Redefining the Art of Visual Storytelling with Joey L, E021 (part 1)

Welcome to a special two-part episode of the Mood podcast.
I say special for a few reasons Firstly, it was our first visit away from our own studio and I was honoured to have the space of Brooklyn podcasting studios in New York.
And secondly, the guest I had the privilege of speaking to was none other than Joey L.
Joey has been one of my idols in the photography space for some time now, and I've been yearning to meet him for a while, but never thought I'd get the opportunity to be able to sit down one-on-one with him and talk to him at length regarding his journey and the current landscape of photography in the world of art we know today.
We talked about a lot more, though, and I only hope we get to do this again.
This truly was a special honour for me, so I have to say thanks to the studio and Josh who worked hard to accommodate us, and, of course, joey, who gave up his valuable time to sit across from me without showing any awkwardness around my starstruck demeanour.
From his early beginnings to his meteoric rise as a photographic visionary, joey L shared with me his journey, offering a rare glimpse into his artistic process and a development of his iconic style.
We explored his latest 13-year-long project in Ethiopia and the profound cultural impact of his work.
We dissected the very essence of photography, pondering its future in the face of emerging AI technology, social media pressures and much more, asking the critical question does photography need rescuing right now or is it merely evolving In an era dominated by digital reliance and the rise of NFTs?
We dived into the potential solutions and opportunities they present for photographers in a world threatened by saturation, dilution and automation.
Is social media a powerful tool for revitalising the industry, and do NFTs hold the key to preserving the artistry of photography in an AI-driven landscape?
So join us as we embark on a captivating exploration of these topics and many more, with Joey, a true luminary in the world of visual storytelling, and I hope this is a conversation that promises to inspire, challenge and ignite your passion for the art of photography and visual storytelling.
So please shamelessly indulge in Joey's genius and don't forget to get lost in his magic by visiting his website and other profiles in the digital space.
Lastly, if you haven't yet already, I would greatly appreciate a thumbs up and a subscribe to this channel.
I appreciate it from the bottom of my heart.
But now here he is Joey L, joey L Absolutely on a man.
Hey, this has been years for me, I guess in the making, to sit down across from you.
You, could have done it earlier.
You just didn't ask me Well exactly.
Yeah, I guess that's less than it so if you want something in life, you have to put it out there.
You got to ask for it and then usually it's easier than you thought.
There we go.
Podcast finished.
There you go, tell us, without kind of asking for, like a really serious introduction about yourself.
Tell us kind of what you do and why you do it.
I'm a portrait photographer and I've been doing my own personal work more years that I've been alive than not, and I've never been anything else.
I like barely finished high school.
I didn't go to college or university.
I've just always dedicated my time to my craft and working commercially for other clients and applying my vision for them and then working on my own things.
All the same time, my work has taken me to many countries around the world and, yeah, I describe myself as a photographer.
Why portraits?
I say portrait photography because I deal with.
I'm mostly only interested in humans and people and, yeah, I've been to a lot of places with beautiful landscapes and things like that.
But I'm mostly just a very curious person and photography can be a nice tool to explore things that you couldn't get away with if you were doing another kind of craft.
I always say this, but I'll say it again photographers are kind of known around the world to ask a lot of questions, spend a lot of time, be very curious people and it's okay with our line of work to do that whereas another kind of person who just shows up somewhere, it's not known why that person would be there, but a photographer is, like it's kind of like accepted around the world.
So I always choose my projects based on something that I have a very deep fascination for, whether I was a photographer or not, and then if I do choose to start a photo project on that, when it gets really difficult or tough, my interests will help me carry it through to the end.
Versus, you know, choosing something that's just based off pure photography.
Maybe I won't have the interest or the drive to finish it if it could take many, many years, and I know that because I have started projects that I never finished, that it was not, it turns out I wasn't so interested in them after all.
So the things that I have managed to get over the finish line are things that I've just keep me up at night out of passion and interest.
And right now you catch me at an interesting moment in time because I just finished the very massive project and I don't really know what I'm gonna do next.
But what I do know is that I've been in this position before where I don't have a project and I always figure it out.
So as you get older and as you spend more time doing this, you just get more comfortable with uncertainty.
And that's where I'm at now.
I just finished like a huge project.
It's out in the world.
I can't believe like people are seeing it, like thankfully, there's like no major mistakes in it.
And now I'm asking myself okay, what do I do next?
Well, I need to remind myself my own advice, because I did have a moment like, oh, what do I do?
My own advice is don't pay attention to photography.
Just look at, like, what I'm curious now, what I'm really interested in now, then do the act of photography later on that thing.
So that's what I'm searching for now interesting and obviously that that this big project talking about is Ethiopia, right yeah, the, the sorry.
Yeah.
The Ethiopia book that just came out is 13 years of work from Ethiopia.
