Review: Songbook by Alec Soth

This review is written by Adam Bell, a writer and photographer based in Brooklyn, and will also be published on his excellent photo book review site.

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Songbook by Alec Soth (MACK, 2015)

I want to invite you to dance. Yes, you. Here, I'll show you. Like this. 

Tender, innocuous words, yet full of vulnerability, Soth's latest work begins with an invitation. Arms held out, the dance beginning, we're invited to relearn songs we've forgotten or maybe never knew we knew. In many ways, it's hard to write something new about Soth. One of the most celebrated contemporary photographers, Soth's work builds on a long, and rich tradition of American photography—Walker Evans to Stephen Shore, William Eggleston, Joel Sternfeld, Diane Arbus, and more. With each project, Soth has plumbed the American landscape to create works that are deeply personal, but universally resonant. Compiled from Soth's collaborative work with Brad Zellar on the Little Brown Mushroom Dispatches (2012-2014), as well as work as a freelance photographer for Magnum and personal work, Songbook is a tender, but heartbreaking anthology of love songs, ballads, choral anthems, and sing-alongs masquerading as photographs that speak about our yearning for both individual expression and communal connection.

Photographs rely on context, yet often thrive in its absence. While the images in Soth's latest book are closely modeled after newspaper photography of the likes of Weegee or any number of nameless small-town newspaper photographers, here they are presented without their original context. As part of the LBM Dispatches the images were accompanied by pithy and insightful texts by Brad Zellar and in other settings by essays, such as the work from The New York Times. Stripped of their original context, Soth's photographs have a heightened mystery. Although there are often signifiers that place them in the present, the appearance of anachronistic dress or environments confound any easy assessment of their age or provenance. This tone is furthered by Soth's use of black-and white in place of his signature color. Although the images vary in approach and style, the more event and documentary oriented images, like those of conferences, events or church gatherings, reminded me of Bill Wood's Business, a show at the International Center for Photography and also a book by Marvin Heiferman and Diane Keaton, which featured the work of Bill Wood, a commercial photography from the late-30s to 70s in Fort Worth, Texas. Self-consciously modeled on photographers like Wood, Soth and Zellar reported on many local events including self-help conferences, church socials, and town dances. Attempting to see beyond what is often assumed to be American monoculture, they looked for the local. As Zellar put it, "we wanted to see how folks were faring outside the ersatz, isolating communities of office hives and cyber space."




 

In addition to small town photojournalism, the key visual reference for Songbook, is Evidence, the ur-photobook of decontextualized archival photographs by Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan from 1977. Shorn from their original text and accompanying archival context, Mandel and Sultan's images suggest a myriad of possible meanings. Like the odd images used by Mandel and Sultan, Soth's black-and-white images often utilize a strong flash, which not only freezes his subjects, but also places them under a clinical gaze and asks us to look more closely. References to Evidence can be seen throughout the book, but are most present in the more peculiar imagery. In one such image, a man wearing a baseball cap has pushed all his hair over his face and resembles Cousin It from the Addams Family. In another, two hands, cut off by the frame, toss a rock that's frozen mid-air. My personal favorite is a vertical photograph that shows a couple from behind sitting on a bed. Turned towards each other for a kiss, both their faces are obscured. Like a found photograph from the 50s, the image is a vexing puzzle.

Bound in a green fabric, the book is embossed with the title on the cover and the music and lyrics from Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz's "Dancing in the Dark" on the back. As the lyrics on the back cover instruct, "slowly, and with much expression." These are appropriate instructions for approaching the book. Generously proportioned, the book resembles the oversized songbook it references right down to its semi-soft cover. Throughout the book are fragments of song lyrics that guide us along. They help maintain a beat, and bring us back to the melody at hand. Like the images they accompany, they are drawn from the longer songs and offer their own mysterious allure. Save the few lyrics and a brilliant quote by Eugene Ionesco at the end, there is no text in the book. Thankfully, there is a LBM Dispatches book in the works that will include the excellent writing of Brad Zellar, whose writings and collaboration Soth acknowledges in the book as the unseen presence behind almost all the work.




 

Despite the sense of loneliness that often pervades the work, the people depicted in Songbook are never ridiculed or patronized by Soth's camera. Although Soth acknowledges their quixotic search for fulfillment, expression and connection, each image seems to be recognition not only of that same longing in Soth, but also an invitation to recognize it within ourselves. This is a theme that is present in much of Soth's work from his breakthrough book Sleeping By The Mississippi to NIAGRA, and more recently, Broken Manual, his darkest work. It is also what makes his work so very American. Soth acknowledges the fragile but powerful bonds that unite us as a nation, while also recognizing our fierce independence. While Soth may bend the narrative of his images to fit his vision, he's created a story that speaks to our post-recession and socially anxious age. In the end, all artists frame a version of reality to tell a large truth. Whether or not that truth resonates is what matters. Fans of his work have no doubt snatched up this book already and don't need to be persuaded, but the work may also appeal to people who don't know his work, or were not persuaded by his previous books. Admirably, Soth has refused to rest on his laurels and has continued to challenge himself. In this new work, Soth continues to explore familiar territory, but shifts directions again. Like the dancer who opens the book, he's asking us to follow, dance and sing along.

How to Start a Project: Jeff Whetstone

© Jeff Whetstone, from the series "Post-Pleistocene"

During the last year, we published 14 short essays from photographers to the basic question, "What advice do you have for starting a project?" The series featured replies from Judith Joy Ross, Irina Rozovsky, Alejandro Cartagena, Phil Toledano, Steven Ahlgren, Susan Lipper, Amani Willett, Lisa Kereszi, Eirik Johnson, Richard Renaldi, Brian Ulrich, Mark Steinmetz, Tim Davis and Nicholas Nixon.

We subsequently began a follow-up series of posts of advice from photographers on how to develop a project, asking them how they approach the middle ground of their projects after giving basic definition and before taking steps to finish. Responses in this series are from Elinor Carucci, Michael Itkoff, Jackie Nickerson, and Alessandra Sanguinetti.

Today we return to the question of starting a project with an essay from Jeff Whetstone.

Jeff Whetstone was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee and has been filming and writing about the relationship between humans and their environment since he received a Zoology degree from Duke University in 1990. After following the migrant farm worker stream and producing a book entitled Migrant Summer in 1992, Whetstone served for five years as an artist-in-residence at Appalshop, Inc., a media arts center located in coalfields of Eastern Kentucky. There he produced numerous exhibitions about the changing Appalachian landscape. In 2007, Whetstone was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for a body of photographs entitled "New Wilderness." Since 2008, his work has been exhibited internationally and reviewed in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New Yorker Magazine, and Art News, among others. Whetstone first exhibited his video work in 2011 when his experimental short, On the Use of Syrinx, premiered at the Moving Image Festival in New York. A second exhibition in 2011 at Julie Saul Gallery entitled Seducing Birds, Snakes and Men introduced Whetstone's work in animation, 16mm film and video to a wide audience. Whetstone is a 2012 recipient of a North Carolina Arts Fellowship in film and a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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To start a project, I have to fool myself.  I use what the late, great Larry Sultan called the Provisional Myth of photographic projects.  Here's how it works:  to start a real project, I need a fake project, "A Provisional Myth." I embarked on the three-year long "Post-Pleistocene" project, through a fake project that I designed while sitting at my desk. (Usually a project I design at my desk is shallow, literal, unviable and fully cooked by the time I get up from the desk. There is no real need to photograph those projects.) However, I do design projects at my desk sometimes, and at my desk this day I decided to go photograph the farmland where I grew up. Bawcress Farms was a former mule and horse farm, with rutted roads bordering fields of feed corn.  It was transformed into a subdivision about the time I graduated high school. The photographs I made were somewhere between New Topographics and Better Homes and Gardens.  With a few exceptions, the pictures were what you would expect - boring landscapes with new homes.

