William Kentridge on the Excess of the Studio

This interview originally appeared in Aperture, issue 249, “Reference” (Winter 2022).

In the video artwork Drawing Lesson 47 (Interview for New York Studio School) (2010), William Kentridge stages a split-screen conversation with himself. William Kentridge stubbornly refuses to answer William Kentridge’s straightforward questions: “Can you describe your life as an artist? Can you say, rather, what it is that you did today to give us some sense of how you fill your hours?”

Speaking from his studio in Johannesburg, Kentridge tells the writer and fellow South African Jonathan Cane, in response to those same questions, that he had been in his studio collaborating with editors and artists; working on a large ink drawing for his career-spanning solo show at the Royal Academy of Arts, London; preparing for a major presentation at the Broad, in Los Angeles; and revitalizing a nineteenth-century theatrical technique called Pepper’s Ghost. Internationally recognized for his drawings, animated films, theater and opera sets, sculptures, tapestries, and performance pieces, Kentridge is not, in fact, a photographer. Yet, as he describes, his childhood discovery of forensic photographs recording a terrible massacre, his boxes of reference pictures, and the images Instagram’s algorithm filters into his feed have all informed a photographic approach when Kentridge puts charcoal to paper.

Jonathan Cane: I interviewed David Goldblatt for Aperture in 2015, and I think that’s why they’ve asked me to do this.

William Kentridge: He was a real photographer. [Laughs]

Crane: Can we start with you discovering the box of photographs in your father’s office?

Kentridge: In 1961, when I was six, my father was one of the lawyers representing families at the inquest into the Sharpeville Massacre. He had his study down the corridor in the house we lived in. I went in there one afternoon, and there was a yellow box, which I thought looked like a box of chocolates. It was bright yellow and was, in fact, a box of Kodak 8-by-10 film. I opened it, expecting to find chocolates. So that was already kind of transgressive, to be stealing a chocolate in the middle of the afternoon.

But instead of chocolates, what it contained was a pile of glossy, black-and- white photographs by Ian Berry. Photographs of crowds gathering, and then of the shooting itself. The police on top of Saracens [armored vehicles], photographed from the vantage point of the crowd outside the gates of the police station. And then shots of people running. And then, also, many photographs, both close-up and wider shots, of bodies on the ground—of someone lying with what looked like a small stain on the back of their jacket, and then, in the next photograph, the body rolled over so you can see the exit wound with the whole chest blown open.

It was completely shocking, as if this was my dessert for looking. There was a huge amount of guilt. It was only many years later, when my father and I had a public conversation in Munich, organized by Okwui Enwezor as part of Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life, in 2013, that I had to tell the story again. My father said that, yes, he’d heard the story, but he’d never had a chance to apologize to me for having allowed those photographs to be where a six-year-old could find them.

It was the shock of the forensic image, so much less present now, that gave me a lingering sense of the photograph holding a kind of truth, a record of the world, rather than a construction of the world. Now, Photoshop, algorithms, and filters on your phone give the sense of a photograph being something there to be altered, something not to be accepted at face value.

Crane: You aren’t, in fact, a photographer.

Kentridge: No. But I use a lot of photographs as references and, more recently, as collage elements, constructing a drawing out of things deliberately photographed, like elements of a still life—just taking them with my phone and then changing the scale and physically gluing them together. I suppose it could be done by a more skilled person in Photoshop. But it very much has to do with the physical activity of cutting and gluing them, seeing all the things at the edges that arise, which would not have been there if I’d been working in a pristine environment like Photoshop.

Crane: Let’s talk about photogravure, because maybe that’s the closest you come to making photographs.

Kentridge: Yes. On the one hand are the series of drawings I have made, which I think of as photographs, that instead of using silver nitrate use charcoal and paper. The essential construction of the drawing is the construction of a photograph. A bird held by a clamp on a medical stand: all the effort is spent lighting and arranging and taking the photograph, knowing that it will be rendered finally as a drawing, but very close to that constructed photograph. In the end, it’s a drawing, but its language and its source is very much a photograph that is made in order to be drawn.

