Ian Johnson is a photographer from Seattle, currently living in New York City. He’s also a talented musician with a BA in jazz bass performance. I’ve known Ian for several years; he’s become a great friend, and one of my favorite photographers. Amongst a sea of often derivative NYC street-based images, his work stands out for striking compositions, a strong sense of visual intelligence, and recently, a relentless exploration of color. 50 years after the lessons learned from Eggleston, Ian’s images prove that there is still plenty of work to be done exploring the meaning of color in a photograph. We recently spoke over video chat, and talked about coping with quarantine, photography as jazz, conscious intuition, and the importance of walking.
Sebastian: So what have you been up to during quarantine?
Ian: I just kind of putter around and test my very low prowess in the kitchen – my wife is a much better cook than me. Some photos, but I have to say, I’m really not quite as active as I would have thought. For some reason it’s been hard for me – some people are like, “oh, let’s use this time to do this document on my life at home,” and some of these projects are really great. And for me, somehow I just don’t have it in me.
S: I feel the same way.
I: I still engage with the thing, I look through the archives, but I don't know. Maybe I’m just not being creative enough. But I’m like, eh… I don’t know, there’s only so many pictures…
S: Yeah. My photos also normally aren’t necessarily topical, so I generally don’t feel like I need to document specific events. Though obviously, this is kind of affecting everything in a more pervasive way. But I’ve seen some cool stuff – I don’t know if you saw Lucia Buricelli’s home project…
I: Yeah, that’s the one I was thinking of – fantastic.
S: So yeah, there is some very good work. I usually mess around with shooting at home a bit anyway, but not really in a serious way.
I: Right, I have plenty of those too. We started our lockdown March 10th, and there’s maybe 8 rolls of color film. I can’t remember if they’re all taken then. But the pictures I take will in no way be emblematic of COVID or anything like that. It’ll be like “look, the light was this way” or something. But that has its place too.
S: Of course. And actually, even though I’m not doing anything about the pandemic, I’ve actually been somewhat more active during lockdown. Since we’re a little more sparse here [in North Carolina], I can mostly safely walk around town without exposing myself or anyone else. So lately I've started shooting more consistently here than I really had up to now.
I: With the large format?
S: No, I’ve been doing a mix of 35 and medium format. I'm still interested in large format, but I realized that I need to walk around. And what I found myself mostly doing was driving around and looking for interesting places to stop. And then making a photo became this kind of – not quite an ordeal – but just sort of an event each time.
I: It stops your flow sometimes.
S: Yeah. And I’ve realized that the walking is really important to me.
I: For sure. I miss that.
S: So one thing I wanted to talk about, was your recent color work. You're someone who's obviously worked both in black and white and color, but over the last year or two, you've not only focused on color just in terms of shooting a lot of it, but it seems like the photos are about color; you’re really into exploring color as it works in photo. So I'm curious how that came about, and what do you feel like you're seeking?
I: First off, that’s very astute. That’s absolutely right. I think I have very specifically tuned in that route. I think for better or worse, since I've been shooting any kind of photos, back in 2011 or 2012 I guess, it's always been pretty intuitive. It’s not that I didn't know whether I had black and white or color in the camera or anything like that, but even if I had color, I would just go ahead and do my thing. And I feel l like I got to a point, maybe in 2015 or 2016, where I’d shoot all the rolls, and I’d drop it off at the lab and get all the negatives back and scan it, and just like any other roll, there would be stuff I liked, and stuff I didn’t like.
And then it started to be, I would like a picture, and then I would hate it, and I’d think “I don't understand.” Because this was a cool moment, this person was doing this, or look at these things together or something. And then I would post it, and I would just delete it because I’d be like, it’s not right somehow. But the whole time, it was like, why? Why does this keep happening? And then, how can I do this differently? And it was just the kind of dumb realization of oh, I like this because the color works for me. For whatever reason, this scene works for me just visually on a very pure level. And since then, I thought, why doesn’t the experiment now be that I just focus more intently on being intuitive. It’s almost kind of realizing I was being intuitive when I was shooting and going, ok, now let’s just hone that a little bit, to being intuitive about color and how it presents itself either with people or inanimate objects or whatever it is. And probably discovering Eggleston around that time. That probably subconsciously influenced that, because it was like, “oh, all these pictures – I like looking at all of them.” And why are there pictures that should work, because they have interesting things in them, but they don't work for me on another level. Does that makes sense?
