Anne Noggle - aged artist - Interview

Anne Noggle was born in Evanston, Illinois, in 1922. She came to art when she was in her forties, receiving degrees in art and art history at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, where she is now an adjunct professor of art. Earlier she served as a captain in the U.S. Air Force, a flight instructor, a crop duster, and an airshow pilot. In 1943-44 she was in the Women Airforce Service Pilots. Between 1970 and 1976 she was curator of photography for the Fine Arts Museum, Santa Fe. Among the exhibitions she curated was the pioneering survey "Women of Photography." She has received three NEA grants in photography and a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Her work is represented in many museum and private collections. A selected list of institutions giving her solo exhibitions includes Friends of Photography, Camel, California; Madison Art Center, Wisconsin; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Bellevue Art Museum, Bellevue, Washington; and Photographers' Gallery, London. Monographs include Silver Lining: Photographs by Anne Noggle (1983) and For God, Country, and the Thrill of It: Women Airforce Service Pilots in World War II (1990). Texas A & M University Press will publish Noggle's A Dance with Death, on Soviet women pilots in World War II, in the spring of 1994.

This interview was conducted by telephone from my home in Houston, Texas.

Anne Wilkes Tucker: You have been photographing for twenty-five years?

Anne Noggle: Yes, I started to photograph when I was a student at the University of New Mexico.

A.W.T.: After a career as a pilot?

A.N.: After all the other careers. When I took photography courses, everything began to fall into place about how art worked on a piece of paper. I realized that photography, not art history, was the field that I should be in. Very early on I realized that I wanted to photograph people, and I've done it ever since.

A.W.T.: But the pictures aren't all portraits?

A.N.: In part, the ideas are from my imagination. Those earlier works were not so much about a person as an idea or a vision.

A.W.T.: The photographs were staged, rather than found?

A.N.: I thought them up, lying in bed at night.

A.W.T.: That hasn't changed, at least, not in the self-portraits.

A.N.: That's true. Some of my photographs are really of me, and some of them are about other things. For the most part they're about aging. And I couldn't ask anybody else to pose in that way, except perhaps my sister. So, I used myself. People tell me that the photographs of me are not in any way flattering. They are not meant to be. They are supposed to be real. And how you look when you're older.

A.W.T.: You identified that as a theme with the face-lift series in 1975.

A.N.: Probably.

A.W.T.: Those are tough pictures. I've watched people turn away from them.

A.N.: Well, they probably turn away from life too, and from their own mirrors.

A.W.T.: Would you say that growing older is a unifying theme throughout your different series?

A.N.: It has grown to be. I like older faces, not because of aging itself, but rather the look of the face, the revelation of life, and the conflict between what was and what they are now. That interests me, not the idea of aging itself.

A.W.T.: Some of the pictures from the Silver Lining series, where you photograph couples who have lived together for a long time, address aging implicitly.

A.N.: I was a little surprised how those looked after I took them. They are probably the least kind images I ever made of others. But I didn't know it at the time.

A.W.T.: It's not a series that comes to mind when I think of joy.

A.N.: No, it isn't. |laughter~

A.W.T.: But conversely, the pictures of yourself frequently make me laugh.

A.N.: They're supposed to. It's also a debunking of the notions of aging, and mainly, the notions of aging that I had as a young person.

A.W.T.: Such as?

A.N.: I remember a conversation with my mother about an older couple and their sex life. I was so surprised. I said, "You don't mean they still do it?" She looked shocked, and said, "Of course they do!" She was almost mad at me for my surprise. Another thing that haunts me is that I used to be afraid of my great grandmother, who was still alive when I was young. She was old; her voice was a wispy rasp. She was never included in conversations. Now, I wonder, "My God, what could she have been thinking?" How alone she must have felt.

A.W.T.: Your most recent works--the book you published in 1990, and the book that you will publish next year--return to your flying days. First you photographed Women Airforce Service Pilots, many of whom you knew in World War II.

A.N.: As I aged, and thought of my past, I focused on my memory of never seeing another woman at the airport when I was learning to fly. And I began to think that maybe there was something very special about women who were flyers then. I had to photograph them to see if this was true.

A.W.T.: You had the women stand in front of a backdrop, some in civilian clothes, some actually wearing their old uniforms. What has been the response to the book?