The blurred line: Where art meets photography

In this episode of The Search Bar, Adam Sparkes welcomes Kris Sanford to the show. The two discuss what makes a photographer truly great, the blurred line between art and photography, the pros and cons of artificial intelligence in the photography industry – and more.

Adam: With the ubiquity of smartphones, who's a photographer when everyone's a photographer? Welcome to The Search Bar. I'm your host, Adam Sparkes, and on today's episode, we talk with Kris Sanford, professor of photography at Central Michigan University about what separates good photographers from the great ones and the blurred lines between photography and art. Thanks for coming in today, Kris. I'm excited to have you here because for once we're talking about something that I feel like I'm an expert in. And we're going to talk a little bit about photography, having students, how we came up, who are reverential towards, and then AI, because we want to end it on a depressing note.

Kris: Oh, right, right. Yeah. Well, thank you for having me.

Adam: What are you photographing right now?

Kris: Well, currently I'm photographing my son.

Adam: Yeah, I see that a lot.

Kris: A lot, right. So I am the parent of a boy who was a little over a year old, and so that's really changed my life in the last year.

Adam: Did you think you'd become such a momtographer?

Kris: No. No, and he's hard to photograph. I probably don't need to tell you that when they're toddlers, it's like you can't watch them and photograph them. I mean, you can attempt to do that, but possibly something bad could happen to the kid or your camera if you're chasing them around, and so I thought I would take better pictures of him actually than I do, to be honest with you, because it's like my photo brain and my parent brain. You got to be in two separate spaces.

Adam: They're little feral animals too.

Kris: Oh my gosh.

Adam: You get that toddler age and it's like, you're right. They'll just tip over something and they have no sense of self preservation.

Kris: Oh, absolutely.

Adam: Which can be really cute, but then you're like, oh wait, you got to run over.

Kris: Yeah, I take a lot of cell phone pictures. He likes to take selfies. He seems to recognize, I don't know if it's himself or it's just recognizing another person in the cell phone when we're playing around with that, so he seems to like that, which makes sense, right?

Adam: Yeah. That's like the early magic of it, right? Seeing yourself and seeing someone you know but they're not there or they're not how you remember them or something.

Kris: Right. Well, in the phone he likes to play with-we will FaceTime my mom sometimes, and so it is interesting to see his facial expression change when she calls or he sees her or hears her voice because it's this little black box that now has a person coming out of it, either through the visual or through the audio. That's fun to watch.

Adam: It's magic for him every time.

Kris: It is. Yeah, yeah.

Adam: He's getting sucked in. He could be your protege in like 10 years, right?

Kris: He could, yeah. Yeah. I imagine he'll be playing with cameras really early, right?

Adam: Yeah. My kids went through it and then went out of it and now are expressing interest again and they're both later in high school, I have a sophomore and a junior or something. I'm in the back nine or however you want to- I'm rounding the clubhouse. I don't play golf is a horrible analogy for me.

Adam: But yeah, you get there. It makes me think about what got me into it. What got you into it initially? What made you think, man, I want to pursue this thing that is everyone else's hobby, but pursue it seriously?

Kris: Well, I mean, it wasn't everyone else's thing when I got into it. It's funny that you mentioned that and we're talking about kids. I had a one 10 camera, film camera, which had those little cartridges when I was a kid and I used to love to take portraits of people, but unexpected. I would call my mom into the room and then take a surprise picture of her face. I just love to catch people by surprise. It was this funny act.

Adam: She probably loved that.

Kris: Everyone hated it, everyone. So I have all these bad pictures of people from when I was a kid of people caught up guard, caught by surprise, and so that's kind of silly, but that was my first exposure to photography. I took a photo class in high school and it was all film. This is pre-digital. And working in the dark room was my jam. There's something about the tactile, the getting lost in, just losing hours of time because you're so into the process of making prints. There's just something a lot of fun about that and the hand work of it that I don't get lost in the same way when I'm sitting at a computer.

Adam: Yeah, I agree with you. It's much more of a time vacuum when you're in a dark room.

Kris: Yeah. But a fun one.

Adam: Yeah.

Kris: Like an invigorating one. I remember when I was in undergrad and I was doing my thesis work, which was all from black and white film, and I would print for eight hours and I would be on concrete floors, kind of similar to the ones we are on here. And my feet and legs would ache at the end of a long printing session, but it was still just like this hard rewarding work, and it was just worth it.

Adam: Yeah, there's a magic to the dark room too, even when you're good at it-I'm not saying that I was ever that good at it, but I was competent-You kind of go, what if I did this? And there's a permanence to making a decision to try something a little bit different, doing something wild in there. Whereas if you're in Photoshop and you're like, what if I did this? Generally speaking, it’s non-destructive, right. You're not burning paper, you're not tossing a coin into the wishing well, you can go back but not in the dark room. Start over.

Kris: Well, it's not chemists, it's not chemical reactions, it's chemical reactions in the dark room and there's these happy accidents that happen and you can get that in digital as well, but it's a little different. There's just this physical material that you're interacting with in the dark room that I think really changes the process and kind of deepens the understanding of what photography is fundamentally right, this action of light, this writing with light and these chemical reactions. And there's a community aspect to working in the dark room that you don't quite get in a digital lab or you can kind of recreate it or you can work on it in a different way in a digital lab. But I do notice there's this comradery that you get when people are looking over the tray together and seeing what image emerges out of that print that you're developing. My memory was always playing music, but you had to negotiate what the music was going to be. I mean, now it's a little bit different. You go into a computer lab and people have their earbuds or headphones on. Everyone's having an independent private experience, whereas there's a lot of labs in art and design where it's a community experience where we're all kind of there working together. So that's why the dark room I think still has a lot of value even though it's not the dominant way that we make pictures anymore.