S: So you felt that the ones that didn’t work were too thought out? Or they looked too much like other pictures?
I: It was actually almost simpler than that. It was just that the colors didn’t work. There’s one that I was thinking of. It was just some scene on the street where there was some green or some neon purple or maybe a T-Mobile ad or something, I don’t know what it was, and I just kept thinking, I don’t like the way this looks. I just don’t like it. And then I thought, oh, it’s just because I don’t like the way that things look in this picture. And then when I realized that, I also realized that the pictures I do like all seem to have something chromatically going for them. And then from there I thought, ok now I can kind of hone that a little bit. I can say, if I’m consciously doing this – if I’m consciously intuiting, if that makes any sense – then I can actually kind of hone in on that. From there it was just kind of walking that line in between – because I feel like Joel Meyerowitz is someone whose color is so outstanding, but they’re still street pictures – that line between, the color is almost always working, but there’s also something interesting happening in the scene he’s photographing.
S: Right. That's the thing. We’ve talked about this before. I think there's a lot of people being overly conscious of color, trying to match colors up in the picture. Or people who predominantly shoot in black and white, and they have this hang up about switching to color. They end up paying too much attention to it. It ruins their flow, because now they’re suddenly aware of what the colors are going to do in a photo. Is the color on your mind consciously when you're out there, or is it more that you shoot intuitively, and then later it affects how you edit?
I: I think that the division of editing and shooting is still very much there. It vacillates a little bit back and forth, but mostly when I’m out there, I’m just kind of intuiting. For the most part, once you get into the walk – you were just saying that before about walking, it’s so important. I was reading a study, about the nature of the brain and certain things that are happening chemically that are firing up in different regions of the brain when somebody’s walking, versus when they’re still. I think the main thrust of the article was that, for whatever reason, walking is a time where your brain starts kind of piecing things together, or starting to link disparate regions or disparate hemispheres. And I think when you’re out walking taking pictures – and that’s why it’s so important – once you hit a flow there and you’re just walking, I think that’s when your intuition or your perception opens up after a while. And I think maybe that’s why it’s hard just to shoot at home, for me anyway, because I’m not walking, I’m not getting into a flow.
So when I’m out, the color is there. I don’t go hunting for anything, or I’m not like, “this is a purple day,” or “this is a blue day” or anything like that. But I’m like, “oh, that’s good.” And I'll try to work with something if it seems interesting, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't work. But yeah, it's funny because sometimes I'll find myself when I'm editing, I'll be going through and I'll be like, “oh my God why have I shot so much yellow?” or some of these things, and it keeps showing up here with primary colors. And then it's like subconsciously giving a palette to myself, where I keep being attracted to certain things, and then maybe it’s important to actually be more conscious about it. But I find, in any case, that it kind of just wavers between conscious and unconscious and then – I’m sure you get this too, when you’re editing – you start putting things together, and from that you come up with an MO about what you’re doing. Once you’ve seen the pictures together.
S: Which then inform what you do when you go back out.
I: Right, exactly. That’s the circuit.
S: And that’s also the tough thing to balance, too. Because you want to incorporate what you learned, but on the other hand, you don't want to be thinking about it.
I: That’s like the jazz pianist, Bill Evans, who played on Kind of Blue and all those other records. He has a great quote about it. He says the key to playing jazz is, “develop a comprehensive technique and then forget it.” And I think that’s the ultimate thing in jazz, but indeed in any other art, especially when you’re improvising. You have a certain technical thing you must learn: the camera, and you have to know how it works, and know what happens when you’re at f/8 versus f/4 or whatever, but then ultimately, you have to be intuitive. Or else you’ll start thinking about what you’re doing. And I’ve certainly been there, where I think, that one thing I did, that was good. If only I could have five or six pictures that are like that again. And that’s the trap; as soon as I do that, then I’m out there trying to do it. But for some people, that works really well. Like I’ve seen certain pictures where I just know the person had literally slept with an Alex Webb book under his pillow. You know, just just had it close at hand, and looked at it every morning, and looked at it every night. And just starting to create a theorem for how the pictures are put together. And maybe that is a good way to learn. But I think ultimately even then, you do have to be intuitive, even if you’ve mastered a certain technique.
