Interviewer: Stephen Kilar
Interviewee: Scott Lapham, manager of AS220 darkroom, commercial photographer, art photographer, director of Photographic Memory Project at Broad Street Studio
Category: Visual Art
Genre: Photography
Length in time: 01:20:11
Date: 12/1/2004

00:00:00

Stephen Kilar: This is Steve Kilar interviewing Scott Lapham on December 1, 2004 at 11 am. Okay, so, if you just want to start off by talking about early life. I don't know, are you from Rhode Island? You can talk about your family...

00:00:18

Scott Lapham: Family? Like how far back, like what do you want to know?

00:00:22

SK: As far back as you want to go, when they came to the United Sates if you want.

00:00:25

SL: Okay, well, I don't know when they…well, my father's side has been here for a really long time and they were Quakers and they started off in this area and moved to upstate New York for a couple hundred years and then I've come back and found that there's actually some family, I think, some family history here that's we've been disconnected from a long time ago. And my mother's side is from Germany, they came over about three generations ago. So anyway there you go with that. I came to Rhode Island actually to go to school. I went to RISD and I graduated in 1990. And there was pretty conscious decision on my part to stay in Providence when I got out because I really didn't feel that… there was a very, there's a strong pull to go to larger cities where, if you're an artist, New York, L.A. or what have you, cities usually like that and felt that there were so many people that were trying to do something similar to me I thought that those environments would be more aggressive and I didn't feel that I needed necessarily to be in a place like

00:02:00

SL: that to be inspired to do what I wanted to do and I decided that unless there was a reason for me to leave that it made sense for me to be here because the city was less aggressive, then rents were really cheap and I could find space to try and do what I wanted to do. And then it was a little ambiguous as to exactly what that was but basically what it meant was that I wanted to do art, have art as part of my life. You know, a real major part and how I was going to support myself in addition to that was probably going to be commercial photography, it was a little up-in-the-air, so I got out of school, I stayed here I did start hanging around AS220, which is a nonprofit art space downtown and I started just being there because it was also, I was out of school and this was place that was active in the community arts orienting and so forth. So I gradually started trying to do art, which took a back seat for a number of years because I was also trying to start up the commercial photo thing and I was in 1995 opened up the AS220 community darkroom, myself and another RISD grad, Pam Murray. And both those things took a lot of time so I started getting to my own work less and that really didn't feel good at all. It also, you know I was looking at what I was trying to do with the rest of my time and you know it made sense. The idea was that I could have a commercial freelance

00:04:00

SL: business that would allow me to have time to do my artwork and it was a goal that, although it had no guaranteed outcome, seemed worth pursuing. So I did that for a number of years and things got a little better from the hand to mouth kind of thing and then I started doing some work again and I had a studio down in Olneyville and up the street they were talking about putting up a new mall which is the big Providence Place mall. And at the time you know there was you know a three or four story URI building there and then behind that of course there was this whole expansive industrial buildings, a lot of which were barley being used or not used at all and they could be turned into Olneyville there was a whole bunch of artists living there and it was very organic, it was very loose it was very you know, not structured and the mall came and there was huge, when it was being proposed, the design, there was huge building behind it called the Providence Cold Storage building. It was a large beautiful storage building for refrigeration so it was quite a commodity and it had a antiquated cooling system and it was really, really Goliath and

00:06:00

SL: it was just so sturdy, it had old-world craftsmanship, it was very Gotham City, this big imposing thing, and very beautiful. And that started to come down, that was being demolished, so immediately because I'm from Massachusetts and when I was teenager, I wasn't from the city of Boston but I used to hang out there a lot and in South Boston at that time every other brownstone was abandoned throughout these large sections of town, so me and my friends, we used to run around in them you know we put plank on top from one brownstone to another which we would run across, it was like abandoned. And then I saw that in my lifetime turn into just the highest end luxury apartments or condos in New England, just completely unequivocally changed in such a way that it was terrifying because you know it was like, where are all of the people going who used to live here in the places that weren't abandoned, you know it's really amazing it see it happen so thoroughly and so quickly. So when I saw the cold storage coming down I said, this could be it, this could be a real huge change and the kind of shit that happened up in Boston could easily happen here why couldn't it happen here if it happened only an hour away and you know I mean, Providence had really been a very dilapidated gritty hard luck kind of town after all of the industry left and it depopulated in the sixties and all that so that, so the city didn't necessarily have that great of an image of itself and I don't think anybody that I knew

