Ron Gregg in Conversation with Bryson Rand

I first met you at Yale, and I remember that your work at the time consisted mostly of photographs of male bodies. There were also some photographs of nature, all in black and white. You were defining yourself, but most of your faculty were struggling to understand what you were doing. You said that you were still kind of discovering yourself, so, on some level, Yale did work by pushing you, or perhaps by throwing you into the lake.

Yeah, I think being at Yale was the first time I was really able to declare myself an artist without any sort of doubt. Before then, I defined myself as a teacher who made photographs or something. So, yeah, at that time it felt important to go hard into things. My work prior to graduate school had really been skirting around my sexuality. I was photographing other gay men, but in a very generic sense. I had this approach of, “I’ll just document things and not really intervene.” That changed when I was in school and encountered confusion or resistance from the panel and the critics there. Looking back, it was very beneficial that they gave me something to push back against.

I remember the first time you and I met. I was really struggling to find useful feedback that wasn’t just about the photographic nature of the work. I was interested in history. I was interested in grieving that history and in finding my own place within all the loss experienced by the generations prior to mine. I remember you coming into the studio, and I felt as though you simply understood the references I was working with and the history I was engaging. During so many of my previous studio visits, I had to start from the beginning and say, “Here is the history of all these things.” You just sort of came in, and it felt like you already knew what I was engaging with, which was really incredible and helpful.

Illuminated Ice (Fellsfjara, Iceland), 2019

When you talk about the shift in your work, were you initially making mostly “candid” portraits of male bodies, and then, all of a sudden, bringing this different kind of energy into the work and enacting it through the photographs? I love that you use the word “document.” You were documenting these bodies, these lives, and their sexuality, but there was also a sense of participation in the images I saw. I felt that I was not simply observing voyeuristically, but that your camera was somehow inside the action. There was a profound shift in the work at that point.

Absolutely. During my last semester of school, my computer crashed. I think I lost a lot of the work I had made before entering the program, which sucked, but it was also sort of like, “Well, whatever.” Prior to graduate school, the way I operated was to go to parties, visit a friend’s house, or photograph in bars, attempting this fly-on-the-wall type of photography. I think that approach is ingrained in a lot of photographic history, especially U.S.-centered photographic practice. It is all about Garry Winogrand or Lee Friedlander: you are out there capturing things happening in front of you, but your intervention happens primarily through the camera and through how you depict something, rather than by injecting yourself into the situation, calling the shots, or influencing what happens. Before school, I had occasionally arranged photo shoots with men and gone to their apartments. I started making some very tentative nudes, but I felt really uncomfortable directing people in that way because of much of the teaching I had received.

During one critique at school, I was criticized for not having a gay aesthetic, and someone assumed that I didn’t know about the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. That was incredibly offensive and made me very angry. After that critique, which took place during my first semester, I really dug into researching literature, movies, and anything else I could find about the history of gay male culture in the United States, with an intense focus on the 1980s and 1990s, when the AIDS crisis was at its height. I began to realize that this history had deeply affected both my generation and the ways in which I dealt with my desires and sexuality. I wanted to find a way to infuse the work with all this new knowledge and with the grief I was experiencing. Those feelings would also emerge in conversations with the people I photographed, who were sometimes friends and sometimes strangers. As these things came up, I began searching for a way to channel that energy and history and to give their presence some kind of visual form. I realized that simply standing back and documenting things wasn’t going to accomplish that for me. I had to direct what was happening through the lighting and the action. As I became more confident, I grew increasingly excited about the potential of this way of working to produce new kinds of photographs.

Mist (Dettifoss, Iceland), 2019

That is so helpful, because so many gay photographers in the 1980s and 1990s were documenting their communities. They were very much involved in the worlds they photographed. It also helps explain one of the questions I was going to ask: Why black and white? Much of that photography captured more natural, nonidealized bodies, including bodies as they became sicker. The photographers were documenting changes in people’s health and in their bodies themselves, often naked and showing the effects of disease, of HIV, and they wanted to record that. This helps answer one of my questions about your choice of bodies, the way you light them, and how black-and-white photography moves the work away from the kind of beauty and perfection associated with Mapplethorpe and toward the grittier Lower East Side communities of the 1980s and 1990s. I am also thinking of Mark Morrisroe and others like him.

