Matthew Stone's Riddles

Last week I went to Copenhagen with Matthew Stone, who shot These New Puritans for our Fashion Issue, for the opening of his solo show Body Language. I've been taking part in Matthew's weirdo, naked, ritualistic photoshoots for nearly five years now, so I tagged along, partly to hold his hand, and partly to eat up Copenhagen’s hot, girly-looking boys in Christiania, the drug-drenched squat commune. I spoke to my friend for you.

Vice: Hey Matthew. I’ve noticed that increasingly your photographs are of just bodies, and less faces. Why is that?
Matthew: The images are becoming more abstract. When you see a face, straight away you know what you’re looking at.

Why do you want the images to be abstract?
People are abstract, thinking is abstract, relationships are abstract, but bodies aren’t. They separate us from one another. I want to push the body towards those abstract spaces and bridge the gaps between us. It might sound literal to say this, but I think that actually placing bodies against each other makes them closer in multiple ways.

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What’s the relationship between the color and the black and white images in the show?
I started shooting 35mm black and white to challenge my own established working method. All of the photographs I made prior were quite controlled and shot in the studio, so I inverted that way of working with a fully automatic camera.

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How much of your work do you feel is staged?
Not as much as it looks like. I do rely in part on the people I photograph to define the image. I like to think that I stage situations that allow for intense activity to unfold naturally. I push people into strange and intimate situations, but what happens between them is real.

[caption id="attachment_16612" align="aligncenter" width="418" caption=""Awake For You Know Not the Hour""]

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My favorite photos in the show are the ones taken in the empty department store in Peckham. We all performed a ritual which we made up as we went along and to me it felt more like we were documenting an experience than staging photographs.
Yeah, and it went further than we thought it would. It was playful but it also ended up being quite serious and sincere. Don’t you think all the shoots are like that in a way?

[caption id="attachment_16614" align="aligncenter" width="635" caption=""Inflorescence" "]

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Yeah, more recently it’s definitely felt like that. I mean, you don’t dictate what happens, but those situations wouldn’t occur without you. Can you describe what you want to happen and then what actually does?
I try to help people enter a psychological space that is separate from ordinary reality. I think that creative minds in particular are wired with the possibility for a type of thinking that is fluid and ultimately beyond individuality. Different artists and mystics have used various methods to get into these states. Most people who are born with these abilities nowadays just take drugs to get out of themselves and to ignore the responsibility that comes with it. But that’s not the only way or even the best. I feel comfortable directing elements of the images as long as it helps to metaphorically explain what is really happening inside of people while we make them.

[caption id="attachment_16615" align="aligncenter" width="635" caption=""Bunny and Karley""]

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That last sentence was nonsense. You speak in riddles!
I can’t help it. Every time I make a statement the other side of the argument presents itself as being equally valid. I’m not trying to be obscure--I just think that we are complex beings and our day-to-day interactions often ignore this, which leads to unnecessary suffering.

Stop it!

The next day we went out to explore the place, get stoned, and get laid. I'll let you know about that soon.

KARLEY SCIORTINO