BEAUTY SLIGHTLY ENDANGERED
In Party Crasher, photographer Nick Mele sends a horse through a formal dinner, revealing a world where tradition, absurdity and deeply personal taste coexist.
At first glance, everything appears perfectly civilized. A table has been set with flowers, candelabras and wine. The guests are dressed for dinner at a farm in Virginia. Then a horse and rider fly through the middle of it.
The photograph, titled Party Crasher, is theatrical, elegant and completely absurd. One guest ducks, another sends wine into the air, while others remain composed enough to suggest that this may be merely another inconvenience of country life.
“The absurd thing is happening, but everyone is trying very hard to maintain appearances.”
“That is usually where the humor in my work lives,” photographer Nick Mele says. “The absurd thing is happening, but everyone is trying very hard to maintain appearances.”
The idea began with Mele’s fascination with the unusually expansive role horses occupy in equestrian life. They are athletes, companions, status symbols and members of the family. He decided to take that relationship one step further by having the horse literally interrupt dinner.
“I wanted the image to feel elegant at first glance and completely ridiculous a second later,” he says. That collision—beauty, humor and tension arriving in the same frame—defines Mele’s work. His photographs are visually seductive, but rarely serene for long. The setting is beautiful, the clothes and light are right. Then something slips. An animal refuses to cooperate. A ritual begins to unravel. Something has gone wrong, or everyone has agreed to pretend that nothing has.
“Beauty by itself can become predictable, and humor without beauty can become a gag,”
he says. “I am most interested in creating a world that is visually seductive enough to draw you in, then giving you something slightly off that makes you stay.”
Mele’s images often feel cinematic, as though the viewer has arrived halfway through a film. He may begin with a room, a person, a joke or a half-remembered moment from childhood. Rarely does he begin with a finished picture in mind.
“I usually start with one strong ingredient and build around it,” he says. The location, clothes, props and composition gradually suggest a narrative. Mele leaves enough unresolved for viewers to imagine what happened before and what might happen next.
“You do not know exactly what happened before or what is going to happen next,” he says, “but you want to.”
That balance between polish and disorder becomes especially vivid in Mele’s Horsing Around series. He did not grow up as an equestrian, and his outsider’s perspective allowed him to see the world with both admiration and curiosity.
“The clothes, the houses, the dogs, the old cars, the mud, the rituals,” he says. “It is incredibly beautiful, but it is also wonderfully messy.”
What intrigued him was the contradiction between a carefully preserved world and the enormous animals at its center—animals with no interest in following art direction.
“There is something very funny about people attempting to maintain centuries of tradition while standing in mud and trying to convince a thousand-pound animal to cooperate,” he says.
The humor is affectionate rather than cruel. Mele is drawn to the codes, rituals, dress and architecture of equestrian culture, but also to what exists behind the polish: muddy boots, dog hair, broken fences and temperamental horses. The people may understand the social hierarchy. The animals remain entirely indifferent to it.
“I wanted to be affectionate rather than satirical,” he says. “I am drawn to traditions and the worlds that preserve them, but affection does not mean taking them too seriously.”
Horsing Around is, in his words, about “tradition meeting dysfunction”—a phrase that could describe much of his work. Disorder is not the enemy of beauty. It is what keeps beauty from becoming lifeless.
Mele’s photographs are filled with beautiful houses, clothes and objects, yet they resist the impersonal perfection often associated with luxury. He is drawn to rooms that have evolved over generations, objects that do not quite match and people comfortable with their own eccentricities.
“To me, taste is much more interesting when it is personal than when it is perfect,” he says.
“Taste is not about owning the correct things. It is about having a point of view.”
Perfection can be beautiful, but it does not always reveal very much. Mele wants to see the books someone actually reads, the strange painting they inherited, the wallpaper everyone else would have removed and the old station wagon they refuse to replace.
“Taste is not about owning the correct things,” he says. “It is about having a point of view.”
The same principle shapes his understanding of luxury. The worlds he finds most compelling are inhabited. Children run through the rooms. Dogs climb onto the sofas. Someone spills a drink. The furniture gets used, and the symmetry is occasionally ruined.
“I think people often confuse luxury with perfection and seriousness,” he says. “The worlds I find most interesting are beautiful because people actually live in them.”
For Mele, life does not diminish an extraordinary place. It gives it character.
“A beautiful life should still look like a life,” he says. Humor gives viewers a way into these environments. It interrupts the surface just enough to reveal something familiar beneath it.
“It says you are allowed to enjoy beauty without worshipping it,” Mele says.
As the cover of VIVANT’s Fall issue, Party Crasher speaks directly to the season’s exploration of style, culture, tradition and the people and places that define taste.
The photograph contains the formal symbols of ceremony. The table is set. The candelabras are in place. The guests have dressed for dinner. Then life charges through. Yet the disruption does not destroy the scene. It completes it.
“I think the photograph says that tradition survives because life keeps happening inside it,” Mele says.
That may be the deeper subject of his work. Traditions endure not because they are protected from disorder, but because people continue to live within them, subjecting them to accidents, laughter, eccentricity and change.
“The traditions and beautiful things worth preserving are not museum pieces,” he says. “They should be lived with, interrupted, spilled on, laughed at, and occasionally jumped over on horseback.”
In Party Crasher, beauty remains compelling because it is still part of life. The table can be reset. The glasses can be refilled. Dinner will continue, now with a story worth remembering.
“That is how I like beauty,” Mele says. “Slightly endangered.”
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