It's somewhat autobiographical because it's the country where I found my style as a photographer.
It's connected to my family because my wife is Ethiopian and I would say the majority of the work is from the last few years, but there are photos that go back until 2008, when I was 18 years old.
So, yeah, it's like a massive volume of work altogether in one book.
It's kind of like a love letter to Ethiopia.
But now that that's done right and like the photos are done, it's out.
I'm like posting about it.
It is time for me to go back to square one and get inspired with something else again, because I will tell you that it, whatever I end up doing, is it's not going to be a book about a country, right, that's only.
I could do that for Ethiopia, because I only have a certain amount of years alive on this planet so I have to like take my projects carefully, but also like it'll be something else that I'm interested in, right like.
I chose that project for many reasons, like the fascination of the country.
As I said, the personal story it was to, you know, spend more time with my wife and be together and have a like a creative project to actually do.
So there's like all these things and it's something that like obviously really matters to me.
But now, when I'm searching for another project, I have to like not think in photos first dive deeper into that process like square one.
You know, actually let's rewind to well I can just tell you what I'm doing right now, because I'm literally going through it.
Like right now I just I just see what I look at on Twitter.
I see I see like what, what?
Just like the articles I read, like what I pay attention to what makes me excited, what's going on in the world.
Maybe it's something that's not like topical, that's like coming and going, but just like I don't know, like what, um, what, what is a something fascinating that just, I don't know, just just makes me interested and makes me curious again and gives me that kind of buzz.
You know, I'm saying, and then later on I'll decide how to make it photogenic, like I can always figure that out, yeah, like how to tell the story visually, like that's easy, I'll do that down the road.
For now it's just kind of like what's something that's gonna like really grab someone, starting with myself, by the soul what?
what was it about photography that grabbed you by the soul initially, when you were how 17, when you first started picked up a camera, when I, when?
I.
When I first picked up a camera, I was I believe I was seven years old, because my dad got a digital point-and-shoot camera and he would photograph his antique restorations before and after with it, and I would photograph my toys, like my toy dinosaurs, with that camera.
So now I'm 33 years old, so that was like a long time ago.
What was the the fascination?
Well, I I definitely think that photography is is an art, but there's also a social aspect to it, where a lot of problem solving and going out into the environment and going out into the world is part of it.
Like, the best photographers are really good with people at least the best portrait photographers, mmm a lot of photographers that I admire.
They're just, they're capable of becoming obsessed with something and becoming like going very, very deep on a subject, and you can see it especially in subject matters that are replicated.
I think photographers are just kind of curious people, so it's just a curiosity about the world and most of the work that I admire, that I respect from other photographers, kind of has has that first.
They're already that kind of person give me an example.
Mary Ellen Marks work right, like you could tell.
Like even if she wasn't gifted technically, you know she would be like a very curious person going around and she's photographed some subjects that many people have shot Like to the not I don't want to say they're cliche, because they're not, but they're just like known photogenic things.
But it doesn't even matter.
It's like the way like her humanity and the way that she's gone deep shows to me like a very curious and also an empathetic person.
I like empathy too.
The kind of photography that I don't like is like looking down on people, choosing a point of view.
That's like kind of normie, if that makes sense.
Normie Like just sort of like a holier than thou kind of thoughtless approach of like spray and pray kind of journalism is a kind of photography that I don't like, that I don't respond to.
What I do like is more colluding kind of people that are empathetic, that are into it.
That doesn't matter who their subjects are, they kind of like are weirdly connected with them and fascinated with them and like this is going to get the journalism police called on me.
But just like the people who are really engaged in what they're doing or what they're empathetic for and find that in there.
Those are people like if they had another job they would also act the same way.
You see what I'm saying.
They would be that style of person in another line of work as well.
It's a character trait.
That's the character trait that I think makes a great photographer.
Yeah, I mean there's almost an emotional intelligence to those type of people, right To be able to connect with other people.
Did you recognize that in yourself early on and is that why you went to kind of the human side of photography in terms of portraiture?
I think you just you gravitate toward it, and it's when you're young you have a lot of bridges that could be burned behind you.
If you do what I did right and like don't like study anything or don't you just only follow what's working, naturally you're going to end up where you should be going.
If you don't have a plan B or plan C and you just kind of are doing things by gravitational pull, well, the only things that work are the things that you're good at.
Anyway, it's going to pull you in the right direction.
So I'm very lucky to do that, because I'm from Canada, which is a country where, if you mess up, you can just move into your parents' basement again and try again.
So it's like it's a good fertile grounds for being a little bit self-destructive and experimenting and choosing an experimental path in life.
But nowadays a lot of people can do it as well, right?
You don't need much to pursue that.
So for me that's the kind of path that I've always been down and again, like when I'm at the stage where I'm at now.
