The MOOD Podcast

Change the Way you See: Art Wolfe, EO74

• Matt Jacob

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“My goal is nothing less than to change the way you see.” This powerful declaration from Art Wolfe, a world-renowned photographer, perfectly encapsulates his life’s mission of reshaping perspectives through the lens of photography.

Known for his breathtaking images of nature, wildlife, and diverse cultures, he has published over 100 books, hosted the Emmy-nominated TV series Travels to the Edge, and led numerous photography workshops across the globe. Art’s work is deeply rooted in conservation, blending his artistic vision with a commitment to preserving the planet.

Our conversation covered:

  • Art Wolfe’s artistic journey, from painting to photography.
  • How abstract expressionism influences his photography workshops.
  • Insights into his Emmy-nominated series Travels to the Edge and its impact on his career.
  • Challenges of navigating cultural sensitivities when leading workshops and tours.
  • The importance of finding beauty in unexpected places and developing a unique creative voice.
  • Why constant reinvention is crucial for growth as an artist.
  • The role of photography in global conservation efforts.
  • Lessons learned from decades of exploration, including hilarious mistakes like photographing without film.


Find Art Wolfe's work on his channels:
Website: www.artwolfe.com
Instagram: @artwolfe
You Tube: @artaolfephoto

Thank you to Luminar Neo for sponsoring this episode - get 25% discount on all their products here using the code MOODPODCAST25.
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Matt Jacob:

Welcome to the Mood Podcast, uncovering the art of conversation one frame at a time. I'm your host, matt Jacob, and thank you for joining me in today's conversation, and in this episode I talk with Art Wolff, one of the world's most renowned photographers, whose iconic images have shaped the way we see the natural world. With a career spanning five decades, art has captured breathtaking landscapes, wildlife and cultural traditions from every corner of the globe. His work is a testament to visual storytelling, blending artistic vision with a deep commitment to conservation. From publishing over 100 books to hosting the Emmy-nominated TV series Travels to the Edge and leading multiple workshops and photo tours around the world, art continues to inspire photographers and nature lovers alike, and in my conversation with him, we jump into his journey into becoming a photographer, exploring how his early passion for painting influenced his unique visual style.

Matt Jacob:

We also discussed the making of Travels to the Edge, a series that brought the beauty of remote landscapes and cultures to living rooms worldwide. We also talked about the challenges of creating work that balances art and advocacy, also the philosophical questions surrounding conservation, the role of photography in preserving our planet and the profound emotional connections that arise from being immersed in nature, as well as different cultures. I felt it was also salient to touch upon his ethics when leading workshops and photo groups abroad, especially how he approaches entering other cultures' habitats and what he advocates and hopes people do through his approach. So now I bring you Art Wolff. Art Wolff, welcome to the Mood Podcast. Thank you so much for being on here with me today.

Art Wolfe:

Pleasure is all mine, Matt. Thank you for having me.

Matt Jacob:

Yeah, we've got a lot to talk about. You've been in this space for a long time, very experienced photographer, and I'm super grateful I've caught you in between travels, which we'll obviously get onto. But I wanted to start with something I noticed through doing a bit of research. Obviously I've known about you for a while, but, diving a little bit deeper, there was a quote that you said that really sparked my interest and I wanted to unravel it a little bit more, and that quote was my goal is nothing less than to change the way you see. Now I don't know when you made that quote or what your intentions behind that was, but please elaborate.

Art Wolfe:

That is really a quote that I was referring to, the classes that I teach.

Art Wolfe:

I do two or three things. I work on books that feed my heart and my brain. I take people to places around the world that I love to show them, but I also spend a lot of time teaching workshops. I have very elaborate and hard-fought lectures and I like nothing more than to take people that only have one way of aiming at a subject and translating it in a unique way, and that's what I really meant and that falls really under the genre of photography as art, where I first give lectures on abstract expressionism, explain the history of that, and then we go out to degraded environments, you know places that people would never think to shoot, and we find things that look like a Jackson Pollock or William de Kooning and other famous artists of the past, and it's a great challenge. So think of Old Delhi and going into the back alleys and finding walls that have been painted a hundred times and chipped and broken, and people love the challenge and that's really what I meant by that quote.

Matt Jacob:

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Art Wolfe:

Well, you know, I was an art major, painting major, but also an art education major, and so abstract expression was the one genre I never got. So when I first started teaching, just out of college, I was latching on to French Impressionists, because Monet and Renoir and all these other artists really painted landscapes that I was really enamored of. But abstract expressionists, which meant non-objective, and non-objective means something you're not looking at a house or a horse or something. That's obvious, the subject. But these are non-subjects, and so the famous abstract expressionists would say they're paintings and where your imagination begins. And so I took it on to learn about what I never understood. And then, once I started understanding it, then I started teaching it and people really took to it. So it's the most popular workshops that I teach around the country, and I'm just growing, as I. You know, when I learn something, I teach it. I don't covet information, I want to share information, and I've always been that way. So how do you?

