Photography Archives - Pi.co: A Conversation Series!

Ragnar Axelsson

Om Malik: How did you get into photography?

Ragnar Axelsson: My father was an amateur photographer. The magic of the pictures, that was kind of, wow, this is something I like. I started taking pictures when I lived on a farm as a kid, at 10 years old. The documentary became a common thing for me because I always felt like an old soul. I felt like that right away: I have to document it. Later on, I came to the newspaper as a photojournalist. That was the greatest job in the world. It was so much fun: traveling and seeing life on our planet. The camera became a part of me.

OM: You’ve been photographing the Arctic for a long time and have seen the climate change firsthand. What changes have you seen, especially recently?

RA: I went there over a span of 25 years before The Last Days of the Arctic book came out. Now it’s been more than 30 [years] and I’m doing the whole Arctic again. We have to support scientists by showing in pictures what they are saying.

First when I started photographing the Arctic, in Greenland, I read all the Arctic heroes, the explorers, and I wanted to go and see that kind of life and the Inuit. When I first came, I wasn’t thinking about climate change or anything. I was going to get pictures that I would like.

Through the years, I realized what was happening. The ice was getting thinner. It’s hard to show it sometimes in photographs, because you just see the surface. I managed to do that. You see it in the book here: There is a picture with 20 years in between, the same place. The fjord was frozen 20 years ago. Now it’s open water, and there’s only one hunter left in that village. There used to be 20.

When I look into my grandchildren’s eyes, when the question comes from them, “Grandfather, why didn’t your generation do anything?” I want to say, “Well, I tried. I tried by showing it in my photographs, because that’s my voice.”

OM: Human beings tend to destroy more than create. What about in Iceland? You have a million and a half people showing up every year, and that’s got to have an environmental impact. Can you see it with your naked eye?

RA: I can, because I’ve been going over and over again to certain places with hunters. I asked my friend a few years ago, “If you had one wish, what would it be?” At the time, we were on the ice, and it was very thin. He said, “Could you give me 25 years back in time, when the ice was safe?”

The ice is their hunting ground. It’s so hard for them. There are fewer and fewer people living as hunters. They will always go out and hunt seals, but that’s not the same as living there.

OM: What would they do now, if they were not doing that?

RA: That’s a problem. Some are not doing anything. Some are on welfare. Some get jobs in shops. It’s changing from being, if I may say so, one of the greatest hunters on the planet, because it’s a hard life, into being something…

OM: Passive consumers?

RA: Totally different from their original life. I understand the young generation, they don’t want to be hunters. They see James Bond on films, American films about different lives.

A lot of educated, talented people are changing this country, like Greenland, slowly into something they want to see, because they don’t want to live in a tent on the ice, hunting seals or narwhals or polar bears. The villages that I’ve been into, where there used to be 10, 12, 14 hunters, now these villages are closed down. When you see the houses, it’s like they left their knives and spoons on the table, and they left.

OM: I’m interested in knowing more about your photographer life and your camera. How did you arrive at your style?

RA: I don’t know whether I had a style or not. It happened. It’s like something in your head, from the heart, that you want to do it this way and not the other way.

I was so fond of Eugene Smith and Mary Ellen Mark as one of the greatest documentary photographers ever. She was a friend of mine. Eugene Smith was so great. I bought his book, and I was looking through his work. I wanted to see his real prints, so I flew to New York in the afternoon, went into a gallery in the morning to see his prints, and back home the next afternoon. My wife thought I was in the highlands. [laughs]

I wanted to see how he printed. [When I got home], I went straight into the darkroom and started to print and use the same technique as he does. It’s a big part of how I think in black and white today, actually. He was probably one of the greatest photographers ever and a great printer, a great inspiration.

I even was reading books by painters. I was looking at Caravaggio and the light in his paintings.

It takes 10,000 hours to be good in printing. You have to print and print and print, but you’re taking it in. It’s strange when you say this because when I take a photograph, it takes me a long time sometimes to accept it as a good one that I like or I don’t like. Sometimes you kill your darlings.

OM: You just have to work harder, though. I definitely know. Any other subjects you like to shoot, apart from the Arctic and people here?

RA: I’ve been all over the world. That’s the reason also why I started doing the Arctic as a photographer because I once wanted to go to Africa. There were problems, so I wanted to photograph them. Every photographer in the world was there taking the same pictures, so I thought, “I have to go the other direction.” That’s why I wanted to go to the Arctic, and there was nobody there. [laughs]

Then I realized what was happening. I passed an old man every morning when I was in a small town in Greenland. He was always looking up, talking to me, and I didn’t understand what he was saying. I asked the teacher in the school, “Can you translate?”

He said, “Well, there is something wrong. This shouldn’t be like this. The big ice is sick.” That was the moment, probably six years after I started, that I realized something was changing. They sensed it before everybody else. Then I realized, “Oh, I have to continue.”

Sometimes it takes 10 years, 15 years, to show the same spot and the difference, what’s really going on, like the ice. In this book, we couldn’t put more, but I thought maybe in a bigger book, in the next one.

OM: What is this book, Faces of the North, about?

RA: This is about Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland. That was actually my first book. This is like two books in one because we added the old one, and then we added new pictures related to the older ones. The stories that I wrote, in the beginning, weren’t in the first one. I tell the story about everything, about the pictures.

OM: The thing I’ve always wanted to know from somebody like you, who started in film and printing, is, what do you make of the current disposability of photography, like with Instagram and Snapchat?

RA: [laughs] There are more photographs taken today, because of the phone and all that, than in the past 100 years, I think. My friends, they were crying, “It’s over.” I was saying, “No, it’s not over. You have to run faster. We have to be focused on what we’re doing. They must believe in what you’re doing.”

All my projects, I’ve done it myself. There’s no grant or anything here. There’s no support at all. I’ve been doing it all by myself, because I believe what I’m doing will one day matter — maybe.

I was in Siberia 20 years ago, and then I went back this winter, twice. I went on a reindeer sled, and they told me that the tundra has big holes in it, 80 meters deep. It’s like a big blast by a meteor or something. There was an old man living in a forest, in a cabin with his wife. I had a translator, and I asked him if he had seen any changes. He told me that his land used to all be flat. The tundra was all flat, the permafrost. Now it has holes everywhere.

The lakes are ice‑free two weeks earlier [in the spring] and later in the autumn. It’s freezing much later. It’s much warmer in the winter and lots of difference between days. It can be ‑20, ‑40, ‑50, ‑5 over the course of a few days. He said it used to be ‑35, ‑40, ‑50 all the time.

OM: Has it changed you in any way?

RA: It made me a little bit more aware. If we can do something, everybody should, because this is our only home.

I grew up underneath the glaciers, so I’ve seen it. I was measuring the Glacial River when I was 12, 14, 16 years old. I was riding on a horse. I had to pass the Glacial River on a horse just to measure the depth of it and how it was changing. I’ve seen them retreating. If you could flip the switch off today, you can’t stop the melting of those glaciers here. They will disappear in 150, 200 years. There’s no way of stopping it.

In the future, what will happen to those people? It’s something that’s not fair to ignore.

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Joshua Allen Harris

Om Malik: I only know you in the context of Instagram. That’s not a nice thing to say, because I skipped over your past life and let this square space define you. I don’t know anything about your journey. Tell me more about yourself.