I walked the paths of my old hunting trails interrupted by driveways and privacy fences. The drastic transformation conjured deep memories. I began to see the change in the landscape reflected the change in me.  This land and I were both once feral. Now we had become domesticated and predictable. I had a family and a job. This subdivision was built for people kind of like me. The landscape and I coursed the trajectory of contemporary life together. Our culture transformed both of us from wild and feckless into secure commodities.  As I looked around and made some boring photographs, I was forging the image of this landscape around the historical and political forces to which it was subject.  That was the "Provisional" part of Sultan's "Provisional Myth."  The act of photographing my boyhood landscape provided me with an opportunity to enter the mental space where my desires, the changing landscape and our mutual histories became entangled. That is, after all, the overarching subject of all my work. I can only access these ideas by working with my subject directly in front of me.

The "Myth" part of Sultan's formula was that this project would portray the farmland of my youth becoming a suburban subdivision.  That was not the project. The real project started when, after submitting to the generic personality of the photographs I was making, and the urge to reminiscence on my youth, I wondered about "The Cave."

© Jeff Whetstone, from the series "Post-Pleistocene"

In my adolescence, I expressed my most feral adolescent desires deep underground inside Wolftever Cave. It was near the farm, tucked away in a rockfall above the creek. Was it still there?  Could I find it? What could a subdivision developer do to a cave?  Do kids still visit it? I hadn't been there in twenty years or more. I was surprised when I walked right to its hidden entrance without making a wrong turn. I tentatively crawled inside and flicked on a light. The scene had not changed much. I saw the familiar beer cans, condom wrappers and graffiti layered so thick that the wall in front of me was almost completely red. I thought to myself – "Ha! A Tennessee Rothko. Contemporary cave art." At that moment the real project was born.

This project was not so different than the initial provisional myth project of photographing my childhood farm. "Post-Pleistocene" was about a similar story – cultural evolution, territory, landscape and escape. I walked in that cave carrying with me specific ideas and a particular philosophical stance that the provisional myth project provided me. It is no coincidence that the subject matter I saw in that cave was Art forged by the tension between cultural systems and our inner animal.

Photographic projects for me begin when I am wandering, knowing the real reason I am there reveals itself over time. I have to be somewhat lost. It is not a particularly pleasant feeling - seeking by means of photographing. I want my pictures to make sense together. I want to be guided by a principle - that is when making art is so comfortable and generative. But sometimes, at the beginning of a project, I don't get the benefit of that guidance. I wander, and I try to remember Keats' idea of Negative Capability. That is, when a person is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after reason.

I am a practical person. I generally have to have a reason to photograph all the while knowing I can’t invent that reason. I have to discover it through the act of photographing. That is why I give myself a fake project: to motivate me to search for the real one.

© Jeff Whetstone, from the series "Post-Pleistocene"

The Cliché in Photography

© Irina Rozovsky, from the series "My Mother and Other Things from the Sky"

As an undergraduate painting student at Boston’s MassArt, I studied under a recent teaching arrival who created his own ad lib studio rules on the first day of class instead of doing the typical reciting of the official rules handout. Among his spontaneously created rules: try not to do drugs in the studio. An...interesting first interaction, perhaps, but the professor turned out over the course of the year to be a sort of sensei: slow and calm with an incisive eye.

During one particular mid-semester class we sat to critique the paintings of a student who had returned to college at a late middle age. He had placed on the wall – yet again – a handful of paintings of his cats. Most of the students in the room felt a degree of anguish looking out over the paintings, embarrassed for him and struggling to maintain a conversation while inwardly frustrated that we, the serious painters, were stuck critiquing a guy painting his fucking cats.

The professor understood well what the dynamics were in the room - and the real problem at hand. He moved to address it in a few well-drawn sentences.

He pointed out that the majority of us – most of whom were creating brainy abstract work created with inspiration from Radiohead and wine we’d snuck into the studio (hey, inspiration-in-a-five-dollar-box isn't what he meant by drugs) for all-night painting sessions - were in terms of content painting very similarly to each other and also very much within a branch of Abstract Expressionism developed 40 years prior. He asked us if our work at this point in history was really any more or less derivative or cliché than painting your cats.

This revelation-via-rhetorical-question was no less stunning to me at that moment than a 10-year-old believing the woman on stage has actually been sawn in half: all of the "serious" painters working together late nights were painting more or less on par in terms of the collective and historic art conversation as cat man.

All of this is to getting me to ask: HDR photos of city skylines? The rainbow at sunset? Pigeons? How are they more cliché and more predicable than the 6x6 or 6x7 blank-eyed camera-staring portrait? Or Grahamesque two- or three-image sequences? Or massive 50 by 60 inch prints of Chinese landscapes - preferably of a misty, polluted river - in a Chelsea gallery? Is a cliché in one area of photography or inside one community really any different than the clichés of another? When and how does visual language lose power - or even meaning - through repetition? Who defines cliché and how does the process work?

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We create a collective definition of beauty and value in contemporary aesthetics by socially negotiating a definition between each other in a singular cultural context. The art world works to define aesthetics, but so too do other communities. I was reminded of this by a great aunt of my wife who, paging through a copy of Alec Soth’s Dog Days Bogotá pulled from my shelf, was shocked by how ugly the images were. She, on the other hand, loves contemporary paintings of Jesus Christ and high-key paintings of flowers that I – best guess here – imagine Alec Soth may not love so much, at least not unironically.

There's not a single global visual language any more than there’s a single spoken language. Cliché is a community identification arrived upon within a given context of aesthetic navigation. Perhaps counterintuitively, there are no universal clichés. Universal clichés would require alignments between interpretations of visual ideas in a myriad of contextual spaces, a virtual impossibility. Aesthetic reception varies widely based on viewing context: some Japanese pop songs may seem sentimental to a US audience, for example, whereas minimalism may seem profoundly simple through the lens of popular culture.

Instead, ideas of cliché shift between cultural and physical spaces, not just between classes and educational backgrounds - as in differences between high and popular culture - but also between countries, parts of the same country, rural and urban, generations, subcultures, ethnic groupings…the list is long. These differences are only problematic when a community applies their own sense of tired and trite to the visual language of another community. The understandings of a visual element are not universal - reading an element of one context with the understanding of another is a fundamental misunderstanding of the way we interact with images.

Cliché not only shifts between communities but also changes through time. Think of visual ideas as paths. As a path becomes congested, the visual expression or element experiences a reduction in meaning and impact by use. Alternatively, as paths become abandoned, the grass and trees grow back and it can suddenly seem a fresh visual idea again, appealing in the limited traffic that passes through it. I've seen this recently, for example, in conversations I’ve had with a number of photographers who are interested in black and white because it seems new again.

Another function of time in relation to cliché is the measure of how long an idea takes to tire. The acceleration of life in contemporary society coupled with our culture of cool jaded cynicism in the West has - empirically - created a problem in which ideas tire more quickly than in the past. It seems that we are more quickly dismissing ideas as exhausted than previously and that there is almost a power and status generated by being one of the first to declare something "dead" or "over."

