Liz Kuball Photography

Monday, November 17, 2008

Will and Zoe

Melanie McWhorter at photo-eye just helped me change my order of two copies of Zoe Strauss’s America from unsigned (all that was available when I placed my order) to signed (which they’re now offering). Hell yeah, I want signed. One copy for me, one copy for S. for Hanukkah.

If you’re eagerly anticipating the arrival of your copy, be sure to check out Will Steacy’s fantastic interview with Ms. Strauss at photo-eye magazine.

Labels: books, interviews, Melanie McWhorter, photographers, S., Will Steacy, Zoe Strauss

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Muzi Quawson and some other stuff

I’m really drawn to photographers who straddle the line between documentary and fine art. One photographer whose work I’ve been interested in recently is Muzi Quawson, who had a solo show at Yossi Milo earlier this year. When I started looking for more information on Quawson, I came upon a page at the site of the Royal College of Art, from which she earned her MFA. This is the bit that got me:

Quawson “kind of knew vaguely” what she wanted to pursue in her own practice—she knew she wanted to document U.S. communities that live on the fringes of American society, and she knew that she was fascinated by the cinematic scope of a landscape that, through the work of some of the country’s most influential directors, such as Martin Scorsese, made her feel like she was “revisiting a place I’ve been to before”—but she was having trouble turning her ideas and influences into a single, clear vision.

I love hearing about people who “kind of knew vaguely” what they wanted to do and eventually figured it out. I’m still in that vague stage, but I’m getting closer.

Meanwhile, here’s some of Quawson’s work for you to enjoy. (You can also hear an audio interview and watch a video interview with her; these were created in conjunction with the Tate Triennial 2006: New British Art exhibition at the Tate Britain, of which Quawson was a part.)

Labels: interviews, Muzi Quawson, photographers

Sunday, June 29, 2008

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.

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.

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

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

Labels: 1000 Words Photography, interviews, Martin Parr, Naoya Hatakeyama, Paola de Grenet, photographers, Tim Clark

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Labels: Allison V. Smith, blogs, cameras, Cindy Sherman, CNN, Diane Arbus, editorial, education, interviews, James Carville, Lee Friedlander, photographers, politics, TV, Walker Evans, William Eggleston, zines

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

A very vulnerable thing

Thanks to a late-night e-mail from Susana Raab, I caught Jhumpa Lahiri on Charlie Rose last night, and that led me to reading some online interviews with her this afternoon. In one, at The Atlantic, she said:

It’s easy for me to think, “Why am I doing this? There are so many great writers and great books—what’s the point?” I can get into that mindframe pretty easily, and the more I see that this or that book is coming out, the more easily I go into a very scared place. I know that about myself. I feel protective of my work. And the ability to stay focused is a very vulnerable thing.

Blew my mind. In another interview, she said that she doesn’t have Internet access on her computer and has only really been online looking over other people’s shoulders. (The interview was from 1999, so maybe things have changed for her in the time since then, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they hadn’t.)

I love blogging, love that someone I met through blogging contacted me through e-mail to tell me about an interview with a writer I’d posted about here. But sometimes I read about other photographers and all they’re accomplishing, and I just want to shut down, forget the rest of the world, and live only in my own.

I haven’t yet ruled that out.

Labels: blogs, Charlie Rose, interviews, Jhumpa Lahiri, photographers, Susana Raab, TV, writers

Monday, May 05, 2008

My interview debut

Can’t get enough of me? Check out this interview on You Call This Photography? A big thank-you to the guys at Farting on Thunder for asking the questions. I had a lot of fun answering them.

Labels: interviews, self-promotion

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Interview: Susana Raab

You gotta love Susana Raab. Here’s why.

Liz: I first heard about you on Amy Stein’s blog, where Amy mentioned she’d hung out with you at PHotoEspana, and I figured, “Hell, if Amy likes her, she must be a swell gal.” I checked out your Web site and blog, and you were my new photo hero, a working photographer, making your living through your work, and also producing personal projects that were getting you to Spain and all over the world. Why don’t you start off by telling me how you got into photography in the first place? I think I remember that we’re both English majors (well, I know I was an English major, and I think you were, too). How did you get from English to photography?

Susana: I spent a lot of time out of college trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I had switched from a business major (which my mother had urged me to be—“How else will you get a job?”—oh, the irony of that statement now!) to English after I was flunking out of econ and stats from total apathy. Ended up finishing my major in three semesters with close to a 4.0 and really being enthused about my coursework again. Growing up, I was pretty much a latchkey kid, moving every two years till junior high, and, as a result, I spent an inordinate amount of time in my room reading and not really pursuing any other interests. As a result, when I graduated from college, I had no clue what I wanted to do or how to determine it.

Returning to Northern Virginia, I took a job working at the National Beer Wholesalers’ Association, which at the time, as a recent post-grad, sounded way cooler than it was; revisionist history being what it is, I see it now for what it was: a desperate attempt to pay rent at any cost.

Knowing I had to figure something out, I fell back into English, taking grad classes at night, and deciding to move across the country to Eugene, Oregon, to pursue a graduate degree in English there. (Two out of my four best years as a kid were spent in Eugene, Oregon, and I think I was drawn there to sort of recapture what I thought of as my Edenic moment.)

About a year in, writing a paper on Foucault and madness, I began to feel slightly mad, realized I was enjoying the literary theory too much and to what purpose? Didn’t want to get a job teaching freshman English in BFE. Stumbled upon a book by Howard Chapnick, Black Star agency founder, entitled Truth Needs No Ally, and realized that, through photojournalism, I could combine my love of words, narratives, social utility, and art.

Started taking classes in photography at the local community college, dropped out of grad school, skied, camped, hiked, joined the Peace Corps, dispatched to Outer Mongolia, and, when I returned to the D.C. area, I started working for local newspapers, which led to an internship and job at Roll Call, a newspaper that covers Congress, which led to a full-time non-staff position at The New York Times D.C. bureau, freelancing for major pubs, which led to grad school for a self-imposed timeout and a reinvention of myself as a photographer, a process which will probably continue till I die. As you can see, it’s been a long and winding road.

L: I have a master’s in writing from USC, and though I’m glad I was there (because of the people I met), I graduated with $40,000 in student loans and the realization that I didn’t want to be a writer. To me, grad school seemed like a way to force people to write who weren’t writing on their own. Some people I went to school with are writing and publishing; but more of them are just working day jobs, paying off their student loans, and talking about how they haven’t written much lately. You got your master’s from Ohio University’s School of Visual Communications. What made you decide to go back to get your master’s? What are your thoughts about grad school for photography in general? Do you recommend it? Why or why not? What purpose does it serve?

