FRAMES Photography Podcast
FRAMES Photography Podcast
Robert Flischel
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
In today's episode, W. Scott Olsen talks to Robert Flischel, a fine art photographer and photography educator from Cincinnati, USA.
This podcast is brought to you by FRAMES, a high-quality quarterly printed photography magazine. You can find out more about FRAMES at www.readframes.com.
I mentioned the movie Jaws because uh the backstory on that is fascinating and an important learning lesson for every photographer, young or old. And it goes like this. When Steven Spielberg got that movie, it was going to be his first major Hollywood movie, he had a quiet uh session with himself, and he said, if I do it my way, which is gonna be very slick, have a million tricks, and have all kinds of advanced cinematography, he said it'll be a failure of a movie.
SPEAKER_05This photography podcast is brought to you by Frames, quarterly printed photography magazine.
SPEAKER_06Here is your today's host, W. Scott Olson, with another fascinating conversation.
SPEAKER_02Well, hello everyone, and welcome to another podcast from Frames Magazine. My name is Scott Olsen, and today, folks, all of my homes, today we are going to be talking to one of my favorite photographers, a man whose work in color is so breathtaking and also so sophisticated. I feel humbled every single time I look at it. We're talking with Bob Fleischel. Bob, you may remember, you know, did a book called The Colorist. I had the good fortune to write a review of it for Frames Magazine. And in there, I said this book, if it was a musical score, would be labeled Forte Piano. In other words, really bright and bold at the beginning, and then all this subtlety becomes apparent. It's just really, really impressive work with understanding color. Bob's work has been everywhere. It's been in life, Time, Audubon, Newsweek, Smithsonian Air and Space, one of my favorite magazines. He graduated from Xavier University in 1971, studied under Kazakh Pezowski. A lot of credit he gives to that mentorship, to those days. His books include the Ohio State University, Pathways to the Heart and Mind, Messages of Glory, The Narrative Art of Roman Catholicism. I'm gonna talk about that one in a little bit. The University of Cincinnati. I mean, he architecture. He has got photographs in everything from the big pig gig celebrating pigs in the city to a junior league cookbook to architecture of the Aegean Sea, my I mean, a traveler's guide to Ohio's urban architecture, a portrait photographer, a landscape photographer, and whose work every single time I look at it is immediately compelling and deeply pleasing.
SPEAKER_03Bob, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today? I'm good. Great, Scott. And I appreciate you inviting me on this nice little adventure.
SPEAKER_02It is an adventure. We get to go everywhere. You credit your or you describe your photographic career beginning in college. But I'm always interested in how the camera first came into somebody's hands and image making sort of got into their heart and soul. So tell me the pre-college origin story. How did photography become something that you knew was going to be a compass heading for the rest of your life?
SPEAKER_03When I was in college, I was a sociology major, and it was an uh at that time Xavier was all male. And they said, We're going to acquire this small college down the road called Edgecliffe College, and they have a great art department, and it was all women. And so they said, if you want to learn a little bit about art, uh you could take some classes. So I uh I thought, boy, anything to break up this uh this mob of uh hunky males that are just you know drooling and um walking around hung over. So I stu I I took a class in watercolor, and uh there was a nun, a sister, teaching it, and she had us all do uh drawings of uh a scene that we were going to paint in watercolor. So she walked around the room and picked up mine, which was on like a 16 by 20 piece of parchment paper, and she held it up in the class and she said, Class, this is not what we're going for. It was humiliating. And uh I stormed out of the room, and years later I ran into a young lady who had been in the class, and she said, You know, I've never heard someone cuss out a nun until that day. But what it did was it eventually made me a pretty good watercolor painter because I used that um uh experience to kind of knuckle down and say, Well, you're not going to walk on me, I'm gonna become a decent painter. So I studied painting seriously, and eventually I became really comfortable with it. And my first experience with photography was I was walking by this solarium. This was in an old mansion. This uh the the whole art school was an old mansion, and there was a lady in there with a camera on a tripod, a 35 millimeter. I'd never, you know, picked up one or seen one. So this is 1969, 1970. And so she said, I said, Well, what's going on? And she said, Well, let me show you. And she was uh, you know, doing a portrait on a tripod, and she let me play with the camera. And so that that kind of was my first introduction because later I realized I was so impulsive and even borderline compulsive, and I I thought, boy, the watercolor is getting a little too complicated for me. And I bought a camera on an impulse, it was a uh 35 millimeter Mamiya C core with a uh a little zone metering system, BTL 500. It was 129.95. And so uh that's when I started to experiment with it. My brother would load the film because I I was not that technically gifted, so that anyone who remembers those days, you know, you don't want to misload the film. So that's how it all started.
