INTERVIEW: JONATHAN EBY

When I decided to do interviews for this blog, the first person I thought of was Jonathan.  After all, I've known him my entire life - literally.  As my older brother, he's responsible, whether directly or indirectly, for getting me into most of the things that interest me now.  His photography is an interesting blend of experimentation and more traditional composition, and he always manages to find some beauty in the mundane and spectacular alike.  You can see more of his work on his photo stream,  Stay Raw.

First off, I have to ask - film or digital?

I don't think I believe in one over the other when it comes to film or digital. With the immediacy of digital, and the fact that your shot documents itself with the EXIF data, I find that I can learn and progress a lot faster than with film.  Film is more sacred somehow. I feel like if I'm going to burn a frame of film, I'd better be pretty certain I'm going to get the shot I'm going for.

Since I picked up a medium format camera, I've been getting more heavily into film photography, and I feel that there's things that we're definitely losing as digital grows. Mainly, I feel that we're losing some creative control of the medium we're shooting. With digital, your shots are going to come out as crisp & pristine as the engineers at Canon or Nikon or whoever have made your sensor.  If you want something with a subtly different look to it, you don't really have the option of loading up a roll of super grainy film into your DSLR. You can always use Photoshop or something to filter your image and make it look as if it was shot on some particularly unique film, but my feelings on image editing, briefly summed up, are that if you're doing any more than slightly tweaking the levels, and *maybe* cropping the image, you missed the shot. And if your workflow is Shoot->Import->Heavily Edit every time, then you're a straight-up hack.

So, after all that, I don't believe in Film OR Digital, I believe in Film AND Digital.

What set-ups are you currently using/experimenting with?

My backpack is currently filled to bursting with: Canon Rebel XTi (actually a Kiss Digital X - the Japanese name for the Rebel XTi. I bought it grey-market, and didn't really save myself any money. Luckily I haven't had any problems with it) with the following gear for it: LensBaby Muse with Double Glass Optics and Plastic Optics, Canon 18-55mm 'kit lens', Canon 'Nifty Fifty' 50mm lens, flakey Canon 28-90mm lens that occasionally makes my camera spit out scary error messages, Zykkor .42x fisheye adapter for the 18-55, old Vivitar 285HV flash + ghetto eBay remote trigger & receiver, and a handy little GPS receiver for geo-tagging photos which I barely ever remember to use.  My favourite components lately for the digital setup are the LensBaby and the 50mm. The 50mm because it's the best I've got for low-light, and the LensBaby just because it's a really different way to shoot.

On the film side of things: Bronica ETRSi, two 120 backs, 150mm lens, 50mm lens, AE-II metered prism viewfinder, Waist Level viewfinder, and a Flashmate L-308S light meter. There's also an ancient little Kodak Brownie camera floating around the house that I've been wanting to try my hand with, and a while ago I was reading about some people taking photos with cameras made from scanners. The scanner pics are pretty wild. It's like inverse motion blur. Things that are moving show up fairly defined and identifiable, and static objects like buildings and stuff are just unidentifiable blobs of colour. 

It seems to me that there are two main camps in photography - I could be totally wrong about that - on one side, you have photographers who approach it as a carefully calculated art, and on the other photographers who view it more as a means of documenting fleeting moments with a real sense of candidness and immediacy. Where do you lie in the spectrum?

For the most part, I'm probably pretty deep on the 'fleeting moments' side of that spectrum. Having learned photography largely by shooting you learning to ride a skateboard, I'm typically all about catching that exact instant where things look how I want them to in order to make that shot.

Sometimes though, a lot of calculation goes into that. I might be trying to catch that perfect instant in a trick, but depending on if I'm going for a crisp shot or something with a little motion blur to it, I'm juggling shutter speed & aperture as well, and making a very calculated attempt at catching that fleeting instant.

If I'm shooting skateboarding, particularly if it's a gathering of more than just 2 or 3 people, I usually try to sneak in one or two candid 'lifestyle' shots. Sometimes I catch something I really like, for example that shot I got a while ago of Isaac Watamaniuk holding a busted board over his head. Typically for the candid stuff though I kinda feel like I have to at least know the person, and most of the time actually be friends with them before I take candid shots of them. It's just a personal boundary thing I have, but like... if you're out on a board doing something cool, or playing on stage or whatever, OK, you're in the public eye and if I can get a good picture of you I will. If you're just standing around chilling with friends, setting up your board, tuning your guitar... those kinda more personal 'nobody is watching me do this, why would they?' moments... those are the ones that I think make really good candid shots, and that I'm typically least comfortable shooting.

