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 work. 40 photographers on process and practice. Hello, everyone. I'm Sascha Wolf Recording in Woodstock, New York, and joined as usual by my good friend and producer, Mr. Michael Chovendalton. Hello, Michael.
Hello there. You know, I'm sitting in my office and I just realized if I move, my chair squeaks. So I'm going to hold real still.
I was just hearing something. Oh, maybe it's not your chair. Maybe it's just some random. But anyway, I thought I heard some mice.
Yes, there's little squeaks. Hopefully not coming through.
Yes. How you doing?
Doing great.
Yeah.
Yeah. Tonight is our annual student exhibition. So a bunch of my students are all dressed up and going to the reception at 5:30.
Oh, exciting.
A fun night. It's a really fun night.
Yeah.
That's great. Well, I hope it's wonderful. And it's always so thrilling when you're a young artist, of course, or I guess an artist of any age to see your work up on the wall. So that's really wonderful.
Yeah, they really look forward to it. This is a particularly good group that really takes it seriously. So they were. They were working hard.
I remember when I, when I was making films and being like, you know, in whatever space where one of my films was playing, it was both thrilling and I always thought there was the possibility I was going to faint. So, yes, I keep.
I keep a lot of snacks. A lot of snacks in my office for my students.
Can be scary. Here's my soul bared for all to see. So, Michael, we have a long episode, so let's get into it. I had a really wonderful conversation with both Charlotte Cotton, writer and curator extraordinaire, and Jess Dugan on the occasion of a new book that they have done together called Love Pictures with Radius. And it's quite something.
Yes.
So, yeah, and I want to talk
to you about that.
But why don't you tell folks a little bit more about Charlotte and Jess, because as people will hear in the episode, we didn't quite get through bios.
No, you really get to the work and the process and so, yeah, let's introduce now. Yeah, yeah. So Charlotte Cotton is an independent photography curator and writer. She has held positions including head of the Wallace Annenberg Photography Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, head of Programming at the Photographer's Gallery, creative Director at the National Media Museum Curator Photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Curator in residence at Metabolic Studio at Los Angeles, where she participated in a program celebrating the legacy of Women's Building founded by Judy Chicago, Sheila Lavrant debrettville and Arlene Raven. Cotton has curated a number of exhibitions on contemporary photography and her publications include the Photograph as Contemporary Art, Imperfect Beauty, Then Things Went Quiet, Guy Bourdain and Photography Is Magic. She is also the founder of WordsWithoutPictures.org and Aithrend.org Words Without Pictures was published as a print and ebook by aperture in 2010. Jess T. Dugan is an artist and writer whose work explores the complexities of personhood, relationships, desire, love and family through photography, film, writing and drawing. Their work is informed by their own life experiences, including their identity as a queer and non binary person, and reflects a deep belief in the importance of representation and the transformative power of storytelling. Their work is regularly exhibited internationally and is in the permanent collections of over 70 museums. Their books include Love Pictures, which we're Talking About Today, a survey book made in collaboration with Charlotte, published by Radius Books, Look At Me like youe love me Mac 2022, to survive on this Shore, Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender non conforming Older adults, Kyra Verlag, 2018 and Every Breath We Drew Daylight Books, 2015. Okay, that was a lot. They are very accomplished people.
Yeah, that was very well. That was very well done. I'm going to send you a bonus check in the Matt. That's how he earns his bonuses.
That's right.
I just say what I don't want to do. All right, so what did you think of the show? What were your key points?
What I loved about listening to the show is it kind of embodies a lot of individual things we talk about with other guests. But this is sort of all of it. This is like collaboration within collaboration. Charlotte and Jess are friends and this is built out of their friendship. And then of course, Jess work is so rooted in collaboration and compassion and care and that is sort of how they were with each other on top of the interviews that they do for this two volume book and the work that goes into the book. And then it grows in a way, I think that sort of surprises Jess in that it becomes. It becomes this comprehensive survey of Jess work. And so there's just so much that has to sort of all come together, including trusting who you're working with and finding a publisher and then trusting the people at the publisher, Radius Books, you know, to handle this work. And so all the things we kind of talk about again, more individually with other artists. It's all in this episode.
Yeah, I totally agree. And yeah, I think there's something really wonderful about the sort of way in which they found the project, you know, and, you know, you can really do that when you're working with someone you trust.
Exactly.
Not something you can really do if you don't have that really intrinsic layer of trust and understanding the other person and, you know. Yeah, just really beautiful. So it was really fun to talk to them about that. I don't know that I've ever really had that conversation before, you know, so I really enjoyed it. And it's always fun to talk to two people and that energy is really, really contagious. So.
Yeah, because they also end up being in conversation with each other, which is a lot of fun.
Yeah, absolutely. It's a really good episode. So I hope everyone enjoys. And Michael, if you don't mind, please take it away.
My pleasure. And here is your conversation with Jess T. Dugan and Charlotte Cotton.
Charlotte Cotton. Cotton, Jess T. Dugan, welcome to the Photo Work Podcast. I feel hyped up because I am so excited to speak with you both today. So thank you so much for being here.
Oh, that's so nice. Thank you. I'm excited, too.
Thanks, Sasha. It's always lovely to be with you.
Yeah. You're our third timer, Jess, which is fantastic. So, so, so much to discuss. We're together today to talk about this really incredible book project that the two of you did together called Love Pictures. I'm going to read a. Actually, you know, before I do that, Charlotte, let's tell us a bit about your journey and then. And then we'll in earnest get into the occasion of this new publication. But, Charlotte, yeah. Start us off with your journey in photography and, you know, from the beginning where you were born and raised and all the good stuff.
Thank you. Yeah, I'll think about what sort of comes up in relation to this project. And meeting you today, I should say that I recognize that I have decades of photography being my first love, so not all of it is needed. And I get. As I get older, I find that I get halfway through and I'm like, oh, enough, enough. And I'm. And I'm also reminded, boy, I can relate to that. You know, I was once in Australia interviewing a photographer called Lewis Morley, who had an incredible life, which included being in a prison of war, Japanese prisoner of war camp, when he was a boy, and I asked him about the first few years in Australia in the 1970, and he didn't want to talk about it. And I said, so what happened? And I knew how much he'd done in growing a photo community. And he just said, oh, nothing much happened. And I thought, that is the privilege of age is you get to decide which bits you talk about, which you
don't, what decade you can leave out entire decades.
