At Rizzoli Bookstore, Chris Wiley and Robert Swope discussed ÓRALE: Love and Death in Mexico City, the debut monograph by the late photographer Michel Hurst, with Swope, Hurst’s husband and longtime collaborator, joining Wiley in a conversation about Hurst’s life and work. The book, co-edited with Nan Goldin, draws on Hurst’s Mexico City archive and the discussion considered both his biography and the process of shaping his photographs into a posthumous publication.
Chris Wiley:
Robert, I wanted to start by bringing in Nan, since she’s not in the room with us. I wanted to ask you how it is that she came to be involved in this project, for people who don’t know and how you became acquainted with her.
Robert Swope:
Nan and I were lovers before I met Michel. After Michel’s death, Nan understood that a book was being initiated, and I asked her if she would like to be involved in working on it, and she said, yes, she would. And so we started working together. I started sending her some images. Initially she wasn’t that happy with the selection, and then she started showing more of her preferences with the pictures, and now the final product is a beautiful mix between her and Barney. And I think she really is very proud of the way it turned out. I’ve known Nan well for many years, and I know that she wouldn’t have gotten involved in this as a favor to me if she didn’t really like the work as well.
Chris:
Michel had an incredible life, both with you and before you met, so I think we should give the audience a sense of his life and his adventuresome spirit that both shows up in his photographs and sometimes was not photographically documented at all.
Robert:
That’s true, that’s true. Photography was always his first love. His father was a photographer, an amateur photographer. Michel was someone who, after he graduated high school, he never really worked. For nearly, 10 years, he basically traveled and when he didn’t have money, he didn’t spend money, and he traveled in France, started a commune, went to India for two years, lived in Africa, West Africa, for two years, and at one point, his father died, and left each of the children some money. His siblings all purchased houses, and he used his money for travel. He still traveled on the cheap. He never flew anywhere. He hitchhiked, basically to India and from France, you know, going through Afghanistan, Pakistan. And, you know, he hitchhiked across the Sahara, as he used to like to say, without a hat, without a bottle of water. And I think at one point, it was a very spontaneous decision, he was planning to go visit some friends, some French friends who were working for a television station in Africa. And he suddenly decided, oh, I’m not going to go visit. I’m going to go through the Sahara.
Chris:
What did he call himself? Not a hippie.
Robert:
He didn’t call himself a hippie. He called himself an “experimental bourgeois.” His father owned this store, they had a very nice house, better than any of his friends. His father was very clever. During the war, his father was immediately captured as all the French soldiers were at the beginning of the war, and they were marching them to Germany. And because he was from that area, when they got to a bend in the road, he disappeared into the forest. Then he went to Paris. He had connections for finding leather, which you can imagine was very hard to find during the war. So he had those connections, and he was selling leather to Coco Chanel during the war so that she could keep her business going. So after the war, he had some money and he found this property. It was basically a mansion that had been built for one of Napoleon’s generals. And like in those days he rented it with a 99 year lease for nothing. And then eventually he bought it by telling the owner, you know, I can stay the rest of my 99 years, or you can sell it to me for whatever I want. But it was like a really grand house. They had a ballroom. They were rollerskating in the ballroom as children and stuff like that.
Chris:
I think it’s kind of important to talk a little bit about his relationship with his father, because I think it sort of shaped a lot of his later life in photography.
Robert:
Yes, his father. I mean, his father realized early on that Michel was gay, and they never talked about it. I don’t think they ever mentioned it once, but he knew and there was a famous incident when Michel was six. He begged his parents for a doll for Christmas, and his father said absolutely not. And then his grandmother interceded and got him a paper doll. But I think the main conflict between Michel and his father wasn’t just the gay issue, it was that he was smart, smarter than his father, even as a child. And I think his father realized that, and felt kind of challenged. Michel talked back in those days. His father came from the generation that did not talk back to your father, and Michel did, and that created the stress between them. And so basically, as soon as Michel could leave home, I think he dropped out of school at 17 and started traveling, and never really saw his father much after that.
He initially wanted to be a writer. He was a voracious reader. One of his uncles was a big executive with Hachette and he would come visit the family with the trunk of his car filled with paperback books, and Michel would just go and get a big stack. He didn’t even know what he was reading. So he read Sartre’s Nausea when he was 10 years old.
