1000 Words Photography

Copyright © 1000 Words Photography

Tim Clark, editor of a new online magazine called 1000 Words Photography, e-mailed to tell me about the magazine’s launch, and I’m really glad he did, because the site is fantastic! First, just in terms of design and presentation, this is a magazine I want to read. But beyond that, there’s a diversity of images here that’s refreshing. I love Naoya Hatakeyama’s Slow Glass series.

Copyright © Naoya Hatakeyama

And Paola de Grenet’s Albino Beauty/Aicuña series stopped me in my tracks. There’s also a nice interview with the photographer that’s worth checking out.

Copyright © Paola de Grenet

The final highlight for me was Martin Parr’s Luxury/Parrworld.

Copyright © Martin Parr

I’m looking forward to seeing how the magazine evolves and which projects they feature next. Be sure to check it out.

Patti Hallock

Patti Hallock purchased a print from me, and she was kind enough to send me a free one of her own. So beautiful.

Copyright © Patti Hallock

Thanks, Patti!

Valiant

Lydia, this one’s for you.

Copyright © 2008 Liz Kuball

My day made

Copyright © 2008 Liz Kuball

Copyright © 2008 Liz Kuball

Interview: Allison V. Smith

I’ve heard Allison V. Smith’s name in the blogosphere here or there, and I finally spent some time on her blog and ordered her zine, and I am officially a huge fan. She’s seriously good. I had some questions for her, and she was kind enough to let me post our conversation here.

Copyright © Allison V. Smith

Liz: So, looking over your résumé, it seems like you had your start in journalism, and you’re now working as an editorial photographer and doing your personal projects, too. What’s your background? What’s your story? Where’d you go to school? How did you get where you are today?

Allison: I’ve known I wanted to be a photographer since I was fifteen. I’m the youngest of five and it wasn’t very easy finding my voice within my large, active family. As soon as I discovered photography, I had my own way to communicate. My tenth-grade photo teacher exposed us to Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, Lee Friedlander, Walker Evans. She would give us assignments specifically based on photographers—“Go shoot a Cindy Sherman portrait,” etc. I could not get enough of photography.

Frustrated with college, I took a year off and studied at the Maine Photographic Workshops in the fall and then interned at the now-defunct Dallas Times Herald in the spring. It was a very important year for my photography. It was that year that I knew I wanted to make pictures for a living. Newspaper photography seemed to be the answer. It would feed my need to photograph daily and to be published. I finished college at SMU in Dallas and immediately started working for newspapers. I worked as an intern and full-time at seven newspapers over fifteen years. It was an amazing time to be a newspaper photojournalist—experience and knowledge that I will never forget! But I knew I wanted more.

In 2004, I quit to pursue freelance photography and my own personal artwork. Today my freelance work for magazines and newspapers supports me as a fine-art photographer. I’m represented in Dallas at the Barry Whistler Gallery, known for showing contemporary Texas artists. The Dallas Museum of Art and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, both purchased two images from my last show at the Barry Whistler Gallery in 2006.

Copyright © Allison V. Smith

L: Do you find that living in Dallas (i.e., anywhere outside New York), it’s harder or easier to get work? Does location even matter?

A: I am a half-breed. I am half-Texan, half-Maine. I hope to live both places someday. For now, Dallas is a wonderful place to live and work. I’m a laid-back Texan, and it definitely suits my personality—not to mention that the artists’ scene in Texas and especially Dallas is very supportive and a great place to be.

Copyright © Allison V. Smith

L: Do you shoot medium-format? Digital? Strictly film? Whatever works? Does that kind of stuff interest you, or is the equipment kind of ancillary? (I read an interview with Eggleston where he said he just picked up whichever camera was around when he walked out the door. Seemed really random.)

A: I shoot it all. I have digital for mostly freelance jobs. I shoot Hasselblad and Lomo and Widelux for myself. Occasionally, a client will ask me to shoot with one of my film cameras for an assignment.

