Transcription: Creative Path | Building a Life around Photography: w/ Michael Kirchoff

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Transcription

Anne Kelly:

This is Art in the raw conversations with creative people. Tonight I have a very special episode for you. We’re going to be talking to Michael Kershaw. Michael was my guest on episode one of Art in the Raw Recorded in July of 2020, so we’re going to catch up and see what Michael is up to. For those who don’t know Michael, Michael is a photographer, both commercial and fine art. He’s also a writer podcaster and more, and tonight we’re going to talk about the creative process, the act of being amazed how just sometimes being a little bit naive about something is actually a good thing. And we’re also going to talk about a photography train trip that he took on the Trans Siberian Railroad. Yes. Michael threw a bunch of cameras in a bag one day and just jumped on a train to see what there was to see. 

Michael Kirchoff:

Can you guess what episode we’re on tonight? 

Speaker 3:

1000? 

Michael Kirchoff:

Not quite pretty close. 

Speaker 3:

55. 55. That was my next guess. 

Michael Kirchoff:

Okay. Well 1,100. 

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that’s normally my guessing pattern. 

Michael Kirchoff:

55. If I didn’t have a full-time job, we probably would be on episode 

Speaker 3:

1000. I believe that though 55 is pretty substantial too. So 

Michael Kirchoff:

I was outside earlier, just wandering around before we started recording, and I was thinking, well, the first few episodes were recorded outside. Maybe I should go back outside again, which kind of violates all the rules of podcasting in terms of sound fun. 

Speaker 3:

It was a good way to start. It didn’t work out that well, but I think there was some issue. 

Michael Kirchoff:

The internet might’ve gone down 

Speaker 3:

And it got dark outside. I got the 

Michael Kirchoff:

Light with a flashlight. That’s right. Sometimes being a little bit naive about certain things is actually beneficial. If you don’t realize how much work something’s going to be or you have no preconceived notions, you’re perhaps more likely to do things. Would you agree with that? A 

Speaker 3:

Hundred percent. Yeah. Not knowing what you’re getting yourself into is probably the better way to go. If you had more knowledge of what was to come, you would just say, maybe I’ll pass on this one. 

Michael Kirchoff:

I think that applies to a lot of things that are big, important endeavors that we end up embarking upon, and so we’re grateful for that being naive in that moment. I 

Speaker 3:

Remember when we did the very first one, I think your idea was there wasn’t going to be any editing. You were just going to hit record and we’re just going to go for it. It’s art in the raw, this is how it 

Michael Kirchoff:

Worked. But then I got really into the art of editing and also came to realize that most people aren’t going to really want to watch unedited. I mean, maybe aspects of Unedited video. Yeah, 

Speaker 3:

Bloopers. You had originally come up with the idea doing Zoom interviews, so those were kind of just off the cuff anyway. 

Michael Kirchoff:

Yeah, all improv and it’s still improv. 

Speaker 3:

Yeah. I don’t even know what you’re going to ask me. So yeah, so be afraid. 

Michael Kirchoff:

For those who don’t know Michael, he is a fine art photographer, but he’s also a commercial photographer. He is involved in Analog Forever Magazine started Catalyst Interviews is co-host of the diffusion tapes. The list goes on. 

Speaker 3:

People approach me all the time about different ideas or projects and it’s hard to say no, you, I’m excited about the industry that we’re in. I’m excited about photography, I’m excited about art and I like talking about it and discussing it with people, so it seems like a very natural thing to do. The problem is though the list keeps getting longer and longer and at a certain point, I can’t make 25 hour days, eight day weeks. I can’t add more time to my life. Like you mentioned, I’m a photographer and I think that the fine art photography part of what I’ve been doing lately has kind of taken a back seat to all of these other things. The good part about that is that I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything. I feel just as happy about what I’m working on and excited about what I’m working on. 

Speaker 3:

When it was just me working on me and my work, I’m doing something like this. To me, that’s very valuable time out of my day. I’m grateful that someone like you who thinks very similarly would ask me to even do something like this time well spent engaging with fine art, photography, podcasting, writing, curating, doing portfolio reviews, all of those things. I’m kind of all over the place, but I really thrive on that. I think it’s a good idea to diversify a little bit, take on some new challenges, and I’ve definitely been doing a lot of that over the last, gosh, I think it really escalated about five years ago. In fact, both Catalyst Interviews and Analog Forever Magazine. I think actually I think tomorrow is the five-year anniversary of Analog Forever. Catalyst started maybe a week or two before that. So looking back, it’s kind of a little bit idiotic that I would try to do both things at the same time. They both required a lot of thought and planning, and I doubled up on that when I was doing it. I spent a good six months trying to figure out all the nuts and bolts beforehand, and then they ended up launching a month or two weeks from one another. 

Michael Kirchoff:

Well, so here’s the question. Five years in, do you have any regrets? Regrets that you want to publicly air? 

Speaker 3:

No regrets, definitely not. There have been plenty of times where I’ve thought about scaling way back 

Michael Kirchoff:

And for anybody who’s not familiar, catalyst is all written interviews. 