It was the shock of the forensic image that gave me a lingering sense of the photograph holding a kind of truth.

But photogravures are about the transformation into the etching medium through the strange alchemy—a real art form—of the degree of humidity in the room, the hardness of the gelatin, the different degrees of the acids. It’s a very complicated way of doing something which is done with the push of a button on a computer screen. But it gives the extraordinary richness of the black of an etching and aquatint, and the silveriness of it. It’s something other than the source photograph. Also, one has to adjust the source photograph because the acid and the aquatint react differently; they push the lighter parts lighter and the darker parts darker, so to find the balance in the middle is a bit like lithography. It needs a real expert to deal with the medium.

It’s also about either finding or constructing the photograph, knowing that it’s going to be turned into the photogravure print. That’s very much part of the consideration. What kind of paper, what kind of charcoal would I use if I was making a drawing? I presume that it’s like the way many photographers would have thought about which paper stock would they use, how contrasty would it be, whether it would be a slow or long exposure with the enlarger, as well as which film stock they would have chosen.

Crane: It’s also part of your broader collaboration, working in a larger studio with specialists and technicians.

Kentridge: Yes. Basic etching, you can teach someone in a morning. Photogravure, like lithography, requires someone whose métier it is. A lot of the work I do in the studio, if it can’t be done with charcoal and paper, and maybe some glue and hot wax, it needs other people.

Obviously, in the theater context, there are many, many collaborators—designers, performers, musicians—that’s normal. With prints and with sculpture also, I work with a print studio or with a foundry. There is a particular platemaker for photogravures I work with, and two printers. For drypoint, there’s a different printer.

It’s always a negotiation between the image and what’s possible in the collaboration with the particular skills or sensibility of the collaborator, and what that suggests to me, backward and forward. I wouldn’t have arrived at the images except from working with particular collaborators.

Crane: You like that?

Kentridge: Yes. I like the possibilities. It’s a nudge of something from outside of myself to get the work going. It’s a little bit like starting a piece of theater and someone saying to me, Well, here is your space. We are offering you the armory, which is eighty-five meters wide. That’s enough of an impulse for me to say, Let’s see what can happen with that. Here’s a Greek amphitheater. Let that be your starting point. Here’s a printmaking technique. See what themes that would suggest. What is the material? It’s allowing the material and the medium to be part of the thinking. It doesn’t start with: Here’s an image I want to make. What is the best medium? Let me find somebody who can do colored linocuts. It starts with: Here is someone who does colored linocuts. What images or what themes does that suggest?

Crane: What we’re talking about is the studio in an extended form.

Kentridge: Yes.

Crane: Recently, at the Whitechapel Gallery’s A Century of the Artist’s Studio, I watched your video piece Drawing Lesson 47 (Interview for New York Studio School), in which you interview yourself. I’d like to re-ask you a question that you pose but won’t answer in that work.

Kentridge: I’m sure there’s a good reason why I don’t answer it.

Crane: You ask yourself: “Can you describe your life as an artist? Can you say, rather, what it is that you did today to give us some sense of how you fill your hours?”

Kentridge: Today, it was getting ready for the Royal Academy exhibition in London. It started off with a photographer from Wallpaper magazine. Then I went on with a drawing for the Royal Academy, a large ink drawing in many sections, which has a lot of text in it. I am too messy with painting text, so there’s someone in the studio who is a champion of neat lettering. I was briefing her and projecting the lettering to the right size.

Then upstairs to the edit room, where there are four editors at work on different projects, primarily an episodic series of nine films about life in the studio, which is nearly finished; it premiers at this year’s Toronto Film Festival.

I was in town at the Centre for the Less Good Idea, where we’re doing a workshop on a particular theatrical technique called Pepper’s Ghost, which is a nineteenth-century technique using a semi-silvered mirror and lighting in front and behind the mirror, so as the light goes bright or dark, you either see what’s behind or what’s reflected in the mirror.

Then I came back to work on the drawing.

