Every Photo Is a Crime Scene - Brad Zellar on How He Reads Photography and Inspects an Image, E111

I think all of the great photographers can write about their work, they can talk about their work, and so words matter.
I love books, and the library was my refuge.
When I have a photo book I'm really engaged with, I can just be lost in it for hours.
Every photo is a crime scene.
What happened in the picture before?
What happened in the picture after?
What's outside the framework?
I just write down everything I notice.
I interrogate them.
I despise the 21st century and what it's done to me.
Can you elaborate a little bit more?
Are you pessimistic generally about the future of the written word as much as the photographic word?
You can train a whole generation of people not to care about it, which is the more dangerous thing we're redealing with.
So here's what I wish happened in literature.
So let's talk about writing.
If you're happy, we'll kind of just go go into it because we've already like talked about some stuff on it.
Yeah, yeah.
Um I actually I think this was from your Instagram page because obviously I looked in a little bit more detail on Instagram, just putting some notes and questions together.
And there's something that you wrote.
I mean, there's so much that you've written that I don't own, but I've read or seen snippets of.
And you know, the let me let me let me give you a preamble because I want to make sure you know why I want you on the show.
Although you're kind of this writer first, you obviously have a deep respect and love for photography and photo books.
And for me, that gives you this rare objective lens on this medium that we've just been talking about, photography.
And I admit there's like this slightly utilitarian edge for me of talking to you because while I don't want to like use you and your insights, and I'm still extremely interested in you as a person and a writer, um, I do want to leverage your knowledge and your experience to help me and us, the people watching and listening, become better photographers.
So I'm hoping like these questions and these notes I've put together will kind of lead us down that line for you to impart some of your well-known wisdom and all of the photography world that you've been immersed in for so long, uh, to give us some, you know, really kind of good advice for us budding photographers and you know, the likes of people attending the first Chico review and all this kind of the that type of cohort that I think you can be so valuable for.
So kind of that that's the context with which I want to frame this conversation and kind of get to know you a little bit more.
Um so there was this thing I saw on Instagram, and I just obviously love the way you write and love the way you see things.
I perceive that you see things.
And you wrote this I've been nothing but a writer for more than 40 years, and though the world doesn't have much use for writers, it's too late for a plan B.
Thankfully, I still love to write and look forward to the challenge of doing it every night, digging back through the landfill of words from so many chapters of my largely misspent life.
Uh, I think that's a really good place to start.
Please kind of can you elaborate on these terms like misspent life or your so many chapters and dig a little bit deeper into where writing emanated from and your passion for that?
And then we'll get on to kind of the photography thing later.
All right, so I'm gonna do this fast because I am old and I've had a lot of chapters.
Like I was young.
Um, I grew up in a blue-collar family in a small town, slaughterhouse town.
I don't have a college degree.
Uh, my dad was one day automotive garage in a tire shop in a small town uh down near the Iowa border.
Um it was just, you know, but I don't think anyone on any either side of my parents went to college.
It was a very isolated place.
Um, I was drawn to all sorts of strange things as a kid.
The library saved me.
That's where I first saw.
I mean, I I I was writing about this last night at the library in my hometown because it was uh there was a large uh meatpacking company that has that had a plant there.
And um, their corporate office people were there.
And there was a well-endowed library where they they they, you know, I didn't know anything.
There was no context for anything, but that library, I went through it section by section.
I knew from the time I was literally, my mom would always pull out this little book that kids made when we were in our in our like first, or whenever you first learned to write, where the teacher asked the students to write a little little, to write, you know, draw a picture and then say what you wanted to be when you grow up.
And she'd pull it out to show all my friends, and mine said, you know, I want to be an author.
And that's all I ever really wanted to be.
But I I was drawn to music.
Um, we were a very musical family, and I was, I loved like books, and the library was my refuge.
Um my mom in the summer, I didn't, I was afraid of water, and she would take my siblings to like the municipal swimming pool, and the the library was where she would drop me off.
And I'd spend the day there just making my way through it, and I would draw maps of all the sections, and I was just so fascinated by books.
And I made my way through it and I drew maps that I would put on the wall of my bedroom of the library and the things I discovered there.
And on the top floor of the library, there was a section of records, and right around the corner was the art and photography.
And I started um just, you know, not knowing anything.
We didn't have that kind of stuff around my house, and I wasn't, we we didn't talk about those sorts of things in the school I went to.
There was really not a big emphasis on culture at all.
No emphasis, in fact.
Um, so I would pull these photo books down and I would just sit at this big white table and I would look at them, and we we weren't a family that went anywhere.
And I was like, where is this?
Who what is this?
And so, I mean, this is the truth, is that I it was so vivid an experience to discover that collection of photo books.
And I it was so the ones that I would grab over and over, that was there were a lot of good ones, but they had Bill Owens, Suburbia, Susan Massillis' Carnival Strippers, William Eggleston's Guide, um, and this book called The Champion Pig, which was like vernacular or studio photographs from all these old small towns photo studios.
In those four books, I was obsessed with them.
I didn't know that Eggleston or Susan Massillas or Bill Owen or these books were significant.
I'd never heard of them.
But the pictures in them took me into different worlds and places and made me immediately realize I am not going to live in this town.
I need to go out and see that kind of a world.
Um and there, you know, around the corner in the record room, I would check out records just because there was, you know, they some strange cover or title, or often this my town was entirely white, a small white working-class town.
And anything that had a black person on the cover, I learned that's usually Thelonious Monk.
What a name.
Never had no one had ever mentioned him to me.
There was a Thelonious Monk record.
That name, I checked it out.
Ornette Coleman, uh, science fiction.
I know the records.
Like I would check out Thelonious Monk, the genius of modern music, uh, Ornette Coleman, science fiction.
And then they had these Tucson Ra records.
And I might be talking like in a foreign language to you or other people, but these are the people who made me who I am.
Like these Tucson Ra records, who was this avant-garde, big band leader, free jazz guy.
There were Atlantis and the Magic City, two names that were like, whoa, that's like comic books.
And so I would check out records and I would take them home and I'd record them on my little Radio Shack stereo.
And to me, it was like I was drawn to things I didn't, I'd never seen before or that I'd never heard before, that didn't sound or look like anything around me.
And so all of those records, I didn't understand them.
But I'm a person who, from the time I was a kid, if I found something that sounded different or looked different and I didn't understand it, that's what I was looking for.
And I would be super drawn to it.
And so from that experience of those records, those books, the novels I was reading, Catcher in the Rye, which I discovered as if I as if it was another continent.
No one had ever told me you should read this book, this guy.
I was drawn to it for some reason.
It seems like everything in that library that I would get, I was just drawn to it.
I didn't have friends who were saying you should look at this.
There weren't anybody, there were no there were no algorithms, you know, it's like you there was no internet.
You couldn't look up who are these people.
So there were there were records I found there and book and photo books I found there, and like Susan Massilis' Carnival Strippers was because I was a young kid, you know, adolescent, and the and the text, interestingly enough, most of the books I'm taught that I was drawn to had a text and a photo component.
Like if you know Bill Owens Suburbia, it has the voices of the people he's photographing and it's funny and it was relatable.
And Susan Massilis's, all of her books have kind of a most like great photographic element and a textual element in which you, you, you um you learn something about these people and their lives.
And I, when I left that town, it was many years before the internet, and I would look and use bookstores trying to find copies of these books that I only knew from my own experience.
I didn't live in a world still where anybody I knew knew who these things were.
And I, oh, they had Arbus's first monograph, the aperture monograph of Dan Arbus in the library.
And that one really, you know, just like, wow, this is the kind of people and the kind of world I want to see.
And um, and a Bruce Davidson book.
I mean, it was it was amazing some of the things they had there.
And no one had ever checked them out.
The records are the books.
Like they had cards in those days, you know, where you'd put your name on it.
So I could see in the most cases, I was the only person that was looking at these things.
So that was my indication that I wanted to get out of town.
But I left town.
I didn't go to, I, you know, I tried college and it didn't work out, couldn't afford it, had over.
Sorry, Brad.
I just want to, yeah, well, before we go into the next chapter, I want to want to understand why you think you were so curious about those types of bands or writers or photographers.
What was it about you that made you didn't have that exposure as a child?
So it was just kind of like this, this kind of greater curiosity.
Or what was it that you think drew you so much to that type of form?
Um, I think part of it is that I, you know, they didn't have a diagnosis then, but I was, you know, I was I was diagnosed as a hyperactive, which was the what they called ADD then.
So I was taking Ritalin.
And then as I got older and into my, you know, when I was had jobs and stuff, then I was on stimulants for a long time for basically attention deficit disorder.
And um, I was bored out of my mind.
And when you're bored, boredom is the enemy of ADD.
Like if you're bored, you it's like somebody's got their thumb on the channel, on the remote in your brain, and they're just changing the channel every 20 seconds, trying to find something more interesting.
So school was bad.
That's why I didn't want to go to college.
Um it was it was a very small conformate, you know, townwork conforming was very important.
I don't know why.
I mean, I do spend a lot of time like, why was I what happens if I don't find those that those books or those records?
What because I, you know, basically this is this, this is how I do feel my like my life is sort of miraculous because I left there and because I chose not to go to college, I wandered a lot.
I lived in Maine, I worked for the Park Service, I built trails, I went to Florida, I worked in a minor league baseball stadium, came back home and I worked in warehouses and factories, and I didn't know anybody that was making any kind of art.
I didn't have friends who were writers.
I had a lot of musician friends, and there was a lot of music going on in town.
My brother was a musician.
That's probably a big part of what saved me.
But I I was um I still was just always drawn to things that were like challenged me.
You know, like I had to work to understand why, why would someone make this kind of music or why is this music important, or is it important, or why do I find it interesting?
Because I didn't even know it was important.
I didn't know what it was.
It was all I thought I was discovering every- It's like every week I felt I discovered a new planet.
