Breaking the golden handcuffs:

An Interview with Alexi Lubomirski

In our profit-driven society, artists oftentimes find themselves wed to one medium – afraid to lose traction in their primary field, it can be tough to experiment with other possibilities. In this interview, internationally acclaimed photographer Alexi Lubomirski describes what it can mean to tap into a greater creative valve: “While I used to fear that if I didn't keep feeding my photography, I would lose it, I now understand that you have to break away and expand your creative muscles to exist in a more constant, creative flow,” Lubomirski says. His latest mixed-medium collection, Talk to Me Always, brings personal poetry together with intimate photography. In addition to describing his artistic processes, he shares more about the inspirations for his book, namely his love for his wife and lessons from his stepfather about what matters most in life.

Ansel Adams said, “When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.” However, as you say in your collection’s introduction, instead of turning to silence you looked towards poetry. What aspects of the poetic medium allow you to create in ways that photography might not?

Once upon a time, I gave myself a pair of golden handcuffs in terms of photography because there was this stay-in-your-lane mentality. So, whenever I was inspired by something, whether I was sitting opposite my wife and she said something beautiful, or maybe it was the way the light bounced off her hair, I would always think how do I make this into a photograph? just because that’s my job title. It wasn't until I allowed myself to shake off those handcuffs that the inspirations began to manifest themselves through whatever medium suited them best. While I used to fear that if I didn't keep feeding my photography, I would lose it, I now understand that you have to break away and expand your creative muscles to exist in a more constant, creative flow.

There is a specific power in the poetic narrative as well. Sometimes when I was doing fashion shoots for magazines, I would compose stories in my head to inspire my photography. For example – and this was a more exaggerated one – I once said to a model, “I want you to pretend this is your character: you’re a young Peruvian girl who ran away from home when you were 16 and you married this rich oil tycoon from America. Because your parents said you shouldn't do it, when he later died of a disease you found yourself too proud to go back home...” and I go on to spin her this whole story. Luckily, she was a wonderful actress and really took on the role which elevated the shoot so much. When I finally started to write more poetry, at least when it wasn't about my wife as majority of my poetry has been, I was able to return to these pictures that I’d taken to excavate these stories all over again.

 While a benefit of photography is that you can tell a story with one image, there’s also a limit to that one image. There's only so much you can convey without detailing the emotions and the smells and the textures and all that wonderful stuff involved in a moment. I think about these details when I write poetry for my wife. When we got married 10 years ago, a lot of people said to me, “Look, you're a straight, successful fashion photographer so you're going to be unfaithful.” And I thought, what a horrible thing to say! So, I immediately went on a mission: how can I make sure that my marriage stays awesome and solid? I decided to put certain traditions in place. For example, we do a monthly instead of yearly anniversary to remember and celebrate this wonderful thing we have. On the eighth of every month, I decided she would get a pearl, a rose, and a poem. The pearls are so that we can see the collection grow, like a physical manifestation of our love growing – then one day, when we have granddaughter, we’ll string them all together so she can wear the necklace as a symbol of our union. Writing a poem each month has also been a fantastic exercise because sometimes, I’m writing in a state of I love this and that about my wife. I know everything about her: the way she looks at the children, the way she looks me. Then other times, we don't get on and I’m not in the mood to write about this woman that I live with. But I have to find that little strand of sunshine, the break through the clouds, then pull that piece out to write about it.

In this way, I think writing is such an amazing tool because we walk around with a million thoughts bouncing around in our heads. But when we start writing, we're forced to let one idea out at a time. Whenever I talk to creatives, I say we're so lucky because we get to tap into this creative ether which surrounds us. I remember talking to Bruce Springsteen when taking his picture about a year ago, and I was so eager to ask him about his process – do you ever have to make yourself write, or must it come organically? He said that sometimes, you can try and force it but it's difficult, it’s not fluid, and other times it's like you’ve hit a vein and as soon as you’ve hit that vein, you’ve just got to keep pumping. And it's true, because sometimes I'll go for a month without writing anything. Nothing inspires me. I'm just walking around everything as normal when suddenly, I’ll see something like my son or my wife looking a certain way, a leaf on the floor – nothing momentous. Then five poems will gush out and it's such a gift to be able to access that rhythm, whether you're a poet, a painter, a songwriter, whatever you practice. Working with other mediums is like being given a secret valve to tap into a greater understanding, allowing it to flow through you in different ways.

The book invites its reader with the title Talk to Me Always – what was the story behind creating and choosing this title for the collection?

There’s a two-part answer. The first relates to what we just spoke about in regards to the creative ether, asking it to talk to me always. I want to always have this connection, so I try to nurture it through meditation and through self-care. Each day, I get up at five o'clock in the morning so that I have those two hours by myself before the kids wake, before I’ve looked at my phone. I don't do anything. And that's when all the magic comes in, when you’ve just woken up and you sit on your bed as your body is still processing all the emotions that you felt during your dreams. Then, the memories of what you're supposed to be doing today or what you did yesterday start coming, and these two waves crash together as you lay.