Adam: After doing undergrad, what was that next big step for you? What was the big project? What was the thing that kind of got your legs moving to do more-pre-professor Kris?

Kris: Right, right. Well, I worked for a commercial photographer in Ferndale, Michigan, so I stuck around the Detroit area and it was very valuable experience. I learned way more about lighting, about what it's like to work in the commercial field, and this was back in the film days, to date myself a little bit. So the ins and outs of working with people, picture taking is the tiny part of what you do, and it's all the other stuff of scheduling shoots, driving to shoots, setting up lights, sending stuff to the lab, all of that. And I enjoyed the job a lot, but it wasn't the kind of creative problem solving that I loved and I was able to teach a class at the same time or around that same time and working in the classroom with people and that trying to figure out how to explain something to someone so that they understood it. I really seemed to like that. And so I thought I was going to go into commercial photography and turns out photographing and conversing with corporate CEOs, it just wasn't my strong suit or wasn't what I was interested in. So that's when I pursued graduate school. I ended up out in Arizona and that really kind of changed the trajectory of things because then I really firmly planted myself in fine art and pursuing that direction, and that involved a lot of breaking down what I thought was a good picture or what I should be doing. And it's tough because you're fighting with making pictures that you think other people will like or pursuing your own impulses. I would say those experiences got me started on the path I'm on now.

Adam: Let's talk about that a little bit more. I think that's an interesting thing, which is following that impulse, what makes you a photographer? What's the engine or the motor for that? And I'm sure it's different for everyone, but I'm curious what it is for you. I know that for me, I'll share briefly and you can share much longer than this.

Kris: Of course.

Adam: I started very much wanting to do it for other people because I wanted them to see how I saw them. And I started it at my college newspaper really. I'd always had cameras and things like that and liked taking photos, but when I got really serious about it, I was like, for me it was this, “oh, you should see yourself. Oh, you should see yourself right now.” And that feeling is what kind of got me to pursue it a little bit. You just started to fall in love with the familiar things that people around you did. So people that became familiar to me as I was out on the beat doing my little shoots here and there as a student journalist, it was the familiar photos that got me, and that was what made me kind of go, “man, I want to keep doing this.” It wasn't necessarily the pursuit of the new, it was the pursuit of showing it back to people. I guess maybe I wanted recognition for it, but it wasn't adventurous or anything like that. I was steeped in the familiar.

Kris: Right, right. I mean, for me, I've always been interested in people and portraiture is kind of the main thing that holds all my work together. And it's very much about getting to know people and holding onto them. I think it's holding onto something that is fleeting, and I was interested in psychology when I was younger, and it seemed like the path was either going to be to study psychology or study photography. When I was looking at classes and programs, I was like, oh, I think I'll study photography. I didn't want to make the commitment to go in that other direction, but that interest in psychology, I use the camera in some ways to not exactly examine people, but to get to know them. It's my way to get to know people.

Adam: We talked about this before the podcast where there's this, when you're doing it, there's this fine line between honesty and kind of a very skewed perception of what's in the image and it's you, the photographer, but it's also what happens to someone who invites you in. I can remember being, when I was really young, I would go shoot punk bands in Detroit in really bad bars, in really questionable neighborhoods or basements like people's basements and the amount of drumsticks that got thrown at me, I think for the effect-

Kris: Oh, okay.

Adam: -so that it would be a photo or the amount of beer that got poured on me for the photo. I don't think it was out of-maybe a couple of times it was-but I don't think it was get out of here. I was invited by these bands in most cases, but I would get these stuff or something would get smashed in front of me and I'm like, this is for the camera and you wanted it. But I always wonder, would the beer bottle gotten smashed on stage if I wasn't dangerously seven inches-I wasn't wearing glasses back then, by the way,

Kris: Or they're showing off a little bit. It's their way of showing off.

Adam: Yeah. You'd get stuff like that. Or sometimes when I was a young photojournalist, I would do these things where you get invited into someone's business and it's not a business that's public in the way that people see the inner workings of it. And you kind of start to wonder how good of a boss is this guy really? How diligent employee are they really? Do they really always dress like this? I just would wonder those things a lot, but also how I feel about it is definitely affecting the way that I'm telling the story back.

Kris: Right, totally. Totally. I mean, what you're photographing says as much about you, that's the photographer or who you choose to photograph, how you photograph them, all of that. So much of what I photograph or how I photograph, it's a reflection of me as much as it is about the person I'm photographing. There's a lot of projection involved and in general, but in what I do specifically, especially doing fine artwork and I use appropriation in my imagery, so I'm borrowing and copying and-to make something new out of it, and it's very much like I'm looking for something that has this emotional resonance and then kind of sharing that with other people who also are finding that connection or that resonance.

