Ivan Makarov Blog

In another installment of the interviews with photographers whose work I admire, I’m happy to feature my interview with California-based artist G. Dan Mitchell. I first saw his work on Flickr a couple of years ago, and have since followed his stream, and his blog on a regular basis. Dan and I had a chance to shoot together out in Mare Island last year, and I was impressed with how thoughtfully he approaches each photo. Dan’s main subject matter is very similar to mine, as he loves shooting nature and architecture, but because Dan shoots so much, he shoots other subjects too.

I love two things about Dan’s work. First, he produces a lot of photographs. He posts photos to his Flickr account and his blog on a daily basis. He shoots all over SF Bay Area, south of here in Carmel, Pt Lobos and Big Sur, and north of the Bay in places like Muir Woods. He also goes on several photo trips during the year. This dedication helps him produce a large body of work every year, and his top pictures of the year sets are always one of my favorites (see the ones for 2009 and 2008).  Second, he has a unique style to his photos derived from his vision and from years of shooting. When photo thumbnails from my contacts on Flickr come up on my screen, I can easily spot Dan’s work.

With that, here is the full interview where Dan talks about his love for the medium, the interplay between music and photography in his life, about how he manages to find new photos to share every day and about his favorite photographers and photo tools.

Tell us about how you started in photography.

My Dad gets the credit for starting me and my siblings in photography. He was a talented and enthusiastic amateur photographer who had a bunch of camera ranging from an old Graphlex to an early Kodak Retina Reflex 35mm camera. I still have an old Rollei 35 of his. When we were young he got us each an old box camera, gave us a bit of advice, and let us shoot. He also had a home darkroom, and it was a great privilege when he took us into it to help him develop prints.

My interest continued and I was in the high school photo club. While I did the usual stuff – photographing football games, etc. – I also was aware of landscape and nature photography and I recall exploring certain landscape subjects and even doing some Weston-style (though not Weston quality!) photographs of various objects. Before long the photographic interest became tied up with my passion for the Sierra Nevada and for years I carried 35mm gear on long pack trips. Eventually, I began to feel that the photography interfered with the backpacking, skiing, and climbing and I did less and less photography. That all changed in the last decade when the digital revolution rekindled my interest in the medium.

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Over time, how did your style developed? How about your choice of subject?

The first photographs, other than family photographs, that I remember looking at and being impressed by were nature and landscape photographs. I don’t recall the exact photographers I first “saw,” but I do remember being taken to a talk by Ansel Adams when I was quite young. (And I regret to this day that I didn’t understand who he was or remember anything about what he said!) I recall three early photographs I made – most likely in high school – that seem important in retrospect. One was of an old oak tree in a now-developed area of Santa Clara Valley, another was a photograph of North Dome centered between some foliage (I can still find the spot where I made it), and another was a “study” of an old gate latch and chain. I think it is fair to say that all of these years later some of these same subjects appear in my work.

But that isn’t to say that my photography is the same. Back then I knew that these things interested me and I knew that I liked the subjects and the presentation of the prints… but I really didn’t understand why, or how to do such things, or what was really going on in them. That came much later.

In addition to the subjects that I can trace back many years, I don’t think I could have predicted my interest in certain other subjects that fascinate me now. Two examples are night photography and what I refer to as “urban landscapes.” Believe it or not, I get about as much pleasure from shooting the infinite variety of urban subjects as I do from shooting natural subjects.

As you have another occupation besides photography, how do you balance the two? And how does music interacts with your photography?

Yes, I’m one of those photographers who doesn’t quite know how to answer that inevitable question: “Are you a professional photographer?” Sort of yes and sort of no. By academic training and long experience my main field is music. I was originally a trombone player and I ended up with degrees in music theory and composition with a specialization in electronic music. I’ve been a college faculty member for many years.

I like to think that this gives me the best of both worlds. Teaching music is a wonderful profession on its own merits, and I love that part of my life. Being married to a professional musician, there is always music around.

It may sound odd to those who aspire to do nothing but photography, but not having to rely on it for my income frees me to be a better photographer, I think. I photograph only those things that I care to photograph. I don’t have to take photography jobs that dont’ interest me in order to make ends meet. And the nature of my schedule gives me ample opportunities to do photography.

It occurred to me recently that the American composer Charles Ives might be an example of what I’m thinking. While you can’t draw too many parallels between his music and my photography, there is a lifestyle connection. Ives decided to separate his creative work in music from his professional work in, of all things, the insurance business. This allowed him to follow his own unique path as a composer, something that would have been almost impossible if he had tried to make a living from his music in turn-of-the-century America.

Beyond that, there is something that connects music to photography, but I’m still not certain that I can articulate it. There are a number of photographers with musical backgrounds. Well all know about Ansel Adams’ experience as a pianist; others include Don Worth and landscape photographer Charles Cramer. Eventually I hope to articulate something about this relationship.

How do you find the inspiration for new work?

Wow, that is a big question! Certainly I’m inspired by the photography of others. Sometimes it is somethings specific, like seeing an image of a familiar place in a new way. At other times it might be something that someone writes or says. I read a lot about photography and I visit galleries and look at and try to understand the work that I see – I hardly ever walk out of a show without some notions about how this might change my photography.

Moving among what might seem like very different subjects also helps me “see” in new ways. As I mentioned earlier, I do a lot of urban photography – and when I do I frequently think of it as landscape or nature photography, just in a different place. I’m almost always thinking photographically, even when I’m not carrying a camera – filing away concepts and images that I’ll eventually draw upon.

