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Virus (1994 - 1998) Anno Numero 13 maggio 98



LOLA FLASH

by Franko B.



Mutation
ARTICOLI DAGLI ALTRI NUMERI

LOIS KEIDAN
intervista di Franko B
n. 2 febbraio '98

Fear and loathing in Las Vegas di Terry Gilliam
Gianni Canova
n. 4 sett-ott-nov

Jenny Holzer - Interview
by Florence Lynch
n. 10 gennaio 1997

Incontro con Lea Vergine
FAM
n. 10 gennaio 1997

Renée Cox
Interview by Cristinerose Parravicini
n. 14 ott-nov '98

Movimento lento
di Renata Molho
n. 14 ott-nov '98


Yvonne 1996

B.J. 1997

KKK

Americana di nascita e inglese di adozione, Lola Flash ha iniziato a lavorare con la fotografia nei primi anni '80, realizzando una serie di immagini che riproducono la mappa delle nuove forme di aggregazione, utilizzando una particolare tecnica di inversione del colore che diviene una sfida iconografica.

Franko B: When did you come to London and where are you from?

Lola Flash: I came in 1991, in November, just for a holiday. I am from New Jersey. I came here for a holiday and why I started moving was because I thought it was a good base to go and see other countries in Europe.

How did you start to be a photographer?

When I was 13, probably in the high school, I started to have a camera and to go in the dark room and also to do it at home. Then when I went to college I decided to be a photographer because photographing was too expensive as an hobby.

What does influence your work?

Well, I do like Andy Warhol's kind of work, in fact also the colours I do become a sort of unnatural and the depth as well seems to be flatted somehow by the colours... I also like some painters : I could say that I have a kind of direct influence from every person that I admir; but I do like also extra painters, most of them are photographer and I am fascinated by their colours: I do like very much colours.I know there are so many incredible women and black people who have done great pieces of art, but then they have been left out of it, and that is because I do not care about where is going the trade and i still look to what is real more similar to me. Moreover having lived both in the United States and in Great Britain I try to get influenced by both these different "worlds"... I am like the older artist, who were that sort of people who hang out Paris , lived there like six years and then they fly to New York: they were that kind of circulating people who refers to some capitals which attract them like Paris, London, New York; so that they really get influenced by all this different culture.

That is good because it opens you up

I know and I am trying to explain to my students how important it is, because when you are a young artist and you are really good at drawing, you think you will become the greatest and you do not realize how important it is to see what other people do. Yes you draw lines too but maybe in a different way; that is why it helps me to see other photographer work, at whom I would not normally look at, just to take some information out of that. When I was in America I would never teach about any wide artist because I think that my students have to know everything about Picasso and all the rest of them, be moreover it was really difficult to go to through all the different ethnic community and try to get books because there was just one book in the library. And in a way my students meet a lot of artists in their family, or between their friends but they did not know it was art. So it was a real challange when I brought the first book and they look at that saying "Oh, maybe I can be an artist too", so they were learning that also the boy you meet in the avenue could be an artist although you have not had the same experiences.

I come across your work: in the past you have gone through some campaign for gay men, AIDS...

I have been a great AIDS activist for the last 10 years and I did lots of work in New York ('AIDS WARRIORS') and through this experience my work becomes more critical and political: lots of my work becomes more about the demonstration and anything which deals with AIDS, not specifically people with AIDS, but also such as the enviroment, the homophobia that was affecting them through the AIDS crisis and the racism.You know in America we don't have the same campaigning you get for healthcare, so I think that it was the right way to show the problem.

Do you think of yourself you are a "queer" artist?

For a long time I relly think of myself as a dike photographer and I used to be very eliminativeby showing only gay people end girls purposing like lesbians, but now after almost 20 years of working like this I feel that my work is not becoming less political but not as elemental as I used to be: I can see other ways of taking picture. I am not as angry but I think also thing has changed a lot, in one way you don't have to lobby so much because everyone knows about AIDS now, people know about gay people, it is not such a secret. I mean still a lot hasn't changed but for me there is not such a need to be so angry although it is still important to talk about these themes. So I think a queer photographer is an okay way to describe me because there is still need to fight for equal rights for women, coloured and gay people.

Tell me about your origin: you were brought up in New Jersey...

My grandmother is native American, so I have got African American and native American's blood but I am light skin coloured maybe because I came from some African American who has the master's blood in his veins.

