FRAMES Photography Podcast
FRAMES Photography Podcast
Tim Soter
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In today's episode, W. Scott Olsen speaks with Tim Soter, a Brooklyn-based photographer and bookmaker whose work fuses environmental portraiture, reportage, and a dry, intelligent sense of humor into photographs and projects that feel both sharply observed and deeply human.
You can visit Tim's website here.
Find out more and join FRAMES here.
I really love the process. I think there's a real zen to doing that activity, to cutting a ton of things out out of a piece of paper and gluing them together. And I think there's a lot of good happy accidents that can happen that way. They can certainly happen digitally. I've certainly I've had that experience, but I like it when I can just, you know, maybe something falls out of your hand and falls onto a photo, and you're like, well, that's a weird kind of relationship that just happened there.
SPEAKER_02This 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_04Well, hello, everyone, and welcome to another podcast from Frames Magazine. My name is Scott Olsen, and to, you know, folks, there is a question that every single one of us answer or ask. Um, with any luck, we answer it, but we ask it either explicitly or it's just in the back of our heads every single time our finger even approaches the shutter release. And it's it's a version of what the hell am I doing here? But it's it's it's a little bit more focused than that. It's the idea of how can I make this image special? How can I do something with my work that is me or has not been done before? Because let's face it, so much of the planet, so much of the events on the planet already have thousands, if not millions, of pictures of it. I mean, can you take a picture of the Empire State Building and make it fresh, make it new? And you know, there's there are a couple people out there who are really rocking this question because their approach to photography begins with how do I make this special? How do I make this something that is, you know, resonant of a larger truth, if we want to get philosophic, but also, you know, expressive of me and my way of looking at the world and the kind of energy, creative energy, intellectual energy I want to bring to this. There is really nobody out there these days who I think is addressing that question in a more creative, in a more dynamic, kind of energetic way than Tim Soder. I mean, his we teaches photography at the Fashion Institute of Technology and bookmaking at the Center for Book Arts. Uh, his work is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA at ICP, the Tape Modern. Um, it's even in Alex Sauf's collection. Got a shout out to Minnesota Boy there. Tim even says that his parents have got a copy or two of the books, which I think is great. He is all over the place in terms of creativity, and he's got some ideas. We're going to talk about something, a term that we haven't talked about before. This whole notion of what he calls criteria. There is a way to approach the act of image making and of bookmaking and of understanding what visual arts can do that in Tim's hands and in his mind is absolutely unique and I think really, really special. Tim, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing this morning?
SPEAKER_03Things are good, and that is a fantastic intro. I'm just gonna copy and paste that and give everybody the future and say, read this. That's the way everybody will now uh start off the podcast. That's great.
SPEAKER_04Good. Well, um, Tim, you your work I mean is really, really dynamic. It's it's got so much energy in there. And and I wanna I want to go back to prehistory. We'll we'll go back to the Cretaceous period here for a minute. You know, doing a little research, we're talking, you know, looking at your early life. Um, you've got your high school senior picture, it's not like everybody else's in the book. Um, you know, I'll let you know tell that picture. But also, how did the camera, even before then, how did the camera first come into your hand as something more than a paperweight?
SPEAKER_03The first time I really kind of got interested in photography was probably just documenting things. I had like a cheap, maybe a Pentax, uh fixed lens, point and shoot. But um it was pretty great to document the things that I really enjoyed. When I went to college, I went to college at a small state school in Pennsylvania called Cootstown University. They had a really good art department. And I had I was enrolled in the uh BFA program there, and the smartest thing that school did was they said, before you can declare your art major, you have to take five intro courses: intro to sculpture, painting, drawing, photography, and painting. And so I had taken all the intro courses except for photography. I thought I was going to be a printmaker. I thought photography was for monkeys. I thought I couldn't believe it was an art form because it was this cold, removed box and it had no sense of gesture. I was really into painting, I was really into pop art. Okay. I couldn't see how this cold thing could be an art form. But the school required me to take that intro class. And when I took it, uh, it was a total awakening. It was amazing. I can remember the day right before Thanksgiving when my uh professor had three slide projectors dissolving into each other, giving us the whole history of photography passionately while smoking. You could still smoke in a classroom back then. This wasn't the 40s either, and I left that class. I was so inspired. I left that class, I walked up the hill, and I thought, I will do this um for the rest of my life. I don't care if it pays well or whatever. It was like monastic. I will I will do this forever. And I really felt that, and that's how I got turned on to photography. It was the thing when I started doing it, it was the way my brain was already thinking anyway. Even the prints that I was making in printmaking class, I was doing this kind of photo etching technique that I had read about. And so I was really trying to make photographs in printmaking class and didn't understand that until I had photography.
SPEAKER_04Do you think it was the printmaking, you know, desire that took you very early into doing something else with the negatives? Because you say you knew you admired Avidon, you admired others who were sort of photoreal or photojournalism, and yet suddenly you're covering your negatives in rubber cement and setting them on fire. Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_03I think that kind of um unique approach was uh a little uh emblematic of the time period. I was in school in the early 90s, and some of our heroes back then were the Starn uh brothers, uh, or Joel Peter Whitkin or Dwayne Michaels, who even made uh things singular. And it was those type of people that we were all looking at in books that we kind of were turned into or wanted to emulate or were inspired by. So I think that's where the kind of make things unique or one-offs uh ethos came from. The starns were um oh, very cool. Yeah, they're they're printing uh photographs, cutting them up, taping them together with scotch tape, and putting them together as one piece. Joel Peter Whitkin was uh making unique prints by printing through tissue paper and putting uh, I think liquid graphite over top of it, scratching the negatives and printing through that tissue paper to make each print literally unique. You know, it would be a different arrangement that overlay on the next print, even if it was the same image. And that to me was so exciting because painting, all the other mediums had a way to be unique or were inherently unique. But photography, even though I absolutely loved it, was something that could be repeated endlessly.
