Your Body Decides the Photograph Before You Do - Photographer Tim Carpenter, E119

Well, to photographs to learn how to die, I think. I don't think that the world has inherent meaning.

“I think that we human beings are the creators of any meaning there.”

And I find that to be liberating, but I find it to be a responsibility. This is Tim Carpenter, photographer, educator, reviewer, and author. He's spent a lifetime making pictures, pushing the boundaries of what we understand about why we pick up a camera at all. If I was six inches taller, six inches shorter, every single one of my pictures would be different. Right? You can't pull yourself out of it, so you can't pull the dumb machine out of it either.

In this episode, you will learn why the form of a picture matters more than whatever sits in front of the lens, how the camera quietly reveals who you are, and why finding your voice means walking towards the strangest, most uncomfortable part of yourself. Why this matters? Well, it's simple.

Most of us stay busy chasing trends, approval, and gear, and never make the work that is unmistakably ours.

This is the conversation that hands you back your own reasons for picking up a camera. I was mid 80s a gay kid in the Midwest of the United States. This is not a possibility for anyone I'm not going to be happy in the way that I understood you're everyone else to be happy in. I want to get to that really weird part and maybe a little uncomfortable. And maybe it should be a little uncomfortable.

Tim, welcome to the show. It's great to finally have you on here. Thanks so much for having me. It's already been a pleasure talking to you in person before,

“so I think we're going to have a good time.”

Yeah, I'm sorry. There's a lot to go through, and I say that with many of my guests, but with you especially, having been such a prolific artist in this space for a while and having met at Chico Review and giving me a review and then discussing things a little bit more. There's a lot of layers of interest. I want to dive into, but the thing I want to start with before we kind of get into a little bit of your background and your pedigree because I think

people who may not know you, you could kind of explain how you kind of came up in the space and wife photography means so much to you. But there's one topic I think that kind of is overlaid with a lot of the things that you write about, talk about, photograph, and that's this theme of the broken self. And I know I'm pretty sure you kind of talk about this and educate your students with this, but I want you to elaborate on this thesis for me, at least this subject of the

broken self, how it all broke and why that pertains or how that pertains to photography specifically

and your practice. Yeah, for sure. No, that is probably you've isolated the single most important

thing to me and it has different ways of expressing, different ways of manifesting. But you know,

“I think the real and the ideal never match up for us human beings and that is the root of all of”

our pain, our existential suffering, is that we are, we were this amazing conscious creature that can think itself into the past, it can think itself into the future, it can think itself into other places, places that don't even exist, times that don't even exist. This conscious mind can do it all. This body is stuck in the here and the now. And that is a really painful disjunction. You know, like no matter how much you want that girlfriend or boyfriend back,

no matter how much you want to grant mother back, no matter how much you want to be in Paris right now, if you're not, you know, and that sounds a little trivial, but you know, like, um, but this whole thing is this, this, the gift of our consciousness, consciousness, it comes with a price,

is that, you know, like there's just always this tension in there, but in us. And you know,

like it's so many different people talk about it in different ways, like Lacan and dirt on, you know, like a bunch of other people. But that, I mean, when you just say that that's just really kind of the basic thing. And I think, be personally, is that that is what engenders all are, is we're always just trying to knit something together between what we want and what we can have and find something in there. And, you know, in the book I wrote and, you know, my favorite

quote is about wall Stevens and his whole project, I mean, it was kind of like always making peace or finding like a bit of a way to, to reconcile the real and the idea or like one poem, you know, that's a, one's one commentator called it a temporary truce, you know, there was never a final end of the war, but you had a little, every poem was a truce. And I really believe that about every photograph is a little truce between what's innocent, what we want and what the war

And it will not match our desires. And so we're just trying to figure out this thing. And that's the brokenness, you know, like that's the eternal brokenness of this conscious creature. So it's our glory, but it's our downfall. And, you know, like it's, it's our, our think our job, not only as artists, just as human beings, is to try to find a way to, and live really fruitfully, and profitably, and maximize ourselves knowing that, you know, and saying, okay, that's the deal.

I'm going to work with it. I'm going to do the best I can. Yeah, it's liberating one way once you understand those types of limitations, right? And then you could work, work within them, and understand yourself a little bit more, and the limitations

are working within the external world. And the point I always bring this around to is the painter,

the poet, the limitations of the world don't really exist much for anybody who works in a assigned-based medium, and I can move the tree. I can, in a poem, I don't, the tree was there, but I don't even have to say it existed. Us people with a camera, we have to move our body, you know, to move around and to get that tree out of the picture, but then the whole world is changing. So again, like that, and what I was saying, the world will not give itself up to us to our conscious

witches. It won't give itself up to the camera either. You have to do the work to make that happen.

“And I think that's why the, you know, the camera is so profoundly different from any, any other”

art form, and certainly any sign-based form. This, I guess I don't want to call it philosophy, but this, this, this way of, I guess seeing the utility of the camera and, and how it can be, almost cathartic in a sense. But do you get, it could be perceived as a little bit nihilistic, and, you know, to, for me, not so much, but do you get any pushback in, in the way that you describe that and the way that you, you talk about it? Oh, I get pushback. Yeah, and that's fine.

I enjoy. Listen, I love friction. I thrive on the kind of friction. And by the way, I will tell you, again, I've written a whole book. I'm writing another one. I don't think I've ever gotten anything right.

I don't think there are things to get right, you know, later. There's no, I always say there's no teachers

edition that has all the answers in the back of this thing. I'm just saying some things that might result with some people. They might not result with other people. Oh, cool. You know, but there was

“one phrase written about Nietzsche and said, he was a nihilist in a sense that you have to”

clear out a field of weeds to plant a garden. All right, so there's, yeah, there's some things, you know, and a lot of people, they like sort of our conscious ability to narrow stories for itself. I like to daydream. I like to think myself as a really great musician. I love this, you know, like, and I know why people, a lot of people do not want to deal with reality. I had, and also, I would say, getting to the nihilism point. I'm fine. And for some reason,

I've been like, "Sway, all my life. I'm fine with not having meaning and everything." Okay. I'm fine when things aren't offering up themselves, because I don't think that the world has inherent meaning. I think that we human beings are the creators of any, any meaning there. And I find that to be liberating, but I find it to be a responsibility, you know, is that now it's, it's my job to, to create meaning, because there's nothing sitting there.

“And I'm, I'll tell you just, I'll go a little bit further with this, is that I think that's why”

I love photography so much. But also, I've been attracted for a long time, and now I'm finally starting to understand it to, like, abstract art. And to avant-garde, like, jazz and classical music, that most people find, you know, like, or now culminate, like, that's just screechy. And I'm like, my God, I think it's the most beautiful thing, because it's not giving itself up to this easy interpretations. And, like, you know, my favorite point, one of my favorite painters is Joan Mitchell,

but like, I also say the same thing of, like, twombley or somebody, is that, you know, like, people, like, there's no meaning in that. And I was like, yes, that's right. You know, like, I am called upon now to interact with this thing and figure it out or not figure it out. But it's not,

it's not giving me these things. And guess what, life is never going to give you these things. It's

such a joke. Now, again, that is me. That's the way I approach the world. That's the way I write. But you're right. I mean, like, not everybody likes to think this way. And, you know, I get that. Sorry to cut away from the episode from in it, but I wanted to talk to you about something very quickly. Now, I spent a long time thinking that isolation was part of the deal when it came to photography, that if you were so serious about the work, you did it alone. You'd consume enough, watching

off, reading off, and eventually it would all cohere into something meaningful. And it sometimes did.

wasn't a course or a workshop. It was a conversation with someone who was doing the same kind of work and cared about it in exactly the same way I did. The doubts didn't disappear, but they got a little

“bit smaller and I felt more okay with them. They got named. That's what I'm building with the mood”

inside us. It's a place where the work is taken seriously, where you can bring your questions, and, of course, your hard-finished ideas, and where someone would actually engage with them. We have the ad-free extended podcast episodes with bonus content. We have monthly Masterclasses, Q&A sessions, and, of course, the weekly book clubs, and direct access to me and my team. Because you don't have to do this alone. So, the link is in the show notes. Hopefully, I'll see you

inside. Do you think we, I guess, collectively, as photographers? Do you think we try and insert too much meaning in our work? I do think that that happens a lot. And listen, I'm going to say something again that I don't, again, I don't mean I'm right, but I think the world right now, and I also, I'm going to say this, I think the world is probably correct right now, is that most of the things you see at, like, Perry photo or APAD are whatever, they, you know,

there's good, easy, prose, equivalence to take out of the picture. And that's the way the world is right now. And the reason I'm not like complaining about that is I think that there's been too many people who have not had the fair share and have not been represented properly. The politics of it, I'm all behind it. You know, we do need those things to happen. That's cool. The thing I would just

“want to argue for is that that's not the only thing. There is still room for, for this thing,”

that's just not quite going to spoon out the politics, the topics, the ideologies, or whatever, you know, like there's these things that can also exist. You know, and most people call that

derogatory, they call it art for art sake. You know, that's always used pejoratively. And I've said

all that art for art takes means is that it exists interpretation. And I strive to make things that do resist interpretation. That's where I would like to be. That's where most of my heroes have seemed to work. I also still, you can see this library around me. There's so much stuff in here that in varying degrees does or does not do what I'm saying I would do personally. So I still enjoy that other kind of work. I just, I'm talking about, you know, what I, I seem to be driven to

do. And I want to put a little fine point on this is that that ethical kind of argument is the people say you need to be one must be politically engaged. And again, the way that we are in the world and the way that we are particularly right now in the United States, that is absolutely true. That is more true of the person I am, rather than the photographer or whatever or writer that I am. And the argument that I've come to understand just in the last couple of years is that

every, each and every human being, resist interpretation. And there's a lot of powerful

philosophies. It's the only way you can meet something truly ethically is to meet it as an absolutely singular thing that is not interpreted in interpreted in your language that is not owned or appropriated by any of your concepts or categories. You know, and that is a really powerful idea. That's what I'm writing my next book about. But so there is a politics, there's an ethics to also for art for art sake, even though that's not really popular right now. I think it's valuing another human being

“or even a tree or a rock or whatever, it's absolute singularity. And that's what the camera does I think.”

