MakingRoom Interview

Anna and Lily, Route 17, NY 2008 © Amy Stein

MarkingRoom is an online magazine that looks at the process of making images. The magazine is run by the wonderful Davin Risk who also writes the MakingRoom blog. Davin just posted an interview with me about my ongoing Stranded series.

On the Record

© Amy Stein

"I don't loathe interviews, I'm just one of those people who makes music because I find it difficult to talk."

- PJ Harvey

This year I have been asked to do several interviews about my work. The most recent interview with UNseeN Magazine was just published on their Web site along with a nifty Flash presentation of my Stranded series. I find being interviewed an awkward exercise because, like Polly Jean, I am more comfortable making work than talking about it. I'm not a shrinking violet, but it challenges my humble tendencies to talk at length about myself.

As I have done more interviews I have become more comfortable with the process and grown more sure of my words and more sure of my work. It may seem weird for a visual medium, but the exercise of talking about your images in an interview challenges you to glimpse new layers of meaning and develop new relationships with photos you are all too familiar with. When you live day in, day out, with the same images you can start to get detached and even bored with them--it's probably not unlike Kansas having to play Dust In The Wind every night. I'm starting to realize that having focused conversations about your photography can not only reconnect you to the work and can rekindle that love affair, but may be just as important to the process as printing and editing.

Interviewed on Identity Theory

© Amy Stein 2006

Last week Alexandra Tursi interviewed me about my photography, my influences, and the Do You Know What It Means project. The interview is now posted on the Identity Theory site. Other recent Identity Theory interviewees include photographer, Abelardo Morrell, Sleater-Kinney guitarist, Carrie Brownstein, and Poet Laureate, Donald Hall, so I feel duly honored and humbled.

Interviewed by The Intrepid Art Collector

The wonderful Lisa Hunter interviewed me for her Intrepid Art Collector site. Lisa is one of the leading authorities on the contemporary art market and the author of a great new book, but what I find most impressive is that she managed to escape from New York and transplant herself to the Great White North. There is something very inspiring about that.