Q & A with Tom Griggs, Part Two

Tom Griggs is a photographer, writer, and educator based between Mexico City and Medellin. This is the second half of our recent conversation. Part one is here.

BA: Hi Tom. How's your Monday going?

TG: Well! I'm in Dresden, Germany—a surprisingly lovely place to wander around. 

What are you doing in Germany?

The woman I'm dating is finishing graduate work here in the town of Dessau, and I have some friends in Berlin...so just hanging out and seeing what I can. Ever been here?

No. Berlin is on my list. Never been. Plus I suppose the rest of Germany is also on my list. Colombia too at some point.

This is my second trip here this year and I'm getting more and more into it...one place leads to another that I want to see as well…it always feels like the town just around the bend is where the Reformation started, or where Bach lived and worked, or where the Stasi maintained a headquarters or…there's not enough time to cover it all, so choices will have to be made. Colombia is well worth a trip and you got a tour guide and host all in one guy if you make it down to Medellin.

Hmmmm.

I'll take that as a yes. 😊

Our last kid moved out this summer, so Tab and I have a bit more flexibility now and we've been trying to plot potential trips. The first one was kind of boring, just a trip to visit my kids back east. But next spring we are thinking of Europe. The typical empty nest trip I guess.

What part of the east coast is your kid—or are your kids—in? I've made a couple of Europe trips for fun and for work the last two years and each trip leaves me with a laundry list of places for the next trip 😅

One kid in college in Montreal, one in college in Ithaca. So we drove between them and then to Toronto to see kid #1 play in the Canadian college ultimate nationals. 

Toronto, October 2024, Blake Andrews

Very cool. I made a first trip to Montreal in 2022 and loved it. Never been to Ithaca.

Montreal is the closest thing that America has to Europe I guess.

It definitely has that feel.

From a photo perspective, I just enjoy getting away. Any destination is ok. I have my camera, and I'm usually shooting nonstop. But the new empty nest routine may be slightly different, we'll see…

Having a camera and shooting nonstop seems to make pretty much any travel destination worth it.

That might be an open question. I think photography can get in the way of real world experience sometimes. For me anyway. If I could push the "pause" button I would. But it's kind of like kicking heroin. I mean, from what I hear.

Hahaha so they say, so they say.... I think, for myself, that I've come around to believe it actually makes me more participatory in events and where I am, and I end up more present to what is going on around me, talking to more people than I would otherwise, stopping longer to watch a situation unfold, etc.

I used to interact more with people when I took pictures. In recent years I seem to be going into a more reclusive mode. Shooting depopulated scenes more. And when I shoot crowded events I tend to keep to myself more than in the past. Maybe it's something to do with my life stage? Or it might be just tuning into my deeper identity. I am basically an introvert at heart, and that seems more present now. That may also be why I've stopped blogging. Related story.

Interesting...it would make sense to me that as we age our shooting style evolves with the stage we're at...or that we get closer and closer to who we truly are in our photographs as we age...

I actually wrote a blog post on that once, speculating if or why photographers generally moved toward abstraction in later years. I'm trying to remember the examples. I think I focused on Strand and Sudek and Orkin, all sort of focused on their immediate surroundings as they entered their last years.

That answers a question for me about blogging and the world in which we met originally. You made 260 posts in 2010 and 3 this year. The lower activity on your blog, was it a question of being ready to turn toward your innate sense of self and a type of relationship to the world and photography that feels more "you" in some way?

I think the lower activity was just the cycle running its course. There is no way I could keep that pace up for any extended period. It took a lot of energy. You know from Fototazo.

Exactly. My trajectory is parallel, with the exception that I started after you and have completely stopped at this point.

So now that we've both moved on, what the hell happened? What was that blogging phenomenon all about? I don't think there's been any real post-op debriefing. 

Ha, I don't think that there has either. It kind of collapsed and I've generally lost touch with the people that, during those years, I would be in touch with weekly or even daily in some cases.

Let me back up a second. What made you start Fototazo?

I started teaching at a big public university in Medellin, Colombia and had some amazing students who were taking my classes with borrowed point-and-shoots and flip phones...Fototazo had a non-profit component; it began by raising funds to purchase prosumer level cameras for the strongest students I had during those semesters and pair them with mentors from the international photography world. But I couldn't just ask for donations, and so I became a blogger to fill the site in the hopes readers would contribute to the grants for the students.

Hmm, so your blog was maybe a bit different than most in that it had a financial objective from the beginning?

