In Between – Jeffery Saddoris

I want to give you a quick update to some of the changes I’m making to my shows over the next several weeks. If you’ve listened to any of the recent episodes of Iterations, In Between, or Process Driven, you’ve heard me mention my new Everything feed. For those of you who may have missed it, subscribing to the new feed gets you everything I do. Every Iteration, every In Between and every Process Driven. Plus, you’ll also get special one-off conversations and any new show that I happen to do all in one feed that’s available in your favorite podcast app and now also on Spotify. I’m adopting the YouTube model of “subscribe to me, not my show.” What that means is that the individual show feeds are going away as of April 1st, so if you are subscribed to one or more of the individual shows and want to keep getting it or them, please subscribe to Everything so you don’t miss anything.

My goal here is consistency, both for me as a producer and for you as a listener. I want to be able to produce compelling conversations on a regular basis and build a community of listeners that feel like they (you) are a part of them. To that end, if you have an idea for an en episode or feel like you may want to join in on the conversation, send me an email at [email protected] or connect with me on Twitter or Instagram @jefferysaddoris. I’d love to hear what’s on your mind.

Subscribe: iTunes | Pocket Casts | Overcast | RSS

 

Music in this episode: Step On (Jahzzar) / CC BY-SA 4.0

 

Over the weekend, I took a workshop in encaustic painting. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it’s basically painting with hot wax and it’s a process that’s been around for literally thousands of years. The are records of the Greeks using it as far back as the 5th century BC. The process involves heating beeswax with damar resin crystals which forms what’s known as "medium." From there, you add pigment — either oil-based or dry powder — to create whatever color you’re after. What first drew me to the idea of encaustic was how much faster it seemed than the acrylic process I currently use in my paintings. Some of my pieces are 15 or even 20 layers deep and when the gels are applied thick to create the impasto type of textures that I use, it can take hours or even days to dry between layers. So, it’s not unusual for me to take weeks to finish a piece and, if I’m being honest, there have been several instances where I was either bored with the piece or I basically forgot where I wanted to go with it. So the idea of encaustic has been in the back of my head for a while as a potential solution to speeding up my process and as a way to inspire new work.

Subscribe: iTunes | Pocket Casts | Overcast | RSS

 

Ben Bond is a photographer from Ghana whose latest BTS video is a terrific example of using simple gear well to achieve really superb results. For this shoot, Ben used one light firing into a 120cm octa and a Fuji X-T3 with the 18-55 kit lens. The results are just brilliant.

Journalist and photographer Will Hunt has written a new book called Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet in which he explores some of the communities that call the sewers, tunnels, and catacombs beneath cities like New York and Paris home. Will was recently a guest on Fresh Air where he talked a bit about the project.

If you’re looking for creative inspiration, The Metropolitan Museum of Art has added nearly 600 full text books and catalogs to their digital collection that cover art, design and photography, which you view, search, and even download for free.

 

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

In my last Iteration, I was talking about social media, specifically how this year I was looking to refine or even completely redefine how I use it, personally and professionally. One of the biggest challenges for me historically has been consistency, both in terms of what I make and how I share it, and I think the bulk of the challenge comes around just how much I’m trying to do and the fact that when I look at it on paper, I end up almost feeling paralyzed by the weight of my own ideas, and as a response I don’t…

Earlier this week I put up an image on Instagram with the caption “Time for a reboot.” It’s basically a “glitchy” version of my signature logo that I use as my avatar on Instagram and Twitter. I posted it because I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how I use—or in some cases misuse—social media and I’ve come to the conclusion that now is a great time to redefine what I want to get from and what I want to bring to social media.

Subscribe: iTunes | Pocket Casts | Overcast | RSS

 

A fantastic article was recommended to me by Hugh Brownstone from Three Blind Men and an Elephant, who I had the pleasure of speaking to recently. It’s called The Amateur Spirit by Daniel Boorstin and if you’ll just indulge me, I’d like to share a quote that goes “I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.”

Also, if you love super cool fountain pens, or know someone who does (hint, hint) check out Karas Kustoms. They make a line of pens called Stonewashed that feature anodized barrels that look like they’ve been at the bottom of a backpack or the glove compartment of an old truck for years—and I mean that as a compliment. The orange barrel with the tumbled aluminum grip is particularly lovely.

And I finally got to see Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse and all I can say is wow. I am typically not a superhero/comic book movie person, but this flick was fantastic. If it’s still in the theater where you live, go see it.

 

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

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how photographs influence our memories—not just of people and places, but events in our lives. For example, I have realized that there are memories of certain aspects of my childhood that are rooted not in an actual event but rather in the photographs depicting the event. There are multiple “important” events in my life where the time surrounding the event itself is a complete blur and my “memory” of it only exists because there happens to be a photograph. So, in this conversation, we’re talking about how memory can often be influenced or…

Last week, we were in New Hampshire celebrating Christmas with family. Now, I’ve got to tell you that I love handmade gifts and this year my eleven-year-old niece Anya made me a gift that I absolutely love. It’s a canvas board which, for those of you who may bot know is basically a piece of mat board wrapped in canvas. This particular piece measures 3x9 inches and on it she painted the phrase “My Instrument” with a little camera in between the two words. What I found so amazing about it—besides than the fact that it was completely unexpected—was how much I love the typography, partially because it’s just so different from the way I see. I’m typically more Helvetica or Futura and this is reaching into David Carson territory.