SPEAKER_04A lot of people get turned on into photography because of the experience of you know being out in the field or the studio and shooting. A lot of people get turned on to it, you know, because of the gadget, you know, the mechanical thing in your hand. But a lot of people get really turned on by the print, the physical thing that winds up in your hand at the end. And I'm I'm assuming it it's that physical thing at the end is which gives you the most joy.
SPEAKER_03It was at the time, and now I would say that thing is the book. The book, uh, the books I've made are now the prints, and that's the physical thing. So yeah, that's how I'd I'd answer that. I still love photography. I still like taking pictures, but in the last 10 years, making those photographs has almost always been in the service of printed matter and making a book from it.
SPEAKER_04This is wonderful. You know, we we have the Center for Book Arts in Minneapolis here. Um and and book design is one of the things that we don't talk about as often as we should in the photography world. Um, but the we we're gonna get to the books here in a couple minutes. Let's go back. So you you know, you you are, you know, you you're young. You look at your career. I mean, you worked for Rolling Stone for 10 years. You spent an afternoon at Slash's house. And by the way, I just got turned on to his uh version of Stormy Monday with Beth Hart. Oh my Lord. How in the world I ever missed that? But you you look at your portfolio, there's Ford, there's Starbucks, there's Bank of America. Um, you know, you've got a really nice sort of you know commercial, professional photographer portfolio, and yet you've also got a whole, you know, universe of nightclub and you know, uh rock and roll pictures as well. How did you go about defining yourself and what in the world you were doing?
SPEAKER_03I always loved music photography, and that was probably the first type of photography that I got turned on to, you know, in junior high and high school, going to the local mall and finding magazines like Rolling Stone or Spanner music magazines where there were amazing photography, Anton Corbine, um a Morrissey cover, or things like that really turned me on. So when I moved to New York, straight out of school, I needed to get a job. I got a kind of average job that worked out at a photo bookstore, which is amazing. But then uh the scene that I was in, I thought, oh, I'm just gonna meet a lot of other photographers. I'm here in New York. This is exciting, it's what I always wanted. And I ended up not really meeting photographers or artists. They were, in my opinion, kind of guarded in my neighborhood, not as approachable. So the first people I met um were DJs. And I already loved uh electronic music a whole lot. And so the people I were meeting, uh I was meeting were from all different parts of the U.S. They had moved here to New York too, and we all had a real common bond. So I would go to a lot of shows at the end of the night, small uh DJ performances and underground clubs and things like that. And I started documenting that because by would have been photographing something. This absolutely interested me. So that's how I got started making music photography in New York. And back then, this was like the mid-90s. It was kind of a wonderful time because I was often the only person there with a camera. Everybody had their role. You know, she was the promoter, he was the DJ, I was the photographer. So it was kind of nice to be a part of that and actually kind of contribute, but also do this thing that I love while I'm at a place that's playing music that's blowing my mind. So that's that's how I got started into that.
SPEAKER_04But but there are two real problems with that world. Number one, I mean, the technical and and and sort of um legal. I mean, the the the club owners, they're they're protective. They don't want pictures getting out there of stuff doing things that that perhaps might get them in trouble. On the other side, just from a photographer's point of view, clubs, the lighting, and to use a technical term, oftentimes really sucks. Um it's difficult to take pictures in that kind of environment. I notice in some of your images, you know, you're clearly used in a flash, some you're not. So tell me about sort of the culture of being a photographer at that time and then the technique of being a photographer in that world.
SPEAKER_03Culturally, it was easy because I had everybody's trust, because the people that I was seeing at all these different parties were already people that I knew. Some of them I knew just by their first name. Some of them I knew just because I'd see them and we didn't need to share names. We just were there all the time. So it was just friendly. So that gave me all of the access that I needed because everybody there was literally a peer. Technically, I always just like shooting flash on camera, and then sometimes turning that flash off and seeing how low you can go. Like how much light can I can I get here? Uh 3200 uh T Macs I loaded my camera with a lot, which um had a wonderful brain uh and really, really could capture some good low light experiences. So it was somewhere between balancing um those two things out. In terms of clubs possibly being lititious or uh sorry, litigious or or fearful of being sued. Letitious. Look that up. Uh it was um, it wasn't an issue until I started photographing at uh a major nightclub called Twilo. Somehow I had met the owner there, and this was a huge nightclub that was doing well uh every weekend. And I approached him and I said, Hey, I want to be the the house photographer, so to speak, here. And um he said, Okay, and he was really concerned. So what we agreed upon was I would photograph the whole night, and at the end of the night, I would come back to him at like four in the morning and give him the film to hold on to. And I said, Okay, we can do that. Let's do that. So I ended up Undeveloped? Undeveloped, thanks. Yeah, just giving him spent rolls of film in his hand that had images undeveloped on there. So I came back about two days later, and he was kind of like, hey, what are we gonna do here? And I said, Look, these are this is slide film. I can go and get this processed and be back here in about three hours. You can count the number of frames. There were 36 frames, you know, per roll. You can see that I haven't taken any out, you know, or done anything nefarious here. And um, that's what we're gonna do. And he said, okay. And so I did that. I came back, he saw all the images. He liked the photography and could see that I wasn't, you know, duping him, literally. So uh no dupes were made from those slides. So um that was it. And then I was the house photographer at Twilo for a couple of years, and it was great. Um, but that that's but he was still concerned that I would photograph or someone would photograph uh someone doing drugs in the bathroom, on the dance floor, whatever. They had had issues, it was a big deal. So um most often I was the only person there out of a few thousand people who had a camera, and that was really a good fun time. I had a day job. I had a day job that I had to do, and then I'd have to set the alarm and wake up at midnight and scramble over there, and it was uh something you could only do in your in your very young days to have that uh stamina, but it was great. I really enjoyed it.