I think so in terms of the model and the motivation. In terms of content, however, maybe not so much. I also had the energy to do it at that age and point in my life. I wouldn't be able to do something like that now. What inspired you to start?

I knew some friends who had blogs. And then, maybe around 2007 it seemed like photo blogs were springing up everywhere. And I figured hey, why not? But without any real game plan. Just started in. Most of the early entries were just reports on my daily photo activity, where I went and what I shot and what photos I was thinking about, etc.

The fun thing for me—and maybe this is true for you?— is that the further I got into it, I began learning more about myself in the process. Usually I didn't even know what I was going to write about until I started. And then a few hours later I had gone down several tangents, and returned a slightly different person. So I got to follow myself almost as an outside observer, and learn about my interests by writing about them. If that makes any sense?

That makes a lot of sense. I had different types of posts. Some were essay-style, and I think in those I had more of the type of experience you're talking about, my writing would explore ideas in real time as I worked on them…although in my case it would wander inside a topic that set parameters. The thing which made it fun, which I had no idea about in the beginning, is what you mentioned above, the interactions with other people online (you included). It really felt like a community. A number of my posts would pick up where someone else's post had left off...or would respond to someone else's post. I don't know if you had the same experience, but writing definitely helped me to understand my take on a number of topics, and to find out what I really thought about them.

And everyone had these "blog rolls" in the margin where you could connect to the whole network. It felt like a big spider web of activity. I haven't really found anything to replace that since blogging died off. We sound like two old geezers on the porch in rocking chairs, why back in my day...

That's right. Shane Lavalette had the most extensive list of them all on Lay Flat...and people would have these sidebars of linked sites... 

He's moved on to Assembly now. But I'm not really sure what's happening there after the NFT bust. 

When did the whole interlinked spider web collapse and why? There was a true community that was lost. I would place it...maybe to when Tumblr started to take over as a content platform? It seemed like a lot of photo sites became redundant quickly, especially those that just shared images, portfolio style, around a project.

Were you on Tumblr? 

I had a fototazo "sidecar" Tumblr site that would post content related to posts on the main site. I was never really active on it. A friend and photographer named Kevin Thrasher helped me to post there.

I was there for a bit, but I don't think we ever connected there. Now my main social media is the Big Brother default, Instagram. Ugh.

Yup, me too. I don't know of a work around. It seems like you've turned your IG into a way to continue to create, to write and to learn about your interests as you wrote earlier...? My IG is a small mix of posts of my photographs or from my family's archives, and reels of whatever seems worth posting day-to-day—some ridiculousness, and some attempts to get a little more out of the platform in terms of sharing and conversation.

Instagram is certainly the flavor of the day. But of course tech is always changing so it will fade at some point. Maybe it already has?

For me my years running a blog and its end aligned with changing technologies. A lot of content moved to YouTube and then to podcasts. The time that would take to be able to continue onwards on those platforms, first learning the technologies and then editing the video/audio, seemed too daunting for me with my already waning energy for giving a lot of time to having an online public-facing presence.

I could probably learn the new tech if I wanted. But the thing with YouTube and podcasting is that video and audio are fundamentally different mediums than writing. I guess this goes back to my pre-digital youth. I was a diehard reader from an early age, and that segued into writing. And written text is still my preferred method of absorbing information, and also expressing it. Nothing against YouTube and podcasts, which are much more current with the millennials and whoever. But my brain is just wired for text. Which makes me a dinosaur I suppose.

Huh, this describes me pretty much perfectly as well. I was— and still am—a reader first. If someone asks me what my first passion is, it wouldn't be photography or even writing...but reading. I process ideas by writing about them, and learn best by reading others.

I would guess if we were both 25 that we would say TikTok is the big thing, not IG...and if we were 70 that it would still be Facebook. I guess we're kind of blocked into three separate platforms now, separated by rough generational lines. It also seems like people in our bracket are ready for the next thing, though. I feel like people are tired of the ads, tired of Meta....

Tired of ads? Ads are built into the fabric of reality, like death and taxes. 

At some point IG ramped up the volume after Meta bought it and it felt like suddenly every other post was an ad.

I just kind of tune them out. Maybe I'm numb? I can still find good stuff on IG, ads or not. When that is no longer true I'll have to shift gears. 

I think most people have developed a quick thumb flick to get past the ads and have become habituated to them in a way that they barely register.