SPEAKER_02Well, fast forward just a couple of years, and you are a staff photographer for Cincinnati Cincinnati Magazine. Right. So yeah, why not go into fine art? What was starting to call you towards magazines and photojournalism and sort of documentary storytelling?
SPEAKER_03Oh, oh, because once I started to uh learn photojournalism, because prior to that job, I had studied with um uh a very well-known uh photojournalist, Kazakh Pazowski, and he had been trained classically in Poland in the 30s, but came from a military family, and um his whole family was uh wiped out by the Nazis. He escaped and became a prisoner, and then he was a prisoner with the Germans for years, and then he was captured by the Soviets, and then he finally was freed and escaped to England and was within two years uh won the award for the top British photographer, you know, this uh humble young man from uh uh Poland. So when he moved to the US, he took a job in Cincinnati as the uh chief photographer for um Farm Quarterly, which was the real magazine for agriculture in the whole country. And so uh you know, he had some bad habits, chain smoking, boozing around, and and things like that, and uh ill health forced him into retirement and he became a teacher. And he had this institute in a neighborhood of Cincinnati, and I was struggling, so someone said, Well, if you really want to learn something, go study with Kazakh. So I I uh went up there in 1972 after college, and I met with him and he said, You must take entrance exam. Now, Tomaz is gonna kill me if my Polish accent isn't perfect, but so I took the exam, which was brutal. It was brutal. And what was on it? What's on a photography entrance exam? Oh, you you uh it was what he studied at the big uh institute in um Poland. Where where did um where did everybody study art in uh the the capital city? Um heavens, I don't know. Anyway, well, anyway, it was uh brutal, and he came, he said, I must grade exam. So he he left for about 15 minutes, came back, and he said, Um, you got 42 percent. You're a real dummy. I'd take you anyway. And so 30 it was $35 a semester.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_03You're getting encouraged at every stage of your career here, man. From the nun to this guy. Well, that's the that's the beauty of being criticized by people who know what they're doing. You will always learn from it. Now, the people that don't know what they're talking about, and you get criticized by them, that can uh be jarring. But so I studied with him for oh close to three years uh and did uh photography and social work. Uh I did social work better than I did photography. I was a freelancer and I just, you know, I was really, really uh rough around the edges. But I did eventually get a job at Cincinnati Magazine because they had a uh an essay they needed to get done uh over a holiday weekend, and it was a miserable um thing of contacting people, organizing people, and uh getting it all uh developed and ready by that following Tuesday. So I did that and uh in the next few weeks they said, Well, we've got an opening. Um so I learned how to tell stories in um in a magazine format because it was uh you you had to shoot the entire magazine and the pay was pitiful. But uh it was a uh a way to learn and if eventually I I joined Ohio magazine as a contributing editor, which by the way was founded by Larry Flint, the infamous pornographer who uh evidently was on a cross-country trip from New York to LA, and he sat in first class next to President Carter's sister, who was e an evangelical Christian, and she um uh uh saved him and somewhere over Oklahoma, and uh he said, I'm going to go back to my adopted state and start a topical magazine about that state. So it was Ohio, and he was based out of Columbus, and uh that's where I really, really uh started to develop some skills.
SPEAKER_02Oh, that that is very cluminary. You mentioned a couple of things that I want to go back to. But first of all, you know, two years into your gig at Ohio magazine, you are in Life magazine, the Pictures of the Year edition. Tell me the story there.