SPEAKER_04So were they also then the outlet for it? They would use it in their own promotional materials or or what were you doing with the work?
SPEAKER_03Exactly. I still retained the rights. I would give them, I think I gave them duplicate uh slides of their selects, and then I'd hang on to the originals, and then I'd make some other dupes, and I independently would send them out to magazines and things like that, trying to uh see if they would use them and I could get paid. All the while I'm doing this, I was shooting um other nightclubs and things like that, or other smaller venues with DJs and putting together my own archive. Again, this would have been the mid-end of the 90s. And so I had a whole list, a whole list of DJs. So if you wanted a you know, a DJ shadow photo, you could come to me and it was on my list, and I would, you know, mail you out that slide or something. I know this is sounds very primitive, but um that's how I I started. Sounds fantastic. Yeah. So I was I was creating that thing.
SPEAKER_04I mean, you're you're hustling, man. And I don't mean that in the you know the bad sense. I mean, but you are your own, yeah, you you are your own business manager here, uh, working to build a business. This sounds fantastic. Um you tell a cool story of someone knocking on the door and saying, you know, does little Timmy want a bunch of comic books? Which sort of you know changed your life in a lot of ways. Tell me about the comic book and and how that sort of creeps into the way you understand, let's just you call it volume or or when I say vibrance, I don't necessarily mean color. I mean just the energy of an image.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, comic books were one of the first, if not the first thing that I really got turned on to. Again, like the way my brain reacted so strongly and excitedly to photography. It was kind of meant to be because that's the way my brain thinks, and creatively that was a good match. And it was the same with comic books. Back when I was maybe four or five, five, maybe, um, there was a guy who lived on the first floor who was moving out, and he came upstairs to my parents' apartment, knocked on the door, and he said, Hey, do you think, do you think Timmy would like this box of comic books? And it was huge. It was a huge, enormous cardboard box of uh comic books from like the late 60s to early 70s, so even a little before my time. Uh, some old Mad magazines were in there. And thank God my mother said yes. So I got this big box of comics, and I had the, I still have almost I have them all, actually. I have them all here in this apartment right now. I saved every one of them. But for years and years, I would revisit those comic books because uh on a rainy day I was trapped in the house. I would just pull out a few of those and read them cover to cover. And I know every one of them backwards and forwards. And the things that turned me on about them were the stories were really kind of fantastic. The artwork, the skill that went into that artwork and that sequential storytelling was amazing to me. And I really connected with it. The dazzling color, the graphic design of the covers, all of that was really amazing to me. So years later, I would do a project with that. I don't know if we want to jump to that or not, but I took those. Um I took those. Oh, go, yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, sorry. I hear what you're saying. Yeah, I'll just go for it. So um uh friend and fellow photographer Arthur Tress was visiting me uh here in my apartment for the first time. We had just met, and he saw something and he had an idea. And he's really somebody who's great with ideas and who really thinks outside of the box. And that's something I, when I'm giving lectures or teaching or talking about things, I really encourage people to take that advice that I have gotten from Arthur, but also kind of push on other people, which is don't be afraid to get messy and go somewhere that feels uncomfortable to you. I don't always like that's I mean, that's why it's uncomfortable. I don't even, I don't always like being in that space. But he encouraged me to do that. And what he said was, he said, Oh, I see you like your comic books, because he's got a great uh Brooklyn accent. I see you like your comic books and your four by six prints over here. So what what if you were to just put these four by sixes on top of the comic books like this? And he took, you know, one of uh a four by six uh print I had made with a always had a white border, just on top of the comic book, and said, What about this? And I said, Okay, yeah, yeah. And I was really just humoring him because I thought that idea was totally stupid, and I was never gonna do that. But he's a sweet guy, I'm not gonna say no. So I just kind of let that idea go for about a year. And then for some reason, some reason I decided to try that idea. And in one day, I took 50, uh, somewhere around 50 four by six prints that I had edited that I thought were kind of dynamic and awesome, and went through all of those comic books and would match them up for interesting relationships. Maybe there's a character uh on the comic that somehow had something to do with my photo, or maybe there's a dry sense of humor, as there is in a lot of them, um, or graphically they paired well. And I put those all together and made a book out of it called Fumeti, uh, which is the Italian word for comic books. And that was an idea, like again, that that germ of an idea came from Arthur, but um, I'm so glad I realized that idea because it was like chocolate and peanut butter come together. Like I love comic books from that era, and I love the photos that I had made. Uh, and so it was really a good combo. Coming together, they made something truly new.
SPEAKER_04They really do. And I've seen you know some of these images on the web, but you you also gave me a great sense of relief a minute ago because I had just assumed you destroyed the comic books to make those covers. Um, and so the fact that you've still got them all. I'm a good archivist. Are there any in there that you can okay? And any of those comic books, ones you can retire on?