00:08:00

SL: would have believed that things would turn around in a dramatic way. But what I started finding myself drawn to were these building because I realized that these buildings were really one of the reasons that I had stayed in the city because I could have a lot. I could have a studio and it could be really cheap and it could help me get my feet off the ground and I had so many other expenses also. So I was able to buy equipment, I was able to figure out how to have a business, I was able to do a lot of work on the inside of these places which for me was gratifying and I started to look around these places and I started to realize how beautiful they were and I realized that these buildings could never be reproduced again. You can't, there aren't that many forests, or forest products left – all of the beams in most of these buildings were virgin timber. If my resources are correct a lot of that timber came form the Carolinas forests, which I've heard don't exist anymore because they were all cut down for, you know, for projects like these old mills during that time. You know the amount of brick, the amount of hardwood floor; you know all of these things are just too costly to build in that manner today. I started to realize that if this were the I high rent district that I would never be afford to live in the space that I was living in and you know that part made me feel good that I was living in a place like this but it also just, you know, I suppose the writing was on the wall so I started just photographing the demolition of the Providence Cold Storage building and there was

00:10:00

SL: very little talk at that time about how to save these buildings or how to have alternative uses for them. Or I should say not, maybe there was talk then but there wasn't a lot of organizational structure, or maybe all that much awareness as to how to get directly involved with it. So I started photographing these mills and they just started coming down, it was like "Boom!" It was now the late nineties, early 2000, real estate was going up so suddenly land became valuable and they started knocking down buildings for all kinds of different reasons, but often economic or to put up a strip mall or something like that or a Home Depot which became one of these sites and then rents started going up and then you know a lot of artists started getting nervous. I got evicted from my place, I was never, my whole building got evicted, it was never quite clear why, we never knew why or were told why really, well we sort of told why, but not in a satisfying way so there was all kinds of paranoia about what was happening with that and with that real estate. Fort Thunder got evicted and they were in Olneyville and they were like, do you know about Fort Thunder?, and you know there was the whole Eagle Square, Shaw's Feldco development and that's what actually brought a lot of attention to these areas because was so many people started showing up at the town meetings and so many artists were being displaced and they had a stake in the community so it was really, you know, we saw it happening. Everything was just changing all of this space was disappearing and you know, then the West Warwick fire happened

00:12:00

SL: and that brought a lot of attention to people, their tolerance for people living illegally by which I just mean that everybody had been doing it, it was not an issue. And they were cracking down on codes, all kids of codes all, just an awful lot of attention was being focused suddenly on this artist community because of rising rent property values and paying attention to not wanting to be responsible for fires and fire causalities and whatever and buildings were just getting knocked down left and right so a lot of my art work in the last five years has really paid attention to the demolition of these buildings and I've been, you know as a building was coming down I would go there as often as I could and take these pictures. I tried to be as faithful as I could to the spirit of well, whatever, I wanted to take pictures and the pictures I ended up coming out with felt to really reflect each other. It was you know a real sense I think of loss. A loss for history, too. Not just cheap space but you know one hundred years ago the country didn't look the way it looks now and a lot of that is kind of shitty, the way the country looks now. I guess the point that I am trying to make is that the economy that we have today is largely built on the activities, or the thoughts, just the history just the plain history good or bad of these buildings. These buildings set all of this other stuff off and the people who worked in them, you know I mean people thought that these things would never go away.

