fototazo: interviews

interviews

Blake Andrews, Part II

This is the second of three interview posts with Blake Andrews.

f: Alec Soth started off a recent article he wrote on Martin Parr in the Minneapolis StarTribune by calling him the Jay-Z of documentary photography.

BA: I think what Soth was referring to is a sort of hyper-contemporary vibe. Both Parr and Jay-Z seem to have a hand in many cultural outlets nowadays. They almost define contemporary. But also both have a loose experimental quality. Always moving into new territory. And the fascination with bling. Truth is I'm not a huge fan of Jay-Z. I'll take MF Doom over Jay-Z.

f: In respect to your plea for more interactive posts - discussed last week in the first part of this interview - complete the following photographer-musician analogy. Martin Parr is to Jay-Z as Blake Andrews is to Woody Guthrie.

BA: I'm guessing this relates to my survey from several months back comparing Dylan and Frank. Guthrie for a few reasons. First of all, he was absolutely prolific. Many photographers make a point of never going somewhere without a camera. I suspect Guthrie was like that with his guitar. He carried it everywhere. If he couldn't fit the guitar he at least had a pen and notebook. I doubt there were many days when he wasn't writing songs or lyrics. Second, he was fiercely independent and had a deep suspicion of institutions which I share. I am deeply cynical about corporations, government, and general group-think. Third, he was a bit of a renaissance man. He wasn't just a songwriter. He was an artist, a dad, a writer. And just a good spirit in general. So I admire the guy. I wish he'd written a blog.

I've had a tickertape message on the bottom of my camera for years. It says "THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS" A direct homage to Guthrie.

f: And as a way to push towards interactive posts, I would like to invite you to make a creative competition for other photographers with me, the results of which we can publish both here and on B.

BA: One competition that I've been curious to try is based on predicted outcomes. You set out 20 well-known photos by famous photographers from a wide variety of types and eras. Then people rank them from most favorite to least favorite, 1 to 20. Then collate, average, and form a general ranking based on all voters. That's the simple part. The second layer is to have people guess at the overall rankings before they're revealed. Perhaps this would happen during the initial voting, or shortly after. Then collate predictions. The person who predicts favorites most accurately is the winner. This would only work with a large enough pool of voters. At least 100 or so.

[This contest is now live! You can participate by clicking here.]

f: You have actively explored the medium itself, working with panoramas, color and black and white, a range of formats and cameras. You have published your images as playing cards and are working on a faux-postcard project. What drives you to expand the range of approaches to photography in this way? Is there something you feel you can do with these explorations that 35mm black and white cannot do?

BA: My camera experiments have typically been winter flings. When the days get shorter and the rains set it, it's not as easy to roam outside with a camera. But I still need to make photos. So I've explored a variety of ways to shoot inside using flash or slow shutter speed or combination of the two. I've toyed with Noblex, Diana, Holga, digital point 'n shoot, Fuji Instax, etc. The only common denominator is that they're all hand held. They're quick 'n dirty cameras, no tripod, no fuss. Typically I go on a serious bender with a camera and shoot the crap out of it for a few months before the buzz gradually wears off.

That's fine for winter. But during nice weather I kick into high gear and that's basically 35 mm black and white. That's been the core of my work for the past 20 years. It feels right because it rewards experimentation and multiple frames. There's very little penalty for pressing the shutter, as opposed to say 4 x 5. I know that for most people 35 mm is a dead form. It's seen as anachronistic and passe but I can't help it. It's just how I see. If I want my photos to get any attention it probably has to be in another format. So I've tinkered with many methods, but 35 black and white still gives me the most satisfaction. I shoot a few rolls every day from about May through October.

I think whatever you use you need to commit fully to it. You can't be fiddling around wondering what camera to use. It has to be one or the other, and ideally just one lens too. You have to see and think like a camera, and that's hard to do if you're shuffling between several. At least that's my experience.

f: A related question: you have said in a previous interview that as a child, you thought photography was a mere recording of a scene and because of this you weren’t interested in it. It’s interesting, then, that despite expanding the range of approaches to photography as mentioned above in the previous question, that one of the few lines you do not cross is that line between “straight” and “constructed” photography. What keeps you on this side of that line? Have you ever tried constructing a scene for an image?

