This interview with the Chicago-based photographer Melanie Schiff was conducted in Brooklyn, New York, in April, 2007. It was originally published as a supplement to North Drive Press and then re-printed in a monograph of Schiff's work.

BJS: If one was to use a cultural thermometer to read the temperature of your photographs, the mystical qualities would give them warmth. As I phrased it when I wrote about your second solo exhibition, it's almost a hippie-ish quality. Is that term something you disdain? Or do you embrace its connotations?

MS: I think there are visual tropes from the term's connotations that I certainly embrace. Perhaps there is an idea floating around that the work is about music or beer or a hippie lifestyle. I'm not so interested in that, actually; the works aren't about me. But I do like how it looks...

BJS: You don't want someone to look at an image and try to extrapolate from it something about your life...

MS: No, I'm not really interested in that. I'm using those referents but I'm also idealizing them in a way, romanticizing them.

BJS: An American Romanticism, as opposed to a Caspar David Friedrich canvas in which the lone figure looks over the sheer cliff edge...

MS: Exactly. It's also a generational idealization, a way of looking at a certain type of artist and musician. But it's not the lifestyle I lead. These are not self-portraits and I'm not cultivating a cult-of-personality.

BJS: Are there other artists working today, whether photographers or not, who you think Are tapping a similar cultural vein? Is that something prevalent in the Chicago art scene, for example?

MS: It's not necessarily prevalent in Chicago, but there are artists I think ... well, some younger artists whose work I'm interested in are Wolfgang Tillmans, Ryan McGinley, and Anne Collier.

BJS: Well, without veering too far from a discussion of your work, but it seems that Tillmans and McGinley are a more natural pair. They have a revelatory light and a disheveled quality to them, whereas Collier is very exacting, very clinical—she runs cultural forms and signifiers through a very rigorous Conceptual process ... which, now that I think of her work in the context of yours, is perhaps a way she analyzes these romantic myths.

MS: I'm not interested in the space between those people or how they can be corralled together, though I think you said it well. I know how that work is critiqued, but I still can't help but like it. Collier's rigorousness is what appeals to me about her work.

BJS: With regard to the newest images, those in your recent solo show in Chicago, to what extent is the material pictured in them happened upon? Do you bring elements in to perfect the compositions?

MS: There are of course different methods, but I do sometimes bring things in. It can be a way of re-accessing an earlier experience.

BJS: A conjuring of sorts.

MS: Yeah, exactly. It's not only about constructing the image for the art piece, but, in a way, conjuring the experience. It's important to have that or—and I hesitate to use this word—it might not have authenticity. Perhaps it helps people to feel that the moment is real. Then, of course, some of the work is made in the studio...

BJS: But for the majority of the works, whatever is there is there because, well, it was there.

MS: Yeah. Interestingly, the piece called Studio—which was shot in an artist's studio—is the most happened-upon composition in the whole series.

BJS: It was the quality of light coming through the window in the background that caught your eye...

MS: I went to this studio and loved the space. It's not mine, and for me it is an ideal studio, one I wish I could have but I can't.

BJS: Is it an attic space?

MS: Yeah. It's not that I can't have the space, but I'm also just not the kind of artist that would have that space. But I could capture it in an image. I wanted to photograph it as a triangle with the light coming through, but the time of day that I came to photograph there was a prism in the window that I hadn't seen before. It caused a rainbow to shoot across the floor. I think about ... I'm really specific about what time I shoot, about when the light's going to be at just the right point, intensity. I thought, I'll come around three. Being in someone else's space by myself and photographing it—it was a unique experience for me. But in some ways that was a really traditional photograph.

BJS: Is it a portrait of the space, in a way?

MS: Yeah.

BJS: Do you consider the early still lives, or more recent images without people, as being kind of portraits? Whether it's the fish bowl with all the plants...

MS: Well, I think you could say that. The prism pieces, the cases pieces, the beer pieces were all done at the same time. The books-and-plants piece was done in the same space. All of them were about how those objects existed together in that space. Obviously these items can exist elsewhere. You can move them. But it was about their relationship to their environment and my relationship to them at that time. So it does make it a kind of portrait. Perhaps, oddly enough, more so than the pictures I take in which you see people. I wouldn't necessarily think the ones that have people in them are portraits.

BJS: Is that because the people are doing such very specific things, whether it's a handstand or spitting or lying on a bench?

MS: Yeah. And most of them are me. So it's about the performance, the maker of the photograph as a kind of director of action. I don't think of the images in which I figure as self-portraits. Using myself is important simply for the act of experiencing it, for doing it.

BJS: Also, one of the things that you mentioned about the attic-studio photograph is that you were there by yourself. Much of your work seems to be about solitary revelation. There's a Rodney Graham film in which he re-created the first-ever LSD trip, the one taken by the drug's inventor in Berlin's Tiergarten. It's an incredibly private moment, about his heightened attention. Perhaps by keeping yourself in your photographs it ... it doesn't close other people off from being able to interpret it, but it gives the resultant work a sense of interiority. It gives them a capacity for wonderment that you can't necessarily have when you're with someone else.

MS: Which I think is a lot like Robert Frank's photographs, actually. The experience of looking at his work, especially The Americans—

BJS: That's sort of the essence of the romantic thing, the individual with, in your case, very casual, golden late-afternoon moments, which can be very important to people even if they aren't fraught with explicit meaning.

MS: I am definitely interested in how private experience can be understood universally, the significance of the nearly clichéd moment. It's a romantic view, but it's real and it's important. It's not ironic.

BJS: It's almost like those moments defeat cynicism.

MS: Yeah.

BJS: You can't be jaded when you're having an Ahh, life is good moment. Or, for that matter, Ahh, this is a good photograph. You can just sense it.

MS: Perhaps that gives the pictures a certain sadness, a twinge of melancholy.

BJS: In the sense that it's always a moment that has passed.

MS: Yes. I think that has a lot to do with photography's material conditions, which I'm interested in—the Barthesian approach to photographs, the idea of death and the photograph. This has been, this moment is past. Once you take the photograph it's already gone. The person is already dead in that moment.

BJS: To follow that line of thinking, it seems almost perverse to try and reconstruct those moments you've had through photographs which will themselves become objects of a romantic longing. It's akin to a hall of mirrors in which everything is always already passing.

MS: I think that's the perversity of daydreaming, or existing somewhere else instead of the present moment.

BJS: To what extend do you edit when you take photographs? If there were sixteen photographs in your second solo show and five or so in your first, how many from each body of work didn't make the cut? How many, roughly, didn't even get printed, for that matter?

MS: There are always things that don't work out. But sometimes I'll re-shoot an image several times to get it right.

BJS: So you'll go back and revisit a location.

MS: Yeah.

BJS: Or a compositional arrangement that you made.

MS: Yeah, or an idea, even. Each of the five still lifes in a way was going back to the first one and drawing on that.

BJS: The casualness of the end result—and I don't mean that perjoratively—in fact requires a lot of effort.

MS: It's true and I'm—

BJS: Like novelists who rewrite their sentences over and over again to achieve believable dialogue. Would you say that in the second solo show you were striving for plausibility? That the scene, in the viewer's mind, could be understood as having been happened upon? And would you say you were better able to achieve this than in the first show?

MS: Yeah, I felt like it was looser. Exactly. I felt that I could have looser ends in the exhibition, and that was OK. I'm working a lot to get to that plausible moment, or at least trying many different ways to get there.

BJS: A final question: Is there any photograph that you've taken that achieves this so well that you almost don't want to exhibit it? That it becomes a kind of private totem?

MS: Yeah, there are...

BJS: (laughs) Okay, good.

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