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

Matt sits down with photographer, writer, and educator Tim Carpenter, author of 'To Photograph Is to Learn How to Die' and photobooks such as 'Local Objects', 'Little' and 'Christmas Day, Bucks Pond Road', for a deep conversation on the philosophy beneath the photographic image. 

In this episode you will learn a way to understand why the form of a photograph, not its subject, is where its meaning and beauty actually live, and how working with a camera can teach you to make peace with a world that will never bend to your wishes.

We explore the 'broken self' and the gap between the real and the ideal, why form is everything that is not in front of the camera, the difference between the depicted and the detected, how the body and the camera move through the world as a single instrument, why beauty in a photograph is a fleeting moment of equilibrium, and how a photographer can build a meaningful body of work and a real audience without chasing scale.

Other things we discussed:

• Why great art resists interpretation, and the ethics of meeting a subject as something singular
• The exposure test that reveals whether you truly care about form
• How Tim moved from being subject-matter driven to understanding structure
• Reading his own emotional distance in the photographs of Local Objects
• The pinned butterfly problem in portrait photography
• What Robert Adams wrote in a two-page handwritten letter
• Why Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes may not help working photographers
• The anti-solipsism machine, and how the camera refuses your projections
• The loss behind Bucks Pond Road and the books that became a loose trilogy
• Why you do not need a big audience to make work that matters

Tim's links:
Website: https://www.timcarpenterphotography.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/timcarpenter

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Transcript

Meaning, Nihilism, And Photography

Tim 0:00

The world does not give a sh about us. Well, to photographs to learn how to die, I think. I don't think that the world has inherent meaning. I think that we human beings are the creators of any meaning there. And I find that to be liberating, but I find it to be a responsibility.

Matt 0:14

This is Tim Carpenter, photographer, educator, reviewer, and author. He spent a lifetime making pictures, pushing the boundaries of what we understand about why we pick up a camera at all.

Tim 0:26

If I was six inches taller, six inches shorter, every single one of my pictures would be different. Right? You can't fool yourself out of it, so you can't fool a dumb machine out of it either.

Matt 0:34

In this episode, you will learn why the form of a picture matters more than whatever sits in front of the lens, how the camera quietly reveals who you are, and why finding your voice means walking towards the strangest, most uncomfortable part of yourself. Why this matters? Well, it's simple. Most of us stay busy chasing trends, approval, and gear and never make the work that is unmistakably ours. This is the conversation that hands you back your own reasons for picking up a camera.

Tim 1:06

I was mid-80s a gay kid in the Midwest of the United States. This is not a possibility for anyone. I'm not gonna be happy in the way that I understood everyone else to be happy. I want to get to that really weird part, and it may be a little uncomfortable. Um maybe it should be a little uncomfortable.

Matt 1:32

Tim, welcome to the show. It's great to finally have you on here.

Tim 1:37

Thanks so much for having me. It's a a it's already been a pleasure talking to you in person before, so I think we're gonna have a good time.

Matt 1:43

Yeah, I hope so. There's um there's a lot to go through, and I say that with with many of my guests, but with you especially, um, having been such a uh prolific artist in this space for for a while, um, and having met at Chico Review and and giving me a review and then and discussing things a little bit more. Um, there's a lot of layers of interest I want to dive

The Broken Self As Art Engine

Matt 2:06

into. But the thing I want to start with before we kind of get into a little bit of your background and your pedigree, because I think people who may not know you, it'd be good to kind of explain how you kind of came up in the space and why photography means so much to you. But there's one topic I think that that kind of is overlaid with a lot of the things that you write about, talk about, you photograph. Um, and that's this theme of the broken self. And I know I'm pretty sure you kind of talk about this and educate your students with this, but I want you to elaborate um on this thesis for me, at least this subject of the broken self, how we're all broken, why that pertains or how that pertains to photography specifically and your practice.

Tim 2:50

Yeah, for sure. No, that's a um, that is probably you're you've isolated the single most important thing to me. And it has different ways of expressing, different ways of manifesting, but you know, I think the the real and the ideal never match up for us human beings. And that is the root of all of our pain, or you know, our existential suffering is that we are we were this amazing conscious creature that can think itself into the past, it can think itself into the future, it can think itself into other places, places that don't even exist, times that don't even exist. This this this conscious mind can do it all. This body is stuck in the here and the now. And that is a really painful disjunction. Um, you know, like no matter how much you want that girlfriend or boyfriend back, no matter how much you want your grandmother back, no matter how much you want to be in Paris right now, if you're not, you know, that and that, and I that sounds a little trivial, but you know, like um, but this whole thing is is this the gift of our consciousness, consciousness comes with a price, is that you know, like there's this always this tension bit in in there, but in us. And you know, like it so many different people talk about it in different ways, like Lacan and Derrida and you know, like a bunch of other people. But that, I mean, when you just say that, that's just really kind of the basic thing. And I think, me personally, is that that is what engenders all art, is that we're always just trying to knit something together between what we want and what we can have, and find something in there. And, you know, uh in the book I wrote, and I you know, my favorite poet is about Wallace Stevens, and his whole project, I mean, it was kind of like always making peace or finding like a bit of a way to reconcile the real and the ideal. And like one poem, you know, that's a one one commentator called it a temporary truce. You know, there was never a final end of the war, but it had a little truce, every poem was a truce. And I really believe that about every photograph is a little truce between what's in us and what we want and what the world is going to give us, because the world does not give a shit about us. You know, it it is there and it it will not match our desires. And so we're just trying to figure out this thing, and that's the brokenness, you know, like that's the eternal brokenness of this conscious creature. It's also it's our glory, but it's our downfall. And, you know, like it's it's um our think our job, not only as artists, but just as human beings, is to try to find a way to live really fruitfully and profitably and maximize ourselves knowing that, you know, and saying, okay, that's the deal. I'm gonna work with it, I'm gonna do the best I can.

Matt 5:39

Yeah, it's liberating in one way once you understand those types of limitations, right? And then you can work within them and understand yourself a little bit more and the limitations you're working with in the external world.

Tim 5:50

And the point I always bring this around to is the painter, the poet, the limitations of the world don't really exist much for anybody who works in a sign-based medium. You know, I can move the tree. I can in the in a poem, I don't the tree was there, but I don't even have to say it it existed. Us people with a camera, we have to move our body, you know, to move around and to get that tree out of the picture, but then the whole world is changing. So, again, like that, what I was saying, the world will not give itself up to us to our conscious witches, it won't give itself up to the camera either. You have to do the work to make that happen. And I think that's why the you know the camera is so profoundly different from any any other art form, and certainly any sign-based form.

Matt 6:37

This um I I guess I don't want to call it philosophy, but this this um this way of I guess seeing the utility of the camera and and how it can be almost cathartic in a sense, but do you get uh it could be perceived as a little bit nihilistic and and you know, which for for me not so much, but do you get any pushback in in the way that you describe that and the way that you you talk about it?

Tim 7:02

Oh, I get pushback, yeah, and that's fine. I enjoy I listen, I love friction. I thrive on friction. And and by the way, I will tell you, yeah, I've written a whole book, I'm writing another one. I don't think I've ever gotten anything right. I don't think there are things to get right. You know, like there's no, I always say there's no teacher's edition that has all the answers in the back of this thing. I'm just saying some things that I that might resound with some people, they might not resound with other people. All cool. Um, you know, but there was one phrase written about Nietzsche and said he was a nihilist in the in the sense that you have to clear out a field of weeds to plant a garden. All right, so there's yeah, there's some things, you know, and uh a lot of people they like sort of our conscious um ability to narrate stories for ourselves. I like to daydream, I like to think myself as a really great musician. I love this, you know, like and I know why people a lot of people do not want to deal with reality. Um, I had, and also I would say getting to the nihilism point, I'm fine, and for some reason I've been leaked sway all my life. I'm fine with not having meaning in everything. I'm fine when when things aren't offering up themselves. Because I don't think that the world has inherent meaning. I think that we human beings are the creators of any any meaning there. And I find that to be liberating, but I find it to be a responsibility, you know, is that now it it's it's my job to create meaning because there's not nothing sitting there. And I'm gonna I'll tell you just I'll go a little bit further with this, is that I think that's why I love photography so much, but also I've been attracted for a long time, and now I'm finally starting to understand it to like abstract art and to avant-garde like jazz and classical music that most people find, you know, like Ornette Coleman, they're like, that's just screechy. And I'm like, my God, I think it's the most beautiful thing because it's not giving itself up to this easy interpretations. And like, you know, my favorite poem, one of my favorite painters is Joan Mitchell, but like I'd also say the same same thing of like Twambly or somebody, is that you know, like people are like, there's no meaning in that. And I was like, yes, that's right. You know, like I am called upon now to interact with this thing and figure it out or not figure it out, but it's not it, it's not giving me these things. And guess what? Life is never going to give you these things. It's up to you. Now, again, that is me. That's the way I approach the world, that's the way I write. But you're right. I mean, like, not everybody likes to likes to think this way. And, you know, I get that.

Finding Community Beyond Isolation

Matt 9:38

Sorry to cut away from the episode for a minute, but I wanted to talk to you about something very quickly. Now, I spent a long time thinking that isolation was part of the deal when it came to photography. That if you were serious about the work, you did it alone. You'd consume enough, watch enough, read enough, and eventually it would all cohere into something meaningful. And it sometimes did. But mostly I was just alone with my doubts and no one to push back on them. What changed things for me wasn't a course or a workshop. It was a conversation with someone who was doing the same kind of work and cared about it in exactly the same way I did. The doubts didn't disappear, but they got a little bit smaller and I felt more okay with them. They got named. That's what I'm building with The Mood Insiders. It's a place where the work is taken seriously, where you can bring your questions and, of course, your half-finished ideas, and where someone will actually engage with them. We have the ad-free extended podcast episodes with bonus content. We have monthly masterclasses, QA sessions, and of course the weekly book clubs and direct direct access to me and my team because you don't have to do this alone. So the link is in the show notes, and hopefully I'll see you inside.

Politics, Interpretation, And Ethical Looking

Matt 11:01

Do you think we uh I guess collectively as as photographers, do you think we try and insert too much meaning in our work?