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it’s basically a blog. It is a website of written interviews and they’re all peppered with images from the photographers that I interview, and it’s about how they started in the industry, their process, their creative process, and where they’re going with their art, things like that. While doing all of these things is a lot of work, I’m learning things in kind of an exponential way. It’s kind of like being in school. This week’s assignment is this photographer, this process or the business aspects of it all. There’s so many different bits and pieces. 

Michael Kirchoff:

So for five years you’ve been interviewing artists for both Catalyst and analog forever, but then you’ve also been a portfolio reviewer and jurors. I’m wondering, has that affected your work at all? Some artists don’t want to look at any other artists’ work because they want their work to be completely uninfluenced, but then it’s also good to know what’s going on, but you’re immersed and then also making your own work. 

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I can’t say that I’ve really adopted anything specific from other people or their process into my own work. If anything, you kind of start to see some trends of how people are presenting their work or bodies of work that are being completed and marketed. Especially if you do something like critical mass, you look at 200 portfolios and at the end of every single one of them that I’ve done, I think this is my, I think the sixth one, and I noticed immediately that when you’re finished with them, you kind of think, oh, this was the year of this idea or that idea. As soon as Covid hit those years, and even still now, there’s definitely a lot of bodies of work that are kind of covid related in one way or another. First it was just photographs of empty streets, like public places that you would normally see lots of people and now they’re empty. I can’t tell you how many bodies of work and how many photographs I’ve seen of that. 

Michael Kirchoff:

That is an interesting thing about being somebody that sees a lot of different work is you will see very similar projects from a wide range of people in completely different parts of the world. I’m sure had no knowledge of the existence of the other. I dunno, it makes you think of the whole collective consciousness thing. I mean, when it’s a pandemic thing, it’s an obvious, but sometimes it’s weirder than that. It’s like some guy in Poland is making the same project as the guy in San Francisco and it’s a random project. Do you see that sometimes too? Yeah, 

Speaker 3:

All the time. I think it’s kind of a numbers game. More bodies of work and project statements you read. You got to connect the dots. 

Michael Kirchoff:

So something I’ve been thinking about recently is a lot of artwork is fired based upon the act of being amazed. Curious what you think about that and if you feel like that applies to the fine artwork that you make. 

Speaker 3:

I think so. Yeah, definitely. Sometimes it’s subject matter, sometimes it’s process, and sometimes it’s just that act of discovery and that the idea of looking to be amazed I think is a very exciting prospect to take on. And I often, because of who I am and how I operate, I often find a lot of humor in that as well. I’m amazed at how amazed somebody can be over that. Like, ah, this person has dedicated their life to the world of jello and now they’re making a body of work in a book about jello. As far as I know, there’s nobody really doing that, but now I’m going to get an email. 

Michael Kirchoff:

Well, Liz Hickok did reconstruct San Francisco out of Jello. Oh, 

Speaker 3:

I didn’t know that. 

Michael Kirchoff:

You didn’t know that? I’ll send you the link later. Okay, good. I was like, is he talking about Liz? 

Speaker 3:

No, I’m not. No, there’s somebody else. 

Michael Kirchoff:

She’s been doing some other things. 

Speaker 3:

See, we all learned something today. 

Michael Kirchoff:

What up, Liz? How about within your work? Do we see the act of being amazed in your work? Oh 

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I think so. A lot of my work, physical exploration of our environment, whether it’s a natural environment or the built environment, those are all things that I’m always fascinated in. I shoot a lot of landscape, but I don’t think of myself as a landscape photographer, and I feel like I’ve always kind of shied away from that because there’s so many people that shoot landscape and I think landscape photography is almost synonymous with fine art photography. So if you say, oh, I do a lot of fine art photography, immediately people will say, oh, do you take pictures of the mountains and you take pictures of the beach? Well, yeah, but among other things, the idea of landscape photography and what it can entail is a much broader idea to artists than it is to the average person. My landscape photography had predominantly been kind of more built environment. 

Speaker 3:

When I first started going to Russia, which was a project that I’d spent 10 years doing, and a lot of it stemmed from the amazement I had for what I had seen on early newscast when I was a kid, and it had a lot to do with places like the Kremlin and St. Basel’s Cathedral. Those were really amazing to me. I didn’t see places like that in Los Angeles unless you went to Disneyland. There was something very creative and very about a lot of the structures that I saw there, and that piqued my interest and that was one of the things that helped prompt me to go there and start that exploration and that project and that branched out into other countries and other cultures as well over time. But all of those bodies of work are kind of said and done at this point, 

Michael Kirchoff:

And so at least part of the work from Russia and Enduring Grace, you took a train trip through Russia, you just threw a bunch of cameras in your bag and jumped on a train with I think your dad’s 

Speaker 3:

Pocket watch. It was a wristwatch, but yeah, 

Michael Kirchoff:

Because of all the time zones, you needed that one watch to keep you consistent. So yeah, talking about dedication and the mission, I’m curious about that story. 

