JLS: The photographs were taken in the early 2000s?
BL: It was that weird period between when digital took over from analogue, so I used to have a point-and-shoot camera and also a 35mm camera that I started taking photos on film. There’s that transition to digital cameras, which was somewhere in the early 2000s and before the smartphone took over, so there is a difference between taking pictures with a small point-and-shoot digital camera, and with a smartphone, because the digital camera is still kind of old school, you’re still pointing, you’re still framing, it still feels like real photography in a strange way. Whereas the smartphone seems more like you’re just capturing something. It’s not as much about the aesthetics or the framing, or even the composition, it’s more just capturing a fleeting moment and quite often directed at one’s self with the selfies. So that soft spot before the smartphone took over and after digital took over from analogue.

JLS: It was a special time before the dominance of social media in our lives. Do you think people were a little less self-conscious and more sincere in their actions when you photographed them?
BL: In the late 90s, I was hanging out with a lot of artists and photographers, filmmakers in New York. I was hanging out with Ryan McGinley, the artist Dash Snow. We were running around clubs and wherever in everyday life in New York, everyone snapping pictures. It was kind of an anticipation of what would happen eventually with everyone taking photos with cell phones. It was strange because it was the first time that I’d experienced everyone with a camera – like, the same event would be documented by all your friends from different points of view. I think that’s when people started becoming self-conscious because before that it was more about experiencing the moment without constantly reflecting on it. With cell phones you document absolutely everything and you’re constantly reviewing your life moments after you’ve already lived them, you take pictures of something you’ve done and then a minute later you’re reviewing your life, kind of like an instant replay, which adds to the self-consciousness of it. So yeah, I do think that. Some of the photos in the book were taken in Cuba and South Africa, where there’s a different mentality, some of them were in areas that seemed caught in time. In those, the subjects are less self-conscious and it’s a different kind of landscape, a different frame of mind.

JLS: Your images are like snapshots of a larger film and we get to jump into parts of your life. Some moments do seem quieter than others – there’s an image that jumped out at me of kids in school uniforms. What can you share about that image?
BL: That was in Havana. There are several images with children, who are always interesting subjects because they also have that kind of non-self-consciousness. There’s another one where these little girls are playing with a fountain, and it’s a fountain of a boy peeing and the girl has their hand in the pee stream of the fountain in a very playful way and there’s nothing weird about it. There’s another one with kids playing on two tanks facing each other, which was taken in Kyiv in 2011. It’s a grim reminder of what’s happening now with the war. But you have these kids playing on tanks from a previous war, and again, there’s no way these kids would have known they’re playing on these tanks and in ten years there would be real tanks going through their cities. I have that in my movies too, I often have children in movies that are quite harsh and have very adult themes. It’s important to acknowledge that we were all children once and that we had a certain innocence, that’s kind of what we want to get back to or never forget amidst all the craziness, violence and horrors of the world.

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