armfuls of show and tell: 11/1/10

photo of Sara Lafleur-Vetter

I first saw Sara Lafleur-Vetter's photos back in 2003, at a small coffee house on the campus of Reed College. I was instantly impressed, and her work has only gotten better since then. Lafleur spent a year pursuing an MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York, then took a leave of absence to move to Russia. She spent the last two years in Luxor, Egypt, taking photographs for the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE). The lady’s a badass, basically; she speaks several languages, is incredibly adventurous, and runs straight at whatever stirs her heart or grabs her interest. One of her flickr testimonials calls her “brilliant and crazy…. [with] the guts to point [her] camera at total strangers.” Another hails her “powerful images that hit straight in the guts.” And it is guts---feeling things strongly in her gut, as well as having the guts to go after stories and images, that has led Lafleur to have such striking, intimate, and direct pictures.

How'd you first get into photography?

I first got into photography in a couple different ways. My older sister majored in photography in college so she more than likely turned me onto it at a young age (she's seven years older than me) . The first photography classes I took were at the Community Art Center in Wallingford, PA where I grew up. I was 13 or so. The photo teacher was this kooky guy who looked like Keith Herring and had Elvis Costello black rimmed glasses and he traveled to Africa and had these stunning black and white images of half naked Africans standing in this barren landscape. I was of course very curious about these pictures and how he got all the way over there. I immediately tried to get hired at the center to be his assistant in the darkroom. I remember him walking me around the darkroom explaining the chemicals: how to mix the developer, the stop bath, the fixer. How to set everything up and take it down. I don't think I got hired, but I do remember that once he accidentally left out some contacts of these pictures he had taken of himself making out with his date in a car. Me and another girl in the class made fun of him for being creepy. Clearly he had to set the camera up on timer to get the shot of him kissing the girl and that's a pretty good reason to make fun of your geeky photo teacher. He had left them on the drying rack or something and I guess that was my first encounter with the voyeuristic, risky, documentary power of photography.

I should add that I didn't have a dad growing up, that I learned about him from flipping through photo albums and thus, I developed a unique fixation with photos in a way other people might not. I came to know this person I idealized only through pictures; I poured myself into them.

I didn't completely fall in love with photography until I was 15 and I went to this summer program for high school kids called Horizons. Now it's called Snow Farm - it's an art camp up in Massachusetts. I totally fell in love with my photography teacher. Not in the romantic sense--in the sense that he filled the father/older male mentor role in my life at that time and he was just the kind of bohemian documentary person I was craving. It was the first setting where I got to not just have a photo teacher but also kind of interact with him at bonfires and outside of class. His pictures were mostly pictures of himself dressed up in women's lingerie and transsexuals and drag queens and nuns with guns. Gender and societal taboos. But he also introduced us to the greats - Henri Cartier-Bresson's decisive moment is the one I remember from the class slideshow. The man jumping over the puddle with one foot dipping into the reflective puddle. I attached myself to Sean. I was fairly androgynous at the time so I was honored when he took my portrait dressed in a cloak with short hair. Also I remember the camp talent show - I read a lesser-known Jack Kerouac poem about dirty assholes and following my public reading he leapt on stage and started break-dancing. We got along. One day he mentioned to me that his girlfriend lived in Philly so we ended up getting together the three of us. To cut to the chase, I had an opportunity in high school to do a one month internship and I took this opportunity to live with Sean and his (now wife) Susan in NYC. I worked in the professional Manhattan photo studio where Sean still works today and got to experience that whole commercial studio atmosphere at the ripe age of 15. We are still really tight and Sean and Susan are like second parents to me. They mean the world.

What kinds of subjects are you drawn to?

Mostly I'm looking for stories and radiant individuals, but more often than not I'm drawn to the downtrodden, the outsiders, people who otherwise might not have a public voice. In that vein, I've photographed child acrobats picked off the street, disabled children living in under-funded institutions, a schizophrenic world traveler, homeless people lined up to receive food - they all have stories to tell that make you re-think your own.

Sometimes the person is someone you meet on the street or sometimes you hear about an interesting figure or group from a friend and you have to go and invade that world and it always feels like you're going into battle; there's always that initial period of bombardment, where you go into their territory with your camera and you feel like you are wielding a weapon and you have to somehow show them that you are there to listen to them, to get their side of things, not to attack them.