Skin Hunger: Camraface for Noén

Office— Describe the 2020s in 3 words. Lies only.

John Lippman— Stable. Boring. Offline.

Matt Weinberger— Artificial (that’s a hot take because people would say it is artificial). Unoriginal. Mundane.

O— Matt, for this issue you described photographing fleeting moments as declaring “this deserves to exist tomorrow.” To both, what makes a moment magnetic enough that you believe it’s worth experiencing again tomorrow in photographs or literature?

JL— I come at it from the literary perspective. If I had to say one word, I would say poignancy. There are a lot of people writing a lot of different versions of the current moment, but some of them seem to resonate a bit more, and capture the moment [more candidly].

MW— Whoever you are (Whoever is reading this), whatever is around you is important if you say it is. The idea that some spaces or worlds or groups have something that is particularly exciting— there’s some truth in that. But the reality is that, especially from a historical lens, it’s exciting because people made it exciting. People positioned it in a way that those who came to experience it secondhand actually found value in it. But that value is created, and that's created also by the observer.

O— What do you guys admire most about each other’s artistic perspectives?

MW— I think what John does really well is that he has come to the literary scene with this perspective that every writer is a rock star. The New York lit scene in the 2020s is back and popping off. We need to shine a light on it. Writing is sexy, writing is cool, and writing is important.

As a documentarian, as a photographer, I've been sort of on that wave since post-COVID when I got into shooting stuff. It was largely through the literary scene, Forever Magazine— which I write about in the article— that issue 03 launch that Anika Jade Levy had hired me to shoot was my gateway into this broader cultural world. 

John sees that writing isn't some sleepy thing that just belongs in the spider-webbed hallways of universities. Writers are on the forefront of culture and are the movers and shakers of what is creative and exciting today. So I think he does a great job at that. 

JL— I appreciate that. And actually, I would say that what I really admire about Matt (I mean, among many other things) is the literal flip side of that. Like for me, authors really are my rock stars. You know, I come at it from wanting to promote authors, and I believe authors should be at the center of American culture. And so to see a person like Matt who is documenting the 2020s in New York City broadly— he's at fashion shows, he's doing brand work, he's doing DJs, he's doing raves, skateboard culture, everything broadly, but is coming at it with the real love of literature is great. I love that. Mixing the literary with other types of art and culture, and Matt does it better than anybody.

O— What changes have you guys noticed in the culture of your respective crafts in recent years?

MW— This is very well documented, but it's relevant to this issue, Technodystopia: social media has just fundamentally changed the role of the photographer. With everyone having a camera in their pocket, the purpose of the photographer is very different. 

Now, it's not that nobody's documenting anything, and that we need a photographer to be there to document it. If anything, now, there's almost too much information. If you're trying to get a flavor of what happened in a past moment or era, there's just so much documentation and [such a vast] visual library of everything. The role of someone like myself is to be a voice of perspective to say: here are a group of images that I've captured and done with intention to create this little time capsule of what we have today. So, despite the total excess of imagery, we have this little capsule and world that you can look to.

Also, with AI, it’s important to have voices that are known and credible because when people look back to any point in history from now on to as far as technology continues to progress, it will not be obvious what was real and what actually happened, because anything can be manufactured with AI. False narratives can be built and false images can be indistinguishable from that which is real. So it's important to have known, quantifiable voices that say, here's my body of work.

JL— One thing I’ve observed that been developing for 10 or 20 years, but really accelerated in the last five, is the pressure on authors to figure out how to use algorithmic media to promote their work. 

Writing predates film and certainly social media. Natasha Stagg actually, in our previous issue, wrote an article for us called “The Lamentation of Natasha Stagg”, where she talks a lot about this. There's increasing pressure on authors to not just do great written work, but then to figure out ways to promote it visually in a competitive media landscape that's really dominated by short-form video right now. What I'd like to do is to try to help build some of the infrastructure that helps promote authors, and promote their work without them having to be the primary or sometimes sole force of promotion.

MW— I will say, one observation about what John said— I think that people having a large social media following doesn't really mean that you will be culturally relevant because there are a lot of people with a million followers that you’ve never heard of. And I think an interesting example of that in literature is how well Madeline Cash is doing with Lost Lambs, which I know John was a big supporter of. She’s the absolute opposite of an influencer girly, she's not posting short-form videos promoting her book or her content. Rather, she's someone who locked in and wrote something that's really great, and she's being recognized for it. And I think it goes to show that you don't need to fall into that trap of feeling like you need to feed the algorithm. If you just make great stuff, and of course, maybe know the right people and get promoted in the right circles— you can find success without having to be a slave to social media.

JL— Yeah, it's really important if you think about it, the group of people who are amazing social media influencers and the group of people who are amazing authors, maybe there’s a little bit of overlap, but there's plenty of amazing authors whose specialty is not social media. So, how do we help them get out there? Matt's great about that as well, making sure that people are seen, you know, in photos and in publications and in media.

MW— But then of course, there are writers who are very good at social media, and then they use that to promote their writing career. Like Caroline Calloway is the queen of social media, but also has written and published three books that have done very, very well.