Matt Jacob:

go about teaching people. You talked about abstract expressionism. You're not quite getting it. How do you teach people to?

Art Wolfe:

get it? How do you really open that up in people's mind when what they want to do is photograph a mountain range or an animal or something like that? I'm taking them polar opposite. I'm taking them into really junkyards and places that look really unsavory and yet when they come away with something extraordinarily beautiful, it's really highly rewarding. And I do it through very elaborate, well thought out lectures that I spend years assembling. So I don't take it lightly and I can.

Art Wolfe:

I show one shot. You know I'll show a series of shots of Jackson Pollock, which was this painter, if you're not aware, who threw paint on the floor. And it's just, it's beautiful, but it's completely abstract and complex. And then I show the side of a freight truck driving 65 miles an hour down a freeway where I've taken a picture of the side of a freight truck driving 65 miles an hour down a freeway where I've taken a picture of the side of the truck and I call it a Jackson Pollock. Nobody even questions it because in fact it looks just like the previous artwork that I've shown them, and so that really starts to sink in that you can find art anywhere. You just have to have the imagination and the eye to see it, but it takes time and it takes lectures and it takes redundancy and then suddenly it's like working on a muscle it starts to relax and they start to see art anywhere around them. And that really is the source of that quote.

Matt Jacob:

Yeah, and isn't that beautiful when you start seeing art everywhere. That's really the source of such fulfillment and happiness that certainly I believe in life right.

Art Wolfe:

It's a great metaphor. Finding beauty in decay, birth and renewal. These are themes, and that is a positive theme, and so I'm all about uplifting, educating, inspiring people. I've been that way through over 100 books and TV shows and things like that. I do shoot. You know degraded environments that have been destroyed by bad policies, or you know fishnets around the neck of a whale or things like that, but what I'm interested in is inspiring people and finding beauty. That keeps me going for five decades.

Matt Jacob:

So why photography? How did that come about?

Art Wolfe:

It came out of it was purely accidental. Actually, I was a painting major at the University of Washington, but I started getting into climbing and I was always one of those kids that was rooting around in the neighborhood woods and hiking. At college I became friends with other young climbers and so I joined them and started taking an old camera along to document the climbs, to show friends and family where I was going on weekends, and my allegiances shifted from painting to photography little bit by little bit, and by the time I graduated what two degrees, seven years later, I really was much more into photography than painting. Simply put, it was easier to create an original composition through the photographic medium than to conjure up a meaningful painting from a blank canvas, and so my temperament and the way I am suits photography far better than just sitting at an easel and painting. And I never looked back at that.

Art Wolfe:

And yet I draw from what I learned from art school and apply it into my painting, into my photographs, and apply it into my painting, into my photographs. And I remember instructors goading me on never to rest on my laurels or working on previous successes, but to always try new things. And photographically then, I've expanded and I keep expanding the work I'm doing. Today people would never expect of me. I'm doing a book called Act of Faith that looks at world's big religions, but also voodoo, shamanism, things that people would never associate with Art Wolf, the wildlife photographer. And yet another body of work was called the Human Canvas, where I painted over 100 individuals into really ornate backdrops that I had previously created, and that body of work really shook a lot of people up in a positive way. But they would never have expected that of me. So I love to surprise my audience and just when somebody's pigeonholed me into one category, I try intentionally to show a different side and that I really brought forward from what the instructors were really intending for me to do.

Matt Jacob:

So that's a conscious driver of yours to not surprise your audience, but maybe surprise yourself and try something unique and new and iterate for yourself rather than for others, or is there a bit of balance there?

Art Wolfe:

Definitely is to avoid the analogy of a writer's block. I mean, I have known, and in my professional career, a lot of early colleagues that gave up photography because they kept on doing the same thing and they lost interest. So you know, I first started in the mountains around Seattle and after I exhausted that I moved further afield, went up to Alaska and when I'd done the West Coast then I jumped the pond and went into Europe and Australia and New Zealand. I just started traveling everywhere looking for culture shock and things that stimulated my imagination and I suspect, matt, you're exactly wired the same way.

Matt Jacob:

Yeah, absolutely, curiosity, right, and curiosity not just in other things that we can try and create art out of, but curiosity in yourself, right, curiosity. And what are you? What? What we can do, what, what? What's the next challenge and how can we be better all the time?

Art Wolfe:

well, you know, I I started off with a uh, older man that was into photographing geese and ducks and he had a big. So I bought a big lens when I could afford it. And one day we're in the mountains, at the edge of a lake and we're photographing these birds called mergansers. And I said to Robert there's a bear with a cub right at the edge of the lake. And he looked at it and he goes yeah, but they're not ducks. And I couldn't believe that he responded that way. I was so excited to see a bear with a cub. I spent all the time photographing it. Robert, after a while, had every photo of every duck in North America and then he left the field. He had no interest in photographing anything else and I always use that as an example of somebody that gets so narrow focus that they lose interest.

