This week, Fuzz interviews Sadie Cook, SM ’20, about performance for and behind the camera.

F: Describe your work in 5 adjectives.

SC: Brutal, sideways-traditional, kind of funny, and (apparently) “un-sexy.”

F: So someone said that, “un-sexy,” about your work? How do you feel about that label?

SC: I feel like it’s kind of hilarious, and also true. The pictures are un-sexy, even the ones that are about sex, or are of people I’ve had sex with. No one would use my photos for, like, a tinder profile picture. Which I guess is something I’m thinking about now.

F: Would you say sex is something you’ve been thinking about consciously when making photographs?

SC: Consciously, yeah. Consciously and constantly for the past two months. Before that it was only the scary parts of looking, and the implications that looking at people and being looked at by people have around flirtation and power. So I was thinking more about power before the past two months. Then over the past two months I’ve been thinking about how photography ties in, and has been tied in, in confusing and terrible and sometimes amazing ways with sex and control, and gender, and what on earth I’m supposed to do to deal with that, and how I’m going to deal with that. That has been literally keeping me up at night. So… I’ve just been reeling from those questions. It’s like, “What the fuck? I need to deal with all of this, like right now.” This has been the most urgent thing I’m thinking about. I’m not even just thinking about sex, which would be such an ordinary thing for a college student to think about. Instead all that I’m thinking about is, “How are sex and photography tied up, and how can I deal with both of those at once?” It’s pretty terrible.

I figured that I needed to sort this out, partially by asking someone I thought was hot if I could photograph them. Someone I just had a crush on, not someone I had already slept with. Because that creates such a weird and horrible power dynamic. Especially in the current climate, after the past two years with all of the revelations about the creepy, horrible photography professors who have their young, pretty, female students model for them. As somebody who has definitely been in iffy situations with people who’ve photographed me and with people I’ve photographed, those dynamics feel like a really rewarding thing to explore.

F: When you say you’re thinking about the dynamics of sex and the way they relate to photography, it seems like your work is self-referential, in a way. It’s very conscious of the medium. Do you think that is something specific to your work now or more inherent to all art photography?

SC: Yeah, I’ve actually been thinking about that a decent amount as well. Sex, gender, and photography. I don’t know how specific it is. For instance, Josh Tarplin’s work is ultra-photography specific. I think my work is fairly specific for photography, because I’m tied up in questions of beauty and aesthetics. But I think maybe all artists are tied up in that. Don’t we all think about what it means to have something beautiful and wanting to have something that can draw people in?

But I also think that my photography pulls a lot from ideas of performance and gender. And a lot from the history of photography, like what it means to photograph other people, and what an intimate, weighty thing that is. Even just asking somebody on the street if you can photograph them. Which is something that people have been doing for a hundred years. Do my pictures look different because of that innate character that makes me me, or do they look different because I’m a girl, and I’m queer? The way people respond to me, and the way I respond to other people changes because of that. Photography is so tied into what I look like, and how I exist in the world. You know what I mean? A lot of the time I’m actually photographing me.

F: In a way you’re documenting the world responding to you.

SC: Yeah, exactly. Strangers responding to me. Which is why whenever I go out to photograph I have to think really carefully about where I’m going and how I’m going to dress. It’s also why I spent about two months debating whether I should cut my hair short. To which the answer was yes, and I’m very glad that I did. But yeah, it just feels so complicated, and it’s so vulnerable. To go up to someone and say, “Hey, total stranger, I want to have a picture of you forever.” And then there’s the question of what I’m in charge of. I’m in charge of how other people are going to see this person. It’s so complicated. And on top of that, I feel like I need to make really beautiful things. I mean I do take photographs of things because I think they’re beautiful, even the really awkward things. Not sexy.

F: Un-sexy?

SC: Yeah, un-sexy. I don’t know, I literally haven’t been sleeping the past week from thinking about these things. I’m running on five hours of sleep a day for the past week, because I just lie in bed thinking “History! History of men photographing women! How do I fit in with this? What role does desire play in all of this? What is happening? Who would I show these people to? Who would I show these photographs to?”

