Almost Everything with Jeffery Saddoris

Earlier this week I put up an image on Instagram with the caption “Time for a reboot.” It’s basically a “glitchy” version of my signature logo that I use as my avatar on Instagram and Twitter. I posted it because I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how I use—or in some cases misuse—social media and I’ve come to the conclusion that now is a great time to redefine what I want to get from and what I want to bring to social media.

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A fantastic article was recommended to me by Hugh Brownstone from Three Blind Men and an Elephant, who I had the pleasure of speaking to recently. It’s called The Amateur Spirit by Daniel Boorstin and if you’ll just indulge me, I’d like to share a quote that goes “I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.”

Also, if you love super cool fountain pens, or know someone who does (hint, hint) check out Karas Kustoms. They make a line of pens called Stonewashed that feature anodized barrels that look like they’ve been at the bottom of a backpack or the glove compartment of an old truck for years—and I mean that as a compliment. The orange barrel with the tumbled aluminum grip is particularly lovely.

And I finally got to see Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse and all I can say is wow. I am typically not a superhero/comic book movie person, but this flick was fantastic. If it’s still in the theater where you live, go see it.

Music in this episode: The Wrong Way (Jahzzar) / CC BY-SA 4.0

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how photographs influence our memories—not just of people and places, but events in our lives. For example, I have realized that there are memories of certain aspects of my childhood that are rooted not in an actual event but rather in the photographs depicting the event. There are multiple “important” events in my life where the time surrounding the event itself is a complete blur and my “memory” of it only exists because there happens to be a photograph.
So, in this conversation, we’re talking about how memory can often be influenced or even replaced entirely by photographs. We’re also wrestling a bit with a question Sean Tucker asked about whether photography is more about the end product — the image — or more about the process of making it.

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If you’re enjoying the conversations so far and you’d like to keep listening, you can subscribe to In Between in iTunes or in your favorite podcast app or you can get it as part of my Everything feed, which also includes Process Driven, Iterations, and anything else I happen to put up. Just search for “Jeffery Saddoris Everything” wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can connect with me on Instagram @jefferysaddoris or email me at [email protected].

If you would like to see what Jon is up to, you can find him on Instagram @jonwilkening or on his website at jonwilkening.com.

Music in this episode: Take Me Higher (Jahzzar) / CC BY-SA 4.0

Last week, we were in New Hampshire celebrating Christmas with family. Now, I’ve got to tell you that I love handmade gifts and this year my eleven-year-old niece Anya made me a gift that I absolutely love. It’s a canvas board which, for those of you who may bot know is basically a piece of mat board wrapped in canvas. This particular piece measures 3×9 inches and on it she painted the phrase “My Instrument” with a little camera in between the two words. What I found so amazing about it—besides than the fact that it was completely unexpected—was how much I love the typography, partially because it’s just so different from the way I see. I’m typically more Helvetica or Futura and this is reaching into David Carson territory.

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The MY INStrUment painting that my niece Anya made for me.

Lewis Rossignol is a terrific illustrator from Portland, Maine whose mixed media portraiture is fantastic. In addition to prints, he’s got two books available which I just ordered today and will hopefully be sitting down with him on an upcoming Process Driven to unpack some of his work.

The Art of the Title just posted their picks for their top 10 title sequences for 2018 and there is some really great work in there, particularly the titles for Counterpart and for the new season of Mozart in the Jungle.

And if you’re a fan of minimalistic graphic design—like me—you’ll love some of the prints available at 2046 Print Shop. I’ve got my eye on the General and Special Relativity prints for my new podcast studio.

Music in this episode: The Wrong Way (Jahzzar) / CC BY-SA 4.0

I’ve been sitting on something for a while because I didn’t know how or even if I should share it. But, I think it’s important and while I won’t share it in its entirety, I would like to share a portion of it because as I said, I think it’s important — both for me to say and maybe for you to hear. It all centers around a conversation I had with Adrianne that was one of if not the most difficult conversations we’ve ever had. It started with a podcast I was listening to which was a terrific interview with a conflict photojournalist named Giles Penfound. I was telling Adrianne about it and told her that when I was in high school, I thought seriously about becoming a photojournalist—specifically a combat photojournalist after seeing some of the work of Larry Burrows—and that photojournalism was one of the two types of photography that I was most drawn to.

