Ep 026: Caroline Tompkins
A SHOT: To start, can you describe the photo that we’re going to talk about?
CAROLINE TOMPKINS: It’s a photo of a person on blue bedding. They have their shirt off, and they’re wearing Adidas shorts, and on their [torso], they have three leeches that are filled with blood. They’re very shiny and glistening and full. From the middle leech that’s on the person’s stomach, there’s a big pool of blood and one red line that goes down to the bed, and there are some drops and things like that. And finally, the person has their hand down their pants.
When and where was this photo taken?
It was taken in my bedroom in, it must have been, 2022. I think it was the last photo that I’d made for my book [Bedfellow].
Where does an idea like this come from?
This idea came a long time ago. I was in this really toxic relationship, and I would have these recurring dreams that I was covered in leeches. I’m not somebody that dreams and then has a notebook by their bed and writes it down really quickly. This was just something that was very visceral. Eventually I looked it up — what’s the meaning of this — and the Internet was like, ”Something is sucking the life out of you.” It felt so apt for where I was in my life. But it wasn’t until eight years later that I actually made the photo. It was just something I had in my mind, and it didn’t really come to me until much later that this could be an image.
So then for making this image, how much planning is there on your part? I feel like I recall at some point you asking Instagram, “How does someone get leeches?”
I was living in Greenpoint in Brooklyn, and there’s a high Polish population. At the time, there were a lot of leech therapists, so I had reached out to a handful of them to see if I could go there and, while they were practitioning on somebody, take some photos. All of them said no, or there was some miscommunication. I started reaching out to people I knew that spoke Polish to see if they could intervene for me. And also they wanted to charge me a lot of money, so I was like, “All right, I’ve gotta take this into my own hands.”
I found a YouTube micro-influencer that does a lot of leech practices. It’s pretty gnarly. She’ll put them on her gums, and she’ll put them on her boobs. And she’ll film the whole thing. I think she has an OnlyFans, as well. And she either started or she’s part of this company that’s just called Leech.com, and she would always have affiliate links. After a while of feeling like I was hitting these walls, I was like, “The answer is that I’m gonna have to buy leeches.” I eventually bought nine leeches from Leech.com that were the medical-grade ones that you are meant to use for yourself.
How do you get ready on the day that you’re gonna make this image?
I think I was just re-watching a lot of the videos on how to do it and making sure that I… You know, it’s like a medical thing. I’m creating a hole in somebody. I was just concerned mostly of making sure I was doing that part right and thinking, “What if they don’t wanna suck?”
Is there anything you had to do to get them going?
I just kept having to put them back on. Luckily my friend who’s in the photo was very down to be part of this. It was maybe past some of his boundaries, but he was interested in the story as well, or the experience. There’s one in his bellybutton where I think he was really like, “Not the bellybutton!” But it had already latched on. Once it latches, you don’t wanna mess with it.
Sure, and then removal is how?
Yeah, the removal… Actually, this is helpful if anyone listening gets a leech on them: Any vinegar or acid, the leech will let go. And you want to make sure they let go like that because if you pull them off, their teeth can stay in you, and that can be a problem. But what’s happening in the photo is the middle leech has gotten filled up with blood, and once they’re done feeding, they let go.
Before you’d taken any frames, what did you hope to make with this photo?
I think I wanted to be surprised. I wanted to make something that felt shocking in some way but not shock for shock’s sake. Shocking but smart. Or surprising but interesting. The reason I came to wanting to do this at all is I became fascinated with the duality of these creatures. They are taking something from you, taking your life-blood. But also, people use them in therapy to be reborn in some way, or regenerated. People believe that the leeches will go to where you have problems, that the leech will know to go to your liver or to go to your stomach, wherever you might have some sort of health deficiency. The idea is that you will regenerate your blood to flush out that problem that you might have. And I should say that it’s not actually the sucking of the blood, but its saliva is an anti-coagulant, so you actually bleed for, like, 24 hours after that. So it’s more of a blood-letting therapy, where people believe you’re flushing all of those toxins out of you. So I love that duality of the violence but its regenerative, and so much of the book that I was making was about heaven and hell.
When you’re making this image, is this something that you know is going to be a part of that series, or did it become a part of that series as it settled and developed within the work that you’d made?