S: I was really burning out on D.C. photojournalism, covering Congress and the White House, that feeling of being so cool because you were traveling on Air Force One, landing in some small town and walking in a giant pool, colleagues in the bubble being rude to local press, being pushed by and screamed at, “Go pool!” by twentysomething White House staffers, evaluating your photography in comparison to what 30 other people had shot, from virtually the same angle, being asked every evening, “Do you have something that matches the wires?” This was really not for me. I really value not foregrounding one’s ego, being nice to people, regardless of status, byline, or who made the front page of The Washington Post. Don’t get me wrong—it was a fantastic experience, and I’m grateful for the opportunity. I have many fond memories, but I wanted to put more of me into my shots (I mean my thinking, my personality—this might be ego?). I have a lot of respect for the photographers who make their living this way, there are some excellent and nice ones, it’s just not for everyone. It was a fantastic training ground, and I was privileged to learn so much, technically, how to handle situations, how to work a scene, how to work fast, and, of course, the caliber of the people I was working with was super-high. I also was able to meet a lot of extraordinary human beings. So no regrets, but it was time to leave.

Grad school for me was my hall pass. I got out of D.C. I could focus on what I wanted to shoot and how I wanted to shoot it. Moving to Appalachian Ohio was a complete paradigm shift, but moving all the time growing up, and spending that time in Mongolia, I really look forward to new environments and am pretty happy anywhere. My tolerance for ambiguity is infinite. A friend of mine, a noted Magnum photographer, advised me to just go the workshop route instead, so before I went to grad school I took a workshop with another noted Magnum photographer. The other photographer also reinforced the feeling that grad school was for people who didn’t know what they wanted to do. This may be true. But for me, grad school was incredibly more rewarding than that seven-day workshop (though I am not against workshops at all—had a fabulous experience at the Missouri Photo Workshop, and am looking for a good one for this year for a little recharge). But in grad school (OU’s VisCom program does a great job of funding—I have no debt), I really became free. I shot medium format exclusively, when I could; I began my Consumed and Off-Season projects; I learned audio, multimedia; and I was free. Free! I drove all over Appalachian Ohio—I loved it! I loved the landscape, the people, the quirkiness, the accessibility. I was inspired by walking into class and being forced to come up with story ideas all the time. It was fabulous being in this cocoon of photography—I didn’t make the connections I would have had I been in NYC, but it was a nurturing, productive period in my life, to which I would return in a second.

So I don’t know what to say about grad school and photography, really. My time in grad school for English ultimately created a great antipathy in me about theorizing, etc. Words, words, words. I’m into narratives—in this sense, I like words. But this ivory-tower navel-gazing is not for me. And I don’t mean any disrespect by this. I am very much a live-and-let-live person, and I accept that much of contemporary art is entangled in this sort of theoretical construct that gives it meaning. I can’t fight it, nor am I interested in doing so. It is simply not for me. If I die obscure and irrelevant because of my refusal to participate in this process, so be it. I am what I am. So I don’t think I would have been a good match for more of an art school, in that sense, as I’m kind of a just-stop-talking-about-it-and-get-out-and-do-it person. Of course, the nature of my work is different from that of contemporary art photographers, so different bodies of work obviously have different modalities. I complete embrace the diversity of expression—I’m just not going to talk a lot of hooey about my work. (Kidding!) That said, I do employ metaphor and symbolism in my work. Living under the shadow of the Washington Monument, I am very phallo-sensitivo. Oh, sorry—off topic!

Okay, back to grad school. I mean, I think it really depends upon the individual and what they are trying to do. I think that the reason I went back is not a common one. And in my program, the majority of students just wanted to get into photography in the first place. I think what is helpful about going back as a more mature student (and I say this pronounced like couture) is that, generally, you know what you want out of it, you have something to say, and you’re just trying to find the proper tools to employ in the expression. In any graduate-school endeavor, I think it’s best to go and get some “real-life experience” and live a little (or a lot) before rushing into grad school. You do learn a lot along the way. Everything I have done informs me now.

L: What personal projects are you working on now? And what are you hoping to do down the road? Do you want to continue working editorially? Teach? Publish a book? Have a solo show at MOMA? Be copied by every young photographer?

S: I’m a bit pathetic in that I will continue to work on Consumed and Off-Season. I leave them for months—months!—and then will one day be inspired and go back to it. I would love to make Consumed into a book in a couple of years. Off-Season is going to be a longer endeavor. I am always in awe of these photographers who can pull these two-day projects out of their hat and make a fabulous book. This is not me, alas. I started this other project, an homage to my English background, A Sense of Place, on dead writers’ homes. Totally different, and doesn’t appeal to the same people who like my other stuff, generally, but you know, I got to mix it up. I’m a peripatetic person and that extends to my vision. Some projects are poignant, some ironic and humorous. I don’t wake up in the same mood every day. This is probably not the best career choice. But I gotta photograph for me.

One year, at Review Santa Fe, I was lucky to be reviewed by the remarkable Bill Witliff, a very generous soul. He looked at my Consumed work and said, “You have to keep shooting with your heart and not with your head.” And at the time, I thought I was shooting with my head, because at last I was putting something of myself into the photographs, rather than recording history (not that the two are necessarily exclusive—I was just not adept at this at the time), and then, months later, I realized he was right, it was all coming from the heart. Every bit of it. So this is why I do what I want to do, because I struggled for a loooong time to realize what I wanted to do, and to deny it now would be ungrateful.

I’ve got a lot of project ideas rolling around the old squash. I’d like to do one in D.C. It’s so ridiculous to live in this town that is fecund with nascent projects and to instead spend $500 in gas getting to another idea a thousand miles away. Plus, I think it’s very underrepresented in a wider pictorial sense. Andy Cutraro did a nice project last year on the two faces of D.C. along Pennsylvania Avenue that put all us documentary D.C. photogs to shame. I think it’s pretty common for us to overlook our backyard.

I’m starting another one in Peru—was lucky to get an assignment while away that jibed perfectly with a project I’m developing there. I love working editorially, even though at times, I do feel like a waitress with a camera (in the sense that you’re fulfilling an order without a budget that gives you the gift of time to think). I’ve worked enough jobs I really hated to be grateful to be paid for one that, 75 percent of the time, is fantastic.

One day I would love to teach, too. I really enjoy meeting with students and fomenting ideas, inspiring and being inspired. I love sharing—it’s the basis of art, isn’t it? But I’m traveling too much right now to teach, so that will have to wait.

Solo show at MOMA? That’ll be the day! Wouldn’t say no, of course! But it’s not on my inspiration board, at the moment. I’m super-grateful to be working and have the time to do my personal work and have it get some recognition. It’s going to happen, but for me the most important thing is producing the work. Of course, you have to get the work out there. No use doing all this work and dying on the vine. But it’s just much more fun to produce.

