FRAMES Photography Podcast
FRAMES Photography Podcast
Xiomaro
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 speaks with Xiomaro, an internationally exhibited photographer whose work blends historically grounded images of iconic places with candid street photography that treats everyday urban life as future history.
You can visit Xiomaro's website here.
Find out more and join FRAMES here.
If you're going to do street photography in a certain place, or if you're going to photograph, let's say what I do with the National Park Service, someone's home of a poet or politician or someone like that, I kind of approach it like an actor where I go in and I want to know as much as I can about the place and about the person. And I almost want to be able to uh when I step into it, almost be like I'm from that community or I'm actually President Theodore Roosevelt, right? So I kind of approach it that way. But like an actor, uh once I've done all the background research and I've thought it through and all that, and I kind of inhabit that mindset, then I open myself up for whatever ca happens once I'm there. So if I'm photographing on the street, you know, I can't prepare very much for who's gonna walk in my path or what's gonna happen on the street or what the weather's gonna be like. And if I'm photographing a presidential home or a poet's home or a landscape, an environmental landscape, I also can't control what's there. And I don't want to prepare for it too much either. I I want to give myself a little bit of freedom to kind of shoot from the hip.
SPEAKER_00This photography podcast is brought to you by Frames, quarterly printed photography magazine. Here is your today's host, W. Scott Olson, with another fascinating conversation.
SPEAKER_05Well, hello everyone, and welcome to another podcast from Frames Magazine. My name is Scott Olsen, and today, for my lord, today is gonna be so cool. Because you know, every now and then you come across the work of somebody and it just strikes a chord. There's an aesthetic, there's an idea, there's an intent there that you you resonate with. And it's a kind of project that you say, I wish I was doing this. And some of the work is just reimagining what's possible with photography. Today we're talking with C. O. Marlowe, who is at one level a street photographer, also a documentarian, a uh PBS called him, a historian with a lens. Um, he has done work with the National Historic Parks, the National Park Service, and just about every portraiture, street photography, you name it, rock and roll, uh, he's done work out there that is just inspiring in its breadth and inspiring in its depth. He has been exhibited internationally. He's got books out there on street photography and more. We're gonna get to that in just a second. And he's one of those guys that you look at the work and you think not only is this image real, I mean, it pops, it's just right there in your face and wonderful. It is the kind of photograph that provokes curiosity. You stick you you're looking at a picture of somebody's bedroom in a National Historic Park, and you're looking at it for 20 minutes, 25 minutes. Your eye is scanning all the intricate details, and that's not an accident. That is an artist's vision. And speaking of artist's vision, there's a hell of a story in terms of how he got from being a little kid, you know, doing rock and roll in the basement, up to being a world-class photographer. Uh C Lomaro, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today?
SPEAKER_04I'm doing pretty good. And boy, that was some introduction. I almost didn't recognize you were talking about.
SPEAKER_05I'm gonna have to get you to write my Wikipedia entry. There you go. There you go. Well, that it is all earned, man. Um, because this really is remarkable work. So, I you know, it's as I said just a second ago, and uh we're gonna hold off on the photography for a second because how you got there is is so compelling and so rich. Doing a little bit of research, you know, let me tell you what I know, and then you tell me the story in a little bit more detail. Sure. So, okay, you you're a kid, you're a rock and roller, just like the all of us. You know, I had my you know, Slinger Linda, then my Ludwig drum set in the basement. Your dad made your first guitar, which I just found absolutely mesmerizing. Um, but you make a turn then. Uh you won't you go off to college and you become a philosophy major, and then you go off to law school, and you're not just any lawyer, you're damn good. You I mean you're the editor of the Journal of International Law and Politics at NYU. Um, but you're not giving up the music. You wind up being a manager as well as a musician, and not just a little manager. I mean, Lisa Lisa's hiding out there. Um, I gotta tell you some stories about head to toe, by the way. We'll talk about that some other time. Um and then health issues come in. So, how you got to hold a camera in your hand is a long, wonderful, terrible, complicated process. Fill me in on how that all happened. Sure. First of all, I'm very impressed by your research skills.
SPEAKER_04Man, you dug in deep there. It was amazing. Not really, but okay. You starting to scare me a little bit. Um, well, uh, the way it all worked out was uh I never planned to do what I'm currently doing. In fact, I never would have even imagined uh that that was even uh a direction that I can go in. I've always um, you know, liked photography. I mean, when I was a teenager, I use uh an old Canon AV1, if anybody out there remembers those film cameras. And so, and it was complicated. I couldn't understand it, but you know, I got a lot of nice blurry pictures out of it. Uh, but yeah, again, never really thought of this as a direction. But what happened was um back in 2004, um I was actually doing uh I was very active in music at the time. And uh sometimes in between sets, um I had to run to go to the bathroom real quick, you know. Uh and usually there was a crowd of people there, so I had to wait. So I was real fast to do it. And uh I don't think I've told this portion of the story before, but uh basically when I was uh urinating, I felt a little bit of pain, and I thought maybe I was getting um uh what do you call those little granular things you get in there? Um kidney stones are gallstones. Kidney stones, yeah. I never had one before, but I thought maybe that's what it was. And then I was also thinking that maybe it's just because I was rushing and kind of pushing myself that that's what accounted for the pain. So I ignored it, uh, but then it kept happening. And then I started getting a little nervous about it. And because I was so busy with what I was doing at the time, uh, what I did was unusual. I I put off my annual physical exam. But I don't really do that. I'm pretty religious in making sure I do it. Uh, but I was so busy, I put it off for a few months. And finally, when I did go, uh they did the PSA test for, you know, it's a blood test. Right. And the PSA test determined that I had uh prostate cancer. And that was pretty mind-blowing because at the time I was uh mid-40s, and usually prostate cancers associated with people who are much older, like you know, elderly, 70, 80 years old. And of course you can die from it. So they did another test just to make sure that the uh blood test, you know, wasn't incorrect. And sure enough, you know, that's what the test revealed. So that that was uh a mind blower because uh they could not tell from the blood test whether the cancer had spread. Uh, if it spread then you know to other organs, and obviously it could be life-threatening. So um what they decided was they advised that I uh do what's called a prosectomy, I think I'm pronouncing that correctly, where basically they remove the entire prostate. Uh, but the doctor did say that when he does the surgery, he won't know for sure until he's in there whether it indeed spread. Because all you need is one cell to, you know, to trigger all that. So, and then I had to wait six months for the operation. The doctor I went to is a world-renowned surgeon for this. Uh, so he was in high demand. He had people from all over the world uh coming to him. So I had to wait about six months for the operation. And so for those six months, you know, I'm