Art Wolfe:

And I keep on challenging myself to look for new subjects, new ways of shooting the subjects. I photographed a bunch of books on wildlife, but every book that I've done on wildlife had a different style, different point of view. One was called Vanishing Act and it was about camouflage in nature point of view. One was called Vanishing Act and it was about camouflage and nature. Another one was called Migrations, which was inspired by MC Escher, so it was a book on patterns. Rhythms from the Wild was a look at wildlife, but with long, exaggeratedly long exposures, so always trying to shoot something different so I don't get bored and it never becomes blasé. That way it's a difficult balance, isn't it?

Matt Jacob:

Because all of these analogies and cliches of mastering one's craft and the 10,000 hour rule and finding your style and voice and what you want to put out there, and there is an argument to say you can't really be great at anything without doing this, doing it and iterating over and, over and over again, and that is not conducive to wanting to try different things. But there's an element in there that's always, usually always, a common denominator you are still it's still the same person behind that lens, so there's always going to be some kind of cohesiveness amongst it. It's just whether you can find that, would you? Would you agree with that? I?

Art Wolfe:

totally agree with that, because if I talk about jackson pollock, only one style comes up. If you think of, well, picasso is a different animal because he sculpted, he painted, he drew a lot of different inspirations, so he was unique. But so many of the famous artists had a unique vision and a unique style that they stuck with. And people ask what is your style, my style? And I have no way of explaining it because I don't think I've got a style. I try too many things. So it has been a liability because there's such a broad base of genres, but it keeps me happy. So you know, and as long as you're happy and moving forward, you've got a reason to get out of bed.

Matt Jacob:

Absolutely. There's a lot that could be said for that. Do you find there's a problem of gatekeeping in the photography industry, where a lot of photographers don't want to share their knowledge and education?

Art Wolfe:

Yeah, yeah, and you know I'm single, I don't have children.

Art Wolfe:

My legacy is the work I do and if, looking back after I'm long gone, if I've inspired a generation of people, if I've inspired a generation of people, that is good enough for me and what I have found in parallel, however, that we live at a time where, if a photo appears on Instagram, there could be a flash mob trying to do the same thing at the same location and you could ruin an environment, and so I'm being a little more discreet at this point on where I may have shot a sensitive landscape or a endangered species. I don't need to spell that out but the style and what I used and all that I share with, and I'll tell you why, because I did a TV series on public TV in the States, but it ultimately aired in 70 countries around the world. I really didn't think people would go to the extremes that I did to get the images or the locations, and yet people did, and I think I've changed a lot of tribes and locations over the years through my naivety.

Matt Jacob:

Yeah, thank you for that.

Art Wolfe:

So I'm a little more aware that people now are waiting for you or me to show them the really early on and be invited into monasteries and photograph monks and be careful and not intrude on them and give them their own sense of dignity and privacy. And yet what followed then were people that had no sense about that and they would just overwhelm the monks to the point that suddenly the monks were closing off their monasteries or keeping people out. So I always thought people would have natural common sense of working around people, and I found that's not true at all. So it's a learning curve for me. If I try to think that everybody thinks like me, I'm going to be sorely disappointed, and so a little more caution now is issued. But I still stick to the fact that I'm going to share whatever I learned today tomorrow to my audience, and you can do that without divulging every you know. I would give them a roadmap to the location.

Matt Jacob:

Locations and populations are very, very, very sensitive, right? And, like you said, as we become more digitized and saturated around the photography industry and the world generally, it's such a danger and such a risk to be sharing those types of things. It's such a danger and such a risk to be sharing those types of things. And, like you said, the next thing you know, these places are inundated and overwhelmed with tourists who not saying all of them, but you mentioned it and I've experienced it firsthand as well A lot of them don't respect the local culture or the nuances or the language or the cultural practices that have to be abided by. And, even more so, they don't really understand that you should not just go and point a camera in someone's face just because you've seen it on Instagram, right, and this degrades cultures very quickly.

Art Wolfe:

I'll give you just a brief history. When I was seven, my mother took me downtown on a bus and we transferred to another bus and I rode about 10 miles from where I lived to a school that was provided post-war families. And so at seven, after she taught me that I would do it on my own, so every Saturday morning I'd get up and get on the bus and ride downtown and transfer to another bus and ride across the city, and what that did was give me a sense of empowerment and confidence which allowed me then to walk in any city around the planet. And so I traveled early and often to places that a lot of my colleagues at the same time would never even have thought to go because they were still photographing in Yellowstone or wherever. And then I met a friend of mine from Romania that became a lifelong friend. In fact I just talked to him about five months ago. He lives in Khon Kaen, thailand, and he'll be joining me on the tour of India.

