James Lam Scheuren

 

These are portraits of standup comedians in Austin, TX. I have been making these pictures since January 2013. They are mostly made with a 4x5 camera and a strobe at night in front of venues during open mics and feature sets. The pictures are called We're all Gonna be Famous. A larger selection can be found here

 

For this residency, I am making One Question Interviews with the comedians asking the following, "Which joke do you use when you start to lose a crowd?" You can view these videos by clicking on the pictures. 

 

In Walter Benjamin's "The Storyteller" he compares the  different modalities of the story and the novel: one is a public performance and the other is made in solitude to be consumed in solitude. Live comedy––like storytelling––is public in both its failure and its craft. Though jokes are written off the stage they must be edited and refined live in a collaboration with the audience. In this way, standup is an emotive and hopeful anachronistic process that begets community.