wondering, well, what's gonna happen? I'm gonna be dead or alive, uh, I'm gonna be incapacitated. I mean, I just didn't know. Uh, and because I assumed the worst, uh, that got me thinking, you know, about well, if I can get past this, uh, do I really want to continue as I have been, you know, in my life? And part of that was getting rid of people who maybe they were well-meaning, but they were really kind of getting in the way of what I want to achieve as an artist. Uh as a musician, I actually had a um a bootleg recording that somebody did at a show I did. And somehow it found its way into um uh America, what's that big show there? America's Got Talent. Oh, yeah. Oh, American Idol. American Idol. That's what it was, yeah. And at that time, American Idol actually had a website version of the TV show, and the website version had more alternative music, whereas the TV show is more like RB and pop music. And that um that little bootleg actually hit the top 10 of their charts for a week. Uh I did not know that. Very cool. Yeah. I didn't even know it either because they sent me an email about it. Uh, but the point that I'm making, the reason why I bring that up is because uh with that level of grassroots success, I wasn't able to get the band to, you know, kind of up their game so we can take advantage of that, you know, and kind of push us to another level. So I was frustrated with all that. Um, you know, after the operation, um the doctor said, you know, thankfully you didn't spread anywhere, so you're good. And for many years after that, I continued getting the blood tests and checkups just to make sure that it didn't come back. But uh that whole experience got me thinking about, well, you know, what do I what do I want to do now? So um I had already been taking a lot of photos of the shows that I was doing uh because also at the time uh YouTube was becoming a thing. Um I forgot what the pre-Facebook was. My space was a thing, you know? Yep. And I could not get anybody to take pictures of the band. You know, when they did it, they just wouldn't send it to me. So I bought a little digital camera and I just would give it to a friend or somebody can just take shots and we'd upload that to the internet. So, but eventually that camera really drew my interest, and I just started um photographing after the surgery. Uh, I went out to the parks out west, and it was just a way for me to, you know, I was kind of depressed. I really didn't know what I wanted to do next, and the whole experience was kind of you know a downer. But I really felt good about not being in a band, being by myself, just me and this camera, and just photographing and really focusing on what's around me in these parks.
SPEAKER_05Okay, but there are a lot of other currents going on here because you know you've got the law career going on you know, at the same time. And then in another interview, you talked about, you know, these these weird things started coming in from outside. You know, Napster appears, a recession appears. What took you away from law, you know, and having sort of photography as the thing you do on weekends and made the photography, you know, this is my heart and soul?
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Part of my confusion at the time was I just I literally didn't know what to do next because I just got over this cancer. Uh, I was trying to get rid of folks who are kind of standing in my way. Right. Um, but as you mentioned, the music industry that I was in is starting to change uh drastically. At the time, I was an entertainment lawyer. So I was representing uh mostly musicians, but also all kinds of creative people, actors and models, and other photographers and folks like that. Uh but music was the main thing. And I had also just uh at the time just kind of finished managing a recording artist named Lisa Lisa. So I was very involved in the music industry. That was my bread and butter. But Napster, for those who might be too young to know much about it, Napster was uh this social uh it was a website that basically people contributed uh digital recordings of their favorite albums, and then other folks can just download and share it freely. And that was decimating music. You remember that, right? Yeah. And that was decimating the music industry because now they were losing sales of CDs. And this was way before Apple Music and all that sort of thing. As an entertainment lawyer, I always try to help out the musicians, being one myself. And I knew many times these are younger people who don't have a lot of money for lawyers. So the arrangements I would make with them was I would negotiate the record deal. Uh, they would get an advance, you know, some money from the record company. Right. And then I wouldn't take a percentage of it, but whatever my uh bill was, I would just wait when that advance came in. Now they would have the funds to pay me. Unfortunately, because the music industry was doing so bad economically because of Napster, the labels weren't putting up money anymore, and they weren't signing very many artists either. So that trickled down and affected me where basically I had very little business to do. You know, there was nothing happening. And then after that, after even though the music industry was already kind of in its own recession, then we had the great recession, the worldwide one of 2008. And that really just knocked out the music industry in my own practice. So then I basically had no practice. You know, it was just trickling in. So um I ended up working for these large law firms as an independent contractor, just you know, doing um, you know, it when they had these really large cases where they had to hire a lot of people or needed a lot of lawyers on it, instead of hiring them full-time, they would just hire you on a project basis. So I started doing that just for the cash, basically, because it was not work I was interested in. It was all corporate litigation, uh, mostly from the fallout from 2008, that recession. Right. And I was still doing music and still doing, you know, just photography for myself. Uh, but what was interesting was that when I did do the shows, um, a lot of folks were buying uh these prints that I made of these photographs that I took out west, you know, out in the national parks. I I would set up a little table that had my CDs, you know, and my t-shirts that people can buy that. The merch table. Yeah. But then I wanted to be different from the other artists. So I said, I'm gonna have a little art show. So I had all these uh framed uh photos, you know, on display, and I offered them for sale. And interestingly, a lot of people really like the photographs, and that was encouraging to me because uh I didn't take them with the intention of selling them. It was just almost like a therapy for me. Uh but when I saw there were people willing to pay money for it, then I realized, well, maybe there's a direction here because what I like about it is I can express myself artistically, but I don't need a band to do it. I don't need one person to hold the camera and one person to press the shutter and one person to set up the tripod. I could do all that myself. And, you know, I work hard. I mean, if I want to stay up all night long to get something done, you know, I'll do that. But I can't always count on other folks in the band to do that sort of thing. They didn't have that same level of commitment. So I like the idea that with photography, uh, I can do that as a solo.
SPEAKER_05With your philosophy major, um, with your law degree, uh, you know, we tell students here at the college where I teach that they want to go into pre-law, you know, we say be a philosophy major, be an English major, be something like that, because law is reading closely and writing exactly. I mean, there is a kind of attention to detail that is at the heart of being a good lawyer. And at the same time, you've described, you know, your musical interests as being really invested in in live music, something about the energy, something about the frenetic ambiance. That's too polite of a word. Um, but you know, but the energy of a concert, of a club, whatever. Are those two threads complementary? Are they contradictory? Um, how are they coming together to form who you become?