Tim 11:12

I I do think that that happens a lot. And and listen, I'm gonna say something again that I don't again, I don't mean I'm right, but I think the world right now, and I also I'm gonna say this, I think the I think the world is probably correct right now, is that most of the things you see at like Periphoto or APAD or whatever, they you know, there's there's good, easy prose equivalents to take out of the picture.

Matt 11:38

Yeah.

Tim 11:38

And and that's the way the world is right now. And and I like the reason I'm not like complaining about that is I think that there's been too many people who have not had the fair share and have not been represented properly, you know. The politics of it, I'm all behind it. You know, that's we we do need those things to happen. That's cool. But the thing I would just want to argue for is that that's not the only thing. Yeah, um, there is still room for for this thing that's just not quite going to spoon out the politics, the topics, the ideologies, or whatever, you know, like there's these things that can also exist. You know, and and most people call that derogatorily, but they call it art for art's sake. You know, that's always used pejoratively. And I've said all that art for art's sake means is that it resists interpretation. And I strive to make things that do resist interpretation. That's where I would like to be. That's where most of my heroes have seemed to work. I also still, uh you can see this library around me, there's so much stuff in here that that in varying degrees does or does not do what I'm saying I would do personally. So I still enjoy that other kind of work. Um, I just I'm talking about, you know, what I I'm I seem to be driven to do. And I want to put a little fine point on this is that there is, you know, and uh the ethical kind of argument is that people say you need to be one must be politically engaged. And again, the time the way that we are in the world and the way that we are, particularly right now in the United States, that is absolutely true. That is more true of the person I am rather than the photographer or whatever or the writer that I am. And the argument that I've come to understand just in the last couple years is that every each and every human being resists interpretation. And there's a lot of powerful philosophies that the only way you can meet something truly ethically is to meet it as an absolutely singular thing that is not interpretated and interpreted in your language, that is not owned or appropriated by any of your concepts or categories, you know? And that is a really powerful idea. That's what I'm writing my next book about. Um, but so there is a politics, there's an ethics to also for art, for art's sake, even though that's not really popular right now. Um I think it's valuing another human being or even a tree or a rock or a building, whatever, it's absolute singularity. And that's what the camera does, I think.

Matt 14:12

Isn't that extended to responsibility as much as uh an ethical viewpoint?

Tim 14:18

It is, you know, and I'll I'll just go a little far. So the guys who really got into this, um, well, the one was Emmanuel Levinas and uh and also uh Maurice Blanchot, but they were writing after the Holocaust when, you know, the totalizing uh ideas of categories and concepts had really gotten us messed up. And and their thing was, you know, Levinas was said the only way to be responsible to another human being is to be proximate to them and to not think of them as any sort of there's no there's no categories for this other creature. It is it is absolutely singular, it is absolutely it there's never been a person or anything like it before, there never will be again, and you have to meet it that way, and that's your responsibility. I will say that most most commentators also say that Levinas's ethic is impossible. But they say that it's it's it's good to strive for, it's good to think about, you know, it's an objective. So I I'm a lot of these things I'm saying, I don't think that they're necessarily 100% achievable, but they're good to keep in mind and they, you know, they're a good like guidepost.

Matt 15:19

Yeah, a driver. When you when you talk about resisting interpretation, seems a little bit abstract. Can you can you elaborate a little bit more? Maybe you kind of ground it in in an example, maybe.

Tim 15:33

Yeah, for sure. I use well, the one example I I like to use is my one of my favorite photographs of all is a John Gossage picture that is of a cardboard box and out out adding kind of some bright sunlight. And you know, like well, when I saw that, but when I'd seen the pond before, it's just like, okay, so you could say a it's cardboard, all right? It's yeah, bright sun. You're kind of then thwarted, all right, and you there's not much more to say. The in my artist talk though, and stuff I talk about some things I I love and still revere, like let's talk about you know, like Robert Frank or uh Helen Levitt, um Dorothy Alang, you those photographers uh benefited from what you knew about worldly topics like the pre-war period, the interwar period, the depression, race relations, gender relations, um, specifically getting into like advertising culture, car culture, um celebrity, all you know, all this kind of stuff. Like, and if you see some of those pictures, uh any smart high schooler could start, could write like 10 pages, you know, about all of that kind of stuff. Those, and I'm I'm talking about these pictures that I think are great. So I am I'm saying I think they're great, but I think that one can do a lot of interpretation on them because of the way that that photographer met the world and you know, their editing choices, their shooting choices, and all that kind of stuff. And again, like I love them all. I'm just, you know, I'm kind of making a counter-majoritarian, uh, I don't know if that's the right word to say, but like an argument for for things that don't give themselves up easily or and or and resist it actually entirely. And that's you know, kind of what I'm talking about, the music and the painting as well, or like, you know, what they call language poetry or concrete poetry, you know. And in fact, that's the reason that most people are scared of poetry is because they're like, I don't know the meaning here. And and once you kind of free up and be like, I'm not meant to get a meaning here, I'm meant to like just absorb this thing and feel it, then you can you relax into poetry and you're like, all right, this is pretty cool. But if you're trying to extract some prose equivalent to the poem, you you you're never gonna do it, and you're only gonna frustrate yourself and you're doing it wrong, you know. That's what I think.

Matt 17:50

So yeah, that's good. That's really, really nice to to ground that. Uh I found that um also a lot. And you when we first met at Chico, I found myself doing that a lot, and you know, all of all of my critiques, as well as the general narrative around the reviewers and and getting informal feedback and just discussions was exactly that. And um, that's probably the the the biggest thing that I I I took away from that. But when you talk about this political engagement, um, do you again, do you feel like artists or photographers try and do too much with the photographs in that respect and kind of insert almost that externality and then that external um intent that may uh sway them down the wrong path, or maybe again like adding interpretation when maybe it's not there, or do you feel like there's there's room for that and for people to find their path in what however they want to use their photographs and use their practice as a utility, essentially it was as a function?

Tim 18:54

Yeah. Listen, we all gotta follow what's in us. And I if if anyone like me, like some stupid guy like me, dictates to you what you make pictures of, you're you've really made a mistake. You know, that's what I feel like. It was more getting towards what the latter thing you said. It's like, listen, if there's things political in you that have to get out, that is what you have to do. You know, like I don't, I there's no way as me as a teacher or an editor or a reviewer could ever say anything against that. Now, one thing you said I do think is really interesting is that I've told this to several people at reviews. I say, your pictures are more interesting than the way you talk about them. And that happens because these people are intuitively making pictures, but they I think they feel these pressures, like MFA pressure, pressure to write grant proposals, pressure for awards, where you have to connect it. Like everybody feels like I got to connect this to the political situation. And that becomes a very tenuous, not well-supported situation. And also, you know, part of what I've been talking about is that when we are in politics and topics and stuff, we're in we're in conventions, we're in our common culture. When somebody sits down in front of me with 40 pictures, 50 pictures, I'm actually, for me, I'm seeing something that is outside of that conventionality. I'm seeing the way another human being moves her body and that machine against the world. And that's what fascinates me. And I don't, I don't want to talk about it. I mean, we still have to talk, we have to use words, but I don't want to talk about it in sort of commonalities that everybody is talking about or everybody, or like lowest common denominators, you know. I mean, you know the way, like I really want to go into like the edges of the pictures, I want to go into the depths, I want to go into the chaos of the picture or the completion of the picture. I want to go into like all the things the picture is doing way before I go into ideas about what that person might be in there.

What Form Means In Photographs

Matt 20:46

Yeah. When you say what the picture is doing in the chaos, um, are you talking about form essentially? Because you use that, you use that word a lot. And I think for amateurs or beginner photographers and photographers learning and want to get into the space, you throw this almost abstract word in. It's like form. What does what is what I know what form is in terms of me and an object, but when it comes to photography, I see that in your work so much. And I love the way you talk about um, you know, not even thinking about the narratives or you know, connecting it with some kind of representation and looking at the form of a photograph and a photographer in how they they they're positioning themselves, whatever, whatever, you know, kind of the layers of that are. Can you elaborate on this word form for us and and connect it deliberately to your photographs and and how you see other people's?

Tim 21:39

Well, there's there's a couple important things to say about form. Um one is that, you know, like when I talk to people, uh, you know, they say, Oh no, subject matter is the only thing that's important to me. And I say, okay, cool. So when you when you come across a situation, a person, whatever, um, and you want to photograph, you want to make some make a photograph, how many exposures do you make and They're like, you know, two, three, four, maybe in digital, like a bunch. And I say, well then guess what? Uh subject matter, uh, the politics of that is uh yes, it's important to you, but but you want you seem to want to make a good picture. And that's what I'm talking about when I when I mean form, is it's it's the structure of the picture. And there's a you know, there's a lot of thinking in in uh in theory of art, is that for anything really to hit, like a if you want the politics to hit, the form has to hit first. The the beauty of the picture has to come to you first. And then, you know, you can really hit the message with that. If if if you if you make something that really affects someone, then you're gonna get you're gonna get kind of an entree into them to really twist the knife if you've got something that you would like to say. And that's that's how that whole thing works. I love that.

Matt 22:50

I forgot my first point. I forgot. I've asked you to repeat it enough now. Now, there comes a point in every photographer's journey where gear or technique stops being the question. You've learned your camera, you can read light, you know how to edit, how to produce, what a good frame looks like, and you can probably make one on demand quite easily. But something is still missing. The work feels good, competent, maybe even pretty, but it doesn't quite feel completely yours. It doesn't really say anything that couldn't have been said by someone else on Instagram with the same camera. That's the moment most people get stuck. Not at the beginning, but right here, right there, somewhere in the middle of it, in the midst of it, where you have all the tools, but not really any of the language. And the reason it's so hard to move past is because nobody can teach you your voice in a tutorial or a silly little YouTube video. Because it's not a setting on the dial. It has to be drawn out of you slowly by methods and introspections that actually allow you to look at yourself and your work and challenge you with the harder questions, all in order to draw out your unique and photographic voice. That's what my voice alchemy mentorship program is. It's an online container for photographers who really already know how to use their camera, but want to use it to say something that's more meaningful and that actually matters to them. Personalized strategy, honest feedback, and the kind of work that builds a body, a voice, and a brand that actually gets noticed. It's not a course, it's just the thing I always wished I'd had. And it's the thing I now spend most of my days doing. The link is in the show notes. So if something in this is calling you, hit the link and we'll see where you're at.