But to answer your question, in terms of when my journey with photography started, it was when I was 16. So very, very typical journey in the analog era with photography that I was 16 and my parents were furniture historians, and really the first British historians to look at working class furniture and regionality. And they did a lot of field work, like going to the Outer Hebrides and photographing black houses and what was left in them. So they learned serious photography as documentation of their research process. So there was a photo studio set up in our home in the middle of the Cotswolds in an old barn. And so the magic of photography as a process and as a way of thinking and seeing was something that, quite naturally, I was really lucky came into my life. And then When I was 16, I had work experience, you know, I'd just done what was called the Ode levels exams. And so I went to do work experience in a wet darkroom in Oxford, which was where I was going to school. And even though it was obviously a very masculine pastime and passion, everybody was really nice to me and I had your classic wet, dark room experience. So my way into photography was one where sense of community and camaraderie and much more of a kind of sibling rather than an institutional or patriarchal or hierarchical system was really evident to me. So I think I've always felt more accepted, even with the challenges of that within photography. I felt more accepted as myself from a younger age than I found in other areas that I've moved and researched. And then my sort of first academic relationship, actually, my only academic, truly strictly academic relationship with photography was my undergraduate degree at the University of Sussex in art history. And that was a period I say my only because I don't have any academic qualifications beyond a bachelor's degree in art history. I think that's because I'm also a person who likes to do things, to understand them. And also I came into photography as a cultural subject in the early 1990s when really there wasn't a lot of competition. There weren't many people who really thought of photography as a cultural subject, so you could kind of slip into it through internships, et cetera. So, but at University of Sussex, I mean, principally there was. There were two, three academics, Tom Christie, the very notable film historian and academic, and David Allen Mellor and Annette Oldred. And the combination of the three, looking at photography and film essentially as electives. But they became really the basis of my understanding of the radicality of photography, whether it was looking at what was happening between the first and Second World wars and anything from Powell and Pressburger films to Bill Brandt's the English At Home book. So it was a very animated, imaginative relationship with the academic study of photography as a cultural subject. But it was also very open in terms of. Followed by my internship at the Victorian Albert Museum, which I did straight off the bat. As soon as I came out of my undergraduate degree, I had a summer internship and I was waitressing, so I could manage economically to stay on when everybody else left in September. And I just stayed at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which, you know, is obviously one of the principal collections of photography, the National Collection of the Art of photography in the uk. So I had this. I mean, this really lovely relationship which was about finding the cracks and the gaps. Like the photography collection was, you know, one of the country cousins of collections within a major encyclopedic museum. So there wasn't. There were people who are passionate about works on paper and photography, but it was quite a quiet place in terms of the hierarchy of an encyclopedic museum. And so it meant that we had really direct relationships with users of the collection. And the reason ultimately that I went, you know, I interviewed for internships at the National Portrait Gallery and even the Imperial War Museum, which was another major collection. The takes collections didn't exist at that point. But the reason I went to the Victoria and Albert Museum is because of the print study room, which you walked into this room and it was open to anyone at the time, without a reader's ticket, five days a week. And every day there was an amazing curator who you could go in and say, look, I'm doing my school project on light and shade, and you would be presented with these incredible things. And I just thought, this is the business, this is. This is where I want to be. And I'm almost crying at it now, because it is. Has remained my vocation essentially to increase the intellectual and physical accessibility and in my case, to photography in the midst of a context which is really broad. So, as you might know about my choices in terms of what I curate and write about, it ranges from really that establishment of photography as an undisputed contemporary Art form, which began at the same time as my curatorial life in the early 1990s and was situated in a place London in the early 1990s, when the Royal College of Art was just up the street and predominantly women were going to study photography, but as a contemporary art medium rather than as a vocational training, which even right up to that point, was still a debate about what photographic pedagogy was. Similarly, I was in the midst of a place where students, maybe in fashion at Central St Martin's or the Royal College of Art, would come in and ask to see work by the new photographers Jurgen Teller, David Sims, Corinne Day, even Nigel Shaffrin. And I had a public mandate to go out and collect what fashion image making in London in the early 1990s was, and created these life story interviews with these photographers, stylists, art directors, hair and makeup artists who were working or came out of London and for the British Library, which was another resource for collecting the stories of photography. So, anyway, I'm sort of going on and on, but basically the premise is I found a community really young, which I was really intrigued about, and I found a medium that was really pluralistic and was not based on a hierarchy of class. It had its challenges in terms of gender and race, obviously, but I could also see that it was an opportunistic medium. I saw that in the fashion image generation that really flourished in the UK in the late 80s and early 90s, and I could see myself within that. So I would say it's. I'm the kind of person who likes to put something in their mouth, unfortunately, to see what it tastes like, which has its pluses and its minuses. But when it came to thinking of photography as a cultural subject, it was very present and it was very. It's always been very. Yeah, very present. It's about what's happening right. Right now for me.
And where did you go after? I mean, I know this, but tell folks like, your curatorial journey.
Yes, well, yes. And so it's like, interesting. That was a really good phrase and writing.
I'm sorry, let me just say you, you know. Yes, please. Because you've written some, you know, really seminal and important books in our community. So. Yeah.