I've done this enough times to know that I just have to listen to myself and like something will guide me toward where I need to be going, because I'll leave myself open for it if that makes sense.
Very much so when you talk about your connection with other people and how that is a I guess either innate or learnt skill in a photographer's toolkit.
Where does today's digitised society fit into that?
Do you think that kind of the Twitter's, the Instagram's, social media's, the democratisation of photography generally doesn't help?
That type of approach, that real kind of in-depth emotion and connection with other people, that type of approach in photography I don't know that's like a very loaded question because you're assuming that I think I know what I'm doing.
I think most people watching this would think you know.
These are my five techniques of how to convince someone to do anything.
Okay, I think it's like this like when you go to do the act of photographing someone, it's already totally bizarre, right you know?
Like what you're doing, it's just weird.
It's like even someone who grew up around photography like me myself.
When I'm being photographed, I don't know what to do, like with my hands, or just how to feel, or it's just like the whole thing is weird.
So if you start from that place and then work your way backwards from it, it's really easy to do that.
It's really easy to connect with someone and just explain what you're doing, is what you're doing and what the point of all of this is.
Like, what's the greater goal?
So, like for the Ethiopia book.
Anyone who's like part of the book knows, like what the end result is and why it's important.
So you get kind of co-collaborators that work with you to achieve that goal and it doesn't mean like you have to hide the fact that you're a photographer and like first get to know someone over many years, like yes, you could do that, I have done that.
That's important.
But also just like putting it out there like this is why I'm here, this is what I'm doing, this is like what I hope to achieve.
But also to explain to somebody like hey, I have this vision of a book that includes, like all of these kinds of people.
This is how it's gonna look, like this is what I wanna do, this is why I'm spending so much time doing this, so many resources doing this.
This is why it's like odd if we spend so much time trying to create one picture like that's why right, and that kind of message I think resonates in any country.
Especially it resonates in a country where photography might be viewed as kind of conspiratorial.
So I think if you come at it from that perspective and you have like nothing to hide and you explain things, people are like usually really honored to even be part of anything, right?
Like if someone came to me and I didn't know anything about photography and they just explained, like, oh, this is like what I do, this is my project, can I include you in it?
I'd be like, yes, right, and that's.
With or without a knowledge of what's good photography or what's bad photography, I'd probably agree to it.
So back to your question about today's modern age.
To me, none of that stuff like really matters.
I think that social media and digital photography is amazing because it gave so many new artists a chance, and what we're seeing is kind of the destruction of the old way of photography, which could be described as a kind of a gilded age of photography.
That had a lot of gatekeepers and, like to do advertising, you had to, like have your photo published in a magazine with your name beside it, cause that's the only way someone's gonna know your name is seeing it in a printed magazine with your name there, and if they messed up your name, that's so bad, right?
Nowadays that kind of doesn't matter.
So, yes, it did open the floodgates and it did devalue photography as a whole, but what will ultimately come from that, I think, are creative works and creative voices that we can't even think of yet, cause it's only been maybe a decade or two of this kind of thing.
But you have to imagine, you know where all of this is going in the future.
And we're all of my favorite, like modern favorite photographers are playing with these things and are starting with these things, and they weren't available to us in the past.
Even, arguably, these digital tools were around when I first started as a photographer as well.
Like some of my first work working for musicians was from MySpace, right, like doing artists promotions for their MySpace page.
So that gave me a huge chance, right.
Myspace is gave me a platform and a way to do business when I was 15, 16 years old.
So for me to sit here now and say like, oh, I think Instagram photography is bad, well, like, what about MySpace photography?
It was really bad, right.
But here we are.
Do you know how many grunge filters I use?
A lot, a lot.
So it's just like you know, you got to put things into perspective and kind of zoom out.
I am annoyed by Instagram.
Personally, I can't look at it.
It's hard for me to open it and engage with it, but I do see the power of it, you know.
What is it about Twitter that pulls you in so vehemently?
Twitter is where all the psychos are.
It's crazy maze of.
Well, there was a moment when all the photographers were on Twitter.
It was around 2009, 2010.
I can't remember when Instagram got popular, but it was probably when all the photographers left Twitter.
It was like 2011.
And all the crazy people just stayed behind on Twitter who were interested in things beyond visuals.
I'm not saying that Instagram photographer's not interested in anything, but the platform inspires a lot of chaos and also an interest in, I guess, world events or news and things like that, which Instagram does not have.
So there was a moment a few years ago where photographers did come back to Twitter.
I think it was when they allowed high resolution images and the embedded posts like they looked really nice, but then they kind of went away again.
So I don't know.
I find myself it's a lot easier to post on Twitter.
And I think the NFT rush kind of played into that as well, didn't it?
People were rushing over there to make money, essentially.