Joshua Allen Harris: I grew up in Pittsburgh, and I studied graphic design and illustration at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. It was a two-year program. This was at the time when Photoshop 1.0 was out. It was the beginning of a lot of digital manipulation. I was also still doing a lot of illustration and a lot of painting for graphic design work. I fell in love with painting at that time.

Eventually I entered the School of Visual Arts here in Manhattan, and I dove into what it meant to be a fine artist, a narrative storyteller, and working with concepts and allegory. There I found one of my greater influences in mythology with The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell. Joseph Campbell allowed me to step into myth and the idea around following your bliss, the mystery and the involvement that might be on the other side of life. From that and from being an artist, that sort of sparked my imagination and my creativity.

In my senior year, I happened to create the Air Bear project. I was walking down the street, and a piece of trash flew up on a subway grate. I got interested in working with that wind. The subway train would exhaust wind up through the subway and onto the sidewalks through this grating system. I started to attach inflatable sculptures to them in the street. These gorilla sculptures became viral. It went all over the internet.

This was 2008, at the height of election season. Climate change was a topic. I made a polar bear out of recycled materials, which were trash bags, and was using renewable resources, which was the wind on the street. It also came to life, and when the wind ended it would fall down and show a death too.

People would come across them on the street and be extremely surprised, excited and elated. Fortunately, it got into the right hands and I got to show in Istanbul, Amsterdam. I traveled around with these sculptures for a few years.

In between I was working as a stylist for brands such as J.Crew, Abercrombie & Fitch, American Eagle, Aeropostale and Under Armour. That was supplementing my opportunities to grow as an artist. I had stopped painting and sculpting. I was sort of burned out, and I was focused on getting a good job in styling.

Om: Is that how you got into photography and Instagram?

Joshua: My friend showed me Instagram, and I started taking pictures with my iPhone 4. It took some time, and then I started to find myself. My earlier studies with graphic design helped me in composition. With painting it helped me craft my colors and post. With the ideas of myth and storytelling, I started to use the image to interject a narrative.

All of those things came together with the camera. I started with the Fuji X-T1, taking pics on the street and pics of my friends. I started going to photo walks and meeting photographers that I admired. One thing led to another, and I started to have a good support group and fellow artists to bounce ideas off of.

I was asked to join Tinker Street Collective, which is a social-driven, influence-type community, where we work for major brands creating content for social media. I got to work with amazing brands such as Levi’s, Google and Apple and start to hone my skills. I was shooting some commercial work, I was working as a stylist, and I needed my artistic outlet.

Om: How did you go from Instagram and all the things you were doing to working on this new project?

Joshua: In 2014 I started working on a book project that later turned into Broadway. Broadway Street in Brooklyn is a stretch that gets through the heart of the borough. There is a train overpass. There are a lot of commuters, and each corner has a different feel to it and it was starting to gentrify. I was one of the gentrifiers who moved into the neighborhood.

I allowed myself to shoot between two stops and only those two stops and only on Broadway. I like to box myself in. With that pressure and that trust in life and in myself, something will pop, and there will be something crafted there. I put myself in those circumstances.

I learned to shoot film for a year, and I learned to shoot the Leica. I knew I wanted to shoot with a Leica because it has a stealth quality but it also has manual focus. A lot of my photography heroes shot on a Leica, they shot manual focus, and they are some of the best images ever taken. Some of those images shape the human condition, and those are the ones we remember. I knew if they could do it on that system that it was something I wanted to try too.

While I was putting the book together I got an opportunity to film at Belmont Park for seven days. All of a sudden I had a book. It felt like a wonderful companion to the Broadway book. At that point I had to complete the trilogy. I had an opportunity to go to Seattle. We hiked a lot of different mountains. This narrative thread shaped itself as the books were shaping themselves out of nowhere.

I started piecing them together over two years. Throughout all three books there’s a thread. You start on the streets of Broadway, and then you’re transformed and carried in the middle book from Belmont to Tahoma, where you end on the pinnacle of Washington State. It is this sort of transitional story that ends on a high note.

Om: I have been playing around with a film camera these days, and while my photos aren’t great, I like the slow pace of photo-making with film. There is something more spiritual about it.

Joshua: The advantage to shooting film is that you’re not reviewing every photo you take. As a result you have a more optimistic approach, and you’re anticipating doing well and getting back good photos. There’s something in that, that’s nice, where you might shoot a couple rolls of film a day, and you drop them off at the lab. Then there’s that picture in there that surprises you, and you’re like, “Oh, yeah. I remember that moment. Oh, I did get it right.” You can dissect the image and know what aperture you were at or maybe what shutter speed you were shooting at that time.

All of that sinks in at a gut level, and because the process of shooting is stretched out, there’s a certain amount of time that passes that injects itself into the photos and into your memory bank. Then, when you’re out shooting again, you can recall those wins and those losses.

It puts you in a certain mindset and vibration that allows for more surprise or happenstance. You might make a bunch of bad pictures, but that one that you make that’s great sometimes has a lot of power. There’s also a respect level amongst other photographers that you’re willing to make pictures on film still.

Whether there’s a nostalgic feeling to it or not, digital files over the years start to look dated, but a picture on film is going to hold up the rest of our lives.

Om: You’re right about the pictures embedding themselves in the memory bank. Film trains you to not take 20 pictures in a go and just take maybe 2 or 3. And to think before pressing the shutter. How did you start working with film photography?

Joshua: Initially it was the aesthetics of film. I found myself looking at photographs. You start to dissect photographs, and you look at them, and you wonder what’s going on in the picture. I started finding that I liked the dynamic range of film. Film captures more levels of shade and tone. They give the pictures more life.

I don’t know if this sounds crazy or not, but I like to make things harder on myself. I feel like there’s more of a reward in that. I like to play the long game. For me it was like, I’m going to take pictures the rest of my life. I’m in love with photography, and I’m in love with the process of making images. I knew that I needed to learn that skill set, because I felt that it was part of what it meant to be a photographer. The people that I admired were good with film too, and that’s why I started it.

I also wanted to build these projects, these photo essays. I wanted them to be more art pieces than anything. I felt that with film there’s a textural element that almost feels like clay, or like a painting.

Om: It has become harder to be a professional photographer in today’s age. And if you’re a professional photographer, you have to work differently in order to stay relevant. Do you agree?

Joshua: The definition of photography is changing too and becoming more of a language: We’re attaching imagery to tweets or text messages, almost like a period at the end of a sentence. It’s enhancing our communication in a whole new way. The term “photographer” is changing.

Science and art have always been in this dance of demand and creativity. What does that new tool provide the artist? There’s always been that duality.

I like to make sure I have one foot in the past and know where the trend came from but also a foot in the present to predict where the trend is going. It is a balance. I like to be able to think that whatever the need of the picture is, that I have the specific tool and the wherewithal to gather it and grab it in a way that helps tell the viewer what it is I’m looking at and how I perceived it.

It is a fine line between these Instagram stars that are taking wonderful photos on the smartphone and high-end, fine art photographers and high-end commercial photographers who are using cutting-edge technology too. You have to be aware of all of them. One’s not more right than the other. They hopefully can inform your process from many different angles.

Om: The challenge from my standpoint is that to many people, a photo is essentially a visual bookmark of a memory. I see people take a photograph of a coffee cup and I’m like, “This must be the 100th million coffee cup with the same latte heart in the middle.”

I think what they’re trying to do is document that they went to this place and checked off an item on their checklist. For the viewer, there is no emotional payload to a photo like that. But the person who took the photo is remembering their life through a set of random photos without any emotional attachment to them.

