INTERVIEW w/ SAM FALLS

My first reaction to Sam Falls’ work was to say, out loud to my computer, “Sam Falls, who are you?” I realize that a more accurate question would have inquired about who Sam was as a photographer, as an artist working to visually document his world. Clicking through the large, screen-filling images on his website, a viewer is taken from a garishly pink close-up of cotton gingham and lilies, to the gray, decaying, furry remains of an animal on a forest floor. There are muted landscapes with hunched figures, surface studies of lurid wallpaper, portraits of both faces and the backs of heads. These often-disparate juxtapositions of subject are made more prominent by Sam’s play with form, color, light, and composition. His work strikes me as ambidextrous, even ambiguous, moving between themes and motifs, just as freely as he moves between style and genre. For all the technical and thematic in his work, the question of “who” is behind the work still seems important—there is a distinct feeling of the personal here, of Sam’s self, whoever that may be.

Sam was gracious and willing to chat with me about all this, and the following conversation took place through email, from November 2008 to February 2009.

Sam’s work can be viewed at samfalls.com. This interview is co-published by Wassenaar Issue 02 and will be available there soon (update to come).

1. “I Felt Like Another Alienator Instead of Helping Other People Feel Less Alienated”

This is That: So, Sam Falls, who are you?

Sam Falls: I've been living in Brooklyn for a little over a year now, and on average, I'm about one third finished with my lifetime years. I was born in San Diego and grew up with my mom in Vermont, visiting my dad in the summers. My mom has horses, and animals in general have always been really important to me. In high school I enjoyed math and was very much into theoretical physics. That's mostly what got me into photography—numbers and light, with stints of East Asian religion and English. I undergraduated from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, which was one of the best experiences in the country I think. Now I'm an MFA student at ICP-Bard in Manhattan—mainly because I am interested in teaching to make a living outside of my own arts practice.

TisT: Your website is experienced by clicking, one at a time, through fairly large images, without titles or designated into series. Though there is a lack of text or categorization to your images, different themes and subject matter seem to be woven throughout. Can you speak a little about the presentation of your work online, or how/why you want viewers to experience your photography this way? I'd like to know how you would describe, if you had to, your approach to presenting a body of photographic work.





SF: Well, my first serious body of work was We Are All Here Now which was accompanied by an 80-page written thesis, so it was very thought out, mapped out, and conceptual. This part of my process hasn't dissipated, and what you see in the website is very intentional, but I have freed myself from certain taxing and what I found to be limiting theoretical precepts which sort of narrated my work in the past. When it comes to critical theory and influential texts, I was reading and thinking a lot about object-hood and the alienating Other found in photography, especially in portraiture. A few years ago I was overwhelmed with how many photographs there are in the world and how hard it is to remember who you are standing right in front of an image when everyone in advertisements is not only going to look better than you, but also has what you want. You are alienated from your present moment, and in a not-so-fun way. Then there's the blow-up of flashy art photography, the acceptance of digital techniques and large reproductions, all of which has somehow been adopted into the world of “fine art photography.” So many artists are either talking about advertising (directly or indirectly), or straight up using models and the aesthetics of want; in the safe zone of art the everyday viewer (namely, those of us who can't afford art from a Chelsea gallery) feels outcast here too. I wanted to make the viewer feel at home with photography. I've also been using video in portraiture to make it seem more personal and readily context-ed.

My website now is a reflection of my developing "everything is important" concept. This doesn't mean I will take my process down to a snapshot level, but if I love my horses and I love my mom, I may as well have one follow the other photographically. This has returned a lot of my joy to working with photography. I've started spending more time with the things I enjoy, also working with a large format camera instead of struggling with the concept for eight months in writing and then making the visual interpretation in only a few weeks. When I worked like that, a lot of my connection to the real world vanished and I felt like another alienator instead of helping other people feel less alienated. My present work is more adventurous for me and the viewer together, rather than me just showing other people some heady b/s that at the end of the day isn't that important.







