Age: 26
Hometown: West Palm Beach, FL
Current town: Brooklyn, NY
Job description: Photographer; street artist; printmaker; sculptor; co-conspirator of all trades, including set design
Bio: Documented alternative economies in America using wet-plate photography for a self-directed project called Homeland; crew member of Miss Rockaway Armada's Let Me Tell You About A Dream I Had in Philly and Swimming Cities Serenissima and Switchback Sea; helped to build mud huts in Ghana for six weeks; set designer for Jeff Stark's Sweet Cheat
Upcoming projects: A solo show at Christina Ray in Soho on January 12th (“Basically showcasing the whirlwind of making things that happened over the last 10 months.”); applying for grad school (“The deadline is January 15th”); traveling to New Orleans to do some more work in wet-plate; possibly biking across Europe; “more whirlwinds”
Select links: "Photographer Goes Off-Grid With An Antique Camera" (NPR); "Creator Q&A: Robyn Hasty" (Kickstarter); "A Vintage-Style Photo Essay of Alternative American Communities" (Flavorwire); "People engaging with the economic collapse" (Marketplace); "LOVE + BULLSHIT" (Suckapants); robynhasty.com
Describe your current state of mind.
I’ve been kind of sad.
Why have you been sad?
I’m not entirely sure but I just spent a few months traveling across the country and doing this big project in Philly. And then I went to Ghana with a lover to build a mud house. And then he kind of broke up with me. And then I came back alone, spending time in my house without this support network.
Break-ups: we’ve all been there. What was the everyday process like in Ghana?
It was really amazing. I don’t even know where to start talking about Ghana. I’ve traveled for eight months in South America and developing countries there, and Ghana was different than the other places that I’ve been in the developing world. It’s much less traveled by Westerners, so being white you stand out a lot. Which can be overwhelming and sincere. In the village, it manifests this incredible community that’s like the fabric that helps the kids get raised, because people have so many kids. Your grandmother lives with you until she dies and is supported by her kids. We were being fed so we didn’t have to worry about cooking for ourselves, and you can focus on building this house. But at the same time, while we were when we would go to work sometimes there would be a crowd of like 15 people around us just watching, because they’re interested and sometimes helping. All of the kids would take buckets and carry water to make the clay for the house. Some of these kids could carry as much water as I could. Which was incredible.
How much water could you carry at a time?
I would say about five gallons. And in Ghana everything is carried on your head. You get used to seeing Ghanaians do it, but they laugh when they see you do it.
It actually is a more efficient way of distributing weight from your core, so you can carry much longer without getting tired.
Eventually, did you learn how to do that?
Yeah, I carried a few things. Often I would go into the bush to carry [with] my friend, Jay, and Apocho, who is the African man we were building the house for; he was also helping us. Most of the time, Apocho wouldn’t let me carry very much. Usually much less than what I was carrying. But I would be like, “No no no, let me carry something,” and he’d let me carry one stick of bamboo. And Jay would carry four and I’d carry one.
How long were you in Africa?
Six weeks.
Would you go back?
Yes.
Tell me about how your project, Homeland, came about.
I guess a combination of a lot of things. I reached an artistic wall and wasn’t sure where I was going and what I was doing. I had been doing street art for a while and felt kind of suppressed and bleak. I had been doing all these collaborative projects in this community for several years, and I realized that was always separate from what I was doing on my own. I took this workshop in wet-plate and realized I had a really clear idea of what I wanted to do with that process. Which was basically to document this already sprawling loose community of people that have a pretty cohesive ideological unity - even though they may not know each other, even though there’s no formalized manifesto of what that is. And through my connection to it, and my ability to find contacts that I didn’t already know, I just bought a camera, a bunch of chemicals, and car, and drove it cross country.
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| Images courtesy of Robyn Hast |
My friend is borrowing it.
Parking in New York has to be hard, right?
I have a very sweet setup. Which is a street that has no parking regulation on it.
Is there a street like that?
Yes, and I can’t tell you where it is.
Okay.
It happens to be outside my apartment though.
What’s the learning curve in making a presentable wet-plate image?
I got good results in the workshop, which was the first plate within 10 plates or something. I started scheduling shoots with people with the hope that the pressure would help me perform, for the first couple weeks - maybe even longer. I’m always surprised when I see the result. I always felt that I didn’t make it; it just happened.
What year did you start learning the wet-plate?
2010.
How does one go about finding the right materials?
There’s a lot of online suppliers for alternative photographic processes. The only thing that’s hard to get is potassium cyanide - the fixer for some processes. It has the potential to produce a deadly gas that will kill you. I don’t use that chemical.
[I use] sodium phosphate. It’s much less toxic.
One of the more toxic things I use is ethyl ether in a small non-ventilated space.
Once you find your equipment, how much does it cost?
I know that every time I replenish chemicals, it’s $150-200. And then the camera was like $400, the tripod was $200, and the start-up chemicals are more than the replenishing chemicals. And the car…it’s probably the most artistic project that I’ve ever done. [There was] a moment of maturity in taking it on.
How often do you replenish your chemicals? I’ve only done that once in four months of shooting.
