BA: Thanks for chatting. And belated thanks for sending your book a few weeks ago.
JS: Long time reader, so it was a little return on years of your own efforts.
From the old blog days?
The blog days, yes. Photo blogs were an important part of me getting ready for grad school.
Then maybe you know more about me than I know about you. I only know some of your photos and the book, but not much else. Can you get me up to speed on your path as a photographer? When did you first begin taking photos? In Haiti? Or in the states? How did it start?
So I get to Houston in the late 90s to attend college. No experience with photography past the usual snaps of the family. Even though there is some stuff probably cooking in the background. My father's family used to have their own darkroom. By the time I'm growing up in the 80s, it's a ruin in the back of my grandmother's house. It became mostly a cinematic space for play.
Anyways, I'm here for college, and eventually settle on a graphic design major. I'm not really feeling it, and I'm not really picking up the skills, but my degree plan requires that I take fundamentals of photo. Something clicks, and I change my major. Get the degree, get burnt out through deep disconnect with the faculty. Days before I'm meant to pawn my photo equipment, I come across William Eggleston and Wolfgang Tillmans in a magazine. The spark is reignited. I'm a photographer again, and I'm free for the first time.
Years later, my wife convinces me to go through graduate school. This time I gel with the faculty, and with most of my cohort. But the 2008 crash had just happened, and we're mourning a parent, and we become parents. And in all that sauce, I reach my current form as a picture taker.
That's a lot to unpack. Let's begin with your father's family. Did you ever visit that darkroom? Where are the negatives now? What kind of photos are there?
Oh yeah, it was a nice place to play P.I. or Space Ranger. The chemical smell was still there, the trays, the enlargers, but no negatives or photos. Inside my grandmother's house a few silver gelatins hung here and there as a memento of those years, mostly portraits. The other reminder was my dad's slides that he shot during his residency in Europe. He would truck them out every couple of years for slideshow theatre. I still have a few of them here in the house. They were not your average tourist pictures. There's a real attention to order, and a sensitivity to distance. Pops really has an eye for this even though he didn't go down that road.
I don't know if there is a cache of negatives or pictures that someone in the family inherited. Grandma could be withholding with the accumulations of the past, specially if you were not one of the favorites.
Are you one of the favorites?
No.
Haha. OK, so photography ran in your family on some level. That might have planted the seed? How/why did you choose college in Houston?
Family again. I was given the choice between 3 cities where we had kin. NYC was too expensive, Miami was not far enough. Houston won by default. I had an uncle here.
What was your first impression of Houston?
"This is not an American city!" Listen, I grew up with copious amounts of US TV and movies. Maybe copious undersells it. There is a picture of me being fed a slurry (dinner in a blender) because I would not detach my eyes from the television. Mike TV from Willy Wonka.
I'm imagining you binging a dinner slurry. I'd love to see a photo!
I'll see if my mom can send me a picture of that picture. If she still has it.
Houston doesn't look like New York, or Chicago, or San Francisco. It does look, here and there, like LA, but not the LA of movies. When I look at John Humble pictures, or Anthony Hernandez pictures , I see a lot I recognize. It took at least two full years for the city to charm me, but once it did...
Once it did, what happened? It grew on you?...
It was real low key at first. I remember being on a Greyhound from Fort Lauderdale one day, and once the city came into view, this Cuban lady started talking shit. A few month prior I would have joined in, but at that point I was thinking "Fuck you, lady. This is my home.”
I haven't visited Houston but I'm curious about it. The first thing I ever remember learning about Houston is that it has no zoning. Which must manifest in strange ways. But maybe generally as sprawl? That's just a guess. But maybe Haiti has no zoning either? I'm not sure?
No zoning means sprawl absolutely, but also means chaos. It also means a certain porosity in the expected cultural and financial borders. Last week I was explaining to my high school students about the No Zoning thing, and I said "That's why you can have a strip club down the block from a school." It was an abstract example for me, but a couple of them had concrete examples of just that. The bayous and the luxuriance of the place are defining features that are often missing from outsider accounts of the place.
Personally I have no problem with strip clubs near schools. But I’m probably in the minority there.
I have none myself. I grew up in what was originally a bougie suburb that was slowly transitioning into a red light district. Pay negotiations for sex work were my lullabies.