Origins, Grad School, And Voice

Matt 24:48

Um, when did this concept um become uh enlightening for you? When when did you know go coming coming up into you know the art schools and and actually um I can't remember your maybe you can tell us how you you learnt photography and came into it? Because I know you had a sure uh an you know an indirect um introduction into photography, but give us an explanation, that kind of your background and how how you you got into photography, but also when when did you start learning this concept of beauty that is that is formed the external, the internal, how you kind of package that in the way you see art?

Tim 25:29

Well, it's a good question because it is that's entirely intimately related. Um so I, you know, like I I'm an undergrad in business. I went to law school. Uh, you know, I didn't think I was an artist. I didn't know, you know, like I always took pictures, but I, you know, I took a lot. I was seriously interested in my guy, you know, I got into some like group shows, you know, I was doing okay. Um what I started to realize, and so I went to graduate school, uh, to the Hartford Art School, and I got uh an MFA from them. So I dropped out of full-time, you know, like I was a manager, I was, you know, like getting good money, you know, like and I was like, I thought my life was set, and then and then the Hartford program came around. So in 2010, I dropped out of full-time employment, went to grad school. What I was starting to understand, and this was late in grad school, but also in and then after, is that part of me was so into the Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld sort of um western, not only western, but landscape sort of road trip kind of thing, color. Um, you know, and I was using a four by five, I was using a Mamiya 6-7. So like there was that kind of thing. The other thing that was gigantic was that sleeping by the Mississippi, you know, had only been out a year or two. So Alex portrait, yeah, so Alex So's portrait work had, you know, was really dominant. And what I, you know, I even sometimes in my in my talks to students, I mention this is like I would go, and I did a road trip with my dad, even around the West. I would come back, you know, 100 rolls and 80 sheets or whatever. And I'd I in my head I'd be like, I hope that old motel sign worked out. I hope that interesting-looking guy turned out, you know, like I was so subject matter driven because I was thinking about those photographers and others in the wrong way. I was just looking at what they had photographed and not how they were structuring that whole thing. And so it took a while to get out of that. But the the kind of fortunate, I didn't plan this, but the fortunate thing I did is I decided to make my thesis project. Um, my dad and I were, my dad's a lifelong railroad fan. And there was this line that has long was long gone in central Illinois. It was an electric line, you know, that just had passenger service and then later some, you know, some freight. But we, you know, using some maps and GPS and stuff, we were, we found the old rail line and I was just photographing along it. So like that took me out of like trying to find interesting things. Now I had to figure out along this just long narrow line, how am I going to structure pictures that are interesting? And so, you know, that makes it sound like it happened overnight. It didn't. It happened over many months, and I had to really, I had to really think about it. But you know, like I was like, so now, and this is true to this day, you know, like I uh and now even with the digital that I'm editing much more quickly, but like 150 rolls, 100 sheets, or whatever, I come back, I was like, yeah, it's it's some trees, it's some water, it's some roads. I don't, you know, I'm not really remembering any specific subject matter that I I'm hoping for. So that was that's the major turn in, and I've I you know I just felt like I really need to work on understanding the form of this thing. And then in writing that first book, but now I even fully, you know, I much more understand about I'm really interested in idiosyncrasy, and I I probably brought that up with you, Ichico. I'm really interested in like how how we get to the most individual, weird, strange part of us, because I think that that's that's almost always going to be successful in art, you know, if we can if the closer we can get to that thing. And tying this back to what I said earlier about signs and languages and stuff like that is that you know, Nietzsche said we can't be individual in language, in consciousness, because that's a commonality that we share. We share our language, we share these ideas and stuff. There's been a whole lot of you know, a branch of philosophy called phenomenology, and a guy named Um Maurice Merluponti, who's kind of my hero, he's like, you know, the body is where we are individual. The body knows nothing of concepts or anything, and e and each body, not only are all our bodies obviously different, but each body moves through the world differently. And that's why you hear me keep hammering on the body and the machine, and how the body is how one places one's body in relation to the world and the subject matter. Are you getting in really tight? Are you maintaining a distance? You know, are you whatever? You know, like how are you doing this? And that is where I, you know, like people ask me, they're like, when you met 60 people, 70 people at Chico, can does it get boring or does it get old? And I'm like, every person is like a fresh miracle to me because I'm seeing, I'm seeing how another human being positions herself against the world. And I'm like, that'll never cease to amaze me. Now, we can say that there are varying levels of quality or where they are and all that project, of course, but like to get to see how another person structures her world, it's all it's never gonna, it's never gonna bore me. It's always gonna fascinate me. Uh, but anyway, I'm kind of trailing off. But but you know, like that's that the the idea, you know, like I'm a person who kind of has to explain stuff to myself. So when I say yeah, I'm more interested in form, I was like, okay, well, I I'm not just gonna stop there. What's that, what does that really mean? And it means the bodily structure of things, you know, and um there's been famous writers, this woman named Vernon Lee, who's amazing, who I quoted in the first book, but she's like, Yeah, we can talk about the subject matter of a painting easily. We have tons of words for that. We have a very, very hard time talking about the form of anything, you know, like, and that's and she's like, that's why it's special, you know, like it doesn't lend itself to these interpretations coming back around to, you know, what resists interpretation and and what it will not let itself be owned or appropriated or brought into what you would like it to be. And so that's why I really stick with form. That's why I stick with the body, uh, because I think that's the genesis of uh almost anything interesting, especially with the camera.

The Cognitive Body Behind Choices

Matt 31:40

When you say body, you incorporate the mind in that as well, because that it's all one thing, right? And the mind is essentially the the certainly our subconscious is incredible how much that controls our actions, decisions, and we could talk about free will and and you know whether you believe in it or not until the cows come home. But essentially everything is is driven by what's up here. And I'm extremely interested in those subliminal, subliminal, subliminal uh decisions that photographers make in the moment. And you do you talked about it before when people make decisions before they walk out the house to go and photograph, but they don't know why. And I think that's such a huge complex layer to try and break down as a photographer. Because once you start to understand why you make certain decisions, why you see things some way, and why you put yourself in certain positions, not others, essentially why you choose specific form. Once you start to understand that, then this whole new world opens up and you can really start to understand yourself. And therefore, you can potentially translate it a little bit better into the viewer. Am I making any sense with that?

Tim 32:47

Matt, you just wrote my thesis statement for like the way I teach writing right now. Yeah, it's like we and like I've kind of tried to re-engineer the idea of how you write about stuff to make it come from that get let's get that underlying structure. And we can we can ratchet up to politics and ideas and whatever, but I want to start with like how you know, like, is the world seeming chaotic to me? Are the pictures chaotic? That's uh that's important, you know. Like, are the pictures so well, you know, like a lot of people make their pictures from kind of the outside in, you know, like they're calm and stable. And I was like, that speaks a different world than a than a very chaotic and you know, like picture with all the edges, there's things coming in, you know, like or whatever, the are you know, especially for me, it's the bottom edge of a picture, like the footing, or where do I have a purchase on that world? Am I still where am I standing? Am I moved? You know, when you shoot up, when you shoot down, you know, all of those things impact us. Like, and I I really feel like in a especially in a project, you can manage someone's bodily space. You can bring things into them, you can take things away from them, you can force them into different orientations of the body. And that is a really important organizing principle when you're working with multiple pictures, it's kind of figuring out, well, what's my dominant mode? Do I stay tight? And then like my minor mode is to get out a little bit, or am I, you know, like am I kind of emotionally distant with my pictures? And then only a little bit do I ever allow myself, you know, to get in tight a little bit. Um, now there's one thing I do want to say, because I, you know, it's easy for me to kind of gloss over it, but when I say the body, I mean the body and the brain, absolutely. What I mean, and I call it the cognitive body a lot, and using some other people's phrases like that, what I mean is not the conscious brain. Um, and you know, the lot of people call these, you know, big, big fancy words. They call them incommensurable. A lot of the leading, not only the leading philosophers, but the leading neuroscientists say that, you know, like this thing, the hunk of meat and its brain, there's there's some strange thing between that and the consciousness. And still I they a lot of people feel that we're never ever going to know how those two things absolutely relate. You know? Um, and that's a fascinating thing. But the body is super body does so much to filter out so much that we, you know, like, and a lot of thinkers actually say that if something, if a situation gets thrown into consciousness, that's actually the body kind of admitting, I can't handle this.

Matt 35:19

Yeah.

Tim 35:19

Because it handles almost everything for us. And sometimes we need to do a little problem solving, you know, with concepts. But the body does so much. Like I tell people, if you drive for 15 minutes in a in a familiar place, and if somebody probes you afterwards and say, What all happened? you'd be like, I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Can you think of the billions, like the the tiny increments of you paying attention, uh, using feet pedals, using your hands, doing all of this other kind of stuff. The brain just the non-conscious brain of the body just do it. And that's also why when you're a learning driver, you're you're bad. It's because you're you're being like, oh, I got it, I need to work through the concepts that I have. And that's why you're a shitty driver. Once the body takes it over, you become a much better driver because you're not spending all that time with the consciousness. And I will tell you, I think this is absolutely true. I don't know if you've experienced this, but when I get a new camera, especially now that I have a digital camera that can do about a billion things more than I need it to do, like it takes me a while for the body to get right with that machine. Uh, and and to start to feel like, you know, like I'm not uh I want the conscious mind to stop and I want to just uh work with the machine. Same thing is true of getting a new lens, even on like an old film camera, or especially a new lens on like a four by five. Like, I guess, all right, the world's changing here, you know, like I have a I have a different view of this thing, and it and it takes me a little while. The body walking around with that tripod to be like, okay, here's here's probably where I want to be. You know, I'm gonna mess around with it a little bit. But then if you change a lens, you're you're probably where I want to be is now different, right? And but the body usually takes care of all that, and we don't need to consciously think about it. And I I happen to personally think the better, the more we can avoid the conscious thinking, the more interesting and strange the pictures get.