Subscribe: iTunes | Pocket Casts | Overcast | RSS

 

The MY INStrUment painting that my niece Anya made for me.

Lewis Rossignol is a terrific illustrator from Portland, Maine whose mixed media portraiture is fantastic. In addition to prints, he’s got two books available which I just ordered today and will hopefully be sitting down with him on an upcoming Process Driven to unpack some of his work.

The Art of the Title just posted their picks for their top 10 title sequences for 2018 and there is some really great work in there, particularly the titles for Counterpart and for the new season of Mozart in the Jungle.

And if you’re a fan of minimalistic graphic design—like me—you’ll love some of the prints available at 2046 Print Shop. I’ve got my eye on the General and Special Relativity prints for my new podcast studio.

 

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

I’ve been sitting on something for a while because I didn’t know how or even if I should share it. But, I think it’s important and while I won’t share it in its entirety, I would like to share a portion of it because as I said, I think it’s important — both for me to say and maybe for you to hear. It all centers around a conversation I had with Adrianne that was one of if not the most difficult conversations we’ve ever had. It started with a podcast I was listening to which was a terrific interview with a conflict photojournalist named Giles Penfound. I was telling Adrianne about it and told her that when I was in high school, I thought seriously about becoming a photojournalist—specifically a combat photojournalist after seeing some of the work of Larry Burrows—and that photojournalism was one of the two types of photography that I was most drawn to.

Subscribe: iTunes | Pocket Casts | Overcast | RSS

 

A British sculptor known as Anna & the Willow makes beautiful large scale outdoor sculptures out of rods of willow, which she then places in the forest near her North Yorkshire studio.

Can art be so beautiful that it makes you ill?  According to an article in The Guardian, yes, provided you’re in Florence and looking at Renaissance art. It’s called Stendahl syndrome and apparently there are cases dating back to 1817 and a man is currently recovering from a heart attack in a Florence hospital after gazing at Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.

If you’re a fan of street photography, take a look at In-Sight, a short film by street photographer Nick Turpin, which profiles 10 photographers from the In-Sight collective on why they are drawn to shooting street.

 

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

In the last episode, we talked about how I—and maybe even you—rewrote the memories of childhood so they would fit the narrative we crafted about it as an adult, and what happens when childhood photographs begin to poke holes in the story. We also talked about some of the challenges of monetizing our work to the point where we can actually make a living as an artist. In this conversation, we’re talking about the ideas of urgent vs important when it comes to the work we make and how social media tends to encourage, and often reward, one over the…

One of the things that I enjoyed the most — and miss the most — about doing a weekly podcast like On Taking Pictures is having discussions in between episodes with friends and listeners. Sometimes we would go a little deeper on conversations that were started on the show, other times they would prompt related discussions connected to things going on in our lives. I think the in between moments are what are most interesting to me — connecting broad conversations around a topic to our actual everyday lived experiences. I’m starting to roll tape on some of these conversations…

Iteration 37 was called The Myth of the Perfect Thing and in it I chronicled part of my years long search for a new camera to replace or at least complement my Fuji X-Pro1, ultimately leading me to the Olympus EM1 Mkii. A few days after I recorded that episode I actually bought an X-T3 and since I started posting images taken with it, I’ve gotten some emails and messages asking what happened and whether or not my feelings had changed about the Olympus. The short answer is no, but I feel like this deserves a little clarification. The main reason I chose the Olympus was how it felt in the hand, but as I mentioned mentioned in 37, it wasn’t JUST the feel — the performance of the camera is outstanding, and not outstanding for a micro 4/3 camera, just outstanding. Full stop. But something in the back of my head kept me wondering about the new Fuji. If you were ever an On Taking Pictures listener, you heard me repeatedly wax poetic about my love and borderline obsession with my X-Pro1.

Subscribe: iTunes | Pocket Casts | Overcast | RSS

Esquire just released a brutally honest and revealing interview with Bruce Springsteen talking about politics, mental health, and exorcising some of his demons. And if you enjoy the interview and want to learn more about Bruce’s life, I can’t recommend his autobiography Born To Run highly enough, especially the audiobook version. Hearing Bruce tell his own life story — at least for me — was a profoundly moving experience.

Also, Russian director Maxim Zhestkov has created a new short film called Layers, which shows a variety of matte black monoliths being bisected by an invisible force revealing multicolored layered interiors. My description isn’t doing the piece justice—it really is hypnotic.

And finally, Google has created a new augmented-reality app called Vermeer that pulls together images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art here in DC, the Rijksmuseum, the Louvre, the Frick Collection, and The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum into a virtual museum of all 36 pieces of Vermeer’s work.

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