So the writing. The writing came just as a normal process within the professional life of being a curator. I stayed at the VA for 12 years and, I mean, I was really fortunate that I. I mean, partly because photography was not a major collection within the museum, it was possible for me to be a full curator of photographs by the time I was in my mid-20s, which is pretty unheard of. But that was, I think, because I had a well rounded package, or at least I'd had the support to develop a well rounded package of exhibition making and writing and writing with real clarity for an audience who may not be in the know of the. The lingo or the kind of the elite in which this is being defined. So I came to writing very much in this role of. And I still maintain that idea of who's the person, who's the character, often a younger me, who I'm writing to and how do I get to. How do I give that information in a form that is immediately receivable and doesn't have any hurdles within it. And in 2003 I was. I just done this, probably the biggest exhibition that I'd done at the V and A in terms of its scale and its resonance, which was the first museum exhibition of the fashion photographer Ghibldin, which was an epic journey worthy of a podcast in and of itself. So while I was working on that show, I got approached by Thames and Hudson and the editor, Andrew Brown, of the World the World of Art series of books, which, you know, as you know, is this really useful, small, compact, inexpensive book on every subject within art and design. And I'd use those books when I was like 17 and sort of cramming for my A level art essay writing on pre Raphaelite. So you'd pick up a World of Art book on pre Appleite painting and it'd be like, flick, what do I need to know? What is this? And I got approached by Andrew Brown to say that the amazing curator and artist Jeremy Miller, who'd been commissioned to write the Photograph as contemporary art, was running out of time on that and his creative direction was shifting and he'd recommended me to write the book. So I was second choice for that book, which I. I like to say, and I'm very proud of because I think life works in that way. So I had this brilliant editor, Andrew, working with me to write the. What became the Photographer's Contemporary Art. And you know, it started off as a book of six chapters. It's now, I think at eight or nine chapters and amazing. I was, I was 33, I'd never written anything of that length. I used all of my knowledge and I made. Each chapter was an exhibition, so it was already a sort of Xerox story and I, I wrote the two big decisions I had to make with that book was one is, do you need to know about the eminent canon of Photography in order to understand what's going on right, right now in the 2000s. So this was like the beginning of the 2000s and it was a book that was really the start of how do we articulate what is happening right, right now in the first decade where photography is an undisputed contemporary art form, or at least a less disputed contemporary art form. And who do you need to know about? Who sets the precedents for that? And so the big decision for me actually at that point was, am I going to talk about Cartier Bresson and Robert Frank? Do you need to know about that in order to be a contemporary art photographer? To which my answer was no, I don't think you do. I think you need to know about James Welling and Cindy Sherman and Louise Lawler and, you know, amazing artists from the 70s whose brain had clicked into postmodernism. And I had, you know, an iconoclastic relationship with the history. But I also was just thinking about the 16 year old me and going, would I restrict you by saying you have to know about this in order to determine your own future? And the answer was no. And then obviously the other part of the book was instead of using art historical genres like still life or portraiture as the defining categorizations of photography, which had never worked for me because it didn't represent the motivations of photographers. And so for me, because I was having these real live discussions and relationships and studio visits with artists, I was like, I will be led by what artists do. And that again became a precedent for everything I do, which is follow the artists, because it'll be more predictive of what is happening in our present and is about to happen than anything else. And so I think that's why the book has stood up to the reader and has remained a kind of a key text for a lot of people who are like, I need to understand the landscape of this is because it's actually driven by the motivations of artists.
And anyway, yeah, there's a real elastic quality about that which is adaptive and flexible and of the now really important.
And it really happened. Like it's an. In a way, I write in a way that is my account of what is happening at this moment in time. And that's really how I, that's how I choose projects to work on. Like working with Jess is what is the most useful, what is the most urgent and relevant thing I can articulate at this point in time?
Well, let's get into the book. I can, I'll handle some of your Resume and Jess's as well in the intro, because we have so much to talk about. So let's get into it. I'm just gonna read this little bit from the press release. Love Pictures, a collaboration between photographer Jess T. Dugan and writer Charlotte Cotton, is centered around a series of conversations between the two, focusing on core themes that inform Dugan's practice, including gender and identity, family and politics, writing and language, the book as object, and the dynamics of the exhibition space. These internal dialogues then prompted subsequent conversations with others in Dugan's and Cotton's respective communities, friends, colleagues, mentors and subjects of Dugan's work, including Dawoud Bay, Kelly Connell and Dorothy Moss, among others. Transcriptions of these intimate and in depth exchanges are woven with the first comprehensive survey of Dugan's work in book form. So, Jess, why don't you flesh that out a little bit more and tell folks a bit more about this book books.
Sure.
And what the form literally is, so they have a sense of it because it's quite a beautiful, really stunning object in and of itself. So just want to say congratulations to both of you on this really amazing piece of work that you've created and this quite gorgeous object that I'm sure the two of you were very involved in bringing to life.
Yeah, thanks, Sasha. So the book, literally, it's a two volume set. There's two books encased in a slip case, and it contains 20 years of my work, including some early pictures that I've never shown that have never been published going back to when I was 17. And it is organized around a central conversation between me and Charlotte. So volume one has nine chapters of this conversation between the two of us, and there are eight visual chapters in between. So some of those chapters are organized by a specific project like To Survive on the Shore or My filmmaking. But many of them are organized around ideas like Self Portrait, which is the first chapter in the book. Gentle Masculinity, Still Life plays. And I really love this kind of organization because I feel like it foregrounds the core themes in my work and it's a new way of presenting my work that I have not had the chance to do before. So that's volume one and then. And I'll elaborate a little bit on how this came to be as well. But volume two has conversations with, with 15 people who have been important to my life and work. Those include my mentors, Dawoud Bey and Kelly Connell from graduate school. It includes early influences like Kathy Opie, several curators I've worked with closely Several long term subjects. One of my favorite conversations is with my mom as both my parents and a subject of 20 years and someone who's watched my work develop and my career develop. And my mom and I ended up having a really intimate conversation. And it's one that I'm the most excited about in the book. So just briefly, I love Charlotte that you talked about coming to photography around the age of 16, because that's very parallel with me. And also that you talked about the photograph as contemporary art, because that's where my connection with you began when I was. I must have been 19, it was 2004. I read that book when I was an undergrad at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. And so that was my first introduction to you. And then we connected again in 2012 when I was in graduate school. And I'll keep it short for the sake of the podcast and getting everything in, but we essentially built a relationship over many years. We had different opportunities to work together. And every time we spoke, I just felt like we had this very strong intellectual and creative chemistry. It just felt like we could speak for hours and hours. And so I think one day I said to you, hey, do you want to make a book?
And you said, yes, I think you did.
And I don't think either of us. I just felt like. I just felt like we should make a book because every time we talk, we have all this inspiration and we could just, yeah, talk for days. And you said yes, not knowing what the book was about or how it would come to be. And so we had this idea. And then I remember you reached out and you said, okay. So I bought my ticket to St. Louis and I said, okay, what is our book about? And so I just, you know, I share that because I think the way this book came to be was incredibly organic. It came out of my specific relationship with Charlotte. It also came at a moment in my career where I was looking back at 20 years of work and, you know, my first and kind of significant 20 years of work and taking this look back at it more holistically than I had had the opportunity to do before. But the way we approached the bookmaking process itself was also incredibly organic. We recorded conversations over a series of many days and we didn't have specific topics that we intended to address. We just started speaking and we let the conversation go where it would, which I have to say is largely Charlotte's influence, because I'm extremely type A and I'm an extreme plan nurs. And I think that's Why I was drawn to collaborate with you, Charlotte, because you think in a very different way than I think. And so we really let this entire process be organic. And the way those 15 people who are in volume two emerged is, as Charlotte and I were speaking, we kept referencing other people who were important, as Charlotte likes to say. We kept bringing people into the room. And so it became really clear that we wanted to include those people. We didn't know at that point, of course, that it would be a second volume. All of those decisions came later, but we just had those conversations and moved forward with the process. And I think something that's really important for me about this book is that it's really centered around collaboration, community, and love. And those are things that have very intensely defined my practice and my life as an artist. And they all carried through into this book in both a conceptual and a physical way.