L: I just got a $37.50 store credit from photo-eye. What one photo book should I put that money toward buying? And why?

S: I have to say, I am often more inspired by reading the biographies of artists. Nothing like witnessing thirdhand a good struggle to really buck you up and get you out there. For ejemplo: Did you know Willem de Kooning didn’t have his first solo show till he was well in into his 40s? And you know, I love looking at others peoples’ work, photographers/artists, but I gotta say: Invest in yourself. Buy yourself some gas, film, or fund some time, whatever you have to do to make it happen for you.

If you insist on purchasing a book, I’d say Lars Tunbjork’s Office. Mundane hilarity. Making something out of nothing. The inseparability of humor and tragedy. Not taking the easy way out.

Labels: age, Amy Stein, Andy Cutraro, artists, Bill Witliff, blogs, books, day job, debt, education, interviews, Lars Tunbjork, photographers, portfolio reviews, Review Santa Fe, Susana Raab, Willem de Kooning

Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Interview: Michael David Murphy

Today’s interview subject, Michael David Murphy, is the guy behind 2point8, a great photo blog with an emphasis on street photography.

Liz: When I first found your blog, I fell in love with the Ways of Working posts that you did. I was terrified of photographing people, especially strangers, and you laid it all out there in a way that made sense to me—almost like a playbook. Have you always been a street photographer? Or did you have to work up the courage to photograph people on the street?

Michael: Ways of Working came about because I didn’t know anyone in San Francisco who was as fired up about photography as I was, so I figured I’d shoot and take notes and share my thoughts with whoever might find them valuable, and maybe I’d learn something myself along the way. I was hoping they’d read like a playbook, of sorts.

Photography guards its secrets, and I’m pro-transparency, especially when it reveals failure. So I was photographing a lot, and failing, and that led me to textually explore the hows and whys of what worked and what didn’t. I was teaching myself how to photograph in two ways: on the street with my camera, and after, in words (and at the library). Each helped me grow, equally.

On the courage front, I’ve fabricated a kind of bluster, which works in a pinch. Courage implies a fear of something that needs to be conquered. If you don’t think things are scary, there’s no fear. So generally, I don’t consider any of it scary, so I don’t have any fear. This did not come naturally, though.

I like people enough, I suppose, but I came to photography via big love for Ross McElwee, the Maysles, Chris Marker, Les Blank, and Barbara Kopple. I like dealing with people when they’re filtered by incredible editors, be they filmmakers or photographers. Up close, we’re a difficult and squirrelly bunch. The rub is, to get gold, you have to get in there and at least try to play the social game, even if you’re dressed like Joel Meyerowitz. [Michael provided a link to a post in which he pointed to a video of Meyerowitz shooting. I liked the video so much I’m posting it here. And if you’re a real Joel junkie, you may be interested in listening to an interview that Ibarionex Perello did with him.—Ed.]

L: What is it about street photography that you like? What are you looking for on the street? Which street photographers do you admire most and why?

M: Street photography is sport. Not like duck hunting or archery, more like soccer or basketball or even boxing. At its root for me, it’s a physical exploration. I may not run all over the place bobbing and weaving, but the success of street photographs has everything to do with getting your body in the right place at the right time so that your skill as a photographer can do the rest of the job, whether it’s a perfect-moment kind of picture, or something slower, borne of conversation with a stranger.

It’s about your eye, but it’s also about your ability to haul yourself through space so you can use your skill, dumb luck, and foresight to get the picture. It’s like catching a pass—you plan it out, predict where the ball’s going to be, make last-minute adjustments, and hope you’re not going to run smack into the fullback.

Accordingly, I started photographing on the street after sustaining three concussions playing soccer. I think there was a bike wreck in there, too. The concussions slowed me down, and my little Nikon digital was beginning to interest me. I enjoyed photographing, but I wanted to push myself to shoot more than the typical photo fodder of dogs, flowers, and fireworks.

My favorite pictures from then (2001–2002) were from photographers who’d begun publishing on the Web. (This is the first round of “photo-bloggers,” who will always be the real photo-bloggers, to me.) Eliot Shepard, Lucas Shuman, Todd Gross, Mark Powell. The more I looked at Eliot’s and Mark’s work, the more I knew what I liked, and the more inspired I became to take a wide look at the whole history of photography.

I’m most impressed by photographers who’ve cut their teeth on the street, but have “graduated,” like Mitch Epstein. My favorites shoot like I do (vice versa, most likely), and embrace the imperfections of flux. Lars Tunbjork, Tod Papageorge, Mark Steinmetz, Martin Parr (at times), Rosalind Solomon, Larry Fink, Brian Finke, Susan Meiselas. I look at Garry Winogrand’s Public Relations more than most. Some Meyerowitz. And then there’s Joel Sternfeld, whether or not he fits that mold.

L: I think I read that you were working for Atlanta Celebrates Photography. Do you want to talk a little about what that is and what you do there? How do you fit in your own photographic work with the day job?

M: We put together a city-wide, monthlong photography festival in Atlanta at nearly 200 venues during the month of October. We have lectures, openings, public-art projects, portfolio reviews, a film series, educational programs, and more. I’m the program manager there. We’re a two-person nonprofit, with volunteers and a fantastic board of directors. October’s an exhilarating whirlwind. Ya’ll should come down, or over!

As a photographer, I’m lucky to have a schedule that allows me to shoot when I need to shoot, which is a luxury after a corporate career. I owe it to Jason Fulford, who curated the public-art project Paper Placemats (ATL) for ACP last year. He chose a picture of mine for the project, and gave me the heads-up about the organization. I was new in town, came aboard, and it’s all worked out nicely. Check out ACP Now!, our corner of the photo-blog universe.

L: Where are you going with your photography? What’s on your wish list in terms of your photo work?

M: Street photography is a hamster wheel. It’s a limitless game of limitations. I’m as fascinated by it as I was by poetry, because it’s both proscriptive and infinite. It’s what you make of it. Because it’s fairly prohibitive here in Atlanta (pedestrian culture: slim to none), I’m heading in other directions, which has been a surprise bonus since leaving San Francisco.

I’ve been shooting the campaign trail here through the South, since November. I have a few Atlanta-specific projects in process that I’ve been shooting with a 4 x 5. Portraits, even!