2. "This Is What I Care About, and You Have Things You Care About"

TisT: You touch on an uneasiness in photography—the fact that it's so ubiquitous in advertising, in addition to having a kind of pomp surrounding it in the fine art gallery. You mention that you want to make "people feel at home with photography." It struck me that this kind of approach might never be applied to a medium such as painting or sculpture; I'm not entirely sure, but there might be something inherent in the medium itself (perhaps its relationship to "technology"?) that lends itself to this. Can you talk a bit more about how you see photography making people feel outcast, or even, as you say, "alienated from the present moment"?

SF: I think you're right in pointing to photography's technological element as playing a large role in its cold and impersonal relationship to the viewer—the classic pitfall of its mechanical reproduction. With painting and sculpture for instance, along with writing, their is an inherent acknowledgment of the time the author spent producing the final product, which therefore serves as a much more intimate medium of exchange between the viewer and the creator. Photography on the other hand only depicts the surface of time, namely the miniscule, cropped moment available only to the lens of the camera. The time the artist spent in the depicted space framing the scene, and later developing the film and printing, is both figuratively and literally washed away and lost in the final product. So the viewer really only has their own frame of reference relative to the image at hand, without any sign of the artist's emotion or interaction with the object—something readily apparent in painting and sculpture where texture and material manipulation reveal the artist's interaction over time. This is not always negative I think, because the viewer is left alone to their own interpretations, but I think art is really valuable when the viewer gets to know the artist and where they are coming from. This is where a photographer must relate their subjectivity to the viewer through content and composition. This is perhaps why I've really begun leaning toward photographing the people, places, and things that hold lasting personal value to me. I used to think this was something reserved for amateur photography and photo albums, but now perhaps it needs to be reinstated in a fine art context in today’s image-based world where meaningless images are omnipresent. I mean any advertisement created by a nameless photographer of a model casting a blank stare away from the camera just tells the viewer "I don't care," and I think just saying, "This is what I care about, and you have things you care about," is now a very interesting concept to me.

TisT: I like your approach—that "everything is important." You've made a decision to include things you love, be it your horse or your mom. For me, I rarely photography things which I have overt connections to (for whatever reasons), and I find it interesting that as a way to reconnect with photography, you've chosen a path that seems very personal to you. Can you talk about how emotional connection plays into your work?

SF: More and more I think that the only art that really sticks with me is art that I have an emotional connection with. I really dig conceptual art that requests time and mental processing, but this usually ends up in a sort of "knowing" that doesn't necessarily drive me back to the artwork. The pieces I always return to and can look at over and over in a museum's permanent collection are works that make me feel and not think, where there's no pedagogy but just empathy. An artist friend told me a couple years ago that his goal was to make people cry, and that has always seemed to me like a very worthy endeavor and the reaction I have with my favorite pieces of art, like Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth, or Henri Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy—I don't know why. I don't care if an artwork makes me really sad or elated, so much that I really feel something. I like Romanticism and the old notions of the Sublime, thinking about Melancholy and the huge role it’s been playing for centuries in western culture. I don't think these concepts are passé and the individual's flux in emotion relative to nature is still a very real and worthy endeavor in the arts.







3. An Essential Compilation of Meaning

TisT: I find it interesting that you respond most to more emotional, romantic artworks, “old notions of the Sublime,” particularly the paintings you mentioned. In a sense, photography has always seemed like a young medium when compared to painting; like we talked about, this has caused it to be slighted even as fine art. Nowadays, though, it seems to have earned its place as a vital and modern medium. However, I think it's key when you mention concepts that are now typically viewed as passé in painting, and I wonder how that applies to photography. Your work strikes me as both concerned with emotion and the sublime (romantic), and also current, very modern. Your video pieces looped with your favorite songs, the narrative presented on your website, even your using of your website as a new kind of "gallery," strikes me as something that could only be done with photographic media, now in the early 21st century. Also, your "reversed" portraits, where you have your subject turned around in a seemingly classic portraiture frame, play with these two contexts.

