 How's it, how's it, guys? Dan Winters. Oh, if you don't know him, he is one of the most amazing photographers working today. I recently got a chance to spend an hour talking with him about his long and varied career, and I was left feeling inspired and galvanized. And I hope this chat will do the same for you in your own photography. So here we have, we've got Dan Winters, who is just one of my, he's just like an all-time favorite photographer. And one of the things I particularly enjoy about Dan is that he is not only a talented visionary, but also he has a depth and a knowledge and a passion for photography, which I think is so vital to, you know, helping us sort of grow as photographers, you know, we get a chance to listen to their thoughts, to their, you know, to their ideas and it can only inspire us. And at the beginning of the year, I released a video that talked about why, that coming back to our center, coming back to the why are we motivated to take photographs. And this seems like an apt time to say to Dan is like, what initially drove you or beckoned you to pick up a camera and take photographs? I think, well, there was multiple experiences that have kind of isolated and identified as kind of seminal moments for myself with regards to photography. And one of them was, I was nine years old and I was at my friend Kenny's house and his dad was a US Navy photographer during the Vietnam War. And they had a dark room and that smell of glacial acidic acid just kind of permeated that wing of their house. And he took me into the dark room with my friend. And he showed us how to make a print. And it's the first time I saw the image come up and there was this magical space. And after that, I would go down there when he was printing or if I were down there hanging out with Kenny, we would, I would always make a point of going in the dark room with, with him to have that experience. But I think my first, kind of passion was filmmaking. And I had an eight millimeter movie camera that I got from my grandfather. And I would make these kind of war epics with my friends, you know, dress up in, in military clothing and do explosions with, you know, cut off match heads and light them on fire and just really kind of like rudimentary special effects stuff. And then I started building miniatures so that, you know, I'd build like a German bunker so that we could blow it up and, you know, tie a bunch of firecrackers together and blow it up. Just super, you know, lo-fi. But one of the problems I had is on one occasion, I burned a bunch of tank models that I'd built. And we built a roadway with like trees on the side of the roadway and a bunch of tanks and trucks. And we put model glue on them and lit them on fire. And then I kind of flew the camera over it, almost like a drone shot, you know. And I could not wait to get it back from the pharmacy, which is where I took the film tablet processed. And it was absolutely unviewably bad. The exposure was so far off. Yeah. And so I thought, wow, I really am blowing it quite often with these exposures. So I should learn about it. So I got a cheap Dawson light meter that I found and started, I got a Canon FT, which is a kind of like late 60s or at least 70s camera, and started shooting stills. And then my parents, you know, my dad was a welder and my mom worked at a bank. And the one thing I would say both of them did is they fostered all of my interests. You know, like if I expressed interest in something, they would do anything they could to sort of help foster that. So we built a darkroom and, you know, I would, I would process my film and make prints. So I used to joke that the reason, I like the darkroom so much that the reason I would shoot pictures was so I had something to print, which is kind of true at one point where I was just so excited about getting in there and like making the print. But at some point, you know, the still image started to speak to me more than the moving image. And, you know, there, I've thought about that quite a bit and I've written about the idea that, you know, we have these images that are cemented in our mind, which is a uniquely still photograph experience. I'd give you a couple of examples would be Joe Rosenthal's photograph of the flag raising at Iwo Jima that exists as a 35 millimeter cut of chrome film and also as a still photograph. And when you watch the film, it's pretty uneventful, to be honest with you, but that still photograph really resonates in the same way that my friend Nick Utt's photograph of the girl running from the village having been napalmed. There's film footage of that as well, color film footage of that moment. You can see Nick in the film. And then Eddie Adams' photograph of the street execution in Vietnam, same thing, film footage of that. You actually see Eddie go in and shoot this still. But what resonated in terms of, you know, public opinion in Vietnam and in the Second World War with regards to the Rosenthal image was those cemented galvanized moments are the ones that really spoke. And I started to feel that with stills. I started to feel like I've extracted something from a fluid experience that speaks to the experience, but also sort of lives on its own. And I think that's kind of the moment. So that would have been like in high school, where I did less film stuff and more still photography. And it kind of just, you know, there are a bunch of reasons. One another reason I've spoken about, you know, I shoot a lot for National Geographic and we got National Geographic and we got Encyclopedia Britannica. And, you know, I would pour over those images. And at the time, even I thought I would rather be the guy who's actually seeing this than myself who's viewing it in print, you know, I want to be the guy. And that Geo has a saying, which is kind of an amazing saying that we use a lot. And that is how are our viewers going to take the journey if we don't take it first, which I kind of love that saying. And I think about that a lot when I'm shooting for them, you know, like, I'm doing the work to present this to a very, very large, you know, almost a billion is what our kind of collected following is now. So, and that's not in print as much as it is in all the forms of distribution. But yeah, so that's a kind of a long answer to a very sustained question. Yeah, but it's interesting because it sort of leads neatly on to, you know, this idea about the fact that you are able to verbalize, you know, why you take photographs. And when you hear somebody talk and are able to express themselves about, you know, their imagery and how it sort of feels, that is, would you say it's fair to say that's a benefit of having studied these things at a tertiary level, that you are able now