All right, let's do this. Peanut, if you're staying in the room, no talking. Hello and welcome to the Photo Work Podcast, the talky and touchy feely version of my book photo 40 photographers on process and Practice. Hello, everyone. I'm Sasha Wolff recording from Woodstock, New York and joined as usual By My friend, Mr. My joined. Joined as usual. He is my friend.
Joined his friend by my usual.
He's also producer extraordinaire. Mr. I don't have any excuse today. Mr. Michael Chovindalton, my friend and producer, Mr. Michael Chovendalton. There he is. Hi, Michael.
Yeah, well, I mean, I'm feeling a little exhausted. We're recording at the end of the week, which we don't normally do.
No.
Yeah. So I just had my first two summer classes and they're, they're four hours long. And, and those first two meetings are always pretty intense because it's a basically a 15 week semester compressed into five weeks and I have to get them out and photographing right away.
Wow. Yeah.
But I do, I actually enjoy that kind of intense seminar style of teaching. But it does take a lot out of you.
Yeah, for sure. Well, I will just say one thing and then we'll get to the episode. I had a fantastic meeting with Taylor Tower and I have a standing meeting every Friday and almost every other day. But anyway, today, two main topics. One was some wonderful sessions we have planned for our senior fellows, which I'm really excited about. But the other which pertains to our listening audience is our hundredth episode is coming up and we're planning some really cool stuff for that that I think we'll talk about in detail on the next podcast. But I just want to let people know that that's coming up and we are going to actually reach out to you, our listeners, for some. We have some requests for you, but they're fun. So that will be coming up, our hundredth episode and something fun and interactive, hopefully with you all.
Absolutely, yeah. Oh, and you just reminded me. I have a quick announcement, if you will allow me.
Yeah, sure, go ahead.
I'm part of an event called the Homecoming Biennial and this is the year where we accept applications. It is free to submit@homecomingbiennial.com it is free to have your work in the show, it is free to be in the publication. We even make prints for you. The only thing is, if you come to the professional development part of the event, you do have to pay for your own room and board. But this is for anyone who graduated last year and this year with of photo degree from community college through graduate school. And it's a fantastic event. And again, there are just no fees all along the way. And you get to show at the RIT City Arts center and the professional development activities and the portfolio reviews are in the beautiful RIT Magic Spell Studios.
What is rit?
Oh, Rochester Institute of Technology. You're right. I shouldn't just assume.
Everyone knows you're not an assumer. I'm shocked.
I know. I usually explain everything with pain detail.
Where's Michael Chovin? Dalton. Good golly.
That's right.
Well, that sounds really wonderful. And thank you for announcing that great opportunity for people. Yep. Well, let's get to the episode. This was a wonderful conversation that I had with the photographer Sage Sawyer, photographer and educator. Sage, I'll just say is incredibly prolific and has had a long career. But if I may just say personally, Sage made this black and white work in the. The 80s that we talk about, and it's some of my favorite work ever made. And that's not hyperbole.
No, no, I agree.
Raheem and I, Raheem Fortune and I were talking the other day about stuff having to do with his career, but I told him that I had just talked to Sage and he. I mean, he's also like just an over the moon fan of this work. And we geeked out for like 30, 40 minutes talking about this work and how amazing it is, and so folks don't know it. You know, I hope after this conversation with Sage, they'll really dig in. It's so special. I. Yeah. I mean, so many people that have come after Sage, I think, have really. That knew the work have really benefited from its example of excellence, so.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
And, you know, the. The beauty of this all is that the work is being revisited and published. Passing Time was just published in 2023, and American Scene was republished in 20. So this work is accessible and it's getting the attention it deserved. Back in the 80s. Sage Sawyer's name should be on the tip of everyone's tongues, like Winogrand and Friedlander and William Gedney. And it's just. It's incredible work.
I couldn't agree more. 100% emoji. Yes.
And of course, she's still working. You also have a fantastic conversation about Witness to Beauty, which is very different work. And that's part of this conversation, is Sage is just someone who likes to try new things. And you even talk a little bit about gear and trying new gear and just, you know, Sage's enthusiasm is infectious. And the way she talks about her influences and her work, it's also beautiful. You know, this is someone who's. Who's still doing it, and the work is just incredible.
Yes. I'm with you on all of the above. I didn't really know Sage before this conversation, and now I'm planning this is true. To go visit her. She has a cabin in New Hampshire, and I think we're going to head up. And I said to her, please, like, my fantasy would be that, you know, come camp out on your lawn. And to balance the rustic, I get to come inside and look at vintage prints. To which she said yes. So I'm.
Oh, nice.
This is like, this is literally my dream. This is my dream weekend getaway, right?
I mean, camping and looking at prints. Oh, my God.
