Almost Everything with Jeffery Saddoris

One of the biggest struggles as a maker, regardless of what it is that you’re making, can be finding meaning in what you make. Whether you’re a painter, or a sculptor, or a writer, or a photographer, finding meaning in a particular project is often one of the obstacles that prevents us from starting, or can be one of the challenges to overcome in order to finish. As someone who spends a great deal of time talking to creative people, I often hear about projects at the poles, either early in the planning stages, or after the work has been completed, but rarely in the middle — which can be a challenge to talk about because there are often themes and ideas that haven’t quite come together yet. Oli Kellett is a street photographer from the UK who’s 18 months into a multi year project that brings him to America several times a year to photograph cities and the people who inhabit them.
At its core, the project is about crossroads, but as you’ll hear in this conversation, Oli is still wrestling with the literal representation — those few moments before the light has changed that leave us alone with our thoughts — to the symbolism and myth of the crossroads that draws a line from the ancient Greeks to a young guitar player from Mississippi who made a deal with the devil just outside Memphis.

LINKS
PDN Photo Annual

CONNECT WITH OLI
Website: https://www.olikellett.com
Instagram: @Oli_Kellett

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(Jahzzar) / CC BY-SA 4.0

Nick Mayo is a terrific street photographer from Grand Rapids, Michigan who is using YouTube and Instagram to build a platform centered around serving the photographic community and having an ongoing dialog discussing the challenges of making and sharing authentic work. His
Two Minute Tuesdays for example are live weekly snapshots of some of the things he’s wrestling with not only as a visual artist, but also as a human being. In this conversation we discuss the value of revisiting a favorite location again and again and how being a little outside his comfort zone, is exactly where he likes to be.

CONNECT WITH NICK
YouTube: http://youtube.com/nickexposed
Instagram: @NickExposed
Facebook: @NickExposed

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(Jahzzar) / CC BY-SA 4.0

As much as I love artists like Rauschenberg, deKooning and even Boucher, the first artist I knew by name was Frank Frazetta. He painted worlds I had never seen before, filled with warriors being pulled by a team of polar bears, red eyed demons on horseback and beautiful scantily clad maidens. I poured over his books, meticulously copying my favorite characters. While it was great drawing practice, I wasn’t doing anything original. I had sketchbooks filled with Frazetta drawings, but not one that was a Saddoris.

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I’m loving the work of Canadian illustrator Terry Edward Elkins. He has a terrific style that reminds me of vintage national parks posters and some of my favorite children’s book illustrators.

Questlove is a monster. He’s the founder and drummer for the Roots, a DJ, a producer, a professor, and an author. As you’ll hear in this NPR conversation, he also has some really inspiring thoughts around creativity.

Israeli photographer Natan Dvir was the winner of the 2017 Lens Culture Emerging Talent award. His project Platforms takes viewers below the streets of New York to “investigate the interactions (or lack thereof) between the city’s commuters.”

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

Trying to make a living as a professional photographer is hard, really hard. You might get into it thinking that all you’re going to do is take pictures, but it doesn’t take long to realize that time with a camera in your hands is only a small part of a what’s required day to day. It’s even harder when you’re also working a full-time job. But Freddy Clark is doing the work. He’s taking his passion for photography, an encyclopedic knowledge of beer, and a background in IT and is steadily building a new career as a food and beverage photographer, and it all started at a small rock ’n’ roll radio station in the Poconos.

CONNECT WITH FREDDY
Website: http://santephoto.com
Instagram: @santephoto
Twitter: @santephoto

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(Jahzzar) / CC BY-SA 4.0

Dutch street photographer Maarten Rots makes the kind of pictures that the graphic designer in me can’t get enough of. His purposeful compositions are made up of strong lines, bold colors, and subtle overlapping textures with just enough visual ambiguity to pull me in and ask myself, “what is that?” It’s the type of work that I seldom grow tired of and often find new details the more I look at it. In his self-published magazine
March & Rock
, Maarten’s work takes on a different dimension when it’s no longer confined to a phone or a browser and it’s exactly this project that I wanted to talk to him about.

CONNECT WITH MAARTEN
Website: http://maartenrots.nl
Instagram: @maartenrots

MUSIC
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(Jahzzar) / CC BY-SA 4.0

Earlier today, Bill and I recorded episode 312 of On Taking Pictures and while I wouldn’t say it was our best show—it was a good show. I think every show is a good show for one reason or another. It was one of the more significant shows because of the number—episode 312. If you do the math, 312 marks the end of six years of doing On Taking Pictures every week and while I’ve talked in the past about what doing OTP has meant to me and what I’ve learned from it, how it has changed my life and the new friends I have as a result of it, those things are really byproducts of doing the work.