to put into words a feeling that you have the connection that you have with an image. I think that, you know, I was talking to someone recently and I had to write a piece for an exhibition that I had work in that was from one of my mentors of still photography, John Gray. There was a collective exhibition of his former students and the one thing I feel like I learned from him was art is not a race and there is no finish line. Because I think that we have a tendency to expect a certain outcome from our actions rather than just allow it to be like fluid. And I think with regards to studying and education and, you know, collecting information and knowledge, you know, that's something I actively do to this day. You know, I absolutely digest to that kind of content, but to speak to the point of the still image having more power or having a great deal of power and a great deal of draw, I think the challenge today is to get people to slow down enough to actually try to digest it. You know, it's just scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. And then, you know, TikTok's like a huge thing. And I feel like the idea of like a very sophisticated image or sophisticated image making is lost on a lot of people because they're so, you know, barraged by whatever comes through their social media, their expectation of an image, it becomes more about the content than it does the context of the image and the skill of image making. It's more about like, oh, there's a picture of a guy in a dog. You know, it's then you scroll. It could be one of the most amazing photographs of guy in a dog ever, but it's not really considered because I think all the consumption is taking place at such a high speed, a high rate of speed. Yeah. But that sort of leads us into this idea that, you know, I have a tertiary background of photography and you have, you know, obviously a tertiary education in, you know, in film and what have you. And both give, they've given us the ability to spend some time being, a, introduced to the history of the medium, but also having time to think about and to digest, as you said, about images and really get into them. And a lot of photographers today, especially people who are, you know, coming into or back into photography, when they are, you know, retired or finding themselves, they have more time to vote to something they enjoyed as younger, don't have that benefit. And they're turning to the internet to find, you know, find inspiration, find education. And how would you suggest that people who are coming back to photography can sort of somewhat replicate this introduction to the medium that you've sort of gained throughout your life, because obviously you're a big fan of people who have come before us and who have influenced the way that we take photographs, that really how do you, how would you get over this hump of not having to go to art school for three, five years and at least touch into that? As photographers, you know, we're dependent on someone or something to train our camera on. And I think one of the issues that people have when they get started is what to photograph, right? So the sort of default is sunsets and flowers and things like that, things that are pleasing to the eye. And we hope that as we explore the medium deeper, you know, we start to make images that are more substance that I think anybody that's coming back to photography should simultaneously be educating themselves about photography. And, you know, as kind of corny as it might sound, you know, you Wikipedia photography, which I've done out of curiosity, and it's actually pretty full of information, you know, and it's a good place to start. And you can, you can sort of like, you know, Wikipedia I look at is like a family tree, right? You know, the more blue lines you click on the deeper your dig. And, you know, I feel like people can get a really sort of like solid sense of the way people worked prior to that. And then specifically, if they start exploring those individuals, but, you know, to be honest with you, you know, if you go to a good bookstore and just spend hours there looking at photo books, you know, you don't even need to buy them necessarily, maybe you walk out with one after 20 or 30. But, you know, just to get an idea of like, wow, this person walked down this path, this person walked on this path. And I'm not suggesting like, you know, to emulate or to copy, but even emulating and copying, I mean, if you can emulate or copy, Cardi Bresson, good for you, you know, that's very difficult stuff. So I think that's probably the would, I would recommend, I mean, I speak at universities and, you know, probably to the chagrin of the instructors, you know, people ask me like, you know, do you recommend art school? And I say, I say if you're self motivated, no, spend $30,000 on books and equipment and go to your thing. And if you're not self motivated, yeah, art school is probably a good place for you. It depends on the way we learn as well. You know, we all learn differently. I think it's really important. I mean, it's never been easier to teach yourself lighting. Now that we have in feedback, you know, and it's inexpensive. I mean, even when I was kind of in college, doing stuff with strobes, you know, it was a, first of all, I had a separate Polaroid, you know, a 195 Polaroid separate from my camera. Yeah. And then it was expensive. It was almost prohibitively expensive. And it was probably less than a buck a sheet. And back then it was probably 50 cents a sheet or something. Yeah. But, you know, it's never been easier to teach ourselves. I mean, the one thing I will say about, you know, I get asked this question a lot about digital, you know, and the idea that, oh, everybody's a photographer and digital's made it easy for everybody to be a photographer. I mean, in my opinion, digital has allowed people to make pictures that are properly exposed and in focus. Like that's what you get when you use a digital camera. After that, it's image making, you know, that camera is in all its glory is not going to be able to make a compelling image on its own, you know. And I think that, you know, that skill or that skill set of being able to go out and extract from an experience, which is essentially what we're doing, right? We're extracting an image, I think on road to seeing on the back of it, I wrote, I think I wrote something like I find solace in the knowledge that millions of potential masterpieces occur every second and go unfotographed because they're all out there happening right now. Masterpieces are happening right now. See, another one just happened, another one, you know, but they're not being recorded, right? So the idea is we need to go out there and try to extract