this is the what

When did you first know that you wanted to be a photographer? Did you always plan on going into still-life photography?

When I was in high school. It was the one thing that was totally satisfying yet I still wanted more. I was never very interested in portraiture but I would spend hours in the darkroom making photomontages. In college I had a few conceptual sculpture classes and those classes kind of provided a similar feeling to making photomontages, trying to make something interesting and beautiful within some limitations.

Sam Kaplan – Flossed

Sam Kaplan – Flossed

Sam Kaplan – Flossed

Sam Kaplan – Feed

Sam Kaplan – Feed

Sam Kaplan – Feed

Sam Kaplan – Feed

Who were some of the first photographers that inspired you?

Jerry Uelsmann, Edward Weston, Irving Penn. My high school had those photographers’ books in the photo classroom.

Sam Kaplan – Form

Sam Kaplan – Form

Sam Kaplan – Form

Sam Kaplan – Form

Sam Kaplan – Form

Sam Kaplan – Disposables

Sam Kaplan – Disposables

Sam Kaplan – Disposables

If you could go back ten years, what advice would you give yourself?

Assist as many people as possible, keep your eyes open – you can learn something from everyone.

Sam Kaplan – Consumables

Sam Kaplan – Consumables

Sam Kaplan – Insert Here

Sam Kaplan – Insert Here

Sam Kaplan – String

Sam Kaplan – Milestones

Sam Kaplan – Milestones

Sam Kaplan – Milestones

Sam Kaplan – Milestones

Any words of wisdom for the up and comers?

Shoot as much as you can, and be on time.

(Sam is based in New York. See more of his work, here)

When did you first know that you wanted to be a photographer?

I think I knew I wanted to pursue photography and photojournalism seriously during my freshman year of university at NYU. I’ve always been interested in international affairs and history, and during the first few months of college I was reading up on the Balkans in my own time. I decided to take a trip to Bosnia to see how the country was faring over a decade after the end of the war there. This was 2006. I got in touch with local NGOs and one of them took me to an internally displaced persons camp outside of Tuzla in eastern Bosnia. I met many widows of the men who were killed in the Srebrenica massacre in 1995 and I spent a day with them and photographed them. I suppose it felt natural doing that, and after developing the images I realized how powerful the medium could be to tell stories.

Nicole Tung

Nicole Tung

Nicole Tung

Nicole Tung

Nicole Tung

Who were the first photographers that inspired you?

The first photographers who inspired me were Josef Koudelka, Luc Delahaye, several others who brought a particular aesthetic to documenting history and social structures.

Nicole Tung

Nicole Tung

Nicole Tung

Nicole Tung

As a female photographer traveling to places of conflict, and oftentimes in the Middle East, do you find yourself treated differently than your male counterparts by your subjects?

As a female photographer traveling to conflict zones or conservative societies, yes, sometimes I get treated differently by my subjects. Sometimes it can get incredibly frustrating but I focus on trying to make the photographs and focus on the stories rather than the personal issues that might otherwise affect me. I’m there because I think the camera is a tool to say something, so it’s not about me and I have to set aside gender issues to show that I can do the same kind of work men can. I usually don’t see my work through that kind of lens but it’s often difficult not to in a place like the Middle East.

Nicole Tung

Nicole Tung

Nicole Tung

If you could go back ten years, what advice would you give yourself?

If I could go back 10 years I suppose I’d tell myself to be a better business person! Navigating the world of freelance photography, especially in photojournalism, is a steep learning curve when you are completely independent.

Nicole Tung

Nicole Tung

Nicole Tung

Nicole Tung

Nicole Tung

Any words of wisdom for up-and-coming photojournalists?

Advice I’d give to young photographers: photograph what you are interested and passionate about. The content of the work and what you are trying to say through it is the most important aspect, and everything else will follow.

(Nicole is currently based in Istanbul. See more of her work, here)

When did you first know that you wanted to be a photographer?

I think I was very young. When I was fifteen, I started taking pictures of my mother, and then when I was seventeen after a trip to New York, visiting the International Center of Photography and seeing more photography, I came back to Israel and told my parents that I wanted to be a photographer. I think I never felt so connected to anything that I had done before, and I had done a lot in the arts; I played the piano, I did theater, but when I did photography, it was just the thing that I could do all day and all of the time. I was completely in love. It was like, maybe my first love. Before I fell in love with a man, I fell in love with photography.

Bite 1, 2000 – Closer – Elinor Carucci

Eran almost touches me, 1999 – Closer – Elinor Carucci

Making the bed, 1996 – Closer – Elinor Carucci

Mother and I, 2000 – Closer – Elinor Carucci

As a mother to twins, you have documented some incredible, and honest moments, of your pregnancy and life as a mother. How do you balance having two children with and having time for your own work?