00:14:00

SL: It was like looking at the Pentagon or the White House and saying that "Well, that's going to be obsolete in 50 years." You know, nobody thought that! Communities were built up around these areas and just to see them in such horrible states, you know just abandonment, just forgottennes, it's crazy. It's like a national park in it's own, it's an ecological you know important spot just because it really is a piece of history and really it should be put into a slag heap for a number of reasons, you know. And so well the project hasn't had a text component thus far it has had a very visual slow description and you know I might think of it as a long poem of just these images and in addition to that Jen and I are working on trying to get interviews with people who worked in these buildings. We are interested in people, obliviously, who worked in them a long time ago but were also interested in people who worked in them not so long ago because as the large industrial owners and tenants moved out and the industry went elsewhere a lot of these spaces became very adaptively suited for other things and right now obviously a lot of artists, creative small creative businesses really benefit from these spaces being available and really were finding it difficult to operate if they weren't and a lot of that Providence

00:16:00

SL: is gone. Look at Pawtucket and just a lot of good things have happened it's just that actually not a lot is available and it's difficult you know all of these issues are difficult to do legally. It's expensive to rehab places, it is, there's no getting around it but its just when you look at somewhere like Pawtucket, they make my experience a to do also but they seem to have thought of, you know, held out a hand more to artists who are looking for space to, you know they were very proactive in letting them know that they wanted artists in Pawtucket whereas Providence is for all of its hype, really slow to respond to any of that. It just didn't seem like it was a priority or a real priority for them and you know if people hadn't made an awful of noise we wouldn't have been a priority at all. You know, it's just interesting to see what the city said about the arts and what it did about some of the real functioning arts in the community how they responded and they realized that there was a big artistic community that they may not have been that aware about until they were getting evicted so it was interesting to see that play itself out. So for me, the end product was a distillation of that I guess that kind of expanse that part of my life this body of work that's winding itself up right now, adding some of the text that's you know, of people who were in there often

00:18:00

SL: talking about what they want to talk about those buildings people who actually spent time in them. I think about Providence too is that I think that when I first started talking about this I was talking about how Providence wasn't as aggressive a city and that was, that meant a lot to me because I didn't want to be following in the footsteps of many of my friends where they had to work so much just to pay the rent like in New York that they really, that their own time with their art work really got eclipsed, you know and that continued to increase as the years went by you know they really, you could do an awful lot of stuff back here then, you could make a lot of noise I wasn't always the biggest fan of a lot of noise because I was right next to a lot of noise but I mean you could make incredibly amounts of noise in an industrial area that was, you know where nobody cared, you could do a lot of stuff that now you can't do as much because you don't have the space to do it. And that was a real reason why I and a lot of people stayed around this area, stayed I town you know and so of course everything changes and lots of things adapt

00:20:00

SL: and adapt successfully, but those were serious reasons why I was here and now that rents are rising and property values are rising too I, you know I'm one of the people that doesn't necessarily think, you know that's not a great thing, that's not a great thing for a place to become so expensive that an awful lot of people can never afford to, traditionally, own a house or to do things that you know they should be able to do without killing themselves. So those things bum me out, you know about the current climate. One things, you know, maybe, one things that does make me feel positive on just a personal note is my involvement with AS220 because you know I've been with AS220 as it has grown, and it has grown in such a way that its has remained true to what it was trying to do in the beginning. Often organizations lose sight of that and become something else that is not as effective or what have you. I feel that AS220 has remained a very open kind of environment for people to come and do stuff. I've seen it grow it a point where it is cognizant enough of potential vulnerabilities that its dealt with them before they've gotten crushed.

00:21:45

SK: That's been a great introduction to your work so far, but I'd like to move back to almost childhood, early involvement/interest and any kind of in artwork, photography specifically if you have it. What it was like growing up,

00:22:00

SK: where you're from in Massachusetts, and what your parents did. All that sort of stuff, okay? Oh, and how you ended up at RISD…

00:22:10

SL: Okay, I started drawing as a young kid and I started drawing on public television shows. They had kids shows, or one in particular, and the guy would take you through step-by-step through drawing animals. Animals were a large interest of mine so I just kind of did it. And I don't know if it's true or not but I think that a large part of why I was interested in art was certainly due to this… (Recorder cuts out briefly)

00:23:00

SK: You were talking about your father.

