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Timothy Archibald
Timothy Archibald is the author of the photography book Sex Machines. His involvement with this community of people who construct these homemade sex machines almost ruined his career. Not because of the content, but because Archibald immersed himself so deeply for so long in this subculture.
Here, we talk with him about the inception and creation of Sex Machines.
Chief Magazine: Were you into photography right off the bat, or was it something you kind of found later on?
Timothy Archibald: I got into it pretty early. At age 14, there was this guy in the local town who would teach photography to different types of people. He taught a photography class to college students, but also liked to see how other people related to photography: he taught in China, he taught retarded adults, all sorts of people above and beyond college-aged kids. He thought it would be neat if he let some high school or junior high kids into the class, to break up the general vibe of the thing, so I was a part of that.
Sounds great.
The teacher, he was trying to teach you photography as a way to learn about the world, you know, as a way to learn about yourself, not necessarily how to process film. I mean, by age 14 I was your average screwed up kid, trying to find my way. That’s what photography became for me. He was really teaching a form of expression, and it stuck. I think that’s why I’m still doing it.
So he was a pretty big influence early on.
Oh, totally. I bring him up in every interview. His name’s Martin Benjamin. He still teaches at Union College in Schenectady, New York. Schenectady is this terrible, disgusting, failed industrial town. The area is overrun by crack and the public schools are terrible, but there’s this weird, pseudo-Ivy League private school right in town for whatever reason. This guy taught photography there. And so, as a kid you’re impressionable, you can be molded, and I kind of thought this guy’s brand of photography was just about exploring the world, learning about yourself, and I think that’s something he drilled into me when I was young and I wasn’t able to let go of that.
So how did you originally start choosing the subjects that you were into?
The teacher, Martin Benjamin, he was into photographers like Robert Frank, kind of photographic people who were interested in expressing themselves. Like the work of photographer Bill Owens, who did the landmark book Suburbia.
The idea was that you would go out, and try to not just photograph your friends, or your friends dressed up, but try to go out and meet people in real life who were doing something that’s different than what your life is like. And the funny thing about Schenectady being this failed industrial town, it offered a lot of good stuff to photograph. It’s a very ugly town, everything looks like its right out of Robert Frank’s The Americans. Everything looks like it hasn’t been cleaned since 1960 or something. It’s old and dirty and the buildings look like they’re falling apart. Nothing is modern about it. It lends itself to exploring. It wasn’t like living in a modern suburb where you ate at the Red Robin. You know what I mean?
It wasn’t a case of everything being sanitized, packaged and presented to you.
Right. It had like weird places that seemed to have some history. People who looked like they weren’t like you.
Did you have any form of nostalgia with your new shots of mascots and kind of the high school oriented stuff? Was that stuff close to your older work at all?Oh no, no, that stuff’s all my modern attempts to sell out. What essentially happened was, I put so much time and energy working on the Sex Machines project, that my career, my job – essentially the way I employ myself is by freelance photography, doing work for magazines, and doing work for advertising – and I got so wrapped up in that Sex Machine thing, that I essentially let my career pan. I totally lost it all. And then the aftermath, once the book came out, and we put all this energy into promoting the book, I had to come up with a little commercialized, sure thing to try and make a living. Like the things you see on my website, like The Last Mascot, and After School Special, Yeah that’s my attempt to use the humor that’s in my photographs, polish it up, and make it something that’s going to fit into the commercial marketplace.
Oh God, I can see that.
Yeah that was all done to try and resurrect…
Yeah, damage control.
Sex Machines was something that I had worked on for a number of years, and started as just an interesting project that I had an excuse to take pictures and promote myself with it, and then it got bigger, and I started selling versions of it to magazines overseas. I started getting interviews for it, it became a bigger thing, I got a book publishing deal, we started exhibiting it, and it was great, but I started treating it like my day job, you know what I mean? The thing is, I never made any money off of it. So I treated it with the seriousness of a job. I was flying all over the country doing it, putting all this money into it, having prints made, and no income came from it. And so I was like, “Oh, I have to figure out how to make a living again.”
So what were you doing before the Sex Machines? Strictly magazine work?