And because no one else was checking these things out, I thought, I'm discovering these people, you know, like no one knows who these guys are.
And um, you know, I remember I came up to Minneapolis and I I there was a box of uh called the anthology of American folk music that they had at that library, but they didn't have any of the notes or the actual packaging.
It was just in like a library plastic library sleeves with a Xerox of the cover.
And I checked it out for some reason and I taped it, and it was like old, old American music of all kinds, you know, the foundations of like American popular music, gospel, and old folk blues and and country hillbilly singers.
And and it was like it was old 78 transfers, and it sounded like transmissions from another planet, crackley, and I would listen to it with headphones, and I would be like, I have no idea what I'm listening to, but like this is like you know, miraculous noise.
And I I would come up, I came up to the Twin Cities and I would ask all around about some of these records and some of these photo books, and no one seemed no one even in these places knew who these people were.
So I had this illusion into my twenties that I was like a planet unto myself.
Like I'm the only person who knows these.
It turns out that all of them were significant to certain types of people.
And when I started gradually meeting artists, I would learn that they also had had similar experiences.
But I was um I developed in that that same era, segueing into the next chapter, a a serious like drug and alcohol problem.
And I ended up in a treatment center um when I was 26.
Um, and I came out of that treatment center, and I was like now what?
You know, my life was going to see punk rock shows with my friends and and you know, just being crazy all the time and and I self-medicating.
So that was when I started to be like um I came from a blue-collar background.
I'd worked blue-collar shitty jobs all through from the time I graduated from high school until I went to treatment.
So eight years of just bouncing around working what we call shit jobs.
And I thought I'm not qualified to do any of the work I really would like to do, which was be a a writer or a journalist, or um, I wasn't writing because I was too messed up.
And um, I started, I was a big reader, and um, and I I noticed that almost all the new books, novels that I would read were not, were about like people who were like, you know, college educated, neurotic, marital dysfunction, suburban lives, uh, people who went to fancy universities, because it was the era of all these big MFA programs and these writers who were cranking out books that were about, you know, so basically if you think about television, it was like Friends and Seinfeld, these books were the same in that era.
They were these people who were Wall Street, trends me, never saw them working, or they were white-collar professionals or professors, and all they did is just sit around and talk all the time about their issues and their problems.
And I read, like, you know, at one point, like a dozen straight books, and I realized there's not one book that's about the kind of people I am and the kind of people I come from.
Like blue-collar workers and blue-collar work and like the kind of place I grew up, they aren't represented in American art.
It's all college educative stuff.
And this really does segue into where we are as a country because I saw that coming long before any of my friends who grew up in the big city.
Like all my a lot of the very large percentage of my hometown, which at one point was a blue-collar union liberal town, has become the epicenter of that sort of Trump world.
And because everybody who had any, you know, this was the myth of the small towns in America, is the brain drain.
Everybody who had any potential or talent left there.
And the people that were left behind had to stay there and do the shit jobs, and they got bitter and they hated the people who went away and got college educations.
Even though I didn't do that, I left.
But because I left, that's enough to make me, you know, the enemy.
But it was um so I started doing a zine, little typewritten zine that I would print at a copy shop with some friends, and it I was really interested in like the voice of somebody who's not from that world and like blue work, somebody who has to actually worry about.
I mean, I think at the time I was working in a warehouse in a parking lot.
And um, and I you know, working in a parking lot where I would stand there and people would leave at the end of their days driving, you know, $40,000, $50,000 cars.
And I would, you know, it was before a computer and I'd have to say, hey, how you doing?
I'd take their money or their cart, and everybody would just ignore me.
They wouldn't even look at me.
They wouldn't acknowledge my greetings.
And I was like, there was this chasm between the world I was living in and the world other people were living in.
And I did this zine.
Um I wrote, you know, a lot, that was when I really started writing, and some a couple different publications either wrote about this scene or excerted something I wrote in the zine.
And then some of those publications asked me to like freelance, do some freelance assignments for them.
And then one of them, after I'd freelanced for a while, hired me as a writer and eventually I became an editor.
And then, you know, I did that.
I became a journalist.
I worked at papers and weeklies and magazines until all they all kind of dried up.
And um one of the publications I worked for, um, I wrote about photography because it was a magazine that was had a lot of cultural bent.
And they gave me a lot of rope.
So I wrote about, you know, photography.
And I I, you know, they gave me a lot of space.
And also Alec South, who's from here, who I did not know, um, but I knew his work, he uh he would do freelance assignments for us.
And um, and then I did a book of uh um the archive of a small town like ambulance chasing community photographer, uh suburban here in the Twin Cities.
I did a book, there was a museum show, and the publisher or the editor of the book asked Alec to write the intro to the book I did.
I I still hadn't met him.
I did not ask him, but he wrote he wrote the intro to my first book.
And that's really when I met him.
And I think then uh, you know, we ended up somehow, you know, from that experience, get ended up working together.
And then I, which was great because once the whole journalism world collapsed, Alec was there to say to me, Hey, do you want to do a project with me?
And then it was just this is this new chapter.
And there's no like overlap between any of these lives.
Like my wife is always saying when we go to a gathering of my old friends, like, how do they know these people?
They don't.
My music friends don't really know my journalism friends.
My journalism friends don't know my photography world friends.
There's no overlap here.
And it's like it's like it's sort of frustrating, and especially now, because all my work, like almost everybody, all my friends, you know, on Instagram and that I actually know, which is a lot, I know from photo workshops and book uh art book fairs and projects around all over the place, and I not here.
Um, so it's it's just very you asked me a question that I really don't I wish I had knew the answer, but like um, you know, I was 31 before I had a byline.
Um and that so those first before that, 31 from eight high school till 31, I was just sort of in the wilderness.
But I do think I had an advantage because I did a lot of interesting, you know, I hopped hop trains all over and I hitchhiked all over the country.
And I first went to Montana and I and I backpacked and I I I did interesting, weird jobs, you know, cool jobs that sounded, you know, work for for, you know, I took jobs that just seemed like they'd be interesting.
Or I would choose, at one point I chose.
This is kind of like, why did I choose those books?
I was in uh Orlando, Florida, and I was uh working a temp for a temp agency where I was loading luggage at the airport, and I chose to live in like a rooming house that was for like people, mostly people that were being, you know, pro had been were on probation from prison.
And it was like in a really bad neighborhood, but everyone in there was called a Christian hostel, but it was actually all old guys that had gotten out of prison.
Some of them had oxygen tanks.
And I and I thought, well, this would be an interesting place to live for stories.
You know, I had two other guys in my room, and and it was just uh, you know, uh and I I made that decision because I thought, well, this might be interesting.
Um it was it was miserable, but it wasn't interesting, you know.
Like I so that was actually pre treatment.
I don't know if I would go quite that extreme anymore, but um I was I was just really I still am.
I'm most motivated by like having an interesting being interesting to myself or having an interesting life and not ever feeling bored.
I mean you can only see part of this but I mean this is my this is a little shed in my backyard and it's just full of photo books and music and I've seen the I I've seen photos of it um a while back.
I think you might have put them on Instagram as well.
I was like oh my goodness that that looks like a heavenly little cave.
Yeah just I can't I have to do what I've learned over the years.
Without the Adderall I need something that replaces that and it's like it'd be very hard to be too bored sitting in here, you know, because I can just put another record on or switch to a different type of music or grab a book and start looking at it.
And if I'm doing something that really is the question of why was I drawn to those is it's very hard to to to to strange things.
It's very hard when you're bored but if you find something you don't quite understand or that challenges you then suddenly you can flip the switch and you can pay attention because you're trying to figure it out.
I think that's key.
Yeah it's the curiosity and the this this this uh questions left unanswered that we want to answer it's just kind of part of you and nature just following your curiosity and trying to get answers and then those answers will lead to more questions and those questions lead to more answers, blah blah blah.
So I think that's that's kind of the beauty of art as well we get to follow that path and just see where it leads without hopefully being limited too much.
And that's what I love about photo books like that.
You know photo books are I can just I mean I'm sure I'm on the spectrum but like when I have a photo book I really engage with I can just be lost in it for hours you know where did so I just want to touch upon this relationship with Alec because that's really where I first um got to know about you uh just having having followed Alec's work for so long.
And you seem to have met you've already kind of explained how you met but I'm interested in the this collaboration and you've you've by the looks of it turned into the best of friends over the years but this initial collaboration with a photographer writer photographer maybe you didn't delineate that clearly but what did what does collaboration teach you about the limits of photography on its own?
Because there's this there is this beauty and ambiguity that photography photo books can can narrate and can tell a story in its own right but throw in writing and kind of this tension that I think you emanate between emotional truth and factual fabrication I guess.
Correct me if I'm wrong I'm keen to hear your answer but how does collaborating with a photographer work and what are you trying to do to not overlap the photographs and to enhance the story or is it the other way around whereas Alec's photos might just be supplemental to your work can you kind of tell us how that collaboration worked Yeah it's it's sort of complex but I think that Alec and I were both interested in so my my basic I often have conversations with photographers where they will say you know good friends you know photo is a visual language of its own it shouldn't have it doesn't need to be it doesn't need words.
Photo should should stand on its own it should you know the story should be apparent from the photographs blah blah blah.
You know there is a very strong school of old old school photo people who feel like you know don't explain the photos don't don't step on the photos with words um the picture pictures or you know photography is a visual language and it it doesn't need the architecture of of words.
And um I'm always arguing with that and that I mean the example I always give is the way a kid learns to read.
Almost every kid there's a picture in a text like you know Maury Sendak or Go Dog Go or pick any of your formative childhood book.
And there's something about the way you learn if you were a curious kid who studied everything and how it worked was like why does this work this picture now in my mind 50 years later 55 years later whatever 60 years later I translate it into those words automatically somehow it does that they they meld.