00:23:07

SL: And although I never really though of it that much, even when I decided to become a photographer, he used to take tons of pictures we'd have slides, slide carousel after slide carousel after slide carousel of family pictures – just a huge amount - but that wasn't really what inspired me. Although when I look back at a lot of those pictures, they really are pretty good. And actually I liked drawing and painting and things like that and I focused on that a lot more during high school, that might have been just because those things were available to me, I didn't have a real darkroom. But I went to high school in Massachusetts in a town called Westford

00:24:00

SL: and I think freshman, I was going into my freshman year of high school, or maybe it was my freshman summer – something like that – I had gone to art school I had go to a summer drawing program at the Museum School in Boston and my mother had signed me up for it, sent me on a train to go out there and my parents had just split up so this was like a real activity to try and get me out of the house a conscious decision on my mother's part to do that. And I went to this thing and I was right about that age, or just after that age when children stop drawing intuitively and start concentrating on drawing in a way that kids at that age - 12, 13, 14 -start envisioning things looking "right." They want it to look real; so everything tightens up and the playfulness and the fluidity and the intuitiveness often with people drawing just dries up completely and most people never get it back – it's just gone after a certain age. However…and that could have happened to me real easy, but I went to this school, this class, this drawing class, and it was a college-level drawing class with all different ages. It was very intuitive, it was very open, it was very freethinking, nonjudgmental. You know, generally positive criticism, but very, very intuitive I mean there was little structure. You were really supposed to supply, you know, pay attention to, a vocabulary that was supposed to emerge from you as far as "line" and stuff as opposed to being taught what is what is what is what…

00:26:00

SL: You know when I first got there I thought that it was loosey-goosey, which it was, but not for lazy reasons or anything. And you know, I believed what the teacher was trying to do, but everything I was drawing just ended up looking incredibly awkward, it was all from live models and one of the things, one of the first things we tried to do was you had a huge pad of paper and you had to draw the essence of the figure in ten seconds and you would go through like twenty of those, twenty pieces of paper just drawing those, and for me it was frustrating because I was a young person who just wanted to draw everything perfectly and I didn't care. You know I had break down these, "oh, it's unfinished." That was common for the people who were taking this class, so these ten second exercises were valuable to anybody, but we especially valuable to people who had a perfectionist idea that it wasn't completed. And then gradually the posing would become longer and the idea was that as you sort of loosened up you could keep that freshness about your lone and your activity for a longer period of time without getting caught up in details like that, ruining the feeling of the image. And then after weeks, and I don't have them anymore, but I saved all of the notebooks and you could see just a big geometric shape in the beginning where it was supposed to be a person and I didn't have time to draw anything except, you know, a triangle for a torso, sausages for the thighs and sausage for the lower leg, that kind of thing and

00:28:00

SL: then I just got really frustrated because I couldn't do what these other people were doing. You know, some people really had some nice stuff going on, some nice fluidity and that was describing something but it was not something all on its own and it would have been beautiful just to see the line, but it was actually illustrating, you know, a presence that was in front of you. You know, And I wasn't doing that, I was just doing these awkward awful block things, so I gave up. And I was still in class, but I was just like, "Oh, you know, whatever." And, "I can't do this." And then my teacher would just come around, comment on what people were doing, came around and said, and these were 30-second drawings so they were very quick and she said, "Look at that!" And I hadn't even seen it. I was just about to turn the page because I literally hadn't seen it because I wasn't looking, I didn't care, and there was this beautiful drawing! It had just happened because I had let go and it wasn't – I had let go and then my brain and my eyes and my hands were just doing this thing and they were doing it, you know, so I wasn't over emphasizing anything I wasn't trying to anything and when I saw that, when I saw the picture, I had this receding feeling like you do when you're truly taken aback by something and you know, I've only had it for like a couple times in my life and actually the other time I had that when I was a young person was like my first kiss – so it was like that kind of intensity and then once I saw that