S: I think, just like with music – certainly with developing a musical style, if you’re in an improvisation-based music – I think all the greats tried to copy their influences.
I: Oh, absolutely.
S: So I think it can be good to say, learn a solo note for note, or go further than that and really get obsessed with a certain person. But the thing is, since you’re not them… if you’re trying to become an artist, even if you tried your best to mimic somebody exactly, it’s still going to come out like you. I’ve felt that big time. For me it's always been cracking the code of the multi-person picture. Not so much in the Alex Webb, layered way, more in the Gus Powell kind of tableaux, all in one plane, middle distance, everyone looking interesting, and trying to get that to work. And whenever I try to do that I don't succeed. Mine are just different. But I feel like that helped me get at some part of my own style.
Alex Webb, Bombardopolis, Haiti (1986)
I: Oh sure. It’s almost like, a certain style like that, that’s like a place. But we all have to find our own path to that place. But we can’t hop over to Alex Webb’s or Gus Powell’s path. Although we can look at that, what they’ve done, we have to go on our own path. And I should have said, as a jazz musician myself, you have to transcribe [solos note for note], because that’s how you learn the language. But then what you say with the language – it will never be the same as Bill Evans or whoever, because you’re not Bill Evans. Not in some sort of put down way, but in a very basic sense. You’re literally not the same person. I’ve learned the hard way with jazz too, when I was an undergrad. You really want to be Paul Chambers or Ray Brown, and eventually you just have to synthesize what you can from that style and certain techniques. But then, like Bill Evans said, you have to forget it, and let it just kind of come back out in its own way.
S: And with photography, camera technique, the analogy would just be making sure that your instrument is in tune, and that you’re fingering the notes clearly. But the equivalent of scales or phrases would be, where do you stand? And how do you move your body? There’s so many other elements to photography. I feel like nobody really talks about that aspect of it. Everyone gets obsessed over the technical aspects, the things that are tangible, like zone focusing, and shutter speed, and what focal length, that stuff. Because that’s sort of easy to get your head around. But then, the intangibles – especially with street photography, where it’s this interaction all the time – how you throw your gaze, the footwork, where do you stand, the body language, and that kind of stuff.
Richard Kalvar, Piazza della Rotonda, Rome (1980)
I: That’s a really good point. I was watching this video – do you know Richard Kalvar? I’ve always kind of wondered about him and his shooting style, because he’s always so close to the people. It’s not just the close thing where you can tell the person was like, click click click, a thousandth of a second and they’re gone. I remember thinking his technique is so interesting. It’s almost like that Winogrand video where he’s fiddling with the camera and smiling. But Kalvar’s doing it, and he’s perfected it. Not to say that he’s copying Winogrand or anything, but he’s just so unsuspecting. He’d just be like right next to people, kind of like, “oh.”
S: Yeah, the body language is so important. I think, especially for those of us who have watched that Winogrand video and those other videos a hundred thousand times, it definitely was helpful for me in developing that. And again, not that I actively tried to mimic something that I saw, but it just sort of got incorporated into how I shoot.
I: Yeah. That’s another side of it that’s very unique to this art form, the art of the interaction. I’m not sure I have it cracked at all. It is awkward to turn a camera to somebody.
S: Totally. But on the other hand, beginners in street photography, that’s what they always want to talk about, as if that’s the problem, but that’s … we all kind of figure out our way. Once you push through that, then you realize that that’s actually not the problem at all. In a way, I’m starting to face that all over again here. People are so scared of taking photos candidly… but then, for those of us who get used to shooting that way, the opposite – talking to people first and taking a photo based on that interaction – is scary too, and that’s been my struggle down here. And actually, one of the things that I realized with large format was that it can be a crutch. It gave me this strange object as a conversation starter. But I realized I shouldn’t let myself rely on that.
I: Yeah, with a big camera especially – it’s the question of, “what are you doing?” It’s going to come up. You can’t run around with it on your shoulder.
