Strange Fire

Q&A: Stephen Milner

By Zora J Murff  |   Thursday December 20th, 2018

Stephen Milner is an artist working in photography, sculpture, video, and installation. He received his MFA in Studio Art as a Graduate Teaching Fellow from the University of Oregon and his BFA in Photography at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Stephens work revolves around the representation of masculinity, identity and community through images, objects, fictional narratives and the human-altered landscape. He is currently based out of San Diego, CA.

This conversation between photographers Stephen Milner and Zora J Murff took place from August through December, 2018. In it, they discuss navigating personal narratives in bodies of work, documentary photography, interdisciplinary studio practice, and the complications of gaze in photography to name a few. Stephen is in the process of publishing his work “Goat Trails” through Aint-Bad. Please visit his Kickstarter campaign to support his book.

Zora J Murff: Hi Stephen. I finally got settled in Arkansas…sorry the delay. But le't’s get started. Can you tell me a little bit about yourself? How did you get into photography, and what shaped your initial experiences with making.

Stephen Milner: I grew up on the North Fork of Long Island, NY and spent the summers skateboarding around the island and NYC with a close group of friends. The culture of skateboarding definitely shaped my interests in art, music, and design. We all got pretty good at it, however, I was the least skilled and I was shamed into picking up a camera and becoming photographer for the group. Beginning then, I was self-taught. I took a few art classes with a teacher I really looked up to, but never really learned about the history of photography or contemporary art. One day, an older friend of mine who was taking college courses in photography gave me a copy of Tulsa by Larry Clark and I remember it having a profound effect on me and my understanding of how photography can be used to influence narratives. I also remember having to hid it in my bedroom, afraid that my parents would find it.

SM: To come back to the frustrations I felt with Ogeechee and the documentary approach, I started to notice that I was not able to use the images I liked or questioned the most because they might now have this clear agenda needed to tell this story of the river, that my audience wouldn’t understand or may be confused by them. This became really obvious when I was choosing images for my first solo show of the work that was completely funded by an environmental organization, which was totally an amazing opportunity and experience that I couldn’t have done on my own. The final show was very cohesive and just…easy. I felt sanitized, but it was because I did it to myself. I didn’t know any better about the language and functionality of photography outside the “documentary” school of thought. A few months later, I moved to Oregon to start graduate school. I didn’t start questioning personal narratives until graduate school critiques. I think fellow graduate students started asking me why I only photographed men and once that appeared, I started noticing all of these connections between my subject matter from all of my projects. Thus started the conversation in my research and art-making of my own gay identity and interior desires of being an artist.

ZJM: How did you begin navigating more personal narratives after focusing on something largely outside of yourself? Also, I’ve recently been doing studio visits at other schools with students, and this is a question that keeps coming up—navigating the personal without being too personal, or trying to connect a larger issue to oneself. What advice do you think you would offer to others who might be in the same territory?

SM: That’s a tricky question and relates not only to making work, but also while teaching. I always liked to tell my students that personal projects function better sometimes when they have multiple layers that you can peel back if you need to. The first layer should simply be visually interesting, compelling photographs using techniques and visual tropes that make sense for the artist’s voice. The next layers can be anything that can hold a narrative together (e.g., social, political, environmental, personal), but it’s definitely important to avoid the obvious in metaphors. This is also coming from my academic standpoint, where we are trained as students and educators to be critical. I’m so hoppy to not be a student anymore. All of these things come more naturally and free now. As of right now, I could care less about my audience when starting a new project, I can just follow my intuitions and enjoy the ride (for now).

ZJM: I think this is a good place to begin talking more deeply about your work. In your thesis exhibition, A Spiritual Good Time, you compare the surfing and gay men cruising for sex. How did you begin to bring these two things together? I’m also interested in your approach formally—using photography, collage, and sculpture. Why did you decide to incorporate other media, and how do those connect to your ideas?

SM: Blacks Beach is one of the main nude beaches I photographed for Goat Trails. It also happens to be an iconic surf break. I’m a surfer, so I would visit the same beach to both surf and to also make pictures. I had to keep the activities separated because I knew that if I went to surf, I wouldn’t actually make pictures because I’d never want to leave the water. The treacherous trails down are called “goat trails” because of how difficult and dangerous the are. They are also shared by men cruising for sex and surfers hiking down to the break. I started to recognize the same psychological and emotional feelings I’d get when hiking down for either activity. They felt similar in that they are performed in the conditions of the pursuit of chance and vertigo with psychological undertones of fear, desire, and body thrills.Growing up in a very small farmer town, I spent so much time trying to hide my identity as a gay male. While in grad school, I started to look back into my past and recognized that maybe I started surfing because I was attracted to the hyper-masculine surf culture. I was interested in investigating that space of confusion, hyper/toxic masculinity vs. homophobia in the sport. Sculpture, video, installation, and photography were the vehicles I used to merge my investigations into the history of gay identity, and to force a dialogue between surfing communities and gay culture.

SM: As far as using other mediums, I started thinking about sculpture and installation because of the community I had at the University of Oregon art department. I was one of the few photographers in the program, most grads were multidisciplinary and my critiques were different. I felt inspired by everyone else multidisciplinary approach and felt it was a safe space to explore other possibilities. I was also really envious of the “studio practice” that some of them had, especially while I was out driving around the state of Oregon or Southern California for long weekends, sometimes not coming home with any good photographs. The first successful sculpture I made was Other Men’s Sunsets, the photographs I found on Flickr were appropriated from dads on vacations photographing sunsets. People would come into my studio and interact with the piece for way longer than any of my photographs. At this point in time I was writing about the mythology and romanticism of the beach environment and gay identity in surf culture. I was looking at artists like Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Roni Horn, Roman Singer, and Tom Burr. I was starting to understand the different languages at play with using sculpture, installation, and video that photography couldn’t really access. Having a studio practice, investigating different materials and spaces to make work in, and appropriating images and text was a new way for me to delve into my own personal space along. Not having to rely on meeting and developing relationships with strangers and chance encounters was so nice and refreshing.

ZJM: My experience in sculpture and installation was quite different, probably because I went to a pretty traditional photography program. I mostly wanted to break from what I felt that I knew, and wanted to see how sculpture could influence how I thought about photography. In retrospect, I feel that I had a hard time completely divorcing myself from photography, and the sculpture in my thesis was heavily tied to photography. I’d be interested to know how you feel your approach to image-making has changed?

SM: Yeah, I definitely felt the same way. I couldn’t and wouldn’t divorce myself from photography. I did have to learn that it was ok to have projects exists as photographs, rather than having this grand installation including appropriation and other mediums. The preparation of my thesis exhibition was a good lesson. Coming into grad school, I was thinking about the big photography project idea right from Ogeechee. I was spending all of my time making connections, becoming a part of a community, building trust and making relationships with the people in the area I was photographing, in this case the Oregon outback and high desert. Every photographer, especially ones working in the field of documentary personal projects , know this process very well.