Joshua: That makes a lot of sense. You mark the moment. You underline the word in that sentence. I understand what you’re saying about it being this opportunity to hold on to some fleeting moment or to stake your claim that you were there.

It’s so nuanced and it’s so layered — what it means to make a picture for lots of different people. Somebody could take a picture of a coffee cup, and they could feel as if it was marking a place in time. They remember going to that coffee shop in San Francisco that day. Another person could take a picture of a coffee cup because they know it will get them Likes on Instagram, and they’re trying to build a brand. Another person could take a picture of a coffee cup because intrinsically it’s warm and comforting and maybe that day they’re feeling a little vulnerable, and the idea of sitting with a nice cup of coffee might be nurturing their spirit.

They are bookmarks in time, but they also represent the emotional state that you’re in when you’re taking it. There’s this wonderful book that I read by Larry Fink, and he beautifully explains how not only are you taking a picture forward but you’re taking a picture backward too.

The image is revealing something about the photographer as much as it’s revealing what object or idea is being captured. If you’re aware of reading the photograph in both ways, you can start to get a feel for more of, not only the image but of the person who was taking the picture and maybe where they were or what they were trying to share and how they might be lying in the image also.

Om: How do you stand out from the crowd in this new world?

Joshua: It’s hard when you work diligently at crafting something that you feel is different from the norm that might influence your community in a different way than the everyday coffee cup. When you see these tons of images of selfies or coffee cups or food, I think it can drain your creative juices, because you’re wondering what it is that everyone’s seeing in these images and why it is that everyone’s taking them.

Those things can pull you down, or they can inspire you. They can define you as an artist. I remember early on in shooting pictures around New York, we were all shooting the Brooklyn Bridge or Central Park. I would take a picture that might have shared a new perspective. Maybe it was over in a specific corner, against a wall or something like that. I would get a certain amount of Likes, but somebody who was higher on the Instagram food chain than me would go out and take the same shot and get more Likes. They never had to reference that they got the idea from me.

I remember feeling so burned, like, “How could you steal my property and claim it for yourself? That’s exactly where I put my camera and I took that exact photo and nobody else had taken it like that before, and now you’re taking credit for it and getting more praise than I did.” It upset me, but that moment in itself defined me as an artist. I said, “You know what? That’s not their fault. That’s just the game.” That’s the situation we’re in, and if I decide to share my photos for free on this platform, then that’s going to be part of the requirement of doing that.

From that point on, I thought, “I need to make images that can’t be copied. I need to make images that are specifically mine.” And that’s where the idea of being a street photographer and a documentarian photographer came into my mindset.

You can’t recreate the moment that I just captured, and there was something in pushing off the coffee cup, selfie image to define who I was. Sometimes you need something that burns you a little bit to push you in the direction that’s more you.

Om: That was the next question I was going to ask you. I have this concept called data Darwinism that I use to look at our world. We started out quantifying products, then services, then people. And more recently people offering those services, like how things happen on Uber and Airbnb. We start to lose the humanity in doing so, and when you think about the economy of Instagram, it starts to etch away at the idea of creativity a little bit. I think it makes that whole notion of data Darwinism apply to creativity also.

I hate to be the guy who brings this up, but Netflix is essentially using data and the viewing patterns of millions of people to figure out what shows they should make and bring to the market. I don’t blame them for doing that, but suddenly the idea of creativity is defined by the Likes and views.

Joshua: Instagram has a specific aesthetic, and there are certain pictures that do well on a two-inch-by-two-inch iPhone screen. I got so extremely nervous one day that I unplugged my Instagram for a month, and I didn’t look at any photographs on there.

I ordered a bunch of photo books from Magnum, Alex Webb, David Alan Harvey and Larry Fink, and I got The Americans by Robert Frank. I started to educate myself as a historian of photography. That feeling allowed me to gain a new perspective on why I wanted to make pictures and what pictures I wanted to make and how I wanted to have my own voice amongst all of those greats.

I opened my Instagram a month later. I unfollowed a bunch of people, and I started trying to follow people that were making a different type of image, actually sharing images that they made on DSLR or on film.

There was this real pushback in the early years of the Instagram community to post iPhone-only pictures. I remember this one specific day when I posted a picture from my DSLR and lots of people were like, “I can’t believe it. I thought you were iPhone only.” I lost a bunch of followers. I gained some other people. There was this debate about what it meant to share on that platform.

I think I’ve always had that nervous, anxious feeling when too many people are doing one thing. I want to run in the other direction. Sometimes when I see a lot of people doing one thing, I know that I don’t want to do that either. Though it’s harder, I’d rather fail trying to find a new direction than be following somebody else’s.

Om: I think people want to conform. But why have we made technology that can lead to so much creativity and yet we aren’t willing to be different?

I also unfollow a lot of people now that it’s become so commercial: everyone I see posting photos that are sponsored by so-and-so. Really? I signed up to see your story. I understand people need to pay their bills, but would they have made that picture if they were not being paid to go someplace? I don’t know. Meanwhile I started following you because you told stories.

How did the photos from Broadway, Belmont and Tahoma become worthy of a book treatment in your mind?

Joshua: I wanted to shoot Belmont as a story before Broadway. I was attracted to the idea of these beautiful light, powerful horses and these gambling stockmen. There was a real dichotomy there: I was intrigued by the person who went to the track every day. There was a desperate mentality. I felt so protective of the horses that are being mistreated and worked in such a way and bred in such a way, whose life is dangerous. They felt like slaves to this human ugliness of gambling, this addictive quality that I could relate to with my own addictions. We’re willing to let it happen, whether it’s the life of this beautiful horse or our addictive qualities. Relating them back to my own addictions. I felt there was something on display there.

I cornered myself again. It took me a good year to learn how to stand with the camera. Learn how to zone-focus quickly and learn how to see certain images unfolding. To watch people moving in and out of my frame and to time things. Broadway was such a big learning experience that it was almost like a boot camp. I went out seven different days, and I came back and said, “I’ve got enough of a story here.” I surprised myself: I thought I was going to have to shoot it for a month.

My good friend called me, and he said, “Hey, the people at Belmont Park just reached out to me about coming behind the scenes and taking pictures for them, but I can’t do it. I know you’re working on the project. Would you want to?”

The day that I got to go to Belmont was gorgeous, and the light was wonderful. It was an October day. I shot everything else in July. October light in New York City is my favorite. It’s warm and crisp, and the shadows go blue. It’s great for black-and-white photography. It was one of those special, serendipitous moments. I got close with the jockeys and got to go back with some of the horses.

It elevated the book to the next level. At that point, it was floating in this, “Oh, I’m not sure if I have it. Yeah, I think I do,” space to, “Oh my God, I can’t wait to share these pictures.” I put them all together; I had more than enough.

I had Broadway and Belmont, and I thought, “Well, that’s great. I’m ready to launch these.” My friends and I decided to do this camping trip in Seattle. I packed 25 rolls of film. We spent four days. I don’t shoot much landscape work, because I’m in New York a lot. I got out there, and my eyes were wiped clean.

Om: What was different about shooting in Belmont?

Joshua: I felt fresh. I felt at home with my friends, and I had a real security about being with them. An adventurous spirit and exploratory. I knew I had all that film in my bag. I didn’t want to go home with anything unexposed, and I gave myself permission to shoot like crazy.

Each morning and each afternoon, we were blessed with such great light and great fellowship that the images just came together. When I got back, I realized I shot 25 rolls of film. I was like, “Man, I might have enough here to complete this narrative.”

