Jeffery Saddoris

In this episode, I want to talk about prints. You remember prints, right–little pieces of paper with pictures on them? Your parents probably had albums or maybe boxes of them that you would flip through on holidays or birthdays or the night before you went off to college.

The act of printing photographs has changed dramatically since I bought my first camera in 1982—necessarily so. With film cameras, you had to make prints—even just contact prints—to see what you shot, unless of course you were shooting slides. But even then, if you were regularly shooting slides, chances are you had a slide projector and one of those clumsy fold up screens, or at least a favorite wall. The point is, the act of looking at photos used to be a completely separate act than that of taking photos, since film offered no way to chimp as you shot. With digital, it’s all more or less the same process: shoot, look at what you shot. If you missed it or it wasn’t quite right, you do it again and if you did get it, you move on. And once you post that shot to social media, you may never look at it again, other than to check the number of likes.

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Recently, a friend turned me on to the work of a Russian photographer named Daria Belikova, whose work is absolutely stunning. It’s a little Tim Walker, a little Mario Testino, and a little Paolo Roversi all wrapped up into one terrific body of work.

Lead Foo Fighter and former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl has released a new documentary called Play that “celebrates the rewards and challenges of dedicating one’s life to playing and mastering a musical instrument.” The film shows Dave playing every musical part of a 23 minute instrumental track, all recorded live.

If you’re a fan of drawing sketching or journaling, you’ll love The Moleskine Project, which is a collective exhibition of artists’ sketchbooks from around the world from a variety of different backgrounds.

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

A couple weeks ago, I spoke to a friend from college who I hadn’t spoken to in…well, longer than it should have been. It’s something I’m really trying to work on, but as you probably know, sometimes life gets in the way. Anyway, during the course of our conversation catching up on what was happening in each other’s lives, he told me that my design professor and the person who was really the cornerstone of the entire technical theatre department had passed away last year. I hadn’t spoken to him since 1989, but the news of his passing left me a little gutted. Herb Camburn was a scenic designer, a costume designer, a director, and an artist. He was one of the most talented people I had ever met, let alone had the pleasure of studying under. When explaining a particular concept, he would routinely grab a pen or pencil and begin to draw—sometimes a costume rendering, other times a scenic elevation—but regardless of what he was drawing, the execution was always impeccable. The real art, however, was that he would make his drawings upside down—either seated or standing—from across the table, so that they would be right side up for the intended viewer, who on more than one occasion was me. I had enormous respect for him and for the skill he made look so effortless. He was gruff, at times incredibly difficult (at least this was the memory of my early twenty-something self), and if praise ever did escape his lips, it meant the world because you knew that you’d earned it.

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The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore is an Academy Award-winning homage to the printed page and the love of books based on a book by William Joyce.

Here’s the trailer and a behind the scenes look at a short called The Lost Property Office and one of the things that I absolutely love about this stop-motion film is the fact that everything in it was hand made out of cardboard by filmmaker Daniel Agdag. Be sure to watch the behind the scenes clip to see how some of it came together.

Bill Sienkiewicz is a giant in the comics industry, has worked on books for both DC and Marvel and is probably best known for illustrating Moon Knight and the Frank Miller series Elektra: Assassin. In this video from The Illustration Academy, we get to an overhead look as Bill creates an illustration from start to finish and offers some insights into how he creates his signature style.

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

Earlier this week, we recorded the last episode of On Taking Pictures after more than six years of weekly episodes. While the show was ostensibly about photography, the legacy of the show is 325 episodes—about 600 hours, give or take—of conversations that ranged from why we make art to whether digital is better than film. I think we spent more time asking questions than answering them, and for me, that became the main point of being there week after week. One of my favorite quotes is by Rainer Maria Rilke and while I won’t share the whole thing with you now, the core of it is to “live the questions.” By living the questions, Rilke writes, “Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

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Here’s a link to the full episode of On Taking Pictures the clip was taken from: Episode 43 Artistic Monkhood

LA-based artist and photographer Natalja Kent makes incredible colorful geometric large format photographs without the use of a camera.

Here’s a terrific documentary about Japanese motorcycle culture called Motorcycle Boy. I love the way this thing is shot – it’s dripping with tons of style and energy.

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

Jude Gerard Prest is an actor, a writer, a director, and a producer with more than 700 hours of television under his belt. He’s also one of my oldest and dearest friends. In fact, I was the second person he met after moving to LA from the east coast to pursue a career in acting. Over the next 25-plus years, his hard work and dedication to his craft behind the camera has earned him the respect and friendship of some of the biggest names in Hollywood, but he’s still looking for that one great role. He’s got more integrity that just about anyone I’ve ever met, he’s taught me about perseverance, humility, and grace and I love him like a brother.

LINKS
We Can Get Them For You Wholesale
IMDb: Jude Gerard Prest

CONNECT WITH JUDE
Website: https://judegp.com
Facebook: judegp

MUSIC
Please Listen Carefully
 (Jahzzar) / CC BY-SA 4.0

Tomorrow would have been my mom’s 74th birthday and while not a day goes by that I don’t miss her, I am grateful for the life I was allowed to share with her. She was generous, compassionate, and the most unconditionally loving person I have ever met. She always encouraged me to embrace the quirky, creative side of myself and insisted that following my passion meant not holding back and always giving 100%. As a child, my mom was a dancer—she and her brother Jerry even appeared on The Jack Parr Show together. A few years later, Jerry decided that “dancing was for sissies,” then life ultimately got in the way and my mom eventually gave it up too. While a life as a professional dancer was not to be, music was still an important part of her life. Even after I came along, our house was always filled with music—mostly Motown. I grew up on a steady musical diet of artists like Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight, Marvin Gaye, and the Jackson 5. But when she wasn’t grooving to the sounds coming out of Hitsville USA, she was listening to Elvis.