SPEAKER_03It was 1984, and my father had passed away in um January of that year, and I was kind of burned out a little bit. I think I was depressed and grieving and just out of sorts. And a friend of mine stopped over to the studio, and um we were sitting there, and they called from it was Time magazine and they said, Um, we need you to tomorrow go up to this small town where a hundred-year-old lady is just finishing her novel that took her 40 years to write. So, and it was gonna be a big open press date, so that since she was a hundred, it was not gonna be something that you know you could uh just show up anytime and and do. So uh I was I said, I'll call you back, and she said, just do it. It might be a good uh it might be a good way just to get busy again and and get back on the path. So I called him back and said, I'll be up there. I I confess that I was uh doing photojournalism my own way, and because I was doing so much commercial photography, I thought I'm just gonna bring a damn softbox with me because uh when I dropped my credentials off, they said, Well, you're gonna get some alone time with her, because I was with time, and uh so I had an assistant uh and a softbox, and I had like a five or ten minute window, and um that's uh that's when I got some really beautiful pictures of her, and then uh the editors at Life saw them and included it, included that uh image, one of the images in the the pictures of the year. So that was fun, and it was it was poignant too because I was dealing with so much personal uh things that um it kind of got me back on track. And it was exciting. Oh, very cool.
SPEAKER_02Very cool. You know, you use a term that a lot of photographers use, uh, has nothing to do with F-stop or shutter speed or any of that kind of stuff. Um and this even became the subject of one of your books. And and that's storytelling or narrative. Uh and and you sent me a note that I was supposed to bring up Jaws in Chinatown, uh, you know, those wonderful movies. Tell me what storytelling is all about in your photographic life.
SPEAKER_03Well, uh for me, I learned just like in music, that there's a hook that has to be employed to get the listeners' attention. And there's a hook or establishing shot that has to immediately attract the attention of the viewer. Because my editors always said, boy, if you don't get them to stop on the page, it's it's not working. They wanted us to create pictures that stop people momentarily on a page so they'd have to deal with it. I mentioned the movie Jaws because uh the backstory on that is fascinating and an important learning thing lesson for every photographer, young or old. And it goes like this. When when Steven Spielberg got that movie, it was gonna be his first major Hollywood movie, he had a quiet uh session with himself, and he said, if I do it my way, which is gonna be very slick, have a million tricks, and have all kinds of advanced cinematography, he said it'll be a failure of a movie. But if I went back to my first day in uh cinematography class at USC, where they presented the three shots that all movie makers use, and that those are the establishing shot, the normal shot, and the normal shot is where you put your hands up alongside of your head, and when that those hands start to get fuzzy, outs within that frame is the normal vision. And then the third one is the close-up shot or the detail shot. And he said, if I can mix those effectively, I can keep the story simple, and I can really um really execute my vision. And so if you watch that movie without sound, you'll see those three shots intermingled throughout. And it's uh it's really really basic storytelling. And the weather was so bad that the uh actors and actresses would get together on a rainy day and work on the script because they were really unhappy with the way the script read. So um I've used that experience and also the experience of watching Chinatown, even though it's a gruesome ending, which I would have changed, I would have had everything work out. But the story, uh the the way that uh um Pazov or uh Polansky, I almost said Pazovsky, my old teacher, but Polansky uses light and framing, color, and uh mood is really, really an impressive way to learn and understand light and color. You know, even for a still guy.
SPEAKER_02So I was gonna say, do you do you think there are a lot of lessons for still photographers to be had from the movies? Oh my god, yes.
SPEAKER_03Oh yes. Uh because they're spending millions of dollars to frame up these uh scenes. And so we never have those kind of budgets. So the more you can study, I mean we don't.
SPEAKER_02No, we don't. I don't know if a million dollars would make me a better still photographer, though.
SPEAKER_03Well, no. No, you we would both uh we would go off the deep end within weeks, Scott, and you know that. Uh but uh I I just think that backstories on photographs and backstories on movies are a really uh remarkable learning tools.
SPEAKER_01Let's take just a quick break. We hope very much that you are enjoying today's episode. The very fact that you are listening to this podcast suggests that photography means a lot to you. And if that's the case, you might want to have a look at Frames, quarterly printed photography magazine. We truly believe that excellent photography belongs on paper. Visit readframes.com to find out more about our publication and use the coupon code podcast to receive a recurring 10% discount on your new frames magazine subscription. And now, back to today's conversation.
SPEAKER_02So so tell me about, again, staying on the on the storytelling aspect. You you know, portraits, okay. I I understand, you know, how you can sort of imply a narrative, you know, out of portraits and stuff. You've got a whole book on um on that you call narrative that's really architecture. Um, you know, the the the the Catholic arts uh book. How how can architecture and and Photo and those images be narrative.