those. And, you know, in your career as a photographer, if you can make one, honestly, if you can make one image that is relevant in the long history and tradition of photography, I mean, that's, you're doing pretty well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Very elusive, you know, those those kinds of pictures are incredibly elusive, you know, you can get close to them sometimes. But to really nail it is is really, really, really difficult, you know. You know, who are the photographers, you know, that are the people who in 20, 30, 40 years time will be referred to as the grades. And obviously, this is also tricky because you have to look at a person's body of work. But who do you feel are photographers up and coming photographers who have the potential to expand on what is that they're doing to to kind of start making their own stories, their own pantheons, if you will. Because, you know, there has to be a change. We can't always just refer back to the pens and the avidans and the, you know, the westerns. Right. Who are these new people? I'm just looking one guy who I really like. Just give me two seconds. I can't remember his last name. So I'll put you on the spot now. There's a guy that works through the New York Times, Fairmount, Philip something, Philip Montgomery, I think. Philip Montgomery, yeah. I've seen, I've seen sporadic work, but I believe that's the same. But I also, he did a book with aperture on sort of like, I can't remember what it was on and I looked at it and I was pretty blown away by it. It was really beautiful, black and white, really raw, really great work. And I don't know anything about him at all. I just have seen the work. I tend, I tend to, I don't really know, you know, I, for whatever reason, like it's like music. I mean, you know, we get in, we get in, I just had this conversation about someone about Harry Styles, this 19 year old friend of mine. And she was listening to Harry Styles and I'm like, okay, dazzle me, like play me the best Harry Styles song. But she starts playing the song and then she's like, wait, wait, not this one. Wait, wait, not this one. And realizing like she wasn't going to dazzle me with her hair. And it's not a, it's not a judgment on Harry Styles. If I have like, you know, if I've listened to John Coltrane my whole life and Miles Davis and Led Zeppelin and like, I go like, this is like nothing compared to this stuff. There's nothing compared to the Stones. There's nothing compared to so many bands. And so it's like, she explained it in a really interesting way though. She said, I want to be a fan of someone who's making music now so that I can like be with them kind of on their journey. To the whole, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I thought that was really, she loves Lana Del Rey who actually loves Lana Del Rey as well. But she said that about Lana Del Rey that she wanted to be a fan of someone, you know, like, yeah, okay, I can be a fan of the Beatles, which I'm a huge fan of Beatles. But, you know, when I was actually a kid, I was a fan of Beatles before they broke up, you know, in 1970, because my aunt was really into the Beatles and I would listen to them with her. But I understand what she's saying because a lot of the music I listened to now either came before me or during my time, but there's still a lot of stuff that's, you know, being made. So I'm not really sure about photography. Like I haven't, to be honest with you, I don't really actively like seek anything out. Stuff comes to me when it comes to me. There's a Mexican photographer who I really love who's still working. I have a few of his books and I can't remember his name either. I can, I'm going to, can I run away for two seconds? You can run away for two seconds. I just wanted to grab the book real quick. I want to tell you he's really special. All right. I couldn't find it. I have over a I have over a thousand books out there. It's like out of control. And I just didn't want to, I would be able to find it, but I didn't want to spend the time. But I just found another one of his books at the Strand in New York that was gravure printed on gravure. It's really beautiful. Yeah. And, you know, he's, he's a Garcella interview day is someone I love who's working now that I think, you know, she's older as well. And she's certainly, you know, gonna sort of in, especially in considering the genre she covers, but you know, like both of them are covering Mexico. He's covering Mexico City for the most part. And he's done a couple of like really amazing books on Mexico City. He also did a really kind of amazing, very, very heavy, very thick tome on, I wish I could remember his name, on Mexican portraits that is really kind of an amazing journey through, through, so I feel a responsibility real quick. Let's see. Sorry about this. It's okay. I'm sorry. It's always tricky when somebody says, what are the, who are the people you enjoy the most? And you're like, I've totally forgotten their name. Yeah. Well, and then you feel like you feel it's awful because it's like, if you like them so much, you should remember. Yeah. So he's got, he's got a lot of name though. I will say that. His name is, it's a big name. It's a lot of, it's okay. Yeah. Because my Spanish is appalling. I can do Dosekis and that's about it. That's funny. Today's, today is Day of the Dead. Yes. Yeah. Oh, God, you reminded me. It's my, it's one of my best friend's birthdays today. Shit. Okay. I did a cool Day of the Dead posting. Yeah. The other day. Okay. So his name is, I found it, I found Mexican portraits anyway. His name is Pablo Ortiz Monosterio. Pablo Ortiz Monosterio. And he's shooting now. And he's shooting in Mexico. And this Mexican portraits book is stunning. It's Aputure published it. And it's a collection of like the history of portraiture in Mexico. It's not his work. And it's just this incredible collection of, you know, all just all kinds of stuff, really special. And then his work, his individual work, you know, and I discovered him probably within the last maybe, well, it's not true actually, because he did a book with Twin Palms several years ago that I bought because I just loved the book. And then I just found that gravure book at the Strand. And then I started looking into him and I found this Mexican portraits book that I bought. But it's really special. And, you know, of course, yeah, all the stuff, I think Cadelka, he's still working, you know, he's making incredible work. And, God, there's just, you know, so many, I can't even, you're putting me on the spot. It's interesting, because, you know, people sort of said to me, like, who are the people from today? You know, who are these people? And, and you have to sort of say, well, look, we