How long does it take you to create a wet-plate photograph?
It’s very fast. Maybe the setup is the longest thing, about half an hour. And setting up the camera is about 15 minutes. The exposure is like 2-20 seconds, and then it’s developed within a minute and a half after that.
How patient have your subjects been with that process?
Very patient. There are people who have sat still for 20 seconds, for more than one shot if I get it wrong the first time.
What was your route?
I started in New York and went down to New Orleans, through Texas and up into Arkansas. And it was a major problem. The whole engine had to be replaced; it was a kind of a fraudulent Craigslist deal. So the car gets taken. I come back to New York. The car gets fixed. I go back to Dallas to pick up the car, drive it back to New York, start again, drive to LA in one shot, and made my way back through Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Missouri, Detroit, Ohio, and Philadelphia. And that was one six-week stint on the road after four weeks, when the car broke down. But there are certain areas that I haven’t gotten to. The Southeast and the Northwest I have to deal with at some point.
When did you leave?
I left May 15th, 2011.
When did you get back?
July 1st.
And then I was immediately in Philly.
Are there any misconceptions about your project that you’d like to address?
There’s a lot of press with the Homeland project, and I think in some ways people are latching onto the element of the recession and this economic show on NPR. They were like: “Oh, these people with these grassroots things that are dealing with the recession.” I think that in some ways is a conventional way to look at the work and the communities. What I’m trying to do is show that in some ways a Utopian world on a mass scale is really not possible. But what’s happening on a small, almost neighborhood, scale or the small communities that are creating these alternative worlds, that’s significant and that poses a viable alternative to whatever people envision. Like a radical shift in the future. It puts the responsibility on the individual instead of waiting for bureaucracy to change. Bureaucracy will probably never change and it’s up to you to want to envision your own world, and you should be empowered to do it. That’s really why I think it’s an important project. I don’t know if other people see that.
I saw the NPR piece and I read some of the comments. There were two that stood out to me.
Someone told me they were all bad, and that they would depress me.
I’m curious about your thoughts on two of the comments. The first: there’s this perception that your subjects are “destitute” because they’re living in an alternative economy. That’s not the case. Really I think I’ve only shot maybe two or three itinerant people, which I think is an important thing to represent as an alternative way of living. It was such a short piece; the clips that they took weren’t particularly deep. I think the thing that no one got [was] that a lot of it had to do with my relationship with the person. That’s something where a personal bias and judgment are coming into it. It’s not completely objective in that way. The people I’m [photographing] are doing something that I think is amazing and I’m respecting them for it; it’s a very sincere thing.
It’s interesting that you’re a subjective documentarian. From a journalistic standpoint, there’s this principle that documentarians have to be objective. How important do you think it is to be objective as a documentarian?
I see it as an art piece. There are documentary aspects of it and I don’t feel like it has to be objective. I’m not trying to represent it as that.
In terms of just in general, I also think the idea of objectivity is not possible. I think it’s better to be upfront about your bias and have a very strong personal voice than to try and hide behind these two points of view. There are actually so many more than two. How do you represent all of them?
My next question is perhaps one of semantics. I noticed in the comments that there was some confusion about the phrases “off the grid” and “collapse of the American Economy.” In your opinion, are they interchangeable? Or, how do they relate to one another?
People in an abstract way are “off the grid”, creating a life that is independent of the greater society that’s around. I mean, a lot of the people I photograph are clearly “off the grid” in the literal way that word is used.
Out of all your subjects, which stories would you say are most representative of that?
In some ways, I’m thinking more of a place than a person. If the collapse of the economy could or should produce a single image, it is Detroit. It is a living apocalypse overwhelmingly so. It feels like a war that has happened there with the amount of decay. And you realize that the war that is happening on Wall Street – and that is why Detroit is dying. And it’s not the only place. The dynamic there is so strange. There are people still living there, [but] there are no jobs.
How do you envision Detroit, say, 10 years from now? Do you think it'll ever be bustling again?
I think if Detroit were to become bustling again, it would need an incredible shift that I think is impossible. It seems like it hasn't gotten a lot worse yet. I think there are a lot of reasons by Detroit won't be come another Berlin. One of the major things is that American policy does not make it very easy for foreigners to come here. So it's really dependent on Americans to think about Detroit. The people who are doing something are not settling. They are artists that are passing through, sucking the resources of the decay from out of the rubble and using it for art and learning - and not building a new community there.
New Orleans has a very strong countercultural revitalization. It's also notoriously violent, and it doesn't provide a high quality of life for the people who are [living there]. And i think Detroit is a place where the people will have to deal with a lot of hard things before things get comfortable, and I don't know how we'll localize that.
What was the most challenging aspect of Homeland?
Having the guts to start it. It involved learning a rather technically intricate process in a medium I have never worked with, buying a lot of expensive equipment, including a car, building a lot more specialized photographic equipment, researching all the equipment I needed and how to use it before doing either of these things. That leaves out the more pragmatic hurdles of funding. Money will come. It's all the other things that pose a greater risk of failure.
What did you learn from that project?
