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| rick castro: hustler with a stogie~1993 |
Alexander Smith interviews Rick Castro about the history of his photography~
ALEXANDER SMITH: Who are your biggest photographic influences? Joel-Peter Witkin, right?
RICK CASTRO: No.
A: No? But he gave you your first camera.
R: I asked for his advice on purchasing my first camera, and he took me to his camera shop in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He recommended a very basic Nikon FG because he said it was foolproof, and he was right.
I loved it.
A: How did you meet him? Why were you in Albuquerque?
R: I worked for Joel Witkin as a wardrobe stylist and everything else. I was his photo assistant, wardrobe stylist. I used to find models. I would art direct, do the wardrobe, organize the shoots.
A: So you did admire him, but he's not an influence?
R; I definitely admired his work. I sought him out in the mid-80s. But the work that inspired me to become a photographer has always been the same. I like all the dead guys. Pierre Molinier: the best example of a fetish artist, ever. Do you know about him? He lived in Bordeaux, France, and was shooting himself from the 1940s to the late 60s. He would do different variations of self-feminization. He also invented the high-heeled dildo.
A: Interesting.
R: Yes. He used to penetrate himself with the high-heeled dildo, and take portraits of himself as a male and female. Very kinky. And then do actual cutouts, placing himself having sex with himself. Sometimes he would use mannequins, and he did this all in his atelier in Bordeaux, France, and never really showed his work to anyone. But Andre Bréton from the early dadaist movement became an admirer of his work, and gave him an exhibition – not during the dada era but later on, I think in the late 50s. That was really his only exhibition. In 1976 he left a note at his front door that read,"I’m taking my life. The key is at the concierge’s." Beforehand he designed his own grave marker with an epitaph that read "Here lies Pierre Molinier, He was a man without morals.” Which I think is so beautiful.
A: It's in France?
R: Yeah, in Bordeaux. I am inspired to design my own grave marker because of Molinier. So he's definitely an influence and someone whose work I've always admired. I was in fact introduced to his work by Joel-Peter Witkin.
A: Okay.
R: Joel gave me a book of his and said, "You would like this work." I was like, "Yes, I do!” But I'm also inspired by, I guess, obviously Brassai. Are you familiar? He documented nightlife in Paris in the early 20s with all ambient streetlight.
A: I love how fuzzy his pictures are.
R: Ultra atmospheric. They look staged, but it's the real deal. He photographed gay and lesbian bars and balls of that era and, I think they were called artists balls where art students would come out nude in body paint and roam the streets, and he also documented streetwalkers. I'm not only inspired by photographers, I’ve always been inspired by Tennessee Williams, his writings, and the writings of Joris-Karl Huysmans, especially La~Bas and À rebours. And Gilles de Rais.
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| rick castro: hard~ 1997 |
A: How do they manifest in your photographs, in your work?
R: I am personally drawn to dramatic and moody images. So that's what I was drawn to by these artists, their images and writings, for sure the drama and then the darkness. As a child I was very drawn to film noir even though I didn't know what it was called. Black-and whites: early Joan Crawford, James M. Cain books that were made into films. The cinematic aspect of black-and-white was very hypnotic for me, it drew me in and took me out of reality. When the movie was over I was depressed because I didn't want the fantasy to end. I wanted to exist in this world. When I was a kid I used to have a lot of nightmares after watching monster flicks – I was drawn to monster flicks, all the classic ones like Frankenstein, Dracula.
A: Invisible Man.
R: Most def, then I would have nightmares. But then I would want to see more. It was attraction-repulsion.
A: There's a dreamy quality to some of your pictures.
R: I hope so. I’ve always had a cinematic eye, a photographic memory. I can remember how somebody looked, and the position they were in from years ago. What people wore. Like right now I see the whole composition of how you look, with the background of this beautiful park and this sexy boy jogging behind you. I don't miss anything. Can you see him by the way? He's very hot! I take everything in. Where we're at, the old Los Angeles zoo. I'm always taking in the atmosphere. So then I'm gonna document the atmosphere that I'm remembering or create a tableau which you can keep going back to, maybe seeing different things each time.
A: You worked with George Hurrell, right?
R: I did, as a wardrobe stylist. I was also drawn to his work, of course, the dramatic lighting.
A: He was big in the film noir era.
