Part I: The Invisible Closet: on Coming Out as a Photographer

1996 Interview by Philip Vincent

This interview was quoted in OBLIVION magazine, Vol. 2, Issue 2 (San Francisco, May-June 1996) p. 14.

In May 1978, Biron relocated to San Francisco from Ann Arbor, Michigan where in the early 1970s he had Come Out, dropped out of a Ph. D. program at the University of Michigan while working on dissertation on Tristan Tzara, and focused his energy on various projects and activities within Ann Arbor's politically active Gay community.

His interest in Xerox art in the late 1960s, eventually led to his involvement in a series of conceptual and mail art projects in the 1970s, activities which he continued in San Francisco, but which he abandoned along with photography in 1979 after the murder of Robert Opel, a friend and collaborator.

TELL US ABOUT YOUR NEW BOOK.

L.B. It's called MIKE - TADZIO OF THE NINETIES and was recently published by Janssen Verlag in Berlin as a hard-cover edition. It features an extraordinarily beautiful young man from Pacifica in 64 color photographs taken from four rolls of film I shot last year in my lower Haight studio.

You may recall that Tadzio is an ethereal god-like presence - a golden boy - in Thomas Mann's 1911 novella, DEATH IN VENICE. I'm proud to be associated with such a masterpiece especially in a book published in Germany.

I really admire Mann's work which clearly positions homosexuality at the historical center of Western culture and I hope the images reflect it. At the end of the story, Mann mentions a camera set on a tripod facing the ocean in the direction of Tadzio. I imagine that I used that camera when I took the photos of Tadzio's for this book.

DO YOU IDENTIFY WITH ACHENBACH, THE PROTAGONIST IN "DEATH IN VENICE"?

LB: At my age that's a reasonable question, but truthfully I can say no, I don't. However, I do relate to some of the issues presented by Mann each time I photograph beauty at its peak whether its a beautiful man or a beautiful flower which I often combine in a photograph. It's all about Carpe diem. That wise admonition to pluck the day has absolutely nothing to do with retirement plans [laughs].

HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN A PHOTOGRAPHER?

LB: Well, I've been taking pictures for over 40 years, but it's only recently that I've come out as a photographer. I remember, in 1961, when I was an undergraduate at the University of New Hampshire, I entered a photography contest and unexpectedly picked up both the first and fourth prizes for two color slides. I didn't show any of my photographs after that until four years ago when I contacted Richard Labonte at A DIFFERENT LIGHT and told him that I had made a series of 11"x14" color prints of the 1989 San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Freedom Day Parade which he nicely let me exhibit at the book store.

WHAT DID YOU MEAN WHEN YOU SAID YOU CAME OUT AS A PHOTOGRAPHER?

LB: Looking back, I now realize that I could have taken my photography more seriously after I won those prizes 30 years ago. But what influenced me at the time, and stuck in my mind was a frat brother's reaction.

Although he never came right out and said it, he let me know that I really had no business taking the results of the contest seriously because I had no formal background in photography: I hadn't taken any courses in photography as he had, nor did I know the first thing about developing my own pictures as he did.

In short, I never questioned his assessment and took my winning the contest simply as a fluke. It was just like my being a Gay 'wanabe.' You know, I wanted-to-be Gay but I didn't see my gayness clearly enough to even acknowledge its presence. Repression relieved me of the responsibility of making any conscious decision about my gayness like living in an invisible closet. Similarly, I caved in to peer pressure and repressed my photography. So for me photography is all vaguely linked to gayness and a life-long process of Coming Out.

WHAT ARE YOUR PICTURES ABOUT?

LB: Pride and Acceptance. Pride as reflected in the attitude of each of my models and acceptance from the public I seek.

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR STYLE?

LB: Three years ago I wanted my style to be transparent so as to be invisible. I wanted to let the subject matter speak directly to the viewer without any particular style interfering. I had a sort of Warhol attitude.

At least that was the intention. I've never liked the fact that people get off identifying the artist when they see a work of art. I could never figure out what the pleasure was in spotting the style of particular painter or photographer? "Oh! there's a Georgia O'Keeffe!," "There's a Maplethorpe!" That sort of thing is neither difficult nor significant; yet, I suppose recognition - like a brand name - sells because people are insecure in their tastes.