There's a saying "Youth is wasted on the young." I might rephrase that as “strip clubs are wasted on the old." Or something like that. I wish I could've visited one when I was 15. But I digress…I didn't know you teach high School. Do you teach photography?
Yes, I teach photography/art all over the city. This semester at three different schools (a high school, a university, and a museum school).
Very cool. Can I go back to an earlier comment? You had just gotten your photo degree. And then you lost interest in photography? What was that all about? Were you burnt out through disconnect with the faculty?
Man... I'll keep the novel short. I was really interested in what I would later learn was the Szarkowski canon, but my professors having come from a very postmodern perspective were not interested in revisiting or deepening or complicating any of that MoMA photo stuff. Someone like Earlie Hudnall was living down the street and we were never told about him. Geoff Winningham was teaching about one neighborhood over and we were never told about him. Provoke never came up. Magnum never came up. Atget was seen as a joke that the Surrealists played on the world. We saw bits in photo history, but in studio these were not traditions that really came up. So I was making photographs against the current. Then you throw in the very important factor that all but one (and an important one she turned out to be) were white Americans with very little curiosity past their own educations, and school was often painful.
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| Earlie Hudnall, Bouncing Boys, 1981 |
Who was the important one?
Delilah Montoya who was the first one in the faculty to really see those of us that were BIpoc and from other countries, and understood how foundational that could be to our expressions and understandings.
Photography is a pretty wide spectrum. Sounds like you just had to find the photographers you could relate to. Which is pretty a standard learning curve maybe. Eggleston and Tillmans? Is that who you mentioned above? Eggleston makes sense. Tillmans? Hmm.
If you look at my practice sentence by sentence Eggleston makes sense, but if you look at it paragraph by paragraph, Tillmans makes just as much sense.
Atget as a joke? That's just wrong.
Tell me about it!
You mentioned Magnum a second ago. What do you think of Bruce Gilden's Haiti photos, shot for Magnum?
I love Gilden's Haiti photographs. There is a lot of white tourist goes to X work. Some I loath, some I enjoy despite the implications/problematics. But Gilden's pictures of Port-Au-Prince ring true. Truer than even Danny Lyon's pictures, but that might just be because I don't really know Gonaive that well. One of my fave of faves.
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| Bruce Gilden, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 1985 |
Well yeah that's an amazing photo. Gilden knows a good frame when he sees one. But does he know Haiti? I’m not so sure.
Know? Probably not. But I think he is a more attentive and tender photographer than most people give him credit for.
Did Danny Lyon shoot Haiti?
Danny Lyon made a book called Merci Gonaïves.
Can you tell me a little more about Delilah Montoya? What lessons did she teach you?
She comes in during my senior year. And right away she taught us that our experiences matter. I occasionally teach at my alma matter and it's a very different game these days, pedagogically speaking. Back then it was heavy on the postmodern stuff as the only game in town. I feel that linguistic ideas mattered more than visual ideas, and even there they were much more versed in Derrida than Saïd. Montoya understood that not all post-structuralists came from France. She understood that when one of us had broken English that meant that we knew more than one language. She was actually curious about our lives beyond the studio. She got a lot of shit for not fitting in, from the rest of the faculty, and from the white students.
Ok, so she stirred shit up? Move fast and break things?
I think she was just doing what made sense. It was the resistance that was active rather than her efforts to question status quo.
Was she influential in your decision to go to grad school?
No, that was all Julie. Delilah was my first stop for a recommendation letter though.
Can you talk more about your wife's influence on that decision?
My wife is a wonderful artist and a wonderful booster. I helped her pay her way through grad school, and when she finished she was like "Your turn." I wasn't even thinking about it. I was still just happy that she convince me to photograph regularly again. When we met, I was a middle school teacher. I was exhausted all the time and barely took any pictures. She was asking me questions about my practice while we were flirting, and all I had were excuses. She said, "That all sounds like a cop out." But said with real sweetness, real generosity. I photographed almost every weekend after that exchange.
Earlier you said that blogs were also instrumental when you applied to grad school. How were blogs a factor?
Right out of undergrad the Museum of Fine Arts Houston put on this enormous Japanese photography retrospective. It covered everything from the 19th century pictorialists to contemporary stuff like Yokotai, Homma, Hatakeyama. All new to me. It was invigorating, revelatory, but also made me realize that I came out of a program that covered so little of the history. Things like your blog, Conscientious, Reciprocity Failure, Mrs. Deane, and so many more helped me filled in the gaps. It got me ready to hit the ground running when I got to grad school. Without y'all, I probably would have been lost for a good part of that program at UNT, no matter how great the professors were.