I would like to hear your thoughts on this: Do you find that Romanticism, and your being drawn to that sensibility, is at all in opposition to photography these days, to the modern sensibility? Specifically for you, how did this influence your becoming a photographer, and do you consciously play with those themes now?

SF: One of the main problems I had with photography when I first started taking it seriously as an art form was “Why should I try to subject other people to looking at my images rather than putting them in an album on my bookshelf like everyone else?” In my opinion this is basically the same problem photography faced when initially entering the art world, and why there was the Pictorialism movement, with people like Gertrude Kasebier, Clarence White, Stieglitz, and Steichen, trying to imitate the craft and stylization of painting. This was also unconsciously the approach I first had when I decided to do photography as "art," especially because I worked as a commercial photographer throughout school—I wanted to make something meaningful to others since it wasn't just going in my personal drawer, and I wanted it to look like art, not just photography. I feel like this is really present in my photos of the backs of heads, which are sort of "anybody portraits," where the viewer is not an Other but left to their own imagination of the central idea of a portrait, which is “What does the face look like?” This also was the beginning of my real formal inclusion of Romanticism—the direct reference to Friedrich's "Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog"—you know, the back of the head of a central, unidentified, but glorified individual, which in essence the viewer can read themselves into, joining the gaze of the subject.





My approach, though informed by Romantic painting, is the opposite end of the spectrum, which is drawing on an ideal form by stripping an idea or scene down aesthetically and subjectively. I feel like we all live in a routine reality where it might not be literally 9 to 5, but we have a bed or sleeping bag, friends, and a place that is familiar. Romantic painting took aspects of this existence, like a mountain, river, a field, or harbor, and glorified them in an impressive and enhanced pictorial rendering. In my photographs my goal is to take these very familiar elements, like my mom, a friend, flowers, the moon, planes, etc. and strip them down of their everyday tangential distractions and relationships to an image of their aesthetic essence. These isolated elements of my life when photographed come to form an essential compilation of meaning, which organized on a wall or in a book is a great escape from what I know as routine reality—similar to the effect of a Romantic painting. This sort of heightens my experience of reality in a very mellow way while hopefully offering an interesting perspective on archetypes of beauty for others.

I think these notions are surely in opposition to a lot of early 21st century photography that has been about either hyper-production or re-working photography's reflexivity and documentation, again. When I think about someone like Crewdson now his work seems very surface, and Gursky's new stuff looks really cheap. But I think their generation was working in a climate where photography still had to put in some extra work to really make it in the art world, whether it was in scale, technology, or shock value.

Now however, there is this boom of young photography, like the stuff on I Heart Photograph, where photographers seem to be more comfortable with their position (which still isn't painting), and somehow I think a lot of the images are more genuine. It is less of that empty parking lot or vacant stare bullshit that was around a second ago and more intimate. The way that folk trends are making a huge comeback in music, I think photography (and art in general) is returning to something more individual and smaller-scale while retaining just as much socio-political import. I think websites can create a valuable viewing experience of images via simplicity and considerate sequencing rather than some a hyper-technological rendering which eventually reduces the images to a digital life.

At the same time, I think people working in photography still have to be careful because, as a fine art medium, it is much easier and quicker than painting or sculpture, and it isn't usually as entertaining or encompassing as music and movies. If a photograph documents something really worth sharing than it is usually published as journalism, if it is conceptual and reflexive, than it is boring re-hashed modernism, and if it is super creative and has a high productive value, than it is a spectacle and becomes more entertaining than meaningful. So it's hard, through all of this I've turned to a much more personal way of working, but that also returns to the initial family album problem, which makes photography as art feel very presumptuous to me still. This has evolved a lot in my video work too, which is trying to move past talking about art and the references I am making to expose something more personal regarding my generation that has never been without an influential and succinct image for every idea and emotion, even nostalgia.





