Spotlight: Robert Tucker
May 12th, 2022
Interview by Felix Allan @felix_allan
Robert “Bobby” Tucker, was not what we expected. Affable, entertaining, and light hearted, we’d seen his work before meeting him face-to-face and had unfairly assumed he’d appear with a much darker presence. An American living in London he came to us with questions about what football (“soccer”) teams to support, where’s best to live in the city, and even joined the team for drinks out in Hackney. All of this is to say, he’s as charming as his work is foreboding.
There’s a sense of the uncanny valley, a nod to serial killers, and pinch of body horror to his series, Still in the Dark. A photographic and film project looking at dismembered doll limbs; his work openly acknowledges aesthetic similarities between a doll and a corpse. Bobby is a unique artist, someone obsessive and open - so we asked him five questions to get a little peek behind the curtain and into his creative process.
1) How would you introduce your work to someone who hasn’t seen it before?
I collect the limbs of dolls.
I actually had no desire to be a photographer to begin with, I was in film school in the US, my relationship with photography came from a course I took at college - in which my college professor pushed me onto the right path after some disillusionment with where I was at.
2) Do you have any influences?
I was really influenced by Hans Bellmer’s work with dolls and the bodily anagrams. The idea of looking at these bodies and that taking on different meanings.
I look at the dolls as a self-portrait in a way, we project a lot on to them. They’re shot very mechanically, it has a lot do with my underlying fear of death, the inference of chopping up of the dolls into separate pieces.
3) Your work is shot and displayed in a very methodical, grid-like system, where did this come from?
I call it serial collage, I try and make order of chaotic thoughts. The monochromatic aesthetic of my work helps keep it uniform and adds some abstraction and the uncanny, dealing with these humanlike things.
4) Looking at your images they’re a little… spooky - would you say that that’s a reflection of something about you?
I see dolls as an extension of the self and photography a means of Socratic examination. Within this fragmented self-imagining, intense bodily terror of illness, dismemberment and inevitable death pervade the images. Still in the Dark functions in the uncanny terror of suggestion, as opposed to the abject horror of repulsion. It is an invitation into my private mental theatre.
5) What’s next for you?
I want to keep delving into the surrealist roots of my projects. I have a small video piece for this and want to continue working with video and dolls.
About Robert Tucker
Robert Tucker is an American photographer, born in New England growing up in a small town on the coast of Connecticut. Attending a school for Arts and Humanities in New Haven, learning methodological theatre in his adolescent years was foundational in his artistry. He went on to study Cinema Production at a liberal arts college in New York state, directing and writing horror films, influenced by the slashers of the 70s and 80s.
He began his practice as a photographer with portraiture and street work, first with digital, then teaching himself how to shoot and develop 35mm without a darkroom. He spent many years at summer camps teaching drama and video production. He worked as a political organizer in 2018, and then went on to live as a dorm staff and poetry teacher at a private boarding school in his hometown for emotionally disturbed teens.
In 2020, he moved to London where he began his graduate degree at the University of the Arts London.