don't know, really, because they haven't gone through their whole career. You know, there may be somebody who's doing fantastic work, and then just produces like one monograph or, you know, works for like five years, and then never does anything again. And, and that kind of feels like it's tricky to make a judgment. Whereas obviously with people in the past, their careers have, you know, you mentioned at the beginning earlier, that there is no end game, you can't win photography, you can't win art. But you can create a body of work that people can then look back and say, okay, that's, that's a solid body of work. I get it. You know, as I had somebody yesterday ask me about William Eggleston and say, well, look, what's what's the deal there? You know, and individually, some of those pictures are like, okay, whatever. But as a whole body of work, it begins to make a bit more sense. And, and, and you mentioned aperture as well. And, and I have a compendium of the aperture mine of white years. So he's got he's got articles with with Ansel Adams and all that sort of stuff. And, and I wonder if we're not missing something today, because there aren't, well, there doesn't seem to be, let's say, say voices from people who have, who have a knowledge about photography, who are imparting their opinions, whether right, right, as opposed to just selling presets and making things. And, and I mean, what's your thoughts about that? Because you, one of the reasons why I like your work is that a the work speaks to me and I find it visually intriguing. But you also, you were eloquent about the art form, about the process about why you photograph. I think if we talk about the days of like minor whites and Aaron Siskind and Weston and Callahan, you know, even Stieglitz, I mean, you know, Ansel Adams went and visited Stieglitz at the 231 galleries and made a portrait of them. And early on, I think the community is a lot larger. You know, I talked to, I did an interview, I interviewed Eggleston at one point and he talked about, you know, the community with Dianne and, which I always said Dianne, Arpis, but it's he said it was Dianne. And, and, you know, Meyer Witz and Avidon and it was like a small group of people that were really focused on, you know, and then there guys that were outliers a little bit like Saul Leiter was, you know, not a part of that discussion. And I, I feel like to a degree, you know, there was this moment where Sarkowski took over as curator of photography at MoMA that he gave, you know, he gave Eggleston the Eggleston's guide show that was roundly like pounded into the ground. It was reviewed as like the worst show of the year and etc, etc. Because prior to that, you know, what they were showing is like large format black and white landscapes, etc. You know, Charles Schiehler and, you know, Ansel Adams, obviously, and Steichen was the curator at that time. So it was stuff that aligned with his sensibility much more. And Sarkowski was kind of more like forward thinking, you know, he gave Dianne her show and he gave Eggleston that show. But I think community is, is, you know, photographers work autonomously, you know, we're not like social beings really. I mean, I'm very social, but I don't hang out nor do I really know that many photographers. I mean, I know a lot just knowing I'm just from over the years, you know, those that are my peers that I've met at, you know, certain functions or awards or whatever. But, but no, no, different photographers. No, I know way more designers and art directors than I do photographers. But I think the sense of community, you know, I think the sense of support, you know, like I asked Eggleston about that show, for example, that Sarkowski kind of mounted. And I said, you know, this is a part of the interview. But I said, you know, that show was reviewed as the worst show of the year. How did you feel about that? And he said, I had my, I didn't let it bother me. I had my friends and supporters. And so, you know, when we have that and we're working, you know, if we think about, you know, Weston kind of transitioning from pictorial work into what they called straight photography, and, and kind of coming up with F64, you know, that group with, you know, imaging Cunningham and Ansel Adams and Weston. And there's a group of photographers that we're trying to think of there are some women too. It's funny you've brought up the thing about, you know, most photographers in the history of photographers were kind of like white males, but I could think of so many insanely talented women photographers, you know, from Tina Medotti, Julie Margaret Cameron, Tina Medotti, and then getting into Margaret Brooke White and Dorothea Lange, and, you know, Annie and Mary Ellen Mark. So, you know, there's, there's always been like Maverick women photographers in my opinion, you know, like Medotti to me is like a really understated, but I brought up the saw lighter thing to make a point and that is that it was kind of working outside of that circle. And he was a editorial photographer. And I know that almost all the photographers I named from West, from Weston to Walker Evans, to Ansel Adams, to Cardio Brisson, you know, we're all shooting Rosenthal, we're all shooting for magazines as well. And that was kind of the idea with magazines for me is always been like, how much of myself can I get away with, you know, and the answer to that is, I started at a great time in magazines, I started in the 80s and late 80s. And the expectation was that there was authorship. And that was a really great time because prior to that, and then I worked for an afternoon geographic now a lot. And there's an expectation and historically geographic had the geographic school of photography. And this stuff looked like geographic, he could almost insert caption or insert. There were guys that stood out for sure. I don't diminish them like, you know, Abel and Alex Webb. And, you know, there were guys that really like stood out David Allen Harvey. But, you know, they called it the geographic school. And in the 80s and magazines in New York, anyway, you know, the expectation was that it was very personalized work. So I started at a great time. And I would say there's still that expectation. But I think that, you know, we got away from like the S square school of photography or the GQ school of photography. And we got more into sort of like the individual voice. And I think like Rolling Stone, Fred Woodward at Rolling Stone was largely responsible for pushing it in that direction, sort of more than anybody. And, you know, the idea of like, wow, that's a weird picture, you know, might have been perceived as a weird picture, but truthfully, people were trying to make images that were