The Fragmented Eye: Would you do a shout-out to everyone at starDom?
Dominic Monaghan: Absolutely. Well, are people listening right now?
TFE: No, it's being recorded so I can type it up.
DM: In print. Like I said to you when I saw you, it's one of the few, if only, websites associated
with me that I actually check out, 'cause there's a lot of kind of embarrassing ones out there
and ones that, you know, don't really document the truth. But I really like starDom and I think
the photos that you choose are always really good too.
TFE: They'll be happy to hear that.
DM: I hope so.
TFE: The number one question that they have for you is, you've kind of outpriced a lot of your
market with your photos, and they want to know if you'll do a book or a print set or something
that they can actually have.
DM: Yeah, there's definitely a book coming out. I actually sat down and chatted with someone yesterday about a book.
You know, the reason why the photos are expensive is simply the fact that, if you're printing something
as big as the biggest print in the gallery, that's costing you about five or six hundred dollars just to
print one print and then to frame that is close to about seven or eight hundred dollars. Obviously I have
to mark up the price because I need the gallery to make some money and I really want this orangutan charity
to make some money, too. So, I totally appreciate that the majority of the people would not necessarily be
going to be able to spend that amount of money.
But I'm coming out with a book. I think the book is probably going to be called "Happy Accidents" as well.
I'm probably going to include about four or five extra prints in the book that you won't see in the show and
probably about seven or eight poems that go with certain photos in the gallery. So, that should be out hopefully by the end of the year.
We're also talking about maybe moving the gallery, if anyone missed it, moving the show I should say, to possibly New
York and then England and then maybe Germany and Spain. So there's a lot going on with those pictures.
TFE: When did you first start thinking about putting an exhibit together?
DM: I found myself with about five and a half thousand pictures in my iPhoto gallery, and and I
just thought, well, I'm going to try to make a file where I can just run that as my desktop and I won't
be embarrassed by some of the pictures that I don't like. And then it became a mission to find my favourite
two hundred pictures, so it went from five thousand to two thousand and from two thousand to a thousand,
then five hundred, then two hundred and fifty and it took me about a year and a half to find my favourite two hundred.
And, as I was looking at my favourite two hundred, I thought, there's some real themes there. There's themes
of people. There's themes of nature, due to my passion with the natural world. There's a lot of shots of
these things called "happy accidents," which are my favourite shots. So I thought, well, maybe I'll put them
into categories and then, from there, I showed them to a couple of people at my agent's office and, you know,
Viggo and Elijah and people like that. Everyone said, you know, you should do a show or bring out a book, so
it was just kind of a natural progression from there.
TFE: What was the process of putting the show together?
DM: I tried put them in an order that I would like to see them walking around a gallery in terms
of theme and in terms of colour coding, so that you're not moving from a vibrant blue to an electric red.
I wanted to see the colour scheme kind of complement the picture that it was next to. I wanted to find a
space that was intimate and a place that I could invite my friends.
I just kept looking at these pictures and playing with them and cropping them and working out ones that
were good but were too personal or working out ones that didn't make sense.
Then I met with a guy called David Galgano, who runs the Hamilton Selway Gallery, and I showed him my
pictures and he flipped out. He said that he loved them and showed me his space and it was the perfect
space for the photographs. And then I went to a digital photography studio in Culver City called
DigitalFusion and I worked with a guy called Hugh Milstein and I worked with him for about ten days on
the pictures in terms of trying to explain the story that I'm trying to tell with each picture and then
from there doing a small amount of tweaking.
You know, a lot of photography students came into the gallery and asked if I'd played around with the
pictures a lot and I honestly haven't. I complemented a few of the natural colors that were in the
pictures. I cropped some things out that didn't need to belong there. I highlighted a couple of things.
But for the most part what you see is what you get.
TFE: Let's talk about about some of the individual photos. Let's start with eye fragment, because it's right in front of me.
DM: What? Eye Frag...? Which one?
TFE: Eye fragment?
DM: Oh. It's called "Eye Frgt.," because obviously I took out a couple of the
words, um, of the letters in "forget."
TFE: Oh, OK.
DM: The top left hand corner spells out F R G T.
TFE: Yeah. Did you want to talk about that?
DM: Sure. That picture's about my first year in L.A. My first year in L.A. was a kind of year that
I was a little lost and a little all over the place and that picture talks to me about that first year in L.A.