SPEAKER_04Aaron Powell Well, they're definitely complementary. I mean, the precision that is required in analytical thinking as a philosopher or as a lawyer and also in writing, I think is really, really key because you know, you don't want to flounder, you want to have an artistic vision and an approach to your photography. But at the same time, you know, you don't want to get hung up on that to the point where you are um you're not opening yourself up to artistic possibilities. When I was on stage uh performing, what I loved about it was it was a certain amount of chaos that I knew was going to happen at some point in time because I played guitar, lead guitar was my main instrument, and I also sang. Uh, but I use a lot of uh uh effects. For those of you who are musicians, you know that uh guitar is like they had these pedals that we have, you know? So I always had a lot of them. And so, and then we we were often doing material that was new and fresh, so we weren't completely rehearsed. So what would happen is, as prepared as I was, I knew something may go wrong somewhere, and that was kind of exciting too. It was a little bit dangerous, but sometimes those mistakes ended up being something that people liked because they didn't know that it was a mistake, you know. And I would, of course, just kind of go along with it. You know, in fact, there's an old um an old joke or saying amongst musicians that when you make a mistake, right, and you know it's an error, but the audience doesn't know and they seem to like it, make the mistake again on purpose. Again, yep, do it again. Yeah, yeah, just do it again. So with photography, it's kind of like that. I mean, I I kind of go into a project with a general idea of what I want to do. Like with the National Park Service, for instance, uh I photographed uh President uh Theodore Roosevelt's home, which also was a summer White House. I photographed uh two different headquarters where George Washington engaged in the Revolutionary War. All these places that I photographed, I will do lots of reading and research into them. And I almost want to inhabit the minds of these folks that I'm, you know, that I'm photographing their their places because they're not alive, so I can't photograph them.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, you you have a cool term for that. And I can't even pronounce it. Resident resident basically it's resident and photographer put together. I have yet to be able to get my mouth to say that word. That's because I made it up. It doesn't exist. It's it's residentography. Residentography. I I still can't. Okay. Well, well, first of all, I mean, tell me what you mean by the word, and tell me what you mean by the idea.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, so residentography is the idea that uh if you're going to photograph, uh if you're gonna do street photography in a certain place, or if you're going to photograph, let's say what I do with the National Park Service, someone's home of a poet or politician or someone like that, uh, I kind of approach it like an actor where I go in and I want to know as much as I can about the place and about the person. And I almost want to be able to uh when I step into it, almost be like I'm from that community or I'm actually President Theodore Roosevelt, right? So I kind of approach it that way. But like an actor, uh, once I've done all the background research and I've thought it through and all that, and I kind of inhabit that mindset, then I open myself up for whatever happens once I'm there. So if I'm photographing on the street, you know, I can't prepare very much for who's gonna walk in my path or what's gonna happen on the street or what the weather's gonna be like. And if I'm photographing a presidential home or a poet's home or a landscape, an environmental landscape, I also can't control what's there. And I don't want to prepare for it too much either. I want to give myself a little bit of freedom to kind of shoot from the hip, uh, almost like I did on stage. I'd rehearse, but I knew there was gonna be an opportunity for era, and I'd forget a lyric and I kind of had to make it up on the spot. And so those happy accidents will sometimes result in some really interesting uh musical uh performances or some really interesting uh photographs. And as it was we spoke about earlier, I'm not a very technical guy, you know, so you know, I'm not consciously thinking about f-stops and this, that, and the other thing or lenses. I mean, I just kind of go with what I have, and it's really kind of taking everything that I've uh that I've read about and drawn into my mind and just letting it percolate in there. And then it just comes out depending on what I'm influenced by in the in the environment.
SPEAKER_05You know, you you bring up an interesting point, and you know, you you are you are mainly a street photographer in New York and you live there. I mean, so the your research is every minute of every single day. If you were to go to some place you've never been, you know, Sao Paulo, Sydney, whatever, um, would you do the months of research before you got there? Or would you say, here I am, world, show me what you got? Uh I do the research in advance.
SPEAKER_04In fact, I'm doing it right now on several locations that I'm photographing for potential, for potential future books. So I will do the research in advance. Uh, but then as I'm shooting, I keep doing the research because as I become this residentographer, right? If I'm immersing myself in the community, I start becoming more aware of it. And so then I can pinpoint my research a little bit deeper. So I try to get to um kind of the spirit of the location because in many cases, when one visits, say, New York City or some other uh towns, we kind of go there as a tourist. So we get drawn to the same places everybody else goes. And I want to avoid all that stuff. Um, not really avoid it. I mean, I will photograph it, but I don't want to approach it as a tourist where it's the same shot of Radio City, you know, the facade or Times Square. So I try to delve deeper on well, let's not just focus on the tourists, but who are the people who work here? Who are the people who live here? Uh, what's important to them, uh, what's their culture like, and trying to get a little bit of that in the uh in the photographs, which is a hard thing to do because the photos, by their nature, are an abstraction. So then you start. Start thinking about, well, if I do a book, uh, how do I write about this? How do I approach captions? Uh, what story do I want to tell? So it's a lot of different things kind of mixed up. It's not just taking a picture and that's it and getting an interesting composition, but I'm thinking in my head, how do these pictures, how can I sequence these pictures to tell a story in a in a museum exhibit or in a book or in some other or you know, in some other vehicle for getting that out there.
SPEAKER_05You know, when you mentioned composition, do you have any formal photography education at all? Uh just YouTube.