Well, full disclosure, I’m really bad at making color photographs, and I more or less stopped doing it before graduate school. When I was applying to school, a friend looked through my work, which was in color at the time. He said, “You know, your photographs are in color, but the color isn’t really doing anything. They’re just in color.” I thought, “You’re kind of right,” and I started experimenting with black and white again. I found that, with the removal of color, I could see things better and construct a more exciting frame. The photographs became more about texture and shape. I really love photographing skin and hair in black and white. There is something so beautiful about it.

As the work developed and I began finding my voice, I also came to appreciate the fact that black and white places the images within a nonspecific period. A photograph could be from 2013, 2019, or 1970. I was also interested, as much as humanly possible, in avoiding signs of the immediate present. I don’t like including technology in the photographs. Obviously, hairstyles, tattoos, and similar details will provide some sense of time. But I felt that, by working in black and white, I could communicate across these different periods and move more fluidly between them.

You bring up something I think about a lot: the idea that people such as Peter Hujar, Mark Morrisroe, and Nan Goldin were, in different ways, documenting a community that was under threat and then rapidly disappearing. This is a question I continue to consider: What does it mean to continue that tradition or perhaps to pick up where things were left?

I don’t necessarily mean “document” in the sense of documentary photography, but rather as some kind of proof. I listened to a lecture by Nan Goldin while I was at Skowhegan that summer, and she spoke about her work as proof of a history that cannot be denied or interfered with. I had always had a little bit of a problem with the way her work is sometimes discussed, as though it were “the most accurate and truthful depiction of my life and my community’s life.” But I think the idea of the photographs functioning as proof is powerful. Even though they might not represent “the truth,” they remain undeniable proof that we existed and that we did these things. In her best work, you can really see the engagement, the friendships, the pain, and the joy. That is something I think about a lot in relation to my own work.

Jack at the Sink (Skowhegan), 2019

You mentioned the types of bodies I photograph, and Mapplethorpe has never been my favorite. I find his work rather cold. I think that is partly because of how the subjects are photographed, but it also relates to those perfect, beautiful, sculptural bodies. That isn’t really what attracts me. I find something much more interesting in seeing the hair, scars, and rolls. There is something more visceral about seeing a body that doesn’t immediately take you into a fantasy and away from its humanity.

Are most of the models, if I can use that word, people you know? Do you ever hire models? How does that work for you now?

I have never paid anyone to pose. In graduate school, I mostly photographed strangers, although it was actually a combination of strangers, people I knew, and acquaintances. It is a process of seeking people out. There are certain people I approach because I would love to photograph them, either because I am physically attracted to them or because I am drawn to their personalities. Sometimes it is as simple as saying, “You have really cool tattoos. Can I photograph you?”

For a while, it was easier for me to photograph people I wasn’t particularly close to. I still can’t really make good pictures of my husband, Ryan, or at least I have made very few good pictures of him. Part of the problem is that he is a little disagreeable when I photograph him. He doesn’t tolerate as much as the other people I photograph. Much of the work involved in making photographs consists of repeating movements or having me move around while the subject holds a pose. Most people are pretty obliging, but Ryan will say, “I’m done. We’re done. We did it.” Then he puts his shirt back on and stomps out of the room. I have discovered that, if I flatter him by saying, “Ooh, babe, you look really great in this light,” he will indulge me a little longer.

I think part of it is the excitement of getting to know someone during that moment. Jimmy, for instance, is someone I don’t know particularly well; we’re not close friends. During our usual interactions, he is pretty quiet and a little shy, but when he recently came into the studio, he was fired up, and his excitement made me excited.

Jeffrey (Skowhegan), 2019

Going back to graduate school, and even today, there is always this question: “What gives you the right to make these photographs?” There is always tension around whether the work is exploiting people and whether it is morally right. That question, or that dismissal of the work, can be very frustrating because, although I seek people out, people also sometimes approach me and say, “Oh, I like your work,” or, “I would love to be photographed by you,” or something similar.

I have my intentions and desires, and the people I photograph have their own intentions and desires. I really try to create a situation in which they are also getting something from the experience, whether it is the opportunity to indulge in a fantasy or something related to being looked at. You know, not to toot my own horn, but people will often say, “Oh, wow! I’ve never seen myself this way.” Some people have told me, “I’m self-conscious about my body, and you freed me from that feeling while we were shooting.” I think that is important. I want people to feel comfortable and respected and to feel that the experience is some kind of mutual exchange.

Photographing someone I don’t know very well is similar to entering an unfamiliar landscape. It is visually and mentally exciting. I see things, and I respond to them. I am so intimately familiar with Ryan and his body that this sometimes becomes a mental block. How do I photograph him in a way that will be exciting to me and communicate that excitement through the photograph?