Adam: It's a partnership when you take a picture with somebody. That's how I always think of it, is the reality of it is whether it's candid and I showed up somewhere and I just happened to be there, or whether I arranged to take your portrait or to see you in some environment to photograph you, we're doing a thing together. I think that speaks a little bit to your idea that it's people management. Well, not just in running a business of photography, but good photographers aren't always the best technicians, but I think that they scrape layers off of people. They scrape layers off of situations and show them to us in a way that's just slightly ask skew of what we expected or what we thought to be true. Aaron wrote in our notes, all photographs are accurate, but none of them are the truth.

Kris: Right? Yeah. That Richard Avedon quote, I love that quote, and I try to talk about this with students. The control lies with you as the photographer. We think that photographs, that when we take a picture or especially make a portrait of someone like a formal portrait, that it's capturing some inner essence of that person. And maybe you can touch on that a little bit, but mostly it's a projection of who you are as the photographer. You're choosing the angle, you're choosing the lighting, you're choosing the location, so it's very much, it's your truth. It's not like the universal truth. Right?

Adam: Yeah. I feel like that's a huge, that burden of how truthful you're going to be or what your angle is. Speaking of Avedon, I think of Avedon's photos of his father, and it's his father, I think all the way up to and including in a coffin,

Kris: Yeah.

Adam: And I, I'm not going to try to quote him, but in one of, there's a couple Avedon documentaries, but in one of them, I think he says, or maybe his brother says it or something, but he's killing him with his camera. There was this resentment that existed there, and the question, this is after Avedon's death that the film was made, but it was sort of like what was he trying to accomplish there? What was he telling us? How personal were the pictures of his father? Were they really of his father or were they a photo of his relationship with his father? And I know that's a bit oshy-gushy, but I think that's a very real thing that somebody can do, especially somebody who's that skillful. He could intentionally be like, eh,

Kris: Well, there's so much of that that's about vulnerability, right? Vulnerability of his father, but also was it Avedon confronting his own mortality? I mean, was it his way of dealing with his own fear of death? That's probably how I read some of those. And do we as photographers ask too much sometimes of our subjects or are we intrusive? Yeah, that's whole conversation to have. And yeah, Avedon was pretty unapologetic about a lot of the stuff he did, and

Adam: In retrospect, he would tell you he didn't like people.

Kris: Yeah, right, right.

Adam: I thought they were ugly, so I took an ugly picture of them.

Kris: Right, well, and that's the other thing is we think of photography as being this thing that flatters people, but you can also make very unflattering pictures of people. Nobody pays you to do that. Generally, we think of commercial photographers is trying to make people look better than they really do, but in fine art, you might be looking for that darker side of someone perhaps that you don't respect or just darker side of our experience that we normally don't document and share with people. But that is real and that is there.

Adam: Let's go there for a second. I think there's these two kind of revealings of truth that happened. We talked about this really briefly the other day, where there's this kind of traditional journalism where somebody goes out as an explorer, if you will, into a space that they may not be-I'm sure they research it-but they may not be that familiar with it. And the photography has a voyeuristic element to it.

Kris: Yeah

Adam: You are discovering new truths with the photographer, and I think that's what we're used to seeing in newspapers. I think traditionally the pictures and the history books and stuff are sort of that, and I think particularly as photography has become more accessible and there's a greater audience for it and there's a greater amount of people creating it, we're seeing more people. This has always happened, don't get me wrong, but we're seeing more and more people who are going, I'm taking you on a journey that I'm familiar with, and that's going to add different value to you. So you're coming along on my side of the ride, I think about, do you know Richard Renaldi?

Kris: Sure. Yeah.

Adam: So Richard Rinaldi has a ton of amazing projects, but there's this one called Fall River Boys, I think it's New Jersey from Fall River, New Jersey. It's a book. It's shot mostly in the late ‘90s and early ot’s, and it's his hometown, and it is reverential, but not flattering, but it's a bunch-he's mostly a portrait artist-it's a bunch of these beautiful portraits and we can maybe link to where you can buy the book. I think it's still a managed book that you can purchase, and you kind of go, “man, Fall River seems beautiful, but maybe not a place I'd ever want to go.” And it's a really interesting way to go about it. And I'm a big fan of Renaldi, so I feel like I'm watching him kind of battle with his upbringing and who he Elton was. And he also did a lot on and off throughout his career of himself. He would document himself. He traveled to do photography, and with his partner at the time, he was putting a lot of very queer images out that I don't think existed-

Kris: Totally

Adam: -in the late nineties as much. It was laid very bare, and it wasn't always fun. You sometimes felt like they were very uncomfortable with where they were and how they were traveling, what they were doing.

Kris: The hotel portraits.

Adam: Yeah, the hotel portraits. Yeah. That's the series.

Kris: Yeah, absolutely.

Adam: And it's beautiful, but it's like haunting in a way that makes you go, why are you doing this? But you're doing it for us to get some insight.

Kris: And those are voyeuristic, right? You're in the hotel with them, they're often in bed. They're two men in bed together. And so there's definitely pushing boundaries with what the audience is comfortable with, but also just showing two men in a really matter of fact way. But it's a lovely document of the places they've gone. I mean, when you ask questions about photographers that influence you, or I think a lot of times for me, it's people that I'm jealous of that I'm like, I wish I'd have thought of that. I wish I would've taken that. And so those hotel portraits are kind of like that. What an awesome document to have, but also just a documentation of their experience because everyone's going out. If they travel and they're photographing the scenery, they're photographing the iconic locations that everyone's photographing. But to turn the camera inward in the hotel room and to capture all the ugliness or opulence, depending on the type of room they're in, I think that's pretty cool. But then there's the queer angle as well, so there's a lot of layers to those, even though they're kind of simple-

Adam: Yeah

Kris: -In terms of just being self-portraits in hotel rooms. And it documents their relationship too, because I think it started-

Adam: It's like 10 years.