Is that extended to a responsibility as much as an ethical viewpoint? It is. You know, and I'll just go a little far. So the guys who really got into this while the one was in manual loving us, and also Maurice Blancho, but they were writing after the Holocaust when, you know, the totalizing ideas of categories and concepts had really gotten us messed up. And their thing was, you know, loving us was said the only way to be responsible

to another human being is to be proximate to them and to not think of them as any sort of, there's no categories for this other creature. It is absolutely singular. It is absolutely,

there's never been a person or anything like it before. There never will be again. And you have to

meet it that way. And that's your responsibility. I will say that most commentators also say that loving us is ethic is impossible. But they say that it's good to strive for. It's good to think

they're necessarily 100% achievable, but they're good to keep in mind and they're, you know,

they're a good, like, guide post. Yeah, driver. When you talk about resisting interpretation, seems a little bit abstract. Can you can you elaborate a little bit and maybe kind of ground it in an example, maybe? Yeah, for sure. I use, well, the one example I like to use is one of my favorite photographs of all is a John Gossage picture that is of a cardboard box. And I'll add and kind of some bright sunlight. And, you know, like, when I saw that, but when I'd seen the pond

before, it's just like, okay, so you could save a, it's cardboard. All right, it's, yeah, bright sun. You're kind of then thwarted, all right. And you know, there's not much more to say.

In my artist talk, though, and stuff I talk about, some things I love and still review, like,

let's talk about, you know, like, Robert Frank or Helen Abbott, Dorothy Elaine, those photographers benefited from what you knew about worldly topics, like tree war period, the inner war period, the depression, race relations, gender relations, specifically getting into like advertising culture, car culture, celebrity, all, you know, all this kind of stuff. Like, and if you see some of those pictures, any smart high schooler could start to write like 10 pages, you know, about all of that kind of stuff.

“Those, and I'm talking about these pictures that I think are great. So I'm saying, I think they're great,”

but I think that one can do a lot of interpretation on them because of the way that that photographer met the world. And, you know, they're editing choices or shooting choices and all that kind of stuff. And again, like, I love them all. I'm just, you know, I'm kind of making a countermajoritarian, I don't know if that's the right word to say, but like an argument for for things that don't give themselves up easily or end or and resist it, actually entirely,

and that's, you know, kind of what I'm talking about the music and the painting as well, or like, you know, what they call language poetry or concrete poetry, you know, and in fact, that's the reason that most people are scared of poetry is because they're like, I don't know the meaning here. And once you kind of free up and be like, I'm not meant to get a meaning here. I'm meant to like, just absorb this thing and feel it, then you can, you relax into poetry and you're like,

all right, this is pretty cool. But if you're trying to extract some prose equivalent to the poem,

you're never going to do it and you're only going to frustrate yourself and you're doing it wrong.

“You know, that's what I think. Yeah, that's good. That's really, really nice to ground that.”

I found that also a lot when we first met Chico, I found myself doing that a lot and, you know, all of all of my critiques as well as the general narrative around the reviewers and getting informal feedback and just discussions was exactly that. And that's probably the the biggest thing that I took away from that. But when you talk about this political engagement, do you again, do you feel like artists or photographers try and do too much with their photographs

in that respect and kind of insert, you can't almost that extentality and then at that external intent that may sway them down the wrong path or maybe again, like adding interpretation when maybe it's not there or do you feel like there's there's room for that and for people to find their path in, however they want to use their photographs and use their practices as a utility, essentially, it was a fun thing. Yeah, listen, we all got to follow what's in us and if anyone

like me, like some stupid guy like me dictates to you what you make pictures of, you've really

“made a mistake, you know, that's what I feel like. It was more getting towards what the latter”

thing you said is like, listen, if there's things political in you that have to get out, that is what you have to do. You're like, I don't, there's no way as me as a teacher or an editor or a reviewer could ever say anything against that. Now, one thing you said I do think is really interesting is that I've told this to several people that are views. I say, your pictures are more interesting than the way you talk about them. And that happens because these people are intuitively

making pictures, but I think they feel these pressures, like MFA pressure, pressure to write grant proposals, pressure for awards, where you have to connect it, like everybody feels like I got to connect this to the political situation. And that becomes a very tenuous, not well-supported situation, and also, you know, part of what I've been talking about is that when we are in politics and topics and stuff, we're in conventions, we're in our calm and culture. When somebody sits

down in front of me with 40 pictures, 50 pictures, I'm actually, for me, I'm seeing something

and that machine against the world. And that's what fascinates me. And I don't want to talk

about it. I mean, we start to talk, we have to use words, but I don't want to talk about it in sort of commonalities that everybody is talking about or everybody, or like lowest common denominators. You know, I mean, you know the way, like I really want to go into like the edges of the pictures, I want to go into the depth, so I want to go into the chaos in the picture, or the completion of the picture. I want to go into like all the things the picture is doing way before I go into ideas

about what that person's representative. Yeah. When you say what the picture is doing in the chaos, are you talking about form essentially because you use that, you use that word a lot. And I think for amateurs, I begin a photographer's learning and want to get into the space. You throw this almost abstract word in this like form. What does, what does, what, I know what form is in terms of me and an object? When it comes to photography, I see that in your work so much and I love the way

you talk about, you know, not even thinking about the narratives or, you know, connecting it with some kind of representation and looking at the form of a photograph and a photographer in how they, they're positioning themselves, whatever, you know, kind of the layers of that are. Can you elaborate on this word for us and connect it deliberately to your photographs and how you see other people's? Well, there's a couple of important things to say about form. One is that, you know, like,

“when I talk to people, they say, "Oh, no subject matters, the only thing that's important to me."”

And I say, "Okay, cool." So when you come across a situation, a person, whatever, then you want a photograph, you want to make a photograph. How many exposures do you make? And they're, like, you know, two, three, four, maybe in digital, like a bunch. And I say, "Well, then, guess what?" Subject matter, the politics of that is, I guess it's important to you, but you seem to want to make a good picture. And that's what I'm talking about when I, what I mean

form is it's the structure of the picture. And there's, you know, there's a lot of thinking in, in theory of art, is that for anything really to hit, like, if you want the politics to hit,

the form has to hit first, the beauty of the picture has to come to you first. And then, you know,

you can really get the message with that. If, if you, if you make something that really affects someone, then you're going to get, you're going to get kind of an, an entree into them to really

“twist the knife. If you got something that you would like to say. And that's, that's how that”

whole thing works. I don't think I'm going to tell you, I forgot, I forgot. I forgot my first point. I forgot the last one. I forgot. I was not going to repeat it enough now. Now, there comes a point in every photographer's journey where gear or technique stops being the question, you've learned your camera, you can read light, you know how to edit, how to produce, what a good frame looks like. And you can probably make one on demand quite easily. But something

is still missing. The work feels good. Competent, maybe even pretty, but it doesn't quite feel completely yours. It doesn't really say anything that couldn't have been said by someone else on Instagram with the same camera. That's the moment most people get stuck, not at the beginning, but right here, right there, somewhere in the middle of it, in the midst of it, where you have all the tools, but not really any of the language. And the reason it's so hard to move past is because

nobody can teach you your voice in a tutorial or a silly little YouTube video. Because it's not a setting on the dial, it has to be drawn out of you slowly by methods and introspections that actually allow you to look at yourself and your work and challenge you with the harder questions,

“all in order to draw out your unique and photographic voice. That's what my voice alchemy mentorship”

program is. It's an online container for photographers who really already know how to use their camera, but want to use it to say something that's more meaningful and that actually matters to them. Personalized strategy, honest feedback, and the kind of work that builds their body,

a voice, and a brand that actually gets noticed. It's not a course, it's just the thing I always

wished I had had. And it's the thing I now spend most of my days doing. The link is in the show notes, so if something in this is calling you hit the link and we'll see where you're at. When now this concept becomes enlightening for you, when did you know go coming up into the art schools and actually I can't remember you maybe you can tell us how you learned photography and came into it because I know you had an indirect introduction into photography, but give us an explanation

this concept of beauty that is formed the external, the internal, how you kind of package that

“in the way you see art? Well it's a good question because that's entirely intimately related.”

So I have an undergrad in business, I went to law school, I didn't think I was an artist,

I didn't know, I always took pictures, but I took a lot, I was seriously interested and

I got into some like group shows, I was doing okay, what I started to realize and so I went to graduate school to the Hartford Art School and I got an MFA from them, so I dropped out of full time, I was a manager, I was getting good money, I thought my life was set and then the Hartford program came around, so in 2010 I dropped out of full time appointment and went to grad school. What I was starting to understand, and this was late in grad school, but also in and then after,

without part of me was so into the Steven Shore, Joel Sternfeld's sort of Western, not only Western, but landscape sort of road trip kind of thing, color,

“you know, and I was using a 4x5, I was using a MFA 67, so like there was that kind of thing.”