BA: I have constructed images for the blog. The postcards, for example, are constructed. I substituted blue skies for grey. For applications like that or for commercial applications I think constructing images is fine. But for examining the world, which I think photography does very well, constructed images aren't very interesting to me. They don't show the world so much as they show what's in someone's mind. Nothing wrong with that. I'm just more interested in the world. And that applies to other forms too. I only read nonfiction. I generally prefer documentaries to fictional films. I guess I have my quirks.

f: In the previously mentioned Wired article on photobloggers, you also mentioned what you’d like to see less of in the photography world: “Less 6 x 7 aspect ratio color photos of the human-nature interface delicately composed, with everything in focus; less portraiture with desaturated colors; less perfectionism; less constructed images and more found images; less commercial advertising on blogs; and less equipment talk.” Building from this previous list, please list the 10 most painful trends in contemporary photography in 2012, in reverse order from 10 to 1 with 1 being the most painful.

BA: I will probably get in trouble here. First of all, everyone is totally free to do what they want. As with any Top Ten list, please take these with a grain of salt.

10. The widespread inability among practitioners to differentiate an average print from a great one.

9. Thought before seeing. It should be the other way. Shoot first, ask questions later.

8. Conscious perfectionism and unconscious imperfections.

7. Film growing more expensive as it gradually phases out.

6. The planned obsolescence of most cameras in use now, and the correlating obsolescence of work being made with them.

5. Neo-pictorialism. I am all for shooting Holga / Diana / Instagram, as long as the material isn't sappy. But when blurriness combines with an overly sentimental vibe, it feels like something that was done, and better, 100 years ago.

4. Photos without credits attached. Every photo printed or online should include some reference to the creator's name. I'd guess that less than half actually do.

3. The idea that everyone's a photographer. Everyone has a thermometer in their medicine cabinet. That doesn't mean we're all doctors.

2. The conflation of a photographer's life story with their images in assessing aesthetic merit.

1. Homogenization. In photography as well as in the broader culture, homogenization is the most powerful, evil force we face. All 7 billion of us are unique. Be yourself.

f: And what gives you optimism for the photography world today?

BA: 10. The ocean of photographic archives currently being put online by various public entities. A very powerful resource in all sorts of ways, some not even thought of yet.

9. Street photography's apparent revival. Possibly a reaction to photography's hyper-conceptual direction.

8. Cupertino. Post. Applesauce.

7. General improvements in color printing over the past decade. 40 years ago good color prints were generally inaccessible. Now they can be made by anyone.

6. Looking forward to the return of Jesus Christ my lord and savior. I'm expecting him to help me fine tune my portfolio.

5. The decreased environmental impact of picturemaking. The marginal cost to the environment of taking a digital snapshot is virtually zero compared to the age of paper and chemicals. Of course the planet is already fucked anyway so I'm not sure it matters much in the end.

4. The decline of matting in galleries. It's about time we phased out this Victorian relic. Maybe glazing will be next.

3. The idea that everyone's a photographer. Never has photography been more accessible to all. Moholy-Nagy said "the illiterate of the future will be the person ignorant of the camera as well as the pen." I think we have finally, only quite recently, arrived at that future.

2. The photobook renaissance. These are the glory days of photobook publishing.

1. Every time I press the shutter I'm an optimist. The idea that the next image will be special is what keeps me going.

Blake Andrews, Part I

Blake Andrews, Emmett, 2011

This is the first of three interview posts with Eugene, Oregon-based Blake Andrews, a photographer and member of iN-PUBLiC. He runs the photography blog B and is also involved with the Portland area photography groups Lightleak and Portland Grid Project. The second part will be published next Thursday.

Blake’s early history, experiences with iN-PUBLiC, role as a photoblogger, thoughts on street photography as well as influences both contemporary and historic have been covered fairly thoroughly in interviews here, here, here, here, and here.

The following questions attempt to complement these previous interviews and you may enjoy reading one or all of them along with this one.

fototazo: I have one question for you on the blog: what kept you working on it as many others dropped theirs?

