MICHAEL GARLINGTON: REDIFINING THE FAMILY PORTRAIT

He seats us in a setting that awaits us in the woods. Karen dons an elaborate dress made from photographs glued to multiple slivers of cardboard fragments, an assemblage that looks strangely elegant. I’m wearing a headdress that feels silly. Michael assures me that I look stately and dignified. Garlington bends over his well-worn Speed Grafix 4×5 and adjusts focus. “Chin up,” he advises. “Fingers almost touching,” he suggests. Click, click. He rotates quickly through three film holders pulled from capacious pants pockets: click, click, click. And he’s done.

These are not your run-of-the-mill portraits that Garlington is crafting. He has made a reputation for creating surreal tableaus into which he deposits his willing subjects. His photographs follow his whims and fancies as he explores his inner child.

“Honestly, these ideas keep popping into my head,” he says. “Every day, I’m just sketching out ideas until something or other congeals and starts to excite me. I’ve made so many of these bizarre sculptural things that the excitement is not knowing what, exactly, they are going to turn out to be.”

Garlington has photography in his blood. His parents owned a black-and-white photography lab in San Francisco from the 1980s into the early 2000s. He spent his childhood familiar with the smell of Dektol, and eventually took over the business when he was 22.

“It was scary,” he remembers. “I knew the business inside and out, but the timing was bad. The rise of digital meant we were sinking into the ground. I wanted to get out of the darkroom anyway, but the darkroom was my savior, too. I mean, it got me off the streets as a punk rock kid, and begrudgingly, against my will, I learned how to print emotionally, how to make portraits that really make the eye focus on the people I was photographing.”

Even though he comes from a photographic family, Garlington really considers himself a sculptor, noting that one can sculpt out of many materials: wood, steel, even mud.

“Anything can be sculpture. I have the ability to take photographs, and a lot of them. I can mount them to cardboard and make anything from that. I’m a sculptor who uses photos as my raw material. The dresses I make are sculptures. I have covered cars with photos, and they became my photocars. This was the beginning of my photo sculptures. They were great because you could drive them around and people would gravitate towards them, and then you could get their portrait to add to the sculpture. Or you could park in front of the Guggenheim and become a part of the Guggenheim.”

Garlington is much more than a sculptor, though. As a longtime member of the Burning Man community, he has built several monumental structures using thousands of his exotic photographs, mounted to plywood and soaring 80 feet above the Nevada desert (see B&W issue #114, April 2016). These temporary “temples” are visited by tens of thousands of people before being burned to the ground at the end of the 10-day festival. “I’m honored that I am able to do this. I’m honored to work with so many talented people who helped me put together my last project: ‘The Tower of Babel.’ I learn so much from them.”

Garlington likes the temporal nature of his Burning Man temples: building something that is meant to last a few weeks, to be seen and enjoyed by thousands of people, then set ablaze at the end of the festival. He sees it not as a destructive act, but as a wonderful destiny for the many photographic sculptures he has accumulated over the years. It is a great way to repurpose them into his temples, and give them a fiery final farewell.

“I can make something and not worry about lugging it around forever,” he says. “I look at it like the sand mandalas made by Tibetan monks. They spend all this time making these perfect intricate designs, spending months and months on these pieces. Then they are gone in an instant. There is such a great release in letting go of things, especially when that is the intention of your creation.”

During Garlington’s second temple, called “Totems of Confessions,” in 2015, he was in a hotel in Los Angeles doing portraits to raise funds for the 60-foot tall structure. He and his wife, fellow artist Natalia Bertotti, were about to pack it up when the actress Susan Sarandon strolled by. She became enamored with the work and asked to be on the building crew. She mentioned that this temple would be the perfect place to scatter the ashes of Timothy Leary, who had been a friend of hers. One thing led to another, and Leary’s ashes went up in flames for a second time when the temple was ignited at the festival. This relationship also resulted in the portrait of Sarandon you see in this portfolio.