Matt 37:08

Couldn't agree more. Do you practice do you encourage with your students then to practice some form of mindfulness or some you know more mindset training or whatever it might be? Uh because we're all, you know, I say we're all, I speak generally, of course, but generally even more so now in society, we're so in our heads, we're not aware of anything that you just talked about. We're just it was so kind of in a daydream all day, hooked to our phones, hooked to the next distraction that that we're um experiencing. Do you do you I I truly believe that you know, to be a better artist, to be more connected with ourselves and with our with our practice, ignoring, like we talked about, the the external elevations we might put on our work later on and how we present it to the world, but in order to make stuff that we feel is meaningful and connected with form and what we interpret as beauty in that, as well as the kind of the the beauty of our own expression and doing that accurately and authentically to ourselves, I honestly believe that we need to know ourselves as as much as possible without being tethered to the conscious, right? To be able to be be free of that, but mindful of the body, mind connected to the body, mindful of what your body is doing in any moment, how you're feeling, all of the sensations, the emotions, the thoughts, but not get attached to them, but be aware of them. And I truly believe that is, you know, the source of being a a better a better photographer, but but a more empowered and more artistic photographer. So do you do does that ever enter the conversation in your teachings and and how you kind of uh encourage people?

Tim 38:52

It does, but I don't, you know, like I don't you probably I probably don't use the word like mindfulness, but I mean I'm getting there through the back doors be like, let's talk about how you you're using this machine, you know, like and and then you know, like all the things I've already been talking about, and we'll like look at the pictures and be like, you're you know, you're making, let's say we're somebody's making four. I usually find this with myself. I'm making three or four or five different kinds of pictures within any, you know, like uh with the distances with the edges or whatever. And I start to figure out what the dominant sort of thing is and where the calibrations are are like you know, going in and out of that. And that would be that would be my idea of what I would call mindfulness. It's like starting to think about, and I'm gonna tell you this, like I I a lot of people are like, when do I need to be that? And I I I still there's no there's no answer to that. I think I think everybody needs to be really free and intuitive and just use the machine and like make a lot of exposures, you know, like but at some point, and this is different from it's different for me in every project, and I'm sure it's some so it's different for everyone, is like you kind of gotta yank yourself out of it a little bit and put put the screws to it and be like, what have I been making here? Yeah, what am I doing? And and why, yeah. And the why can even kind of ladder up from, you know, um, and I'm because I'm gonna tell you, like, I've had people when we've had like some I almost feel like a psychologist in a little bit away, or um psychiatrist maybe, but like my first book, local objects, like I when I was making those pictures, I I when I finally I was like, wow, my distance in here is really there's a lot of dead foreground space in a lot of these pictures. And I my next thought was, what is that saying about me? Like, am I am I kind of a distant person right now? And that that actually was the case, you know, like and so the the why, I think from a really strict examination of uh of the what you've been doing, your pictures, you can start to come up with a why, you know, like do I feel complete and whole? You know, do I feel sort of fragmentary right now? You know, like what how much do I want to get into the weeds, like literal weeds, but also like metaphorical weeds, you know, like how much am I getting in there? And and I think that our bodies are our bodies and our lives are always changing. My the way I make pictures, the way I place myself against the world, now that I'm an older guy, I'm I'm able to look back at times, sometimes long-ish, sometimes quite short, depending on like a life event or something, where I was just a different creature with respect to the world. And I made that I had to necessarily make a different kind of picture because the camera is attached to this thing, you know? And I've said it before, but like there's there's dumb things to say about it. If I was six inches taller or six inches shorter, every single one of my pictures would be different. Right? I know it that sounds but also just think about like isn't that beautiful, right? Well, it is, but also if you're happy, your shoulders open up. Like if you if if if things are terrible, you close in and you move differently, and and the machine is responsive to every little bit of that. And I think that's its glory, you know. Like, I mean, it is it is there and it is gonna it is gonna be with you, and you can't fool it. You can't fool it out of that, you know, like you can't fool yourself out of it, so you can't fool a dumb machine out of it either. Yeah. Um, but anyway, that you know, like I that's just kind of tying this all together, is that you know, like that's why I love the camera so much is that it, you know, like it is just absolutely responsive to this this thing we are moving through the world, and I think that's where we are, where we are at our most interesting and our most unique.

Portrait Distance, Focus, And Responsibility

Matt 42:22

Yeah. Um yeah, I I love I love the way you talk about it. And and just I I I I think about uh one of my community members who brought this up literally on uh on Monday when we had a uh a meetup, and he talked about how he took portraits a lot, but the portraits were always tight. And he didn't know how to kind of he didn't know that first step to get away from that because he obviously didn't want it just a portfolio of headshots. He he wanted to find a way to move around a little bit more, get a little bit wider, and not just stick a wide-angle lens on the camera. Maybe that's like one thing he can try later down the road, but how would you even start to break that down for someone? You know, if they come to you and because I was a little bit stumped, like, well, just step back a little bit, think about environmental portraits a little bit, but we have to, I guess, answer the questions of why that why you might be inclined to always be in tight. So where would you even break that down for for someone like that? What are what are the first kind of cues that you could give them?

Tim 43:29

Well, I'm gonna give you a couple things. First, props. I have uh modeled much of my approach with teaching um after Andrea Motica, because I took a like a two or you know, two or three weekend course with her at ICP years ago, and it was like all about portraits. And I think I just happened to be the person first person who was picked to like go through your pictures. But right away, she's like, she said things like, Class, look how that shoulder hits the background. Look how he decided to give the person this much head space versus not. Look how the feet are chopped off versus how. Versus this. Like, and I'm going to tell you, I went to school and I have spoken with many of like the top portrait photographers of the, and almost invariably, the best thing you get out of them is like, oh, I like the body language or I like the look. You know, like, and and Andrea just like was so specific about everything that was happening in that picture. And I was like, I was like, that is actionable. I like that. And I'm going to be the actionable guy if I ever get to be doing this thing. And so that's like why I want to be like, we're going to look at these things really hard. We're going to figure some things out. Um, a little bit of a related thing. And this happens, I've tell you, it happens in portfolio reviews a lot, but also with some of my longer-term students. Somebody will say, I'm so interested in this place. You know, I've been going back and back there, you know, multiple times and stuff. And they'll make these landscapes amazing. They'll shoot them at 11 or 8, depending on the light, and everything, you know, a really a picture plane that's really there, all there. Then they make the portraits and they go down to like five, six or four to pop the figure off of this landscape. And I'm just like, listen, uh the portrait looks great, but maybe next time consider if the light allows, trying to knit that person into this landscape that you've told me is super important to you, you know. And I'm gonna give, I I I've done this before, I'll do it again. I'll give Justine Kerlin props. She came up with one of the best little phrases I've ever heard, and she called those pinned butterflies. She's like, you stick the needle right through the creature and and elevate them off their background, but and they look great, but you also kind of kill them. And you you remove them from this space. And so, like, that is just a matter of their your aperture choice. That's a matter of your focal, you know, what you're doing focally. These are machine things, these are choices, formal choices. And I'll just keep going back to that. But like every formal choice you make with, again, with like, so, okay, so if the lights dim, do you use a faster speed or do you go to digital, you know, faster speed film? Another thing I want to tell you about Mark Steinmetz, I did a podcast with him. I did an interview with him while we were walking the streets of Paris. He had been working in Paris and Berlin and maybe London, I can't remember, but and he was doing he wanted late fall kind of stuff. So the light was getting a little low. And he's like, so I chose this camera and this film speed and everything. And I was like, you know what? Nobody ever talks about this. Mark has a picture in mind and a picture he's making. So he lets he pick he chooses how he's gonna make things. Oh, because also he wanted like people to not have motion blur in in public spaces. So he needed a speed and he needed, you know, in lower light, and so he figures it out, you know, like, and that is what I'm talking about is ownership over all of these formal qualities of these this machine and how you want to use it and the picture qualities that you want to have. And so then, see, I and I'm gonna tell you, I don't know if somebody only does tight up portraits. I'm not sure, you know, like how how if I would have specific advice to shake them out of that. But, you know, you know, you'd be interested and be like, well, why, you know, like, and even like, you know, you see some of those portraits where only like a little bit of the nose is really sharp, you know, or whatever. And like, I'd be just like interested. It's like, well, you know, if you especially have a digital camera, like how, you know, how much focal, how much stuff could you get in focus? Because I think that's really expressive too, is like how much you let a person in and out of focus, you know, in in the in the picture plane. But that's all I would do is like, you know, there's always a way to look into this, you know, like the tones of the printing, you know, all that kind of stuff. There's other, you know, there's other formal matters if you even if you're really going kind of like tight on, you know, like that's whatever the subject matter is, if you're being really tight with it, there's other things to consider. Um that might be a I'm I'm gonna tell you, that might be a tougher nut to crack. Uh I mean it could be it could be the relationship, yeah.

Matt 47:54

I mean, it could be the the the the relationship one has with that subject matter, maybe not directly, but with another human and the kind of the the closeness that you may be desiring or or looking at, or it could just be a fear factor of trying something different. Um so it could be it could be anything like that.

Tim 48:14

But I mean, you know, like the other thing, well, the one other thing I would say is that especially with portraits, and I wrote about this a little bit in the book, but like, and I I'm gonna tell you, I kind of come from this former thing that I uh I was like, well, there's somebody I would like to take a picture of, and then there'd be 20 people where I just it just didn't strike me that way. And I've heard many other people talk about it in that way. And then I started to realize that that was a shame. And I was like, I think if I want to get good at this, and I'm not, I'm not really a portrait photographer, but if I want to get good at it, I need to know how to make all 20 and and and want to. And then I you know, I had to extrapolate it, and I was like, you know, like I finally realized I was Judith Joy Ross is the person who can make all 20 of those, you know, like, and they'd be sensational. Um, probably Steinmetz and Motica too, like those kind of people, you know, um, they just have some sort of gift for whatever, you know, the person does not have to be spectacular or or uh photogenic or anything. And they're gonna, because it's more, it's again, it's all about the picture and not about the subject matter. You know, and that's just a different, you know, like it's such a simple way of saying it, but it's just it's the it's the whole game to me.

Matt 49:27

Now, when it comes to photography, the whole infrastructure of the internet rewards speed. Post more, post faster, be first, be everywhere. The algorithm doesn't care whether you went deep. It cares whether you showed up yesterday. And I guess that's not photography specific. Now, for me, I built my work around a different bet that there are people who would rather go slowly and understand something fully than go fast and understand probably nothing. That depth is not a liability, that the work you make when you take your time is categorically different from the work you make when you're chasing the feed, maybe, or chasing the algorithm. Now, the Mood Insiders is built on that same bet. It's a private community for photographers and visual artists who are serious about the slow work. We have monthly masterclasses where we actually go deep on craft and thinking. We have a weekly book club, monthly QA's. We have the podcast, of course, but ad-free with bonus content, and we have direct access to me and my team. It's not another newsletter you'll forget about, not a Discord server full of noise. It's a room with a small number of serious people and a very clear and supportive focus. It's just $19 a month. The link is in the show notes, and I really hope I can see you inside.