Style is ego, an afterthought, a conclusion the stuff critics depend upon. Now, when I look back on my work the past few years, I realize that in spite of the my initial intention to downplay it, to subordinate it to the visual content, style simply imposes itself whatever one may think of it. My photos are as easily identifiable as anyone else's, but it's something I'm not particularly proud of. I see it a reflection of my limitation as a photographer.

IF STYLE ISN'T IMPORTANT, WHAT IS?

LB: What matters is the quality of the individual work. Nothing else. Energy is immediate and transformational. And in that respect, there's no difference between art and any other human expression. If one gets too self-conscious, it's all over. For example, compare Miró's works through the early 1950s with his later oversized made-for-the-mantelpiece prints.

WHAT ABOUT PORNOGRAPHY?

LB: Photographers can get into an artsy posing mode and use beautiful models to do nude photography because they want to distance themselves from pornography. As in real life, people are neither as interested nor as tolerant when confronted with the naked bodies of ordinary looking people, as they are when faced with drop-dead gorgeous people.

In other words, beautiful people seem to get away with things others can't, even in photography. The double standard for beauty is deeply rooted in Western culture and goes back to the ancient Greeks.

Then there's the more important issue of censorship surrounding the last great sexual taboo the showing of the erect male cock. I began to realize that "tasteful nudes" were often little else than rationalized self-censorship.

Why should a photo with a hard cock by definition be considered tasteless? Conventional morality must not dictate aesthetics. I want to integrate the cock into my photography.

That's why I recently did an issue of GRUF [Great Unshaven Faces], which unashamedly deals with pornographic imagery. It allowed me to combine traditional porn shots with sexually neutral nude shots. This, in turn, led me to"erotic portraits" that attempt to introduce the hard-on into the photo without it overpowering other elements of the image.

I believe sexually charged imagery can be more varied and interesting than we are used to seeing. We're conditioned to seeing porno in a very limited way. I think the potential of porno is very rich and has only barely been tapped.

WHO MAKES UP YOUR AUDIENCE?

LB: I'm not exactly sure. I've discovered, much to my surprise, that many of my photos have great appeal to straight women. I have a client who is a Midwestern novelist. And then there are the young gay men that seem to relate best with what I am doing and provide me with most of my models. I'd like to photograph older men, but I find few of them are open to it for all kind of reasons.

CAN YOU GIVE ME AN EXAMPLE OF YOUR EARLY PHOTOGRAPHY?

LB: A triptych comes to mind taken in the mid 1950's. One shows my mother and father seated in lawn chairs in our back yard in New Hampshire; there's another with just my mother; and a third of me which my mother shot under my supervision so I'll claim it as my own unless she objects. For me, these three photos evoke the 1950's, in a minimalist way. Definitely a past world - a past consciousness - yet it was once me and my world which I'm now resurrecting with the help of my computer and Photoshop.

Then there are a number of formal architectural and textural shots that preoccupied me in the 1960s: railings, walls, buildings that sort of thing. It's taken me a very long time to photograph people as I now do.

HOW MANY PICTURES HAVE YOU TAKEN?

LB: If you mean throughout my life, I really don't know, but there aren't that many. And I certainly haven't taken myself seriously enough to catalog the stuff. However, I'm a natural collector so I've kept every picture I've ever taken, perhaps four or five thousand in all. Many are slides form the 50's and 60's others are b/w prints taken with my Kodak Brownie Hawkeye camera. Have you ever seen one? A square black box that took square pictures and were printed with a white border.

HOW DOES YOUR PHOTOGRAPHY RELATE TO YOUR XEROX ART AND MAIL ART?

LB: I first played with Xeroxes in the '60s and Mail Art in the '70s and used both Xeroxes and 8"x10" color prints to document my mail art. Sometimes I made Xeroxes of color prints. Teddy, who worked with Gronk in L.A., and Jerry Dreva, in South Milwaukee, with whom I often collaborated, did much the same. Prints were too expensive and difficult to mail; so, we made photocopies that could be easily folded. These old color Xeroxes were great: '60s and '70s pre-grunge. The colors were quite garish with ink surfaces raised high enough for a blind person to read.

WHEN DID YOU START DOING XEROX ART?

LB: I first started working with photocopiers when I had deadlines to meet for my term papers when I was in grad school in 1964-65: I'd cut and paste the paper then get a clean photocopy if you whited-out the edges of the paste ups and adjusted the copiers contrast properly. This allowed for last minute editing. So was life before the personal computer.