Copyright © Allison V. Smith

L: I’ve been working a lot lately (in my mind, on my blog) on developing my vision (for lack of a better word), my style, my whatever you want to call it. I think this all relates to knowing what matters to me, figuring out what I want to photograph. It’s all tied together. Part of what I love about your zine is how cohesive it is. It includes a wide variety of photos, but they all hang together really well and seem to be talking the same language. Did that just happen for you, or did you work at it? Either way, how?

A: I think it is for sure something that has developed over time. I work hard at improving all the time. My ninety-six-year-old grandfather taught me that you never stop growing and evolving as a person or an artist. Part of my zine was an effort to loosen up my style, not worry so much about making the composition perfect. It has been a great exercise for me.

Copyright © Allison V. Smith

Copyright © Allison V. Smith

L: Do you feel like you get pigeonholed in a particular genre? I mean, are you known as an editorial photographer, or a fine-art photographer, or both? Do you feel like people are open to blurring boundaries? Maybe I’ve just been watching too much CNN, but I heard James Carville the other day talking about how if a politician doesn’t define himself, someone else will define him, so you need to control the message. I hate the way that sounds (Carville’s voice is ringing in my ears), but I think there’s something to be said for the fact that people do like to categorize and define each other. Is there a way to avoid that as a photographer? Or do you just say, “Fuck it,” and do what you want and screw what people think you are (or aren’t)?

A: I think about this all the time. You know people in the art world don’t quite appreciate newspaper photographers the way I think they should be respected. There are some amazing photographers out there—Damon Winter, Mona Reeder, David Leeson—all of whom I consider some of the best photographers in the country. Yet, you never see their names outside the newspaper worlds. Damon is hands down one of the finest portrait photographers there is, and besides seeing his credit in The New York Times, you never see his name. So this makes me mad and it kind of gives me the attitude of, “Fuck it.” I am just going to be who I am. I am going to continue working for clients who are wonderful to work for, who hire me for my vision rather than tell me how to shoot something. I am going to continue to shoot for myself, and I hope for more beautiful exhibits in the future. I am going to continue to make zines and postcards. I am going to continue to shoot for myself as often as I possibly can because, in the end, I love photography. I love photographers and photo books. It’s who I am, what I am.

Copyright © Allison V. Smith

Mel Trittin

Mel Trittin was one of the people who bought from me in my print sale, and she was kind enough to send me one of her own photos in exchange for the free prints I sent out. Here it is.

Copyright © Mel Trittin

Now that’s the kind of mail I like to get. Thanks, Mel!

Allison V. Smith: Superficial Snapshots, Zine 2: An Issue with Lomos

I got myself a copy of Allison V. Smith’s second zine and, man, am I glad. (The first issue sold out before I even knew it existed.) The zine as a mode of publication is my new favorite thing in the whole wide world, and Allison’s is as good as it gets, for sure. I love everything about this little thing: the photos, the layout, the design, the price. I can’t believe she even has any left, but you can still snag a copy here or here.

Copyright © Allison V. Smith

Copyright © Allison V. Smith

Copyright © Allison V. Smith

Excruciating

I am sitting at my computer watching as Auditorium, by James Rajotte, sells out on 20x200. I’m dying to buy a medium-size print myself, but forcing myself not to. It is excruciating. And, frankly, I’m shocked that I’ve held out this long. (This is a testament to just how high my credit-card balances have gotten.)

Copyright © James Rajotte

My angst and me

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of Joan Didion. She’s the one I go to when nothing else works. I’ve also been thinking a lot about my place in photography, where I fit in (or will fit in), what kind of work I want to be producing and why. The two are connected, in ways that dawned on me this afternoon.

When I do this, when I look at other photographers and try to find someone who’s doing what I want to be doing, I often come up empty-handed. The art world drives me crazy with its valuation of inane artist statements. Stock photography makes my eyes glaze over. Journalism doesn’t do it for me. Editorial has possibilities—but only if I’m hired for my style, my vision, not to execute somebody else’s. But what exactly is my vision? What kind of photographer am I? What kind of photographer do I want to be?

I sent out two prints to each of the people who participated in my print sale—and they’re completely different in style. If you saw the two photographs, you’d never guess they were taken by the same person. That’s not a good thing—it’s a sign (or a symptom) of my current lack of clarity.