SPEAKER_03Well, it it was a uh interesting uh way that I came about doing that. And that is um many of these old cities in the U.S. and and in Europe have these remarkable cathedrals and basilicas and chapels, churches. Well, one of the ways I made money all through the 70s, eighties, and 90s was by doing photojournalistic weddings because they weren't being done. And the old photographers in town, the commercial guys, the editorial guys, would tell me, I'd say to him, I'd say, Corson, uh, somebody wants me to do a wedding. He said, Well, that's easy. Just tell them it's 5,000 bucks, and they'll either pay you or go away. Because being a wedding photographer was not exactly the end game of uh photojournalism or the end game of uh you know uh a serious commercial photographer. But if the poor souls were willing to kick in five G's for about six hours, then uh then it was worth it. So that did happen to me. A guy said, I'll pay you anything. And I said, Okay, uh uh 5,000. He said, Okay, great. And that was in 1978. So I did about a dozen weddings a year as a cash crop. Like a farmer will grow tobacco and he has a small plot, but it's a cash crop. So I used um weddings to finance some other things that I, you know, so I had more flexibility. But the storytelling with uh the narrative art of Roman Catholicism is uh since I had been in every church in the city and around the area, I thought, man, there is a um, they've got all this art from around the world. And uh I'm not interested in doing you know just church architecture. So I I used the um all the tenants of that faith and built a chapter for each one. So there's a chapter on symbols, there's a chapter on the holy family, there's a chapter on the Beatitudes, and I used art from around the world and all these churches to tell that story. So it now it did win every award from the secular press and the Catholic press the year that that came out. So it was um it was quite an accomplishment.
SPEAKER_02And then but then you have another book that's um entirely your work, as I understand it, about community and art and architecture, the expression of community. Was that a follow-up just more of your own book?
SPEAKER_03It was the first one. Oh, it was the first one. Okay. Yeah, it was uh I was assigned by Ohio magazine to go do some um architectural shots, and I will show this, I will send this picture to you. It's a picture of a terracotta statue of a young girl reading on a rooftop and uh in an old school from the 30s. And so, of course, I used my skill as a um managing gatekeeper as I went to the principal's office and I said, I got to get out on that roof. And in those days, this is back in the 90s, yeah, go ahead, uh, just make sure you can get back in and don't fall off. So as I got on the roof and was beginning to uh photograph this four or five-foot-tall terracotta statue, a school bus pulled up on the right-hand side, and it was out of focus. So I had my focal attention on the uh terracotta statue, and then I had this out-of-focus school bus back there, and the light was it was uh what I call codachrome, a codachrome morning, and it was uh you could you could feel the light, and I knew codachrome would feel the light too. So that was a special gift we had we received from Codachrome. You felt it, you almost could taste it. It was you knew when it was gonna work, and uh so that picture uh kind of got me moving, and I I spent, I guess, four years and photographed 50 historic schools and told the story of um schools as temples of learning instead of uh factories, you know, low-roof brick factories as they are today. So that was a um that was uh quite of an experience.
SPEAKER_02Oh man, uh you use the term gatekeepers a lot. And then you talk about you know special access and backstage and this kind of stuff. Um tell me about your relationship with the people that are gatekeepers.
SPEAKER_03You just love them to death. You you you if you're gonna get by a cruel and evil gatekeeper, you got to bring the heavy artillery. And that means complete honesty, I really need this shot. And to get this shot, I need to get there. And then they either say yes, no, or maybe. And then it always helps if you uh sometimes I've just laid uh $40 on the counter there, and the next thing I know, I'm on the roof. And uh but you have to be, and you have to give a if you have to go back, you bring a thank you gift. It can be, it can be a cake, it can be one of your books, it it can be anything, but you have to treat them like gold because they really do. If you want to get in, you've got to win them over.
