It all started like a little kid, not knowing anything, and amusing himself, I wasn’t hurting anybody or doing anything. After a while I started to get kind of inventive with what I wanted to do, so I started to bring wigs that my mother gave me after she survived cancer, nice blonde wigs and big afros from Halloween, masks, essentially I had a destabilized moment when I walked into homes that are 15-20 million dollars, and I can’t even believe that people can live like that, so here I am , the white Jewish kid, that everyone assumes, that because I am Jewish, that I am privileged and I have all this money, so I love the idea that I was being escorted through some of the best homes in Miami as if I was going to buy them.
I’m a big photography nerd, there is a writer whom I am in love with whose name is Susan Sontag and in the book of photography she writes on the idea of self portraiture, and that in our world, to be photographed, is to matter, because essentially people don’t take pictures of things that don’t matter right?
She also went onto explain that you cannot own reality in any sense, but you can own an image of reality so it’s more permanent, it's finding a way into that reality, so I’m in this crazy multi million dollar reality with crazy furniture, chinchilla rugs and things that I cannot even think of, and instead of feeling envious or feeling less than, I decided to pose as if that was my house, so I’d get naked, or I’d feel pretty like a girl and pose feminine, or I would put on my mom’s cancer wig because there was two paintings that looked like the wig I had in my bag.
One of the great things is that I don’t know anything about the environment before I go into them, and I don't know what I’m bringing, sometimes I don’t bring anything! And they are all produced in a minute or less, because the realtor or the person escorting me through the house, is right there! Usually I have to tell them to close the door because the best shot is from behind the door, so in a minute I have to take that shot! And that is how Intimate Strangers happened.
Thank you so much Zachary, I love how passionate & humble you are. It is one of the first things that drew me to you when we met. I remember when we were in Portugal en route to the venue, and we got derailed a few times because you were just like a little kid getting inspired by the new buildings, the light, the people, it was fun to see your process and I knew then that your work was going to be amazing! I know quite a few photographers, but they don't get as excited as you do. Where does that creativity come from? Why do you think that after all these years you still get as excited as you do when you shoot?
That’s a good question and I have a great answer. When my sister passed away and my father died and I was left with a house that I didn’t have to pay bills for and I was more sad than I ever had been because I had lost my two best friends , minus my mother you know, at that point I had bought a gun, I came home, put it to my head, tried to shoot myself and it didn’t work. So I go into the backyard, to see if I had done something wrong, I shoot it into the ground and the way I thought about it is, I wasn’t supposed to die, because I tried and it didn't work, so at that point, I didn’t know what else to do, I didn’t know how I was going to pay bills, how to eat, I didn’t know anything, and I didn't really have any help because my mother moved away at the same time that all of this came crashing down on me, so my mom kind of threw me in the pool and told me to swim. What happened was that I started to create, I started to paint, I spray painted my body gold, put on bell bottoms and started to dance my ass off in my studio.
The point of the story is that I went to school to study art because I thought is something I wanted to do, and then what has happened over time is that art saved my life, if I didn’t have that process of creation to deal with life and the unfairness of it, the uncertainty of it, life and photography have become a therapist, the way I negotiate with the world, so I think art is never going to go away for me, because its how I process the things around me. Creativity is part of me.