Blake Andrews: That's a good question, and well-timed too because my blog is actually now on indefinite hiatus. But during the 4+ years I kept the blog current, the main thing that kept me going was just sheer enjoyment. I like writing. I like trying ideas on for size. At a certain point the blog gained a level of inertia. It had a momentum of its own, and so I had to feed it every day. And the pouring out of ideas on one end seemed to help ideas generate on the creative end, like a siphon hose. It was there every morning staring at me like a hungry lion. Feed me.

In its last year or so the blog evolved for me into a sort of art project. I wasn't interested so much in writing expository essays as toying with the whole form. I was asking, what the heck is a blog? What is it expected to look like and why? How can it be different? So that's what generated a lot of the recent experimentation, changing headers every day and making up new profile locations and colors, and all the polls, and making the background fade like an old newspaper. I went through a long series where I gave each post a song name, and I named posts after photo books, and posted things upside down or inside out or whatever. Anything to just try something different, to keep myself entertained, to make myself laugh. When I'd write posts that made me laugh out loud that's when I knew I had something good.

Gradually I wound up creating this online persona. B is sort of a crazy cynic. I suppose there's a part of me that's like that, but in many ways it's not me at all. I'm actually a nice guy. I'm shy. But for whatever reason I carved out this territory online where I'm a weird photo-geek who'll say just about anything. And I've probably sabotaged any hope of a fine art photo career in the process. So be it. But it is troubling that people know me as a blogger rather than a photographer. People reading my blog might call for me to be committed, but the truth is I'm very committed, as a photographer.

Blake Andrews, Eugene, 2005

I guess what it comes down to is I'm not really a critic. I feel silly cranking out some educated-sounding critique about a photo project or trends or whatever. Who am I to be an authority on any of that? But what I am an authority on is my own life, and so I tried to root the blog in personal exploration. Every post had at least one subtext, and often two or three, many of which only made sense to me. It became a sort of scientific workbench, a place to dissect and recombine ideas. But in the end it was mostly for me. I often felt a disconnect with readers, like I was saying one thing and they were reading something else. The posts which really made me laugh rarely received comments.

In the past year the blog began to feel more like an obligation and less organic. If I didn't write something for a day or two, I felt like I was letting folks down. I started to track hits, page views, comments and a lot of other meaningless crap, just to try to gauge who was reading. Why did they read it? What did they want? When I found myself worrying about that stuff I knew the end was near. My post about dead photoblogs last December was a premonition, but it was unconscious. I didn't realize at the time that I was writing about myself.

A main problem since the beginning is that my blog has gotten in the way of my photography. I have many photo projects that I want to pursue and a certain amount of free time. But as long as the blog was around, it's what received my energy. Ideally there should be a way to do both, to pursue projects and keep a blog up. If I could do the blog as a little side thing and just write one post a week it would be great. Some people can do that, but I've found that style doesn't work well for me. If I'm not writing every day my posts don't have the right snap. In order to write well or perform any task really I need to get sort of obsessed. And I was obsessed with B. But it was keeping me from getting obsessed with my own photography. So on March 1st I decided to go cold turkey and put it on hold for a while. At first I just thought I'd leave it for a few weeks. I've done this before a few times when I needed to recharge and always resumed blogging. But I'm really enjoying the time off so I may extend it indefinitely. We'll see. I honestly don't know what's going to happen. It's really up in the air. I've been tinkering with it a bit lately, slowly lightening the text every few days, letting past posts fade into the blank page. I think that might be a good way to end it.

One of my projects while my blog is down is to compile B's archives into a series of Blurb books, not for sale but just to allow me to make a hardcopy of what I've done. I got freaked recently when I read that Too Much Chocolate went offline not because of a creative decision but because it'd been hacked. Someone got in and sabotaged the archives. Which really sucks, and would suck if it happened to B. right now all if it exists only online. So I'm making a hard copy which will wind up being four books of roughly 350 pages each. Booksmart can get them into rough form but they still require some tweaking, so I'm in the process of editing now. It's been fun going through old posts and seeing the gradual changes over time. Once I get the raw posts printed I want to put the best ones into one volume for iPL.

That's one project. I have several others, but I'm not really ready to discuss them.

f: During your year of experimenting with B, did you come to any conclusions on what a blog does best? Or what its limits are as a format?

