Thomas Hawk Interview

Saturday, July 5th, 2008
by Rachel

Photographer Thomas Hawk, living in the San Francisco Bay Area is on a personal life long mission to to create and publish an astounding One Million processed & finished photographs before he dies. Currently he has around 14,000 all ready published with 986,000 to go! I for one am very excited to see that one millionth photograph but even more than that I’m excited to just follow along on the journey to it. I hope you enjoy our interview with photographer, blogger, and CEO of Zooomr, Thomas Hawk.

Photos

Who or what influenced you to start taking photographs?

I first started taking photographs around 7 or 8 years of age. I’m not sure why actually.  My first camera was a Kodak Instamatic.  The photos were pretty terrible, but I’d feel a tremendous amount of anticipation while I waited for K-Mart to develop the photographs.

Sensing that I enjoyed the camera, my parents bought me my first SLR when I was 14.  They bought me the camera in conjunction with a U.S. coast to coast bicycle trip that I completed at age 15.  The following summer I took my first photography class at Glendale Community College.  This is when I first started focusing on fine art photography.  All but a handful of my photos that I originally made from back then have been lost.

It may sound strange, but music was my biggest inspiration for my photography early on — even though I wasn’t photographing music.  Early photographs by Glen Friedman were some of the first photographs that I fell in love with.  Photographs documenting much of the hardcore punk rock scene of Los Angeles in the 80s.  Going to gigs in the 80s and watching bands like Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Social Distortion, X, Bad Religion, and others and then watching Friedman’s documentary photography show up in places inspired me.

I used to wear this Minor Threat t-shirt with one of Friedman’s photographs on it.  I thought alot about the photos behind that scene even though I wasn’t actively photographing it.

What equipment do you currently own?

Currently I own two digital camera bodies, a Canon EOS 5D and a Canon EOS 10D.  I also own 5 Canon L Series lenses, the 135 f/2 (my favorite lens), the 24 f/1.4, the 14 f/2.8, the 50 f/1.2 and the 70-200 f/4.  In addition to these lenses I own the Canon EF100 macro.  I also own various accessories to go with this Canon setup, Speedlite, batteries, CF cards, card readers, tripods, etc.

What is your favorite piece of equipment?

My favorite piece of equipment is my Canon 5D body. It’s a remarkable camera and currently sits at the sweet spot of accessible photography.

How do you feel about digital imagery alteration?

I’m an image whore.  I have no problem with image manipulation and think almost any image can be improved with digital manipulation.  In general my own style is to keep digital modifications to a minimum, but frequently I’ll go off on tangents and explore more abstract ways to manipulate imagery.

I admire many of the artists most adept today at digital image manipulation — Merkley, Kelly Castro, Cole Rise, artists like these are years ahead of where I am with their post production work.

Most of my digital alteration happens very quickly as so much of my work is focused on quantity as much as quality. I simply don’t have time to spend manipulating imagery to the point that other artist’s choose to.

What do you believe to be the pros and cons of photoshop?

Actually I use Photoshop very little.  95% of my image processing takes place using Adobe Camera RAW.  I basically only use Photoshop to heal dust spots on my photos, perhaps sharpen a bit, or in an every so often case where I significantly work with abstraction.  I don’t use even the most basic functionality of the software like layers.

The primary respect I have for Photoshop is that it enables and empowers artists to transform their photographs into new art.  The biggest con in my opinion is that the program is not as intuitive as it could be.

How do you feel about nude photography?

The human form is one of the oldest subjects of art. The body can be a wonderful canvas.  The female form especially is a beautiful thing.  I love well done artistic nudes.  I haven’t done much of this work myself yet but plan on working with nudes at some point later in my life.  I love nudity in photography even more though when it transcends pure aesthetics — when it becomes part of a larger project.  Merkley’s work comes to mind again here,as does Larry Sultan’s project “The Valley.”  A few months back I found a book of nudes of common every day people. Each page of the book contrasted a fully dressed photograph of a person with their nude equivalent on the opposite page. These were common every day people, not models mostly –stockbrokers, truck drivers, bartenders, that type of stuff.

I really liked that presentation of nudes.  I think it was by Lee Friedlander, but I didn’t buy the book at the time and can’t seem to find it online.