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Here’s a link to the 1999 Charlie Rose Interview with Richard Avedon that I referenced in this episode.If you enjoy that, you may also like this terrific documentary about Avedon called Darkness and Light.

The artist Christo has just unveiled his latest installation, called The London Mastaba—a 600 ton pyramid made of brightly painted 55-gallon drums. The whole gigantic thing is floating in Serpentine Lake in London.

I know I’m a little late to the game on this, but if you want to either deepen or broaden your musical knowledge, check out allmusic.com. It’s an incredible resource that has not only album reviews, but also shows connections to similar artists and recommendations for the best albums within a given artist’s discography . The site even offers suggestions for albums based on your current mood. For example, feeling ironic? Check out Elvis Costello’s Trust, Blur’s Modern Life is Rubbish, or David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane – terrific record by the way.

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

E3 was last week and for those of you who may not know what that is, it’s the Electronic Entertainment Expo and if you’re a gamer, it’s like Mecca. Every year, game studios and indie developers descend on the LA convention center for the chance to show the games the’ve been working on, sometimes for years. E3 is full sensory overload—a barrage of sight and sound from the minute you walk through the doors and I love it. Like many kids who grew up in the 70s, I’ve been hooked on video games from the moment I unwrapped my Atari 2600 on Christmas morning in 1977. With each new console, my addiction only grew—the NES, the N64, the Gamecube, the Wii, the Xbox, all of the Playstations. My favorite console was the Dreamcast, by a long shot. I remember being at E3 in 1999 when the Dreamcast launched against the announcement of the Playstation 2. Sony had the budget (and a DVD player), but Sega had the heart. In the end, the PS2 won the battle and became the best-selling console of all time but I think for many of us, there was something about the Dreamcast that transcended Megahertz and Gigaflops.

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Here’s a short documentary on Hiroh Kikai, a Japanese photographer who has spent decades taking portraits of strangers against a the same wall outside a temple in Asakusa, Japan.

The New York Times magazine released a special issue completely devoted to love and photographer Ryan McKinley shot for 24 hours straight to capture all 24 portraits that were used as covers and distributed at random to subscribers and newsstands.

French painter Mark Maggiori brilliantly captures the mood, colors, and spirit of the American West in his drawings and paintings.

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

Kristopher Matheson is a photographer living in Tokyo after leaving Canada for a teaching position that was only supposed to last six months to a year. Twelve years later, he’s still there and has made Tokyo his home, at least for now. I was introduced to him through the terrific photos he began to post in the On Taking Pictures Google+ group. His images showed a side of Tokyo that I hadn’t really seen before – his composition and use of color made the photos somehow more personal and intimate, despite the fact that people are virtually absent from them. Kristopher and I have become friends over the past several years through calls and emails that are sometimes frequent, sometimes sporadic. But regardless of how often we talk, it seems like every exchange ends up being a slice of a larger ongoing discussion, where questions are raised and sometimes answered and rabbit holes are explored, often over the course of several interactions.

CONNECT WITH KRISTOPHER
Website: https://www.krismatheson.com
Instagram: @kristopher.matheson

MUSIC
Please Listen Carefully
 (Jahzzar) / CC BY-SA 4.0

There’s a saying in photography that goes “pretty light plus a pretty subject equals a pretty picture.” And if you believe that, then you might be tempted to form an opinion about who Gareth Lewis is based solely on the provocative nature of his portfolio, but you’d be wrong. After booking a one-way flight from his native London to Australia, Gareth found himself a stranger in a strange land. Before settling in Melbourne, he spent the first year driving over 24,000 kilometers exploring Australia in a “Miami White” station wagon. Along the way, he picked tomatoes, clipped mandarins, and even did a brief stint as a jackaroo before eventually finding his way to a camera.

CONNECT WITH GARETH
Website: http://www.garethlewisphotography.com
Instagram: @garethlewis

MUSIC
Please Listen Carefully
 (Jahzzar) / CC BY-SA 4.0

Joshua K Jackson is a terrific street photographer from London. On paper he’s relatively new to the genre, but his already stunning body of work is every bit as compelling as those by some of his photographic heroes. Though Josh is quick to point out that he still has a lot to learn, his dedication to photography as both an art and a craft is immediately evident in his use of bold color and superb composition to communicate mood and narrative. While he often leaves the house with any sort of expectation or agenda, he says that the energy and buzz of the city is like fuel to keep shooting, especially since you never know what the scene could be just around the next corner.

CONNECT WITH JOSH
Website: https://www.joshkjack.com/
Instagram: @joshkjack
Twitter: @joshkjack

MUSIC
Please Listen Carefully
 (Jahzzar) / CC BY-SA 4.0

Recently, I was talking to a friend of mine about Process Driven and he asked me why I did the show. Not from the standpoint of having the conversations, but rather why release them into the world. “What do you get out of it?” he asked. As I thought about it for a bit, I really couldn’t come up with an answer—no one that was coherent anyway. I’ve been thinking about it ever since—a lot—and I think I’ve come up with an answer—at least a partial answer and that it this. Throughout my life there have been a handful of people—and I’m talking about people other than family—who have taken an interest in me that went above and beyond what was expected and as a result of that interest, either subtly or dramatically altered the trajectory of my life.

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In addition to being an incredible film director, Stanley Kubrick was also a photographer. A new book called Through a Different Lens showcases around 300 of Kubrick’s images, many of which have never been seen publicly.

He may have been born Usher Felig, but at 14, he quit school and began photographing for newspapers and ultimately became famous as Weegee. Christopher Bananos chronicles Weegee’s life and career in FLASH The Making of Weegee the Famous.

Yuni Yoshida is a Japanese graphic designer and art director whose work I am absolutely loving.

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