BA: It wasn't just a year of experimenting. I had been experimenting a little bit ever since the blog began, but it definitely picked up in the past year. What does a blog do best? That's a tough question because I think it can be many things depending on who is writing and what the audience is. The blogs that tend to capture my interest are those which are most personal, which tell me something about the person behind the work. In that way they're somewhat like photos. I tend to respond best to photo projects where I can get a sense of the artist, of the person behind the image. Maybe the image is just an elaborate smokescreen.

I felt a bit limited just in terms of what I could do with layout, fonts, and design. My blog was like most. It was run through a pre-existing template (Blogspot in this case). There were some times when I was in the mood to just substitute a graphic for the whole page, or rework the columns, or whatever. And I couldn't. But that's not much of a complaint. It is what it is.

I think where a blog becomes interesting is when it gets interactive. A post can generate comments, and then those comments generate more, and then that material is integrated into the essence of the blog. It turns the author-audience dynamic on its head, because now everyone can be both. When I read blogs often the most interesting material is in the comments section, which tends to be more raw, spontaneous, and unfiltered than just a straight essay. Of course comments sections don't always rise to great heights. But I like their interactive spirit. I tried to incorporate some of that into my blog in the form of polls, quizzes, and deliberately provocative statements, but the reaction rarely rose above a quiet whimper. Maybe that's part of why I quit.

Blake Andrews, Near Lovejoy Fountain, Portland, 2005

f: One question on the photoblog world in general: In an article on Wired about photobloggers in 2010, you said “I'd like to see more day-to-day journaling from prominent photographers...thoughts by photogs as they work through ideas” and also "more unpublished street photography circa 1965-1985; more creative quizzes, lists, contests, and generally interactive posts."

Have any of these hoped for changes happened? Or is the photoblog world more or less where it was two years ago?

BA: I think the blogging world has generally diminished in the past few years. Or maybe shifted is a better word. To Twitter, Facebook, relinks, and other shortform outlets. I see a big move toward Tumblr in particular which is a great outlet but it's built around relinking more than original creation. Maybe there is some sense of community there. I don't know. A few years ago there was a very strong sense of community in the blogosphere. All the photoblogs had links to their favorites in the sidebars, and we sort of kept track of who was out there, and it seemed a new one came online every few weeks. There was a feeling of excitement that something new was happening, that we were all participating in something larger, and outside the previously established channels. Now that feeling is less strong, for me at least.

I think the blog form is well established now. There's a certain preconception now of what it should be, the role it should serve, and most blogs fit themselves inside that box. Show some photos you like, link to a new show, review a book, whatever. It all blends into the same mushpile for me. I see very few contests, quizzes, interactivity, or anything bizarre or absurd or anything that makes you ask "What the fuck?…" Which is a shame because I think "What the Fuck?" is a very important question. It needs to be asked every day by every artist. Every day we need to see something or read something that we don't understand, that makes us ask WTF? Sometimes art is very good at filling that need. WTF did Ellsworth Kelly create? What planet was Joseph Beuys on? Sometimes it's in music. You listen to the Beefheart or Deerhoof or Sun Ra and it's all about that. And sometimes photography can do that. I'm reading the Mark Morrisroe monograph right now and he's very strange. Half the time I don't think he knew exactly what he was making, and that's wonderful. That's so important. Because life needs mystery. But right now I don't sense that much in the blogging world. I don't feel much uncertainty. Maybe we're in a lull before the next creative wave. Who knows.

I do think the WTF? question is best asked in a noncommercial setting. As soon as you introduce advertising there's no WTF? The question has been answered. Even if it hasn't been answered there's the suspicion that it has.

You also asked about day-to-day journaling by prominent photographers. The only recent example that comes to mind is Richard Prince's online journal. That's been fun to read. It definitely raises the WTF question. But it's just one small example. That type of journal isn't very common, probably for the same reason I've found it difficult to blog and keep up with other projects. Most prominent photographers are quite busy and don't have much time for blogging. You can't make a living at it. Paying jobs take priority.