There's a girl's eye in the center of the frame who I was spending a lot of time with in L.A. at that point.
There's a lot of stop signs and a lot of directional signs, which was my way of understanding the fact that I
was getting lost in a city that I didn't know.
There's pictures of my eye, but not directly looking at the camera too much, kind of looking away from
the camera and looking in different directions and that's based on the fact that I was having a hard
time looking at my reflection at that point. There is a couple of boom [?] shots of an airline bag cause
I was doing a lot of flying, flying on crappy kind of planes at that point. I think... what else is there? That might be it.
Ah, there's a shot of my toenail painted in red toenail polish. One of my favourite things about that first year
in LA was I went down to Mexico. Billy Boyd was making a film called Master and Commander and I went down to Mexico
for about six weeks and Billy and I both painted our nails red to show the passing of time. And that was about
halfway through that period and you can see that there's a big gap between where I had originally painted my
toenail and where it got chewed on. So, it's essentially about my first year in LA, which, obviously, there are
elements of that that I would like to forget.
TFE:Well, we'll move on then.
DM:Yeah.
TFE:Well, I have to ask about Christmas Day because I bought it.
DM: Yeah. Where are you going to hang it?
TFE: In my bedroom, I think.
DM: Oh, that's a little freaky.
TFE: No, it's not. It's just the only place I have space.
DM: Well, we're printing orders today so, hopefully, you should get that within the next ten days or so.
Christmas Day was shot on Christmas Day in Manchester. My parents had gone to bed. My brother was out doing something
with friends. And I took all the Christmas lights off the tree and I wrapped them around me 'cause I was kind of
bored and I wanted to see what it looked like on the camera and then I ended up kind of laying down in front of the
camera and taking pictures. You know, I don't use a flash that much. I always like to play around with light and
I was playing around with a lot of light, a lot of overly-lit kind of fairy lights on my face to see what it looked
like and it was just a really great final result, so that's one of my favorites in the show. I was really happy you bought it.
TFE: Thanks.
TFE:Let's talk about some of your happy accidents. What about the New York, there's three in a series?
DM: Yeah. My agent actually bought those. The head of my agency, a guy called Jim Gosnell, bought three of
them for the office, which was really cool.
They were shot when we did the Two Towers premiere. We, uh, we were drive [driving] around New York and we ended up
getting to a point where we were close enough to the hotel that I knew where I was and I jumped out.
And I wanted to try and capture New York as I always considered it, which was more kind of like Gotham City.
I'm a big comic book fan. I'm a big Batman fan. And I'd always associate New York with Gotham City, so I wanted
to get the kind of slightly hectic, slightly intimidating, dark skylines with the skyscrapers. You know, we
don't have skyscrapers in England in the way that you guys have skyscrapers and, when you first see them, they're
quite powerful and quite intimidating, so I wanted to try and capture that and have it look a little moody and a
little scary, as if you might see Batman at some point in the corner. And there's a couple of nice shots of the
moon in there too, which is another thing I always associate with Batman and Gotham City, too.
So I'm just a big fan of New York. I've taken a lot of pictures. There are about four or five pictures of
New York that didn't quite make it into the show. I was going to do a big kind of New York theme but they
just didn't quite make it.
TFE: Salvia?
DM: Salvia. Yeah. Salvia is a drug. It's an agave root cactus that, I guess, is ingested and kind
of causes hallucinogenic visions and stuff. And I'd been reading about it and was kind of interested in
it as a kind of hallucinogenic idea.
And I went to a Yankees game and I stood outside with a friend of mine talking about this plant and I started
taking pictures of traffic driving by and, like I said, I don't tend to use the flash and, yeah, I was getting
these really amazing shots of these crazy, out-there, hallucinogenic colours and we were having this conversation
about salvia and I thought there was some slightly magical thing that was going on whereby the conversation that
we were having was actually dictating the colors that I was seeing through the camera lens, so that's the reason I called it Salvia.
TFE: You have two horses in your show.
DM: Yeah, yeah. Well, the first one that I took was My Ghost Horse, which was in Japan. There was a huge piece
of material drying out in Japan. It had been dipped in ink and it was drying out on a clothesline. And I just happened to be
sitting there watching it dry, drinking a cup of green tea and I just saw this image of this horse come through and I was kind
of astounded by what I saw, so I tried to capture it and it kind of became a lucky kind of a guardian angel type character in my mind.
