Lisa Kereszi received her MFA from Yale University School of Art. Her
work has been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art,
New Museum of Contemporary Art, and International Center of Photography,
all in New York City; and Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. She was awarded
Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers, Art Directors’ Club’s
Distinctive Merit Awards, and the Bronx Museum’s Artists-In-the-Marketplace
Program. Her photography has been published in the New Yorker, the New York
Times Magazine, Harper’s, GQ, Nest, and wallpaper*. Born in Chester,
Pennsylvania; she lives in Brooklyn, New York.
STUDIO MAR. 2006
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PREVIOUS WORK
Broadway
Arcade,
Times Square, 2004, 30" x 40”
C-print
INTERVIEW
Name: Lisa Kereszi Where are you from: Suburban Philadelphia, PA Where do you live/work: Brooklyn, NY Your website (if any):www.lisakereszi.com
Is there any recurrent motif that appears in your works? What is
it and why?
Some idea about escape, and a failure to completely do so. I had an idea
of the world I was born into, and I wanted to escape that – what
I deemed to be my fate – a world of struggle to make ends meet when
you are being thwarted on all sides. That’s what I saw as I was growing
up with my family’s failing business. So, I sense a need for escape
and fantasy as part of the human condition. I rarely feel like I break
through that wall of what is real life. I am an outsider looking in on
these worlds I feel driven to investigate – amusements, haunted houses,
strip clubs, bars, theatres. There are a lot of corners, and twos,
or couples, too.
Who or what influences and inspires you?
Photographers like Walker Evans, William Eggleston, Robert Frank and Stephen
Shore in the way I see/organize the world. Photographers like Emmet Gowin
and Richard Benson in how I’d like to live a life. Filmmakers like
Lynch, Waters and Scorsese in how I want to tell a story. Painters like
Hopper, Munch, and Eakins in expressing something with color.
Do you have an unrealized dream project? (no matter how improbable,
absurd, costly, etc. it might seem)
Photograph gifted children from all classes.
Photograph in every former Soviet state.
Photograph the interiors of Disneyworld’s dark rides.
Photograph the details and unseen spots in the White House, CIA, Pentagon,
any place considered top secret and off limits. Or any person considered
off-limits.
Photograph in remaining fallout shelters that are still fully-stocked.
Photograph on certain movie/TV sets.
Do a project about Niagara Falls, which I keep putting off.
Make a movie, if I could figure out what to make a movie about.
Continue a project about the Coal Belt in Pennsylvania, where much of
my family settled: Bethlehem, Hazleton, Pocono Mountain area.
To photograph in Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch, with no one there
to keep me from photographing in its nooks and crannies.
What is your favorite spot in Lower Manhattan? Any discoveries?
I love the South Street Seaport area – not the touristy part, but
the part that is slipping away – the little old rowhouses, restaurants,
the print shop, the cobblestones, the red brick. I can almost step back
in time, if it weren’t for the luxury condo construction on all sides.