Road trip with the fam. And camping out and looking at vintage prints of Sage Sawyers.
Wow.
I'm one lucky dog. Well, Michael, let's get to it. If you don't mind, Please take it away.
My pleasure. And here's your conversation with Sage Sawyer.
Sage Sawyer, welcome to the Photo Work podcast. It's great to finally have you on. I'm so looking forward to talking with you today. So, yeah, thanks so much for being with me.
Hi, Sasha. So thank you for having me, and great to talk to you.
So, Sage, I'm very interested in hearing all about your background, which is where we always start. But first, I just want to embarrass you by saying that how often your name comes up with artists, that I'm speaking to a lot of young artists. And by young, I mean anyone under 35, I guess, as one of their favorite photographers. So your name is just constantly, constantly, constantly in the conversation. And I'm sure you're aware of that, but I'm just saying it anyway, so.
Well, that's so nice. Thank you.
Tell us all about your. Your history. Where did you grow up? How did you find photography? Where you are now, the whole kit and caboodle.
Okay. So I grew up in Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C. i was always interested in photography. I grew up with a mother who had been a fashion model in the 40s and had been photographed by Richard Avedon and Irving, Pennsylvania. So I grew up looking at these fashion pictures of her. And she also was a, you know, took a lot of snapshots, and we would sit next to each other making our albums together. And then I went off to college. I went to Harvard University, and I still didn't really think of photography, you know, I thought of it sort of as, you know, you take a photograph and then you write. You know, there's. It needs writing with it. So I photographed for the school newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, and I was majoring in English initially, and I thought I might become a writer or a journalist or, you know, maybe a photojournalist. But still, I was thinking, no, I'm mostly, you know, in the writing mode. And I took my first photo class as a sophomore in college from someone named Dick Rogers, Richard P. Rogers. He was a filmmaker. He became a filmmaker.
I know who Dick Rogers is because. I'm sorry to interrupt. Well, he taught at Purchase when I was there.
Oh, good. Yeah, I loved it. He was incredible.
Yeah, he was amazing.
And he ended up married to Susan myself. So the small world. Small world, yeah. But the way he talked. He was so eloquent. And the way he talked about photographs, he'd leave them up on the screen for a long time, and so you could really look at them. And he'd start. He'd first say nothing, and then he'd start talking. And it was really transformative. And for the first time, I really understood the power of a photograph. Then I was very fortunate. My senior year, Todd Papageorge was a visiting artist. And this was before he went to Yale. So we're Talking about, you know, 75, 76, he was at Harvard. And he was so eloquent and funny and so encouraging that I decided that this was something perhaps I could dedicate my life to. Oh, also, the year before, Bill Eggleston was a visiting artist.
Yeah. You did pretty well with his professors.
Yeah. And Bill liked to hold classes at the local bar, which, back in the 70s, you could get away with that still. And I did not really like that idea. So I didn't really go to many classes with Bill, but I did do the work. And I would sort of find out from a male friend what had happened during class. And so Bill had his. I think his uniform was kind of a dark suit tucked into riding boots. That was how he went around Cambridge.
Very Southern gentleman.
Southern gentleman, yeah. And then I didn't go to grad school, actually, which was. Didn't get my mfa, which was a mistake, I guess. When I got out of college, I was basically trying to be Garry Winogrand. I was photographing with a Leica, and I was out photographing, trying to do candids on the street. And I was going to public events, and pictures were just awful. And I. Eventually, Todd Papa George had told me about. He was using A Fujika camera. I think it's what he used for the Studio 54 work. And I thought, well, maybe that would help. Maybe that would slow me down.
So I say, why? Say why? For folks who don't know.
Well, because a Fuji is. So you're using 120 film. And with a Fujika, because it's a six by nine, it's a long format, like same proportions as 35 millimeter, but a bigger negative, bigger negative. A six by nine centimeter negative. And you only get eight shots on a roll. So you really, you know, you don't want to be at the end of the roll and then miss what ends up being the best moment, right? So you only have eight shots. So you really have to be selective. So I would. I started shooting with that and I actually had a Leica 28 millimeter viewfinder on the top because. Because the viewfinder was notoriously inaccurate on the Fuji. And I would sort of zone focus and then I would just shoot. I wouldn't focus for every picture. I was, you know, stopped down to F16 or F22 and I had a flash on camera on a bracket next to the camera and I would just zone focus and shoot. And suddenly I found that the pictures were getting better. That when I asked permission and when I used this bigger camera, the pictures were suddenly getting much more interesting. And so at that point I thought, well, I started taking. I took a workshop with Lee Friedlander. He came to Mass College of Art, and I took a workshop with him and I took a workshop with Garry Winogrand. At that point I had some friends who were taking classes with Nick Nixon who was teaching at MassArt. And I sat in on a semester of one of his advanced classes. All of those were really, really helpful. And then eventually a year or two later, I started teaching at MassArt in the early 80s. And, you know, I met Baldwin Lee, who was there directing the program. And there were just. It was a great place to meet other. Other interesting photographers. Abe Morrell, we eventually hired Abe and Abe was there. So it was a great place to be. And so I was lucky enough to receive some fellowships early on while I was photographing. So, you know, Mass Artists foundation fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts. And I got a Guggenheim in 1984. You know, maybe too early, I would say, you know, maybe it would have been better to struggle more before I got a Guggenheim. I think again, I think I. It was a little bit imposter syndrome where I felt like, what? You know, I'm not very Old. And the work, you know, I'm just getting started here. You know, I didn't do great pictures my Guggenheim year because of that. I think I was sort of like, really?
