Marissa Patrice Leitman: Lucky All The Time
Interviews
More about the artist:
Marissa Patrice Leitman (b. 1995, the USA) is an American photographer and artist currently living in Berlin. She is a past CO-founder of Hit Gallery in San Fransisco and currently runs Way Out Magazine.
In an interview with Discarded Magazine, Leitman talks about her photography journey and the impact of the pandemic on her work.
Linda Zhengová:
Which person that you photographed keeps coming up in your mind?
Marissa Patrice Leitman:
The first person who comes to my head is my oldest and dearest friend, artist and architect aficionado Isabella Salvo (the purple girl). We’re very in synch both as friends and as artists. She really understands how important taking pictures is for my relationships; she knows it’s her is more than just a superficial gesture. We’ve been friends for over ten years, so we have an almost psychic connection now- artistically and otherwise, despite being complete opposites. Which I think is fairly beautiful. I think we’re going to get married.
Linda Zhengová:
Ranging from the queer scene to flamboyant individuals, one wonders, who gets to be chosen for your shot?
Marissa Patrice Leitman:
I hate the word chosen. It’s much deeper than that much, more animalistic and intuitive. It’s very much tied to connection and my own anxieties about connecting. I consider photography a landing point for me to connect with others and them connecting back to me. There’s a kind of twisted tango to it. Taking photos has a real integration into my life and leads me to live it more and control it less. I want to be washed away by other people. A camera is just a constant to see what’s actually happening. It leads me into navigating a tricky web of attraction that doesn’t always make sense. It’s tied to living, which is a surprisingly hard thing to do.
[…] A camera is just a constant to see what’s actually happening. It leads me into navigating a tricky web of attraction that doesn’t always make sense.
[…] I’m constantly falling in love.
Linda Zhengová:
Would you say that intimacy is crucial for your work?
Marissa Patrice Leitman:
Yeah, I would. I struggle being so definitive in my answers because there’s a lot of different definitions of what intimacy is. One photo that would be the most intimate for me isn’t to someone else. I do think there has to be a level of honesty and closeness. I am someone who connects to people really easily – I’m constantly falling in love. I use photography to process that. Though I do have a bad habit of making idols and icons.
Linda Zhengová:
You were working on your project over the course of seven years. Perhaps, it can be interpreted as not only a direct representation of the characters you shoot but also of your personal lifestyle. Would you say that your photographs serve as mementos for you?
Marissa Patrice Leitman:
Kind of? I don’t know! I want to say no so bad, but I don’t know if I can. I want to say yes because this project has been a lot about relationships, memory, finding beauty, etc. There are certain photos I have more specific memories with. With any project, there’s the poetry or associations that are transparent to the viewer and then there are personal rationales to the maker that are never going to be 100 percent understood by anyone else. I’ve used the word in the past but in conversation, I instinctually shuffle away from the word memento in some ways because I feel like photography is so easily categorized as just about memory to some people. But of course, there is an undeniable connection to memory.
Now I can’t stop thinking of that soft cell song Memorabilia…”Everywhere I go, I take a little piece of you I collect, I reject, photographs I took of you. I’ve got to have a memory, or I have never been there” … [laughs] Yeah, maybe I’m also just some kind of fucked up emotional hoarder.
[…] Yeah, maybe I’m also just some kind of fucked up emotional hoarder.
Linda Zhengová:
How would you define your role as a photographer?
Marissa Patrice Leitman:
In this project fairly submissive. Which I think will be surprising to some people when they look at the pictures. I really wanted to be washed away in something.
I know some of my friends in other arts sometimes view photography as this overpowering, hunter and prey medium. You know the kind of “the picture steals your soul” and like that’s what photographers want, a little bag of souls to devour. And you know, there are some photographers who are fucking evil, but I just don’t believe that’s always true. I’ve always been attracted to photographers who are obsessive people, who project a lot onto others, who really get excited about things, and I don’t necessarily think control is part of it. I think there’s a real desire to be guided by other things and to really see the world. When you say “define your role as a photographer” I wish I was coming at that answer with a feeling of agency and grand power and control over my life but the more I’ve gotten into it I think it highlights the areas I’m working to have more control and that I don’t have a lot of control over. It reminds me how little I can keep up with everything.
Linda Zhengová:
Starting in San Francisco and ending up in Berlin, how do you reflect back on the journey of ‘Lucky All the Time’?
Marissa Patrice Leitman:
A lot of highs and lows. I know for me it was a really celebratory and tragic time. I’m hoping I’m not sounding like a cliche but I’m not sure I could do it again. I moved to San Francisco when I was 18 after a not-so-good time in high school and really threw myself into the scene and the city, I very intentionally got into it.
I mean, I didn’t sleep for about a year when I first moved to San Francisco, I was constantly going out and meeting different types of personalities which were great but really taxing. I had all these amazing experiences like jumping into vans to drive around the states or watching the sun come up for the third night in a row with the people I love…
Marissa Patrice Leitman:
I had a boyfriend beat me up when I first moved to San Francisco and I think I avoided a lot of that pain by going out all the time. Then from 2016-2017, I knew nine people who died, almost a person a month. Starting with the Ghostship fire which was a fire at a rave that killed 36 people. I knew three people there, some of my friends knew upwards of ten people. It just ripped through mine and my friend’s realities. After that the deaths just kept coming; two people I knew got in car accidents, one person OD’d, someone I knew got shot, and then one of my closest friends got cancer and passed away. I saw all these places I had gone with my friends to party and fuck around but then, suddenly, were holding memorial services every other month. There were all these things in my community and on a personal level just bashing from either side.
It’s not a document of that in any way, but I can see how those feelings and experiences formed and transformed the work. It was sink or swim. I was just trying to come up for air from that but also photographing in this increasingly neurotic way. Shifting between trying to distract myself or keep up. It was like someone hit the accelerator button. I was always chasing a desire for maximum joy and then not really recovering from these extreme things. Looking back, it’s all pretty exhausting.
Linda Zhengová:
What about the title?
Marissa Patrice Leitman:
The name itself holds a lot of irony for me. I think it sounds super cocky and maybe even the pictures look cocky but it’s not how that time felt for me at all. I just remember after Ghostship being on the porch of this dilapidated West Oakland punk house that everyone was maybe going to be evicted from with all my friends who were just in ruins and someone saying, “we’re so lucky”. Even in all that desperation and deviation that word luck was in the air.
Linda Zhengová:
Since most of the clubs are closed now, what type of work are you producing during COVID times?
Marissa Patrice Leitman:
Totally different. It’s all black and white and somber and about my environment. I did something really stupid at the beginning of the pandemic and moved to Berlin. I felt really trapped in SF and COVID just completely exaggerated that feeling. I moved at the beginning of winter, during an anti-social pandemic, I don’t speak any German, I’m doing something very on the skin of my teeth. I think it’s a lot more introspective maybe a little bit more from a veil of depression because COVID made me and everyone else fucking depressed. I’m really excited about it, it feels pretty angry and fucked up. I feel completely out of my wheelhouse for the first time in forever.
For ‘Lucky All the Time’ I mostly used a Mamiya c330, which is super heavy and obtrusive. You really need to have a relationship with someone to shove that camera in their face. But I’ve used it for so long that intellectually I’m pretty tired of the relationship. I always think of a camera you’ve used forever as when you’ve been in a long-term relationship and you’ve been fucking for so long that you can make each other cum pretty fast but that spontaneity is gone. So, I’m trying to use different cameras that cause me to have a different physical relationship to the world but it’s a challenge to “make cum”.
‘Lucky All the Time’ is now available for pre-sale here.