Visual artist Amanda Charchian On the art of looking at art

Amanda Charchian’s work is simultaneously epic and intimate. Known for her deeply sensual and feminine photography, her book, Pheromone Hotbox brought together images of female artists she had shot between 2012-2015, from Costa Rica to Cuba, Morocco to Israel. In conversation, Amanda’s vision for what art is and can be shows a palpable need for a pursuit of and career beyond image-making and aesthetic alone. While working with clients like Vogue, Gucci, Interview, Cartier, i-D or Billie Eilish, Amanda seamlessly transitions  into projects focused on physical structure, architecture, furniture and other conceptual creative philosophies. Recent collaborations include a fragrance with French luxury perfume house Ex Nihilo, where she created images inspired by the ways in which a particular smell makes us re-enter a mental space completely forgotten by visual memory, and a campaign book and painted prints for jewellery brand Venyx on their Man Ray capsule collection. With her latest venture crafting sustainable-conceptual furniture, she’s bridging the divide between her captured subjects and tangible forms.

 Here, Amanda shares why we ought to be wary of creativity under the gaze of social media, how everything an artist creates becomes part of a larger body of work and why context does matter.

James Wright: You're a first-generation American – your parents are Iranian. To what degree do you think your cultural heritage has influenced your work, especially given that you probably wouldn't have been able to make art and explore themes like womanhood, if your parents hadn’t moved to the States?

Amanda Charchian: I think about this all the time. My entire life has been a celebration of the freedom that I was gifted by my parents’ sacrifice. My mother wanted to go to art school, but wasn’t allowed because her family thought she’d be called a slut. There was no example of what a female artist could be. There was only religious art really.

Even when I wanted to go to art school, I had to go to a counsellor and give a presentation explaining how I could make a living, because my parents didn’t understand why I couldn’t just paint as a hobby.

I actually just finished reading the biography of the Iranian queen, Farah Pahlavi, who went to architecture school before she became the Shah’s wife in 1959. She created one of the most incredible art collections in the entire world in the sixties and seventies; I read the story of the curator who was hired to create the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art with her. It’s a beautiful account of how they knew art was the best way to communicate with the public about what the rest of the world was doing. They acquired Warhols and Rauschenbergs and all of this American art because they wanted Iran to be more democratic and in conversation with the rest of the world. 

But my mother never got to express herself. So it became my duty to become obsessed with women's freedom. I made an entire book about creative women. Pheromone Hotbox – my photo book that centres the idea and intimacy of what happens when a woman photographs other women – was just an experiment in trying to understand women's creativity and liberation and freedom.

JW: So the personal is political...

AC: I think society is organised by situations that people have experienced on a personal level. I don't think people have lived experiences that don't connect them to the rest of humanity. We're just social animals really, and I think it's really important to remember that art is the expression of that. That’s what it is for me, and I think for everyone. It teaches us what other people are experiencing. Right now I'm having this perspective that life is just the things we do while we're alive. Like, we're just making things up? Everybody is. 

JW: You've described previously that above all other things, the notion of intention is really important to you when it comes to looking at art or photography. Can you speak a little bit about what you mean by that?

AC: The intention of what I'm looking at? Or my intention for looking? 

JW: Both. And of making work. Are they the same thing?

AC: There are two kinds of people. You can walk into a gallery and you can read the wall text first, or go straight to looking at the art. I’m the kind who reads the text first. I want to know who the artist is, when they were born. It's tricky because there's a lot of fluff in those texts, and I think you have to learn to read between the lines and ignore the art jargon. Often everything becomes about identity, or politics, but I don't believe that most artists were thinking about these big universal themes when they were making the work. I think they were probably thinking about their personal lives.

JW: Would it be accurate to say you’ve started moving away from photography?

AC: The other day, I realised it’s been twelve years since my first photo shoot. I’d just left art school, where I’d been making six-foot art works, using marble and painting photographs I’d taken that were essentially fashion pictures. I didn't realise that’s what they were at the time, but I was getting models, I was styling them, there was hair and makeup, I was making sets. My teachers said, “these are better than your paintings.” Then a woman who collected my sculptures asked if I’d shoot the campaign for the brand she had, and so I kind of fell into photography... 

If I think about it in terms of a service that I'm doing, then I like it, I enjoy the challenge. And it's not so much only the image that I'm interested in but the connection I have with the person I'm photographing and who I'm making the picture for. I like to convince myself that I'm moving away from it and I think I thought I could break up with it, but I can't.

My main guilt in life right now is that I feel like I'm not paying attention to the part of myself that wants to just be making abstract paintings in a field somewhere.

JW: What's stopping you?

AC: I think what I'm really rebelling against right now is how public everything is, how people have to show what they've made straight away, constantly. I wish I didn't come of age creatively in the era of social media.  I have a little bit of an aversion to being seen in that way. And now it's like, every photographer also has to be like a public figure. I hate it. 

JW: In this world where image-making has become so democratised and we're flooded with it all day every day, whether we go seeking it or not, do you feel disillusioned by the fact that the craft and artistry behind taking a picture has been diluted and lessened in some way?

AC: No, I actually appreciate how democratised it's become. My problem with photography is more that I don't like the way it's presented in a fine art context. Every time I go to The MEP in Paris, I'm so annoyed that it feels like an academic presentation. Then I go to a museum that's showing painting or sculpture, and the work is elevated through the way it’s displayed.

The last photography show I loved was Jack Pierson at Lisson Gallery in New York. And it's because his photographs are sculptures, like, photography pinned to sheets of aluminium, and in a kind of screen. The way he presents his photography is interesting to me. And I think Tyler Mitchell’s doing a good job of that too, incorporating it into furniture and mixing it with fabric. 