R: That was his heyday. He created all the original Hollywood glamour portraits of every celebrity, male and female. Jean Harlow, Hedy Lamarr, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, everybody from the studio system. Then he retired and I thought he was dead. In the mid 80s, my agent called and said, "Do you want to style a shoot for Interview magazine?" The photographer is George Hurrell.” I said, "He's alive? Yes!"
I worked with Hurrell a couple of times. But you know the thing about these, I'll call them masters, they're sure of themselves. So as an artist, he didn't interfere with my part. He wasn't even in the room and gave us all the time to do what we needed to do. Then he would come in a positioned her – in this case it was Lesley Ann Warren. I don't know if you ever heard of her, but she was big at one time – and he positioned her on this Charles Rennie Mackintosh chair that I had borrowed from the Pacific Design Center: ultra dramatic chair, high back. He loved it because it created perfect lighting and shadows. After I'm done, after the hairdresser's done – José Eber, by the way. "Shake your hair, darling!" That one – and then he comes in and works with huge tungsten lights on wheels. Work with his lighting, work with his scrims, tilted her head, work with the lighting: takes ONE photo. And its perfect.
A: How does your sense of recall affect your work?
R: I have a photogenic memory, so when I'm creating the shoot I know beforehand exactly what I'm going to do, and I know exactly how it's going to look or how I want it to look. Of course, you have to give leeway for whatever, but at the same time I'm spontaneous because I'm working with what's there, especially in the 90s when my main subjects were street hustlers from Santa Monica Boulevard. You work with what you get, right? You work with with whatever their thing is. Almost like sex play, they say the sub is always in charge because it's their limits. So whatever their limits were, that's what I would work with.
A: Is there always a sexual attraction between you and the model? How does that work?
R: I have to be obsessed. I don't have to have sex with them, but I have to be fixated with the person.
A: Is that generally [the case, you think], with photographers and their models? Is their at least some sense of that?
R: I could probably list the type of photographer I would assume thinks that way, and that would be Guy Bourdin. I know that for sure. He was obsessed in an extreme way. I guess a couple of his wives committed suicide. Helmut Newton for sure. And Pierre Molinier was fixated on the idea, but he was doing it all on his lonesome, so that's different– that's like this longing. Maybe my early work has a real longing to it because I'm creating this homoerotic utopia that I know doesn't really exist. I'm working with someone from the street, and I'm working with what's available and it's very haphazard, but it's presented as this idyllic kind of dramatic image.
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| rick castro: donkey dick~2000 |
A: You['ve] photograph[ed] more than just young boys and hustlers, like you also photographed furry [pictures], for instance.
R: Yeah, that was in the early 2000s. That started by me filming furry culture to make a documentary. Then I photographed [them]. I did large scale portraits, during that time and eventually got them exhibited.
A: Is there sexual tension between you and a model just in the sense that there's a photographer and a model? Like not necessarily, like, "Oh I want to fuck them." Just within like the artist and the person posing, no matter who it is?
R: Well I definitely didn't want to fuck the furries, I'll tell you right now. [laughs]
A: Yeah, but was there any sort of inherent sexuality there at all?
R: I have to have this longing, but it actually works better if we haven’t had sex. If I had had sex with them,
I probably would not have shot them. But then, you know, with the street boys, that’s a one-time-only thing. We're two ships passing in the night. But with people like Tony Ward, and then more recently with Matthew Steele, there's a relationship and then they become my favorite model. Tony was my favorite model for many years, but you know, he's a damn good model.
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| rick castro: hollywood speakeasy~2009 |
A: Do you see the camera itself as a fetish object?
R: Yeah, for sure. I'm not a technical artist. I don't have to have perfect exposure. There was a time when I was doing F-stops. I used a light meter, but I get excited and I'm too haphazard. So the mistakes sometimes are the images that I like the best because it's more about the mood. I don't care about having the most expensive state-of-the-art equipment, and I don't. I get obsessed with that one piece of equipment that I use all the time. That Nikon that Joel Witkin picked out, I used that one camera for many years and it was only replaced with another Nikon that had a motor drive. Then that was replaced with the current camera I have now which is a Nikon digital. So as a working photographer to only own three cameras in your entire life – I mean, that’s unheard of. I've only had one lighting kit, which is flimsy and rinky-dink. If you saw it you would laugh, but that's what I use. I want to use that lighting kit, or ambient which is always my first choice.
A: So was there much of a change in your technique or much of a change in your style when you switched from film to digital?