Art Wolfe:

But the two of us went into the Omo River of Ethiopia oh, it has to be 27 years ago and Angela Fisher and Carol Beckwith went in years before and we went in and it was a great time and we were camping, there was no tour company that would take us.

Art Wolfe:

We were just striking out on our own and the photos I took went into a book called Tribes, went into a book called tribes, and then a couple tour companies that kind of are favoring photo tours started going there, and then other people started going there and then the very uh, people that were photographing and there was about seven distinct tribes they started, um, wearing hats that were given to them and t-shirts that were given to them and their culture completely changed, and I feel responsible for that. And as soon as we lose a culture or a language, the earth is diminished and it just seems like people go seeing people wearing skins or almost no clothing whatsoever. People go seeing people wearing skins or almost no clothing whatsoever and they feel compelled to take off their T-shirt and baseball hat and give it to them. But what they're doing is really changing cultures, and so when I later did the TV show Travel clothing, no sunglasses, nothing was left behind, and so that became a philosophy going forward, because I've seen how people really can be inappropriate travelers.

Matt Jacob:

It is difficult to go into these cultures, these places and meet and have these wonderful experience of photographic experiences with these indigenous populations and wherever we might be, and it's difficult to not just take from that and just to take for your own self-interest, which is take photos, essentially, or lead a tour there. But it's also very easy to, or very, very difficult to, go the other way and want to give them everything, to say thank you and oh, they need this and they need this and they need money, and give them those money because then that just snowballs. They get used to it. They may want to be more westernized and be more affluent, essentially, but we all know that that's not a good solution. But there's got to be a good balance somewhere where we're not just taking but we're also not ruining that culture. How do we go about doing that? David Elikwu.

Art Wolfe:

Well, first of all, a lot of the cultures we're talking about, for instance, the folks of the Omo. They're growing crops, they've got corn, they've got grains, they've got happy life. Honestly, and before I ever pull out a camera and photograph them, I usually put a camera in their hands and have them photograph me and look at the back of the camera now that they can see an image, and they're quite thrilled with that. They're rarely asking for anything from me, but they're enjoying the experience that somebody's come from afar and finds them interesting, and so it's an interesting diversion from their normal life. In the case of early travel to the Amazon, they wouldn't even know how to ask for anything, nor would they need it, because they've got their own style of hunting and gathering or growing manioc or other crops.

Art Wolfe:

So I'm not run into people wanting something from me unless it's more of a Western culture or even an Asian culture where they've been. They're living in the modern world and in fact even the most remote people are modern human beings and so if you treat them with respect, as intelligent humans, they can size you up in a nanosecond. Whether they have cell phones or technology or not, they can read people really quite fast. So if you go in there open-hearted and with no objective to take from them other than to engage them in a friendly, nice way, I've never had experiences that led to something ugly or bad taste.

Art Wolfe:

So I've been lucky about that. But then I grew up understanding a little more about humanity because I paid attention to my friends. I grew up gay, so we become very aware of people around us. We know who our friends were and who we would never associate with. So I think it gives you almost a heads up on seeing how people are reacting to you and whether it's safe for you and all that goes into it goes into it.

Matt Jacob:

Yeah, that's interesting and I'm sure that's shaped your way of thinking about how to express yourself and how to distribute your work accordingly your sexuality was that ever a thing that really you consciously put into or thought about when you were creating art essentially?

Art Wolfe:

You know, I think any gay person growing up in the period of time that I did, of course it dominated your life, but I also was an alpha male. I had all straight friends. I even had a gang of kids that kind of roamed the forest and protected the forest. So I wasn't a shrinking violet. I never felt inferior to anybody nor superior to anybody. I just was myself. But I think being gay you are different in a way, and so you see safe people, you read people that's really what I was getting to. You read people from afar, you're aware of people and I never went anywhere with fear at all, but I know who to avoid down the road and I guess that's just part of growing up in the period that I did. And things are very different these days. Yeah, they are, and all for the right reasons.

Matt Jacob:

Yeah, I hope so. I hope in your experience they are at least. You talked about fear. What do you fear right now? And being a photographer, a global photographer, who travels the world, does books, tv series, which we're going to touch upon later but what? What is at the forefront of your fears right now? We talked about environmental impacts. The balance between tourism and environmental impacts is that up there near the top definitely.

Art Wolfe:

Uh know, it's no mystery. The oceans are rising, the earth is warming. I think if I was a young man that had aspirations of having children, I'd be concerned about that, because what kind of life are your children going to live if things keep going on the same trajectory? I also am aware that there's a lot of smart people and NGOs that are out there working on behalf of everybody. They don't make the news. You know the old term if it bleeds, it leads.

Art Wolfe:

We tend to hear the negative rather than the positive stories.