Om: How do you think the books relate to one another?

Joshua: The story told itself. I go from the streets of Broadway to the peaks of Washington State. From one side of the country to the other. Here’s unbridled nature, and it felt healing and restorative for me when I was there. It felt like we’d reached a certain pinnacle by climbing the mountain.

I put those pictures together, and those are intimate and different from the other two books, but it felt like that myth that we talked about. It felt like that journey, and I felt like I was photographing my process and it ended up becoming these great stories.

You know when you try to rush stuff in life, and it pushes back, and it’s not working the way you envisioned it? You have to release the process and trust in life. Trust there are other things that play behind the scenes that you might not know about. I did that, and as they started to develop, all of a sudden I had this longer narrative.

I had planned to make one book and then these other two fell in my lap, and I’m glad they did because it does feel like a complete story. Now I’m ready to shoot that next story.

Om: A lot of people like me want to experiment with film and photography. Do you have any advice?

Joshua: I like to play the long game. It gives me space to explore. I don’t like to think I have to solve any problem quickly. I think when you put those pressures on yourself, then you look for either a quick out or quick safety, ideas that make you feel comfortable. Or you’re trying to problem-solve quickly, and you’re failing and you’re getting self-critical. All of those things dissolve the creative vibrations.

For me it’s about, Did I take a better picture today? Did I learn something today? Did that bad picture inform me on how to make my next picture?

My second piece of advice would be, gather a group of like-minded people so you can critique openly and feel safe in a creative environment. If you can find a group of friends who are critical because they care about your work and they care about you as an individual, that’s huge, because we’re all used to hearing, “Awesome photo, great job, love it” on Instagram. That can cloud your development.

The third thing is, look at the masters. Find out what it is about the photographer you love, what it is you love about their work, and dissect images. Sometimes I trace an image that I like, so I see why it is those shapes were in that frame in those specific orders.

You’ve got to go back and see what today was built on. Mix that up with a bunch of friends who are doing the same thing and give yourself the time to explore and give yourself the space to fail and learn from those mistakes.

Don’t even see them necessarily as mistakes. See them as another correcting point to who you are as an artist. Trust yourself. Have fun. Take your time. Get people around you that love to talk about photographs, and look at things that inspire you. Those things will keep you going and sustain you.

Credits: Photos of Joshua Allen Harris, including the cover photo, by Bijan Sabet. Photos of Broadway and Belmont courtesy of Joshua Allen Harris.

Vincent Laforet

Om: How long were you at The New York Times?

Vincent: I was at The New York Times for about eight years. Some pretty incredible years working with some of the best reporters in the world. Covered events like Katrina, 9/11. Climbed the Empire State Building’s needle. It was pretty fantastic.

Om: When you were in the news business, did you imagine a time where news would happen pretty much every millisecond, thanks to somebody taking a picture with their smartphone?

Vincent: In 2008, I wrote an article called “The Cloud is Falling.” As a young man, I was seeing the publishing industry and the internet coming together, how the current model was not sustainable. Being a staff photographer with a comfortable job, a company car, company gear, a great salary, and seeing the internet rising and distribution based on cell phones or the internet — I knew something was going to fundamentally change.

I went from my entire career covering news on a live basis — there was always that time that we had to process the information, whether to write it down and disseminate it the next day or a few hours later or minutes later at least. As a photographer, that time got truncated more and more.

I knew the time was coming when it would be live. It was a no-brainer. You saw it in CNN. Being a teenager, seeing the first Gulf War disseminated live, we all knew it was changing. It sure has now. The biggest realization for me was that, as a photojournalist, I could always elevate my skill and my level as a photographer — the highest level that I could potentially achieve — and yet there’s nothing I could ever do to compete with someone who was there at the moment when it happened. There’s no substitute for being there with an iPhone, a GoPro, whatever it is, a security camera. If you can capture the actual real event happening, nothing you can do after the fact can compete.

Om: One of the great things about photography is how it shapes history, especially news photography. Time and time again we have come across photos which were essentially posed. Now everything is real and the pictures are real, and yet they’re not at times. How do you contextualize the magnitude of news right now?

Vincent: I think your question is really adept. Is there such a thing as a real event? The only real events that I know are the birth of a child, the death of someone that you love, the breaking of news as you’re there. That’s the value of having a citizen capturing an event in front of them: It’s unfiltered.

But what is real? Is a press conference real, is a press photo op real? People are told to show up here at this time and shake hands and do this and step here. It’s all fake, yet it represents something. When people take selfies, that’s not real either. That’s not a real relationship, when someone takes a photograph of themselves, with a celebrity or their friends. It is the moment [in] itself [that] is much more valuable.

[Photojournalists] did get to capture some real moments: Eddie Adams’ Viet Cong photo of the execution or Nick Ut’s photographs of the Napalm girl. Those are absolutely real moments in history that are hard to argue with, that changed the course of history, literally. Those two photos had a severe impact on the Vietnam War.

Since that time people have realized the power of photo journalism, and when people recognize the power of something, they want to control it. Ever since, we have seen more and more control of the image — or one’s image — to the point where it’s being curated by PR people and controlled. We are in an environment these days where everything is controlled, where as citizens we are trying to garner back our privacy from our Facebook pages and make sure we have control of what other people see.

Om: What is the role of news photography now? What does the professional news photographer represent now?

Vincent: The professional news photographer has enforcedly been severely diminished in terms of their impact because publications are dying. When I was a teenager in college, Time magazine carried an incredible amount of weight in determining who the next president could be. We would talk about what that columnist on Time or The New York Times used to write.

It seemed, at the time at least, to impact the way history unfolded. Now you’re reading a magazine and it’s thinner than five pieces of paper and doesn’t have the same relevance. Now somehow Twitter and a teenager could potentially have more of an impact than a 30-to 40-year veteran journalist.

Things have changed. Photojournalists are still extremely relevant. They still produce incredibly important work. The reality, though, is that everyone produces media these days. We all have iPhones, smartphones and cameras, and we’re documenting more than ever before. It’s getting harder and harder to rise above the fold.

Om: I am old from a journalism perspective: I remember typewriters and newspaper type being set. At that time, there was an ability to focus, because there wasn’t diffusion of so much media. My theory is that because attention is fractionalized, news becomes even less and less impactful.

Vincent: The attention span of the public has always been in the two-to-three-to-five-day region. No matter how big the story was, it rarely made it past a week. But now I generally say that we have the attention of rats on crack. We are looking to sources like Storehouse or Twitter or Facebook or whatever it may be, Instagram, to constantly feed us with new information [that we can] forward to others in a consumer-oriented way. That is the trend, but I think the next iteration will be more curated content.

But I always like to look at the other side of that coin. Back in those days it tended to be white, 60-to-70-year-old men telling you what to consume. Whereas now a 13-year-old kid from any background, any race, any culture can have a voice. As long as you tell good information on a consistent basis, you will build a following.

Photojournalism will find a new home over time. This latest piece I did, the aerials over New York at night, is an excellent example. I was a successful photojournalist for 15-plus years. I worked for every single outlet: The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, National Geographic, et cetera. Eventually I found that the photography business was not a sustainable model for my family. So I went into filmmaking and directing commercials.

Once in a while I would have someone call me to shoot a still assignment. After having shot this assignment for a magazine, I put [the photos] on a new outlet, Storehouse. And the next thing you know, this thing has gone viral. It’s been reported by well over a hundred media outlets from The New York Times to Al Jazeera to Esquire to Gizmodo to Flipboard, Yahoo News, you name it.