00:30:00

SL: I was amazing, you know, I was impressed. And it seemed that you know all of these other drawings that I had done, which were kind of realistic renderings of photographs became a very different thing and it became a very different process that meant a whole lot more to me and then it became something to me and so after that I might if I am a perfectionist, you know I am a perfectionist about if I think the piece is done or not – that's what I'ma perfectionist about. There a lot of things that I'm not a perfectionist about, but that is one. As a perfectionist, I can't let it go, I can't let it up on the wall unless I think it is what it is supposed to be and so art became something that I was very aware of for me and in school, high school, was difficult for me I did not dig it at all, you know it was just kind of a waiting game to get out of high school for me and I was just trying to do everything that I could to get out of high school well and into somewhere else that would be better. And so art school became a viable thing. And my parents supported me in that. My own parents had, my mother had gone to music school and she became a teacher as a job and my father had gone to college for, I think it was chemical engineer, which was a degree that could get a good job, but he didn't like it and against all of the advice of other family members,

00:32:00

SL: he was from a generation where you didn't necessarily go to college or what have you, his father had been the first person in the family to go to college so it wasn't, you know it was looked at as not a given, and not something to do lightly. So he went through a bunch of this early chemical engineer and when he got out he wanted to do…physics, he got physics degree. Which meant nothing. What it meant was you couldn't get a job doing physics. And anyway, it was a big risk for him but he stood by that risk because he felt that it did his life better and he ended up having a lot of knowledge, completely unrelated to his efforts, that ended up being useful in today's technology so he ended up believing that it was good a idea to do something that wasn't necessarily the most practical thing in the world. So I did get to come to art school and I think I probably took, take a lot of that for granted what I mean by that is what I learned. You know, I was involved in art for so long at Museum school at a time when most people were sort of buttoning up their minds I guess I was just kind of realizing that very physical and mental, I guess quasi-spiritual way that letting go sometimes was a certain amount of

00:34:00

SL: I don't know, beauty and maybe truth and trying to be reflective and understand yourself. And art was very good that way because it allowed you to create things that were coming, if you let them, that were coming through you and if you were honest maybe it clues you in a little bit to yourself, about how you actually feel or think about something. You know, you actually get to spend the time doing it and this was like, you know your subject matter and you images are sort of a product of you, and your physical and mental emotional, subliminal functions and you know so I was very, very glad to have that and it also suited me well because you know I never tried to be, I was never proud of it or anything like that, but it was kind of a space shot when I got into college – you know, not cripplingly dyslexic, but somewhat so all of these academic study things that people don't have a hard time with was more difficult for me so I think may have also pushed me in a way to be in an arena where I could you know I was doing something I was decent art without it being a stupid struggle, you know anything is a struggle, but when it's stupid, well, that's just grim. So I was very lucky to have found this outlet and also to you know, be supported by my parents in it too,

00:36:00

SL: because that doesn't always happen. So I came to RISD and I went to RISD and got out and you know, and have stayed here. I have found myself to be in a community of supportive people and I have been here long enough so that if that were not the case then it's my own fault for staying, but that is something that does exist here and I don't think that it exists everywhere like it exists here. I mean I have, in a lot of places, you know personally all of the artists that are in a place, that are in a town, just because it's you know. And here I don't know all of the artists you know and I have friends that are artists and there are artists who I know their work, but I've never even seen them that may be more of a reflection of me not getting out all of the time, but I think it's cool that there's a bunch of who, you know, who are doing it. Who are dedicated to what they're doing. You know, so, I hope it stays that way.

00:37:28

SK: Tell me about you time at RISD, what it was like to be at RISD in the late eighties. Tell me about the beginning of your time there, when you started shifting focus from drawing and painting to photography…

00:37:40

SL: Let's see, RISD for me, actually, that time for me from like.... I always say that'd I'd never want go back to being a teenager and I'd never want go back to being in my twenties because I was miserable.