R: Yeah, because I switched to digital kicking and screaming. I was technophobic. I was a proud Luddite.
I guess I still am, I'm always asking you young guys to help me, but I know more than other people my age.
So I reluctantly switched to digital because it was getting to the point where nobody wanted to wait for film, and film even back then was very expensive. The processing was expensive. The paper was expensive. If you took it out to be printed, it was expensive. If you weren't taking class somewhere you had to pay for a darkroom, and then I was the type of photographer that would by mistake turn on the light and expose my photo with everybody else’s in the whole room, and everybody would yell at me and then I would do it again! Then digital came and it took me a while to embrace it, because there's a definite – you can see the difference. It just was a different quality that I had to accept. But then again I've always liked Xerox. I was a big zine person. What I liked about matte fiber prints is this organic aspect of this item, almost like an old book. You can obsess on that and I can fetishize that, the actual object, the tactile. Its like a rare jewel.
Now I would never go back to film. A lot of young editors have asked me to do film, they want me to recreate what I was doing in the 80s and 90s. I'm like, "Well, why? I already did that. Just use those photos." I have numerous 35 MM photos from the 80s and 90s. They want me to recreate with film, but then they don't want t to wait for the process. Besides working for Hurrell and Witkin – in the 80s, I also worked for Herb Ritts.
Herb didn't do much of his printing because he was too busy shooting. He had a full-time printer named Howard who eventually died of emphysema because of all the chemicals – even before that was a known fact, that to me made sense, that those chemicals are lethal. I used to choke when I was doing darkroom in my bathroom. As most photographers I turned my bathroom into a darkroom. The tub would be where you'd have the chemicals and stuff and that didn't last because I hated having that stuff around and it's highly flammable. So I don't miss any of that… at all.
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| rick castro: saddlebag~2015 |
A: So one of the biggest differences to me between film and digital is with film you have to be, to some extent - you can't take as many pictures all at one time. Like you have to do more like Hurrell, you have to style it -
Because it gets more expensive to do it, and then to print them out. But with digital you can take a million at a time and then pick them out later on whenever you like.
R: Well sure, but then the downside is that now everyone thinks they're a photographer, and you've got numerous people that consider themselves a photographer on Instagram, and that's accepted. Nobody wants to own a print anymore. Now with this whole NFT stuff, they really don't think it's important to own a print. Virtual is going to be as expensive or more expensive than print collecting. I want to remind you of something, or maybe you didn't know this, there was no respect for art photography until the 80s when Sam Wagstaff, who was Robert Mapplethorpe's lover, put him on the map, and made photo collecting a thing. That's when photography as art started to have actual value. Before that there were very few photo collectors, and few exclusively photography exhibits.
A: And even back then, in a way, like even though it wasn't digital people still kind of thought that, well, anybody can take that.
R: Yeah, that's exactly what they thought. When you used to photograph for the magazines, you had to send in your actual prints. You were lucky if you got those prints back. I mean now that would a lawsuit. But that's how these archives like Diane Arbus and Lisette Model and all these photographers that were having stuff printed, the publisher would have the actual prints. And then the photographer forgets or dies and then publishers have all [these] archives of original prints.
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| rick castro: new head harness~2019 |
A: So do you think there's been any degradation of photography as a fetishistic medium now that everybody can just kind of take pictures willy-nilly, more or less?
R: It's a niche group of people that have appreciation for photography as an art form. Then there's a much larger arena of people that admire an object and that can just be virtual and they're fine with that. When you meet collectors and true photo people, it's definitely like any other fetish. Their eyes kind of glean and then you have something to talk about with them all day, which I enjoy. There's also a competitive thing, and the photo enthusiasts starts to talk about "Oh, what F-stop was this?" and "What paper stock did you use?"
A: Do you see your work as poetry? I ask that mostly because on your blog, the way that you post things like all these pictures in a row, and then you repost pictures, but in a different order. It feels very poetic to me in a really interesting way, and it's not maybe totally obvious to someone that's just maybe scrolling through but it feels like you do have a very poetic sensibility, generally.
R: Oh, good. I mean I do consider myself an artist. I guess the only reason why I have a hard time with the term poetry is because I've never had a lot of interest in poetry per se. I do like writing but I've never spent a lot of time investing and reading poetry and discovering different poets. I mean even like Walt Whitman, who I love, it took me up until a few years ago to actually read Leaves of Grass – and the same thing with Rimbaud. I do like his writings, but I’m more interested in his life. Poetry takes a certain kind of thought process that maybe is not my thought process.