Wishes:

Find a unique, original space to hang So Help Me. . . on election eve in November. I’ve been recording speeches on the campaign trail, while shooting. I want to hang a show of all the campaign work I’ve been shooting, and flood the space with swirling audio, red/white/blue bunting, TVs showing election returns, all held together by fantastic prints. My inner military brat might rupture after an evening like that. Go, team!
Publish the book version of unphotographable.com.
Build a new project called blinding.us.
Long term and impractical: Write the book that needs to be written about Winogrand, with or without permission.

L: I just got a $37.50 store credit from photo-eye. What one photo book should I put that money toward buying? And why?

M: Cancel the credit and spend it on home or renter’s insurance! Take an hour and write down each and every serial number for every item of equipment you own. When we were robbed a few months ago, I wished I had one sheet of paper with all that info, so I could get on the phone with insurance and start demanding replacement cash, stat.

If not insurance, get Sternfeld’s On This Site. There are good books, and then there’s that book, which is so good it’s frightening. That book’s a long, satisfying punch in the face. Every time I have a copy, I give it away to someone and have to find another. It’s my photo-book hot potato.

Labels: blogs, books, Garry Winogrand, Ibarionex Perello, interviews, Jason Fulford, Joel Meyerowitz, Joel Sternfeld, Lars Tunbjork, Michael David Murphy, Mitch Epstein, photographers, poetry, portraits

Sunday, April 06, 2008

Interview: Greg Wasserstrom

One of my all-time favorite bloggers I’ve never met is Greg Wasserstrom. As I told him when I e-mailed my list of questions, I see him as part of a younger generation of photographers, many of whom seem Serious (with a capital S), and he doesn’t. I don’t mean that his work isn’t serious or that he’s not serious about his work; I mean that he doesn’t take himself too seriously, and I dig that.

On to the interview.

Liz: I love your project The Doldrums. It feels really cohesive in its disjointedness to me, like there’s a madness with a method underneath. Is that intentional, or does it just come out that way? I tend to be worried about drawing connections between images, and you seem not to be burdened with any of that, and it works so well. I guess I’m curious how you do it, if that’s even answerable.

Greg: I’m really happy to hear you say Doldrums feels cohesive. Having lived through all the moments the series presents, it certainly feels cohesive to me, but I’ve shown it to a couple gallerists who didn’t agree. But I do feel that these images are inherently tied together and that they are part of an ongoing body of work. The series is about the last few months before I moved from D.C., so I added the subtitle “A Fractional Portrait of the Nation’s Capital.” I think that helps make sense of it for people who don’t see what I’m getting at at first (or second) glance.

At the same time though, I kind of don’t give a shit about traditional organizing principles. Not that there’s anything wrong with creating work in a more project-based way. If that was a process that came naturally to me, I would assuredly use it. But I don’t think like that. I just shoot, and then the art is in the editing. So, in a certain sense, they all are just a bunch of one-off snapshots thrown together. But they create a sort of nonlinear narrative about me and the space I inhabit. If that doesn’t appeal, I don’t blame you. My life isn’t exactly the most fascinating.

But I hope to make work that that’s both personal and socially revealing. Looking at my life and what’s going on around me always makes me think that it’s totally insane that we live in a system that can support kids like me. So I want to try and do things that are sort of self-conscious chronicles of this particular historic moment; something that’s immersed in it all, but always cognizant of the giant thundercloud that’s hanging over this entire period of history.

But even if you don’t buy that, I think that my way of seeing comes across loud and clear. It all serves as a chronicle of depression if nothing else. So one way or another, I think it’s the autobiographical nature of what I do and the inescapable point of view I bring to it that links my work together—at least in my eyes.

L: How did you get started in photography? What made you want to be a photographer? And you write, too, from what I read on your blog, so how do you mesh the two interests in your life? Do you see yourself more as a photographer or as a writer? Do you want to find a way to combine them more directly?

G: Oh, gosh. I really have been using a camera in some form or other since I was a pretty little kid. I always loved taking pictures when we were on vacation growing up and practically begged my parents for my own camera. They were always really hesitant to give me anything of the sort because I’ve never been very good at keeping things nice. I went through quite a few. I have no idea what happened to all the pictures. I would love to take a look at them now, especially since my way of working has come pretty much full circle.

I got into stop-motion animation when I was 10 or 11, which developed into an interest in video art by the time I was going into high school. I got into still photography around the time I was graduating. The common thread here, I think, is that these are all ways to make art without having to have, say, fine motor skills or other abilities demanded by other forms of visual art. Also, I’m an incredibly analytical person, and I think I’m drawn to the photograph because of its capacity for symbolism. Photographs are interesting, I think, when they add up to depict something much larger than what’s within any individual frame.

That’s how my photography relates to what I write; I’m a political blogger, so my job is to provide commentary, which is what I also try and do with my pictures. So I don’t really see myself as some hybrid of a writer and photographer. I think of myself more as a kind of social observer working across a couple of different mediums. I would love nothing more than to combine these two things directly; they’re the same thing as far as I’m concerned, so I’ve been experimenting with different ways to do this in a kind of interesting or innovative way. To that end, I’m sort of looking to Wolfgang Tillmans and Dash Snow and the way both incorporate news clippings and other text into their work. I’m getting closer, I think.

L: When you think about photography, do you see it more as a craft or an art? I’m thinking of woodworkers, for example—they can make beautiful things, but they probably still see themselves as craftspeople more than artists. Maybe it’s a moot point, actually. I don’t know . . . scrap this question if it doesn’t do anything for you.

G: I don’t think I could dare to classify an entire medium as one thing or another. I’ve seen wedding photographs that I’ve really loved. And I’ve seen photographs on the walls of museums that make me vomit in my mouth a little. I suppose it has a bit to do with what kind of pictures are being taken and the attitude of the photographer about her own work. All the boundaries are really blurry. But when I think of photography as craft, I think of the guy who takes pictures at Little League games for the newsletter or something, all the way up through certain approaches to photojournalism and some commercial photography. But things are what we make of them, really.

L: Do you have any specific goals for your photography? Where do you want to go with it? (I sound like a college admissions counselor all of a sudden.) I mean, are you thinking you want to remain in the art world, focus on gallery shows, maybe a book someday, teach, etc.? Or do you think you’ll go the editorial/commercial route and try to make a living from your photographs? Or maybe neither?

G: Yeah, I mean, I have all sorts of grandiose fantasies about where I hope all this will go. I was just at Ryan McGinley’s opening at Team Gallery the other night and it was ridiculous and, of course, I'm sitting there thinking, “I could see this for myself.” So that’s pretty silly and is akin to wanting to be Radiohead or something. In real terms, I don’t have a specific plan for where I’m going. I know I want to be in this for the long haul, I want to get an MFA, I want to teach. I would love to make books. Regular editorial work would be fantastic, though I’m not comfortable enough to start seeking it out just at the moment. And if someone were to pay me to do commercial work for them, I would have no qualms whatsoever. (McGinley just did a big shoot for Heineken, I hear.) But I feel like I have a couple of questions to answer before I go full throttle after my dreams of riches and international superstardom. As soon as I feel like I have a little more control of the kind of work I produce, I’ll be hot on the heels of destiny, or whatever it is they say. I hope to be on much different footing a year from now.

