» Kings of the wild frontier
Katie Glass dons her cowboy boots and rodeos way out west with photographer Poppy de Villeneuve
If the stereotypes are to be believed then the Mexican border of the Lone Star State is not a place you go to make art.
Traditionally, the no-man’s-land where the Texas border meets Mexico is more likely to evoke images of redneck cowboys, trailer parks and J.R. from Dallas, than of creative and political communities, ripe with artistic inspiration.
But for her first solo show – ‘This is a story of hope and we are all characters in it’, displayed earlier this year at London’s Paradise Row Gallery – Poppy de Villeneuve ventured beyond the cowboys and cattle to discover a collection of people as interesting as they are diverse. And as unique and surprising as the area they represent.
“It’s a shame we imagine these people to be really stupid and lacking in culture because actually they’re very interesting and a lot of them are really intelligent,” explains Poppy, after months spent travelling the wilderness of the Tex-Mex border, convincing its residents to pose for her. “They’re not people who have just ended up in the middle of nowhere. A lot of them have actively chosen to be in that environment – because they want the space, or they want to escape, or they don’t agree with what the American Government is doing.”
Poppy – whose father is the famous 60s stylist Justin de Villeneuve, and the man credited with discovering Twiggy – admits that some of her affinity with the area arises out of her own sense of displacement. Drawn to La Frontiera – the last frontier, a stretch of desert that flanks the Rio Grande – Poppy found herself addressing her own sense of displacement, and her own place on the fringes: “My mother’s from Middle America, Ohio, and my dad’s from east London. But I moved to New York two years ago so I think of myself as half British and half American,” Poppy rationalises. “I can sound quite American, but also I think I have a nice British accent. So I understand the feeling of being removed from a situation.”
Perhaps it’s this sense of empathy that makes Poppy’s portraits so effective. Certainly she has mastered the unnerving juxtaposition of creating pieces that are both minimalist yet intimate. But, as she explains, the lack of cohesion in the place itself is often what drew her and her subjects closer together.
“It’s a very wild place. You’re so removed from your usual environment, so it’s a very intense and a very overwhelming and emotional experience. Because of that and because it’s in the middle of nowhere, you form close relationships with the people you’re working with. You meet people and they become your family-away-from-home.”
Interviewing and then photographing her subjects for periods that sometimes spanned into months, Poppy worked with each sitter to create a portrait that reflected their individuality as much as her own vision.
Asked how she encountered and worked with her subjects, she explains: “You travel around, people introduce you to new people who you interview, and then you meet more people through them. It’s like putting pieces of a puzzle together. You might meet someone and they work as an interview but not as a photograph, and sometimes it’s the other way around. So you have to work with them one-to-one to reveal things – it’s like a little dance with them – and sometimes it takes five minutes and sometimes it takes months.”
While Poppy’s work reflects the social aspect of the place from which her subjects came, she points out that they themselves affected their environment: “I didn’t try to position them or style them too much. They are extraordinary-looking people anyway, added to which they’ve visibly been affected by the weather – because it’s so extreme there. Even after a couple of weeks I noticed my skin felt different.”
But ultimately what is so interesting about Poppy’s exhibition is not that she has succeeded in capturing images of an alternative way of life or an alien culture, but rather that her audience finds themselves more drawn to similarities they share with her subjects than tier differences. It’s a subtle effect, but as Poppy says: “You can’t assume your audience doesn’t have a brain. You can keep it simple and leave them to pick up the pieces.”
Expressing her subjects’ underlying humanity, Poppy seeks to reveal that as human beings we share something greater than the countries and borders that distance us. Her work reveals humanity to be universal, whilst also maintaining faith in the humanist conviction that images can spark empathy and communicate with feeling.
“What I wanted to show was that they are extraordinary people, but they are also very ordinary characters – they have the same things going on as all of us. They may seem unusual but they represent the big picture. They have the same concerns as all of us and that’s why I called the exhibition ‘This is a story of hope and we are all characters in it’. In the end we are all fragile, just in different ways.”