It really wasn't until 1967-68 that I started playing and experimenting with b/w photocopiers and then color photocopiers. I was at the time I was producing French television programs for advanced language students under an Experimentation Fund Grant while teaching at Drake University in Des Moines. There wasn't much to do in Des Moines, but they had this brand new TV studio donated by Cowles Publications, headquartered in Des Moines, and this wonderful copier in the basement of Drake's Administrative Building where I spent a lot of time. This playing around with cut and paste collages opened the door to mail art, much like my Dada research in Europe led me to conceptual art in 1973-74.

WERE MANY PEOPLE DOING XEROX ART IN THE `60s?

LB: I really don't know. I'm no historian on the subject. All I know is that when I first got started with photocopiers, they were used almost exclusively for text - to copy business letters and annual reports. Anyone using these copy machines for graphics had to be playing; that is, making art. Photocopiers weren't at all accepted for graphics until Xerox produced this clear plastic sheet covered with a grid of tiny black dots that could be placed directly under the image. The dots broke down the white areas and produced results similar to the old photographs in newspapers before computer imaging took over. From an art point of view, I feel nostalgic for this period when technology just wasn't slick enough to interest business, however much it tried. With these early copiers grunge was a fact, not a special effect.

WAS XEROX ART POLITICAL?

LB: For me it was. My experience with photocopiers proved very useful when I began publishing a weekly newsletter and some flyers for Ann Arbor's Gay Community Services: one flyer which had a calendar of events printed over a full-face close-up of a cute young Caucasian boy whose hair I highlighted with a neon yellow Magic Marker. Our attendance shot up, but I got some political flack for that one. I collaborated with a graphic artist (whose name I've unfortunately forgotten) who did a pencil drawing of Allen Ginsberg, for a photocopy limited edition of poster we created to publicize a fund raising reception for the Gay Community Services' Center which Ginsberg signed at the event.

WHAT'S THE CONNECTION WITH "NEO-DADA" AND MAIL ART?

LB: To infiltrate and destroy the conventional art structures was a tactic often used by the early Dadaists. For example, Tristan Tzara's Dada newsprint magazine, published in Zurich from 1917 to 1919, advertised a deluxe limited edition on its back page. So it was not in the least original when mail artists mimicked limited edition prints by using photocopiers to create all kinds of signed, numbered multiples.

I once copied the format from an issue of S. HITchcock's mail artzine CABARET VOLTAIRE - the Blue Star Edition of 500 published in San Diego - which used a quarter page format: 4 1/4"x5." Many Xeroxes we exchanged were produced in numbered signed editions. Lists were kept of the recipients of these Xeroxes with the edition number they were sent. It was a way of ridiculing the Capitalist art market by creating limited editions and then giving them away. If it's free, it can't be worth anything. Right!

WHAT ARE PHOTOCOPIERS LIKE TODAY?

LB: They're great. My current favorite is the Kodak 1575 probably the best on the market for black & white images. The machine is so sophisticated that it has separate settings for glossies and newsprint. It also has great manual and auto blow-up capabilities. I sometimes find the black & white result superior to the original color prints.

Color can be distracting, so removing it can intensify a mood. If you're into special effects, you can also play around with second generation images which are far superior to any first generation images produced 30 years ago.

Now, I scan my negatives into my computer, transform the images in Photoshop, and print them out on an ink-jet printer. The color output from Epson's Stylus Color II with 720 dpi is really amazing for under $300 and if you need an 11"x17" blow-up of an ink-jet , you do it on a Canon color copier.

WHAT FIRST INTERESTED YOU IN XEROX ART?

LB: Photocopying is not as elitist an art medium as photography. Although the machines are expensive, the copies themselves cost relatively little. It doesn't take equipment, photo labs, oil paints. All you need is some paper, ingenuity, and a concept. Like writing, it's a very democratic medium. Most of the Xeroxes are given away or exchanged rather than sold. I've know few artists who have made any money doing these things. Gronk is the exception. So it's done because it's fun. What's interesting doesn't necessarily pay off in conventional ways.

END OF PART I

Part II: The 1970s Revisited: Biron on Robert Opel, Camille O'Grady, Jerry Dreva, Robert Maplethorpe, Gronk, Teddy, Jorge Caraballo, Clemente Padin, Guiglielmo Achille Cavallini, and other artists.