above: We did a SLAP article where we brought some skater/musicians on the road down the Blues Highway from Chicago to New Orleans, recording music and skating the spots along the way. One of the best trips I ever did for the mag. This is Ray Barbee recording on my 4-track in the bathroom of some crappy hotel in Clarksdale, Mississippi just up the street from where the reallife Crossroads are (where Robert Johnson purportedly sold his soul to the devil, but now there’s donuts, burgers and discount tires).
I realize this is kind of a dated debate right now, but do you have a preference in the digital versus film category? Did you spend a lot of time in darkrooms in the pre-digital era or was that side of it appealing to you?
I spent a lot of time in darkrooms for sure, between like 1990 and 1998 probably almost every day I was in school and had access to a darkroom. When I started at the mag I didn’t develop my own film or print anymore because we had lab accounts. I don’t really miss that end of it that much, but I do like film. I can’t lie, I’m probably 99 per cent digital at this point, but I do still love the aesthetic of film, the analog-ness of it, the feel of the cameras. I do think digital is way more versatile and I think I’ve been making better images with it, so I can’t deny that I’m pretty sold on it. But a good black and white film photo is still pretty powerful to me.
What’s the best argument for using black and white over color in this day and age?
Something about black and white just sets a different tone—a quieter one, a more serious one, sometimes a more artistic one. Something about it seems to say “this is more truthful” but I think that’s just photographic history and psychology tainting the way I read images. That’s another nice plus of digital—you can make a color version, black and white version, a cross-processed version, etcetera.
You have an updated version of your book This Is Not a Photo Opportunity coming out on Gingko Press. Can you talk about what you were able to include in this version that may have not been included in the first version?
I got to revise the one I made on the self-publishing tip—it’s two years later so I got to add in a bunch more photos that weren’t in the original version, and also add a paragraph about each photo in the back. I think that goes a long way in adding more dimension to the photos, to hear the story behind them. Some photos were dropped from the original version, too, and then there’s an intro that Stecyk did for me. The layout was done by Cleon Peterson and includes handwritten captions that I did, and also a new cover. The content is probably like 80 per cent the same, but the 20 per cent difference makes it a fuller and cleaner.