That's interesting. Wow.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, not that, you know, I was incredibly grateful, but I felt like it was hard to prove that I was worthy of that. Anyway, so that's how I got started. And I really didn't end up publishing a book of my work until I was in my 50s. In 2007, I published Perfectible Worlds, which was basically through Photo Lucida. It was a book prize. And then after that, I got the publishing bug, and I thought, well, I've got all these old projects. I gotta get them out there. But before that, when I was young, I think I was always rushing on to the next project. And it was harder then. I mean, now we're living in a sort of heyday of book publishing and publishers who will do these small runs, and it's wonderful. But back then, you know, there was Aperture, there were some university presses, but most places wanted to DO runs of 5,000 copies of books or more. And, you know, that's tough unless you're photographing famous people.
Absolutely.
So I guess that it was that and that I didn't really put the effort in to really push to get things published.
Did you show at a gallery or any galleries, or what was your.
I did. I did. I showed. I was showing at that point at Vision Gallery. Brent Sikima was in Boston, and he was. He was at Vision, and I also showed a lot of work at nonprofits like Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Oregon.
Yeah, I know they've been a big supporter of yours. That's Christopher Lauschenberg. And. Yeah, yeah.
Chris is amazing. He's done so much for so many young photographers.
Absolutely. Yeah.
He's incredible. And Houston center for Photography. So I did show. And especially, you know, when I was working on the. At Home With Themselves, the work about gay and lesbian couples. I had a lot of shows around the country and that work. I really did try to get a book, make a book of that work, but again, it was tough. And Aperture was actually interested in that project, but they did not want to pull. Publish the interviews. I had interviewed all the couples that I photographed, and I thought it was important to contextualize that subject for people. And they said, well, you know, we're not really interested in doing the interviews. And I said, no. I'm like, well, I walked away, which I think was the right decision, because I thought it would have just been sort of sensationalist back then. I mean, it sounds funny now talking about from today's world, but back then I thought, no, you know, people really need to hear what people have to say in addition to looking at their picture. So when I showed that work, I did have the interviews on the wall next to the photographs. I did eventually self publish that book in 2014 when there were a number of same sex marriage initiatives pending in different states. And Blue sky had said, you know, come show this work, because, you know, there were Oregons voting on the same sex marriage initiative in October. So I thought, well, oh, this might be a good time to finally publish that work. And I looked around quickly to see if I could find a publisher who could do that in a few months and of course that was impossible. So I ended up doing a blurb book and I printed maybe four or five hundred copies and then I. I've just basically sold those out through my website. And it's. I was very glad I did that because I've gotten incredibly touching letters from people all over the world. I mean, I've sent it to so many different countries and it's been an interesting thing. So self publishing, that's the other thing. I think it's great that you can self publish now and there's no shame in it. In fact, it's a terrific way of doing things.
Absolutely. Without a doubt. There's no wrong or bad way of publishing. I don't think, if you're getting your work out there.
Exactly.
I just want to go back to something you said in passing, which is that you regretted not going to graduate school, though it sounds like you sort of cobbled together graduate education in some ways. But tell me what that thought process is because I'm really just coming back to it because I know this is something that's really agonizing for so many people and a lot of people listening to the podcast. I know this because they write to us all the time. This sort of, you know, crossroads and difficulty in making this decision because obviously not only is there expense involved, but you can't be working a job. I mean, it's complicated to just drop out of a sort of adult life if you're or delay it. What are your regrets? Where would you have gone or right to have gone? What would you have gotten out of it, do you think?
Well, it just made it harder to get a tenured teaching job and to get hired basically. And you know, it was easy to get. It was just for practical reasons. It's not that I feel like I missed out on the experience. And, you know, I probably would have considered going to Yale, but I'd already had Todd, so I didn't really feel like I needed to repeat that experience necessarily. The other thing, I guess, I think is that I probably could have learned some things about lighting and things that I. That were harder for me to learn on my own.
