'I love life, but I’m fascinated by photographing dead people. About two and a half years before this interview, I came up with the idea of photographing a beautiful slow death, so I booked a model through an agency. It turned out she was from the Czech Republic. She had to choose between a lucrative job in London for a client she’d worked with before and coming to me.
She didn’t know me at all, the pay was poor, and she had no idea what I had in mind. But when I told her at my home that she would spend the entire day acting out a kind of suicide, she said, ‘Wow! I made the right choice.’ I also rented a real revolver for the series, and that really excited her—‘A gun is terrible, but sóóó sexy.’
In the end, I made ten photographs for that series, including this one. She is the beauty; smoking is the slow death… When I saw the final result, I suddenly thought of the band Sweet Smoke, which released Just a Poke in the seventies—a fantastic album with an even more fantastic cover. And I simply think Sweet Smoke sounds very sexy. No, I didn’t do all that much to this image beyond giving it my usual treatment and atmosphere. Five minutes of work, no more.
It’s important to me that a photograph evokes a feeling. I never tell the whole story with my photographs; the viewer has to finish it. That’s why I obscured her gaze and emphasized it with ‘no light,’ so she doesn’t look directly at you and therefore reveals no emotion. It adds mystery and brings the image more to life. At least, that’s what I think. Someone else may see it completely differently, but that’s fine—that’s exactly what I want. The more interpretations, the better. I’m actually very lazy: I leave everything up to the audience.'
Name: Andy Tan (1960)
Location: Amsterdam
Info: andytanphoto.tumblr.com