That’s what photojournalists need to do. People will always gravitate toward quality content, whether it’s visual, whether it’s a story that’s written well, whether it’s a combination of great storytelling, visuals, et cetera. Storytelling is as old as the cave drawings and the cavemen. That’s not going away.

Om: One of my early memories of magazines from America was LIFE magazine’s older issues that were not even published when I was a young man. When I saw those, I always used to think, “Wow! That is some clever photography.”

Vincent: We have this terrible tendency to idealize the past and to get nostalgic, myself included. Too many of us are waiting for a solution to be given to us, and too few of us are willing to actually try to invent a solution. Those that make their own solutions and harness technology and tools are generally the ones that seem to excel, because we’re the ones that are able to tell stories that are seen, for X, Y or Z reason.

Om: I find that most of my peers don’t think about photos for their stories. I think about the headlines, the photos. Can I add voice? Can I add picture? Can I add moving pictures? Mostly because I feel that if you are on a live platform, why not use it to its logical impact?

Vincent: That’s a modern way of thinking. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, you would have been called a heretic. That was multimedia, and most journalists are not visual people. It’s a different side of the brain. They don’t think visually. I’ve met some of the most brilliant journalists that are utterly visually inept. They saw the picture as a service that would make their stories look pretty and get them on the front page. The best journalists understood that the best photos would make people read their stories.

Om: When I was a young reporter in India, I had this one photographer friend, Anu Pushkarna. He would take the flattest pictures ever, but he was the bravest guy ever. If there was a riot or some other craziness going on, he was right in the middle of everything. It wasn’t art, but they were real. He would get hit on the head for taking a picture.The same event captured by some of the bigger-name photographers in India like Raghu Rai, the same perspective, it would be like, “Wow.” The pictures were what made the story better.

Vincent: It’s a perfect marriage. It’s like a movie, with film and sound and acting and directing and music. I wish there was more mutual respect between the different professions. I can tell you that the joke amongst war photographers has always been that most war correspondents work from their hotel rooms at the suite at the Ritz-Carlton, whereas the war photographer has to go where the bullets are flying.

Om: Speaking of which, you went up 7,500 feet. What did you learn from that perspective?

Vincent: I don’t know that I learned anything, necessarily. It reaffirmed to me that the power of image is still sacrosanct, that a series of images could impact millions of people across the world. Universally it’s powerful. People recognize the incredible beauty of New York City, the energy within it, the light screaming. On my end, I’d wanted to make that photograph for 25 years. I just didn’t have the technology that could do it. I didn’t have a camera that could capture dark or low, high images so well.

There is nothing intrinsically different about what I did on that series of images from what I’ve done in 15 years. It just struck at the right time, with the right camera, at the right angle.

Om: I always felt that looking at the world from above makes you think differently. My friend Chris Michel went up in one of the U-2 planes to get sense of what the world looks like from that high up. It seemed like it was almost a spiritual experience.

Vincent: Every time you take off in a helicopter, you realize. Or just look out the window on your plane when you are flying across the country or across the world, and you realize how much closer we are in terms of geography, how much smaller the globe is.

You can actually see the curvature of the earth from up there, and you start to realize that we are not that far apart. We’re not that different. We are all taught how there are these big oceans and these cultures divide us. But we’re not that separate from one another.

Om: I think I almost like feel [inhales dramatically], Where is the surprise?

Vincent: One of my biggest lessons in life was that I spent 20 years of my career as a photographer, chasing the best image. Making the deadline, often landing on the cover. Always pushing it to the limit. Unfortunately I didn’t enjoy any of it, because I was so focused on the end result. When I left photography I made a promise to myself to actually enjoy the moment and the process.

There is an old saying: Enjoy the journey, not the destination. You’re like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever.” I can tell you, as a photographer, I did not enjoy the journey; I enjoyed the destination.

Now, since I’ve left photography, as I go back, I enjoy every single moment of the journey. Because you realize, it’s those visits at the restaurant with the owner, who is famous or not famous at all but who makes you laugh or has a story for you, who makes you the sauce by hand that you wanted. Those are the interactions you remember.

Photos courtesy of Tim Donnelly, Vincent Laforet, Pulitzer Foundation and G-Technology.

Cole Rise

Om Malik: I’ve been fascinated by your work, and I don’t mean the Litely app or the presets. I often go to your website and look at your work. Goddamn, those pictures. Every single time I see them online and on Instagram, I’m like, “What is with this guy? How can one be so amazing?” Anyway, enough of the gushing. Let’s talk about photography.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the iPhone as a camera thing and wondering what it all means. Looking at it from my perspective, four years ago, I did not know how to take pictures. I thought I was just not a visual person. Instagram came and something clicked in me, and I figured out that I can express myself through photos. More recently I have been wondering if we are in the second phase of the phone and camera marriage.

Cole Rise: It’s a renaissance. In 2003, camera phones were just coming out. I forget which exact phone had it, but it was fascinating to see normal people suddenly have a camera with them all the time. Suddenly I was that person. I always had a camera, like a big DSLR. A $1,000 Sony DSC‑F707 five megapixels. Best camera you could have. It was in my hand, basically — it was always with me.

But I also had this little Sony phone for a while in college. I was photographing all the time with this little two megapixel — not even, like, a megapixel. I think it was 320 x 480: tiny, tiny photos. They were so pixelated. But they were gorgeous. They almost looked like a painting, because they were crappy.

Now when I’m at home at Christmas time, it’s like, Mom’s got her iPad out. She was always resistant to it. She’s the one who stuck to those 35 millimeter disposable cameras on trips, because that’s all she knew. Now she has her iPad, and she’s shooting only with that. Our family camera is a tablet. It doesn’t make sense. It’s fascinating to see that.

Going through the Instagram thing and making those filters was a learning experience, because — there’s a couple things there. First, it was giving away what was my signature — how I edited photos — to an app that I selfishly wanted to use to just post my photos on really easily. But then suddenly it became 200 million users using that same style. It’s no longer unique.

At the time phone cameras were crappy. They were five megapixels or three megapixels starting out and weren’t very high fidelity. You had to cover it to make it look good. Hipstamatic was the thing. They wanted to create this vintage feel. You just smattered it and made it look like something else, because the actual photo itself was nothing to marvel at.

It’s different now. The iPads shoot amazing photos. My phone shoots better than what my $1,000 camera did in 2003.

OM: I think 2010 is when I started taking pictures differently. Before that I had BlackBerry and Nokia smartphones and I would take a lot of pictures, but there was no depth to them. The photos were flat. You couldn’t be creative. It was just pictures.

Thanks to the iPhone, post-Instagram, people have started to think in terms of composition, color, and exposure. I think for a lot of people like me — who are not natural-born photographers — all of that was ambient learning. You didn’t know much about how to edit a picture, but you learned by playing with the apps. You saw what other people were doing and you tried to figure it out yourself. It was less about filters and more about changing one’s expectations of photography.

CR: That’s a good point. This renaissance is really the democratization of photography. Cameras are a commodity. They’re everywhere. For exactly that reason, it used to cost you a lot of money to get a decent camera to make art. For a long time having a camera in general was like, “What is that person doing? Who are they?” This whole Vivian Maier thing. Have you heard about her?

OM: No.