Blake Andrews, Portland, OR, 2002

f: The social dynamic of the photography community in comparison with other visual art forms is a very particular and highly developed one. There are very few painting or sculpture blogs in comparison with photography blogs. Photographers pay heaps of money for reviews that don't exist for other art forms which in large part are about networking. Photographers also seem to me much more active on Twitter and other social media forms than other visual artists. And I'm not aware of an equivalent to online discussion spaces like the Flak Photo Network for other art forms.

With all this in mind, I think of a quote from a recent interview with photographer Gregory Halpern: "Photographers can sometimes be the most conservative and least ambitious of visual artists."

I'm wondering if all this connectivity, all this common intake of information results to a degree in homogeneity of thought and more of a tendency for group-think than other artists in other art forms. Or - alternatively - it's the other way around, that the type of person photography attracts is also the type of person more likely to eventually weave this interconnected world of social media, reviews, and discussion spaces that photography has created.

Why is the photography community so integrated socially as compared with other mediums? And is this something that makes us more prone to being conservative in our thinking, to homogenization and to group-think?

BA: Photography invites a lot of thinking just by its nature. There are so many ways to approach it. Is it art? Evidence? Documentation? Memories? Look at Google Street View which makes thousands of new images every day. On the face of it it's the least artistic application imaginable. It's pure record-keeping, map-making. But once those photos exist someone is going to twist them into art. I don't think painting or sculpture have the same problem. The intention there is generally more obvious. In most cases, those are nonutilitarian outlets with no practical application.

Another aspect in that photography is very egalitarian. Everyone has a camera and so everyone has to come to terms on some level with what role photos play in their lives. Few people have fine art paintings in their homes but everyone has photos. So there are 7 billion ways to approach it, and no one clear path, and so photography tends to attract thinkers and theoreticians who want to sort it out. That's part of its problem. Sometimes it can become buried in hyper-conceptual rhetoric. And it is pretty widely open to interpretation. I've often wondered about photos in relation to music. You can play a song for someone and within ten or fifteen seconds they will generally know if they like it or not. There's a societal construct from early childhood which trains one in musical appreciation and taste, even if it isn't always conscious. But show that same person a photo and they will probably have a much harder time deciding. Is it good? Bad? Interesting? There's less of a societal baseline for determination, so I think that invites in all the thinkers and theoreticians.

I think the reviews you mention have tapped into some of that ambiguity. Since there's less of a baseline for judging photos, the reviews have stepped into that role. And maybe they've preyed a bit on the ambiguity. Some of it is about getting feedback but as you say there's also a lot of networking. Part of the photographer's job now is to create a niche for their work, create a storyline for it. You can't just send it off into the world as is and expect it to be understood. You have to tend its nest, and reviews help foster that.

I don't really follow other art forums so I can't compare photography easily to other forms. All I know is that there's a lot of social media centered around photography. Perhaps part of that is that photographers nowadays are generally computer-savvy. Computers are more integral to picture-making than say ceramics. So if you're hanging out in front of a screen anyway social media is a natural outlet. And of course photography is a 2D medium which translates relatively well to a flat screen. It might also be that photography is a fairly solitary activity. So maybe photographers are especially hungry for social outlets. I don't really know.

I think another part is that photography is relatively young and hasn't yet segmented in the way some other arts have. I see a huge range of topics covered in FPN, everything from documentary to portrait to landscape to general advice. It's all collected in there under "photography," when the truth is all of those interests might not have much in common. It's like having a forum with text-book writers, advertising copywriters, novelists, and poets all contributing. Or a music forum covering classical, pop, jazz, new age, etc. Is there such a forum? Not that I know of. It might work in some ways but would probably be too scattered to generate much substance. I suspect poets would get more from talking to other poets than from ad writers. It's the same with the reviews. They're open to just about every type of photography, when in reality some forms have very little in common with others. So a place like FPN is nice as a catch-all. But maybe a more targeted forum is better for nuts-and-bolts feedback.