SPEAKER_04But I I did take uh I did take a lot of art history courses when I was in college, as well as studio art classes. Okay. You know, when I think compositionally, a lot of it I'm really drawing it more from paintings like Rembrandt, uh Goya, uh V Vermeer. These are uh wonderful painters because really the the history of visual art is a lot longer and more deeper on the painting side than the photography. Photography's only been around since 1839, I think. I think it's a year. So I draw a lot of it from there. And many people have commented, especially on my um national park photography, that there is a painterly quality to it. I'm very comfortable using blurs, for instance. I'm very comfortable not wearing too much. If there's detail in the shadows, I read these forums where people obsess over that stuff, and I don't care if it goes all black, you know? Yeah. Because a lot of paintings from Goya that are all black, and it gives you this sense of mystery. So uh more of it is that than anything else, I would say. And also music contributes to that too, because in music, in fact, Ray Charles had uh I'll paraphrase him, but he said something to the effect that you know, when you do a movie, you have an hour and a half to tell your story. If you have a book, you have hundreds of pages to tell your story. And if you're doing a Broadway play, again, a limited amount of time to tell your story. When you do a song, you generally have like three minutes, four minutes to tell your story. And in photography, it gets compressed even further, I would say, you know, because you have even less time to get that across. So four thousandths of a second. Yeah, exactly. And you're not capturing the entire scene because it's just a frame, it might be uh rectangular or you know, a square. So a lot of it is also what you omit. But um, you know, that that's part of what I think about. It's like, well, how do I put things together in a way that uh either tells a story or maybe doesn't tell a story, kind of leaves it open to the to the viewer. There's some ambiguity and some hist and some mystery to it. Uh also they're like puzzle pieces for me. If I take enough photos of a of a certain place, you know, uh I want to have enough variety where I can kind of move them around in sequence so that maybe the individual photo doesn't tell you too much, but when you put them all together with some other ones, you come away with a certain um not just a story, but e even a feeling, just like you would in music.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. Tell me the story of 2011. Um, you know, you wind up getting a residency um at the at the Weir Farm National Historic Site. What made you first fill out the application for that? I mean, because you could have done landscape stuff, you could have gone out to arches, you could have, you know, done Yosemite or the Badlands, whatever. Um, but you wanted to go to a historic site. They gave you, you know, you you got the the uh residency. So tell me why you did it, what you did when you were there, and this became a watershed for you.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, that is that is absolutely key. It's it's called Weir Farm National Historical Park. They actually changed their name. It's in Wilton, Connecticut. Uh, I got this email from the AAA, you know, the Automobile Association of America. The great art sponsorship of the AAA. Okay. Yeah, I owe it all to them because in this email that I got from them, it was like a newsletter, they were recommending Weir Farm as a good place to go for a day trip, you know? And I never heard of it before. I mean, you know, Connecticut, it's just it's far, you know, not far from New York. I never heard of it. Also, I studied art history, and Weir Farm is named after Julian Alden Weir, who is a very famous impression, American impressionist painter. But I name didn't ring a bell, so I was very intrigued by it. And this this email arrived during that period of time you were alluding to earlier, where basically I was just kind of floundering. I was, you know, not really in law anymore. You know, I was kind of doing it as a side gig with these uh big firms, and music was kind of going downhill for me. So I was looking for a direction, and I had purchased the camera years earlier because I wanted to go more into it, as I mentioned, since people were buying pictures, but I was still kind of floundering with it. Like I couldn't find a direction for it. So I decided to go to We're Farm, not even for photography. I just wanted to check it out. I thought it was intriguing. But what happened was we uh my wife and I went on a uh a ranger-led tour of the place. Okay. And the ranger kept referring to the fact that We're a farm, because it is the homestead of a famous painter, that they have an artisan residence program. And this is a way to develop new talent or for artists who are established to be able to uh, you know, maybe finish off a work or something like that. But it's part of the tradition of this park. I had never heard of an artisan residence program, and that really intrigued me. And the Ranger kept encouraging us, saying, you know, if you know of an artist or if you're not an artist and you want to apply, make sure you stop at the visitor center to get an application. Well, that really fired me up and I wanted to do it. But to be honest with you, I had, you know, I said, Well, I'm not an artist with a capital A, you know, and I don't have a portfolio. I've just been messing around all this time, you know. I mean, okay, maybe in music I'm confident with that, but not in not in uh photography or painting or anything. So my wife and I are walking to the parking lot to go home, and this just kept nagging at me, you know. I said, Do I really want to leave here and not pick up that application? To be honest with you, Scott, I was actually embarrassed to go into the uh visitor center and ask for the application because I didn't feel I was worthy. He's like, How dare I ask for an application, you know? Yeah, but you know, being the manly man that I am, there we go. I turned around and I got my wife to do it for me. I said, hey, do me a favor. I'm too embarrassed. I admit it publicly. I'm I'm shaming myself here, but I I asked my do me a favor, go in there and get the application for me. So so she did it. She got she didn't look at you and say, no, go get it yourself. Oh, my wife is used to my insanity, so she got it for me. So I looked at the application and I said, There's no way they're gonna accept me. I mean I don't have any of the stuff they have here. Plus, I went online and I saw that all their previous artists in residents were professors, you know, people have these big credentials, they had PhDs in art and they had exhibits, and I had none of that stuff. And then also they asked for recommendations. And I'm thinking, well, who's gonna recommend me? I don't know anybody who's gonna be able to comment on my art. So uh what little I was doing of it. So I went through the application, I prepared it anyway, because they asked a lot of really good questions about um, you know, what is your philosophy of art? You know, what what's your viewpoint? Uh, what are you trying to accomplish? Lots of internal things that I had not considered before. And so I figured, well, let me prepare the application because it's good practice. I'll submit it. I know they're gonna reject me, but this way in the future I kind of know what they're looking for. And in a future application, either here or some other place, you know, maybe I'll have a better shot at it. Well, I prepared it the best that I could. I submitted samples of my work. They wanted a portfolio. And at the time I was doing a lot of abstract, um, abstract photography, you know, okay. Things where I was, you know, turning the composition upside down where you had no sense of what you were looking at, uh, reflections off of um, you know, surfaces like water and things like that. Uh it looked almost like it was photoshopped, but it but it wasn't. It was straight out of the camera, you know, other than some small adjustments for contrast and saturation and all that. But they but that intrigued them. And I was explaining to them in my application, and I don't want to get too nerdy here, but since you asked a question, I'll do it anyway. Um I explained to them that I was fascinated, and this was true, I was fascinated by a um uh something called the Mandelbrot set. If anybody out there is familiar with that, it's a different kind of geometry, and the thinking behind it is that all geometry is uh, and I'm gonna explain this poorly because I'm not a smart person in that way, but it's a geometrist. Yeah, I'm not a geometrist, if there's such a word. But basically that there's a certain shape from which all other shapes come up. So when you think of Euclidean geometry, you have squares, right? Spheres, these are triangles, these are all perfect shapes, but those shapes don't reflect what we see in tree leaves, for instance. Or if you're flying over the landscape, you see the coastal lines, right? Uh the Mandelbrot set is this anybody can look it up and you can see what it is, what I'm referring to. Mandelbrot is M-A-N-D-E-L-B-R-O-T, for those of you who want to find out what this means. But the Mandelbrot set is a shape, and if you look at it, you could see how if you multiply that shape, you can start approximating the look of a tree or the look of a mountain of a mountainscape. And so that really intrigued me on many levels. And I was kind of exploring that with these photos that I submitted for this uh application that I thought I was gonna get rejected on. But surprisingly, they actually thought it was intriguing too. And so they accepted me. And I was completely blown away by that. Holy cow, I can't believe I pulled this off. And to this day, I still think that maybe someone canceled and they had to fill in a spot and they stuck me in there.