4. A Wow-ing Blueprint = Hearty Intentionality

TisT: You touch on something here, when you talk about reasons for other people to look at your photos, that has always nagged at me: this idea of a photograph being something viewed by the public, and how that affects the content or subject of the image. Because photography has this root in documentation, in being something that archives, there's an inherent kind of public-ness, I think. This plays into the voyeurism of photography, too, I think: that we look at a photograph to see some slice of time or reality, or a view of truth—that we are looking at the photo, but really into it too.

You mention that a photograph can quickly become spectacle, which I think is an interesting point to make. I often wonder how photographers are effected by the knowledge that their images will be looked at eventually, by strangers most likely, or people from a certain distance. You're saying that, as a way to return photography to yourself, you've been taking pictures of things that are very close to you, or everyday for you, and focusing on their aesthetics or their subjective meaning. In the time we've been chatting, these notions have started to influence my own work, in that I've been inspired by things that are more quotidian or personal to me. However, something about this makes me a little anxious. My question for you is: Does it make you feel vulnerable—the fact that you're bringing your camera into intimate situations (your mom, a friend, etc.), and thus, bringing your audience closer to you, too? Or, do you think it's a kind of necessary vulnerability, even a necessary anxiousness, that the work gets that much more compelling because it closes the space between you and the person looking at your photos?

SF: I do worry about vulnerability now and then but not relative to myself so much as the person or place I'm shooting—I'm not concerned about the viewers' insight into my life (because I've already made the decision to show the photograph) but I have to make sure those people pictured are alright with me sharing their life (like why I only show the back of my mom's head as a portrait). My photos are rarely snapshots because I often take at least several minutes to a short while framing and composing, usually working with a tripod, and so there is always a level of understanding and comfort involved with myself in the subject of what will be exposed. The composition usually lacks referential context as well, so the image does become something less personal on an everyday basis, rather functioning to reveal my own grander scheme of aesthetics and taste. I like to think that my images are intimate enough to bring the viewer closer to where I am coming from: my surroundings, ideas, and influences. What seems to be ultimately related is something a bit more general about my relationship to art and photography as an expressive medium. I really enjoy the art historical discourse, and I think this too often gets in the way of me surpassing a certain threshold where the images do become primarily personally revealing rather than conceptual, but I really want to bridge these two things.





TisT: Ah, I think this is an important point when you talk about worrying not for the vulnerability for yourself, but for your subjects. And, especially since you have an emotional connection to them, this is strong. You talk about trying to reconcile the very personal with the very conceptual, bridging the two things. I think that's very interesting, especially when dealing with these ideas of the vulnerability of your subjects—there's unease there, as if you're subjecting your subjects to a conceptual idea, or to your own aesthetic.

Can you talk about how this tension between personal and conceptual works when you're photographing? I'd like to know how much of the photograph is conceived conceptually first, or how and when your work comes together thematically. Do you give much consideration to the concept at first, beyond just knowing what or who you'd like to photograph?

SF: To me, conceptual art means to have a given idea all planned out, theoretically, and then do whatever it takes to carry it out. This is how I first approached art and photography, thinking that if I didn't have some sort of wowing blueprint the art wouldn't be interesting or have any hearty intentionality. I think with painting and sculpture this approach of conceptual art works better because the material isn't always known and so the final object can be something very different than what the artist conceived initially while still sticking to the concept.

With photography though it sometimes just comes off dry and pretentious. That's why I started working with subjects that already have meaning to me, kind of took the pressure off. The problem again though is how to relate this meaning to viewers who don't have history with the subject at hand, and that's why I've been trying to get more intimate, break a threshold. But you know, that's when I have to make sure the sitter is okay with it too. And even if the viewer is willing to show it all it whatever dimension it may be, there's a point when graphic imagery is boring no matter how personal and private; it just loses any sense of poetics. So to complement my aspirations of intimacy within photography I've been exploring alternative processes and materials, which can be more suggestive or more subtle. As I get further with representing what I find inherently meaningful in a subject, I am able to leave behind the “predetermined concept” method of working. This is challenging, because rather than photographing something I hope references melancholy or setting up a set of sadness for example, I am now photographing in personal states of sadness or melancholy, which isn't so fun but feels heavy when I'm printing, and that makes me feel better about what I'm doing in the bigger picture of artistic production.






