The Brooklyn Rail

Sara Cwynar is interested in how photographs travel, assemble, and evolve—through time as much as through a glowing screen. In recent years, her colorful and abundant films, photographs, collages, installations, and performances have looked to our image-driven world to raise questions about systems of power and control, including what they disregard. Her current exhibition, Baby Blue Benzo, centers unattainable desire: that drug-like haze of possibility seducing the mind while convincing the body to stay at work. A model walks on an emerald treadmill. A version of the world’s most expensive racecar sits in a museum in Germany. A figure skating Cwynar spins dizzyingly at the center of an ice rink. “Everything is moving forward as planned,” states the new film’s narrator, yet somehow forward—in the film as much as in life under late-stage capitalism—means moving to stay in place.

In October, Cwynar and I spoke over Zoom about desire, her recent photoshoot with Pamela Anderson, the color blue, and Baby Blue Benzo’s central protagonist: the dream car. What follows is a version of our conversation that has been edited for length and clarity.

Chloe Stagaman (Rail): Sara, it’s such a pleasure to have the chance to talk to you. My first question is about desire. Ten years ago your book Kitsch Encyclopedia was published, and a lot has happened since then. How has your interest in desire evolved?

Sara Cwynar: I think when I made Kitsch Encyclopedia, it was about desire, but I didn’t realize that yet. I remember making that book and trying to figure out: why do I want to make photography and why do I care about these kinds of images? That’s still the question. I think it’ll be boring when I can finally answer it. That book was about a sad version of desire: trying to project a better version of the world on top of the one you’re actually living in, and how images function to make things seem more digestible. The central text of the book is Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, where he talks about kitsch being this image world that is built on top of the actual one. His famous line is “Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.” It’s about seeing with other people, with a collective eye, and imagining how everyone else is experiencing something. When I made the film Rose Gold in 2017, I brought those ideas back more clearly, and I found Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, which is one of my favorite texts. It’s about the same thing, but much deeper and more sad and connected to contemporary life, whereas The Unbearable Lightness of Being is kind of corny. With Berlant, here was this person saying, in a much more profound way, how desire is connected to these good life fantasies that are no longer in step with the reality of what’s possible in our actual lives. Baby Blue Benzo is a continuation of that, getting bigger and bigger with the object of desire, and more unattainable.

Rail: The current exhibition takes the dream car as its object of desire, focusing on the 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé, which became the most expensive car in the world when it sold at auction in 2022 for 135 million euros. I imagine it was exciting when you seized upon this car as a framing device for the ideas in this new body of work, and I’m curious about when that happened, and how the film and the show coalesced around the Benz?

Cwynar: It’s funny. I first started working on Baby Blue Benzo (all works 2024) before I knew I had the show at 52 Walker. I was doing this residency in downtown LA, and I wanted to make something that used Hollywood artifice and props, and that would show the surface level of how films are made. My photography has always been about that to some degree, but I wanted to think about that in film. And then I found the car and, at first, it was just one object among many. I had this giant armor, and I had an eighteenth-century doll costume. And then slowly, the car emerged like a hero image. I knew that I wanted to have this image of a model in a bikini on the car, where the car looks real and then the camera turns to reveal that it is actually an image of the car. The first image for the new film was a dolly shot, that appears maybe three minutes in, of a woman in a pink bikini on the car, and it guided me through the whole project.

Rail: The Benz becomes this device to further your explorations of images and value, and sits at an intersection of toxic masculinity, cinematography, and nostalgia. When I think about the Benz’s “One Mr. Private Buyer,” I think about how the car, at its most valuable, becomes associated with the act of collecting.

Cwynar: Yeah, because you wouldn’t drive it.

Rail: Exactly. There’s this scene in the film where you are in Stuttgart, Germany at the Mercedes-Benz Museum, modeling in and around the car as if in a music video. What was that like?

Cwynar: It was weird. I arrived in the morning before the museum was open, when it was empty. I had hired a female cinematographer, because I was like, “I need a woman because I’m gonna roll around in front of this car and I’m never gonna have met this person before and I don’t want to feel judged.” [Laughs] She was a documentary filmmaker, so she knew we needed to start doing what we wanted right away, until we were stopped. But then I started rolling around in front of the car and climbing in and out of it, and the museum didn’t care. Until this twenty-year-old male security guard showed up and was like, “You can’t do that!” He’s in the film. He’s wearing a suit in the background. But the curator, she said we could. So we kept going. It was perfect.