Kris: -when they were possibly from their first trip together. And so it probably didn't start as this long-term project. It probably just started as a one-off that, I'm not trying to put words in his mouth, but I imagine it started as a one-off that just continued, continued. And then it's like that commitment to continuing to follow that.

Adam: When I think of people like Renaldi, I think it's hard to convince people to want to do that kind of art now because we are satisfied so quickly. And he is, I really encourage people to check him out because

Kris: Yeah, do check out.

Adam: He’s a master of just doing something for 15 years and being like, you'll see it at the end baby, which that's hard to do. I mean lucky for him. He has good representation. I think he's still getting paid to do it, but tell me how you feel about that. I mean, trying to get people to go on that kind of a journey, A journey that's that long.

Kris: Well, it's one of the other questions that you had also was about photographers that influenced me. And to me, the most interesting photographers are ones that do these long-term projects who are investigating something or seeing how time changes us as people. Mark Klut is another photographer who's photographed the landscape over years and decades, and also referenced the past as well. And so I find that interesting, and especially the older I get, the more I'm interested in time and change and how photography is this way to document that, examine that look back, bring the past and the present together, collapse them, mash them up.

Adam: Yeah, it's a little. Those vignettes, they can be dizzying and it's such an important thing, and I love it talking about it. It's like, oh, man, I could go spend an hour staring at some stuff. But it feels a little bit like we're also, because of the vapid nature of how we consume media right now, I think it's sometimes it's hard to appreciate it. Right?

Kris: Totally.

Adam: What's that? Tell me about it. Tell how it's changed for you. It feels weird

Kris: Right. Well, social media has been great and terrible for, I think for image makers and for photographers specifically. It's hard to describe because I didn't start photographing in an age of social media. So if you wanted to be a photographer, you had to have a camera and you had to learn how to process film or where to send it. And there's skill involved, I mean, not too much, of course. And you had to print the picture to see it. And so there was this laborious process and all of that. And so it was a different process than now. A lot of times the pictures are sometimes made just for social media alone. The picture's not made for the picture's sake. It's kind of made for other people, but very specifically to generate a certain kind of engagement on social media, to generate likes, to generate comments, to generate controversy, to generate praise. And I can't really relate to that for that to be the sole drive personally.

Adam: No, but I mean, I see where you're coming from. It's one of these things where it's like there's so much, there's a huge audience now. The audience is just really, really big for this stuff. But I feel like photography is always suffered in the arts of being this art that is a little bit more accessible than other arts.

Kris: Oh, A lot more. A lot more.

Adam: Yeah. There's only three things to learn, and they largely haven't changed. It's aperture, shutter speed, ISO or a ISA, whatever you want to call it, that hasn't changed in 150 years. But because of its accessibility, it's been difficult to leave an impression on it, I think because so fewer people become a master sculptor then can become a master photographer, at least from a technical standpoint. It's tough. But now it's gotten really tough. I think there's even more great photos out there probably that you can see, but trying to figure out what makes them special starts to be hard to wade through. I feel like,

Kris: Well, how do you even find them? How do people believe? And I guess that's the thing. That's because in order for people to find you now, you have to have an online presence. You have to be on Instagram, and you have to grow a following. And the bigger you're following, the more people are going to see your pictures. So it's the incentives structures a little different, I guess. And I'm a Gen Xer, I think you are as well. And so when I was a student, there was this concept of selling out, and that was a bad thing. You didn't want too much attention.

Adam: If a band you listened to had their song in a commercial, never listen to that band again.

Kris: Right. And I'm sorry, I have had a really hard time letting go of that. It's just ingrained in me a little bit. But I think it's wonderful that students can, or just anyone emerging in the field, they can create a following out of nothing and they can build their own following. So that is cool. It is cool.

Adam: Some of the gatekeeping is tamped down.

Kris: It is, yeah. The gatekeeping is-

Adam: It almost can't exist anymore. I mean, it's there.

Kris: It's not totally gone, but a lot of that is gone.

Adam: Yeah

Kris: However, the algorithms and the motivation for, let's say advertising or the incentive structure, once again, is it a little shallow, right? I guess that's the-

Adam: Oh, for sure.

Kris: And that's the part that I don't like about it. And that's the part-

Adam: I mean, even social media has had its own kind of change in the way it functioned. I mean, I remember early Instagram, it was great. You could get work from it. You could literally just get work from it. You would see people, you would engage with people that were more adjacent to the communities that you're already in, into the people that you're already communicating with. And it's really just become cable television at this point. You just flip channels and it's mostly going to show you people that make money for Instagram, for example, and this is a lot of other timelines, social media, not necessarily the people that I am most likely to engage with at a personal or professional level. If I just put photography as an interest and I started a new account, I'm going to see a lot of Peter McKinnon or something, which is fine,

Kris: Yeah, yeah.