“Talk to Me Always” was also one of my favorite poems in the book. It was about my stepfather who raised me – he was God’s gift; the perfect, most nurturing, loving, supportive father. About nine years ago, he was suddenly given three weeks to live. We all rushed home and sat with him. During that time, he taught me how what he was going through was really a blessing because rather than being, say, hit by a bus and gone immediately, we had three weeks to just be together and talk, saying all those things we’d always meant to. He was English and my mother is Peruvian so she was the Latin, emotional one of the house whereas he was a steadfast, salt-of-the-earth kind of guy. So, it was amazing in those last three weeks to finally tell him how much I loved him, because it's not the sort of thing you talk about when you’re English.

During that time, I would also ask him about things like, how do you feel as somebody who's at the end of their life, who is suddenly able to look at their own life in its entirety? What do you feel has been important in life? One of the most meaningful things he said was that when you know you're about to die, all the things you thought were important fall away. For example, he was a huge Chelsea supporter, massively into sports. But suddenly things like winning, comparisons – who has a better job, nicer car – all these things, he said, cease to matter and you're left with two or three things that are really, really important to you. For him, these were that he spent as much time as possible with his kids and family, that he loved and had been loved, that he'd done lots of work for charity. He gave me this incredible gift of what I call future hindsight: after he passed away, I decided that every decision I had to make would be based on how I would feel about it on my deathbed. I mean, it sounds a bit morbid, but it's so freeing. When he passed away, I realized how many of the poems in the book are actually related to him and what he’d taught me. Just hours after his passing, I wrote that poem “Talk to Me Always” because I knew he was still with me. I knew he was this guardian angel in my living life and also part of my past. Just keep talking to me, I thought, because I'm always going to be here.

Our review celebrates collages: the patchworks that make an individual, the power of combining art forms, the diversity in speech. Talk to Me Always speaks to this theme through its mixed bag of photos interspersed between the poetry. Could you describe your process for arranging the collection? 

At the beginning, I was very dubious about pairing photography with poetry, simply because everybody has a phone through which we’re inundated with imagery. I spoke to someone about Instagram a couple years ago and he told me that our reaction time for how fast we can we can assess an image, whether we’ll be interested or not, has quadrupled. The trouble with this exposure is that we've all built our own huge, visual reference libraries in which each image is attached thousands of emotions and feelings. So, I was worried that if I put an image next to a poem, it would pollute the interpretation. People would automatically look at the image first and it might make them sad because it reminds them of a holiday with an ex-boyfriend, or it maybe it’s happy, reminiscent of good night with friends from college, whatever it might be.

I worried that by the time they read the poem, it wouldn’t be a clean slate. But then I realized that, as with everything in life, you can look at this interaction as a positive or negative. Maybe, instead of taking away from one another, they could elevate their connection.

Often in your collection, the poems and photos are in close conversation, making it difficult to know which piece came first. I was particularly struck by the intimate portraits of your family in “Born of Love,” the anaphora in its poem “I Write for the Father” establishing the section as a haunting declaration of a parent’s role – and their subsequent responsibility. Did you ever write specific poems based off the photos, or vice versa?

Actually, those are two photos in the book which were taken by my wife and not by me. The photo alongside “I Write for the Father,” for example, is of my youngest who would constantly come into my bed and use me as a mattress. One day, my wife took that picture of us. I think that the way in which you place your poems with images and whether one informs the other is completely organic. I've tried to be very personal because I realized that oftentimes, my poetry has been an evolution of my journal entries. It’s like a more grownup version of that journal, a more polished version. Though there are a couple of fashion images in the collection, I chose only ones that have a real narrative or emotion in the picture. 

Recently, I’ve been putting these personal photos on Instagram for a series called The #AllLoveSeries, simple portraits of family or anyone who loves one another. I get such joy out of taking these pictures – I did another round yesterday and I'm just like my mother, I'll cry at anything. In these images, you can truly see the love and the connection that can exist between people. If I can get paid to take pictures like this, to capture that one special moment for the rest of my life, I will be so happy.

There were some images in Talk to Me Always that were the basis of the poems. There were other images, like the fashion stories I mentioned for example, where the story came first. And then there were pairs that had no relationship whatsoever but I felt as though when I looked at them, I had an immediate gut reaction to link them together. It’s like my process when I edit photographs. I’ll have to edit, let's say, 1000 pictures of Julia Roberts down to one and they're all mostly the same picture. There's always going to be those last two images where you’re thinking, which one is right? Her head will be tilted this way in one, that way in another. I tell people just shut your eyes, open them, and whichever one jumps out at you is it. And so that's how I pieced together some of the book – you have to go for it.

