Jeremy Kost

August 5th, 2009

THE ART PHOTOGRAPHER’S POLAROIDS BRING VULNERABILITY TO A MEDIUM KNOWN FOR SLEAZE
Words Heather Watson Images Jeremy Kost

Jeremy Kost’s position in the art world is as unique as the range of subjects he engages with from behind that most anachronistic of photographic instruments, the Polaroid camera. Born in Corpus Christi, Texas, and holding a Bachelor’s degree in Marketing from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, 31-year-old Kost now resides in New York. His initial attempts to transpose his success as a club-night organizer in Washington, DC, to the East Village, where his friends all worked in bars, brought him early acclaim as a nightlife and celebrity photographer. The camera, he acknowledges, became “a vehicle for protection.” “I didn’t know this until later,” says Kost, “but that’s very much why Warhol took so many Polaroids: it was totally a social filter and guard for him.”

Inspired by iconic artists like David Hockney, Larry Clark, Stephen Shore, Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, most strongly, Warhol, whose artistic conversations about pop culture also embraced images of celebrities, Kost’s eschewing of digital cameras and Photoshop and his choice of discontinued hardware and its increasingly scarce film stock as a medium is a juicy rumination on the innate restrictions of a set frame, as well as concepts of immediacy, permanence, and consumerism. It also helps explain the artist’s own reluctance to define himself as merely a photographer. “[Polaroid has just] become this object through which I create. I look at everything I do through one filter, and whether it’s an elephant in Thailand, a transsexual, a go-go boy, Paris Hilton, whoever, I treat every subject the same way – it’s the integrity through which I make them.”

His current series – involving what he good-naturedly acknowledges are “hot guys, guys I want to sleep with,” most of whom, he notes, are straight – came about following the encouragement of creative director Sam Shahid, the man behind sexy ad campaigns for Abercrombie & Fitch and Calvin Klein, with whom Kost was photographed for the Out 100 in 2007.

“In theory,” says Kost, “I still make pictures of celebrities, and I view it as my day job. [The celebrity stuff is] not any less ‘art.’ … But it’s certainly not what I’m passionate about. You think about [mortality] in the context of ‘if I’m hit by a bus tomorrow, what am I leaving?’” From work with drag queens he recently titled “Private Pageantry” to the erotic, partially-clothed images of now more than a hundred sexy young male subjects, Kost isn’t aiming for the overtly political. “I don’t want to be so specific. … Ideas of body consciousness and power and beauty and desire and all those things are timeless.” Even as his subjects reveal themselves, Kost’s insistence on strict professionalism guards against the appearance of sleaze. “The idea of restraint is really, really important to me in terms of that work, which is why you don’t really see full frontal. You get the keys and the last bastion of covering themselves, which to me represents that last tiny bit of vulnerability.”