So Alec and I would talk about you know I mean we we really it's been a really really super um educational and gratifying friendship because we both come from different places.
And so we were interested both interested in you know visual storytelling how you can and we talked we would together we would think about like I mean I am I could consider I'm sort of you know not expert in very many things, but like the use of photo the clo my collection of photo books is all the different ways people have used photos and words to tell stories from documentary to sort of impressionistic that I could sit here and rattle off and I teach you know image of text a lot at workshops and um it's hard to do but like most of my favorites including some very you know arty people and some you know from Jim Goldberg to Susan Massiles to Ed Van Dersken to Bill Brandt to you know there's like Danny Lyon, a lot of my favorite people Robert Frank later in his career Bill Owen there's text and image and all of them do it differently but they never ever resort to academia or explaining the work or calling the work significant.
The work the words are a complement to the to the photos or they speak to each other without ever intruding on the same I mean I always feel like the words in a photo book they should read at the same pace as the photos and you should be able to digest them and you should they should you should get something different.
So we we talked about all the ways together or let you know it was possible to tell a story with photos and images.
So it started Alex started with the little brown mushrooms which were modeled on the little golden books which were children's picture books.
The design was the same and they got like Trent Park and he got Seth Laura and he set you know me to do little little picture storybooks with pictures and images or pictures and text very simple like a children's book.
It could be a more like a poetic approach or storytelling approach.
And then it was like we did an illustrated novel collaboration which was House of Coats where we created a character.
Alec created this character that he used throughout his broken manual project and then we tried to you know inhabit that character and in that book Alec you know was this the pretense was of the book was that Alec was in fact Lester B.
Morrison and he was this drifter who was lost out in this godforsaken landscape south of the Twin Cities near this oil refinery where there's a lot of transient hotels.
And we were really like method acting so there's like a rooming house above this bar and Alec got a room there and he was out there and he was taking pictures.
These were supposed to be pictures that Lester was taking himself.
So he was using disposable cameras and it was in the middle of the winter it was this very bleak landscape and then I went out there and I, you know, figured out how I would tell Lester's story in this terrible winter in this terrible place.
And we combined the words and the images and then you know the other book conductors of the movie world was an archive that we knew nothing about the person or the work and I just had to find a textual treatment to make this kind of artist book of you know die-cut pages with inserted mix and match photos with a text that was very fragmented and kind of Zen-like and then the next step was like we both really admired all those great you know life magazine photo essays Gene Smith and Robert Kappa and you know Country Doctor and like what if we did a you know um a fake newspaper of our own where we went out into the con into the exurban twin cities here in Minnesota and we pretended to be you know representing some a newspaper we created this idea the two of us purely for fun called the Winter Garden Dispatch and we had business cards.
I was the Bureau chief and we would go to these small town dances and town meetings and and like you know karaoke and we would go to these strange local the last snowblowed repair men in America we were doing research and finding out who who and what lived in these interesting these little places and we would go there as if we were a reporter and a photographer and we recreate this body of work and the goal was to put out a paper together that would be like those time life photo essays.
And be that because of that it became the Little Brown Mushroom dispatch and Magnum got involved and we ended up going on the road and all the work we did in Minnesota we still really never did anything with it because Alex showed the work around and they were like oh you should do this and somewhere else you know so we ended up going on the road for several two two two and a half years or whatever, three years, I don't know what it was, putting out these publications where we traveled for two to three weeks and we just town to town and we did stories.
And the way it worked was sometimes the clo the nature of the collaboration is particularly with that one, sometimes there we'd be somewhere and Alec go, well we gotta get something here because this is a great picture.
And then sometimes it would be this guy's story is so great that you got to find a picture because we're gonna we're gonna and then eventually we decided we didn't really that didn't need didn't actually have to be the case.
If Alec had a picture that he thought was really strong and I didn't have a story at that there wasn't a story there, I could make one up or I could use a story a fragment of a story from somewhere else and I would we were collecting photos and texts and histories and little pieces of from from like the WPA guides to these places.
And we were started just mixing and matching and we realized we didn't have any rules.
We weren't a real newspaper um but when it was you know serious and when there was something we found that we were really really drawn to that was a real story we told it faithfully in both pictures and the text but other times we were having fun and it would be very hard for anyone I think to read those things today and know where what's the truth, what is it?
I mean I was even making up historical extracts in books that I was you know I have a lot of quotes in there from both books and sometimes those books are real and those quotes are from a real book and sometimes I made up both the quote and the book and it's like you know we didn't have we it was just we could do what we wanted and it was super fun.
And that was sort of the nature of our collaboration is like to find a way that like we both had fun and that we and but yet we also both were doing I don't think I don't feel like either of us in any of the things we did ever had to go like oh no I have to compromise and get rid of this beautiful thing I want to do.
I think we were pretty good about being able to do each do our thing and put them together and be happy with it.
I mean certainly there were some small compromises.
There's things that you know I think in a lot of ways some of the pictures that didn't make it into the dispatch are the ones that haunt me more than the words because we'd have to cut them down you know we'd have I mean I'm sitting here right now I'm looking like the the the we'd do a drafts of everything we did.
So we have draft folders and I have you know all the work, the work prints and work worksheets and like so there's probably like three times as much material that that we ended up being able to use because each publication was like 48 pages.
So we'd have to cut, cut, cut.
And I look through these things all the time because I'm trying to figure out how to make a book of the whole project.
And um I'm just like how do we ever cut this one?
How did we cut this one?
And I think we're both two guys who are always constantly onto the next thing.
So that dispatch archive which I have I have boxes of it here, the notebooks and the work and the various drafts and folders and brochures and maps and I've never since we wrapped it up I just haven't been able to find the time to do it but every once in a while I just allow myself to poke through it and I'm like man there's just so much stuff in here that's so good but I don't know I don't know what will what will become of it.
But I know that we Alec killed a lot of his killed a lot more of his darlings than I did.
Well I want to get on to uh the the editing later when it comes to photographs but also writing but I I did want to um double click on this relationship you have with the images as much as maybe Alec had with uh writing as as any other photographer does but what do you think you look at photographs differently than a photographer does or what is it that gives your perspective a power that can either enhance or complement the images itself?
Does that make sense?
Yeah I mean I that's a good question.
I don't know if that I look at the I think I look at them I think we all look at them differently.
We all it's one of the reasons I always talk to photographers and teach classes and say like even if you're not a verbal person and you don't know how to you should know how to write an artist statement or a grant proposal and be able to explain your why you should at least be able to communicate to people why you felt compelled to make this work and that you did feel compelled to make this work that there was some urgency or that you couldn't wait when you got up to go out and make this work.
But like every artist I mean I I believe this is true every great artist that I know in the photography world is able to articulate in an entertaining or informative way.
You know, Mark Power is a great guy.
Like I mean the guy can actually is a great speaker he has a real um internal logic when he's making his work he has big ideas he's not afraid to when he gives a talk he's not he's like he's not isn't trying to like make it sound grander than it is he's explaining in a very matter of fact fashion how he makes a work but more importantly why he felt compelled to make this particular work.
And I think all of the great photographers that I know can write about their work they can talk about their work.
And so words matter and like I think it's always interesting when they when a photographer gives his talk even photographers who will say they don't believe words have anything to do with photography when they give a talk they can't resist going oh this one I was doing this and that you know and I think the store the stories behind the um the photos are really interesting.
And like when I was teaching briefly um in a college program one time we went to a um you know there was a photo show at the at the at the museum in town uh at the uh the major museum in that city and we would walk through there and I I I loved to like you know I think every artist should experience that like people are looking at this photo and each of them has their version and they're talking about it.
So even if you think your photo is completely should be all free of any kind of language or thought processes like people stand there and look at it and they talk about it and here's what they say you know it's it's I think if you made an anthology a recording of everybody in one day what they said in front of a piece of art it would be really super entertaining.
That's a great idea.
So I was really fascinated by that.
So I still try to like go around when I go see art and listen to Stan.
I mean I stood at you know you know one of Alex's shows that opened I stood at at one picture for for like an hour and just everybody that came up I listened to what they said to each other about it and it was like wow wow wow wow and so I I'm one of those I look at something and the thing I what happens to me is because I'm a writer and because of the type of mind I have every photo and I read a photo book as slowly as I read a novel I do two things to every picture and I work with photos.
When I'm writing I always have a pile of vernacular photos sometimes I'll use a photo book and I'll use those as to do for descriptions and for the way the place I'm writing about looks or the way the character looks or how they dress or I will look at a picture and I'll make up I will I will often probably more than half the time when I'm trying to get started on something, I will just look at a picture and I will just start writing the story to me of that picture.
So I use them as these kind of fictive minds for material.
But what I do when I write about photos and when I write and when I look at photos is I do two things just instinctively that I've done since I was young.
One is what I I always it's just forensics.
I just sit there and I make on index I have piles of index cards everywhere and I just write down everything I notice or that catches my attention in that photo.
That's the forensic and then I have a separate one where I write every single I interrogate them.
So it's a kind of like a crime scene.
I think that's somebody's that's a famous quote I think it I remember which photographer said every photo is a crime scene but so then I will ask I will write down just brainstorming every question that I could pose to that photograph.
What is this?
What's going on?
Who is this?
Where is this?
Why is this hat that way?
Well who's that person in the margins?
You know, and I'll I'll try to come up with and then I try to expand the frame to so what's outside the frame, what happened in the picture before what happened in the picture after.
And I'll just play with them to try to get a story and to turn it into words and fiction I will just try to move animate the a still photo so that I can see or pull it way back to a satellite view so I can see the whole world that it's in and catch that.
I know from like my experiences of standing there when Alec took all those dispatch photos that that was one moment in this great sometimes we would spend a long period of time with these people and sometimes that guy, he took many pictures of this person and that person was particularly funny or interesting character and in the picture he looks very serious.