Yeah, kind of. It was like, I got out of college and I was always interested in photography as art, but when I got out of college, I had to figure out how to make a living out of photography. So I started working at newspapers. I was a newspaper photographer for probably like, seven years, then left that to be a magazine photographer. So I moved to California to be a magazine photographer, in like, ’99, and the economy was booming, so it was very easy to break in, to be a freelance photographer. I was on the West Coast, and everybody wanted to know about the West Coast. Internet was a big deal, and it was just easy, no questions asked. A monkey could have moved into San Francisco with a point and shoot and have a killer career making six figures, no question.
Oh, that’s nice.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s like, the nostalgic era of easy money. And so, I was making decent money during that period just working and being as a magazine photographer. My wife was going to school for sociology, and she was going out interviewing people, and somewhere in the middle there, the idea of Sex Machines, I kind of stumbled upon it, and was into the idea of interviewing the people and trying to figure out what makes them tick. I stole those ideas from my wife and kind of came together with that process. The thing was, I had a good career going, but I was so taken by that one project that I kind of felt a photography enthusiasm with everything. When you’re enthusiastic, you can really open doors and kind of do your best work. It felt like, before Sex Machines, I was just a working photographer. You know, just doing assignments, and sometimes there were themes in the assignments that would be going around, researching things, but the work was not great. I was doing good work, but it wasn’t great. It never transcended, you know, and I felt that when I stumbled upon the project of Sex Machines, and figured out how to do it well…
You could just pour yourself into it?
Yeah, I felt like, “Oh, I finally have something that I can say all the things I ever wanted to say, and I can round it out and dig in with the writing,” and so I poured myself into it, and then when I got a book deal I kind of fooled myself into thinking, “Oh yeah, some income is going to come out of this.” It was like, "Nobody bought the book," and it’s hard for me to say this, but there was no real financial compensation. It kind of helped me define myself... kind of allowed me to make a name for myself. We didn't sell that many copies, but we got a lot of press.
It’s tough with books, man. It’s such a cool idea, but there’s just no money in it.
Yeah, I do know people who have come out with nothing as esoteric as mine, but photo-oriented books that hit the mainstream market and made a decent chunk of money. Much more mass market, but someone can make the money, but yeah it’s much more…
So how did you originally stumble upon the Sex Machines?
It was funny, I was doing a story, one of these little photo assignments for magazines, and I think it was Fortune Magazine or something, where I had to photograph this inventor, who in his garage, he had invented this thing that I could only describe as a new form of foosball. You know foosball, where you’re hitting the ball with the little soccer players. He kind of had a riff on that, like a new version. And the genius was an independent inventor, he was in his garage, and he had taken over the garage with this invention, and he was so passionate about it, and so driven, and he himself was a quirky guy, and when I went to photograph him, I saw how the whole family had been affected by his passion and obsession with this invention of his. You know, like his wife couldn’t use the garage for anything, she couldn’t park her car in there…
Oh shit, he just took over.
Yeah, he just took over. And you saw how it affected everyone, like the kids were a little embarrassed by how passionate he was about this thing, and so after meeting him I was like, "Oh man it would be great if I could do a whole series on these kinds of things. Like small-scale inventions!" And while researching that, I came across this kind of list serve thing, where inventors of sex machines were sharing stories about how, “Oh, I disassembled my clothes dryer to use the motor, and I couldn’t put it back together, and can anyone give me some hints?” And there would be these great stories and I tried to reach out to these guys, and it was all anonymous and there were like ten members in this group. They were like, “Oh we just like the anonymity of the Internet, and we don’t want to talk to you about it.” So I let it sit for a while, for a year, and then a year later I met these two guys. They had a porn studio, and they had started doing pornography that used machines. So I reached out to them and was like, “Oh, let me do a story on you for like The Village Voice, or I’ll sell it somewhere,” and I got together with them and they were real nice and real smart, and I went to their studio and took pictures of the machines, and wasn’t happy with the work and told them that. I was like, “Your machines are great but I’m missing something, and you guys are so smart.” But they were like, “Oh, you’re probably interested in the people, you’re not so interested in the machines. You probably want to meet the inventors.” And I was like, “Yeah you know, you’re probably right.” And it was clear that these machines, in a porn studio, that was just theater, it didn’t tell me about anyone’s life. But, you put one of these machines in the home of the person who invented it, and there, you’ve got something.