Yeah, tech stuff.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Technical stuff. I think for me though, I was sort of off and running, you know, from the age of 25 on and I just wanted to photograph. I didn't want to stop to think about school or anything else. And so, you know, maybe that was the right decision. I think it would have been. It would have been great to see what other people were doing and to be influenced by that. But at the same time, probably I should have gone back and gone to grad school when I was in my 30s or something. You know, that's hard to do when you've gotten grants and stuff already.
Yeah, absolutely. So I want to go back also to the 6:9 because I think it's really important. You talked about the way in which it sort of made you more deliberate because you only had eight frames to work with per roll. But I mean to my mind, and I know to yours as well, so I just want to get into it a bit. The other thing with the 6:9 and the lens you were using, a wider lens is that it really made you. And you were doing a lot of what you refer to as environmental portraits, so photographs of people, but with a lot of their environment seen in the picture so that you have a real sense of place and where you are and where the environment is its own sort of character. You know, using the type of camera, the format, the lens you used obviously puts a lot of pressure on the photographer to be super mindful of everything that's that's going on there. And I just want you to talk about that a bit because in my opinion, that work, which people I think can see now most easily in Two Books of American Scene and Passing Time, I think that's some of the best work of its kind, you know, ever made. Period.
Like, wow, thank you, Sasha.
It's just the amount of time you can spend on each photograph is just really mind boggling because the richness of the description, there's so much to look at and when you think you've seen everything, you know, all of a sudden you see something else in the corner here or in the way background there, and then you see even more I mean, first you see a guy in the way background of a picture of a flooded area in, I think, Louisiana. And the main subject is a boy who's in the picture. Then all of a sudden you realize there's someone in the way background. Then all of a sudden you realize they're wearing a. A suit, which is sort of so incongruous in this setting. And, you know, I could go on and on because it's in so many of these images that you made, I think primarily in the 80s using, I think, that camera and that setup where there is just. I mean, it's just like these pictures keep on giving. And I just want to be really clear to folks listening that that's not why they're. They're good because they're beautiful and moving and interesting and edifying. And then the icing on the cake is the generosity of detail and description. So I just want you to talk about more about that artistic decision and how you think about it now.
Yeah. And that picture, by the way, Sasha, that you mentioned, the one taken in Slide Link during the flood where there's that guy in his suit and his long boots. He was going to look for his pet alligator who'd gotten lost.
Oh, wow.
Just so, you know.
Just so you know, has nothing to.
Do with the picture, but in talking to him as he walked past me, he told me that. And there was something about being told that that motivated me to make a picture. I mean, it's funny how things work, right? That what happens when you're talking to people has nothing to do with. With the ultimate picture. You get it, right?
Yeah, yeah. No, that's for sure.
But it motivates you because somehow this interaction leads to something else, you know. So the six by nine, I guess I had seen a book that John Jarkowski edited came out, I think in the. Sometime in the 70s from the picture press.
And John was very influential curator of photography at moma.
Definitely, definitely.
For our audience. John was hugely important and influential in sort of the division of photography as sort of art.
Exactly. And very eloquent. An incredible writer about.
Great writer.
Yeah, yeah. So he put out this book from the picture press. And I got fascinated with all these photographers, including Ouija, but, you know, just press photographers who were using these large cameras, but handheld with a flash on a bracket on the side. And what I liked about it was not only the detail that it was different from 35 millimeter pictures, street photography, but the way the flash, you know, it was almost like this surreal or hyperreal effect that the flash made. So I really liked that. And then the other thing that got me going was Chauncey Hare put out a book in the seventies called Interior America. And I think it came out in maybe 79 or 78 maybe. And he photographed people in rooms with a super wide angle. I don't know, probably was like a 24 or maybe even wider. And the people, in a way, were almost objectified. I mean, I didn't like that part of how he photographed, but I did. I was amazed by how the room was as important as the people and how interesting the room was and how much the room told you about these people.
Absolutely.
So it was sort of, you know, those two books that got me really interested in wide angle and flash. And when I started doing it, I also really liked the challenge of trying to get as much in the frame as possible. So, you know, of course you're gonna have mostly failures when you try to do something like that because, you know, if you're photographing more than one person and potentially they're moving and you also want the frame to be interesting. It's tough, but it's really what interested me. I mean, it's really what excited me, you know, that's why I was zone focusing rather than taking time to focus too, because you really didn't have time. Especially the Fuji's kind of very slow and bulky to focus. It's got this little range finder and by the time you focus, forget it, you've lost the shot.
And some of your pictures have like 10 or 12 people in them. I mean, it's really amazing.
Yeah, and that's another thing that I think is interesting is, is how as I get older, my photography has changed, I mean.