Its very very hard, and some days I almost give up. I mean, its just, working a lot, and I give up my social life, so, a lot of my friends are waiting for me, in a few years to maybe go back to going out sometimes, or to having brunch over the weekend. I just don’t have a social life, so it became the priority was just like, I’m going to be a mom, and I’m going to do my work. I don’t have help, I have help from my husband, but Its just really focusing and prioritizing. I’m not going out. I’m not having a social life. This is all I do, my work and my children.

Diary of a Dancer – Elinor Carucci

Diary of a Dancer – Elinor Carucci

Diary of a Dancer – Elinor Carucci

Diary of a Dancer – Elinor Carucci

Diary of a Dancer – Elinor Carucci

Diary of a Dancer – Elinor Carucci

Diary of a Dancer – Elinor Carucci

If you could go back ten years, what advice would you give yourself?

If I could go back ten years, I don’t know if I would have such smart advice. But maybe twenty years ago, I would not let myself move from Israel to New York, because I’m here now and the opportunities here and how my work was received, will never make me go back to Israel. I mean, New York loves me, and the people here love and get my work. But the pain of being away from my family in Israel is sometimes unbearable. So, maybe I wouldn’t even give myself the opportunity to explore New York and just stay in Israel by my family. I think once you leave the paradise of having one home, one country, you can’t go back. Because once you immigrate to another country – I am American, I am an American citizen and I love New York, but you never belong completely to one place anymore. I belong here, and I belong to Israel, but I am not completely belonging to either of the places. So, I think you learn a lot when you go through the immigration experience, but its painful, its a painful experience and hard to be so far away from my family and my culture, the country I left behind. And when I go to visit, I feel like, I never completely belong there anymore, I feel like a visitor. So, maybe, maybe that would be my advice – to stay, not to see too much. On the other hand, that might have been bad advice, because I am happy here.

Cherries i ate by myself, 2003 – Crisis – Elinor Carucci

First tears over another man, 2002 – Crisis – Elinor Carucci

Love, in spite, – 2003- Crisis – Elinor Carucci

Any words of wisdom for the up and comers?

I think the only words of wisdom I have for people who are starting off in photography is to try to find your voice and to find the kind of work that you’re really good at, and that reflects who you are, and to stay yourself in the process. I mean, yes, be proactive, be a hard-worker, initiate – but stay yourself, don’t feel like you have to be anyone else other than who you are. And you can do things your way, even if it will slow you down a little. So I think its all about really finding who we are, its a combination of finding who we are and what our work – what do we want to to tell the world, how we are different, how we are unique. And staying who we are also in the way we run our careers. And so its this, plus working hard and not giving up and going through the dark times when you think, you know that things are not going well and just keeping the strength. And be flexible, if you started thinking you want to be one thing and your ending up that you like something else – a different kind of photography or you like curating more than you like being a photographer, or you like writing about photography, or you like doing fashion photography more than fine arts, I mean, just let yourself explore and change and keep developing.

(Elinor is based in New York. See more of her work, here)

When did you first know that you wanted to be a photographer?

I fell in love with photography at a very young age. My first image was made with a milk carton pinhole camera when I was in 5th grade. Later, my mother’s boyfriend, Paul, had a camera and he had put a darkroom in our bathroom, so that’s where I learned the basics. I bought a stolen Nikkormat from a “friend” in 1978 and I was off to the races. By the time I was in high school I realized that I had a natural gift for composition and was pretty good with visual art. After a few years in art school, it became clear that I excelled in photo and sucked at everything else, so I just went with my strengths. To be honest, I never planned for a “career” but landed in the middle of the indy rock scene as the photographer of record by a serendipitous twist of fate. I was good and I was in the right place at the right time.

Michael Lavine

Michael Lavine

Michael Lavine

Michael Lavine

Michael Lavine

Michael Lavine

How did you land your first shoot?

What I consider to be my first assignment was photographing the band White Zombie for their first album cover PsychoHeadBlowout. When I was 22 years old I moved to NYC In 1985 to attend Parsons to study Photography. In college I was a real party animal and I used to go to a lot of rock shows at CBGB’s, The Pyramid and other clubs. Everywhere I went I kept seeing this beautiful girl with a crazy mane of thick curly red hair. The people at Parsons were all pretty square but one day I spotted the frizzy redhead in the Parsons cafeteria and I got up the nerve to say hello. I think I said, “didn’t I see you at that Sonic Youth show?” Her name was Sean Yseult and we hit it off right away. She asked me if I would take photographs of her band White Zombie and that shoot was my first album cover. The image was a straight B&W studio shot but there was something really in your face about it and the cover got a lot of attention in the downtown scene.