Adam: But the chances of it showing me like you or Aaron Mills or somebody who's in my community, in my geographic region anymore, that's gone. That was kind of early on how you'd find people. And I do feel a little bit like, you're right, they have the ability to make the audience, but even students that you and I engage with now, they don't even have the benefit of that early version of it where it was a little more organic, even though it was digital.

Kris: True. Well, and you have to keep generating content.

Adam: A lot more, yeah.

Kris: So, there's a certain pressure, and do you have to generate content that people want to see? And so I guess, can there be genuine curiosity? Can there be genuine experimentation? Can you go out on left field and do something totally different? Or if you're too different, will you lose your audience? Or if you take a break because you just need to recharge or you're between projects, are you penalized for that? I think sometimes you are on social media, right?

Adam: Yeah. If that's where you're measuring your success-

Kris: Yeah.

Adam: How would you encourage students now to take those risks, to develop that? This is the thing that I try. This is a style. How do I learn to approach image making in a way that will be mine at some point at the end of the learning process?

Kris: Yeah. Well, and that's tough too, because you should be influenced. You should be looking at what other people are doing and should be aware of what's come before you, especially knowing history, history of art, history, photography or other photo journalists, if that's your background or your area of interest, because we don't create in a vacuum, right? So, knowing that I think is good. And so then you're, you're kind of cutting your own path. What are you bringing to that conversation? What are you adding that's new? And it comes from who you are as a person, your own background. So there is some amount of imitation that's normal when you're starting out, but if it stays at imitation, right? I think-

Adam: Yeah.

Kris: -you got to kind of move beyond that. And it's hard because you really have to figure that out on your own. You want to get feedback from people, but as we both know, you can get contradictory feedback even within a single classroom critique.

Adam: I give it all the time.

Kris: Yeah, right. Yeah. You're going to get that. And so at a certain point, you have to make those tough decisions, but that's just part of it. And so you'll make a decision to put together a certain portfolio or that is going to please one audience, but maybe not another. But I've been talking with my students about portfolios. It's the end of the year. We're getting to that time. And honestly, you should have several versions of your portfolio. The portfolio is not one thing that stays the same. It's this thing that's constantly changing and evolving. And sometimes you can test that stuff out on social media or in critiques with your peers or just getting feedback from folks. Maybe it's even people that don't know anything about photography.

Adam: Have you ever had a project that you felt nervous about? What was a risky project for you? I don't know if this is going to work.

Kris: I don’t-risky…?

Adam: I mean creatively risky. Not like you were going to get jailed.

Kris: No, no, no, no, no. Well, yeah, I'm a risk averse person in general. And then, well, I did a portrait project a few years ago where I basically revisited a portrait project I had done as an undergrad. I had photographed people in the LGBTQ community in, I don't know, the year 2000, and I went back and revisited them again. I just got this idea like, “oh, wow, it's 2015. Gay marriage is now legal. A lot has changed in a short amount of time” because in 2000, I didn't know if I'd see gay marriage become legal in my lifetime. And here we are. That was 15 years later, and I realized, wow, I could probably find all these people and rephotograph them. So I did. And so that was nothing risky about that. However, I decided to do video interviews as well, and I thought like, oh, I'm a still photographer, so I'm going to capture great video. This should be pretty simple. I'll just shoot a quick little interview while I'm there making a portrait.

Adam: May I introduce you to audio?

Kris: You're right. Yes, exactly. So I learned a lot. It was a really steep learning curve because yes, the audio was definitely a complicating factor that I did not know a whole lot about. And there's a certain amount of learning as you go, but there's a certain amount of things you can't redo or go back and do. So I was in a little bit over my head. I was doing it by myself. I probably should have called people with some expertise or collaborated with someone who maybe had expertise in that area. So that was a little, I got in a little over my skis there. And then also the audience for that. I knew who the audience was for the portraits. I am familiar with places to show it, but I had these video interviews, and once again, I loved sitting and watching however many minutes of these videos that I had recorded, and I liked the conversations that I was having with people, but every time I would show a piece to someone, they're like, that's too long. That's too long. You need to cut that in half. This should be like a minute. I don't want to sit and watch six to eight minutes of this. So that was a big learning curve as well, because you're adding the time element to it. And I have a little less experience with that. And I'm a curious person. I can sit and talk for quite a while. So I enjoyed listening to people talk, but who's your audience and what's their attention span? What's their level of interest? Who are you making something for? Sometimes you do have to answer some of those questions.

Adam: How many folks did you find out from your original project on them? I'm curious.

Kris: Well, the first project, it was 12 portraits. I photographed 12 people, and I was able to get back in touch with 11 of them. There was only one person that I couldn't find, and some of these folks were personal friends. And funny enough, somewhat, the germ of it started because I had reconnected with an old friend. I saw her on OkCupid. I was online dating at the time, but I lived-

Adam: That's a different podcast,

Kris: -Right? But I lived hours from where I had grown up. And so I reconnected with an old friend, and she was in that series. And that is, in part, it was like, oh, yeah, right. I could just reconnected with people, not on a dating website, but-

Adam: They were all on OkCupid. It was wild.