SPEAKER_03Um, I don't think they're in that quality or that shape that I could. But I have thought of that. Earlier when I was stumbling and I said I have almost all of those comics here, and then I changed it to saying I have all those comics today. I'll say the reason that I stumbled over that is because I have almost all of them. And the reason I don't have all of them is I think one time. When I was moving from Queens to Brooklyn 25 years ago, I got uh some unscrupulous movers that I had found, you know, in the back of the newspaper or something. And I honestly think some things fell off the truck. And I only know this because occasionally I'll be looking for an issue that I remember as a kid, and it's not amongst the few hundred that I have. And I think that's what I can't prove that, and it's it's been too long. But uh, yeah, I think some of them uh went missing.
SPEAKER_04Somewhere, somewhere, yes, somewhere in Queens, though those books exist. Exactly. Um, but okay. Okay, I mean, and we're gonna get to Arthur Truss in a second, or Dwayne Michaels, and and and all these wonderful influences in your life. But I want to go back because you know, here you've got you're messing with the print, you're messing with, you know, the old comic book and your own four by six. And and I mentioned earlier, you know, way early in your career, you're scratching styluses across negatives, just setting them on fire and stuff. Um, what are you doing? What you know, why, why mess with the image as representation of some external event?
SPEAKER_03I think part of it was getting to that thing, uh, which was the reason I was avoiding photography, which is that it had no sense of gesture. You know, it was so cold. You know, it's just you point the box over there and then it makes the image, and that's that's it. I mean, there is some something that happens wonderfully when you're in the dark room and you see the print rise, and obviously that's that's tangible. But I think with the stylist or putting rubber cement on the negatives and then setting them on fire, and then you'd have these like bubbly little bits on there and stuff. That was a way of physically interacting with the medium, and then you print that and you get the evidence of that. So I think it was a way to really interact with it. It's the same, and you know, we'll probably get to talking about books, the same with books. I can't just design a book most of the time and then have it go to print and then it's done. Like there's almost always, if not always, somewhere in there, something that I have to do with the book, something that's included, something that's drawn on in the book, or something to make it, I don't know, to interact with it. I don't want the process to end. You know, that's not where it ends for me. In terms of mentors, who came who came first? What was it? Dwayne Michaels? Influence, uh Joel Peter Whitkin, uh, Arthur Tress, Dwayne Michaels, Avidon, and absolutely Gary Winnegrand. You know, they were all all around the same, the same time. I joke that there were three people in my photography program that we all were so similar that uh all of the people that I named, those books were never in the library. They're always shuffled between the three of us. And the library never, never owned them. You know, we really did own them for a good four years.
SPEAKER_04But but yeah, I mean, you wound up meeting Dwayne Michaels. You you wound up having you know a long-term um kind of correspondence and then relationship with them. So tell me that story.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I obviously had I had really enjoyed Dwayne's work back when I was a student. And some at some point, this is going back 10 or 12 years, his work really popped into my head again. And I was thinking about his work, and I had owned a ton of his books. He's got so many books of his work printed, and I decided to write him a letter because I I was like, I I know he lives in New York. So I had been watching a YouTube video where some Europeans came and interviewed Dwayne at his apartment, and I saw in this YouTube video, I saw a little bit that just said East 19th Street. Didn't have the address, just said East 19th Street in Manhattan. So I was like, I can work with that. Okay. So I one day I just decided to walk the length of East 19th Street, kind of not in the middle of the road, but kind of near to the edge of the one sidewalk on one side, glancing from house to house on the first floor the whole walk to see if I could see that that buzzer, the way that I had remembered it in the video. And occasionally I'd think I'd see it and I'd go up to the door and it was somebody else's buzzer and stuff. So finally at the end of East 19th Street, I saw it and I went up and I quickly took a picture of it and I ran away. So that information, I wrote Dwayne a letter and I said, Look, I enjoy your work. You know, um, I would love to come and talk to you. And he contacted me, called me, and we met right before Christmas. And uh I talked to him for about an hour and a half at his home and asked him a bunch of questions. And then at some point he said, What time is it? And I said, I don't know, I think it's around five o'clock. He said, Oh, you've you've got to go, you've got to go. Uh I've got things to do, you've got to go. And I said, Okay. And I brought two or three books with me. And I said, Would you, would you mind just signing these books? And he said, Okay. And he grabbed the first book and he just wrote, Tim, go away. And he handed it back to me. And uh I thought, I thought that was pretty good. That was polite. Yeah, and he signed it. Yep. Uh, and so I thought that was pretty good. He signed the other two as well, I believe. And so um I kept in correspondence with him. I would send him letters or I would go to, you know, his openings and things, and eventually took a workshop that he did out in Palm Springs and took photos of him out there. And so I started putting together a book uh about that experience. And it didn't have a title. And when I showed people the book, by the time they got to about the sixth page, everybody laughed. And I said, Well, what are you what are you laughing at? And they said, Oh, oh my God, Tim Go Away. Because I had a photo of his uh inscription in the book, and everybody laughed, which is great. That's a great reaction. So I decided to call the book Tim Go Away. Um, and it's this book, uh, for me, it's really a book about how do you interact with someone who you think is one of your heroes or somebody you know hold in this kind of high regard or almost fetish eyes, you know, and so it's as much about me, this book, as really it is uh about Dwayne Michaels.
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_04What was the Electronic Music New York the the 1995? Was that was that your first book?