Yeah, well because there’s someone that, like, their life revolves around that machine.
Totally, totally. But that means the magnets that they have on their refrigerator--that means something. The cookie jar they chose, that means something. And it’s funny, because you’re stumbling around and trying to figure out how to do a project, and right there I think the whole thing was answered. And I was like, oh great! That might be the combination that would work. A weird machine that looks like it came out of your kid is your darkest sexual desire, and then something so normal, that it looks like your mom’s house. That combination could do it. And then, these guys pointed me to a couple inventors they thought would speak to me, and then, like any project, once you start that project you can share it with other people, and then they can feel good about participating as well.
Well sure, because you’ve proven you’re safe.
Yeah you can prove to them you’re safe, and I think also, with me, at the time I did this, a few years ago, I was just this friendly nerdy guy, this suburban dad, and I don’t think anyone thought I was trying to enter their sexual subculture, or screw their wife or anything weird like that. Here’s this guy, and he just wants to come over and take our picture and so forth.
Yeah, yeah just curious.
Yeah, yeah curious. Which is what it was, I didn’t have ulterior motives, I was just curious. And they knew I was an outsider. I think a number of the inventors were happy to be taken seriously, rather than be thought of as a dirty pornographer…
Or as some sort of deviant…
Yeah, yeah totally, or having to hide it. Here’s this guy coming across the country to talk to me about it.
It’s a pretty respectful way to go about it. You’ve been introduced through members of that group.
I do think knowing the pornographers first gave me a little validation, and I think with any subculture, you kind of need someone to vouch for you.
Absolutely.
And then your work starts vouching for itself. But in the beginning, breaking in is harder. No one wants to pass the peas, and no one wants, “Ha ha ha look at this loser,” this sexually frustrated loser making this machine.
Yeah, if no one walks you in, you just immediately come off exploitative.
I think so, yeah. Throughout the project, I had done other little documentary projects myself, nothing on the scale of that, but there’s always the feeling of, "I’m the observer, you’re the subject." Here, that was something that I carried with me throughout the whole project. I'm not trying to look down at these people. Getting the pose right was very important to me.
How long was the whole process?
I think it started in 2002, and then the book came out at the very end of 2005. The weird thing is, I’ve known photographers who have worked on a project for years and who have marketed it around to book publishers who are interested, and with this one I did kind of get lucky where, before it was done, this book publisher was already interested in publishing it, and the advantage of that was that they were able to collaborate with me at the end and say, "Here’s the weak points, and here’s the strong points. You need more here, you need more there, get more, get more." The project was okay to begin with, but with their collaborative hand, it got much better.
So it’s like someone to refocus you, because you’re so into it.
Yeah, they knew what I was trying to do, and they could be like, "Well this guy doesn’t work, you need to find somebody else," or "Here’s an omission that you definitely need." So that was super helpful. I got lucky on that.
So it’s been out for a while, did you get any sort of feedback from the people?
Yeah, I was kind of hinting at that a little earlier. I did always have this kind of burden, like, was I doing these people justice? Like, here’s something about sex, and people are going to laugh, but I want to make it clear that I’m trying to treat these people respectfully, and I’m trying to use their own words to tell a story about why they’re doing these things. Even in my own hands, the text would sound snotty, but the publishers of the book were really good at taking that out, you know, taking out the snottiness. And allowing it to be more…
Earnest?
…neutral, or what was the word you were going to use?
Uh, maybe earnest?
Yeah, yeah more earnest or just more honest, and not trying to make a funny David Letterman thing…
Right, right. Or I guess just try to remove any sort of judgmental talk…
Yeah, exactly. And I think because I wasn’t a writer, it would be easy for the default to be some sort of snotty thing, or eye-rolling, or somebody saying something stupid. And the publishers were always like, “Take that out, and let the pictures do the talking and let their own words be accessible.” And I think they hit the tone right, but we had a number of shows, I would do a lot of book promotion talks at bookstores. There would be a slide show and a lecture, We did a couple of them. One was at the Museum of Sex in New York, and then another was at Powell’s Books and Gallery in Portland. And at all of those events, I tried to let the people know that if you want to come, the inventors, you’re more than welcome to come. I can’t fly you out, but the audience would love to meet you. I was real psyched, because the one in New York, a bunch of the inventors came. And some of the smaller things, a number of them came as well.
