PRESS RELEASE
Sometimes an artist draws a satisfying line directly back to their own work. When Nan Goldin writes of her choice of Larry Clark’s 1971 untitled image of explicit drug use, she says: “Larry’s work was an epiphany. It gave me permission to take my own work seriously and to publish a book of my own life.” Influence seeps down the generations when an image from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Goldin’s now-classic 1980s series, is chosen here by Welsh punk feminist photographer, Megan Winstone. That master of the ambiguous, staged tableau, Gregory Crewdson, selects After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California, July 1979 by Joel Sternfeld and pinpoints its influence: “… the sense of light, colour, the unresolved narrative element, the suggestion of some kind of occurrence that has undercut ordinary everyday life – all captured from a slight remove”.
War photographer Don McCullin surprises by offering his own photograph from 1958, Guvnors, Finsbury Park Gang, which might well have saved him from a life of skulduggery in north London. “Looking back, if it weren’t for that one image, my life might have been so different, one of crime and thievery.” David Bailey, who has captured so many beauties, talks his way back in time through possible historic contenders, finally arriving at The Haystack, Lacock from 1844, by pioneering photographer, William Henry Fox Talbot. “I can hardly believe this picture has had so much influence on me – it is not only significant in the history of photography; it is history.”
Where do we come from asks actor, photographer and producer Richard Gere, responding with remarkable openness. He sees his grandfather, a farmer, standing with his crop – “Simple and honest. Vast. And beautiful.”
Cheatle had started work on The Photograph That Changed My Life before lockdown, but “in terms of this project, lockdown was an amazing opportunity because globally everyone was at home. I could get Duane Michals at home, I could get Arthur Tress in his house… It was a good time tocatch up and chat to people, and they had time for the book.”
Cheatle’s challenge sends several photographers on extended personal journeys of rediscovery. American artist Alex Sothhunts down a book last seen decades ago about psychiatric photography that contains his chosen 19th-century portrait. “I knew that this man, in this book, was the right portrait for me. I am pleased now that I have opened up another valve that I can talk about, this task really made me think. I was terrified of photographing people, I avoided it and made landscapes for a long time. But I felt the pull…”
