Amanda Weil
Amanda Weil is a photographer and an artist. She founded Weil Studio in 1993 in order to develop her interest in the intersection of photography and architecture. Collaborations with architects, lighting designers and clients are an essential part of the creative process.
The experience of light is integral to each installation. Just as glass is transformed by photography, imagery is transformed by light. A translucent image has a visceral effect. Weil considers issues of context, scale and location as well as the vision of each client. The studio creates imagery specifically for each project.
Amanda has a BA from Harvard College and spent a year at The Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. She is board chair of Creative Time, an arts foundation that offers millions of people nationwide rare encounters with art in the public realm.
Tell us about yourself and your work?
I’ve been an artist for many years; in many different ways. In college I started working with transparencies and, now many years later, I’m still working with large-scale transparencies that are structural and architectural. Screens are a wonderful way to make some of my favorite images manifest. They build a physical boundary between two areas, though the fact that you might be able to glimpse what’s going on the other side is conceptually very interesting. I’m also very interested in scale, because it’s very difficult to get people to pay attention, and these screens are essentially the scale of a human body, and that means that people pay a different sort of attention.
How important is the natural imagery?
It’s very important because it’s the aspect of my work that is least conceptual and the most spiritual. These are the images that I find most compelling in my life. Glass, and modern objects in general, can be very cold and austere, and images of nature can make it seem more human.
Do you think of yourself as a photographer?
I talk about myself as a photographer because that’s my tool, but the fact is that a lot of my images aren’t even made with a camera -- I scan them and when I was in the darkroom I used to make a lot of photograms.
So how would you describe yourself?
At this point I think of myself more as someone who’s working architecturally, or who has more of a relationship with architecture than art. I see my pieces as structures in an architectural setting rather than as objets. The architects Herzog & de Meuron have been a big influence on me, specifically the Ricola building that they did in 1995, where the outside skin of the building is a photograph. I’d like to think of myself as being on their coat tail.