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The sense of cliché can come from a number of different parts within the image making process. Clichéd images can be called as such based on the expression of a subject in terms of technique (think paint on velvet) or form (think centrally placed, "objective"-style architectural images), but also based on the subject matter itself. I would argue that the expression is more the determinant of cliché than the subject matter of the image, although all three parts of the picture making process - technique, form, content - can deliver you to the doorstep.

To make my point, consider the lead image by Irina Rozovsky. If I tell you pigeons are a cliché of street photography, you'd probably nod your head. In the right hands, however, the expression and idea of the image of a pigeon can be profound, despite the sea of images of pigeons. The bird, caught between resting and flight, falling without stretching its wings, seems unfamiliar again, seems suddenly a vital way to discuss the easily crossed line between life and death, the seeming lack of gravity in the image a way to evoke questions about the nature of reality itself, the white napkin on the ground below echoing the shape of the pigeon gives an idea of time as we imagine it as a prevision of the fallen bird on the concrete.

The lesson of my painting teacher holds true with the image by Rozovsky - it's not the cat or the pigeon as subject that marks cliché; it's the treatment we give it and what we use it to say. Expression overrides subject matter frequently, though not always.

That being said, some areas of art and photography are harder to work within than others in regards to ideas of repetition which leads to - at its extreme - cliché. That is to say, some paths are more historically trodden than others. Larry Sultan in a critique once talked with us about the heavy history of landscape, how its very long tradition within visual arts means finding a vision within it that can contribute to the conversation is that much harder. On the other hand, new paths push visual language in new directions and are fundamental to the process of expanding ideas of photography, but we quickly in contemporary life reach a sense of cliché – witness Google Street View projects – without more to the project than technique and form.

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The same professor I began this piece with told me once that if what I am doing is currently out of fashion in galleries, wait a while and it will be in fashion again. This idea of aesthetic cycles seems to me an important part of the conversation around "progress" in visual arts discussed in a series of posts last year on this site. Cycles as a model, however, doesn’t quite provide space for the importance of images and projects that strengthen and expand our ways of using photography more than others when re-passing through an established area of the medium. Instead, the model of a spiral works better. We retrace similar concepts and aesthetic predilections periodically, but at the same time we do so in different ways so that while they overlap they are not actually going through the same space.

I think that's how we can look at an interesting question - why is one subject a motif or tradition while another is a cliché? A motif or tradition retraces a point without going over the exact point again, but instead moves over the point at a different place in space as a spiral going either forward or backward. A cliché, alternatively, doesn't expand forward or backward through space, but rather repeats the circle exactly.

Practically for photographers, what this means is the vital importance of being culturally aware of what is going on around you. This is an argument to know other photographers, to complement and expand on their statements while not repeating them. It's also an argument, perhaps, to look to expression as a guide for expanding photography as much as to content - a project doesn't need to rely on obscure subject matter from uncovered areas of the world. It needs, more than anything, to be thought through personally and deeply to arrive at our own vision - the one thing we can truly guarantee is not cliché.

Review: "Looking at the Land"

© Kate Greene, untitled, Massachusetts, 2011

BASICS
Looking at the Land is an exhibition of twenty-first century landscape photographs made in the United States curated by Andy Adams of Flak Photo in collaboration with the Rhode Island School of Design's Museum of Art. The museum contracted Adams to produce the exhibition as a projection installation currently on view in their gallery alongside the show America in View: Landscape Photography 1865 to Now. The gallery exhibition is up until January 13, 2013 in Providence. Adams has also released the exhibition as an online video of the projection alongside an online gallery of the same images with accompanying texts.

The exhibition has also taken physical form for the first time at FotoWeekDC with a selection of 20 images from the exhibition being presented. FotoWeekDC runs from November 9 - November 18, 2012.

Looking at the Land has also been reviewed on PHOTO/arts Magazine, American Photo Magazine, NPR's The Picture Show, New Landscape Photography, n j w v, Time Magazine's Lightbox, and other sites.

© Joshua Dudley Greer, Imperial Sand Dunes, California, 2011

SNAPSHOT OF THE WORK
Looking at the Land is a group exhibition containing images by 88 international photographers made from between 2000 and 2012. The images were culled from over 5,500 submissions received after an online call for work as well as from the Flak Photo Collection, an online archive of images Adams has curated since 2006. The exhibition crosses the boundary of online / offline as well as presentation concepts, being simultaneously shown in Providence as a projection, online as a video exhibition and gallery, and at FotoWeek DC as physical prints. The project includes photographer responses to four questions Adams has asked them about their practice and landscape photography generally as part of the online gallery and via URL links posted with the physical prints in DC.

© Nicole Jean Hill, Highway 14, Ucross, Wyoming, 2011

CURATION AND INSTALLATION
Unfortunately, I have not - and will not - be able to get to Providence or Washington D.C. to see the projection or the installation of prints. The online exhibition consists of a gallery and video of the same images as the Providence projection. Both are straightforward, professionally produced presentations. The gallery is click through, image-by-image, with the photographer biography and their responses to Adams' four questions posted below the photograph.  The video passes through the 88 images at 10 second intervals, clocking in at just under 18 minutes long. The photographer's name, image title, and location and year the photograph was taken appear to the left of the image.

© Rachel Barrett, At Low Tide, Bolinas, California, 2009

COMMENTS ON THE EXHIBIT
There are too many images to really discuss photographers or images individually, so let's pull back and look at the exhibition as a whole.

In his essay about the exhibition Adams talks about the trends and dynamics in the work. He writes:

This survey is by no means exhaustive but it does signal the beginning of a fertile new era in the ever-evolving landscape photo tradition. It studies a cross-section of current landscape photography in the documentary style...We live in a post-New Topographics landscape where an entire generation of photographers was born and raised in suburban sprawl. Wilderness is a foreign concept. Our environment has been significantly altered. We keep nature at arm's length. Photography describes these things. 

And yet, these images are subjective interpretations, not objective facts.

As a whole the photographs included in the exhibition do indeed give a sense of a changed, evolving contemporary landscape photography. As curator and historian Alison Nordstrom writes in the NPR Picture Show review of the exhibition, many of these photographers focus on the integration of a hybrid constructed landscape and nature. The images feel collectively – but not all of them individually – like an acceptance of, maybe even a fondness for the "man-altered landscape" in this generation of suburban-spawned photographers as the landscape they grew-up in ages and matures. This fondness manifests itself in more overtly subjective, personal lens work as well as more space for beauty.

While a handful of the images stop at being merely visually clever, the majority have more sincerity and warmth in their approach to their surroundings then the critical indictments of Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, and others of the New Topographics photographers. In fact, many of the images in the exhibition seem to move beyond criticism to take stock of the poetry in the odd constructed / natural spatial juxtapositions in suburban and urban areas - the formal connection of a cloud and shadow of a tree, groups of birds taking flight from different phone poles at the same instant.

Wilderness seems less "foreign" and "at arm's length" in these images to me than reflecting, perhaps, the role of wilderness in the suburban-dweller's contemporary narrative: an element of power to respect and preserve, even while manipulating and containing what’s around us for our needs.