And then I went to Hawaii to film Lost and we filmed the pilot. And we were in this field and there was a stable, a kind of
paddock with a horse, and he looked quite worse for wear. He was very thin and quite moody and wouldn't really eat too much
and he just looked like he was kind of dying, you know. And I wrote a poem about him when I was spending time there about
the fact that he wanted to get out and wanted to leave his stable. He didn't want to run around any more and he didn't
want to eat apples or eat sugar lumps. He just wanted to either be free or die. And I found out a week or so later that
I think the horse passed away, so it just seemed like the final time that anyone got a chance to really capture this horse
before he kind of passed over to the other side.
That one, the thing with the horse, too, that got bought as well, some of my favourite ones got bought, so I was really happy about
that that the ones that I like the most were the ones that seemed to get bought.
TFE: What about your, uh, it's just called Spider?
DM: Uh, yeah. Is that just the one...?
TFE: Against black.
DM: The one kind of floating in space. You know, I'd just bought a macro lens which shoots very, very small images
very close up. I'd been playing around with the idea of negative space, so I wanted to have a lot of negative space and
then this kind of planet floating in space but the planet floating in space is a spider.
You know, I'm a big fan of spiders. I think they're an amazing animal and very successful and deserve our respect.
[They] behave in a way that is very kind of zen, you know. They don't do anything, they don't waste their time. They do
everything that makes sense and then apart from that they just sit and rest and meditate. I wanted to capture this
spider kind of floating in space. It was one of my first kind of experiments with my macro lens and, from there,
I then took some photos of the ants, [unintelligible] mosquito, and obviously the spider attacking the ant. All three
of those were shot with a macro lens.
TFE: They're amazing, to get that focus.
DM: Yeah. It's very difficult. It's one of the hardest things to shoot because you have to be very still.
You can't even breathe while you're taking the picture because everything'll shake, so you have to spend a long
time getting yourself set and try to get yourself into a position where you'll be a still as possible and don't
disturb the animal and just, you know, take the shot until you get it.
TFE: Slava's Snow Show?
DM: Yes. Slava's Snow Show is a theatrical piece put on by a clown called Slava who used to be in Cirque
de Soleil, who then defected and then started his own theatrical piece which is essentially the story of three
clowns, slightly melancholic clowns, and it ends with a huge man-made snow show in the theatre. It's one of my
favorite experiences in the theatre ever.
The first time I actually saw it was in Sydney with Orlando and Billy and Elijah and we all went to the show.
We were like little kids. We stayed in the theatre for about half an hour having fake snowball fights with each
other. And then I went to see it in New York, which is where I captured the photo, and what I was trying to
capture was that feeling of joy, that feeling of celebration and of a party that happened at the end of the show.
Actually, my best friend in the world, a guy who I've known since I was seven years old, emailed me last night and
said that his favourite piece in the show was Slava's Snow Show, so that was really good, 'cause, you know. I mean,
all the pictures in the show have a great meaning to me but some of them mean a lot more than others and Slava's
Snow Show is definitely up at the top of the chart there.
TFE: There's one called Jim Morrison?
DM: Yeah, I tend to associate birds of prey with Jim Morrison. They have a kind of foreboding coolness and
a stealth-like quality to them and I always think about birds of prey wearing leather jacket for some reason. It's
just an image that I've always had in my head that they're so cool, they kind of fly around with Fonzie leather jackets on.
I was in Canada going for a kind of hike and managed to see a hawk, quite a few hawks actually, and this one hawk
just burst out of the trees and we kind of startled it out of its roost and managed to get some shots of it while it was
circling back around to check us out.
They're just very powerful animals and I have a lot of respect for them. I didn't do a lot with that picture
apart from just drain out a lot of the natural color and, um, and that was it.
TFE: I have to ask you about your photos of Billy. Do you want to say anything about that?
DM: Well, I'm in love with him, you know. If I was a gay man I would actively pursue him. Billy and I have
had a relationship over the years that is one of my favourite friendships that I've had. He's an incredibly
charming guy and someone who I always enjoy spending time with and just a very close personal friend and someone
who gets me. You know, there's not a lot of people out there that I really feel get me and Billy got me in an effortless way.