Art Wolfe:

In fact, the most recent book that I've done is called Wild Lives, and in part it was done because people are overwhelmed with COVID and earth and politics and war and yet they never hear that there's more whales in the ocean than there has been since the 1950s, that there's more mountain lions in North America than there has been in 200 years, that mountain gorillas are growing in population by 10% a year, as are tigers in India. Those are all positive things that people need to hear. So it's not all negative and it's not all going to hell in a handbasket, and there's a lot of NGOs working on behalf of the greater good and we just need to hear more of those stories and I have no regrets. I don't look back with regrets. There's a lot of things I could have done better, but to try to live in the past and regrets is a useless energy. I live in the future. I'm working on books that will see the light of day in a year or two, so everything's about what's next rather than what was.

Matt Jacob:

How do you see the role of photography in that conservation effort, if photography has a role at all? It?

Art Wolfe:

definitely does. You know, the written word is very powerful, but one single salient photo can move a lot more people, and so I've seen it with my own work and in my colleagues' work that photos are right in your face. People identify with the image, and so I see a huge role for photography not only in saving lives of people that are in conflict, but also animals at risk and environments at risk, and so it takes somebody to go there and to bring back and show the world what just written words would not have the same impact on the average human.

Matt Jacob:

Yeah, another quote I found of yours was this it is in the wild places, where the edge of the earth meets the corners of the sky, the human spirit is fed, which I thought was extremely powerful, certainly for someone who enjoys being in nature and wildlife. How does that belief kind of drive your work in raising awareness about environmental issues and so on?

Art Wolfe:

Well, you know, that phrase was actually used as part of an Everest expedition that I was invited on in the winter of 1984. We were the first Western expedition allowed into Tibet by the Chinese government up the northeast ridge. There was no Google Earth, there was no living human being that had ever climbed successfully, and so we were feeling like we're going into the great unknown. And yet it was one of the greatest things I ever got involved with, simply because it was one of the last great expeditions, and so we were out of communication with the outside world for three months in the winter. It was hard, it was cold, it was inspiring.

Art Wolfe:

The beauty of the Himalaya from the north side, from the Tibetan side of the range, was under photographed and I just enjoyed the camaraderie and the experience. But I always felt that when I got into mountains. So over the years I've been to every big mountain range on earth, and when I go into the mountains it just reminds me of my roots, of being in my early 20s and standing on a mountain range looking over the summits of many peaks. But I think that spirit was implicit in Western culture, especially in the United States, where we started on the East Coast, and the people that were the outliers kept moving west until we hit where I live, right here on the West Coast of North America, and so now the great unknown lies beneath the ocean or in the skies above, and there are people that are wanting to explore every aspect of Earth, but also space. So I think it's just inherent in the human spirit to want to go and see the unknown. I don't think that actually answered specifically your question, but that is really the origin of that phrase.

Matt Jacob:

Yeah, no, I love it. And I didn't know it was from so long ago, so that adds even more gravitas to it. And yeah, that's wonderful. And obviously travel has been in your blood all your life and you did this. You mentioned earlier the Travel to the Edge series. I haven't had the pleasure of watching. I've seen a few clips. Can you tell us a little bit more about that series, Because there's a lot of episodes? Right, it was over a couple of seasons and multiple episodes.

Art Wolfe:

It was one of the hardest things I ever did, because we would do three episodes at a time and you shoot. Well, for our 28-minute episode you'd shoot 30 hours, and I like efficiency. I'm sparing in what I shoot and so I don't shoot a lot of everything, hoping that there's a couple of good shots in there. At this point in my career, after 50 years, whatever I'm shooting I'm using, and so it was hard for me to work with a film crew which were professional but they would back up and back up, and back up and to repeat lines and all of that was drudgery. Now the good side of it was it was a small film crew and we were able to get funding from Microsoft and Canon and we were able to go into places that I wouldn't have been able to afford at the time, from Mali Africa going to Antarctica since the early 80s. So I had been down there many, many times. But it was nice to bring the film crew to South Georgia or the Antarctic Peninsula or the Sahara Desert or, and so I love taking the crew to places that I knew and places I had never been to, and originally it was going to be just for American audiences, but then, since I owned the series, we were able to broker it through Boston Public TV and they sold it throughout Europe. Al Jazeera was the first entity to buy it and it was broadcast throughout the out there Arab world. And so for me, growing up poor, really poor, in Seattle, I never would have dreamed that something I helped create could be broadcast around the world, so it seemed like the future was limitless, and it still feels that way.

Art Wolfe:

I'm always surprised on how your name gets out, my name gets out to the world. Now I just did an interview yesterday morning with a lady from Tbilisi, georgia, and I've never been there, and so she's asking questions about Wild Lives, the most recent book, and I'm still I mean, I'm always thrilled. It's never. We don't turn down interviews. I like to share whatever I know with the audience, and so people like you that have really robust audiences. Of course, I'm going to do your podcast I'd be an idiot not to do it so but it's also great to have a conversation with somebody that is also a very fine photographer oh well, thank you very much, I'll take that as a compliment um, very honest, it's special to have you on and I wish we could have you on for longer and we're going to wrap this up soon.