Adams writes that this is a cross-section of contemporary practice, but by no means exhaustive, which I agree with; his acknowledgement of this blunts what would be my main criticism and suggestion for the exhibition – a wider visual range in the edit while not necessarily increasing the number of images. While knowing he was beholden largely to submissions and images already in the Flak Photo Collection, a broader aesthetic range could be provided without compromising the thesis, providing more visual variety and play while maintaining visual coherence; a number of the images say the same thing and a sense of visual sameness pervades a section of the images. I would briefly add that while Adams overall presents a consistent vision in terms of the exhibition theme and, at the same time that I would suggest of wider variety of image-making approaches within the show thesis, a handful of images fall outside the coherence of the thematic argument he's making with the work.

A second point of critique: just based on the small sample size of photographers I’m familiar with, there is a lot of work based solely in the natural landscape still, work that could be molded by a different editor into an argument we have reconnected with or returned to nature in contemporary landscape practice. In that way, I question whether this idea of suburban-focus and nature / man-made landscape hybrids is really a singular thesis that unites much of contemporary landscape practice in the documentary style or, more likely, a particular thread that Adams identifies. If it’s the latter, I would argue for a change in the exhibition statement that moves it away from the idea that it presents a survey or cross-section and instead focuses on linking this particular work to that specific thread.

Let’s go back to New Topographics for a moment as it’s been a major topic of conversation around the exhibit so far by just about every reviewer. As written above, I believe there is generally a distance in terms of tone in this contemporary work from New Topographics. I do see, however, a technical and formal debt: both shows overwhelmingly present clean, straight, direct, frontal, 4x5 aspect ratio images. The only real large difference between the two exhibitions in these terms is an exact reversal of the role of color and black and white. While Stephen Shore was the only member of the New Topographics Ten to use color, the same percentage of those included in this exhibition (9 of 88, or basically 10%) are represented by a black and white image. The percentage similarities also roughly play out between the two exhibitions in terms of the relatively small amounts of 35mm images (LAL 8 of 88; NT 2 of 10), square formats (LAL 2 of 88; NT 2 of 10), as well as what I’ll call conceptually-lead work which is hard to define, but let’s just say it’s when the idea of the image strikes you first when looking at it, even while staying within the "documentary style" (LAL maybe 5 of 88; NT 2 of 10, i.e. the Bechers).

This common ground - beyond suggesting a technical and formal relationship between the two exhibits and a lineage to the current exhibit - raises the question of whether an issue that the curator of New Topographics, William Jenkins, labeled "a problem of style" or "stylistic anonymity" in his exhibition is also an issue with Looking at the Land, but let's discuss that down below as part of the wrap-up.

Before doing so, let me add that in a critique in graduate school, Larry Sultan talked with us about the specific difficulty of working with the landscape – it’s simply such a rich tradition to work in relationship to. That being said, I really appreciate Adams’ edit and the photographers individually for providing a large number of visually fresh images and, beyond my suggestion above of a wider edit, the editing itself is almost uniformly strong, with impressively few weak points in a 88 image line-up. I also appreciate - while perhaps not completely agreeing with - the idea that we are in a "fertile" moment and the show left me with optimism about contemporary landscape work and a new understanding of the themes presented.

© Brad Temkin, Hanging Deer, Laporte, Indiana, 2005

WRAP-UP
Lots to consider. I'll start with a couple of smaller points and questions the exhibition raises.

Let's first go back to the question of the previous section about Jenkins and "stylistic anonymity," a term which I am admittedly taking completely out of context, distorting its original meaning of an "absence of style" and using to mean "tight stylistic similarity" for my needs in this review. To what degree are we looking at a fine-tuned editorial vision that provides stylistic consistency and how much should we see this as a large number of photographers all coming from the same background and going to the same types of schools producing relatively - considering the broadest range of ways of making a photograph - similar work?

Is the issue of "stylistic anonymity" Jenkins raised about New Topographics an issue here – even if it's applied to work that's warmer and more personal, not the cold anonymity he was originally referring to?

So many photographers today are making strong, but related images in terms of aesthetics and production methods. I'm actually building to a point that’s not critical or dismissive around the point of originality, a point that's back on the conversational hot plate in articles like this one. I've felt more questioning recently, personally and by others, of the idea of photographers in the 21st-century as individuals. I'm coming around to the idea that all of what we're doing is a collective project, its group research into aesthetics, formal and conceptual ideas, and cultural themes. 5,500 submissions? Hundreds of them most likely interchangeable? The common approach seen in much of the work – but by no means all of it – to the landscape in Looking at the Land leads me to wonder just how valid the individual really is in photography anymore, assuming it really ever was valid. We are in some sort of photographic Golden Age – the number of photographers today and the quality of images produced, as shown in this exhibition, is unprecedented, even if finding truly new and fresh ideas and territory to explore is increasingly a limited proposition as the medium enters adulthood. I'd just as soon do away with individual names, contests, and the fetishism of certain work. What does it serve beyond the market and egos?

Another question this exhibition raises: what does it mean to take images from their original context and present them together in the 21st century? On the point of curation and authorship, Nick Vossbrink of n j v w has written much of what I would like to write here and I would recommend reading his review of the exhibition. In essence, he points to the exhibit as part of the trend of curation being increasingly viewed as a creative act.

What exactly is Adams' role? Photographer Mark Powell has been working on a project curating images from the Spanish-language equivalent to the website "Hot or Not." Photographer Paul Shambroom in an interview with Pete Brook, revealingly titled "In Digital Age, Sourcing Images Is as Legitimate as Making Them," recently explained why he’s giving up actually making images, instead working on projects in which he’s culling the images from Flickr. Isn’t Adams' role sourcing images very similar, besides the fact he’s generally working with better images by photographers who would like a "name"? But is this really any different from the role of the curator mounting an exhibit fifty years ago, any different from The Family of Man? Is the exhibition a work of art? Are we moving to the idea of a hybrid photographer-curator? I need a drink.

Another point I won’t attempt to answer here: it seems to me to suggest any number of issues that the suburban-born MFA photographer is generally defining contemporary landscape practice and our collective artistic vision of the landscape. This speaks quite loudly about the limited voices present in contemporary photography practice and suggests a distorted emphasis on certain spaces and their cultural importance because of the personal familiarity of fine art photographers to them.

Moving towards a conclusion, Looking at the Land excites me about the future of exhibitions. As I wrote in a previous post, I don’t think enough has been made quite yet of Adams being at the forefront of the movement of online editors to offline roles to produce exhibitions such as this as well as 100 Portraits (which Adams curated along with Larissa Leclair). I think this presents a turning-point in the relationship of online editors and bloggers to more traditional, brick and mortar spaces.

Finally, most importantly and interestingly, Adams has presented a vision of the future of exhibitions – flexible and nimble, shifting between various iterations of form between offline and online, between physical presentation and Internet video exhibition, between 20 or 88 images. In fact, this should really be referred to as the Looking at the Land Exhibition...s. As the work shifts from the screen to being projected on the wall to a physical print and the number of images included changes, the meaning of the images included changes and, therefore, the exhibition itself.

Adams’ new model also creates a change in the time relationship between the observer and the work. It’s a shift towards a multiple relationship with the work, allowing the images to be digested in parts, in the case of the online iteration, and at one’s own pace. I have about an hour in me, tops, when I go to galleries or a museum. Here online I can take a half-hour one day, ten minutes the next, digesting the work in parts, going back to and reinforcing my understanding of the exhibition instead of trying to consume an entire physical show at once. The format also allows Adams to include more elements to the multi-media presentation with the accompanying texts, enriching the experience. The online version also allows for Web 2.0 interactivity to play a role in the experience, creating an exhibit that all can refer to, facilitating comments, inter-linking reviews, and generating public conversation about the work between people on different continents.