I had felt like the book was basically done, and my publisher also said, “You’re good! It’s done.” I just had this leech photo always… I keep a list of pictures I wanna make, or picture ideas, and this leech photo was one of those ones that sits with you, like, “That’s one I really gotta make.” So we were almost starting to print the book, and I kept delaying it a bit to be like, “No, I’ve gotta take this leech picture.” It’s one of the few in the book that were super pre-meditated. A lot of the work in the book is me living my life, making photographs, and then afterward realizing that I was unintentionally making this body of work, whereas this picture was kind of the opposite of that. It’s interesting that this was the last photo made because I want to work this way more and more. It felt like this was the closing of a door and an opening of a door. That intentionality is really exciting to me right now and trying to find room for… You know, I didn’t plan on him having his hand down his pants. I feel like there were still lots of moments of opportunity for surprise, but the intentionality and the pre-planning felt really exciting for how I want to move forward.
I think you said at one point that you used to take pictures as an observer who was waiting for the photo to happen, which was surprising to me because when I see your photos, they feel the opposite of that — at least the photos you make now. I see orchestration and decision-making in place, and maybe it’s just the situations that you’re attracted to or the situations that you’re interested in. From that perspective before, what do you think has changed, and if we can relate it to this image, how do think we can see that change here?
It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently. I think I’m not young anymore. And I’m not surprised as much anymore, and I had to mourn that a little bit. You know, I used to go to California or Rhode Island or even Ohio, where I’m from, and feel this sense of, like, “Wow, I’ve never seen this before. I have to take a picture. I’m so moved to take an image of this.” And I just… I’ve been to a lot of places now. I’ve been to California a lot now. And that tactic doesn’t work for me anymore. And I’ve often felt insecure about that, even in the last few years. I mean, I make a lot of pictures for money, but I don’t make a lot of pictures for myself anymore, and I’ve realized I have to plan it now. I have to plan for those moments, and I have to orchestrate those moments of surprise, and I’m just not naive anymore. And this image was one where it felt like that moment of, “OK, I’m actually never gonna come across some leeches on someone.” Or maybe I would if I put myself in a different situation and there were some leeches about. But no, I actually have to spend $200 on leeches and live with them for five months in my apartment and do this whole thing.
How quickly do you take this photo?
They feed for, like, an hour or so, so this was nearing the very end. Probably the whole process was an hour and a half. I moved the light around. I had a different intention with the light for the first half of the shoot. It was a more frontal, almost like on-camera flash, and nearing the end, I moved the light to be more of a back light that maybe looks more like a sun. Yeah, very grateful I did that. The glistening of the leeches and things like that I wouldn’t have achieved otherwise.
Were there any challenges in making this image, anything you found yourself fighting against?
It’s interesting. This picture is one of my best friends, and my boyfriend’s best friend. My boyfriend was helping me with the shoot. His name is Kevin. He often helps me with a lot of my work. And as I was taking the photo, I think I was holding back a bit. I felt a lot of guilt. I felt like I’m asking this person to do this insane thing, and why would anyone do this? He’s gonna bleed for 24 hours after this — which I don’t think he knew the extent of — but I felt this immense feeling of shame and guilt and almost like I can’t ask for anything more. And as I was shooting, Kevin said, “Grab your cock!” And [he] obviously did that. It was just this moment of synergy where Kevin really read my mind, knowing that’s what I wanted. The book is so sexy, related to sex. I wanted there to be some reference or tipping of the hat to confuse the viewer as to what exactly is going on here. It’s something I don’t think I would have asked, but I would have wished I’d asked for. Without it, I still think it would be strong. I think people might feel like, “Oh, maybe she happened upon this scene. Or maybe they are in a park or something.” But with this implication of something sexual, maybe this is a sexual kink. Maybe this is some sort of desire. Maybe it’s just a feeling of protection or maybe it’s a feeling of… Sometimes I find that men will sleep with their hand down their pants, and it’s not anything sexual. It’s just this comfort. So those sorts of confusions there, it really added to that sense of intentionality.
Let’s talk a bit about the composition of the image. What decisions have you made?