Curran Hatleberg, Detroit, MI (2011)
S: Actually, one of the other big things that made me question large format was last summer when I went to the Whitney Biennial. I’d already heard of Curran Hatleberg… have you ever seen his stuff? He’s this young photographer, and he’s basically been traveling all around the US for the last 10 years, and it looks like it’s all medium format, color. And clearly he’s interacting with people, but the pictures look very spontaneous. And he was in the Whitney Biennial, which was super cool too – because there’s so little photography, period. And very little photography that's not topical or…
I: Conceptual.
S: Yeah, exactly. It’s not explicitly conceptual. It’s mainly the product of wandering. But seeing that work, especially big prints of it in person – I was like, damn, the movement and the interaction, the getting close and the spontaneity are important to me. And I was starting to miss out on that.
I: Yeah, it’s a hard thing to balance. I think medium format is a good solution. Because you have the depth, and you have that clarity, but you’re not up on a ladder on top of a car with the bellows five different ways.
S: It’s funny though, I’ve noticed that I've started taking more verticals [portrait orientation], partly because I fell in love with the parallel vertical lines. If you’re shooting a horizontal it can be hard sometimes, especially if there’s a building or a tree or something that’s taller. You can’t basically fit it all in and keep the camera level. But with a vertical composition you can sort of simulate that large format perspective.
I: Yeah, that’s interesting.
S: You talked about how you feel like your camera got stuck vertically sometime last year. What was that about?
I: It was, what did I say? Verticulitis. It’s a rare hereditary disease. I think it was just – not so much with the Leica – but when you look through an SLR viewfinder, I just really liked the way it looked when you turn it that way. I mean, I guess I just like the way it looks anyway, because it’s so bright, and even if you’re stuck at f/2.8 or whatever the viewing one is…
S: Even that, it makes it more pictorial…
I: Yeah, it’s like almost the inverse of what Winogrand cautions against in his Rice lecture where he’s warning against SLRs, saying, “you’re going to have to compose” as if that’s… oh God, we wouldn’t want to compose! And I mean, point taken for what he’s doing. If he’s talking about his own work, it makes sense. His composition was a lot different. It’s not that he didn’t; he very much did compose, but it wasn’t composition in the same way. But yeah, I think that there is something pictorial to that, and I think it probably comes from Saul Leiter, looking at a lot of those things. Or that photographer I was talking to you about, Jennilee Marigomen, who I think of for instance. I just really like the way – I think you said it a second ago – it emulates kind of a feeling of medium format, or maybe large format. Without the horizontal plane being the primary one, visually, you’re able to just say, OK, this is the object, and I do want attention here, and maybe obviously a little space around it. It’s easier to call attention to things that way. And it’s not as if you can’t with horizontal, but it just comes down to the basic problems of taking pictures where you have this rectangle, at least in 35mm, and how you fill it is going to some extent determine how it feels, or how you read the picture. So I think it’s important to be conscious of that. And I just kind of liked what it was able to do. And it’s also a different challenge, where suddenly you don’t have that lateralism, and you have to compose in a different way. And maybe getting my first iPhone. Because I was thinking about this the other day, where suddenly with Snapchat and TikTok, ever since we’ve been shooting video on our phones, it’s like everything is this really thin vertical rectangle, which is really kind of absurd in some ways. Because of course our field of vision does extend upwards and downwards, but we’re much more…
S: Yeah, I’ve thought about this a lot. Our eyes are oriented horizontally.
I: It’s like peripheral vision. When you see something in peripheral vision it’s not like, “Ha! I caught you up there!” Maybe we do, actually. But it really does seem to be from the sense of probably being at one point in our evolutionary life, as prey for some animal, we probably are much more aware of the sides. So having it vertically shakes it up a little bit. Like, ok, now this is what you have. And so maybe you do fall into some other kind of way of looking that’s more pictorial, or it’s more composed.
S: Yeah. In New York I long avoided verticals because I think in the Winogrand-esque kind of close-up, wide lens street thing – for that type of photograph – a vertical often has the opposite effect, where it maybe distills things too much. It ends up just being like a study of a single person, who may or may not be filling the frame, and it can lead to a less interesting composition. You get less of the background; you get sky that doesn’t do anything, or sidewalk that doesn't do anything, But somehow in my current environment, that distillation works. It’s a good way of isolating things, or like you said – if there’s something there that you want to draw attention to.
I: Sure. That’s a good way of putting it, of distillation.
S: My other related question – and partly this is because it's difficult for me to relate, since I’ve spent very little time shooting with a long lens, and on that Nikon you've been shooting with an 80 or something?