The other thing that was gigantic was that sleeping by the Mississippi, I had only been out of

a year or two, so Alex Portrait, yeah, so Alex's Portrait work had, you know, it was really dominant. And what I, you know, I even sometimes in my, my talks to students, I mentioned this, is like, I would go and I did a road trip with my dad, even around the West, I would come back, you know, 100 rolls and 80 sheets or whatever, and in my head, I'd be like, I hope that old motel sign worked out, I hope that interesting looking guy turned out, you know, like I'm

so subject matter driven because I was thinking about those photographers and others in the wrong way. I was just looking at what they had photographed and not how they were structuring that whole thing. And so it took a while to get out of that book, the kind of fortune that I didn't plan this, but the fortunate thing I did is I decided to make my thesis project, my dad and I were, my dad's a lifelong railroad fan, and there was this line that has long, was long gone

in central Illinois, it was on the electric line, you know, that just had passenger service and that later some, you know, some freight, but we, you know, using some maps and GPS and stuff, we were, we found the old rail line and I was just photographing along it. So like that took me out of like trying to find interesting things. Now I had to figure out a long, this, just long narrow line, how am I going to structure pictures that are interesting? And so, you know, that makes

it sound like it happened overnight, it didn't happen over many months, and I had to really think about it, but you know, I was like, so now, and this is true to the day, you know, like I, and now even with the digital that I'm editing much more quickly, but like 150 rolls, 100 sheets or whatever, I come, I'm like, yeah, it's some trees, it's some water, it's some roads. I don't, you know, I'm not really remembering any specific subject matter that I, I'm hoping for. So that

with that's the major turn in and I, you know, I just felt like I really need to work on understanding the form of this thing. And then, in writing that first book, but now I even fully, you know, much more understand about, I'm really interested in idiosyncrasy. And I probably brought that up with you, Chico. I'm really interested in, like, how, how we get to the most individual, weird,

strange part of us, because I think that that's, that's almost always going to be successful in

art, you know, if we can, if the closer we can get to that thing. And tying this back to what I said earlier about science and language and stuff like that is that, you know, mecha said, we can't be individual in language and consciousness, because that's a commonality that we share, we share our language, we share these ideas, it's stuff. There's been a whole lot of, you know, a branch of philosophy called phenomenonology and a guy named Marie Smurley Ponte, he's kind of my hero. He's like, you know,

the body is where we are individual. The body knows nothing of concepts or anything and each body not only are all our bodies obviously different, but each body moves through the world differently.

“And that's why you hear me keep hammering on the body and the machine and how the body is,”

how one place is one's body in relation to the world and the subject matter. Are you getting in really tight? Are you maintaining a distance? Are you, you know, are you, whatever, you know, like, how are you doing this? And that is where, you're like, people ask me, they're like, when you meet 60 people, 70 people at Chico, does it get boring or does it get old? And I'm like,

positions herself against the world. And I'm like, that will never cease to amaze me. Now,

we can say that they're very levels of quality or where they are and all that project of course. But like, to get to see how another person's structures her world, it's never, it's never going to bore me. It's always going to fascinate me. But anyway, I'm kind of trailing off. But you know, like, this dot, the idea, you know, like, I'm a person who kind of has to explain stuff to myself. So when I say, yeah, I'm more interested in form. I was like, okay, well, I'm not just going to

stop there. What does that, what does that really mean? And it means the bodily structure of things. You know, and there's been famous writers, this woman named Vernon Lee, who's amazing, like quoted in the first book. But she's like, yeah, we can talk about the subject matter of a painting easily. We have tons of words for that. We have a very, very hard time talking about the form

“of anything. You know, like, and that's, and she's like, that's why it's special. You know,”

like, it doesn't lend itself to these interpretations coming back around to, you know, what resists interpretation and what it will not let itself be owned or appropriated or brought into what you would like it to be. And so that's why I really stick with form. That's why I stick with the body, because I think that's the genesis of almost anything interesting, especially with the camera. When you say body, you incorporate the mind in that as well, because

that it's all one thing, right? And the mind is essentially the, it's certainly our subconscious

is incredible how much that controls our actions, decisions. And we could talk about free well,

and, you know, whether you believe in it or not until the cows come home. But essentially, everything is driven by what's up here. And I'm extremely interested in those subliminal, subliminal, subliminal decisions that photographers make in the moment, and you do, you talked about it before, and people make decisions before they walk out the house to go

“and photograph. But they don't know why. And I think that's such a huge, complex layer to try and”

break down as a photographer. Because once you start to understand why you make certain decisions, why you see things some way, why you put yourself in certain positions, not others. Essentially, why you choose specific form. Once you start to understand that, then you just hold new world opens up and you can really start to understand yourself. And therefore, you can potentially translate it a little bit better into the viewer. Am I making any sense with that?

Matt, you just wrote my thesis statement for, like, the way I teach writing right now, yeah, it's like, I've kind of tried to be engineer the idea of how you write about stuff to make it come from that get, let's get that underlying structure. And we can ratchet up to politics and ideas and whatever. But I want to start with how, you know, like, it's the world seem chaotic to me. Are the pictures chaotic? That's important. You know, like, are the pictures so well, you know,

like, a lot of people make their pictures from kind of the outside in, you know, like in their common stable. And I was like, that speaks a different world than I've been a very chaotic, you know, like, picture with all the edges, there's things coming in, you know, like, or whatever, the, you know, especially for me, it's the bottom edge of a picture, like the footing, or where, do I have a purchase on that world? Am I standing where am I standing? Am I moving, you know,

when you shoot up, when you shoot down, you know, all of those things impact us. Like, and I, I really feel like, in, especially in a project, you can manage someone's bodily space. You can bring things in to them. You can take things away from them. You can force them into

“different orientations of the body. And that is a really important organizing principle when you're”

working with multiple pictures. It's going to figure out, well, what's my dominant mode? Do I stay tight? And then, like, my minor mode is to get out a little bit, or, you know, like, am I kind of emotionally distant with my pictures? And then only a little bit, do I ever allow myself, you know, to get in tight a little bit? Now, there's one thing I do want to say, because I, you know, it's easy for me to kind of gloss over it. But when I say the body,

I mean the body and the brain, absolutely. What I mean, and I call it the cognitive body, a lot, and using some other people's phrases like that, what I mean, it's not the conscious brain. And, you know, the lot of people call these, you know, big, big fancy words they call an incommensurable. A lot of the leading, not only the leading philosophers, but the leading neuro scientists say that, you know, like, this thing, the hunk of meat, and it's brain,

there's, there's some strange thing between that and the consciousness. And still,

I, they, a lot of people feel they're, they're never ever going to know how those two things

absolutely relate. You know, and that's a fascinating thing. But the body is super, it's like the body does so much to filter out so much that we, you know, like, and a lot of thinkers actually say that if something, if a situation gets thrown into consciousness, that's actually

And sometimes we need to do a little problem, so I mean, you know, with concepts. But the body

does so much, like, I tell people, if you drive for 15 minutes, you know, in a familiar place. And if somebody probes you afterwards and say, what all happened, you'll be like, I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Can you think of the billions, like the, the tiny increments of you, paying attention, using feet pedals, using your hands, doing all of the side of the kind of stuff. The brain just, the non-conscious brain of the body just do it. And that's also why when you're

learning driver, you're, you're bad. It's because you're, you're being like, oh, I got it. I need to

“work through the concepts that I have. And that's why you're a shitty driver. Once the body takes it over,”

you become a much better driver because you're not spending all that time with the consciousness. And I will tell you, I think this is absolutely true. I don't know if you've experienced this, but when I get a new camera, especially now that I have a digital camera, they could do about a

billion things more than I needed to do. Like, it takes me a while for the body to get right with

that machine. And to start to feel like, you know, like, I'm not, I want the conscious mind to stop. And I want to just work with the machine. The same thing is true of getting a new lens, even on the like an old film camera, especially the lens on like a 4x5. Like, I guys, all right, the world's changing here, you know, that can have a, I have a different view of this thing. And it takes me a little while, the body walking around with that tripod to be like, okay,

here's, here's probably where I want to be. You know, I'm going to mess around with it a little bit.

“But then if you change your lens, you're, you're probably where I want to be. It's not different, right?”