So he's one of my favourite subjects to shoot. You know, not only is he comfortable in front of the camera when I'm
there, but he's also, uh, he gives something. He exudes something to the camera.
I got a chance to show Billy the show. He's actually in town right now, so I got a chance to show, give him a
kind of private tour of the show. I told him that I was considering calling the show "I'm in Love With Billy
Boyd," just because there's so many pictures of him.
I think my favorite one is probably the one that says Hobbit. I mean I think that captures a part of Billy that
not that many people see. He has a great resonance and a great power about him and he looked very, very cool in that shot.
And then I like the shot called It Must Be Love. It was a black and white shot and I coloured a little yellow bird in
the top left-hand corner just to kind of try and hopefully make people smile and laugh, because in the shot itself, Billy
and I are at the premiere of the Return of the King in Japan, and we're just having a great time. We enjoy each other's
company and we're just smiling and having fun and I wanted that to come across in the photo that we're both so happy and
comfortable in each other's company.
TFE: What's the status of your movie with Billy?
DM: We wrote a treatment for the movie and we shopped it around to a few people and it
had a kind of organized crime theme and a lot of people had a problem with the organized crime
theme. So, we then went back and started rethinking the idea.
But, you know, obviously, in between that, Billy's had a baby and he's been busy working in Scotland
and I was doing this TV show Lost, so I've been kind of a little busy too, so it's kind of in lieu [limbo?] right now.
But Billy's in town right now and we spent a little of time talking about what will do next. We're hoping that,
at some point in the future, it will happen. We have great kind of comradery on camera together and, fingers
crossed, at some point in the future it will happen.
TFE: One last question about your tattoo or I'll get kicked.
DM: 'K, what do you want to know? Which tattoo?
TFE: The new one. You have a new tattoo.
DM: Ah, I do. I do have a new one. I have a new one that says, "Life Imitates Art."
It's what I tend to do with my tattoos is, if I have an idea in my head, I tend to roll it around for a
year or two before I consider doing anything with it. And I had two things I was going to do and "Life
Imitates Art" was the one that kind of stole the show.
I found that, throughout my life, whatever art I'm associated with tends to be showing where
I'm at in my life and, you know, this is just a small part of it, but I was leaving an island
and leaving a show and leaving a bunch of people that I liked and coming back into a place
that I'd not been for a long time. Meanwhile, on the actual show itself, Charlie was leaving
the island and leaving a bunch of people that he liked and going to a place that he'd not been
before and a lot of uncharted territory. And that was one of the small things.
But, I mean, there's just, it's always been that, you know, I surround myself with art. I take pictures.
I paint. I write. I find that I have to try to get it out on a daily basis. I tend to have the ability
to look at that art in a week or in a few days later or even a few months later and realize that that
art is sometimes pre-empting where I'm going in my life or predicting where I'll end up or sometimes
just complementing where my head-space is at, but I can't see at the time. So, I think that art is a truly
powerful medium and I also think that it has sometimes the ability to foresee a potential future for you.
I wanted to give my compliments to art in general.
I was just going to write "art," because I believe in art and I think it's great and I'm associated with art.
But then I thought that I should push it one further. You know, it's an Oscar Wilde quote and obviously
Oscar Wilde had a few great things to say.
And it's just a phrase that I find myself saying quite a lot to people and giving as a piece of advice.
If anyone's ever in a bad way, I always say that that you should write that down or you should try and
paint or you should go do something. You should try and get it out because it shouldn't stay in your body.
You should try to get it out so that you can understand it and you can look back on it in the past.
So, it was just my way of kind of saying thank you to the fact that I've been able to tap into that and
I've been able to use it as a kind of piece of therapy in a way.
TFE: Dominic, thank you so much for doing the interview.
DM: You're more than welcome. When are you going to post it up?
TFE: As soon as I can, like, decipher it off the tape.
DM: Well, good luck with it and I'll look out for it and, um, thank you for buying my picture.
TFE: You're welcome.
DM: And I'm sure I'll see you around. Take care. Bye.
An audio clip from this interview can be found in the audio section, called Dom talks about starDom.
[ Thanks to The Fragmented Eye for doing such a great interview, Dom for being such a generous interviewee and also thanks to msil for helping with the transcription. ] |
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