Lamono

This month I am also featured in Lamono, an incredibly cool art magazine from Barcelona, Spain.

The cover artwork is by Alvaro Barcala.  To see more examples of his exquisite pencil drawings check out his blog.

ScareFest

I made my first publicity appearance this last weekend at ScareFest in Lexington Kentucky.  Everybody enjoyed seeing my work, and I had a great time watching faces as people reacted to my photographs.  A few timid ghost hunters ran away from my booth with their eyes covered, but this didn’t hurt my feelings at all.  In my opinion, it was just a good review. 

I got to meet real Horror celebrities at the event, which completely brought out the geek in me.  The first person I met was the great Harry Manfredini, the man who composed the original score for FRIDAY THE 13th.  You know that “Chuh, chuh, chuh…Kihl, kihl, kihl” sound in FRIDAY THE 13th? Harry designed that.  In the documentary on the Slasher genre, GOING TO PIECES, you can see Harry describing the origin of that amazing sound element. He enunciated the first letters of “Mom” and “Kill” into an echoplex machine. That sound is the voice of Jason driving his mother to kill. Brilliant, right? The music in the film only appears when the killer is present.  This audio technique is the suspense trigger, and a large part of why the film was so frightening to audiences.

Harry loved my work and sent over his friend Victor Miller to check it out. Victor Miller, Yale graduate and winner of three Emmys, wrote the original script for FRIDAY THE 13th.  Victor Miller invented Jason Voorhees. An elegant gentleman with perfectly coifed hair and sleeve tattoos, he has to be the coolest man I have ever met.  Harry and Victor liked my work so much that they started sending people over from Celebrity Row.  In a swell of appreciation, I gave them both prints of my work.  On top of that, Victor also bought a copy of BALLOONS, making him my first customer.  

I brought with me my amigo Kevin Sisemore.  Kevin is my closest friend and advisor, a brilliant photographer, and my ad-hoc manager. He shoots documentary photography in the same social realist vein as Joel Sternfeld and Stephen Shore.  He spent many years working in New York City, and was most recently published in the art book A Field Guide To The North American Family.  You can check out his work on his blog Sight Under Construction.

Kevin and I mingled with other vendors and quickly became friends with The Strychnine Sisters.  Their jewelry was the big hit of the show. Everybody tumbled into their web of charm.  To see samples of their ultra-hip jewelry visit their MySpace page.  All weekend long I had a hopeless crush on Strychnine Jen – she of the flaming orange hair.  We met Betsy Palmer together, the actress that plays Mrs. Voorhees in the original FRIDAY THE 13th.  Betsy Palmer is hands down the sweetest woman I have ever met in my life.  She kissed us both on the cheek when she said goodbye.  I’ve already decided that I want her to marry me and Strychnine Jen at our wedding.

After hours, The Strychnine Sisters were the center of the party.  Due to the magnetic pull of their personalities, we got to hang out with Tony Todd, best known for playing the title role in CANDYMAN, Tony Muran, the original Michael Meyers, and Michael Berryman, famous for playing Pluto in the original THE HILLS HAVE EYES.  My Horror friends will look upon me with incredulous disbelief and ravenous envy when I tell them I had drinks with Candy Man, Michael Meyers, and Pluto. Because of The Strychnine Sisters, I also got to ride over to the midnight screening of FRIDAY THE 13th in Tom Savini’s van.  Now admittedly, Tom Savini had no idea who I was, but all the same, I looked like a rock star getting out of his van.

For the record, Tom Savini is one of my absolute heroes.  Listening to him speak, he reminded me of Nick Vedros, the original photographer I studied under.  Both have alpha-male personalities.  Tom Savini is so brilliant that he is beyond reproach.  In my opinion, his work on DAY OF THE DEAD still serves as the standard by which all other gore effects are measured. 

This is my portrait with the amazing Tony Todd.  Best known for playing the role of Candy Man, Tony is one of the very few Horror icons famous for his own face.  Tony Todd is a fantastic actor.  He is so tall, that I was able to nestle into the crook of his armpit for this photo.

I just want to thank everyone that came by to flinch, gasp, and giggle at my work.  I had a great time and look forward to heading out into public again.

Brazil Interview

This is the English translation of my interview with Danilo Corci for the Brazilian website Speculum.

Your work is not well known here in Brazil.  Can you tell us a little about your career, when you became interested in photography, if you are only interested in fine art or if you also shoot other kinds of photography, like journalism or advertising.