Kris: No, no. Right. And it was interesting to find out who was in the same relationship, whether people had changed, just kind of to find out what had happened in people's lives over 15 years. And that was part of what the interviews were for, was to find that out for them to talk a little bit about that experience. Some folks were married. One of the folks I photographed, he had gotten married and then they had already gotten divorced. They were one of the first couples to be married in Michigan in that little window of time where it was legal in this state, but wasn't legal nationally. And this was a subject too, by the time I photographed him the second time around, he was in his sixties. And he talked about how hard it is to date at that age for probably anyone, but especially for a gay man in his sixties. So he had challenges that he shared. And so it's nice to kind of have this conversation and a little bit vulnerable. And those are things you can explore in a video and through interviewing someone that you don't get quite all of that in a picture. You could get it in a photo story, you could do a longer project of still images. But I enjoyed doing those. I enjoy doing those interviews.

Adam: I'm interested in your take on the difference between photography as an art and photography as a technical skill, because I do think that it's another one of those things. As the arts go, there's a huge part of the job that is just being a technician. And there's very successful photographers who are technicians and run really great businesses. And that could vary from people who, I don't know, they take survey photography of giant buildings or something. It's actually industrial to people who have, this is going to sound mean, and I'm not pointing this at anybody directly, but who have really successful portrait or wedding photography businesses. And it's more about being a good salesperson and an appropriate technician than being particularly artful. And I think most photographers have to find a way to ride that line or to saddle that fence or however you want to kind of state it. I'm just curious what your take is on that, and do you want to see people go one way or the other?

Kris: Oh, that's a good question. I mean, I guess photography is a medium. It's a tool, and you can use it for all these different purposes. That's what I like about my job here at CMU and the classes that I teach in the art and design department, I get folks from all over the university. So I get someone who might be an art major, but I also get someone who might be a psychology major or studying early childhood education or a photojournalist. All those people will be in one class together. And so I try to show this wide range of photographers and photography can be this thing or it can be that thing. And photography wasn't immediately an art form at all. It was this kind of marriage of art and science. But it was originally seen as not a high art at all, because it was a machine taking the pictures. It wasn't somebody's hand making the pictures. You had to have a lot of technical knowledge to be a photographer in the 19th century when photography was invented. And that's obviously changed a lot. And so I think I don't really push anyone in any one direction. I'm personally always trying to strike that balance where I think some artists could maybe master some of the technical stuff a little bit more because that's how you communicate that vision or that idea is knowing that material allows you, knowing that tool allows you to manipulate it. But then sometimes folks who are more on that commercial side perhaps need a little more creativity, need to think outside of the box or be experimental or not be afraid to fail and do something wrong. It's different because yeah, once again, the incentives are different. Whether you're making photographs as art or photographs as commerce and selling them, the incentives are a little bit different. So that changes it, of course. But I love the way they can learn from each other or inform each other. And I kind of feel like I have a foot in both camps a little bit.

Adam: Yeah, I feel the same way just because, I mean, for myself personally, because I'm a nerd and for a lot of my careers-throughout a lot of my career rather not a lot of my careers plural. I've been doing this for 20 years. It's frightening. But it's been wanting to know how somebody did that. How did they do that really motivated-

Kris: Yeah.

Adam: -me for a long time. But I think a lot of times I'll do that for a while, and then I come back around and I go, but it's easy to do once you figure it out-

Kris: Once you know it.

Adam: Once you know it, yeah. You kind of go, “blah I can ignore how all that works, but don't always,” the thing about knowledge, I think, not just in photography and any art or skill that you have, is that you can't shed it. Once you know it, you can't really unknow it.

Kris: You can't unknow it, yeah.

Adam: And it's hard to appreciate the void of where that knowledge was before. So now I'll think of ways to simplify things I do. Or I'll think, “man, if I make another project for myself, it's going to be really untechnical, but there's probably a certain amount of technician in me that I can't get rid of.”

Kris: Well, and I was not a nerd, and I'm still wouldn't classify myself as such, but as an educator, I am always trying to figure things out to explain them to students, to keep up to date with the technology. I think when I was younger, I was always kind of intimidated, to be honest with you, intimidated by the technology. When I was first starting photography in the, let's say early to mid-nineties, it was still a very male dominated field. I would go to a photo store because there was no Amazon to buy stuff. You had to go into the photography store,

Adam: Ad Ray Camara.

Kris: You could be the only woman there. And I was young. And so sometimes the guys talk down to me and I wasn't very confident with the technical side of it. And that's the one thing, getting back to social media or talking about the internet is you can learn stuff. And that's great for students to be able to absorb that stuff. But it's also good for me as an educator to be able to have a greater understanding of that technical stuff. And that's probably why I do tend to be kind of tech heavy in the classroom. I really want students to not be intimidated by their cameras. I want them to-

Adam: Yeah, this shouldn't be an obstacle. The thing you're holding shouldn't be the obstacle.

Kris: No, no. And because it's going to help you with your vision, whatever it is. And I guess that's maybe the thing that I'm compensating for. When I was younger, I didn't always know some of the stuff, and

Adam: People were more gatekeeper. There was a lot of like-

Kris: Oh, sure.

Adam: “Learn that for yourself. Why would I teach you to be my competition?” There's a real attitude like that, for a while.

Kris: There was an attitude in the camera stores,

Adam: Yeah.