Yes, to tap into this new goldmine of liquidity.
Crypto Twitter is a thing where crypto people only use Twitter and it's not really on Instagram at all.
That's certainly been the case since 2021, I suppose it was used for that as well.
Yes, but that's not why I like it more.
It is a part of it, but I've been on it for longer than that.
Seems like community is probably the most powerful on Twitter, I think.
Certainly my experience, the likes of Instagram is definitely a community aspect, but it's kind of fake and it's people use it for other means and you don't have the kind of visceral interaction that I think you do on Twitter.
So you like Twitter too, I do.
Well, actually.
I don't like any social media platform, but I dislike some more than others.
But I totally understand.
I respect, I understand what they're used for and the utility of them, but I generally don't like what social media has done to society in whole.
Yeah, but what are we supposed to do, though I don't know what would you?
I'm not saying we should do anything, right okay let me ask you this If you could invent any app that works, how would it work?
Just for photography?
Because I don't know if you know this, but actually before Instagram, do you know who thought of Instagram first?
It was actually Chase Jarvis.
He came out with an app called Best Camera or Best Photo or something, and it was kind of Instagram.
Honestly, someone stole his idea or it was so obvious that multiple people thought of it at the same time, like the creation of the wheel but his app.
What he did was allow iPhone photography to have filters on it and there was a shareable component to it and it was very pure, like early Instagram was.
And I'm waiting for somebody to save photography with a great app.
Maybe there could be a crypto component where there's a native currency where likes equal that currency, kind of like Frentec.
But that's not going to work because those curves are going to be all messed up eventually.
But something like that could really save photography if there could be a system which valued striking work and it didn't devolve into what other people are looking at on social media, so like you've seen those tweets where it's someone posting like oh my God, I looked at TikTok and it's all just a bunch of naked women Like what's going on.
It's because the algorithm was like trained by what that person was spending time on and swiping on.
I can't believe it.
If there could be an app that doesn't devolve into that but that evolves into kind of very moving, meaningful photography, that could be the thing that saves photography, because it could replace every kind of printed magazine, whatever is still remaining in the dustbin of history, but it could save all of this.
Personally, I haven't figured it out, or else I would make it, so I'm stuck on Twitter, but I think there's a way to do it.
There's definitely a way to do it.
It would just be finding a way for an algorithm to value the right kind of imagery and when I say right, there's obviously no right or wrong kind of imagery but just to find things that are moving.
So, for example, my friend Sam Spratt.
He's an illustrator.
He just released a painting called the Monument Game and he inspired people to leave annotations on top of his painting, to kind of compete against one another.
But what it did was it made people really engage in his work and spend hours looking at this painting, which is very complicated, full of little tableaus and things, and if you've ever been to an exhibition, what most people do is they turn their backs to the art they drink in their hand, and it's just a social club that's surrounded by art, but what he did was make everyone turn and look at the artwork, basically, with that project so I love that as a reference for a photography app that could work is he gave people a way to meaningfully engage with his work.
That compelled people to kind of give a piece of themselves and pull something out of themselves and he's a painter.
We could definitely do that, because we're photographing things that are real and around the world that people are interested in.
So if he could do it, I think we could also do it.
Just do it Sign up.
All right, delete this podcast Secret.
Yeah, okay, I thought of it.
No, but please, if someone's out there and wants to say photography, that would be amazing.
So you're talking in rhetoric like photography needs to be saved.
Can explain?
Well, I think it's over.
No, I'm just kidding.
I think photography does need to be saved in the sense of, like, I believe in where all this is going, but I do see and acknowledge how the world is changing with AI and just.
I don't know.
Everything is just.
The whole world is always changing.
When I first started photography, by the way, photography also needed saving because every magazine was collapsing.
There's a great financial crisis in 2008, when I first started making money at this and it needed saving then too, and one of the things that did save it was, honestly, a digital renaissance.
At that time, I even remember watching a panel of Rolling Stone magazine and they were saying like, oh, we advertise like products in Rolling Stone magazine, so when it's on the internet, we can put a lot more advertisements for products on the magazine page.
And people were like whoa whoa.
So that did give an injection to save things for a certain amount of time.
But now I think it's time that time has come again, because look how our industry is being eroded.
Getting assignments and things is like really tough to come by because the economy is being squeezed, clients are being squeezed and it's trickling down to us.
Also For work that's not process driven, meaning like you just go down the street and you see an advertisement and that's the end of it.
All of that work can be generated by AI, because if it's still life or product or something, there's honestly no reason for a photographer to do it.
Even some of the ways that I have shot movie posters in the past makes no sense, because you photograph them on a gray or green backdrop, they're composited together.