In your recent launch video for the collection, you mention writing poetry for nearly 12 years, and we’d love to hear more about your initial encounters with poetry and what inspired your continuous commitment to this art form.

I remember my first journal entry from when I was 14 and its first line exactly: I'm going to start writing how I feel about things. And then I just went off, using my journal to talk about

my deepest emotions and deepest thoughts and deepest insecurities. I did this all the way through my twenties. It wasn't until my thirties that these entries started becoming poems. It was like going from drawing with a pencil to suddenly painting with a paintbrush and colors – of course you can write down, “I feel sad because he didn't like me.” But if you start painting colors into that feeling, changing the brushstrokes and putting heart and soul through soft watercolors and oils – I get tingles talking about – then the emotions become so much more of a fully interactive immersion. 

Now, I always bring my notebook with me. When my wife is shopping, I’ll sit outside the dressing room and go yes, no, that sort of thing. While I'm sitting there, I’ll take out my notebook so that I don't get grumpy. On one of those trips it was Father's Day, so I started writing about fathers (later, this became the poem “I Write for the Father”), different types of fathers in the world and what they might represent. From what I’ve heard, it has touched so many people simply because it isn't just saying a father is a man, but rather it undulates into the different insecurities of men and the fact that fathers are not the stereotypically manly figures they have always been perceived as, those who do nothing but lay down the law: instead, they are evolving.

What does poetry mean to you personally and how has it become an indispensable tool and mental framework to you? In line with our journal’s beliefs, you’ve mentioned poetry as your form of “therapy” –  how does this medium allow you to structure your thoughts in a way unique from other artistic forms?

I think it's so important to be able to describe your feelings about a certain subject. That's where you get to start to understand yourself and you start to understand the world. Still, I think it can be very difficult for some people to allow themselves to enter into that emotional writing. Like you’ve said, poetry can have a stigma to it, especially among men. The only reason I allowed myself to start writing poetry initially was because I moved to America: in England where I grew up, there’s a business-like mentality where you can't rise too high, you can’t go too far outside your lane because everybody else is comfortable with you being where you are. So, it wasn't till I came here that I felt I could have the freedom to do what made me happy. All of a sudden, I was allowed to be ambitious – a dirty word in England. That's why I love New York because it's been such an incredible place for somebody who wants to take opportunities.

To go back to the idea of poetry as therapy, during the lockdown I’ve been telling many of my friends who are going through difficult times that you’ve got to write. And they’ll say, I can't – what am I supposed to write about? And so I’ll say, just write down “I feel sad” then base the next sentence on, “why do you feel sad?” and then just go and go and go and the floodgates will open. Writing is one of the greatest therapeutic tools out there. It’s easy to act like robots, locked into time, but we need to go back to empathy and emotions and compassion. On forums like Instagram these days, we are pummeling ourselves with split-second micro emotions. When you're looking at a photo, you'll be jealous, happy, bothered but you don't stop to ask yourself to process why. You just shove the thoughts into the back of your head and they pile up, these micro emotions that are never dealt with.

So, I think it's incredibly important to do these exercises whether it's writing, meditation, or just talking about feelings. Because otherwise, we lose connection with each other and even with ourselves. You know, if I stop at a red light, my hand automatically goes into my pocket – I can't stop it. So when I do sit down to write poetry, it allows me to flush the system and process the stuff that often ends up needing more attention and deeper reflection.

As a great initiative, the proceeds from the book are going to Concern Worldwide – could you share why you’ve chosen this particular organization & elaborate on your work and involvement with them?

I think when I was about 14 or 15, I remember reading a passage in the Bible about giving 10% of your earnings to charity. For some reason, that idea stuck with me as something really cool. I'd like to do that one day, I thought. But whatever jobs I had when I was growing up, you know, working at the garden center or delivering washing machines, didn't allow me much money to spend. When I got my first paycheck as a photographer, I went out in the street and decided that I’d help the first person I saw who was in need. There, on the first corner, somebody was collecting money for Concern Worldwide. I started talking to them and was moved, ultimately setting up a monthly donation then and there. 

I reached out to Concern Worldwide when I went to publish my first book, “Princely Advice for a Happy Life” and I said, “Listen, would you mind if I attach your charity to my book?” Since then, and with the advertising help of the people I photograph, that book has been translated into six languages and raised tens of thousands of dollars. I’ve also become a global ambassador for Concern Worldwide and really, they're just incredible. You know, we all have empathy for these causes every now and then when we see them on TV. We wake up saying, I want to help. But then we get stuck on who should I give to? and the list becomes so large that we end up giving to no one. The great thing about Concern Worldwide is that they do everything from refugee crisis aid to bringing basic needs to people around the world. So, to those who are having trouble making a decision, I recommend giving to Concern Worldwide to know that you’re helping so many people.