Where do you hail from and how long have you been at this whole photography thing?
I grew up in Ohio in a small town south of Toledo, on the other side of Lake Erie. I guess I started photography in High School, the shop teacher did double duty and taught photography as but the students shot for the school newspaper. So it wasn't a Fine Arts thing. My dad had done it before as well. Then I went to college to pursuing a general study of art but I liked the photo faculty there a lot. I continued on in that program.
If you're from outside of Toledo and not Europe, where did you get your name from?
Everyone thinks I'm from Germany or my family is, but that's not the case. My family came to the States a long, long time ago, generations removed. So it's not a German household or anything like that.
What type of camera do you shoot with?
For the work I am doing now, It is one of the Canon Prosumer Digital SLR cameras. The top of the line thing I don't need that because the images are comprised of so many smaller images. I don't need a pristine initial image. And there's a lot of post production work done in Photoshop too. It's a good camera but the technical side isn't that slick.
For some reason I thought that you worked very traditionally. Can you tell me a bit about your process?
It's all done digitally. I started that back as an undergrad too. The program that I was in only did traditional photo, chemical black and white, color, darkroom stuff. They didn't have any of the facilities so it's all self taught - the digital aspect of it. I got pretty good at it, they are all refined images, but the tools that I use are fairly rudimentary and it's a simple process. I spent a couple summers gathering source material, traveling around to small towns, photographing landscapes, buildings and architecture, all that sort of stuff, without any real intention for the images. After the fact, when I have an idea for the image, I go back into all that material and pull things from different places, then photograph myself as the last part. Its always a synthesized image and a figure in front of that.
It impressed me that you seem to take a lot of time constructing a project statement for yourself when most artists barely bother. Why do you feel it is important?
Truthfully, a lot of it can be coined to UB and the program that is really theoretically intensive. You have to do it. I suppose I do it for practice because I don't think that am all that good at explaining the work or myself. Like this interview; I don't know if I'm a good interviewer or not because I don't know that the language I would use would be all that interesting. I am already rewriting the artist statement - the one that you read - and making it a lot better. I's a way to practice talking about the work and investigating the issues. It helps to understand after the fact, because it feels good to go back in and rewrite it because you loose site of it when you're actually working on it. I assume you looked at the Wrong Film series. I haven't made anything for it in about a year so it's time to go in and reinvestigate.
Do you often notice things about your work, a hidden meaning for example, that you hadn't before?
No. But different things have come to mind that I've forgotten. Things that were there when I made the work. I guess I lost site of them or never introduced them when I talked about the work. The projects that I've done after that I can pull from and reflect on too.
Is it your hope that the audience will create their own narrative or that you'll be able to persuade them into your realm of thinking?
I think that the interesting images are always the ones that are open ended. When you're given enough to go on, but you can create your own narrative, and so thats the way my images operate. In each one, the figure is sort of an anonymous every man and a surrogate for the viewer. You have this one to one relationship. Each one is a suspended moment where you are confronted with some situation and you have to make a decision, or his action is called into question. I think from that moment the viewer can finish the picture.
Is there a subject matter that you keep finding yourself coming back to?
Sure. It all goes back to the small town and locality and issues of place because of where I grew up. It started because I was always really bad at creating a series of work whether it was photos or paintings. I could always make a one off image and make the narrative interesting but I didn't know how to construct a series that worked towards anything. I read this book called Winesburg, OH. It was written about a town that was close to where I grew up. If you pull back the veneer of a small town, the quaint ideas about what it is; it was made up of twenty-six little vignettes that each concerned a character. Sort of a look into the inner-dialogue of that person. I was in a class where we were forced to create a series of work and I knew that I had this limitation, so I thought 'this book is a series of work with small parts to it and I could illustrate that'. I used it as a crutch to start working and then I figured out that I was really concerned with this place. All the work has been about that in some way.
Do you use a local printer?
I do it myself because as a grad student you have service hours too. I was recruited to work at the printing lab at UB, so I have access to a big printer and it's really cheap and convenient.
You have worked in some video as well. Is that because you have been commissioned for specific projects or because you are interested in expanding your portfolio?