CR: She’s this undiscovered artist from the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s. She’d been shooting since the ’50s, but after she died they found 300,000 undeveloped negatives that she’d taken, totally unknown to anyone else. Now she’s being hailed as one of the top street photographers of the 20th century. She was always unique. People remembered her because she had a camera. That was rare at the time.

Now everyone has cameras. They’re all pulling out these phones and doing all these things. How do you stand out? How do you comprehend all that data? It’s mind-blowing. These are our memories. These are what people are using every day. We’re remembering more, first of all, because we’re taking more photos.

Also, as an artist, that’s conflicting, because now my little cousin can take a similar photo to mine and edit it like I used to. It would take me days. But she does it instantaneously on Instagram.

[topic]Are memories dead?[/topic]

Are Memories Dead?

OM: One thing I find distressing about the camera revolution is our ability to form memories with the photos, considering that we are always busy taking the picture and forgetting the life unfolding around the picture, which is what gives it so much context. Memories are in your heart and in your mind. I think we confuse photos on our smartphone as memories. The omnipresence of visual sensors has eliminated the idea of memories. There is a payload of emotion attached to memories. Today pictures have none of that. Even though they’re more beautiful, they’re more omnipresent. There are pictures everywhere. But there is little emotional payload to them.

There is a picture of me and my sister. I was five and she was three. Every time I look at that picture I’m taken back to that time. Not because of the picture but because all the stuff that happened that day is still somehow logged in my head. It is a emotional mile marker, and every time I see her, I am reminded of how far we have come. Whereas today we’re constantly taking digital pictures. We don’t have the metadata of emotion from the pictures.

CR: You’re describing the eternal struggle of a photographer.

Traditionally, a photographer’s job is to document and not partake. I’ve actually written a blog post about this, where I have days of photos and no actual memory of that day aside from the photos that I took. That’s because I’m so lost in the minutia of the camera and trying to get a photo that I’m not participating. I’m hiding behind this machine.

I was with my girlfriend in the Salt Flats in Utah. It was gorgeous. We had a fantastic day, I think, because she was smiling in the photos. But I have no memory of the day. It’s embarrassing. I wrote this blog post called “Don’t Forget the Salt,” because I forgot that day. It was because I was lost behind the camera. How do you balance that out?

One of the main reasons why I call my app Litely is because you can get in and out of the app quickly. I don’t want to spend a lot of time in that app. I don’t want it to be that my girlfriend is driving the car because I’m editing photos for an hour in the passenger’s seat, missing the trip. I’m missing the scenery that’s going by. How do I reconnect with that? So rather than having to send my photos to the [Adobe] Lightroom and bring them back to edit in the way I wanted to, I made an app that quickly applies the edits. And I made the interface easy enough where I don’t have to go, “Tap tap tap tap tap.” I can select it really easily and be done with it.

I actually have a gift for you. The last time we talked was through Twitter, because the iOS 7 camera app crashed on you three times. I felt really bad about that. We learned that iOS 7’s implementation of that camera, at least, if you look at Litely on the iPad, is crap. This is a 3D-printed logo of Litely from Shapeways. My girlfriend has one around her neck. I made three of them. One is on my desk, one is hers. You can have that one as well. I’m sorry that you missed those photos.

[topic]Are filters the new “film”[/topic]

OM: Wow, thanks! This is super cool.

ARE FILTERS THE NEW FILM?

OM: I’ve been using the app, but I still have not figured out how to get the most out of it. Could you write an FAQ or how‑to on what these things are useful for? They’re not all filters. They’re essentially —

CR: Film.

OM: It’d be cool to know what these presets are good for. The variations are subtle, and you have to spend hours trying to figure out what the variation is in many of these presets. Yes, you can see the variation from Whiny to Platinum, because it’s color versus black and white. But it helps to understand, “OK, this is my starting point. See if I like that look, or I don’t like that look.”

CR: You’re right. We tried to describe the Venice preset as, “These are warmer colors, and they’re good for skin tones and portraits.” But the presets are loose. It’s fun to hear you describe them, because it’s like a film stock. Why would you use Fuji versus Kodak?

I like to think of Litely as taking a century’s worth of film stock and putting it on your phone. That was impossible not too long ago. You’d choose one film stock, like [Kodak] Tri‑X. It was one of my favorite films ever. It was unique in its capabilities. People have shot it for that reason. Why Tri‑X? It’s one of those indescribable things. It’s the feeling that you get from it.

As you described it, they are Lightroom presets, and the adjustments that you have in the app are the top four adjustments that I use in Lightroom. As a professional photographer, everything that I need — those four adjustments and those filters — are the 99 percent case when I edit a photo.

OM: So if you understand film, you understand Litely better. If you don’t understand film, you don’t quite understand the nuance of the app.

CR: For most people who shot with Kodak, they didn’t really care too much. They just shot, like, “OK, I’m going to use Kodak,” and it became a favorite for certain photographers because of the results. Most people just stuck with it because they liked the result, and it was a trustworthy result. We’re actually building the store into that app now.

You can learn more about the apps and also buy presets, so you can preview the ones that you don’t own on top of your photo and go, “OK, why should I have that?” There are two more packs coming out. We have 12 new presets in the works, and we’re going to release them over time. We’re also adding push notifications to the app so that when we have a new one, you’ll see an alert.

OM: The whole thing is such a guessing game for me. I’ll keep trying. That is the most frustrating part and the most interesting part at the same time. I figured out everything about Camera Plus on my own. I could have emailed someone and they would have helped me, but I wanted to learn how to do it.

How did you get into photography and ended up starting Litely?

CR: I’ve been shooting photos professionally since 2005. Litely is, in a sense, the merging of my tech side and my photographer side. Photography always been this passionate hobby of mine. It was my diary when I was in high school. I always had a camera with me, and I was always taking photos. I was that weird guy with a bag in American Beauty.

That was me, basically. Everyone used to joke about that, because when that movie came out, it was very much an accurate description. It was my cardboard spaceship, I like to say. When I was little, I would look through the family camera and see through the lens. It would change everything. That was fascinating, and it was technical at the same time.

I started a web company in high school as well, just making websites. The design side happened. I worked at Yahoo doing mobile design in 2007. I was doing a lot of mobile design stuff in general. Finally all the mobile design and all the photography came to a head: I got to design my own photo app. It makes sense. The perfect blend.

It’s fascinating, because these are the presets that I’ve been using personally for a long time. These are the colors that I’ve since graduated from.

[topic]Rise of the Silicon Traveler[/topic]

The Rise of the Silicon Traveler

OM: You live here in San Francisco?

CR: Yeah, I live here currently. I haven’t really been back here too much, though. I’ve been traveling since leaving Apple, the last year and a half or so, pretty consistently. They talk about Silicon Valley or this whole Silicon Beach thing. I think that’s already outdated, because I was able to launch Litely and start an entire business remotely. I don’t really need to be here. I currently have guys in New York, building. I go visit them once in a while, but I like this idea of being a silicon traveler, where we’re always connected and where we need to be.

Looking at the work life, the Industrial Revolution, and Henry Ford, who dictated our five‑day work week, our nine-to-five, “Make sure you stamp out 20,000 parts today in your 8 hours” — I don’t think that applies anymore. Especially while trying to live this photographer’s life and doing tech at the same time.

OM: You would love my friend Matt Mullenweg. He’s a big proponent of the distributed workforce. Gigaom itself has always been distributed. We have so many people living in different places.

I think having a distributed company is essentially a mindset. If the founder doesn’t have the mindset, you can never have that. That ability to be flexible about things is important. I loved the idea so much that I started a website called Web Worker Daily, which is the idea of nomads. We used to call them “digital bedouins,” but now they call them “digital nomads.”