Speaker 3:

Like I said, I was very curious about what was going on there, especially with the built environment and even the natural landscape as well, because I was amazed that people built structures that looked that way or operated that way, and I felt like the best way to experience it was firsthand and was to go there and make photographs of them, and I kind of did it in my own way. When I first started, I was photographing different types of cameras and processes. Some of it was digital, some of it was Polaroid, some of it was strictly film, both color and black and white. The first trip especially, I had way too many cameras and I was kind of all over the place with it, but by the end of, I had kind of worked through it enough to know where subsequent trips were going to take me at least creatively and what types of cameras or film or not that I might use, but I ended up settling on using GraphX cameras and original Polaroid film, positive negative film so that I could have negatives and make prints from those. 

Speaker 3:

But early on, I always knew about the Trans Siberian Railway. I remember reading about it and thinking, oh, that sounds really cool, but I would never do that for this trip. And probably a year after I had those thoughts, I found myself just planning it anyway. I just started doing it, and again, maybe if I had thought more about it, I never would’ve done it at all because it was kind of a challenging thing, especially to do by yourself to go to another country and travel 6,000 miles by rail or you don’t speak the language, you don’t read the language. I’m sure I’d learn some phrases here and there, but unless you’re really immersed in the land and the people and the culture, you kind of lose those over time. I have, but it was a bit of a daunting trip, and I think looking back now, I think that if I had known what it was going to take to accomplish that, I may have bailed on the whole idea to begin with. 

Speaker 3:

It wasn’t a vacation at all in any way. It was actually a lot of work and it was something that I always felt like had to be on. I always had to be paying attention to what was going on around me, how things operated, and then how do I make photographs in the midst of all of this. To the outsider, they didn’t look chaotic, but within my mind, things were actually kind of all over the place and extremely chaotic because I didn’t often know what was going on or what was going to happen next and the environment that I found myself in. 

Michael Kirchoff:

Did you find though that maybe that was creatively a positive thing? Maybe things came out of the project that you wouldn’t have planned? 

Speaker 3:

My work in general is things constantly changing and moving around and be physically navigating through the environment. It’s all a very kind of chaotic thing anyway. I never say, I’m going to go to this place and I’m going to take this specific picture. Everything’s kind of off the cuff at best. There’s maybe some sort of an outline for what I want to do. Oh, maybe I want to do that on Tuesday. And I find that especially in a place like that again, where you don’t normally operate, things change often and quickly. I kind of thrive on that, but that’s just how it works for me. I don’t think about where I’m going to have lunch or I’m going to have dinner or when I’m going to eat it all. A lot of the times I’m on foot, I just go, even if I think I’m going to go over there, I’ll see something over here and then well, I’ll just go over here and then I never make it to that other spot at all, no matter how much interest I may have had in it because I went left instead of right. Sometimes it’s as simple as that. 

Michael Kirchoff:

That’s one of the fun things about traveling alone. 

Speaker 3:

I think it would be a bad idea for somebody else to want to go with me. They might want to go have lunch, and I’m like, Nope. I’m like, I’m hours away from even thinking about my next meal because this is in my head and this is what I need to do. Now 

Michael Kirchoff:

You’re in that zone 

Speaker 3:

For sure, and if you step outside of that zone, it all kind of just, I think it evaporates quickly. 

Michael Kirchoff:

When it comes to the making of your work, what percent do you feel like is magic versus conscious thought? 

Speaker 3:

As far as the process itself, because I thrive on that chaos and because everything has the ability to change at a moment’s notice, I think it’s mostly magic. I think serendipity plays a huge role in the images that I get by the steps that I take to get to the location that I’m in. And then as far as the final photograph, I’d say it’s probably 50 50. There’s so much of what I do, especially using expired Polaroid. I don’t really have much control at all across because there’s no way to control any kind of expired film. When you click the shutter and you pull the Polaroid, you don’t know what happened in between. In the action of pulling that Polaroid, did the chemistry spread across evenly? Did it not? There’s one specific instance because the emulsion didn’t spread across the base of the film evenly. When I peeled the Polaroid and I looked at it, I literally shouted, fuck yeah, and did a fist bump, and I was in Talon Estonia and there were a couple of other people around who looked at me. I was out of my mind, what is this? I was just looking at a little print and I’m shouting about it, and because it was very, again, serendipitous that the image worked out that the way it did, that kind of imperfect pole of the Polaroid added something very special to the final photograph that it never could have been planned. It never could have been controlled. It just happened and it was kind of perfect in that moment, and that’s why I had the reaction that I did. I was not really thinking about where I was and who might’ve been around when 

Michael Kirchoff:

They’re like, who is this guy and what is he? Yeah, 

Speaker 3:

Sometimes stuff like that will draw people to want to investigate what I’m doing when they see the camera. 

Michael Kirchoff:

More often, when you see people taking pictures on a normal day, it’s with their phone and not with any sort of medium to large format analog camera, and for me, that’s how I fell in love with photography. Was that kind of magic of 

Speaker 3:

It? Oh, absolutely. The period of time that that film was even created is very small, and then to use it in the way that I use it is much, much smaller than even that. So it’s a process that most people don’t understand. I’ve had people guess what it is that I do, and 99% of the time they’re wrong, and now it’s kind of coming to an end. There’s very little of it that I have left that’s both frightening and exciting at the same time because I think in a way it’s almost kind of a relief. I never wanted to rely on one thing to determine who I am as an artist or for the same idea that I didn’t want to be kind of pigeonholed as a landscape photographer. I don’t want everything about me to be, oh, he’s the guy that did that one Polaroid process. I’m not done yet. That imperfect nature of creating artwork is really kind of the backbone of who I am as an artist and the images that I make. I think that that’s, for me at least until up to this point, it’s been rubbed requirement and even the exhibitions that I’ve done have been called flawed or Fractured things of an imperfect Nature. 