It solved some problems for me, because it helped me to feel that they felt good about it, but there even was a situation where, out of love, I did say something condescending about one of the inventors, and he did approach me about it later and said, “Wait a minute, that was kind of condescending, why did you say that, what were you doing here?” And I was like, “You know you’re right to call me on that.” Like in any relationship, you can mess up, you can try hard to make it good, but then you can make human errors too.
Some of the inventors, they took the book more, like, they wanted to be at all the events and they were very open about their participation and they wanted to participate as much as they could, and others were not. But then it ended up being as complex as any real relationship. Like your friends and your best friends, you can get into a real fight because you shunned somebody. There’s always going to be that inequality between the observer and the subject. And that’s something that’s always going to go on. That’s this project, there are reasons people like it, and there are reasons they don’t. Some of the women in the book have since gone on to get married and have kids and they are naked in the book. Time has to go on.
Well, I mean they have to go on and have lives. So that’s great that some of them came. I guess if they show up after the fact, after it has been printed, then that’s cool because it is a level of endorsement that can’t be replicated.
Yeah, I felt that. But I also felt like, "Oh why do I want this so much? And why do I feel so guilty about this?" I feel like I need them there to make it feel like its okay. It’s a complicated thing.
I think on some level that’s a natural form of guilt. I guess to crush any lingering feeling of exploitation. If they were along with you, clearly they were consenting members of the situation.
It’s almost like, here I’m trying to crush the guilt, or the accusations of exploiting these people, but then if I didn’t feel that it really was exploiting, then why would I feel the need to crush it? I’m just trying to more honestly acknowledge the complexity that comes with anything…
Well, that’s whenever you take any picture. Since you’re behind the camera, you can never possibly be the subject, or be with the subject. So to some extent, it’s always going to feel exploitive. Because you are capturing something else that’s not you.
Yeah, and I think with this group, who were just a funny little subculture, I wasn’t an insider, and if I was an insider, the project couldn’t have the detached tone that it did. I was this sexually vanilla guy who was like, “Gee, this is way out there.” And that is what maybe I felt guilty about. The other thing that made everything a little bit easier was that a number of these people are inventors who have a product to promote. A lot of people are making these things and selling them. So I think inclusion in the book, and being held up as a trailblazing inventor or artist or however they would see themselves, that also helps. I don’t know, there could be a number of motivations.
I guess some of them are just really proud of their invention. Besides the fact that it’s advertising and a little bit of marketing, it’s also, they’ve spent the time and energy to create this vision they had.
Oh definitely, across the board. Like every one of them was proud of this like you would be with your best story. I remember going out to shoot this one guy who was in middle America, and he had some wacked out machine, and he’s like, “The machine’s great, I think it’s fascinating, it’s the best thing I ever did, but I don’t really know how to make money with it yet. But I think that that will come.” And I remember that it was a quote that I got from him over the phone, and I wrote it down, and as I was going to fly out to photograph him, I was like, “That’s kind of like me.” It’s like, "I’ve got this project that I think is great, it’s the best thing I’ve ever done, and I don’t really know who’s going to want to care about this." And so there were definitely parallels in that. The people were just artists, like you and I are artists, trying to make something bigger than themselves.
I guess a fascinating element of this was the group of inventors having this forum to discuss their trials and tribulations with it.Oh, you mean the first way I found these people?
Yeah, I can’t believe that that was even remotely accessible to an outsider.
Yeah, that thing was neat. What it was, was a Yahoo group, or an MSN group, something like that.
When was this? 1999, 2002?