Chris:
What was one of his first jobs as a photographer?
Robert:
Well, he started taking a series of male nude photographs in the south of France that he published. Some of them, like freelance with a gay publication called GAI PIED which was a big magazine at the time, probably one of the first devoted to gay photography in France. But, you know, Michel was devoted to photography. When I met him in New York in 1980 he was always taking pictures, but he never really had the confidence to pursue this as a profession. But he always did, whenever he had time, whenever we went anywhere, he was taking photos.
Chris:
So before I get into your life together, because I know you’re going to read a couple of letters after this, I want to give some context for people who won’t know this. In addition to hitchhiking across the Sahara and going to India, he also spent some time on the Canary Islands as a kind of barefoot mystic.
Robert:
This is one of my favorite stories. He lived for four months in a cave on top of a mountain in Gran Canaria, and he used to tell me that the cave was like a volcanic bubble that over the years, erosion on the mountain had made an opening in the bubble. He said, once you got inside the bubble, it was like natural concrete, it was like something designed by Eero Saarinen and, you know, TWA terminal, kind of, you know,
Chris:
You’re also burying the lead, which is that he spent the whole four months naked.
Robert:
Naked. And without shoes. And so, basically, the only reason he could stay there is that there was a little stream of water, I think actually also this area where he was, the initial plan was that they were going to build a dam, a hydroelectric dam, in this area. So they evacuated everyone in the villages in this area, and then they never built it because there was no water in the Canary Islands for like five or six years. So very near his cave were all these farms with crops that kept growing, even though they weren’t being tended. So he had food, he had water, and every two or three weeks, he would walk an hour to the nearest tienda to buy some cigarettes, to buy some wine and have a cheese sandwich.
Chris:
So how did you guys meet and begin to form your life together?
Robert:
We met in a bar in the East Village, not a gay bar. I was living with Nan then, and at that moment I was working at a trendy Japanese restaurant in Soho. And one of my colleagues invited me to go out with him for a drink, and I had never done anything with him before outside of the job. To this day, I’m still surprised that I went. But I went with him, and he was meeting his friends in that bar, and Michel was one of them, and he introduced me, and then my Japanese friend kind of disappeared, and Michel and I started talking. It was kind of funny in retrospect, because his English was still very primitive, but he was very adept at making you feel like he understood everything you’re saying when he really didn’t. I mean, that was one of his tricks in traveling too. He thought it was the kiss of death for people to think that you didn’t understand them. So he managed somehow to have an attitude that made people think that he knew what they were saying. So we had this like two hour conversation. I was, at that moment, very much into reading Jean Genet, so I spent the whole time at the bar talking about Genet and how much I love Genet. And he was nodding and smiling. I only learned later he had never read Genet. For some reason, his group of friends weren’t into it and he never read it. But as I say in my little afterward, Michel was the master of fake it till you make it.
Chris:
And you moved in together immediately?
Robert:
Immediately. And then we went traveling for a couple of years because he had never been outside of New York. He wanted to go to San Francisco to see it. I told him he wouldn’t like it. I had been there a year before. We went anyway. And did he like it? No, he didn’t. For one thing, we hated the weather. You know, it was too cold, and he couldn’t get a job because all the French restaurants were unionized, and so we had a really rough time. And then we ended up coming back and on our way back to New York, we stopped at my mother’s house in Nashville, and we ended up spending 14 months there. Michel was very popular with that French accent, and he was kind of outrageous. And, you know, because of the accent and everything, they gave him a complete pass. He could say anything they would just roar with laughter. It was so funny.
Chris:
Barney sort of alluded to this, but you then started together, probably the most important mid century design store in Manhattan.