I started making my first photographs shortly after graduating from college.  My focus has always been fine art photography, but I have shot many different kinds of work over the years.  As a young photographer I worked for Hallmark Cards, which is based in my hometown of Kansas City. Later, I ran a portrait and wedding photography business out of my home. These days I shoot original album artwork and conceptual portraits for bands and musicians to help support my expensive art habit.

What are your influences?

Horror films, fairy tales, Jungian psychology, and the works of Joseph Campbell.

When did you become interested in Horror?

Horror became the principal subject in my work about five years ago. It happened after reading a poem by Kenneth Patchen.

Come now

my child

if we were planning

to harm you

would we be

lurking here

beside the path

in the very darkest part

of the forest?

Right away, I wanted to create images that felt like this poem.  

On your website you talk about Jung and the power of cliche, and about the reinvention of archetypes. Obviously this goes through the stories you create in your photographs.  How do you choose the stories you want to reinvent through your photographs?

I am interested in creating photographs that employ archetypal imagery to act out universal fears.  These are the subjects I look for. The more common or cliched the fear, the more I want to make an image of it. We can all relate to the idea of a monster hiding under the bed, but we’ve never seen a photograph of it before. Through photography, I want to explore archetypes that we are already familiar with.  I want to drag our psychological monsters out into the light of day and take pictures of them.  

Your work deals with childhood imagination.  Is this kind of terror more powerful than the one we have as adults?  Does playing with childhood nightmares make adults even more frightened?

We can all remember being children, when our fears were still very primal. My photographs remind adults of things they used to be frightened of, but have forgotten about.  Recover the memory, and you recover the fear.

The experience of ‘fright’ is intrinsically related to the level of commitment the viewer has to fearing for the protagonist under threat.  This feeling is a responsive emotion which demonstrates a desire to protect someone from harm.  If the viewer empathizes with the victim then it is likely that the fright will be mutually experienced. These are the basic mechanics of Horror.

Your work deals with universal themes, while at the same time reflecting some kind of North American style. Would it be true to say that America has some peculiar form of Horror locked in the back of the head of the country?

While Horror does explore fundamental and universal questions about human existence, it also deals with the anxieties of a given culture at a specific time.  In Japanese Horror, for instance, there is a preoccupation with ghosts, something relatively rare in contemporary American Horror. This is because Japanese culture is concerned with the spirits of ancestors, and American culture is not. Beginning in the 1960’s, with movies like PSYCHO and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, I think American Horror has been predominantly concerned with the fear of other people and the threat of social collapse.

I try to style my sets so that they reflect a sense of innocence and nostalgia.  Many of the elements in my sets, such as wallpaper patterns and furniture, come from the 1940’s and 1950’s, which in America represents a period of relative innocence.  It helps me to create a familiar psychological backdrop for the primal drama unfolding.

It is impossible to see your work and not think about literature. Do you have any literary background?

Yes.  I did not go to art school.  I have a degree in English Literature.

Working with disturbing imagery is always a challenge.  Where is the thin line between good taste and provocation?

Horror is underpinned by the desire to experience feelings which relate to taboo agendas and the limits of gratification.  One of the major functions of Horror is to define cultural taboos.  The experience of Horror resides in this confrontation with what is taboo.  For me, what is or isn’t in good taste is never a consideration.

Going a little further, where does Joshua Hoffine’s work go in the future?  More Horror?

For the foreseeable future, yes, more Horror.  Right now I am beginning work on the second half of AFTER DARK, MY SWEET.  When that is complete, I have two follow-up projects called THE GRAND GUIGNOL and THE CULTURE OF FEAR.  These three projects are meant to go together. While AFTER DARK, MY SWEET is about universal childhood fears, THE GRAND GUIGNOL will deal with the more adolescent concerns of sex and death.  And THE CULTURE OF FEAR will deal with real world adult fears, like terrorism and nuclear holocaust.  With this final series I will strip away the buffer of fantasy and metaphor.  

In Brazil, narrative photographers, like Sebastio Salgado, have a mystical element to their work.  How does work like yours penetrate this assumption that narrative photography is for social purposes only?

In America, we are currently living in an Age of Terror.  I am interested in exploring the nature of our fears, and the role they play in our culture.  My work may be repugnant, rather than mystical, but hopefully it has some social merit.  I believe that Life and Death are two sides of the same subject.