Kris: For sure. And it's kind of funny because it's certainly flipped around now with how technology has changed and the way mom and pop shops have to compete with Amazon. But I would rather go to a camera store now. I value that now, and I have the confidence to be, to not be intimidated when I go into a store for a number of reasons. But it's like, okay, help me figure this out. You're the expert. Tell me what's the difference between this and this, where there was certainly-same thing with going to buy CDs or albums or the music store. It's kind of a similar vibe, a similar guy.

Adam: I remember going into Sam Goody in the nineties and being like, they're so much cooler than me because they work here.

Kris: Right, right, right. So yeah, that whole dynamic doesn't really exist anymore. And now it's all about reviews too. You can read reviews, and I encourage folks to do that when they're looking at new equipment, is read what people are saying about this.

Adam: Luckily for them now, the parody in the market is bananas. I think we lived through an era where there was a lot of failed ideas in the camera world. I remember Kodak's line of cameras, I remember Fuji-S series cameras before Fuji-X series, they had our Nikon Mount camera, and they all took AA batteries. They had AA battery, and this is digital SLRs. There was so much wild stuff that hit the market like that, that it would never survive. It would never survive past the internet reviewers to get sold to anybody, now.

Kris: Did you hear about the Litetro, I think was what it was called, this camera that was capable of maximum depth of field, but you could change the depth of the field after.

Adam: It had a bunch of little lenses all over the front of it-

Kris: Well, I'm not sure. I don't remember.

Adam: No, no, no. Yes, the light field camera, that one.

Kris: Yeah.

Adam: What the hell happened to that?

Kris: Well, right, exactly. It was supposed to revolutionize photography. It was going to change everything.

Adam: I remember that now,

Kris: And I might be misremembering the name, but

Adam: It was something like that.

Kris: Nobody's using that now. I don't know what happened to that technology.

Adam: No, it's the global shutters that we're all going to get used to now.

Kris: Right, right, right. Yeah,

Adam: I've been calling it baby. So speaking of tech,

Kris: So tech, yes, yes, yes.

Adam: Let's talk about, I think the scariest thing for most people who are in the arts, which is that software-coding-AI is giving us art, when it was supposed to be cleaning my floor or driving me to work every day in my car, I didn't get a self-driving car. For the record, my dishwasher doesn't put away my dishes for me.

Kris: That's right.

Adam: But by gosh, is there AI photography all over the place!

Kris: Yeah. Well, I guess the first thing I would say about that is I refuse to call that photography. Number one-is it’s illustration. And so I don't know if that helps or not, but it-

Adam: Makes me feel better. So we're going to go with it

Kris: Right, right. Because it's not really photography. It's using photography. It's mimicking photography. It's using the language of photography, so it feels real, and it looks real when we look at images. But there's that uncanny valley, and you probably see AI slop through your Facebook feed.

Adam: Oh, yeah.

Kris: And I don't know if you've ever been fooled by an image or had to step out and do a quick Google search to sit, is that weird picture that just popped up in my feed?

Adam: I don’t think I've been fooled yet, but I've looked twice quite a few times because it’s getting better.

Kris: Yeah. It's getting remarkably good. I think there are ways it's useful in terms of, I mean, most recently I've been playing around with the retouching tools in Photoshop.

Adam: It's so much faster.

Kris: -and Camera RAW, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Adam: Do you feel like you've wasted so many hours of your life fixing something?

Kris: Well, and you sound silly when you tell students that “we used to spend an hour or two making a selection, using these tools, but now you can just do it in half a second by pressing this button.” So yeah, so retouching, that's something that you could spend a lot of time doing, and it's just a lot easier and faster now. And AI now can read and detect people in photographs so that you can make quick changes to light and darken or do various things. And so to me, as a photographer, that's exciting. I think that I could see AI being useful in pre-planning and pre visualizing shoots, maybe animating still. I've seen artists who are animating still images to make a still image into this kind of short video clip or something that's kind of appropriate for social media, because the video content you put on a lot of social media is really, really short. But I'm not terribly comfortable with it replacing the creative process in and of itself. I mean, I think that's why a lot of creative people are in the arts in the first place, is to do the fun stuff. I don't want AI to take the fun stuff and do that for me.

Adam: And isn't most art fundamentally about some sort of a human connection? Right?

Kris: Yeah.

Adam: It's a passive connection if you're just consuming art, but that's what it's supposed to.

Kris: Yeah, definitely.

Adam: The thing that I have a nightmare on is are we just going to start prompting ai, “Hey, I was at this event, this is what happened.” And then it generates the image and that gets put on with a news story somewhere. You know what I mean? Where there's like from a baseline, at least in the Western world, or I guess in the US let me speak to where I live, but just ethics, just basic ethics of, show me what really happened. And then we kind of go, well, what really happened?

Kris: Yeah, sure.

Adam: More so than what you and I are talking about, which is there's a photographer's bias. I'd rather know who the photographer is and try to see if I can sort through their bias than Gemini or something.

Kris: Yeah, totally. Totally. And yeah, I think we're already seeing that where AI has been used to generate and essentially fake news images that spread around on social media. And what concerns me is, I mean, our generation, I think we're visually literate enough to know, and we've specifically studied photography, so we're familiar with processes and the history of photography. So we could spot this stuff pretty easily. But I think average folks can't necessarily, so I-

Adam: No, my mom gets confused by what's real a lot.

Kris: Oh, okay. Right.

Adam: It’s not even younger people who are used to looking at this stuff as a normal part of their feet, it's like, I always joke, if you were raised by baby boomers, they're like, the TV will rot your brain, and then it rotted their brains.