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| rick castro: sneaker bondage~2019 |
A: Do you always get to know your models, to some extent at least, before you photograph them, or are you always more interested in their look?
R: It's better if I don't know them in the beginning. If they become a regular then yeah, for sure I get to know them and I want to know them even more. Then I think the images change as our relationship changes. Like I've been shooting Tony Ward – he was my first photo. Did you know that? So that's 1986. And then the last time I shot him was 2019, so right before the plague, and I have this – maybe you've seen it, I guess I posted it – but in 2005 he had a daughter Ruby Sato Ward. I believe when I met her she was - how old are you before you walk? Three? Because she wasn't walking. So she was pre-walking. He took me to his apartment –he was living in Venice – to hang out and then to meet her. Then he picked her up and I wanted to photograph them and – I don't know if he had his shirt off already – or I told him to take off his shirt. But he's holding her. So she's this cute nude baby and then he's nude from the waist up, and it's sooo beautiful. That's not something that you [would] think that I was drawn to. Because it's so sweet. I'm surprisingly a sweet person.
I just like, you know, sweet kink. My inspiration for that is Trash, (1970) with Joe Dallesandro, when he's nude playing with his real son. You know this scene? That to me is like – I never knew that that could be erotic. Like fatherhood or, you know, a child and a father relationship could be sensual without it being perverted. I love that. So I was very happy with that photo in 2005, and it ran in a Dutch magazine. Then in 2019 I was shooting Tony for AnotherMan Magazine – so Ruby is now 16 – I recreated it. Have you seen this? I love this series so I always exhibit them together.
A: There are similar sweetnesses, but in a different way perhaps, in the photograph series that you did with your dad, in the Rick Owens photoshoot.
R: Yeah, that was in 2014 when he was a youngster of 94. I had photographed my father once before in I'm gonna say 1989 or '90 because my parents have – well, this portrait of my father was created. This is when he's 21. So this is 1940, he's wearing his military uniform. This is right before he went into the service, WW2. There's an 8x10 portrait of him that I grew up with, and the same portrait of my mother. She's 18, and she has that Joan Crawford hairdo and she's wearing this cute little dress with – not Joan Crawford shoulder pads, but little shoulder pads, and they just look fantastic, right? The original photos are hand-colored. If that was now that would be 1000s of dollars. They just went to some photo studio in Boyle Heights and probably paid like, I don't know, $1 or something. That was commonplace back then. They're organic matte prints. They're just beautiful, right? So in 1990 my parents are in their early 70s, and I wanted to recreate it. My dad still had his uniform and it still fits him. Have you seen these pictures?
A: I have. They were at the art show you did at that palatial estate in the Hollywood hills.
R: Yes! Okay. So I recreated a portrait of my father in the same pose and then I did one of my mother. And she recreated her hair, but she had less hair. She didn't have the same dress but she wore a similar dress. That's the same idea of recreating Tony and Ruby.. I was very pleased. I had that 1940 portrait and my 1990 recreation of my mother at her funeral last September on the display.
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| rick castro: Angela Lansbury~2021 |
A: Do you see your photography reflecting queer life in LA over time?
R: I hope so. I haven't shown many of the queer history [photographs], which I have. I used to work for The Advocate and Frontiers, which was a free gay paper at the time, and also there was a magazine called Edge. So I used to freelance for all these gay publications. They didn't call them queer then, they called them gay.
I freelanced for all of them. So that was being documented and published, but I haven't done an exhibition that showcases that era as of yet. One day I will. I documented the political protests, the ACT UP protests and Queer Nation. I have a lot of that.
A: How do you think queer life has changed since the 80s to now?
R: Where do I begin? How much time do you have?
A: To narrow it down a little bit, what are maybe a couple of pros and cons for [queer life in the] 80s and 90s versus now?