I've actually found that the restrictions of IG have been helpful. There is a 2200 character limit to the text. I can usually bang that out in an hour or so. If I'm feeling patient I will sleep on it, and then fine tune the text the next day (not that many IG users actually read texts anyway, haha). I usually go over the word count in the first draft, so it’s fun for me to write something longer, and then boil it down to 2200 characters. I find that pruning usually makes my writing stronger. Maybe 1000 characters would be even better? Or 500? In the old blog days there was no limit. And I probably abused that at times.

I published some tomes back in the blog days as well! I think restrictions definitely help creativity. I remember Jack White of the White Stripes saying in an interview that he gives himself sharp rules for song-writing, something like 4 chords, 10 words, 2.5 minutes—and that that helps make it work.

Hmm, interesting. Although I think his music operates more on energy and feeling than on songwriting. Just my personal take. 

A fair take!

Well you could argue that artists in general tend to work better when they feel bound in by something. Art needs something to push against. It needs to break rules, or at least feel like it's breaking them. So any perceived confinement is like a battery for artists. Not that most artists would admit that.

from Herida y Fuente by Tom Griggs

It circles back to your mentioning the lots of shooting on your travels and looking for a pause button. Do you think about this question of being bound by something in terms of your photographic work?

I could use some boundaries for sure! My photography is out of control at the moment. But maybe that's just a reflection of the world itself, which has no bounds.

I can see that. I could also see the boundless world as being something to create friction against and to push back against as you were mentioning above as well.

Have you ever tried Substack? 

I have thought it might be a good option if I were to go back to a public-facing project, but I've never investigated it too deeply. You?

Not yet. I think the shift to Substack and other subscription services represents a more subtle change. Which actually is related to IG and maybe Facebook and other Web 2.0 (or is it 3.0?) social media. It’s a shift from static content which you had to search out to a more directed content which comes to you, which seeks you out through email or alerts or whatever. There’s a fundamental difference I think, and maybe that’s part of what killed the old blogs? Now people wait for the content to show up in their stream. And if it doesn’t, then it's basically invisible. Maybe that says something about the world in general? I dunno.

That seems right. I remember a few people with blogs started doing mass emailing via services like Mailchimp late in the game as the blog world crumbled which I guess is its own type of early alert and a recognition that the model was shifting...the content had to start being delivered directly as you're saying. And about volume of information. People can only take in so much and it would make sense that they would first take in what is waiting for them via notifications and alerts and whatever... leaving not much time after to go visit photo blogs.

Is it stretching the metaphor to throw this paradigm onto photography in general? The classical photographer went out in the world to record subjects and return with what they found. No exploration meant no images. It is more common now for photographers to receive content through a computer. Whether it’s identity politics, personal relationships, archive sifting, or whatever, these tasks can be basically done from anywhere. Old geezer speaking, sorry…

My take on the death of blogs is that Tumblr started to kill them by creating easy sites for long scrolls of photographs, and also forums for back channel conversations between photography bloggers that suddenly became private instead of public. I remember one forum in particular drew many people that had blogs, and I think energy started getting poured into the forum instead of public posts. Also a lot of us were photographers first, bloggers second. Many of us started up around the same time and probably ran out of gas around the same time. In many cases including mine, the energy and time I have for photography at this point in life I’ve wanted to put into my own work without also trying to run a site as part of the math.

Oh shit, I must've missed out on those private forums.

from Ghost Guessed by Tom Griggs

I was in one that I’m pretty sure Bryan Formhals started and also a couple of others, I think.

That guy was a dynamo. He grew up near you, right?

He did, we both grew up in Minnesota and I've heard from a mutual friend that he's moved back. I had the chance to meet him once, but in New York City. 

Wait a sec. Wait, I think we were in the same forum? With James and Noah and Wesley? And Wayne Bremser? 

Honestly, I'm not sure. I wasn't super active on Tumblr and so I was in a couple of those spaces, but rarely contributed or engaged with people unfortunately. I remember the conversations were good, but I was mostly a reader.

How many private forums did Bryan found? 

I don't know, he had one that was a private Tumblr conversation with a lot of photo writers, that's the one I have in mind...I'm not sure it's the same one?

There were some great writers back then. 

There were some really strong writers. Another was on a site called A Spark of Accident, I believe, and the writer was someone named...John Anderson maybe? I just looked and couldn't find the site live.