Glad to be of service!
Can't forget Amy Stein who gave me my first public platform.
Yeah Amy Stein's blog was great. I’m not sure if she's making pictures anymore.
Shifted medium or out of the game?
I’m not sure. Photography is such a huge world, it's up to each person to find the stuff that energizes them, and then teach themselves accordingly. I'm doing the same thing. My blog was a way for me to learn about new subjects and explore them for myself. The learning happened on a public platform, but it was mostly for me, haha.
Yes, public explorations is a bit what teaching became for me.
When did you start photographing Houston?
I started taking pictures in Houston in 98 or 99. The year I took my first photo class. But it wasn't until 2010 that I became interested in Houston as a subject, as an aesthetic, as an organizing principle.
What do you mean by Houston as an organizing principle or an aesthetic?
I tell this story a lot (I tell several stories a lot) but certain moments are so important. We are back in Houston after grad school. No money, no jobs, no prospects, living with my in-laws. Shit looked dire, but we stood in the back yard, holding each other, telling each other that things would work out. And in the thick Summer air we heard one of those Houston anthems rising (Sometimes I remember "SouthSide", sometimes "Knocking Pictures off Da Wall") and it made us believe everything we were telling each other right there.
Some music (like Chopped and Screwed) and some individual artists (like Bert Long) feel like they have terroir. They are suffused with the specificity of this land, this culture, this moment. I got interested in making pictures in the same way. I cherish my Haitianess, but I always felt somewhat uncomfortable there. Out of place, out of synch. I detest the US empire, but Houston specifically feels like home in a way that I can barely describe.
How does Pugilist Press Collective fit into this? Is that a group of people shooting Houston? Or what is it exactly?
Hahaha. It's all me. I'm all the members of the press: Sebastien Boncy, Abdul Aziz Binbaz, Colleen LaMontagne, Sensation, Jericho Butters, DJ Baby Neck Fat. I love being invisible, I love flirting with fluidity. I would meet people in my twenties and give them a fake name. Most of my publications don't have my name on them. I love muddying the waters because it's fun, but also because I'm interested in collective authorship. With photography, one is never starting with a blank canvas. Every photograph of the world is a collaboration in a way that is direct and visible. It's an acknowledgement that we're all in the shit together, that our fortunes and miseries are connected; every act is a collaboration with community/history even when it’s less than obvious, a sustained peripatetic photo practice makes it obvious. My parents would say it's because I'm an absolute fucker, and they'd also be right.
Hmm, ok. Shifty. That feels like it fits into the Chopped and Screwed aesthetic, which puts content into a blender of sorts. I can see how that is a regional voice specific to Houston. When you said you "make pictures the same way" does that refer to how you shoot? When you make a picture somewhere in the world, do you compose it in "Chopped and Screwed" style?
It means that I'm trying to make pictures that capture the right feeling. Tomatsu feels like post war Japan, Levitt feels like mid-century New York, Southam feels like Albion. “Feels” in the sense that those works shape the way we remember these places. I’m perhaps taking it for granted that they must have been true enough to do this. Some other stuff feels more tied to the author or a movement or a moment in time. I'm interested in making pictures that are tied to the geography and the culture. Most of the time, when I'm out of town I'm actively looking for Houston or the lack of Houston in how pictures can be made. I was in Juno Beach a few years ago. I took many pictures in 3 days. Some I like. But only one Houston picture in those 3 days. A big part of it is games. You know, if it ain't fun why do it? Beyond the fun and games I’m also thinking about how resistance cannot afford to be monolithic, and that means that any attempt to shake off the shackles that keep us from dreaming the future must include a certain amount of thinking about the specific weight of the shackles, the exact circumference of our wrists, the scent of the metal. I know that's putting an awful lot on pictures of parking lot, but that's where my mind is at.
How do you decide where and when to shoot in Houston? Are there parts of the city which feel more "Houston" than others? Do you try to visit unseen parts just to spread the love a little? Or how does it work?