SPEAKER_03Uh yes, actually, yeah. That was the work, the photos that I was shooting when I was here in the 90s. So when I was going out late at night and was amongst my fans, uh friends rather, not fans, amongst amongst my friends and peers. Um and there was uh there was a publisher, there is a publisher, not was, there is a publisher who I found in a bookstore called Foils off Tottenham Court Road in London. It's a great photo, it's a great art book store, but they have good photo books. Went in there and saw just a whole wall of these small, zine-sized black and white books that all had kind of a standardized design to them. But they were fantastic, and they were all the equivalent of like five or six dollars each. And I bought three and I thought, wow, these are awesome. And the next day I went all the way back from where I was staying back to that bookstore and barked three more. I thought these are great. So I contacted um Cafe Royale, the person who uh is the project. Cafe Royal, yeah. Yeah, it's great, and and talked to Craig and said, Hey, I have this project that I've never published anywhere. Would you be interested in this? And he said, Yeah, this is actually uh a good fit for us. So that is how that book got published. The way that he was handling it, and maybe it's different today, but he um made a print run back then of only 150. He hand numbered them on the cover in pencil. And then the deal was the artist photographer would get 30 of those books. I got 30 books, and he kept the rest and he would sell them, and I could do whatever I wanted with my 30. And I thought that's perfect. That's that's all I want.
SPEAKER_04That sounds fantastic. And and the reason I asked is when you get around then to Tim go away, are is the book already in your head as the product you're you're working for?
SPEAKER_03Yes, I really liked the idea that while I was still getting to know Dwayne, I could be working on this book simultaneously. So I had, you know, started a layout and was putting things in that I already had. And then I liked the idea that I could keep adding to that or creating to it. There's some things in the book that are a photograph that I would print out at staples and then paint over or use whiteout on or collage a little bit or something, and then re-photograph that, and that would be in the book. You know, I had scanned in every letter that I had written to him, not because this was before I thought I was going to make a book, just because I'm a good, like I said, I'm a good archivist. Like I didn't know why, but I was like, you should have a record of this for some reason and kept high-rise scans of those. So those went into the book. So it's really a very intimate book. I can't reread it anymore because I'm not that person anymore. You know, it's embarrassing. It's embarrassing. Put yourself that much into a book and show your fandom at the time and show the things that you would say to somebody who you really admire. But I'm glad it's there because those are the things that everybody wants to know anyway. Like that's the most exciting thing.
SPEAKER_04You you mentioned, you know, getting the color printouts and stuff. A lot of people these days with Photoshop or Lightroom or whatever, you know, they'll say that they really discover their images in post-production. You know, that they'll play with the sliders, you know, they'll mess with the picture endlessly to discover something unique. You you physically cut them apart, tape them together, white out over them. Um, tell me about the act of discovery when you've got paper and scissors and glue.
SPEAKER_03I really love that process. I think there's a real zen to doing that activity, to cutting a ton of things out out of a piece of paper and gluing them together. And I think there's a lot of good happy accidents that can happen that way. They can certainly happen digitally. I've certainly I've had that experience, but I like it when I can just, you know, maybe something falls out of your hand and falls onto a photo, and you're like, well, that's a weird kind of uh relationship that just happened there. Um I have a little bit of drawing envy. I used to absolutely love drawing as a kid. And then at some point, I think this happens to a lot of people, at some point you get self-conscious. You get to a point where you're like, oh, for me, I couldn't draw feet. Feet were a problem for me. And I can see, I mean, I remember a drawing I did of this kind of creature, and then I had his feet hiding behind two small stones that were right where his legs ended because I couldn't draw feet. And that was around the time where I became self-conscious, I gave up drawing. So with drawing, uh, or with uh sorry, collaging and doing those type of things in this book, I get back to that thing that I really love and that I've always loved that I kind of shied away from for a while.
SPEAKER_04You know, our our friend Julie Graham described you in an introduction on a video as being somewhat obsessive, and you teased yourself about that a fair bit. Is obsessiveness a good thing for a photographer?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I think people devise rituals for themselves because it's something that works for them. You know, maybe the obsessiveness or the ritual makes them feel prepared, and that's what works for them, you know. Uh so I am obsessive about a lot of things uh to varying degrees. Right. But I'm also self-aware of uh most of it, and a lot of it is pretty funny. You know, I had a I, you know, this is this is not creative, but I had I was I had a girlfriend who was cooking dinner one night, uh Swedish girlfriend. She was amazing. I really liked her. And she's she's cooking something, and uh, I looked down and I I inadvertently made a face and she looked at me and she said, What? I did everything right. And I was like, oh my God. First of all, that was the good, oh it killed me to hear her say I did everything right, knowing that I'm a little nutty. And then she goes, What is it? I said, No, no, no. I said it's nothing. She said, What is it? Because she knew she knew something crazy. And I said, Oh, you're you're actually using the breakfast spatula, and I have a I have a spatula that I consider to be the dinner spatula. And I had never told anybody that or said that out loud, but I absolutely knew what the two were and when they were to be used for. And so luckily she found that to be uh great and absurd. And uh I remember being out years later with friends, and she's like, Oh, can I tell them the story? I'm like, Oh, yeah, please tell them. So she loved telling the spatula story.
