London-based photographer and filmmaker Tyrone Lebon’s new film Reely and Truly unearths the truths behind the practice he inherited from his father Mark Lebon, who helped tear up the fashion rule book in the mid-90s with The Face and i-D. Getting up close and personal with a vast crew of the world’s foremost image-makers—including Araki, Mario Sorrenti and Juergen Teller—Lebon Jr. sheds light on their visceral relationship with the medium in cinéma vérité style. The 30-minute film, excerpted here, challenges the preconception that photography presents the true likeness of a moment in time; that in reality the very act of photographing a thing, like memory, offers a cloudy perspective shrouded in bias and doubt. “But I wouldn’t say that photography is necessarily ‘false,’” notes Lebon. “I guess it’s more about the question of what is true.” Below, the Brit gets candid about his artistic pursuit.
It’s a funny thing to make a film about photography: the very thing you’re questioning is the way you’re questioning that thing.
I studied anthropology as my MA and wanted to make documentary films, but when I graduated I really struggled for a couple of years trying to get by, so fell into assisting and before I knew it I had a photography career. When doing my MA, I had tried to make a documentary on Mario Sorrenti. It didn’t work out, but that idea had been sitting in the back of my mind ever since.
I started visiting photographers who I admired to try and to see how they actually worked. Juergen Teller had always been an enigma to me, the way he lightly stepped between fashion and art. I went to his hometown near Nuremberg in southern Germany a couple of times—for his 50th birthday and when he was teaching at the university there—and then to his exhibition in Vienna with Araki, then Venice, Calcutta and in London a few times. Juergen and I talked about making a proper film, just on him. I’ve pretty much got that material already.
The most significant point from the project was my last day in New York with Sean Vegezzi, a young photographer who basically breaks into buildings and train stations. He took me on to the roof of this skyscraper and we stayed up there as the sun went down. It was the perfect end to the whole project, that insane view. The most thrilling bit of making the film was breaking into places with him thinking I was about to get arrested.
Reely and Truly is produced by Somesuch and Dobedo, and premieres in full on Canvas this Friday.