Michael Kirchoff:

Polaroid Phil, how many years has that been your preferred method of 

Speaker 3:

Shooting? I’ve been using that film outside of the professional realm for a very long time, a couple of decades at least. The year that they stopped making that particular film was 2007, and that’s when I really started using it quite a bit and developed several bodies of work with it, whereas before, I was really just kind of having fun with it. I wasn’t doing anything in a very serious way with it at the time. The film I use, it comes in, there’s a pack of 10, it’s pack film, and out of those 10 I’ll get anywhere from zero to if I get three or four, I feel like I was blessed. So what often happens is the first few, they just fall apart in your hand. You think, man, oh man, I just got this really great picture, and you pull the Polaroid out and it just explodes into a heap of paper and photo garbage. 

Speaker 3:

Really, there’s no good way to fix it out in the field while you’re out there. So there are times it’ll take me several tries just to get one actual photograph, and then if I’m not a hundred percent pleased with it right off the bat, I’m going to continue at least for a little while to get the photograph that I’m looking for if it’s in an environment where I can actually do that. If things are changing too often, then of course you’re never going to get the same shot twice, but knowing that there’s probably going to be several failures around that. Just taking that one photograph, I have to be extremely selective as to what I’m doing or if I even just get one. Sometimes I feel like, well, I think I’m going to be good with this. There are some aspects to it in how I work that I have kind of developed a little bit of control or been able to manipulate things in a creative way to my liking and to my quote aesthetic, and I can implement those manipulations into specific photographs in the act of actually making the photograph and pulling the Polaroid and handling the negatives. 

Speaker 3:

I can change that up at least to a certain degree if I feel like it, and sometimes it adds something and sometimes it doesn’t, but that kind of helps make up for the fact that I may not be able to shoot one whole pack of film with one idea, basically finishing one body of work with what I have left, and that’s it, and then once that’s done, that’s done. At this point, maybe I’ll come up with 100 more frames that I can shoot for that body of work, and out of those 100 frames, how many of ’em am I going to be pleased enough with to include ten five? I don’t know, maybe, so I’m very selective as to what makes it in. 

Michael Kirchoff:

Well, that’s a big thing. Editing, there’s what actually technically works, and then when you get to the editing process, what visually works, what is cohesive with the project, 

Speaker 3:

And that can change over time as well. I have gone through old proof sheets, things that I’ve photographed anywhere from a year to 10 years ago or more for that matter, and kind of looked through the proof sheets, and sometimes I think it’s very healthy thing to do because you’ll be like, oh, how did I miss that one? That one fits in with what I’m doing. Or maybe you just want to experiment with it, or maybe it has a place somewhere else. It doesn’t have to necessarily fit into a body of work. Sometimes it might just be a photograph that pleases me for just because it doesn’t have to have a specific reason to be printed necessarily. It’ll just be something that sits on my desk or hangs on the wall in my office. Nobody else ever even sees it. I’m okay with that too, 

Michael Kirchoff:

So that does make me wonder. When you do run out of that film, do you have a plan? Is there another camera or a film or a medium? Are you plotting? 

Speaker 3:

Oh, yeah. There’s always plotting. Some of it’s process related and some of it’s concept related. By and large, almost everything that I’ve done that I’ve shown as a body of work, I would say 95% of it is film related film or analog in some way, whether it be camera or film or both, and very little. It has been digital, but there’s kind of a documentary project that I’ve always wanted to do based upon, again, fascinations I had when I was a child or my teenage years or early adulthood, things that I was amazed by that I want to explore. It would probably be all digital, which would probably scare a lot of people. Why would you do that? Sort of the film guy, but I think that you have to choose the process or just the way that you make photographs for the body of work. 

Speaker 3:

Sometimes it’s film, sometimes it’s digital, sometimes it’s a hybrid of the two, and I thought about even that project like, well, maybe I would incorporate some film photographs into it, but I’m not going to know until I start it. Like I said, it’s all just something that’s just spinning around in my head at the moment, and then there’s other ideas I’ve had that are more kind of process now that there’s no more Polaroid, what can I use that will still feel natural to me and be in some ways recognizable to what I’ve done in the past? I can go down a different road, but people will be able to look at those photographs and still be able to identify them as something that I had done. I think that that’s an important part of being an artist. You want people to be able to recognize your vision and your aesthetic and had to market it to a certain degree. 