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A British sculptor known as Anna & the Willow makes beautiful large scale outdoor sculptures out of rods of willow, which she then places in the forest near her North Yorkshire studio.

Can art be so beautiful that it makes you ill? According to an article in The Guardian, yes, provided you’re in Florence and looking at Renaissance art. It’s called Stendahl syndrome and apparently there are cases dating back to 1817 and a man is currently recovering from a heart attack in a Florence hospital after gazing at Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.

If you’re a fan of street photography, take a look at In-Sight, a short film by street photographer Nick Turpin, which profiles 10 photographers from the In-Sight collective on why they are drawn to shooting street.

Music in this episode: The Wrong Way (Jahzzar) / CC BY-SA 4.0

In the last episode, we talked about how I—and maybe even you—rewrote the memories of childhood so they would fit the narrative we crafted about it as an adult, and what happens when childhood photographs begin to poke holes in the story. We also talked about some of the challenges of monetizing our work to the point where we can actually make a living as an artist.
In this conversation, we’re talking about the ideas of urgent vs important when it comes to the work we make and how social media tends to encourage, and often reward, one over the other.

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If you’re enjoying the conversations so far and you’d like to keep listening, you can subscribe to In Between in iTunes or in your favorite podcast app or you can get it as part of my Everything feed, which also includes Process Driven, Iterations, and anything else I happen to put up. Just search for “Jeffery Saddoris Everything.”
You can connect with me on Instagram @jefferysaddoris or email me at [email protected].

If you would like to see what Jon is up to, you can find him on Instagram @jonwilkening or on his website at jonwilkening.com.

Music in this episode: Take Me Higher (Jahzzar) / CC BY-SA 4.0

One of the things that I enjoyed the most — and miss the most — about doing a weekly podcast like On Taking Pictures is having discussions in between episodes with friends and listeners. Sometimes we would go a little deeper on conversations that were started on the show, other times they would prompt related discussions connected to things going on in our lives. I think the in between moments are what are most interesting to me — connecting broad conversations around a topic to our actual everyday lived experiences. I’m starting to roll tape on some of these conversations and while I’m not entirely sure whether it will become a new show per se, many of you have expressed an interest in hearing more of these types of explorations. With that, here’s In Between.

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As I said in the intro, I’m not entirely sure what this is going to be, but I’d love to hear what you thought of it, and whether or not you’d like to hear more conversations like it. Email me at [email protected].

You can catch up with Jon on Instagram @jonwilkening or on his website at jonwilkening.com.

Music in this episode: Take Me Higher (Jahzzar) / CC BY-SA 4.0

Iteration 37 was called The Myth of the Perfect Thing and in it I chronicled part of my years long search for a new camera to replace or at least complement my Fuji X-Pro1, ultimately leading me to the Olympus EM1 Mkii. A few days after I recorded that episode I actually bought an X-T3 and since I started posting images taken with it, I’ve gotten some emails and messages asking what happened and whether or not my feelings had changed about the Olympus. The short answer is no, but I feel like this deserves a little clarification. The main reason I chose the Olympus was how it felt in the hand, but as I mentioned mentioned in 37, it wasn’t JUST the feel — the performance of the camera is outstanding, and not outstanding for a micro 4/3 camera, just outstanding. Full stop. But something in the back of my head kept me wondering about the new Fuji. If you were ever an On Taking Pictures listener, you heard me repeatedly wax poetic about my love and borderline obsession with my X-Pro1.

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Esquire just released a brutally honest and revealing interview with Bruce Springsteen talking about politics, mental health, and exorcising some of his demons. And if you enjoy the interview and want to learn more about Bruce’s life, I can’t recommend his autobiography Born To Run highly enough, especially the audiobook version. Hearing Bruce tell his own life story — at least for me — was a profoundly moving experience.

Also, Russian director Maxim Zhestkov has created a new short film called Layers, which shows a variety of matte black monoliths being bisected by an invisible force revealing multicolored layered interiors. My description isn’t doing the piece justice—it really is hypnotic.

And finally, Google has created a new augmented-reality app called Vermeer that pulls together images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art here in DC, the Rijksmuseum, the Louvre, the Frick Collection, and The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum into a virtual museum of all 36 pieces of Vermeer’s work.