Blake Andrews, Seaside, OR, 2005

Andrea Modica

Andrea Modica has been exhibited across the country and is in many collections, such as The Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. An MFA graduate of Yale University, she is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship among many other prestigious awards. Andrea's work has been featured in many magazines, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and American Photo. Her five books, including "Minor League" and "Treadwell", have met with critical acclaim. In addition to teaching at the International Center for Photography, the Woodstock Photography Workshops and the Maine Media Workshops, she currently is a professor of photography at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

This interview focuses on Modica's latest body of work, Best Friends, in which she made portraits of best friends at high schools in Connecticut, Philadelphia and Modena, Italy. She previously answered a few questions for Zoom magazine about the work.

fototazo: You mentioned in the Zoom interview that this project came out of making portraits of high school students in Connecticut and finding that frequently the subjects had their best friend hanging around as you made the images – but how were you invited to this high school to take portraits originally?

Andrea Modica: A high school teacher, who was taking a one-week portrait class with me at the Maine Media Workshops, invited me to do a brief residency where he worked, the Loomis Chaffee School, in Windsor, Connecticut. When I returned to my home in Philadelphia, I found three high schools that allowed me to visit with my 8x10 camera and make portraits.

f: Unlike the portraiture in your other projects, you chose to work with a blank wall background for most of the images in this project and to remove most of the spatial context from the images. Talk about this decision.

AM: Actually, the structure of these photographs is not very different from that of my much earlier series and book "Minor League". The reason in this case is largely due to the fact that I had very little time with each pair, since they were essentially cutting classes to be photographed, so I kept things very simple. But, in fact, I like the way the subjects sometimes push against the edges of the frame, enhancing the power struggle or some other dynamic between the friends.

f: The images range from almost allegoric, such as the girl with her head to the chest of her friend, to something between sensual and sinister as in the image of the boy in a striped shirt in the background staring at his friend in the foreground who faces the camera, to the somewhat comic, for example the skinny, shorter girl and her tall best friend. To what degree did you work with the dynamics that you sensed between the subjects and to what degree did you invent the dynamics or narratives to serve the making of a strong photograph?

AM: The beautiful thing about this project is that the students chose each other. The "casting" was done and the drama began long before I ever showed up. I find the best portraits are made when I listen carefully and watch closely. Inevitably I fall in love with something that presents itself, and hopefully I step up to the plate with the skills I've honed over the years of working with the view camera. Working with the big camera often requires a collaboration between the photographer and the subject - one that is slow, and at best, encourages things to unfold.

f: You photograph with an 8x10 and make platinum / palladium prints that by their nature have something of an atemporal sensibility. The subjects, on the other hand - through clothes, shared headphones and gestures - seem of this moment. I would be interested in hearing about how you feel time functions in these images.

AM: Tough one. What do you think? I might be more interested in knowing what the viewer thinks about this.

f: Judith Joy Ross said about her school portraits, "I don't want the picture to explain school in some documentary sense. [I] want it be an emotional journey. I want the viewer to reconnect with what it is to be a kid." Your school portraits perhaps push for a third thing that's neither about the schools or the observer reconnecting with childhood. They seem to explore the nature of friendships, who we chose to have close to us and how we connect with others, both in the high school subjects themselves as well as in a more generalized sense through them as subjects. Would you agree? Did doing the project Best Friends change your understanding of the theme of friendship or how to work with this theme through photography?

AM: Yes, okay. Yes, I'm often surprised by how the world presents itself in front of the camera. I think these pictures are generally very optimistic, and this isn’t something I was particularly expecting or searching for.

f: You have made portraits over your entire career. How would you say you have evolved and grown as a portrait artist over time?

AM: I’m not sure I'm the person to answer this question, as it pertains to the work. I'm more interested in how photographing people has challenged me personally, and enhanced my life, providing me with gift after gift of great intimacy, both with people I know well and with strangers.

f: What portrait photographers do you go back to regularly for ideas and inspiration – and who are some newer discoveries you’re enjoying at the moment?

AM: Julia Margeret Cameron, Bellocq, Man Ray and Sander will always be among my heroes, as well as many, many of my contemporaries, including Lois Conner and Greg Miller - too many to list, though only yesterday I was very moved by Paul Graham's current show in NY, as well as Alec Soth's new show. Perhaps my greatest pleasure in looking at other people's work these days comes from returning to academia after some years, as a professor in Drexel University’s Photography Program. There is something truly inspiring about watching a young person get excited about seeing the world through a camera for the first time.

f: Lastly, who was your best friend in high school?

AM: Rosemarie Loconsolo Rizzo, who remains a close pal and confidante.

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