JC: Sometimes we’re surprised that they don’t understand it. People look really quickly at images because there are so many of them, but if you look at some of our images that way you may think, ‘Oh, it’s Photoshop’.

AS: I hear a lot of people who don’t understand our images – who don’t look at photographs closely – if they’re in an exhibition; they say, ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, but they don’t think about it. It’s not an active viewing of something.

WE: Marshall McLuhan had a great phrase. He said modern viewing is pattern recognition. So people just walk in, they try to grasp basic concepts, ‘OK, colour photographs, big colour photographs, iconic pictures, seem to recognize them, fabricated…’, and that’s it, for most people. Very few people are going to look carefully … but some do.

AS: They come and see, and they think, ‘Oh, it’s the Titanic, yes … but why…?’ We want to activate the viewer; to push them to think about our photographs, and think about the original.

WE: It takes a minute. I mean, if I were just to walk in, I’d see this photograph, I’d think, ‘Is that just a photograph, a blow-up of a photograph, I’ve seen many times before?’ But then you notice details that start to question that, and then you start to question what you’re seeing as a whole. You’re playing with people’s perceptions there.

AS & JC: Yes.

JC: But another funny thing is that we’ve also had questions from people who’ve said, ‘I like your “Making of…”.’ The title was ‘Making of…’, and they came to it to see the final image, you know. But they think this is just the ‘making of’ – in other words, it’s not finished yet – and the final image will follow….

WE: You’re touching on so many things here. We’re used to thinking of photographs as sealed records of the past, and then somehow you’re bringing it back to life, so you’re kind of suggesting that it’s actually happening now, in a way. By refabricating it, you’re bringing it back, watching again….

JC: Yes, it’s a moment; a moment of time.

AS: But when we’re setting it up, it’s not a moment any more, it’s staged, and the surroundings seem like the documentation of our setup – the scattered tools and materials that look like a documentation of a normal day of work in our studio; and when you look outside the studio windows you see the weather conditions, which are a very clear statement of being ‘at this time’.

WE: But it still seems to be happening, and this is so effective. I would think some people would think – when looking at the wall of water for the tsunami, for example – ‘Oh, they have some kind of pump’ that actually is pouring out, you know; you have the feeling that in a second it’ll come forward…. And also there are two kinds of pictures. You have pictures where the event is very spectacular – like Concorde, or the World Trade Center, or the jets colliding – and it’s a very momentary, almost split-second thing; whereas with the Titanic sailing away, the historic event hasn’t happened yet…. The sister ship was the Majestic, and it never sank, it went on many years’ faithful service. So, if you said, ‘This is the Majestic’, it would change everything, because … nothing of great significance ever happened. It’s because we know what happened that the image punches us in the gut…. With some pictures – like the Black Power salute – we have to bring some history to it. Could we take one photograph and talk about it in detail?

AS: Man on the moon. We’re selecting this because it’s a very famous image … and it’s a very simple image, just a little bit of dust or sand, nothing else.

WE: And how long would you have taken for this photograph?

AS: I would say two weeks. The first problem was to find the right material to simulate the surface of the moon. We tried it with sand, with flour and different
things, and finally arrived at cement powder.

WE: And there’s the photograph. Is that the original?

AS: Yes, in a lot of our images you will see the printed-out original photograph.

WE: So, why did it take two weeks?

JC: The problem is the details. The real problem was to be satisfied with this footprint, because we’d built this piece of wood that simulates the boot, and you
have to do the print in one go. And we didn’t manipulate the footprint; we really did that many, many, many times before we got it right.

WE: This dust goes everywhere too, huh?

JC: Yeah.

AS: It’s also very dangerous.

JC: The material is perfect for the image, but it’s really fragile, so….

WE: So in a case like this, you’re touching on another subject, which is the conspiracy theory about how this never happened. How do you feel about entering that zone?

JC: We have images where it’s obviously staged or maybe faked, like we have ‘Nessie’, that’s proved to be fake.

WE: That’s not true, is it? I still believe in the Loch Ness Monster!

AS: A question we also sometimes get asked is if we believe in the hoax. But for us this work is not about the hoax.

JC: If a magazine wants to reprint an image in the context of conspiracy theories, we always reject it.

WE: But what’s interesting is we get trapped in situations we don’t intend. This crazy conspiracy thing is very real. A photograph like this could escape your control. You could find it on the internet as supposed proof that it was all fabricated. You don’t get any credit, it’s just an image … and it’s tweeted or Instagrammed or whatever, and suddenly it’s all over the place. ‘Hoax, hoax!’ So in a way, what you’re doing, with no intention, is you’re exposing yourselves to this kind of doubting; a cultural moment where people are dealing with photographs constantly in their lives, like never before … as you say, not looking, really. Everything is taken out of context. It can be removed, somebody can see this, snap it, snap it in the exhibition, and say, ‘Hey guys, look, proof!’ Have you ever thought about that – that kind of misuse of your photographs – as an issue?

JC: For me, no. I don’t think our images are perfect enough.