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Christopher Burkett is a landscape photographer who uses a large format 8×10 film camera and discontinued Cibacrome paper to make stunning photographs of the natural world. Unfortunately, when Christopher runs out of paper, he will put away his camera and turn out the lights in his darkroom for the last time.

Sanderson to Brackettville is short documentary made by filmmaker Parker Hill as she followed photographer Jason Lee on a four-day stretch in West Texas as he attempted “to document residual American landscapes across Texas in early 2017 with large format color films” for his new book A Plain View.

If you are a fan of classic movies and terrific graphic design, Indiewire has you covered with this fantastic collection of every movie poster iconic graphic design Saul Bass ever created.

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

Sean Tucker is a photographer in London who I was introduced to by an
On Taking Pictures listener who emailed me and told me “you have to see this guy’s work. I think it’s right up your alley.” He was right. Sean’s work is terrific, but it was his YouTube channel—how he approaches and speaks about photography and creativity—that was even more up my alley. As you’ll hear, Sean is honest, insightful, and the dedication he has to the craft of photography really shines through. We begin this episode at a point in the conversation where we were talking about some of the challenges commercial photographers face working with clients, specifically when your ability as a photographer to simply shoot the brief seems more important than having the talent and creativity to go beyond it.

CONNECT WITH SEAN
Website: http://seantucker.photography/
YouTube: Sean Tucker
Instagram: @seantuck
Twitter: @seantuck

MUSIC
Please Listen Carefully
(Jahzzar) / CC BY-SA 4.0

I was introduced to Karl Taylor in 2010 when a friend gave me one of his photography training DVDs. Karl’s energy and enthusiasm for photography along with his incredible knowledge of how to make great pictures in virtually any situation really set him as my benchmark of what photographic training should be. He also has a brilliant way of bringing a fashion style and sensibility to commercial and product photography. Karl lives in the Channel Islands between England and France, and when he came to California in 2012 for a production, I got a chance to spend some time with him and his team in Long Beach and Joshua Tree and we’ve been friends ever since. In this conversation, Karl and I discuss the business side of creativity. I began by asking him to talk about how changes in the industry nearly forced him to close the doors of his studio earlier this year.

CONNECT WITH KARL
Website: karltaylorportfolio.com
Instagram: @karltaylorphotography
Facebook: @karltaylorphotography

MUSIC
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(Jahzzar) / CC BY-SA 4.0

There are some photographs that just stick with you — images that once you see them, you simply can’t unsee. It happens across virtually all genres of photography. A single image, a particular project or an entire body of work seeps into our being and becomes a point of reference along an internal visual continuum. When I first saw the work of Nick Brandt, it was unlike anything I had ever seen. His photographs taken in East Africa transcended any wildlife photography that I had seen before. Nick is somehow able to photograph the souls of the animals, not just their image or likeness. In his newest body of work, called
Inherit the Dust
, Nick returns to East Africa to show how habitat loss as a result of population explosion and urbanization are dramatically changing the landscape and threatening biodiversity and the continued existence of species that roamed the plains of Africa for thousands of years prior to the proliferation of man. It’s a fascinating conversation and an incredibly powerful body of work.

LINKS
Big Life Foundation
Amboseli Park
Fitzcarraldo
Apocalypse Now
The Godfather
Godfather, Part II
The Conversation
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

CONNECT WITH NICK
Website: nickbrandt.com

MUSIC
Please Listen Carefully
(Jahzzar) / CC BY-SA 4.0

When I was a junior in high school I took my first photography class and one of the things we had to do before we got to shoot with the “real” cameras — in our case, they were Pentax K1000s loaded with Tri-X — was to build a pinhole camera from one of the round Quaker Oats boxes. And I remember thinking how incredible it was to see the simplicity of what photography is: light and time. Not even a lens — just a strip of gaffer tape covering a tiny hole in some tinfoil. But there we all were, toting our oatmeal boxes around making pictures. Then we would go into the darkroom and print little positive contact prints from the paper negatives and I’ve gotta tell you, it was alchemy. For us, the pinhole camera was just a stepping stone to get to use an SLR. In this episode, I’m talking to Jon Wilkening a photographer in Philadelphia who uses pinhole as his preferred platform for communicating his creativity. For Jon, pinhole is his tool of choice for expressing his point of view. Jon calls his work “the blurry middle between photography and painting.” His pictures are terrific and it all started sort of by accident.

LINKS
Holga Pinhole Camera
David duChemin
Ernst Haas

CONNECT WITH JON
Website: jonwilkening.com
Twitter: @jonwilkening
Instagram: @jonwilkening

MUSIC
Please Listen Carefully
(Jahzzar) / CC BY-SA 4.0