury to be able to find a way, I clearly understood that New York is a very contemporary city. Even though living in Mexico, by the third week on the beach, hanging out with the local families, that we know very well, cause we go back to the same place every year; just watching the simplicity of their life, and feeling so close to them and part of how this people are living, we realize that we’re so far behind. Their life is so simple, and there’s an immediacy you get after living a few weeks there, that you’re so part of the place, you’re so inside it, that you realize: Ok, if I don’t have all these wants and needs, we surround ourselves by an idea that is initiated through that daily. But at the same time, why can’t we just be, there. Everything is just there. Everything’s just simplified in a way, and it always has been, we’re complicating things. We failed, our society failed, it did fail.
But I think with New York, the mind of the people that I surround myself with, we’re in a really good place, it’s an exciting world here right now. But you can’t participate with the world that is out there, like my wife Maria would come back from work, from her store in the city and she’d be complaining about that world. And that world is not going to harm me, it’s not going to touch me, those things are not going to affect the way that I feel. I mean, it’s the same thing with not participating reading the newspaper and watching the news and filling yourself with all the media. I used to love reading every morning for 20 years the french newspaper Liberation, and then when I was in Paris I’d get the Herald Tribune. So every morning for 45 minutes I’d read the newspaper back to back. I loved it. Every day I though I was nurturing myself, finding myself withing politics, and to find my own way, and to know where I stood. But I found myself reacting to it, and then I’d get too sad. Cause I was too sensitive to this information, cause you see all this horrific images, and that’s what hapens, we are being bombared by these images. I knew that I couldn’t live in a world where these images existed, or that I gave a chance to exist on their own accord.

 

And how do you do with your kids?
I don’t know… In my little world, I have to think of Maria and the kids, cause for me it’s very simple: I find my joy in their joy. If Maria and the kids are happy then I’m happy. I’d love to take my son out of this regimented idea of what education is. I did that with my daughter Bebe and she’s just an extra-ordinary child, so open and so wise but at the same time really understanding too that she doesn’t have to know everything, she doesn’t have to be... the best! I don’t like education as a competition, school as a competition, or "this is how you have to be to part of society". I’m really against any theory that gets into that. Like at her age now, fifteen years old, she understands that she’s not interested in science, she had really hard problem with mathematics and algebra, it’s just not her. The same with me. I can’t see numbers, I can’t speak numbers, money doesn’t exist to me, anything with numbers, money, it’s just no. It’s really great to just nurture her that, to let her understand that it’s ok, this doesn’t have to be part of your life, don’t make it difficult for yourself in school. Because your parents could make your life hell, when you go through school. You nurture that daily, you don’t have to struggle to find it. Love is real, in the same way with " Today is the day". If we share our love with people, then we’re on the good track.

 

You're optimistic about the future.
There will be shifts in our lives… But that doesn't answer the question whether New York is a good place to be. I don’t know… it’s difficult to say. Cause I don’t really agree with the politics here, I don’t agree with the politicians, and I don’t want to be involved with it. But I am interested in having a point of view, but it’s a self-point, trying to find another way, but that way is something that we all have access to, which is getting rid of all the the ways that we’ve been told to. And life in Tulúm, or anywhere else, could be a dream. I’m not sure if North America will exist in the future, some countries will disappear and fade away. This is not a country that set by any standards a good example to the rest of the world. So this will disappear or will turn into something else.

 

So you're saying that if have your group of people and friends, the surroundings could be really different and it wouldn’t really matter?
It’s really interesting and I don’t know if it’s the older you get, that you have more experiences, but you go certain places and you feel good. You arrive on the beach on holiday, or you go upstate to the country or you go to a park for tea. With me it’s outside, always outside. If you take those feelings it could be anywhere, as long as you are in peace with yourself and the surroundings, and everyone around you. I try to be with Maria and the kids outside, as much as possible, and I try to nurture that cause I think that’s really where we’re from. I’d like to get closer to that the older I get, or to be in an environment which is really outside, where the temperature is pretty consistent the all year round… I’m not against winters and summers, but I really like the idea of always living outside. All day… being one with the birds.

 

It reminds me of "Speaking for Trees", the film you did with Chan Marshall from Cat Power. She sings her songs in the forest and you can hear the birds, the wind, the trees.
Yes.

 

And in your new house in Brooklyn you have a back yard where you invite friends and cook for them.
Yes.

 

You cook for everyone?
Yes.

 

Is it hard?
Yes… No… it's easy, ha.