This update of the concept of the exhibition for the contemporary audience is Adams’ pioneering gift with this exhibit, which I say even while appreciating the strength of the work and the photographers he’s selected for it.

© Todd Hido, #6097, 2006

8.21.11 Reading Shortlist

The Reading Shortlist is an occasional post with a listing of recommended readings from other sites.

Joerg Colberg, Conscientious, Conversations About Photo Books: Lesley Martin

Katie Fowley, Electronic Beats, Pieter Hugo - Nollywood

Jim Goldberg and Todd Hido, PDNonline, Heroes & Mentors: Jim Goldberg & Todd Hido On Larry Sultan

Sam Mirlesse, Whitehot Magazine, Interview with Alessandra Sanguinetti

Jerry Saltz, New York Magazine, Generation Blank

Michael Werner, Two Way Lens, Simon Roberts

Interview: Steve Davis

Interviewed by phone in Olympia, WA
February 18, 2011

Olympia, Washington-based photographer Steve Davis won 1st place in the Santa Fe Center for  Photography's Project Competition Award in 2002 and is the recipient of two Washington Arts Commission / Artist Trust Fellowships. His images have appeared in Harper's and The New York Times Magazine and are in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the George Eastman House, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Musee de la Photographie in Belgium, and the Haggerty Museum at Marquette University. He is the Coordinator of Photography and a faculty member at The Evergreen State College. He is represented by the James Harris Gallery in Seattle.

For a full exploration of his images, visit his website here.

An excellent 2009 interview focused on his Captured Youth series can be found here on Pete Brook's Prison Photography.

In this full-length interview, Davis shares thoughts on his new body of work, As American Falls, talks about reasons for moving into digital image making, reveals his fantasy of being a war photographer, and explains why galleries selling artwork may as well be selling socks.

Background
fototazo: Tell us how you got into photography and about your background in photography. You’ve been involved in it since fourteen?

Steve Davis: Well, since I was even younger than that [I was] really interested in it, but I think at about fourteen that’s when I learned about the darkroom, started to learn how a camera works and that kind of thing. So then I pursued that through college as well, and it’s all I can do now.

f: Did you have an early mentor or somebody in your family that was a photographer?

SD: No, not really. In my family I had uncles and a grandfather that I was always impressed could control a camera and do all these pictures, but at an early age, not really, I just sort of thought it was exciting.

f: And you never put down the camera?

SD: Yeah. Pretty much. I got a Bachelor’s Degree in Communications which was mostly photography, and then I went on to a Masters in Fine Art, again photography, so yeah, at that point that’s pretty much where I was going to go with it.

I thought I’d be a commercial photographer for a while, or a fashion photographer, but I realized quickly that I didn’t have the nerves for it or really the love for it.

f: Did you do much commercial work to figure that out?

SD: No, I never did a lot of commercial work. And most of what I did would be working for someone else. I spent a few years as a professional printer, and I worked for a photographer or for a newspaper or a company, mostly the darkroom end of it, until I got into the job I have now which was quite a while ago.

I always wanted to do fine art, or at least after I got my master’s degree, because that’s pretty much how everything was focused. What I thought was, if you were doing work that was important, it needed to be in that direction, which I don’t think is true now.

I just kept working towards that. I would enter work in juried exhibitions and things like that. When I got the job at Evergreen State College, it was an interesting mix between doing editorial or marketing photography for the college and teaching at the same time. It allowed me to really have a lot of tools and things to play with, to work on my skill level a lot and also to teach and keep myself up on ideas - keep me thinking critically about everything, which you don’t have to do as much if you’re not engaged with other photographers. If you’re not teaching it’s easy to stop thinking so critically about it.

f: How do your roles as photographer and educator overlap? What do you get from teaching and what does it make you give up?

SD: Yes, I think it’s really important. I think going out and making pictures and having to deal with all the logistics makes me better at teaching, but the teaching makes me think more theoretically and study other work and have to defend myself to students, and demand that they do the same to me. I think they balance out really nicely. The downside is I can’t really commit 100% to being an artist or a photographer the way I could I if I was independently wealthy and didn’t have to teach. But overall it’s a pretty good deal.

Processes and Working Methods
f: I’d like to ask you about processes and working methods, from the cameras and films you’re using, to parts of your workflow, to editing a project.

SD: I totally shifted the way I approach things. I was shooting 8x10 on everything, and I thought, you know, I just don’t have the time or the money to be doing this anymore. I’d rather spend it with my new daughter, so then I moved over to a digital set-up, partly just for the speed of it.

[It’s] not to say I won’t [shoot large format] again, I like it. But the landscape stuff, the Western Lands series, I started that with an 8x10 and I’d go out for a few days and I could literally only take twenty exposures on my entire trip. I like the idea of being slow and deliberate and careful, which is what large format makes you do, as you know, but yeah.  After a while I said this is ridiculous. So I got a medium format digital, a Mamiya, and that actually worked out just great.

I have to spend a lot more time editing, and I’ll edit and re-edit and change my mind and go back to the first edit, and that sort of thing.

I invested a little bit of money in a good monitor. I keep it well color managed to the printer that I use. It’s the same thing I have at work, so I can work from home and basically what I’m seeing there is gonna match what I do when I bring it in and make a print. I’ve been working digitally and printing with inkjet, even when shooting film, for years. Since about 2000 everything I did past the negative was scanning and Photoshop.

f: You have students that work with you?

SD: Yeah. And I’ve had interns that worked very closely with me, especially on projects like the Captured Youth stuff.  I would never go out without a helper, and they’d get credits for it and learn a bunch.

So that was a nice thing that I had. I don’t have one now, I don’t think I need one.

f: Are you working on a digital project right now?

SD: Nope, I’m not working on anything right at the moment. I’m poking around. There’s a couple possibilities down the road that I’m just coming to terms with, but right now, I’ll probably wait until summer because I’m off for the summer. That’s probably when I’ll jump into something next.

f: Any other parts of your workflow to share?

SD: I would go out usually, shoot a bunch. It used to be I would play with it a lot in editing and then I’d make prints, a lot of prints. I make less prints now, because my color management is better and I know what to look for better so I don’t have go through that process quite as much.

I’ll do that a lot and I’ll edit it and I’ll put [it] online on my webpage, almost more for my benefit, so I can just sorta see what that looks like, and I’ll pull some out and put some back in. Lately for the past three years, I’ve worked with my gallery dealer really closely just getting feedback from him. By then there’s a lot of printing and re-printing, and small prints, and test prints.

Ultimately I like prints. I tell my students that too. I never want to see a computer monitor, I never want to see a bad print and have you tell me that it was better on the monitor.

I shoot in RAW, I use Lightroom. Usually in the mornings before I go to work and my mind is freshest, I go through stuff, and I go through it, and I go through it and I play with it and then I go to work and I forget about it. The next day I’ll do more of that kind of work until it’s starting to kind of gel. A lot of it is I’ll have six really good pictures, but they’re sort of the same picture, so which one are you going to pick? What does that suggest for the next image to be? So I do all that just in my head as I’m going along and I can take a couple of years doing that sometimes.

On His Projects
f: Has there been a common trajectory to your projects in terms of timeline and how they evolve?