I kept the leeches pretty center framed. I was playing around with cropping out the nipples or leaving them in, how much of the bedspread to leave. For me, what made this the image over so many other ones was the drips, the wetness. That dripping of blood happened, and it didn’t really stay looking like that for very long. And just the dripping of the leech saliva… They’re extremely wet, and the blood is very wet as well. It felt like this moment of perfection. You really feel the wetness and the texture of it in this image that the others couldn’t really compare.
Do you think about what’s left beyond the frame when making or looking at an image like this? I think one thing I really love about this photo is without seeing the person’s face in it, I can imagine what his face looks like?
I was always sure that his face wouldn’t be in it. When I was thinking about it, I wanted to make sure, it wasn’t somewhere… You know, seeing a leech on a penis seemed too crazy. I thought about putting them on my boobs. That also just felt like I was teetering on this, “How obscene do you get?” It already feels like these leeches and the blood and the liquid is pretty disturbing. And I still want to create something that feels beautiful. Choosing to be on the stomach and not see their face and not place an expression… I think the expression would be way too powerful.
So this series of images in your book features both men’s and women’s bodies. How important is it to this photo that this is a man’s body?
There was something about the violence of it all that it didn’t really seem right to be on a woman’s body. I think that a white guy’s stomach is kind of neutral in this way where, for better or for worse, you can take it at maybe the metaphorical meaning and not thinking about violence against women or violence against people of color’s bodies or something that feels political, which I didn’t want this image to feel like.
Obviously because this originated in a dream that you were having, it’s a personal image, but I never get the sense that your photos are just a diary entry. That doesn’t seem like the type of photo that you’re concerned with. What allows a photo like this to go beyond being purely personal?
I’m always thinking about what do I have access to as an artist that nobody else has access to, what do I care about more than most other people, and trying to find inspiration in my work or driving forces through the answers to those questions. So inherently the work will be personal because it’s often sometimes of me or people I love and know. But I always have this sense of divorce from feeling like those images are personal. I always see these images of my friends or me as stand-ins for whatever I’m trying to say. Photography for me doesn’t have to be this quilt of my life, more that photography’s just the medium I like the most to portray the ideas I’m interested in.
A lot of your work leans heavily into things that most people would tend to keep hidden. How do you consider privacy when making an image like this?
There were a handful of images that my boyfriend, who’s in the book a lot, asked me not to include in the book. And that was one of the first times that I was thinking about privacy because I don’t really care about being seen in whatever capacity. I don’t really feel like I have a boundary with that, but within my relationship, I understood and obviously didn’t include those images. And I asked most of the people in the book if they would be OK with being in it. I really just didn’t want any instance of someone regretting me taking their photo. Or I felt I never want to be a bad experience for anybody. So my personal boundaries? Don’t really have ‘em. But for everyone else around me, I have heightened boundaries for them. I forget that it’s private until I’m talking to boomers. I’m like, “Yeah, you know, it’s about how you’re a woman and you really wanna have sex, but it’s scary.” And then I find myself like, “I shouldn’t have said that.” Or there’s a feeling of a lack of openness in that way, or I find myself then like, “Oh, maybe that’s not an OK dinner conversation.”
So let’s talk a bit about fear and desire. How would you describe your relationship to fear?
I’ve realized, especially with this book, that fear is a big motivator for me, and things that feel scary and uncomfortable are the things that I’m like, “Oh, maybe sit with that a little longer, or maybe needle into that a bit more.” When I was in college, I was photographing men who cat-called me, which isn’t typically a way that I work now in terms of shooting on the street. But it was the roots of this project in that I was new-ish to New York City. I was experiencing this fear, was getting followed home at night, these sorts of things, and I felt like, “OK, let’s take some pictures. At least that’s something.” Fear, again, I was using as that motivator. Then when I left college, I found myself really wanting to be on the opposite end of that where I was thinking a lot about sex, thinking a lot about how I haven’t really seen that many photos of what it looks like for a woman to desire sex. What do those pictures look like? So I was focusing on that and not so much about that fear. I was taking pictures of people I thought were sexy. When I started making more and more of those pictures, I realized a lot of them were a little bit scary, especially the ones of a boner or something that felt very intense. It has all the markings of something we would think is sexy, right? Like, a man who’s aroused, but instead, I feel like the image I have in the book of a guy with a boner is the scariest image in there. Not because of the guy. But just the whole thing is intense. So that started to inform this feeling of how these two things can’t untangle themselves. Once you start to step into desire, the fear presents itself. And oppositely, I think fear can inspire a lot of desire.
