Laurel Nakadate Quotes

I shot my undergraduate work on 35mm. I love the way it looks, but I haven't shot film in a while. If you can avoid scanning, it makes your practice faster. Oh, and I shoot a lot of Polaroid, too. I have about five hundred Polaroids from my film that I hope to show soon.

People want movies to be one thing or another; they want it be fact or fiction.

Sometimes, photographs live in our hearts as unborn ghosts and we survive not because their shadows find permanence there, but because that thing that is larger than us, larger than the things we can point to, remember and claim, escorts us from dark into light ...

I think most interesting people are socially awkward even if they're able to hide it most of the time. If Henry Darger hadn't been a shut-in would we love him so much? Any act that we do in private is amazing and profound because it is private. You don't have to worry about being socially awkward in the privacy of your own home ... well, unless I show up.

It's always a problem - you've got to figure out a place to put your body. You've got to wake up in the morning and deal with the fact that you have this body to lug around.

I think my work is optimistic - as much as it is pathetic and funny and sad and ridiculous, at the end of the day it's about the hope that something will go right, and the constant wishing for a world where things might start to make sense.

Photography has saved my life, over and over again.

I never want to make videos with people who don't want to make them with me. I don't want to force people to take part. Only people who want to collaborate. And that's important because otherwise, the videos wouldn't work. Them choosing to take part is very important to the videos.

I love fiction. I like reading short stories. Cupcakes, pop songs, Polaroids, and short stories. They all raise and answer questions in a short space. I like Lorrie Moore. Amy Hempel. Tim O'Brien. Raymond Carver. All the heartbreakers.

I present the thing we're going to do as a simple starting point. They all know it's an art piece and that it's all going to be recorded. And I have never had an experience where one of these men tried to take advantage of the situation. If they were guilty of anything it was of being lonely. It was never that they were violent or dangerous.

Although I get a lot of ideas from things that have happened in my life, I see the final product as a place where my imagination meets my experience. What I love about photography is that nothing is really as it seems.

I'm more interested in the idea of role-playing in general than the idea of role-playing in art. I like the childlike quality of making pretend or the optimistic idea of pretending something's happening when it's not.

Every time I hear that somebody died I think of their body, on a steel table in a morgue somewhere. I think of how they can do nothing about it.

Well, my intention is to make work about being uncomfortable. About being in a world that isn't always the world you want to be part of. I talk a lot about the free fall, the moment in the scene where gravity takes over, and the beautiful awkwardness when gravity wins. Gravity is hilarious. Gravity always wins.

After you die, your body is just there. Isn't it kind of embarrassing that your body is going to be there and you have no say or control over it? Somebody's going to have to deal with it. I've always respected people who kill themselves and find a way to get rid of the body. Very clean. Lost at sea. I can see why they do that. There's nothing left.

Tenderness and lust are just immature little brothers of love. Yes of course it was lust ... but I'm not sure how evolved or resolved that lust was.

I would always say I'm doing a video project. About dancing or birthday parties. Of course, the video becomes more than that. It goes deeper than that. But it's not a lie. It's a starting point.

I'm always afraid going into strange places, but I also choose carefully and listen to my instincts. These were men I could trust. I'm a pretty good judge of crazy versus sad. I prefer sad.

Polaroid, you know, goes against everything that photography is now. You can't make multiples. Only one exists. I love that. By the way, while we've been talking I've now seen a total of three people I know walking on 8th street.

Also, I'm drawn to moments of ambiguity, when things could go right or they could go wrong. I'm interested in discomfort. Discomfort is a place where we're still close enough to comfort to understand our unhappiness. Most of the things we desire are things that can destroy us.

Things might not get better but they might not get worse. There's something sort of beautiful about that.

I think we're put out into the world to forge relationships with people. Those can be as small as buying coffee from someone or as large as a marriage. The important thing is that we try to make connections or have experiences with other humans. Otherwise what's the point of being on this earth?

I think it's a really good idea to be bumping into all kinds of people in all kinds of ways. So you make art with strangers. You give a reading. You move somewhere new and try to build a life. You grapple with humanity.

I believe photography is about choosing to live, being brave. Looking is an act of courage. It's terrifying. It's possible to see too much, to witness things that we cannot hold.

I have very little interest in endlessly telling people about my artistic process. It sounds like throwing yourself against a wall and crying. It's not interesting to most people. It's interesting to yourself. But it's your problem, not anyone else's.

Discomfort and awkwardness are places where you feel things. I'm a big advocate for being happy. We can choose to live in a happy bubble. But part of being happy is understanding how sad things can be.

A lot of people think that my work is about mocking or making fun of things, but a lot of it is about discomfort and making myself as uncomfortable as the men feel, or putting myself in a situation where I'm revealing my loneliness as much as they're revealing theirs.

As people who make things, we have the ability to think of the most vile, awful things we can imagine, but it doesn't mean we believe those things. I allow myself to go places in my videos that I would never go in my real life.And I think that there has to be that place where you can create and not have to be living it in real life.

The act of looking is brave. Especially if you look at things you can't handle. I think that most people do not look. If you're really paying attention you could have your heart broken twelve times a day. Most of the time we aren't looking.

Death is sad, yes, but there are some great laughs you can find there.

I feel like I'm at a place in my life where I'm really strangely happy, and in awe of how great the world can be, and I think that's because I have gone through periods of looking at the world through a really melancholy lenses. It's all just flip sides of the same coin.

I wanted to tell stories that moved. Nothing stays the same, and that's why photography is important. The world flickers and changes, and that's why video is important.

I think it's a really good thing to put yourself in a situation where you feel really uncomfortable because I think things can come out of that discomfort.

Sometimes it's good to get mad, sometimes it clarifies where we stand. I think that art has the ability to challenge and push, and that's great. That's better than great ... it's necessary.

Everything is mediated. Everything is influenced by its maker. And happily, right? I'm so happy everyone leaves fingerprints on things whether they like it or not. Fingerprints solve crimes. They're profound. They're your best and worst friend and you were born with them and you can't get away from them without a lot of pain and sandpaper.

If you can see a thing you don't have anymore it's very heartbreaking. To hold onto things longer than we actually can hold onto them is a desire. Writers and artists are trying to record these things they can no longer have. We're a heartbroken lot. Taking pictures is a brave act in which you try to explain and remember a thing you can't have anymore.

A cupcake is like a great pop song. The whole world in less than three minutes. And it's impossible to have a bad cupcake. In New York you walk everywhere. So I'm always looking, always on the eternal search for the perfect cupcake. I take them very seriously. It's like hunting and gathering for me.

A lot of people have said that the main thread in my work is loneliness or just wanting to create a world with someone who doesn't really have much in their life, so maybe I'm looking for someone who's lonely and wants to try to create something with me as a subject for my videos.