SPEAKER_02Oh man. Can you tell me the story of the most difficult gatekeeper you've had to deal with? Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_03There was a uh there was a mil middleweight boxing champion out of Cincinnati, and his name was uh Aaron Pryor, and his nickname was the hawk. So you got you boxing aficionados can go look him up. But he um his um manager was a guy named Buddy LaRosa, who owned maybe a hundred pizzeria in this region, and so they were in a feud, and the magazine, Ohio magazine, wanted me to do some shots of him, and he uh they refused. His his handlers said, no, we're fighting with Buddy, the manager, we're not interested in anything. And so then a friend of mine said, Well, you know, one of his press agents is Billy Waller, who went to your high school. And so, oh, so I found an old book from Art Kane who had a picture of Joe Lewis in it, and it had an extreme wide-angle view of Joe Lewis's hands, fist. And so they were giant, and then it went back into a portrait of Joe Lewis. So I thought, well, maybe I'll call Bill and see if uh I'll tell him this is what we're going for. So I dropped off the Art Kane photograph, and uh he called me back and said, Well, Aaron said he'll do it, but you only have 10 minutes, and then uh Buddy will come, but they're not talking. So I got into his uh his gym space, and I had lights set up because when you have 10 minutes, you have 10 minutes. Buddy showed up looking a little sheepish, and the next thing I know, the entourage comes through the back doors, and they had Dobermans, shotguns, and uh uh what they call bodyguards everywhere. And they were screaming, hawk, hawk, hawk, hawk. And so I I went up to Aaron and I grabbed him and I said, You stand here and buddy, throw your arms around this guy. So the next thing you know, they're hugging, and I shot, I had the shot all uh uh all blocked out. I hit it, hit it, hit it, and then I said, We're done here. And uh Aaron said, I want that shot like uh you did a Joe Lewis. So I uh I got another five minutes. But it was uh nerve-wracking, but I kept my cool, and um you know, and that that turned out, and I'll put that one up on the board too. But that was a tough, tough sell there.
SPEAKER_02I I would have been three steps out the door at that point. Um but now you you said something that's really interesting. I mean, you're basically in the field, and yet you're still doing all this pre-visualization. You're still really kind of pre-imagining the shot in a really fluid situation. Tell me about thinking ahead. Tell me about you know being the kind of instantaneous art director or you know, more considered art director of your own work.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that's easy. Um expect the unexpected. And always scout the location ahead of time. If you can, if you can scout it out, you'll know where all the plugs are, where all the uh light's coming from, and you can start to prepare in your head what you can do lighting-wise and um environment-wise, to control it. And so the other part of that is the more you allow yourself to be complete, lose yourself completely in the in the process of photography. And that means you're out there shooting, like this um, well, you gotta mention that Gladys, um, no, Cynthia Gladys, you could cage her behind like you could put her in a jail cell, and she'd find her way out within a couple hours and come back with a damn good picture. So you're not gonna stop those that are motivated to explore, examine, and um study. And so that's that's the key.
SPEAKER_02So when you when you're scouting more or less, are you scouting for light or are you scouting for shape and line?
SPEAKER_03I'm scouting for portraits. I'm scouting if I have to do environmental portraits on location, I'm scouting the depth, how far back uh um shapes start to appear, like a tree line or buildings. The one saying that I remind myself about all the time is that the picture you think you want is never as good as the picture you find on the way to the one you think you want. In other words, if you're out, if you're on the path, if you're doing the footwork, the pictures will will uh present themselves because you're out there actually walking on the path. And so that's I always keep that in mind.
SPEAKER_02I I am looking at your uh recent contributions to the Frames Facebook page. And there's one that's now an entire four hours old uh as we're talking, um, and although by its title I can tell it's much older, uh, November Evening. And it strikes me that you design your work around colors. Uh you know, you your whole book is called The Colorist. Um and I'm wondering, do you see light or do you see light in terms of composition differently when you're dealing with black and white, or are we dealing with uh more journalism? When you're doing fine art stuff, is is color your foreground?