SD: It’s kind of funny, I feel like I sort of fell into this thing of working with imprisoned people, or people that have serious limitations. I don’t think I ever sought out to do that. That happened by working with juvenile offenders and doing portraits of them and teaching them workshops. From there, other things sort of fell in to place, and the Department of Social and Health Services had me do work, and the first project, the Captured Youth project, was off and on for almost, I guess eight years. And the next project was a couple years, and the next was a couple, and then American Falls, which in some ways is the largest project, I did that in one year. So I guess I’m getting faster. But it seemed almost too fast. I kind of like the idea of having a fair amount of time to tease out an idea, because I don’t really know what it is when I’m starting.

f: Does the timeline on American Falls have to do with a farther away location as well?

SD: Partly, yeah. And I’m not even necessarily sure that I’m even done with it… I’m done with it for now, but it could be one of those things that I want to revisit periodically as well.

f: I was reading the mission statement for American Falls and you talked about looking to lock in an image that you had from growing up in the town as one of “tenderness and beauty.” I was wondering how that resolved in the project, if you came to a place where that happened for you.

SD: I didn’t grow up feeling there was tenderness and beauty there, I really didn’t like it. I think it was more coming back to it. A lot of my family members died there. So my attitude was changing towards it and I got more curious about it. I think in my statement I said I was “vainly attempting to lock in the tenderness and beauty.” I kind of knew I was never going to do it. But having said that, I wasn’t quite sure if I was going to be making a negative statement about the town, or have a little bit of sympathy to it, and [in the end] I feel pretty sympathetic to it. And also kind of a nice result of this is hearing from other people, some of them I don’t even know, who live or have lived in American Falls, who seem to connect with it on that level as well. I’m happy about that.

I think once I got involved in it I realized that, if I was going to try to really document it I was going to do a piss poor job of it and so I decided not to worry about that so much as just sort of let my feelings toward the town just sort of…just let it happen, I guess. I didn’t have too much of an agenda after a certain point. I wanted it to be more about the mood and the ambiance. There’s actually some very literal images that would have been very helpful and very descriptive that I intentionally didn’t put in there because I really didn’t want it to be too much about the actual place. I wanted to be a little more able to be interpreted on a broader scope I think.

f: Is that something that you’re able to do easily, leave some of the strongest images on the table and out of the body of work, just to make the…

SD: No, that’s not easy. In fact, the gallery exhibit which is showing right now, I think it’s 24 images, but that’s really just a small amount of it. We spent like two days going over re-, re-editing it and pulling and trying to figure out what can we get away with not having. That was kind of hard. But I think descriptive images aren’t necessarily the strongest and there were pictures I had that didn’t describe anything, that could have been anybody’s backyard, that I really wanted to put in the show. The American Falls dam, for instance, I have no pictures of the American Falls dam. And that’s sort of what it’s all about, but I just didn’t want it.

Yeah, it was just too much about this picturesque little town in Idaho. And I wasn’t really comfortable with that, so I think the idea that you almost have to imagine this place might be like is kind of where I wanted it to lead to.

f: After doing all the previous bodies of work on imprisonments - incarcerated youth, functionally disabled citizens, institutionalized developmentally disabled - do you think that the theme of imprisonment continues in the American Falls images? Especially thinking about your quote about family dying in Idaho...

SD: Yeah, that’s a good question and I thought about that myself. I think to a certain degree there’s a level of imprisonment based on economy and family ties for anybody.

I think some of my work that I wasn’t particularly addressing in that quote has more to do with communities, whether they are forced communities or virtual communities or managed communities; they don’t all fall under the idea of imprisonment, but there is some kind of a lost freedom. On that level, over the years, I’ve been in one way or another dealing with these sorts of communities.

American Falls is a real community that is not a managed or forced, such as a home for the mentally retarded or something like that, but it still has a lot in common [with the communities in other projects]. That seems to be a thread that I’ve been following for quite a while. One of those things you sort of look back and see it happening. At the time I wasn’t really thinking I was [going to make] everything into that, but that seems to be what I do.

f: It sounds like you started with the Captured Youth project, started working with a group that needed some photography, and then it just kind of unfolded from there, project after project, continuing with a theme that started out of a more or less volunteer photographer role.

SD: Yeah, and I like portraits. One thing that I think some people didn’t understand was that part of me was thinking, hey, I could be photographing kids from any high school, they don’t particularly have to be in jail here. That just happens to be the population I’m working with. It was the fact that they were tied together by this population, I think. It was more interesting than prison culture on a certain level, although that definitely plays into it because that is the subject.

After a while, I really got to where I was finding it very burdensome to photograph, to make these portraits mostly because of the logistics of getting permissions to do it. Everybody having their say, and everything by committee and it was really, really getting to me and so the landscape stuff [Western Lands] was just me wanting to get away from everything and me not having to answer to anybody.

But I think there is a connection between that [work] and the portrait work because that’s sort of the antithesis of it. Basically those [landscapes] are where there’s nothing or it’s about trying to be somewhere else or moving somewhere else, that’s how I see them. It’s basically getting out of these confined spaces, which is what all my previous work was about.  I sort of like to think of them as balancing against the other stuff, but I didn’t intentionally go in with that in mind.  It wasn’t like trying to counterbalance these portraits with these open spaces.

f: Somehow that comes through a lot. I felt that looking through it. I wasn’t sure how intentional and how literal it was. I also wasn't sure how much it had to do with yourself and your experiences as a photographer and how much it was thematically looking for a counterpoint for the other work. I didn’t know where those lines fell.

SD: Well that’s good, I hope that there’s always some kind of connection, in one way or another, and that people can pick up on it. I found landscapes to be incredibly difficult. I thought they’d be sort of easy and I wouldn’t have to think too much. But they were really hard.

f: Were you able to pinpoint over time a particular reason, is it just the legacy and tradition of landscape work makes it…

SD: You hit it, the legacy is so big…and I’d never done a whole lot of landscapes. It was actually sort of new to me and trying to take pictures that mattered to me and that weren’t completely redundant of just a whole host of remarkable stuff out there would drive me crazy.

f: Talk about representing Washington in the 50 States Project, about the project itself, how you were chosen, and what kind of connections you have with the photographers.

SD: Yeah, I wish I had good stories for you there. I got an email from Stuart Pilkington, who is English, actually, who put that project together.

I asked him, “Well, how’d you pick me?” and he [had] found my webpage and he liked the work, so I said, “Sure.” At that point, he had a few big names like Brian Ulrich and some other people, who were signed on to the idea, but there was really no sharing or communication between the photographers. Maybe every now and then an email saying, “I liked your picture,” I wish I could say there was more, but...I think we pretty much all just worked in isolation and submitted our pictures.

f: Do you go through the work that the others submit?

SD: I would always look at what the other people did on any given assignment. He’d make these assignments up and it was like, "OK, you have thirty days to go do this." Some assignments were easier than others.

f: Is there an endgame with it or is this an ongoing project?

SD: 50 States? No, it’s over. In fact it’s been over for over a year now. It’s still online, but then he moved on. I think he did one of Sweden or something. He’s got one of the UK. Structured very similarly.

Influences
f: Do you have some photographers, contemporary or historical, that you were looking at a lot while making these bodies of work?

SD: I guess I look at a lot of people, but not necessarily that deeply anymore. I think one person who’s stood out to me recently, I’d never even heard of before is Elger Esser. And I guess [Edward] Burtynsky. I like Larry Sultan, I like Rineke Dijkstra. When I was younger and starting photography I would worship photographers more and I would really study them, I don’t know if that’s true of other people or not. When I learned color, I would look at [Richard] Misrach’s work a lot, I liked his use of open space and large format detail where everything can be very tiny and still be very important.

f: Are there certain photographers who you would consider long-term influences on your work that you’ve looked at or studied for the length of your career?