Are you saying what I think you're saying, which is that because you're such a strong believer in collaboration, then the logical sort of end result of that was to have these people speak for themself?
Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I think I. I mean.
Cause it's funny. It's like, sorry to cut you off, but, you know, this is how you and I talk, just jumping in and out. I mean, sure, you and I are old friends. I mean, it seems to me like that's sort of like, you know, if you're going to maintain that commitment to collaboration, and there are literally pictures of people in this book that you have ongoing collaborations with, or there's, like, huge influence from people who have been very important to you as you're talking with Charlotte. But as you said, they keep coming up in conversation. Does it just feel like a logical conclusion that, well, let's give them their own voice?
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I have a long interest in oral history and interviews. It's something I've used over and over and over. So I'm always really interested in having people speak for themselves. I think with these conversations, I was interested. I was truly interested to hear what people would say because, you know, I conducted some of them and Charlotte conducted some of them. But, you know, she spoke to some of my subjects, and I was very interested what they would share about the process, not speaking to me directly. So I think I just wanted to bring in people's experiences. But I also wanted to acknowledge this larger community and circle in which my life and photography exists. I also wanted to acknowledge my mentors and speak to their. This lineage of creativity and, yeah, it truly just developed organically and that's. And that's how it manifest.
Could I attempt to answer that?
Yes, yes, please.
In terms of this, what you're describing as this sort of follow through of the idea of collaboration in the book, I think it's got a lot to do with interviewing and talking and oral history, as Jess was saying that that's obviously part of their practice and you know, truly a big part of my practice as well. And of course, one of the steps in our relationship, Jess, is you in interviewing me and being really good at it. And of course, like anyone who does a lot of interviewing, I'm a real stickler. Like, people put me on edge the entire time. Cause I'm like, oh, I wouldn't have done it like that. And I didn't have that in experience with you as an interview in. In the same way. I'm not having it with you either. Sasha, it's like really lovely to be in your discursive space today, but there's something about interviewing and life story interviewing and expansive interviewing with. Without the clock fully ticking, which of course is the luxury that we gave each other, right? Was to come together for days and see where our conversation goes. And so it was. I mean, for me, the way that I described it to Jess when we were getting to the stage of thinking whether truly we were going to commit to doing this, what became the second volume and these interviews with people that came up is really the natural, the very organic nature of having an intense conversation with somebody you love and admire is you do summon other people to come into the room, right. Like you talk about other people or you. Well, this reminds me of this. And you know, my. I often say, my therapist would often says to me, you know, the room is getting very crowded at the moment. And so I have an. I have a natural tendency to sort of cite because I'm such a relational person and as is Jess. And so there was a point at which it was like, well, quite naturally you would. I mean, Jess in particular was going to be contacting somebody after who'd come up in our conversation. And I would do that and go, you know, I might say to Kathy, were your ears burning? Because we were talking about you. And you know, that's what you do with friends, right? You say, hey, I should call you because you came up. I summoned you into a conversation, those sort of things. So there was. It was that it wasn't really the concept of collaboration as a structure for the book exactly. It was more, well, this is the Natural process of things, which it. And also the idea that we would do a very different kind of interviewing with everybody who was summoned into the room. And in the sense that the interviews are quite specific. Even Jess interview with their mum, which is expansive and enormous and feels like the first time on record that such a big story of 20 years of collaboration and parenting and being the child of is put into form. It's an epic interview, but still, it's quite specific to the context of this book and this challenge that Jess has set themselves, which is to do a survey book articulated in a very specific and unique way and in the way that they want to do it. So I really love the fact that actually the interviews are really specific to the context of the first volume and this quest that we went on, which is, how do you articulate 20 years of Jess work, but really 20 years of life and a set of really foundational ideas about what it is to be and to exist and to be human as well as to be an artist?
I think I'm drawn to the interview form and the conversational form because it is both very personal and very exciting, accessible to a viewer. And Charlotte and I talked a lot about how I want my work to be accessible and I want it to be of use to people.
I literally have that note in front of me and my.
So we can come back around to that. But I think, you know, we made a very intentional decision to only have conversations in the book. There's no introduction, there's no academic essay. We actually skipped the acknowledgments as well. You know, it's really just this conversation and the work.
Well, the acknowledgments in some way are in the book in the form of these conversations. Sure. So, you know, it's really amazing that you just brought up accessibility because it's. I have all my notes in front of me, and that's at the top of my list, because it does come up a lot in your conversations, which I really appreciate, you know, wanting work to be legible and not exclusionary. And, you know, we could spend a whole podcast talking about the pros and cons, for lack of a better term, of that. But I'm, you know, generally very in the. In favor of widening the net. And I want to actually connect that to. I want to read something, Charlotte, that you said in the conversation that I just was really taken with and talk about it as it relates to the book as well. Charlotte, you said this one general style of exhibition design. Obviously, talking about exhibitions here, one General style of exhibition design and layout puts the viewer in charge. They walk through the entrance door of the gallery, they can see everything in place, and there are no surprises to come. The viewer is given the authority to pace their journey. In such exhibitions, you can ask them to take charge of their experience and how they internalize it. In this context, the exhibition is not something that happens to you, it's what you make of it. And you know, I really love that and I love that concept and I haven't really heard people talk about that specific way of designing and I hadn't really heard that articulated very much. And so I was really thrilled to read that. And then as I got more and more into the book, I felt like the book has that same generosity. And again, it comes back just to what you were just talking about, the importance of accessibility. So, you know, Charlotte, I wonder if you could just talk about that as you meant it specifically in the gallery context and also in the book form.