Matt Jacob:

Um, I just wanted to dive a little bit deep into the, the travels to the edge, because, as a photographer, looking at a very successful photographer like you've been doing it for a couple of decades then how does one even attempt to do something like a TV series? Because as photographers, we don't even think really about like, oh, I'm going to want to go do a TV series about traveling and taking photos, I mean in our dreams. Yeah, how did it all come about? What was the intent and the purpose behind it?

Art Wolfe:

Well, first of all it was a personal challenge because I was one of those kids that was a saboteur. In high school, junior high, I'd sit in the back of the class and make a wisecrack and embarrass somebody up in front of the class, but when it was my time to get up in front, I would just go white. I could not carry on a conversation until college where, in the second degree that I got, which was art education, I was forced to take speech class and then be a substitute art teacher in the school district, and I make the analogy. It was like a coyote being cornered they either fight or they die. And I learned that if I could say words with confidence, that people would listen, and that helped me immensely on selling stories to National Geographic or Audubon or any of a number of national magazines. And so it was a personal challenge that here is this guy.

Art Wolfe:

Even though I was an alpha male, I was still, like most people, petrified in presenting in front of an audience. It's one of the most common fears of men and so it gave me the encouragement to do a TV show. I started giving lectures once I got a little older and I loved getting in front of audiences and making them laugh, and so the TV show was just a continuum of those public presentations. And so I still do it Like in February I'll be before 2,000 people in Freiburg, germany, at an opera house that I helped open on one of their first performances.

Art Wolfe:

And it's funny because I've been going to Germany for 25 years and originally you would have an interpreter on stage and you couldn't make jokes because it would not translate. And when I was in Fribourg about four years ago on the grand opening of the opera house, every little joke, every nuance people were getting so long gone were the interpreters. They just understand English so well these days and Germany is a great country for nature and photography. They just love nature. They're very similar to Americans in their love of nature and photography, so it's a good audience for me. When a book comes out in English, it generally is printed in German as well.

Matt Jacob:

Wow, okay, and how did that Travel to the edge series shape your perspective on, well, kind of, what was the result of it internally, more than anything else, you know, how did it change your viewpoints, if anything, on the global cultures and landscapes?

Art Wolfe:

Do you know? I was a couple of years after the show ended. I was in Iceland and I was at a waterfall on a private property and I had never I've been to Iceland many, many times but here I'm in Iceland, at a waterfall, on a private ranch, and nobody was there except for Gabrielle Jacan, this Romanian assistant friend of mine, and he's on a bridge. I'm off the bridge, I'm up at the waterfall photographing, and then suddenly I turn around and there's 25 people on the bridge acting, all animated, and I thought, okay, shit, they are angry that I'm in their picture. So I packed up my camera, started walking back to this bridge, but they keep watching me rather than the waterfall, and like, come on, get over it. I'm opening the shot up for you. And then, when I got up on the bridge, a couple of them were like pounding their heart and I had no idea what was going on and, as it turned out, it was a photo club from Madrid, spain, and they had seen this episode that I had done. And now they recognized me, even from behind, all bundled up with a wool hat, but they recognized me and suddenly the power of the TV show came coming back to me and I have to say I was thrilled. I posed with every one of them. They were so happy to to me.

Art Wolfe:

And I have to say I was thrilled. I posed with every one of them. They were so happy to meet me and it was like God I keep on harking back to being that kid in the outskirts of Seattle. Family had no money. We never really traveled very far. And now people from Madrid, which I've never been to, are thrilled to meet me and I just. It was really quite gratifying for me to know that that camera that my parents gave me it was old used Konica camera became literally a passport to the world. And so you know, there's still. There's not a lot of money in this business. You have to do it because you have a passion for it, and so I never think about money. I'm thinking about the next project or the next destination.

Matt Jacob:

At what point do you start thinking about money, though? Because obviously we have to. As photographers, whether we're beginners or advanced, we have to still pay the bills.

Art Wolfe:

We pay the bills by working seven days a week. I never take a vacation. I am always breathing and living this, uh. And so I'm always working and people say, oh yeah, you must take a vacation. It's like, no, I I'm not one to lay on a beach, I'm, I'm all about the next adventure. So, and my staff, which are downstairs downstairs is a small dedicated staff. Two of the women have worked for me for 32 years. Gabrielle has been working with me for 30 years. I'm longevity with people, so I'm very loyal to them, they're loyal to me and we just make ends meet. But we're not buying brand new you know Teslas nor would I now anyways, yeah, let's not mention Elon.

Matt Jacob:

That's wonderful. I love that. That you've said that about longevity with your staff, and that's something I really want to strive for as well. You know, grow together. They're growth partners as much as they are, you know, members of staff or employed staff, right. So, yeah, this whole thing, this whole endeavor, is a vocation, without vacation, right. It's something that we just love to do and we'll always do, whether it makes a lot of money or not. So, yeah, I love that. It's such a huge inspiration for other people. So, thank you. Why do you and I love that little anecdote about being in Iceland those people really cheering for you? Why do you think that people, your audience, is your audience? Why do you think people follow you and are interested and love what you do?