Then a Zoom call with the Athens Epidaurus Festival, a first conversation about doing a production in the Greek amphitheater. It may or may not happen.

Then back to the drawing, until our conversation now. But very often, when everybody leaves the studio, that’s the quiet time for more drawing to occur. There will be another three or four hours when I can quietly get on with that.

Crane: How will you install the Royal Academy exhibition?

Kentridge: There are nine or eleven beautiful galleries in the Royal Academy. So the exhibition was shaped around those spaces. In the largest room, we have a series of projections from the series of Soho Eckstein films called Drawings for Projection (1989–2020). There’s a room in which we hang a series of large tapestries made specifically for that space, for the scale and grandeur. There’s a room which is a forest of drawings of trees, and leading from that, a room which is related to the chamber opera Waiting for the Sibyl (2019). There’s not exactly a reconstruction of the stage in that room, but it’s not simply a projection on a wall.

Each room has a shape. But the central room is a version of the studio, which is to say, an excess of different forms together— sculpture, drawing, the drawing lessons, all those expanding outward into the exhibition. Insofar as there’s a theme, it’s about the excess of the studio.

Crane: Next to Drawing Lesson 47 at the Whitechapel were the iconic photographs and films by Hans Namuth.

Kentridge: Yes, of Jackson Pollock.

Crane: Those photographs became the way we understood what it meant to paint Abstract Expressionist works.

Kentridge: Absolutely. Then there are the photos and film of Picasso drawing with a torch. The series of films that I’ve been making, they are not copying the Namuth film, but they are about the activity of both making and making meaning in the studio. The image and the theme of the artist in his or her studio is certainly not a new one. The Namuth was a new way of seeing Jackson Pollock. There’s a later version with the Bruce Nauman films of himself in the studio, where the studio both becomes a film set but also the canvas. I still hold in my head Georges Méliès, the very early filmmaker in the 1890s, who also would paint his backdrops and then perform in front of them, in the way that you could say Jackson Pollock has his backdrop and is performing in front of it and is making it at the same time.

There are the fantastic photographs of Matisse in his studio, either in his white dentist’s smock drawing a naked lady or holding a dove in his hand and drawing the dove.

Crane: You are involved in a meticulous recording of your own work. You employ photographers to record carefully what you do, but you also stage the studio.

Kentridge: In the film series Self Portrait as a Coffee Pot (2020–22), the studio is staged. It’s both a record of making and a construction. It’s not just a camera recording the studio. It’s taking the studio as subject matter and allowing that to expand, or be spoken about, or shown. For example, in several of these films about studio life, there’s a nighttime sequence where the old movie camera and an old sousaphone are either moving around, observing, or dancing. There are paper rats that come alive. It’s not just a record of the drawings.

We do try to take photographs of work as it is done to put in a database. Because when it comes to an exhibition like at the Royal Academy, they say, “These are the photos we need.” It’s important to have them in some order—or, it makes life easier to have them in an order.

Crane: Can we talk about drawing proper and photography proper?

Kentridge: Drawing proper and photography proper. For me, when I think of the photography of someone like David Goldblatt, for him it was the “is-ness” of what there was. It never struck him to say, to make his point, Let me take this sign, which I found somewhere, and put it in this other context. Never.

Crane: Never.

Kentridge: It would be complete anathema. It’s about finding those moments of synchronicity and relationship in the world: the fact that a woman is sitting, and there is what looks like a halo of a window behind her. It’s about saying the world is full of wonderful and strange things for us to discover.

I’ve taken photographs like that, but as references to be chopped up to be used for collage. Much in the way, say, an eighteenth-century drawer might go with his sketchbook into the woods and draw this branch and that root and that rock, but then come back into the studio and think: I’m going to make the rock bigger and move the tree across; on page seventeen, I’ve got a nice branch that can come into the top. The result is a collage, even though it’s an invisible collage. The same with John Constable’s landscapes, where the size in his sketches of houses, trees—all of this is up for grabs.