Thanks to his uniquely outré images, Garlington’s bread and butter comes from the outlandish, surreal portraits he makes on commission. His style evolved from an early desire to photograph one of his early musical idols, Tom Waites. Garlington had envisioned a shoot in which Waites would be standing in a little dinghy, holding a lantern, looking up at an enormous beached whale. He went about constructing a whale-like frame from PVC pipe, which he covered with rags gathered from a garbage dump. But when he contacted Waites to set up a time for a photo shoot, he was met with a grumpy and definitive “Nope.”

“Basically,” Garlington says, “I had to eat humble pie. There was nothing I could say or do to really talk him into this, even though he’d seen my work and had initially agreed. Now he was saying no. He was grumpy, and that was that. But things like this often turn out for the best, because you strive forward, and it becomes a better story than had he just said ‘yes.’

“I went home that night, and the rain started falling, and the next morning my whale, which had been covered with hundreds of pounds of rags, was now covered with thousands of pounds of wet rags that smashed the whale into the ground into a giant pile of garbage. I mean, all you can do is stand in the rain with a glass of wine, or a bottle, and laugh at the absurdity of it all. And then get up and go forward the next day with your next idea.

“Here’s how I feel: I’m an art lover. Art is everything. Art is the way nature makes you look at things, like when you look at clouds and see an elephant. Art is seeing a cigarette butt on the ground, and Irving Penn turning that into monumental photograph. That’s how you develop a style. Penn wasn’t afraid to walk down the pathway of other great artists, seeing things they, perhaps, overlooked. It’s a great chain of artists building upon what came before. I sit down in my studio every morning, I put on Mozart and start playing with things in my own way.

“Now, Mozart is as dead as yesterday’s ashes in the fireplace, but he is in me. He is in all of us. That’s what art is. What makes people original is that they are not afraid to just keep going. Not everything is a success, but you are taking a first step. If you don’t like it, you keep going. I work every morning. I’ll paint a page in my journals. The secret is really to just get up and not be afraid. Do not be pushed down by anybody who says, ‘you can’t.’ A photograph is supposed to be this balanced thing in a rectangle. Or a square. But why not make a photograph do this or that, even if it’s wrong? But is it wrong? Maybe it’s just another way of seeing things.

“I get bored with trying to make ‘perfect’ images. I try to make something that engages your eye. Maybe some will look at it and find it repugnant. But maybe it is also interesting. Then you can add balance to that repugnancy, and people will like it. It’s so interesting to me: the infinite possibilities of what art can do.

“’Nope’ gets you nowhere. It is so much better to just try. When you think about what’s good and what’s bad, there is a lot of ego involved. I’m more interested in discovering what is possible. There are so many things we can make and so many roads to explore. Without trying new things, discovery never happens. I see this with my little daughter. She approaches everything with a sense of play. She’s just flowing. She doesn’t have any limits. Nobody has told her ‘nope.’ Painting with her and making art with her is so liberating. I love letting go in the mornings, when I’m alone in my studio, and just seeing what happens, instead of going right into nope, nope, nope.

Garlington doesn’t like to edit. He will shoot six 4×5 shots and is done. Actually, he feels six exposures is too many. He usually makes four. With the 4×5 camera, he believes that one just have to be present, watch the subject’s eyes and ask what they are telling you. He will then take several iPhone pictures, just to cover himself if there are any mistakes.

“There is something to be said about capturing everything in the negative. But if somebody’s face is out of focus, and it’s a great image, I will take the sharpness of the iPhone picture, throw it in there, and you will never know what I’ve done with my magic.”

Garlington prints in a small shed behind his barn on a 44-inch Canon printer. In summer, he likes to start at four in the morning or evenings when the day cools off. He likes the cold, so he’ll don a jacket, turn on his podcast or listen to Mozart. The darkroom is his temple, where he can get into the zone.

“Sometimes I’m doing something monotonous to get to the important thing, but it’s all fun, really. That’s what I’ve realized. One by one, you put things together, and you are being creative. Eventually, it is going to turn into something. Good or bad, you’ve made something out of nothing. And that’s so much fun!”

Addendum
Experience more of Michael Garlington’s unique creativity at michaelgarlington.com and instagram.com/michaelgarlington1.