Speaker 3:

Those are all things we have to do in order to get eyes on the work, so I would want to stay in that vein because again, that’s just who I am. I’m in other alternative processes. There’s so many now, and there are some things that I really like, and some of them maybe I will dabble in them just because they’re fun or the process of learning a new process might take me to an alternate process, and that will become something that I’ll be able to embrace. It’s just experimentation. It’s just something that you have to try, so I’m sure I’ll have to fail quite a bit, and that’s something that I always have to tell other people as well when they’re working on bodies of work, especially during portfolio reviews. It’s okay to fail, and I’m all about failure. 

Michael Kirchoff:

Sometimes failure is good. It doesn’t seem like it in the moment, but it can be 

Speaker 3:

A good thing. Oh, for sure. It doesn’t feel right when it’s happening, but it’s part of the learning process. 

Michael Kirchoff:

So in the context of your career as a fine art photographer specifically, is there a way you measure success then? There’s a lot of assumptions in what that looks like, but the more I think about it, I don’t think it has to be pigeonholed. 

Speaker 3:

No, not at all. In fact, I have thought about that a lot lately. If I ended my photographic career at the end of this podcast, I would feel like I ended it in a very successful way and on a high note, and I didn’t get to that point until I realized that even though photography is my means of income and my livelihood, it isn’t necessarily the be all end all. I have to be enjoying what I’m doing. I have to enjoy it. I have to have fun with it, and I have to ultimately only please myself. I could care less if anybody thinks of me as a success. I want to be able to look back on my own life and see as much positivity as possible, and for me, that’s the ultimate success. I’ve always played by my own rules, and that’s why I say failure is important because the failures that I have had, I can attribute a hundred percent to myself, and I have learned from them and I have grown from them, and they’re all things that I can apply to myself moving forward. So I feel like I can look back at just a handful of photographs, even my favorite photographs, not even anybody else’s, and be like, these five photographs are how I identify myself, and I think that they’re successful. 

Michael Kirchoff:

I think that’s honestly the best approach. Not that the goal is even becoming the most famous photographer in the world, whatever that means, but it’s a creative endeavor. Do you measure it with money? It’s an odd thing, 

Speaker 3:

And even how people speak about themselves, I see it every now and then, and it makes me laugh, especially with a contemporary photographer like fine art, commercial, whatever, or anybody in the visual art when they start referring to themselves as I’m a master photographer or world fame, when you start portraying yourself in marketing yourself that way, I feel like you’ve already lost your own identity. You lost focus of what it is that you’re doing. The first time I sold a print, I was so beside myself with excitement. Maybe at that point I already thought, oh, okay, now I’m a successful fine art photographer. I sold a print. That’s all it took. Do you have to sell a hundred? Do you have to sell a thousand? I don’t know. At what point does it become enough? 

Michael Kirchoff:

Well, that’s a weird thing is there’s no official metrics, but I think why I like that idea of the act of being amazed, artists being so driven to do things that they literally cannot help themselves, and that’s something that I’ve continued to explore in these conversations. There’s passion involved and there’s, I think some luck involved and there’s a lot of magic in. 

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I definitely think that, and exploring all of those things within myself is what helped lead me away from doing my own work and like you interviewing other visual artists about what it is that they’re doing, because I’m amazed and I’m excited by my own work, but I’m also just equally amazed at what other people are doing. It always blows me away at the lengths that people will go to make a photograph. When I started the Analog Forever and Catalyst interview, there are things I knew that I had to do, but I didn’t know how much effort and how much time it would take, not just to do them, but to do them well enough. I didn’t want to screw it up for other people by presenting writing that wasn’t quote good. I think I’m an okay writer. I don’t think I’m a great writer. 

Michael Kirchoff:

I think you’re a great writer, but I’m allowed to say that. 

Speaker 3:

Oh, okay. Well, thank you. Yeah, I mean, I get some compliments. Maybe I have a hard time with compliments too. 

Michael Kirchoff:

That’s part of the whole being modest. I admire you as a person. I really do. You continue to pursue your own fine art photography, but you support a lot of other artists as well by interviewing them, reviewing them at portfolio reviews, it’s clear you love photography and you’ve managed to build a life around it. 

Speaker 3:

Oh, yeah. And those words. Exactly. Again, if I had thought about it when I was younger, what it has taken to get to this point, would I have still done it? That’s probably the hardest question because parts of me want to say yes, and parts of me wants to say no, but because I’ve been able to do it on my own terms, for the most part, I feel very satisfied with how I got here, and again, we keep using the word amazed. I think that that’s kind of the word of the day for this episode because I’m amazed that anybody can do that. I mean, this is what I get to do and still have a roof over my head and food to eat. It’s amazing to me that I’ve been able to do that or anybody for that matter. 

Michael Kirchoff:

So I am curious. Writing has become a big part of your creative process. People use photography as a means of communication. I would say the written word is a more common way to communicate. As someone who’s communicating frequently between the visual image and the written word, I’m just wondering what thoughts you have. 

Speaker 3:

From my perspective, they correlate with each other perfectly. I mean, they’re language, right? Ones written or verbal language, and the other one is a visual language, and every art form is its own visual language, I think, and you can have a conversation strictly with images and no words at all. There have been websites built where one photographer will post an image and then another photographer will respond with an image, and then you can look at a storyline with the end result, depending on how long it goes on, and it’s built. Similarly, the way words and sentences and paragraphs and chapters in a book are, I’m often comparing both books and films and bodies of work. You have to kind of communicate it in a way that tells a story. There has to be a beginning, middle, and end, and along the way you want there to be some peaks and valleys and items of interest that happen along the way, and we see it the way directors build movies, and we see it the way really great authors write books. 