Well, I really appreciate you picking up on finding something that I said that resonated especially with you. And the reason I'm sort of hesitating to respond is you are literally the first person who has read what Jess and I talked about and had a point of view on it. So I sort of like, huh,
thank
you for being the first reader. And the other reason I'm hesitating a little bit is, well, Jess knows this better than anyone, which is. So we transcribed our conversations and we both shared the load of tidying up these transcripts to be readable, legible. But what was left in which is very unusual for me, very unusual for me, in fact, this may have been the first time fully is the way that I converse when I do interviews, which is very non journalistic in style. Either I'm really silent in the way that you generate an atmosphere for people to talk. Sasha. And I love that. That's the trad. My favorite form of interviewing is not filling the silences and. But the way that I often interview when I'm really close to an artist is I say a lot. I say way too much. And when you get the transcript back, the responses from the artists are beautiful and meaningful and deep. But the transcript of what I say to get us to that point reads like nonsense. You're like, how the fuck did that person being interviewed understand what she was saying? Because. Because it's a lot of emotional communication. And so what happened was, is so we, you know, when we started working with David and the team at Radius is I was like really anxious we'd have meetings, I'd like, look, I need to edit out all of what I've said because it's like nonsense and nobody, nobody wants to hear that. This is Jess's book. I mean, it's a collaboration, but it's about Jess's account of the last 20 years and why they've been doing this incredible work and being so motivated and then. And David, in his subtle way was like, you know, just, just tidy it up, but send us everything. Send us everything. And it was like I didn't realize what a sheepdog he was, and he was like, shepherding me into actually presenting my words and. Cause I was like, well, it kind of worked, but I'm still anxious about the fact that I said too much and that was not my job in the interview. But of course it worked.
I don't agree, I don't agree with that position. But anyway.
Well, I think I'm getting used to the fact that what actually happened is. How would you feel what you feel when you read Jess say some incredible things? How would you understand the significance of that if you didn't have those 2,000 words of our conversation? That gets you to that point, that contextualizes what is being said. So I know I'm being, you know, annoyingly self deprecating, but it was a real. This book is a real reveal of how I like to commune with people I admire and love. And I've just never put it into print. And it. I'm so excited that you are the first person to ask me about this. I'm not answering your question. I know, but a bigger thing has happened, which is you've read a conversation and, and you've taken it. You're not saying, well, that's a bit of a shocker that you're so. It's all you, you, you, Charlotte. That's. That you don't have problems with that. That's amazing.
Let me just say this. First of all, I understand exactly what you're talking about. I mean, I think, you know, I do see the transcripts. I mean, I really don't look at them anymore. But, you know, in the first couple of years that we were transcribing the podcast, I would see the transcripts and just, you know, want to lock myself in a closet and not come out. And so I totally understand. But I have to say, Charlotte, that there's so much that you talk about that I was really fascinated by and that, you know, you bring up things that. There's a number of things that I Hadn't really thought about that much. And, you know, that I really was just very, very engaged with. And so, for me, I really enjoyed. You know, look, I'm a specific reader here because Jess and I are close, old friends, and I know a lot about the way Jess thinks about their work and about photography in general. But I really loved reading your thoughts about photography and the way we do and the way we can engage with it and your sort of inside curatorial curator knowledge. And I was just in. You know, I really enjoyed it. So there's nothing that feels superfluous or like, how did I get here? It just feels like a conversation that's flowing, and I really appreciate that. So, yeah, that's amazing. Just throw that out there for what it's worth. And now I'm gonna bring it back, because I do think that. And I can put it in a larger context. I do think that what you're talking about is giving agents a certain agency to the viewer. And I think that that's, you know, in that context, you're talking about in the gallery context. But I think that this is a very big topic, right, which is, you know, it can expand all the way out to legibility in general. Who are we talking to, who is included, who is excluded? And these are huge topics in art and very, very important. And, you know, there's not one right way, but certainly they're very important and very worth unearthing as much as possible and discussing. And so I feel that the book sort of comes down on this side of accessibility, legibility, and agency for the person engaging with it. And I think that that's, you know, clear and I think, worth talking about why that's important to both of you. Jess, if you want to grab that and just talk about the importance of. To you, of that big tent sort of approach.
Sure. Yeah. I mean, I have always cared about and been committed to my work being accessible. And there are sometimes many layers behind that initial accessibility. And some viewers will understand those and some will not. And I have always had this belief, and Charlotte and I talk about this in the book. You know, I make my work from this very personal place, but then when I put it out in the world, I have this belief that it will find the people it needs to find, and maybe it won't resonate with everyone, but the people that it does resonate with, it could be powerful for them. So I think that's always been important to me. But as I've gotten older and further along in my career, I've really come to understand that the creative process for me is really about the connections I make with other people. And sometimes those connections are with the subjects, sometimes they're with people like Charlotte, but they're also with viewers, and they're with people who might see my work in an exhibition or encounter my work in a book and have their own experience with it. And sometimes then they share about their own life with me. And there's this reciprocal kind of vulnerability and opening up and honesty. And I really, really value that. And I think in order for that to happen, that kind of communication to happen, the work has to be accessible. People have to be able to enter it. They have to see themselves in it somehow. They have to relate to it. And so that's becoming welcoming, right? There has to be an entrance, and it doesn't mean every person is gonna walk through, but it has to be clear how you get in, how you access it. And I think when we were making the book, I mean, there are so many decisions we made first between me and Charlotte about the content, one of which I will say, is that the book was a collaboration. It was a very intentional trial that Charlotte brought her own subjectivity to the book, which is something I really love. And I'm really honored, Charlotte, that you were willing to go to that place with me, because I know it's vulnerable. But we did decide early on that it was not my book with Charlotte sort of propping me up. It was our book. It was our creation. And it's a very large book for listeners at home. The first volume is well over 300 pages. The second volume is almost 200 pages. And, you know, that's part of why it became two volumes, because the content was such that it required it. So it is a very big book. But at the same time, we were all thinking about it being accessible, and we were thinking about how a reader would enter it. And there's many different layers in which you can engage with the book. You can just look through the pictures and not read the text. You could read, like, one chapter of text text and one chapter of pictures at a time. We also have. And we can talk about this more if we talk about the physical book, but there are three paper types throughout the book, and one of those is a vellum. So there's some images printed on a vellum that kind of overlay with other content. And on some of those vellum sheets, we have little bits of text from the larger conversation. So those also were meant to, you know, for a viewer who's Just kind of flipping through the photographs. Those were meant to be an invitation to the content, to bring a little accessible amount into the book in a way that mattered. But obviously someone could take a deeper dive. And we know no one's gonna read this book in one sitting. It's not really possible. I mean, I guess it's possible if you have many, many, many hours, but we, you know, we understood that people were gonna engage with us. Yeah, it's not really possible, but, yes, I mean, making it accessible was a big part of it. And also, you know, part of why I was drawn to Radius is because they have a donation program built into their publishing model. And so out of our print run, 350 copies will go to libraries all throughout the country and a few international locations. And that, to me, was also really important because even though books are relatively accessible compared to exhibitions or, you know, museum spaces, they're still expensive for your average person. And I just. I loved the idea that so many of these books would be in libraries. And with the Radius team, we talked a lot about, like, you know, a queer kid in rural Idaho, like, coming across this book and what that could mean for them and what that might do for them. So we were really thinking about it being useful again. That's become a pretty significant guidepost for me. Like, how can my work be the most useful and how can it make a difference in someone else's life?