And so I know a lot more about those photos than you'd see looking at those photos because I was standing there.
And like because of that and I think even before that experience when I look at a photo I'm always curious about you know what does this person if they're not smiling look like when they smile?
How does their what does their laughter sound like you know are they funny?
Where do they live?
And I like to see interiors of people's houses because I can use that descriptions are hard for me to write I steal all mine just from photobat photographic backgrounds.
Whether it's a farmhouse or um somebody's bedroom I'll like look at a picture and I'll go that's it.
You know he's living in McGowan's farm.
And um it's like um I think it's interesting because I am a I am a writer and I do talk a lot with photographers.
I do I do fundamentally I think we see things differently.
But there are photographers who I think are very kindred with the way I see photographs.
I think it's philosophical more than anything.
And there are other photographers who I have no idea what the hell they're talking about.
You know um I respect their work and I respect them but I'm like I don't get your you know when they start talking about photography then I'm just like I don't get that that's not how I think about photos.
I don't uh can you give me an example of a photographer?
It's just just an example of what that photographer that you don't get might say.
You know what I mean they're too abstract or too vague or yeah so here's what I do a lot of um you know portfolio reviews and I um work a lot with you know some different um programs where I work with them on writing artist statements or grant propos, you know, writing for photographers.
And so I the first thing I always do is before I see your project, you send before they send me a PDF, and this is true of people who you know are established and have books and before they send me the PDF of the work, I want to hear, I want a statement, I want a project statement.
So if I get the project statement, this is the way it works on most grants now they'll ask the, you know, even the Guggenheim, they'll ask them to send a project statement, a grant proposal before they decide if they're gonna request to see the images.
So you have to be able that's my ace card right there.
You have to be able to use words to describe your work in a compelling enough, true enough fashion that somebody's gonna go, I want to see those pictures or you're not going to get your foot in the door.
So I asked for the statement and there's two things that happen.
Sometimes I'll be like oh this is person can really write and this is a really great compelling statement.
I want to see this work and then I'll get the work and I'll be like you just wrote the statement.
It's not in the work.
You know you're making a case you're shoehorning this polemic or this theme into a work that I don't see it in Any of the pictures.
So that always gets me hacked off.
And then sometimes they just resort to the usual bombastic art speak from, you know, graduate school or whatever, that I don't speak that language.
And it's like from reading the statement, I would have no idea what I'm going to see.
And so I think like the I always encourage people, like it should be the most honest answer I can say to people is like, what if you and I get together for coffee and you say, well, I've just started a new project, and I say to you, Oh, yeah, what it would tell me about it.
You know, you're not going to go on, you wouldn't resort to like the usual academic essay in a photo book.
You'll tell me, like, oh man, I'm really you'll be at your most excited.
You'll what I will, I mean, this is true of every one of my friends when I have that conversation.
That's when they're most excited.
They're getting rolling and they're that and they're really enthusiastic and they're conveying, like, I really am excited about this work.
And that's what you want to communicate.
And that's what I think if you can see that in the work.
Like, I mean, often I will be looking at something at a portfolio review.
And often I'll have read the statement, and it'll be like, you know, some it's like it's kind of a zeitgeisty, um, it's a piece about some important theme or subject in the world today, identity or, you know, climate change or something.
And so the statement will be very profound.
But I'll look at the work and I'll say about halfway through, I'll I'll say, so you know, did you, when you got up in the morning, were you just dying to do this, to do this work?
And they'll say, um, and I'm not kidding, like this has happened a half dozen times.
They'll say, not really.
And I'll say, Yeah, I I I it's a parent.
You know, like you wrote, you decided what you were going to do a project about, and then you decided to go out and try to find pictures that fit that theme.
And you know what that is?
That's building a garage, you know, with a with a with a a blueprint you cut out of like a magazine.
Like it's not like that's not how it works.
You find something that gets you excited and you figure out if there's a theme in there.
But like, I don't know.
I mean, I I I I'm interested in, I think I'm interested in passion projects.
You know, and they can be really qu quiet or they can be really loud and they can be really wild and they can be street photography, but I'm interested, I think it's really clear when you see somebody's work and they're just like a junkie.
You know, they want to do this work.
They live, you know, most of the photographers I work with and that I love as people who are my friends and I want to work with are people who are like obsessed.
This is this is all they want to do.
You know, Alex like that.
Todd Heido's like that, Jim Goldberg's like that.
Um most of the, you know, Tanya Franco-Klein's like that.
I mean, like people who are just really, really this is their life.
You know, it's like the thing that most matters to them.
And that's like that's how I am about everything.
So I'm drawn to that.
I think because it also moves the most.
Like when you can see the obsession and passion behind any type of art or body of work, it it's it moves you if you can feel that movement from the person that created it.
And I was talking about this with Jesse Lenz.
I'm gonna come on to Chico in a little bit because we're gonna meet each other.
In fact, this is probably gonna be out when we are in a room together uh at Chico, so that would be interesting.
Um, because the the whole uh the obsession thing is something Jesse talked about a lot, and he said exactly the same thing, you know, because he obviously reviews a lot of work himself, uh, as well as publishes a lot.
So he's looking for that obsession.
He's looking for that, it doesn't really matter what the the story is, as long as it's something close to you and and passionate um to you and that you are obsessed about, and like you said, you want to get up every morning and just go go and do it.
And that is, it seems to be from your side of the fence and Jesse's side of the fence that that's very, very clear when you're reviewing work.
It's very evident to see that and to not see it.
So when you know we go to cheat, because I'm I'm kind of asking some of these questions from a selfish standpoint.
It's like, what the how am I going to explain this body work?
Because I can talk about it for hours, but I need to kind of maybe write something down that's succinct, articulate, very clear for people to understand.
But I also hear other reviewers don't want any explanation, they might just want to go straight into the photos.
So the photos have to do the work, but also you have to have some kind of way of explaining it rather than just like this is my obsession and I love this and I do that and getting kind of carried away at the No, no, no, it's like I think like so just you know, I do it because these things can be long and like Chico can be very long, and you look at a lot of work and you start not remembering who did what and but sometimes I'll just I'll I'll I'll have before they sit down, I will um ask them, you know, to tell me something about it.
In recent years I've gone more the other way where I'll just want to like look at the work first and then like half if by the you know, usually if the if the if they are actually about a theme, if it's about some subject, if they have a statement that that that makes a case that this work is about, you know, I'm trying to avoid saying anything particular because it would all somebody would know I'm referring to their work.
But like, you know, it's about American violence, or it's about, you know, and so you you start, you know, if you're making a case that this book is about blank, and I don't know that, yeah, I don't ask you that right up front, and I start paging through and like six, seven photos in, I have no idea what it is.
Then like um, and then I get done and I say, okay, you want to tell me something about this?
And they say something, and I go, Well, I don't see that anywhere in the work.
How are you visually trying to communicate that with these pictures?
Um, some people are really successful.
I mean, like, sometimes it's it's you know, I get like third or halfway through flipping, and I'll look up at somebody and I go, Oh my God, you know, like uh what's going on here?
You know, like this is powerful.
There's an undertow here.
Like I'm really compelled to keep turning the page, but I also um, you know.
I mean, I did this once where I, you know, I was it was very mysterious work.
I mean, I there's uh this is an analogy I give a lot.
There's uh two, two, probably I would say like more half of the photo work I see that comes to me unsolicited, half of it falls into what I call the what the fuck category.
And there's two what the fucks.
One of them is like, what the fuck?
I don't get it.
And the other one is I'm like a half, I just started getting into it and I'm like, what the fuck?
And that's good.
So one of the what the fucks is bad, and one of them is the best for me.
Like I don't get it, but I just want to keep turning pages.
And like Void is really good at that kind of a book.
Sleep Creek, uh Pia, you know, that that those guys are they though that group of people, and some of those books, when I was first seeing their books, like they were, they had that down.
Like, I love those books.
I don't need to know.
This is like the subconscious.
There's like it's just this undertow, and I'm in it.
And once I'm in it, I don't really need to know, like, well, what's the story here?
You know, like it's just it's mythical.
Jared Jesse's very into the mythical, the the the you know, the middle ground between reality and myth and like dreams and reality, and and that's kind of this liminal space is is like is a certain genre.
And I like a lot of that work, and a lot of it I don't.
I mean, it's just it's how much does it just like does it push the right buttons?
But I mean, I think the thing is um if if your work is a theme, if it's a narrative, it's a photo narrative or it's a th a book about blank, that has to be in the pictures.
You know, like and that and if it's not, you just have to go back and take some more pictures and work harder to find a way how to photograph whatever it is you're trying to photograph.
You can't just tell people your book is about X, Y, or Z and then go, here's the pictures, and they're supposed to just take your word for it.
Um or that's the one instance where you need to find a text treatment that doesn't get in the way of the photos to help you with.
I mean, there are some books that are just amazing pictures, and I see a half dozen at Chico or at Riv Chico's amazing is the most amazing.
Other ones I don't see as much stuff that I'm like, whoa, Chico's juried, I think, and that makes it challenge.
It makes it, you see a lot of amazing work there.
But like, I see a lot of amazing work at Chico where I'm like, this is amazing work, but you need to tell me what's going on or why you did it.
And they tell me, and then I go, okay, you need to have a text treatment because people need to know that.
Um, that's that's a compelling part that makes the photos even more compelling to know that this this took place at this place, that's this, you know, you know, whatever it is.
A theme park or a school for the you know certain again, everything I can say, I'm gonna give away somebody's book.
Yeah, yeah, it's okay.
It's okay.
Um yeah, there are uh you see stuff and you're like, this is great.
This is totally a book, but you're you're gonna have to have a text treatment.
And then that's where like it can be fairly simple, or it can be the one thing I just never want is an academic essay telling me how significant this work is, unless it's a famous person who's been photographing for 40 years or something, you know.
Um and that used to be all the books.