 

Are you the only cook in the house?
Yes. My girl was well trained but not anymore… she’s fifteen and kissing. She’s up to other things right now. And Joey, yeah, he’s alright, he’s
going to definitely take over.

When did you start cooking?
When we were kids we used to take a lot of mushrooms. You could just pick them in the fields in England, the really small ones. But you must take like 40 or 60 of them to get high, so we’ve go pick them and I would make toast. I remember people don’t liking to eat them, so I was like: "Oh I’ll make it in an ommelet or a toast with jam or garlic" and then slowly I became the cook in the house. And the house was like eight people, like a bedsit kind of place.

 

That was in London?
No, actually that was in the countryside. At this college I went to, but not for very long, I was thrown out.

 

For making people mushrooms?
Yes... I started floating there and I never went down… It’s all because of the mushrooms, ha… That’s great right? I think from that age I really liked that idea, where magic time was a good time to cook for everybody, when everyone smokes and wants to eat.

 

So you are a self-taught cook?
Yes.

 

And with photography you're self-taught too?
Yes.

 

And how did you became interested with taking photos?
I was in London, partying a lot and I wanted to stop but not consciously. So I began to take black and white pictures, which I could only develop at night, when the room was really dark. So that way I stopped going out to so many parties.

 

But you do have some rules with photography right? Don't you take one picture of your son everyday when you take him to school?
But I don't see it as a rule. I take him to school every morning and we have so much fun taking pictures. But after a few weeks or a few months the pictures were all the same thing. Which is great but it became more interesting to take one picture. Not because I didn’t wanted to have a choice or about creating a rule. You know, sometimes you take pictures and there’s a picture on the roll that somehow doesn’t exist, like you question it: "Why did I take that picture?" Or sometimes the camera is sitting here and you press the button and by accident you take the picture and it is out of focus or something. And because that picture is so different from all the others, it's the one picture that you look at. So I was always intrigued about those moments. When I lived in Manhattan I lived on 24th Street and 11th, and I got a little studio on 28th. So every morning I would walk there and walk back. And the location was where I was taking a lot of pictures at the time, like concrete walls. And I was always shooting fashion stories and catalogues, always shooting there. So I just liked this idea, I don’t know why, to not to think about what was I going to shoot, but at the same time just take a picture of something that I never photographed before. So I wasn’t thinking about it, but because I created this rule, there was never an option about taking a picture of that again. So basically what happened was that every single time I took a picture again, it became a random thing. But those random things there weren’t really that random. I’ve been photographing things on the floor: weeds or cigarette butts or newspapers, other things, other cracks, just stuff. That just became part of daily life, it’s just things that you see. You find so much beauty in those smaller details that we notice everyday, but other people don’t notice. I realized after a few months in doing it that all these images we’re finding there own importance without me initiating a relevance around them, or trying to shoot them. And also again, the idea of just surprising yourself.

 

You always find a way to surprise yourself?
Always… yes. But that’s because with photography, in a certain way, everything that you photograph is everything that you love to look at, so you’re vibrating at that level already. There’s a certain moment when you don’t need to do anything anymore, the documentation of it is already there cause you feel it.

 

And when did you start taking these kind of pictures you gave us for the magazine?
It has been in the last couple of years, just opening the back and letting the light in. If you want the pictures to get yellow, you open the back of the camera, inside the house when it’s not too bright. If you open it in the sun, it gets red and orange. I’ve been doing this for years, even in my first book “Synthetic voices” the first picture with Bebe is just that. When that happened it was a mistake, when that happened I was just like wow! It’s about not wanting to have any control of the images whatsoever. Cause what happens when you do that, is that the five pictures before that one are gone, and the five pictures after that are gone. You don’t know which pictures are going to come out. No idea. Sometimes it’s two pictures on a roll of film… It’s crazy. You realize that nothing exists, right? Cause it doesn’t exist, you see? It doesn’t. You know what I mean right? If you give importance to this objects, these things around you, and you take photographs of them, in your mind you have all this stuff recorded, and then you get the roll of film and they’re not there…

 

You like to hide things.
I remember once, long long time ago, I did a fashion story for a magazine, which was a girl walking with a plastic bag over her shoulders, and the editor called up and was like: "So where are the credits?" And I said: "Oh I put the clothes in the bag, so this one is Calvin Klein, the other is... It’s all in the bag, it’s the same right? You just write the name of the brand". That’s all they want, the name written in the page.

 

Did they print that?
No, they didn’t get it.

 

 

 

 

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