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 15. 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 10th-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 15 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 96-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

Norma Rae, Annie Hall, and Nicholson

I’ve been into photography since I got a Kodak Disc camera for my 10th birthday, but it’s really only been in the past two years that I’ve started to get more serious about it. This leaves me in the position of being 34 years old and just getting started. I look at most of my “emerging” peers, and they weren’t even born when I got my Kodak Disc. I was born under Nixon; they were born under Reagan or, Christ, even the first Bush. (I can hear S. laughing now; he was born under Hoover.)

I don’t think this really matters to me on its most basic level. Age has never been an issue for me, and you don’t have to look very far for proof of that. In many ways, I feel thankful that I’m not trying to find my voice as a photographer at the same time that I’m trying to figure out who I am as a person. I’m over that whole angst/ennui thing, and now I’m aware—very aware—of what I want to do and how little time I have to do it.

I sent Julia Dean an e-mail a couple weeks ago, thanking her for the wonderful classes she puts on at JDPW, and she replied saying that my e-mail couldn’t have come at a better time: She was just thinking that she hasn’t done enough, particularly where her nonprofit work is concerned. I haven’t yet replied, but when I do, I’ll say that no one worth her salt—and Julia’s worth her salt and then some—ever feels she’s done enough and that one lifetime isn’t adequate.

What I’m saying is, Norma Rae has osteoporosis, Annie Hall is hawking anti-aging cream on TV, and Nicholson is starting to look like a dirty old man instead of just dirty. I will blink and it’ll be over; I need to make sure I do all the things I want to do.

The result of this awareness, something that has only started to hit me in the past year or so, is that I sometimes have to pull back on the reins a bit. Case in point: Critical Mass is accepting entries, and I felt I had to do it, I had to get my work in front of those 200 reviewers, and it had to be now. I paid my $50 and started thinking about my work and which images I wanted to enter, and I realized I wasn’t ready. Not this year. Next year, maybe. But not this year. I e-mailed and withdrew and the sense of relief was incredible: I can take this at my own pace. I’m not in a race with kids still in undergrad. It doesn’t matter what anyone else was doing when she was my age.

It’s okay. And that’s the thing: When I was younger, it wouldn’t have been.

Mystery

So Monday night I was taking pictures outside the post office, and while I was there, I took a few shots of the liquor store across the street, realized I didn’t particularly like them, and moved on. When I got home and downloaded, I saw this strange reflection in the image, and I couldn’t figure out where the hell it was coming from.

Copyright © 2007 Liz Kuball

I e-mailed Say Dempsay, an awesome photography teacher, to ask her what she thought it was. If anybody could figure it out, it would be Say. She had some ideas, for sure, but she said she’d never seen anything like it before and she wasn’t certain of the explanation.

The mystery was deepening.

Tuesday night, I happened to be at that same post office again (this time actually picking up some mail), and I thought, “Hey, I’ll try to replicate that effect and see if it was just something freaky in the air last night.” I took a few shots and, sure enough, there it was again. But this time, I noticed that I could actually move the reflection around the sky, depending on where I pointed the lens. I e-mailed Say and, this time, she actually tried to get the same kind of reflection using a candle in a dark bathroom in her house. (This is why she’s such a great teacher—your obsessions become her obsessions.) She couldn’t get it to happen, but she offered me the use of her camera to see if it was something weird in my camera or lens, or whether it was something I could get to happen in hers, too.

Copyright © 2007 Liz Kuball

I took pictures with my Canon 5D with my 16-35mm lens and then again with my 50mm lens, and in both situations, I could see the reflection. But I noticed I could see it as I was looking through the glass—even before I hit the shutter release. So it had to be some kind of reflection on the internal elements. But just to be sure, I took out Say’s 5D and I was able to get the same result. (To the left is a crop of the part in question.)

I drove back to campus (where she was in the middle of teaching a class) and showed her the results. We know that there’s some reflection going on with the lens elements, but we don’t know why. And we don’t know why we’re not seeing this same effect in other similar situations.

So what do you think? Have you ever noticed anything like this in your own photographs? Do you have an explanation for it (beyond just knowing that it’s some kind of reflection in the camera)? If so, be a pal and e-mail me—this is the kind of stuff that keeps me up at night.

Welcome

New year, brand-spankin’-new blog!

To kick things off, here’s a bit about me and what I hope to do with this blog.

I got my first camera, a Kodak Disc, for my 10th birthday, in 1983, and for the next 20 years, I always had a camera around. Maybe more important, I was always aware of photography and photographers, sort of like when you have your heart set on a new car, it seems like every time you turn around, you see someone driving one. It’s as if your senses are heightened when you want something that much, and I wanted to be a photographer more than I’ve ever wanted any car.

As I got older, though, and started thinking about a “career” in a more concrete way, I didn’t have any context for what it would mean to be a working photographer, or how to get there. I didn’t know any photographers, and the ones whose work I’d admired as a kid seemed out of reach. Plus, I wasn’t a fan of uncertainty—the thought of not knowing where I was going or how to get there drove me crazy. So I ended up majoring in English and taking a more traditional path, one that led me far away from photography. Sure, I kept my camera, and I took the occasional darkroom class at the local art center. But that was the extent of my involvement with photography, and I thought that’s the way it would always be.

After undergrad, I spent six or seven years working in a job I didn’t love—cubicle, gray walls, fluorescent lights, The Office minus the comedy. In my late 20s, I moved to L.A. (shout-out to Angelenos!) and picked up a master’s degree in writing. School was like a Linus blanket for me, all blue and warm and fuzzy, and I thought for sure this degree would change everything. And it did—just not in the way I thought it would.

I didn’t write the Great American Novel or become the Voice of My Generation. But for my master’s thesis, I wrote a collection of essays on photography—and the more I wrote about photography and thought about how much it had mattered to me ever since I got that Kodak Disc camera and wore the collars of my Izods turned up, the more I wanted to be out taking pictures. I started to remember what I’d wanted to do and be when I was 10, before I started telling myself those things were out of reach. I finished my thesis and walked away with $40,000 in student loans—and the decision to be a photographer.

Everything had come full circle.

Today I’m taking some amazing photo classes—not to get a degree, just to learn—and I’m letting my curiosity lead the way. Right now, I’m most interested in documentary work, but I’m open to other possibilities. I’m still growing as a photographer—finding my voice, my style—and I don’t want to limit myself.

In this blog, I’ll post images I’ve taken that same day (like the one below). I’ll also write about the photographers I’ve always admired (and ones I’ve just discovered), photo books that have made me think, lectures and exhibits I’ve attended, projects I’m working on (or hope to work on someday), successes I’ve had, mistakes I’ve made, things I can’t figure out, and anything else that’s on my mind—because if it’s on my mind, odds are, it has to do with photography.

Copyright © 2007 Liz Kuball