Oh, yeah, for sure.
There was a kind of athleticism to that work of being in the right place at the right time and getting the people, but also the frame around them, making it good. And it's not work I could ever do at this stage in my life, but it's interesting. So you kind of change. So now I find that I move closer in, I photograph fewer people. I mean, you kind of, as you get older, you adjust to your limitations. And of course, in other ways you get better. You get perhaps a little better talking to people, you know, maybe a little wiser. I mean, there's different ways in which you improve and there's other ways in which you think, okay, well, I can't do that anymore. I'm not that quick on my feet, but I can do this.
You know, you've talked about the way in which the type of work we're talking about, this work that you made in the 80s with the setup, you know, had a lot of sort of moving parts and wasn't so straightforward, not in the way that someone like Gary Winogrand was working. And that sort of, that sort of classic run and gun street photography with a smaller camera. And you know, it's okay if things are a little askew and you know, in fact we'll work with it that way, et cetera. Your pictures are much more formal, although there's also an incredible looseness. I mean, they really are so imbalanced, it's freakish. But I've heard you talk about when you're working that way that, you know, with the bigger camera, obviously you do need to sort of go up, introduce yourself to people, ask them if you can make a picture. And that of course brings out a certain amount of posing awareness of the camera, self consciousness, et cetera. But I have to say that when I look at your pictures from this time, I don't really see that. I mean, often there is like in the group shots, often there's like one person who's sort of mugging for the camera, but you have so many other people in the picture and most of them are sort of going about their business because they're interacting with each other. So I have to say that again, it's just so imbalanced to me where the viewer gets to have both those experiences. The one person who, who's sort of super aware that you're making the picture and the others who are just like, eh, whatever, I'm just gonna carry on. And it really just is so lovely. It creates something so, so beautiful and generous. Like you just feel like there's so much there to learn from as far as other people and the way they're living their life. Anyway, I just wanted to say that.
Well, you know, it's interesting when you run up to people and say, you know, I really want to take your picture. You know, those were different times. And I think that's important to point out is that people weren't practicing their selfie smiles. There were no, you know, so there was less understanding of photography, there was less self consciousness about it.
Oh, for sure, for sure.
And you know, it was a little harder in the sense that you couldn't give someone a card and say, here's my website. You can look me up and know that I'm legitimate, you know, I'm not some creep, right? So there was that disadvantage. But there was the advantage that people were much more, especially children and teenagers. I found that if you went up to groups of children or families or teenagers, they kind of had their own dynamic. And in asking, they would stop for a while. But if you hung around at all for a few minutes, usually they would get back to doing whatever they were doing before. And, you know, I did get to like that kind of hybrid thing where some of it looks candid, some of the picture looks candid, and then there's this person who's kind of connecting with me. It's a strange hybrid. Yeah, I love it of some sort. I got to really like that. At first I thought it was a fault, and then I thought, no, you know, let's run with this, you know, and see where it takes me.
I think it's fantastic. And also sage. The use of the flash is in that context or in any context with these bodies of work is so fascinating because when you did use the Flash, it's sort of like the people in the foreground sort of are popping out of the picture that, you know, it really, like, does something interesting between foreground, background. I mean, so many times I see people using flash now, and it's giving light. It's giving a sort of artificial light to the picture, but it's not doing anything interesting with depth. But right when you used it, I mean, the thing that I noticed is this just incredible thing that happens between foreground and background that's just really just another little jewel in the picture.
Oh, thank you. Well, that's great. Yeah. I mean, I think it was just kind of trial and error and figuring out getting used to what the flash did. And inside. When I was photographing people inside, I really didn't go by the rule, you know, you're supposed to expose so that the window's brighter outside. And I decided I liked the way it looked when the outdoors looked like a picture on the wall. So that was kind of a decision. But it's not really what you're taught you're supposed to do if you want the light to look more natural.
More natural? Yeah. Let that be a lesson to everyone. Go with your artistic instincts. So let me ask you, who are you showing work to at this time? Like, who's there at this point in your life to cheer you on or give you critiques? Who's that person or those people?
Gosh, you know, I show work to probably the same people I've shown to for years. You know, I show to my friends Len Genchel and Diane Cook. I show work to Laura McPhee, who's a friend. She taught at MassArt for years. I show work to Nick Nixon. He and I show each other work. You know, Chris Rauschenberg. I show him work. I found when I was young, it was super important to have a cohort of people to show.
Absolutely. That's what I'm getting at.
So at that point, it was my friends Susan Kandel and Joan Albert. They had been in the same class, Nick's class, with me at MassArt. Joan Albert died about 10 years ago, and I actually. Stanley Barker. I showed them her work and they've done a book of her photograph.
How fantastic. Yeah.