And do you want to just talk a little bit about the production of it? And I'm curious myself. I'm sure you told me, and I really just don't remember, but did you guys started it without having Radius on board, I assume?
Yes.
Yeah. So what was that process? I mean, I think people are always really interested in some nuts and bolts stuff. What was that process of finding Radius and then collaborating with them?
Sure. Charlotte, do you want me to jump into that one?
Yeah. No, you do this, because this is all you.
Yeah. So Charlotte and I entered this process without many details, including not having any idea who would publish it. I think we just both had this blind faith that was it, it was going to become something meaningful, and we would figure it out as we went. But when we were thinking about reaching out to publishers, really, for me, RADIUS was number one and was the publisher that I thought could handle this material because it was so much material. I mean, I. I still tell David. I'm like, I had no idea how you were going to turn this into a book, like, truly, because, I mean, it was. It's 20 years of my Life in work, you know, we had hundreds of pictures. We had hundreds and hundreds of pages of text and interviews and conversations. And so what I really loved about Radius was how they make these very complex books that have many layers of content and they can handle these sort of multiple through lines and yet they're very accessible. They're very. You know, it's kind of like when the design is good, it disappears, right? So when you're holding the book, you don't think about all these decisions, but it just feels like something you can engage with. And I mean, that's what drew me to Radius. I mean, I also just have always loved the books they make. I've admired them for a really long time and really appreciate, you know, the book as object, which is something I was already thinking about a lot with my previous book, Look At Me like youe Love Me. And, you know, I really wanted this book to be its own experience and its own object. And I'm still blown away by David's design. I'm still taking it in because. Because as Charlotte was saying, you're the first reader. We've only had a copy of the book for about a month now. So I'm still taking in how the object came together. But it was really his brilliance around bookmaking that led to a lot of the practical decisions. So, I mean, the first step was just figuring out a general structure for the book at all, figuring out how are we going to organize the photographs, how are we going to organize the conversation. And I went to Santa Fe many times and worked with the team in person. And we, you know, over several meetings, eventually settled on this structure that the book became with different chapters and the images sorted under certain headings. I mean, it's interesting because I gathered so many pictures, including these archival early works, like, you know, pictures I made when I was 17 and doing my BFA and, you know, so I looked through my entire archive, which, which in and of itself was a rather intense experience, and just gathered this huge amount of material. And it was a really pretty significant editing down process to get to what we got to. Yeah, and it was funny actually, because so, yeah, we organized the structure. And then, you know, at the moment that David presented me the sort of first, you know, first designed version, I remember it was so funny because I had this perception that, you know, it did not include my comprehensive life's work. And I remember David very kindly, you know, basically saying, actually it does. You know, there's hundreds of pictures, but like. But when it's your work, it's you know, it's harder to see. So. Yeah, and then, you know, it was a process of choosing papers and choosing, you know, the way the text was designed. They designed the conversation with me and Charlotte in this sort of non linear way where each response moves around on the page and. And again, that was done to be more accessible. So you're not, as a viewer, you're not confronted with this block of text and. Block of text.
Yeah, no, it's very smart. Yeah.
And so all these formal decisions we made and practical decisions were meant to make this massive amount of material much more accessible and easier to engage with. So I will say, I mean, I was very involved in the concept of the book and the editing and the pictures and as was Charlotte. But I will say, so much of the design and the finished book really came from David and I think he's just brilliant in terms of seeing this content and imagining it in book form and turning it into book form. And that's something I really love about working with brilliant publishers because I feel like as an artist, I can get my work to a certain point. I can, you know, I can make the pictures, I can gather the content, but then I feel like there's really a moment where I just have to hand it over and let someone else bring their expertise to it. And it's always such an amazing experience when I get to do that. And working with Radius, I think in particular, this was the largest, most complicated book I've ever made. And working with them on such a complicated project was a really singular and magical experience.
That's so great. Yeah. Well, congratulations. Yeah, you guys really did an amazing job altogether. So these things are not easy and obviously there's a lot of people with opinions, but really amazing job. One thing or another thing I really, I want to ask you two about just getting back to, you know, recurring themes in your conversation. One is this idea of how work enters a collection. So talking about a museum collection, how it enters, how it's thought about, when it enters, why it's entering and how do I put this? How that might morph and change over time. So, you know, Jess, you are very candid about really being collected at this moment in time as museums try to be more inclusive and are, you know, therefore very focused on sort of aggressively going after work made by people outside of the white male binary. And you know, Charlotte, you talk a lot about that in your conversations with Jess and say a lot that is just really, I think, important and edifying. And one thing you said that I was really taken by is. I'm gonna quote you again. You said you can't fully control how your work will be used, but you can set an intention and resist a particular kind of reduction. And I wanna just. I want you to talk about that a little bit because I thought, honestly, I thought. Can you. I mean, I love this idea. I mean, it was so optimistic. You are very optimistic. You say a number of things that just made me smile because they were really. I was like, this is the best side of the art world, the way Charlotte sees it.
But
no, I love that. I think I'm an optimist, even though I'm also. I can be extremely brought down sometimes by certain parts of the machine. But let's talk about that because I think it's a really important thing for listeners to understand and I'd like to understand it myself. This idea that you can set an intention and resist a particular kind of reduction. You just talk about that.
I think one of the. I mean, both Jess and I have histories working in museums and with collections. And I guess what I mean by that is in my working life, I've had moments where I'm really communing with objects, you know, that I have the privilege to be in storage spaces and finding photographs, essentially. But I think actually all of us who are interested in photography at this moment in time are dealing with. Is the material legacy of a medium that's been around for, you know, a couple of hundred years, right. And in a period where archive reanimation or reinterpretation is just a massive part of what we might think of as photography as contemporary art. Right. So we've. We're well beyond the phase with. Of thinking that it's about clicking the shutter of a camera. Camera, right. So in a way, as a very active creative body of people of self elected people who are into photography and create photographs and photographic stories.
We're.
