Interview in SixDegrees 5/2009

Photographer Curt Richter is a seasoned veteran behind the lens. The Helsinki-based American has an abundant body of work from his long and checkered career as a freelance photographer. But how does he fit into the Finnish visual arts community?

What is instantly clear about Curt Richter as we sit down to talk in the windy courtyard behind Gallery G18, where photos from his latest project Gravitation are shown, is that he is not going to be easily contained. As you would expect from the offspring of academic New Yorkers, he rambles and muses from one topic to another and from story to story, rarely sticking to the question at hand. The conversation could use auto-focus, but then again listening to him talk is just too much fun.

Born and bred on Manhattan, Richter has lived and worked in Helsinki for 12 years. His love for the country and depth of knowledge about Finnish culture is impressive: he talks with equal passion about Hugo Simberg and Nadar, the early French photographer. His work of late shows little of a Finnish slant, however. Simply put. Gravitation documents NASA’s Space Shuttle programme, and the spirit of humanity.

Richter’s CV is humbling. A freelance photographer since 1982, he has had exhibitions in museums and galleries on both sides of the Atlantic. His photos have graced the pages of numerous magazines (Newsweek, Fortune and Rolling Stone, just to name a few). He has taught in art schools in the US and in Finland, most recently at the University of Art and Design Helsinki And aside from those ample career highlights, he has spent a lifetime taking pictures of things for a living. He is a person committed to his craft.

Growing up with a camera

Richter traces his involvement with photography back to his childhood. In particular, two seminal events, he says, that took place within a day of each other during Christmas of 1968.

“I was 12 years old, and my older brother came back from boarding school. We walked across Central Park in a blizzard to a tiny revival house called Thalia, and we saw The Seven Samurai by Kurosawa. It had a profound effect on me,” Richter recalls. “Partly because I was dyslexic. I couldn’t read but I was hungry for stories.”

That was the day before Christmas Eve. For Christmas his father had gotten him his first camera: a used Viewfinder. “I remember standing by the Christmas tree, holding the camera and looking at it, thinking: this is it, this is what I’m gonna do for the rest of my life. There were a lot of reasons why it appealed to me. One reason was that a camera could do what my eyes couldn’t – actually decipher an image.” Growing up within walking distance of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and dozens of other sanctums of civilization, Richter was interested in art and culture well beyond photography. He still likes to talk about the connections and differences between photography and other visual arts. “You know, with any art you have to have the opportunity to fail. That’s how you learn. I did painting and drawing, but it took too long to fail! I was a lazy TV baby, I wanted immediate results.”

Upon graduating from SUNY Purchase College, Richter found himself looking for a means to make a living as a photographer. The college had an excellent art programme, and the talent that accumulated in the photography department was at the same time exciting and daunting. Reluctant to enter an academic career. Richter chose to do commercial work. To make a living purely as an artist, particularly as an art photographer, he says, is worse than being a professional athlete.

“And I like doing commercial work. It has presented me with challenges I otherwise wouldn’t have faced myself. It’s also about working on my craft. Certainly a lot of what I’ve learned about lighting, for instance, was something that I refined through doing commercial work.”

Art versus commerce

Throughout his career, Richter has straddled the divide between art and commerce, engaging in projects from catalogue work to illustrations and magazine shoots on one side, and artistic ventures on the other. Yet he appears relatively untouched by the age-old debate between making a living and maintaining artistic integrity. Is there an unfair amount of animosity towards commercial work in the art community?

“There certainly is here in Finland, and that’s a luxury they can afford here. There are a lot of state grants and a lot of support that we don’t have in the States. For every tax dollar a US citizen gives to the arts, a Finnish citizen gives 250. And I think it’s great, but there to a certain basic rule of nature: you don’t feed wild animals. It doesn’t hurt to be competitive.”