Lately, I have been trying to work more with people I consider close friends, lovers, or simply people with whom I am more intimately involved. That doesn’t mean I won’t photograph a stranger or an acquaintance, but it represents a shift in my intention. Because this has been a mental block, I think it is something I need to overcome.

This is a nice segue, because you mentioned that bodies can be like landscapes. You also photograph landscapes and nature. Is there an energy or excitement in doing that which differs from the way desire operates when you photograph a body? What language would you use to describe what inspires you when you look at nature photographs like this one, Untitled/Lake Water (Skowhegan)? You have photographed the light, the water, and their textures, making the image both beautiful and complicated. These are not simply textures; they form a kind of landscape, and the spaces you choose possess a sense of movement or complexity alongside the light and textures.

Untitled/Lake Water (Skowhegan), 2019

Yeah. Going back to my early education in photography, I loved Robert Frank. The Americans was the first photobook I owned, and the idea of capturing the mundane, or something that surrounded you all the time, and making it photographically exciting informed my work for a long time.

At the beginning of graduate school, I was working in a way that tried to imitate street photography because I thought that was simply what you did. As I began shifting toward these more intimate, indoor, private encounters, it no longer felt sufficient to show bodies only within interior spaces. I wanted there to be a connection to the larger world. I began photographing very dense vegetation while visiting my sister in Okinawa, and then I did something similar in Los Angeles. I found that I was really excited by the light, the succulents, the palm trees, and the way the light interacted with them. That offered a clue as to how these two modes of making photographs could fuse together. I began to understand the formal connections between the external world and the way I was photographing bodies.

At that time, I was thinking about the landscapes as representations of a kind of psychological state. There were these very dense walls of plant life, and I imagined that, as you moved through the photographs, they became obstacles you had to move around or pass through. They countered the freedom with which desire and sexuality were expressed in the pictures of bodies by introducing a more obstructed psychological state, one that I think many gay men and queer people have to overcome because we deal with so much from society, including trauma, stress, and shame.

Something similar is happening in my more recent work. I think there is an interesting psychological shift when you move from looking at a body or a portrait to looking at a landscape, but I want there to be some kind of connection. The light, the textures, and even the fact that the photographs are shot in portrait orientation formally tie them together.

During a studio visit with Shirin Neshat at school, she discussed the way she interpreted the pairing of bodies and landscapes. She said that introducing nature makes the statement that these physical acts are natural and that these desires are natural. There is nothing wrong or shameful about them, which counters what I was taught while growing up. This idea has continued to come up in conversations about the more recent work.

I think that is some of the language I was trying to draw upon at Yale when I first saw the images of nature alongside the bodies. On some level, erections and cum can look dirty, but when you place them within nature, they suddenly become part of nature. They are natural, even though we have created these kinds of taboos around things that are part of our physical processes and our natural existence: you piss, you shit, you cum. You can’t avoid it. It is there, but you are supposed to shut the door and hide it.

So, I would agree. The person I always thought did that beautifully in the 1970s was Barbara Hammer. She filmed a radical lesbian separatist community in nature, and it was as though their love and their bodies suddenly became natural. Even though their bodies weren’t classically beautiful, they became natural. This is beautiful. It should be beautiful.

During my time at Skowhegan, the rural setting was so beautiful, meditative, and peaceful that I found myself walking around with my camera and thinking, “What am I going to do today? I’m just going to look at the rocks and trees.” Over the previous couple of years, I had kind of hit a wall in the way I depicted environments in my work.

I hesitate to use the word “landscape,” because it has a grander connotation for me. I think it has something to do with the specificity of declaring, “This is a place,” on a grand scale. David Sherry’s work is like that. He photographs monuments, and the work is very much about identifying a particular sacred space or a space that is under threat. I’m not as invested in that approach. For me, it is more about quieter moments and quieter discoveries.

I was walking around thinking, “How can I use the environment and the landscape to make drawings, essentially?” From that very simple exercise, I allowed things to expand, contract, and become more complicated. I was also concentrating on making portraits rather than simply making pictures that included people. In other words, I was trying to achieve a more direct engagement with another person and perhaps reveal something about that person, which is a complicated problem.

Being in the lake at Skowhegan, spending time around the trees, and basking in the sunlight made me realize how connected we are to these natural systems. Even though we live in New York City and are, in many respects, highly detached from nature, it is fascinating how immediately we reconnect with these systems when we enter those environments. After lying beside the lake for a day, I thought, “Oh my God, I feel so relaxed and nourished!” In the same way that I was trying to connect with portraiture, I was trying to understand what this connection to the environment meant.