I: 85, yeah.
S: So, with with a wide lens, I feel like – and this is another connection to large format – you’re essentially composing with your body, and then the camera is just capturing something roughly approximating your field of view. Whereas with a longer lens like an 85, you're taking such a small angular segment out of out of the sphere that’s surrounding you. Do you find yourself identifying something interesting and then pointing the camera, or are you doing a lot of looking through the viewfinder to see what's going to happen?
I: That’s a really interesting question. I think it’s a mix of both. I guess it depends. There’s a picture that I took when we were sitting at that café downtown with the lights on the wall. It’s a horizontal picture actually, but it just matched the frame. I barely had to move closer or anything like that. So there’s certainly those pictures where they’re just there, and I know that’s going to be roughly about 85 or 90 or wherever I am. And then there’s the other one where it’s like, ok that thing is interesting, then you pull up your camera and you’re like “woah, where did everything go?” And then you do have to recompose. But then what I find that’s interesting with this thing, and this is probably Saul Leiter, his influence, is that the things that you thought maybe were blocking your view of the scene before, suddenly now become part of the thing. That was a big one, realizing that these big blocks of color that he had in his photos, he was just… whatever he was standing next to just became part of the composition, this block almost of this abstraction next to it. I think much of the time, you get used to using something after a while, so you start to begin to see things vis a vis how the camera’s going to pick them up. After a while, like anything else, you start to get a sense of it. And then you also know if there’s this wide street scene happening around you, it’s off limits. There’s nothing much I can do here. But then, I was looking through a book of Rene Burri, it’s called Impossible Reminiscences. I think it was maybe a late life release of his color photography. And he was somebody who worked very well with long lenses, and how they flatten things down. I think you begin to kind of see that potential too, after you use the thing for a little while.
S: That makes sense.
Rene Burri, Brazil, Sao Paulo (1960)
I: It’s a great book by the way. I was looking through it the other day. First look I thought, “oh, this is pretty good.” But now, looking at it again, I really think it’s quite great. And the sequencing is really interesting. It feels like his work, but it’s also not that much like his black and white work. It seems like he was being very specific and thoughtful about the color. And some of the images are just really weird and bizarre and great.
S: I should check that out. I think one of the criticisms of long lens stuff, or photos where the color the dominant element, is that you’re almost painting, or just sort of playing with composition. I sometimes think about that in regard to a lot of the kind of urban minimalist kind of photography. Or other people who I think of would be maybe Ernst Haas, where the pictures are pretty, but I don't necessarily feel an emotion, you know? It just feels like a study, or an assemblage or something. And then there's the color photographers – and I think Saul Leiter is a great example, and Eggleston, of course – where the color is still very bold and it's a huge part of it, and the composition is a huge part of it, and yet I feel something there. I don't know that I even have a question. I would put you in the latter category – I think there’s a feeling that’s conveyed when I look at your pictures. How do you think you avoid just making a visually pleasing thing that doesn’t have any emotional content?
I: That is the thing to avoid certainly. I don’t know. I think that there’s been plenty of times where I’ve been like, “oh, that’s nice looking” but then I realize I don’t really… there’s no problems here. I guess maybe the word I’d use is problems. It’s nothing you can sink your teeth into. I know the kind of work you’re talking about. And it’s hard, because if you get, let’s say, a really nice Canon, like their best DSLR right now, the one that's like 50 MP or whatever it is, it’s just so… I mean, you can take beautiful pictures of really just about anything. It’s not going to look bad. But then the cumulative effect is just… “Ok, next?” These all look good, but nothing lasting. I’m not sure that I have a conscious strategy to avoid that. I think that is something that I’m aware of, and maybe to some extent I’ve reacted to it by switching back to other focal lengths when I feel like I’m getting that. If I feel like I’m going to that place.
S: Is that a risk of the long lens, losing the emotional connection?