All the photo books before I met, you know, before the internet, when I was first collecting photo books, it was like aperture monographs, and they were just greatest hits packages.
So when you saw something like Bill Owens Suburbia or Danny Lyons books or Susan Masilis, where they were actually about something, they weren't just collections of their greatest hits, they were really compelling to me.
Um, and they were very rare.
Those people really all deserve credit as like the pioneers of everything that's happening today and that's happened in the last 10 years, and everything that Alec and I did, and it's a small group, but there were all these people in the, you know, always right, Morris, um, you know, the WPAFSA people that were that were doing these very ambitious projects.
Um, you know, Mitch Epstein's family business.
There's just so many text-image books that are not just great as hits packages that tell a story through text and documents and archives.
Um Christian Patterson's really good at that too.
Um, making a book that's about something, using a lot of different materials and I making a beautiful object and actually preserving some some of the mystery.
Um I don't know.
When you look at No, no, no, it's great.
You've answered many of my questions all at once.
It's that's great.
Go back to like a print on a wall, and you talked about Alex, uh, you know, you standing at one of Alex's photos and listening to what people said.
For you, what makes you go wow when you look at a a photo?
I know that's a really kind of uh base question, but what what is it, what are you looking for?
Is it is it you know an indicator, a good indicator maybe how much time you spend looking at an image when you think about what you said, uh every image is a crime scene?
Is it kind of that investor investigation side of things that you're you know, you want that curiosity, or is it more aesthetics, or is it more narrative driven?
What what makes you really fall in love?
Um I think there's a real difference bet between the books I'm drawn to.
I mean, that's the other thing.
When you look at a portfolio review or some of somebody's like body of work, like, all right, this is a narrative.
This there are a lot of great photo books that I've seen and that I've actually, you know, somewhat worked on that work as a great, you know, you they read as a book.
There's a narrative.
They're about something.
They're they're work.
But like at the end of you get to the end and you start talking about this is great, this will be a great book.
I can see the beautiful design, I can see everything about it.
It turns nicely, you know, like it feels flow, so almost like a film, um, like an art house film or something.
But like, what are the prints?
Like, what would you if you had a show?
And and I think if if you think you I could pull books down, we're like, this is a great book, but like, is there anything in here that you would really want to have on your wall and look at every day?
And the so that's I have a lot of photography in my house and in my my studio.
And it's they're all things that are there are prints, they're pictures that could be abstracted from a book and stand on their own as something I could look into.
I mean, there's a photo at the bottom of my stairs.
I get up in the morning, I come down, it's right there.
It's an Aaron Springer photograph.
Um and I could look at I look at it fifty times a day.
I have a bunch of Alec photos, and I um they're all pictures that not like probably wouldn't um they're pictures that have something about them that I could look at that photo, you know, like there's just something about it that um I'm I'm drawn into it again and again and again, or each time I stop to pause and look at it, I feel like I'm rewarded.
Whereas in a book, you tend to like, you know, it has to sort of function as part of the edit and the flow.
But I'm always, when I'm looking at books and other people's books, especially, I'm always looking like, well, this is this is a, you know, I'll say to them, and this is funny because a lot of younger people don't really understand.
Oh, but I'll I'll pause and go, this is a great print.
And I'll say, thank you.
And I mean, no, I mean, like, you could sell this photo.
People don't have to know your work or this photo.
This is a photo you could make money on.
And that's where people will make money down the road.
So like they should, you know, at least it, it's it's a good business practice to like be sort of conscious that like here this is the money thing, this is the single, you know, like this is like this one I can pull out of the book and put in a frame and someone will want it on their wall.
And, you know, there are a lot of pictures, you know, often that tends to be what Alec would call, or a lot of photographers will disparage pretty pictures.
But um, you know, desolate pretty pictures, you know, the whole trespass guys, Matthew and Brian and and Henry Head and all those guys that I love their work and I love their bookmaking, they all make great prints as well.
You know, they know how to mix in a landscape, and often the function of some of these pictures is that that's going to be a print, you know, and that would look good on the wall of your house or your living room.
And it's like, and I don't think that's their cynical thinking, but I could go through a lot of those guys' work and I would find dozens of great prints, but they also function as a book that also tells a totally different story.
Um so I it's a good question.
What I'm drawn to want, I want that picture.
Sometimes it's because there's a story behind it that I know I was with like some of the Alec pictures I have are from our trips.
And I remember that day, like one of them being lost in a dust storm in Death Valley, in which I actually was the person out there lost in the dust storm that you can see sort of like in the haze.
Um it's a beautiful picture, mysterious picture.
I like mysterious pictures, and I I'm I'm a I love like beautiful landscapes.
I think Todd Haido's like I'm drawn to Todd Haido.
The first book I ever bought online was a Todd book before I ever knew him, before I ever knew any photographers, because I was I'm a nocturnal person.
And I walk around, I'm I work and I and I live in the middle of the night.
Um and I'm up.
I usually go to bed about the time my wife is getting up.
And so I'm out since I was young, I'm out walking.
And when I first saw one of Todd's house hunting photos in a magazine, I was like, that's my, that's me.
That I took that picture.
That's like that guy was with me.
Like I see that fake picture every night when I'm out walking in the misty, snowy winters.
So those those houses, I saw that picture.
I just got in the internet, I had a dial up and I looked him up and I found the book.
It was in Harper's Magazine.
That the it was just a one picture.
It said nothing, it just had his name in the Nisraeli, but then there were, it was part of us.
A little uh story that was unrelated to the photo was just an illustration.
Um, so I ordered the book and I got it, and I was like, wow, this is like my world, like, you know, this this sort of the kind of film noir aspects and the nocturnal aspects and the fog.
And here in Minnesota, you know, if you haven't lived through this kind of a winter, at night when it gets colder or cools off, there's just this mist off the snow, and you're walking, it's kind of like a foggy um, you know, it's just this.
I love this.
That this is why I live here.
It's like this just kind of um the strange weather that we have, and the extreme weather is like I love it from a standpoint of in the middle of the night when you have the city to yourself, you see who's up and there's a TV going and there's a lamp, and like you see somebody walking and they come emerging out of the fog.
And it's just I love that film noir aspect of it.
And so that I'm I'm drawn to those Todd's kinds of moody atmospheric.
I'm drawn to kind of film noir pictures a lot.
I think what I'm hearing is uh a lot of it is uh seeing yourself in or a part of yourself in these images or or part of what you are naturally interested in in these images.
Or if I was driving, you know, because I I still think and and travel like a photographer, and I and I'm a road tripper, and I'm constantly driving back and forth from here in Montana where I have a place.
And I just I never go on the interstate highways, I travel on small roads.
And there's always, you know, I'm always drawn by pictures where when I'm driving, you know, how you if you're a photographer, you're scanning the landscape that arrest me when I'm driving, and I'm always thinking that's a picture I would take if I'd seen it.
Like I would recognize that picture if I saw it, you know, like I would recognize that as a picture, and I'm drawn, or I'm just drawn back to it again and again.
Like if you go to periphoto or you go to some of these, you know, PayPal or the armory show, and you know, I walk really fast around and around at these things because I have ADD and there's a lot of people, and I do laps, and like the third or fourth lap, I realize that I keep my eye keeps being drawn to one thing.
And then the lap, and as the day goes on, I zero in on the things that I've noticed that I keep my tension as I walk by keeps being drawn to that, and I go to those.
And I found a lot of amazing stuff that I didn't know about the people from doing that.
Like if I'm continually my eye is caught by one thing, I'll I'll return to it again and again.
And um, and I do think that's there are a lot of Alec photos that when I open his books, and this is unconscious.
I mean, I have a large collection of Alec stuff, but when I open a sleeping by the Mississippi or Niagara or Broken Manual or even the dispatches, almost always unconsciously, I go to one picture that I want to look at again, you know, that I go to again and again.
There's a handful, but like I'm interested, something draws me back to certain pictures.
And it's usually there's a narrative, there is in that picture for a writer that there's like a flanry O'Connor Connor character in that picture.
And there's like a world in there that I could write a whole novel about this picture.
And um I do believe this is the challenge.
I mean, I wrote a book, you know, um, you know, without I've written books without pictures.
And my the novel that came out cut came out a couple years ago, I wrote, you know, entire sections of that book inspired by one or by a handful of photographs that are kind of famous, and no one's ever gonna know that.
But like it was that photograph launched this whole section of the book.
And it was deliberate.
It was a challenge.
And the real challenge is I was gonna see if I could write an entire novel made based on.
I have a bunch of photos that are like some of my favorites, you know, that are kind of, you know, by famous photographers.
And I someday I always want to just hold off and see if I could write a short novel based on one photo.
Um, the photo that has the most compelling potential narrative or story in it to me.
And um, I've written a whole bunch of short stories that are entirely based on one still photo.
I have a collection that I've done of those.
Um Um and some of them are rather long, but I'm I'm I think the I'm super interested to see if I could stretch it out.
It'd be like a Don Delilo project.
But if I could like really I'm looking for when I find the right photo and I'll know that's the one I can write a novel based on this photo.
Um but that's that's a challenge that I've had for like 25 years.
You should launch a competition, an open course.
Like everyone give me one photo each and I'll choose one and they get them to pay it, and then you'll be you'll be rich.
It actually makes money for a change.
Yeah.
Um I don't want to talk about money, but talk to me about your working life as a as still a working writer.
And this kind of loops back to what we opened the conversation with in terms of what you're saying in terms of the world doesn't have much use for writers.
Um but but tell me tell me what your working life is like as a writer at the moment.
You go, you do a lot of different things, and like you said, you're a bit of a road tripper.
What is what is uh your working life kind of um Well, I always have you know, not always, but I have a dog and I have a life and I have, you know, so part of being a writer to me is that I have to like I always have to read.
Um I like to spend time, I mean, I try to read, you know, I read every day.
