JOEL WANEK

Alex Harris had been a very influential part of my artistic life, even before I ever met him. As an undergraduate student at Webster University in the mid-90s and aspiring documentary photographer, I was enamored by Doubletake Magazine, a short-lived publication that Harris and famed child psychologist Robert Coles created together at the Center for Documentary Studies. It was a gorgeously printed and carefully curated magazine which combined documentary photography and writing. It honored and elevated documentary art and gave both photographers and writers a beautiful platform to distribute their work. I was such a fan of the work that Alex and company were doing that I packed up and moved to Durham, North Carolina one Fall, found a job and a place to live, and enrolled in a couple of classes at the Center for Documentary Studies - one of which was Alex’s Documentary Photography class. So, when I returned to Durham thirteen years later to pursue my MFA in Experimental & Documentary Arts at Duke University, I was excited to work again with Alex. He was an invaluable mentor to me there and important collaborator and inspiration since graduating. This interview was initially intended to be part of the written portion of my MFA thesis. It was conducted in December of 2012 in Durham, NC.

AH: So we were talking about me saying to you years ago that what you were feeling was different — what you were expressing about your feelings in words was different than what I saw in your work. I think what I probably meant was that the photographs were saying something different than you were expressing about the way you felt about the people. It's a paradox because on the one hand as a photographer you kind of find what you are looking for. You choose to click the shutter at a certain moment because on some level you're looking for a certain kind of moment. But, in another way, I think if the pictures are any good they're going to say something different than you intended and that they're different than your actual experience of the thing itself. That's what is interesting to me. I think in my own work I started out being interested in the idea of documenting my experience of the world when I was with, say, Jacobo Romero in New Mexico or spending time in Alaska in Eskimo villages. Gradually I became more and more interested in what pictures say that is different than my experience or even what I feel about something. 

JW: Did it take you awhile to realize there was a difference or was there a process of having to come to terms and be ok with that?

AH: I think I began to take photographs just for different reasons. When I started out my motivation was psychological and much more personal much more wanting to become part of a place wanting to understand how different places and communities worked. And, the photographs were the way I was able to immerse myself in that world.

JW: Like an excuse to be there almost?

AH: I think so and I almost felt like the pictures couldn't miss because if I could just get to know people in a certain way and have them allow me into their world and get to know their landscape in a certain way then how could I miss? That was sort of my feeling. I think I was thrown on to myself as an editor early on and that was the really, really crucial thing. If you take thousands of pictures or hundreds of pictures, why this one over that one? I think it was the process of beginning to choose pictures and then putting them together and realizing that the pictures were different than my experience. And then really become fascinated - and I really see this in your work - with the possibilities of photography to see more and say more than I know. I really see that in your photographs of the bus with the light coming in there that that's just something beyond anything that you could ever say. It just was there and you captured it and you recognized it. It's the equivalent of me editing my pictures, you're choosing those moments. I became fascinated with the possibilities of the medium itself to render the world in a way that was beyond my experience. I began to move more and more towards the possibilities of photography and less and less about my immersion into place. In Cuba I spent thirty days over three trips. In New Mexico years ago I spent ten years or in Alaska I spent a year and a half over a six year period. Now in Mobile I made five trips and it's been a couple of weeks each time. 

JW: I was thinking about how your intentions could be very different than what you actually make which makes me think about process. Just from being in your class last year I know that everyone's process is quite different. Some people think about it a lot ahead of time and then make what they're thinking about. I've realized that my process is just to go out and start making something and then I'll figure it out later on.

AH: I think that you're process on this project, what I know of it, has in some ways been similar to the way that I approach things. It used to be just to go somewhere and hang out, get to know people and see where that took me. If I had and assignment or given myself an assignment like my first book in New Mexico was The Old Ones of New Mexico and my job was to actually spend time with ancianos out there. Within that world I could do anything. I think more and more I've gotten interested in the narrow frame. For instance when I was working in New Mexico on my color book at a certain point I got interested in the way that people see the landscape through their automobiles. In some ways that could seem like such a limiting way to photograph: you can only take pictures that way. Once I began to think about that frame, it just opened up a whole world for me of seeing one thing in relation to another and trying to imagine the frame of their car in relation to the frame of the landscape that they drove through. I would work on that concept for awhile and then I might move on to another concept. Gradually, say by the time I began to photograph in Cuba, every trip I had a different focus/frame/concept. When I just talked about my work with E.O. Wilson at the Nasher I talked about how his life and work and writings became the frame through which I saw Mobile. I think that notion of having a narrow frame is very much the way that Wendy [Ewald] works where she has a theme or idea or frame and she allows herself and her subjects and her collaborators to do anything that they want in that. 