I happened to be in Europe for a commercial project. At that point, it was hard to justify flying all the way to Germany for three hours of shooting a car. But in the end, it was so key to the film. I think I would have done it eventually, just way later and when I finally realized how important it was. The car is not very fancy inside. It feels like you’re in a picnic basket. It’s plaid, and it has hard surfaces. It’s beautiful but, like so many things, smaller in real life.

Rail: That feels like a reflection of the time element. Cars used to be so much smaller.

Cwynar: That’s true, and I guess because it was a racing car… but you can’t imagine a human being fitting in it for more than ten minutes now.

Rail: I thought about speed a lot watching your new film, Baby Blue Benzo. The rhythm and the cadence of the film differed from some of your past ones, both in its use of popular music, which had an earworm effect, and in the film’s narrative seduction, akin to cinema. While it continues your ongoing collaborations with actor Paul Cooper (who does its voiceover) and graphic designer Tracy Ma (who models), how do you think it differs from your earlier films?

Cwynar: It started out so different. It had all of these slow shots with no rapid editing, and with a very measured voiceover that came from more than four-hundred pages of research. There was an eighty-page script and I recorded forty pages. This is what I always do, but then once Paul reads, I can tell what works and what sounds too corny. I try to keep a few cheesy things, because I think it helps temper the seriousness. I really tried to write this one with a story from beginning to end. Even though it’s not a traditional narrative, it does have more of an arc than some of the other films. I also wanted it to have commercial breaks, or sections: now you’re in the Pamela Anderson section, or now you’re in the figure skating dream section. You so rarely sit down and watch anything for longer than two minutes now, and I wanted it to echo this. Everything is a little chunk of something but never lasts more than a few minutes.

For this film, I made an animation style with Wilson Cameron, who I work with on all of my films. We figured out this effect where the film scrolls sideways and then goes back and forth. I wanted it to feel like this constant forward motion that stutters sometimes and is unsure of itself, and to have some of the chaos of the other films but in a slower structure. I challenged myself to work on the script before I did anything else, so that I would be able to stand behind every line.

Rail: You use a circular, two-track system in the film, which was set up in your studio and encircles models, at times with two cameras on different tracks, so that there is always a camera and operator visible. I wonder if that structure was an “aha!” moment for you. In earlier films, you often played with mirrors so that your audience could see the camera. But the circular track system in this film renders the camera absurd and alive in a new way. When did you discover that structure?

Cwynar: It was something that I had wanted to do for a long time and never had. I was making a film for MoMA at the Banff Centre, and they had a big TV studio where they set up circular tracks. I was so excited. At one point, I realized that if you’re going around in a circle, but you can’t see the other track, it just looks like you’re going in a straight line. I got tricked by photography. [Laughs] So that’s when I knew it needed to be two tracks so that you could see the tracks from each other and see the cameras. I thought it would be this amazing ouroboros, like the line in my film Glass Life (2021), where the snake eats its own tail. It’s something everyone talks about on the internet, how everything seems to be eating itself or folding in on itself. And so it was a nice metaphor for the way images work in this time, and how images of women, in particular, get used up and spit back out. I wanted it to be used with this empowering script, and with these models who don’t really seem to care that they are saying Martin Heidegger lines.

Rail: That’s a good segue to talking about the shoot with Pamela Anderson that you did for the New York Times in 2022, which is incorporated into the current show. Pam, Plastic, a new photograph, has a plastic layer over Pamela’s figure, so that you can just make out the side of her face. Even from afar, it’s so obviously Pamela Anderson. It feels like a litmus test of recognition.

Cwynar: I wanted Pam to feel like she’d just been taken out of storage somewhere. Like someone had decided to pull the image back out, but hadn’t quite made it shiny again. When I was photographing her, she was talking to Jessica Bennett of the Times about how she had been “rediscovered”—if you can be rediscovered as the most famous person ever. And she didn’t want to be reevaluated, or rescued from the public discourse by anyone. So I was thinking about her image being re-presented. She was beginning this campaign where she went out for all of her PR appearances with no makeup on, which I thought was amazing. What ways are left to take power in a public appearance situation if you’re Pamela Anderson? That’s one way that actually seemed to work.