Robert:
Before I met Michel, one of my best friends in New York, had a junk store on Avenue A and when Michel and I got together, we used to go and hang out there at night, smoking pot, watching black and white TV, and reading the New York Post and all this kind of stuff. And we would watch him with his customers and we thought, God, this looks kind of easy what he’s doing, selling all this junk. Once in a while he would get something good, and he would still sell it cheap. We were looking for something to sink our teeth into, something that we could have a passion for. And in fact, as a teenager, I had never paid that much attention to design, but Michel had always been into design. He used to say, when other kids in his class had pictures of footballers on their wall, he had photographs of Knoll furniture. So he really had that connection. But we decided we wanted to have a really upscale store. We were fortunate, because we had a side business before we opened the store that was doing quite well. So we kind of started as collectors, and we started buying stuff, and then we opened the first store on Avenue B and Sixth Street. That was in 1985. The only thing there in those years was the Pat Hearn Gallery, which was on the opposite corner from where we were. And it was pretty rough but we managed to do really well. We would have curators from MoMA coming in limousines to buy Italian plastic furniture and stuff like that. We had very good timing for getting into that business, because it was just the moment when, particularly museums, were realizing that they hadn’t updated their design collections beyond basically Art Deco.
Chris:
Then you moved to Soho.
Robert:
We moved to Soho. That was after the riots in the East Village, because that killed the whole retail landscape there for about a year or two.
Chris:
And because you were in the epicenter of the Soho gallery scene, you ended up having a lot of like, illustrious clients.
Robert:
I never go into it too much, but everybody came to our store. We always remember one of our friends, he was an older gentleman who had been in the design business in New York since the 50s, and he used to come and visit us and we did some business with him as well. And he used to say, you may not have the best mid century store in New York, but you have the sexiest. Basically all of our other colleagues, there weren’t that many, but you know, stores like 50/Fifty, they were trying to go backwards, like away from the 50s. They were specialists in the 50s, as were we, but their tendency was to try to deal more with material from the 30s, because they thought it was more expensive.. And we had the exact opposite approach. We wanted to push the envelope and go forward into the 70s and even 80s. Those were the first few years of that Park Avenue Modernism show, and I think we only did it one time, I think it was 1991. In those years, you had to be invited to participate and they wanted us in the show, but we told them we wouldn’t do it if we can’t bring things from the 70s, because they had a cut off date of the 60s, if we can’t bring things from the 70s, we don’t want to come. So they said yes. So I still think to this day that we had the most eclectic booth that they had ever seen. I mean in terms of sales, it was a total disaster. We sold basically nothing. But we exhibited a seven foot tall Frank Gehry cardboard canopy bed, a seven foot tall Ettore Sottsass lamp with fluorescent tubes. Really crazy stuff. And we didn’t really care, we kind of just wanted to show what we could do. And it was fun.
Chris:
Eventually you moved to Pennsylvania.
Robert:
We did. We suddenly woke up. After our lease came up in 1999, they wanted so much money for our store. We didn’t want to go there and we realized that we had missed the opening for buying property in New York, even Brooklyn was too expensive. So we decided to go one hour outside of Manhattan, and we ended up buying a building in Easton, Pennsylvania. It was an abandoned department store right in the middle of town, 13,000 square feet, completely a shell, but it had good bones. That was kind of financially one of our lowest points. I don’t know what we were thinking, but at the same time, we didn’t have the store in Soho anymore, and so I think we needed a project to really throw ourselves into.
Chris 24:27
I love the story that even though you were in this sort of small town in Pennsylvania, you were still doing up the windows like they were in New York.
Robert 24:36
Exactly. We would have killed for a store in New York like we had in Pennsylvania: 30 foot frontage on the street, three 10 foot showcase windows, two entrances. And we knew that by then, all of our business was basically online. We would go into New York and sell things to customers, and we could have frosted the windows of our store and just pretended like we were a completely online private business. But we did the windows as if it was our store in New York. We didn’t have hours, but we had a sign on the door that said ‘open by appointment.’ No one ever made an appointment in this town. We looked really expensive, and we were. Once in a while we would grab somebody. One of the funniest things was once somebody called and said, I’m in front of the door. We came down, and it was the fashion designer Tom Brown, and I remember Michel said, “what the F are you doing here in Easton?” He said, “oh, my mother lives in Allentown, I came to visit her.” So, you know, once in a blue moon. Actually, we did have one local customer who was a pretty wealthy child psychiatrist and had some family money as well and he was a big collector, incredible folk art collection. He worked at night, and so we always knew if we had something that we thought was for him, we would put it in the window, because we always knew that he passed our store on his way to the garage.
Chris 26:37
So now, since we’re sort of rounding the bend of the time that we have to speak, we should talk about your move to Mexico and the photographs. What was it that drew you to Mexico in the first place?