JW: Where do your ideas for your concepts come from? Are they a result of thinking really hard about some aspect of it? Or do they just come to you?

AH: If I have to think hard about it it's not typically going to work as well. I simply have learned to follow my instincts. I think the hardest thing about being in graduate school, about being anywhere as an artist, is the voices that are speaking in your ear about, "Should you do this? Can you do this? Is it right?". I think the idea of really allowing yourself to follow your instincts and - that is so much of what I'm trying to do in that MFA class that you took - realize what they're process is, where they 

AH: I'll give you an example of the way that my thought process might work. Last year after Reynolds Price died I was asked to go in and photograph his house before it was dismantled. His house was like a museum. In some ways I've been training to do that all my life. I have done a whole book in New Mexico about interiors without people and I'd been in his house hundreds of times over the years. He was a neighbor, he was a godfather of Will [Alex's son] and a good friend but I'd never been in his house when he wasn't there. All of a sudden what what was the background to the photographs became the foreground, the thing that I was really looking at in a way that I never had looked at before. So much of what he did was write and titles were very important to him. His books were collected in a certain way, his books and the books of other people. How do you photograph books on a shelf and make that an interesting image? 

JW: More than just a document. 

AH: Right, how do you get it to say something? That is an interesting way to put it: more than just a document. I had seen David Gatten's work about books, about the way he focused on words and the way he focused on the spine of books. I had just seen it probably six months before when he had talked at Duke. So that's in the back of my mind when I'm looking at Reynolds' shelves and I'm seeing them in a way that I wouldn't have seen them if I hadn't seen David's work. I think that was a big influence on the way I photographed his books. There are different influences that come in so that's a small part of what I did at Reynolds' house. I began to feel like his house was really inhabited by other people and spirits in the form of paintings and sculptures. There were so many renderings of other human beings by artists all over his walls and in sculptures. So I began to really think about his house as having all those characters being present there and how to photograph those characters not just as things on the wall but as if they were present in the home. So I got that idea and just subtly that influences how you photograph. It's not like a conscious thought but as I'm doing it I'm allowing myself to have that kind of response to that place and then once I have it I think, "ok I'm going to photograph it that way".   

JW: So it's a response of being in that place and allowing yourself to be taken one way or another by some aspect of that space.

AH: Yes and I think that really goes back to what Walker Evans said and wrote about how when you're young you want your work to spring not from accomplished art but from what he called the life of the streets. How do you have your influence be  as much as you can the subject, the thing that you're photographing, the thing that you're doing, and your response to it. Here I've just contradicted myself in a way too. In a way I was influenced by Gatten's accomplished art but I was also influenced by just the experience of being there. 

JW: What ever happened to those photographs? Is that a future book?

AH: I am now going to work on that this upcoming year. I spent the summer reading many of his books, anything that he had that related to collecting or portraiture or that seemed to resonate. He wrote a lot about art, he wrote a lot about being a collector, he wrote about his home, he wrote poetry, essays, interviews, fiction and all this stuff. More and more I am interested in the relationship between narrative and words and photographs. The last two books I've done have really been about how do you photograph an idea — how do you photograph Cuba in relation to Jose Marti, how do you photograph Mobile in relation to Ed Wilson? So, I'm sure in some way I'll incorporate some of his writing into this. 

JW: The relationship between text and image is really something that I've been grappling with for my current project, my thesis film. You talked about narrowing and I think what I'm trying to do is not narrow the possible interpretations too much. How do you use text and not have it limit the pictures too much? What is your process for combining those two mediums?

AH: I feel like photographs hint at so much. You could say the same thing about film but I think photography particularly hints at so much. If you tie it down to specific captions and places and theories and narrative it can take away from that. Almost any book that I've done there's always a place in that book, and usually a significant place, where photographs are allowed to speak and hint at what they do hint at without guiding the reader. More and more I've wanted to tell the story about how those photographs came to be. In the text to the Cuba book and this Wilson book the way that I get around this question of limiting is by writing about my own process of moving through that world as a photographer. 

JW: Rather than saying, "this is what the photographs are about".

AH: Right. This is what I was exploring, this is what I was looking at and trying in the writing to make connections between things but not say, "this is what it is about". I think it really leaves it open but it also makes such a difference if people can take that journey with you into that world and then see the pictures rather than just see them, at least for me. When I was talking with you about your thesis film we were talking about this idea of not having to have these definitive statements about these things but it's about this process of exploring these notions that relate to your film. How does the relationship between text and photographs connect to what you're doing with your thesis? What's that all about?