I: Yeah, I mean it is like that. It is this thing where you get into street photography, or let’s say unposed photography or whatever, candid stuff, and I think generally speaking that’s a good… I think there’s a reason why the iPhone’s default thing is a wide lens. Because you want to just be able to get things that are close to you. I think that everything’s predicated on being able to get things quickly and not letting it go away, and I get that too. But I think that what’s lost in that, or presumed, is that inherently anybody who’s beginning with a camera wants to make pictures that have this wider field of view. And it’s almost like when I discovered Saul Leiter, and he’s part of In Public, no less! He was listed as a senior member there, or something. I remember looking, and I thought, “Oh, but he has telephoto... these are different looking.” And well, where do I get that? How do I apply for that license for the longer lens, you know? I’d like to try that.
S: The wide lens has become like a dogma or something, and then the telephoto feels wrong or sinful…
I: Well I get why.
S: But it’s so limiting if you think about it. There are so many photographic possibilities, and to just say, oh well a photograph has to be a wide lens, it’s kind of…
I: It’s true. I certainly love a lot of wide-angle stuff too, and right now during the lockdown I’ve been going through my archives and looking at some of the 28mm stuff I had previously shot and I thought, I actually kind of like what this is. So I’ve been thinking, maybe was I going in the wrong direction? And the other thing about it is… I understand why people are maybe reticent about it because there is… it lets you get a picture of people in a frame very clearly without, I guess, taking the risk of being near them. And the idea is somehow you get the payoff without having to do the work. But it’s a different kind of picture in that way.
S: Yeah, if it’s done with intention, by someone who trains their eye over time, it’s a different situation.
I: And I mean I think we’ve all seen that weird kind of… hobbyist, who has a telephoto and he’s kind of… why is he pointing it at women? It’s that feeling of like.. ugh. It just feels icky somehow. But then you look at Martin Parr’s work with the telephoto at the beach a little longer away, and I guess somebody could make the argument that, how could he? He’s voyeuristic. And sure, ok, that’s fine.
S: But again, that’s about the intention.
I: Yeah, it’s very purposeful.
S: And playing with that idea of voyeurism intentionally, that's a whole different situation than someone whose payoff is the actual voyeurism. As opposed to the exploration of what voyeurism is and what it means. Actually, he’s a great example too, because another thing that’s totally not taken advantage of… that whole project he did with the macro lens, right? Where he was super close to people but it’s like of an earring, or of what they’re holding…
I: Food or something, yeah. And the ring flash.
Martin Parr, from Common Sense (1998)
S: I forget what it’s called. [Common Sense] It’s from the late 90s. Is it my favorite book ever? No, but it’s cool, and I like that he’s not content to just do… he could have kept doing 6x7 wide angle flash color stuff like Last Resort all the time, but he’s clearly someone who's a bit relentless.
I: Yeah, and I think that just hits the nail on the head. It’s really about intent. I think why I don’t worry too much about it is – even though I’m sure with a focal length, you fall into certain traps – but why I don’t worry about it too much is, it’s still essentially the same operation of, like Joel Meyerowitz says, saying “yes” to the world. Of saying, “I want to keep this thing. This is great… or what about this?” And I think that same energy, if you feel like you’re doing it in good faith – I can’t believe I’m using these terms like “good faith,” as if it’s talking about something really horrible, all I’m talking about is using a telephoto lens – but you’re still saying “yes” to something coming in, and ennobling that object or that scene through taking a picture of it. And I think that at the end of the day, as long as you’re true about that...
S: And also being aware of the way that you’re transfiguring the world, right? It isn’t just a collection of objects. The photo has its own… not just quality to it. It’s a distinct entity.
I: Yeah, it’s own life.
S: And being aware that you’re making that happen, and that you're creating this transformation.
By the way, what was it like shooting in India?
I: Oh man, it was a wild trip. Actually, getting married there, it was like the photos kind of fell by the wayside most of the time, just because there’s a million people stopping by who want to say hi, and you’re meeting all these people. And there’s a culture, especially around a wedding… it’s just going to be a lot of guests and stuff. But being from the states and not looking like anybody there, you're not ever going to really take a picture that's like… you're not going to be Raghubir Singh. You're not going to be able to just kind of get into a scene, or blend into the background. Going everywhere, people are like, “what?” Especially where we were, outside of Chennai. Downtown Chennai, there’s people from all over the world. But we’re in the suburbs, so people are like, “Woah… who are you?” And India presents a really interesting problem for somebody who works in color, because again, as you’re saying with the telephoto, you can make interesting formal pictures out of anything. But there, the problem is like, there’s color everywhere all the time. And where we were, in Chennai, that’s not even supposed to be the most colorful region, like Rajasthan and all these other very, very vivid places. But for me, just going and walking to the store it’s like, “Oh my gosh, I love the way that everything’s so bright.” It just presents a whole different palette, and just a different sense of what to do with that. And to take pictures while not feeling like you’re sticking a camera in somebody’s face. Some westerner coming in to do their own thing on top of daily life in India.
