VICE is unique because the magazine has always been free, so it’s never really made money. There isn’t as much pressure to appeal to any sort of advertisers or anything like that. I also don’t feel as much pressure on myself or who I’m assigning. I think a lot of new, smaller staffed magazines are popping up as a reaction to this, because we do want to be making work for printed media. Are there certain themes that you feel are reoccurring in your own photography? I think a lot of my personal work that has been shown a lot—it’s work I’ve made three to four years ago. Not that that’s old in anyway, haha. But I feel like in our photo world, lots of people take a photo and put it up and then it’s gone. With my personal work from that time, and sort of what I’m working on with new sculptures and projects now is that sort of manic behavior of young people—certainly my own manic behavior at that time period. There are certain symbols of what meant a lot to me growing up in it. The work that was shown in VICE in the photo issue is about symbols applied to girls and how crazy they are. Horses and dolphins and what happens when you illustrate that and what that kind of girl can be. It was really funny and interesting to me. I don’t mean this in any sort of way, but I think the work that I was making then has in the past four or five years become very trendy and popular. I think you see a lot more of it now. The exploration of femininity in photography and still life has really blown up, and I think I was coming in right before that major wave. So it’s funny and cool to be a part of that zeitgeist or see yourself starting to be a part of a zeitgeist in photography. How do you think the internet has effected photography and the direction it’s going now? I don’t know. Like anything else, it’s just used as a tool to self promote a lot and to get work out that you’ve either made for yourself or other publications, at a way faster rate. I think sometimes that’s really awesome and makes my job a lot easier. But I also think it’s really cool when I meet somebody who has been working on something that they’ve never decided to put online. They’re just making it because they need to. Then they’re showing it to me for the first time. That only happens like once or twice every few months. When ever it does I’m like “Are you a unicorn?” hahaha. We upload so much photography to the internet. Everything is effected by it. It’s like that over saturation I was talking about. I just think we lose our attention span and ability to distinguish between those really thoughtful stories, and just “content.” What still excites you about photography after it’s taken up so much of your life for so many years now? It’s so cool to be able to pair an artist with a writer and have them come together and make something really awesome. To have someone who is shooting something so
different from themselves and really connect with a subject—and when you can see that in the film they submit— that’s really cool and exciting for me. It’s also nice to see the perseverance of people who feel this need to commit and invest in their personal work. Then having them share it with me is a huge honor. I get to do that so often, and it’s constantly invigorating because it’s something that, as I’ve taken on more editing, editorial is something I haven’t been able to do myself. So it’s so inspiring to see people balancing everything. To see people driving to the desert one or two months out of the year and sleeping out of their car and making images that way—or working with a traveling clown circus and making images that way. That’s just really cool to me, and there’s so much of that, which is awesome. It doesn’t all have to be a curated life on Instagram. There are still people really wanting to just tell stories through the medium of film. What things do you have coming up this year that you’re excited about working on? In 2017 I definitely want to do the third edition of Tag Tag Tag, and either get it on the website or figure out a way to print it cheaply. I just want to have it out there, and I want to have a new catalog of people to support. So I want to get that done. I want to do another awesome photo issue, and I want to make it bigger, and I want to have it be more of an event and a series. I want there to be a community created around it, so I just have to figure out a cool way to do that. Are there any projects you would like to embark on that you just don’t have the time or money for at the moment? I wish I had the time to really take a couple weeks off. I find when I’m at the bottom of a mountain of a project— I’ve completed one, and I’m conceptually a little lost—I really like to have time to sort of reflect and absorb greatness in other mediums. I have the resources here to do it. But to really be thoughtful and to take that selfish time to focus on what my next personal body of would will be, is something that has been eating at me now for the past year. I would love to invest time in that, when I’ll be able to. That’s definitely something I think is worth investing time into. As a photographer—or a musician or whatever—you feel a certain amount of pressure to make a statement every couple years as to where you are as an artist. I think the longer that you take to do that, or get bogged down with other things, it becomes this weird sense of dread. I don’t know if you feel that way about your medium, but it also helps you recenter on your point of view for so many things because you’re figuring out what you care about again and how you’re going to uniquely express yourself. It’s a huge undertaking and you need time to do it.
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