Interview by Rita Lombardi

  

I met Robert at Fotofest in March (just before everything was shut down) and we hit it off right away. His work is playful and sincere, as he is. He works in a delightfully old school way with 5x7 and 8x10 film in his studio. His work ethic puts most people to shame, up and making pictures before some of us have had our coffee. 

Rita

How are you doing this morning?

Robert

I'm good, thanks.  Morning routine.  The dog wakes me up to feed her. I press coffee...she and I head for the workspace and plug into whatever is in progress. I've already mixed Dektol and fix, and stopped to look at Jupiter and Saturn. It's been a productive morning. 

Rita

How long have you lived there [Blackfork Creek in East Texas]? Your whole life?

Robert

  Not yet.  I was raised just out of town on my grandparents land.  As their kids married each couple got a lot.  It was 1/4 mile of cousins.  As a kid I put on rubber boots and went out among the bugs and turtles and snakes. Moved to town for third grade and became a city kid.  But Blackfork Creek followed me in. I’m just above the 6th fork of Blackfork Creek. If I walked downstream far enough I would be back at my grandparents.

Rita

It’s interesting to me that you work so close to home, like you said, everything’s in arm’s reach. Working mostly with things at hand. Or maybe you alternate between travel and working at home?

Robert

I love the West. The spaces.  The volume.  Not like home.  People ask me how I became a photographer: I was seduced and then betrayed by Georgia O’Keefe and Ansel Adams. When you start out you just don’t know what you’re looking at. When I started photography in ‘71 at the community college…[my teacher] was enamored with Ansel Adams.  I loved those Western photographs but you can’t make photographs of the granite walls in Smith County, Texas. There are no rocks in Smith County. No waterfalls, no alpine meadows.  First time in the West was a Yosemite  workshop.  Wrecked me. They invited me back as an assistant, then back as an assistant again. I worked with Ansel for the summer out at Carmel and kept Ted Orland's house and dog. Previous lives. 

 It's so difficult to see what's in front of your face.  As an adult, investigating, searching, learning to see a little bit.  I finally began to get through a tiny crack to where your true-er perception lives.  I started seeing some of what’s in front of my eye. It was a great relief!  Exciting!   It turns out ordinary stuff is very exotic.  Everything you need is within arm's reach.

Rita

Was it necessity or maturity, or a little bit of both that led you to that discovery?

Robert

Some of it was just growing up, the life process.  Coming into your own work. Nobody takes this advice but I feel that I ought to at least set it on the table: Do not look at other photographers’ work.  If it’s good it will seduce you into their vision. If it’s not any good it’s a waste of your time. Look at the subject matter you’re interested in.  Subject matter, YOUR subject matter, will show you the way a lot quicker.  Next question: what’s my subject matter? I guarantee it’s something you already feel comfortable with or familiar with.  Within arms reach.  Maybe you have to travel, but probably not -- the people I admired photographing in the West were photographing in their back yard. No matter where you are, feel at home.

You would think there would be easy and plain instructions by now, for flowering a human consciousness.  Instead we watch TV.

Rita

Let’s talk about Bestiary or Magic & Logic.

Robert

How about the Blackfork Bestiary first? In the summer of ‘74 Ansel went to France and I worked in Monterey that summer. Many epic adventures.  California and the West. They asked me to stay as assistant and I was so young and dumb I turned them down.  That was a fork in the road.  Back to the Blackfork to make landscapes that were made out of what was in front of my eyes.  I had faith that this sandy, verdant, tree-bound space had extraordinary images in it...that I just couldn't see.  I knew it was me, not a failure of grace by the land. Just needed to drop the scales from my eyes, stand differently, squint my eyes.  It was a work, but things began to pop.  I noticed the trees get all sapped up in the Spring, their flowers came out and they had this sexy social life. It kind of slapped me.  How long has THIS been going on?  I had an interest in people who lived in one place a long time, how it affects them. One of the ideas is that when a human culture lives in a place for a long time your language and gods resonate with the land. Land generates culture. This tree cycle was important to pay attention to.

I taped together dozens of USGS terrain maps of the county covering the studio wall, about 12’ high. I'd walk Caddoan village sites down the Blackfork, following the water.  The Caddoan bestiary starts as deep in the ground as anything could live and goes as high in the air as anything ever flies.  I was looking at the land, empty of those ancient people, but still full of these animals who had been their cultural guides and relations.  Cousins.  Snakes and bees, birds and bugs, Fox and moles.  Everyone doing their thing. So I got interested in these animals and once I got interested they started finding me. I was really hesitant to take an animal out of its ecosystem so for a while I was just stuck. I wanted to photograph these animals but I’m not a nature animal photographer. So when they curbed a part of the highway turtles started fell off the barrier and I would have to rescue them.   Or my possum photograph: my 90 year old neighbor called me up and said “Robert, there’s something wrong with my garbage can,”  I said, "I’ll be there in 30 seconds."  A possum had gotten trapped in her trash can.