Maybe even there's a shot in the movie poster that was taken by another photographer, like a unit photographer that was there on set, maybe not with a cast in a controlled lighting, but it's in the poster and it's made out of all these pieces and woven together to the point where you can't even claim it as your own art.
So if that's already the way that advertisements and posters or products and still life are being made.
Well, how can you follow the logic?
You just follow the money, and just the cheapest way to create these things is going to be the way that it's going to be done, not to mention even celebrities just having a scan of themselves that they license out, that they like how they look.
That's way better than turning up to a photo set.
I'm a photographer and even I admit that makes sense, more sense than what we're doing.
So I said, you know that's not process driven work, because when you walk down the street, the only interaction you are supposed to have is to look at that thing or see it on your phone, wherever your eyeballs may be.
Is the final work?
Other things that are process driven.
There's a place for photography.
So, for example, assignments where you must go out and photograph the real people doing it, the real thing.
Or we don't want to generate this on AI because, like, we have to actually visually show it right.
But what does that do to our industry?
It cuts it in half or maybe even more than half.
So photography is already devalued.
Now this thing that's coming is going to shrink it again.
What that does is it destroys the business of every little equipment rental house that's around the earth where you can rent a pro photo light right.
It destroys the jobs of retouchers.
It just puts a shock to the system.
So, of course, there's more things to photograph now than there ever was.
There's more clients, more assignments.
I think the whole pie is getting sliced in half.
Luckily for what I do.
I consider my work to be process driven.
Okay, I'm not going to generate the Ethiopia AI book of just all the things that I think are in there.
In fact, if you do that, all of the imagery that's already been thought of Ethiopia is not correct, because it was framed by photographers whose vision of it was more of the visuals from the 1970s the famine or something.
If you were to try to generate that vision, it's pulling from things that are already created, not a new artistic expression.
Ai doesn't work.
Even you don't even want to look at a book that's generated by AI, but you want to see photography.
So photography is not dead, but I do think that everything that we've grown to know, that has become normal in the past 20 years, is dramatically changing.
I can feel it everywhere the people I meet, the people I talk to, the people who've lost their jobs, the people who are, by the way, growing and doing something bigger and better than they've ever done.
All of these things are very shocking, a shock to the system, so that's why photography needs saving again.
I had to think of your original question.
Yes, but one would think, if, essentially, the supply of the supply of photographic output is dwindling, essentially, you would think the demand would then the level of demand okay, maybe not on a commercial level, but certainly individuals, collectors, in the kind of the art world.
You would think then that demand increases because there's less of that real photography around.
On that I 100% agree with you, but that's already a very small niche cottage industry.
One interesting thing about what you just said is, in my view, there is a time before AI and there's a time after, and everything that was created before AI does receive a new valuation.
Right, because we can trust that it was actually made by a human.
But again, how many photo collectors are there to support a whole world of photographers?
The math just doesn't compute, but certainly I think that everything does get a historical value.
And back to cryptocurrency and NFTs that's also why I love NFTs is that it is a digital certificate of something that you can trace back to being made by a human.
I think that AI and cryptography can go hand in hand because, we're going to have to verify the source point of all these things being made by a human.
The only way to do that at this time is with a cryptographic signature.
So this is not my original thought.
I've heard this and I believe in this from others, but I really think that that's kind of the future of this, because when you look at a photo that's in the news, sometimes even before AI, you couldn't verify, like, is this a real scenario or is this fake?
I believe it was like you always hear people winning some kind of prestigious photojournalism award and it gets taken away from them.
So it's like already, things are not always as they seem.
Well, when you throw in the ability to manipulate things with a machine, it's going to get even more confusing.
Or with the deep fakes, and I think you'll be able to hear an address from the American president and be able to verify it somehow, and the only way to do it is if there's a ledger storing this thing and it can be traced back to the original.
It could be a wallet or a source point address that has minted it from the beginning and that's acknowledged as the verified one.
The problem with a platform verifying these things is, then the platform becomes the purveyor of all knowledge.
But if it's decentralized and the person does it themselves, such as an Ethereum or cryptocurrency, well then it's not centralized.
So that's the importance of these things and these ledgers existing outside of a controlled state.
Yep, Totally agree.
Do you know of anything that's being developed right now to have that authentication method?
Because I hear about this all the time, like people talking that way.
There needs to be a cryptography way of authenticating whatever it is, whether it's audio visuals, stills, moving images, whatever it is, Even just sources.
There's nothing to stop us going on and writing 10 different papers about climate change and posting it, and it could be true, it might not be true.
There's no way of anyone discerning that information, so I don't hear.
The problem, I see, is that AI is growing faster than we are as legislators, as humans, as society and as governments.
I don't know what is happening at the moment.
If anyone is developing these types of systems, I know the government isn't exactly breaking the walls down to create these authentication methods.
I'm sure it's all coming.