L: I just got a $37.50 store credit from photo-eye. What one photo book should I put that money toward buying? And why?

G: I flipped through Brian Finke’s new book, Flight Attendants, when I was at The powerHouse Arena the other night and I would probably pick that up. He takes some pretty well-established archetypes (the pilot, the flight attendant) and does a masterful job playing with them and looking at them in very fresh ways. Also, the images are gorgeous.

Labels: artists, blogs, books, Brian Finke, Dash Snow, Greg Wasserstrom, interviews, music, photographers, Radiohead, Ryan McGinley, Wolfgang Tillmans

Saturday, April 05, 2008

Interview: Raul Gutierrez

Raul Gutierrez in the house. Read on.

Liz: So as I mentioned to you, what I love about your blog is your mix of words and photographs. It’s unlike anything else I’ve found online, and in this day of everybody posting the same stuff, that’s remarkable. I’m curious about the role of blogging in artists’ lives. Why did you start your blog, and what does it do for you as an artist?

Raul: I started this particular blog to let friends and family know what was going on with a move I was making from L.A. to New York. It began as a typical “I ate cornflakes for breakfast” blog. But the move happened in the same year as the birth of my first child, and becoming a parent sparks all sorts of internal machinery, and soon I found I was writing posts about the emotional reality of being a new parent—posts like this or this. But the idea of turning into a daddy blogger horrified me, so I tried masking all the papa posts with other stuff—posts from old journals, random thoughts, and travelogues. Becoming a parent meant spending much less time in galleries and museums and more time looking at photography on the Web, which led to making posts about photographers I found along the way. The blog evolved and still evolves, but it’s getting closer to resembling me. A friend told me recently that she thought the blog was a decent proxy for the letters I used to write to her. That’s sort of how I look at the entries these days: as open letters to friends.

As for the role it plays in my life, it’s a creative outlet, but it’s an outlet that talks back. Through the blog, my circle has grown larger and more varied than it ever would have been off-line, through the blog I can get instant feedback if I want it, and through the blog I’ve received artistic support that I never would have had otherwise. Blog audiences are self selecting, so if you write about photography, your readers tend to care about photography. So when you meet blog readers in real life they tend to become insta-friends.

L: Much of what I like about your posts is the minimalism—like the one about the lies you told your 3-year-old recently. You reveal so much of yourself in these posts, in very few words. How do you see that approach applying to your photographs, if at all?

R: In L.A., I worked for a movie producer at Paramount. In postproduction, he would often repeat that old editing aphorism “Arrive late, leave early,” and time and time again I saw scenes improved by cutting both the beginning and the end. So, in theory, I like the idea of economy in storytelling. And when blogging, it’s sort of a necessity, as people have no attention spans. But I’ve rarely been accused of being a minimalist photographically speaking—in fact, probably the opposite is true. I shoot with wide-angle lenses and often try to cram as many stories into a frame as possible.

I’m an emotional often undisciplined photographer. I shoot daily and have a variety of projects going at any given time. Most of my negatives never see the light of day. I file them in boxes and never even print contact sheets. Part of my initial urge to post photography online was to use the audience as a motivational tool to force me to make scans of work that had been unseen for years. The pictures I put online were essentially rough selects from rolls of film that were eventually edited down to a show.

When editing, I try to ask myself, “Where is the story here? Is this the best shot to tell this story? Does it tell the story well enough?” . . . and then the ultimate and most useful question, “So what?” If you can’t answer “So what?”, you should go home and call it quits.

L: What are you working on photographically right now?

R: I’m working on a long-term project taking environmental portraits of fresh-off-the-boat immigrants in New York (usually in their apartments). I’ve been at it for two years and probably have two years to go. I’m planning on doing the same thing I did for Travels without Maps—scanning and editing in public. I don’t want to start look at anything until I’ve finished shooting. I rarely look at negatives until I’m finished shooting.

L: Your show at the Nelson Hancock Gallery was called Travels without Maps, and that fits with how I imagine you living your life—seeing where things take you, with few plans or road maps. You seem really . . . I guess whimsical is the best word I could find to describe the impression I have of you. You see the wonder in life, which is why I think your posts about your kids are so magical. I guess this isn’t a question so far. Hmm . . . okay, so why photography? You’re definitely good with words, so what is it about photography?

R: I’ve been making photographs since I was in elementary school. When I show up in my hometown, old-timers always say, “Hey, you were that kid with the camera.” So making photographs comes naturally and easily. I think in images. My photographic taste is binary. I pretty much love images or hate them (most things I hate). Words are much harder. I enjoy writing, but it’s a struggle. I always doubt my words.

Six months after graduating from college, I lost my mother and youngest brother and then soon afterward I lost grandparents and some close friends. Tragedy can deaden people, but for whatever reason the opposite happened to me. You never realize how much a finger can feel until you have a paper cut and after all those deaths I had a thousand paper cuts. It was as if the world had been blurry before and had snapped into focus. It’s been years since then, and carrying a camera helps me maintain that feeling of clarity. I see more with a camera in my hand, and when I see something, even if I don’t get the picture, I see what the picture should have been and I imagine the story contained within the picture.

Don’t know about the whimsical thing. I’m a quiet man, who comes from quiet people. At parties, I’m the guy in the corner nobody notices.

L: Last question, one I’m asking of everyone: I just got a $37.50 store credit from photo-eye. What one photo book should I put that money toward buying? And why?

R: For sheer formal beauty, it’s hard to go wrong with Andrew Moore’s Russia ($36), but then again you could also get a used copy of Helen Levitt’s Slide Show for $26.75, which would give you $10 left over to put toward something else like KayLynn Deveney’s The Day to Day Life of Albert Hastings, which sells for $17.95. Of course, if I had that gift certificate, I’d probably put it toward something like Watanabe Katsumi’s Gangs of Kabukicho ($60) or anything by John Divola.

Labels: Andrew Moore, blogs, books, Helen Levitt, interviews, John Divola, KayLynn Deveney, photographers, Raul Gutierrez, Watanabe Katsumi

Friday, March 28, 2008

Interview: Justin James Reed

Batting cleanup is Justin James Reed, just about the nicest guy in the world and a damn fine photographer to boot. His responses were so good I smiled the whole way through reading them. I hope you do, too.