Kris: Right? Right.

Adam: I'm like, you guys are losing it, man.

Kris: Yeah. Well, yeah, and I don't have the answer or answers, and I'm concerned about it too, of course. But yeah, that human connection and exploring the human condition, I don't know how AI does that better than we do. And also what's going to happen when it starts replicating itself, endlessly replicating itself.

Adam: It feels like this conversation has probably have in a lot of spaces too. Could you imagine two novelists sitting here and going, who wants to read a novel written by AI? And that's probably getting pretty good, and it just feels like, ew. You would hope that at some point, somebody somewhere is like, okay, this is enough. But it does feel like profit motives kind of outweigh that sort of consideration when it comes to these things. And maybe I'm being too cynical, but it does worry me a little bit. You kind of go, man, are my grandkids ever going to go to a movie with a real actor and stuff like that?

Kris: Right, yeah. Yeah.

Adam: They won't have to. It's a matter of whether we, the royal we, I think, decide whether we're going to accept that or not. So hopefully there's a fight there for me anyway. I hope there's a fight.

Kris: Right, right, right

Adam: So I have teenagers. I have teenagers. My teenagers love-they love an old point and shoot camera now, which I'm realizing is their version of me listening to my dad's Led Zeppelin records, or getting my grandpa's old Yashica SLR that he got sometime when he came home from World War II, that kind of a vibe. But for them, it's like a Sony point and shoot that gets really hot when it takes six photo. I find that interesting, and maybe it's the adverse of some of this AI stuff to me, is people want to touch something that's a little more clunky, a little more physical, a little more random.

Kris: Well, and there's this nostalgia, and now it's like nostalgia, typically is this longing for something that's passed. And maybe it's a past that we experienced that is no longer here, but it's also nostalgic for this past that we weren't a part of. So yeah, I feel the same thing. I was very nostalgic for the sixties and the seventies back in the nineties when I was a young adult. And so I see, it seems to be, I don’t know if it's just a 20 year cycle, but yeah, it seems like folks are often nostalgic for whatever happened around the time when they were born or right before, something like that

Adam: Yeah. It's something that was just on the precipice of their existence almost

Kris: Yeah. But I enjoyed working with vintage photographs and cameras and processes, and getting back to that dark room stuff.

Adam: It slows you down.

Kris: Yeah. Oh, it absolutely slows you down

Adam: Like in an intentional way though, right?

Kris: Yeah. Yes. Yeah. It slows you down and in an intentional way. And it's where that experimentation comes back in. And maybe that's the thing, the iPhone photos being too clean, too perfect to this, to that. They're longing for something that's a little, I don't know, less polished.

Adam: I think so.

Kris: Maybe.

Adam: I was on spring break and my kids, so I have a son and a daughter and an exchange daughter, and then we had some friends, my son's girlfriend, they're all in the same area, and they meet up on the beach one night and they all want to take pictures. My son has this, it was like a $40 camera that he got somewhere. It's a crappy little point shoot screen, and they're tricking it by blocking it to make sure the flash goes off. And it is the images, the images are grungy.

Kris: Right

Adam: I feel like there's something about that. They want to kind of go wild and take a bunch of these, and one of these is going to be really good, and Oh, that almost works. What if we try this? There is a little bit of this. I think it's a cool thing. My daughter loves it, and she goes, I want his camera. She wants his camera, not mine. And I’m like, man.

Kris: Right, right.

Adam: But I ended up buying, one of-Aaron Mills got me to buy one of those, the plastic lenses they make now, the fake pinhole lenses.

Kris: Oh, okay. Sure, sure.

Adam: And I threw it on my X Pro three, and I'm like, “no, I'll take a crappy picture of you kids.”

Kris: Yeah, I'll show you. I could take some bad pictures too. Well, but what you're describing is a process. They're engaged in this process, which is, that's great.

What's one piece of advice you wish you had received when you were starting out?

Adam: All right. If you could give one piece of advice to someone who's trying to make it, who's trying to do it, maybe it's the piece of advice you didn't get when you were 22, what would it be? What would you tell them, right now?

Kris: And I probably was told this maybe, and maybe it just didn't sink in, but don't take things so personally, especially when it comes to feedback or critique or any of that. Don't take that so personally. And there's still feedback I received when I was a student that either hurt my feelings or that I struggled to accept. And some of it, I look back and I'm like, “oh, wow. I really see where they were coming from.” And now I have some distance through time or through experience confidence, which that's a hard one because does that just come with time and age and experience? You can't-

Adam: Maybe? Treat the camera like a passport.

Kris: Yeah, right.

Adam: I belong here.

Kris: Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. Don't be afraid to put yourself out there, put your work out there or your physical self out photographing as well.

Adam: Yeah, absolutely. This has been great.

Kris: Yeah, it's been fun.

Adam: Thanks for coming. We're going to have to do this again.

Kris: Yeah. Say, are we done already?

Adam: Yeah, I think we are. But you know what? We'll do it three hours next time.

Kris: Okay.

Adam: And Aaron will love

Kris: That. Yeah. Right, right, right, right, right.

Adam: Alright. Thanks Kris.

Kris: Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.

Adam: Thanks for stopping by The Search Bar. Make sure to like and subscribe so that you don't have to search for the next episode.