But the body usually takes care of all that. And we don't need to consciously think about it. And I, I happen to personally think the better, the more we can avoid the conscious thinking, the more interesting and strange the pictures get. Couldn't agree more. Do you practice doing courage with your students then to practice some form of mindfulness or some, you know, more mindset training or whatever it might be, because we're all, you know, say, we're all,

I speak generally, of course. But generally, even more so now in society, we're so in our heads with not aware of anything that you just talked about, which is it was so kind of in a day dream, all day hooked to our phones, hooked to the next distraction that we're experiencing. Do you do, I truly believe that, you know, to be a better artist, to be more connected with ourselves and with our, with our practice ignoring, like we talked about the external elevations,

we might put on our work later on and how we present it to the world. But in order to make stuff that we feel is meaningful and connected with form and what we interpret as beauty in that, as well as the kind of the, the, the beauty of our own expression and doing that,

“the accurately and authentically to ourselves, I honestly believe that we need to know ourselves as”

much as possible without being tethered to the conscious, right? To be able to be free of that, but mindful of the body, mind connected to the body, mindful of what your body is doing in any moment, how you're feeling, all of the, the sensations, the emotions that thoughts, but not get attached to them, but be aware of them and I truly believe that is, you know, the source of being a better, a better, a better photographer, but a more empowered and more artistic photographer. So, do you,

does that ever enter the conversation in your teachings and, and how you kind of encourage people? It does, but I don't, you know, like, I don't, I probably don't use a word like mindfulness, but I mean, I'm getting there through the back doors, be like, let's talk about how you, you're using this machine, you know, like, and then, you know, like, all the things I've already been talking about and we're like, look at the pictures and be like, you know, you're making,

let's say when somebody's making, I usually find this with myself. I'm making three or four or five different kinds of pictures within, you know, like, with the distances, with the edges, or whatever, and I start to figure out what the dominant sort of thing is and where the calibrations are like, you know, going in and out of that. And that would be, that would be my idea of what I would call mindfulness, just like, starting to think about. And I'm going to tell you this, like, I,

like, a lot of people are like, when do I need to be at? And I, I still, there's no, there's no answer to that. I think, I think everybody needs to be really free and intuitive and just use the machine and, like, make a lot of exposures, you know, like, but at some point, and this is different, it's a different community and every project, and it's so, it's so different for everyone, it's like, you kind of got to gank yourself out of it a little bit and put the screws to it,

and be like, what have I been making here? Yeah. What am I doing? And why? Yeah. And the why I can even kind of ladder up from, you know, and I'm, because I'm going to tell you, like, I've had people when we found like, I almost feel like it's like, I'll just a little bit away,

or stick hard, just maybe. But like, my first book, the local objects, like, I,

there's a lot of dead foreground space and a lot of these pictures. And I, my next thought was, what is that saying about me? Like, am I kind of a distant person right now? And that actually was the case,

“you know, like, and so the, the vibe, I think from a really strict examination of the, what you've been”

doing your pictures, you can start to come up with a why. You know, like, do I feel complete and whole, you know, do I feel like a sort of fragmentary right now? You know, you know, how much do I want to get into the weeks? Like, literal weeds, but also like metaphorical weeds, you know, like how much am I getting

in there? And I think that our bodies, our bodies and our lives are always changing.

My, the way I make pictures, the way I place myself against the world, now that I'm an older guy, I'm able to look back at times, sometimes long-ish, sometimes quite short, depending on, like, a life advantage or something, where I was just a different creature with respect to the world. And I made that I thought to necessarily make a different kind of picture because the camera is attached to this thing. You know, and I've said it before, but like, there's, there's dumb things to say about it. If I was six

inches taller, six inches shorter, every single one of my pictures doesn't do that, right? I know, it's, but also just think about, like, there's not beautiful. Well, it is, but also if you're happy, your shoulders open up, like, if you, if things are terrible, you close in and you move differently, and the machine is responsive to every little bit of that. Yeah. And I think that's its glory. You know, like, I mean, it is there and it is going to be with you and you can't fool it.

You can't fool it out of that. You know, like, you can't fool yourself out of it, so you can't fool the dumb machine out of it either. Yeah. But anyway, that, you know, like,

“it's just kind of tying this all together is that, you know, like, that's why I love the cameras”

so much as it is, you know, like, it is just absolutely responsive to this, this thing we are moving through the world. And I think that's where we are, where we are most interesting and our most unique. Yeah. Yeah. I love, I love the way you talk about it and just, I think about one of my community members who brought this up literally on Monday when we had a meetup and he talked about how

he took portraits a lot. But the portraits were always tight and he didn't know how to kind of

he didn't know that first step to get away from that because he obviously didn't want to just support photo of headshots. He wanted to find a way to move around a little bit more. I get a little bit wider and not just stick a wide angle lens on the camera. Maybe that's like one thing he can try later down the road. But how would you even start to break that down for someone? You know, if they come to you and because I was a little bit stumped, like, well, just step back

a little bit, think about environmental portraits a little bit. But we have to, I guess, answer the questions of why that, why you might be inclined to always be in tight. So where would you even break that down for someone like that? What are the first kind of cues that you could give them? Well, I'm going to give you a couple of things. First, props. I have modeled much of my approach with teaching after Andrea Modica because I took like a two or three week

and course with her at ICP years ago and she said all about portraits. And I think I just happen to be the first person who was picked to go through your pictures. Or right away, she's like, she sent things like class. Look how that shoulder hits the background. Look how he decided to give the person this much headspace versus not. Look how the feet are chopped off versus how it versus this. And I'm going to tell you, I went to school and I have spoken with many

“like the top portrait photographers of the and almost invariably the best thing you get out of them”

is like, oh, I like the body language or I like the look. You know, like, and Andrea just was so specific about everything that was happening in that picture. And I was like, I was like, that is actionable. I like that. And I'm going to be the actionable guy if I ever get to be doing this thing. And so that's like why I want to be like, we're going to look at these things really hard. We're going to figure some things out. A little bit of a related thing. And this happens, I've told you,

it happens in portfolio reviews a lot, but also with some of my longer term students, somebody is saying, so interested in this place, you know, I've been going back and back there,

you know, multiple times and stuff. And they'll make these landscapes amazing. They'll shoot

them at 11 or 8 depending on the light and every, you know, a really a picture plane that's really there. All of all there. Then they make the portraits and they go down to like five, six or four. It's a pop, the figure, off of this landscape. And I'm just like, listen, the portrait looks great. Maybe next time, consider if the light allows, trying to knit that person into this landscape that you've told me is super important to you. You know, and I'm going to give, I've done this before.

little phrases I've ever heard. She called those pinned butterflies. She's like, you stick the needle

right through the creature and elevate them off their background. And they look great. But you also kind of kill them. And you remove them from this space. And so like, that is just a matter of your, your aperture choice. That's a matter of your focal, you know, what you're doing locally, these are machine things, these are choices, formal choices. And I'll just keep coming back to that. But like, every formal choice you make with, again, with like, so, okay,

so if the light's done, do you use a faster speed or do you go to digital, you know, faster speed film? Another thing I want to tell you about, Mark Steinnets, I did a podcast with him. I didn't interview with him while we were walking the streets of Paris. He had been working in

“Paris in Berlin and maybe London, I can't remember, but he wanted to let fall kind of stuff. So”

light was getting a little low. And he's like, so I chose this camera and this film's being everything. And I was like, you know what? Nobody ever talks about this. Mark has a picture in mind and a picture he's making. So he let he chooses how he's going to make things. Oh, because also he wanted like, people to not be having motion blur in public spaces. So he needed to speed and he needed, you know, in lower light. And so he figures it out. You know, like, and that is what

I'm talking about is ownership over all of these formal qualities of this machine and how you want to use it. And the picture qualities that you want to have. And so then, and I'm going to take, I don't know if somebody, it only does tight up portraits. I'm not sure, you know, like, how if I have specific advice to shake them out of that. But, you know, you know, you'd be interested to be like, well, why, you know, like, and even, like, you see some of those portraits,

we're only like a little bit of the nose is really sharp, you know, whatever. Like, I'd be just like interested in it's like, well, you know, if you'd especially have a digital camera,

“like, how, you know, how much folk, much stuff could you get in focus? And I think that's really”

expressive, too, is like how much you let a person in and out of focus, you know, in the, in the

picture plane. But that's all I would do is like, you know, there's always a way to look into this,

you know, like, you know, the tones of the printing, you know, all that kind of stuff. There's other, you know, there's other formal matters if, even if you're really going kind of, like, tight on, you know, like, whatever the subject matter is, if you're being really tight with that, there's other things to consider. Um, that might be a, I'm going to tell you that might be a tougher and not to crack. Uh, I mean, it could be, it could be a relationship. Yeah, I mean, it could be

the, the, the, the, the relationship one has with that subject matter, maybe not directly, but with another human and the kind of the, the closeness that you may be desiring or looking at, or it could just be a fair factor of trying something different. Um, so it could be, it could be anything like that. But, I mean, you know, the other thing, well, the one other thing I would say is that, especially with portraits, and I wrote about this a little bit in the book, but like,

and I'm going to tell you, I kind of come from this former thing that I, uh, I was, well, there's somebody I would like to take a picture of, and then there'd be 20 people where I just, I just didn't strike me that way. And I've heard many other people talk about it in that way.

“And then I started to realize that that was a shame. And I was like, I think”

if I want to get good at this, and I'm not, I'm not really a portrait photographer, but if I want to get a good out of it, I need to know how to make all 20. And, and, and want to, and then I, you know, I had to extrapolate it and I was like, you know, like,

I finally realized like, due to dry raws, is the person who can make all 20 of those, you know,

like, and maybe sensational, um, probably styled notes in modicative, like those kind of people, you know, they just have some sort of gift for, whatever, you know, the person does not have to be spectacular, or, or, or, uh, photo-genic or anything. And they're going to, because it's more, it's again, it's all about the picture and not about the subject matter. You know, and that's just a, you know, they, it's such a simple way of saying it, but it's just, it's the, it's the whole game to me.