Before you send me an e-mail telling me I’m being too hard on myself or I’m overthinking things or I’m focusing on my angst, and I just need to get out and photograph, I should tell you: This is who I am. I overthink things. I focus on my angst. That isn’t going to change, and I’ll be better off if I learn how to put my obsessive-compulsive control-freak tendencies to work for me in my photography instead of trying to fight them. As S. pointed out today over coffee, “I’ve seen you do this numerous times. You work things over, worry them, until you come to some understanding of what you believe. How many times have you talked for hours like this, and then said, at some point, ‘That’s it! I’ve got it!’ You need to work things out this way—that’s who you are.” (God, it’s good to be known like that, you know?) But it makes sense. There’s the noun form of worry—“mental distress or agitation resulting from concern usually for something impending or anticipated; anxiety”—and I’ve got plenty of that. But the worrying S. was talking about is a verb: “to shake or pull at with the teeth [a terrier worrying a rat].” I gnash at a thing over and over until I get to the heart of it. (That’s much of why I like Didion so.)

Anyway, in my worrying over coffee, talking this out with S., I came up with this:

• I need to not fight who I am (see above). Take Didion and Sontag. Both good writers, but completely different in their approaches. Sontag was all in her head, and Didion comes at things equal parts mind and heart. To read Didion is to have the very real sense that you know her; you can read lots of Sontag and never feel that way. Neither approach is better or worse—but they know who they are (make that past tense for Sontag). So when they approach a topic, they come at it in different ways. That’s what a good photographer has—a sense of who she is, what she cares about—and that’s what helps determine, even if subconsciously, the subject and the approach.

• I want to be in my projects. Not the way Amy Elkins is in hers—not in self-portraits. I don’t want to do projects that are directly about myself. But I want people who look at my work to get some sense of who I am, in the same way that Didion’s essays, though about, say, 1960s America, are also about her. I want to choose projects that I care about that much, projects that I have an emotional connection to, not just projects that are interesting or timely or that satisfy my curiosity. Those things are nice, but the most important thing is the connection, because if that’s there, it’ll show in the work. So whether I’m doing my own personal projects, or I’m doing an assignment, I want to come at it with who I am at the forefront. There are thousands of good photographers out there; the only thing that sets me apart from anyone else is my take, me. The voice, the vision, that’ll come in time. Until then, practice. And if I’m not in it, walk away.

Goodbye to all that

I was back east the past few days, visiting my parents in Michigan and my sisters and newborn nephew in Chicago. I can’t visit my family without some drama or another; everything is heightened there.

Copyright © 2008 Liz Kuball

As my plane made its descent into O’Hare, two guys behind me, apparently native Californians, remarked on how green and flat the land was. That comment set the tone for me, in many ways, and I started seeing parallels between the landscape and my relationship to my family. The intensity of the colors mimicked the intensity of emotion; the flat land, my inability to hide.

Copyright © 2008 Liz Kuball

The first night I was home, I called S. and I was still myself. I had gotten out of bed in California that morning, and there was California dirt on the bottoms of my flip-flops. The second night I was home, I called S. from under the covers in my childhood bedroom and cried. Cried not because I missed him (though I did) and not because I missed California (though I did that, too), but cried because my sisters were both in Chicago and I was alone in the house with my parents, cried because my parents are grandparents now and my grandparents are dead, cried because I felt guilty for all the ways in which I’ve let them down and all the ways I’ve hurt them, cried because my mom said she wanted to sell the house before my dad died, so she wouldn’t have to move from it alone someday, and though that was all theoretical (my dad isn’t ill), it was also frighteningly real.

I’d brought Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album with me, and on the way back I read nearly all of the former. Didion makes for a great traveling companion, particularly when your destination is California and California is home. On our descent into Los Angeles, I looked out and saw muted shades of gray and brown, green and purple, and I felt better. I can’t live my life against a backdrop of such intensity. I need the chaparral and the palm trees, the dust and the sand, the marine layer and smog, and the smell of jasmine in the air. I need the ocean out the window, and half a continent between my past and me. I need to feel, as Didion writes, “some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”

Copyright © 2006 Liz Kuball

Marine layer, corduroy, and silver hair

As everyone back east is sweltering in the heat and humidity and flooding rains, it’s a typical June day in Southern California—64°F (18°C), the marine layer creeping into my apartment through the open balcony doors.