JW: I'm interested in your relationship with architecture and the locations you choose to photograph. There’s a noticeable emphasis on form in your work, whether it's the way light interacts with a space or the interplay of light and shadows on the subject. How do you think about structure and form in your work?

AC: The last major body of work I made was about environmental intimacy. I'm interested in how we occupy space, how it affects our lives. I don't know if that came about because of COVID. It made me think a lot about our relationship with right angles and round spaces and why we love places with high ceilings, why we think better in rooms with more light, or with green outside. 

Like this entire time, a quarter of my brain has been looking at that shadow right there. I can't help it. It's just what I'm thinking about. And I'm thinking about the triangles, about how the closer it is to the wall, the sharper, and then it becomes blurrier. This is what my brain cares about, how light forms. 

JW: Would you agree there's a connection between the formative experiences in the photographic world and the design of a beautiful object, like for example, a table?

There's a strong connection. Every time I was taking a picture for that series about environmental intimacy, it was always about the shadow. It was always about the black vs the white. I was trying to interject a shape into those images that was almost like an impression of something that you couldn't see with your eyes — and that turned into how you can cut stone in a way that does something similar, and it's an expression of the same thing.

JW: Do you believe you use furniture – for instance – as just another means to evoke memories or sensations tied to places you yourself have encountered and experienced throughout your career?

AC: Absolutely. I think everything is absolutely connected. So let's take for example, the design of a table – what are the ingredients, the form and the materials? How do you approach collaboration with the people helping you craft it? How do you kind of connect it broadly to all of the other things you're doing? The purity of an idea and organising principle that has to feel consistent.

JW: Is design and furniture something you imagine doing more of  in the future?

AC: Yes, absolutely. I have a bunch of designs that I'm in the process of making. I'm also incorporating painting into the cushions that go on this specific bench. And I'm at this point where I'm thinking about myself as a 70 or 80 year-old, where you're going to see all these things together and it's going to make a lot of sense.

JW: Having tried your hand at multiple different things, different forms, do you feel the need to rationalise them all together into a kind of harmony?

AC: Yes, as we were saying, it has to be very cohesive. I mean, I just did a project where I was commissioned to make a book – a travel book. I spent a year shooting the Chateau Marmont in LA, and it was about to go to print and then the client blocked it from happening. But then, I know when I have a retrospective when I'm 85, the Chateau pictures will be there, the bench will be there, the painting from art school will be there, and it'll all make sense. Man Ray is my idol because he did all the things. His paintings were horrible. They were really bad, but he had to make them. And he made incredible fashion pictures, incredible fine art photographs, incredible sculptures. But do you think at the time he was judging himself or wondering how it all made sense together? No. The surrealists didn't put those restrictions on themselves. 

JW: As a photographer, you work quite quickly: you can get something in less than ten minutes, whereas the precision needed and the time it takes to create a table or a scent, say, is necessarily very different. Has that shift in pace been a welcome adjustment to your creative process?

AC: Yes, but I've had to do quite a lot of unlearning. My sense of self-worth is so connected to my productivity. I think I was raised with a lot of pressure to perform and my whole identity has always been about what I've been able to produce.  I don't know how to carve marble. I have to talk to somebody else to do it. I’m trying to get to a place where I'm okay with just sitting in a room doing nothing.

The beauty of photography is the immediacy of it, and it speaks to how quickly I can feel intimate with absolute strangers. This is a gift that I have, that I can make people feel very comfortable right away. When I take a picture, I feel like somebody's giving me something, and I want to feel like I'm giving them something too.

JW: What does collaboration mean for you?

AC: Any fine art context my work has lived in, it's always been collaborative. There's always a person in the photo. There's always some person that had to make sculptures for the photo, there've always been other people involved. My energy needs other energy from something or someone else. That's how I got here, I think. 

JW: What does intimacy look like in other realms where there’s not so direct a relationship with a person? For example, I know you’ve started art advising recently...

Yes, getting into art consultancy came very naturally and it grew out of my intimate relationships with people. I had two friends who were constantly asking me about art, what they should buy, what they should put in their house. Should I buy this? Should I paint this, that colour? I found it very weird but I enjoyed it, and then another friend was asking me about a foundation they wanted to build, and I came to realise my entire life has been about conversations. So now, with the clients that I have, it's so important for me to have an intimate relationship with them to understand whether I suggest certain artworks based on who I know they are. It’s very psychological. 

I don't really see it as being so different to photographing someone, you know, it's like how can I engage them in a way that makes them feel comfortable to show me a part of themselves that maybe they wouldn't show to somebody else? How can I excite them? How can I turn them on to things? How can I show them that this painting is as incredible as it is? What language do I use? 

JW: When it comes to ‘the art of looking at art’, as an art advisor, do you start by outlining what a piece evokes for you; what it felt like to you, seeing it for the first time? Do you feel that this transition in your career is reflective of change in you as a person?

Absolutely. The difficulty is, I think it's a truism to say that people like to categorise individuals and groups of people so that they can better understand them. That's been going on since forever, sociologically. We like to label things and label people, label tribes. I know it’s become memeable to be a ‘slash’, like the DJ / designer / photographer.

I'm grateful that I have the opportunity to do so many different things. I could probably make a clothing line tomorrow. Who knows? It’s liberating when you're an army of one as an artist, because you're in control, you can determine to some degree if you can get away with it and if you can convince people that this is what you're doing now. And I'm making that sideways move.

And besides, what makes someone an artist? Isn’t everything in life art? Why isn't it me talking to you about art? Why isn't me making breakfast art? Everything is art, everything is beauty, everything is contributing to channelling your experience and expression.

Follow Amanda @Amanda_Charchian