SD: I’ve been coming back to August Sander, I love August Sander. I like [Richard] Avedon’s portraits. When I was in college I really liked Ralph Gibson. This was a long time ago, he had Lustrum Press, and he did these really great books. So I really liked Ralph Gibson, because his work could be so sort of vague and mysterious which really turned me on a lot. I started to kind of come back and look at that kind of work again.

I met him, I took a workshop from him and he was a real asshole, he really let me down, it’s like, no more hero worship, this guy was a prick. But after a while you figure you can still be a prick and an interesting person, artistically. Most of them probably are.

f: Maybe that allowed you to burn the proverbial house down a little quicker and move on.

SD: Yeah, I think so, yeah, kill your father. Chuck Close, I always liked him. I think the first photographer I knew the name [of] and I was really impressed by when I was a kid was Annie Leibovitz. But not the kind of stuff she does now, her really early, early black and white stuff. It’s mostly just rock star stuff, it’s editorial stuff she did for Rolling Stone, but it was far more candid and loose and not so orchestrated like her Vanity Fair stuff, in fact it’s nothing like her Vanity Fair stuff.

Galleries and Museums
f: I want to ask you about the Haggerty Museum at Marquette University acquiring the four images from American Falls and see if you had any thoughts about the gallery-museum world and strategies for having a successful relationship with it.

SD: Yeah, I don’t. I don’t know much about it, actually, especially museums, they’re kind of a mystery to me. I started working with a commercial gallery about five years ago and that’s the first experience I’ve had with a commercial gallery.

f: How did your connection come up with James Harris?

SD: Well I sorta stopped looking, and that’s how it happened. I think [gallery owners] want to know that they’ve discovered someone, not that someone was standing at their door with a portfolio.

I was in a group show and one of his artists was in the same group show and he saw my work and bought a print for himself. Then he kind of toyed around with the idea of having him represent me and he finally decided he would and he’s been just great. He’s really supportive.

f: Is James Harris a pretty big Seattle gallery?

SD: Yeah, he’s pretty well respected, he’s got a really great reputation. He’s not photography per se, he’s a variety of things. I actually met him a few years earlier because one of my students was his intern, and I just remembered thinking I’ll never bother showing him my work, he would never look at my work in a million years. So you can’t figure those things out. I’m still surprised that my kind of work is stuff he’d want to show, but he does.

I try to do everything I can to try to keep a good relationship with him. I trust him, he trusts me. When I say I’m going to do something, I do it. He doesn’t have to wonder if I’m going to change my mind and go bicycling across the country one day or something. I think they like that, I think they want to know that they can basically trust you. But the museum part? Jim Harris is trying to get my work on the museum level a little bit, but it’s a mystery to me.

I remember a few years ago I heard people speaking - curators, dealers - and they basically all got up and said, “We’ll never show anybody, even if we like them, unless they’ve got a pedigree.” I thought, well, that’s true, but I can’t believe they’re actually saying that in public. And they all agreed, they all freely admitted that. It’s a really closed world.

f: I’ve always kind of felt that that’s on some level a little discouraging, and on another level it’s very liberating. If it’s not a meritocracy, you do what you do the best you can, and there’s not a lot of thought you can give to the other side of it.

SD: Yeah. It is, and on a certain level, they might as well be selling socks as well as selling your artwork. On a certain level, the guy’s got to pay his bills. That’s just the truth to it, and you just have to accept that. It’s really important for work to sell or otherwise he won’t want to show it. I might break even. Or I make like nothing, but somebody has to buy something, or the whole thing just stops.

f: Does Seattle have a pretty strong art scene or photography scene in general?

SD: It’s not bad, but I think Portland is better. Portland seems to be really growing, and Seattle too. But I’m in Olympia, and I’m pretty much on my own, I think, in a lot of respects. And I don’t get out to galleries a lot and I don’t do that much socializing.

Sense of Self as a Photographser
f: How about your sense of yourself as a photographer, your own sense of strength and also things that you continue to work on.

SD: My sense of myself as a photographer…well, that’s hard for me to answer. I feel like I’m good at portraiture and I think I’m getting better at landscapes. I seem to deal with work that has a certain sad tone to it and I think I can convey that in the way that I want to and people seem to respond to it in the way I hope they would, so I guess I’m good with that.

What I need to work on, I would like to be able to expand my subject matter, I’d really love to be a war photographer or something, that would be my fantasy, which is not going to happen. That’s something I never wanted to do when I was younger and when I got older I thought, man, that would be so outstandingly exciting.

f: Is it the adrenaline that would draw you to the…

SD: Well, I think the element of risk, partly in the photograph. Part of it is, you have completely, absolutely uncontrolled events, or close to it, and trying to make something where you just don’t have that sort of control, you can’t manufacture, you can’t come back the next day and shoot the same mountain. I think part of it would be just the experience of making the images, which is, yeah, the adrenaline I guess.

I’d like to be able work with people even closer, and get them in their own environments without them just sort of disappearing, as sort of cogs in a landscape, really make them have more of a presence.

I’ve done portraiture and then landscapes and with the American Falls stuff, that’s sort of the first time, at least in recent years, that I’ve really tried to merge those together and I’d like to continue to try to work on that.

f: Do you have any comments about what you’re looking for from photography as a medium or from your photographs themselves?

SD: A student talked to me today and she asked me, “Why do you take pictures?” and that is such a hard question. It should be the easiest question.

I think what I’m looking for in photography is trying to get to the next step, where there’s maybe a little more clarity that I see and that maybe, hopefully, other people see too. Because I don’t do this just to show the pictures to myself. I like other people to see them.

I don’t like to take pictures of things that I think I’ve figured out. I don’t know what the point of that is. So usually I’m taking a picture, or I’m approaching a project in a certain way, because I don’t know what it will lead to, or I don’t know what it would mean. So I look for that in photography in general, photography that perhaps implies, or suggests, but that doesn’t say.

It’s a pretty superficial medium in that it only photographs the surface of things. And so, it’s what it suggests and what the brain kicks in and starts adding to the picture that I think is intriguing about it.

f: And that may be another reason for moving into doing the landscapes and then American Falls as a project that hybridizes your earlier work - the chance to do something different, evolve, not do the same thing, not do something that’s known.

SD: Yeah, that’s definitely there, and also turning my camera on people that know me, that I know, that I have a history with.

[As American Falls] was grounded in my past, and that was something that I kind of wanted to do, because I think I always avoided that.  There’s a certain level of the personal that I don’t usually have in my work, and you can argue that this isn’t that personal either, but at least there’s some degree of it.

f: You were talking earlier about making less prints because you’ve gotten to a point with color management you know what to look for beforehand. I wonder if also as a photographer you come to a point of refinement and sharpness where you know you’ve seen that image, you know something’s not worth taking, it’s too direct, it’s too…

SD: Yeah, I see that a lot in student work, where they’re exploring some new idea and to me it’s...I would not touch that one again.

One thing that doesn’t interest me too much in photography is stuff that’s basically based on a punch-line or a gag or “Isn’t this clever, I’m really outsmarting the system by turning it up on its ear with this project.”

To me that stuff gets just boring. It’s easy to appreciate right off the bat, instantly, but it doesn’t necessarily sustain very well.