No, this was like, 2002, or 2001. Probably 2001, because it was a whole year before I actually met someone. So I think it was 2001. The group isn’t around anymore, but I remember there was someone in the group, whose name was like “Invention Bob,” that was his name, and he was the guy who I wrote this email to saying, “I want to meet you,” and the group disappeared. Then when the book came out in 2006, I get an email from this guy, Invention Bob. I mentioned him in the introduction of the book, and it was like, “I entered this Yahoo group, and someone named Invention Bob…” and Invention Bob sends me this email saying, “Yup, it's me, yup I remember you, sorry that I couldn’t participate, I still couldn’t, but I love the book, glad it worked out for you.”
That’s fantastic!
Yeah, the Yahoo group isn’t around anymore, but Invention Bob is still out there. In the world somewhere.
That’s got to feel so great though.
Yeah, yeah yeah. No, the better thing came from the fear was that people would just think the book was a bunch of penis jokes, or something like that. And when it came out, a lot of the inventors, the people weren’t actually in the book but were friends with someone in the book, said that, “Oh, you know, you really humanized the…
I guess it’s understandable, but it’s a little ironic or interesting that basically people that are inventing robots are really excited when they get humanized.
Yeah, yeah, no for sure. People who are making a surrogate human being.
So when you were initially observing that group, like the Internet group, did you interact with them at all, or was it merely viewing?
Oh, I lurked in their little group for a while. There weren’t a lot of kinks there, you know what I mean? Someone would post a picture of something they were working on, but no, I just wrote them a note saying, “I’m a journalist who is interested in meeting with you, and looking at your machines, and talking with you.” I forget how I phrased it, but the note said something about wanting to do a story.
Right, right, sort of like an inquiry.
Yeah, right. Like here’s what I want to do, and the only cheap thing I gotta say, on that group of inventors, is they had photos of the machines, and that was the other thing that I totally ripped off. Like, here was an inventor with no knowledge of photography, with a digital camera, and had put up the machine on his kitchen table, and you realize that like, he had made a sheet to give himself a backdrop. And there’s the cookie jar, and there’s the crib, and then there’s like a bicycle and the kids, and all this junk in the back of the photo. And I remember thinking, I’ve been trying my whole life to make a photo like that. So I kind of had the blueprint right there and then I just copied it.
That was the inspiration for the whole thing.
Yeah.
It’s just so real, all the elements of this man’s life, or of this person’s life. It just so happens the machine is the biggest thing in his life, so it gets a prime location.
You could read into the photo in that way. And then again, we’re dealing with machines that look like they were done in a high school shop class, and then, with a dildo on the end of it. The trouble with the shoot that never happened, there were a couple of pornographers who were in the book, who had worked on the machines, one of them I had spent all this time with interviewing but we had never gotten together to do a photograph, but he called me up once, and was like, “Ok, we are going out into the woods with my machine. My machine’s going to be plugged into a generator and we’re going to be filming,” for his pornography, with this action movie name, and it’ll be legendary [laughs]. You know, “We’ll be out in the woods with my machine and a generator.” And I remember telling a friend about that, and he was like, “The hardest part of the day for you is going to be loading the camera. All you need to do is point the camera, you don’t need to make an intelligent photograph. You just have to push the button.”
Some of the things were like that. As a journalist or a photographer, you want to set your self up for success, you want good subject matter. You want something that’s going to fascinate people, and then it’s your job to dwell or to get out of the way, and this project had me kind of going out. There were a lot of funny stories like that. One of the guys would call me and tell me that’s what he’s going to do, something like that. “We’re going to take my van across the country and make a film where they’re going to be shooting in the back of my van.” And then I’d be like, “How come that never happened?” And he’d be like, “Oh, I realized there’d be no way to run the machine. It wouldn’t plug into my lighter.”
So do a lot of these inventors have engineering backgrounds? It keeps bothering me that it’s a safety issue.
Oh yeah, definitely. I think that’s why no big company is making them. You know, like vibrators and stuff – no one is making sex machines. There may be somebody, but it hasn’t taken off. But you go on Ebay, and all these people are making homemade, backyard sex machines. They’re not engineers, they’re people. If I were to try and find commonality, it would be like tinkerers, people who are mechanically inclined, they like working with engines. People who are mechanically inclined and always thinking of ways to make something, and then essentially have a lot of free time. Guys who have two kids, and they probably think about sex more than they have it. A lot of middle-aged, I mean there were a couple of kids in their twenties who were making one, and I wanted to include them to round it all out, For some reason it tended to be Caucasian, middle-aged…
Really? That’s the demographic?
