Landscapes

Andrew Hetherington was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland. He moved to New York City in 1995 to pursue a career in photography where he spent his formative years assisting some of the cities top photographers. He struck out on his own and was named one of PDN’s 30 emerging photographers to watch in 2003. Since then his work has won awards from American Photography, Communication Arts and American Photo. He is a contributing photographer to Wired and ESPN the Magazine and his work has been featured in GQ, Details, Esquire, Portfolio and Mens Health. He is also the author of the photo blog ‘Whats the Jackanory?‘

You have recently self-published the photography book, A Room With A View. What made you decide to show the work in this way?
‘I decided from the get go that this was going to be a long-term project. I had been shooting it for three years and just kept filing the negs away before I figured out how I wanted to present it. There were a lot of images. Early on I knew that it was all going to be about volume and repetition. The pictures don’t necessarily stand alone by themselves.

‘All the advancements and options available in on-demand publishing made perfect sense to me. I wanted to be able to present the project in book form and a traditional portfolio would not have worked. I would have had to edit it down considering the amount of images involved. There are 220 pages in the latest edition.

‘I also wanted to produce a book that was self-editing. All the rooms are laid out in numerical order so I don’t have to spend hours working or reworking the pacing and the layout. In a way, it’s very organic and takes care of itself. When you see the book, you will realize there are lots of little nuances. Also, it’s just the room number on the page with a location listing in the back. I didn’t want you to know where you were looking at. Some people have turned it into a guessing game’.

How many images do you usually shoot of the inside and outside of your room and do you photograph every hotel room you stay in or only the most interesting?
‘I only shoot one picture of the interior and usually only one of the exterior. However, if I am staying in one room for multiple days, I might take a few further frames of the exterior at another time of day or maybe when the light is more interesting. Then I will choose later. But honestly, usually it’s just the one of each.

‘I try and photograph each and every room I stay in. Sometimes if I am on assignment I might have a very late check in and early check out, so after a long day of work or travel, a few beauties have slipped through the cracks’.

You’ve compiled this work four different times over the last four years of shooting. Are there plans for a master book?
‘One of the reasons I chose to print on demand is that I wanted the book to be ever expanding. That is to say that each new edition contains the pictures in the previous one with new rooms and views I have photographed since. Depending on my travels I usually put out a new edition every four months.

‘I had thought that I would stop at some stage, so yes maybe then I would consider doing a “PROPER” book, but I am still hooked and it has become a habit, a bit of an addiction, and I am still taking the photographs with no intention to stop. Maybe in 20 or 30 years if I am lucky to have a couple hundred more rooms it will be the time for the master’.

Has there been any response (positive or negative) from the hotels/motels that you have stayed in?
‘There has been no response because I haven’t shown the books to any of the hotels I stay in. From the beginning I have always lit the rooms the same way. It’s not very flattering. I wanted it to be uniform so that the rooms would present themselves in a consistent light (no pun intended) and then the ambient light in the exterior shot would be another random factor in the mix.

‘So I guess what I am trying to say is I don’t think I will be getting a gig anytime soon from a chain looking to ooze some subtle sex appeal with moody room shots in its advertising. But hey, you never know’.

Can you tell us a little about your marketing efforts for this work?
‘As an editorial/commercial photographer, the idea of compiling it in book form certainly appealed to my self-promotional needs. I hadn’t done an extravagant piece such as this in a couple of years. I really felt it was a great opportunity to put a new and perhaps unexpected volume of work out. Although I had been working on it for years, only a few people knew. I also wanted to direct it towards new areas and definitely wanted to explore other marketing options and work on expanding the fan base.

‘The first drafts got very positive reviews and when I showed it to David Strettel at Dashwood Books he expressed an interest in selling in. I printed a limited first edition of 20, all numbered and signed. He got ten and sold them for $75.00. A little pricey, yes, but he sold out in about ten days.

‘It helped that it was Christmas and that I had pimped it up on my blog (I still do at every opportunity), but still I was quite taken aback that someone would fork out that sort of money.

‘The subsequent editions have been sent out as a concerted mailed promo campaign to photo editors and art buyers. A lot of the editors get a great kick out of them, especially if they had sent me out on assignment and the room I stayed in on their behalf is featured.

‘I had tried putting images from the book on my main website but it just didn’t really work in the Livebook template I use, so I figured it would be good to keep breathing new life into it with a satellite site. With the help of Rob over on A Photo Folio we figured a blog template would work best. See, in the book there are room numbers and locations but no hotel names or any extra info. I wanted this site to include all that fun stuff and my room rating. Like the book, I wanted the site to be easily updatable. I add two rooms/views a week, although I have been lazy over the holiday break.

‘All the effort appears to have paid off. Much to my amazement the book took first prize in PDN’s Self Promo Competition Extraordinary Promotion and was selected in American Photography 24.

‘I have certainly gotten a lot of mileage out of it’.

Cameron Davidson has shot around the world, with assignments including aerials of landscapes for advertising campaigns, offshore gas platforms for annual reports and natural disasters for magazine stories. When not harnessed into the back of a turbine helicopter, he photographs people on location for a mix of ad, annual report and editorial clients. He is a pilot but never flies himself for his aerial work. He has had five books of his photography published with another two on the way.