Michael Lavine

Michael Lavine

Michael Lavine

Michael Lavine

Michael Lavine

Michael Lavine

Michael Lavine

I love this story – I didn’t realize you had shot that album cover. Its so iconic of the music scene then. You went on to photograph most – if not all – of the major bands and musicians, as well as actors and other celebrities. Do you feel like that album cover opened the door to meeting more musicians or was it something else?

I don’t think it’s any particular assignment so much as the people you meet along the way that defines ones path forward: it was my friend from college, Bruce Pavitt, the founder of SubPop that hired me to shoot so many of his bands, It was Rick Rubin, who introduced me to the people at Geffen that really helped me get started shooting for the major labels. It’s kind of hard to imagine now but back then there weren’t that many photographers around. It was quite difficult to be a photographer, the skill level required to work professionally was tremendous and there was a tall barrier separating the pros from the amateurs. Anyway, the work kind of snowballed into more work. when I look back, I think that the SONIC YOUTH Daydream Nation album package was a real turning point for me. Ironically back in 1987, nobody outside of downtown NYC even knew who Sonic Youth was.

Michael Lavine

Michael Lavine

Michael Lavine

Michael Lavine

That seems hard to imagine now.. both the lack of photographers and anyone not knowing Sonic Youth.

I was wondering about your newer work, Sliced Eye. I have been following you via Instagram and the work you put up is really interesting and the text which accompanies the image. When did you start this project and how do you feel about using such a public platform to share new work?

I am uncomfortable with the idea of using social media as marketing tool for my commercial work and Ive been struggling to find a methodology that I find respectable. If I have work to promote I use facebook and twitter but I made the decision a while back to keep my instagram feed free from outright promotion like pics of tear sheets and BTS shots. My personal work is based in a classic street photography sensibility and using my iphone camera wherever I go just seems like a logical extension of my image making process.

Over the last few years I’ve become completely obsessed with the idea of creating emotionally charged imagery. I’m mainly interested in exploring the rich emotional landscape of sadness and loss and the powerful feelings that are associated with pain and heartbreak. I’m coming up on my 50th birthday and everything just feels so intense. I’ve been spending a lot of time attempting to express my feelings through narrative short film and I’ve found that by far the most essential element to a successful film lies in the writing. Without good writing, the narrative falls apart and the movie sucks. So I’ve been trying to write. What happened to my instagram feed was a natural collision of these two different means of expression, my iphone photography and my writing, a sort of you’ve got chocolate on my peanut butter kind of moment.

I find the photos and the text to be really beautiful and intense. Its kind of amazing to go on an instagram feed and see this series happening as you make it. Do you have the text in mind before you take the photo or the other way around?

Well thank you! I come up with these fictional sentences mostly when I am lying down trying to sleep. I usually reference some sort of feeling that I had that day and build a story around that feeling. They are not autobiographical events but more just expressions of emotions. The photographs are made completely separately and are basically a travelogue of where I happen to have been. If I have a meeting in midtown, then you will see something from midtown. I have some guilt using my iphone and not carrying a real camera around but I’ve come to terms with the digital age and embraced the concept of iphone imagery. I’ve made some prints and they actually look really nice. When I match an existing phrase to an existing image I usually look for some sort of shallow connection that ties the two together in an unexpected and non-literal way. I enjoy fooling around with the word play as much as I enjoy making the photographs.

Michael Lavine

Michael Lavine

Michael Lavine

Michael Lavine

Michael Lavine

When did you start shooting video? I love your music videos and video portraits.. Are you coming up with the concepts for the music videos? With your Video Portraits, do you shoot these before or after shooting still portraits of your subjects?

I made a few music videos with a small production company called High Risk I had in the 90’s but I found the process to be too demanding and my photography business was being neglected. When my business partner Steve Brown died of AIDS in 1995 I put motion on the back burner. I didn’t do anything else for 15 years but then I got I Canon 5D in 2010 and I realized that I could make good looking video without all the crazy production. I made the Heavy Trash video with one assistant.

For the video portraits, I had a client that was asking for BTS video and I felt like I needed to tell the story in a different way, not just over my shoulder, but more integrated with the stills. These are simple interview based profiles that are unscripted and improvised and really fun to watch. I got a GREAT response and I really thought that everyone would be asking me to make them, but to be honest, I haven’t gotten that many commissions. I’m hoping they will catch on!

Can you tell me about the short film that you directed, Weekend Away – Did you write the story? How long did filming take? Did directing a short film feel more collaborative than being behind the camera?