Speaker 3:

Everything’s broken down into scenes or chapters, and I approach the writing. I kind of have to think about it that way as well. I don’t know that I’m at all accomplished as a writer because my approach has always been to communicate the way that I, I go off on little tangents all the time, but they’re all by way of describing the ideas that I’m trying to put forth. So a lot of my writing is kind of conversational. It’s very kind of off the cuff, and it’s very down to earth and not at all formal in any way. When I started Catalyst Interviews, there’s a very brief intro at the beginning of each one, and it’s written by me, and it’s usually just like one or two short paragraphs. Sometimes they’re just even just a few sentences, but they’re basically written kind of stream of consciousness. 

Speaker 3:

I’ll just sit down and I’ll think about the interview that I just conducted, and I’ll think about the person, their work, and the first things come into my mind. I’ll just start writing about that person, and sometimes it takes me to surprising places that I didn’t think that I was going to mention when I sat down in front of a blank page, but going back to the idea that photographs are a visual language, correlate them the same way authors write books and directors make movies. When I’m sitting down and writing, I’m kind of in the back of my head. Those are concepts and ideas that help me kind of set the stage with, I take that along with me everywhere that I go 

Michael Kirchoff:

In terms of writing, there is that perception that it has to be kind of academic, but I don’t think it has to be, I dunno, I get kind of bored sometimes when it’s too academic of writing. 

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it’s just putting down the words that pop into my head versus writing all of those things down and then rearranging them so that they fit with the parameters. When I started writing, I didn’t know what that even was. What kind of style do you use? I don’t know. I just write down words, so even though I’m doing it the way I’m doing it, it has to be easy to consume. 

Michael Kirchoff:

How do you think that applies back to photography and image making 

Speaker 3:

For that? I don’t think that there are rules. I’m sure there’s plenty of arguments in there, and we could go out, future episodes are, but I think with the art world, like the visual arts, especially for the most part, rules are made to be broken. I always tell people, don’t make this work how you think. Other people need to see it. Don’t make it to please that person over there. Make it so that it pleases you and gets the point across that you’re trying to make the best way possible again, for you. Just make as many pictures as you possibly can. Get ’em out of your system and then print ’em out or look at ’em on a desktop all at once and then start to find that through line so that they make sense and they spell out the concept that you’re trying to convey to people, if that’s what it is. Sometimes people just want to make images and then they find the reason later it pops in like, oh, I’ve been doing it all along because of this. I didn’t really know that when I started, but now I do. Seeing them all together, 

Michael Kirchoff:

Finding your own voice is a major challenge. So most photographers start by, they’re emulating the things they’ve seen. Not everybody ever finds their own voice and figuring out how to do that is a challenge. This is their advice. You 

Speaker 3:

Have there is, and in part it goes back to just be honest with yourself, make the images that you want to make. Everybody could tell you you’re crazy and doing it that way, but just at least for a little while, just try it. You’ve got nothing to lose. If anything, you’ll at least learn something from the process of doing that, and that will help lead you to finding your voice. It’s going to take time, so be patient. I often bring up the Cartier Broan quote where he says that your first 10,000 pictures are your worst to this day. That’s probably one of my favorite quotes because I feel like that’s really true. You got to make a lot of shit before you make a masterpiece, and once you get to a certain point, that doesn’t mean from now on you’re only making great photographs. It’s always still a process. 

Speaker 3:

So my advice is always to just allow yourself to work through that process and be patient with yourself. Don’t worry about what other people think that is, that you should be doing. And one of the things that brings those questions into people’s minds is, I think is social media because you go onto social media and you see, oh, there’s these 10 people that I admire. They’re always making new stuff. They’re always putting out new work. Maybe they worked on all of those things over a long period of time and they just started putting them out one after another. You don’t really know how it is that they work unless you’ve talked to them and interviewed them yourself. But artists that I love will disappear for years at a time, and then all of a sudden seven years went by and, oh, now this person’s doing this new body of work. 

Speaker 3:

People feel like they’re going to get forgotten. And I think that I’m here to tell you that if you do something that people take notice of, you’re not going to lose those fans five years later if you don’t do anything else. Bodies of work that somebody made years ago are still at the front of my mind, but that person may have not have made anything for the last several years, and then when they do show up, it’s like this extra special treat. But you don’t have to be putting out something like every month, every year. If there are people out there that are responding well to your work, they’re going to stick around and they’re going to stay with you. So don’t let that color how you work or what it is that you’re putting out. Let it percolate for a little while. Set it aside. 

Speaker 3:

Make a whole bunch of pictures, and if they’re film, I may not even really look at them. They’ll get processed and I’ll just set ’em aside. I might look at ’em a month later. I might look at ’em a year later, seeing them with fresh eyes after you’ve made them, it might tell you something a little bit more about the images themselves and why you took them in the first place, rather than immediately responding to them and trying to get something printed and get something out there so that you could post it on Instagram. Just relax, take it easy, work at things at your own pace, and you’ll figure it out. 