Rail: Have you shown Pamela the film?

Cwynar: She hasn’t seen it. I know she really liked the photographs for the Times.

Rail: The plastic in Pam, Plastic also recalls the role of institutions in guarding or conserving objects. Were you thinking about that?

Cwynar: I was thinking: How did anyone decide the Benz was worth that much money? And how do these things get treated with such value? And I was also thinking a lot about the art world. We’re in this moment where the market is oriented towards painters, and paintings are just one part of the art world. So, there are lots of references to how art gets valued in the film, including the line, “a car is a safer bet than a painting,” which is from a McKenzie Wark piece about how the internet, or the image of something, creates the value now and not the other way around. That idea felt like a thought experiment when I first encountered Jean Baudrillard, but now it actually feels true. And so the central theme of the film is how photography creates value, and how all these tools that I have at my disposal make things seem more important and precious.

Rail: Another new photograph of yours, Automaton, seems related to that. It portrays an automaton with its back to the viewer that’s been cut open, so that we can view its insides so precariously held together. There are canvas supports obstructing the image, making a cross in front of it, and it has a spare wood frame.

Cwynar: It stands out because it’s so simple. I found that image in the New York Public Library Picture Collection, which I still visit often. I had it for a long time and I didn’t do anything with it. But I kept coming back to it. I tried to see if the Met had one that I could re-photograph. But then, I thought, why do that? The photograph is perfect—how you can see the back of the hand, and part of the surface from the front, and all of the machinery. I had been interested in the automaton and the Turk and their connections to AI—those earlier fantasies of someone doing your bidding without you, the dystopian attempt to outsource yourself, and the trickery of it. One of the earliest stories is about a chess-playing Turk who was, allegedly, beating everyone at chess. There was actually a little man crouched in the box underneath. Everyone probably knew that, but it was about the illusion of an artificial intelligence that wasn’t there. I wanted to bring that idea in. I put the photo in the frame, so that you see into the artwork, but you’re looking at the back of something that’s an illusion. It has the effect of looking over someone’s shoulder and trying to see things the way they’re seeing them.

Rail: When I think about the internet, I think of never being able to find the back of it. [Laughs] Just beside Automaton, there’s a photograph that’s part of your ongoing series called “Doll Index.” Doll Index, 1865 portrays a doll made out of many different labeled images. In the context of that work, could you talk about your investigative work online, and how it culminates in visual collections like this photograph?

Cwynar: I wanted the work to be this giant index of dubiously desirable objects. The original doll pictures are from the Met’s archive, which is another endless online scroll. I spent days looking for them, although, funnily enough, they’re prominently placed and advertised on the Costume Institute website. I found them another way. The Met doesn’t have the dolls. They just have images of the dolls that they acquired from the Museum of the City of New York. And they’re badly photographed, shadowy, creepy doll photographs. I already love anything with a bad shadow. They go through a history of French fashion from the 1700s until maybe the early 1900s, covering this time period of the “new woman,” when women were discovered as a new consumer. When I saw the shadow and the weird depth of the studio space that the dolls were in, I wanted to make a work using a technique of mine where I re-photograph sections of existing photographs, mixing other images in, so that the resulting image is a flattened, gridded version of the original with new stuff crammed into it. At first, I wanted to get whatever the contemporary version of what was being sold to the “new woman” or “newly-invented consumer,” and to look at how problems are invented to sell new things. I was buying a lot of skin rollers and things that you didn’t know you needed. And then it expanded to include images from porn, stock images, and things that you can buy on the internet, but that aren’t actual objects. The main websites I was looking at were Shein, Amazon, and eBay. The text at the bottom of the image is pulled from the shopping sites—texts that describe scale and color in ways that fail, so that when you get the thing, it doesn’t look anything like it was described. I was thinking about what the thing would look like once I’ve photographed it once, then again, then again, and how far these things get from their optimistic descriptions.

Rail: Calling out from those descriptions is “baby.” Baby as doll. Baby as “new woman.” Baby as you. Baby as us. [Laughs]

Cwynar: As general infantilized woman buyer. [Laughs]

Rail: The film uses “baby” in its title, but also as this referential tactic with the audience that’s playful and sinister at the same time. How were you thinking about this word?