Weekend Away is a short film about a woman who decides to escape for the weekend on a road trip to the beach. Her travels bring several confrontations with characters that reveal her inability to actually escape from anything at all. The film is based on a short story written by the author Justin Taylor and I wrote the screenplay myself. The production took months to organize but we only shot for 4 days. And then it took months to finish all the editing and color correcting and sound mixing. The process is incredibly complicated and while some of my skills as a photographer came in handy there was so much more that I had to learn along the way. Writing screenplays and directing actors are not skills that one knows about as a photographer. I’ve become obsessed with figuring out how to tell a story using emotional content. It can be a lot of fun to take a photograph of an actor sitting in a chair but it’s a whole different ball game to guide actors through a scene with a commanding understanding of the complex and subtle language that actors use to communicate. Weekend Away is actually my second short and I definitely am getting better at it. I feel more confident now about the filmmaking process. A big item on my bucket list is to direct a feature so hopefully if I keep pushing I can get there.

I know this is well beyond a ten minute interview but before we wrap up, I wanted to ask your thoughts on editorial photography. Mainly, what do you think the future might look like for editorial photographers? So much has been said about how rates haven’t changed in years, how photographers are expected to do more for less and with quicker turnarounds, but it doesn’t seem to be slowing down all of the talented women and men who go into this field.. do you have any advice for them, and do you have any predictions for what we might see in the future?

Hmm, the future of editorial? Have you looked at any charts of print circulation lately? It would be a great hill to ski down. Long and steep with no bottom in sight. I have 2 teenage daughters and I’ve never seen either of them reading a magazine. And my wife owns HER OWN MAGAZINE! (they read hers) So I don’t have too much faith in the future of print. But hey, I remember not so long ago when shooting for the website of a magazine was considered to be an embarrassment, practically a disgrace. Now its totally cool. We all know the digital revolution has turned the world upside down. So as the transition from print to web continues there will be more assignments not less, you just might be shooting for Rookie instead of Teen Vogue. And yes the pay is the same as when I started 25 years ago. But at least it hasn’t gone down like in music and advertising. You don’t shoot editorial to make money, you shoot editorial to feed your ego. As far as advice goes, I might not be the best person to ask that question considering I’ve never been able to make much of a dent in the editorial market. It helps if you are young and beautiful and have a cool blog, but mainly, you need a SINGULAR vision. Find a style and stick with it. Focus on subjects you care about. Pick a theme like humor or irony or debauchery, something that suits your personality. If a photo editor can recognize your photo without reading the credit, you know you’re on the right track.

(Michael is based in New York. See more of his work, here. See more from the series Sliced Eye, here. Learn more about his film, Weekend Away, here)

When did you first know that you wanted to be a photographer?

I never did, it just happened. I knew I am passionate about traveling the world with a camera, capturing moments and sights in order to share with friends and family (pre-facebook era), one thing led to another and I found my work in magazines and exhibition spaces.

Kobi Israel

Kobi Israel

Who were some of the first photographers that inspired you?

I guess most young photographers from my generation primarily fall in love with the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson but it wasn’t until I saw Nan Goldin’s solo show in Amsterdam (or was it in NYC) that I grasped to potential of an image and the medium to shock and amaze at the same time. It was also Shopie Calle’s narratives and Philip-Lorca di Corsia image quality that influenced and shaped my interest in photography.

Kobi Israel

Kobi Israel

Kobi Israel

Can you tell me about your series, Cuba! Love Story? You mention on your website the paradox that you saw between the masculine and homoerotic in Cuba and your experience of growing up in Israel. Can you expand on that? And do you feel that growing up in Israel has shaped you as a photographer?

I am sure everyone is shaped by his childhood backdrops and memories, even if only subconsciously. For me going back to Cuba was like entering a time machine, back to childhood but from an adult point of view. Looking a bit Latin, picking up on the local dialect and adopting familiar body gestures, I blended in. I made friends and lived in their remote country houses. I dined with their families and socialised with their friends, all the while walking the thin line between observer and participant, gathering homoerotic and homo-social experiences that were so familiar from my childhood. I even managed to capture a secret love story with my camera.

Kobi Israel

Kobi Israel

Kobi Israel

Kobi Israel

If you could go back ten years, what advice would you give yourself?

Not bothering myself too much with the technical aspects of the camera. For years I was horrified not to make the right exposure as I only used film and never was too sure of the results until I get the film back from the lab.

Kobi Israel

Kobi Israel

Kobi Israel

Any words of wisdom for the up and comers?

Experiment, experiment, experiment!

(Kobi is based in London. See more work, here)