In those performances where Soltau carries out the binding on members of her audience rather than herself, for instance Permanente Demonstration am 21.1.1976, questions arise as to issues of power, of victim and perpetrator, of deprivation of liberty, of reduction of identity. Hans M. Schmidt describes Soltau’s performances as acts of mummification, which on completion change the viewers’ perception of the participants. He suggests that from initially empathising with the increasing physical restriction of the participants, once the limit of the wrapping has been reached, the viewer feels “less a feeling of compassion than a relatively disinterested curiosity.” In this reading, issues of ‘otherness’ might be seen to arise once the body no longer looks as we expect it to. If it no longer fulfils our perceptions of the body because it fails to remind us of our own, or reminds us too much of what our own might look like in similar circumstances, for instance, bound, degraded and abject, then our reactions to it might be called into question. What better role can photography play than that of the compassionate voyeur—allowing us to step out of our own limited lives and, at least for a moment, and pull us into someone else’s very different existence? The possibility of stimulating our understanding and compassion for another human’s condition, pushing the boundaries of our own contained world—this is ones of the most valuable roles that photography can fulfil. SL: Maybe I should have been more organised! A lot of my negatives were destroyed in a flood and there were two fires where my files were kept, and the fireman came in and sprayed the place and a number of things were badly damaged. But I figured that if I had everything I did it would be terrible; at least I don't have to deal with all of it! Pasternak said something like one should lose a quarter of one's work. I think I lost more, and I think that's good. People who keep everything amaze me. I keep a lot and my house is a mess, a disgrace… I'm ashamed to have anyone come in now! (Ha, but not really.)

Clayton Maxwell: Because your panoramic images are composed of three separate photos, they seem to embody the ever present tension between the individual and the collective, both in the actual structure of the images and in their content; the subjects often seem to be both alone and together. Can you tell me more about this?CM: Do you feel like your work has a particularly gay content? There are beautiful men, and there is longing and attraction between them, is that enough to categorise the work as gay? Are such categories useful? I wrestle with Earnshaw’s work, having photographed the same streets, at the same time that he did with a camera, for I know now that, after 45 years, anonymity was our greatest friend, there being reciprocity between anonymity and clarity. But I also know as well that we do not bring these works forth only to be lost and forgotten to the world, that we have a responsibility towards the things we create, to insure their survival. So as artists we offer each other a hand held out, we try to save the work, that which truly enriches our lives. It is what sustains for it is our connection to the truth of things. HS: What emotional or psychological impulses do you work out for yourself by bringing these images into existence? DH: It’s not so much about my desire to embrace the geriatric crowd but rather a newer project where I’m photographing my mother and her community down in Florida. My parents divorced in the 1970s and have since taken very different paths in their lives. My mother is a born-again Christian and it’s taken me many years to get my mind around that and begin to make pictures. It’s obviously quite difficult due to the fact that the very nature of who I am is counter to her spiritual belief system. We love one another…yet there’s so much that’s wrong. Much of this work is Florida is about what remains unspoken. Outwardly the work is playful and colourful. But in actuality it’s heavy and dark. They’re some of the hardest pictures to make. I feel very disconnected in those moments.