Robert 26:52
Well, we had been traveling a bit in countries like Brazil and Guatemala. We kind of saw the writing on the wall. Our business was completely online by the time we moved. The furniture business for us was changing, our sales were getting less and less every year, and it just wasn’t as fun for us. We weren’t really discovering new things and also, I think at that point in the business, you needed to be very well capitalized, and we weren’t capitalized at the level that would have really made us a player.
So yes, we decided, this is the time to retire. So we basically sold our personal collection of furniture at auction. We liquidated our inventory, sold our building, and moved to Mexico, basically with a couple of suitcases and all of our furniture that we wanted to keep in storage. And Mexico wasn’t even really our first choice. We were first more interested in Brazil or Guatemala or Argentina but finally we went to visit Mexico. We were basically going to visit a friend in San Miguel de Allende. We had never been to Mexico before, but we had heard enough about San Miguel to know that it probably wasn’t the place for us. But we were passing through Mexico City for a couple of days on the way to San Miguel, and within the first hour in Mexico City, we just said this is it. You know, it’s so incredible. People don’t really know, I think, still. Now… of course Mexico City is very hot and trendy but I think the general American public doesn’t really realize how interesting Mexico City is, or for instance, how green it is. And we just fell in love with it.
Chris 29:03
So at what point did Michel sort of take the camera back up in earnest?
Robert 29:09
The first few months we were there and we made the move. Because now we were retired, Michel wasn’t someone to like, you know, laze around and not do anything. He had to be active. So when we didn’t have the store or the business anymore, he needed something to focus on. And right away, he started taking pictures where he could. We would take any opportunity to go to, like the feast day of Santa Muerte in Tepito which we did three times. We once went to a leather fetish party because we thought it would be a great opportunity for photos. I mean, it really became his absolute focus, and I kind of joined him as well. So we would take pictures together, and at one point we did a self published book where we each took photos during the day, and then at the end of the day, we would pick one photo from either one of us, whatever we thought was the best photo of the day. And we did that for a full year, and then we self published a book of 365 photographs, basically a kind of a diary of that year in Mexico.
Chris 30:38
Tell a little bit about the church of Santa Muerte, which seemed to be a sort of fixation.
Robert 30:51
Michel, he had a dark side. I think that was one of the things that Nan wanted to talk about if she was here. He had kind of an obsession with death. And he thought about that a lot, and he was drawn into dangerous situations. We heard about the Santa Muerte and on the feast day of the Santa, which is the Day of the Dead, there’s one block in Tepito, which is the most dangerous neighborhood in Mexico City, where they they build an altar to the saint, and the devotees come to the altar, bringing their icons from home to have them blessed either at the altar or have them blessed by the other people at the feast day. And so we had heard about this. We didn’t really know what to expect. The first time we went, we hired two bodyguards to go with us, which we ultimately didn’t need. But it was just fascinating, really, to see the people there. They were very nice to us on that day. But I remember one of the guys told us, if you were to come here any other day, we would steal this camera.
Chris:
She is known as the Saint of..
Robert:
Kind of like marginal people, killers, thieves, drug dealers, unwed mothers, street children. It’s for people that feel like they want an alternative to the Virgin Mary. The people, I guess, that feel like I’m bad, I’m proud to be bad. And so this is the Saint that protects bad people.
Chris:
So he also photographed religious rituals for people?
Robert:
Semana Santa in Mexico is such an incredible period, and particularly in small villages, not just Mexico City.
Chris:
So, what was his relationship to religion? I mean, he did live as a barefoot Saint for a while…
Robert:
I don’t think he really believed, but he did grow up Catholic. And I guess you don’t ever really purge that Catholicism when you grow up in that church. Although Michel’s family never went to church, his grandmother used to take him. He used to always tell me that his grandmother and he would go to church, and in that point in the mass, when I think they ring a bell and you’re supposed to close your eyes and be praying or something, he said his grandmother would open her purse and take out candy, and the two of them would sit there eating candy for the whole period. So I think he was attracted, he was attracted to the spectacle of it, and he was attracted to the faith that people would have. He was really impressed by people’s devotion because in Mexico, certainly a lot of the people, the working class people, that’s kind of all they have. I mean, that idea that a better life awaits them in the next world is what keeps them going.