new, you know, and fresh, which is hard to do when you're working with a medium that's, you know, 100 plus years old at the time. And, you know, if you if you count the Epses, you know, breakthrough in 1826, or if you use to gearers, even either way, it was like close to a century and a half. Yeah, I mean, already explored for a century and a half. So making new anything is difficult to do in that sense. But but I think the community to round to circle back to the community, the idea community. And I think, you know, photojournalists were always lucky, in a way, because oftentimes they were a part of agencies, which is how their work got out. So you know, your magnum or any number of agencies, which still exist. But there was a stable of photographers. And I had imagined there was probably jealousy. And I didn't imagine there was like healthy competition as well, at the same time. But, you know, I think there was a sense that they there was a larger sort of belonging than, I think, just being like just going out there and shooting something, you know. Yeah. But it's interesting, you know, you talk about, I think there's a feeling of, you know, community, and then competition. And, and, and there's some of God like a validation that you know, you may have experienced this in your own studies that there is nothing more competitive than having an assignment and then being critiqued by your peers in a room with like 20 people or something. And encourages obviously to improve because those people will not hold back. Whereas today, I think we're in this kind of weird vibe, especially for people who don't photograph professionally, you know, just, just kind of for themselves, that they want to improve, they want to get some feedback, but they don't have a peer group necessarily, they have the internet, which is not necessarily the best thing in the world. And, and in some regards, they sort of feel a validation or they look for validation by trying to have people like their photographs. Whereas, you know, when you talk about people like the, you know, the group of 64 and then, you know, the Steichen and the Victoria lists and all that kind of stuff, that there was a smaller group who were kind of talking together. And, and this is kind of one of the things I want to try and impress upon people is that, you know, you obviously have to walk a fine line between, you know, being true to yourself and creating work that comes from here that is that is Dan Winters, but also you need to fulfill the brief that you are photographing. Whereas a lot of my viewers, they don't need to, they just need to fulfill this. They want to be happy taking photographs. And how would you suggest that they find that fulfillment when they're not asking for validation from a person who they don't know from a random person on the internet who just like likes their photograph, because that's not the same as saying, I like your photograph, I think your photograph moves me. It's, it's something like that. And I think a lot of the viewers do struggle with finding this balance about are they improving? Are they being true to themselves? Are they moving in the right direction? I think the statement you made right at the end about being true to yourself is like a huge piece. I think for me historically, when I take on what I try to do is establish my intent, and I find that if I establish my intent, then things sort of fall into line. And I think that one of the big, I'm assuming you're talking about, you're talking about people that are kind of amateur photographers that want to improve and maybe kind of on some level don't know where to look to get validation or feedback. You know, it used to be what you did is you joined a camera club and you got together and you had portfolio reviews. You saw what other people were doing. It fostered community. It fostered passion. I think oftentimes people take up a, take up a practice and tire of it quickly because it's not doing anything for them, right? So if you have a, like a group of people that can give you feedback, et cetera, then that could be helpful. I also think a big piece is just being really honest with yourself about how much work you're putting into it. Because this is a very well explored medium. People work at a very high level in this medium and it happens over a very long period of time. And usually it doesn't happen right away. You can certainly come out of the box swinging, but you talked about the idea of like, it's very difficult to gauge where career is going to go because we can't see it. Like we're in it in the same way that Lola was telling me about being in, like on the ground floor with a certain musician or whatever. So the idea of looking at anything in retrospect is often like a gift because we can see decisions. We can see, I mean, in my opinion, like Walker Evans made like every one of his great photos in 1939 and after that kind of didn't do much. And that might be sacrilege to some people, but I've got like every Evans book like ever made. And he made a few good pictures in Cuba. We made a lot of good pictures in Hale County, Alabama and for the FSA, but after that it was kind of like there's nothing really. So I think artists oftentimes will experience like a profound moment of productivity followed by maybe lapsing into formula or maybe just kind of uninspired. And like I said, we as photographers need to put ourselves in front of the thing that we're photographing like we're not like illustrators where we can just conjure from the ether, you know, we need to be there. And so like, what is it? What am I putting myself in front of? Well, the first thing I would recommend is put myself in front of my life and what's around me and people that are around me and the places that are around me and try to get a deeper understanding of what I'm surrounded with. You know, I mean, Harry Callahan is one of the greatest American photographers ever lived, in my opinion. You know, he never shot within a, he shot everything within like a 50 mile radius of his house. And profoundly understood what he was looking at and profoundly interpreted what he was looking at. And I think it's the looking, right? The looking and the being honest with yourself about how deeply you're looking is what it's about. And to expect accolades and to expect validation, we all want to feel relevant. We all want to feel valid and that what we're doing is is valid. The internet is a very mean, bullying place. And, you know, I've had a lot of conversations with people who've gotten, you know, really eviscerated and bullied writer friends of mine and et cetera, et cetera. And I think it goes back to that Eggleston statement of like, I didn't let it bother me. I knew I had