Animals  in peril.  Racoons in the attic, bird in the duct-work, snake in the house.  Termites or bees moving their kingdoms.  Once I carried my daughter under a huge blooming wild pear and we stood silent until she could hear 10,000 bees working the blossoms. Whole tree was vibrating. When it registered her face changed.  I thought: that's how my face ought to look every time I find a miracle.

Rita

So how did you handle some of these animals? I’m thinking about that Possum picture and it looks a little scary.

Robert

Possums turn out to be pacifists. He was really a sweetheart. His next trick after gaping and hissing was to play dead.

Most animals I had for just a few minutes. My studio was close and I’d walk around to my studio and take their picture, maybe for the afternoon but then I would put them back where they were supposed to be.

The animals are like your cousin who lives in the same neighborhood. Even a pissed off Copperhead: we’re related, we live in the same place. I have respect for them, as individuals and personalities. They're cultural guides.  I want to be quick like a bird, dig like a mole, listen like a deer, be busy as a bee,  shed skin like a snake.  Cousins.  Kin.   Usually as long as you’re patient and you’re calm, they’re calm.

A friend of mine brought me an alligator and the alligator was just...cool. She was cool. I've kept up with her over the years. She's bigger, but still cool.

I know rehab people and the word is out. Once people know they bring you animals.  A friend's wife had 6 baby squirrels who thought she was their mother. My downstairs neighbors’ cat snagged a rat.  The telephone repairman finds a connection full of bats.

 As an artist, take heart.  Your subject matter is trying to find you as much as you’re trying to find it. Once you find it, there it is. Then you just go to work.

Rita

My son Max [6 yrs old] sees your scorpion picture and he has a question about it.

Max

How did you find a scorpion without getting stinged by it?

Robert

What an essential question, Max!  There are few stories where scorpions are the good guy.  You might ask your mom to read "The Scorpion and Frog".  I was stung as a child and it was an aching, throbbing, feverish experience.  A weird kind of deep pain. As a Scout camp counselor I learned to scoop up scorpions with cardboard and drop them into a glass jar.  This one lives in a pile of bricks. I herded him around with a twig. Very difficult guys.  Related to spiders.  Caddo natural science lists them at ground level, near your feet.  Be careful!

Rita

One of the things that is so interesting to me about these pictures is that you have gorgeous light, they’re large format [5x7], and then you’re using a used up toilet paper roll and an old rubber ball. I love those materials, the everydayness of those materials. Can you talk about your choice to use those materials instead of something majestic?

Robert

My prop table is a pile of splendid trash.  I'm constantly on the lookout.  For more trash. Cameras love texture and surface, (though I have yet to get a good photograph of styrofoam.)  If I see something the camera will love I throw it in my pile.  A bit instinctive to pick something that reflects the surface of the animal.  There's certainly a lot of that in this series.  Eye contact, hands, containers.  Kinfolks.

Rita

How did the Bestiary work become Magic and Logic?

Robert

Photographers have made still lifes from the first moment of invention of photography.  Everyone they knew that trained as an artist, made still lifes. But still life comes out of painting and drawing.  It's how you TEACH drawing.  The instructor puts a bone and an apple on the stand, everyone gathers round and away you go.  It doesn’t belong to photography. The camera didn’t have to learn to draw a line.  So what do cameras do that painters don’t do?  In general, it stops time.  So what still life can you make that is a photographic still life?  Well,  I want them not to be very still. So I balanced things, frozen and melted things, stopped moments, stacked moments.  Mine are more an event than an assemblage, so to speak. If I’m really just assembling things I’m really a sculptor and the assemblage is the art and the photograph just a copy.  The ideas that appear contain things never before seen in nature or culture.  That's what I am searching for.

Rita

Do you think it is just a copy? Yours seem so activated.

Robert

Well mine are activated because I activate them. Many of my still lifes can only be seen in the imagination until the negative comes out of the fixer.  Multiple exposures, quick exposure, flash with a long exposure inside it. I’m using camera techniques but it's very mental.  No painter would ever paint the things, the still life that I’m doing. I'm dragging still life out from under the painters and illustrators and schelping it over to this thing only a camera can do.

