Facebook Interview

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Gina D: hi, in my photography class we are doing a project on photographers and i chose you but i cant really find much information about you and i was wondering if you could help me out with that, please? :)
i just need to know some general information like where you were born, grew up.. where you get your inspiration from.. and like when and how you started taking photos
i would appreciate it so much if you helped me with this!
thank you! -gina

Ian Aleksander Adams: I’m all for helping you out. This is actually the second time someone has asked me about such information for a similar project.

Perhaps you could send me a list of questions (around ten is fine, I can find time for that) and I’ll answer them to the best of my ability. I’ll post it on my blog so anyone else looking for the information can find it.

I assume you’re already familiar with a lot of my work, but most of it is on my website. Let me know if you’d like to know anything particular about a certain project.

GD: Thank you so much for taking the time to do this :) To be perfectly honest, i hadn’t been familiar with your work until just a few days ago. After finding out about the assignment I just started looking at photographers work and yours interested me quite a bit. My class is just doing short presentations so i probably won’t even ask ten questions lol but here i go:

GD: Birthplace and date?

IAA: I was born in Manhatten, NYC in 1986. My family is from the Bronx in New York, but I went to highschool and spent the biggest chunk of my life in Amherst, Massachusetts (and the surrounding towns).

GD: How old you were when you first starting taking pictures?

IAA: This is hard to pin down exactly, I just found a print of a shot I know I took from 1993, which makes me about 7. I also found a couple rolls from 6th grade – all from disposable cameras. So I guess you could count that. My first photography class was in senior year of highschool, though I had been trying to get in for four years (public school, hard to get into electives sometimes).

I seriously started thinking about art as a career the summer after highschool, so I was 18 then – so five years ago.

GD: Who got you interested in photography?

IAA: Both my grandmother and mother always took pictures, so I’m sure there is some heavy influence there. I’m actually trying to get a hold of my grandmother’s slide archive to make a book from them, she’s never shown anything she’s done publicly, but she was really quite good.

How I really got into visual art is kind of dorky though, I programmed since I was about 10, starting with visual basic, working my way up to C++ and JAVA, but sort of burned out on it my freshman year of highschool. Before that I always thought I would work with computers (I do a fair amount of work on computers now, scanning all my negs, working on video art, doing my website, etc) – but programming as a career felt too slow for me.

It took way too long to express my ideas visually, though now I’m probably going to seriously study it more to make more interactive work. At the time, though, I was impatient and looking for something quicker. I took a graphic design class and also spent time learning flash and 3d programs. After about a year of that, I felt it was still too slow, and I sort of pushed my way into photography. I was shooting digital before I shot film, but after working my way through the standard B+W darkroom phase, I ended up liking shooting color film the best.

Now I know that anything worth doing takes a lot of time – but I’m glad my impatience led me to try a lot of different things. It’s allowed me to develop a pretty broad range of skills, and I don’t feel tied to any one medium anymore.

GD: Who/what is your main inspiration now?

IAA: This probably isn’t what you’re expecting, but I’d have to say my primarily influence at this minute is… well, comic books. I’m doing this huge project that is basically a celebration of sequential art – though it probably won’t look like what most people would be expecting. I’ve just always been into comics and this past year – after getting seriously into Swamp Thing while just looking for something to take my mind off work – I’ve started reading A LOT of trade paperbacks. At least one a day, sometimes five. [More recently I'm doing something else with the actual books as well, but it's still sort of hush hush right now in case it doesn't work out.]

I was working on a couple books at the time, and taking sequence of images into account a lot. So while it started out as something to let me relax apart from work, I realized it was helping me a lot in my projects – the photo books, the zine I just put out. A lot of people don’t think about it, but pacing, timing, spacing – it’s all really important to a photographer.

Well, to some photographers. I’m just not that into the singular image anymore – I find sequenced projects a lot more exciting.

GD: What is your favorite technique to use while taking pics?

IAA: I’m not sure what you’d include in Technique, but I’d have to say “going with my gut.” There’s a certain point when shooting, especially when you have a limited amount of film, when you have to decide if you should be taking the picture. With digital, it seems easy, like you should always take it – but maybe it’s always true that if you’re more discerning you get more interesting results. I’m not sure either way, but I’ve been learning to trust my gut a lot, if I feel like I should shoot it, I really should – even if it seems like a really mundane moment. It’s often later, when I’m sequencing or just spreading out a lot of images, that I find why that image was important in the context of everything else I’ve been trying to do.

If you’re looking for a more technical answer: I prefer to shoot with my Rolleicord V. It’s a TLR (twin lens camera that you look down into at waist-level) that I inherited from my grandmother. It’s 50 years old, but it still makes sharp (if you want them to be) and somehow nostalgic looking medium format negatives. I tend to shoot mostly expired film, since I’m into getting the fear of “not knowing” back into photography. I think the nostalgic look has something to do with how the blur (bokeh) is shaped.

A lot of people don’t seem to understand that it’s pointed at them – and it’s really quiet – which helps when shooting people. Plus, when you tell them you’re photographing them after, they’re usually more intrigued by the camera than scared or angry at you.

GD: What is your favorite thing to take pics of?

IAA: Boring things, probably. Things that seem boring to people who think they (personally) are exciting. So things that seem boring to boring people. But I think they’re not boring, and I think most people that I’m excited by don’t think they’re boring either. Is that a fair answer?

Hope that helps! Let me know how your presentation went! Feel free to grab any of the images off my website that you need for your presentation. There are print resolution (8×10) spreads from my gray days book on flickr.