Tell me about your KKK picture.

For me being gay is similar to being black, because people who look at me cannot really say that I am black, same as they cannot really say that I am gay because I am not that sort of angry looking woman, and so they let me in: for example they invite me to parties and they treat me in a particular way, to make me feel they are including me, but to me it make me feel more excluded, but I think that was good sometimes because I was a kind of infiltrate. Probably that's why my work has always been an interior one, sort of showing me as I feel, but I have got a lot more outspoken opportunity growing old even though I have always been very quite and I would not feel like sayng "no you are wrong" even if I know someone is wrong.

How do you think the world is changing?

I think that not only me has changed but also the people around me, so I did a lot of works on them: we all have to grow old and we have to be sometimes more in keeping with our plitical agenda and at the same time we are moving on and we do our works in other ways. It could be obvious but I feel that still a lot of things needs to be changed, but anger is not the only way to reach your aims. Sometimes I feel like I am preaching to convert people and because of this I think it is important for us not to be just a queer culture because there are a lot of straight people who are fighting just as long as we have been fighting. Coming together people who have different skills but the same right in the world, they can make everithing changing, like what is going on in Great Britain with Blair. I am sure lots of things are going to change by now and sometimes we are too pessimistic: I know that a time will come in which people walk together making changes

In which way your work is going to progress, I mean what are your ambitions?

I am trying to do other types of covers; I did something for a girl magazine: they were looking for a photographer doing something out of their own style and maybe this was because they choose me. People knows me for the kind of work I do: the cross colour stuff. Thanks to this work I would be more recognised but now I want to move into other areas of photographing, I am looking thing that would not normally look at and at the same time i am doing double exposure, slow exposure, both to try to get a different feel. I still like that my work is a little abstract: I am still trying to abstract within using the camera because I think a photographer can explore a lot of things just to make them artistic things. I would like also to paint very much, but when I get old, when I get like 70 years because right now I am very slow, and I think if I was to paint right now I would never finish a painting because I would stay hours just thinking what is the right colour, wherease with the camera just because of the way the camera is, you can just click and then you have it. Now I'm doing black and white but just for my self, professionally I mean teaching is great but I think I'm going into doing other kins of coloured works, you knov doing normal colours but making them more red or more blue.

What kind of people do you like?

For my picture I am the kind of photographer who feels like the model is just as important as I am, as the film is, as the studio is because sometimes I can say to a person "look this way", so that a really nice picture comes out, but generally my favourite way of working with people is coming together things like: feelings, attitudes, colours, emotions so that I am gonna get something from a person, and this one is gonna take something different from me. For example, if I want to take a picture of you, we would work together so that we agree on the right moment and the right colours inthe same time and it is just magic, it is lovely!

All sort of experiences are presented to you also by the society: it presented to you also the negative aspects, which are not usually proposed by the media.

I know, but I feel like I could be useful for their life, for example even though i havenot got any black student in my classes I make them know black culture because they coul have a black boss or they could meet black people and they will have a different outlook. I mean for me it is nice to be in power, it is good for their education that a woman is in power but at the same time I do not want to lose my own work.

Why do you select this particular kind of colours in you works?

First of all I think that sometimes the general use of colours is backwards, because we believe that some concepts would ever be true but it is an old way of thinking of white as being good and black being bad, and all these sort of things lika for example in America we have the Kodak, that to add its products shows lots of pictures with families composing of a father, mother and two kids and they are white, whith blond hair sitting for a picnic on a beach and the clouds are perfectly white and the sky is perfectly blue. But my life is not the way they show it: I am living around, I went to school very close to Washington, very close to The White House and grew up with the concept of The White House being the capital of the world; so many time I heard people talking about a dark day and even though i know it was not referring to me as a dark person, I would like to blame him because when you are a black people you get bored by all these idioms like "dark day", "black monday". So I try to change all the colours in my works and I am trying to make people realize that a dark looking day is now looking bright, it is very simple but sometimes when things are too simple they do not seem necessary but I think until things change I would not feel like stop doing that, because it does not alienate people, they say "You are still doing the same colours, well nothing really change ". At the same time I want to alienate some people I want to bring some people in and the cross colours means so much for me, they say so much of what I want to say in a not scary kind of way, I mean I want to scare people but not in that kind of way that will take them away from my works, because they feel tortured.