Why Form Resists Language

Matt 50:46

Why do we find it difficult? You mentioned earlier we've we find it diff more difficult to talk about form than necessarily the the external the subject matter. Why do you think that is? Is it a limitation on our language? Is it a limitation of understanding us as humans? Limitation on understanding the consciousness, subconsciousness, the brain. What do you why do you think that is?

Tim 51:11

Yeah, it's a limit on language. I would say, you know, and from from what I've read, yeah, it's just we just don't have, you know, there's a lot of things we don't have vocabulary for that really make much sense, you know. Um, there's not a concept, you know, again, I can I've tried really hard to like, you know, talk about the depth, talk, and like if somebody prints in like impenetrable blacks, you know, or like if somebody likes high-key, like I, you know, there's a lot of things to go in. Um so one has a vocabulary for those things, you know, like, and you know, I'm not the first to say all those things, but that's where I, you know, I really want to exist. Um, but they're they're so specifically tied to the picture. I mean, listen, the thing I also also say is like you could take a picture of a an American flag or a Christian cross or a handgun, and all of the things that you would say about that, they're all in your mind. They're not in the picture, you know? They're they're concepts, and concepts only live in brains, uh, in conscious brains, you know, like, and they're not in the picture. And so we can, again, we can ladder up to those, we can ratchet up, we can talk about those things for sure, but like there are things that are absolutely in the picture, and those I do think are the harder things for us to put vocabulary to.

Beauty As Equilibrium And Sudden Rightness

Matt 52:24

So, what in that respect, what would you define beauty as in photography? So, when you're looking at your heroes, your inspirations, what are you actually, or or other, you know, peers or maybe some of your students or people at Chico Review, whoever it might be, and you and something strikes you, do you does that is that an experience for you? Um, first of all, and if so, what is what if you were to to, you know, we just talked about the limitations of language, but I'm gonna ask you to try and um explain why what your kind of idea of beauty is in in a photograph and and why certain photographs strike you, Tim Carpenter, and maybe not other. What is it? I know you talked about what you know what you're interested in, but when we talk about beauty and and beauty in in photographs, what does that mean to you?

Tim 53:18

Yeah. So the one I will go back to, and you know, it's in the it's in the first book, but it's gonna be in the second one too. Is I I I agree with Robert Adams said that you know, he pretty much equated beauty with form, uh, with what a lot of people call significant form. And I what I think is that, and this is gonna be all in the second book, uh uh, I've been talking about you know, us creatures and what the what a phenomenologist would say, both the philosophers and the neuroscientists, by the way, would say that this this creature is in an almost constant state of imbalance, and it's always looking to make it to balance it to get a better grip on its inputs, you know. Um we're we're we're in a constant state of frustration. And when when our disequilibrium becomes a little bit of equilibrium, the body relaxes for a moment. That's fleeting and it's furtive, but the body says, I gotta control on this, I got a hand on this, you know. Like also, this is why we like being in our homes and stuff, is because uh, you know, all of those uh inputs are calmed, you know, and that's why we can feel calm that we can't out in the world because of all you know the the diversity and the the the speed of all the inputs. But but okay, so what I'm going towards is that like this creature needs form. It needs for for some things occasionally to make some sense and say, all right, I got a grip on this, things are good for the for my survival. But what I really want to work on in this in this next book, and um I'll give it away now, uh, is that I think that form in any artwork is a model for that form that brings us a bit of equilibrium. And that's why I think we have a bodily response and a non-linguistic response to form. All right. That's that's how this all kind of comes back around together. Um, you know, like we uh uh when we see equilibrium in a picture, in a poem, in a painting. All right, I understand in that made thing what I'm always trying to do. And we would never articulate this, you know, like and here's the twister is that the photograph is the thing that's most attached, most tethered to the actual world. So it's I for me, I think it's the most, it's it just does does that job the best because those are actual things, you know. Like uh even though we, you know, we can love a painting or love a poem, but we know that we're living in an imaginary world. And it with the photograph, it's different. You know, like it's it's we know we're we're familiar with we we live in that same world, and and somehow this person, she found a purchase on the world for a moment that makes sense to me. Um so that's where I really, you know, like I think that I think the form is and that's why it's be we call it beauty, because you know, like uh a beauty is a relief. Um, you know, it's it's a it's a it it's a wholeness, it's a completeness. Um Wallace Stevens called it a sudden rightness. And I think the sudden is so important because I these these things are fleeting and they are furtive, you know, but and that's the brilliance of a work of art, is that somehow it like locks it in, right? And and now we can contemplate that and we can put it on the wall, we can look at it every few days, whatever, we can open a book and look at it again, but but it it kind of uh formalized, you know, formalizes, but uh, but it it consecrates, it consecrates a formal coherence to us. And that, I mean, I I I can't even stress enough the I think the like the psychological importance to us, the the creaturely importance to us to to have some models for this for this thing that we are, you know. I think that's that's to me, that's why art is the most is is is so important, is that yeah, it it just it allows us to see what this creature's kind of going through and and how it kind of makes us uh a bit of rightness with the world.

Matt 57:25

Mike Drop, I think that's a great expert. I love the way you talk about it really and I I can I can hear your inspiration from Robert Adams in in that book Um uh Beauty and Photography, which yeah, gosh, um it was a bit of a hard read when I read it a few years ago, but um you know the second read was a little bit made a little bit more sense, and then having these types of conversations about it makes even even more sense.

Tim 57:49

So it's uh it's a weird acceptance that is so true for everything though. Like, you know, like in writing the second book, I've reread all the Bart, I've reread, you know, all the I mean all the Adams and Stephen Shore and everything, but like, you know, I'm reading Foucault and Derrida and Lacan and all this kind of stuff, and the first time it is it is fucking impenetrable. Yeah, second time it's still impenetrable, but then maybe you read a secondary source on them, and you're like, oh, I kind of get what this idea means. And you know, like you may decide, hey, I'll read it once and I never want to try it again. And I would be like, totally, but like repeated immersion in these ideas, I can promise everyone it'll you can break them down. You can break these ideas down. Yeah, it may take a lot of effort, you know, and for especially for Robert Adams or somebody like Stephen Shore, Wright Morris, repeated readings of those, and they're not long, you know, or anything, like uh, and they're well written, you know. Like, so I I think for me, I've I've tried to get to this point where I even if something reads really difficult the first time, I try not to give up. You know, I I try to like take a second, and I've also gotten smart enough where I can be like, all right, this is uh this is beyond me. I don't quite get it. It's cool, but I'm gonna

To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die

Tim 59:01

try, you know.

Matt 59:01

Yeah, so talking about breaking ideas down, we can break all of these ideas down. And you've done that. Um, we're gonna I do want to talk about your photo books if we have time towards the end, but I I can't not cover this book. Um, To Photograph is to learn how to die, which was released a couple of years ago. Um, I've I've read it once. I'm definitely gonna read it again and encourage all everyone watching and listening to this to read it because it does encapsulate a lot of what we've already talked about in the last hour or so. But I think it can, you know, I'm gonna read a few excerpts after I ask you to kind of give give me a synopsis of it, where it came from, the concept of the book. Um, but yeah, I think um uh we're gonna spend a little bit of time dissecting a few things in here before we talk about your photo books and the the next book you're working on. But tell me tell me about this book, to photograph is is to learn how to die and and what it's all about.

Tim 59:57

Yeah. Well, you know, it came about fortuitously. Uh there's an essay by Montaine called To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die. And I read it, and I was reading the complete Montaigne, and um right away, I and I I know it's this simple, but I think it was that pH sound um that I was like, well, to photograph is to learn how to die, I think. So suddenly, like I had this interesting phrase, and I thought, well, let's see if if I'm right about that. And I just started to think about it, and I, you know, I kind of had to reverse engineer it. And there was a, you know, I'd been writing already a you know a bunch of essays and doing doing some stuff, and I kind of thought that I might want to do something longer form, but this is the then I was like, all right, I think I might have the framework of the idea here. But like I said, I did have to reverse engineer it. And I, you know, I had to understand about what he meant about, you know, basically he was saying, you know, if it was kind of like what we're talking about when I said, you know, you gotta yank yourself out and be a little like a little bit objective about your subjectivities. You gotta kind of look at what you what you're doing and what you're making. And it was it was kind of the same thing as he was saying, is that like you can calm down about all the contingencies of life, the big contingency being your demise, uh, if you just you know remove yourself from that a little bit and don't be and be less worried about it. And right away I was like, you know, again, this is something we you and I are already covered, but that because the camera is absolutely tethered to the stuff of the world, it makes you deal with that stuff. And you can't just imagine yourself elsewhere. You can't imagine a better picture, imagine a different picture. You gotta make it. You know, you have to work on that, you have to work your body around on it. So anyway, I just saw that parallel, and then I thought, well, okay, I gotta figure this out. So basically the book is in four sections. First section, it talks about as we we talked about earlier, kind of the general brokenness of all people, you know, that that that clash or that gap between um what's real, you know, and what's ideal, what we wish for. Then the second section was you know, well, why why do only quite a small amount of us decide to make what we call our or aesthetic objects to kind of like deal with that? And so, you know, that's just exploring that. It's finally the third section where you get around, you know, like there's a lot of photography stuff in the first two, but it's really we really get to the in the third section, is where you know, I I try to get to was like, why is using a camera such a specific and unusual you know form of art making? Uh and and then the last section kind of like kind of like extrapolates that and brings it back into some ideas of like you know, freedom and um and just you know, peace. Um, you know, so that's kind of the j the general layout of it is just trying, you know, like trying to apply what what the cam what working with a camera does to you know a big existential problem that everybody deals with. But you know, like that we all of us, you know, I'm assuming most of the listeners are people who like just have to use a camera to try to make sense of things. And that's what I wanted to figure out, and that's what I'm gonna figure out in the next book too. But like um, you know, it's it's a weird thing to to be attracted to using um what peop what many people call a sterile machine, you know, to do this. And and I think it's pretty amazing. And I I know you do too, and I know a lot of other people do, yeah, but not every but not everybody.