Mostly I shoot in the in-between moments. I work all over the city so that helps. We—my family and I—have real big back energy so we'll drive clear across the city just to get a bowl of soup, and that's another opportunity for pictures. If I go see a friend, that's another opportunity. I stay strapped, and many of my favorite pictures happened while I was waiting for something or someone. Occasionally, I will identify a hole, and try to address it directly. For example, I need to spend more time at the Houston Rodeo. I need to spend some time in Sunny Side, Sims Bayou, Upper Kirby. Sometimes I take requests or suggestions. Somewhere on my desktop, I have a list of the most important/iconic streets in the city. Occasionally I give it a look to remind myself where I still need to go.
I'm still trying to digest your comment about shackles and dreaming, etc. Reading between the lines, is photography a form of liberation for you? Do you use the camera to present an idealized version of the world? Or am I getting it wrong? Maybe it's about racial justice and our current political mess? But your photos don't seem very political to me.
Yeah, that's why I said it's putting a lot on parking lot pictures. When I'm on the street walking around with no goal and no purpose in a car city, making images in an American metropolis free of tourists, there is something perverse about it. There is a racial component, because my practice turns me into a "purposeless nigger" which confuses and angers so many people (the tingling means it's working), but that perversity is necessary. We're at the end of the empire, and capitalism has passed the point where it needs to make so many concessions to the workers. There are libraries filled with predictions and prescriptions out of this calamity. It's hard to jump into Kropotkin and Fanon and Luxemburg from a regular 21st century life. There are thousands of years of examples of egalitarian or egalitarian-adjacent societies in the world, and we have documentation. The history is there, the ideas are there, but they mean nothing without buy in from enough people. Entry points are weird and often unexpected. If I lean anarchist in my forties, it's because of the adventure comics I was reading in the 90s. They are political in the sense that their making, and their distribution are tied to me thinking about anarchy. If I’m good enough, they can become entry points.
I'm interested in a real picture of Houston. I've lost track of how many people have reached out to talk about seeing a specific bit of their daily reality turned into a sturdy image, into a convincing aesthetic. My wish is to make enough of those connections that people start seeing their way past the illusion of the dead end of the current hegemony.
So you're capturing the last days of empire? If this whole American experiment really implodes (seems uncertain to me), your photos will certainly gain new relevance in the post-empire future. All current photos will. Do you think the U.S. is heading toward a situation like Haiti, where society eventually got so top-heavy and corrupt that it just collapsed? We've got those strains here for sure. But I have a hard time visualizing how America might transform. I guess that's why I'm a photographer. I lack imagination. I rely on the real world for ideas.
I'm not sure if it's the last days or the last century. But I'm also interested in how we are more than the Empire. I try to make sure both end up in the pictures. The USA was always Haiti, in the way that it was always Israel: at the mercy of the colonial project that starts in Western Europe. Haiti should have been different, but we were surrounded by Europe and its very effective invention: white supremacy.
There are parallels between Trump and Baby Doc.
Trump is white Sweet Micky.
Haha, yes. You mentioned earlier that you take photos on family car trips. Does that mean your whole family is with you while you’re photographing? Or do you ditch them when the camera comes out?
I don't abandon my family, but if I'm waiting for a pick up? Pictures. If they are going swimming? Pictures. And even when I'm by their side? Pictures.
Reminds me of a Winogrand anecdote. Supposedly he used to show up early for meetings as a matter of routine. But there was never any downtime or waiting. Any extra moments he spent photographing.
I'm afraid to end up like Winogrand or Smith in a sort of photo mania, but the "We have not loved life" paragraph in its entirety resonates more and more each year.
"...And the bomb may finish the job permanently…” Do you have a photo community in Houston? A group of photographers to meet with and share work, or just touch base sometimes? I have a book by Colby Deal. Do you know him? There's also FotoFest. But that's not really specific to Houston.
I'm glad you asked me about community, not many people do. I know the excellent Colby Deal who also attended University of Houston, I know the erudite Garry Reece who wrote the essay. I know Reece's daughter Irene who makes wonderful books. We all know the great and powerful Jessi Bowman who runs a Lab/Magazine/Exhibition space here in town dedicated to fostering photo-community. I've met some great people thanks to these teaching gigs like Emily Peacok, Keliy Anderson-Staley and Bennie Flores Ansell. Way too many talented students over the 15 years I've been teaching photo to even start to mention. None of these are people that I see often enough. We don't often end up in the same room, life and distance, but we know each other and there is a certain camaraderie there that comes up in unexpected ways. Fotofest I used to fuck with heavy 20 years ago, but everyone I knew there is gone. I have no connections to the new regime.