SPEAKER_05So I mean, the the original idea always has strength. So I mean, you you you got 85 applications and they're all saying the same thing. Here comes one from left field, and you think this guy's good. This guy's got some some creativity.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, uh maybe it was that. I mean, I I don't think I was pulling that off entirely with the pictures, but you know, that that was my intention behind it. And uh and I wasn't even aware of that too much at the time uh I was taking the photographs. It was because of the questions that was asked on the application that it forced me to write this out because they want you to submit uh like a statement about what what you're doing. And so it was actually very helpful in that way. But uh that ended up putting me into the park for um for a month-long residency where I lived in the park in a historic cottage. And I tried approaching, you know, this Mandelbrot set type of photography on the grounds, and I just wasn't seeing things that lent itself to that kind of a photograph. So I was kind of at a loss there once I arrived. But I ended up photographing the beauty of the park. They have some beautiful architecture there, uh, beautiful landscapes. I mean, these are landscapes, Scott, that inspired not just Julian Alden Weir, but also all of his famous painter friends, you know, people like John Singer Sargent, for those of you who are familiar with painters like that. And so there are paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other world-class museums that reflect this very landscape that I was living in. So for photography, it was great. Uh and they wouldn't let you go. They wouldn't let me go because what happened was uh after I finished the uh the residency, then I was lost again. It's like, well, where do I go from here now? You know, what do I do? And so I was floundering again. But then a few months later, the park called me up and they said they were interested in some of the photographs that I took. And I got a little bit nervous there because what happened was I actually met the son or the grandson of Julian Alden Weir. He came to an open studio that I was required to present as part of the residency. He really liked the photographs that I took because he actually grew up there as a child. So he he could tell that I um that I was connecting with the environment, with the architecture, and it was heartfelt. So he arranged for me through the park service to actually get entry into the buildings, which at that time were closed to the public because they were under renovation. And so I photographed the interiors, but I was just doing it for myself. They were like snapshots. It was very dark in there too. So a lot of stuff came out blurry. I was being led on a personal tour, and I didn't want to hold them up, say, oh, can you wait for about five minutes? I can set my camera up. You know, so I was just snapping away. But they were interested in those photos, and then I thought maybe I was not supposed to do that. I was, I wasn't sure what they were asking me about it. But it turned out what they wanted was they wanted to see if they could use the photographs uh to document this part of the park's history and to maybe use it in a public way to uh intrigue the public about what this park is about. So I said, Well, I'm really flattered that you asked me, but these photos are really not very good. However, I'd be more than happy to, you know, go in there properly and shoot it the right way. And between you and me, I mean, I didn't tell them this, but I assumed they were not gonna pay me and I was just gonna do it as a freebie, and I would have done it. Uh, but they said, you know, basically they formally commissioned me to do the project. So they gave me access to the whole place.
SPEAKER_05It should not be this easy, man. I just don't want to let you know that.
SPEAKER_04Well, you know, it's funny you should say that because, you know, as as a lawyer and someone who's very organized, I plan a lot of things. I'm very good at planning. And there's no way something like this could be planned. You know, it's it's almost like there's this invisible hand that's just guiding things to happen. Because again, I never even heard of an artist in residency, and now because of it, I got accepted, not thinking I would get accepted. And then I get this project, and all of this was triggered through cancer. You know, I kind of joked in a black humor kind of a way that in a way, cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me because it it would not have launched me into this direction.
SPEAKER_02Let'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_05In this work, and and in the work that you do, we'll get to this in a second, you know, at other parks. Is there a real difference between being a documentarian and being a fine art photographer?
SPEAKER_04Um you could certainly shoot in a documentarian way. So for instance, um I did do some uh one little tiny project for Newsday. It's a newspaper in in New York. But, you know, if you're shooting for a newspaper or, you know, a publication like that, then it's gonna be more of a straight shot. You know, you're not gonna do much editing afterwards. Uh you really kind of want to document what's happening there. It's it's a little bit more straightforward. As an artist, you could take more liberties, you know, you can introduce uh now I have to say, um, having said all that, if you look at some of the photography, say in the New York Times, every now and then you get some really interesting shots, and they're just they're not part of the art section, right? I think it's just actually part of the hard news section where they'll use reflections, they'll use blurs, they use silhouettes and things that are kind of artsy. Uh, but for the most part, you know, it's gonna be pretty straightforward. Uh, I like to approach it where it's a little bit of both. I want to be document, documentary in the sense that people will come across, they'll know what We're farm is, you know, what it's about. But at the same time, as an artist, I want to challenge myself and I don't want to just take shots like you see in a newspaper. I want to take something that's a little bit weird. So what I do is I I do both. I usually will have an establishment shot like you have in a in a movie or in a sitcom where it kind of shows you like an outside shot of the house, and then the next scene, other people in the kitchen talking about something. So I'll usually do those shots so we kind of know, like as an anchor, so we know where we are and what's what it's about. And then I start getting, I start doing other things. So maybe I'll start photographing small details. Uh New York Times commented on that that I do a lot of small detail work, and I like doing that. I want people to get really close to an object that they can't when they're behind a velvet rope or when they're rushed because it's a timed uh tour that they're on. And also they can't get into the room, whereas I'm allowed to go into the room. So I can get really close to a historic artifact that belonged to Washington, for instance, and I can get a shot of it where you can see the texture in it, you can see the detail, and you can linger over it and like really get close to something that you're never gonna see. In some cases, these are objects that are not even on public display. They're in the archives, and that basically they're too rare to be exposed to the public. So I'll do shots like that that are really detailed and close.
