Week 7: Elizabeth Weinberg
The rotating gallery features the work of a young emerging photographer as well as an interview with him/her, and will change every Wednesday. The gallery is based off ‘collective curatorship’, where the photographer from week 1 chooses and interviews a photographer for week 2, week 2 chooses/interviews week 3, etc. (I no longer have say in the matter, so please don’t email me asking to be in the gallery!- Jake). There is only one stipulation to the process: Next weeks photographer has to be someone he/she has not had direct contact with yet. Ideally, this will take the gallery on a linked tour around the internet, and exploring and unearthing new photographers as it goes.
Last week’s photographer was Jimmy Limit, but due to some issues, the interview didn’t pan out in time. I’ve started a new round of interviews, and we’ll see what direction Elizabeth Weinberg takes us…
Jake Stangel: You got your start in photography by shooting musicians, both in concert as well as the backstage moments. How much influence did these initial experiences have on your photography, the way you shoot, the way you interact with subjects?
Elizabeth Weinberg: Shooting backstage, you get used to being in a position, literally, where there are no other cameras, so no one else is going to shoot what you are–you know you need to use that advantage and just nail it. When I used to shoot live a lot I’d go as far away from all of the other photographers as possible; we’d all be getting the same boring shot otherwise.I’d find a way onto the side of the stage or even behind it. You need to figure out how to get unique pictures and I think that carries over to what I do now. I was trained as a photojournalist in college, and I learned how to make an image tell a story by shooting the opposite of what your brain is telling you to shoot or looking at a scene in an unexpected way. Live photography isn’t something I really do that much anymore, but it was a great way to hone my documentary shooting skills.
In terms of dealing with musicians, I’ve been working with and for them since right out of high school, so I’ve learned how to keep cool, stay out of the way, and be as unobtrusive as possible. Being backstage is a privilege, so why screw it up? This carries over to celebrities and other people I photograph for editorial jobs nowadays. Being friendly and not seeming stressed keeps everyone at ease, and makes people more likely to want to have you around.
JS: You’ve got a trademark aesthetic down, a kind of ‘refined carefree introspective lifestyle’ thing going on. Is this how you would generally define your life too, do you feel the shots you take line up to what’s going on in your head? If so, how do you make your personality come through in your shots, how it influences the process?
EW: I think that’s how I’d define it. I like adventures and the unexpected, but within those loose confines I’ll hone in on a particular moment or scene, so I guess that’s where “refined” comes in. To me, those types of photographs are almost an exaggeration or super close-up zoom of something that’s far less significant than its surroundings. I guess a good metaphor would be an ant in a field, or something like that. I think my personality comes through in the way I position myself, be it up above or from underneath or far away from something. I think I am always “there” in some way. Sometimes my friends will be doing something crazy and they’ll say “put down the camera and join in!” but to me I’m already participating.
JS: Are you visually influenced more by your friends and contemporaries, or by more well-established photographers? Is there a difference?
EW: I don’t think I’m really influenced by well-established photographers in terms of how I shoot. I’m influenced more by the way they do business or how their careers have progressed. I just try to do my own thing. There’s a lot of great work being done by people around my age and with the help of the internet I’ve met a lot of them, so they’re more my peers than untouchable “star” photographers. Of course in some way all the work we see influences us in ways we can’t quantify, but I try to think about that as little as possible and just shoot.
JS: How long have you live in NYC and how do you like it? A lot of people I know either love or hate shooting in the city… does living there stifle your shooting process or help it? How so?
EW: I moved to New York on April 1, 2005. I got mugged April 8, 2005. I’d moved with about $200 to spare and a room that I was subletting for a month while I found a job and a place to live for May. After the mugging and a fruitless job search I thought, “Maybe I’m just not supposed to be here.” But I stuck it out. And I’m coming up on four years here. I absolutely love it. I love exploring the outer reaches of the city like the abandoned waterfront in Brooklyn or biking 40 miles out to City Island in the Bronx. If you get out of the mindset of “hang out in the Lower East Side or Williamsburg” there’s so much to do and see and lots of adventures to be had. Those are the sort of things that drive me, creatively.
It’s very easy to be overwhelmed by the pure volume of photography and competition that exists here, but it’s important to just do your own thing or you’ll just make yourself crazy trying to see what everyone else is doing. I’ve had my ups and downs here and I have a long way to go. It took a long time to make the leap from working full time at labs or studio managing to deciding that I needed to just jump in and market and email and go to meetings. It’s paying off, but far more slowly than I ever thought (naively). But that’s the business. I wouldn’t be in it if I didn’t feel without-a-doubt compelled. New York’s really tough financially. It costs a hell of a lot of money to live here, but you can also make a killing, too. There’s no where else I could see myself in the foreseeable future, but I’d like to be able to spend winters in LA and maybe the spring in Oregon later on. I’m a born and raised New Englander and I still despise the cold. Every year it seems to get worse!
JS: You shoot both digital and film, and I think you’re the queen of RAW conversions, like in the shots below, which I would have never thought are digitally shot. What factors determine if you shoot digital or film? Are you ever going to write a post in your blog about raw conversions?