Uh try to read 50 pages every night before I go to bed of whatever novel or book I'm reading.
Um I have to write my word.
So I have these books, which are I they go back, this is my I just passed the 31th year.
They look like this.
I write in them every single night.
I've never missed a night.
Um years.
And they're for 31 years, and I'm knocked on wood.
Uh so that this is like, you know, I mean this is like it's chicken scratch.
Like it's like mic micro script.
And you know, it's about 700 to a thousand words a night.
And I um it's often continuation of something I'm everything I've I've worked on is in here.
Or, you know, if I'm traveling, it's in here.
Depending on what's going on in my life, this is really my work.
Like, um, and my um it doesn't have a strictly a diary function.
I'm working through ideas, the dispatch trips, and the you know, the original version of House of Coach started in here, and all my books are in here.
And um, so I I do that in the middle of the night.
That's the last that, and then I read my 50 pages.
I have to listen to music.
I have to have um, and then I take, you know, paying gigs, which are either like working on a right.
I mean, right now I have like, you know, several photo projects with photographers where I'm kind of behind and I need to like start figuring out a text treatment.
And so my days are usually like photo work, whether it's teaching or um critiquing a uh looking at somebody's work, or in this right now I'm have three things that I'm trying to like do a book with someone and um and figure out how my what my contribution would be or how it would work from my end.
Um I mean I'm I'm I'm at this point I work with people I mostly know and they know that like they sort of give me like the work and say, figure out what you want to do with it.
They're not telling me like, do give me an essay or about this.
They're just like, here, do the thing you do, which is I look at it and I I mean, basically I mostly tell people, unless they're offering me a lot of money, which they don't, if you give me the work, I'm not gonna write about you or your photographs or the work or its significance, or I'm not gonna mention the photographs or you.
I'm gonna respond in some way it's gonna be sort of in conversation or complimentary or on the same frequency as the photos.
I'm gonna write something that is a response, my response to the photos, but it's not going to be any kind of like a traditional photographic essay.
It's gonna be a piece of it's gonna be a photograph, another series of photographs, but with words that's in response or in dialogue with your pictures.
And none of that maybe makes sense, but that's my goal is to find a way to like write about um.
I mean, last year I had a really great, I did two projects that I loved.
One was with Todd Haido, and it's a very small, limited edition book that was published in Paris.
It only has 500 copies, but it was the perfect collaboration because Todd Marina gave me the work and said, figure out how to what you want to do with this.
And and I sent them what was quite honestly quite crazy, because it was a very ADD piece of channel surfing uh fragments that I wrote in the middle of the night.
And the work is very much a scrapbook of kind of Todd's self-conscious, subconscious mind and how he works and it's somewhat collagenist, and then there's pictures and there's stuff from his childhood, and it's a very much a scrapbook kind of approach, and and because the work, his work resonates with me, and this work really resonated with me, I came up with something that really felt like an out-of-body experience.
And I sent it to him and to the editor at Xavier Brown, and I fully expected, because it was a whole bunch of bursts of words and fragments, that they would be like, this is crazy, no, or it used to be caught in half.
And um I was kind of insecure about it because it was it felt like a crazy sort of um uh irresponsible piece of writing in response to, you know, a a really great photographer's work.
And they were like, this is great.
And just said, no, we don't have to change, you don't have to change or edit anything.
And so basically it they ran it exactly as I sent it to them.
And then I did another book with this photographer in the Canary Islands.
Same thing.
Like I said, I'll do it, but I'm only gonna do it if I I'm just gonna do something that, you know, your photographs made me, you know, took me to a place in my mind and in my, you know, I had an immediate response to your photographs, but it was not about your photographs.
So I wrote something again, much shorter than the stuff for Todd Marina, but I sent it to him, and then they just used it.
So, like if I could get away with that, I'm I'll be super happy the the rest of the way.
Do you write um, do you write any poetry or are you you know purely prose?
Um I I know you sometimes cross between fiction and uh kind of factual.
I mean, I write poetry, I'm embarrassed by it.
You know, I mean I've never tried to publish it.
Um I love poetry, I read it all the time.
And um I, you know, I have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of poems.
I have never attempted to publish them.
So um and I think it's I think most of my prose, like the book of the Todd stuff is essentially prose poetry.
I mean, it's like I'm it's this me.
Um I'm more in sp I'm I'm more um influenced by poetry poets than I am by fiction writers, by far.
And I I mean I think it sounds pretentious to talk about, you know, I don't know.
It feels presumptuous to even call yourself a writer, let alone a poet, because I think it's really hard to be a good poet.
And I would say poetry has a battering batting average of probably like, you know, the lowest batting average of any art form.
Like one out of one out of ten poems I read.
Do I think I even have any idea or like it or get anything out of it?
There's not even a single line that I remember, but those one out of the ten are what keep me going.
Um so I will say that no, I don't this is pretty much universally agreed.
And it was one of the early points of agreement with Alec and me is that um it's almost impossible to do a poetry.
Poetry and photography are trying to do the same things, and it's there's almost almost no examples of a photo book that incorporates poetry that's any good.
Um, it's almost impossible to do it.
So, like when you see them in workshops, it's kind of almost like a gag at this point.
You know, it's almost always like, uh, did you write this poem?
Yes.
Do you consider yourself a poet?
No, not really.
Do you read a lot of poems?
No.
Well, I think you should take this poem out, you know.
Because there are a lot of uh photographers, they're very kindred art forms.
Yeah.
And I'll um a lot of my friends, you know, met Jen and Tempo.
You know, we talk poetry, like in Brian Scootmont loves poetry, you know, Grays the Mountain Sand is a line from a Richard Hugo poem.
Elick loves poetry.
But they would never attempt to put a poem.
Their picture's a poem, you know, like they're doing something with photography that poets are doing with words.
So it's just very, very, very hard to compare to to pair the two.
Even if you're using someone else's poem who's a very good poet, I mean, I could think of, I mean, I there are books that have done it, but they're so rare that they I can remember all of them.
I mean, that's I mean, I think that's the truth, like that are published, that that are like there's poetry and photoc photographs together, and it works because the poet and the photographer are really crosswired and uh melded, and also they're just it works.
And um the the first the first people I sort of were Matthew and Brian.
I think Matthew and Dogbreath has has some poems in there as well, and uh they just seem to work for some reason.
But like you said, you don't see you don't see it too often, and so often it can just be too much on the nose, uh because because of that clash.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of times the poem, you know, and the thing is the problem with it when people do it is, you know, if they wrote it themselves, is it's very personal.
And I'll say, well then why do you have it in here?
And they go, I really like it.
Okay.
Um I mean, it's like uh it's so there's you know, there it it's a battle, often a battle when I'm at these things, because the other the other reviewers will say, you know, did you see, you know, the one with the poems?
And I'll be like, Yeah, you gotta tell them to take that out, you know, like you're the writer, you know.
Oh, I'd love to know what goes on behind the scenes with these reviews.
So it's like uh but uh there often will be, hey, you know, it's always constructive.
Like it's almost no one will talk about the work, someone else's work unless it's great, but there's something that they think has to be changed.
And so there was a case where this was a very strong collection of photos, like really, really, really good.
And then there was like handwritten, you know, childlike handwritten poems next to the pictures, you know, like about horses and stuff.
And it was like, When why are these poems here?
Are these yours?
Yes, I wrote those, you know.
I love horses.
And it's like, uh I would take them out, you know.
I really like them.
Well, um publish it for yourself then.
You know, uh, you know, it's like that this was a case where there had been a lot of discussion about like, yeah, this book is great, but those poems have to go.
And this person was literally like dug in, like, those poems are the key to the whole book.
That's great.
You know, you're not gonna forget the book published, you know.
It's it's a hard world, but like it you make yourself a little book.
It's even harder now.
And and when we think about the photo book world, the photography industry in general, but the photo book world, the the the even smaller sector of the art industry that is poetry, writing.
What is are you pessimistic generally about the future of the written word as much as the the the photographic word?
What what do you see over the next five to ten years?
Uh please, let's not talk about AI.
I mean, we could talk about AI if you want, but I'm I don't know anything about I mean let's I don't know.
No, I mean of course as as we started out, I literally have no fing idea what AI is.
I mean, it sounds ridiculous.
I'm sure I'm against it.
Ignorance is bullshit I don't know what works.
Yeah.
I know I'm against it, but I have no idea what it is.
Brilliant.
Whatever.
And if you can throw basically, you know, it's like if if you can throw a pork chop by a wolf and he doesn't know that you throw a pork chop by him, then you must be pretty good at what you're doing.
So if somebody got put something in front of me and it's AI, which I believe stands for artificial intelligence, correct?
So if if I saw something I mean, I'm sure I I'm exposed to it all the time, and I just don't know.
Um I think it's I don't I don't know.
I mean, I have a hard time believing that like um that these m machines gonna do something that like you know, I mean, I think like a photographer, the great musicians, the great photographers, the great writers I know, the poets I feel like I recognize their voice and I feel it's it's distinctive to them.
And if somebody can just if a machine can just imitate that and like can fool me, then we're f ⁇ ed.
That's and I that's if that's what AI is and it can do that, then I would be very afraid of it.
But I'm not gonna live long enough to have to worry about it.
And I'm surrounded by, you know, 20,000 books and 10,000 records that are not AI, that I can always resort to that.
So I just feel sorry for kids.
But AI aside, the you l let's leave AI aside.
Is there gonna be uh uh is there gonna be someone like you in 10, 20 years' time doing doing that?
I don't think so.
I mean, I I don't I'm more bullish about the photography world and the people I meet in the photography world.
They're more passionate, they're more interested in going out in the world.
Um they're they're they're capable and willing to make so here's what I wish happened in my in the liter literature.
It's happened.
All my music friends, you know, 10, 15 years ago, they figured it out.
They were getting screwed by everybody.