00:38:00

SL: And there wasn't a whole lot that anybody could do about it, you know, I was just a miserable person. And you know, I'm in my mid-thirties now and it's a much better time for me personally, than anytime I can think of. And it's just simply a matter of timing and then trying to live you life so that you're in a place that you like that's happening to me now, so it's great. But when I went to RISD I was miserable. And I remained that way until I left. But when I went there, you know, I grew up in a middle class maybe upper middle class household and I grew up in a town where there was a lot of people who had similar backgrounds and also a lot of people that didn't I was never too aware of and my parents never made us kids aware of it and my father, you know, he built all of our bikes from the dump, you know, going to the dump was a big deal because it meant that we were going to bring stuff back and in those days, then, you could just walk around the dump, there were no restrictions, you just dumped your trash and just went to different piles and pulled stuff out. So that's the kind of stuff that I grew up with, I was doing that kind of stuff and you know I never was really aware of you know having money or not having money or anything like that. I was painfully unaware of it, you know it was never part of my thought process

00:40:00

SL: and when I got to RISD, I was with so many kids who were so wealthy and didn't know it that it was just a shock for me. It was difficult for me to deal with it. And you know, It was very difficult. And even strange why it was difficult because it was not like I should have had any chip on my shoulder because I didn't grow up in a tough financial situation, but for some reason it was real hard for me to deal with that and like I said I was miserable and I just found that I was a very alienated person and I found that I couldn't think of a place to be that was better. Mentally, physically, so it wasn't like I felt like I had that many options, you know, what to do, so I thought I'll slog through this just like I've slogged through everything else. And I did that and freshman year at RISD, and that's not to say that I didn't appreciate the parts of the education that jumped out at me and seemed sincere and meaningful, there were certainly a number of instances of that you know, that's not to say that I didn't have close friendships or all that stuff – and all of that is totally right there, it's totally true – but my overall thing was not feeling so great. So freshman year you do foundation which is drawing, 3-D, 2-D, some liberal arts classes and maybe something else thrown in there too, but it's supposed to be like an all-around basic arts foundation,

00:42:00

SL: you know of understanding space, exploring space and that was awesome and at the end of that you had to make a decision. After that one year you have to major in something and that was challenging for me because I felt split in many different ways, but one thing that it kind of boiled down to was I didn't consider myself a technical person, I don't love gadgets and I'm not drawn to them for gadgets sake and I said to myself "If I don't learn photography now, I'm probably the kind of person that will never learn photography." Or learn to that degree. And that was something that was interesting to me and I like the idea of time, which I think you just peruse with photography anyway even if you're not aware of it. But I had some pretty clinical ideas about time and how that could be interesting. And then later when I picked up a camera and started using it some of these ideas in mind got less clinical, more poetic, I guess, maybe for lack of a better, the right word. But that was why I wanted to do photo and you know, and looking back it was actually just a very pragmatic decision. Just about everything I did big decision wise was pragmatic just because that was my mind state. But I did end up you know, taking photography as part of, as almost all of my art making process and it was little bit of a surprise to me I thought I would have you know,

00:44:00

SL: been switching back and forth between whatever, and I'm getting back into painting a little bit more now, and drawing a little bit more now and possibly sculpture too but really all of my art output towards its own process has really just come down to photography, you know when I was in school it was mostly like that. And I do some mixed media and stuff, you know, I don't limit myself, but for the most part for the past bodies of work that I've done have really just sort of filtered themselves down into these single photographs. It's a real funny thing for me because I never thought of myself as that kind of a person and I like the work I've been doing, so it's not a problem, that I'm doing stuff that's uninteresting to me for whatever reason, it is interesting to me, it was always kind of a surprise because I always thought that'd I'd be mixing things up more media wise, and to date you know I mean I have stuff that I'm working on now that is starting out as not photographic, but there's a good chance that when it's done, it'll be photographs, so we'll have to see. But it's cool, you know. That's kind of what, I guess I should say I do feel that I've been able to work steadily and slowly, not, steadily and continuously, if not furiously, I mean it's not always slow, but I've been able to make my art work a part of my life, like a real part that's not going to disappear. And I think I'm able to do that – I think it was a wise decision to stay here

00:46:00

SL: because I think that I can do that here now and you know I feel good about that. That's one thing that this place has given me.

00:46:08

SK: Well, did you decide at the end of your foundation year that you were going to major in photography? You did? Had you taken a class in photography at RISD? No. What was your experience with photography before that point?