Now, when it comes to photography, the whole infrastructure of the internet rewards speed, post more, post faster, be first, be everywhere, the algorithm doesn't care whether you went deep, it cares whether you showed up. Yes, today. And I guess that's not photography specific. Now, for me, I built my work around a different bet that there are people who would rather go slowly and understand a something fully, then go fast and understand probably nothing. That depth

is not a liability, that the work you make when you take your time is categorically different from the work you make when you're chasing the feed, maybe, or chasing the algorithm. Now, the mood inside us is built on that same bet. It's a private community for photographers and visual artists who are serious about the slow work. We have monthly masterclasses where we actually go deep on craft and thinking we have a weekly book club monthly Q&As. We have the podcast of course,

but add free with bonus content and we have direct access to me in my team. It's not another

of serious people at a very clear and supportive focus. It's just $19 a month. The link is in the show notes and I really hope I can see you inside. Why do we find it difficult? Do you mentioned early with we find it more difficult to talk about form than necessarily the external or the subject matter? Why do you think that is? Is it a limitation on our language? Is it a limitation of understanding us as humans, limitation on understanding the consciousness, subconsciousness, the brain, what do

why do you think that is? Yeah, it's a limit on language. I would say, from what I've read, yeah, it's just we just don't have, there's a lot of things we don't have vocabulary for that really make much sense. There's not a concept. Again, I tried really hard to talk about the depth,

“talk and if somebody prints in penitual blacks, or if somebody's high-key, there's a lot of”

things to go in. One has a vocabulary for those things. I'm not the first to say all those things,

but that's where I really want to exist. But they're so specifically tied to the picture. Listen, the thing I also also say is like, you could take a picture of an American flag or a Christian cross or a handgun, and all of the things that you would say about that, they're all in your mind. They're not in the picture. They're concepts and concepts only live in brains, in conscious brains. You know, they're not in the picture. Again, we can ladder up to those. We can ratchet up. We can

talk about those things for sure. But there are things that are absolutely in the picture, and those I do think are the harder things for us to put vocabulary to. So in that respect, what would you define beauty as in photography? So when you're looking at your heroes, your inspirations, what do you actually, or other peers, or maybe some of your students, or people at Chicago, or if you have it might be, and something strikes you, does that an experience for you

first of all? And if so, what is what if you were to, you know, we just talked about limitations of language, but I went out to try and explain why what your kind of idea of beauty is in a photograph and why certain photographs strike you, Tim Carbenter, maybe, not other. What is it? I know you talked about what you know what you're interested in, but when we talk about beauty and beauty in photographs, what does that mean to you? Yeah. So the one, I will go back to, and you know, it's in the

first book that's going to be in the second one too, I agree with Robert Adams said that, you know, pretty much equated beauty with form, with what, a lot of people call significant form. And

“what I think is that, and this is going to be all in the second book. I've been talking about,”

you know, as creatures, and what the, what if phenomenologists would say, both of the philosophers and the neuroscientists, by the way, would say that this, this creature is an almost constant state

of imbalance, and it's always looking to make it to balance, to get a better grip on its inputs.

You know, we're, we're in a constant state of frustration, and when, when our just equilibrium becomes a little bit of equilibrium, the body relaxes for a moment. That's fleeting and it's fervent, but the body says, I got to control on this, I got to hand on this, you know, like, also, this is why we like being in our homes and stuff is because, you know, all of those inputs are calmed, you know, and that's why we can feel calmed, that we can't out in the world,

because of all, you know, the diversity and the speed of all the inputs, but, okay, so what I'm going towards is that, like, this creature needs form, it needs for, for some things occasionally to make some sense and say, all right, I got to grip on this, things are good for the, for my survival. What I really want to work on in this, in this next book, and I'll give it away now, is that I think that form in any artwork is a model for that form that brings us a bit of the

“equilibrium. And that's why I think we have a bodily response and a non-linguistic response to form.”

That's how this all kind of comes back around together. When we see equilibrium in a picture,

in a poem, in a painting, all right, I understand in that made thing what I'm always trying to do,

and we would never articulate this. And here's the twister is that the photograph is the thing

it just does that job the best, because those are actual things. Even though we can love a painting

and love a poem, but we know that we're living in an imaginary world. And with the photograph, it's different. We live in that same world and somehow this person, she found a purchase on the world from moment that makes sense to me. So that's where I really think that, I think the form, and that's why we call it beauty, because a beauty is a relief. It's a wholeness. It's a completeness. Because all this even is called a sudden rightness. And I think the sudden is so important,

because these things are fleeting, and they're afraid of. And that's the brilliance of a work of art, is that somehow it locks it in. And now we can contemplate that. And we can put it on the wall,

we can look at it every few days. Whatever we can open a book and look at it again. But it kind of

formalizes, but it concentrates. It concentrates a formal coherence to us. I can't even stress enough them. I think the psychological importance to us, the creaturely importance to us, to have some

“models for this thing that we are. I think that's why art is so important. It allows us to see”

what this creature is going through and how it kind of makes us a bit of rightness with the world. Mike, drop. I think that's a great explanation. I love the way you talk about it. I can hear your inspiration from Robert Adams in that book, Beauty and Photography, which gosh, there's a bit of a hard read when I read it a few years ago, but the second read was a little bit made a little bit more sense. Then having these types of conversations about it makes even more sense. That is

so true for everything, though. In writing the second book, I've re-read all the parts, I've re-read all the atoms and see the short and everything. I'm reading Foucault and Daredean, Lacan and Augustine. The first time, it is fucking impenetrable. Second time, it's still impenetrable. But then maybe you read a secondary source on them. You're like, oh, I kind of get with this idea. I mean,

you may decide, hey, I'll read it once and I never want to try it again. I'll be totally

like repeated immersion in these ideas. I can promise everyone, you can break them down, you can break these ideas down. It may take a lot of effort, especially for Robert Adams or some of the elext even shore, or write more as repeated readings of those, and they're not long,

“you know, or anything. They're well written. I think for me, I've tried to get this point where”

even if something reads really difficult the first time I try not to give up. I try to take a second. I've also gotten smart enough where I can be like, all right, this will be on me. I don't quite get it. It's cool. I'm going to try. Talking about breaking ideas down, we can break all of these ideas down, and you've done that. I do want to talk about your photo books. If we have time towards the end, but I can't not cover this book. To photograph is to learn how to

die, which was released a couple of years ago. I've read it once. I'm definitely going to read it again and encourage everyone watching and listening to this to read it, because it doesn't encapsulate a lot of what we've already talked about in the last hour or so, but I think it can, you know, I'm going to read a few excerpts after I ask you to give me a synopsis of it,

“where it came from, the concept of the book. But yeah, I think we're going to spend a little bit”

of time dissecting a few things in here before we talk about your photo books and the next book you're working on, but tell me about this book. The photograph is to learn how to die and what it's what about. Yeah. Well, you know, it came about for too obviously, there's an essay by Montaine called to philosophize this to learn how to die. And I read it. I was reading the complete Montaine. And right away, I know it's this simple,

but I think it was at pH sound that I was like, well, to photograph this to learn how to die, I think. So suddenly, I had this interesting phrase, and I thought, well, let's see if I'm right about that. And I just started to think about it. And I kind of had to reverse engineer it. And there was a, you know, I've been writing already, you know, a bunch of essays and doing doing some stuff. And I kind of thought that I might want to do something longer for him. But this

was then I was like, oh, and I think I might have the framework of the idea here. But like I said,

you know, basically he was saying, you know, it was kind of like what we're talking about when I said,

you know, you got to thank yourself. I feel like a little bit objective about your subjectivity. You got to kind of look at what you what you're doing and what you're making. And it was kind of the same thing as he was saying is like, you can calm down about all the contingencies of life that big contingency being your demise. If you just, you know, remove yourself from that a little bit and don't be, and be less worried about it. And right away, I was like, you know, again,

if this is something you and I've already covered, but that because the camera is absolutely tethered to the stuff of the world, it makes you deal with that stuff. And you can't just imagine yourself elsewhere, you can't imagine a better picture, imagine a different picture. You got to

“make it, you know, you have to work on that, to work your body around on it. So anyway, I just saw that”

parallel. And then I thought, well, okay, I get a few of this out. So basically the book is in four

sections. First section, the talks about ways we talked about earlier, kind of the general brokenness of all people, you know, that clash or that gap between what's real, you know, and what's ideal, what we wish for. Then the second section was like, well, why do you only quite a small amount of us decide to make what we call our aesthetic objects to kind of like deal with that? And so, you know, that's just exploring that. It's finally the third section where

you get a, you know, like, there's a lot of talk with you stuff in the first two, but it's rule, and we really get to the, in the third section is where, you know, I, I try to get to, it was like, why is using a camera such a, a specific, unusual, you know, form of art making. And then the last section kind of like kind of like extrapolates that and brings it back into some ideas of like, you know, freedom, and just, you know, peace, you know, so that's kind of the general layout of it

is just, you know, like trying to apply what, what the camp, what working with the camera does to, you know, a, a big existential problem that everybody deals with, but, you know, like, that we, all of us, you know, I'm assuming most of the listeners are people who, like, just talk to

“use a camera to try to make sense of things. And that's what I wanted to figure out. And that's”

one of whom we figure out in the next book too, but like, you know, it's, it's a weird thing to, to be attracted to using what people with many people call a sterile machine, you know, to do this.

And, and I think it's pretty amazing. And I know YouTube too, and I know how to other people.