So they all started, you know, their own labels and they put out their own records and they use the internet and band camp and things to sell their own product, and they control their merch and they control everything, and they can make money off performing, and they can make, you know, my I have my brother and I have many friends that were in bands that were signed to major labels, and they made no money and they got ripped off, and then they but they made enough of a name for themselves that they can put out their own stuff now and perform and make a living.
In some cases, a pretty good living.
They make no money from because of like Spotify.
There's always these people, and I mean the phrase I always use is there's always these people who, you know, want to steal all the honey and kill all the bees.
And that's like that's every industry, creative industry.
Like, you know, Spotify is killing musicians, but they still can go perform and they can still sell merch and they can scrap by.
It's not as flush as easy as it was.
Photographers, they can make prints, they can make zines.
Most of the really cool.
So when I started in the photo book world, the first year I went to the New York artbook fair, I think it was like, you know, there was a foot photography publishers were in one room, and it was, you know, aperture, and and like little brown mushroom was brand new.
And now it's like they're bigger and bigger, you know.
Perry, Perry Photo and Photo London and and LA Artbook Fair and San Francisco New York Art Book Fair.
These things are everywhere.
There are photo book stores popping up all over the world in the country.
Not here, but um, unfortunately.
But every year for 15 years, I've seen more and more and more amazing um photo photo books, and and more and more of them are being made by publishers that are owned and run by photographers like Trespasser and Clinton Deadbeat Club.
And, you know, it's like it's it's a it's a it's a much more the the I know from traditional publishing that I've worked in, it's you know, I signed a contract for a book that's finished two, three years ago and it's still two years away from coming out.
Photo books like, you know, everyone I've ever worked on, Alec and I would get stuff out within like three weeks.
And, you know, even like big books I've worked on, like they were conceived of in like last spring and they were out in time for Ferris Photo.
That never happens in like the literary world.
It's everything's backed up forever.
There's a hundred people work on every book.
Whereas when there's just a couple people, you know, my my my partner Ethan and I, you know, my big we have a little published photo book publisher here that we started last year called Nocturno.
Ethan is Alex's studio manager.
He's a great photographer.
So we put out a book last year, and basically that book, you know, very printed in China, you know, beautifully made and designed.
We had that book within like three or four months.
So I it's like the photographers have got it figured out.
They're doing it for themselves.
Some of them are making more zini type stuff, which I'm all for.
I have like, and they they have there's a really good sense of community in the photo world.
I mean, I would used to go to trade shows in publishing as a writer and as a correspondent for a magazine.
And they got to the point where there, it's like you wouldn't know you're at you, you could be at a hardware trade show.
I mean, there's like no sense of any kind of this is cool or something exciting is happening.
And like every one of those photo book fairs and every one of the workshops that I've been to in the festivals are like great, great times.
They're a great party.
There's a great sense of community.
People are having a blast.
I've lived in a lot of different worlds and a lot of different lives.
This is like the rock and roll without the drugs and the alcohol.
You know, there's some alcohol involved at Chico, but like, um, but yeah, it's it's I I I climbed into this thing whole, you know, whole hog in the last six years because it's really a beautiful bunch of people and they're making beautiful stuff.
And um I don't have any hope at all for what I uh for my other life, you know, not journalism and not books.
I mean, I was a book store owner and I'm a writer who's published books.
You can't make any money on any of it.
Like I got 10,000 books in my garage, and I mean, I'm, you know, I'm kind of a snob about books, you know, hundreds and hundreds of poetry books.
And um, I open my garage every year, and I sell books for a dollar each, and I can't even get people to buy.
These are all like the great books of you know, the greatest books ever published, like all the top books in every list of historically and in the 20th century, and like no one will even pay a dollar for them.
I mean, like, there's a little free library on every block in the Twin Cities where people are just giving away their books.
And it's like, I don't have any hope that I don't, I mean, barring, you know, somebody throwing some insane amount of money at me.
I'll never publish another, I will self-publish or put it online.
There isn't a model in like if you self-published a novel, no bookstore will carry it, no distributor will carry it, nobody will review it.
It's considered like, you know, the kind of shit that like some some kind of like rate, you know, retired dentist or something wrote his memoir.
No one will touch it, but yet almost every musician I know and almost every photographer I know is essentially engaged in a form of self-publishing and it's it's killer.
They're killing it.
But I I don't see any I don't see that changing for me.
And I think I will just it's better to self-publish a book and get it out there and sell 500 copies and get all the money than to get no money for waiting around for five years from some publisher, you know.
I mean, uh none of my books that are traditional books without pictures have ever made any money.
Let me rephrase this.
Because I I saw um I picked another quote from you, so excuse me if I'm if I'm not providing context around it, but I let you do it.
And it was uh it's just some of these really make me laugh because I feel what you're saying and I resonate with it so much.
And that was uh let's have it.
What is it?
Which one is it?
I despise the 21st century and what it's done to me, what it's done to all of us.
So I like I feel you, but can you can you elaborate a little bit more?
What are we what are we missing here?
What are we not talking about, or what what do you hope that we kind of get back in connection with as we move through these weird, difficult, crazy times?
That's a good that's a good, I mean, that's my that's my life's uh work.
That's my obsession.
No, you know, half of my life, no internet, no streaming, no smartphones, no smart TVs, no cell phones even.
So when I started my first journalism job, I didn't have nobody had a cell phone.
We didn't, we had dial-up connections in our in our office, and we did not have a website.
And it was like it's rewired everybody's brains.
And like, so what I'm talking, what I'm talking about when I say that, and I believe it 100%.
And it's why I love things like Chico and any of these, you know, photo book reviews, portfolio reviews, book fairs, I will go to them because this before the internet, I'm a book guy, I'm a record guy, I'm a culture guy.
I would walk into a record store or a bookstore, and the people working there would like recommend things to me.
They knew what I liked.
My friends would be like, hey, have you heard this new such and such record?
So when I talked at the beginning about all discovering all these things on my own in a library with no place to look them up or even see what they were, were they significant?
Did anybody else know about this?
Was there anybody else out there that had ever heard of this musician or this book?
It's like now, like, you know, there's the algorithm of the internet, and this, I suppose, this is AI.
But like, you know, you type in something and they'll go, customers who bought this bought this.
Yeah, yeah.
They're absolutely, they're absolutely right.
Like that customer who bought that, when I bought this, yes, I bought, I would buy that as well.
They know me.
And I, but like, I would rather my so they go to Chico and I sit around and I talk to like whoever.
Like, you know, those a lot of those people are my good friends.
We talk about stuff, and I it's the only place left where like they'll tell me, have you ever heard this?
You know, Matthew or or Todd or somebody, Alec, will say, Do you have you seen this book or have you heard of this?
You know, it'll be like, no.
Based on that, those people and what I know of them, I will go out and find that whatever they tell me I should find.
That's what I how I became who I am.
There's all these forking paths in your life, and some friend, you went to his house and he played you a Van Morrison record that his uncle had, and you're like, man, I that what's this?
And and you, that Van Morrison takes you here and takes you, everything takes you somewhere.
And now the internet just steers you through all these, it's like border colllies.
You know, I mean, I used to say, I always use the analogy when I'm making work, there's a border collie, there's a bloodhound and there's a border collie.
And I used to be a bloodhound, like I would find one thing I was interested in, and then I would just pick up the traces of that where can I find more of like that?
And I went through life like the bloodhound, trying to find my next obsession.
And then it became at a certain point, like when I'm making work, like I started out as a bloodhound, and then to finish it, I have to become a border collie and kind of herd the ideas through certain gates.
Well, the internet is all border collie.
It's just telling you here going to take you here and move you here.
It's just moving sheep.
And like there is no more bloodhound to it.
You can find, there's a record I had, and like this will be my, this will close my 21st century, but I had a record that I discovered in a thrift store when I was a 15 or 16-year-old.
There's a record called Eddie Sine is the guy's name, step by step.
It's a funky, he's got kind of has a black exploitation cover.
He's got this cool outfit on, and it's this cool, bright colored cover.
And I was a white kid in a white town, and I found this record, and I was like, I played it, and it's this great song cameo, has this super great groove, and I was into roller skating, and it was like, man, this is the greatest record, and I would play it for everybody.
And then I moved to the Twin Cities, and this is all pre-internet.
I knew nothing about this guy.
And I would go into record stores, lots of cool record stores here.
Have you ever heard of this guy, Edis?
No, and nobody's never heard of it.
And for like 15 years, I would play it for friends who were musicians, who were hip, who were cool.
And I would ask at every record store I went to, you ever heard of this guy?
No.
Well, I kind of forgot about it.
Yeah, so I'm moving my, I'm I'm moving my records around and organizing one day, not that long ago.
And there's that Eddie Sine record.
And I realized, wow, I wonder in the day, you know, it's I I this record I I this has been this great, mysterious grail record for me forever.
No one I know knows this record.
I'm the only person in the world that knows this record.
And so I go on online and I like, oh, you know, I'll I'll I don't know that I've ever looked this record up online, you know.
My session with this record predates the internet.
So I look it up, and there's like, you know, like 85,000 returns, it's been reissued and 180 gram vinyl, and there's all sorts of people just like me who found that record and think it's great.
And I'm like, you know, like that spoiled the whole experience.
If I found a human being who said, oh yeah, I know that record, that's great.
But when the computer tells me that I can buy, you know, 70 copies of it on Discogs, it's like uh it's this sort of it's it's sad.
Like the most magical book to me of all of the photo books that I talked about finding is this book, The Champion Pig.
And it's precious to me.
Like I've I love that book so much.
It had such a profound effect on me.
And I, you know, of all those books, you could look it up online, you can find copies of it for like, you know, nothing.
You know, it's like it's not worth anything.
But um at one, and before the internet, when I was a bookseller, you know, there were books that were, you didn't know what shit was worth.