SPEAKER_05Okay, let's fast forward a little bit because you got a couple of really cool stories when you were shooting Teddy Roosevelt's um summer place. Um the E that's been scribed in or you know, carved into a wall, uh, patterns on wallpaper. Your attention to detail was teaching people there about the place.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, that's a good example, actually. There is a um uh there's a letter E that uh one of Teddy Roosevelt's kids scratched into uh a door jam. And that little E, I mean, you'll never notice it unless someone points it out to you because it's very small. Uh, but that E was done by the child because he wanted his sister, I can't remember her name, but it began with an E, and he wanted to get her into trouble. He wanted her to get the blame for it. And I just thought that was a really interesting little anecdote, little story, because as a parent myself, I can remember my kids doing that sort of thing. But that kind of humanizes this iconic larger-than-life figure known as Teddy Roosevelt. And what it also does is it takes the spotlight away from him and it puts it on the other family, you know, the other members of the household that are supporting what he does and a part of his history. So when I do photography, I look for little details like that.
SPEAKER_05I I suppose the Rangers told when you said what's this E, they told you the story behind it?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, what happened was uh when I photographed his home, uh, one of the reasons why they commissioned me for it was because they saw my pictures of Wear Farm, and those pictures of the interiors, the entire house and the studios are all empty. There was nothing there. And and yet I was able to make it kind of interesting. Because as one editor of a newspaper told me, I was ignoring your press releases because I'm thinking, well, what could be interesting about a photograph of an empty room? Right. But somehow I was able to, you know, make it interesting and moody. So they saw that, and so they wanted me to do the same thing for Teddy Roosevelt's home because they were doing the same thing. They were emptying the entire household, which is a huge project, multi-million dollar project, and they had to renovate some of the systems, like the alarm system and the heating and all that, and then put it back. So they wanted me to photograph the interiors in a largely empty setting. And so they uh basically gave me when it was close to the public, so they gave me a uh a personal tour. And so, yes, the historian there, the uh historian is on staff, she was explaining all the different rooms to me, and she was pointing out these little these little things. It's probably part of the public tour, I would think, about the letter E. But again, the difference is that I can get nice and close to it, so I can get a nice shot of it. And so I just thought that was not they did not know about the peacocks in the wallpaper. Right, yeah, that's another thing that I forgot about. So I'm glad you did your research and reminded me. But there's a little corner of what's there's um a very prominent room in the house called a north room. And this is where uh Theodore Roosevelt would meet with important dignitaries, so it was a very impressive room. And in the corner, uh there's still some of the original wallpaper from his time period. They had to reproduce the wallpaper for the rest of the room to restore it. So uh, you know, they said, you know, you're free to photograph whatever you want, but I was intrigued by the wallpaper because I knew it was original. And it's a very elaborate, kind of uh swirly type of pattern in the wallpaper. And as I'm photographing it, I noticed that it they're not random decorative swirls, there's actually images in it. And one of them was of these two peacocks that are, I think they're facing each other. If you look at the entire wallpaper as just one wall of wallpaper, you're not gonna notice that. But I because I focus on the detail, I saw that and I just Assumed everybody knew that. So I took a picture of just that little piece of the wallpaper, and it's very small. And when they saw it, they were blown away because they go, you know what? We have uh historians here and professionals with PhDs and all that. And they've been here for you know like a decade or more. No one here has ever noticed that before until we saw your photograph. And I was so honored by that because, you know, I don't know anything. I'm good. See, now this goes back to what I said earlier, right? So I did research on the place and I read about it, and I was prepared in that sense. But when I went into it, I also kind of forgot about it all and just kind of let things happen as as they do. And I just looked at the wallpaper and I saw the peacocks and I took a picture and I assumed everybody knew, uh, but they didn't. So that was a happy accident, and it's a very popular picture for that reason.
SPEAKER_05We're gonna turn to street photography in just a second, because if if people look you up, you know, probably the first thing they're gonna see is your street work. Um, but one more question about the parks. I mean, I'm looking at a partial list of your commissions here: Big Cypress, National Preserve, Boston Harbor, Everglades, Fire Island. Um, I mean, there's a long, long list of commissions. Did the word simply get out to the you know, historic park world that you're damn good? And so the phone starts to ring, or are these all things that you're chasing down and you're applying for?
SPEAKER_04Uh I'm very um grateful to say that I didn't have to chase anything down. Um, you know, all these park people, they all kind of know each other. Right. Uh there's over 400 parks in the country, but the employees are very dedicated to what they do. They can make a lot more money with their knowledge base in the private sector, but they choose to do this because it's important to them. They want to preserve our history and our culture and our environment. So they all know each other pretty much. And also there's an internal um, I don't know if they still do it, but there's an internal uh employee digest or newsletter that goes out that kind of reports on what's happening in the park, in the park system. And so I know I've been in that many times. So, you know, one person talks to the other and they find out about these things, and then they, you know, they inquire about me, and then I do follow up. And so I've been able to get successive projects that way. And uh, to be honest with you, uh, because of the political situation that we're in now with uh, you know, just cutting back on budgets and all that and the firings and all that, uh, I don't know for a fact that my national park work is going to continue just because everything that's going on right now. And that's part of the reason why I've been kind of pushing more towards street photography, which is another unintentional genre that I got into, which we can talk about in a moment. But right now I am photographing George Washington Birthplace National Monument in Colonial Beach in Virginia. So that's the most recent project that I did get. And and again, they they contacted me about it.
SPEAKER_05And and the project is come on a Tuesday and take some pictures or come for the year and document some process?
SPEAKER_04It's pretty um, it's pretty open. It's it's really as as much photography as I choose to do. Well, cool. And you know, we also time it because they get uh it depends on their budgets too. So they have a fiscal year, so we try to budget so they have the money for it. I mean, it's not like I get a lot of money on these things, but you know, we do have to work with it. So many times what happens is these are multi-year projects. And also the deeper I get into it, the more I discover, the more it interests me, and the more I want to photograph. So, for instance, with Washington's uh birthplace, uh, you know, I'm photographing the grounds. I started photographing the landscape area there. But as I learn more about it, then I realize that there's more to it than just the fact that he was born there. It's also that his the Washington family, you know, they were there for many, many years. It's been a successive, um successive generations of Washingtons have lived there and farmed there. And then before that, you had the colonial period. And then before that, you also had uh the indigenous people who originally were on that land. So one of the things that I want to do is move beyond just George Washington, the star of the show, if you will, but also take some photographs that represent the indigenous aspect of it. So when I was there last, I was trying to make some connections with uh, you know, the native community there. And so, you know, it's gonna take time to build those relationships, but I do want to get them into the project. So I don't know how many years it'll go for. The previous project was related. It was the uh George Washington headquarters, military headquarters in Morristown, New Jersey. And that went on for about five years.