Driving through Kansas is sublime. I will never live in Slab City. Chicago still can't warm my heart. Detroit and St. Louis do. Ether is a serious chemical. One should always take the loneliest road. I actually do love living in America. I am sincerely inspired by the people I met and photographed. I use photography as a way to create experiences, not detach myself from them.
Tell me about your summer with the Miss Rockaway Armada in Philly.
After six weeks of driving across the country, and coming down from the whirlwind of abandoned skyscrapers in Detroit, I ended up in Philly to begin a project with the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program I had been planning since the previous year. They had asked the Miss Rockaway Armada to paint a mural in collaboration with about 30 kids, and I had helped set up a core crew of six people. This was a separate project from the raft thing at the Art Alliance, and originally I had no intention of doing both. And then, almost as if my body had been hijacked by mischievous sprites, I am knee deep in the Schuylkill screwing pieces of beautiful, rotten wood to one another. The rest of the summer I had no time to think about anything at all, I just woke up and started doing things, and kept doing them until I collapsed. I think this was simultaneously the clearest headed and most productive I've been in years -and the closest I have been to losing myself.
I experienced an extraordinary collapse of my universe (in the synchronous way) and realized that there was only one road, and it lead to a junk boat docked on the banks of the Mississippi River. I was in college at the time. I had been in the city three years, and still had not made any real friends. I was working as an intern at the Graffiti Research Lab and living with a cokehead in Bushwick. One day Swoon walked into the lab and started talking about building the rafts to float down the Mississippi - right across the street. This was not the first time I had heard about rafts on the Mississippi that summer. I had just started dating a guy in my neighborhood who was building rafts, too. I suddenly realized he was building the same rafts as Swoon, and they were working together right next to my internship. I needed no further encouragement from the universe. I knew what I had to do.
What were you like as a kid?
I played with dolls until I was in middle school. I had Barbies, baby dolls, stuffed animals, nothing particularly gender bending, but I eventually learned how to make them have sex. I read copiously. I believe I exhausted the entire children’s book section of the public library in two years, reading literally hundreds of serial novels, including all of Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, etc. I remember having an epiphany at the age of 8 that Nancy Drew was “formula fiction”--the plot always followed the same arc, and I began to predict early in the book how it would end.
Do you have siblings?
I was an only child until about a year ago, when I found out I had a sister through a sperm donor my mom had used to conceive. I met her last year, and a few months ago she got a job at Columbia and moved to NYC. Building a relationship with a sister you first meet in your mid-twenties is hard, especially when your lives and interests are vastly different.
What does your mom think about what you do?
My mother constantly tells me she is proud of me, and completely supports my work, even though it has taken her awhile to get past some of the illegal or dangerous aspects. Sometimes I have to understate or creatively rephrase what I am doing to make her feel less anxious. Ultimately, I think I am lucky. My mother is not trying to push me into a conventional career or dissuade me from my way of life. She also tries to come to all of my openings, even when they are in California or New York.
What brought you to New York?
I came here to do a summer program at SVA at age 15. From the moment I stepped foot in NYC, I was filled with the kind of singular desire unique to adolescence that I had to move here as soon as possible. I felt like if I stayed in Florida I would die young, literally or figuratively. I just followed the impulse and over the course of learning the city and growing up, I began to find the words to explain it.
If you didn’t live in New York, where would you live?
My family's ancestral stone shack in the mountains of Italy. It is currently occupied by sheep, but I have a vision for a little renovation.
What’s something you could not live without?
Love. I don't want that to sound cheesy, but man, life would be boring without the rush of intensity that you get when you fall in love. And love isn't always just people.
Describe your eating habits.
I was vegetarian (for 15 years) and gluten-free, and found myself feeling crappy. Now, I occasionally eat fish.
I recently read my ayurvedic personality type, and its description of my eating habits is uncannily accurate. I have a super fast metabolism, so I eat a big, fatty breakfast to tide me over all day, then a late lunch or dinner when I get home. I also can eat way more than you think I can in one sitting. I never say no to butter or cream, and never buy low-fat anything. I love french fries as much as alfalfa sprouts. I make my own sauerkraut and hot sauce. No one can say I don't eat a balanced diet.
Do you cook?
Yes. Every day.
Why?
Because the food that I make is way better than what I can (afford to) buy prepared.
What qualities do you admire most and least in a person? Most: Courage; independence; the ability to make things; mastery of some kind of knowledge.
Least: Insincerity.
What's romantic?
Sneaking into an abandoned building in a foot of snow, and getting so cold you have to kiss to warm each other’s cheeks up.
What’s tragic?
The self-defeating nature of desire. Desire exists for an object, but once the object of desire is achieved the desire disappears.
What’s scary?
It is 60 degrees in NYC and 12 degrees in Texas, right now.
What’s overrated?
Doing graffiti in NYC.
And underrated?
Singing on the street.
What do you want to do before you die?
Sail across the ocean.
What's something that you wish you could do better?
TIG welding, home microbiology, memorizing poems and songs, name all the constellations and their accompanying mythology.
Is it harder to start or finish something?
Both are hard, but you have to start in order to have something to not be able to finish.
Is there anything you'd like to add?
Always say, “Yes.”
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