SPEAKER_04So this is also quality control, though. When you're sitting there at the light table or whatever you use, and you were saying this is almost right, but not right, right? Um it's got to be both frustrating and invigorating at the same time when you are physically manipulating physical things on your desk.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I mean that that's that goes uh towards the kind of thing you had mentioned earlier that I said I like to talk about, which is criteria, but it's almost umjacent to criteria. So when you're okay when you're talking about something uh define it. Yeah. Yeah, what you're saying is, which is interesting, is like sometimes, and I know kids have made this, kids, kids are anybody who is under 30, according to me, but uh people, current and modern-day people, uh have made this expression popular, which is the vibe. And it's like the vibe I've said the vibe for years because it is such a good word. And you know when you're trying to do something, whether it's, you know, manipulate an image or work it up or even take the picture, there is a vibe. There's something where it locks in and it's the thing that you want it to do and makes your brain excited. Doesn't even have to be technically correct, but something goes off in your, I was gonna say your head, but it's really your stomach, like your gut. We feel things in our gut. And that vibe is like, oh, that's it. You know, it's it's right for you. It doesn't matter if it's right for other people. And that's one way to say, oh, I'm really feeling this. It's the same with the spatulas. The spatula is nonsense. But for me, that all kind of made sense because it it just it I felt it and it made sense to me. Criteria is something different, but I use criteria for every project that I do. And I tell people, when you're making something, let's say you're making a book, set the criteria for what that thing is and what it's going to be and what you want to get out of it. Set a really great criteria, the very first thing, as make it the very first thing that you do. And the reason for that is because you're gonna have to make tough decisions along the way. The last book I made is called DFA Records, the early years. And it was all of these photos I had taken from like 2003 to 2007 of um a burgeoning record label that became really big and had a bunch of bands that came out of there, like the Rapture and LCD Sound System. They went on to be a very, very big label. But I had all these images and I was like, okay, I can make a book out of this and tell it tell a story. What's the criteria? And so the criteria for you, for one person, might take a few days to really hone that down to the most specific thing. But in the end, it's going to help you. So the criteria for that book is I'm going to make a book for fans of that record label that will be the ultimate fandom book. If you love DFA records, you can't even believe this book exists, that it has the content that it does, the photographs and everything else in it. It's made, literally made for you. In my era, the the label I liked is called Factory Records, New Order, Joy Division, a bunch of other bands were on that record label. And the books about that record label meant so much to me. And I wanted to give that exact feeling to people who are fans of DFA records. So every time I had a photo, I would put in the book. There's one two-page spread in there that's um shot from above. It's a big kind of warehouse where a party is going on. There's no specific focus really in that photo. It's just kind of the scene. And I thought, God, does this really deserve to be a two-page spread? Or does it deserve to be in the book? Normally, the books I make, a lot of times I want it to just be the hits, you know, like the best of the best photos. And when I went back to that criteria, okay, this is a fan book. I thought, no, a fan would want to see this. It sets the time. Maybe they were there, maybe they weren't there, and they're just catching up and they want to see what the fashion was like at the time, what the actual spaces were like. Those warehouse parties don't happen as much because real estate's way more expensive 20 years later. So everything gets bounced off that criteria, and it just makes life a lot easier and it makes for a better book.
SPEAKER_04You're talking about criteria as as an editorial process. What about as a shooting process? Do you ever, you know, it's four o'clock in the afternoon, you're waking up, you're getting ready to go out. Do you do you predetermine that way? Or is you just you shoot what interests you and you apply the criteria later? That is a good question.
SPEAKER_03I think it's more valuable, perhaps, or it's definitely easier to shoot freely and figure out what your internal criteria is creating. When I was shooting stuff in the early 2000s for fun, I was always using a little Olympus stylist point and shoot, always had Fuji 400 film in there, and I just shot freely with that. I'd make like four by six mini prints, white borders, and that was the whole process. And I shot thousands and thousands of photos without thinking about what they're going to be used for, where they were going to go or anything. And then I would say 10 years later, after kind of shooting like that, uh, one day I just ended up, or well, long weekend, I ended up going through all of them and narrowing them down to about maybe 80, 60 to 80 photos, which I called the ship escaped, based on one photo in there that kind of had a theme that looked funny, that it was like a ship had escaped this painting in a photo. And I could see what the criteria was later. And it was interesting to me. I love where humankind and nature kind of come together in a funny way. I like dry, offbeat humor. You know, I was with my mother in a car one time and I saw this banner stretched over um a restaurant, one of those big towers that has a big name. It was Chevy's, Chevy's was the name of the restaurant. But it gone out of business and somebody had put uh a big sign over there, just said now open before they could get their name up on the sign. And down below on the marquee, where you put the letters at like stake is $12.99. Down below on the marquee under now open, it just said now closed. And I just thought, what would you put open for like 20 minutes? Why would who would put now closed? Who would take the time to do that? I made my mother pull the car over. I was so excited. It was that internal thing where your stomach is buzzing and you know, like, oh my God, this was meant for me. I I'm I'm illogically scared that it's going to somehow go away or the letters are gonna fall off before I can get there, you know? Um, but I found that the criteria, when I looked through all of these photos and narrowed it down to a very small amount, the criteria was interesting. I did have a criteria. I just didn't know it at the time. And it was truly exciting to see the things I liked shooting. And I think for people who are just starting out in photography, that would be a good lesson to just really shoot freely, to copy other people's work if it helps you learn, or just take whatever photos you like taking because they make sense to you. And just keep doing that. And it it will probably be what you consider to be a long time before you're able to determine what your internal criteria is. And that's great. Like you should it's everything takes a long time to get to that kind of awesome state, you know? Absolutely.
SPEAKER_04Um and the ship escaped then became the name of your imprint. Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_03Yes. So the ship escaped is a uh book imprint, yeah, that I have that's got, I don't know, I don't know how many books I'm up to now. But yeah, all published by me.
SPEAKER_04For a photo book, what are the hallmarks of quality? What what are the what are the elements of book arts that you find important?