Liz: You were Shawn Gust’s best man, right? How or why did you end up living in Idaho?

Justin: Ha! That is pretty great that you found out I was Shawn Gust’s best man—you jogged my memory there. Idaho has always been a special place for me. My family is originally from Spokane, Washington, which is right across the Idaho border from Coeur d’Alene, where I lived for a little more then a year. I had been visiting Coeur d’Alene for my entire life, spending every summer out there, and ended up living out there really by chance. After I graduated from college, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, I had a number of jobs and they helped to solidify my interest in attending graduate school. When the opportunity came up to live at the family lake house on Lake Coeur d’Alene in the middle of the woods, I couldn’t pass it up. I knew that at no other point in my life would I be able to just up and leave, and to do something so spontaneous. On top of that, I also felt that challenging myself to create an entirely new body of work (my Westward series), with which I planned on applying to graduate school, would push me, and my photographic practice. My work had always inherently been about traveling, and by taking this chance I was consciously testing myself. This is something I picked up working with Alec Soth, that you had to have conviction and a strong belief in yourself, otherwise you didn’t stand a chance.

L: I read somewhere that you worked as a printer for Alec Soth. What was that experience like? What did you learn about your own photography working for Alec? I’ve always wondered if, after working so closely with a photographer whose work you admire, you end up sort of imitating them, consciously or not. (When I was in high school, my handwriting changed from one class to the next, because I was actually imitating the teacher’s handwriting on the chalkboard, without even realizing it.) Did that happen for you, and if so, how did you work past that?

J: Working with Alec was undeniably a major defining experience in my life. I had originally seen Alec’s work at my college in a faculty show. I initially approached him about possibly TAing for a large-format class he was instructing. Over the course of the class, we developed a rapport, and he eventually asked if I would be interested in helping him print at his studio. This was right around the time that he was finishing his Sleeping by the Mississippi project.

Printing for Alec was a pleasure. It was always a relaxed atmosphere, and not at all intense. I started by making contact sheets for color proofing purposes, and then making large prints for his gallery, then Yossi Milo, and shows. He had a color processor right in his studio, so throughout the printing process we would work closely together, talking about color and other techniques.

But probably the best part of working with Alec was just being able to talk to him on a regular basis. As everyone now knows from his blog, Alec is not just a great photographer, but also probably one of the most inspiring voices in contemporary photography. I was struck by how closely his blog mirrored just spending a few hours interacting with him. He offered me not only some of the best advice about my own work I have ever received, but also, by far, the most critical. Alec had a way of getting right to the crux of the matter, and asking questions about my work that still haunt me. I learned that photography is not just something you do, it is something that comes from inside of you. It is a singular experience that requires patience, dedication, and, above all, a belief in yourself. Seeing how Alec worked, how dedicated he was, made me push myself that much harder. Seeing his evolution and success also solidified my interest in not working for another photographer, and pursuing it for myself.

Before I met Alec, or had even seen his work, I was shooting landscapes mostly but had been interested in portraiture. When I saw how easily Alec oscillated between portrait, interior, and landscape, I knew that is what I wanted to do. He encouraged me to start taking portraits, and offered me some of the best advice I have ever gotten regarding portraiture: He suggested not approaching a subject with the camera, as it can be too intimidating, especially when shooting with a large-format camera. However, the large format affords something incredibly unique when taking a portrait. It forces the photographer to take their time, thus allowing the subject to relax and appear more natural. You get to interact with the person for a few minutes while you set up, and under the dark cloth you can closely scrutinize them without them knowing you are staring! However, the advice that I still cherish today, and share with all of my students, is how willing and giving people can be, that you will always be surprised how often people will say yes to having their picture taken, as I know you now know from your recent “portrait-a-day” project.

In terms of influence, I think it is the most important factor in any photographer’s career. I encourage all of my students to seek out the photographers they admire, figure out exactly what it is that they like about these other photographers’ work, and then try to use this understanding to create a unique body of their own work. My aesthetic is less an influence of Alec, and more a similarity that we both share. Hopefully, my work is distinguishable enough from his work, but I won’t deny that I don’t sometimes think about it.

L: I love your South Philadelphia project, the mix of portraits and landscapes. You said in your HHS work statement:

I moved to South Philadelphia about two years ago from rural Idaho. It was quite a shock to be in an urban inner city again, and I was surprised by how put off I was by the environment. It was only until I started exploring this specific part of Philadelphia at dusk that I was able to approach it as a photographic subject. Exploring streets and finding isolated moments of serenity became my way of coming to terms with this city. I became interested in the relationship between evacuated spaces, and contained lives in the cityscape. Focusing on the young people that live here is another way of revealing quiet beauty under a rough exterior. Through juxtaposition of portraits with the lived environment a more personal vision of this hostile terrain presents itself. By focusing on South Philadelphia’s individual aspects I am documenting the place that I see, and am now proud to call home.

I really relate to that feeling—that sense of finding your place in a neighborhood or a city by photographing there. Do you find, now that you’ve lived there for a couple years, that your photographs of South Philadelphia are changing in some way, and if so how? How do you know when a project like this is “done”? Or will it continue as long as you’re living there? Also, what other projects are you working on now?

J: First, thank you for your kind words about the project. As I mentioned before, traveling has always been a large part of my photography. It took me a while to realize that I could photograph my immediate surroundings, and as I alluded to in this artist statement for HHS, it took me a while to even consider South Philadelphia as a subject. I was so put off by the environment that I didn’t take a picture there for about a year. However, my photographic curiosity got the better of me, and I found myself bringing the camera along because I was seeing photographs everywhere.

In terms of having it change as a photographic subject, I think no matter what, as you continue to shoot something, it changes. You develop a new understanding of it, and no longer approach it in the same way. This is a double-edged sword though. On one side, you gain a deeper understanding of your subject, and how to approach it in order to make strong, meaningful photographs. On the other side, you are more aware of what you are doing, and the initial thrill of discovery can dissipate.

So, how do know when a project like this is done? One of my good friends, who is a painter, once told me that he knew a painting was done because he felt like it was. I think that is a good description. Inherently, I believe you know when a project is done. Sometimes, of course, it is a change of location, but most of the time I think you can no longer approach the same subject again and again in a fresh and exciting manner. I make lists as I drive around of photographs I see, in order to go back and shoot them later. As the list starts to feel more like a chore, then you know it is time to stop. The South Philadelphia series is at that point. I believe I am close to having shot the rest of the series, and am in the process of editing. On top of that, I am planning on moving this summer, so all of the signs are there.

