Younger Than I'll Be by Skye Parrott
Skye Parrott
Daughter of a photographer. Studio manager to Nan Goldin. Managing editor of Self Service. Co-founder of Dossier. Curator of one of the most disparate and essential photography exhibitions BAM has hosted.
Not all of the works date from those years, but they all encompass the feeling of being young in the city as it was before the big boom, back when Manhattan still felt dangerous.
Skye Parrott grew up with a camera her mother, Virginia Parrott, is a photographer. She studied political science at UCLA, moved to Paris in 2001, and built a career that has taken her from Nan Goldin's studio to the editor-in-chief chair at Departures to the founding of Dossier, the bi-annual arts and culture journal she started in 2008.
In 2010 she curated "Younger Than I'll Be" at the Brooklyn Academy of Music an exhibition about the experience and freedoms of youth in New York City, specifically the version of the city that existed before the boom, when Manhattan still felt genuinely dangerous and genuinely alive to possibility. The line-up was, by her own account, incredibly disparate: Nan Goldin, Saul Leiter, her mother's work, Cass Bird's flashers on the FDR, Larry Clark's Kids stills, Robert Longo's Men in the Cities. People you would not necessarily expect to see shown together. That, she says, made it interesting.
"Some of them I knew from the beginning I would pick just because their work is so core to my experience of New York: Nan Goldin, who I worked for, has influenced my work so much that I couldn't imagine doing the show without her."
Skye Parrott · on curating Younger Than I'll Be
What are your greatest inspirations or influences?
Nan Goldin, Brassai, Helmut Newton, Gus Van Sant, Ed van der Elsken, David Armstrong, and my mother, Virginia Parrott.
How does New York influence you as a person and in your work?
New York is a huge influence. There is always someone doing something interesting here, and it makes me always want to do more.
What are the challenges of what you do?
I work with my husband and my best friends, so it's really easy to work all the time if I'm not careful. I also travel a lot for work, which is fun but can also make everything seem like a blur sometimes. I have to really remember to stop and take time to do things that aren't work.
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Stay curious,
Leila Antakly
Photo Cass Bird