So you would sell somebody who wanted this book, I'd sell it to them for $15, and then I find out when the internet comes along that you know those books are like $1,000.
And there was no photo books, you know, really.
When I was first had my bookstore before the internet, that like you would just sell them for like $15 to 20 bucks.
And then within like a year or two, suddenly everything is like a baseball card and it's expense, everything's expensive and not affordable to someone like me that I want.
So I just I also feel like there's all these Ursatz, fake communities that like people feel like they have a sense of community on social media, Facebook or Instagram, and they don't.
They don't.
They're lonely, they're sitting at home, and it's like um, and they're spending more and more time doing it, and young people don't know a world without it, and I they don't even know, like, I mean, if you wanted an answer to some question, you're doing research, you know, when I was first a journalist, you'd have to go find books and look stuff up.
And it's just all of that is gone, you know.
Like, I'm lazy.
I'll be sitting here.
I mean, I when I started, when I built this, we had the shed built in my backyard, it was like there was going to be no internet rule.
I didn't have it wired for internet, and I did was not gonna bring a phone out here.
I work on a manual typewriter.
Now I have a laptop, now I have uh, you know, why internet out here, and I'll be sitting here, you know, looking stuff up on my phone when I have books right here that I could find the answers.
Like they used to like in the process of going to find that answer, I would find something else.
And I would like, I would go down other, you know, paths.
And now I'm just like, it's just all Oh, we definitely don't want to introduce you to AI then because you'll make you even lazier.
Um it certainly makes you even lazy.
So are you are you an AI?
No, I would never, I don't ever want to do the lazy thing.
I want to do the hardest thing.
Yeah.
And I think I think we're seeing some, certainly in the art world and certainly in the photography world, we are seeing a um we're seeing a resistance to that in in some respects.
Now, with like general admin tools, and you can get stuff done now so fast with AI.
So you can also save money with AI.
So there's like there are some really like incentives, might be existential threats that come that get downstream of that.
But certainly for the let's say the photography world, uh I think it's we are seeing something of a renaissance in the way people are thinking about work because they're they're wanting to go down the slightly more difficult avenues, they're wanting to go and do the work, and that's where I think the cream will rise rise to the top.
At least I I hope so.
And you'll know a lot more about that over the next few years as AI has an even bigger footprint in our world.
But yeah, I guess time will tell.
I mean, I was thinking, I mean, maybe you see more of it in, but I mean, in my in writing, paying jobs when like, you know, journalism disappeared, and like, you know, I used to you used to be able to get paid a like, you know, $2 a word for a magazine story.
Now people like in the last week, somebody offered me, would I want to do a story for a magazine for $100, like a legitimate, real, quite reputable magazine.
I'm like, no, I'm not gonna do something for $100.
It's great.
And it's like, yeah, and it's like, so I a lot of people I worked with who are really good writers and like have journalism degrees and masters in journalism.
And even myself, like, you'll you're doing like catalog copy or you're doing press releases or you're doing that.
I've so I've had personal experience with like, you know, like writing catalog copy describing books for a website.
No, that's all AI can do that better than I can.
I've I've that's my only experience with AI, is I used to do this for somebody, and they sent me one day and said, hey man, will you uh or one of our interns put these things through AI?
This is when I really, really heard that it was being used and was, and this is not that long ago because I'm way behind everybody else, but like, hey, one of our interns put this through what is it, chat?
Chat GPT, yeah.
Chat GPT.
This is something I had been doing for them and getting paid.
Not much.
So they go, can you look at and edit it?
I'm like, sure.
We'll still pay you.
So I get the descriptions, and this is where you simply here's a book, this is their catalog online, and you summarize the book in like, you know, a hundred words.
It's hard to do as a writer.
Like it's very hard for me to do that.
So I open the file, I start reading it.
And I still remember, like, I I got kind of like this weird feeling, and I'm like and I and I emailed them and said, So is this like, did somebody fuck with this, or is this actually just a robot or machine?
Is this actually how it was written?
I mean, this is like chat GPT, and they said, Yeah, no, no, we didn't touch it.
We just want you to edit it.
And I just said, I could edit it for pride's sake and f change a word or two or something, but it for this purpose it's perfect.
You know, like unless you notice something that's an error in the description of the author of the book, it's really, really a clear summary.
I didn't read the book, obviously, but like it would take me 90 minutes to two hours to write this.
Like if I edit it, it's just gonna be just so you so I can say I did something, but I I didn't really feel like I needed to edit anything.
And so m just no surprise, surprise, I've never been called again to do those work.
So it's like Well, we love, but that is symbolic of the way the world is going, unfortunately.
I Yeah, and I hear these stories from my friends who do not have the fallback of like what I have.
Like, I mean, I at least have like, you know, a bunch of I've stumbled this walked into this lottery with this photography people who I love and I love doing it.
And it's it's not exactly, you know, lucrative, but like I it's super satisfying work and I love that love it.
Um I have a lot of friends who are just like, you know, writing little 20, you know, $25 music blurbs for websites and shit that were used to be full-time, you know, writers.
And it's depressing, and even those will be robotted out.
Um I I don't I I mean, like every week, you know, I'm I I still have a friends who are in the still trying to be journalists, and I mean every week what happened at the Washington Post is a couple weeks ago, like they laid off, you know, half a third of their own.
300 or something.
Yeah.
Yeah, including their entire art section, you know, their book section.
And there are no, if you lose your job and you've been working as a book editor or book reviewer, there's none left.
That's one of the last ones left.
There's one left now.
I'm thinking it's like New York Times.
And I mean, every paper I know, at one point I knew people in that world everywhere, and they're all gone.
They're all bought out or laid off, or or they're close.
I mean, I I worked for, you know, a series of publications that either got sold to like venture capitalists, bottom feeders who laid everybody off, or they closed and they're just went online.
And yeah, I don't think there's any.
I mean, I think you would I think you would agree with this.
I think most people would agree with this, but it's hard to say the next generate younger kids like I think I have people I like and trust who feel like it's an ex just as satisfying an experience to read a book online as it is on a device, as it is in a book form.
And in some ways, a lot of people say when you're traveling and stuff, it's even more convenient.
I will never do that, never in my life, but I can understand it, carrying a big book, particularly a big hardcover book with a dust jacket in your, you know, on a plane.
So I I get how like that could be, you know, especially for young people who've never their whole lives have been screenshot.
But I don't think that you can replace the experience of seeing I don't think you can replicate the experience of looking at a really beautiful, well-designed, incredibly photo book with a uh on a device.
And I don't think that you could even a great photo, particularly what you can do in galleries and museums with size and print size, like you can see a photo even on a photo book and then see it in the museum and go, holy shit, because it's not it's so much bigger or sharper or amazing in person.
It's kind of like going to see a band and being like, wow, they're just you have to see them live to really appreciate them.
And I don't think that photography, I don't think you can replace you can you can replace that experience.
You can train a whole generation of people not to care about it, which is the more dangerous thing we're we're dealing with.
I mean, there might just be a generation of kids who just that doesn't mean anything to them.
Yep.
Then you're screwed.
You know, like if they they can hold a copy of, you know, Sleeping by the Mississippi or, you know, Decisive Moment, or pick your favorite photo book, you know, Danny Lyons, the bike riders, pick Emma McGowan, and if they can hold that in their hands and be like left cold by it and not be like, this is a great experience to remember or remember this experience and I want this, we're screwed.
I mean, you know, I'd rather just see these scroll through these pictures on my phone.
Um, but I I think that's happening.
That's happening in front of our eyes, and social media has a big part to play in that.
I think oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
So yeah, look, we're all f basically, Brad.
But uh thank thank you, so thank you, thank you so much.
As long as we have this, as long as we have like, you know, a chance to get together with people and we can, you know, they can't take this these books away from me.
Uh and they can't take uh social connection away from us.
And uh, you know, I'm I look forward to having try to do that, but they can't still like yeah.
I mean, it's like these how other people are with their guns, you know, like oh my gun, sweat am I dead, hands, you know.
It's like I'm that way about my books and my records.
And like, as long as, you know, if you don't want this, if you reject this this culture, and if you don't these mean if these are meaningless to you, I don't really care.
I have them, and I like I'm not gonna part with them.
Um, and I still know there are people out there that I can connect with anytime that care about these things.
They may not be the when I'm gone, but yeah.
And then we die, and then that's it.
So on that note.
Um, Brad, it's let's let's continue these conversations in Chico.
I'm gonna be it's gonna be so such a privilege for me to to go there.
I'm super excited.
And uh I'm I love that you love that type of thing, and that's what it's all about.
So thank you for love what type of thing.
The the the Chico photo books, connections, that the the the part where we meet like-minded people and share our oddities and our our passions.
So um we'll wrap it there, Brad.
Thank you so much for your time and I want to just talk to you quick before when we go off the screen here.
Yeah, absolutely.
So are you going to Chico?
What are you gonna keep talking?
Okay.
I was just gonna sign off and say goodbye, and then we'll talk.
We'll wrap the episode.
All right, go ahead.
You'd be great.
Like this has been so so good.
Um, but yeah, uh I was just gonna say thank you.
Thank you, man.
I appreciate it.
Cheers, Fred.
If you stayed with this conversation until the end, there is a good chance uh you're someone who values depth, reflection, and taking time with ideas rather than just rushing past the back.
That's the spirit behind my Voice Alchemy Book Club.
It's a monthly space where photographers and creatives alike come together to sit with meaningful work.
Uh photo books, books, essays, and long-form projects and talk honestly about what they're seeing, feeling, uh, and trying to make themselves better.
It's quiet, it's thoughtful, uh, and intentionally human.
There's no pressure to perform, no need to have answers.
We're all just figuring it out.
It's just time and space to reconnect with others, your work, and your thinking.
So if that sounds like something you would benefit from, you can find more information via the link in the notes and the description below.
Hope to see you there.