I am glad you asked about my new work. I have been shooting a lot and am focusing more on landscapes—no portraits for now. I am planning on updating my Web site soon but am more than happy to share some of my new work with you here. I see this work not so much as a continuation of my New Cities project, but as a continuation of the subject matter. I am approaching some of the same subjects in a new way, stepping back, and looking at their striking presence in the contemporary landscape. This project has become a new challenge for me in terms of light and composition. I hope you like them!

L: You were a Hey, Hot Shot! in May 2007. (Congratulations again!) I’m curious about the whole HHS experience. Had you applied before, or did you get in the first time you applied? Has being a Hot Shot opened any doors for you that you’re aware of? What’s your take on contests like this in general? Do you recommend applying to them?

J: HHS was a great experience. Jen Bekman is awesome, and it gave me a ton of exposure. My Web site and blog traffic exploded, and I think it helped me get my name out there to a certain extent. It is impossible to gauge if it “opened doors” for me, but the exposure and experience was irreplaceable. And, of course, it is always encouraging to receive recognition for your work.

This was the second time I applied, however with different work (the first time was with my Westward series). I definitely felt ready and more prepared the second time around, which I believe came through in the work and statement. Jörg [Colberg] was a juror, and had just been kind enough to feature some of my photographs on Conscientious. So, I also knew that he was aware of and liked my work. All of this goes into my feelings about these kinds of contests. They are incredibly necessary for beginning photographers to get exposure—I kind of look at them as the initial testing grounds. However, they are very subjective, so knowing who the jurors are, and applying with the appropriate work, will increase your chances of success. Of course, because these contests are so subjective, I think it is important to not give up and keep applying if you do not succeed at first. This is something I have to remind myself of all the time. There are so many amazing photographers out there that being a juror must be so hard. However, if you believe in your work, and keep plugging away, you will prevail. And hey, if you don’t, well at least you had a blast and made some damn fine photographs!

L: I just got a $37.50 store credit from photo-eye. What one photo book should I put that money toward buying? And why?

J: Oh man, just one? Well, I will use this as an opportunity to drop a few of my favorite names.

I noticed that you could back-order Katy Grannan’s new book The Westerns. This body of work from Grannan is stunning, and I feel pushes her to the top of new contemporary photographers.

If you were willing to throw out a couple of more dollars, you could pick up Richard Renaldi’s Figure and Ground. Renaldi’s portraits kind of sneak up on you, and the sheer amount that this guy shoots is insane. I also think he is the new August Sander.

And if you were feeling flush, you could throw down for one of my most recent acquisitions, Alessandra Sanguinetti’s On the Sixth Day. This body of work is touching and poignant. It features some of the best portraits of animals, and our relationship with them, I have ever seen.

Labels: Alec Soth, Alessandra Sanguinetti, August Sander, blogs, books, gallerists, Hey Hot Shot, interviews, Jen Bekman, Justin James Reed, Jörg Colberg, Katy Grannan, photographers, portraits, Richard Renaldi, Shawn Gust

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Interview: Mrs. Deane

Third up: Mrs. Deane (a.k.a. Norman Beierle and Hester Keijser).

Liz: According to your site, “Mrs. Deane is a blog run by Beierle + Keijser, visual artists from, respectively, Germany and Holland. It is named . . . after a spiritistic medium from the beginning of the 20th century. For us, Mrs. Deane stands for the ambiguous and the undecidable that one finds oneself confronted with near the borders of the perceptible and the probable. Here, every man has to decide for himself what he holds to be true and what not.” I get all that, but how do you run this operation? Do you both do the writing? Will the real Mrs. Deane please stand up?

Hester: I didn’t realize you believed in resurrection. If the “real” Mrs. Deane decided to answer your call I would be quite shaken. But seriously, “Mrs. Deane-the-Blog” is pretty much a joint venture, with both of us contributing in our own way. I do all the actual writing, but that’s merely a matter of convenience. I studied for two years in the States at a dreadful, posh, all-girls ~~finishing school~~ college in Virginia, making me a bit more comfortable with the language than Norman. Content (raw text) is contributed by both of us. Norman will give me a rough draft, which I then tame into something readable. Finding new stuff is something we both spend considerable time on, somewhere between one and three hours a day. Sometimes we discuss our findings between ourselves before deciding to post about it or not (yet). All this intertwining makes it impossible to say who is “writing” Mrs. Deane, which is why we prefer to keep it open and let Mrs. Deane be our mouthpiece.

L: One of the things I’m most impressed about when reading your blog—and this probably says more about me than anything I’ll ask you about—is how often you’re on vacation/holiday. What’s a day, a week, or a month in your lives like? Are you working artists? Do you support yourself with any kind of day job(s)? How do you make a go of it?

H: That’s hilarious! Of all things, I’d never imagined people would be the most impressed about our periods of absence. How impressed will you be if we’d take a permanent vacation? It’s true we were away a lot last year, but not all these absences were real vacations and often involved working very hard in a place with no (fast) Internet access or good computers.

Norman: We are not the typical holiday-type people. Roasting in the sun on a beach isn’t an “activity” both of us would enjoy. Traveling through Europe is often connected with (art) business. We feel comfortable to bring business and personal things together, so when we visited my brother in Berlin, we also took photographs of exhibition spaces in that city. It’s a common practice for full-time artists to combine business and private matters.

H: Like most full-time self-employed visual artists, we’re overworked and underpaid with the one luxury: that no one tells us when to work and when not. If we feel like skipping a day or two, that’s fine. We’ll make up for it later by working 16 hours a day or more if need be.

What a month looks like depends very much on the projects we have on the go at the time. It can be quite hectic, like last January and February when we worked nonstop on a commission, three exhibitions, a catalog, and preparing for our guest lectures in Rotterdam, but there have been more quiet times, allowing us to develop work and try new things with the financial backup of a stipend. We’ve always supported ourselves with public commissions, sales, lectures, and stipends, but there’s a serious financial dip looming in the not-so-distant future we need to start worrying about pretty soon, apart from buying lottery tickets.

L: Your blog has really become an authority of sorts. You’re linked out the wazoo, read around the world, celebrities in the blogosphere. Knowing what I know about the two of you, you’re probably already blushing in embarrassment if you’ve even read this far. Why did you start your blog, and what do you get out of the blogging experience as artists?

H: I don’t feel that way at all, like a celebrity or an authority. That’s what other people make of it, like the assistant photographer we met last winter in Budapest who almost fell out of his chair when he learned we were “the” Mrs. Deane. I was very embarrassed and told him to get off it, which he luckily did. I feel admiration or a wrongly attributed sense of authority gets in the way of having a normal conversation with another. At the same time, having a blog out there that people read has taken away previously existing barriers as well. In that sense, it’s an excellent business card. But whatever we may think, we’re all pretty much nobodies in this world, especially in the art world, which often forgets how tiny it really is compared to the world of politics or billion-dollar multinationals. What also prevents any hubris to grow, is that, in Holland, this whole photo-blogging thing doesn’t have the same status it seems to have acquired in the States. Honestly, I’m always a bit flabbergasted with the importance attributed to blogs and bloggers in the States, or with the disappointment of bloggers who don’t get the following they hoped for.