Matt 1:03:15

Yeah, but uh, you know, you can explain why, right? And a lot of people, uh including myself, well, I'm getting a little bit better at it, you know, understanding why I love photography so much. I do know why I love photography so much, but it's it's sometimes difficult to explain in a kind of elevated pitch way. But um, so many people don't know why. And I'm I'm so interested in why photographers love photography. And the majority of us don't quite know why. I've just, you know, like you said, when you talk about people um explaining their portraits, right? Why do they like that? Oh, I just like it. I like the way the light hits. So you know, that's not a real kind of explanation. And the same with us uh and photography in a general sense. Um, I just like it, you know. I'm so interested in kind of understanding why we love this thing called photography so much. Um, and you, you know, you talked about, I want to start with um uh the last section and um you you know, you titled the last section the final yes. And I think this kind of can bring us back to the beginning in the concept of the book as well. But um, I'll just read kind of the first paragraph from here, and you quote Minor White in the in the first sentence. I have discovered camera is a both a way of life and not enough to live by. Same here, you say, but I doubt that any vocation taken alone could ever really suffice. My more modest and yet entirely grand claim is that lessons learned from working with the camera can be meaningful, uh excuse me, can be meaningfully extrapolated to the whole of life and much to our benefit. So it's almost saying that this can save you, right? This this idea of photography is is a way to live, but also as as existential as really saving you.

Tim 1:05:03

You know, I I probably wouldn't use those words, but I I will back them up that you saying that, yes. Um again, it's you know, and it's just what I was just talking about with the Montaigne and whatever, you know, is that yeah, I don't I mean, listen, I don't there is no one activity that could really sustain us, but I I I do think that what one learns from making pictures in the world about the world not giving in to every little whim and desire of you that uh of yours that you have, you know, that the world does not bend, because the world does nothing for you. And a lot of people do not want to hear that. I'm fine with it. Like but what I what I think it does, it pushes the responsibility back on you um to to create your your form and your completion and your wholeness by acting, you know, by not sitting around. You gotta you like I said, you know, this thing this thing has you have to act. To move. You have to engage. And you could be more or less successful at that. But I but part of it, you know, part of this is not even, okay, making great pictures would be a just a benefit, you know, like and having having a career or doing making some books or whatever. But like, I just think the sort of, you know, the thing that it brings about and how you understand how you what control and what lack of control you have, and and just be making peace with that, that's like where the benefit of it is.

Matt 1:06:29

Yeah. And you start the book with a quote from Paul Valerie. Valerie or Valerie?

Tim 1:06:35

Um, you know, I don't speak French very well, but I I think it's Valerie. Yeah.

Matt 1:06:39

Valerie. Okay. So you start you start the book with a quote from Paul Valerie. And I just want to read this quote because this was, I think I even like posted this on Instagram because it hit me so much in the face. Um, so I w I want to read it. And um, this will kind of explain, I guess, the you know, what you've touched upon already in the con. And I don't want to keep going over the same thing, but I think this is such a beautiful quote. Um, and then I kind of want to talk about you know the the timing of this book with with you. But the quote is this you are here and later on you will no longer be here, and you know it. What is not corresponds in your mind to what is. This is because the power over you of what is produces the power in you of what is not, and the latter power changes into a feeling of impotence upon contact with what is. So we revolt against facts. We cannot omit a fact like death. Our hopes, our grudges, all this is a direct, instantaneous product of the conflict between what is and what is not. A little, you know, it took me a few times to kind of try and understand that, but can you uh without re repeating what we've talked about already, because it there's there's a danger of that, I guess, but can you just kind of uh uh elaborate on on that a little bit more? Yeah. And kind of bring it down to kind of reality.

Tim 1:08:00

Yeah. You can insert for when he says what is and what is not, when he says what is is real and what is not is ideal, right? Concepts and categories don't exist, you know, like they're we can call them virtual or whatever, but you know, uh, but they they are what is not. And this is, you know, we'll put a fine point on what I was talking about earlier, is that this is the real irony, is that like us conscious creatures, us language-using creatures, are able to create incredible works of art, incredible works of imagination. And yet, again, the body has none of that, you know, like and and and we like I said, you know, there was that conflict between the real and the ideal. The the finer point I want to put on this and what Valerie was getting at, and that other people have, like, uh I quoted David Foster Wallace in this, is like even though the ideal seems so massively to uh to uh you know, so massively larger than the real, you know, the our imaginings are so much bigger than the here and the now. The irony or the the twist on that is that the here and the now is so massive that it cannot possibly be explained in words. And this is getting back to the form thing. We we see, you know, there's parallels once you start to go through this. It's like David Foster Well said, even the uh the most fleeting moment of experience is bigger and richer than whatever you could possibly jam into words or into a painting or anything like that. So you've got this like you know, complete. We tell ourselves that that our brain, you know, our conscious brains are like the most amazing things in the universe, and they may well be. Uh, you know, I I'm not gonna say yes or no on that. And yet it can't our words and our language and our consciousness can't contain even like a second of actual bodily experience. That's a profound irony. Um I you know, like, and that's the one that motivates a lot of stuff, you know, and that's what Valierie was getting at. And I, you know, I think uh other people have said this, you know, said it in different ways. And that's kind of you know, I you know, I was probably halfway through the book when I got Valerie's collected essays are uh terrific. And you know, that quote, I was like, wow, I think that's gonna come early, you know, if not be like kind of right up there.

Matt 1:10:17

So yeah, and uh moving forward a little bit into what we talked about before, moving back to what we talked about before, but to extend that point, what we just we just talked about in Valerie's quote, why is form beautiful? Robert Adams asked, and you you I I can't remember which section this is, but the second or third section. Um because I think it helps us meet our worst fear, the suspicion that life may be chaos and that therefore our suffering is without meaning. We we talked about um that before, but then you go on and say, for you or for me, as I've already made clear, this is more than a suspicion, it is a certitude. Our misery is indeed meaningless, which is just wonderful sentence. This fear, though, drives me and Adams to the same place. Form in a picture is justified by experience of wholeness, coherence in life, he writes elsewhere. And if we are to be convincingly reminded by art of such experience, then the shape in art has to be believably tentative, as fragile as meaning seems to be in life. What a wonderful um uh section.

Tim 1:11:27

Um Yeah, no, he got a lot, you know, like and I'm gonna tell uh Robert Adams wrote me a letter. He read that book, and he wrote me a letter, a two-page letter, and and he did say, and I, you know, I I probably should commit this to memory, but he's like he did say, I'm more of a believer than you are. He's like, I'm just an old man who has to like because you know, like with the way he talks about form, I Adams is I don't uh he's not religious, but but he does believe that more that meaning sort of adheres in the world, and you know, and that's that's a different way of thinking about things, and whereas I don't, you know, and that that's a pretty substantial difference. But like I said, we we kind of get to the end point the same way. So, you know, we get to the same endpoint, so um, about the valuation of that meaning and what we take from it. But no, there's so much good stuff in Adams um, you know, like and I I'm gonna say I I think on balance the best stuff is from practitioners shore, Brian Morris, uh Moradavey, um there's probably a couple other missing. Nic Nicholas Mueller, um, you know, Stanley Wollock on boy, I think David Campany, the you know he takes a lot of pictures. I you know, he probably doesn't he call himself as I mean he he's a he's a photographer. But anyway, so whereas Bart and Songtag and you know Bart to his great credit kept saying over and over, he's like, I'm not a photographer, you know, like and so yeah, and he wanted you to know that his observations were colored by that very fact, you know, like um, but anyway, yeah, you know, like that Adams is, you know, I'll reread that every couple three years, forever, I think.

Matt 1:13:02

You know, so would you you you mentioned Bartz and Sontag and and the like, was was why now this book, or well now, but recently, you know, it's a recent release, but why that time and this time for this book that you wrote and collated, uh, was it a rebellion to something? Was it was it something you felt you had to get out there that had been building for years, or why why did it come about and why now?

Tim 1:13:27

You know, it did it didn't come, it wasn't a rebellion, but then I think people have read it that way, and even I've kind of maybe started to see it um see it that way. You know, like I I'll I love Sontag. Uh like against interpretation, I like her writing on Barth, by the way. I mean I think she's brilliant. Um, I don't think she's good on photography. Um, I she may be good for people who are interested in in photography as like a so as the text or the document and the social parts of it. Um I I don't think she's good for somebody who uses a camera. And I uh Barth less, you know, like um there's some things in him I'm trying to like draw from. But these classics, like even Benjamin and Berger and other ones who are kind of red, if you are in, if you're, I don't know, if you're like a sociologist or a curator, I don't know, you might be more interested in it. But I think if for somebody who really is driven to use a camera again to make sense of the world, I would put those lower on your reading list and go to the people who really have solved photographic problems and thought through uh thought through those things. So um, but you know, like everybody's different. But that that's that's what I think. And so it does, it has struck some people as rebellious. I mean, I've had people being like, How did you write this whole book without mentioning Son Tiger Bart? And I was like, well, it was easy for me. This next book is is uh not is going to mention them, you know, because it I want to place this in a context that that um has all that stuff. But um, but um I don't feel that rebellious, but I did want to strike, I think I needed to strike a chord for people like me and you who just gotta do this thing, you know.

Matt 1:15:07

Yeah, I yeah, I think it's it it's funny when one finds a book as well. You seem to um I I was thinking, you know, I wonder why why I found this book at this time, because it was such a great time for me to find this book and read it. And like I said, it just it seemed to articulate it's every piece of every one of my thoughts for the last few years together into a book. It's like, ah, someone's actually nailed it for me. Um so thank you for that. And I want to, you know, I th I feel like we've basically talked about this book for the whole conversation. I've only just recently mentioned it, but I think we've talked a lot about the concepts that you've you've written about. But I want to, before we uh go on to your your photo books, and they're gonna be linked, I'm sure. And I'm really interested to to understand uh the links, if any. But I want to finish with this uh this little paragraph you wrote in the middle of the book, which again caught my eye. If each and every human being despairs at the gap between the internal ideal and the external real, the artist despairs more deeply at the limits upon what can actually be made of that gap, or even spoken out loud for that matter. And I think that's such an important um like contextual clarification about what we're what the limitations are, what we're trying to do with this. It's it's interesting, you know, it's great to talk about the concept between our internal ideal and external real, but actually when we we boil that down to what that means in real life, this this limit upon what actually can be made of that gap, that's the struggle, but also the joy. That's really where the kind of the meaning comes in if you're really searching for that meaning. Um, so yeah, I think that's a a wonderful way to think about the the struggle that is the photography practice.