This was Summerland this afternoon, after I mailed the free prints to all those who bought from me last month.

Copyright © 2008 Liz Kuball

Copyright © 2008 Liz Kuball

S. always has a way of fitting in with whatever landscape he’s in. (Could his corduroy jacket and silver hair be more perfect? I don’t think so.)

More Mann

What Remains

I’ve had What Remains: The Life and Work of Sally Mann in my Netflix queue since it came out a couple months ago, and it finally arrived this week. I watched it last night, and I think I might watch it again tonight and again tomorrow with S. when he’s over. It’s that good.

Mann was one of the first photographers whose work I fell in love with—particularly Immediate Family—and this film only deepens my admiration for her, as a photographer and a person. There’s so much in these eighty minutes to find inspiring, but here are the first couple minutes of the film, which are inspiration enough for now.



There is the temptation, I think, when you’re just starting out in something, to look for big ideas, big stories, big topics, because you think that if you find something important, your work will be important. But usually, the smaller and more personal you go, the more you pare things down to their essence, the more powerful they are.

Look for projects from me in the coming months that are more personal, less about the world outside my life and more about the world I inhabit. I’m planning to do a zine of one of them later in the summer. I’ll keep you posted.

Dalton Rooney

After my print sale, Dalton Rooney, one of the people who bought from me, e-mailed and offered to send me a free print of my choosing, since I would soon be sending him a free print of a photograph made with my new lens. I wasn’t about to pass up his generous offer, and his print arrived shortly thereafter.

This is the one I chose—I loved it on his Web site, but it’s even more beautiful in print. Thanks, Dalton!

Copyright © Dalton Rooney

Michelle

Copyright © 2008 Liz Kuball

Um, yeah

Oh, come on. If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you couldn’t possibly have expected me to hang it up for very long, could you?

I had every intention of staying away for the summer, or at least through mid-July. As I alluded to in my last post, I was wrestling with a couple issues. First, there was the very real sense that I was spending too much time reading other people’s blogs, and I’m not going to argue that. There are simply a ton of interesting blogs and interesting photographers out there, and moderation and I have never been acquaintances, much less friends. In other words, I was bingeing on blogs and I had a serious hangover. And in the midst of that hangover, I wasn’t differentiating clearly between reading dozens of other blogs, and writing my own. It was like getting drunk on alcohol and swearing off milk.

I wrote that post and waited a couple days to publish it, to make sure I meant what I said. I didn’t want to be all melodramatic and declare my blog over, only to regret it the next day. (It always sucks to have to call your boyfriend the morning after a big fight and say, “Oh, so when I broke up with you? Yeah, I didn’t know what I was saying. We’re good now, right?”) I think I knew, deep down (and S. knew it when I read him the draft, and after I published the post), that I love blogging. Not because of all the reasons I was worried about loving it—not because I was getting more hits or more e-mails from readers or more recognition (and believe me, it’s not like I have, or—so far—deserve, that much). But because this blog is, and always has been for me, a place where I can work out my own thoughts and feelings—whether frustration or excitement or confusion or anger or even, god forbid, the occasional (and short-lived) bout of ennui. Often, I’ve come to some important realization about my work, or myself, through writing this blog. (When I don’t figure out what I think about a subject by talking about it, I figure it out by writing about it.)

I am not not photographing because of my blog—if I were publishing as much as Rachel Hulin does over on the PhotoShelter blog, maybe I could use that excuse. In fact, I’m not not photographing at all. I am photographing. I’m not taking three-week trips down the Mississippi, but I’m snatching the time where I can every day. That’s what I can do right now, and that works for me.

So I’m back, with my list of blogs in my Google Reader dramatically reduced, eager anticipation of the new edition of The Americans set to be delivered from photo-eye on Friday, and new images in my camera. Now is the time to “stop focusing on the quantity of work that’s out there and focus on the work that matters to me.” But this is part of the work that matters to me, and it only took four days—and a publicly declared self-imposed break—to make me realize that.