my friends and supporters. You know, if we're looking outside like that, you know, we're not going to be met with, you know, everyone's not going to meet us with, but I would say if you're, especially like you said, you're older, it's later in your life and you want to, you know, you have an interest in photography and you want to pursue it to a degree, I would look for, I would honestly look for like photo clubs or, you know, places where people, I mean, I know on some level it's probably not, it's not going to be a good fit for everyone because there are people that aren't going to be as serious about photography and they're going to be more serious about socializing or whatever, but or fellow photographers that, you know, we can share our work with collectively and have like healthy competition with or inspire, you know, to be inspired by one another. I think what you said there about being inspired by one another is possibly where a lot of people, I think, find a real issue with camera clubs is that, you know, there's always a force of personality and especially when you come to judging and things and through conversation with a number of the people on the channel, one of the things that they find as a real issue with clubs, especially when it comes to competition is that images tend to be judged based on technicalities, you know, because because you can say it's in focus or it's not in focus or it's this or it's that, you know, that they are things that can be quantified and one of the things that I certainly drew from, you know, from my own experience as a student was that sense of healthy competition, of trying to be better than X person. Like there was that person in the class who was very good at portraits and there was that person in the class who was very good at still lifes and if you could get a higher mark than that person, then you kind of went, okay, I've done well, but this seems to be lacking today because obviously we're not, we're not in a room, we're not in a classroom, we're not in a small community of people who correspond either, you know, through letters or, you know, going to, you know, the American studio or anything like that or sorry, the American place and and I'm looking to just, you know, try and foster this idea with photographers who are coming back into it that not everything has to be about likes, not everything has to be about, you know, shares and things like that, but it's about pushing yourself as an image maker and just really kind of being true to your own vision and when I look at your photography, when I look at your portraiture work especially, it has a very distinctive style, you're, and I'm going to loosely call them still lifes so that, you know, the objects that you photograph, they have also a distinct style and your personal work has a distinctive style, the black and whites that we see in, you know, road to seeing and what have you and how do you balance all that? How do you balance those different visions in your head and still stay true to Dan, the photographer? Well, I want to, I want to just add one or more thing to the last conversation before I answer that and say that a really good place, you know, I said camera clubs but I feel like you're right, that kind of egos would drive that bus there, but I would say like a community college, like, you know, photo 1a or photo 1b or photo 1c where you'd have, you know, an instructor that has a, you know, a degree in photography that knows what he's talking about, I think how I helped to guide you and then you have your classmates as well that can sort of provide healthy competition or feedback, et cetera, et cetera. That would probably be where I would go if I were kind of trying to rediscover photography as I would probably go to a community college because that way you're not going to get, for the most part, I don't feel like you're going to get people that are there for like the social aspect, particularly in photo 1b you're not going to because those are people that are obviously they've moved past 1a and they're taking it more seriously. So I would highly recommend that move because, you know, you can just sign up for a class and and, you know, take a class and you can even do night classes. They have photo 1a and night classes. I think it was it wasn't, sorry to interrupt, was it not Bernice Abner, Eve Arnold? Didn't she do a night class? Probably. With like Avedon and Alexi Boddovich. Yeah, yeah. Just get out of here because you're rubbish. Yeah. Is that right? Yeah. It sounds like Avedon. That sounds like an Avedon move. Yeah. Yeah. I'm at him at Aputure when they were over on 23rd Street and we went to a lecture by Richard Benson who is a photographer but more known for his printing and printing press printing. He was printing. He printed like the America West and, you know, they used like nine presses to get all the sort of values that they wanted out of it and stuff. He was very well known for that type photo book printing. And there was, I would bet there wasn't more than, there wasn't more than 12 people there at the, at the talk. And I just looked around and I thought, how is this possible? How is this possible that there are 12 people here? This place should be packed. But yeah, there you go. No, well, I was going to say, to answer your question, give me the question one more time now that I went and got distracted. It was about to, you know, obviously you have your, your portrait. Oh, right, right. And it's like, how do you balance all this? Because it's, yeah. So that's a good question. And I've, I've worked out a system that works for me. And I don't know if it worked for everyone. But what I do is I, I started to see a pattern in my work from the beginning, where I felt like I worked in different ways depending on what I was shooting. And so I started early on to kind of compartmentalize my work. So I would like put work in certain boxes as it were, and say, okay, this is part of my, you know, this is a part of the work that I is near and dear to my heart. This is like personal work. Although I'm gonna, I'm going to take this approach on assignment sometimes as well, but this all goes here. This black and white medium format, black and white 35, you know, that lives here. And then the large format portraiture at the time, you know, shooting four by five and eight by 10 of everything. So that stuff goes here. And then all of the sort of construction pieces that I build and photograph, those live over here. And I could go on and on, you know, all my aerospace lives here. And then it goes down to subjects and the way it's approached. And so I just kind of like have gotten good at really compartmentalizing. So, which really helps with the intent piece