David Lynch Talks About His 99 Favorite Photographs at Paris Photo 2012

We don’t need to tell you, an Open Cul­ture read­er, about the rich­ness of David Lynch’s con­tri­bu­tion to motion pic­tures. But the auteur also has an ongo­ing rela­tion­ship with still pho­tog­ra­phy which the past decade has seen emerge into pub­lic light. Years ago, I attend­ed an open­ing in Los Angeles—the city so thor­ough­ly cap­tured by Lynch’s surrealism—of an exhi­bi­tion of his own shots. Now, the Los Ange­les Review of Books presents Lynch’s com­men­tary, in the video above, on 99 pic­tures tak­en by oth­ers. Lis­ten to him describe his view­ing approach—that of a voyeuris­tic, all-feel­ing detective—and you’ll nev­er look the same way at cur­tains, wom­en’s shoes, stone Bud­dhas, and fes­ter­ing sores again.

Lynch select­ed these favorite 99 pho­tos from the thou­sand pre­sent­ed at 2012’s Paris Pho­to, the inter­na­tion­al pho­tog­ra­phy fair that hap­pens each Novem­ber dur­ing the Euro­pean Month of Pho­tog­ra­phy. He arrived as the inau­gur­al selec­tion of “Paris Pho­to vu par…,” a new tra­di­tion that will each year com­pile a book of images, their selec­tion “entrust­ed to a dif­fer­ent per­son­al­i­ty each year.” Die-hard fans will sure­ly need to own their idol­’s edi­tion, and in late April they can make a pil­grim­age to Lynch’s town for the launch of Paris Pho­to Los Ange­les. Its loca­tion? The lot of Para­mount Pic­tures, dis­trib­u­tor of Lynch’s pho­to­graph­i­cal­ly strik­ing The Ele­phant Man.

Relat­ed con­tent:

David Lynch’s Sur­re­al Com­mer­cials

What David Lynch Can Do With a 100-Year-Old Cam­era and 52 Sec­onds of Film

David Lynch Teach­es Louis C.K. How to Host The David Let­ter­man Show

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.