CR: “Digital nomads,” yeah.

OM: “Bedouin” is a more real kind of a phrase. You pitch your tent wherever, and you’re good.

CR: It’s fascinating. We have people in Seattle, in Texas, in New York, and here, and we don’t have an office. It’s kind of working. We try to do that, because I think it fuels creativity. Whatever keeps you inspired. For Litely, it’s integral to get out there and experience the world and to perpetuate that brand. We want to turn it into that. That’s what we’re working on right now — having that message out there, in general, and for people to unlock themselves from routine.

So many people ask, “How are you able to travel all the time?” For the most part, I was full-time at Apple. I was just taking photos on the weekends, because I put in the effort. Like, I’m going to drive three hours this morning, wake up a little bit earlier, and be somewhere cool in California and take some pictures. That’s all you need to do. If you can graduate from that, and even freelance a little bit on some level, then you can keep going.

OM: Sometimes I miss out on opportunities to take great pictures in the world around me. I was describing this to a friend of mine. It’s like, you go to a place — like I went to Italy for a few days — and suddenly photos start happening. Sure, they’re not important to other people, but to me, I have a picture of that moment and everything in my head. When I come here, suddenly after four or five days, everything becomes two‑dimensional. I don’t know why that happens. You would think the San Francisco Bay Area is not a place where things would become two‑dimensional.

[topic]Joy of Winging It[/topic]

The Joy of Winging It

CR: That’s interesting, and people do photo walks for that reason. Then suddenly you’re on a block you’ve never been on, looking at it in a different way. I struggle with that, too, living in a city, because I take pictures of the mountains. How do you stay inspired in someplace like San Francisco?

The way I’ve boiled it down for my own understanding is to trust in the idea of “winging it” and believe in that. You can’t plan a good photo. You have to let yourself find them. Going out and searching for a photo is the wrong way to think about it. You should just have an interesting life and tell the story through hitting a button.

Photos are stories. I don’t care about the visual. It’s more about what it says. If you open yourself up to that thinking and spend five more minutes just walking around and exploring a little bit more, you find things, find moments, that you wouldn’t have found normally.

For example, I got lucky one time. We had an office on the Embarcadero. I heard all these sirens, and I saw helicopters. What was going on? I had a busy day, but I was like, “You know what? Screw it. I’m going to go for a walk and figure out what this is.” I was just following helicopters, blindly.

We came to this area on the Embarcadero. I think it was Pier 19, and it was on fire. Burning like crazy, flames shooting out of the top of the roof. I could have stayed back with the crowd, but I decided to be a little more ballsy. I walked right up to it, as close as I could get.

I could feel the heat and the firefighters around me, it was so soon after it had started. I was supposed to be working. I was like, “I’m going to go just wing it.” I winged it and I got this photo, because I could see that things were starting to fall a little bit. I got it just as it collapsed.

There was a firefighter underneath. I can show you the photo. It was one of those pure moments where I could see everything happening. Ten minutes prior, I would have had no idea that this was going to happen if I hadn’t heard the helicopters. Suddenly I’m watching a building collapse in front of me, almost hitting a firefighter. Thank God he was okay — balls of steel.

That Pier 19 fire, it was the moment that told its own story. I was dumb enough and lucky enough to be close enough to take that picture. That was pure photography to me, because it simply told a story. It wasn’t about the photo. It was more about what was going on in it. The purest form of art is something that you’re not conscious of. You’re just living it, and I happened to have my phone with me, thankfully.

It was an iPhone photo, and it was nuts. It still gets me excited to think about it. I think it’s one of my favorite photos I’ve ever taken. I was so lucky to do it. It’s not because I’m a great photographer. It was just because I was able to push myself to go that extra five minutes and walk in that direction.

OM: Your tip on creativity is to be curious. Forget taking the best picture. Forget thinking about the light or the color. Just be curious about the world and keep going.

CR: There are painterly aspects of photography. It’s forced, and it takes a long time to get there. If you think about what photography’s done for human existence, it’s changed our perspective on war. It’s changed human history.

Since the invention of the camera, the first documented war was the Civil War. We went from this romanticized notion to “charge with our swords” and “war is a beautiful, glorious thing” to thinking, “Wow, war is actually terrible. People are dead, rotting in fields.”

People at home were suddenly witnesses to war. We weren’t oblivious. It wasn’t this big picture in our brains that was puffed up by media. It was a real view of war. Suddenly we see this antebellum movement happen around the same time. We didn’t like war after that, because we realized how horrific it was.

In the ’60s, our view of the earth changed when we saw Earth from the moon. That Earthrise photo changed history, and it started our environmentalist movement. We’re like, “Wow! This little teeny, tiny thing we’re on is fragile, and we’re small. We better preserve it, because it’s not that big.” We’re just looking back at that, the first time we’d ever seen the earth that way.

OM: With so many people taking so many photos, I wonder if we have lost that ability to contextualize.

CR: It’s like the whole Twitter versus Instagram thing. Twitter says you have 140 characters. If a photo’s worth 1,000 words, how many characters is that? A photo says so much more. I feel like Instagram has recently surpassed Twitter exactly for that reason. Psychologically, we get more through photos and Instagram. But we can also get desensitized to it.

I had this thought the other day while looking at these gorgeous photos of Washington, Vancouver, and Canada taken by these guys up there. If I had seen that 10 years ago I would be like, holy crap. But now I don’t even spend the time to Like it. I’m just like, “Oh, that’s cool.” I don’t even double-tap it because I’m so used to it. When you have so many war photos, so many horrific photos, people get used to it.

OM: Sameness?

CR: Visually there are a lot of similar photos. I’ve been posting a lot of Hawaii landscapes. I’m just so bored with them. I have to show other people like, “Hey, is this a good photo?” Because I can’t even tell anymore. I’m just like, “Here you go.” The last photo I posted last night, I had the same thing. It’s cool to see it through someone else’s eyes who hasn’t seen them before. But when everyone sees it and they’re all used to that silly landscape and the entire world is known, what’s next?

I think the truth, actually, is what’s next. The story is all that matters. The memory of it. If that is as impactful as what a pretty photo used to be, then I think you’ve actually taken a good one.

OM: One other thing I’ve often thought about photos is that when you look at all the pictures — like, when I came to New York for the first time, I had seen few pictures of New York. I had only read books about New York. It was all in my imagination.

There was this whole joy of discovery. Like, “Oh, I remember reading that thing, and there it is!” And, “It looks better than I thought it would,” or “it’s less than what I thought.” Your imagination is always in competition with reality.

Now there is little joy of discovery. You go and you’re like, “Damn, I’ve seen this picture. I’ve been there, it seems like.” I went to Berlin last December and January. “I’ve been there” was on a loop in my head, and that just didn’t feel right. I wonder if this is the part of photo revolution that we don’t really talk about, this ability to discover.

CR: Yeah, the magic gets muddled.
[topic]How to spot a fake Route 66 sign[/topic]

How to spot a fake Route 66 sign

OM: Let’s shift gears. Do you have any advice for budding photographers as to what they should be doing and what they should be looking for?

CR: It’s that extra five minutes or five hours, or that extra ten percent that you put into it. Because most people don’t put in the effort, don’t open themselves up to that sort of thing. You could have an amazing experience five feet away, but if you don’t walk in that direction and put in the effort to do it, you will never have that. It’s trying harder and also opening yourself up to letting the photo find you. Living the story, going places that you’ve never been before, surprising yourself and letting the day dictate what you capture.