Yeah, but not everybody. Yeah, but you know, you can explain why, right? And a lot of people, including myself, well, I'm getting a little bit better at it, you know, understanding why I love photography so much. I do know why I love photography so much, but it's, it's sometimes difficult to explain in a kind of elevated pitch way, but so many people don't know why, and I'm, I'm so interested in why photographers love photography. And the majority of us don't quite know why, just, you know,

like you said, we need to talk about people explaining their portraits, right? Why do they like that? Oh, I just like it. I like the way they like it. So I, you know, that's not a real kind of explanation. And the same with us in photography in a general sense. I just like it, you know, so interested in kind of understanding why we love this thing called photography so much. And you, you know, you talked to, I want to start with the, the last section and, you, you know,

“title the last section, the final, yes. And I think this kind of can bring us back to the beginning”

in the concept of the book as well. But I'll just read kind of the first paragraph from here, and you quote mine a white in the, in the first sentence. I have discovered camera is a both a way of life and not enough to live by. Same here, you say, but I doubt that any vocation taken alone could ever really suffice. My more modest and yet entirely grand claim is that lessons learned from working with the camera can be meaningful, excuse me, can be meaningfully extrapolated

to the whole of life and much to our benefit. So it's almost saying that this can save you, right? This, this idea of photography is, is a way to live but also as as existential as really saving you. You know, I probably wouldn't use those words, but I will back them up that you're saying that, yes. Again, it's, you know, it's just what I was just talking about with the Montana saying what it, you know, is that, yeah, I don't, I mean, listen, I don't, there is no one activity that could really sustain us,

but I, I do think that what one learns from making pictures in the world about the world, not giving into every little swim and desire of you, you know, that I love yours, that you have, you know, that the world does not bend, does the world does nothing for you, and a lot of people do not want to hear that, I'm fine with it, like, but what I, what I think it does is it pushes

wholeness by acting, you know, by not sitting around, you have, like I said, you know, this thing has,

“you have to act, you have to move, you have to engage, and, you know, you could be more or less”

successful with that, but part of it, you know, part of this is not even, okay, making great pictures would be just a benefit, you know, like, and having to have another career or doing, making some work or whatever, but like, I just think this sort of, you know, the thing that it brings about and how you understand, how you, what control and what lack of control you have, and just be making peace with that, that's, like, where the benefit of it is.

Yeah, and you start the book with a quote from Paul Valeri, Valeri or Valeri, you know, I don't think it's very well, but I think it's Valeri, yeah, Valeri, okay. So you start, you start the book with a quote from Paul Valeri, and I just want to read this quote, because this was, I think I even, like, posted this on Instagram, because it hit me so much in the face. So I want to read it, and this will kind of explain, I guess, the, you know,

what you've touched on already in the content, and I don't want to keep going over the same thing,

“but I think this is such a beautiful quote, and then I kind of want to talk about, you know,”

that the time of this book with you, but the quote is this, you are here, and later on, you will no longer be here, and you know it. What is not corresponds in your mind to what is? This is because the power over you of what is produces the power in you of what is not, and the latter power changes into a feeling of impotence upon contact with what is. So we revolt against facts. We cannot emit a fact like death. Our hopes, our grudges, all this is a

direct instantaneous product of the conflict between what is and what is not. A little, you know, took me a few times to kind of try and understand that, but can you, without repeating what we've talked about already, because there's a danger of that, I guess, but can you just kind of elaborate on that a little bit more? Yeah, and kind of bring it down to kind of reality. Yeah, you can insert, when he says what is and what is not, when he says what is is real and what is not is ideal.

Concepts and categories don't exist. You know, like they're we can call them virtual or whatever, you know, but they are what is not. And this is, you know, we'll put a fine point on what I was talking about earlier, is that this is the real irony, is that like us conscious creatures,

us language using creatures are able to create incredible works of art, incredible works of imagination.

And yet, again, the body has none of that, you know, like I said, you know, there was that conflict between the real and the idea, the finer point I want to put on this and what value he was getting at, and that other people have, like I quoted James Foster Wallace and this is like, even though the ideals he's so massively to, to, you know, so massively larger than the real, you know, our imaginations are so much bigger than the here in the now.

The irony or the twist on that is that the here in the now is so massive that it cannot possibly be explained in words. And this is getting back to the form of thing. We see, you know, there's parallels once you start to go through this. It's like David Foster Wallace said, even the, the most fleeting moment of experience is bigger and richer than whatever you could possibly jam into words or into a painting or anything like that. So you've got this like, you know,

complete, we tell ourselves that our, you know, our conscious brains are like the most amazing

things in the universe and they may well be, you know, I'm not going to say yes or no on that. And yet, it can't, it will, our words in our language and our consciousness can't contain even, like, a second actual bodily experience. That's a profound irony, you know, like, and that's the one that

“motivates a lot of stuff, you know, and that's what Valerie was getting at. And I, you know, I think”

other people have said this, you know, said it in different ways and that's kind of, you know, I, you know, I was probably halfway through the book when I got, Valerie's collected essays are terrific. And, you know, that quote, I was like, wow, I think that's going to come early, you know, if not because they kind of run up there. So yeah, and moving forward a little bit into what we talked about before, moving back to what we talked about before, but to extend that point, what we just,

we just talked about in Valerie's quote, why is form beautiful, Robert Adams asked and you,

I can't remember which section the sins, but the second or third section. Because I think it helps us

meet our worst fear, the suspicion that life may be chaos and that therefore us suffering is

as I've already made clear, this is more than a suspicion. It is a certitude. A misery is indeed

meaningless, which is just wonderful sentence. This fear, though, drives me and Adams to the same place. Form in a picture is justified by experience of wholeness coherence in life. He writes elsewhere. And if we are to be convincingly reminded by art of such experience, then the shape in art has to be believably tentative as fragile as meaning seems to be in life. What a wonderful section. Yeah, no, he got a lot, you know, like, Robert Adams wrote me a letter. He read that book

and he wrote me a letter to page every letter. And he did say, and I probably should commit this to memory, but if he said, he did say, I'm more of a believer than you are. He's like, I'm just an old

“man, I think I asked it. Like, because, you know, the way you talked about form, I think Adams is,”

I don't know, he's not religious, but he does believe that meaning sort of it hears in the world.

And, you know, and that's not a different way of thinking about things. And whereas I don't, you know, and that that's a pretty substantial difference. But like I said, we kind of get to the endpoint the same way. So, you know, we get to the same endpoint. So, about the valuation of that meaning, and what we take from it, but no, there's so much good stuff in Adams. You know, like, and I'm going to say, I think on balance, the best stuff is from practitioners. Sure. Yeah, more of us, more of Davy.

There's probably a couple of them. It's a Nicholas Mueller. You know, Stanley will lock one on, but I think David Campany, he takes a lot of pictures. You know, he probably doesn't call himself as, I mean, he's at his talk. But anyway, so whereas Bart and Sontag and, you know, Bart to his great credit capitals over and over, he's like, I'm not a photographer. You know, like, and he wanted you to know that his observations were colored by that very fact, you know, like, but anyway, yeah, you know,

“like, that Adams is, you know, I'll reread that every couple of three years forever, I think, you know,”

so we do. You mentioned Bart and Sontag and the like was, was why now this book or what now, but recently, it's recently released, but why that time, this time for this book that you wrote and collated, was it a rebellion to something? Was it something you felt you had to get out there that had been building for years or why did it come about and why now? You know, it didn't come, it wasn't a rebellion, but then I think people have read it that way and even I've kind of maybe

just started to see it, yeah, see it that way. You know, like, I love Sontag, like against interpretation, I like her writing on Bart by the way, I think she's brilliant. I don't think she's good on photography. She may be good for people who are interested in photography as like a sop as the text or the document and the social parts of it. I don't think she's good for somebody who uses a camera. And Bart, less, you know, like, there's some things in here, I'm trying to like draw from,

but these classics, like even Benjamin and Berger and other ones who are kind of read, if you are, if you're, I don't know, if you're like associateologist or curator, I don't know, you might be more interested, but I think if somebody really is driven to use a camera, again, to make sense of the world, I would put those lower on your reading list, and go to the people who really absorb photographic problems and thought through,

“thought through those things. So, but, you know, like, everybody's different, but that's what I think.”

And so, it does, it has struck some people as rebellious. I mean, I've had people being like, how did you write this whole book without mentioning Sound Tiger Part? And I was like, well, it's easy. For me, this next book is going to mention them, you know, because I want to place this in a context that has all that stuff, but, but I don't feel that rebellious, but I did want to strike, I think I need to strike a chord for people like me and you who just got to do this thing.

Yeah, yeah, I think it's funny when one finds a book as well. He seemed to, I was thinking, you know, I wonder why I found this book at this time, because it was such a great time for me to find this book and read it. And like I said, it just, it seemed to articulate, it's every piece, every one of my thoughts for the last few years together into a book. So, someone's actually

nailed it for me. So, thank you for that. And I want to, you know, I feel like we've basically

talked about this book for the whole conversation. I've only just recently mentioned it, but I think we've talked a lot about the concepts that you've written about, but I want to, before we go onto your, your photographs and they're going to be linked, I'm sure, and I'm really interested to

in the middle of the book, which, again, caught my eye, if each and every human being dispairs at

the gap between the internal ideal and the external real, the artist dispairs more deeply at the limits upon what can actually be made of that gap, or even spoken out loud for that matter.

“And I think that's such an important contextual clarification about what were, what the limitations”

are, what we're trying to do, this, it's, you know, it's great to talk about the concept between our internal ideal that is done real, but actually when we boil that down to what that means in real life, this, this limit upon what actually can be made of that gap, that's the struggle, but also the joy, that's really where the kind of, the meaning comes in if you're really searching for that meaning. So yeah, I think that's a, a wonderful way to, to think about the

struggle that is the photographer. Well, they're, you know, Ben Loner wrote a book called the hatred of poetry, and he's a poet, and he loves poetry, but like you hate it because it doesn't do exactly what you want it to do. And that, again, that's the great gift of these, these, anything that won't do what we want it to do. And again, I just, my argument is, the camera is, I think it's the greatest inhibitor of our desires, our, you know, our wishes.