I discovered this when I was working in movies as a set designer—as a very bad set designer. “Oh, the actor is too short; put them on a box.” “The table is not at the right angle; tilt it at an angle.” I realized, Well, this is a way one can construct a drawing. It’s very much a construction rather than a discovery.

So whatever form I’m working in, whether it’s a piece of theater or a film or a documentary series, it’s with the ideas or the strategies of drawing, of something that is there to be constructed, based on fragments of the world that one has observed. Or one has a provisional coherence made by different fragments put together in different ways. And, usually, not hiding the fragmentation. In this approach, one is very aware that you’re taking fragments and making a possible coherence from them. Which is different from photography. When I think of great documentary photography, and the integrity of the photographer, one hopes not to view a lie in their photographs. I’m thinking of David [Goldblatt] here. Whereas with a visual artist making a drawing, one is aware that it is all a construction. It is all a lie.

Crane: Do you use an iPhone to take photographs?

Kentridge: Yes, when I go to a museum, whereas before I would have taken a sketchbook. Then, when I get home, I’ll often look through and make notes—to not forget this image, this piece of pottery, that detail in that Manet painting of how he painted that gold leaf on the champagne bottles. I use it as an aide-mémoire, as a notebook. And there are family snapshots.

In fact, we used a phone for the film Oh to Believe in Another World (2022), which accompanied Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 10. That was made in cardboard models, with photostats on them of buildings, making a kind of museum. We filmed that largely with a phone since it could be pushed through the model, and then we projected it at a huge scale.

I have a decent camera for filming and for doing animation, which until the second-to-last film was all 35mm—now it’s filmed with a digital camera. I don’t own any more still cameras.

Crane: Do you intend to collect the images and references together somewhere as an archive?

Kentridge: There’s a shoebox full of photographs from the days when one sent photos to the chemist, and they came back printed. In the last years, I wish I had printed out more, not because I feel a need for them to be displayed, but just to have them. Flicking through those photos like a Rolodex is a way of activating thoughts and memories.

Do I have references? Most of them are photostats or pieces of paper stuck together. There are files of them. They don’t get thrown out, but they are not categorized or ordered.

Crane: What will happen to them?

Kentridge: Who knows? There are also 120 notebooks with lectures and notes and drawings. They’re not being thrown out.

Crane: Do you have an archival strategy?

Kentridge: No. I gave the raw film footage to the George Eastman House because they have a whole department and expertise in preserving film stock. The digital material is harder to preserve than the film material. They do all the migrating onto different hard drives and whatever is needed. I haven’t done it for two years, since COVID. I need to send them a big hard drive with the most recent stuff that just sits there and is not in the cloud. But the physical objects are all still here.

Crane: Which photographers do you look at?

Kentridge: Santu Mofokeng’s photographs of the caves. David, of course, but that’s kind of an obvious one—I spent a lot of time talking to him about his photographs and looking very closely at them.

Crane: Do you have any of David’s photographs in your house or in your studio?

Kentridge: Yes. We have, I think, four or five.

Crane: The 1978 photograph The garden of Felicia and Sydney Kentridge, Houghton?

Kentridge: My father has a photo of that. We were given one after David died; Steven, his son, gave us a print. The photograph of two women at Die Hel at the concrete dam. And one of the landscapes, and one of the mining photographs, and another of a building, I think His Majesty’s Building in Johannesburg.

I also have a set of Rodchenko photographs, a portfolio from his negatives, not printed during his lifetime—printed by his son or his family. So not crazy expensive. Also, a similar thing with August Sander photos of artists from People of the Twentieth Century. A small Kertész photograph and a larger one of Kiki of Montparnasse.

Crane: Your studio is on Instagram. Do you ever go on Instagram?

Kentridge: Yes. I do. I go down that rabbit hole. Starting at breakfast, paging through and seeing both people I follow and then whatever the algorithm has decided I need to watch. For some reason, I am shown a lot of woodworking feeds, and I see a lot about large-scale ships at sea, and parkour. The algorithm has decided this is what I need to see.

This interview originally appeared in Aperture, issue 249, “Reference.”