Tony Hall Shoots Rad Shit
“Anthony Hall is the kind of guy who has the audacity to embark on promotional campaigns that claim, quite simply, ‘I shoot rad shit’; yet for some inexplicable reason he attempted to pen a wordy academic statement to accompany his ‘Value’ series and present it as some sort of critical observation of cultural values and commodity-fetishism, which just made him sound like a pretentious douche. It’s bad enough he’s speaking of himself in the third person now… Maybe he just took photos of naked chicks rockin’ baller fashion accessories, okay?” –artist commentary for “Value” series
When I heard that Anthony Hall’s photographic work of “really interesting” nudes was going to be shown in Spur Gallery this past October, my curiosity led me to his website, anthonyhallphoto.com, for a little pre-exhibit research. I was immediately drawn to his well-composed, gritty imagery that combined the beautiful with the uncomfortable. Divine figures clothed in a secret sort of smirk and the raw sexiness of trash culture imagery. This guy knew what he was trying to say, and he had no qualms about blasting the volume of his message within each of his photographs.
Curious about what he was really all about, I clicked on the “About” hyperlink and found myself staring at a fashion shot: a t-shirt stating “Polite as Fuck” being stretched across the delicate frame of a blonde model. Anthony’s bio was pretty simple: “I Shoot Rad Shit.” “Great. This guy’s a fucking prick,” I thought to myself. “But his work is incredible.” Clicking on the “Contact” link took me to the artist himself sitting in a field, dressed sharply in a black suit, wearing aviator sunglasses, and talking on a cell phone. I smiled. I got it. Nice persona.
After seeing his installation at Spur, “Value,” a bold discussion of materialism using racy nudes as his podium, I was sold. I needed to know who was really behind the camera, and learn a little about how he chooses to focus his lens. When I visited him in his studio at Plant Zero, I wasn’t faced with the “pretentious douche” photographer persona that he described in his artist statement, but instead found a down-to-earth guy who took some time to step from behind his camera and share with me some background on himself as an artist and as an all-around swell guy:
READ THE FULL VERSION OF RVA #7 HERE
Anthony Hall: I have a hard time thinking of myself as an artist. When I got into photography as a career, I totally knew I wanted to do commercial work—make money with a camera. I never had that ‘true artist’ struggle [about] not selling out, or not doing commercial work. Instead, I knew that I could do something I enjoy and shoot great stuff, [while] shooting stuff that I didn’t care so much about, but still made money. So that’s sort of one of the issues I had when I went to VCU. Their photo department is very fine-arts based, which is great, but it made me feel like wanting to do anything commercial was looked down upon. That’s when I started to lose interest in some of my classes. I would come up with some idea that I wanted to do as an independent project, but there wasn’t a lot of time to squeeze it in between school projects.
I took a lot of time off after high school and got into VCU a couple years ago. Because of some weird family stuff, I got my first apartment my senior year in high school. Extracurricular stuff went to the side, because I had to work full time and still go to high school for the year. So I just sort of forgot about photography, and tried to just pick my camera up now and again to just shoot stuff. Finally a few years ago, I picked up the camera and was like, “Oh yeah, hey, this is what I wanted to do.” At that time, I was back in school for other stuff, so I applied to the photo department at VCU. I should technically still be there. Within the last year, I took a bunch of time off for family reasons. I started again last spring semester full-time, but I was starting to work a lot and getting a lot of photo jobs, so halfway through the semester, I dropped almost all of my classes.
When I signed up again, I realized how expensive it was to go part-time, and I didn’t want to keep taking loans out and accumulate more debt. I wanted to take a few classes so I didn’t have to pay my loans back yet. I know that’s not the best motivation for school, but, that’s how it was at the time. College is kind of a scam. So yeah, I did go to VCU, but I don’t know when I will go back, or if I ever will. When I started going to school when I was younger, it wasn’t for art school or anything like that; it was just to go to school. And now I have a bunch of debt that I’m facing and I’ve decided I’m just not doing it anymore.
The one thing that I like about being in school is seeing other people doing work around you. That’s a great benefit, but my mindset comes from being a slightly older student. I’m married, and we have a house, and we’re doing our thing. It’s not like I’m fresh out of high school and looking for the college experience.
Being in school forces you to develop a body of work, but it really comes more in waves for me. I come up with ideas, and write them down, and then don’t get around to doing them. “Value” is the biggest cohesive body of work that I’ve done. My other stuff is single images and smaller projects. But right now, after doing this piece, my work is starting to develop into larger projects.
This is the second time that I’ve had a body of work up in a space. I had an entirely different show up in Sprout last summer, mostly black and white darkroom work. I was thinking about death a lot, and was having a shitty year, so none of it had any commercial or fashion influence--[it was] more just out-of-focus silhouetted figures. I was working on “Value” with the intent of doing a show with it, but I didn’t know if it would be necessarily right for Richmond. When I had the chance to do it [at Spur], I decided to go for it and see how it would be received in Richmond.
I think it would make more sense in New York or LA. Richmond’s sort of a weird place; it’s hard for people to sell art in Richmond. Aesthetically, I guess the piece is more of an LA thing. People [in LA] are more accepting as fashion as art, even though the work is sort of making fun of it, too.
I went into this knowing that it would be a very special sort of person [that] would buy this sort of stuff. I guess the whole thing could have been a series of items on an ass. Just tons of photos of things sitting on asses. Asses can be distracting.
I’ve done photography in so many areas, and have interests in so many areas. My interest is in commercial and fashion work, but I’ve shot more modern pin-ups and nudes. Then I started seeing connections--it’s not all that different. Everything is so sexualized in fashion. It’s fetishizing products, and people as products.
"Value" is a critical work, but of something that I'm also interested in; self critical, I guess. I love to do fashion work. Fashion work has such a human element, dealing with people, and fashion photography is allowed to be superficial. Everything that I have seen in art photography lately has been pushed to be so concept-based that sometimes it’s overly anti-aesthetic. I can listen to [them] talk all day about [their] work, but I don’t want to look at [their] photos. Sometimes I just like looking at a pretty photo—what’s wrong with that? Obviously, I like women. Fashion work can just be superficial, and it’s expected to be that way, so you can just have fun and do whatever. Even in my serious work, there’s humor.
It has always been my intent to use the Internet as a way to be whoever I want to be. The idea of playing with an artist persona... I took that jump to be the cocky “I’m the shit” asshole, and used the “I Shoot Rad Shit” [slogan] in my promo work to ad agencies. I took that risk figuring that people would be either like, “Yeah, fuck this guy,” and hate it, or they’d get that it’s a joke. Those are the people that I want to work with. This is my awesome photographer character. I’m going to wear my nice suit and be on my cell phone in a middle of a field somewhere. There are going to be people who think I’m a super-cocky asshole, or just a skeezy photographer, and not like me based on that. I still get a little nervous, because I want people to like me.
If finding work is considered my next project, then yeah, I’m working on another project. As far as more art-based stuff, I’m not working on anything at the moment. I have a year’s worth of ideas that will be good photographic projects, but right now, I’m working on self-promotion and “work-work.” Being a photographer in Richmond, you have to be willing to do a little bit of everything.
Maybe my new artist persona should be me sitting at a table with a steaming hot cappuccino wearing a cable-knit sweater and big round eyeglasses. That way people would trust me to photograph their daughters.