Do you prefer black and white or color?

I’m neutral on the use of color and black and white.  I do both.  Sometimes things work better in color, other times they work better in black and white.  Contrast plays a big role in which ought to be pursued.  I admire both and consume both.  There are photographs made by people like W. Eugene Smith that I think would never have worked in color. Same thing with Ansel Adam’s work.  On the other hand some of the best artistic creation has relied heavily on color, Rothko, Warhol, Crewdson, etc.

What’s your work flow process on a gig or photo job?

I don’t really do gigs or photo jobs.  At this point in my life I don’t need to make money wth my photography and I’d rather not be constrained by what others would like for me to shoot.  I have a day job that pays the bills and work my photography around that.

So all of the photography that I’m doing at present I do for myself.  I’ll point you to two articles that talk about how I make my pictures.

• Principles and Guidelines for the Modern Photowalker
• More recently on my workflow, My Photography Workflow

One of these days you will see a show by Merkley at a major fine art museum.  It’s going to take time because the internet represents a real and direct threat to the elite who control the fine art world today and there is actually *huge* money involved.  But it’s coming.  It can’t not be.

My photographs on Flickr have been viewed almost 10 million times.  This never would have been possible without the internet.

Your the CEO of an photo sharing site much like Flickr called Zooomr. Tell us, what are some advantages to having a Zooomr account over a Flickr account?

My day job is actually not related to photography at all. I work as an adviser in the investment business. I do work as the CEO of Zooomr though on the side. I’m not sure that Zooomr and Flickr are in direct competition.  I’ve always thought of them as two separate things and I use both.

Zooomr is a different, smaller, community more focused on photography and photograhers in my opinion. Flickr is more of a large community focused on everybody. I get different things from both communities.

One of the features though that I like on Zooomr that Flickr does not have is the zipline feature, a notification and comment system where users can communicate in real time. I also like that our photo discovery system “Discover” allows you to filter popular photographs on the site by more time periods and by your contacts and friends. I like the “undiscovered” section on Zooomr where highly ranked photos by non-contacts are highlighted. This is a great place where you can find interesting new photographers to follow. I like the SmartSet feature on Zooomr that makes building sets and albums easier than on Flickr.

There are lots of things that I like about Flickr too though and feel that Flickr in fact does a lot of things better than Zooomr. Some people will like one site over the other for any number of reasons. Other people are more hardcore like me and will use and love both.

As a photographer looking to sell their photos. Does Zooomr plan on offering more features that expand Marketplace feature currently in use?

Zooomr has thought about a system to sell photographs for a long time. I’m not sure that we are there yet though. Building the payment systems, etc. would take considerable work with a small development team. I think it’s something that we’d like to do eventually, but I think that it is something likely seen down the road and not in the immediate future. I have been impressed with Photrade more recently which looks to me like a site that has built out a lot of the infrastructure necessary to compete in the stock photography market for photographers while maintaining a fair payout to the producers of the pictures. I still need to spend more time figuring out Photrade, but it seems to do a lot of what I’d always hoped we’d see at Zooomr.

If you can hope to leave one impression with your photographs what would that be?

I’m not sure that there is a single impression that I’m hoping to make with my photographs. I think that they will be different things to different people. Some of my photos have messages, some don’t. I think my photography works best within the context of a larger body of work. So much of what I’m focusing on right now is the idea of large collections of images. Combined and presented together I think the collections have more power than any single individual image can on it’s own. I think this is different than the majority of photography out there. So much of the best photography in the past has focused on iconic single images. Strong concentrated moments of reportage or spaces or places in time. I would hope that at some point I will figure out the best way to show the scope of my focus on a river of imagery. Right now Flickr and Zooomr are probably the best places that I can hope to arrange this feat on the web — easy and cheap. Over time though I hope that I can do more with this with large scale collage work using actual printed photographs. Because the scale of what I want to do though is quite grand, funding and space for these types of installations won’t be as easy as simply hanging a single framed photograph on the wall. To that end much of my work is still a work in progress and will get hardest over time.

Linkage:

• Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection ( blog )
• Thomas Hawk on Zooomr ( photo sharing site )
• Thomas Hawk on Flickr ( photo sharing site )

I would like to thank Thomas for his wonderful interview with us.