O— The theme of the issue is techno-dystopia. So I did want to ask, what's the most techno-dystopian thing that you've seen lately? And I think that fits into what we're talking about right now, too.

MW— I have a very quick answer to this. Brad Troemel, who is, I guess, a cultural anthropologist but also a spreader of misinformation, used my photographs that I took a couple of years ago. I guess he pulled them off my Instagram and then changed the images with AI to give my photograph subjects different outfits than they were actually wearing, and then used those photos to promote a fake brand that he turned into a real brand. He sold T-shirts on the premise that these T-shirts were being worn by all the cool people on the scene, but the people in the photographs never wore the T-shirts; he just ripped off my photography. 

So, that was really weird because I had followed Brad for a while, and I didn't really know what his deal was. I assumed that he was just, you know, a cultural anthropologist talking about things that actually happened and existed. I didn't realize that within what he posted, which is broadly truth, he trickles in misinformation. I don't know if it's like performance art or if it's a broader commentary on how you can't trust anything on the internet, but it clearly showed him as a non-trustworthy source. He's essentially trolling his followers and creating fake histories. 

And I think it goes back to the point I was making earlier: it's really important to have trusted sources who are documenting things as they really were and speaking from a perspective of truth and observation, because it's very easy to create false realities with AI and completely change how history is written and remembered. So that was very frustrating. And I did call Brad Troemel out about it on my Instagram. And I messaged him, but I never heard back from him because I wanted him to remove my photos, you know. I was like, don't use this. He never asked me, and I felt like that was almost disrespectful to journalism and to people who care about truth. So, I wasn't happy about that.

O— I think you should write a short story about it for Volume 0.

JL— YES.

My thing is that I was at the car show at the Javits Center a few months ago and there was a stand for a company that makes these robotic dogs. You might have seen them online. They look like dogs without heads, and they’re these robots that walk around. And the particularly dystopian thing about it was that they had these booth people trying to sell a crowd that had gathered around on the idea that these are cuddly and friendly sorts of beings. Not these industrial-use or military-use devices. Look at these cute dogs! You can tell them to turn around! Stuff like that. And it had all these little kids, and I'm just looking at it thinking, well, this is obviously scary as hell, and without irony, they're trying to tell this gathered crowd that these are somehow beings with a soul or actually dog-like. So, that still bothers me several months later.

O— Yeah, I always see those food delivery robots, and they kind of look like animals. I don't know, they give me the vibe of a dog walking on the street, and I always feel the urge to pet it, which is really dystopian to me on my part.

O— How do scenes build momentum, and what keeps them alive, at least from your perspective?

JL— I would say one thing about scenes is that sometimes they are [made up of] lots of partially overlapping artists or groups of artists [that are] all doing their own thing in the same place at the same time, and it organically develops.

Sometimes it's not until later that you might look back and realize some commonalities of work that different people were doing individually. And that's something I think about, you know, not just what is happening this week in New York on any given night. There are literally two or three relevant reading events seven days a week. But some of these people will be writing stuff for coming decades that will be very important. We'll look back and see the scene differently than we do right now.

MW— I would echo that the people make the scene. Both in the sense that people inside the scene make up the scene, and so do the observers of it. It's both made of man and man-made. Scenes are kind of a construction of our imagination.

If you think about it from the techno dystopia perspective, like basically anyone within whatever scene can look me up on Instagram and see that we probably have 200 mutuals. It speaks to how there's just a ton of overlap in what we are consuming just by consuming that which each other is making. Whether you want to be or not, you're gonna be influenced by your peers who are doing things contemporaneously and geographically in the same moment as you are.

O— Let's say a historian is flipping through all of each of your respective work in the future. What do you think that they would come to understand about who you were and what you cared about based on what you curated?

MW— I think it really depends on the perspective of the historian. But one thing I would love for people to get out of my work— there's this underlying inescapable reality that people will say, wow, he was there. He was there, he was there, he was there. He was everywhere. Because I never thought I could be the best photographer in the world. And I'm not. But I definitely wanted to work as hard as I could to capture as much as I could within this little universe.

I’m casting a wide net, trying to be comprehensive throughout not just one world. Like I'm not just doing the literary scene. I'm not just doing the music scene. I'm also doing fashion. I'm also doing nightlife. I'm doing parts of the theater world. Even sport. A little bit of everything. It's hard to think about how you're gonna be perceived, you know. But I think a lot of my work is about giving an opportunity for those who I'm photographing to be perceived in the future.

JL— I mean, I might say one weird idea that has taken place in mainstream culture is the alleged news that reading is dying. The Atlantic just wrote a big piece about this. It's totally wrong. And reading is super fundamental, and authors are super fundamental. I actually am a big believer that a literary renaissance is starting in America right now. The talent of authors we have right now is as good as we had in the 1920s. With Volume 0 specifically, I think people conventionally make a very big distinction between a high lit author versus an alt lit or weird little author versus a commercial author, you know. That these are all very different groups. You know, I'm interested in bringing together all types of different authors who are highly talented to put a fiction lens on all kinds of provocative and taboo topics. I think it's super important.

O— Describe the 2020s in 3 words. Truth only.

MW— Post-COVID. Rebirth. Technodystopia.

JL— I’ll go with those three.