Tim 1:16:53

You know, Ben Lerner wrote a book called That The Hatred of Poetry, and he's a poet and he loves poetry, but like you hate it because it doesn't do exactly what you want it to do. And that again, that's the great gift of these uh anything that won't do what we want it to do. And again, I just my argument is that the camera is I think is the greatest inhibitor of our desires, our you know, our wishes. Um I call I you know sometimes I call it an anti-solipsism machine. Um now the funny thing is that one can use well, you know, like it it thwarts you know if we just say basically that solipsism is thinking that you know all the world is just a projection or an imagination of yours, you know, like that the camera's gonna thwart that. Oh yeah, that makes sense.

Matt 1:17:37

Yeah.

Tim 1:17:38

But now you can one can use a camera solipsistically, you know, but but the cam the camera itself is is uh it it really resists your projections, your ideas, your thoughts, you know, and it just says this is what the world is. Sorry. Um, you know, you can think all you want, you can you can imagine all you want, but that's just not the way things are. And I I again I'm just gonna put that back, you know, like have you ever had a friend who gets dumped or something, and he or she's like, oh, they'll come back to me, and you're like, it's not gonna happen. You know, like, and you just have to be that person who's like, you're the world and the and they're in an imaginative place, and they're not gonna be whole and happy again until they get out of that imaginative place, you know? Um, so I think there's a lot of parallels with you know, all the things that we suffer, you know.

Matt 1:18:25

Yeah.

Suffering, Idiosyncrasy, And The Books

Matt 1:18:26

Where did um suffering come into your own uh photographs and your own projects? And you know, I mean I'm interested in Wow.

Tim 1:18:36

Well, I'm interested in in You wait an hour to a little bit more than an hour to really spring the good good the the good there'll all be good questions, but it's a tough question. All right.

Matt 1:18:45

Well, well, let me let me give you time to think a little bit because um I'm interested in the the link between this writing and these thoughts that you've put on paper and the photo books that you've made. And you know, the this is the most recent, um, I believe, but we also have recent photo books that where's is I I'm trying, I guess I'm trying to find kind of where this is and these thoughts, concepts are in your photo books and how, and if anything, if you're gonna make more books now, if anything has changed since writing this, you know, when you go out and photograph.

Tim 1:19:21

Yeah. You know, I no, this is great. Uh um, I think I think we all suffer and and and we all suffer differently. And so again, that's getting at your idiosyncrasy is like kind of also. Maybe I I'll say I haven't made this exact link, but your idiosyncrasy is your uh a unique way of suffering. That might be something I'd be willing to say. But you know, for me, like, you know, I'm old now, but like, you know, like I was mid-80s a gay kid in the Midwest of the United States. This is not a possibility for anyone. This is not this is before TV shows, you know, like, and it was and I at one point I just thought I'm not gonna be happy in the way that I understood everyone else to be happy. And I was just like, well, that I guess that's the way it is, you know, like, and I don't know what's gonna happen. I turned out to be very wrong about that, like entirely wrong, and I'm I'm glad to say that, but like, you know, I think each of us has this sort of you know disconnect, you know, that and and and it can be whatever, it can be it can sound minor, it can sound major, but but for you, it's probably gonna be major, you know, like it's gonna in inhabit uh inhabit you. And so I mean, I do think one can tell, um, and some people have, Nick Muelner, a very astute observer. You know, like I keep a distance. Like I when I was a kid, I had to keep my distance. You know, you couldn't really open up. And you had to be careful about cue social cues and codes and all that kind of stuff. And that is that is still part of me, even though like my you know, like I live in New York and can be, you know, like for 30 years I've been whoever I want to be, you know, like but those things that happen to you when you're you know in your teens since or before or whatever, those they kind of stay baked in you a lot of ways, you know. And now I know, you know, now I can look at them and be like, oh wow, you know, like but but for me, uh a guardedness and a reserve and a distance, I think still permeates a lot. Um and I and I'm interested in figuring out how that how that gets recalibrated or changed over time. So that's part of my introspection, is like, and that's what I encourage with my students again, is like, let's let's try to think about why you have to do this. Like, what is it? Like, I want to get to that, that I want to get to that really weird part, and it may be a little uncomfortable. Um, and it maybe it should be a little uncomfortable, but like, but figuring it out, and and then then once I you know, once I felt like I started to own it, and then I could be like exploring all of its different manifestations, you know, and thinking about all like what does that mean at different times in my life? What does it mean for different kinds of picture making? And then foregrounds. Exactly. You know, like and well, and you know, like I have my first color book is coming out with the ice plant in the fall, and oh great, because I'm using a digital camera, I've never had autofocus in my life, you know, like and but this book is gonna be just tighter, it's closer. There's all I I mean, there's literally you're in brambles. There's a lot of stuff out of focus because you're you're you know, you're just like it's a it just changes the whole bodily relationship of you know, but I because I had a different tool, different machine, that I was able to do that much better. But like, you know, this now, you know, like I'm older, I'm a little bit more, I I wanted to, I wanted to like really uh mess with my distance. And so that, you know, but now I I start to articulate those kind of things to myself, and it helps me out a lot, you know, and and and helps me help me have a plan. It's like, okay, then I gotta get my body, I have to have this kind of machine. You know, now that you know I have these floating, I'm not telling P new thing that people have had for 20 years, but like I've never had a floating ISO in my life, you know, like suddenly I've like the light hardly matters, you know, like never had image stabilization. And like so suddenly things that used to matter have now I'm a I'm a I'm a different creature with that digital camera than I was with a film camera. And that I find that fascinating too, you know, what it opens up for me, uh what it allows me.

Matt 1:23:25

Um that has really um uh exposed the limitation of my research. So apologies, I didn't know there there was a new book coming, but I'm no hardly anybody does.

Tim 1:23:35

You're heard okay it hasn't been enough.

Matt 1:23:38

You heard it here. So in the fall, this is so in a few months.

Tim 1:23:42

Uh yeah, no, we'll be printing it, printing it in July. So it'll be ready for the fall stuff, yeah.

Matt 1:23:47

Okay, cool. Talk to me about your the the so-called trilogy, I guess, local objects, Christmas Day Bucks, Pond Road, and Little. Um how tell me a little bit of an overview about about those um in terms of your your mindset going through them in terms of what your personal struggles or joy or or beauty were in in those those books. And will this new book just be an addition to that or something entirely separate?

Tim 1:24:16

Not entirely separate. Um, but you know, the thing is like what I think if you want to have a bit of a career and you want to make a few books, you really have to be really super specific with yourself about how you're different and why you're different over time. Because I'm never gonna make anything crazy where you're like, holy shit, I've never seen that guy before. You know, like I just that's probably not gonna happen, right? Yeah, but so they are a loose trilogy, and what I started to become really interested in was um thinking about myself as the protagonist for uh different things and how I which how I I did and do shape my life. And so, you know, I I mentioned kind of that distance that's in that's in local objects. Um Bucks Pond Road came about from a time when there was somebody, and I've told this story before, but like somebody had to leave, and I didn't realize until too late that I didn't want them to leave. And like I was out of sorts, you know. Um, I think it was doubly, you know, it was it was the loss, but also the fact that I hadn't managed it. You know, like you kind of get pissed at yourself for not managing that loss, you know, like so it's like it's double. And just my I my body and my machine were off against the world. And I thought that there was a whole like a eight months or a year of picture making that was just gone because I just was like, I'm not making, and then I kind of, you know, you I got out of it. I was able to look back on it a little bit and be like, oh, there's something interesting in there, you know, like but and then with with little little came out of what I learned in local objects. I learned about I I took every possible sign or symbol that I could out of local objects. There's still some things, but like there used to be probably basketball hoops and skateboards and bicycles and stuff, mostly symbolic of youth, but um, and cars, you know, or sign or anything that was a sign, like a literal sign. Those I pulled out because I wanted it to be a certain kind of part of me that was 14, 15, kind of figuring out things, moving through the world. I thought, but that's interesting to think about the signs and the symbols in it, so maybe I'll revive that idea later. And I I twisted it to where so little for me is really about what I call nation signs, like signs that don't lead anywhere.

Matt 1:26:32

Yeah.