SPEAKER_05Oh my.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and it just began as one simple project they wanted. These needed some photographs for um for a book that they give to people who uh, you know, Washington's headquarters, because it's a historical uh structure, does not have handicap access. So if you're in a wheelchair, you can't get in. Right. And they are they do have a ramp now for that, but it took time to do that because of the budgeting. You gotta get people who know how to install that without uh, you know, messing up the integrity of the historical structure. So in the interim, they created this really large format book with you know, with shots of the interior and details that they asked me to do. And that's how the project began. It was just to create what they call an accessibility book so that if you're wheelchair bound, you can borrow this book from the visitor center and you can page through it. And because the pictures are really big and high resolution, you kind of get a sense of what it's like to be inside. I did not know that. Yeah, but those pictures ended up getting exhibited at the museum there. And then it just kind of went on from there. Well, how about if you photograph this and how about if you photographed that? And so then it just went on and on and on. But again, because of the uh situation in Washington, D.C., I don't know that we're gonna have that kind of flexibility. And then because people are getting fired or new people being put in, I don't know if the new people coming in, if they share the viewpoint of the administration, they may not really care too much about these things. So I I really don't know. It's a big question mark right now, which is a shame. Okay.
SPEAKER_05You know, and and the the switch I want to make now is is almost like we're gonna be talking, you know, to a completely different aesthetic or completely different photographer. You have a wonderful book out there, Street Photography of New York. You you in an interview, I mean you were talking about your process and you know how you go about it. And I had to chuckle when you said, you know, for a little while you had these sunglasses that had the little rearview mirrors in them, so you could make sure you weren't missing something behind you. Um But you know, you were inspired by Virginia Wolf. So tell me how street photography in any way matches the kind of mindfulness of the documentarian work um and how you approach the most photographed urban environment in the history of the planet. Right.
SPEAKER_04Well, part of that is out of ignorance because um sometimes not knowing anything or not, you know, really helps. You're the research guy, remember? I'm the research guy. But what happened was um, you know, I realized that, you know, because of the budgeting and and the planning for the park service work, it could be many months before I get to photograph again. Right. And I wanted to get better at what I'm doing. So I was a little frustrated by that. You know, like I really should be photographing like every day, you know, just like you rehearse every day, if you're a musician, or you write every day, if you're a poet, but the park service doesn't happen every day. So I said, well, you know what? Um, because of the job that I had at the law firm, I will not embarrass the law firm, although I really feel like doing it, but uh I had the lowest rung level of lawyer position there because the thinking was that they they pay you very, very little, uh, but they don't expect you to work that much. I shouldn't say not work that much, but you you work your nine to five, you know. You're not a partner, you're not an associate where you work around the clock, which is very typical of these firms. Right. But what they did was uh they still try to get you to work weekends and work at night, you know, and and I really resented that because I wasn't getting paid extra for it, you know, at all. There was no overtime or anything like that. It was just a flat fee and it was not very high. So uh that also made it hard for me to plan to just go out on an outing on my own, you know, and drive somewhere and photograph just to stay sharp. So I said, well, I gotta work with the situation that I'm in. And, you know, I do commute. I was living in Long Island at the time. So I do commute back and forth five days a week to this law firm, and I gotta walk from Penn Station to Midtown, where the firm is located at. I said, Well, I'll just photograph my travel every day, whatever I happen to see. And a good friend of mine recommended, uh, who's more experienced than I as a photographer, she's she also had her own photography magazine and did a uh a piece on me. She recommended uh uh a couple cameras that were small and stealthy, but had all the functions of a big DSLR, right? Because I was using my iPhone for a while, but you know, the quality wasn't that great. I had an iPhone 7 at the time. So uh, you know, I got this camera and I just started photographing, you know, whatever I encountered back and forth. And I did this for about 10 years, and then uh I I sense you're gonna ask another question. So I'll just say this those photographs over a 10-year period of just going back and forth ended up in this book called Street Photography of New York City, which is available on Amazon and everywhere else.
SPEAKER_05But again, how do you approach? Do you just wait for something odd to happen on your walk?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, what happened was I I really just wanted to get better at photographing. And what's great about New York City is that when you walk through it, everything is happening really like like for instance, when I go to the park service, I have a huge DSLR camera, you know, and and it's on a tripod, and I take my time moving it incrementally to get the composition just right. Uh, I don't use artificial lighting for the most part, but you know, I work with the existing light, and you know, I can set my exposure and blah, blah, blah, all that stuff, right? And I can think about what the picture means and the overall context of the other pictures that I'm taking to tell the story, as I mentioned, right? And also to be artistic and maybe do something different. On the street, I don't have time for any of that. First of all, I'm trying to catch my train because if I miss it, I'm beat. I got to wait for an hour and a half for the next one. Um, so I'm kind of rushing through the city, and then there's crowds of people in my way, especially the tourists who kind of stand, they look and they block the everybody's walking. And then I got to be careful with pickpockets and people trying to sell me drugs and things. There's police, you know, blocking the roads sometimes because there's things happen in Times Square. That's pretty much what I went through. So I was just trying to grab whatever I could and try to create a composition very quickly without thinking too much because there's no tripod and there's no, and then I got to do it sneakily because I really wanted to be honest with you, I was afraid to point the camera at somebody. Really? Especially in New York, you know, you can get punched or something.
SPEAKER_05But there are tourists taking pictures of everything every minute of the day.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, that that is true. But as uh again, as a neophyte, because I had no uh experience shooting in the street, everything I did was in a in a safe environment in a national park with rangers to protect me and there's nobody there. So I was a little nervous about it. You know, I felt like I was invading their privacy, and and so I was kind of sneaking it. So it was very nerve-wracking for me. Um, but eventually I got better at it, got more comfortable with it, and I was just trying to grab whatever got my attention. A lot of it was just people who are dressed in a very interesting way. Uh, I tend to dress more on the flamboyant side as a musician. So that naturally attracts my attention when it's colorful. They got interesting hair. Uh, sometimes there are performers that are interacting with folks in a very interesting way, too, on the street. Um, it might just be a police officer who's literally walking around with a with a machine gun, you know, with like an AK-47 or whatever it is that they have. And, you know, it's intimidating to see that, but then you say, wow, you know, we're in a very dangerous area given 9-11. So it's just kind of photographing different things. Uh, it could be, and then reflections. I'm very interested in reflections. There's a lot of that in New York City.