5. “There Just Happened to Be This Light, and I Had One Sheet of Film Left”

TisT: I'd like you to describe what you look like when you're taking pictures. I ask this because, some of your work seems to involve a very close-up, intimate, almost invasive camera, and other times, it appears as if you happened upon a scene, or you are physically at a distance from your subject. How exactly do you go about taking your photographs? And in a similar vein, you've published your photographs in books in the past. Can you talk a bit about what appeals to you about the book format when it comes to your photographs?

SF: Well I think it varies, but more often than not everything plays out rather slowly. When I'm taking pictures of people it's always one-on-one and a product of a pre-formed idea. For example the one of my god-sister Mary in a hayfield is somewhere in Burgundy, France, this past summer and we were on a boat for a week that was crawling along. I would jump out and go running or bike around, and when I found a “right” spot I would go back to the boat and get Mary, and we'd go back to shoot. In these cases I usually direct their clothes and everything, including poses, shooting about four to ten pictures on a tripod with a 4x5 or handheld Mamiya RB. However, the one of Lauren in towels is up in Vermont, where I wanted to go to my old swimming hole and make a time-lapse video. Then there just happened to be this light, and I had one sheet of film left. I shot it in a minute, and it was the best picture of the day. Similarly, the one of the deer carcass happened when I was chasing deer through these woods in Long Island, and then I saw this carcass and photographed it, but I had to do it super quick because it was just gross. On our way back to Brooklyn, my friend saw a tick on me, and then another—we were in a general store getting sandwiches and I ran outside and took off all my clothes, I flipped out—but that carcass has become one of my favorite pictures. Lastly, some of the photos, like the flowered horse and the glittered plant, are full-fledged art pieces I do in the studio just for the photograph. I'll get an idea and spend a few days making something and then take the picture in half an hour. When it works it's great, but when it doesn't it's a big bummer, but educational I guess.

With the books, I think it's a preferable way to show my friends and others my photos without the computer. People come to hang out and I want to show them what I've been up to, but I'm not about to pull out all my c-prints. Also, I make a lot of photos and drawings/paintings all the time, almost daily, so it's kind of an archival process now. The first book I made was to accompany my first show in Brooklyn last year, so thus far they've been project-oriented. But I am working on one now that is similar to the website in that it is the project itself. I am very interested in sequencing and how formal trends can take the reader into a place that the images isolated on a wall can't. Then there's my written thesis that just got published and that's cool. I'm interested in writing more essays dealing with art and photography/ new media, but first I want to finish this novel I started a couple years ago in China, which got put on hold to write that thesis.





6. “To Say Something Bigger than I Expected”

TisT: I'd like to know a bit about how you got started photographing. You mentioned earlier about being interested in art and photography as an expressive medium. Was this always the case? Were there any particular moments when an artwork, or a photograph, pushed you toward this idea of expressive mediums and made you want to try it for yourself?

SF: My mom is a painter so when I was little I would spend time in her studio with her, and I was always frustrated with drawing or painting because I wasn't as skilled. I was always into math and science throughout high school, but I think my real interest in art as something significant was kind of a trickle down through music and literature, finally ending up at the visual arts. I think a lot of the photography element originally came in from skateboarding, snowboarding, and surfing—all things I was really into—and my friends and I learned to use cameras initially to just document each other getting radical like in the magazines and videos. But I think it was authors like Kerouac and Hemingway whose biographical information got me looking at artists like Robert Frank and Picasso and made me think art was cool, and that I could use the creative impulses I had coming in from every angle to say something bigger than I had expected. It's funny though, I never thought I'd be pursuing a career in the arts—that was always just what my mom did, and she was always way better (still is), and I guess that's also why I do photography and not painting.