AS: It hasn’t concerned us, but we want to have control over the context where an image is used, because the use and the context of the image were and still are very important. I think now, in the era of fake news – it’s probably the first year or the second year of this big important phrase – it’s good for us, for our work, that people are concerned about the truth of photography and what truth someone
wants to tell with photography.

WE: Your work really does get at this question of truth. You’re exposing photography in a way. You’re kind of opening it up….

AS: I think if you say photography shows the truth, you will always find photography that can support a conspiracy theory, because photography is only one part of the world at one time; it’s not showing everything.

WE: Yeah, sure, it’s a kind of dilemma. We’re never going to escape from subjective view. But your work really does force people to think about these things
… though it’s your love of photography that really does it; it’s not theory-driven.

AS & JC: No.

WE: Coming back to the Robert Frank you’re working on right now…. That’s a kind of homage, no? Or not?

AS: Yes … but the whole series is a homage to all the photographers, including those who are not very famous and whose images are probably not as iconic as the others.

WE: Do you feel part of something, part of a community? It can give strength to an artist if he or she doesn’t feel completely alone; if, you know, this has been going on for a long time, and people have been finding their own way, and then you maybe hear somebody talking and you realize they didn’t always have a good time of it; there was a mental block, a fallow period. I’m always interested in this community. And in the past, artists didn’t really think about anything outside: the Swiss photographers were only concerned about having their exhibitions in Switzerland, the French were only concerned about having their exhibitions in France, and the British in Britain…. It was really like that, years ago when I started, and of course if you offered them something outside they were thrilled, but it wasn’t their frame of reference. But now the frame of reference for most people is the world, basically, or the industrialized world, and you’re just as likely to see something on the internet, and you don’t care who the person is or where they live if the work interests you. You read that this guy, he’s a Chilean photographer, or a Brazilian photographer, but it doesn’t make any difference, so that’s what I’m asking. For your generation, out of art school for a little more than a decade, how are you seeing your world of photography at this moment and in the near future? Are you feeling positive about it? Do you feel positive about possibilities, you know, earning a living and….

JC: Yes, right now we see it positively, but we didn’t have a strategy to cross borders, we didn’t really plan. At some point you kind of lose control of the work. I mean, when you publish your images on an internet site, then you’re losing control of it. At first we were a little bit scared, as you didn’t have the control, but then we kind of accepted it…. I mean, it’s our aim not to stay in Switzerland with this work … but we are also a little bit lucky. There are many good artists in Switzerland who might not have the luck we are having right now.

WE: Yes, nobody really wants to talk about the future more than two years or off. But artists have the additional pressure of having to come up with something new.

JC: Especially with this work, which has been very successful – that puts us under pressure to get something new.

WE: You have to remember Bob Dylan going electric, and almost everybody hating him for it! It has to feel right. You don’t move because you feel you should move. You move to something new because you feel it’s the right moment to do that.

JC: I think we could keep doing it, but at the end of the day it has to be OK for us.

WE: Yes, it does. And the other thing is, once you finish a body of work, it gets better with time. It’s like putting wine down; it gets better. So it might be, in terms of creative juices, dead for you, it’s finished, but it actually has a life of its own, gets more interesting with time.

AS: But it’s only a small percentage of the wine and the photographers that remain.

WE: Yes, but if the work is good – because there’s a lot of mediocre work; it’s OK, it’s fine, but it’s not special…. But the work that’s really interesting will always look interesting. Like Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, Berenice Abbott, all that stuff that you know is not going to lose its interest, it only accumulates its interest, it comes back over and over again. So, as long as the work is good and original, it becomes more interesting. So that’s something to build on always.

AS: Yes, those famous photographers, they are timeless in one way, but in another way they are representing their time.

WE: That’s right, yes, and that’s why we turn to them. And it’s interesting, there’s a site online called coveringphotography.com, and it’s just covers of books collected by an American photographer, Karl Baden. He’s collected 6,000 books now, or something like that number, all with covers bearing famous photographs. I’m not talking about photography books per se, but novels, books of poetry, non- fiction, etc. And what’s so interesting is the photographers who are being used the most – legally, but sometimes illegally, without permission – are Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, Man Ray, Bill Brandt, August Sander, Edward Weston. And they are not the contemporary celebrity photographers, not the hip younger photographers, not the fashionable names. It’s amazing, the classics keep coming back. I just saw, in the bookstore in Geneva, an Edward Steichen on the cover of a modern romance novel. It was a black-and-white photograph, it had been coloured, and on the back it didn’t even credit him, just the agency…. [Laughter] But I recognized who it was, and that’s not bad for somebody who made the photograph in 1930. So it still speaks, that’s what I’m saying, it still speaks. And that’s what’s interesting about history: it moves, it adds new things while others fade – some of those things become less interesting, and some of them become more interesting. As the cliché goes, ‘Time will tell’. So you have to just keep working – that’s the whole thing, to keep working. Artists, if they stop working … well, everyone else loses interest fast. I’m glad to hear that you guys haven’t finished yet!