Music in this episode: The Wrong Way (Jahzzar) / CC BY-SA 4.0

I woke up the other morning thinking about The Beatles, specifically the dramatic changes their work went through over the course of their career. From what I know of them, they began doing covers of other people’s material – mostly early American rock ‘n’ roll from artists like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, and Elvis Presley. Learning the songs of their heroes allowed them to use that material as starting points for their own songs. The early Beatles songs were — at least to me — straight ahead rock ‘n’ roll that became the blueprint for the pop songs of the day. They were simple but catchy, and they were packaged in a way that nobody had ever seen or heard before. As they became better and better musicians, they branched out into more complex arrangements — their songs became more “experimental“ for lack of a better word. Somewhere around Revolver, things started to get really interesting.

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I’m loving the Martin Scorsese Masterclass. I don’t know how long it will last but Masterclass is running a buy one get one special at the moment. So, you can get an all access pass for yourself and one for a friend or family member. I don’t have any sort of affiliation with Masterclass, I just have really been enjoying some of the classes they have available.

Also, a listener sent me a video by a photographer named Jamie Windsor who raises some interesting points around the ethics of street photography. The hinge pin of his argument against street photography centers around whether or not you can accurately represent a culture that you are not a part of. It’s an interesting question and honestly something I need a bit more time with. It may even be worth reaching out to Jamie for a conversation.

And lastly, if you like astronauts and pop culture, you’re going to love the work of painter Scott Listfield. Not only does he have terrific technique, there’s a great sense of both irony and humor to his work.

Music in this episode: The Wrong Way (Jahzzar) / CC BY-SA 4.0

There’s a scene in the new remake of A Star is Born that’s been rattling around in my head since I saw the film. It’s the scene where Bradley Cooper’s character Jackson is talking to Lady Gaga’s character Ally about self-expression and finding her voice. Jackson says, “Look, talent comes everywhere, but having something to say and a way to say it so that people listen to it, that’s a whole other bag. And unless you get out there and you try to do it, you’ll never know. That’s just the truth. And if there’s one reason that we’re supposed to be here it’s to say something so that people want to hear it. So you gotta grab it. And you don’t apologize or worry about why they’re listening or how long they’re gonna be listening for. You just tell them what you want to say.”

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8 Artists on Painting is a terrific video which features interviews with artists including Michael Simpson, Cecily Brown, and David Hockney talking about painting and making art, whatever that means.

Painter David Salle talks about joining abstraction and figuration and language and not really knowing where a painting will end up when he begins.

Photographer Troy Colby explores the idea of what a father should be in his long term photo essay, The Fragility of Fatherhood

Music in this episode: The Wrong Way (Jahzzar) / CC BY-SA 4.0

When I was a kid, there was a big department store chain called The May Company. It was sort of like a Macy’s and the one nearest our house was at an outdoor mall called the Eastland Center. In the lower level of The May Company, they had an art supply section and whenever I would go there with my mom, she would let me stay there in the art supply section while she went shopping. I still remember the smells of pencils and the oil paints and to this day, the smell of art supplies takes me right back there. They even had little pads of scratch paper so you could try out the different things. So I did. I was in heaven and I would just plop down in the middle of one of the aisles and doodle away until my mom came to get me. Sometimes, she would let me get one of the fancy drawing pencils without an eraser on the end so that I could continue my budding masterpieces at home.

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I read a story on TechCrunch about protections for freelancers in what they call the gig economy. Did you know that last year more than 1 out of 3 people worked as freelancers? That’s nearly 60 million people, and the numbers are growing. It’s a fascinating read.

LA-based photographer Elizabeth Weinberg recently did an AMA with booooooom.com readers and she talks about some of the strategies that worked for her when she was just starting her business. While it’s primarily focused on photography, I think a lot of it applies to illustrators, writers, really anyone trying to establish or grow your business as a freelancer.

Artpil and Maison have released their 30 Under 30 Women Photographers list and there is some stunning work on it and definitely a few I would like to reach out to as potential guests on Process Driven.

Music in this episode: The Wrong Way (Jahzzar) / CC BY-SA 4.0