Michael Mahne Lamb in conversation with Harry Culy

 2023

 Interview by Harry Culy for PhotoForum

Michael Mahne Lamb (Ngāti Kahungunu) is a photographic artist based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara/Wellington. In 2022 he became the first New Zealand artist to earn an MFA from the University of Hartford in Connecticut where he won an Installation Award and two scholarships. At the end of 2022 he showed his MFA thesis work Prototypes at Bartley & Company in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. He is also a Co-director of Bad News Books, the photobook publishing company founded by Harry Culy. We asked his studio colleague Harry to talk with him about his experience at Hartford, his practice, his upcoming book and his role in Bad News Books.

We share a studio in central Wellington, and I talk to you about photography and books constantly, but I don’t know if I’ve ever asked you about your photographic backstory. How did you first become interested in photography? How did you start out with your study and practice?

 I don’t know how far you want me to go back, but deciding to go to Massey for the Bachelor of Design in photography was really the beginning of this trajectory. It opened my eyes to photobooks, and photography as an art practice. It was freeing to not think about it in a commercial sense. After graduating in 2014 I worked as an architectural photographer, at the same time making personal work, which ended up being Complements that you and Bad News Books kindly published at the beginning of 2018.

You have recently finished up your postgrad studies at Hartford. I’ve been curious about the Hartford photo MFA program for ages.  There have been some amazing work and photobooks that have come from past students - Tim Carpenter, Jenia Friedland, Bryan Schutmaat, Emma Phillips, Morgan Ashcom, and many more. The program seems to be focussed on the photobook, and a kind of pushing of the boundaries of ‘documentary’ (for lack of a better word)  photography. Firstly, why did you want to study at Hartford? And how was your experience there?

Definitely, the work of alumni was one of the reasons I was attracted to Hartford. The consistent high quality of work from past students I had to assume was at least in some way a result of the program. I got in touch with Emma Phillips and she was helpful in telling me about her experience during her time there which ultimately lead me to apply. A funny story actually, there was a Hartford ad in an issue of Aperture that had a short list of alumni and had her name with (New Zealand) in brackets. Turns out that was a typo and Emma is Australian as I thought, but something about just seeing that in print in Aperture made me think OK, maybe I could do that? It didn’t seem so out of reach, which a lot of overseas opportunities can feel like sometimes. In addition to that, it was more realistic that I didn’t have to up and permanently move overseas. Low residency meant I could be based in my studio in Wellington while still getting to travel once a semester for our sessions and experience an international program. That also means that the faculty and guests are from all over not only the US but Japan and Germany as well, so there’s a wide range of perspectives. I didn’t really know what to expect going into it, I just knew I wanted to use the time to experiment as much as possible, grow, and evolve my practice with an open mind. I always said I just wanted to be surprised by the work I make by the end of the program, if that makes sense. Although it was a shame our first year was online, once we were able to travel in the second year it was the best experience — travel during that time was a nightmare but I just had to make it work.  

Your recent show ‘Prototypes’ at Bartley & Company came out of your time studying at the Hartford Photo MFA program. Congratulations on the show! You’ve said the exhibition “uses photography to explore the built environment and its constant flux”- why do you think you were initially interested in this subject matter? How did it evolve?

Thanks! Prototypes was my thesis work plus a couple of additional works I made during my MFA. I’ve always taken an interest in architecture, and cities in general. I found I made what I thought was more exciting work while traveling and visiting places overseas, but what happened was almost the opposite — I was forced to fish my feet and make work here at home, in particular Wellington, and that helped me to look at places I see every day and may take for granted with a kind of different view. What I found was that things change constantly in any city, and the more you look the more you discover, as clichéd as it sounds. The fortnightly schedule of meetings with my advisors — which was program director Robert Lyons in the first year, and Chikara Umihara in the second — meant I was able to just make pictures first and leave thinking about what they might be saying until later. Just trusting the process really and recognising what was piquing my interest either consciously or subconsciously.

I enjoy how you play with ideas of perception in your work. A lot of the time the viewer doesn’t know what they are looking at exactly, and you use various techniques to do this - layering, rephotographing, abstracting forms you have found out in the world, cropping out identifiers so it becomes about form and surface. I see you as a bit of an optical trickster! Can you talk about the techniques you use to play with perception and your reasoning behind this? I get a sense of being disorientated, of the world dissolving and being reformed into something new.

I feel like this way of seeing started when I was working on Complements. I want to say it’s not something I intentionally do, but when looking at contact sheets I’m always attracted to the frames that are slightly confusing or disorienting. If it makes me pause and wonder what I’m looking at, as the person who made the picture, I’m happy. At the same time, I also respond to images that are very stripped back to just a signifier. A very minimal composition with an everyday object can begin to stand in for something more universal. 

The analogue materials you use, and the way you present your work seems like an integral part of your practice.  There's something very tactile and physical about the black and white silver gelatin prints, how did you come to land on this approach?