SPEAKER_03I have a thing that I call the spine test, which I think is uh a good challenge when you're making a book. You're thinking about maybe the books that you own or one owns. Um the spine test. Is, okay, you've made a book or you've bought a book. It's in your home on the bookshelf. Three years later, you're home on a Saturday, you've got some coffee, we walk past the bookshelf. You should be able to see a spine of a good book and be like, oh, I really haven't looked at that in a while, and pull it out and still kind of retain, get some good joy out of it. It's it's something really nice to, you know, revisit. It's book worthy, is what it actually is. And that's probably not most books, you know? And I'm saying that about me. Like I use that test, like I'm trying to hit that mark, but I'm not sure. You know, that's that's for other people perhaps to to judge, but that's that's a tough hallmark. But that's one criteria I have for what makes a good book. For me, I like to tell a story in almost every book that I make. I made a book, you know, like we've talked about Tim Go way about Dwayne Michaels. I made a book called Fortress about fellow photographer Arthur Truss. And they both have stories that are a little bit different. And there's a moment near the end of the book that actually is like the climax. There's like a little moment there that something happens. In the Arthur book, it's a moment where I'm literally telling him, I don't know what this book is. I'm confessing in the middle of making a book about him that I want to do, you know, that I'm doing of my own volition. I said, I don't even know what this is. And I'm emailing him and he emails me back. He said, Who the F do you think you are? Which I thought was uh pretty, pretty great. And then he said, you know, you you choose a path and you go down that road. He's like, I've spent, you know, I don't know, a hundred thousand dollars on the project that I'm currently shooting, and I don't know if anybody's gonna be interested in it. And he just kind of went on and on about, I mean, not too long. He he elaborated on that idea that like you just do something and you go through it and don't overthink it too much. And it was really sweetly worded and the absolute best advice from somebody whose work I had looked at when I was a young student, and now I'm making this thing. And so it was a great way to handle that moment of doubt. And I had people, I've had two people approach me and say, Oh, when I when I got to that part in the book, I actually cried. And I was like, oh my God, that's the literally the best thing that could happen. You literally had you read the story and you got to that part of the story that is the apex, and the photo book is designed to be read and experienced like a story, and they cried at the the crux of it. And I was like, that's that's I can't do better than that. That was that greatest compliment. That is so cool.
SPEAKER_04And and you have also um included prints in your books, you've included fragments of prints in your books. It's true. Um the the physical, the the physical book is, I mean, you know, paperweight, you know, this kind of stuff is tremendously important to you.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that goes, that's uh also kind of parallel to like how do you what's bookworthy? How do you make an exciting book? You know, what's the kind of criteria for making a book that's gonna pass the spine test? It gets into the economics of, okay, I'm gonna ask people to pay $48 uh for this book. Like, is it is it worth $48? Would I spend $48 on this book? You know, for example. So there have been various ways that I've tried to make a book special or unique and also make sure that it's got a value where I feel like, oh yeah, this book is worth it. For example, in Tim Go Away, I had two editions of that book. And in the second edition, for example, they both were handled differently. But the in the second edition, I had known Dwayne a little bit better at this point. And I approached him and I said, Hey, would you mind giving me one of your prints and signing it? I have an idea for this. And I explained what the idea was, and he thought about it and he said, sure. So he gave me a print, he signed it. The value of that print was probably about $3,600. That's around what the that print was going for. Wow. And so the the addition size of my book was 50 copies. So how do I make these 50 copies unique? So what I did was I took that print of his, 11 by 14 print, I cut it up perfectly into 50 different pieces, and then I took those little pieces, put it, put it in a little gold envelope, and adhered that into inside the back of each copy of my book. And so when it came time, as orders were coming in for this book, because I wanted to make sure it was democratic. So one or two of those pieces of the print, and you know, one of two of those books, uh, it was signed by Dwayne. That's obviously the one everybody would really want if you could sit and pick and choose which part of the print you got. So I made that democratic by putting one through 50 on uh pieces of paper, throwing them in a little glass jar. And every time somebody ordered the book, I would reach in and uh pull out a slip, and that's the number uh print, little piece of print that you got with the book that you ordered. So, like those kind of things to me are really engaging and fun. It's a way that I'm still continuing to make the book and interact with it, which uh I enjoy. I don't really want that process to ever end. So that's one way you could make a book kind of unique.
SPEAKER_04You know there's gonna be a movie in about 10 years if someone someone gets a copy of the book and then goes in search of the other 49 copies to put this print back together.
SPEAKER_03It's funny you would say that because there was a moment, there was a moment where I fantasized how great would it be if one person with uh some funds bought all 50 books immediately at the start and they could assemble it all themselves? I I really I wasn't hoping for it, and it's it's just pure fantasy, but I like the idea that somebody could have done that for sure.
SPEAKER_04No, it's gotta be a a quest movie in about 10 years, you know, with some somebody traveling the world hunting these down. Um how do you reconcile all of this creativity, all of this original thinking with the guy who's shooting for Ford and Bank of America? Um, are they differences in degree, differences in kind, completely separate, the same thing? What?