We've come a long way in. In the time that I've been working in it in terms of that. That not being that these collections do not necessarily go mute, which, you know, I'm thinking about like one of my earliest experiences was wearing, you know, overalls and going into the. Of V and a storage off site storage at Olympia and going through the boxes and, you know, it was about cataloging these, you know, well over 300,000 photographs in the collection that had been there since the 1860s or the 1870s, for example. And they've been collected for different reasons, mainly about photographs as records of all forms of human endeavor. And creativity. And so one of the kind of plus moments was discovering yet another Eugene Ache photograph that had been bought from ACE in 1902 or 3 as examples of metalwork in Paris. Right? And then they'd have been kept in a filing cabinet for, you know, all, you know, most of the 20th century. And then you find an Ace. And so I think it was always within my imagination of, like, the fact that there was always this possibility that the meaning of what that photograph was would come back to what it potentially it sort of intention had been, or Ajay's intention had been. And so I think I have a relationship with these kind of. I often use the word in my writing, enduring when I'm talking, talking about photography. And it always makes me giggle because in a way, it's like. We all know that it's like very kind of fugitive in a way, but it's also very enduring. And anyway, I think we have to treat our own practices as having that. That we have to trust the ebb and flow of human agency and culture. And I feel that that's what we've done with this book. I feel that I do that with all of my books, actually, which is you put it out into the world. Your intention is like, I think this is the most relevant thing. I think this is a really important story. And as Jess says, we know who the idealized precious reader of this book is, and we know what this book, if they find it, and it doesn't matter if they find it tomorrow or they find it in a decade's time or two decades time, but somebody will find this book and it means the world to them. And I think that's embedded in Jess's practice and that enduring understanding that the intention of this work will come back and back at every moment, that it's needed, that you can summon it. And yeah, I feel that about this book. And I feel it's really important at this moment in time where it was interesting when you were saying about institutions and being able to kind of maintain intent within these archives or collections or exhibition programs, and whether that's debatable or not, but it's like I was listening to you say that in the present tense, about institutions putting in some effort to move beyond the white male canon of the story of photography. And I was thinking, gosh, should that be in past tense? Because right now I think institutions are having to back away from that commitment and intent quite substantially. And so even in the time that this book has been made and is now coming out, it's like, I think its significance is fugitive, but it is also enduring. And I'm going to cry in a minute, but I think that's why this book is so important, is it will endure. It might have moments where it will go quiet, but it will find the people it needs to find. It's set up that way, and it's just really important to do it. I mean, I know it's a collaboration with me, but ultimately this is a story about why to do this, why to participate, and why to set intentions in the way that Jess has in this remarkable 20 years of work.
Jess, you know, one thing that also comes up a number of times is the line that you're walking between everything that Charlotte just described. The importance of your connection with the queer community, representation, seeing themselves, you reaching out with this sort of love letter to future generations, et cetera. But also equally, your determination to make sure that the work is not reduced and can hold multitudes. And by that, of course, I mean that you are primarily a portrait artist. And what that may mean down the line, as far as the ability to see the work in the context of, for instance, a show on portraiture. How do you think about that? Or maybe I tell folks how you think about that.
Yeah. No, it's interesting because when you were talking about setting the intention, I was thinking about how, for me, I obviously have an intention when I make the work, but I think the careful guarding I have to do is more about how the work is contextualized, and it's often how it's written about. I spend a lot of time trying to make sure that the work is written about in a nuanced way and not reduced by language. And I was thinking about how this book, for me, is a way I can set my intention. And I was talking with Dorothy Moss, who's the director of the Hung Lu estate, and she's the final conversation in Volume two. And one thing we talk about is legacy, particularly for art who are outside the white male canon, and how sometimes we have to have an active hand in creating our own legacy because it won't necessarily be created for us or it won't be recorded in the way we want it to be. I also talked to Kelly Connell about this. Just thinking about, how will you be written about? How will you be understood? And so I think just going back to that question of setting intention, for me, it's partially by taking the reins of these materials that surround my work, not just the work itself. Now, I forgot your original question.
Well, just about, you know, that balance between the devotion to the queer community and your own ambition, rightly so, to be considered and thought of, maybe not first and foremost, but certainly on par with as a portrait artist.
Yeah, so I've always been interested in my work being in dialogue with just much broader conversations, other forms of art, other cultural things going on. And so I think I've always balanced these ideas of representation with a more general conversation about being an artist and being creative and also about humanity. And so I think for me, as I've. As I've gone further in my practice and in my work, I think I've moved away from representation as an assertion of existence and towards representation of an identity or communities through the telling of a very subjective story. And I'm moving toward this much more poetic place with my work and open ended place. And I think one thing that's in this book and also is in my practice right now is this foregrounding of shared humanity. And I've often been saying, you know, my, my work is not about queerness, my work is about life. But it's made through my lens, which is informed by my identity as a queer person and my identity as a non binary person. But of course it's also informed by so many other things. My identity as a parent, where I grew up, my experiences in the world, my experiences with love and relationships. So, you know, there's all of these things there. So I guess this is a long way of saying, saying, you know, I'm really pushing to foreground both the underlying creative practice in my work and this focus on human connection. And it doesn't mean I'm not leading with queerness or it doesn't mean I'm hiding queerness. That's still very much there. But I want it to be within this larger, more nuanced conversation.
Well, I mean, personally, I think, you know, I'm in the camp that believes that the specific is the universal. So I don't think those things, I mean, not only do I not think they're mutually exclusive, I think the more specific, the more universal. So this is something I talk to young artists about all the time for sure. So, you know, I think you're in a good position there. But yeah, I mean, I think it's also important to note that a lot of your portraiture is informed by painting and the sort of canon of famous portraiture or portraiture by famous artists that's been very meaningful to you and that that dialogue is also happening. And you know, if you tease that out, then, you know, in 10 or 20 years, if we're lucky, and we stop moving backwards as we are right now as far as evolution, and we start moving forwards again. We can all pray for that then. You know, that puts your work in a beautiful exhibition of portraiture. Right. Where it's not reduced to it being a work about queerness. Right, right. Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, all these issues are. They're obviously complicated and thorny, but, you know, so important. And one thing that I really appreciated with the conversations you guys had is sort of steering clear of photography that's about photography. And really photography that's about life and how we live and love. And so with that, I'm wondering, how did the title come to be? Love Pictures?