JW: I'm interested in layered meanings, developing layers of possible interpretations. I like the idea of each media that you bring into it whether it's text or sound in combination with the visuals to each say something different. I'm a big fan of certain poetry and that's not to say that the text that I bring into the films has to be poetic but sometimes the interest in bringing text into it is because of my interest in poetry. I guess it's a way to make things more complex. 

AH: That's a nice way to put it, that if you use the right words there's a way that it really expands the possible meaning and makes it slightly more mysterious but you begin to make these connections in your mind.

JW: But not trying to narrow it so much that you're only saying one thing or suggesting that there's only one way to read it. I think in a lot of ways, like you said earlier, I don't even know what I am saying. You're just making something to hopefully see what you're saying. 

AH: That's exactly it but then once you've made it or once you begin to put it together and in the process of editing that becomes apparent, then I think there's a way that - and this is something we talked a lot about in the graduate seminar - how much does the viewer need to know? What can you tell them that will open this up to them in a way that they wouldn't otherwise have? I think we really had a struggle with that with different people in different ways. I think that a lot of people felt that the work had to be pure and speak for itself. I think that can be true in a lot of cases but I'm convinced there's a way in which you can open up the work just by the way you present it, the context in which you present it, the title of the work...

JW: Just say enough.

AH: Just say enough to give people a sense of the frame that they could be looking at this in. There's exactly the thing: only say something that's going to add to peoples' experience if you can in some way that they wouldn't otherwise know and that wouldn't otherwise allow them to appreciate it in a certain way.

JW: One of the things that was mentioned before that I wanted to follow up on was the notion of wanting to create more than just a document. I think for a lot of photographers, filmmakers too perhaps, that is enough, just creating a document. Can you talk more about your desire to have your photographs function as more than that?

AH: Well, I think you have to start by defining what a document is.

JW: I guess I just think of facts, something that just tells you facts about something. Look at how Reynolds Price organized his books and that is all it tells you.

AH: I wonder sometimes whether the whole documentary thing is just an excuse to make images that just fascinate us, me. To me it's really about the beauty of and the mystery of the individual image and then what  those say when you begin to put them together. I think about your work when, first of all, the beauty of the light and the way it moves across the surface and the faces of the people. That in and of itself is a very moving visually satisfying mysterious thing to see transportation on a bus be this thing that is so beautiful you can barely stand it. The moment when they look at you, when you've decided to have them look at you not just look off, then it becomes about something else as well. There's two things going on there. There's the tension of the fact that when they're not looking at you we know you're there because the camera is there. So, it's the tension of the camera being that close and that's fascinating, to be there but be invisible. But then you turn it around and have them look at the camera and look at you and that changes it. The question is what does that do? Is it about you? Is it about the viewer? Is it about them? It definitely changes the experience. Robert Coles wrote about that or talked about that. He called it a moment of intense self-recognition when someone is being looked at and they're given an opportunity to look back into the camera. If it's done in the right way they'll project something because they're given an opportunity to really think about themselves, who they are at that moment and they project it back to the camera. I don't think that happens necessarily when someone's looking away from the camera, it might happen more when they're looking at the camera. Eudora Welty talked about a moment in which people reveal themselves. So, I think it's important that you're doing those two things.

JW: I have a few interests in doing those shots. I see those shots as an extension of my photography practice and interest in photographic portraiture. What I find so interesting about working in film and video is that, to a certain degree, I can control how long the viewer looks at the images. With photographs you really don't have any control over that. But, also doing those shots were a way of working against the traditional documentary. I don't know if against is the right word. I wanted to bring in a lot of other influences and ways of working and have my film be much more than just a documentary. 

AH: See you're doing the thing that I've been talking about, too. The way that you're able to shoot those pan [tracking] shots where you move through a world in this beautiful way like one of those influences of yours that you showed in our class. 

JW: That Bela Tarr shot?

AH: That's very cinematic. That's very photographic. We don't see the world in that way. We don't move through the world in that smooth way where we move around a subject. And, yet, it so mesmerizing and it's sort of what I'm talking about in terms of photography. The medium itself becomes so beautiful you're seduced into seeing something in a way that you wouldn't otherwise see it. At first it's a sensual experience and sensory but then it becomes something more. That's the brilliance of knowing you're medium, knowing you're film, photography, audio, whatever it is so well that you can use it in that way. Just the experience of being part of it so pleasurable that you sort of don't realize that you're also getting another kind of experience as well. What you and I, I think, are saying is that we don't want to dictate fully what that experience is. It's not a narrow message you're trying to get across. 

