Christian Badach

How did you get into making art?

I was fortunate enough to grow up in a household that had an interest in art. I would often come downstairs to various newspaper clippings of Richard Prince, Jamel Shabazz, and Andy Warhol pieces pinned to my family’s fridge.

After making attempts at drawing cartoons and failing miserably, I started carrying my mothers point and shoot around my neighborhood and making group portraits of my friends.

I immediately fell for the medium’s ability to quickly distill and collect memories, from there my interest grew and hasn’t stopped.

What are you currently working on?

For the past two years I have been working on a project called Hotchkiss. The work is about the creation of a fictionalized landscape that uses the natural world to reflect on ideas of isolation, transition, and places ability to both comfort and destabilize. For most of those two years the subject matter that I was attracted to primarily existed outside and was discovered from a point of wandering and research.

A few months ago, I started to feel restricted and in an exercise of self-prescribed freedom, started making still lifes in both my own home and those of my friends which has been really refreshing.

I also began attempting to photograph my surrounding landscape in the way someone passing through might remember them. The human memory often instinctually glorifies memories of fondness and beauty, and so essentially I’m trying to translate that exaggeration which has been both exciting and difficult.

What inspired you to get started on this body of work?

I had just graduated from undergrad and moved to a small village in Western Massachusetts with a local population of about 50 people. It was the first time I felt a place to be both comforting and destabilizing. I was isolated and coping with the growing pains of actual adulthood but at the same time, I was surrounded by pristine natural beauty. Apart from the charm, the act of photography itself and synthesizing my new home was comforting.

The dichotomy between comfort, fear, and my own emotional landscape started to show up in my pictures and morphed my aesthetic vision. This shift was a major breakthrough for me.

Do you work on distinct projects or do you take a broader approach to your practice?

I used to be really stringent with the geographical aspects of a project, so much so that I wouldn’t cross certain highways or county lines. I don’t photograph that way now but I do like to use singular containers to organize images as it helps me stay focused and keep things like sequence and palette relatively consistent. With this new body of work though, I am thinking about the ways that a container around a project can be warped, stretched, and adapted over time.

What’s a typical day like in your studio?

Outside of retouching and printing, I don’t use a studio. I think more crucially, my car functions as my studio and is the crux of my practice. Without it I would have nothing. On days that I am shooting, I will often have some place planned to shoot at a certain time but before then I’ll wander between New York, Massachucetts, Vermont, or New Hampshire looking for things to photograph or to return to at a later date.

Who are your favorite artists?

Currently I am loving the paintings of Katherine Bradford and Billy Childish, Eric Rohmer’s films and Robert Walser’s short stories.

Where do you go to discover new artists?

I have a group text with some other photographers who I went to school with; Hank Tilson, Ian Edward White, and Conor Martin. We will often go back and forth about our own work, sharing pictures of the backs of our cameras or prints but we also share new work we like. Our processes are all a little different and our tastes don’t completely overlap so it’s not a total vacuum, it’s always exciting to see who’s liking what at any given time.