Cwynar: I wanted to keep saying that word in different ways to break up some of the seriousness, but also to get at how infantilizing advertising is. The way Pam was treated, the masculine world of the car, even the experience I had in the museum, all seems to come back to this word.

I think about how condescending “baby” is, but then also how there can be something pedantic or condescending about the film saying: consumerism is bad. I’m trying to avoid that. I have to get close to it in order to say anything. In my dreams, I would make a film that shows you these themes and doesn’t tell you anything. But I haven’t figured out how to do that yet.

Rail: How did you make the music choices in this film?

Cwynar: So I used music in Glass Life (2021) and a little bit in Red Film (2018). Rose Gold and Soft Film (2016) didn’t have music, and you could make this rhythm out of the words. It’s satisfying to play word and image against each other. But I wanted this one to be emotionally manipulative, and to reflect how music makes things seem important. In film and advertising, it’s so easy to throw in the right track. I’m a former teenage figure skater, and figure skaters are trying to find the most emo, catchy song. It’s pure corny showmanship. They’re trying to manipulate the audience and the judges as best as they possibly can. So a lot of the pieces I’ve used in my work are classic figure skating songs, because I love the way that figure skating uses music. At least a few figure skaters skate to “Liebesträume” every year. And then I wanted to use Charli XCX’s song “Porsche” for the music video break section. This was before “brat summer.” She owns one of my photos, and we’re loose acquaintances, so I asked her if I could use it. I tried to use the songs in obvious and very satisfying ways. I remade the first four minutes a month and a half before the film was finished. I couldn’t figure out how to get the beginning catchy enough. So I hired a music supervisor, and her whole job was to find me the most catchy song ever that I could also get the rights to. She sent me so many songs, and “Cold Café” by an eighties Australian pop singer named Karen Marks, was perfect. Have you ever heard of Karen Marks? I had never heard of her.

Rail: I had not, but I wondered immediately about the song as soon as I heard it. It is extremely catchy, and it has this very techno, slow but determined rhythm.

Cwynar: It’s the demo version, which is a little weirder sounding than the recorded version.

Rail: The music and script play a role not just in the seduction of the film, but in the experience of the new exhibition as an installation. There’s this really thick blue shag carpeting on the gallery floor, and the walls are coated with gridded images that you’ve taped together in the style of your films and photographs. There are a lot of different ways that you hang the works. Some of them are up with magnets. Some of them are in frames, and some of the frames have text on them. Can you talk about the process of putting it all together?

Cwynar: Making installations is something that I had wanted to do for a long time. And then, during COVID lockdown, I told myself that I had to do the things that I’d been wanting to do. I made Glass Life, which was a six-channel installation. When this opportunity came up, I felt finally, here was a space that would meet the crazy ambitions that I have for a project. I’d never made a new installation for a space as big as 52 Walker. And so I thought a lot about how the install would go, and I knew that I needed to get the film under control so that I could have time. I found that the video was so intense that it needed its own private space. So, I had the idea to build a video room in the middle of the gallery, and I wanted it to feel sculptural. I really like the way the plain drywall looks, and how it speaks to something always being made and never quite reaching its finished point. This is similar to how the film is about making a film and trying to make a film as good as your last film.

I wanted the video room to have more casual photos on it. That’s why those are pinned with magnets, and some have their edges and include the metallic paper and printing marks. I wanted carpet from the very beginning, and for it to have this slightly nostalgic feeling, like you’re no longer in a familiar space and you’re already one step towards being in the dream world of the film. The wallpapers are the most important images from the film. I selected images that you could feel like you’re stepping into. Some of them are at a scale that they could be in the real world, but you’d never be able to be so close to them. And the wallpapers are broken up by grids. They’re made out of office prints so that they have this plasticky feel, which was important to me. At some point, we thought we were going to need to print them on regular printer paper, but I was like, “No, it needs to be this shitty office paper!” I also wanted it to feel like you’re in these hallways, and you can’t get far enough away to take a good Instagram photo. I didn’t quite achieve that. I would have had to make it even more claustrophobic.

Rail: You definitely have the feeling that you can’t get a photograph of one work without photographing another.