Sure. So the title came from something that my daughter Eleanor and I have talked about. So when I would travel, I would always write her a note or draw her a picture as this kind of love note that she would find after I was gone. And when she was maybe four, she started calling them love pictures, like love notes. So that came from her. And so this idea stuck with me. And then when we were thinking of a name for the book, I wanted something open ended enough that it could work for both me and Charlotte. Right. Like, it can't just be my statement. I've, you know, I've titled other books something that's from that specific content, but that wouldn't make sense in this context.
Right.
But I also wanted something that could just work in many directions so it could speak about, you know, my love of picture making, you know, Charlotte's love of the photographic language and also just the experience of a viewer. You know, it kind of works in all of these directions. So that's how we settled upon it. And when we were first starting the process, it was kind of a working title and then it just never changed.
So did you ever think about sort of being more on the nose in terms of that this is sort of a mid career retrospective type book or you always think, I'm gonna keep it more open and let people sort of come to that on their own.
You know, I think it became that throughout the process, but that's not what I set out to make. And I don't think that's what Charlotte and I thought we were doing in the beginning. It really emerged from that original conversation. It became clear that it was would. Then it would become this kind of mid career survey or, you know, a look back from this moment to everything that came before. And so I think Charlotte, you know, feel free to Jump in as well. But I think we both thought of it as a non traditional monograph, a non traditional survey. So I think it has that function. But again, it just. Its final form was completely organic and came out of our original collaboration.
That's amazing.
I mean, I'd concur on the fact that I don't think we were. I don't think the strategy was exactly, let's do this survey book of Jess's work, but do it in their way or I don't think it was quite as sort of as concept driven as. I mean, that's what Jess is saying and I concur with that. But I would say that I think I had a feeling quite early on at the point at which we were putting together kind of edits for PDFs to go to Radius to say this is what it feels like. And we were choosing pictures to go with the text. And at that point for me, I was like, oh, these conversations create opportunities for slices, kind of lateral cuts through Jess's work over the last 20 years that I really like. Like I get to know the work better once they're not fully held within the so called bodies of work, right. And we treat. And Jess, again, quite organically was going through. You were going through your archive, right. And so you were sort of rethinking what constituted the sort of master set of the archive, like unpublished work or work that is much more about formative before you get to the pictures, that hand on heart you would put your name to, right, Publicly put your name to. So there was a lot of work that was going on there, which of course is best practice if you're going to do a survey book, to sort of take a step back and not just look at the published work or the printed work, but to think about what this archive, what this cache of work really constitutes. And that is a process that was built in to love pictures. And then I think it's a question of really sticking to that. I think that's something that, that you, Jess, me and David really shared, which was to really stay with the gut instincts that we had as we were putting the transcripts and editing the transcripts and putting the PDFs together and beginning to create these folders of images that accompanied the text, which was to not complicate it or not to polish, polish it too much. Like, one of the things that surprised me, that stayed with the whole process was the transcripts we sent in were really the transcripts of when we pressed record and when we stopped recording, right. They Weren't. They weren't neat packages. And I really thought that that would go. And it didn't. And it kind of a new pushed and created and responded to those in really interesting, interesting ways. Like what would be the thematics? Right. Like the queer body within the landscape was like, you know, that wasn't a genre within your archive. Right. That is something that's responding to the way that the conversation flowed. And so I feel like that was probably one of the reasons that it stays really like you don't feel like there's a construct. It's not. It's not. Not a synthetic construct. Like our use of the word organic today is really true. And then the challenges in a process that's really long, really hard, really laborious, really expensive is that you don't try and tidy it up and you stay really true to. I mean, like the relationship between those sort of proposal PDFs and what we have, I mean, is both vastly different, but also the same. It's the same feeling, which is the way that you read the pictures is contextualized in this much broader landscape and all of these different entry points, which again, it really rings true. It's not a sort of retrospective kind of intellectualizing of your process. It's like it's truthfully all of the layers of your work over the last 20 years. So it's a. It's a remarkable survey book, like I'm proud to call it that actually now. Because it's done in your way, right?
Yeah. Now I very much think of it as a survey. But that was not, not at all what I thought we were doing in the beginning. And like Charlotte mentioned, you know, of course we cleaned up the conversation. But the way that you encounter it in the book is. Is chronological with how we had it. You know, we didn't move chunks around. So again, it all went back to this sort of foundation of this really in depth conversation. And you know, we intentionally left in these moments where we revisit certain ideas or the same topic might come up over again. So there is.
Yeah, I think that's very important.
So of course we edited out a lot of things that weren't necessary, but we embraced this reality that, you know, you revisit ideas, you come at them from different angles and, you know, there's a sort of core set of ideas and concerns that drive a practice. And we embraced that fluidity in the conversation as well. And then kind of mimicked that in, in the photographs. There's things that reappear or things you see in volume one and also in volume two. And so there is this sort of nod to experience and memory and a more subjective approach to picture making.
Well, I think we have to wrap up, but I want to tell people that they can pre order the book now. It's going to ship soonish and I think I'm just going to. Normally don't mention the price of things, but it's $75, which I think is sort of miraculous. I don't. I know that's still a lot of money for folks, but it's such an incredible object. Two objects in a beautiful slipcover, just all the beautiful paper and linen one could want in a good photo book. And so quite the deal basically at the end of the day. So if people go to radiusbooks.org they can see it there and pre order it. And yeah, I just want to thank you both so much for being with me today and letting me talk to you about this really incredible accomplishment. And I just, really love just hearing just now about the way you trusted your instincts, both of you, and let this unfold. It started in one place, it wound up in another because that's the way the river was flowing and I think that that's. There's obviously a lot of wisdom and lessons there and really beautiful way to work and collaborate. So, yeah, congratulations to both of you.
Thanks so much, Sasha.
Thank you, Sasha. Listen, I listen to a lot of your podcasts because you've talked with so many people I admire and love and I, having gone through this experience myself, I'm really honored to be in the club. And also I, I understand why you're so adored and loved and admired because you're really good at this. Thank you for staging this conversation with us. It's really important.
Well, thank you. This was really my pleasure. I was really looking forward to it and I could talk to you guys forever, but unfortunately we have a time limit. But both of you, be well and all the best with this book. I think it'll make quite an impression. So best of luck with it and look forward to seeing you both in person sooner rather than later. So take care.
Sounds good. You too. Thanks, Sasha.
Okay, bye.
Bye. Photo Work with Sasha Wolf is a production of a Photo Work Foundation. Executive producer is Sascha Wolf and the associate producers are Taylor Salzback and Noah Lynn. 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 PhotoArch foundation, and be sure to subscribe and review with all the stars on your listening platform.