You know, I’ve been photographing myself a lot. And I think I’ve only been doing that because I knew that this semester my audience is only people that are friendly to me. A lot of female professors, and the queer people I studio visit with. That’s a really different audience. I don’t think I would be doing the work I am now, or at least I wouldn’t be showing it if I still had the same male professors from last year. Even though I know the photographs I take of myself, and other women, even when they’re naked, are for art and not for sex. I don’t get off to any of that. But I don’t want a 78 year old man who calls me “cute” to look at them. And I don’t know how to control that, especially now that I’m starting to get published, and people are starting to want to look at my work. I don’t know if that is something I should, or can control.

F: You know, it’s very important to be working or behaving in ways that go against those sorts of power structures that exist. But at a certain point those power structures are winning, in a sense, when you let it govern the way that you’re working.

SC: Yeah, and you can become conscious of it. I have a lot of pictures where I just think a person is so beautiful. I photograph them and it’s a beautiful picture. And then I have pictures where everybody in the situation is so incredibly uncomfortable with looking and being looked at. And I’ve been doing these painful experimental performances for my camera by myself, on the days when it is just too much to go out there into the world and photograph. It takes a lot, to go out and ask strangers for stuff. When I can’t do that I’ll lie in on the floor in my room, and I’ll make up gestures, and I’ll perform and photograph those. For instance, I’ll think what would happen if I photographed myself and I can’t see myself? What would happen if I was able to touch all over the surface of my eye, and how can I do that? I can do that with plastic wrap. So what if I just photograph myself with plastic wrap on my eyes? What would that be like?

F: Do you consider that body of work separate from the street photography?

SC: No, I think they have to be together. It’s all about what it means for me to be in this body and to be looked at by other bodies. You know, it gets so complicated. I spend so much time thinking about it! And all the histories of all of that! And then I also feel like this is something that every single artist does. Like everybody does this.

F: Thinking specifically about the way that you are looked at?

SC: Yeah, and looking. It’s a human thing. I know that as urgent and complicated and important as all of this feels to me right now (as I said, it takes a physical toll on my body), it also just this classic coming of age narrative for the artist. You’re doing it, I’m doing it, Molly’s doing it. Maybe the white men don’t do it. Which feels sort of unfair. It’s like this is what my work has to be about when I’m street-photographing. Is it even what my work is about, or is it just what I think about? Because most of the street photographers I admire are white men, except for Diane Arbus, who’s the best. But she was also an incredible outsider to the entire street photography crew. I don’t think my street photographs are different from those men’s. I think a lot of them aren’t. I think sometimes when you’re on the street and you see someone with a camera, you’re just going to respond to the camera and not the person behind it.

F: Have you ever considered displaying your work with photographs someone else has taken of you?

SC: No. I think it’s because I am most interested in a first person narrative when I’m showing and thinking through my pictures. I want the viewer to be led through the photographs of me looking at my body, of me looking at how other people look at me. Right now I am less interested in other narrative voices coming in. That’s what it would become if I used someone else’s pictures they took of me for their own purposes.

F: Do you have any idea of what’s next? Is there an end in sight for this vein of work?

SC: Well, this is really new. I was working on the last group of things for about six months or so. And now I’ve been working on this for only one or two months. So I have no idea. I’ve started to experiment with collage, but I don’t feel like that is really different from photography. Because it’s me, laying down pieces of pictures that I’ve taken together in new ways. So it’s just other ways of combining flesh and surfaces and all of the things that those imply. I mean they look collaged, so we’ll see where that goes. That’s new and a bit scary. My professor thinks I should try painting but I’ve done that and it feels terrible.

F: How would you describe your work to a stranger?

SC: [In airy voice] “Oh I’m just a student, in a photography class. I actually study photography at Yale. I don’t know, I just think it’s really cool to take pictures of stuff. Photography is crazy, you know.”

F: Do you actually change your voice like that?

SC: I do, I speak a little bit higher. A little higher and breathier, but not too much. It depends, it depends on who’s asking. Usually who’s asking is just creepy old men.

Artist Portrait: Sadie Cook was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.