But we were all really working along the same lines, really. We were photographing, you know, families, often children, and they were doing more indoor stuff than I was. But we were working in a similar vein. Joan was working with the 4x5, Susan was working with 35 millimeter, and I was medium format. But we were all kind of interested in similar things. And so that was very helpful to have them to show work to me.
Yeah, of course. Let's talk about the process of going back to your archives to create publications many years later and what that process is like. So the books we've been alluding to American Scene in passing time. There's long, long, long, long time between making the pictures and publishing the book. So how does that come about? I'd love to first know, like, you know, because both of these were published by Nasrali, a fantastic press. So first, you know, I'd love to know how that happened. And then if you could talk about then the process of going back and making the decision or decisions about what to include and what it looked like to see those pictures after so long.
Yeah. And by the way, Nasraeli is publishing a third book of photographs from the 80s called Exciting. We're calling it Easy Days. And it's going to be accompanied by an exhibition at the center for Photographic Art in Carmel.
Oh, how wonderful. I hope they do a. Let me just put in an order for a box that will hold all three.
Yes, yes. I think Chris has that in mind. I hope he does. Yeah, I think he does. Because it's going to be the same size and format.
Yeah, good.
As the other two. Okay. And so how initially it got published was that Joseph Bellows, who runs a gallery out in La Jolla, asked to see my vintage print. He had seen a few of the pictures in various books. I think there was a book that photographs from the decord of a museum that he'd seen some of my pictures in. And he said, you know, I really like these. I'd like to see more of them. So I sent him a box of vintage prints, and he ended up showing them without my knowledge to Chris Pickler, because Chris is a friend of his.
Chris. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. So that's how that first book came about, American Scene. The first edition of that was published in 2016, 2017. And it was initially published as a large. I think he called it Nasraeli Library Series. So it was big, and it was in a slip case, and it was really much too much money for most people. It was. I think it was $250, and he only printed 350 of them. You know, it was like a collector's collector's item. And, you know, I really wanted the book to be available to other people. So I think after he did Passing Time, I think he thought, you know, okay, let's do this. It's the same size and same price that other people can afford, you know. But the way Passing Time and this new book came about was that during COVID I decided to go back through my negatives and contact sheets and work prints, and unfortunately, I'd torn up a bunch of old work prints, you know, trying to make room for new work back in the, you know, 80s or 90s. And I had some work prints, and I had, fortunately, all my contact sheets. And so I went through, and I was really surprised to find, first of all, how many work prints that I liked that I hadn't made exhibition prints of, and second, how many interesting pictures I'd never made prints of at all. And I think, you know, back then, I was shooting 12 rolls a day, which of eight pictures. You know, it's not that many pictures, really, but it's a lot of rolls of film to process in the dark room. So, you know, if you're processing 120film, that might take you three hours in the darkroom to process just to process the film. Then you're making contact sheets, and then you're making prints. And so it's a lot. And so I would just sort of print the stuff that was most interesting to me. And I didn't go back much. And I think it's interesting. You know, there's something that happens, too, that when you look back at work that you shot years before, you just see the work. You just see it for what it is, you know, and you think, oh, that's really interesting when you've just shot it. What you see is your failures. You see what you didn't get. You know, you have some shot that you think you thought, oh, I knew that was gonna be the best shot from the day. And I had this and this and this and. And you look at it and you're disappointed. But some other shot that you almost didn't take, that's some weird, you know, you just kind of took it. That's the shot that interests you, and you print that one and the one that disappointed you. You don't get to. Well, later when you're coming back, you don't remember what you hoped for. You just look at what you got. And so it's much easier. And I think this is something that probably, you know, Lee Friedlander goes back through his work and finds. And I don't think he tends to, from what I've heard him say anyway. I don't think he tends to print stuff that he's just photographed that much. I mean, he tends to edit things at least, you know, a few months later because he takes so many pictures. And I think that's helpful. I think that a lot of people, a lot of us, you know, just look at our. What we took the day before or the week before or the month before, and we see what we didn't get rather than what we did get.
And I would just add to that, as someone who both works with a lot of photographers and used to make pictures myself, I think there's a lot more in that. I mean, I think what you're saying is really profound because it's connected to sort of disappointment or being self critical. But of course there's also the, like, what mood you were in that day. And like, I mean, there's so much attached to how you were feeling, what was going on when you're making a picture. And I. I think what your connection is to the subject. And if you can just slow down, I really do think it yields to a much better editing process with a lot more objectivity.
It's also a different process when you're looking back 40 years, because yes, for sure. Of course, the work is now in a different context. It has a historical dimension, which can be very interesting. And so things that weren't as interesting at the time seem more interesting now. And so there's also that.