I, sometimes I call it an anti-Slow-Opsism machine. Now, the funny thing is, is that one

can you, well, you know, like it, it thwarts, you know, if we just say basically,

the solipsism is thinking that, you know, all the world is just a projection or an imagination of yours, you know, like the camera's going to thwart that. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. But now, you can, one can use a camera solipsistically, you know, but, but the camera itself is, it really resists your projections, your ideas, your thoughts, you know, and it just says,

“that's what the world is, sorry, you know, you can think all you want, you can, you can”

imagine all you want, but that's just not the way things are. And again, I'm just going to put that back, you know, like, have you ever had a friend who gets dumped or something and he or she's like,

"Oh, they'll come back to me." And you're like, it's not going to happen. You know, like,

and you just have to be that person who's like, you're the world, and there, I imagine in a place and they're not going to be whole and happy again, and so they get out of that imagination in a different place, you know. And so I think there's a lot of parallels with, you know, all the things that we suffer, you know. Yeah. Where did suffering come into your own photographs and your own projects? And, you know, I mean, I'm interested in, wow, well, I'm interested in, and you wait an hour,

you're a little bit more than hour to really spring the good, the good, the all the good questions with the stuff section. Well, let me give you time to think a little bit because I'm interested in the link between this writing and these thoughts that you've put on paper and the photo books

“that you've made and, you know, this is the most recent, I believe, but we also have recent photographs”

that, whereas I'm, I guess I'm trying to find kind of where this is and these thoughts concepts are in your photographs and how, if anything, if you're going to make more books now, if anything has changed since writing this, you know, when you go out and photograph. Yeah. You know, I, no, this is, I think, I think we all suffer and, and we all suffer differently. And so, again, that's getting at your idiosyncrasies. Like, kind of awesome. Maybe I'll say, I haven't made this

exactly, but your idiosyncrasy is your unique way of suffering. That might be something I'd be willing to say. You know, for me, like, you know, I'm old now, but like, you know, like, I was mid 80s, a gay kid in the Midwest of the United States. This is not a possibility for anyone. This is not, this is before TV shows, you know, like, and it was, and I, at one point, I just thought, I'm not going to be happy in the way that I understood everyone else to be happy. And I just,

like, well, that, I guess that's the way it is, you know, like, and I don't know what's going to happen. I turned out to be very wrong about that. Like, entirely wrong, and I'm glad to say that, but, like, you know, I think each of us has this sort of, you know, disconnect, you know, that, and it could be whatever it can be, it can sound minor, it can sound major, but for you, it's probably going to be major. You know, like, it's going to, and have it, and how big

you. And so, I mean, I do think one can tell, and some people have Nick Mueller, a student of observer, you know, like, I keep a distance. Like, I, when I was a kid, I had to keep my distance,

and codes and all that kind of stuff. And that is, that is still part of me, even though, like, might, you know, like, a living in New York, you can be, you know, like for 30 years, I've been whoever I want to be, you know, like, but those things that happen to you when you're, you know, in your, in your teens, since or before or whatever, those things kind of stay baked in you, a lot of ways, you know, and now I know, you know, now I can look at them and be like, oh, wow,

you know, like, but, but for me, a guardedness and a reserve and a distance, I think, still permeates a lot. And, and I'm interested in figuring out how that, how that gets recalibrated

“or changed over time. So, that's part of my introspection is like, and that's what I encourage”

of my students again, it's like, let's, let's try to think about why you have to do this. Like, what is it? Like, I want to get to that, I want to get to that really weird part and maybe a little uncomfortable. And maybe it should be a little uncomfortable, but like, but figuring it out at, and then once I, you know, once I felt like I started to own it, and then I could be like, exploring all of its different stations, you know, and thinking about all, like, what does that

mean at different times of my life? What does it mean for different kinds of picture-making? And then, you know, it's all grounds exactly. You know, like, and, well, and, you know, like, I have my first color book is coming out with the ice plant in the fall, and, oh, great.

Because I'm using a digital camera, I've never had autofocus in my life, you know, like,

and this book is going to be just tighter. It's closer. There's, I mean, there's literally

“here in Brambles. There's a lot of stuff out of focus, which, you know, you're just like,”

it's a, it just changes the whole bodily relationship of, you know, but because I had a different tool to for machine, that I was able to do that much better. But, like, you know, this now, you know, like, on older, I'm a little bit more, I wanted to, I wanted to, like, really mess with my distance. And so that, you know, but now, I start to articulate those kind of things to myself, and it helps me out a lot, you know, and, and, and, and, and, and, and I have a plan,

I was like, okay, then I got to get my body. I have to have this kind of machine, you know, now that, you know, I've used floating, I'm not telling, can you think that people have actually

20 years, but, like, I've never had a floating ISO in my life, you know, like suddenly, I've

looked like the light, hardly matters. You felt like an image stabilization. And, like, so suddenly, things that used to matter have now, I'm a, I'm a different creature with that digital camera, than I was with a film camera. And that, I'm not fascinating, too. You know, what it opens up for me. What it allows me. Well, that is really, um, uh, exposed the limitation of my research. So apologies. I didn't know

there, there was a new book coming, but I'm, well, no, no, hardly anybody does. Okay, it hasn't been enough. You've heard it here. So in the fall, this is so in a few months. Yeah, this year, you're printing it, printing it in July. So it would be ready for the fall stuff. Yeah. Okay, cool. Talk to me about your, the, the so-called trilogy, I guess, local objects, Christmas Day, Buck's Pond Road, and little, um, well, how, tell me a little bit of an overview

about about those, um, in terms of your, your mindset going through them, in terms of what, what your personal struggles or joy or beauty were in, in those, those books. And will this new book just be an addition to that or something entirely separate?

“Not entirely separate. Um, but, you know, the thing is like, what, I think if you want to,”

a bit of a career and you want to make a few books, you really have to be really super specific with yourself about how you're different and why you're different over time.

Because, yeah, I'm never going to make anything crazy where you're like, holy shit,

I've never seen that guy before. You know, like, I just, that's probably not going to happen, right? Yeah. But so, they are a loose trilogy. And what I started become really interested in was, um, thinking about myself as the protagonist for different things and how I, which I did and do shape my life. And so, you know, I mentioned kind of that distance that's in local objects. But it's upon Roe came about from a time when there was somebody, and I told the story before,

but like, somebody had to leave and I didn't realize until too late that I didn't want to believe. And like, I was out of sorts, you know, um, I think it was doubly, you know, it was still lost, but also the fact that I hadn't managed it. You know, you kind of get plus to yourself around managing that loss, you know, like, you know, like, it's double and just my, my body and my machine were off against the world. And I thought that there was a whole, like, eight months or a

year, a picture making that was just gone, because I just was like, I'm not making it. And then I kind of, you know, I got out of it. I was able to look back on it a little bit and be like, oh, there's something interesting in there. You know, like, but, and then with with little, little came out of what I learned in local objects. I learned about, I took every possible sign

probably basketball hoops and skateboards and bicycles and so mostly symbolic of youth, but, um,

“and cars, you know, or or anything with that was a sign, like a literal sign. Those I pulled out because I”

wanted it to be a certain kind of part of me that was 14, 15 kind of figuring out things, moving through the world. I thought that's interesting to think about the signs and the symbols and it's maybe I'll revive that idea later. And I twisted it to where, so little for me is really about what I call nation signs, like signs that don't lead anywhere, which are perplexing to us. And I only recently, well, within the last year, I learned there's a, you know, a philosopher named

Julia Kristiva. And she used a word called significant odds. Definitely not significant significant odds. And she said, yeah, it's meant to say something that seems to be a sign, but that leads to no, no signified. And, you know, because we are, we are creatures who are looking for patterns and looking for something. That's, I mean, that, that folds into, like, a lot of what we've been talking about is that we see things and we think it portends

of something and that's the time it doesn't, you know, like, because we want answers, as well. We want answers, yeah. But you know, like, I would walk around with my nephew a lot who appears

in little because I wanted to, I wanted to shift from third person to first person. I wanted him

in his, in imaginary head and in, in little he is, he's taken to, like, large oak leaves and pretending that he was, he was young and he was pretending there were wings. So that was his imagination was turning the world into something else, you know, and so I thought that was a good, like, friction against the first person of it. But, you know, when you walk around with any kid to be like, why is that? What's that? What's that? And again, you're going to realize nine times

out of ten, there is no answer, you know? There's just like, yeah, somebody did it. I don't know. They, they made that mark in the ground. They did that. But like, there's no real good reason for all this. And that, so anyway, you know, like, they do fit together, you know, that I'm thinking about my, the, the, the, the Buxplund Road is meant to be myself probably even ahead of myself in age. It's, you know, somewhere else, you know, slowing down, you know, maybe I don't know, but looking at

the world kind of differently. There's this quote I use in my artist talk, I, it's putting AR Amons who I'm not even really read. But he, he said to see it all by the light of a different necessity. And this is, this is just another way of saying things I've been saying is that we have, we have our necessities, but it's different, you know, as a child, as you gain and lose people, as people die, you know, in your life, as you get married, as you get kids, as you gain and lose jobs.

