Michele Robecchi: First of all, how did you
take up photography?
Andy Summers: Well, like most people in my life, I
took pictures, but I think I was probably a bit more obsessive about
pursuing a normal snap than most people. But for me it was really when The
Police got underway and I thought to myself ‘now I’m really kind of doing
this music thing, but I want to do something else’, and I wanted to do
photography. And it was very natural for me, although I wasn’t someone who
was going to get up and really go for it, but I obviously was drawn to it. I
loved black-and-white photography and I just started to study it, probably
in about 1978 or ’79.
MR: You were already touring in the ’60s. Were you interested in art at the
time?
AS: To be honest, I think I was very influenced by
film or at least the films I used to see as a kid, mostly black-and-white
films. I always just liked them. Loads of … well, I was going to say cinema
verité, but particularly the new-age cinema of France. And I tended to see
that sort of imagery as very romantic. I’d think about making films, or
music for films, and always with that sort of black-and-white imagery in my
head. I think actually my decision of starting to shoot so seriously was
probably dictated by my desire to try to recreate a lot of the stuff that
influenced me growing up. And that was actually black-and-white cinema. It
was just a way of creating that sensibility in my mind’s eye.
MR: Your early photographs were staged. They were mostly still-lives with a
strong Surrealism flavour.
AS: Yeah, yeah, well, of course. I was very influenced
by Surrealism when I started. It was a huge influence.
MR: I remember the three stripes of photographs on the ‘Synchronicity’ album
cover (1983). Yours was definitely the most art-oriented.
AS: Yes, we decided to reserve a section of the cover
for each one of us to interpret. We had to choose a photographer and I chose
Duane Michals. So, there was that photograph of the piano with the egg or
the one with the telephone burning.
MR: And then you moved to street photography?
AS: It sort of happened by chance. Street photography
involves more social contact, more political contact. I take art out on the
street generally … not always, I do a lot of interior shots too. It’s just a
context that you’re sorting out to create some other kind of metaphor. When
you shoot a picture, it’s loaded imagery, you know; it’s not just a picture
of someone standing by a lamp-post – there’s more to it than that.
MR: Were you influenced by the work of photographers like Walker Evans?
AS: Sorry, I don’t know him.
MR: He’s the so-called master of the Boston school of street photography.
His work was very influential on a whole generation of artists, from Philip-Lorca
diCorcia to Nan Goldin…
AS: I like Nan Goldin. I like her work.
MR: This series of photographs, ‘City Like This’, is something that you have
developed for three years, right?
AS: Yes, I’ve shot more and more of this night stuff
over the last two or three years and I think when I get back to LA I’m going
to start putting this into a book. In fact, immediately I’m going to start
work on it, because I have all the pictures pulled out ready to go, so now
it’s just really sequencing.
MR: So how did you select the images for the exhibition?
AS: What I did was I pulled out 60 pictures and said
here, look at these, you choose them, because I like all of them, but I let
the gallery pick them and I didn’t really mind because I liked them all.
MR: How do you think the work evolved during these three years?
AS: Well, you know, it’s just like anything else: the
longer you do it, you just get more and more refined. It’s like the taste of
wine, the longer you leave it, the more refined or dark it goes. The same
with photographic art – you get more sensitive. And you also get more
confident. You have this sort of privileged sense … because you’re trying to
catch people all the time in a natural state so the picture is real, but you
don’t want it to look that real. It’s quite difficult to do and you have to
be very subversive. Yet when you’re in action you feel a sort of adrenaline
rush. I go through one or two rolls and then your mind and your eye start to
click in and you start to suddenly see everything. And it really happens.
You start to get into a flow, and I absolutely feel, after an hour or two
behind the camera, I suddenly start to see everything. And it’s not that I’m
not getting anything. I mean you kind of know when you get one.
MR: I like the one of the black man with a white hand on his shoulder.
AS: That was in Times Square. When I go to New York I
love to go to Times Square and hang out there. It tends to bring good
material. It’s always kind of got an atmosphere and a lot of attitude. And
when people are messing it up on a Friday or Saturday night in that sort of
scenario, weirdly enough you can creep around them and they tend to not see
you; they’re talking away with their buddies or whatever. It’s the same in
London on a Saturday night if you go down to Soho – there’s a real mob
scene. When it comes to taking photographs, you can sort of go there almost
with impunity; people don’t seem to see you. Even if you go right in their
face, their mind is elsewhere. You can go click and you’re gone and then
that’s it. So it’s good when it works like that, but it’s not always like
that.
MR: I noticed there aren’t many from LA, which is where you live.
AS: No, because you can’t find that sort of tight
crowded scene where you can really do that. I was thinking about that
recently. I haven’t got much in LA. I think I might go to San Francisco for
a weekend sometime. There’s a great scene up there and I could probably get
some pretty good stuff. And I’d like to go down to Texas, to the border
towns, like Laredo, El Paso, San Antonio. It’s pretty weird down there,
cowboys and shit, it’s pretty cool. I’m thinking about driving down there
sometime between now and the summer and trying to do some photography. I bet
I could get some pretty good pictures. There are definitely some trips like
that on the way. I’m going to go to Brazil too.
MR: You’ve been to Brazil recently, right?
AS: Yeah. I just came back. I was there with Mark
Gibson. We went to Brazil to a three-day, intense, crazy festival, way out
in the Amazon. You’ve got to get a small plane and fly right into the
jungle, where there’s this town on the river there somewhere, with this
three-day carnival, and we went and photographed that together.
MR: You’re also a painter.
AS: I did painting for about six years and I was very
into it. The problem for me with painting as opposed to photography is
really that painting is so involving. You’ve got to spend so much time with
it, and I started to get worried that I was never going to play the guitar
again. So I finally stopped doing as much, and went back to photography,
although I never really stopped doing photography.
MR: Some of your photographs seem to have a painterly quality.
AS: Yes. There is actually one in this show which was
printed on canvas. And we think we might be on to something there because
everybody loves that. Well, it’s a great photograph, but having it on canvas
really worked. And I thought maybe if we started doing the big ones on
canvas I might even paint on them, do something with that. I’m going to
experiment, see which photographs would work. I think you want very strong
graphic images to do that. So yeah, I could paint on them, but then if you
are painting on them, then you are making some other kind of statement.
MR: You are obviously aware of the fact that some people might be interested
in your photographic work because of who you are and not just because of the
quality of the work.
AS: Yeah. I mean, they might be. It’s important to try
to avoid that, but it’s impossible for me. I am who I am, I cannot avoid my
own history, but that doesn’t make me any less than any other photographer.
I might be a better photographer than they are, I just happen to be a major
musician and I can take photographs.
Michele Robecchi is Senior Editor of Contemporary