Tim 1:26:32

Which are perplexing to us. And I I only recently, well, within the last year, I learned there's a you know, a philosopher named Julia Christiva. And she used a word uh called signifiance, uh definitely not significance, signifiance. Signifiance meant to say, yeah, it's meant to say something that seems to be a sign, but that leads to no no signified. And uh that you know, because we are we are creatures who are looking for patterns and looking for signs. That's I mean that Matt that folds into like a lot of what we've been talking about. Yeah, we see things and we think it portends of something, and most of the time it doesn't, you know, like we want answers as well. We want answers, yeah. But you know, like I would walk around with my nephew a lot who appears in little because I wanted to I wanted to shift from third person to first person. I wanted him in his in imaginary head, and in little he is he's taking two like large oak leaves and pretending that he's he was young and he was pretending there were wings. So I that was his imagination was turning the world into something else, you know. And so I I thought that was a good like friction against the the first person of it. But you know, when you walk around with any kid, they'll be like, why is that? What's that? What's that? And again, you're gonna realize nine times out of ten, there is no answer, you know? There's there's just like, yeah, somebody did it. I don't know, they they made that mark in the ground, they did that, but like there's no real good reason for all this, and that. So anyway, I you know, like they do fit together, uh, you know, in that I'm thinking. About myself, the Bucks Pond Road is meant to be myself, probably even ahead of myself in age. It's uh, you know, somewhere else, um, you know, slowing down, um, you know, maybe I don't know, uh, but looking at the world kind of differently. Um, there's this quote I use in my artist talk. I a um this pod name A.R. Amunds, who I've not even really read, but he sees he said to see it all by the light of a different necessity. And this is this is just another way of saying things I've been saying is that we have we have our necessities that are different. You know, as a child, as you gain and lose people, as people die, you know, in your life, as you get married, as you have kids, as you gain and lose jobs, like our our necessities are always different. I think the artist, I'm gonna use another phrase, this woman named Helen Vendler, great writer on Wallace Stevens, she said his job, and I believe that's the job of everyone, is to find formal counters to internal experience. You gotta find a way. If you want to be a long-term artist, you gotta find ways to be adequate to what's inside you. All right. And that means, you know, whether that's, you know, the slightest change in a lens or a camera, whether it means just like using your body differently, whether just like, I don't know, whatever, but your all your job is to find ways that are adequate to what's inside here and adequate to those necessities. And but what that also means you have to be really cognizant, empty. I have to start to kind of articulate what those necessities are a little bit, um, you know, and to kind of like say, all right, here's these pictures when I was really distanced from the world, here's these pictures where I was a little tighter. My friend Jenya Fridlian, her first book is about gratitude, and I think it's genius. Like so few things are about gratitude, you know, like but that's what it's about, and you get it. And I mean it about is even the wrong word. It's it's brought about by gratitude, you know, and you feel it. And that's if I can get like myself, first of all, but if I can get my students to being like, let's I want to inhabit, I want to evoke. You know, it's a pretty standard definition of poetry that it should not be about an experience, but it should be the experience. It should evoke the experience. And so that's what I'm I was like, I want pictures to be, I want them to be that confusion, I want them to be that solitude, I want them to be that distance, I want them to be that that uncertainty, that no purchase on the world. I want them, the pictures to be who what the thing is and not about something else. That's where I want to go, and that's where the body is. Um, and you know, as you can start to see, like there's a bunch of different ways of saying things that kind of keep converging, you know, they they're different ways of looking about it, but like they kind of keep converging on some same basic ideas. And that's what, you know, but again, like I've been, you know, reading about this and then kind of learning and understanding that a lot of this stuff, a lot of different people are talking about a lot of different stuff, but if you can kind of distill it, you realize they're all talking about this kind of these same basic desires and needs that the creature has.

Matt 1:30:55

Um it's the articulation of these things that I think is is difficult for for some people. So yeah, that's why we allow people like you to write books.

Tim 1:31:02

Well, thanks. But like Blanchot uh said, he's like, it's not so much your artistic, you know, your your genius or something, it's the ability to to find what the he called it the disclosive power in it. That is where the hard work is, is to find that. And Valerie, Valerie said another beautiful thing. He said, you know, there's the muse. Okay, you got the muse, that's great. You but but he said, like, it's really it's hard work editing, figuring things out. That and he said that that was that was um that work is for the dignity of the muse. And I really love that phrase. If you think your muse has any dignity, and it does, you need to work hard on it and you need to bring all that dignity out. And that is a hard, kind of different work than just being intuitive all the time. You know, that's just that's a different kind of brain part, you know, like figuring out what's going on, editing that way, sequencing, you know, doing those those things that are different from just being out in the world.

Fixing The Photography Community’s Language

Matt 1:31:54

I love that. Um, Tim, we are we are pretty much out of time. I want to end with just a couple of quick fire questions. So um I will try and keep the the questions and answers short. Um, and there's just a few of them, so I'll just get straight into them. What is wrong? What is wrong? What is wrong with um yeah, everything we just talked about? What is wrong? What is wrong with the way the photography you see or perceive the photography community, um, how it talks about itself, and what we should be talking about more uh as a photography community?

Tim 1:32:31

Well, and I don't this is not a problem, but it it's our it's a situation. And that is that we unfortunately we need to get money, we need to get funding, we need to, you know, do some things. And so we speak in a language that is not our own very much. We speak in more of a critical or or a curator a curatorial language. And I and I don't mean to I love, you know, I have many curator friends who are doing brilliant work, but but it is an external language, and that is where I think that we we really need to think about an internal language that can ladder up to and it can explain exterior language uh better. That's what I think we could do better. Um I and I also think that's why people hate writing, photographers hate writing is because it's not that to write as a critic is not really natural for us. Uh and so I you know, I think there's other ways to get about it. So that's I that's the the answer, I think, is that we're not speaking our own language. Um we're speaking somebody else's language, and we need to fix that.

Meditation, Fear, And Building Audience

Matt 1:33:25

A short note before we close. For a while now, the first thing I've done most mornings before the camera or any other work or before the coffee, before the endless tabs, is sit 10, 20, 30 minutes just watching the noise inside my head do what noise does. It hasn't just made me calmer in the way people imagine, it's made me more honest, more mindful, more compassionate, and more free in more ways than I could even describe. And that honesty and introspective clarity, more than any lens, workshop, or book, is really what changed my photography. The work I make now comes from a quieter place with more clearness and calmness. I notice what I'm reaching for, and I notice when I'm reaching for the wrong thing. The inner critic still talks, it still exists. I just don't believe everything he says anymore. The app I've used for most of this is Waking Up by Sam Harris. It's the one tool I've genuinely kept returning to all this time. This is not a paid sponsorship from them. However, I am an affiliate partner, and for good reason, I believe that this app is worth it more than any other. What's kept me there for years is that it's not just one thing. It's a guided daily meditation, which is the spine of it for me, but there are also short daily reflections, a daily quote that tends to do its own quiet work in the background, and these little moments, they call it, of awareness you can drop into during the day. Two-minute resets when the head starts running. There's also an entire library of guest series with teachers I'd never have found on my own, and a lot more besides that. It keeps the practice alive instead of letting it calcify into routine. So a link sits in the show notes for a free 30-day trial and 20% discount on their subscriptions. If you want the longer story, though, of how meditation reshaped my work, there's also a piece linked through my Substack page called There's No Self-Development Without Self-Awareness. Anyway, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for listening. Do you think there's a fear in that? Like, what is the field of photography afraid about? Is it is it that? And if so, why?

Tim 1:35:49

I do think so. And here's what I tell everybody you know, like in our world, if you sell four or five hundred books or something, that's a home run. And if you sell a thousand, you're you're a rock star. You don't need to please everyone. I want I want everybody to understand this that like our world is kind of this small thing, and you can be who you are and not be these other things that you think people want of you. Now, for the person who's gonna give you the grant, we may have to make our peace with being somebody other than ourselves for a little bit. Get them to write the check and then go back to being yourself, you know. But don't be afraid that going to those weird, strange places in you is not gonna have an audience because it is. And if you can really, if you show us something different, you're gonna build a you're gonna build an audience. It's not going to be gigantic, but you're gonna, but you're it's gonna be rewarding and people are gonna appreciate it. That's that's the thing I would not be afraid of. And don't and don't be worried about getting you know big big audiences because you're it's you're just not gonna happen. You know.

Matt 1:36:49

Love it. How do you find that audience?

Tim 1:36:51

Yeah, the good question. I mean, I think you know, you gotta if you live in a place where you can start to be, you know, uh going to events, like it's easy in New York where I live, and it's much, much harder at other places because we have events and everything. But I think you have to start just meeting people, talking to people, going to things. So if there's more online things that you can do, um, here's what I tell you is like when when Ice plant wanted to do my first book, Mike Slack, uh, Mike Slack and Tricia Gabriel are the Ice Plant. Mike said, he's like, you've already built up a lot of goodwill among the community, so it makes our job easier. Because I was already writing essays. I'd already done a couple books with TIS, some smaller books, you know, not a monograph. So there are, you know, you gotta kind of just start small, like making things happen.

Matt 1:37:32

Yeah.

Tim 1:37:32

You know, getting out there incrementally, you know, and and and build that. And, you know, like once you're ready to make your statement, once you're ready for your monograph, you know, you might it it certainly would help you to have a few things in place, you know. Okay. Um, but like what you're doing, you like I mean, the value to the community of making these things, like you're making an effort that I could not find within myself to do. I'm, you know, like I have not the energy or the or the patience to do what you're doing. And I, you know, like, but you're you're creating, you're bringing us another way of like, you know, doing this whole thing. So all of us have these different talents about how we might contribute to the bigger thing. And I think, you know, anybody who can explore that and and exploit that, um, I would say go for it, you know.

Prompts To Find Your Weird Edge

Matt 1:38:15

Last question, Tim. If you could give every photographer one prompt or assignment from outside photography, drawn from maybe literature, music, or film or whatever, what would it be?

Tim 1:38:26

That's a really good question. One time I did this too, when we were in during COVID, my my crit group, when we had to move uh online, we were trying to come up with kind of things like that. And I said, I want to, I want to see them the picture for of yours that had that packs the most narrative in it. And and everybody, and I was like, I'm not gonna say anything more than that. And everybody kind of came back with complaints about what that wasn't specific enough or whatever, but I was like, I I like doing things like that. It's like because I make pictures that have almost no narrative in them. I mean, you know, we've been talking about that. I don't want there to be things to extrapolate from.

Matt 1:38:59

Yeah.

Tim 1:38:59

I happen to make one picture of my nephew like walking away and throwing a stone, and I was like, I saw a story in that, you know, like, and that's the picture I showed. So I'm not saying that that's the prompt, but I'm saying it's like get to ask yourself specific questions about what's your most narrative picture, what's your what's your least narrative picture? You know, what's your craziest picture, you know, what's the most outlier picture? I was like, I really I think it's really good for us to go to extremes and and then see, oh, that's the border of it, that's the edge. And then I can understand this thing in here better. So, you know, it's just like it would be just challenge you challenging yourself to be like, what's the what's my strangest picture? What's my weirdest one? What's my what's my most non-me picture?

Matt 1:39:39

And what does you know, how do you interpret narrative? Because the word narrative is means different to some people than it does to others. Exactly. Is it allegory?

Tim 1:39:46

Is it like can you build a build a whole story over, you know, like or whatever? Yeah. But um documentative, is it?

Matt 1:39:51

Yeah.

Tim 1:39:51

Right, right. Yeah.

Matt 1:39:53

Um well, I could talk for hours, but uh we are at our our limit here. And I think um I just want to say thank you again for writing your books, making your photo books. Um, we didn't even talk about TIS books that you you co-founded back in the day. We didn't talk about your your commercial photography experience and all of your teaching. We didn't really talk about any of that. But zero commercial photographs. Um we uh we covered all of the things that I'm most interested in. So um thank you for for for entertaining me and and the audience and engaging with what I wanted to talk about. So really appreciate your time, Tim. Thank you.

Tim 1:40:32

Absolutely my pleasure.