QUICK TALK
Jessica Lange
Two-time Academy Award–winning actor Jessica Lange—
whose recent projects include American Horror Story and
The Politician —is also an accomplished photographer. Although
Lange, now 70, left her hometown in northern Minnesota at age 18,
her affection for the region has endured and is the subject of a new
book of photography, Highway 61.
This is your third book of photography. What sets it apart
from the others? It’s the frst time I had worked this way, with
an idea and a result in mind. I wanted to record as much of the
1,400 miles between the beginning of Highway 61 and the end of
Highway 61 as I could. I was looking for things, and it was much
more deliberate.
In the book, you write about feelings of loneliness at visit-
ing parts of that scenic route. Why did that come up for you?
I think I’ve always been extremely sensitive to loneliness. I was
a lonely child. It has been one of the main conditions of life. And
I feel it there. I see it in the empty storefronts and the boarded-
up buildings and the abandoned farms and the barns that have
collapsed. It feels as though something has gone missing. I left
when small towns were still very vibrant and vital. Over the en-
suing decades, the industry, the mills and factories, like most
of rural America, have disappeared. But that’s not to say it’s a
ghost-ridden highway.
Many of the photographs include people. Was
human connection something you wanted to
emphasize? I certainly hope so. The book is not
a political statement. It’s not social documentary.
For me, photography always is emotional. It’s
the same as acting, in a way. I hope it’s kind of
an emotional journey down that highway. At
least, it was for me.
Did you ever feel you had to make a choice
between acting and photography? It was
never a choice between one or the other, and
it still isn’t. I do photography because I love
it, but I don’t have to support myself with
it. So I pick it up, I work extensively, I travel,
I take lots of rolls of flm, but it’s really just for
the love of doing it.
How does your work as a photographer inter-
act with your work as an actor? The discipline
of acting and the idea of being present has helped
with the photography. The photography gives me
a chance to be absolutely alone, and that’s been a
wonderful kind of antidote to the confusion and
the chaos of working on a movie or being in the
theater. One really informs the other.
—suYin HaYnes