I guess what I'm asking is where do you turn for feedback on your photos? Or to share tips or ideas or? Does your wife help? Is it just you making curatorial decisions?
It does help being married to someone that is both a wonderful artist and a sharp art's educator. We have plenty of friends in the local art world that are part of our critical community. But then we also have the internet. When I was putting the book Htown Loops & Lines together for example I did send out pdf drafts to wonderful people like Patrick Collier and Mike Aviña, people I've never shared space with, but with whom I've established meaningful connections.
I know both Patrick and Mike. Both great people. Patrick lives close to me in Corvallis. And Mike, believe it or not, grew up near me in CA.
I have a relationship with the Houston art world and a growing one with Texas in general, but the photo world doesn't seem particularly interested. After 25 years of making images here, exhibiting all over town, and publishing a fair amount of places, Fotofest has never done a studio visit. Same with Houston Center for Photography, same with the MFAH's photo curators. Don't get me wrong. I feel appreciated in my city, but not by most of the photo-specific sector. At this point I've had more music writers (like John Nova Lomax, and Matthew Ramirez) reach out to me than photo writers. It is what it is.
Your situation is not uncommon. I've been shooting in Oregon for 30+ years and I'm the most prolific film photographer in the state. I have some trusted photo friends here, but as far as photo world decision makers, curators, museums, etc., they have no idea I exist. Which is fine I guess. Their world is somewhat removed from ground-level activity.
Maybe a related question is about copyright. You are famous for making your pictures open source, available to all. What's the reasoning behind that? And how does that inform your relationship to the photo world?
It kinda happened organically because several parts of my life converge there. I'm dreaming of an egalitarian society where all the necessaries are free. What better way to put that out in the world, to model that than just give away my labor of love? I also think about photography as something built for proliferation. I'm not a fan of editioning or any of the ways artificial scarcity pop up around the medium. I say this even as I appreciate that people gotta eat. An archive built for the people has gotta let people decide how they want to use it. I got FSA dreams, so I gotta lean into Photogrammar behavior. Also gatekeeping in art circles is so fucking weird. Open source is for everything I'm for, and against everything I'm against.
I like the FSA model. So many great photos, and just by circumstance of how they were commissioned, those images are now in the public domain. Which is great! But the tension you mentioned is real. If you give away your copyright that's basically giving up financial claim to your pictures. So that's a problem for professionals.
I think one way it can be justified for most amateur photographers (or at least for me personally) is that I make very little money from selling prints or selling image rights. And I think 99% of photographers are in the same boat. So from that perspective it makes sense to relinquish copyright sometimes. I give away prints all the time. And if someone wants to reproduce one of my jpgs online I don't care.
Yes. That was never the way I put food on the table, so on that level it was an easy decision. I still sell zines, books, posters, postcards. Affordable things, not luxury items. I have even sold a few files to people who chose to give me money. The bigger hurdle is not protecting that dream of becoming the next Jeff Wall that I see in too many artists.
I think many photographers cling to this false hope of becoming a big art star. Living the dream, monetizing photos. So in that case maintaining copyright makes sense. It kind of dovetails with the MAGA-peddled platform of tax breaks for millionaires. Because everyone in America harbors that inner fantasy that they too might become rich one day, many support tax cuts for millionaires. They act against their own interest.
Exactly.
But yeah, I'm all about open source. Sounds good to me. As I mentioned above, it really gets tested on social media. The way I see it, when you put something online, it's de facto open source. It's mostly beyond your copyright or control at that point. But many photographers cling to this old world view of private ownership. They treat online jpgs like fine art editions. Kinda weird.
Wasn't our NFT moment a complete fucking trip?
That whole thing felt wrong from the get go. But a lot of folks jumped into it. And some made a lot of $$$.
There's always a top to any pyramid. But I hope people remember the snake oil sales folk for next time.
Were you taking names?
I shoulda been. I took note of a few of the boosters on Flakphoto because that's where I ended up having most of those conversations. But none of those people made bank.
I don't really blame photographers for making money on NFTs. Photography is a tough business. So if an opportunity like that comes along, I can't blame folks for jumping on it. I am sure the top-level marketers knew it was a Ponzi scheme all along. But I can't really blame them either. I mean, it's a dog eat dog world. Grifters gotta grift. But if you're one of those investors out there sitting on a $5K jpg file, still waiting for the boom to happen, that's on you. You greedy dumbshit.