S: Yeah, that’s true. Trying to avoid that. I haven’t been to India, but when I’ve been to Mozambique, I definitely had that sense… where I would hold back in certain situations. Not out of any fear, and actually people were very receptive. But yeah, just that feeling that you don't want to be perceived as kind of the white…
I: Yeah, the documentarian coming in…
S: Yeah, I mean there’s such a terrible history – and even now, with social media – of objectifying people in developing countries. On the other hand, again, it’s kind of the good faith thing. You go to a place like that, you're visually attuned, you're interested, and it also is okay to be interested in what you're looking at, and to make pictures. But I’ve always struggled to make pictures that have any meaning to them anywhere except the US. It just feels like I’m making tourist photos.
I: I think it’s both a different skill, and a slightly different practice, unless you’re somebody who just barges into things and says, “Alright, let’s just see what happens.” And that takes a certain kind of personality, which is fine. It’s not necessarily bad. But also, these people who have worked all over the world – like Alex Webb for example – they had a fixer, they had somebody who was traveling with them who was able to… I’m sure somebody at some point was like, “What is he doing? Does he have a permit?” And somebody was able to cool the scene and say, “Oh, this person’s fine.” It’s kind of a different thing. I think with me in India, it’ll evolve over time as we return post-COVID, whenever we’re able to travel that widely again. And maybe it’ll require just changing the way I do things a little bit too. Technique, and just seeing what’s appropriate for certain things. Just kind of how to fit in somewhere and try to get the pictures that I want, but without having to impose myself any more than I already am…
S: Joel Meyerowitz has talked about how he doesn’t want to “bruise the situation.”
I: Yeah, that’s a good way to put it.
S: “Bruise” is a good analogy, because you’re not really hurting anyone… but you don’t want to affect too much of what’s going on around you.
So I have your Blurb books that you did… have you thought at all about anything that you want to do with your pictures going forward? Do you think you're working towards a book one day?
I: Oh jeez.
S: Do you think in terms of projects at all, or is it just kind of one continuous thing for you?
Ian Johnson, Furlough Mag Vol. 3 (2019)
I: Well, it was all one continuous thing. Then I’d kind of just make the zines every year. I thought, this is just like a check-in on what I’ve done recently. And then I could kind of group my favorite pictures. And it would be a way to put it out there in the world, and have it be where someone could buy it, but it would also be a way of me summarizing myself for the last however many months. But In this new time, I've had so much time to just sit and think about pictures, and how I want to move forward. But then I think to myself, Blake Andrews hasn’t made a book. How could I make a book if Blake Andrews hasn’t? There’s so much weight with books. I wish books weren’t… I don’t know how to say it. It’s just like, “This is my book.” They have this literary weight to them, like everything’s a manifesto or an MFA thesis.
S: Yeah.
I: One of my all time favorite photo publications is Alec Soth and Brad Zellar's "LBM Dispatches," which were printed on newspaper and available for very cheap. If remember correctly, they travelled around in a van acting as reporters for an imaginary newspaper. I wish I had collected all the issues. They were so sincere and moving and the work was so great, both writing and images and how they lived together on the pages; I loved seeing these ridiculously high definition images printed on newspaper. They had a real life to them physically and were accessible financially. I mean, images are accessible everywhere now for free on social media like Instagram, but in terms of printing a photobook I absolutely love the idea of it being high quality and widely available, and not easily spirited away to some ivory tower.
S: There’s a finality to it. And also that those pictures are then locked together. You’re kind of putting a lid on stuff. So I can understand why that would be a little uncomfortable.