To tell you the truth, I really can't remember why we started this blog, which was first published in Dutch only and initially covered a wider range of topics than just photography. Let’s say it just happened one day and move on to the next question.

L: What do you get out of the blogging experience as artists? Do you have a love/hate relationship with your blog? I see that all over the place . . . people taking breaks from their blogs, people starting over with new blogs, people calling it quits and returning to the “real” world. Do you have any of that angst, or does all that vacationing you do pretty much take care of whatever blog-related angst you might be plagued with otherwise?

H: Blogging is a natural extension of our art practice, I don’t see it as something I do on the side. Looking at and discussing the merits of other people’s work and photography in general is something Norman and I did a lot even before blogging. We hardly ever get to do this with Dutch colleagues, who somehow shun such discussions about art. With the blog, we tap into a community with whom we can share this need for an exchange of thoughts. The relative popularity of the blog has made me feel less like the odd one out and more confident about my work.

Also, externalizing thoughts on a daily basis in a format intended for publication is like casting a ruthless light on creatures otherwise kept in the comfortable darkness of one’s private opinion. It helps to expose weaknesses and inconsistencies, it shows where you might be too harsh and where greater sharpness in vision is needed. Writing daily also makes it easier to formulate such odious things as press releases or motivations for one’s work. Discipline is as important in the arts as it is in music or theater, and being able to express yourself in words as a visual artist has (some would say unfortunately) become vital for survival in the current landscape of contemporary art.

None of that love/hate stuff. Of course, there are always times when it’s hard to find stuff to write about or when you feel you’re not exploring the right avenues. Then I have to push myself to reinvent or relocate my initial enthusiasm for blogging about photography. Making up silly projects like the fashion week helps to break any rut I’m in. I still feel Mrs. Deane can be a whole lot better than it is and I am far from satisfied with the scope of my writing. As long I have this vague notion of where it is I ought to be heading with the blog, I don’t think I’ll call it quits. Not yet anyway, but ask us again in a year or two.

L: Your Web site has an incredible variety of work, and I find your work as hard to categorize as Mrs. Deane herself. Talk to me a little about your photography, in particular, and what projects you're working on or care about right now.

H+N: I suppose a lot of our work, both photographic and nonphotographic, can be called “site specific” in the sense that, when making work for a show or a presentation, we incorporate in our plans the specific site where everything is to take place. We will take into consideration such variables as the size of the space, the size and number of the images it allows, the kind of light available, what the physical experience of standing in the space and viewing the images will feel like, the demographics of the visitors to be expected, the occasion for which we were invited, the specific prestige (or lack thereof) of the venue and sometimes even the amount of press to be expected. These variables are like pieces of a large puzzle that all need to fall into place. About 80 percent of our shows and presentations, including the publicity, are orchestrated by us from A to Z, even though the public is not always aware of having been part of the plan.

Coming from a background in site-specific installations and public art projects, we apply the same approach to our photographic work, which draws on our passion for (the history of) photography and the context in which photographs appear. Our interest in photography certainly doesn’t stop with taking pictures and making prints of the work. Curators can’t come shopping in our studio for work they’d like to exhibit in whatever venue they have in mind. When invited for a show, we will often make work geared toward the occasion. When making work, we—and especially Norman—always have a very clear idea how the presentation will be in its entirety. Perhaps you could say that the individual objects on display are actualized or come to life by being presented to the public.

The drawback of working with photo-based, site-specific presentations (I wouldn’t quite call them installations) is obvious: You can’t simply transplant work from one presentation space to the next. Presenting the same photographs in different places often means finding a new context for the work that is as viable as the original one, and I can imagine going so far as to reprint works in a different size if the space asks for it. When viewing our online portfolio, you miss out on this site specificness of the work. We consider the Web site as a kind of documentation of our work rather than as a presentation in some sort of virtual gallery.

Currently, we’re making tests for an upcoming show in Hamburg with prints developed in a bath of instant coffee, washing soda, and water. The final prints, which have coffee-table decoration as their subject, will be mounted on a piece of wood covered with typical tablecloth material matching the prints. This project was fueled by something we saw at a photo fair: an unusual Belgian frame, which used folded, art nouveau decorated wallpaper as a background for presenting rows of small photographs that were stuck in the folds of the wallpaper. We liked the strange combination of the wildly decorated background and the fact that the photographs retained their distinct materiality and their character as “objects for use,” something which contemporary framing methods using Dibond or borderless mounting on aluminum try to conceal as much as possible.

L: I just got a $37.50 store credit from photo-eye. What one photo book should I put that money toward buying? And why?

H: If I were you, I’d try to get a refund on that credit or else sell the voucher to someone. Use the money instead on books with photos that can be had for anything between $1 and $5 at thrift stores, charity shops, or secondhand bookshops. We often get more inspiration out of books with old product photography or ancient color reproductions of gardens and flowers; illustrated user manuals; obscure catalogs of forgotten exhibitions about Gothic cathedrals; scientific publications on crop research, ocean-bed vegetation, or something as odd as paranormal photography (although the latter tend to be expensive). In short, anything in which the photographer wasn’t consciously trying to make “art,” yet which we find striking or intriguing. Fine-art photo books are made by artists, but not necessarily for artists. That’s not to say we haven’t any art photo books in our collections, but the ones we most frequently consult are not those. Having said this, probably the best thing we scored last year was the publication by the Albertina in Vienna, The Eye and the Camera: A History of Photography from the Collections of the Albertina.

N: I think I would get The Thornton-Pickard Story by Douglas Rendell . . . also not available from photo-eye. I’m very fond of my T&P Junior Special Reflex camera. Apart from our “modern” Pecoflex, it’s the first (and also oldest) 6-x-9 SLR we bought without the “usual” shutter-curtain damage. It’s my task to keep the technical gear running, so it was a pleasant surprise to get a full working (tilt-and-shift) camera with original and supple curtain shutter and sufficiently accurate speeds. I feel the Thornton-Pickard reflex cameras are underestimated and that’s why there is hardly any coherent information about them. Ideal would be an exhaustive pictorial chronology about Thornton-Pickard reflex cameras, like you get with Leica cameras listing every single little difference between the models. I haven’t seen the book inside, but I would give it a try.

Labels: artists, blogs, books, day job, Hester Keijser, interviews, Mrs. Deane,