I was thinking that a photograph such as Zack in Dappled Light (Fire Island) suddenly becomes, as you say, part of nature, whereas something photographed in a studio pulls you away from nature. The studio constructs and removes us from the natural world, placing us within a system of signs and meanings that detach themselves from life. This is a body that looks as though it is living beside the lake.

What I love about what you are saying is that it isn’t only the body that becomes more natural. It is also not a body chosen for its ideal properties. When we look at one of your photographs of nature, rather than simply thinking, “Isn’t that beautiful?” the image draws nature photography into the same space and away from the distancing effect of an impossible ideal. The body occupies the same space as the tree you photographed.

I don’t know whether you would call the images portraits, but, on some level, they do blend. They come together beautifully, perhaps through the use of black and white, the lighting, and the spaces in which you choose to place the model, the tree, or whatever else you are photographing. There is a sense of overlap, as though they merge in some way.

Untitled/Trees and Light (Skowhegan), 2019

Lighting is always one of the things I think about most when making work, whether I am using natural light or flash. In this sequence of photographs, there is an image of trees with dappled light coming through them, Untitled/Tree and Light (Skowhegan). There is the portrait of Zack with light falling across his body, and then there is the photograph of the lake in which the light transforms the water into an almost metallic surface, Untitled/Lake Water (Skowhegan).

When I first placed these three photographs beside one another, I loved the way the light seemed to move through them, transforming according to the surface on which it fell. That was really exciting to me. I also use light and shadow to create more exciting compositions. I receive a lot of questions about light, but I consider shadows equally important.

I guess this is still something I am struggling to understand, but, as you were saying, we all shit, cum, and bleed. We have systems in the same way that plants, animals, and water do. There are cyclical and systemic processes taking place, and I am attempting to draw parallels between the blood that runs through our veins and the water that runs through a tree and gives it life.

I am trying to expand beyond photographing only gay-identified men. It was funny: when I was at Skowhegan, I said, “I’m going to photograph straight people.” I did, but the most successful photographs I ended up with were all of queer people, so take that for what it is worth.

There is a conservative movement seeking to continue the repression of queer people, just as there is a movement that ignores the fact that we are destroying our planet and that it is incredibly fragile. I think there is a connection between the extraordinary beauty and strength of the planet and that of queer people, both of which have endured despite whatever sort of nonsense has surrounded them. I feel that this is a connection I am trying to bring out.

I think my work is optimistic. For the most part, it shows positivity and strength, but I also love photographs in which you can see people’s scars. Before Skowhegan, I photographed my friend Eddie in his bathtub after he had surgery on his leg. He is completely bandaged, but he has a big grin on his face.

I also photographed my friend Hunter Reynolds after he had cancer removed from his nose and needed a skin graft. For the graft to heal, he had this crazy skin tube connecting his forehead to his nose, and he really wanted to be photographed in that condition. It is about the history of our individual bodies and the idea that we can be battered but not beaten.

I love how you explain this. It is better than where I was going with it, but I am still going to go there because I think it helps explain your optimism. The beauty of the body, even when it is scarred, makes me think of photographs from the 1980s and 1990s, including those that documented Hujar’s death or showed emaciated bodies.

Having cared for a partner who died of a brain tumor pulled me into the body and made me unafraid of shit, piss, or touching a body that is slowly slipping away. It brought me back to nature, to an understanding of the cycles of life, and to an awareness of how connected we are to nature. When we are alive and feeling most energized, we often try to separate ourselves from nature, as though we were superhuman or somehow not a part of it.

I think there is something beautiful in what you are saying because the photograph preserves a sense of life in the body, even when it is scarred. By contrast, in some of the AIDS photographs, it appears that life is being drained from the body, and there is an extraordinary sadness rather than this sense of beauty, optimism, and joy. Joy is a word I would use to describe the light in your pictures and the way it falls across a body, even when that body is scarred.

As I continued the research I had begun in graduate school, reading material written during the 1980s and 1990s and looking at work produced during that period, I saw that, even when artists were directly confronting this unbelievable tragedy, there was joy and strength. You could see it in the resistance and activism taking place at the time. I always found that really inspiring.