SPEAKER_05We're gonna we're gonna run out of time in a second, but it's so I want to talk about because you have a new project, a new book that you're working on that's all blur and out of focus and reflections and stuff.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, it's just tell me about that project. Yeah, it's just messy photographs that would not fit the title. Yeah, it's yeah, it's called uh more, it's called um uh street photography in New York City. It's the same title as the previous book, but then it says more street haunting, uh, and then it's uh drama. I remember it's it's it's drama, uh delirium, and I don't know, some other thing. But but basically it's these more experimental shots that are based on blurs, a strong light and shadow, like you would see in in a in a Caravaggio painting, and lots of really abstract pictures that are kind of delirious because they're reflections off of um storefront windows, and you don't really know what you're looking at. But the comeback to something you said earlier, because I don't I don't think I addressed it, and it's a good thing for folks to know about. When I photographed all this stuff in Manhattan, again, I was just doing it as an exercise. I had no expectation it would become a book that someone would ask me to, you know, to publish it as a book. Uh it was just the exercise. But uh when they did ask me to do the book, the publisher that is, it was almost like my application for the Wear Farm residency. Now I had to think about well, what do these photos mean? Why did I do them? Is there a running theme through them all? And as I studied all my pictures, I was able to see themes emerging that were happening on a subconscious level, and they were sufficient enough where I was able to break it up into basically the three chapters of the book. And so there's one chapter that's more about the people of New York itself, as opposed to the tourists and the different kind of working class folks who, you know, go back and forth and do their different jobs and how they're dressed, as I mentioned earlier. The second chapter is more a little bit more political. So you see a lot of the protests that take place in the city. Um, and then the third one is more um, more about the architecture in the city, but also just happy accidents. Someone who might be wearing a certain color shirt that happens to match, you know, uh some flowers above them hanging from a lamppost, for instance. So some of it's instructional. I'm trying to uh explain to non-photographers who might buy the book how to see like an artist and how to spot these things. Uh, but uh Virginia Wolf, I came across a 1927 essay uh called Street Haunting. And what she did was when she went through uh London, instead of a camera, she wrote down her experiences and her encounters. And these were things that kind of shed light on the human condition, how people live, the drama that happens on the street, these small little um fleeting things that happen, but there's some importance or some interest to it. Something that goes beyond the surface, something that goes beyond the touristy things we're attracted to. And that kind of gave me a uh kind of a structure for my book because, in a way, because I was afraid to photograph people, I was kind of haunting them. I was kind of trying to be invisible, I was trying to be a spirit, and in being a spirit, I was trying to capture the spirit of what I saw in the city. Uh, I grew up in New York City, so you know, I kind of experience it and I feel it in a different way. And that's why I kind of wanted to get under the surface. And I don't know that I was successful at it. I leave that up to people who can look at my pictures and read the book. But uh I connected with that because I didn't know that other people thought that way. So when I read uh her book or her essay about it, I immediately felt the connection to her writing.
SPEAKER_05One last question. Yeah, at the time we were recording this, you have a picture up in a group exhibition over in Barcelona called Going Home. Tell me about just that one image.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, that was an image uh literally going home. That's my wife in the picture. She's there in silhouette, real small, and it was a foggy uh day. Is she going to get an application for that? Yeah, I need to get I need to work her more in that end, you know, get me some more work. Uh but she was, you know, we were just going home together, and I let her walk ahead of me because I like the way the fog uh you know fragmented the light from the lampposts. But it was um, you know, the the th the theme of the exhibit is silence, and so they want you to explore um things that it's pretty vague and for pretty broad. They leave it up to us to interpret that artistically. But I picked that picture because it was Christmas time, but it was after Christmas. Uh that particular year that I took it, Christmas fell on a day such that both of us, my wife and I, had to go back to work on a Friday, which is kind of a bummer, you know? Yeah, who wants to go back to work after Christmas, especially on a Friday. And also it was only a couple of years after my daughter passed away. My adult daughter, who was also an artist, uh, had struggled for many years with a little-known condition called borderline personality disorder or BPD for short. And it's kind of like having um manic depression, except that the mania doesn't happen from day to day or from week to week. It happens, it can happen from hour to hour. You're up and down, up and down, up and down all day long. So it really wreaks havoc on the psyche. And she eventually died from a drug overdose. And so this was only like a, and it happened around that time of year. It happened around um, you know, the holiday period. So uh just between that, because it was so fresh, it was only a couple of years ago, and then having to go back to work and it was Christmas and it was foggy out, and it was kind of dark, and it kind of looked moody like that, it just inspired me to take that picture. Now, I wasn't aware of all these things that I'm telling you now about it. I just kind of took it instinctively and subconsciously. But again, because I had to write an artist statement for the um, you know, for the application for the open call, I had to really think back and dig deep in myself and say, well, what was going on at the time and what might have influenced this? And that's what was happening at the time. And I have no doubt that that had something to do with the nature of that particular picture.
SPEAKER_05It is it is a remarkable, wonderful, beautiful moody picture. And and I do believe that every moment of our entire lives informs the present moment. So when something happens, we may not have you know the articulation of every small detail, um, but it's still, you know, it's still the rhythm section to whatever you know melody we're playing.
SPEAKER_04It's true, because uh, every time I played music, the same song I did, because I wrote the music, uh, it'd always be different each time a little bit, just depending on what mood I was in, what response I was getting from the audience. So, yeah, you're right about that, the rhythm.
SPEAKER_05Well, I you know, I I think music has an awful lot to say about photography. Um, and and in your particular case, I was chuckling earlier this morning because you you were talking about how you hoard stratocasters, and then you sort of paused and you said, but I got a couple less pauls too. Um so the Gibson people are happy. Um you have both sides of the metronome, both sides of you know, the mindful, the frenetic, and it is absolutely remarkable work, every frame I've looked at. Um Zia Marlon, thank you very much. I I have enjoyed this conversation immensely.
SPEAKER_04Well, thank you very much. I mean, I I don't take these uh uh interviews for granted. I'm always really humbled when someone's actually interested in what I'm doing because I don't have any formal training. I I just like to be I like to be open-minded about things and try it and experiment. And I'm always humbled and honored when I get comments from folks about photos and how I connect it with them. So I really, really appreciate speaking to your audience. I hope I had something to share with them that inspires them that they find interesting. If anyone wants to contact me, I'm a pretty friendly guy, and uh, you know, if they want to email me through my website, uh, I would love to hear from them and see their work too.
SPEAKER_01Frames because excellent photography belongs on paper. Visit us at www.readframes.com