Nowadays Richter hopes to find more of a crossover between the two realms. In fact, serendipitous happenstance has led him to some of his most important projects. His book A Portrait of Southern Writers, published in 2000, was a commission. When Richter – “a dyslexic Yankee whose family adopted General Sherman”- was asked to photograph a number of Southern writers, the ironies were just too many to pass up, he says. Another case in point was a project he did for Citibank in 2000. Richter, then in Finland as a Fulbright scholar, was approached by the company’s managing director, who wanted to commission a portfolio from him. The subject matter to commemorate a one and a half billion euro deal between Fortum and Stora Enso over a purchase of power plants in Sweden.

“Now, I would never have gotten out of bed one day and thought to myself, ‘gosh, power plants, wouldn’t that be interesting.’ When in fact it was great! It was something I was hired to do commercially, but then I was able to apply my own vision as an artist to it.”

Magazine shoots, on the other hand, are often a grey area. Richter takes the example of travel articles. On the one hand a photographer is hired for his artistic work, but at the same time he is required by the nature of the assignment to make the locations he shoots look like places people would want to travel to – a parameter few photographers would set themselves.

“My first big travel shoot was for the New York Times Magazine. David Plante was the writer. It was called Venice in the Winter, and we shot that in June, a week before the summer solstice. It was during a heat wave and a festival they have once every four years. The whole premise was supposed to be that it’s isolated, it’s lonely, it’s misty. There was brilliant sun-shine every single day! People talk about the camera lying, but it doesn’t. It’s inanimate, it can’t lie! But nevertheless I did portray Venice at that time of year in a way that was quite contrary to what it actually was.” Even the more mundane work can provide valuable experience for a photographer keen on honing his craft, something Richter values greatly. Artistry is important, but it is equally important to have the discipline to learn you craft: “Anybody who’s competent can take a picture, and it will illustrate something. But if you want to communicate something, that takes a lot more craft, and a lot more preparation and training.”

An outsider in the art community

Richter moved to Finland in 1997 as the result of a fairly familiar chain of events: he married a Finn and they wanted to have children. Finland appeared a more suitable community for raising children.

“Finland, unlike the United States, sees its children the same way it sees its woods: as a really precious national resource that you should encourage. The States is a country of immigrants, you know. If you don’t like how things are, there’s a hundred more people waiting right behind you to give it a go.” But moving here turned out to be different than he had expected. Career-wise it seemed like a wrong turn. Finding work was very difficult for a foreigner trying to work in the domestic market. In a field as introverted as the visual arts it was practically impossible.

Richter believes Finns still have a lot to learn about opening up. They seem to be embarrassed about being Finns, when they have nothing to be embarrassed about. They are apologetic for their recent rural past, when they should be proud of their recent surge into modernity. Finns don’t appreciate themselves enough, Richter says, and all too often that insecurity translates into withdrawal.

“The thing about Finns is that they have a tremendous amount of pride but very little self-esteem. And it’s a pernicious combination, because part of learning is being able to recognize what you don’t know. I met a graphic designer who married a Finn. She was looking for work here, calling up companies, and they wouldn’t even see her for an interview. They wouldn’t even look at her work! She said to me, why the hell aren’t these people even curious? What are they afraid of? Why are they so threatened by it?“

Finns, Richter says, should see their unique cultural features as a valuable resource, instead of a mark of some bygone rural parochialism. “I went with my wife to her father’s family cemetery just north of Riihimaki in the country. Her grandfather and great-grandfather were buried there, and I noticed they had different last names. I couldn’t understand how men on her father’s side of the family had different last names. She explained that back then you took your last name from the house where you lived. That just beautifully shows the Finns’ connection to the earth! You actually took your name from the earth upon which you live. That’s the kind of thing that Finns are apologetic for, when they shouldn’t be!”

– Curt Richter

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Birthdate – 24 August 1956

Place of residence – Helsinki

Education – Dalton High School, Simon’s Rock, SUNY Purchase -Undergraduate

Family – Wife Jaana and children Manna and Will

As a child I wanted to be …James Bond and Jimi Hendrix.

In five year’s time I will be …Five years older.

The best part of my job is …The diversity of people and places I have the opportunity to meet and travel to.

The worst part of my Job is …The unpredictability of being a freelancer.