Cwynar: That’s good. I like that. I didn’t realize how hard, but also satisfying, it would be to make sure every sightline works. I ended up making almost twice as many wallpapers as I used, which is a lot of labor to not use. But only some of them worked, and they had to look good when you’re seeing them in the same view.

Rail: They all carry, in one way or another, a reference to the color blue. You talked about your past project Rose Gold, in which color became this interesting political frame to reflect on the language of advertising. In Baby Blue Benzo, blue is so expansive. It’s a sky. It’s a dream state. It can be calming. It can also be sad. So many interesting texts, including Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, come to mind when I reflect on this color. How were you thinking about color this time?

Cwynar: I did all of this research about color after I made Rose Gold, and found that no one has written anything about color that’s not boring and pseudoscience, with the exception of the color blue. I think Maggie Nelson refers to it a lot, but there’s the William H. Gass book that’s so good. And Bluets I love. I was thinking about blue as this neutral, benign color that most people don’t find offensive, and how it can get to this yellowy blue that’s suddenly ugly. Or it can be carpet blue that suddenly looks out of date. Or the blue of the sky and how it can look so beautiful or so not, depending on how it’s re-imaged. I’m sitting here right now looking at a very synthetic picture of a sky, and it’s next to a picture of the Statue of Liberty with scaffolding around it that also has a beautiful sky behind it.

Rail: Liberty in progress.

Cwynar: Yes, an easy metaphor. That’s another picture that I wanted to do something with, and then felt like nothing could be done to it. It’s perfect. Oh, and the baby blue Benz is not actually blue. Or, it’s a subjective opinion whether it’s blue or silver. I worked with a couple of researchers at the very beginning of the project. One of the things they both said was “we don’t want to upset you, but this car is not actually blue.” [Laughs] And I told them I know, it’s okay. I think it’s blue. I thought it was blue at first.

Rail: The silver of the car in most lights does look blue.

Cwynar: It looks blue, yeah. In slightly yellow lighting, in daylight, and in cool, slick lighting, it looks blue.

Rail: You had the opportunity to make two bags for Dior in 2022 and recently you collaborated with Hermès, working as a fashion performance director for an event for them in Shanghai. Do your commercial projects feed back into your art projects?

Cwynar: I don’t do as much commercial work as people think I do. Because my work references the commercial world so much it might seem like I do a lot, but I’m particular about what I’ll do. Usually, I’ll take on a project if it involves something that I want to figure out for my own work. You mentioned the collaboration with Hermès, and that was amazing. A lot of the people who work there were in the art world before and understand how artists work, and they let me figure out an animation technique that I was able to use in my own work. That project is how I paid to make this film. A major brand gives you so much support. I had a crew of thirty people on that shoot. Everything I could have ever dreamed of trying out I was able to try.

Rail: The new film fuses the histories of our commercial and visual worlds. The beginning of the film references “the dream car, a good image” in one breath, so that they’re inextricable from one another. At one point, the film crescendos, and you think it’s over. As a narrator exclaims “She’s smiling at you,” and roses are falling from the screen’s sky, it feels like the narrative has reached its apex or we’ve won a contest. Then, suddenly, it whirls back into potentialities and what-ifs. In its final lines, it transforms from “You’re a horse running in a Muybridge photo,” to “If I were a rider, I would ride all the way in a Ford. I would ride all the way in a Benz.” The film starts where it ends, iterating in an endless loop. What did interweaving the histories of photography and mass production generate for you?

Cwynar: I read this piece by Allan Sekula called “The Traffic in Photographs” that I had never read. In it, he talks about money and photography both being these made-up forms that remove us from the world and abstract our relationships to each other, and how they’ve always existed in lockstep. It got me thinking more specifically about factory production being conceived and developed alongside photographic technologies. He talks about that too, and about how we could never create so much demand for something without photography being there to sell it. I wanted to think about how that relates specifically to cars and to an extremely intensified version of desire that contemporary photographs create more so than earlier photography technologies. There’s a lot in Sekula’s writing about systems of control—prison photographs or eugenics-oriented photographs—being developed alongside industrialization, and how there’s not that big of a step from those uses of photography to the way photographs are currently used to control, with more subtle methods. Those were central themes in the work, but then it took on its own life.