I started trying to work with video because my wife does and we met in grad school. I took a class one semester in media studies and it was a production course so we had to work with video. I got a lot of ideas from that and it was an entirely different sort of dialogue - how the camera works, the video operates. It really confused me at the time because I had two things that were so closely related, but the discussions about the two were so different. I was trying to figure out my thesis at the time which made it that much harder.
I don't think I'm very good at video, but I tried one summer to make a film anyway and it went very badly. So now I used the video camera in the same way that I would use my other camera. With the little bit of video that I've done, I used a stationary video camera in front of a green screen. It was one continuous shot with no movement, although the duration's different, it's the same as just clicking in a fraction of a second. But also similar because in Walking Video there is this constant movement, there is no end, it's the same moment in motion. I created this handmade film strip with still photos stitched together. Its very obvious because there's thread and tape and glue, although you probably couldn't tell on the small video, but you can see where the images are joined. I filmed that where I sort of pulled it along with my hand. It goes around in a carousel and that is an important part, because it wasn't this linear thing, it was constantly moving in a circle. I did this green screen thing where I had to fake walk in place which makes it look totally absurd and ridiculous. People laugh when I show it.
Tell me a bit about being/having been a college professor at NU, UB, Brockport and NCCC. Do the students have a lot of respect for you?
I don't think I have a hard time, but I could be saying that for my on morale. I get Googled every semester and when they find me, I think they respect my work at least. I guess I sound like I know what I'm talking about, so it goes pretty well.
What are the benefits of teaching young, moldable minds?
You have people coming in from a wide range of backgrounds, experiences and interests, especially because most of the classes I have taught are filled with non-majors and people that have no particular interest photography. Even though we are all sort of familiar with cameras and photographs, lots of people aren't familiar with Fine Art photography so they have other interests. You have to familiarize yourself with what's going on in their majors, their areas of study and find some way to make it interesting to people that aren't inherently into the things that you're into. You find a lot of ways to approach the subject and art and photography and try to communicate that to other people and so it challenges the position that you have or the ideas that you have about it. If it was just me making work, I could make it in one particular way and just have a very linear path but because I have to introduce it to so many other people who respond differently to it, I think it makes you more objective about it. If you have a sustained career in teaching, you have to keep up with the critique as that changes. You stay engaged with the community, especially important if you plan to teach for a long time.
We recently reviewed UB's Visual Arts Senior Thesis show. Our critique of the show fell on the unfavorable side and we received a lot of feedback from our readers claiming that the show was the best they could do on a shoestring budget and short time frame. Can you tell us why perhaps the show was poorly executed? Do the students lack sufficient guidance?
I think that the program at UB, because it is so driven by understanding the theory, the students sort of have a lack of 'hands on' from the beginning. What they don't have, are a lot of instructors who are interested in teaching them how to actually make anything.
What would you drill into your students brains?
Big life lessons? I think that, at the point that I get them, hardly any would work as hard as they have to to really accomplish anything, to have a sustainable career. Art classes seem like high school art where you're graded on effort, but it's very hard to make a career for yourself because there's so much competition. Develop that practice of daily work. I worked all the time when I was an undergrad. I tend to compare what I was doing at that moment to what I see them doing and for most its a huge lacking on their part.
What makes you happy?
These are the questions Im really bad at! What would make me very happy now would be to see a movie. My wife and I used to go see lots and lots of movies, every week we would see one or a couple. We have a daughter now and she's fourteen months old so we haven't seen any movies in the theater. It would make me very happy to get out and see one. Luckily there hasn't been very many good ones since she's been born.
Do you have a vice?
I'm not addicted to anything I guess. Coca-Cola maybe? I used to drink lots and lots of it and sometimes, to work, I sort of need to have it, but I'm trying not to have it. Like smoking, sometimes you need to have it in order to do anything.
Do you like ArtSpace?
I haven't been there that long really. As far as living there and being able to work, it's a fantastic space. Especially with our daughter, we had a really nice apartment before, but the configuration of it was terrible. It was long and lots of little rooms so, my wife would be at one end and I would be at the other, we would yell to each other and the baby would be wandering between the two. This is great because we are all together, all the time.