SPEAKER_03With color, because my whole goal is to uh create some sort of an emotional uh because color creates an emotional response in me. I want it to create an emotional response in the viewer. So I am very, very um in tune with the edges of light. Like that was done in the evening, and I mean I had to scramble, and I got um you know a less than perfect original file, but uh I did burn and dodge that baby um and uh it it it became a better picture. But library had a whole series of books that were published in the 70s, everything about photography. It was called the Life Library of Photography, and the book on color uh it it it sh it it was everything to me because the colorists that I admired were Ernst Haas, he was from uh Vienna or Austria, the um the the the color guy um Jay Meisell was remarkable, and so I became um almost willing to copy their pictures. Uh in fact not copy them, but try to achieve the tonality, the the vibran, the saturation, and the secret weapon we had was codachrome, because it it would hold the highlights without any any loss while you and you could lose the shadows and it would just get better. I mean the the shadows would then be so um full of of uh tone and beauty. So you had the perfect equation for creating color. It was it was a gift that you can never ever uh undervalue. It was um, you know. Are you still shooting film? No, no, no, no, no. No, when Kodak stopped doing that, I switched to Fuji Valveia and did that until the dawn of uh uh digital. And after a while, uh I became comfortable with that process because to me it's really not about the machine. In fact, one of my teachers told me, I said, Well, how what do I do with this little dial here? He said, I do not teach machinery. So I said, Oh, okay. So you were on your own learning the camera and all the uh the parts of it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Um Bob, you have called criticism a gift. What do you mean?
SPEAKER_03Well, I gave up the um part about being uh offended or hurt in art criticism because I was criticized by people I respected, loved, and admired. And I knew that they were doing it sometimes it was very rough. I knew they were doing it to help me. Now, if I'm at a uh on an assignment and some bonehead comes up and says, uh, you know, I don't think you should be using that diffuser on that flash, I'm just thinking, okay, do not respond to the bonehead and he will go away. Because I only take that personally because people like to engage and they like to chit-chat. But when you're but when you're trying to work and you have uh Nimrod, you know, letting you know just uh where you're going wrong, that um that has to be uh I have to move past that pretty quick. Right. Yeah. But the people that are trying to help, when they criticize, they are they are giving you really the keys to uh understanding.
SPEAKER_02Okay. And you do you teach others now?
SPEAKER_03I taught uh uh privately uh for a little bit, and then I taught at Northern Kentucky University for a couple of years, but it takes so much energy. I mean, you're a college professor and you teach English, but the the work that goes into um and my daughter's a teacher, and I know she's just exhausted. And so I had to teach three-hour class at night uh once a once a week for you know like a typical semester.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_03And I loved it, uh but it just um it took so much energy. But I still do um, you know, if somebody needs uh some guidance, I'm more than happy to uh give them a direction at least.
SPEAKER_02Oh, very cool. Um, Bob, you know that The Colorist is is one of my favorite books, and this is a self-published book, um, which it I mean, you got complete control over it. Um you you did want me to ask you, you told me this in advance, you want me to ask you about the secrets of self-publishing. So, what are the secrets of self-publishing?
SPEAKER_03Well, um I only have maybe one super secret, but a lot of people bring your checkbook back. No, right. No, that's what happened. I mean, uh 25 years ago, uh well, it happened in 1990. I was beat up. I was uh I was torn up from my schedule, and I was traveling a lot, and the photography was fine, and I was making a living, but I was exhausted, and I um I woke up on the couch one night, and on the TV was a show on PBS called The Civil War, and it was Ken Burns' first uh well, his major, he had done other videos, but this was a major production, and all of a sudden I was so mesmerized because I'd never seen torn-up old scratched-up black and white images with voiceover, music, and movement. And it was, I was transfixed. And I thought, wow, if he can do this with you know old, old pictures that were damaged, I should be able to do something you know, using photography as a uh storytelling device. And that's when I made a decision to do uh my first book. And so when the publisher met me, he said, okay, here's how it's gonna go down. Um you'll do 95% of the work, and we'll give you 5% of the proceeds. And uh I was never really good at math, God. So when when when I thought to myself, boy, even somebody who's kind of weak in math can figure out Now this is not a good equation. So I um I decided to um self-publish. And the secret is I can't sell books, but I can sure as hell pre-sell them. Well I uh pre-sell at least if I'm gonna and here's the other lesson never ever ever print more than a thousand units. But the first timers like me think they're gonna sell books, uh they're gonna break new records. That does not happen. So when you when you get your first 5,000 books in a warehouse and you realize how much they weigh, how much space they take, and how hard it is to sell, you'll never do that again. So I uh I keep the plane on the runway until I have enough airspeed to take off. And that means I pre-sell a minimum of uh five or six hundred out of the run to corporations uh to give us gifts, to um the entity I'm doing the book for, whatever. I uh and that's how I that's how I operate.