Reading George Chauncey’s book1 also disproved the idea that queer people were completely hidden and afraid, had no forms of community, and possessed no means of expressing or celebrating themselves. It is amazing and inspiring to see all the ways in which they circumvented discrimination and repression and created beautiful communities of many different kinds. I think that history continues to this day.

Jordan Smoking in Mesh Dress (Skowhegan), 2019

I love how you connect that to the planet as well. I want to believe that the planet can survive the terrible things we are doing to it and that it possesses that kind of resilience. I also love the metaphorical connection to the queer community, which continues to find ways to survive under extraordinary repression. The planet itself will outlive us. It will outlive this generation, whatever condition it is in and whatever poisons we put into it.

Yeah, we might not last as long as the planet! I always want to make beautiful photographs. I want people to be drawn into the surface of the photograph and then have an unfolding experience that is hopefully more complicated than simply thinking, “Oh, wow, this is really gorgeous to look at.”

I feel so much anxiety about the state of the planet, especially with the fires in Australia. What makes the anxiety worse is the fact that people in power continue to lie and deny what is happening. They simply don’t give a fuck. That is terrifying, and I don’t know how to deal with it. Maybe making these photographs is a small way of soothing myself.

I went to Iceland in September after Skowhegan. It was somewhere I had always wanted to visit, and it is an insanely beautiful part of the world. I moved between being in complete awe of everything and experiencing moments when my stomach would drop and I would think, “This is all going to change.”

A friend and I went on a glacier hike, and the guide told us that the large lake at the bottom of the mountain had not always been there. It had not previously been a lake; as recently as ten years earlier, it had all been ice. It made me want to lie down and give up.

Beach Erosion (Fire Island), 2019

There is a sense that we are all under threat if we continue to allow the planet to be destroyed in this way. Again, this relates the threat that queer people live with every day to the threat facing the planet.

There is a photograph of Fire Island, Beach Erosion (Fire Island), showing the sand, a shadow, and a footprint. The little cliff visible in the photograph is simply the result of beach erosion. I started going to Fire Island a little over a decade ago. I had lived in the city since 2005, and I think my first visit was in either 2007 or 2008. The beach changed dramatically during those years; we watched it being washed away.

There is a sense that this place, which holds so much history, beauty, and natural splendor, might soon be underwater and completely gone. What that means for our community is one thing, but what it means for the planet is another.

When you speak about beauty, you mean a different conception of beauty. Again, I will go back to Mapplethorpe. Your work shows a more natural beauty, and I love that about the photographs. I can inhabit that space. With Mapplethorpe, I feel more voyeuristic in relation to what I am seeing. I feel detached, as though I am studying something rather than participating in or enjoying whatever is happening in the photographs.

When I talk about beauty in my photographs, I often think first in terms of creating a beautiful photographic object. Only after that does it become about the beauty I see in the subject or whatever else I am photographing. I mean, it sounds kind of clichéd and corny to say this, but I do believe that everyone possesses beauty.

There are so many different kinds of bodies. Returning to the idea of the histories we carry on our bodies through scars, tattoos, size, and shape, all these qualities give richness to a person’s presence when they are photographed.

Elle/Truck (Skowhegan), 2019

Not to become too involved in the politics of bodily representation and beauty standards, but when I first moved to the city in 2005, I was 23. I remember feeling strange about being attracted to certain kinds of men who didn’t conform to the standard bodies seen in pornography, movies, and magazines, including heavier men, older men, and really skinny men. Eventually, I realized I was repressing my own desires and attractions because I was worried about what some imaginary other person might think.

I don’t want to suggest that these standards don’t exist among gay men. I think there is a lot we could discuss there. But I have found a certain acceptance of many different kinds of people in New York.

You mentioned aging. I am 37, and I have found that I, like many other gay men around my age, am strongly attracted to older men. I think this is partly because we grew up without many mentors or father figures, and partly because of the knowledge that so many men who could have been our teachers, friends, and lovers are gone. Until I turned 30, I didn’t receive much of that guidance or acquire much of the knowledge that comes from older generations. There is an attraction within that.

It isn’t always about sexual attraction. One of the things I have been considering in the work I made at Skowhegan, and in the work I have made since then, is that so much of my earlier practice concentrated on sexual desire or sexual engagement. Now I am curious about what other kinds of desire and sensuality I can show that aren’t necessarily tied to sex.

Since returning from Skowhegan and acquiring a studio, the studio has taken on a kind of sexually charged atmosphere. I am interested in returning to that way of thinking and working. It is fun to explore that in tandem with this other investigation that I really dove into during the summer. We’ll see where it all leads.