GARTENFELD: But what qualities do you specifically mean by the word "drawing"? Are you referring to a drawing as a preliminary study, as an overture to another work?

INCANDELA: I say "drawing" in the sense that I'm looking to demonstrate the armature of the image. When making a picture, I try different techniques to make the eye travel about the surface. I do that by showing evidence of the composition, and demonstrating the major lines that hold the composition together. That both creates aesthetic interest and indicates some of the procedures I use to make the picture.

GARTENFELD: In your artist statement you emphasize depth, which is a very traditional trompe-l'oeil concern. At the same time, many of the alterations you make to the pictures refuse depth by whiting out the figures. Could you further defien depth in your work for me?

INCANDELA: Depth is the challenge for everyone who makes art, and it can only be addressed through movement. One cannot assess depth without triangulation. That said, there's an issue in depth that's specific to photography. The photograph can only occupy one material position of the eye. Drawing or painting can much more easily translate movement. That's why I have used several negatives on the same sheet of paper. (LEFT: SITTING, 2009)

GARTENFELD: To what extent do you consider these works nudes? The men are pronouncedly undressed in many of the pictures; all of them have erasures in the crotch areas, as if fig leafs were metaphorically applied.

INCANDELA: The challenge I made for myself was to make a nude photograph of a male that doesn't feel erotic. I like the works to be sensual, but in the treatment rather than the subject. I don't want the eye to stop in the middle; I want it to flirt with a picture, and keep moving. If you have sex all at once you can't stop.

GARTENFELD: You were quite renowned as a muse to Derek Jarman and Sam Wagstaff. What has your experience as a sitter taught you?

INCANDELA: Well, first, I have a hard time with models. They look and they smile, or they pick a pose. I like my models to experience a moment of absence, which I find much more intimate.

GARTENFELD: You were living in Rome when you met Derek Jarman, and subsequently moved back to London with him. Then you were cast in a number of his films, and hit was he who introduced you to Sam Wagstaff. What do you think of your role in his films?

INCANDELA: Derek thought of me as decorative. And while we didn't collaborate, I did my little super-8 movies at the time, and it was Derek who first thought that I had an eye. The films were like portraits, and I did one featuring Derek. In the film, he is shaving, painting, walking about in a landscape. He loved being filmed, and I wanted to document his studio. Derek also got me a cheap Kodak camera to take pictures. When Derek would do a movie he would ask me to take photographs, to document and interpret the sets.

GARTENFELD: David Hockney would take up photocollages as a way of examning the different positions of the eye in photography. Did

INCANDELA: I was sitting for a greek painter named Yannis Tsarouchis. He knew Hockney when he lived in Paris and he took me to meet him. At the time I was studying art history in Paris.  I was curious to see Hockney's Polaroids at the time—it was the early 70s, and he hadn't yet done the photocollages. It was just polaroids of the swimming pool, which he prepared for the paintings. I did photocollages a few years before he did. It wasn't exactly collage in my case: I printed them on the same sheet of paper using serval negatives.When the new Getty opened, Weston Naef, the curator, hung my 1976 portrait of Thilo von Watzdorf and his parents between a Warhol portrait and a Hockney Polaroid. I think he wanted to make a point that mine was a few years earlier... I don't know. (LEFT: STRETCH, 2009)

"NEW PHOTO-DRAWINGS" IS ON VIEW THROUGH FEBRUARY 27. EDWARD CELLA ART AND ARCHITECTURE IS LOCATED AT 6018 WILSHIRE BOULEVARD, LOS ANGELES. THE ARTIST WILL GIVE A TALK ABOUT HIS WORK JANUARY 16, 6–8 PM.