We’re often told that being fearless is a desired or admirable trait. Though at the same time, calling something fearless can often imply that maybe the opposite is more generally true, as in the term “fearless woman” would suggest that women are more commonly fearful, which is why we would have to say “fearless woman.” What does embracing or accepting fear give you when you’re making a photo like this?
I think it’s like the illusion of control. If you can at least name the fear and name the feeling you feel, at least you have some of the mind game figured out. An image like this, it embodies so much of the fear in terms of I find leeches actually very scary, and living with them was scary, and dealing with them was scary. But also I bought them. And there’s something that drew me to doing it, something I knew I had to work through. Maybe I see the photograph as this opportunity to step through it, walk through the fire.
This may be the simplest question, but considering that you made this photo and, as you’re saying, you confronted these ideas of fear and these ideas of desire, and then you put the photo in front of people’s faces and made them look at it, how does it make you feel when you look at it now?
I feel proud of it. It’s hard for me, especially making pictures for money, it’s hard for me to get excited, like, really excited about something. And I have a lot of self-doubt at times. It’s hard for me to feel like, “Ah, I really got this one.” When I was scanning this image, I was thinking, “Yeah, this is it.” And that feels like such a rare feeling. So I think just getting that gift of being like, “For sure. This is it.” Yeah, even before I got the film back… Or I think I took some digital photos alongside it [and] I felt like, “Ah, did I squander this? I made my friend bleed so much, and I got these leeches, and for what? What if I don’t even get the photo?” The more time that goes by, the more I feel like, “Yeah, I got it.”
There were a handful of other images I made for the book that I couldn’t really get them right, and I couldn’t really figure them out, and I had the ideas for them, but they just didn’t fit together. In the years of making the book, wether intentionally or not, I was failing a lot but not really thinking of it as failure. I was making a lot of pictures that no one will ever see. But it feels a bit different when I rented a studio and I made Kevin come and take pictures of me, or I asked certain people to take photos of them. That intentionality is all there, but the photo just doesn’t really work or the photo still kind of failed and having to be OK with that. With this one, it was something I had the idea for for so long and had it rattling in my brian for so long, and that fear of the failure of it was very present. I’m remembering now that I scanned it, and then I didn’t look at it for maybe two weeks. I often feel that way about making pictures, that it’s just a little bit too soon and my emotions about how the day went — or “Should I have done this? Could I have done that?” — need to be a little bit forgotten about. Once I could get over the emotional aspect of it, it’s a lot easier to be pragmatic about, “No. This one is good. This is definitely it.”
We’re not talking about this picture, but I have a photo of a house on fire that I just happened upon as I was driving around. That was a moment of I was so sure of the image because I was so sure of my emotion of, like, shock and awe and feeling like I’m so lucky I was here. I could have taken a different road, and this makes you believe in some kind of other, higher being. And with this image, it’s like because you orchestrate it so much, I found myself sometimes feeling, at the beginning, self-doubt. But of course, there were all those moments of, like, the pool of blood and the single drip, all those things that solidify that feeling of chance and that feeling of something special that only was there for such a short time.
Do you think a photo like this informs the rest of the work you do, whether it’s editorial commissions or commercial work, the things that are more day-job-y elements of being a photographer?
I would hate for someone to look at my work, my personal work, and say, “Oh, it looks so editorial.” I fear that daily. And I especially, now that I’ve started working on new projects, I fear that feeling of someone being like, “Oh, did you get commissioned to do this?” And I think the thing with that word, or the meaning behind that word, is that it seems like you did this for somebody else. Having that in mind — like, “How can I take a picture for nobody else?” after I’ve done literally hundreds of shoots for other people — is really such a mind-fuck. Even with this photo, I remember thinking, “What would I not typically do? New York Times Caroline, let’s leave her in the other room. How do I make a picture for me?” And so much of the work in that book is also a more naive practitioner. I didn’t have Profoto lights. I just used what was available and made a lot of mistakes, and a lot of those mistakes are the photos in the book. So having a more educated mind as a practitioner is more confusing in a lot of ways. Yeah, this idea of “How do I not sell something? How do I not sell an idea?” is something that I feel like is really top of mind. I don’t want this person in this picture to feel, like, necessarily happy with me. I don’t want to make this picture with the intention that they’re gonna use this for their Linkedin.