R: In the 80s, we had very few rights, surprisingly. Marriage wasn't legal, and going into the military was not allowed which is fine by me. For that matter, it's fine by me with the marriage, but I understand the importance of having legal representation because unfortunately this country is based on religion, marriage, and military. That's where the power is. In the 80s, you know, all of my friends, including the love of my life, were dropping like flies of the first plague, AIDS. So I lost everybody. And even though a lot of us were out, the institutions were surprisingly homophobic. Like I worked in the film industry and it was surprisingly homophobic and surprisingly closeted, still, and not surprisingly racist. So I was dealing with all of that, and I was very established. I worked every day, and so that's what I was coming up against, over and over. Things weren't as PC as they are now so people could just say stuff- if you said something calling it out, you’d fired or you didn’t work again with that group. So that was the downside. Now of course we have more rights. If somebody is not out now they're just a coward as far as I'm concerned. Recently it was revealed that Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner had a longtime male lover, and, you know, a kink is a kink. Gender and sexuality has always been fluid. It's not been acknowledged but has always been fluid. Most people are bisexual and most people have dabbled, much more so than the Kinsey scale which shocked the public in the late 1940s when it was published. So that's like the upside of modern times. The downside is all the assimilation and homo-gentrification and the whole idea that a lot of gay people just want to mirror heterosexual lives. It's like they aspire to have the exact same things. What I always thought was interesting about gay or queer is they were creating their own life and their own lifestyle.
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| rick castro: black dildo in Griffith Park~ 2021~ |
A: I agree with you that that's kind of annoying and that there are a lot of younger people that are probably way too fragile, but do you see any radical element as far as the blurring of gender roles?
R: I think that whole fluidity now is great.
I mean I used to get so much flak when I was in my 20s for being androgynous, I mean a huge amount of flak from my family and friends and even men in the gay community, like they didn't want anything to do with someone that was – I didn't identify as feminine but I had like an androgynous look. They only wanted the clone kind of guy. So there was a lot of prejudice in all aspects. And now it’s pleasing to see there's a complete mix - it's kind of nice that you can't tell if someone's male or female and that it doesn't matter.
But to get all angry because someone might call someone he instead of they – I'm never gonna remember this. I'm not gonna remember, "Oh, that one's they, that one's he, that one's she. Yeah, you know, and I don’t like the term cis-male. What a horrible term. Who came up with that?
A: To me, it's kind of a strange time because people that were trying to assimilate and to a large degree did – queer people have a lot of rights and they have kind of been able to assimilate as much as they wanted to. And that's allowed queer people to [assume] roles [to] go further and kind of be more gender neutral, which in turn – in another way is also pushing it even further. Kind of becoming radical again, and like, "Well okay, we got these rights, but we still don't want to assimilate to the degree that you want us to."
R: Transsexual people should push as hard as they can for their rights and for legal protections. Because they're being massacred the way gay people were being massacred since the beginning of time. Now they're the targets because they're obvious. Back in the day, you know, feminine men were obvious, so they were the targets or butch women were targets. But transpeople should protest as much as they need to get their rights. They need their fucking rights. Nobody should be subjected to that kind of violence, let alone death. Even in my day, in the 70s and 80s, people got beaten up all the time and killed. I used to have people threaten me. Everyone I know had people threaten them.
A: Yeah, because it seems like that hetero-normative power structure, to use a UCLA term – they gave queer people rights but with a catch. Like, you can have as many rights as you want as long as it's not obvious. And [for] transsexuals and trans people, it's usually obvious and that's why they still have to fight for the rights in a way that gay men and lesbians don't have to as much. And there's still – despite everything, there's still a lot of censorship these days. Which surprises me in a way.
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| rick castro: hobbling dane~2023 |
R: Well on social media it's just ridiculous.
A: Social media for sure, but you know, even everywhere. Like your work has still [been] kind of censored in galleries, right? Like you don't get accepted to as many galleries as you otherwise would have.
R: I'm kind of dismissed and assumed to be pornography. I've never done pornography in my life.
I'm just sort of perceived as that. I'll tell you one thing if Sam Wagstaff was my lover, it'd be a whole different thing. Or if I was a white photographer, it'd be a whole different thing.
A: Do you think that's played into a lot of your struggles to be as big as you might want to be?
R: What, racism?
A: Racism, yeah. Do you think that's [affected you] as much as the fetish element of your work?
R: I think that it's held me back without it ever being acknowledged. I know that when I used to travel with my film Hustler White with Bruce LaBruce during the late 1990s that we were treated differently. But no one acknowledged that, that was happening…. at all.
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| rick castro: Keith & Keith~ 2023 |
interview by Alexander Smith~ intern for Getty Museum, One Archives, USC,
librarian, Elysian Valley, CA ~
Rick Castro will be featured in a slide show and lecture with Queering the Lens: Queer Photography, Getty Museum, Los Angeles on June 7th.
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