It might take a giant crisis to get it pushed through the door quickly.
But I'm sure there's people that are developing these things because that's the nature of human identity, and some are going to end up looking very freakish and scary, like world coin, and others will look I don't know a little bit more democratic, like Ethereum, for example.
So I couldn't point you in any specific direction of who's doing it right or wrong, but there's definitely going to be a need for it, I think.
So we need to make that happen as well.
Oh, yeah, like I could do that, like I could figure that out.
Going back to that, I thought Vero was meant to be the answer to Instagram's woes for a photography app.
Have you doubled in Vero?
No, is it any?
good.
It went through a kind of little uptrend, I guess, last year when a few influencers kind of posted about it Peter McKinnon's and all that kind of guys and so everyone rushed over to Vero.
I don't know what it's doing at the moment, but as a photography app it's 10 times better than anything else it posts in for resolution.
They say it's not algorithm driven, it's timeline driven.
You can have.
It's not cropped you don't have any cropping there issues, and so it's a bit more, I guess, organic, but I don't use it.
I guess I should, but it's just another thing to.
Yeah, it's just another thing, isn't it?
But if you had an app that was only designed with photographers in mind and you didn't have access to like every other kind of person using it, would that be a good app anyway?
A walled garden that's just photographers?
I don't even know, because maybe that's why people revert back to Instagram is because you do have the possibility of something going viral and escaping your own ecosystem, right.
Sometimes on Twitter most of the times I do a post is very small.
Engagement is just the people who follow me, but sometimes something really goes stratospheric and it reaches an audience of people that don't know me and don't follow me.
Well, if I was on a Twitter that was only designed for photographers, then you would just stay inside your own bubble forever.
So maybe this app Vero or something you know technically displays in 4K or I don't know whatever, but I think the solution rest is algorithmic inside of a larger app, perhaps I don't know.
Ok, because I had alos, one of my friends and it was.
I asked a lot of questions like what dark clouds?
There's certainly a urge for people to get off those apps like Instagram and Twitter.
People will try the new thing a lot for the first few days, like you saw it with threads.
Everybody wants to escape Twitter and they'll try and they'll say, yeah, I'm leaving.
Here's my threads this is my last post.
But they're gonna come crawling back because it's not better.
So there's the urge from people to try something new, which is really good.
They want it, but it hasn't been made yet.
It's also the comfort of what you know as well.
You're always gonna come back to what you know, unless it's some huge drive, in fact, or you go on to something else and you immediately get success right.
Yeah, but Twitter threads was literally just a Twitter clone so that it felt familiar and it still didn't work, oh, okay, well, because you had to start from scratch, right, in terms of following and all of that, which is an effort.
You inherited all your Instagram followers, which was not the kind of people that I wanted because I wanted the crazies from Twitter to find me.
It would be cool, though, if you could withdraw your following and own that.
That would be a good social media app, like the way that I can like if you owned your audience right and your audience follows you.
That's part of your wallet.
So when you open up a count on threads, there's something there which informs your Instagram audience to come there.
But what if your audience could follow you through the web, like a crypto wallet, right?
Like?
When you sign on to a quote unquote like web three website you sign in, your MetaMask is plugged in there.
Then you can unplug it from there and use it on another and carry the NFTs over.
It exists inside of your wallet.
You can carry it here, deposit it there, sell it here, list it here.
The token, like the thing is owned by you across the web.
Maybe you could own your own followers in the same way, and no matter what the platform of the day is, those people could come with you the same way, Like your slaves, like well, it's more surfdom, I would say it's.
You know, it's not.
No, just like I have something of you that like I know where, I know what you're doing.
I know where you're at and I don't need like when you migrate to another platform.
The platform is a stage for this other thing that we have agreed that there's consensus on that.
That is you.
Does that make sense?
Because right now the consensus is oh, you see my little picture and it has my name.
That's the oh, joey also has Twitter, joey also has Instagram.
That's the consensus, kind of, or it's like I've linked my email to it and then verified it Like.
That's not very good, it could be way better.
Yeah.
I liked your idea of linking essentially likes to a monetary value.
That's a.
Well, of course, every photographer does One like equals $1.
I have a pitch for you, right?
Like this image got 3000 likes.
What if it was 3000 dollars?
Love it, let's do that.
Who's gonna?
That would mean that everyone who liked it has to give up a dollar.
But it's almost like that.
At the moment it's not as direct as that, but people see likes as currency and actually a lot of people successfully use the likes of Instagram.
It is currency.
Yeah, and then you can still veer off into subscription based apps, right, patreons and all these types of things where people actually pay you a dollar a month to be part of your following.
Yeah, that's a good Listen.
I really hope someone can figure it out One dollar one like.
That would be great.
But if I liked your photo, that means I have to agree that one of my dollars leaves and goes to you.