Same workflow- stuff within arms reach. Just like the Blackfork Bestiary.  Trash and toilet paper rolls.  Flowers.  Whatever blooms in the yard.  I call them kinetic still lifes.  When my wife Katie got ill I couldn't stand to be more than five minutes away so we moved our studios close.  That's when I really started concentrating on kinetic still life.  It was a miraculous thing.  I started having these ideas.  Out of the blue.  An idea for an image never seen before.  Tornadoes full of flowers or bones or dice.  Flaming mushrooms.  When an idea appeared I would write it down, sketch it.  Figure out how to make it happen with an 8X10 and film.  Lots of fun and excitement.  New ideas.  It's a mystery where they come from.  Magic & Logic.

 

I’m trying to make beautiful images of something nobody’s seen before that’ll stop them...delight them actually. I want people to look at these photographs and go, “What a graceful, amazing thing I’m looking at."  Bootstrap people to new places in their imagination.

The first thing people ask is, “How did you do that?” and that’s the boring part because it’s just camera tricks. Rarely do I tell them.  I'd rather talk about where new ideas pop from.  Let the mystery prevail. 

Rita

The pictures are so magical. To people who don’t know how the camera works, especially. Or even to people who do know, there’s still this childlike delight in the stuff that is happening.

How do you know when you’re finished with something? When do you start something new? Or is it all organic.

Robert

I'm enamored with new stupid ideas.  I want to roll on them like a dog.   It signals that something wonderful is near.  The workflow starts and the picture tells me things I didn’t know. Of course I don’t know until the 8x10 negative comes out of the fix and then its, “Oh I should have done this or this.”  And I’m seven bucks down the road already.

I’m working daily. Pushing piles.  Got a rusty tin can with feathers stuck on it. Feathers from under a bird feeder. Birds molt as they nest so in Spring you get all kinds of feathers.  Tiny feathers on Cindy’s hand [Robert’s wife] and also on this dark tin dented up can. 

Cicada wings. Love Cicadas, love the Cicada cycle.  Sexed-up Cicadas singing in the trees.  One of my favorite bugs out of the bestiary.  Dog walking I find dead cicadas and pick them up because I couldn’t stand the fire ants cutting them up and eating them.  Beautiful death. Turns out I really love their wings. So I put together a wing photograph and sure enough I had to photograph it three times. Today that one’s coming out. The tin can is the first time so I’ll probably have to go back and photograph it a few more times. We’ll see.  Cindy got a little impatient.  I did have 100 dead Cicadas in a ziplock in the refrigerator.  Hard to know which drawer to put them in.

Rita

Your process sounds very intuitive.

Robert

 Mine is...to me, because I am in it.  But how to get to that place?  If offering advice I would say the most important thing is NOT other photographers and NOT what other people are doing but finding your subject matter. It’s probably something close, it’s probably something you already know and you just aren’t looking at it hard enough. Or some relationship you haven’t quite explored or paid enough attention to. But it’s right there in the same ecosystem you’re living in. Maybe you’ve got to go to Tibet or somewhere else but it could be you’re just wasting your time and it’s in the lint in your pocket. That close.  Mixed with loose change. 

Max

Just to know, if you want to find salamanders, look under a log. 

 

Robert

So true.  Just look.  Salamanders, (and everything else), are right there.

Rita

What are some things you are reading/listening to/looking at right now? Any or all! or none!

Robert

If books were calories I'd be Jabba the Hutt.   Might be reading anything or several things, at any time.  I borrow, give away, re-buy, loan, re-read. The approach is to rip through a tome, then go back and explore the parts I want to consider deeper.  Multiple books at once.  Poor Cindy knew I read but she wasn't really prepared for a yard of books standing up along the baseboard on my side of the bed. 

 

Watching the skies and planets.  If you haven't seen the Rings of Saturn for yourself, well...it's life-changing.  Walking down three times a day to look at the neighbors giant Sunflowers.  Walked down to see them in Moonlight last night.

 

The last thing I Amazoned was Marc Johns "The Daily Artist."  I've passed out 20+ so far.  To kids.  (I'm the old guy on the block who will give your kid a book I guess.)  Hokusai, "One Hundred Views of Mt Fuji."  It was mentioned in "Foursome" about the Stieglitz, Strand, Rebecca Salisbury, Georgia O'Keefe group, so I want to have a look. Re-read a couple about Man Ray and Lee Miller.  Two books about Karl Blossfield after Anne Tucker asked me if I was familiar with his work.  A book about spiritual disciples to further understand prayer and fasting.  Two Kurt Schlichters for fun.  Add a "Hikers Guide to Cedar Mesa." as I search for sipapus.  Three books of Harry Callahan's work.  Earlier I got interested in Newhall and Szarkowski's photos they made for themselves.  Explored that.  Two novels made into film: "Death Wish" and "the Getaway."  "Moonwalking with Einstein."  Patti Smith's  "Just Kids" about she and Mapplethorpe.  I think I will order it...right...now.