00:46:30

SL: I would do it casually, you know. And I would do it casually, I liked, I sort of, just like in the way that you don't like every painting you see, or whatever, you know I wouldn't look at tons of photographs that I would see and like them, but I thought of photographs working in the same way as painting was working, it's a sum of its parts, and when it hits you, it hits you. And you know a traditional photographer has a slightly different take on why you take pictures, you know a lot of photographers have slightly different takes on why you take pictures, the discovery processes seems to be often times somewhere else as opposed to it actually taking shape during the photography, you know. It depends on how you work as a photographer, but if you're a documentary photographer, then your process is going to be a little different than if you have a painterly approach to it, and so I was definitely a letting it happen kind of photographer and RISD allowed for that for sure at the time I wish that, you know at the time I was so much that way that I really wish that I would have had

00:48:00

SL: the discipline to teach me how to use these things in a way to make money because I had no business knowledge, experience, or intuition. You know just painfully bad and I knew that and I knew that when I got out I was just going to be toast for a while and I was. So I wish that there was a more of a practical aspect to the education back then but it totally gave me this free reign just to let, you know, just to let the stream of conscious part of that process have validity, go and do sittings and that was a part of the my work that I felt comfortable with for a while so I was able to do, I approached it form that point of view and the camera's definitely, you know it was really when I got out of school that I really started to be a professional photographer and to photograph things professionally and that was when I learned by assisting a commercial photographer and just being put in the fire enough times to just really figure out what works and what doesn't. You know to figure out what I needed to function professionally. But, yea it was a pretty quick decision to major in photography and it was a pretty – you know, you're just kind of throwing yourself into it and that was very important to me to do at a lot of different parts of my life, and maybe it would be that way again but you know,

00:50:00

SL: I decided that I was going to become a commercial photographer and the only way to do that was, before I felt totally ready – because that would never happen – I just had to throw myself into it and started doing this stuff and you know for me that meant doing small jobs which were very anxiety ridden before and during and after because it's a scary thing to take on. And other people have done it much quicker than me, capable quicker than I was, but the way that I needed to do it was just to throw myself into it and to try to do things that was just kind of is – I needed those kinds of deadlines to be there, to organized and productive at the same time, you know. So I did that commercially, I did that by trying to organize shows, you know putting a date down for a show. I would always try to have work somewhere in the mix you know that was valid, that would just be another thing to get me going. A good thing about this point in my life is that for the first time I have had a couple big projects that I've been working on that have pretty much wrapped themselves up and are now about done. So for the first time in years and years and years I have a commercial thing that is supporting me and I do need to keep on top of it, I do need to make it all happen and be real. But at this point I've decided to take this November-to-November as a time to not look for any new commercial work

00:52:00

SL: and spend more time doing artwork. It's like doing it and trying to get it out there more, a lot more. And that's, you know, it's a different way of thinking it's something I'm pretty much used to now, but it has taken a few weeks to just get used to not running myself ragged for, I guess, other people. You know, if I wanted to start running myself ragged for my own stuff, that's great and that's the best thing I can do.

00:52:46

SK: Tell me about your early work after you foundation year, tell me what happened after graduation, where you were working, what was the first time you went to AS220?

00:53:00

SL: I'll start with AS220 just because I know that quickly. There used to be a really cool club underneath where AS220 was when I started hanging out there. It was called The Rocket and they used to bring in new wave, and punk kind of things so it was seriously a cool place and I used to like going there. And I was there seeing a band that was really pretty good, I know their single was covered on commercials.

00:53:43

SK: Who was that [the band]?

00:53:46

SL: The La's.

(Brief phone interruption)

00:53:50

SK: Okay, so wait, what was the name of this band again?

00:53:51

SL: The La's. They had a really awesome song. They were a cool band to see–

00:54:00

SL: and they had this song that's now funny because it's being covered, I hear it covered all of the time on commercials so hopefully they're making some royalties. But during their break I heard this drummer – it was coming form upstairs - and it was incredible drumming and I went upstairs and it was AS220. And it was Matt McLaren, who's a guy, a local musician and he was in a band then called Flower Gang and they were from Plainville, Mass. and just some kids putting together some really amazing music and to this day it's some of the most amazing music.

