Marc Yankus
by Ilenia Zane
Marc Yankus was born in Long Island, New York in 1957 and he lives and works in New York City’s Greenwich Village. His works have been shown in various exhibitions in private galleries such as the ClampArt gallery in New York and in public spaces including the Brooklyn Museum and the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. His images have appeared on the covers and inside many magazines, from the Atlantic Monthly to Photo District News. Marc Yankus has received honors from the New York Photo Awards in 2008 and the previous year from Les Rencontres d’Arles in France.
His work appears in the Collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress
Zoom: Tell me about yourself. When and why did you start to photograph?
What were your goals?
Marc Yankus: I was very interested in art from an early age, particularly collage and drawing. My mother always encouraged me to engage in art, and I’ve always had the desire to create. She still has collages I made when I was 8 or 9. I remember one year my mother enrolled me in a class at this woman’s house, making puppets. We carved the heads out of apples, which would dry up into scary and fun faces.
My father was in the dress business, but he always had a passion for photography. Looking back, I remember him always taking pictures…
Perhaps he influenced me. As I continued to sketch with pencils, I enrolled in a special art high school called the High School of Art and Design. I studied Photography as my major and learned how to work with 35mm, 4×5 and 8×10 cameras. I was very interested in playing with scale, perspective and surreal imagery.
After I graduated I took a semester at Brooklyn College and studied Visual Anthropology, which I found really fascinating, and then took a year off from school. I traveled throughout Europe for two months, and when I came back—a little confused—I took a job to train as a bank teller, got fired, worked at McDonalds, got fired, worked at Baskin Robbins ice cream shop, got fired and finally decided to stop being lost and enrolled in college at the School of Visual Arts.
I studied Fine Art for the first 3 years, concentrating on painting and drawing, which I loved. In my final years there, I studied illustration and as a student started to create collages for The New York Times.
Over the years, I have shot countless pictures of people, places and travels with a Nikon 35mm. It was always an unconscious addiction and interest. I’ve freelanced as a collage illustrator for many years and have incorporated my own photographs into these collages for much of that time.
Z.: Your photos are of great visual impact. In all the images we can see a continual presence of old and new, past and present, why this choice?
M. Y.: My current work draws on all of that prior experience, although in my photographic images I am, in effect, reversing the process that I used in making collages by turning the photographic images themselves into collages. I digitally layer textures over the original image.
This process of superimposing the old on the new serves as a metaphor for my wider conceptual interests, because my newest works—which are hushed and introspective, and which can be touched with melancholy—are, ultimately, reflections of the past, of my past, and of the passage of time.
Z.: The subjects of your works, as cityscapes or portraits, have a nostalgic atmosphere. Is this the result of some interior condition or an aesthetic choice?
M.Y.: My work reveals, before all else, a particular appreciation of urban history and, more specifically, a recognition that the passing of time is relative, and mutable, in big cities.
I am drawn to old architecture, to buildings erected in an era when greater care was taken in the choice of building materials, and in the ways in which those materials were handled and finished. And I am drawn to the frankly romantic, even mystic, dimension of great cities, which are places of struggle and growth, but also of wonderment and ever-unfolding engagement.
They are places where it is all too easy to get lost, but where it is also possible to find oneself—and, in that process, develop a lifelong love of city life and its denizens.
I am especially fascinated with the city in its rare moments of tranquility— as it sinks into slumber, as it rouses itself to face a new day. At such times the city is all abstraction: looming shapes, diffused light, spectral shadows.
In these moments of transient repose, when its elements are briefly cloaked in softness, a kind of beauty envelops even the most mundane street scenes… and my work aims to capture that ineluctable quality.
Z.: What are your points-of-reference in art, the people who have inspired you? Do you have an artist by whom you are inspired or that you consider as a master?
M.Y.: From the age of 11 to 16, I lived near the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan and I would spend hours there escaping into the world of art. I loved the Renaissance paintings, the Middle Ages and the Early American Wing of rooms. I used to sketch the earlier works of the photographer Robert Frank…. I was so inspired by him. The collage artist Joseph Cornell was also a major influence.
Z: What are you currently working on and what up-coming projects do you have?
M.Y.: I am continuing to explore
Cityscapes and new ways of approaching portrait work.
June 2009