Yeah, yeah. You didn’t see the African American sex machine inventor.
I wonder, when they sell these things on Ebay, do they make people sign a waiver?
Yeah, there is something. They all borrow this wording, and again, the Ebay economy is extremely lawless.
Right, right. Where, you can’t track that guy down…
Yeah, they’re saying that they’re all sold for novelty purposes.
Oh, and I guess that would release them from any fear, or any disaster that comes up.
Yeah, yeah. But again, I interviewed women who claimed they’ve done these things, so I think it’s real. To me, it looks like, you’re in college, and there’s a guy with a bong that’s got like eight mouth pieces on it, and you buy the thing and it doesn’t work that well, but it looks cool. That’s kind of what I thought these things were in the beginning. It would look cool, and no one would really enjoy it.
I don’t know, I saw the videos, and it looks pretty explicit. They sure work.
Yeah yeah, I mean they do. I mean, all they do is go in and out. But you do see actresses pretending to have a good time. And I’ve done the shoots that didn’t get in the book of like, someone using one in their living room, so people are using these things and liking them for sure, but [other] people are helping. And I think also for me to do the project, I wanted to talk about the inventors. I wanted to talk about their lives, about their motivations. I didn’t want to talk about if it's good, or does someone like it, because it would become a different argument. It’s rich for an interpretation. It’s rich for a metaphor. It has those things. The tricky thing is for me, upon ending the project, and having the book come out and finishing and promoting it, I knew I was never going to find anything that rich again. And I think that kind of explains why I turned my back on that anthropological project that I tried, as shallow as it sounds, because I was trying to make a living in photography.
Well, you kind of have to.
I had to, because I abandoned that thing, but also, it would be wrong for me to say that I didn’t like the idea of suddenly engaging in something that was more shallow and less…
Less involving?
Less involving, and also less "trying to make a big statement” and more the craft of using photography as a seller.
Right, right. Well, I got to believe immersing yourself into the subject a little less will free up your mind a little bit.
Well, that, and I couldn’t do another thing that was an anthropological “look at these people”, like some subculture. It would be very challenging for me to find another subject for a book that would be as good as that, as rich as that. So I focused on doing this commercial thing, and even now I’m doing little projects on one of my kids. My eldest kid, it’s kind of weird to draw him. I’m trying to take these pictures that are a little more…
A little more mainstream?
There are photos that are all about an anthropological context, and then there are photos that are just beautiful, that are really striking. And I’m trying to do the latter now.
I can’t stop looking at the bullfrog one.Yeah, that was real. That was like, a professional bullfrog. Not a lot to interpret.
When I was looking at the Sex Machine photos, that was the first time I realized that, you know the joke that robots will eventually replace us, well... that was the first time I believed it.
I think the one thing, in interviewing these inventors, I figured these inventors would be people who couldn’t relate to women, or they were afraid of women. I remember I called one of them up, and his answering machine didn’t have his voice on it, it was this whole thing where it was like [doing a robot voice], “Please leave your message after the beep,” and I was like, "He can’t even leave his own voice on the thing, this is crazy." But really, what I learned is that these people all have emotions, they’re like, yeah, “Thank you for humanizing us, and for being nice to me.” Yeah, no one’s going to replace the emotional, or affection. If you could invent a machine…
That holds you afterwards?
Yeah, and that washes the dishes, and cleans up the house.
So what else are you working on now?
I’m trying to make photographs that are about my son, aren’t necessarily of him, but they are about him and the way he creates. So I think rather than going across the country, I’m trying to make a picture at home. It’s something that I’m playing with, and it got a little more serious over the week. That’s kind of it. It’s funny, right around the time I was doing Sex Machines, there was another project, it wasn’t Sex Machines but it was a similar subculture that was very unusual and not a lot of people had heard of it
What was the culture?