Yeah, that thing were you’re taking pictures of someone and you show them the back of the camera to get them excited about it, that doesn’t have a place here?
Yeah, totally.
This wouldn’t be optioned for an Adidas ad.
And it’s like, I need to make those pictures, too. I need to make the Adidas pictures. I have to make them to survive. But how do I survive in my soul?
It’s interesting because more and more the way editorial work and commercial work is commissioned is someone commissions you for that because they saw this photo. Do you think they have expectations that you’re going to deliver this?
Often the person commissioning for these kinds of things is commissioning more based on aesthetics and sensibility. But they know it’s just gonna be different. I think I do get hired for things because I made a book about gender and sex and power and feminism. But also, I think people just like how my pictures look, and they’re like, “That’d be great if you could make something look nice for me, too.” Actually, I’ve been thinking about this: I don’t know that the leech photo is helping me in getting jobs. Like, a lot of my book, I’m like, “I don’t know if this book is actually making more commercially viable.” I’m not sure. I don’t think that Amazon looks at my book and is like, “We gotta hire this girl.”
What do you think we can learn about you from the choices you’ve made with this photo?
Maybe that I’m a little freaky. And maybe a little funny. And sexy. And care about being a good practitioner of photography. I’m interested in light and technical aspects of it. As well as I picked this photo and I made this photo because I feel like it has so many metaphorical values and can be seen in different ways, and I hope that conveys my interest in photography as something that you read and as a language that you interpret that is beyond just the shallow aesthetic of so much of photography. But there’s this whole world of photography that you can find and feel enriched by if you scratch the surface of it.
What have you learned as a photographer that’s given you the instinct or ability to make this photo?
To start, going to art school was a huge benefit to me. I grew up in Ohio. I didn’t have any art education. I didn’t know photography had meaning. Learning that photographs can carry symbols and carry things that can inform the way you think about the world, change how you think about the world, was something that was certainly completely new to me in my early 20s. And then yeah, I think that the technical aspects of photography… I’m glad that I waited seven years to make the picture because I think that the picture is technically more interesting, better than I would have done even three or four years ago. Even just an understanding of meter-reading and film-exposing and Imacon-scanning. And hopefully, the longer you do something, you get incrementally a little bit better at it. Like I said earlier, so many of the photos in my book are just that was what the light looked like then, and I took the photo. Realizing I have this power to re-create the sun if I need to or say something with the light is an exciting power that we have.
So you worked previously as a photo editor before you jumped into doing photography full-time. What do you think you learned from working in that position that might have helped you make this photo?
Maybe just the rules of production. Being a photo editor, you see a lot of pictures that other people are making for you. You’re seeing the full edit. You’re choosing the one or two images to run. You’re working that muscle of being decisive, like, “This is the image.” So in that way, I’ve gotten pretty good at choosing that for myself. And then beyond that, so many times when I worked as a photo editor, it was like, “OK, we need dry ice in two hours. Go find it.” There was definitely that part of my brain that you, again, get over that fear of asking for things or New York City as a resource. I still find myself doing it. I’ll be in a grocery store, and I’m like, “OK, they have cream of tartar here; I gotta remember that.” Just making these catalogs. I might need this random thing on a random day. So yeah, e-mailing the leech people, that seemed like the first move that very much felt influence by being a photo editor, of like, “All right, you need leeches? There’s gotta be somebody that knows how to use those things, and we gotta use that person, and just throw money at it if we need to” — this feeling of nobody else is going to do this, so I’ve gotta do this.
To close the conversation, what’s something other than photography that’s been feeding you creatively lately?
I think the honest answer is cooking. I asked for all of these spices that I never want to buy for Christmas, so I have no reason now not to tackle the annoying cooking project. I don’t want to be on my phone as much, so I love that it’s very hands-on. And the more annoying the better.
Interviewed on March 14, 2024.
(This transcript has been edited for brevity.)