Portrait of an Artist: Louie Palu
This is a continuing series of interviews with the forty-eight artists whose work was selected for the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. The third OBPC exhibition opened on March 23, 2013, and will run through February 23, 2014.
Louie Palu, who participated in our interviews last autumn, created the work Night Raid for the 2013 competition.
Q: What medium(s) do you work with?
A: Mostly photography, with the occasional audio and video piece.
Q: Tell us about your technique/creative process.
A: Straight raw documentary approach when using the camera. Multiple modes of dissemination. In no specific order, traditional print/online placement in editorial media (magazines, newspapers, websites), traditional print exhibitions. Experimental installations of all kinds, including projection, incorporated audio, or using disposable prints or posters.
Q: What is your background (education, career, etc.) and how does it contribute to your art?
A: I started out as a painter and did a lot of drawing. My high school had a special advanced art program where half of my classes were in visual art. I discovered photography at the age of sixteen and since then have used it as a means of connecting to the world around me and expressing myself.
My parents are immigrant laborers who lived through war at an early age; I grew up hearing many of their stories. The issues around immigrants, the working class, and conflict have been a part of my subject matter ever since.
Q: How did you learn about the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition?
A: I frequently go to the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery and several other galleries, including the National Gallery of Art, as part of my research and love of art. I saw the last exhibition of the Portrait Competition at the Portrait Gallery [2009] and was so impressed. There is no bigger gift as a practicing artist than to have such a remarkable collection of work to reflect on and study just a short bike or Metro ride away.
One Sunday I saw a documentary on the history of the Medici family (Renaissance art patrons and bankers) and had my interest in Sandro Botticelli renewed. The National Gallery of Art has several of his pieces, so that same day I rode my bike there and was able to study some beautiful examples of his work.
Q: Tell us about the piece you submitted to the competition.
A: I took this photograph at night in a U.S. Army Medevac helicopter after a bombing in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 2010, not far from where 9/11 was planned. The helicopter had just come under attack and was nearly shot down. A special blue cabin light came on while the medic worked on the casualty. We are in the air flying while a battle took place on the ground. The blue light gives a surreal quality to the image, and for me it is a portrait not only of the soldier, but of war itself.
Photographing casualties of war to understand America’s most painful moments dates back to images from Antietam, one of the most savage battles of the U.S. Civil War, photographed by Alexander Gardner and exhibited in New York City in 1862.
Q: Tell us about your larger body of work.
A: This image belongs to a body of work titled The Fighting Season, which is a study of conflict that takes place mainly in Kandahar, where I worked between 2006 and 2010.
Before this I spent twelve years documenting gold- and nickel-mining communities in northern Canada in one of the richest mining regions in the world.
Q: What are you currently working on?
A: I am currently in the midst of photographing the drug war in Mexico and its effects on the U.S.–Mexico border. I am about halfway through the project and have produced a special traveling concept exhibition that can be hung anywhere in public. It is funded by a fellowship through the Washington–based New America Foundation and Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Q: How has your work changed over time?
A: Outside of some maturing in the understanding and use of my materials and my process, what has mostly changed is me, not really my work. Any change in how my work looks comes from within me. After being a practicing artist for more than twenty years and making a living from my art, I feel a confidence and spiritual maturity I always craved as a young and sometimes frustrated artist.
Q: Tell us about a seminal experience you’ve had has an artist.
A: Meeting and getting editing advice from John G. Morris in France at a photography festival. He was the photo editor for Robert Capa’s iconic images from the D-Day invasion of Normandy. He also worked as a photo editor at the New York Times and Washington Post. I think he made such an impression on me with regards to editing photographs and was such a great teacher that I was forever changed as a photographer.
Q: Who is your favorite artist?
A: Michelangelo Buonarrotti for his heart and soul. I have to mention filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola for making the film Apocalypse Now as well.
Q: If you could work with any artist (past or present) who would it be?
A: I think I would like to do an installation with English poet John Milton who wrote Paradise Lost. My definition of an artist includes writers.
Q: What is your favorite artwork?
A: At this moment, the first work that comes to mind is Vincent Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows.
Q: What inspires you?
A: People who struggle to survive through pain and loss.