I: It’s exciting too, I just got one Jason Fulford’s books, Raising Frogs for $$$. And it’s great. His treatment of books… even though they’re still really nice books, they’re so playful, and they’re kind of open-ended. So even if as you were saying, the body of work ends at a certain book, you can keep coming back to the books. Even that book… I don’t understand half of it. There’s certain things, connections he’s making, and I'm like, “I don't get it.” And then I keep looking at it because I think, maybe this time I’ll…
S: It’s pulling you…
I: Yeah, it’s so cool. I love this idea of the book that you can keep coming back to, without it just being a retrospective. For so much time, I kind of shied away from the idea of making a book, because I don’t like the idea of pictures necessarily becoming these kinds of meaning-units, like words. Where it’s like, this one, and then it goes to that, and then that. Because it’s a picture, and you can look at it for a while. And you never go back to a page in a novel because the word “distinguish” was there and you’re like, “I just want to go back and look at that word once more.” You know? The word is there for a purpose. And the sentence is the unit structure. So with pictures, they have this dual process, or this dual meaning of being both these visual things that you can appreciate just on an aesthetic level, and then they have the other layer of meaning that’s societal, cultural, racial, whatever it is. And you have these things superimposed on each other when they’re sequenced. So when I think about books, I feel like we know so little of what it might be. And I certainly don’t have the answer to what it could be. But I think I'd want to explore the idea of putting these images together. With these latest vertical things we were talking about, I messed around with them a little bit in sets on Instagram. Putting them together in sequences or seeing how they kind of resonate with each other is really cool. I like that it’s similar to montage in cinema. You can get this other third meaning out of it that you’re not seeing literally in the pictures, and I think there is a value to that. I just think it’s a question of balancing the individual units on their own.
S: Yeah. I just had a thought: what if you had a book that, when you bought it, came with a box of prints, and then empty pages that have little cutouts so you could stick the corners in. And then you could sequence the images however you want…
I: You beat me to it. That’s a really good idea.
S: Actually I was thinking about one person who we’ve talked about already a couple of times. Eggleston, although so many of his books are retrospectives in one way or another, I feel like across his books there is this constant reshuffling of his images. Which is actually really nice, in that I see one of his pictures that I know, and I don't immediately think about its neighbors. The opposite of that would be, let’s say, The Americans. Where those 83 or however many pictures are so locked together. I don't necessarily remember the sequence but if I think of one, I immediately start thinking of others. Which is obviously super powerful in its own way. But I understand what you’re getting at, that the book kind of locks them into a certain meaning.
I: Yeah, it does, but I think there could potentially be a really nice way of doing it. Or it could be a way that there’s an open sense of locking, or they’re locked to the sequence but there’s not just this one meaning to them. And I think that is the power of The Americans, where there’s certain things where you’re like, I get it, I get what he did there. Like the car being covered with the sheet and then the…
S: … body on the side of the highway covered in a sheet. Yeah.
I: Which is not to detract from that, it’s beautiful. It’s one of the best sequencing choices…
S: And a good example of how when you think of one, you immediately think of the other.
I: Exactly, and that’s just his brilliance. But Frank is also interesting, because the pictures – as much as they have that link – they also just have this weird, ineffable value to them. And they’re so beautiful on their own, but at the same time they work so superbly in concert with one another.
S: And, the ones that are more obvious then get you thinking about the more intractable ones… not intractable. I don't know what the word is, but the ones that are harder to pin down, the more ambiguous ones. Those get informed by the themes that are running through the others.
Robert Frank photographed by Wayne Miller, 1956
I: Precisely. I think that’s the ultimate achievement of the book and why it’s still so great to look at it, and to try to just kind of vibe with a little bit, and just get the feeling of what he was doing. It’s very jazzlike, and I love that about it. I love the story of him, much to his editor’s chagrin, just taking negatives and throwing them, and trashing them. And ones where he was like, “No, that’s all bad.” I mean I’m sure he kept them, and maybe that story was a little exaggerated. I remember hearing that somewhere, that when he was editing he was so just fierce about which ones he knew. But, I mean, he obviously knew what he was doing.
S: I think in general that was true – with his films, too. He was someone who was extremely intentional, yet not precious about it.
I: That’s the hope. I think that’s the balance that we’re all trying to do.
S: Alright, I feel like that maybe feels like a good place to stop. Thanks again for doing this.
I: Yeah, this was fun.
S: Agreed. Well, stay safe.
More of Ian’s work can be seen on his website and his Instagram. His most recent zine can be purchased here.
Copyright © Sebastian Siadecki, 2020.