So I might have a monthly stipend where I can give 30 likes and maybe I'll like your photo and then you get it, I don't know and then I have to pay monthly right 30 bucks pushing the button.
Liquidity has to come from somewhere.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You would need a subscription for that to work.
Well, joey, I'd subscribe to you.
Tell me about your.
I mean, what's so striking with your images is okay, we can talk about the storytelling aspect of them and your projects and the greater voice of your work.
But the aesthetics and the way you put images together, how did you learn, how did you kind of cultivate that, how did you evolve that over your formative years?
Thank you very much.
Well, I think I started off rather heavy-handed with lighting and then I dialed it back, but learning in reverse.
What I mean is most photographers they start with natural light and then add something to it over time when they figure out studio lights.
Me, I think I was using strobes before I fully understood natural light, just to put it here Blast right, perfect.
So I think when I learned in backwards is just how to kind of work.
What's good about the studio light is just a little bit of elevation from the scene, right.
So like adding a little bit of control, a little bit of a painterly quality, a little bit of something otherworldly or something that's not really good Otherworldly or, let's say, dignifying the person, right.
That's a good quality about flash.
A bad quality is it can make everything look artificial, which is the opposite of what I'm trying to do.
So using a little bit of that with knowledge of natural light, I think really helped me a lot grow over the years.
So how I put things together now is maybe study what's already naturally happening within the scene and then seeing how my vision as a photographer can slightly elevate things or slightly translate things better to a 2D medium.
Because in the world, you know, we walk around it, we experience it, our interactions with things are not two dimensional, but we are.
We have a two dimensional craft, so lighting can help elevate that and kind of bring a sense of cohesion across various things that look different.
So I think when I started to interpret things in that way and see a photo kind of more like a painting, where certain things are brought to the forefront, certain things are in focus, certain things are just kind of composed for the human eye versus reality, this sort of started my style as a photographer and then I think over the time it's just gotten more refined and more refined.
And then I also believe that the edit of work I'm not talking about post production or retouching, but the edit, meaning how stories are told through photo selections is very important.
The flow of the book, the flow of the story, you know, cutting between wide and close up, a kind of a backbone for a project in the Ethiopia book it's portraits that were inside of the Nomadic studio tent.
That's the backbone of it.
And then what do you throw on top of it?
There can be a kind of a formula for different visuals to fit together into a pattern, if that makes sense, because what you don't want to do is have fall in love with every photo that you've ever taken and have to show it.
I think what's more important is to be very brutal and be able to like remove things from a story to make it stronger and show a variety of things that maybe as individual pieces they become weaker, but the sum of all the parts makes a photo collection.
That's why I think I also see in large collections, or I see in books, versus kind of like individual heavy hitting photos.
There might be a few of those if I'm lucky in a collection, but mostly I really prefer when my work is experienced as a book, like turning the pages, feeling the flow of it, feeling what I put in, what I left out.
To me there's a lot more variables to play with as a photographer when you do that, because you don't have to say everything you wanna say inside of a single picture.
Instead, you're saying it with the edit itself.
What does that process look like for you?
Do you have all your images and then you take some kind of space away from that for a while and then come back to it and start curating, selecting, and do you edit them all first, do you?
How does it all work in Jerry's mind?
I think so.
If I could use the example of the Ethiopia book again is when I started to think that this could be a book.
I already had an archive of images that I had to go through and make selections for, but I couldn't do that until the other stuff was shot.
So it was an active process of shooting a little bit, going through, making selects, taking out this, putting in this.
For me it's the most simple ingredient would be kind of coverage, right.
So it's like what's like a very wide shot, what's a very close up shot?
Mix those together.
I think that's like the easiest way to see this.
But then add more and more on top of that.
What's the diversity of the country that I'm photographing so like?
Which ethnic groups are represented, which are not?
How does it mix in terms of visual language when it flows?
Is it very jarring as a spread to see two things that are shot within the same color palette or even from the same perspective of like?
Both of these are like wide shots.
It'd be nice if one was close up, one was far away.
What am I even trying to say as a photographer?
So, for example, I describe the Ethiopia book as a love letter.
Well, it's a dignified look at Ethiopia.
It's like it's the way that I see the country.
So, because of that, there's a lot of poverty in things that exist in Ethiopia but are left out of the edit.
Right, I have a lot of photography where I even was working with NGOs inside Ethiopia that could go in this book, but then it ruins the greater arc of the narrative of the book itself.
Yes, these photos were shot in Ethiopia.
Yes, they're in regions where I wish I could include more of that in the book, but that's not what I'm trying to say with this particular project.
So it's like what is the goal of all of this, and does including that photo selection in here reach that goal or not?
Simple question, right?