that I was talking about. Because if I have a reference now, it's self referential, but it's still a reference. If I say I want to shoot this like I shoot X, then I know going into it pretty much what my approach is going to be and what the photo is going to be. And the thing about photography that it's interesting is even though it's, you know, it's, it's able to be interpreted in many, many ways, right? The world is, we're all using the same tools. So we're completely dependent on manufacturers to give us these tools, and with which we go out and, you know, make images, right? So if I choose Hasselblad with plus X or triax available light, I got kind of a sense of what that looks like, you know, like I know what that kind of work looks like, right? If I say large format, color, lit portrait, I have a general sense of like, okay, but within that, we can make it our own very easily or not very easily. It's difficult, but it's simple to make it our own. I know that was a complete contradiction. It's very difficult. I find it simple to kind of make it my own anyway. But it's based on, it's based on a constant dialogue with oneself, right? It's literally a dialogue. I mean, I even like internally talk to myself about about this stuff. And I think the dialogue is the biggest piece, right? So the dialogue is what establishes your sensibility. And I think over style sensibility is the most important piece because if you have a certain sensibility about something, it doesn't matter what sort of like tools you're using, your voice can still come through. And I think that's the piece, right? So that's the piece is like recognizing what you like, recognizing how you shoot, recognizing the kind of light you like recognizing all those things leading up to. And then when you're making the picture, you've already had kind of a conversation with yourself about it. And every time it changes, you notice, you know, starting out, you notice your mistakes. It didn't turn out the way I thought it would. It didn't work out the way I thought it would. You go back at it and you hit it again, even if it's the same person. I mean, I would say like to a young or a photographer, kind of revisiting photography or starting out photography is like make 10 pictures of your best friend. That's a self assignment. You make 10 pictures and you make 10 different pictures of your best friend, right? You don't just go and shoot 10 pictures and you're done. You shoot it, you look at it, you print it or you edit it at least. We hope people don't really print anymore, which is a shame. And then you go out and you do another shoot with that person and another shoot, another shoot. I mean, Stiglitz did these extended portraits, you know, where he did Giorgio Keefe and he photographed her like extensively and he considered the definitive portrait to be the entire body of work, not one single body of work. And you know, I would say that would be a great, but I think also like establishing once again, establishing intent, right? I'm going to do 10 portraits of my wife or my daughter or whatever and really be honest with yourself about the pictures you're making, simultaneously look into the history of photography, look at what's been done, look at great portrait photographers throughout time, look at the types of approaches because, you know, you're not going to reinvent typewriter, you know, it's like you're going to fall, you're going to fall in line with a long tradition and that has to be okay. But what speaks to you in that tradition? Because maybe you could take this thing and this thing and twist it up and kind of come up with your own thing. And that's ideally, I think, what we seek to do, you know, whether it's consciously or subconsciously, you know, we take all that comes into us and we kind of regurgitate it and hopefully that's something that is in alignment with our internal piece, you know, that you talked about earlier. Yeah, it was interesting you say you take, we ingest things and we put them up here and I think Annie used the phrase that she has like an internal hard drive that she saves images in and then they pass through this filter that we all have and then they come out as an Annie Lieberman sort of Dan Winters or Alex Kilbill, you know, whatever and that somewhat is, I suppose in one sense, backwards looking because we need to ingest the images before we can pass them through. But that opens up the question and says, how do you feel about the future of photography? We've got AI coming up, we've got, you know, obviously digital, we have all a world of photographers now who have never experienced anything but digital. Right. You know, for them, the wet dark room is something long gone. You mentioned acetic acid, you know, glacial acetic acid. And I can instantly smell that. But there's whole generations that can't. How do you see the next 20, 30 years of photography? Well, it's really, it's hard to say because there's that equation about change that begets change, that begets change. And it happens so quickly that, you know, we, that's kind of an Alvin Toffler in Future Shock talked about that, that like technological change can't even be predicted in the moment we're in. Right. So I mean, the interesting thing about photography is photography works and photography works really well. And the still image is still, in my opinion, like one of the strongest ways to communicate from reality. And so my hope is that it's still relevant. The thing that I worry about is people that are able to make a living doing it. You know, there are a lot of people that are getting hired off Instagram and shooting jobs with iPhones. I mean, I'm in close contact with a lot of different assistants and I've heard some horror stories, you know, when people come in and they got an iPhone and their mom's with them and they're doing a fashion shoot for like, you know, Sony or something. It's just like, it blows my mind that that even exists, you know, because you used to, historically, you'd have to work at a certain level before you'd even be considered for an assignment like that, you know. And anymore, it's like, it's almost like hip to hire, like, you know. And those are the kind of careers that there's no way for me to have any idea where it's going to go. Like you said, this could be a total, I mean, I've seen so many people come and go in the almost 40 years I've been having. I mean, people that you thought were like totally relevant. I mean, one guy that was like shooting for Vogue and Vanity Fair owns like a bakery in upstate New York now, you know, it's just like he's out, you know, and he was making great work. So it's hard to tell in that sense. And but I do feel like, I do feel like I got off on that other idea, didn't I? What was the one idea I was talking about? And we were talking about, you know, so the growth in it was like iPhone. