Terry Richardson's photographic gesture
[2020: I’m aware that talking of Terry Richardson nowadays could be misunderstood. What comes is not at all a defense of Terry’s conduct neither as a professional or a person. Still – I believe that as a photographer I should also critically assess relevant photographic work from the past, especially when it also plays an important role in my own photographic work – such as Terry’s work does. So here I’ll revisit this short essay first written back in 2016 as I tried to put into words how I interpreted his imagetic experience and why it has always struck me so much].
When Belvedere Vodka summoned Terry Richardson for its massive 2008 campaign ad, they gave him complete freedom to work. In Terry's own words,
what’s great about Belvedere is they wanted me to stay true to what I do. They really allowed me to put my own spin on the campaign.
But what exactly did it mean to give Terry this "total freedom", let him "put his own spin"?
It meant Terry should not only take the pictures but, furthermore, create the very own event to be shot: an apparently elegant party with Hollywood actors, famous musicians, models, fashion industry hot shots—and Terry himself, who would move around with a Yashica T4 not too different from those cameras our parents used on their countryside visits during their vacations in the 90's—shooting whatever happened as it happened.
Terry's "spin" came from his earlier work that made him famous. If you take Terry's infamous Kibosh (2004) and Terryworld (2005) books, then you'd immediately notice that he was never trying to be just a plain documental photographer. He induces a lot of what's done for the camera: partying, vandalism, love, sex, nudity—that when it's not himself who's in the picture, invading the frame with his hands or his penis, turning the camera to himself or even outsorcing the shooting. It comes to a point where, as I show Terry's work to my friends, the question always arises—who's the author in these? Whose photo is this?
In short, the answer is: the photos are Terry's even in the radical cases when he's not even shooting them—and that because Terry frees the photographer from the camera, he establishes his authority in a different manner than we're used to: not by triggering the shutter but by triggering the events to be photographed. I mean: Terry Richardson's photographic gesture is itself happening, perfomance—not only in the sense that he organizes an event and shoots it but that his own gesture of photographing is itself a performance.
I should remind you that the happenings are a modality that appeared in theater as a performance that aims to free itself from every text and pretext. This is precisely what Terry achieves—a radical theatralization of the photographic gesture whose resulting images are visual provocations that urge us to reconstitute in our imagination what could have actually happened. That's what Roland Barthes, in his 1964 Rhétorique de l'image, called "avoir-été-là"—having-been-there. But Terry's photos never fully give out what's been there and seem push us to what's beyond them: the context.
Let me clarify this further through an example: the famous photography Steve-O photograph in Terryworld. Steve-O is in his socks and boxers in front of a white wall, squatting, spraying whipped cream inside his own mouth. If you take a close look, the focus of the shot is in his balls which appear through the boxers. In his feet we see countless gas capsules that are used for the whipped cream bottle and there's some yellowish liquid dripping off the wall. Observing all these details, we start to ask ourselves: "But was this staged?", "Were the capsules spread as scenic elements?", "Or was it a party?", "Did someone puke on the wall?", "Were they on drugs?", etc. Terry never aims to solve those questions—he rather have the photograph project itself for what's beyond it.
With this radical theatralization of the photographic gesture, what is ultimately brought into question is the very relation between photographer and world. Not in those terms that Susan Sontag once used to describe the non-interventional intervention of the documental photographer ("he won't invervene but will take part of it)—Terry intervenes, his presence is always crucial for the portrayed experience. It as if his photography was physical. I do believe that Terry has created, or at least radicalized, a certain photographic idea: the question of who's the photographer and what's the world makes no longer much sense as this world is no longer understood neither as a fixed, static ob-ject neither as an inventory of possible images for the photographic subjectivity but, instead, there's only an unique reality that engulfs photographer and photographed, activity and passivity, subjects and objects. In heideggerian terms—a photography of Zuhandenheit.
That's why I feel that Terry Richardson's photos are always located in this unclassifiable threshold. In this sense, I'd like to wrap up with the words of Olivier Zham, Terry's friend and editor of Purple Magazine:
[Terry's photos] are an experience. Terry takes these dialectical structures (man/woman, photographer/model, phallic/non phallic) to the limit (…). [He] flirts with the subversion of the dual structure and intends to document the intimate relationship to the model. Up to what point can he take it? Up to what point can he take it today? What are the limits of the game? What will the public consider being "fashion" and what will it consider being "art"?Will it reject the images and censor them? That's what the experience is about. (Uma conversa entre dois mundos. In: RICHARDSON, T. Terryworld. Taschen, 2008)
