Elle Pérez is a photographer based in New York. We engaged in an asynchronous discussion via iMessage — exchanging questions, voice notes, and text responses. In this conversation, Elle shares a bit about the projects they’re currently engrossed in, their thoughts on the practice of image making, and the shifting relationship between image and truth.
What are you working on at the moment?
I'm working on a couple of things. I am working on a book that I am putting together with Aperture, which is a monograph of my work from 2008 to the present. The skeleton of the book is a series of work I've been making since 2015 to 2025, with some recent pictures from this year, even a few days ago, and then also it will have excerpts from these notebooks that I make, which are sort of like sketchbooks, or that's pretty much the role that they fulfill, is a sketchbook.
And then there's two essays in it. One is by my friend Dean Daderko, and another by Sylvie McNamara. Dean is a curator, Sylvie's a writer. They're both essays from people who know me very well, and also, they took very different approaches. Sylvie's is more of a portrait, and Dean's is more of an art historical essay.
I'm also working on a film right now. I've been spending a lot of time making film and video work. It's something that I have always come back to, which is this way of moving with the camera in very fluid ways. I have made a few films that are somewhere between film and video installation.
That's sort of the space that I'm really working out right now, what I want uniquely from the space between those things, between a documentary, between a film, a narrative film, and also video, video installation, video as an art piece, video as a non-cinematic experience. Video as a somatic experience, instead of a cinematic one, if that makes sense.
The piece that I've been working on now for almost two years is a video that has been made at Papi Juice, when it's held at Elsewhere, for the last year and a half.
We've been filming since June 2024. We filmed a straight year, and then, I think, we're gonna film a little bit more because... honestly because we enjoy it so much. It's been a hard project to stop filming just because we like filming it. “We” is me and my cousin, Ramon Pesante, who is an independent filmmaker. He's actually a director (laughs). He has a feature. It's called Playing Sam. He's actually good at this, so he's been helping me, logistically and also physically. We go to the club, our call time is 1:00 AM and then we shoot until the end of the night. Sometimes that puts us at 5:00, 5:30, 6:00 AM. It's been an amazing project to be shooting, and now I'm editing and I've learned so much doing it. I've learned how to DJ, I've learned how to color grade. A lot of skills just to keep up with the potential of the subject.
I’m interested in your thoughts on the idea of making a picture versus taking a picture, which is something you reference in your accompanying texts for The World Is Always Again Beginning, History with the Present. How do you understand that distinction?
That's such a good question, thank you for this one. Maybe the best way to get into making versus taking [a picture] is just thinking about how pictures happen. There's so many different modes for how images are made like whether they're conscious, unconscious, surveillance images, or personal images. There's all of these different ways that pictures are created, everything from screenshotting on your phone, to generating with AI, to taking a cellphone picture of your niece or nephew or child, or your family or your lover. And then there's like another layer of intention, I think, that goes into making a photograph which is thinking about the camera, as something that creates, a vision, like optically.
With photography as an art form, one of the things that you're thinking about is that molecular structure of how is that image being made, what is the process?
When I choose a camera, I am choosing a mode of relation. I'm choosing how I want to relate to a subject and that is informed by how I want to engage with the subject.
Photography takes that question of how that image was made and it elongates it, stretches it out. It's looking at things like how you're moving with the camera or what the camera does to a situation or subject when it's introduced.
An extreme example would be, working with a large format camera, which I do sometimes. That large format camera has a unique quality where it basically allows you to control every single plane of the camera itself which then affects the plane of the image that is created, the appearance of the image. Affecting the way the angle that the lens is pointed at the subject affects how that subject is rendered. This can be used in so many different ways. It can be used as flattery, it can be used as distortion, it can be used as commentary.
When I was photographing the wrestlers, who were in that show at Arts and Letters, the camera that I first chose, that those pictures are made with, is a Mamiya 7. It's this medium format camera, I load film into it, I can move quickly, I can put a flash on it. These film photographs have this kind of tension… an affect to them that feels like sports photography of the 1950s, 1940s. They feel like these, vintage sports images that you would see in the archives or that would have been in magazines.
The camera itself and medium format and the flash allowed for a kind of inspection of detail that gave the images a kind of fun friction, where you can see that the outfits are costumes, you can see the looks, you can see things that you might not be able to see even if you were there.
And they were all choreographed and orchestrated fights, so one of the things that those guys were interested in, in terms of the photographs, was that the photograph had that feeling, almost like it was an artifact from like another era. What they're doing in entertainment wrestling is creating a fantasy that is an amalgamation of all these other references and images and pulling them together into something new.
What my photograph did, was it sort of crystallized that effort, but it also kind of documented that. It muddied the waters a little bit in that it creates a kind of image that is, as confusing or more confusing or more realistic, than another type of image might be.
The camera itself and medium format and the flash allowed for a kind of inspection of detail that gave the images a kind of fun friction, where you can see that the outfits are costumes, you can see the looks, you can see things that you might not be able to see even if you were there.
There’s a different kind of legitimacy, a different mode of perception, that comes from seeing an image in a museum or gallery versus encountering it in a feed on your phone. How does the context in which an image is seen shape the distinction between image making and taking?
I’m always thinking about the viewer. How will the viewer encounter the image wherever they are?
The big difference is that I get to control the context with the gallery — it’s both a signal to question what you see and a space of intention. There is a way to think about art which is that it is an objection of contemplation; that the goal of the object — the painting, sculpture or photograph — is to use what you recognize to make you think about what you don’t. How what you see leads you in or brings you closer can help you understand what you don’t yet know. I like to encourage people to encounter art this way, it changes the goal from “getting it automatically” to focusing on how what is in front of you can help you learn something new.
At the moment, we still attribute some level of inextricable truth to the photograph.
Photography is interesting as art because it uses sight as both instrument and subject to question your perceptions. All art uses sight, but in photography you are using optics — as opposed to paint, or material — as the paradigm of exploration. And then there is what is in front of the lens. At the moment, we still attribute some level of inextricable truth to the photograph.
I think that will change over time, as Gen Alpha grows up with a more comfortable relationship to the malleability of images through editing than we have. In 2024, when I was photographing in Giverny for my show, I was watching a family of two kids and adults try to take a family photograph, like the kind for an iPhone for a Christmas card. As a car was passing them on Rue Monet. the mom wanted to wait for the car to pass, and the kid, who was about 8 or 9, sighed and was like “why are we waiting? we can just erase it from the picture” and I was like woah, what a foundational impulse to have about image making, that it is as malleable as a drawing. It is no longer understood to have an immutable connection to truth.
How have the environments where you share images — Arts and Letters, River, and others — influenced the way you think about that distinction?
What I love about River is that it lets me create a context for my work that can both connect to other people and always be traced back to me. I love seeing the related images, and what the algorithm identifies as similar. It’s cool when the only other similar image is another one of my own pictures. I feel like I win something when that happens. Its been a fun way to think about originality from a different perspective.
River: @elle
Instagram: elleperex