I don’t know if I want to give it away, because I’m still kind of paranoid, and still kind of working on it. Another sexual subculture, like Sex Machines, but not that, something else, and it’s not really popular, no one’s really dealt with it yet. The mass media hasn’t dealt with it seriously. In the end, I think I decided against it for a variety of reasons, I’m not going to tell you about it.The fear was doing another thing that I really couldn’t stop. It can get to you, you can end up in this trap of being the person that does this sort of thing.
Well it still has a stigma. It’s scary because it does limit you, even if you do have two projects, you’d still be pigeonholed.
It’s kind of weird, it’s made me rethink, I’ve got to be careful if I do anything high profile or try to exhibit some stuff. Maybe it can be anthropological, but it needs to be about something other than sex. And so, previous to Sex Machines I had never done anything that had gotten so much attention. For me, the bigger the project, or the more attention it gets, the more baffled I am at the end, like what to do next, or what’s the next thing? After something that rich, and I’m not taking credit for it, it’s kind of tricky, what is next? You want to do the opposite of that, my kid, like something that wouldn’t even compare to that.
It’s tough because it automatically puts anything you do next into context. If that’s what interests you, maybe that’s what you are.
That is true. You want what you want. You can’t decide if that’s what you want. It’s very hard to edit yourself.
So when you were doing your interviews with them, did your wife help?
No, she didn’t help with that, but she pretty much set up the model that I copied. The reason we had moved out to California was that she was trying to go to graduate school. She went to graduate school out in California and she was in the sociology department at UC. She was working on a project where she was interviewing low-income families, working class families where the dad was the primary caretaker. And so, she ran an ad in the newspaper and got people to kind of respond who were in that situation, and she’d go over there with a tape recorder and let the tape recorder run while she talked to them. I remember hearing her tape and thinking, “Oh, this is great.” It was probably something about the nature of interviewing that I borrowed. But, working on Sex Machines when you have kids, there definitely aren’t enough hours in the day. People who don’t have kids, it could be a group project, but it was my thing. But she was a big help in trying to figure out people’s motivations, which, I think throughout the thing I was always trying to figure out. You know, what are their motivations? What are my motivations? Why am I here? She was good with that. I think working on that project was a big buzz kill as far as my own sex life. Hearing hours upon hours of people talking about their sex life is kind of a turnoff for me. It was kind of too much of that on any given day.
Does any part of you regret it?
A lot of people have asked me that, because there was another interview online somewhere. What this interview essentially talked about, was here I am, a working photographer trying to promote myself to like, advertising agencies, and it was really an utter disaster. We were fielding hate mail, hate phone calls. I think people just really didn’t like reading, in the office environment, some postcard, or some serious postcard that had a giant penis on it. Some people were loud, and I think there was a particular one where they may have feared that having my work in the office was sexually harassing a secretary over the mail. It was pretty intense. But in the end, no I don’t really regret it, because even if those negative things, well they probably did impact my career – it probably weirded some people out who wouldn’t want to hire me again and then probably attracted other people who thought it was kind of cool. So it’s kind of a wash. I feel that every now and then, an artist finds an object that allows them to say everything they were intrigued about, and I feel that with Sex Machines, I had that opportunity. With me it’s always about keeping score, not financially, but with your peers, other writers and other photographers. You know, there’s people who are like, “Oh I don’t want to be like them, or I don’t want to be just a working hack, or I don’t want to just do this, or I don’t want to just do that, and I felt I was always someone who like, ‘Ah, photography is something, I’m just going to do it. But when it just became a job to me, I didn’t like it. I disliked the idea that with this thing that was most important and special to me, I had become just a working hack. So I think kind of the reason I dove so deeply into the Sex Machines project, was I thought it was something that allowed me to make my best pictures, but also a little bit of giving the finger to the commercial world. And so I think if I was psychoanalyzed now, I think I threw myself into it with so much intensity that I was like, “Ha, I can do great photography but you ain't gonna be able to deal with it.” And there’s a little double-look, a little self-destructive, self-celebrating thing going on there. So I wouldn’t regret it for a minute.
Website
www.timothyarchibald.com
Photos
portrait by Suzy Poling
Timothy Archibald
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