SPEAKER_03Uh yeah, we I I enjoy shooting. I enjoy shooting um editorially, commercially. It's exciting. You know, photography is one of those things that you can keep perfecting it for years and years and years. And it's nice when you get on set and there's some little problem that pops up, and you're like, oh, I I've had this before. I know what to do. I was shooting a job yesterday where I was inside of uh an industrial space, um, small manufacturers. I was photographing for a nonprofit company that uh is a realtor. And a few things came up. I had it on silent shutter because it was really quiet in there, and I didn't want to interrupt their workflow. And I was glancing at the back of the screen, I really had to look, and I was zooming in, and I'm like, oh yeah, with electronic shutter, um, sometimes it doesn't jive with the frequency of the um overhead lights, and you get this crazy banding in your images that you will not be able to fix later on. It is devastating, and I've had that happen before. So I was like, all right. I didn't know that. Yeah, you if you yeah, and it's the worst is it's very difficult to see just on the back of a small screen, but you will absolutely see it once you bring it into Lightroom or somewhere. Right. So I'm saying this because I enjoy those, I enjoy shooting and I enjoy those challenges. And I think probably all of us as photographers like it when you're like, yeah, this is the thing I'm good at, you know, like and I I I enjoy doing something that I feel confident in doing. So I that's why I enjoy it. Also, I like shooting people, and half of photography is just engaging people and telling them, like, hey, you're making a fist with your hand. Let's not do that, you know, or trying to try to just relax them. Nobody knows what to do with a photograph. So if you're a good talker, you know, uh, and you can tell them, like, look, this is gonna be real easy. You know, we're gonna have a good time here. That's half of photography. The technical stuff you can learn in a relatively short amount of time, but yeah.
SPEAKER_04Absolutely. Okay. Um, you are at work, I believe, on a fake posthumous, posthumous cat, I didn't even say that word today. Um, catalog of yourself. Um, we we got time, you know, basically for one more question. Tell me, this seems like the coolest project ever. Tell me what you're working on.
SPEAKER_03That is uh kind of you to say thanks. Yeah, I have an idea that's been going on for a while. It it will take a long time, and I keep getting pulled into other things, but the idea of the rest of your life, right? It could be the rest of my life. I I have to stop uh collecting things in order for it to begin properly. But um I had I had an idea. I'll I'll start by saying this uh and not make it too crazy long. When I when I first moved to New York, I didn't I didn't have a lot of money to afford uh art books, photography books, but I loved photography books. I was working in a small photo bookstore and couldn't afford the books that they were selling there because my salary was too low. Right. One of the ways I got around that was I would go to the Strand bookstore, huge bookstore here in New York City, and I would buy these uh photo catalogs from like the auction houses, Christie's, Sotheby's, and they were super inexpensive. But when they would auction off big collections of photography, they would have nice reprints of um those images. They would also have a lot of other information underneath there, like uh a little provenance, you know, how much they were listing them for, et cetera, et cetera. So recently, somewhat recently, I've decided to get rid of a lot of things that I've collected: ephemera, um, books, objects, but almost all of them have uh a story to them. So I was trying to figure out a way to let these images go, like literally release them from my life, but it's very difficult because in my stuck obsessive brain, I think each one of those items needs to find the absolute perfect home. Or how can I get rid of some of these things? No one will ever see what an amazing curator I was to have put all these things together over 30 years. My mind thinks like that. I don't think I'm alone. I think other people have uh this type of thinking. Um, so how do I release this and still feel like I've done it or I can showcase every item? So what I came up with was I'll make a fake auction house catalog, like the ones that I loved that I was collecting back then, but I'll make it posthumous. So it's as if I have died. It's the estate of Tim Soder. And here are, you know, different items that I've listed in there that are being now auctioned off because I've passed away. And they may be such things as uh, I don't know, uh some signed uh ephemerite that I got from Gerard Malanga, who is one of Andy Warhol's factory mainstay people, or it may be uh some obsessive uh navy blue t-shirts that I collected and um categorized in my drawers uh between very blue and slightly less blue, which is also uh true. But I wanted to tell their stories as well, and that was the main point. I wanted people to know like, how did you get that? How did you meet that uh Warhol celebrity, or why did you do these obsessive things with your t-shirt? So the stories uh are below the pieces in this catalog, and they're all from fictitious interviews that I would have done. So it'll be uh a blurb from an interview, and it's cited as Art Forum, you know, uh 1998, uh, you know, uh The Ship Escaped and more, or something like that, a fake title for the the uh story. So there's a lot involved in that, but that's kind of the gist of the project.
SPEAKER_04And and I'm absolutely just in awe of the fact, you know, the idea for a for or from other books, the catalogs, sparks an idea for a book from you, which then sparks the photography, which then sparks the text. Um that is a different order than a lot of us work in, where we take a bunch of pictures and say, now what the hell am I gonna do with this? Um, and we start looking for publishers and stuff.
SPEAKER_03So I think there's one one takeaway there that I would offer is that, and I hear what you're saying, and I'm gonna add on to that, is that seeing those catalogs, to me, they are photography books. You know, they were meant to be like, you know, something that gets tossed uh after that auction is over with, or you buy for three dollars at the strand. But to me, it's a collection of photographs with stories underneath them. It's just a different type of photography book that's not a monograph. So there's all kinds of inspiration out there and printed matter and books and things that totally could correspond to your photo project. And those are the books that I think are often the most exciting. And so maybe you'll see something that's in your life that you wouldn't consider to be like an Edward Weston, you know, um, monograph or something, but it might connect you to a different way of telling your story through photography in a book.
SPEAKER_04Tim, I am a fan. I think you your brain works in a way that I find inspiring and really, really compelling. And it makes my world a lot larger, which is the point of the whole thing we're doing here. Thank you very much. I have enjoyed this conversation immensely.
SPEAKER_03I uh I totally appreciate it. This is great, Scott. I I really enjoyed this. Thanks.
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