Amanda Marsalis is a big deal. She shoots folks you’ve heard of for the likes of GQ and Glamour, then does big commercial shoots for giants like Visa and Adidas where they have to fly in million-dollar elephants and sets, then goes and gets pictures of old people for the cover of Newsweek. Then does she head back home and just sit in her piles of money and success? Nopes. Then she goes and hangs out with weird groups of people like black folks and teenagers, and captures them all at their most honest and open without coming across superprecious or like an anthropologist. Then to top THAT off, she’s ridiculously nice and fun to talk to. It’s like dang, you know?
Vice: So you’re on like every photo mag’s “top young photographers” or “18 rising stars list” and do these big, important commercials. Why do you still hang around with l’il ole us?
Amanda: I love Vice. You guys do some crazy shit. And if all I cared about was money then I wouldn’t be doing very well, you know? I care about making my art or my work. That commercial stuff doesn’t mean anything to me, basically. That’s just my job.
In the last year or so you went from shooting all these pretty heavy ghetto types to kind of the opposite end of the spectrum with teenage cheerleaders and surfers. Was that a conscious move on your part?
In a certain sense. There’s only so much I can take of standing on a corner with people selling crack. I’m interested in a lot of different things, so it’s fun to explore. And in a way, those cheerleaders are as foreign to me as the gangsters, so it still feels like I’m investigating the “other.”
Where did you hook up with them?
That was at a cheerleading camp in Dallas, Texas. I spent a week there doing a shoot for Time, and all the girls at the camp were from within Texas.
Was that a big culture shock for you coming right out of a couple years of the hood?
It was like, shit, these girls aren’t kidding. They really believe that this is the true meaning of their lives. Just like gangsta rap was the true meaning in all the other guys’ lives, they really have this passion.
But they’re like 13, that’s not so bad at that age.
Yeah, but they’re going to be doing that for the rest of their youth, straight through high school and on. And the moms are really, really serious. They have dogs with painted toenails—that sort of thing.
Which group was it harder to get in with, the girls or the gangsters?
Neither was really that hard. There are certain things about me that make it really easy for me to go in and photograph these gangster guys, or whatever. That’s what I think being a good photographer is, is being able to come into any situation and make folks feel comfortable with you. That’s the big skill, even more than being able to compose some film and being able to expose it properly.
How’d you originally get into photography?
What happened was I moved from California to St. Louis, Missouri, in junior high, and instantly became a social outcast, which happens. Then I found punk, and I started to go to all these shows when I was 13 and 14. Then the all-ages club in my area closed, so I started to put on all these shows in my basement and my house became the all-ages club. And because of all that I started taking photos, because I wanted to participate but I wasn’t a musician by any stretch of the imagination. I’d make all the flyers for the shows in my house with my photos. I did tons because my high school had a darkroom so I used to skip classes and spend all my time in the darkroom.
Cool, did your house have like a venue name?
It was just Amanda’s basement. My mom was really cool and she just let all the kids come and she passed out earplugs. A lot of bands came through on tour, a lot of Dischord bands, Shelter, the Promise Ring. They all played in my basement. Milwaukee, Chicago, Louisville, St. Louis, they were all kind of connected. You kind of knew all the other kids in the cities in a way.
Then you went off to California for photo school, right? How’d you like that?
I loved it. The education was all conceptual—it wasn’t like I went to school to become a professional photographer, I went to school to become an artist. It actually wasn’t until I left school that I realized, “Hmm, maybe I should do this for a job.” Really, we didn’t ever talk once about “How to make a portfolio” or, “How to get your work into a magazine”. No no no no. I only learned that by talking with other professional photographers.
Really? I always thought art school was big on how to market yourself and whatnot.
When I started school, it wasn’t really acceptable to be a professional photographer and an artist. Like, that’s a new phenomenon. Most of my teachers were really famous artist-photographers, but they couldn’t do professional work because they would have lost their credibility. Now, it’s different. It’s totally cool to be like Terry Richardson, you know? Doing both things. I know this man, Larry Sultan, he’s a fantastic photographer and kind of hot shit, and he shoots New York Times Magazine covers now and stuff like that. But he was only starting to do that when I was in school in the late 90s. Because before then, he only published books with his work and showed in museums, and he’d done commercial stuff nobody would have taken him seriously as an artist.
Who all are you into these days?
I love Tierney Gearon. She shoots for the Fader sometimes. Peter Sutherland just did a documentary on her that was in the Tribeca Film Festival. It’s fantastic. Another of my favorite photographers is Nicholas Nixon. Oh, he’s so good. He takes all these 8×10 photos and they’re all black and white, and they look like snapshots. They’re so intimate—you can’t believe that someone got all these intimate shots with such a giant camera. They were all taken in the late 70s, early 80s, like kids on the beach in Boston and stuff.
INTERVIEW BY VICE STAFF
Dealing With It
