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Olivier: That is a crucial element of this whole thing. His pictures are totally honest. They don’t hide anything. They don’t pretend to be what they are not. In this sense they are a political statement too. It’s not pornographic because it reveals how the rest of photography today is pornographic. By having these images in a commercial context they act as a Trojan horse that transcends the original format. They sneak the viewer a moment of truth.
Gavin: When I look at art I don’t give a shit about the artist’s lifestyle but Terry is an exception to that. The whole dichotomy of lowbrow and high art comes from the ups and downs of his fucked up past.
Half his life is wealthy snobberdom. Hes the son of a fashion photographer and was born in New York but moved to Paris at an early age. It was all celebrities and travel and art until his parents’ marriage exploded after his father had an affair with a 17-year-old Anjelica Huston.
The other half of his life was about being dirt poor and playing in esoteric punk bands, getting addicted to drugs with no family around to care. It’s a weird combination of homeless orphan and uptown rich kid that you rarely see in an artist. Is he where he is today because of luck or was it his destiny?
Olivier: It’s a hard question to answer. Sometimes the images are light and have no purpose other than to amuse. Sometimes they are profound and portray love as a fissure of pain and murder. He is at once a careless street kid and a misanthropic Lacanien. They float in the limbo of rapport and are essentially a documentation of the gap between person and portrait. ls it hatred or an irrepressible jouissance? I don’t know.
Gavin: I just like laughing at poo and fantasizing about fucking the hot girls. It’s the only kind of porn I can enjoy these days.
Olivier: But Terry’s pictures are never pornographic.