Witkin’s well-known dark and troubling work often possesses a beauty that transcends its subject matter. St. Thomas Aquinas, whose thinking about art has not been made obsolete by the passage of centuries, recognised that true art has an expansive radiance, a clarity, which reaches out to and takes hold of the viewer because it radiates the fullness of the form it is expressing. Form is what causes it to be, and its fullness shapes its beauty, its organicism, and its reality. That kind of clarity (claritas) and the beauty-shaping fullness of form (formosus) are, and not to Thomistic thought alone, art’s principal constituents. AS: There are lots and lots. I would like to do a story about the relationship between the body and food. I’d also like to re-do all the advertising photos that exist and make them resemble works by Rembrandt for example, to ridicule them. I don’t know which idea will emerge yet.She spoke no Chinese and RongRong no Japanese. Their initial dialogue was almost solely visual—they spoke to each other through their works. For almost two years, before inri moved to Liulitun, their love subsisted on the sharing of images and rudimentary linguistic communication. They invented a secret language of gestures, expressions, and smatterings of English, Mandarin and Japanese, and collaborated on photography art projects. Their debut collaboration took place during inri's first visit to China, almost ten months after they met. Naked together on the Great Wall, before the majestic silence of nature, they used a timer and let the camera bear witness. After this they would go on to share a dynamic career together, showing their work in galleries and museums across the world. DH: My early passion as an undergraduate was film making. I wanted to tell stories. Yet as much as I loved film and video I was continually left slightly disappointed at its inability to linger and stare in quite the same way that a photograph could. I also have to confess that I was at times a bit overwhelmed by the expectations to say something larger in a film. I was taken by a photographs ability to depict slices of topics that I was interested in talking about; each one being a sentence of sorts. Yet I wanted to challenge the static nature of the photograph by linking them together and activating them; playing them off of one another. So I then began making linear panoramas with a view camera. I began using it in much the same way I was using the video camera…moving across my subject matter, shifting the focus from image to image and displaying the photographs side by side. It was as if I found a way to take the best of film and photograph and join them together in a kind of hybrid studio practice. I was also excited that I could, within one piece comprised of various images, possess a still life, a portrait and even a landscape. It’s a bit decadent.

I see Liulitun now through inri's eyes, its rambling, riot of greenery—vine tendrils reaching out into space, grasping for each other, like the new lovers united after a nine month separation of agonising, mute phone calls—and bohemian ambience offering a delicious space in which to breathe freely. I see the sensuality of their half-eaten dragon fruit, suggestive, moist and magenta-skinned; the shy declarations of their bare feet touching; inri's wonder at the unfamiliar foods in local stores, the rows of strange meats in plastic wrap, culinary mysteries to lay on their table; red roses, hot crimson and belligerent with fragrance; carnal-ethereal moments of the sort we pray never to end, those moments of corporeal discovery in which the tangled limbs of self and other become momentarily indistinguishable, and in the eyes of one's mate you see your own soul; the journeys and homecomings; the mundane rituals of the everyday that make the string of moments hold together in the irreducible chain of subtle repetitions and variations that you come to call your life. At the other end of the age spectrum, Ladli focuses on young girls in orphanages, many of which have been rejected by their parents due to their gender. Fairy Tales and then grounds them within a new context and composition that ignites new meanings. “The structure is a bit complicated. But then, the genre of investigating events is complicated. Plus, stories are complicated by their very nature. I am not interested in the simplicity that is offered in mass storytelling.DH: In this case maybe it’s not that complicated. I think that many of us, myself included, are continually searching for “something”, be it love, friendship, community, family, sexual fulfilment or material gain. As a gay man, much of my life, especially in my early years, was spent searching for an identity that was acceptable to both society and myself. Sex has always been complicated and often dangerous. It goes without saying that often times when we finally get what we think we need…it leaves wanting for more. It’s our nature. SL: I did that for myself as well. That was personal work. I enjoyed doing that. The street for me is almost like a ballet. They are all these people moving around, freely, aware of each other and unaware of each other, and twirling and swirling around… And of course you don't have to deal with anybody, you don't have to ask for permission. Although I think it's become more difficult to be a street photographer. But I did things that I liked doing. I'm going through my work now and I discover things that I never printed, that I think are maybe interesting. Sometimes I didn't have the money to print everything. And sometimes I didn't see. Sometimes a photograph needs time. Time is sometimes on the side of the photographer. What seems to be prosaic and ordinary in a given moment sometimes, with the passage of time, becomes exotic. Christ is my life,” he wrote. “I photograph the living and the dead. My work is a prayer. Photographing makes me the possessor of sanctified and secret wisdom. And for that, I will be judged, not by man—but by God.” allowed it to be used in the media, preferring to have the projects disseminated as exhibitions, books, and on the Internet. Perhaps the fact of their choosing my HS: Because you use yourself as your model and main character, the process of your own aging appears in your imagery. How do you see age or aging as an element of your work? How do you feel that your art, your ideas, and yourself have evolved over time?