Can that be trap at all? I mean, I was gonna ask you about that because I know when I'm editing or trying to sort of critique work that's very old and has sort of a nostalgia factor to it, you know, I've made this comparison before. I'll make it again. It's like, at one point I was. Well, at many points. But anyway, at one point in my life, I was watching a ton of old movies, you know, all black and white films. And particularly I was sort of in a noir space and these sort of be noirs. And I thought everything I was seeing was really great. I realized that I was just sort of crediting the films with, you know, more than they actually had going on because the nostalgia factor was so powerful as a. A seductive element. And so, you know, now when I am critiquing photographs that have a nostalgia factor, old cars, different haircuts, different clothes, you know, you just know it's a different time. I try and be super careful about, you know, just have some awareness about that seductive part of it, because it doesn't make. That's not what's making a good picture. Right.
So I think it is a problem, the nostalgia factor. I mean, I'm very aware of that. And looking back at this old work, I mean, you know, young people especially tend to notice, look that person. Look at all those cigarettes. Well, everyone smoked back then. Teenagers had cigarettes rather than cell phones, you know. So, yeah, you have to be careful to make sure that the picture works on other levels as well.
Right? Absolutely, absolutely. Let's get to this very obvious attribute of yours, which is that you do. We've been talking about this very particular way that you were shooting in the 80s, but you have experimented with so many different styles. And, you know, one other very celebrated body of work. I mean, you have a lot of books out, and people know you for a lot of different projects. But another very celebrated project is called Witness to Beauty, which is a book you did in collaboration with your mother, who had been a fashion model many, many, many years ago. But you had a very glamorous mother who was very focused on her looks and maintaining a certain amount of elegance and sort of sophistication in her way of thinking about that, even as she got older and older. And I know these things aren't concurrent, but when you go from sort of spending time with American Scene and passing time and then jump over to Witness to Beauty, all of a sudden you're sort of in this. These black and white sort of documentary style, although very, very, very much sort of infused with a lot of artistic feeling. But then all of a sudden you're in a sort of Larry Sultan early, like Mitch Epstein, you know, some Doug Dubois, like, you're in this completely different space, these Pictures are colorful. They are. You're in a lot of them. Like, it is. It is just so, so, so different. And. Yeah, just. I'm really curious about, you know, did that feel like a risk, or do you not think of. Not put that pressure on yourself? Do you just do what you want to do and not worry about. Well, I'm. I'm. This is a real departure from something I know worked previously.
You know, I do feel bad that I can't write a description of my, you know, say Paige Sawyer is a person who does portraits that deal with memory and blah, blah. You know, I mean, I'm. I. You can't really. No, it's hard to say. You know, I do feel bad about that. I think, what's wrong with me? Why can't I just have done this similar work my whole life? But honestly, that would have bored me. And I really. I get to the point where I'm working on something, and then I need to stop that because I'm repeating myself too much, and I need to do something else. I need to try something else. I need a different challenge, and I need new stimulation. So I think what happened was that when I was teaching at Harvard in the 90s, I noticed that I started really liking the work of my students who were doing color more. I was teaching a color class as well as an intro class, and I was really drawn to color. And I kept thinking, you know, sage. You know, you should try color. Why? You know, you seem to be responding more to this. And so I did. I tried color through the 90s, and it was just awful. Honestly, I just was. It was a total failure. I was trying this and that project in color, and I go back to black and white. And the other thing that I always told my students is, you know, photograph what you have access to. So you're still young, you're still living at home. Photograph your families. You're there now. It's hard for them to say no to you. Go for it. And I thought at some point, I thought, you know, you should take your own advice here. And I had taken a picture of my mother back in 1980, when I was photographing, doing the work that's now in American Scene in Passing Time. And it was a picture of her trying on an evening gown and looking at herself in the mirror. And I always really liked it and didn't really fit with the other works I was doing, but I was still allergic to, you know, going back to my childhood at that point. I was young. I was. When I took that picture, I think she was 52 and I was 26, and I wasn't free enough from my childhood to want to go back there. And I think by the time I started Witness to Beauty, what happened was I was trying color. And I had gone from a 6 by 9 camera to a 6 by 7 camera. I was now using the Mamiya 7, which is 6 x 7 and gets 10 shots on a roll. And I took a picture of her in 1994 of her looking at herself in the mirror and putting on makeup. And I really liked it. And again, I thought, well, you know, this is interesting. And then a few years passed and I was trying to photograph some friends with their aging parents, and the pictures were drawn incredibly boring. I couldn't make them work. I just thought, you know, you don't know what you're doing. Let's do something else. And I thought, well, I'm about to go see my mother. She was in Washington, D.C. and I was in Boston, and I went down to Washington to visit her. And I thought, you know, you should really take your own advice and photograph yourself with your mother. Do some self portraits at home. And so I came back and printed them. And there were a couple I really liked from that. That weekend it was in, I think, 2000, and I suddenly thought, oh, you know, not only does your mother have star quality, which, you know, she's always had, but color makes sense. Because in this, she had moved into her mother's house, my grandmother's house, and the house was sort of caught somewhere between my grandmother's decor from the, you know, 1920s and 30s, and my mother heyday from the 50s and 60s. You know, these bright colors, chintz, you know, lots of portraits on the walls, family portraits on the walls. And I thought, wow, this is really an interesting backdrop. And so basically they were made. They were collaborative. They were made on a tripod after discussions with my mother and my sister. And a lot of them are, you know, recreations of memories from childhood or recreations of old family snapshots. I decided to include myself and my sister because we kind of act as foils or secondary characters. We provide a contrast with my mother. The other thing that's funny in the book, I think, is that we age past my mother in the course of the book. The book is made over 20 years from 1990, Ford at 2014. And as you go through the book, suddenly she starts looking younger than we do because she's had three facelifts and we have not. So there's this funny thing that happens and people start thinking, well, wait a second, who's the mother here?