I don't know that one, Spark of Accident. Oh well, what’s past is past. I have this strange sense that those forums are still happening now, but I never hear about them. Like, where is all the photo conversation happening? It must be in back channels somewhere? But I don't see anything like a constructive public sphere on Facebook or IG or Reddit. HCSP used to have good conversations. That's dead now. FPN is dead. Is it all private? Where is the discourse? That's what blogs used to supply. Now that they’re gone, what's replaced them? Threads? X? 

That's the great mystery here. Nothing did. There is no space for discourse that I know of either. There are spaces for content —like Alec Soth moving to YouTube, like a number of pretty good photography podcasts—but no space for conversation to happen between people, for ideas to get hashed out by dialogue, other than maybe comments sections.

Are you still connected with anyone from the old blog days?

Not that I can think of. A few people that I have IG connections with. I ran into Mark Feustel at Photo Paris last year randomly and we talked for a minute. I miss the challenge of those conversations and back-and-forth essays. Now I sound like the guy in the rocker. How about you?

Not really. I saw Marc Feustel's name on a recent book of Protest Photography. Looks like he wrote some pieces for that. I still read a few old photo blogs like CPH and TOP. But I’m not in direct contact with them.

I actually met a few people in real life through my old blog. Which probably wouldn't happen through IG. that's fine. But what I really am looking for now is the public discourse, especially for photobooks. I’d love a place where brainstorming and comments can happen freely. I haven't found it. I live in a small city, so there's no hope of that in real life. So I basically exist in a vacuum when it comes to photobooks.  Which is maybe good and bad, in some ways.

I had a chance to meet a few people too over beers and it was great for the conversations to happen live, and to let the connections deepen. I live in a place with no scene either, and in some ways—to go back to the point on limitations helping creativity—the lack of scene has helped me focus on my own photography better the last few years.

We might be similar in that way. Medellin is a big city but it's still not exactly an art capital. Nor is Eugene. So blogging was a tentacle into the broader global conversation for both of us.

For sure. I think that the blog was my conversational space for those years. I'm not sure I would have felt the need if I had been based in NYC.

What is Medellin like? Are there photo shows there? Any active photo community?

It's small, as you imagined. It's dominated by photojournalists, and has a strong commercial scene as well. The art scene is growing, but small. People tend not to connect much, and spin in their own orbits. Bogota is a much bigger scene, and internationally connected.

Do you expect to stay in Medellin for good?

I'm thinking about Medellin as my base camp: a place to come back to, a place for my belongings, a place to explore from. I'm expecting to spend long stretches in Mexico as well. Ultimately where I am for good will probably be determined by who I end up settling down with and where they are from as much as anything else. I could be happy living in a lot of places.

  

How is the recent US election being received in Medellin, both generally and among your own friend circle?

In 2016 a lot of people asked about the result, almost looking for some sort of explanation for it. This time around it seems like people accept it without the same questions because it has happened before. Most of my friends in Medellin have avoided bringing it up with me so far because they know it's still a pretty sensitive subject.

Do you feel like you have a clearer view of US politics, living in Colombia and looking in as an outside observer?…

I feel like I do. If everything is defined in relation to something else, having lived in another country for nearly fifteen years has provided a clear vision of a different reality to relate the political situation in the US to. 

…Or do you feel more disconnected from the pulse? 

I'm usually pretty up on the news, and talk with friends and family about the situation in the US. Overall I feel fairly connected to the pulse from here, although in the last week I think I've looked at the news maybe once.

Maybe another way to ask that is, was Trump’s victory a surprise? Or did it make sense?

I was in the US in the weeks before the election and I started to have a sense that shit! Trump might actually win. I guess his victory felt something like a mild surprise, but not a shock. On some level it makes no sense at all—how can a serial liar, a felon, a racist misogynist win an election for President handily? On another level, it does make sense. Politics is a pendulum. Democrats have had the presidency 12 of the last 16 years, and the swing right was due at some point, and sadly Trump was the candidate that benefited from that societal tendency to swing back and forth. I don't want to totally place the responsibility completely on the broader dynamic though. Democrats have to rethink how some of the policies and ways of framing discourse that they have chosen have been a huge turn off for large groups of voters. To try to end on a more upbeat note, we survived Trump once, and largely healed from it within the four years of Biden's presidency, and we'll just have to do so again after the next four years. We will keep moving forward.

True, we survived Trump once. But just barely, and despite his best efforts to stay in power. The next four years should be a pretty good test of democratic norms.  We shall see…