In addition to being an aerial photographer you’re also a pilot. Which came first? And how does being a pilot help you with your work?
‘I’ve shot photographs since I was fourteen years old. I started working toward my VFR license in 1989 and became a pilot in 1990. Being a pilot helps me understand aviation and (makes it easier) working with other pilots- speaking the same language and understanding what is safe and, more importantly, unsafe’.

Besides your aerial work, you also photograph on land and in remote places such as Haiti. Do you have a interest in photographing these places from the air and what are the logistics of going through with this?
‘I am shooting aerials in Haiti for a magazine story in 2009. A pilot I flew with for a Vanity Fair story is setting up a small helicopter charter company in Port Au Prince. I plan to fly with him and also a missionary who has been stationed in Haiti for over ten years. He has a Cessna 205 that I can shoot the project from, plus keep accurate GPS data on what I am shooting’.

Do your ideas for a shoot ever come to you while you’re in the air, or do you do most of your conceptualizing on the ground? For instance, the Mountain Top Removal and Long Wall Mining project.
‘The Mountain Top Removal project was something I had thought about for quite a while. I have family in West Virginia and I remember hearing stories of the coal camps in southern West Virginia and how bad they were to the landscape. I knew Mountain Top Removal was quite a bit harder on the land than a coal camp. I had seen a few aerials of Mountain Top Removal that showed the destruction but were lacking the emotion I felt the subject needed. These mountains are beautiful and I wanted to show the beauty and scars together. I chose to fly in the morning when I knew there would be valley fog’.

What camera are you using in the air and roughly how many images do you usually take during a flight?
‘Primarily the Canon 1s III bodies with the Prime L lenses, mostly the 35 f/1.4 and the 85-mm f/1.2. I’ve also shot a few aerials with the Leica M8, and recently I’ve been shooting some medium format cameras with the Phase P30 back. Way too many images sometimes, and at other times, you nail it right away. A lot of it depends upon being in sync with your pilot’.

You’ve been taking aerial photographs for a while now. How has new technology changed your process and technique?
‘I love shooting digital in the air because I can load up with 8 gb cards and just keep shooting. I love not having to stop and change camera backs or reload film. The longer tonal range with Digital capture has helped me quite a bit, especially with holding highlight detail in skies and deeper shadows’.

Joshua Lutz is an artist living and working in New York City. He received his undergraduate degree from Bard College and his masters from Bard College at the International Center of Photography. Joshua is the recipient of The Tierney Fellowship, Best Editorial awards from Photo District News and Communication Arts and also named one of PDN’s top 30 emerging photographers. His work has been featured in publications ranging from The New Yorker and Harper’s to The New York Times Magazine. He is currently on the Faculty at The International Center of Photography.

What is it about the Meadowlands that made you want to spend 10 years photographing the landscape and inhabitants, and do you think these reasons motivate other artists and writers to explore the area?
‘I honestly couldn’t begin to speculate why other artists and writers are drawn to the area. For me I think that I spent so long in the Meadowlands because I had such a hard time trying to resolve my relationship to this place. I first discovered it the same way most people do, driving through on my way to the airport. I think for most people the Meadowlands is just that, a place you pass through on the way to someplace else. For me it started simply from being completely blown away by the landscape. I was fascinated by the wetlands and how all of these amazing structures could exist so close to where I lived in Manhattan. It started out a fairly strict documentary project that adhered to my ideas as to what a document is. The more time I spent in the Meadowlands the more overwhelmed I became with ideas of representation of documentation. About half way through the project I stated to think about how I could move away from the specifics of the document and more towards thinking about how the Meadowlands could serve for a metaphor for other issues that I was struggling with’.

What was your process when working on this project? Were you more likely to go out to the Meadowlands and wander around until something caught your eye or did you have specific places and ideas in mind that you wanted to capture?
‘As you can imagine as I moved away from the document the process changed quite a bit. When I first started I would drive around until I found something that interested me. As I started to get to know the space a bit more I would scout out different places and take notes as to when I wanted to photograph it. I would have all these lists of places to shoot in overcast, places to shoot when the sun was setting or rising and so on. Towards the end of the 10 years my process became more akin to that as a writer where I would be at home thinking about different ideas and sketching out pictures with a pen and paper. I would then try and make create or stage photographs from these different sketches’.

Can you tell us a little about the editing process for the book?
‘The initial edit was pretty easy. You would think that after 10 years and only 50 images in a book it would be this arduous task. There were not thousands of good pictures to choose from. Over the years I was always editing, meaning after the first few years I only had a handful of images I was happy with. With each year a few more got added to the pile of winners. In many ways I knew the book was finished when I had enough work that I was happy with to fill out the story. The real difficulty for me was the order and flow of the book. I wanted it to feel like a photography book not a book of photographs’.

Did you ever spend a week or more in the Meadowlands or did you venture there more as a day trip?
‘I never spent a week in the Meadowlands. With no traffic I live about 10 minutes away so it was hard to justify not sleeping in my own bed’.

Are you working on any other project now that you can talk about?
‘I have been working on a bunch of long-term projects. I am not sure at this point which one will rise to the top to have a more resolved ending’.