Week 22: Lisa Scheer

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. 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.

Simen Edvardsen, a reader of the site, wrote me after my previous post and very kindly offered to interview a photographer he particularly admired, Lisa Scheer. Thank you again Simen. If you still have interest in contributing to the site, please do not hesitate to contact me (see the link above) and we’ll talk about setting up an interview with a photographer or ‘photo professional’ in the industry.

Simen Edvardsen: According to your website, you have a BA in English, and you worked as a print journalist for years. What made you branch out into photography? I don’t mean to make it a this versus that thing, but what is it, for you, that photography does better than writing?

Lisa Scheer: I’ve always been fascinated by photography. I think it’s possible to say a great deal in an image, and have its impact felt viscerally, emotionally, on a level beyond words. The intuitiveness, the instinct required to make a good picture appeals to me. A few years ago, I started keeping a camera to record things I was seeing in my environment. I spent a lot of time in my car, just driving around looking. I never really knew where I’d end up. I was looking at the photographs of Walker Evans at the time, and was attracted to the understated, condensed way he expressed things. I liked his lack of sentimentality. Photography for me became a way to tell a deeper story about the identity of place, to express a viewpoint without reservation or self-censorship. I didn’t really care what anybody else thought. I couldn’t have achieved that level of honesty in words.

SE: It’s interesting that you feel that your photography achieves a kind of honesty beyond words. Photos have many properties that could make them more honest than words. You’ve mentioned some: the process is often spontaneous, it achieves an emotional impact directly – more like a direct experience of something than words that need to go through the imagination to create an image in the mind – and so on.

You mention that photography for you can express something a viewpoint without reservations. Much has also been made of the objectivity (or lack thereof) of photography as a description of the world, but maybe you’re thinking of a more personal, subjective feeling. What did you mean by “I couldn’t have achieved that level of honesty in words”?

LS: These images come from a deep part of me, they’re deeply felt. It’s a place without words. I agree that pictures roughly translate “direct experience.” I’m thinking specifically of the project, “Greensboro Vernacular,” a series of images about the place where I live. The images were the result of a year-long exploration, a kind of attentive wandering. Written language would not allow me to adequately describe the experience; for me, photography, with its capacity to still certain moments, could begin to transcribe the experience and intensity of those road trips. Fragmentary, dream-like, a kind of narrative poem. Part of the series became an attempt to record the impact of deindustrialization on the region where I live: the emptied-out downtowns, abandoned strip malls, what photographer Jeff Brouws called the “discarded landscape.” I found a strange, melancholy beauty in those overlooked environments, and tried to communicate that.

SE: Photographers spend a lot of time looking at things while being aware of how they’d fit into a photo. I’m a believer in the importance of a good eye, so to speak. What elements do you look for in a picture? Consider, if you like, this photo. What made you go, “wow, I must take this picture”? Is that typical of how you like to work?

LS: That’s a complicated question. An interesting picture is the result of layers of decision-making, both formal and unconscious. Luck plays a part. Content is important. Lenses and cameras influence my thinking. I also pay attention to light, geometries, and the way the colors work together in the viewfinder. Sometimes I keep the composition uncluttered; occasionally I load up the frame. I try to see the world in a variety of ways.

The photograph above is a truckstop interior in nearby Rockingham County. I liked the red booths, the hard triangle of light on the faded wallpaper, and the wood paneling. But there was also something intimate about that space that provoked my imagination.

Again, these are hard questions to answer. It makes me think of something photographer Robert Adams wrote in Why People Photograph: “Part of the reason that these attempts at explanation fail, I think, is that photographers, like all artists, choose their medium because it allows them the most truthful expression of their vision. Other ways are relatively imprecise and incomplete.”

SE: “Lenses and cameras influence my thinking.” From your Flickr page, it appears you’ve been using mostly a Hasselblad recently, but there’s also some Leica 35mm and digital stuff. What’s your relationship to your photo gear? How has that changed over time?

LS: I started out shooting with a digital SLR equipped with a 12-24mm lens. Later, I became attracted to the look of film, and to the expressive possibilities and clarity offered by medium-format cameras and 35mm rangefinders. Last year I began shooting with a Leica and a Hasselblad 501CM. I love the Hasselblad – its bulk, its waist-level viewfinder and square frame. The Hasselblad’s conspicuous size affects my approach. It requires me to engage people, and changes how I create pictures: the process is now more deliberative, slowed down. On longer-term projects, I previsualize the images, and even sketch them out. To shoot the “Mill Village Project,” I worked with the Hasselblad, two lenses, a tripod and a step ladder. Setting up was a little awkward in cramped interiors. I’m not an equipment junkie, but I want to experiment with a 4×5 view camera next.

SE: I understand you recently exhibited your Mill Village Project at the Greensboro Historical Museum. Can you talk a little bit about the project?

LS: The project documented the memories and experiences of five extended families that had lived for generations in the textile mill villages of Greensboro. The villages were created at the turn of the last century to house people who worked for a big local textile company. The show was a mix of photo-album snapshots loaned by families, as well as contemporary photographs I made. The idea behind the show was to reveal the stories of the people who had lived there, to move beyond an institutional, management view of the history of the community.

SE: I’m guessing most of your photos are made close to where you live, but I can’t really tell, so feel free to correct me on that point. Do you feel you’re primarily a “home photographer”, as opposed to an “away photographer” (photographing on travels to unfamiliar places)? There isn’t much exoticism in your pictures, and I mean that as a compliment.

LS: Most of my pictures were made in and around Greensboro, where I now live. I’m a transplant, originally from the north, so maybe that explains why I find this landscape interesting. The geography might be limited, but I still find variations in what to shoot. At first it was building exteriors and suburban landscapes, and lately it’s interiors and more portraits.
So I’m digging in a little deeper on my projects, taking more risks. William Eggleston revealed a lot about the identity of place in his images of Memphis and northern Mississippi; Ralph Eugene Meatyard showed a rich private world without traveling far from Kentucky. So I guess the key is to find the idiosyncrasies, the interesting stuff in what’s local. I’m always looking for the thing that jolts me, the one thing that sticks out. Travel is great, but I have to content myself with finding meaning in the familiar.

SE: Who inspires you?

LS: Here are a few examples: Stephen Shore, William Eggleston, Sylvia Plachy, Mary Ellen Mark, Robert Frank, Jeff Brouws, Walker Evans, Richard Renaldi, Alec Soth.

SE: What next?

LS: It’s probably premature to discuss this.

Thanks a lot to Lisa for taking the time to do this.