Provincetown is a fishing village turned art colony at the tip of Cape Cod, a curling peninsula on America’s north-eastern coast. In US terms, it’s an old town, and since the first half of the 20th century, it has been a haven for artists, musicians, queer people and bohemians who descend on the town every summer.
Tennessee Williams lived there, lots of the abstract expressionists holidayed there, and the Velvet Underground played there in the 1960s. There’s a cultural pedigree to the place that has made it a magnet for creative people, including the man in this image, my friend and fellow artist, Billy Hough.
Billy is one of the most brash and sparkling performers I’ve ever encountered. He has an act called Scream Along with Billy, where he performs beloved rock albums in their entirety in an improvised cabaret style. He’s also in a band with his two brothers called Garage Dogs. The three of them are sort of the ultimate outlaws – there’s a punk spirit to them that’s just intoxicating.
He and his brothers are southern boys. Billy’s accent has faded now, but his brothers both still have their thick drawl. They’re rough, ready, always up for a good time, and they’re local heroes on the performance circuit in Provincetown. I first encountered Billy performing in someone else’s show. He was captivating and we’ve been friends ever since.
This image was a promotional shot for Garage Dogs. It’s almost a mugshot. It’s clean and simple; I wanted something as free of narrative as possible. But the beauty, I think, is in the detail. Digital photography offers a level of granularity that analogue cameras couldn’t achieve. It allows you to see the pores and folds of a man’s skin, his stretch marks and hair where there perhaps shouldn’t be any. That’s what this image is: a portrait of a person, and a body, as they actually are.
Early in my career, almost everything I shot was soft-focus, overexposed or fuzzy. I shot on analogue and my work was all about capturing a romantic quality – glimpses of a world that were momentary and fleeting. But when I moved from analogue to digital, I became kind of obsessed with exactly the opposite: incredibly sharp focus, crisp details and an almost insane level of information being expressed in each frame. When it works, it produces a new kind of intimacy, or maybe a kind of voyeurism. You can see everything.
I’ve photographed men throughout my career, but the way I shoot them has changed. In my earlier work, sex runs through a lot of my images. There was a narrative going on: the subject might be sitting on the edge of the bed, looking directly at the lens, completely available to me, the photographer, and to the viewer.
With the new pictures I have really tried to make a steady effort not to have sex on offer. Not out of prudishness, but because the increasing sexualisation of our culture has maybe made it less interesting. In the physique photography of the 1950s, there was something powerful in the eroticism of the naked male body. But now, when so much of our culture is pornographic, it feels less transgressive. Maybe there’s no way to shoot male nudity without an element of sex to it, maybe that’s a useless proposition – but I want to do something that is, to use a cliche, slightly more elevated.
In some ways I’m quite old school: I don’t really think photography is art. It’s hard for a photograph, especially a colour one, to have an aura in the way that great paintings do. Photography has to work much harder to earn its place on a gallery wall. The idea of going to a gallery to see moderately sized pictures in identical frames, hung at the same height all the way around is boring to me. Most of the time, I think photography belongs in books. That’s its natural medium. It has to do something in a gallery that it can’t achieve in your lap, whether in an album or on a phone. For me, that means pairing images in unusual ways, showing wear and tear on the paper, collaging – anything to bring the image into conversation with other images and its surroundings.
Jack Pierson’s work is showing at the Lisson Gallery, London, until 3 August
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Jack Pierson’s CV
Born: Plymouth, Massachusetts, 1960
Trained: Massachusetts College of Art
Influences: “Ian Archie Beck, Pat Milo, Vincenzo Galdi”
High point: “That my career in photography has lasted as long as it has”
Low point: “None spring to mind”
Top tip: “Make friends with your shadow”