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Sorry. I tended to drift. So yeah. No, the idea of like the future, right? So I mean, if we think about like the future, if we think about photography, let's think about 1839, when Degir published with the Royal Society, and he was kind of gifted the title of the father of photographer, even though Talbot had been doing way better before him. But that's all good. So think about the dialogues that were going on then, that, you know, it was an imitation of painting, especially pictorialism. And then it was going to take over painting. And then, you know, it was like this giant, like, sort of like argument back and forth between, you know, in the art world about the relevance of photography and how it was relevant. And, you know, cracks me up that even flight was like poo pooed by the military at first, you know, it's like they couldn't see like what it could do. It could not tell. So it is difficult to, you know, if you'd asked, you know, a Brigadier General in the Signal Corps in 1914 about flight, he would laugh you off, right? And then obviously he's everything now. So, so I think the, and I've seen this in my career, and I'm fortunate that I still get a lot of big advertising jobs, because those have always been the ones that like paid the bills. And editorial jobs have always been the ones that you did because you were passionate about publishing and you're passionate about the subject or whatever it was, but it was never like a money making enterprise. And I think the big ad jobs have all been put into a funnel and only a few are coming out. So it's fewer and fewer jobs, more and more shooters. So it's pretty easy to like deduce that it's going to be harder to make a living. I've always thought that, you know, if there's anything at all that you could do besides photography that you would consider doing, I would say do that because it's not, my friend Greg Heisler, he said, one time he said to me, he goes, Oh yeah, still photography? No, he goes, Oh, magazine photography? Man, you can literally make hundreds and hundreds of dollars. It was true then and it's true now. It's not a money making enterprise. For the most part, I get paid pretty well by some of the some of the magazines that I work for, but I know that's an exception and not a rule. But I don't know. I mean, I feel like I'm at a I'm at a good age with regards to this profession because I feel like I'm kind of not my twilight, but I'm definitely like, you know, slowing down a little bit and being more sort of selective and trying not even though I've been doing nothing but traveling for this past year, that I can kind of watch things and observe and see how things change. But I don't think image making is going to change. I do know that AI stuff, unfortunately, I think is going to put a lot of illustrators out of business, because I could see publications saying like, we need to illustrate this subject, you know, and some guy can sit on Dolly and just keep hitting generate for three hours and generate like, you know, a thousand images and then edit them. And there's going to be something in there that's interesting. And I'm not, you know, I was talking to Catherine about that. She my wife actually Catherine, she asked me about Dolly. I got an assignment from Wired Magazine, I think I told you about that. To reimagine one of the covers that I shot for them using Dolly. So coming up with all these prompts and, you know, I showed her some of the stuff that I came up with. And she was like, wow, are you worried? And I'm like, no, I'm not worried photography. This doesn't really apply to photography. You know, this is much more of like an illustration thing. But I think illustrators should be worried. But then I thought, well, you know, you got Matt Marhearn and Jason Holly and Kevin Christie and like illustrators that just knock it out of the park every time and are so smart and it's so like succinct, David Plunkert, you know, I can think of a lot of guys. I love illustration. And there's no AI that's going to come close to that. You're going to get AI that's generating interesting images for sure. But I mean, a lot of the ones I did last night on the Dolly thing, I did I made several hundred images. There are a couple that are like, is really cool. It's like combining all kinds of weird things like red chenco and Dutch masters and black and white. Yeah, with those, you need you need to be able to input an idea into them. That's, you know, you need to say, but I say, Dan, you know, I have to say, you know, it's talking to you, listening to your thoughts about photography, obviously your career, you know, the images that you make and your approach to photography and the thoughtfulness, I think about the medium that you have is an absolute joy. And I have to say, I wish there were more photographers who, you know, would, you know, pass on the knowledge, you know, the experience, the, you know, the interest and the passion that they have for image making that you do. And I hope that the people who have watched this, you know, come away from this going, do you know what, I'm reinvigorated about finding my path with that, you know, to go all the way back to the beginning when you talked about, you know, when you first went down into your friend's basement and, you know, and saw the alchemy, and I think alchemy is the right word here, of that print emerging from the gloom on the paper, you know, that beauty of seeing that you've taken something that is an intangible because, you know, we can't really feel light and captured on there and that magic that hopefully it will remind people that when we pick up a camera, we will have different objectives, different ideas. But ultimately, the thing that that should and I hope it does connect us all is this that feeling that, wow, I have seen something and I have made it physical that I can share with somebody else that would have been lost, you know, you mentioned about Deon Arbus, this idea of like, there are moments that if I didn't see them wouldn't have happened. And it's that sort of thing. And I'm sure that people are watching this, listening to you talk, we'll just get a sense of that and get a feeling of this alchemy and reconnecting with with image making in all of its forms and hopefully just continue to move on. So it's been a pleasure talking to you. I think it is an honor because, as I said at the beginning, you're one of my favorite photographers of all time. And yes, thank you ever so much for your time. Absolutely. It was my pleasure. I really enjoyed it. Thank you guys.