So, because the book is divided into geographic regions, right, like North East, southwest Center, those are all kind of subsections, and then within those exist all of the other parameters that I just described, and then the sum of all those parts North East, southwest make up the Ethiopia book.
Because the other thing is, ethiopia is a country where there is 80 different languages spoken, right, so the idea of Ethiopia itself is a modern day nation state that includes all of these things inside of the invisible geographic borders that we know today.
But the reason why all these different people are here is way before the nation state borders existed.
That we know today through different movements of people through time.
So what is the book itself?
Well, it's kind of a photographic, stylistic way to weave all of these very distinct groups together, where my lighting style or my visual approach as a photographer might be like a nation state to unify these into a collective body of work, but also the individual people themselves.
We can highlight the diversity and the like beautifully unique things about them, and that like doesn't change from my style.
Does that make sense?
Yep, so that's how I saw.
How do you do a book on a country?
Because a country is also very arbitrary, right?
Like if you look back at ancient maps of Ethiopia, of course, it's the only country that was never successfully colonized by Europeans in Africa.
So a lot of the borders are the same, but many things are also different.
So when you have a title of a book that's a country name, like what is that?
That's like a really hard question to solve with photography.
That's what the book is.
But you stamp on that.
You can stamp your own interpretation on the word of that country, Ethiopia, your interpretation of it, right.
Is that?
Yeah, because it's a visual medium.
So the things I'm doing with lighting, the portrait tent, the lighting style, could be the grand unifier of all of this.
And, of course, culturally, there's things that are inherent in the country that are unifying.
Anyway, all that stuff's going on with the religion, with the language, okay, but as a photographer, you're also taking a stylistic approach to this.
So that's one of the few things that you can get involved with that you can have a vision on.
When your subjects are real people.
How do you balance the If it was my own made up world, you could do more things with it, but because it's the world as it is, that's what you add to it as a photographer.
Yeah, yeah, how do you balance the aesthetic style or your intent with the aesthetics, with the representing the dignity of the people and the storytelling behind that all?
Because I'm just kind of trying to zoom in on a photo shoot with you in the tent yeah, what is priority number one there and how do you balance these kind of two things that you bring together, of course, but they kind of are separate to begin with in terms of style, lighting, visuals, people, goal, story.
How do you kind of go about balancing those?
A great photograph should have both.
You should feel the hand of the photographer.
This is what I believe.
Other people don't see it that way.
They might be more purist, and that's okay, the kind of photography that I admire.
You can feel the style of the artist, but equally so you can feel the people there.
So for me it's always that balance and it's not something that you just know and do.
It's like something you have to constantly work on and work out as you're there.
Right, because there's some things that I think would be great but they're not happening right.
Versus, if I were Sam and I could paint everything, there'd be a different artistic expression.
Photography is an artistic expression where you're actually photographing real things.
So there's very few things that you can actually control.
But what an artist, what a photographer does choose to control results in the outcome of the work.
So, for example, one of my favorite photographers is Sebastio Salgado.
You can really feel his presence and his hands in the work, right?
What's another one of like?
Who's your favorite photographer and why?
No, like, really like.
Can you feel them in it right?
Otherwise they're just random images.
So if you see this as an art.
You want to feel the artist right.
The first photographer I really got into is Steve McCurry.
Okay, and you know you can feel his hand and everything.
There's a way that he would see the world where another artist in his same place wouldn't see it.
That way they would do another kind of art.
What I like about but the people could be the same.
But what I like about here and you and some of my favorite photographers is there is always cohesiveness in the aesthetic and the style, but there's also evolution in how that's developed and how that tells a story, which I think is incredibly difficult to do, but the people that do it, you know, are the people that rise to the top, in my opinion.
What about someone like Gregory Crudson?
Right, he has the kind of cinematic Americana large format photography of quintessential American scenes.
But sometimes there's something odd or eerie going on.
They like paintings.
Their paintings are like full on cinema sets.
But if you look back at some of his early, early work the first series like Twilight that he did you can tell like stylistically he wasn't as refined.
I mean, he's like cranking lights, things are kind of wacky but like all the same stuff that he later on and refined in his later series like Cathedral of the Pines or whatever.
It was always there because it comes from him.
Like he has a vision.
That's the kind of work that I love.
He was that person, whether he was a photographer or not, and he like manifested all of this into his visuals.
Like I love that.
If you look across the board of his work over time, you can see it.
Another good example David LaChapelle.
Doesn't matter what he shot, what he did, like you can feel him in there, right, there's so many people that photographed the same celebrity.
That person exists, but there's no one that didn't like him, right?
That stuff is like so brilliant to me.
That's what I love.
That like really gets me motivated.
Even though I'll never shoot anything like that, I love it.
Yeah, totally agree.
That's the end of part one of this episode with Joey L.
Thanks so much for listening and I hope you can tune in next week for part two.