Long before he fronted R.E.M., Michael Stipe was already creating images. Photography was his first medium—one that channelled the qualities (observation, obsessiveness, quietness) less often associated with a life in music. Though he’d later come to define a generation as the face of one of the most influential bands in American rock history, an entirely different kind of lyricism emerges in Stipe's visual work: something more fragmentary, tactile, and unguarded.
This year, Stipe's photography is on view at Jackson Fine Art's booth during AIPAD, the longest-running fair dedicated to photography worldwide. The fair, which fills the Park Avenue Armory's cavernous main hall with work that interrogates the function and form of the medium, will also play host to a series of incisive conversations among practitioners, critics, and curators. As part of this slate of programming, Stipe will sit down with Drew Sawyer, The Whitney's Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography. Ahead of their live conversation, the pair took a moment to reflect on the entanglements between their respective practices for CULTURED.
For Stipe, a core tenet of artmaking is a resistance to confinement—to a single medium or discipline. The artist traces his work across photography, video, sculpture, and bookmaking, assembling constellations of memory and intuition, often drawing from personal archives and ephemeral moments. Sawyer, for his part, sees this insistence on presenting work that revels in complexity as crucial source material for a practice dedicated to the mystery and spontaneity of daily life. Here, the pair explores the deep ties between wonder and the mundane; music and the visual arts; and memory and the present moment.