Right? That is hilarious.
It's hilarious. It's absolutely hilarious. And so it is very different work than anything I'd done I did before. It's personal, which, you know, in some ways, like the gay couples work, that was motivated because my father was gay. And I, you know, I realized after a few months of photographing, I thought, oh, that's probably why I'm doing this. You know, it took me a while to sort of figure that out. But so there's often a personal hook, which is why you get into a project. But in this case it was more like, you know, she's amazing. How can we make these pictures? And I did it in a way that was very different from anything I'd done before. And it was a lot of fun. And I, you know, I usually work on two or three projects at a time. So at the same time I was working on Perfectible Worlds, also in color, and I was working on, I started doing more animals again. I started doing Peaceable Kingdom. So I was working on different things at the same time that were more in line with what I had done before. But you know, I also did that work about people with partial facial paralysis and that there were close ups and that was, was with a square format camera and that. That's very, very different too from my other work.
No, it is. I mean, it's all really different. That's what's, you know, it's so striking. You know, obviously I've been sitting around with your books and you know, it's, it's really intense, the differences and I really admire it because I think that you figured out that in order to make good work, you have to sort of follow what you're feeling motivated by at the time. But I can't help but wonder about something you said earlier, which is, you know, how is, you know, what effect has that had on your career? Do you think that that's been challenging because it is hard to, you know, sort of label you as a certain type of artist.
Well, yeah, I do. I mean, I think probably, I mean, in a way I think it's good that I, I had some success when I was young, but it wasn't, you know, I didn't become an art star. And I'm, I'm so glad about that because I feel that then it's very hard to start making new work and get away from what you're already doing. You know, if you become a commodity and you, you know, there's pressure. There's all this pressure to. To keep doing the same kind of work, keep selling it. And there's pressure from your galleries, from museums. You know, I think it was really a great. A good thing for me that I wasn't under that pressure. And so it's nice now to have some of that work recognized. You know, it's lovely. But it was also very freeing for me not to have that pressure.
Yeah, yeah, of course. Well, I think we're sort of coming close to the hour mark, so just wrap it up. But thank you so much for talking with me and I hope people will. Who don't know your work will do a deep dive and just be as blown away as I am by your work and by your. I mean, I know you wouldn't think of it as sort of your guts or bravery, but. But, you know, it is really impressive the way, you know, even going back to the work we've talked the most about, the black and white six by nine work, you know, even the way you figured out, like, what you needed, the kit you needed to put together to make the pictures you wanted to make, and the way you've sort of done that with every project and that beautiful. You know, it's lovely to talk with someone who's not like a gearhead, but yet has the sort of wherewithal to know that, you know, different cameras, different frames, you know, different aspect ratios provide you with a different language and that that is appreciated and noted by the viewer. So, anyway, thank you very, very much.
Thank you so much. And I have so enjoyed listening to other people on your podcast. It's been. Been fascinating. I've loved it.
Thank you. I'm very lucky to get to speak with folks like you. It's one of the great joys in my life. So thank you for being another one of them. And until we meet up, enjoy New Hampshire, where I really hope it's cooler than it is, or I am.
Well, it will be by tomorrow, hopefully.
Yeah.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, thank you. Take care.
Okay, bye. Bye.
Bye.
Photo Work with Sasha Wolff is a production of the Photo Work Foundation. Executive producer is Sasha Wolf and the associate producer is Taylor Selsbach. The show is also produced and edited by me, Michael Chovendalt in a real photo show. Music is by J. Walter Hawks. If you like the show and wish to find out more about the foundation, please visit photowark.com and be sure to subscribe and review with all the stars on your listening platform.