What's your favourite subject matter to shoot?

Favourite subject matter... that's a tough one. I think that's a moving target with me. I like shooting a lot of action-oriented stuff, but recently I've gotten pretty into the whole urban decay thing. Ruined buildings, rusted out vehicles, old long-forgotten signs outside of buildings that are no longer there, that dirty needle we found downtown. I don't typically seek that stuff out much, but it's a real treat for me when I get to shoot it. Not so much for the dirty needle I suppose.

A lot of your photography seems to focus on communities that subvert, or at least challenge, the status quo - skateboarding, graffiti, punk rock and electronic music. What is it about these cultures and scenes that attracts your attention?

In part, I like shooting those things because culturally they're new growth. The electronic music thing is a great example, because that concert that I recently shot is from a scene that's just barely starting to get a cultural foothold and they're just so crazily innovative. I really didn't know what to expect going in there that night. I'd listened to and enjoyed some of the music, but was having a hard time visualizing what someone playing a set using just a Gameboy was going to look like. 

Another part of it is that even if I considered the status quo to be a good thing, I feel that it's important to question it. Questioning, "Why do we do things this way? Why is A accepted, but not B?" about everything is a big part of how I feel we move forward culturally. I like seeing things grow. I feel like a big contribution I can make, across multiple scenes, is documenting and showing that "Hey, these people who aren't rock stars, or professional skateboarders, or commissioned artists, or legally allowed to be doing their thing in this space right now are absolutely killing it!". I might not know the first thing about how you'd produce fuzzy, glitchy techno/punk-rock fusion with an old GameBoy, but I can get pictures of the people who do, and ideally help spread the word through my photography.

Does your approach vary depending on subject matter?

Yeah, it definitely does. Graffiti is a good example because it addresses both of my main approaches to getting pictures. If I'm shooting people painting their pieces, I hate posed shots.  I like to stay out of the way and just catch them doing their thing as they would naturally do it. That usually means no flash if I can avoid it and taking the shots as I get the opportunity to take them. After the painting is done, if I'm going back to get shots of finished pieces, it's a whole other world. That's when I'll bring out my tripod, try to play with the lighting so it's exactly how I want it and do little tricks to try to pull the brightest colours or deepest black & whites out of the piece that I can. There's a range of ways I shoot, but it's usually in between those two extremes for me.

Does your interest in a certain photo begin with an aesthetic goal that you're trying to realize or does the subject matter influence or determine the aesthetics of the photo?

I don't frequently plan out shots in advance so I think that most of the time it's the subject matter that determines the initial aesthetics. Once I get my camera out though, especially if I'm shooting digital at the time, I might take a picture and then after thinking about it for a second or taking a look on the camera to see how it looks, decide I can get a shot that I'm happier with if I slow down the shutter, or crank open the aperture, or shoot with a different lens, or add a light source somewhere. A friend once told me she loves watching me shoot, and for a minute I was confused about what would be interesting about that process to someone who isn't me. She’s into photography as well, so by watching me she could see the gears turning and see my process in action. Its usually a fairly evolutionary process with me. I'll start with one thing, then build upon that, and build upon that result, and so on.

Some of my favourite of your work is the more abstract stuff. How much of that is intentional and how much of it is serendipitous experimentation?

Straight up, sometimes my abstract stuff is just a complete accident that I decide is worth hanging onto. One of my favourite abstract skateboarding photos I've got is my "Raging sea of concrete" photo of you (http://www.flickr.com/photos/hqas/522561687/). I took that a while ago, but I'm pretty sure I was going for something entirely different and just happened to screw things up in a way that worked out. And then there's the roll of film that I forgot to properly heat up my chemicals for before I developed, so the colours came out all crazy. Another happy accident. There's other times though that I'll just find a texture or pattern that I really like, and I'll spend a whole lot of time tweaking the lighting, perfecting the angle and getting the abstract thing looking just how I want it to. Same goes for some of my more abstract long-exposed shots.

Where do you see the role of older photographic technology such as polaroids, film in general, and physical prints of photos in the digital age?

