We start the year speaking with the acclaimed American artist Mimi Plumb about her beautiful new book Megalith-Still.
S/B: How did you first come to photography?
MP: I began photographing in the late 60s when I was in high school. The world seemed to be on fire yet I lived in the suburbs and not much was happening there. I felt extremely isolated and wanted to find a creative outlet. I spent a couple of years writing poetry and found the process torturous. My brother was taking pictures at the time. He shared with me how to use a camera and he took me into the darkroom at UC Berkeley. I loved everything about the process, and have been photographing ever since.
S/B: Do you see this body of work as a clear break from its two predecessors - the White Sky and The Golden City?
MP: The horses were a departure for me. They are beautiful and they lived in a place of great beauty. My previous work, picturing an American dystopia, led me to photograph what I felt was precious about the world, essentially what was worth preserving. Both approaches, the contrast between them, and the discourse that elicits, speak to the essence of why I am a photographer.
S/B: Is the way you photograph a person and the way you photograph a horse much the same?
MP: When photographing people or horses it's usually a fairly brief encounter. But I often know the people I photograph. And It was similar to the horses. They knew me, otherwise, they wouldn't have let me photograph them, or at the very least, the pictures would've been different than they are. But I always approach a person or a horse I want to photograph with interest. There's something about them, something amazing to me, that I want to memorialize in a photograph.
S/B: Could you tell me about your experience of photographing in nature?
MP: It's sweet to photograph in nature, a meditation of sorts. Since I left the suburbs when I was 17, I have almost always lived in a city, whether in San Francisco or Berkeley or in some of the towns in the North Bay. I have never lived in the mountains although I love visiting them.
S/B: You moved from the suburbs to the city to the mountains, what came next?
MP: What comes next is my current project, Reservoir, a response to the effects of climate change in California.
