In Her Own Lens: A Look at Aida Laleian
“An arrogance accompanies conceptualism, an arrogance that assumes realist painters like Rembrandt had no idea behind their work. This negation of the object is not at all what I admired: I’m a photographer—I love objects.”
If evolution is a theme of Aida Laleian’s individual works, it is also a fact of her general career. The present Galerie makes this clear enough, spanning the ever-changing work she began as a college student at the Art Institute of Chicago, and the work she now produces as an associate professor of photography at Williams College. The following piece, compiled from an interview I conducted with her in Massachussets, provides a background to the career of this enigmatic, ever-evolving artist. This is the story of Aida Laleian.
I left Romania for Chicago when I was six years old and grew up in a traditionally American, middle-class, Midwestern home. Then, in the seventies, I attended college at the Art Institute, to which I commuted daily. There were very few students who were eighteen and going to art school during the seventies. Many of the students were Vietnam veterans who were basket cases and could only manage manual tasks because they were fried from the drugs and the war. There was also a lot of older women, many of them divorced, returning to school with dreams of a career. And then there were others who had attended a liberal-arts college first and, for various reasons, decided that they wanted to be artists. Back then you lived in an apartment or, if you were an immigrant kid like me, commuted on the subway. And back then fashion was the thing. Many of the working-class kids did fashion design because it guaranteed them a job. Yet for me and most of my classmates, the mentality was that you made art because that was what you needed to do and the issue of your career was secondary. I never even thought about a career. I thought that I would just ride the academic wave as long as I could and, when that ended, I would get a factory job or whatever could sustain me while I did my work.
These years were also the height of conceptualism, the height of minimalism, and I would spend hours sitting in lectures with Joseph Beuys. Performance art had an influence on a lot of work that was being done at the Art Institute back then, but I never really tapped that vein. Even though I was reared at the height of conceptualism – I was in art school from ’73 to ’78 – I’m not much of a conceptualist. A sort of arrogance accompanies conceptualism, an arrogance that assumes realist painters like Rembrandt had no idea behind their work. This negation of the object is not at all what I admired: I’m a photographer—I love objects.
One of my greatest influences back then was Maya Deren, the avant-garde filmmaker of the forties. The eighteenth century was also rich font of material, and I still love narrative paintings. I was doing a lot of self-portraiture of fabricated scenarios trying to deal with issues of sexuality. It was a time of sexual exploration when I didn’t know anyone who was just straight; it seemed everyone was at least bisexual. As a straight woman, I went to many of Chicago’s huge gay discos, which were still underground at the time. There was also a lot of private disco clubs, but I found the heterosexual disco scene a bit off-putting. Drugs were not my scene either, even though they were all around me. In my circle, the work never came out of the drugs; that was more of the generation before me. I was of the labored, sketching, working variety, as were many of my friends. The drugs were used as more of a release. There was some dope, but it was mostly cocaine.
During the mid-eighties, as a post-graduate, I had a job as a special-effects technician; I learned Rubalit, Photolit, and masking, and I started using these skills in my own work. Before that I was doing very primitive, dodge-and-burn applications. With Photoshop, I began shooting film, scanning it to a computer, manipulating the photograph using the software, and then exporting it back to film to make the prints. I started working digitally in the nineties, but most of the better digital cameras were unaffordable. It was really not until the turn of century that I began shooting digital and printing digital, and even then my first digital camera cost seven-thousand dollars.
Digital photography remains largely in the simulacrum stage of mimicry—it has barely scratched the surface of its unique possibility. I find it ironic that the art world perceives itself as radical when it’s actually conservative. For the past twenty years, photographers have had a panicked resistance to digital photography, saying, “Oh, my God! This is going to compromise the veracity of the photograph, challenge the very premises of photography.” From my end of things, the whole purpose was all about challenging photographic verisimilitude. And photographs have always been manipulated; it just took a little more finesse before. Now, combining twenty or thirty negatives is nothing in comparison, but you still have to have some very basic drawing abilities in order to work in Photoshop; you still have to know proportion, you still have to know how shadows fall. I look at advertisements and am amazed at how poorly some of them are done without any understanding of these things. But, that said, there’s this other phenomenon in which, regardless of how savvy the viewer becomes, he is still seduced by that image. Even though he recognizes the image as a manipulation, he remains willing to suspend disbelief and engage with the illusion that is being created. People just sarcastically say, “Oh, that’s a photograph. It’s so easy to manipulate.” And they simultaneously embrace this reality. I really don’t know when that is going to end, but consider what it will mean for the medium.