Art Wolfe:

I think I'm basically very honest and open and I think that they like that. I think people are drawn to people that don't have ulterior motives or agendas, that aren't out there and open, and so I think we live in a time where local and national and international politicians are working on behalf of their own greed, so I think people are drawn to people that have a feeling for the greater good, and that's really the way I see myself Tell us the journey towards that, and I'm sure you've been that way for your whole life.

Matt Jacob:

but you must have made many mistakes over your time as a photographer. Are there any that kind of spring out to you as we're talking, now that you've learned really big lessons from?

Art Wolfe:

I think that every trip I go on I'm learning a new lesson. You know, everything that has happened to a photographer has happened to me tenfold, including not having film in the camera and or washing pants that had film in the pants and everything. You know, every mistake you could make has happened to me multiple, multiple times and you just kind of say a few bad words and you move on, but that's it. You just struggle on and know that we're all human and we all trip over stumps and we all fall backwards and yeah, it would be a comedy if we had every mishap filmed and strung together. It would be a very popular show because we are just like everybody else.

Matt Jacob:

And so how, in the same breath, how do you define growth as an artist? Because as artists, we always want to be. You know, we talked about this at the top of the show, right? We always want to be moving forward, we always want to be evolving, doing something different. How would you define, or at least explain that definition of growth as an artist?

Art Wolfe:

well for me. I'm a better photographer today than I was last year, and it's not that my skills holding a camera is any better. Certainly, cameras are getting better, but it's the intellect and the eye and the imagination that gets more and more nuanced. The more you stick with it, you see things faster. You see things that you might not have considered five years ago, but you are now, and so that's growth and you want to be at the end of this line, shooting things that reveal a subject in a very different way, a different perspective, a different style.

Art Wolfe:

Something new is what we're offering people, and you know it's harder to engage people today because there's so much competing. You know there's so much on TV. There's so much new programs. There's AI coming along. You know I'm not fearful of AI so much because I think still the authenticity and the honesty of photography is if it's revealed. People are still going to be drawn towards something that they know the sky really was above that mountain range, and so there's a value in that, and people want honesty. They don't want to marvel at something that was a creation. Oh, even though I just saw Gladiator in the movie and I loved it and the way they use AI to build ancient Rome was amazing. But it's still a movie and you walk out of the theater and two days later you're kind of forgetting about the whole endeavor.

Matt Jacob:

But people, if they see a photo that really touches them and it's meaningful and it's real, that lasts a much longer with people so how do we get to that where we're seeing much quicker and we're, we're, we're, we're more evolved artists, it becomes more naturally, more natural to us. How do we, how do we get to that point? If I'm a beginner photographer, how do you teach people to get to that point where okay, I'm not, I don't need to worry about camera settings, right, they are just the camera settings. How do I see things better? How do I express my vision better? How do we get from A to B?

Art Wolfe:

faster. Well, I think you do it through redundancy and really well thought out lectures and articulating what they're viewing. And if it's an effective articulation and images at the same time, people can learn really fast. People can say oh well, you were born with talent. Well, that's like dismissing a concert pianist that spends hours a day practicing his or her craft. Yeah, there are certain people that have maybe a better aptitude for this or that, but that alone won't get you where you want to go. You have to practice, you have to breathe it, you have to live it. This is not a job, this is life that both you and I are involved with, and you have to be willing to have that life. Because it's not nine to five and what's the earning hours for the first year? It's none of that. You don't even think about that. And yet there's people that come up and they want to know what's the first year salary like is like, if you're asking that question, you're never going to be that so Well, it's analogous to asking the question what settings did you use?

Matt Jacob:

or what camera did you use, right? So, okay, that question is of an importance, but it's not of the importance that we're looking at. And so with it, there is this mindset shift. I think in order to be great at what you do in your craft, you have to have that mindset and, like you said, be willing to just work hard all the time, practice all the time and just live it. I tell people it just is like make, it is so, it's just, it is your life all the time. You don't even think about it being something or having a label to it, just is.

Art Wolfe:

I couldn't agree more.

Matt Jacob:

All right, last few questions. I'll let you go. It's getting dark, I can see it's getting dark in Seattle it's dark in Seattle. When we talk about gear. Just give us an idea. There's a lot of gear nerds out there and they're probably begging me to ask what type of equipment you use. Give us a rundown.