EW: The queen of RAW conversions! Why thank you! I’d love to shoot film all the time, but lots of magazines and bands simply don’t have the budget for it anymore, and sometimes things need to be done far more quickly than film allows. I also like the speed at which I can shoot digitally, versus dealing with a cumbersome medium format camera and stopping every 10 frames to take out the roll. I’ve also gotten to the point where it’s hard for people to tell if something I shoot is film or digital, so it isn’t a huge drag to shoot digitally if the effect is pretty damn close to film. Sure, there’s nothing like doing C-prints in the darkroom, but we need to adapt to the times. I think a lot of the digital haters out there simply don’t know enough about color or the behavior of film to create digital images that work the way they want. Before I did photography in college, I was in studio art classes, and in painting we focused a lot on the color of light. Shadows can be warm or cold depending on the light source. Film is like that too—shadows can be cyan or blue or red, for example, depending on the light source, the subject, and the type of film. Quite simply, one has to understand the color of light in order to get the right results from digital. I don’t want to turn my blog into a Photoshop manual, but I will probably still give some hints about RAW conversions soon. It’s no fun to go to a photographer’s website and see flat, oversaturated photographs that just scream out DIGITAL. The results shouldn’t be overshadowed by the means.
JS: Are you currently working on any new projects, or any exciting jobs you can talk about?
EW: I’ve been working hard on two personal projects for the past few months. One of them chronicles the life of my youngest sister, who is fifteen years younger than me. She was born when I was a freshman in high school, and yes, same parents! It’s a pretty unique situation. She’s the most similar to me of all of my siblings (I am the eldest of four), so it’s almost like watching a mini version of myself grow up. I started getting into photography by shooting pictures of her when she was a baby, even before I was shooting bands. My photography has progressed just as she has, and I’ve amassed a huge collection of images that I’m psyched on, in how they show our respective maturations. Now she’s 11 and a brilliant fledgling novelist!
The other project chronicles a unique household of friends that existed from 2003-2005 in Boston, where I lived as well for some periods of time. It’s probably the most personally meaningful work I have put together to date–very nostalgic, and its existence pretty much gets to the core of why I take photographs in the first place. So it’s been a lot of going back through the archives and scanning and organizing, but I’m super excited to get them up and out into the world soon. I just shot a musician from San Francisco named Sonya Cotton, in the woods of Princeton, NJ. I can’t say much about the final results except that it involves a dead deer in the most beautiful way we could capture it. Once her record comes out in a couple of months, you’ll see it on my site!
JS: Musician shoots are super fun because the mood is always relaxed (usually) and there’s often room to experiment. Are musicians your favorite subjects to shoot?
EW: I’m a huge music fan, and the musicians I admire are definitely among my favorite subjects, especially the ambitious ones who are interested in concepts and want to work with me to get something great out of the shoot. But I also like shooting other creative people, those who want to make it a collaborative effort. Band photography can get really stale and difficult, especially if the band has had 5 shoots already that day and you have 10 minutes with them, and they’re just simply not interested in being there. I guess my ideal thing is to take good pictures regardless of whether or not it’s a musician or a writer or an actress.
JS: What does your ideal shoot look like?
EW: Lots of natural light, no rushing around, unlimited iced coffee, lots of outdoor locations. Underwater and in the woods are my favorite places to take pictures lately. Preferably in the summertime so we have lots of daylight! I pay a lot of attention to sunset and sunrise times, how the sun travels through the sky at certain times of the year, where it is compared to the street when it sets, stuff like that.
Alot of your recent musician shoots seem like they begin with a loose concept, then kind of take a life of their own. Can you detail a bit more this process, like for your Dr. Dog shoot? How many people were on that crew?
The Dr. Dog shoot was the best shoot I’ve ever done on every level, period. Everything just went off without a hitch and it was such a fun day of shooting. I wish they could all be like that! In the weeks preceding, I’d talked to Scott McMicken from Dr. Dog about his ideas—he wanted the images to be reminiscent of a Gangs of New York style era, with really old trains and men in working clothes, posed in front of a train like in old black and white photographs from LIFE or something. I hunted Flickr for abandoned trainyards in the tri-state area and came across some shots of some incredible looking old trains in Jim Thorpe, PA. Apparently there is a vintage train you can ride there, and further down at the end of a parking lot lie all of these old trains, some waiting for restoration. I emailed the girl who shot the photos and she gave me instructions on how to access the area—it was totally easy, we weren’t bothered at all, and the location was better than anything I could have imagined. I took Scott’s idea and just sort of ran with it. Got some shots of the band in front of the trains, and then we climbed inside and shot in there, and then on top of some other cars, and even on a steam engine. Then we drove up the road to an unfinished train tunnel that had been drilled right into the side of the Poconos Mountains. The light streaming in was amazing, and mixed with some cigarette smoke and a reflector, yielded some of my favorite shots I’ve ever taken. The crew simply consisted of my friend Sybil, who assisted me, and the stylist Donald Lowe. No lights, just the sun, a reflector, and a pretty magical location.
JS: Do you have a preference to shoot with lighting equipment, or are you more into ambient? What makes you use lights- lighting conditions, art directors, yourself?
EW: I don’t like using lights. I keep everything as lo-fi and unimposing as possible. There’s no better light than the sun, in my opinion. And an overcast sky is the biggest softbox possible. Sometimes photo editors will ask for a “lit” portrait, so I’ll use a strobe, but in my edit I’ll give them some natural light options as well. If I am going to use strobes, I only use one and maybe a reflector. I try to keep the “production” part of my setup as minimal as possible.
JS: Any shout-outs or last things you’d like to add?
EW: Thanks to Jake for asking me to take part in this; I’m excited to see this blog grow. It’s definitely a strange time to be a photographer, especially an emerging one, with the state of the economy, digital everything, the death of Polaroid, and the changing of media as we know it. It’ll be interesting to see what the immediate future holds.