Like, oh, our, our necessities are always different. I think the artist, I'm going to use another phrase.

This woman in fell in bed later, great writer on Wall Stevens. She said his job, and I believe that's the job of everyone is to find formal counters to internal experience.

“You got to find a way. If you want to be a long term artist, you got to find ways to be adequate”

to what's inside you. All right. And that means, you know, whether that's, you know, the slightest change on a lens or a camera, whether it means just like using your body differently, whether just like, I don't know, whatever, but your job is to find ways that are adequate to what's inside here, and adequate to those necessities. And but, but that also means you have to be really cognizant. Yeah, I've started kind of articulate what those necessities are a little bit, you know,

and to kind of like say, all right, here's these pictures when I was really distance from the world,

here's these pictures where I was a little tighter. My friend, Jenny Friedley, and her first book

is about gratitude, and I think it's genius, like, so few things are about gratitude, you know, like, but that's what it's about, and you get it. And it, at about is even the wrong word. It's, it's brought about by gratitude, you know, and you feel it. And that's, if I can get, like, myself first of all, but if I can get my students to being like, that's, I want to have it. I want to evoke, you know, it's a pretty standard definition of poetry that it should not be

“about and experience, but it should be the experience and should evoke the experience. And so that's what,”

I'm, I'm like, I want pictures to be, I want them to be that confusion. I want them to be that solitude. I want them to be that distance. I want them to be that uncertainty, that no purchase on the word. I want them to pictures to be who what the thing is, and not about something else. That's where I want to go. And that's where the body is. And, you know, as you can start to see, like, there's a bunch of different ways of saying things that kind of keep converging,

you know, they're different ways of looking about it, but like the economy converging on some same basic ideas. And that's what, you know, but again, like, I've been, you know, reading about this and then kind of learning and understanding that a lot of this stuff, a lot of different people are talking about a lot of different stuff, but if you can kind of distill it, you realize they're all talking about kind of the same basic desires and needs that

So yeah, that's why we're like, no, people like you to write books. Well, thanks. But like, Blancho said, he's like, it's not so much artistic, you know, your genius or something. It's the ability to find what the, how did the exclusive power in it? That is where the hard work is. This is to find that. And Valerie, Valerie said another beautiful thing, he said, you know, there's the muse. Okay, you got the muse. That's great. But he said, like, it's really,

it's hard work editing, figuring things out. And he said that that was, that was, that work is for the dignity of the muse. And I'm really loved that phrase. If you think your muse has

“any dignity, and it does, you need to work hard on it. And you need to bring all that dignity out.”

And that is a hard kind of different work than just being intuitive all the time. You know, that's, that's a different kind of brain part. You know, like, figuring out what's going on, editing that way, sequencing, you know, doing those, those things that are different from just being out of the world. I love that. Tim, we are, we are pretty much out of time. I want to end with just a couple of quick fire questions. So I will try and keep the questions and answers

short. And there's just a few of them. So I'll just get straight into them. What is wrong? What is wrong? What is wrong? Everything. Yeah, everything. We just talked about, oh, it's wrong. What is wrong with the way the photography, you see or perceive the photography community, how it talks about itself. And what we should be talking about more as a photography community? Well, and this is not a problem, but it's, it's a situation. And that is that we,

unfortunately, we need to get money, we need to get funding, we need to, you know, do some things.

And so we speak in a language that is not our own, very much, speaking more of a critical or

or a curatorial language. And I don't mean to, you know, I'm many curator friends who are doing really work, but it is an external language. And that is where I think that we, we really need to think about an internal language that can ladder up to and it can explain exterior language

“better. That's what I think we could do better. And I also think that's why people”

keep right for photographers hate writing, it's because it's not that, to rate as a critic, it's not really natural for us. And so I, you know, I think there's other ways to get about it. So that's, that's the answer I think, is that we're not speaking our own language, and we're speaking somebody else's language, and we need to fix that. A short note before we

close, for a while now, the first thing I've done most mornings before the camera or any other

work or before the coffee before the endless tabs is sit 10, 20, 30 minutes. Just watching the noise inside my head do what noise does. It has it just made me calmer in the way people imagine, it's made me more honest, more mindful, more compassionate, and more free in more ways than I could even describe. And that honesty and introspective clarity, more than any lens workshop or book, is really what changed my photography. The work I make now comes from a quieter place,

with more clearness and calmness. I notice what I'm reaching for, and I notice when I'm reaching for the wrong thing. The inner critic still talks, still exists, I just don't believe everything he says anymore. The app I've used for most of this is waking up by Sam Harris. It's the one tool I've genuinely kept returning to all this time. This is not a paid sponsorship from them,

“however, I am an affiliate partner, and for good reason, I believe that this app is worth it more”

than any other. What's kept me there for years is that it's not just one thing. It's a guided daily meditation, which is the spine of it for me, but there are also short daily reflections, a daily quote that tends to do its own quiet work in the background. And these little moments, they call it of awareness that you can drop into during the day. Two minute resets when the head starts running.

There's also an entire library of guest series with teachers I'd never have found on my own,

and a lot more besides that. It keeps the practice alive instead of letting it calcify into routine. So a link sits in the show notes for a free 30-day trial and 20% discount on their subscriptions. If you want the longer story though of how meditation reshaped my work, there's also a piece link through my sub-stack page called "There's no self-development without self-awareness." Anyway, I hope you enjoy it. Thanks for listening. Do you think there's a fear in that?

Like, what is the field of photography afraid about? Is it that? And if so, why? I do think so. And here's what I tell everybody. You know, like, in our world, if you still

you're a rock star. You don't need to please everyone. I want everybody to understand this,

that, like, our world is kind of this small thing. And you can be who you are and not be these other things that you think people want of you. Now, for the person who's going to give you the grant, we may have to make our peace with being somebody other than ourselves for a little bit. Get 'em to write the check and then go back to being yourself, you know? But don't be afraid that going to those weird, strange places in you. It's not going to have an audience because it is.

And if you can really, if you show us something different, you're going to build an audience. It's not going to be gigantic. But you're going to, but you're going to be rewarding and people are going to appreciate it. That's the thing I would not be afraid of. And don't, and don't be worried about hitting, you know, big audiences because it's, you're just not going to happen, you know? How do you find the audience? Yeah, the good question. I mean, I think, you know, you've got to,

if you live in a place where you can start to be, you know, going to events. Like, it's easy New York where I live. And it's much, much harder at other places. But we have events and everything.

“But I think you have to start just meeting people, talking to people, going to things.”

So if there's more online things that you can do, here's what I tell you. It's like, when, when,

I spent, wanted to do my first book, Mike Slack. Mike Slack and Trisha Gabriel are the ice map. Mike said, he's like, you've already built up a lot of goodwill among the community. So it makes our job easier. Because I was already writing essays, auditing a couple of books with TIS, some smaller books, you know, not a monograph. So there are, you know, you've got to kind of just start small, like, making things happen, you know, getting out there, incrementally, you know,

and build that. And, you know, like, once you're ready to make your statement, what's ready for your monograph, you know, you might, it certainly would help you to have a few things in place, you know? Okay. But like, what you're doing, you know, like, I mean, the value to the community of making things,

like, you're making an effort that I could not find within myself to do.

I'm, you know, like, I have not the energy or the patience to do what you're doing. And, you know, like, but you're creating, you're bringing us another way of like, you know, doing this whole thing. So all of us have these different talents about how we might contribute to the bigger

“thing. And I think, you know, anybody who can explore that and exploit that, I would say, go for it,”

you know. Last question, Tim. If you could give every photographer one prompt or assignment from outside photography, drawn from maybe literature, music or film or whatever, what would it be? That's a really good question. Once I did this too, when we were in during COVID, my, my crit group, when we had to move online, we were trying to come up with kind of things like that. And I said, I want to, I want to see the picture for, of years that have, that packs the most

narrative in it. And everybody, and I, I was like, I'm not going to say anything more than that. And everybody kind of came back with complaints about what that wasn't specific enough or whatever. But I was like, I, I like doing things like that. It's like, because I make pictures that have almost no narrative in them. I mean, you know, we've been talking about that. I don't want there to be things to extrapolate from. Yeah. I happen to make one picture of my nephew, like walk

away and throw in a stone. And I was like, I saw a story in that, you know, like, and that's the picture I showed. So I'm not saying that that's the prompt, but I'm saying to get to ask yourself

“specific questions about what's your most narrative picture? What's your least narrative picture?”

You know, what's your craziest picture? You know, what's the most outlier picture? I was like, I really, I think it's really good for us to go to extremes. And then see, oh, that's the border of it. That's the edge. And then I can understand this thing in here better. So, you know, it's just like it would be just challenging yourself to be like, what's the, what's my strange picture? What's my weirdest one? What's my, what's my most non-me picture? What does, you know, how do you

interpret narrative? Because the word narrative is, I mean, it's different to some people. Is it allegory? Is it like, can you build it with the whole story or the, you know, like, or whatever? Yeah, but it's a documentary. Is it? Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah. Well, I could talk for hours, but we are at our limit here. And I think I just want to say thank you again for writing your books, making your photo books. We didn't even talk about TIS books that you, you co-founded back in the

day. We didn't talk about your, your commercial photography experience and all of your teaching, we didn't see a band in it. But zero comparison. We, we covered all of the things that I'm most interested in. So, thank you for trying for entertaining me and the audience and engaging with what I want to talk about. So, really appreciate your time, Tim. Thank you. Actually, my pleasure. [MUSIC PLAYING]