Art Wolfe:

Okay, I have two camera bodies I'm packing for this long trip. I've got two camera bodies, one's in a duffel wrapped in bubble wrap, the other's in a little backpack. I've got one to 500 Canon and a 14 millimeter, and I surmise that's all I need. And then I've got underwater housing with a different camera and lens. It's interesting that when I teach a workshop, at the end of the workshop I have no knowledge. Who's got Nikon, sony, canon? I don't. I'm totally not a geek, you know. I know more about the animal and the forest and the tree and the birds than the cameras. I know probably 5% of what my camera can do. So I'm totally not into technology. And so it's funny. You asked that question because and I know people want to know but I am so not interested and I have to have somebody read the instructions and explain it to me, and then I get it because I'm so adverse to reading instructions and especially, you know from Japanese cameras the way they write manuals. It's like what. So that's my answer to you.

Matt Jacob:

That's why I moved away from Sony. Actually, I used to shoot Sony um back in the day and I just couldn't get used to the the I. The cameras are great, Like the image quality, amazing, the glass that would go with these cameras I'm talking like the Sony a nine, A7R III, these types of things, Amazing. But I just did not like the menu functions. I did not like the user interface. I just wanted something simple and that's why eventually, when I could afford it, I went to Hasselblad. Hasselblad just have very, very simple menu functions. I'm exactly like you. I don't read instructions. Unfortunately for my wife, who always lambasts me about that, I never read instructions. It's just ah, I'll fix it. I think that's a man thing. Right, I'll just get on with it. I'll figure it out. But yeah, I feel your pain. Is that something that you talk about on your workshop as well? You don't really teach that. We say workshops or photo tours. Tell us a little bit more about those experiences. If I'm a client, how am I going to experience this?

Art Wolfe:

Yeah, you're going to learn a lot about seeing and imagination. I do have assistants that are the techs that can help somebody struggling with a branded camera. But I tell everybody, before you arrive at a workshop with me, read at least to know how to use your camera. But I tell everybody, before you arrive at a workshop with me, read at least to know how to use your camera, because I don't want to waste time trying to figure out your camera and you hand me a Sony and I'm going to look at it like a chimpanzee. I wouldn't know anything about that, but I want people that can at least take a picture with it so that we get that behind us. And then we're really talking about subject and finding subjects. You know, and I told them, this isn't about rainbows and sunsets and waterfalls. This is about finding things that people step on on their way to the viewpoint. And if we can get that across, then it starts to open up people's image and I love that because it's.

Matt Jacob:

People are so happy when you give them license to shoot something different yeah, I'd love that and, uh, I, I work on that myself a lot as well.

Matt Jacob:

People, people get very because people see an image and they just go.

Matt Jacob:

Well, well, I want to take exactly that, right, I want to be able to take a shot like that, and that's okay. But you have to kind of go through the whole process yourself to really understand and learn how to capture something like that and, more importantly, think outside of that photo and those types and styles of images and think about how to tell a story or how to add context and narrative to a book or a series of images, right, because photography is not just about an image that looks really nice that's part of it, of course but people I find that in my experiences or people just want well, I'll just want to take this beautiful shot of a waterfall, right, okay, okay, great, but what about all of this other stuff that you know we can use and see and express with? Um? So I I kind of I love the fact that there are people out there like you doing these workshops in in that type of way and and educating people in a in an experiential way to to be able to see different things.

Art Wolfe:

Yeah, it's pretty rewarding when you know you really opened up people's imaginations and that's a big thing for me.

Matt Jacob:

Well, you've opened up my imagination today. Thank you so much for talking with me. Huge inspiration, and I wish you the best of luck on the trip. You've got a big tour. Tell us a little bit about what is this tour that you do. Is it more workshops, or is it commercial stuff, or what?

Art Wolfe:

No, well, there's no workshop. I mean, I'm taking people to the Qum and they're going to be shocked to see all the crazy things that Nagasa does and the holy men do. It's culture shock, you know, everything's going to be different for them. Food's different, the atmosphere is different, the people are different. So culture shock is for me. You find new subjects and new inspiration, so I love it. I've kind of done my underwater work on this previous book on wildlife. I did coral work down in Indonesia, but I'm just going with a friend that wants me to come along and then he's going to continue on to India and so I didn't want to say no and I don't want to stay in cold, dark Seattle right now. So I'd rather be diving, but I'm not a great diver, but I'm um tenacious, so I I'll learn, relearn how to use my underwater housing and have fun and stay warm. But that's the trip, yeah yeah, well, thank you.

Matt Jacob:

Um, we never touched upon your name, but for the record and for the audience, your my friends started abridging it to art, which is short for Arthur and Wolf.

Art Wolfe:

Yeah, that's it. But the people always ask, yeah, you made your name up and I'll say, yeah, my real name's Melvin Pickles, and they go. Really I said, no, I'm not the type that would make up a name. I don't live in Los Angeles, I live in Seattle.

Matt Jacob:

All right, meldon. Well, thanks so much for chatting with me. I wish you the best of luck in the future. We'll keep watching your incredible content, incredible photos, and yeah, until the next time. Thank you so much, yeah.

Art Wolfe:

I hope there will be a next time. Thanks, Matt.

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