SPEAKER_02But you also get you also get a lot of control. I mean you get to be the art director. You get you do the layout, you get to, you know, you get to sequence the images.
SPEAKER_03You do, and then you get a book designer. You don't get a corporate designer, you get somebody that designs books, it's a lot less expensive, and you you give them the storyboard. I I build a storyboard from beginning to end, and then we have to do revisions, of course, but the the poor soul that's designing it is given the raw material, and they just they'll just oh, they'll jump on it like wild animals. And then you publish, you have to publish overseas. I mean, you have to print. We used to be able to do it in Canada, and then um there were some domestic opportunities, but right now, South Korea, Japan, China, and um the Philippines. I mean, it wherever my uh printer has a big press, and usually it's in uh, you know, kind of a back city in uh China. Um that's the kind of the nuts and bolts of that. But always ask for help. Your printing rep will hold your hand the first book. I mean, you'll learn everything that you need to learn because you just beg them. You say, Can you hold my hand? And um, they will.
SPEAKER_02Hopefully. It will, and there are people out there, I mean, you know, the just looking at the color of the colorist here on my desk, three different fonts. Um, you've got a you know, brilliant color image, your fonts are in different colors. A lot of design work goes in um that is not immediately apparent. And yet when you get involved with making them, boy, these these become gut-wrenching decisions after a while. Um, and it it is a beautiful, stunning book. As you know from the review, I just enjoyed the hell out of this one.
SPEAKER_03Well, the the other one I've been working on for seven years, I can't believe it, is a book on poverty. And I took an area, a microcosm of say, oh, southern Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, and southern Indiana, and I picked a time period, 1900 to 2024, and I researched and found the photographers that had visited that region over the past hundred and twenty-five years, and I am um telling a story of generational systemic poverty that uh uh using the work of thirty-five photographers, uh including, you know, Weston, uh Heinz, uh a lot of uh remarkable people. And uh that is that's gonna be uh coming out this summer. But it's exhausting. I mean I I didn't think it would take this long, but COVID hit, yeah, a recession hit, and um but it's gonna be a it's gonna be uh uh uh I hopefully uh a good book.
SPEAKER_02I can't imagine it would be anything else. Um Bob, we've got just just a minute left here. You you did want me to ask you about the joy of frames and the gifts of photography. So I'm I'm I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna be good to your your request here. Uh tell me what you mean. What's this all about? Okay.
SPEAKER_03Um a couple years ago, uh somebody said, you know, you should really um look at this frames magazine. This was two and a half years ago. So I looked at it and I thought, well, you know, you can't beat it. I mean, it was like 12 bucks a month, and and um I started posting, and um um I realized that the more I posted, the more I wanted to go out and shoot randomly and impulsively. And so um it started to energize me. I mean, I'm I'm not a young guy, I'm 75, but I'm one of those photographers that, you know, they'll sh they'll be prying that camera out of my cold dead hands, that's for sure. Because, you know, I love the medium and I love the uh the whole experience uh of photography. So I became um energized, and I picked subject matter that would be not because so many people, it seems, on frames have access to these remarkable natural environments. I mean, it just blows your mind. So I decided to, like I do pictures of asphalt, and I I call it the asphalt jungle, just because I want to I want to try and create some pictures that have, you know, they don't have exactly a sexy orientation uh from the get-go, and I try and uh maybe um you know have fun with that. So it keeps me on my toes. And um, you know, the the whole joy of photography is that you can really, really lose yourself in that whole uh uh transformative process of you know paying attention. We are we're supposed to be the people that notice and and and are impressed by uh little things that everybody walks by. So that's that's all I wanted to say there. But thanks for Scott for um uh your kind um thoughts and um reviews.
SPEAKER_02Well, they they they are all absolutely heartfelt and and well deserved. Um and and I'm I'm chuckling at your comments about the gifts of photography. I'm thinking we we are the community that's most likely to be guilty of trespassing uh somewhere, someday. Um but but we are also the community that I think is is most alive in the moment every day. Yes um by just by the by the nature of our work. So um well said, man. Bob, I love your work. This has been a great conversation. Thank you very much.
SPEAKER_03Oh, good.
SPEAKER_00Thanks to everyone for listening.com.