Artist Blog

Every week an artist whose single image was published by Der Greif is given a platform in which to blog about contemporary photography.

Leigh Ledare (born 1976, US) left home at 15, attended Rhode Island School of Design worked as an assistant to Larry Clark who is clearly a influence on Ledare (TULSA 1971). He uses photography, archival material, text and film to explore human agency, social relationships and taboos. His issues mostly relate to desire, identity, and morality. Pretend You’re Actually Alive is capturing the exhibitionist sexuality of his own mother and shows an extreme mother-son relationship. All of these photographs deal with Tina, Ledare's mother – an influential muse of this project and a highly extravert personality. As a teenager Tina was a ballet dancer who turned to stripping when her career ended. For seven years, Ledare has been photographing his mother in her most intimate acts and attitudes, exploiting her need for recognition and her boundless and exhibitionist attitude. He decided to work on this project when he got home one Christmas: "I arrived at home not having seen her for a year and a half, she knew I was coming and opened the door naked." He said when he entered the house and caught a glimpse into her bedroom "a young man, almost exactly my age, was sprawled out naked. He rolled over to see me, saying hello, before rolling back over and returning to sleep." Ledare interpreted this welcome as "her way of announcing to me what she was up to, at this period in her life – almost as though to say, 'Take it or leave it.' I had a camera and began making photos of her then. She was the catalyst." For me, the power of this work is in the collaboration of the artist and his subject. Somehow he has combined the best and the worst elements of Goldin, Billingham, and McGinley. Ledare’s photographs of his mother are as much about performance as they are about her life — and even if the performance is compelling, the subject is dehumanized; the performance matters more than the performer. “I don’t see this as a portrait of one woman’s eccentricity,” Ledare wrote in a statement, “but as a temporal mapping of reactions to realities in the world, psychological realities we carry with us from situation to situation, positions we must negotiate, subtexts we find ourselves living within.” Pretend You’re Actually Alive got published in 2008.