Michael Kirchoff:

I think that’s a really good point. We are all in this what feels like this very hustle, hustle world with everything happening on social media, but if you’re honestly making quality images that you’ve taken the time to sit with and really contemplate, you’re realistically not working at that speed where you’re like, I made 20 masterpieces today. No, that’s not probably real. 

Speaker 3:

Exactly. You just have to kind of chill out sometimes and work through it at your own pace. 

Michael Kirchoff:

The inward reflective aspect is super important, 

Speaker 3:

And you could completely burn yourself out. I’m as guilty of it as anybody else. I mean, especially when I started Catalyst interview, I was like, I have to put one out every two weeks, and it’s always going to be on Monday or whatever it was. And I did that, and I did that for two and a half, three years, and then I was like, nobody is waiting with bated breath for my next interview to come out on Monday. Nobody’s like, oh, let’s go to his Facebook page so I can get the link to the next interview. Nobody’s doing that. You just put it out when you can put it out. So I went and moved all of that to a more relaxed schedule, and we’re doing that now with Analog forever. It’s gone on full speed ahead for the whole five years, but we just had a conversation yesterday. 

Speaker 3:

We’ve made a ton of content that we’ve put out there. Let’s start to remind people of what we did in year one or year two who weren’t around with us. We have X amount of fans now. Five years ago, we had this many fans. There’s a lot of new people who didn’t know what we did in the early days. We’ve been starting to post stuff that we wrote five years ago, which in a way, and sometimes is also embarrassing. Then you read something that you did five years ago and you’re like, oh, I shouldn’t have said that. Or You wrote something that was way too long. It didn’t need to be so long. 

Michael Kirchoff:

Well, it’s good to revisit, but it’s also sustaining that practice because if you maybe keep just grinding along at that level, then maybe the quality declines or it’s good to look back at what you did do. And I’ve also been trying to create shorter, well, literally they call them YouTube shorts, clips from earlier episodes, a lot of golden nuggets from within those episodes. But I do the same thing. I’m like, oh, why did I ask that question like that? Or Why am I outside lighting myself with a flashlight or, 

Speaker 3:

Right. Yeah, we did the very first one together. And so if you go and look at that and then you watch this one, there’s marked differences in how it came together, and yet at the same time, there’s going to be some similarities. There’s going to be some things that happen. 

Michael Kirchoff:

We’re still authentically who we are. We’re still 

Speaker 3:

Authentically who we’re, you’re just not lit by a, 

Michael Kirchoff:

Yeah, I’m inside the house. Yeah, 

Speaker 3:

The internet did not go off this time. That’s a plus. 

Michael Kirchoff:

So I am, if you could have some sort of photographer superpower, do you know what that would be? 

Speaker 3:

Oh, put it this way. So there’s a quote that I like, photographer quotes. Actually, I like quotes in general. I do find them them helpful and at times inspiring. The ones that make me at least chuckle are the ones that stick in my head. Oh, if I knew how to make a great photograph, I’d do it every time. 

Michael Kirchoff:

And who said 

Speaker 3:

That? Robert De know. 

Michael Kirchoff:

I also love quotes. It’s kind of a form of time travel. All of these amazing creative people from the past, a little snip. That’s a brilliant thing that somebody recorded in the form of written language and we can revisit and learn. 

Speaker 3:

And that one in particular, I think is kind of hilarious because clearly he didn’t take himself as seriously as other people would take him either. And I truly appreciate that about the man, so many memorable photographs that I could think of that he’s made. And for him to say something like that I think is just, to me, it’s hilarious. 

Michael Kirchoff:

And it’s also a reminder for every successful photograph that we see, we don’t know how many, we count countless photographs we never saw because the artist didn’t choose to share them. It’s the editing. They could go like, yeah, every Ansel Adams photograph is amazing. Oh, why 

Speaker 3:

Not? And him specifically, I know somebody very well who will often say that Ansel made a whole lot of really mediocre photographs. You just didn’t show ’em to anybody. Some of ’em he printed, some of them he didn’t. But yeah, you see the gyms, those are the ones that everybody associates with. Again, he didn’t do it every time. There are plenty of trips and plenty of days where he went out and made pictures and it just didn’t work out for one reason or another. Something that’s serendipitous like that, you can’t control that. You can’t make that happen. And oftentimes those are the images that stick in people’s minds, especially some really great street photographs that we’ve seen through the history of photography. You couldn’t have made that happen if you wanted it to. There’s something great about that. Sometimes it’s just a familiarity with something that makes you think that it’s great. And then that’s the way it is. The Sphinx in Cairo, everybody remembers it the same way. It doesn’t have a nose. It fell out like a thousand years ago, whatever. But nobody alive knows what the sphinx looked like. If the head nose, if it suddenly had a nose, you’d be like, that ain’t right. That’s not the sphinx. I’m sorry. 

Speaker 3:

The people that carved the sphinx intended for it to have a nose, but nobody knows it that way and it’s iconic. 