TisT: Can you tell me where you get your inspiration? What do you look at, read, listen to, notice, etc., that ends up finding its way into your work as influence?

SF: Music is probably my strongest motivator, especially when friends make it. I listen to music as much as I can when I'm awake, and that's part of the reason why I chose art as a profession, because I can listen to music while I do it, unlike most math or science. I'm consistently in a Bob Dylan phase, and this winter it has mainly been Elliot Smith (again), Kanye West, Jamie Cobra Time, Swans, Sebadoh, Ghostface, Beach House, and Destroyer. I think about David Foster Wallace a lot, but he doesn't really play into my art (I think). I think Dave Hickey is really tops (especially listening to his lectures online, google them!), he's great at confirming art's significance for the right reasons. And I think it's really great when people don't really give a fuck about getting their's and getting over, which seems to be what a lot of people want from art now. These people are usually doing more than the serious artsy types and doing it in a public and fun way, like Ryan Trecartin, Stanya Kahn and Harriet Dodge, Militia Shimkovitz, Amy Von Harrington, and Tim and Eric (Awesome Show). I'm also really getting into experimentation/ process, like Walead Beshty or Peter Coffin—people whose art you can look at and be like, "wow, that's awesome, but what if they tried it this way…."





6. Some Photos Just Feel Like a Warm Bath

TisT: Can we talk about your video work, which I love? Aesthetically, the looping aspect of them calls to mind a multi-layered photographic experience, as if I were shuffling through a set of images over and over. Can you speak a bit about these pieces?

SF: I made the video pieces that are currently on my website as a very intentional test of my own personal taste. The process was to take my favorite moments from my favorite movies and songs—the sort of epiphany moments—match them up, and infinitely loop them to basically see their beauty would dry up or just be compounded. When I first made them I watched each one for about half an hour straight and they all passed the test with flying colors—I still watch them at work when I need that little something. There is that idea with linear works like film and music that one part can't exist without the rest, but I think that these really do something else, if only illustrating the genius behind Tarkovsky, Lou Reed, and Joy Division.

I am currently working on some projects of my own in video with horses sleeping where the looped sequence is longer, like three hours, to see if I can take it to the next step in my own work. I'm finding it to be a difficult project though because the longer a sequence is the more the viewer expects, which I guess is only natural with moving pictures. And I think it is valid for us to expect more from a video than a still photograph; I don't want to lower the expectations, I just want to make them different.

TisT: We've talked a bit about having a certain aesthetic; you've spoken of your own "grander scheme of aesthetic and taste." In your work, I see recurring images of natural landscapes, and particularly a lot of flowers and trees. Also, there are a lot of interior details—wallpaper, looking out of windows, etc. Can you talk about what you're drawn to aesthetically, when you take a photograph? Recently I noticed that I take a lot of photos of plants in tangles, for example. Do you find yourself taking photographs of the same kind of thing, unconsciously, over and over, for whatever reasons?

SF: Yeah, I know what you mean, and I've found this is something harder to get away from than I expected. I am drawn to color—especially light tones I think—specifically in nature when the hues aren't the norm, like foliage and flowers, and reproductions thereof in fabric and paintings that get far out and detached from the everyday. When it actually comes to taking the photo, I am interested in isolation and simplicity—I don't like having information that doesn't involve the subject or myself necessarily.

It's like The Sun Also Rises where there is one protagonist who seems to be almost floating without any real contextual urgency, no heavy emotional drama; this space doesn't really describe anything but does let the viewer in, lets them in to realize how lonely we all are, conveying a human truth that ultimately we are always isolated individuals who at our closest moments of intimacy—sharing, love, and caring—are only engaged in acts of empathy. Some photos just feel like a warm bath, that's when I know I got it right.