JW: One of the things you say in your classes a lot, sometimes in response to a photograph you'll say, "it calls attention to the photographer too much" or "I'm thinking of the photographer too much". In my shots like that, those tracking shots or the portraits, you've never said that to me about them. I'm curious what it is about them that doesn't call attention to me, the photographer, too much.

AH: As long as you can get the viewer to suspend disbelief and just allow themselves to be lost in the experience that you're giving them, then I think the photographer is invisible in a certain way because we're experiencing it and not thinking about it as a technique or anything. All these sorts of rules are made to be broken but that's not the experience I get from looking at those shots of yours. The reason it doesn't is because you're really dealing with other human beings on the planet and there's that tension of "these aren't actors", "these aren't people who are being paid to act that they don't notice you". And, yet, they seem to be able to move on with whatever they're thinking or feeling or doing while you move through the world in that way with your camera. On top of it there is the slight tension of us knowing and them knowing that the camera is there. So that idea of the moment of intense self-recognition is still going on. It's both self-conscious, on the part of the subject, and it seems like it's something they are doing naturally as well. 

JW: I'm curious how you engage with your subjects. What level of engagement with people is satisfying for you?

AH: Just making a great photograph makes it worthwhile. I think there's a certain conceit that comes with this work that you have to believe that it's worth doing and that what you're doing is worth doing, in the face of a lot of things that tell you that it's not. Simply the pleasure of making a great photograph that can come the first minute that I meet someone or enter a room or it can come the tenth time I go there. I never know quite when it's going to happen and sometimes I don't discover it until later until I see the image on a contact sheet or the computer. So, that's one. The other thing I think really is that - it almost gets to this E.O. Wilson idea that people must belong to a tribe - photography really brings me into these communities in a way that I would never otherwise be engaged with. In Mobile, in order to make the pictures I wanted to make, I had to enter that world. I had to get to know people across a whole spectrum of society there and I took a lot of pleasure in doing that. I just got to know the place so well and I'm sure there are lots of levels that I don't know it. I think there's something intensely satisfying for us as homo sapiens, as human beings just to enter and become part of a tribe in a certain way. Photography allows me to do that as the tool and excuse to do that. Without the camera how would I ever do that?

JW: How do you feel when you are leaving those communities and you've got what you wanted?

AH: Well sometimes I leave and sometimes I don't. I mean, I go back to New Mexico every year. I don't photograph it so much anymore but now I'm really there to live there and work there.

JW: So those relationships that you've established are still there?

AH: Yeah, but on the other hand I think it's true that I used to feel it much more strongly than I do now that ...like in those Eskimo villages where I got to know people so well and I lived with them. Then when the project was over I didn't really go back. It's a complicated question, but I think the real answer to it is for me that I feel like the thing that I create in a way becomes the version of that world that I want to remember, that I want to inhabit. You create the thing that you want to inhabit. You inhabit it in order to create it and then once you create it,then that's the satisfying world that you can live in. And it allows you to move on. It allows me to move on to the next thing.

JW: And is your hope then that it's somehow valuable to those people living there?

AH: It's my hope and my intention that it speaks to them. It rings true for them in a way that's probably that I'll never understand. And that it's ring true for them, but it also has meaning for people who've never been there, who've never met them, who don't know about the specifics certain circumstances of their life or their experiences, and I think that may be true in Mobile. I mean, if you just describe to people what it is you did for your thesis project. I went to the bus station. I photographed people getting on and off the bus. Oh and then I rode the bus, and I filmed people and the light was kind of nice as it came through the windows, and that's my thesis! That sounds, that's a ridiculous idea okay. And as is most of the things I've done are ridiculous ideas but when you actually do it and you allow the medium to translate it and take you somewhere then it becomes a world you've created that only has a tangential relationship to the thing itself. I mean, it's an alternate reality that springs from that thing but it's wholly your creation.

JW: Yes and I guess that's the thing I worry about. I mean, I have this desire to want some sort of deeper engagement and that it is meaningful to the people I interact work with.

AH: Right.

JW: But at the same time, I realize that I'm just riding that bus just to make this project for the most part. I mean I ride the bus to get from here to there sometimes as well, but on that particular route, I only ride it to make that film so it is, it's kind of a complicated feeling that I'm not quite sure how I feel about it, but it's not stopping me from shooting.