I've seen a resurgence of interest in Polaroid happening lately, and while it's not something I have a problem with, I personally don't get it. Even back in my strictly film days polaroids were never my thing though, so it could just be that the concept of lower quality, instant prints is lost on me. Having said that, I've had the chance to play around with one of Polaroid's new(ish) PoGo printers and found that to be really really cool. You just hook your digital camera up to the printer via USB, choose the pic you want, hit the Print button on your camera, and out comes an instant 2"x3" print with a peel-n-stick back. I want to go around to skate spots with one of those and at the end of the night print off the coolest photo and stick it somewhere easily seen at the spot. Skateboarding, photography, and sticker-graffiti all rolled into one!

I think that prints definitely still have a place, but the print is not necessarily the overall objective anymore. So much stuff only needs to exist digitally these days. A photo that someone may have framed and put on their desk at work now serves the same role by being the desktop background on their computer. Sharing photos from an event with friends and family doesn't have to mean bringing everyone over to flip through a photo album together when you can just point the people you want to share it with to a website and allow them to go through it on their own time, at their own pace. I think where the print comes in now, at least in my world, is for the more "special" photos. I've given prints of some of my work as gifts for friends, which sounds a little cheesy and self-absorbed when I say it, but in the cases where that has happened it's because the friends I was giving the prints to had a very particular shot of mine that they felt strongly about for whatever reason. I recently browsed through a set of photos of old photo enlargers. The project was about documenting that sort of equipment now because it's really falling into disuse. We're at a point now where instead of having a dedicated darkroom and big expensive equipment with which to make prints, I have a small night-stand with my photo printer on it and between that and my laptop, I'm all set. I think physical prints are still important, possibly even more important now because most photos don't get printed so it's kindof a big deal when a photo gets as far as becoming a print. I'm glad that not everyone has to shoot film these days. For people who just want to take snapshots with a point & shoot, and maybe print some of them later, I don't think film was ever really a good solution. And that's why Polaroid got big in the pre-digital days. The downside to that is for people who want or need the extended options that film gives them (such as speed, grain, appearance), film now has a severely reduced market and is more of a pain to get a hold of, get processed, or get chemicals and equipment for processing yourself. Until I can get a brand new medium format digital camera with a big range of ISOs for substantially less than the cost of a brand new Smart Car, I think film still has an important, though niche, role to play.

Any particular photographers, artists, or art forms that have influenced your approach to photography?

I don't by any means intend to say that I don't have many influences, because I have literally too many to list, but I'm not great with names, particularly when it comes to this sort of thing. I think before anyone else, I've gotta say our parents were a big influence. Not necessarily the style or subject matter of their photography, but just the very fact that they let me monkey around with their gear when I was really probably too young to be trusted with it. As far as other people I can list by name, I'm consistently blown away by Will Jivcoff's skate photography. His night shots make me want to develop a better relationship with my flash. After that it gets a little fuzzy. Starting out, I tried to take a lot of pointers from various photographers in skate mags; primarily the grittiness of the photographers who were frequently in Big Brother and the artistic qualities from TransWorld's photographers. I don't have any specific famous photographers whose stuff I try to keep up on, and really I draw influence from just about everywhere. Anything from the focal point of a shot in a movie, a creative angle in a frame of a comic book, random photos from people I don't know on Flickr, song lyrics, the way something is framed when I look out a window... it's really pretty all over the place. 

In terms of other art forms music, in particular punk rock, has had a big influence on me, which has had an indirect influence on how I shoot photos. Growing up listening to a bunch of loud, anti-establishment punk rock has really instilled a DIY ethic in me, which results in me figuring out ways to build my own accessories like aperture filters and flash snoots, as well as giving me a strong sense that, as discussed earlier, what the status quo considers to be good shouldn't necessarily have any bearing on what I consider to be good, and that sometimes raw, unpolished, imperfection is the best way to show something. Hence my Flickr screen name: StayRAW. Graffiti has had a more direct influence on my photography, which I think is part of why I like shooting it so much. Graffiti has a lot of elements that I try to incorporate into my photos: Interesting locations and angles, creative representation of everyday things (graffiti at it's core is written words, no matter how abstracted and difficult to read they may be), and another strong DIY ethic. In their purest forms, both graffiti and punk rock ignore established rules and expectations in favour of spreading their message, and that's another thing I try to push for. Who cares if the end result is what's traditionally considered to be good composition if the photo speaks to someone and maybe shows them part of their city that they've walked past a dozen times before without noticing?