Oddly, one other thing that inspires new work is returning to familiar places and subjects. I’m one of those photographers who really wants to know and understand a subject well. I want to see a place in all seasons and all weather and all kinds of light, and I want to get to the point where the subject feels like an old friend. While I enjoy going to new places to shoot, quite often I’d rather return to a place that feels familiar and try to express my understanding of the place in a photograph. Of course, some might point out that I have the good fortune to live close to an urban subject like San Francisco, less than an hour from redwood forests and the Pacific coast, within a days drive of a good portion of the Sierra including Yosemite, and within a reasonable distance from the California deserts. With such subjects, I’m less drawn to faraway places perhaps!

Who are your favorite photographers (both from the past and the present) and why?

Every time someone is asked that question in an interview I listen to them hem and haw and stumble a bit. It is a hard question! As most others do, I’ll qualify my answer by saying that there are so many great photographers that I can’t possibly name all whose work has affected me. (I won’t even mention all of the photographers represented on the bookshelf behind me as I type this.) And not all of them are the big names either. There is so much fine photography out there being made right now. That said, here is a short list:

Ansel Adams. No surprise there, I suppose, given that I was brought up in California and have spent tons of time in the Sierra. There is much that I like about Adams. He was willing to share almost everything about his photography. His attention to technique is astounding. (And, yes, that is important to me.) His work can be appreciated on so many levels: beautiful images of specific subjects and places, fine examples of technical mastery, ability to see beyond the obvious in a subject, and simple aesthetic appeal. His work is also more diverse than some might realize. (Oddly, though, when I saw the “Adams and O’Keeffe” show at SFMOMA last year, it was O’Keeffe’s work that had the bigger effect on my photography!)

Richard Avedon. No, I’m not kidding. I was fortunate to see what I believe was the entire collection from his “American West” series at a gallery at Stanford a few years back, and some of those photographs are tremendously powerful. In this work, at least, the visual and affective power of the images is again linked to technical command of the shot and of the print.

I recently saw the Irving Penn “Small Trades” photographs at the Getty Center. What an astounding body of work! Beautiful prints by the score. Before that I saw the Jeff Wall photography show at SFMOMA. I knew of Wall by way of small versions of his images that I had seen in print and online. Frankly, I didn’t get it. Then I saw the photographs in person and I understood. They require the scale at which he printed them, and they demand long and deep contemplation before I can fully “ingest” them. His photograph of a ventriloquist at a birthday party is one of the most amazing photographs I have seen.

I have to mention my friend Charles “Charlie” Cramer. Believe it or not, Charlie played organ when my wife and I were married! I thought of him as an organist back then, but now I know that is only half of his creative life. Charlie is another photographer whose work is best appreciated in the form of a print, particularly a large print. A year ago I came back from Young Lakes with a photograph of the upper lake that I thought was pretty fine. Then a few months later I found one of Charlie’s photographs from virtually the same spot… and immediately understood the difference.

I could keep going, but I’ve already written too many words!

What is your favorite location to shoot at?

Oh, man, THAT is a tough one. I could cop out and just answer “the location where I’m shooting right now,” but you’d see right through that! I could answer “California” and recognize that my favorite subjects are essentially found in this state, from Sierra to the deserts to the ocean to the redwoods to urban centers. In a way that might be the most honest answer.

But since you’ll want something more specific, I’ll go so far as to select the Sierra Nevada. Added together, the days I’ve spent there add up to quite a few years, and I can always find a subject there to shoot in any season.

What is your dream location you have not yet visited?

I’m tempted to answer “Alaska,” but I have been there for a total of about a month, just not to do photography. But one place that I truly haven’t been that I know I need to visit is the Southwest. Every photographer I know who shoots there raves about the locations.

What are the current projects you are working on?

I have several projects that I’m working on. One that might seem surprising is that I’m doing a series of photographs of small businesses and shops in urban areas. As I walk around such urban areas I’m intrigued by the one-of-a-kind nature of stores, repair shops, markets, and so forth, and how they seem to express the personalities of those who own and work in them.

I also have an idea about a series of black and white photographs of California coastal subjects. I’ve also been specifically photographing certain Sierra Nevada back-country lakes for a few years now, and I think that some grouping of images is a out to emerge from this.

You post a new photo on your blog and Flickr virtually every day. Does it ever gets tedious? Please share any tips on how to keep yourself motivated with such a time consuming project.

Yes, I post a new photograph at my blog every day, and I’ve been doing so now for something like three years. This is a sort of discipline for me in that it keeps me focused on working to “see” photographs all the time. This may be one of those other connections to my musical background, where importance of regular and continuous practice is well understood – basically I’m keeping my vision tuned up by this “regular practice.”

To be honest, this doesn’t mean that I photograph every day. I do work on photographs just about daily, but I can’t actually go out and photograph that often. But I do have to keep the work coming in order to have something ready every day. I try to put photographs in the queue. At times I might have photographs queued up a month in advance, though on one occasion I really did need to be out and make a photograph because I had nothing for that day! (As of today I have about two weeks of photographs ready to go – one advantage of having recently returned from five days in Death Valley!)

Whenever I put a new image in the queue at my sight I post it to Flickr at the same time. (Anyone who is interested can easily figure out what is coming soon at the blog by following Flickr.)

What’s your favorite photography related technology or a tool?

Ivan, you certainly know how to come up with the tough questions!

I’m going to go with what is probably an obvious answer and say Photoshop. I could capture images with a wide variety of cameras and lenses from any of several manufacturers. But in the end, any of those images would end up in this digital “darkroom” that we almost all use today. This is where, to paraphrase Adams, the score of the capture becomes the performance of the print (or jpg, these days). The hardware and software tools we have available to us today have astonishing power. In my case, it is accurate to say that their development is what got me to return to photography.

All photographs in this article are copyright G Dan Mitchell and are used with his permission.