I like a lot of less than wise people. I’m often one myself. Sometimes we learn from our mistakes, sometimes we take our licks, but serial exploiters also deserve a certain kind of pain.
Who would you include as "serial exploiters"? In the photo world I mean.
Anyone out there trying to sell you a shortcut. Anyone that has a "system" for success that you can purchase for a few manageable installments. I often wonder about whether I should include myself as a teacher. I tell them this is not a business, I tell them that there is no money here, but I'll take theirs.
Here’s a thought experiment related to open source non copyright. You just published a book, which is a commercial product of sorts. What if someone comes along, takes your photos, and republishes them under their own name? As if they took them. And the book does well and outsells your book. How would you react?
I might be mad. Most likely, I'd be amused. Selling books this month helped fix my car this week. I've had people I love and respect purchase a copy, and say such kind things I'm getting misty just thinking about it. If someone wants to do Htown Loops & Lines redux and makes even more money, that doesn't take any of that away. And it sure as shit won't impact the other publications I'm working on.
In a way car repair is an open source process. There's a general knowledge base of car facts, and certain mechanics are well versed in that and better at repair than others. And it all sorts itself out. The fact that one guy is good at car repair does nothing to diminish another person's repair skills. It's kind of a shared community of information. At least as I imagine it, with no car repair skills.
Absolutely. One fix I had to pay for, but the other one I YouTubed my way through.
You said earlier that you never felt comfortable in Haiti. I'm curious if or how often you've been back to visit. And if you've ever made serious photos there?
I used to go back every couple of years. I photographed there, but never enough. At first there were limitations on materials (film) then limitations on my time, and eventually limitations on access. I haven't been back in 12 years because this has been the worst decade for Port-au-Prince.
Do you still have family there? Are they safe?
Yes, parents, cousins, aunts and uncles, a couple of friends. None of them are safe.
I hope they're ok. And I hope someone down there is taking photos of this period. Even if it takes 50 years to see them it will be worth it.
I don't doubt it. We need to see them as badly as we need to images from Palestine. I don't have any illusions about images stopping war, but I do believe it has an impact to the shared imaginary.
The only pictures I see from Gaza it looks like they've been bombed back to the Stone Age. Just a blank mass of rubble and grey destruction. Which is maybe what they want me to see? I dunno. I am sure there are happier things to photograph there. But in all the pictures it's a disaster scene. Pictures are powerful that way. They create my reality for me.
Same. I'll admit that I didn't give Palestine much thought until I picked up Joe Sacco's graphic novel back in the day. Those drawings stay with me.
Yeah that's a great book. I think most of the stuff he drew has been destroyed now. So his drawings serve in a way that photos sometimes do. A record of things lost. Now it's just rubble. What's the point of moving back? I think that might have been the strategy all along? Empty it out. Build a Trump resort or something.
Of course it is. The people doing it are also destroying their own souls.
Sacco I think lived in Portland? Or lives there still? And we went to U of O in Eugene, where there's a show now at by Michael Brophy. Paintings of Hanford, WA, inspired by a trip he did with Sacco in like 2021?
I didn't know that about Sacco, but a lot of comix names have called Portland home. I'll have to look up Brophy.
He's a painter. I mean, his work is fine. I like it ok. But I don't really understand painting. I can't relate to it like I do photography.
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| Michael Brophy, Reach: The Hanford Series, currently at JSMA |
Can I go back to an earlier comment? You mentioned a post on Amy Stein’s site, which was your commentary about Pietr Hugo’s work. It seemed pretty well reasoned and argued. I'm curious what you'd say about that work now, 13 years later. Has your opinion changed? Have you kept up with his career? Have you seen his recent photos of LA homeless people?
I haven't. But I've been eyeing an interview on American Suburb X that I will read eventually. I've changed my mind on a lot of things, a lot of people in that window, but on Hugo and the uses of his work I stand firm. Reading Joselit's Art's Properties last year clarified further what's wrong with that work.
I haven't read that. Can you briefly summarize the problems? What else have you changed your mind on?
I don't know if I can do it justice. It was a slow read for me with a lot to digest. He digs into the roots of the museum and how they connect to commodification and identity building.
This conversation probably won't win us many new museum friends.