AH: Well think about it in this way. I mean I think about everything so much in terms of evolution now and having worked with E.O. Wilson. Think about what's the role of the storyteller in society and why is it that we always turn to a special few to give meaning to our common experience. I think it's probably happened for tens and hundreds of thousands of years that there's certain people who become the storytellers and who take the experiences of the tribe and shape it in some way and tell it again. And there's something that's just built into our DNA that it's really important for us to do that and certain people are — that becomes their role in this society, and I think it's an important role, it has to do with why we've survived as a species. You can question it but in some ways I think it's tied back to that long line of narrative artists that have been around since we began to form language. Since we began to scrape images of our surroundings on the walls of caves. This is not something that just started happening last week.

JW: Because you're going into a lot of communities where you're obviously not from there - such as the Eskimos and in Cuba. You're not from that community and are there largely to make photographs of them.

Do you find yourself approaching those subjects any differently because of that?

AH: You know I had an interview with Wilson for the story a few weeks ago, and we were asked a question, I was asked that question by Dick Gordon and I answered it in a certain way and Wilson responded, he didn't use it in the interview, but what I said was, "You know, I think that I'm always an outsider to what I'm photographing, and a certain way, you need to be an outsider from the experience in order to step back from it and see it in another way."

JW: I think the camera just automatically creates that boundary, too.

AH: The camera does it but I think that there's certain people who are really outsiders. Not in a negative sense of that word but that they can step back from their experience of the world and see it in a bigger way and see it in a different way. And that's both a blessing and curse but often those people become writers or photographers or filmmakers or artists. And then I think I'm always an outsider to my experience, particularly, when I'm photographing it. That's even true with my own family. So I said that to Dick Gordon and Ed Wilson said, "I feel the same way." He said, "Even going back to Mobile, I feel like in a way I distance..."

JW: That's where he was from?

AH: That's where he's from. That I, and in my work over the years, there's a way in which he has to, he's an outsider from his experience in order to see it more clearly somehow.

JW: So it's almost like having a dual perspective as your approach.

AH: Yeah. It's true because it sort of allows you to enter that world in a way but constantly to be thinking about it in terms of something else, something else other than the moment that you're experiencing. And I think I've just taken all the guilt out of that for myself, though when I was younger, I probably had some of the same thoughts and concerns about it that you're expressing now.

JW: It makes me think of some of the responses when I showed the current thesis project to some of my classmates and to a visiting artist, and some of their responses were like, "Well you're denying these peoples' stories. You're not allowing them to — you're kind of dictating the terms." And I don't know, I guess I feel like if I were to approach them any differently than anyone else then that would be kind of a disservice. I feel like I should approach and interpret that subject matter the way I would anything else. How do you feel about that?

AH: Well, I really feel like there's a place for anyone to tell a particular story, and you're not denying them their story, they can tell their story. If an African American who rides that bus everyday can write a memoir if he wants to write or she wants to write it. Or some African American filmmaker can do it or someone from Durham can do it or the bus driver can do it, you're doing what you're drawn to do.

JW: I guess they weren't clamoring to tell me their story, I mean...

AH: Yeah.

JW: When my camera's on, they're not dying to tell me anything about themselves.

AH: That's a really tough one. But I think it's useful every once in awhile to have people or have things to be angry at. But it's destructive if you're the kind of person that hears this and thinks, "well, gosh I've got to respond to that and what if they think this and what if they think that?". And I think grad school is only for people who are tough enough just to be fascinated by the range of responses they're gonna get but somehow they're able to really stay the course of what fascinates them and what they're drawn to do.

JW: Speaking about teaching, I know you've mentioned how important it was for you and this is something you really stress in your classes: editing.

AH: Yeah.

JW: And I've never taken a photo course where it was stressed so much, which is not a critique by any means, but I'm just curious about why maybe you stress editing so much or what is it about editing that is so engaging for you?

AH: Editing in the sense of choosing?

JW: Like pairing images and the sequencing and, I mean it's something that it's very akin to editing video I think too...

AH: Yeah.

JW: Just like how you lay things out and create an experience. 

AH: Well, Walker Evans talked and wrote about this as well. He talked about choosing a moment and then what you're really looking for is a moment that — something that's transcendent, that's not just about that thing but it's about something more. To me, that's what you have to say. Without editing, then you're simply taking notes and someone else could choose a picture here or a picture there. Editing is what you have to say. And it's not because you consciously have to say it, it's like allowing your footage to speak to you. It's making your statement. I think editing is everything. The way that I've learned to edit is really just to allow myself to respond to the individual images. Just to choose the image that to me I couldn't live without that seems to really speak to the moment or be one of those so-called transcendent images, and then begin to see how those resonate with one another. And the great thing about still photography as opposed to video is I can make a picture in 1990 and then 1998 make another photograph on the same project and those two pictures resonate in a way. Together they say something so much more than either one says on its own.