Michael Kirchoff:

So if those guys carved it, traveled into the future and saw it without the nose, 

Speaker 3:

The lead sculptor was like, no. 

Michael Kirchoff:

Yeah. And then why are all these people taking 

Speaker 3:

Graphs? Yeah, my masterpiece. Yes, go away. 

Speaker 4:

It must be fixed. 

Speaker 3:

No, it’s great as it is. Leave it. It’s fine. 

Michael Kirchoff:

So that makes me wonder if you could travel time, travel into the future or back in time to take a picture specifically or maybe a whole body of work? 

Speaker 3:

I don’t think I would go back in time to redo a body of work. 

Michael Kirchoff:

I’m talking like thousands of years, and you could bring 

Speaker 3:

Whatever camera you want. Just 

Michael Kirchoff:

Yeah, 

Speaker 3:

I’m a big fan of history in general, so I think I would choose to go back in time to make photographs of something that I don’t know what it would be. At the same time, it’s kind of exciting to think about what would happen in the future. Obviously in the future, you don’t know what it is that you would photograph necessarily. I mean, I guess you could have an idea or hope. I want to photograph the hundredth president of the United States, like, well, will there be a hundredth president by the time we could have a hundredth president of the United States? Will things even operate the same way? 

Michael Kirchoff:

Maybe there’s more surprises in the future 

Speaker 3:

For 

Michael Kirchoff:

Sure. Whoever the ruler is, get a good shot of them with the expired Polaroid, and at that point, the Polaroid films like crazy old. Or you could go back and photograph some dinosaurs with a phase one digital camera. That’d be kind of crazy too. 

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that’s true. That would be interesting. Yeah, if some really highly detailed photographs of actual dinosaurs, that would be pretty amazing. And there’s something to be said about the quality of photographs that are made. Sometimes the blurry ones are the ones that mean the most to you or have the most feeling right. But the ones that are so incredibly detailed, like what NASA does now, they build sensor arrays and then they photograph space or planets, and you could literally zoom into rocks on Mars and things like that. That’s wildly incredible to me, and if you could do something like that from the past, but I think it would change people, you could think about it in terms of a topic like climate change. Would the powers that be change their approach to climate change? If they saw a really detailed photograph of an animal that became extinct during the course of your life? Maybe you would go to greater lengths to ensure that future species of animals would thrive rather than go extinct 

Michael Kirchoff:

Photography. It can do a lot of different things. It can be just whimsical. It can be like a call to action. There’s so many different directions it can be taken. Do you have any plugs, shout outs, upcoming stuff? 

Speaker 3:

There’s a book of my own work that I’m supposed to be working on that I keep putting on the back burner. It’ll be a very limited edition thing. Very different than anything I’ve done in the past that’ll see the light of day at some point. And other than that, it’s really more additions of Analog Forever Magazine. We don’t have any intention of quitting. It’s been a lot of work, but a blast along the way. We’ve learned a lot. We’ve had a lot of successes, and we’ve had a lot of failures. Right now we’re working on edition nines, everything else. I’m just going to continue to work on Catalyst interviews, fusion tapes, making appearances on art in the Roth. I’m just going to keep at it. I’m going to stay at this as long as I possibly can. Like I said before, if I ended my career tonight when this ended, I would still be happy. But I don’t have any intention of doing such a crazy thing. 

Michael Kirchoff:

That’s a good way to live, just life generally. If this was the last day, you’d be happy with the day, for sure. Not to get dark or anything, but I think it’s just a good way. It’s just a good way to live your life. You have some analog forever merch now, really, 

Speaker 3:

We have two items. We have hats and we have hoodies. 

Michael Kirchoff:

Are they the front zip hoodies or the pullover? 

Speaker 3:

The hoodies. They’re pullover hoodies. It has a small logo on the front and a big logo on the back, and the hats have the same small logo on the front. It says analog forever on the back. They’re super comfy. We only made a couple of things because we wanted to find a company that used really good materials so that they’re comfortable. It’s great to make merch and sell it really cheap if you can, but if it’s uncomfortable or scratchy or look shitty, then we don’t want to do it. We want it to be quality, so you have to pay to get that. But they’ll last a lot longer and they’ll look great for a long time. So we’re happy to have those 

Michael Kirchoff:

And people want to wear it. I hope 

Speaker 3:

So. Yeah, I really hope they buy the magazine though, because I think you’ll find more enjoyment in that. But yeah, if you want to want to represent, do it 

Michael Kirchoff:

Little extra support 

Speaker 3:

Analog forever magazine.com. Go there, you’ll learn a lot, 

Michael Kirchoff:

And then people can go to your website and see your work. 

Speaker 3:

Yes, and that’s michael kirchhoff.com. Pretty simple. Got to keep it simple. That’s great. And actually, if you go to my website, there’s links to everything that I do, all of the writing, all of the bodies of work, the curating, all of that kind of stuff. It’s all on my website. 

Michael Kirchoff:

Well, it’s great to see you, Michael, and I look forward to seeing you soon. 

Speaker 3:

Yes, thank you so much, Anne. It’s always great to talk to you.