 The portfolio I showed when I applied and in the first critiques was actually all colour work. Still analog, but I realised early on in the first semester I wanted to spend more time in the darkroom printing, and soon my focus was all monochrome. That first year was a bit of a struggle showing work in PDF form, I felt the material nature of the silver gelatin prints was getting lost; you can’t really talk about that aspect when it’s just an image on a screen. Before the first in-person session we had on campus in Hartford, I spent weeks and weeks printing the work to take over, and pushed myself in terms of how big I could print in my darkroom. I ended up taking about ten 26x40 inch prints over, as well as about 40 16x20s. The conversation that was had around the physicality of the bigger prints, the way they curled on the wall, and how integral it was to my work opened up my thinking towards how far I can push it, with the images being more source material to be turned back into a three-dimensional object. Now those 26x40s feel on the smaller side after managing to make a few 75-inch prints. I’m looking forward to doing more at that scale; printing that large takes it out of you, it’s a relief to get one that feels just right. 

I’m interested in how photographs are essentially a kind of flat medium, and how you have been playing to bring them into the 3D world, playing with the space between sculpture and photography. I like the way you mess with the traditional conventions of photography; The work draped through the acrylic box on the floor, for example, definitely challenges the typical ways you usually encounter photography! How did this come about?

That’s pretty much where I felt things began getting interesting, thinking about how I can take an essentially flat two-dimensional medium, and bring it back into three dimensions, where it has a presence of its own as an object, ongoing, rather than acting as a kind of window to a moment in the past. I don’t consider the Prototype perspex works as sculptures, more containers that are used to suspend the print in a way that brings attention to their properties, but also in a way that relates to the subject matter of the images — structure, perspective, materials, texture. It was also something I hadn’t seen before and feels like there is so much potential for new variations, I’m excited to keep going down that path. Also relating to what you asked earlier, I see bringing the images off the wall and off a single plane as a natural next step in disturbing our instant recognition of what we’re looking at. In the example you mentioned, even the orientation of the image is completely removed since it’s partly laying on the floor facing the ceiling.

It's been cool seeing the process of you working through different iterations of your photobook that you made for MFA.  Again I feel like you are challenging viewers' expectations and doing something new and fresh. Do you see this as different or similar to the exhibition works? I get a kind of dystopian or science-fiction feeling from the book, and it's really interesting how you play with time and repetition. The way you designed the book and the materials you used feel important too.

I had a lot of fun with the book. I focused a lot on the same principles as in the exhibition works, but informed by the structure of a book. It became more about making something that felt like it lived in this world, something with volume and weight, that you could get lost in or would feel disorienting. Material decisions like the size, exposed binding, not having a cover, it feels like you could’ve found it on the ground or in a gutter. There are over 200 images in it as it stands now, and using tonalities of grey as an organising principle in the sequence, re-photographing the pages of the book itself, and layering it back into the sequence were all elements that contribute to creating that feeling of disorientation. Hopefully it will be published this year sometime. There are just a few dummy copies that exist at the moment.

 Above: Michael Mahne Lamb, spreads from photobook dummy

There is quite a conceptual angle to the work you have been making recently, what are some of your key influences and why? What other photographers do you relate to or draw inspiration from?

Canadian artist Michael Snow’s book Cover to Cover was a big influence on the way I thought about how a book can function. Coming from an experimental film background, he approached the photobook in quite a mind-bending way. Pictures are made from two different perspectives, and it unfolds almost like a flip book, each frame a second or so apart. It’s also sort of palindromic, where you can look at it from different orientations, back to front and so on. There are also sections where it switches from the scene to a rephotographed print of a scene — a strategy I use in my own work — it makes you flip back and forth and question what you’re looking at. Italo Calvino’s writing, If on a Winters Night a Traveller especially, where the book begins again multiple times, differently, was an influence in how to think about meta-literary or self-referential ideas can be applied back into the work itself while maintaining a continuous thread. Another one I often find myself thinking about is Dorothea Rockburne’s long-term installation at Dia:Beacon. There’s such restraint but also hyper-sharp intention in the paper folds, nails, plastic and other everyday materials, certain works like Domain of The Variable, that chipboard and contact cement in a studio could feel like a discarded mess, but in the context of the gallery, especially a building as great as Dia:Beacon, there’s something so pure in the materials and execution. That room has an impact on me every time I see it. It’s a great reminder that something very simple often has the biggest impact. 

We work together at Bad News Books (along with Robyn Daly), what is your role at Bad News Books? What are you excited about for the coming year with Bad News Books and what are some of the challenges?

Do we have roles? Working with you and Robyn at Bad News Books is really fulfilling, helping artists realise their projects into a physical thing, whether it’s helping with an edit, sequencing, design, materials or any of the endless other decisions that seem to go into making a book a reality. It’s challenging to stay on top of things when we’ve got multiple projects in the works, but we all seem to bring our own thing to the table, and it’s worth it once the finished book is in your hand. I’m super excited about the projects we have on the horizon, and to get to some international book fairs if all goes to plan!

What do you have planned next?

Just continuing to test ideas, different variations of prototype sketches that my notebooks are full of. I never know if the rough sketch will translate or even work in reality, and when they do it’s always different to what I was envisioning, so each one is unpredictable and exciting in that sense. Also, without the pressure of deadlines, figuring out the right pace of working while keeping up a good momentum.

Harry Culy (born 1986) lives and works in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington. In 2020 he completed a Master of Fine Arts at Toi Rauwhārangi College of Creative Arts, Massey University Wellington. In 2021 he was awarded the Arts Foundation Laureate receiving the Marti Friedlander Photographic Award. He is the editor at Bad News Books with Robyn Daly and Michael Mahne Lamb, which collaborates with artists to produce artist books. He is represented by Jhana Millers Gallery Wellington.

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