The photography exhibition “Younger Than I’ll Be” opens today at BAMart in Brooklyn and runs through May 23. Curated by Skye Parrott, it includes works by Jack Pierson, David Armstrong, Larry Clark and Weegee, to name but a few. Parrott is a photographer in her own right, as well as the creative director of Dossier Magazine, Dossierjournal.com and a woman about town. I caught up with Parrott — who is as lovely as she is busy — to talk about the new show, the new iPad and New York when she was young.
Q.What was your inspiration for putting together this show?
A.When BAM first asked me to curate a show, I knew I wanted it to be a photography show and I knew I wanted it to be about New York. I kind of thought it was going to be a broad survey, showing New York in some of its many incarnations. But when I started putting images together, I found that what I was doing was building a picture of New York as it was when I was growing up. I wanted to talk about how the city felt in the late ’80s in early ’90s, and how it felt to be a kid and then a teenager here. It’s a place and a time I have a lot of nostalgia for.
Tell me about the photographers that you have chosen to include — it is a pretty broad selection artistically speaking, ranging from Weegee to Nan Goldin.
I started with photographs that were quintessentially New York for me. Having worked with Nan Goldin for so long, I know her work inside and out, and she’s been so influential to my work that I couldn’t imagine doing a show about New York without including her. I also thought almost immediately of Larry Clark’s “Kids” stills, Robert Longo’s “Men in the Cities” and my mother’s photograph of the kids in the fire hydrant. Beyond that, I wanted to include photographers whose work I feel strongly about and who feel like New York to me. A lot of photographers in the show have contributed to Dossier, and they’re all people whose work I really admire.
Dossier is your biannual fashion, arts and literature magazine and Web site. Will we be able to see an iPad version soon?
We just started working with a new team of Web developers, so we’ve been discussing a lot of things, including the iPad. We’re in the process right now of relaunching our Web site, and once that’s done we’re going to start thinking about other digital initiatives.
Back to the show: what are some of the standout images that you would like to share with the Moment readers?
Some of my personal favorites are Cass Bird’s image of girls flashing on the F.D.R., my mother’s photograph of kids playing in a fire hydrant in the late 1970s, and Robert Longo’s black and white “Men in the Cities” photographs. I think they were originally studies for the drawings, but as photographs they’re really incredible.
Are there any other photography shows that you would recommend seeing right now?
There are two photo shows that are up right now that I haven’t seen yet but would love to: the Lisette Model show at the Jeu de Paume in Paris and “Haunted” at the Guggenheim. I also really loved the Robert Bergman show at Yossi Milo that recently closed.
What’s on the horizon for you — what is next after “Younger Than I’ll Be” closes?
I have two shows of my own work coming up this year — one this summer at the Dublin Photo Festival, which is going to be a slide show, and then later in the year I have my first solo show in New York at Capricious Gallery. I’ve been working on that a lot and I suspect it’s going to take up a lot of brain space until it goes up this fall. I also have a show I’m curating later in the year out in L.A. And we’re just getting started working on the new issue of Dossier.
What is the most important thing we need to know about you?
I really love New York.
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amela Love