When I was shooting in American Falls I really wanted a wildfire. I found one and I drove and drove and drove and I had a hell of a time finding it and I was so happy that I got the wildfire. And when all was said and done, it was like...it’s a picture of a wildfire. It is too direct, and it doesn’t really say anything. But there’s pictures of fields with just wildfire smoke sort of lurking in the background, and that’s what I ended up using. Or a rodeo where I didn’t shoot anybody riding, I just shot people sitting there.

I’ll have ideas, and I’ll just know this is the most important picture ever, or that maybe it’s not. But that does not mean that I’ll feel that way in a little while.

So I don’t really trust my feelings on that too much. Sometimes I’ll just think, “I don’t know if that’s any good at all,” and everybody responds to it and it’s really important to the piece. I don’t necessarily know how it’s going to plug in in the end.  A lot of pictures that were so hard to get and I was so excited to get ‘em and they were just...they were just too literal, or too National Geographic or something.

The only thing I can really think of that really helps me with that, it’s time, and it’s getting to review, and review, and review. I sort of approach things with the idea, “So what?” Here’s a picture, well so what?  If I can sorta answer to myself why I need it, then that helps it pass the litmus test.

Vision of the Future of Photography
f: Do you have a personal vision of the trajectory of photography? And about where we’ll be in ten years or beyond?

SD: Everybody’s doing it, and everybody is getting good at it, even if they have absolutely no idea why. A part of it is just being able to share your work, which to me is a sort of unexpected thing that’s happened with the Internet and everything. Working digitally, we’ve known that’s been coming, but sharing it endlessly and instantly to me is...I’m only now, I think, sort of grappling with that.

And so what worries me a little bit is that in ten years, everybody is going to be doing so many pictures, they’re not even going to think about it to the degree that they think about it now which isn’t very much, and I wonder what that’s going to do to really in-depth, serious photography that’s done by, you can call them professionals, or people that are really devoted to the craft.

[Also] you see photo webpages by really nice photographers and they’ve got tutorials they want to sell you. They’re making money off of the photographers now. The whole industry is now trying to make money off the people who should be paid. It’s totally backwards, so I worry about that.

I’ve got a friend who’s into this “citizen journalism” thing. They pay her money, and she’ll take them to some presumably third world country and they’ll take pictures as some kind of reportage, and they pay her to do it. I don’t think it’s very much, mostly I think they’re paying expenses, but the point is, nobody’s paying them. They are paying for the privilege to go out and make pictures and I think that’s kind of scary.

Obviously it’s going to really become so technically marvelous. I notice that the more technically magnificent digital photography gets, the more people have an interest in Holga cameras, things that are clearly flawed.  And I think there’s totally a relationship between the two there. So, we’ll see, there’s still a lot of interest in the darkroom, but I don’t know how well that can survive.

f: I think that we’ll be in a world where a lot of these barriers between, going along with what you were saying I guess to a degree, amateur and professional, those that haven’t been erased already, will start to be broken down. I think that there’s a level of interest that I have in that, because I think that will provide for more diversity and more dissemination of photography.

SD: Right, that’s the flip side, yeah.

f: That’s the positive side, the downside is, I think there’s a lot of concern about a career as a professional photographer. I’ve never been a big fan of making fine art photography be the province only of those that use particular equipment, but I think at points there’s been a sense that I’ve had that to be qualified in the fine art world it has to be done in a particular manner, and I almost wonder at points if it’s a defensive stance, to kind of keep a barrier between the masses and the professional photographer. And I wonder if...

SD: Yeah, I think you’re right. But on the other hand, if everybody is taking the same picture of the same mountain, aren’t you going to want to offer the one that’s done a little better? That was presumably done with a better set of equipment?

f: Absolutely. I have always been within my grad program and both before and after that program a little bit of an oddball photographer, shooting 35mm digital photography and looking to work within fine arts. I’ve started shooting a lot more medium format the last couple of years because I’ve bought the argument.

There are certain situations where the 35mm - because of lenses, the ability to make a lot of images, especially say in a very low lighting situation, and being able to see what’s happening with the images and working in relationship to the feedback - where I still think the advantages outweigh the quality of making a medium-format film image, but more and more I’m starting to shoot film for some of these reasons.

I do hope for higher quality equipment at lower prices for diversity and dissemination of image-making, and then also have concern about what that opens up.

SD: What I’ve noticed, students would have to show me portfolios, “Can I get into your class?” - that kind of thing. When they [brought a] darkroom print, it didn’t matter how bad the print was, it always suggested that they had a certain amount of skill behind that print. [They] understood a little bit about putting film in a camera, managing a camera, putting in the work and the money to make that picture, it was all implicit.

And then I started seeing these digital portfolios with work that was just better, but I’d get them and they’d have no mastery, no sense of what they were doing, no ability to follow an idea, didn’t know what an f-stop was…so the digital image didn’t imply any sort of solid background. There’s nothing wrong with that, I just had to adjust the way I let people in my class, I’d have to ask more questions, things like that.

But I think you’re right about the art world thing. I did 8x10 for a few years and I got to really like it because nobody was doing it, and it made me get really, really slow…and cameras aren’t asking you to do that anymore. You don’t have to think about anything, you can take 500 pictures before you think about what you’re doing, and so the idea of just forcing it to slow down, it’s what I needed, because I think I’m basically not a patient person. And it made the people who sat for me think I was really important and therefore that they were really important, and you don’t get that if you stick a 35mm camera out.

A lot of it was theater. All about the theater and the psychology of it. Then I traveled to Colombia, and I wasn’t going to deal with film at all and all I had was a little five megapixel point and shoot, and that was liberating for me. I found out I could do some pretty nice stuff with absolutely nothing to speak of. I was beginning to feel that if I didn’t have an 8x10 camera, I wasn’t going to take a good picture or one that anyone would really want to see. I think it’s nice, once you get too comfortable with anything, to just walk away from it. Just try something different.

f: I have a couple of students I’m not so sure if they know as much technique as they should, but somehow they manage their images into something. It’s like they’ve lost the terminology and the knowledge that we had from the past and somehow they’re coming up with some pretty interesting images. Somehow with a digital camera, they know the buttons well, they know if it appears one way on the LCD screen to tweak it one way or other. I wonder if it’s not a new, different body of knowledge that they are developing.

SD: I think you’re right. I’m always complaining [students] don’t know what an f-stop is, but maybe it doesn’t matter any more. But then I would also say is what I tend to see is that everybody’s images look the same. They’ve all got the same depth of field, the same excellent color, the same excellent contrast, and they don’t stray from that because the cameras don’t want you to stray from it. The cameras know how to make a good picture, just hit the button. The ability to have a colossal failure and then learn from that, and actually maybe turn that failure into a whole new way of dealing with it is a little harder when you don’t have any actual skill behind you and a camera that makes good safe decisions. But I don’t know. Maybe that’s just my generation.

But I think you’re right, there is something to just basically dealing with the instant, that seems to work out pretty well. Work quickly, spontaneously. That seems to be the way people are geared.

Advice
f: Steve, I have one more question for you, which is: advice received or learned over your career that you would pass along to other photographers.

SD: OK, here’s one thing. There’s always 100 really good, excellent reasons why you should not [take a] picture. Right? I mean there really are good reasons, and so I think it’s important that you ignore them. A good image can be a flawed photograph. Don’t over think the problem. I don’t know if that’s a real pearl, but that’s sort of what’s recently in my head these days.

Edited for length, clarity, and question sequence.