There is a question of what one is witnessing and on whose behalf. I still don't think that Hugo, or at least Hugo from a decade ago, is a good witness for Africa. And in the few words that I read from him back then, I heard little consideration for people's pain. The Hyena & Other Men remains The God's Must be Crazy level shit to me.
It's definitely an exoticized view of Africa. But the photos stick in your head, at least for me. I think ASX was better back when Doug Rickard ran it. Talk about open source! They stole all sorts of content with no reservations. But now it’s less entertaining. I’m not a huge fan of Brad Feuerhelm to be honest.
I also miss the Rickard years. I'll admit that I mostly read Feuerhelm because we disagree on most things. It's good to have a couple of people like that on the feed. I used to find Paul Graham boring for example, or Bruce Gilden cruel.
I used to find Paul Graham interesting. Now he's boring. I just don't have the Paul Graham gene. I know everyone thinks he's a genius but I can’t relate.
I haven't seen Graham's last few, but something like Empty Heaven use to put me to sleep. Now I love it. I also find Gilden tender the longer I look at the pictures.
Speaking of Doug Rickard, any thoughts on A New American Picture?
I found it really exciting. Mostly in the way that it extended the idea of the camera. I felt the same way about some work that Jon Rafman was making around the same time, and probably like them better on an image by image basis. I was never interested in making those images, but I really wanted to see the process develop and become more common place.
Is it stretching things to compare ANAP to your photos of Houston? The generalized viewpoint? The empty wide open scenes? The common subject matter of street corners, markets, billboards, and everyday banalities?
Maybe there's some kinship. To offer a fucked up metaphor, Rickard was killing through a scope, I'm all blade work.
What does that mean?
I think it makes a difference being on the street and being on the street long enough that it affects your sense of time and space. Beyond the limitations/advantages of the Google camera balls, none of Rickard's pictures happened because he smelled something, or had to dodge a stray dog.
I tell my students all the time (and I hope I'm not lying) that bike pictures are never as good as foot pictures. That kinda shit makes a difference.
In other words, photography is an experiential art form. You have to engage with the world. You can't make photos in a studio, um, unless you're Doug Rickard...
You can absolutely make it in a studio, but there are differences.
Real world engagement is exactly what I love about photography. I take a talk and bring my camera. It forces me to interact with the environment, physically, mentally, visually. And even if I come home with no good photos, a walk in the world is ALWAYS worthwhile.
Always!
I even do it by bike sometimes. Sorry.
I shoot from the car sometimes. The "sometimes" matters.
I shoot a lot from my car and I have a huge box of car photos. I think the windshield and interior windows can create really interesting prospects for framing and strange compositions. But it's mostly circumstantial. I spend X amount of my day driving. So X amount of my photos are from my car.
Same. The car can be a great frame, and that POV is at times irreproducible on foot. I tell my students to walk because they take enough shortcuts as it is.
What does that mean? Driving is a shortcut? Or some general statement about youth? They don't want to invest the time required?
It's like this: year to year I see an enormous amount of potential walk through my classes. My desire is for all of them to be great, and some of them are great. This is not a lazy kids screed, though. This is more about how difficult it is to establish good habits that lead to a stable practice. There are so many obstacles, that often reaching for a time saver seems like a sound choice, but what I often witness is a death by a thousand cuts.
If I was teaching high school kids I'd say shoot your world. They have access to scenes which no adult or outside agent can see. Show us THAT stuff. I wish I'd taken photos of my life in high school. Some crazy shit went down! But I never touched a camera until my twenties.
"Not enough pictures, and not enough pictures from your life" comes up often.
Same old story. I think I mentioned the quip Youth is wasted on the young? And the corollary Strip clubs are wasted on the old? I forget what it was exactly (cuz I’m old, haha). But basically no matter what your age is, shoot your world! Capture what you see that others don't or can’t. And that concludes my get-off-my-lawn lecture. Sorry for the rant.
The years gotta count for something.
I have a friend in Portland who's in high school. Talented photographer. He shoots his classmates in school or on the bus or at parties or anywhere. Very strong work. I hope he keeps at it. But I don't think he realizes quite how unique his current access is.
Yes, enough all this all-the-pictures-already-exist bullshit.
You got any photos from high school?
None. I wasn't even supposed to have novels on the campus. Catholic schools are strange.
All photos above by Sebastien Boncy unless otherwise noted. Copyright strictly unenforced.