I’ll tell you a story. I was in Baker, California. Baker is just outside Edwards Air Force Base, a middle-of-nowhere town with just one intersection. Two roads intersect; there are two gas stations and an antique store. We’re sitting there, kind of bored. We didn’t have to get home too fast so we’re like, “Why don’t we go to the antique store?” We go into the store, and we are looking at all the road signs. And we see this gorgeous Route 66 sign. It looks like a real antique. $300? It’s actually cheap. This old man in the back chimes in. He’s probably 80. He says, “You know those are fake?” What, really?

He walks over and goes on to show us how to tell a fake Route 66 sign from a real one. He’s like, “I’ve got some real ones in the back in my shed. You want to see them?” We follow this guy outside the antique store. He goes into this giant warehouse in the back that we didn’t notice from the street. He slides the door open. What I think he’s going to do is pull out a couple signs from some dusty area. He opens up the door and it’s a freaking museum. He’s got a Chevy ’54, ’57 — these gorgeous cars that he was restoring.

It’s the most well-preserved, deep collection of Americana road signs and cars I’ve ever seen. He’s got missiles from the air force base up on the roof. He’s got a plane in there. He’s a pilot himself. It was gorgeous. We were just like, “How are you hiding this from the world? This should be a museum.” He’s like, “Oh, this is my personal collection. I don’t let people back in here.” This is his man cave.

We spent the next hour trading stories. I took a photo of him, a portrait that I love. It’s the story around his life and how he’s curated everything in there. We learned that the Kansas Route 66 sign is hard to find, so most of them are fakes. If you see a Kansas one, it’s probably a fake, unless it’s got these certain things. Or with Texas, it’s such a short word that it doesn’t span the entire sign. They center “Texas.” Or if it says “Route,” that’s totally not right. It only says “66.” There’s never a “Route” anything on the sign itself. Fascinating.

We spent probably an hour and a half or two hours talking with him and having an incredible day. I took one photo. That was his portrait. That photo meant the most to me that day because of what it actually was. We would have never had that experience had we not gone into that antique store and been open, just winging it. I’ve never planned a single photo in my life. Let me say that. I’ve got a ton of work, and I’ve never planned a single one. I’ve been in forest fires and insane, insane things.

There was this other time when we were driving toward this cloud formation. I was with my best friend from college and his new girlfriend, who was a model. They were in a separate car. We were driving, and I saw this giant plume over the mountains as we were going, snaking through on that road. Intrigued, I decided we should drive toward that and find out what it was. That’s the kind of decision most people don’t make. They look and go, “Gee, I wonder what that is,” and they keep driving. They listen to their radio. We decided to follow the smoke. We ended up getting closer and closer. It was this giant brushfire. We kept going. We got closer, and we went up into the mountains again. I’ll show you the photo.

Earlier that day two guys had taken off on a plane, and they crashed and died. That plane crash started this brush fire. I learned this after the fact. That was really horrible.

But we got so close that ash was raining on us. This DC-10 flew over our heads, probably 500 feet up, and dumped its load through the smoke. You could feel the heat from it. It burned as the ash hit you. We had to leave, but we did a photo shoot right in the middle of it. My friend’s girlfriend was wearing a white dress. She fell in front of this forest fire at sunset. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it because of what we went through. We were afraid that we were going to start burning. I had holes in my clothing because the ash was so hot. That photo found me that day.

OM: In your mind, there’s no difference between the lens and your eye, essentially. That’s a good picture, when the lens and the eye are in complete sync. You’re seeing and capturing at the same time.

CR: It’s exactly that. You find this honest moment, where you connect with something, and that’s when you take the picture. That’s all you need to do. It’s enveloping that moment and then putting it somewhere. If you open yourself up, it will allow you to do anything. I’m not a great photographer. I’m just a curator. I know when to hit the button. I leave the rest up to life.

OM: The iPhone isn’t really a camera. It’s like the lens is the extension of your eye.

CR: It is, exactly.
[topic]My iPhone is really me[/topic]
OM: If you let it be, right?

My iPhone is really me

CR: If you connect to my phone via AirDrop, it doesn’t say “Cole’s iPhone.” It says “Cole Rise.” It is me. This phone is everything. It is who I am, because it’s always with me. It’s an appendage, and it happens to record.

The whole Google Glass thing, that’s cute. I think we’ll have something better to be able to capture things all the time. If we can solve the storage problem, then we’ll always be capturing these memories. You still have to decide which one you share, and that’s what we’re doing, currently.

OM: Litely essentially wraps presets into an app. I have another photographer friend, Kevin Abosch. He made the Lenka Cam app. Right now they’re black-and-white. It’s just one style of photography. That’s how he likes to take a black-and-white picture. Do you think more people are going to open up to something similar, where the apps become a wrapper for your interpretation of creativity? Like, it’s less about a tool to take pictures and it’s more about a way to express yourself?

CR: Absolutely. Curation and who curates it are as important as how well it’s built and how easy it is to use. A good example is Lenka Cam, of course, because that’s his style. It’s like paint. If you want to use his style, that’s awesome. I don’t see Litely competing with other apps, because it’s just another alternative. I am the burnt sienna, and he is the magenta. He has his style, people can use it, and that’s awesome. I’ll use his style once in a while if I feel like doing it.

VSCO Cam has its own thing going too. You might feel like using whoever’s style that is. Pretty much, all we have is ourselves and who we are. When you edit photos using Instagram filters [laughs], you kind of go away.

OM: It’s interesting; I started out using filters and now I don’t. The only thing I control on the photo is exposure and contrast. Most of my pictures were slightly crooked, and that is because I had some sight issues. It was Helena Price who pointed out that all my photos were crooked, and I ended up figuring out how to deal with the problem.

CR: They discovered this about Monet. Monet’s artwork became more and more colorful over his lifespan, because his eyes were becoming worse because of macular degeneration or something like that. I forget exactly which way it went, but you can see the progression of his vision through his artwork. That’s beautiful, because you are, in a sense, that filter. I prefer that.

OM: Do a lot of people buy your iTunes presets? Or do they buy the Litely app now?

CR: The Litely app was supposed to spur desktop presets, because the margin is a lot better there. Rather than 70 percent, it’s 98 percent. Both have gone up, but far and beyond it’s the Lightroom app. After the first month, it was easy to see, “Wow. We’re making way more money that way.” It’s cool to be surprised that way. Mobile is certainly here.

OM: Why do you think you’ve been successful?

CR: I’m just like any old other person in the world. I’m just a human being. I’ve tried to live honestly to photography and have cared about it for long enough where Litely isn’t a ploy to make money. It’s a passion. It’s who I am. I’ve been fortunate, through photography, to be able to communicate that message on some level to certain people. I feel that honesty resonates with people. It’s not coming from nowhere. It’s coming from someone who has a message. It’s the same reason why I would buy Lenka Cam versus something like an Aviary. I love what they do, but there’s no one behind it. It’s a business.

OM: That’s what you do with food, fashion, the whole thing. We want to know a story. Somebody wrote about this recently, how customization is the next big wave of the internet. I think it’s the new thing already. People have not figured it out.

CR: I’d love to think of Litely presets as handmade. Although they’re digital, they are made in a place over a span of time with a tool. It’s for a reason that’s more than making money. It’s for making art and telling a story.

Photos of Cole Rise courtesy of Helena Price.