00:54:55 (Brief interruption in recording)

SL: Yeah she lived in South End and she was really into all of the music that was happening and all of the music that would come to Boston, you know there was a lot of punk and there was a lot of new wave and a lot hadn't really come through in the way that it has now, so a lot of it was still really underground. And you know however conscious people were of it being underground or not, I don't know much about it, but you go to all of these shows, and it was a real thing, it was a real big thing. I never played any instruments, but I was always, I was totally into this music, a lot of it and it just stayed with me and I think a lot of people that are my age have really strong associations

00:56:00

SL: because you know punk and new wave and things like that a lot of people, it really was a thing where if you were involved with it or liked it or what have you, then you were not involved, you know, that was not a mainstream thing. And if you grew up in a rural place like I did, you really had to search for it, you have to really find it, and you had to really like it. And it wasn't popular, you weren't cool if you liked this stuff and you really weren't cool if you liked this stuff. There was nothing popular about it. It wasn't like you were some cool rebel; it just wasn't like that. You were a loser, you know. And if you had an earring back in the mid-eighties, it meant something. If it was dramatic, or hugely dramatic or not, you know, I don't know, but it actually meant something, it wasn't just like everybody had it. And then, you know, people actually got beat up over stuff like that, so it really meant something then that it doesn't now and so music was, it was like a really personal thing. And it was personal thing where if you knew somebody, met somebody who liked the same thing you did, well, you already had a lot in common. Because there just weren't that many of so that was pretty huge. So, so many artists were musicians and vice versa so the two scenes totally… and one is a much more social scene than another. You know you can't play music if nobody's there to hear it so people gather for musical things a lot more

00:58:00

SL: than they gather, unfortunately, for visual stuff. Or it's harder to draw that kind of energy into any kind of visual art. So the Providence music scene is pretty cool and it's had different waves, I've seen a lot of different waves but it's a pretty cool thing and it has definitely been helped by all of the mill space that was here but…. (pause)

00:58:33

SK: That first time you went upstairs to hear Matt McLaren…

00:58:38

SL: Yeah, I went up to hear Matt McLaren. So after that, I was still in school then, so after that I would come downtown and check it out and that wasn't that common then either because students have a tendency not to leave College Hill, but back then they simply did not leave College Hill. Downtown was very intimidating for a lot of people, much more so than it really needed to be, but you know the population downtown was just nothing, everything after the banks left was… and so I was hanging out there, you know, not regularly, but every now and then a would go and check stuff out. And then when I got out of school it was like the only place to come and just meet people who were involved in art because the rest of Providence wasn't like that and after just terrible jobs, washing dishes and painting houses and things like that it was really cool and I had no money and I had no equipment, you know there were a lot of things that I didn't have, and I did that for a couple of years and then I hooked up with a commercial photographer-

01:00:00

SL: I was his assistant for about three years - and that was really instrumental and helpful in me getting a foothold in understanding how to do this commercially, how to do it, and it also gave me a window into what it was like, whether I wanted to do it or not, whether I could do it or not. So, I stopped working there with the idea that I was more or less working towards a freelance situation but I didn't have that kind of, um, I didn't have clients or anything so I was doing part time jobs. I printed digital for people who shot film, I was printing prints for a silver-smithing company that was used in their catalogues, I was doing that a couple days a week, I had a couple part time teaching gigs I was still working in restaurants, that kind of thing, and then I started slowly buying equipment. I would- what I did know how to do… A. I knew how to do it B. I had the contacts to do it, was photographing artists portfolios because I knew a lot of artists. I started doing that and that was the first real way that I started making money as a photographer and I definitely did a lot of work at RISD during certain crunch times during the year, and I was kind of making a lot of money, for me, at once and it was helping me you know stretch things out and then I started doing weddings, which was something I never, never had a fondness for it but it was a way for me to make money and so I started doing that. And then gradually I started getting these small ins at larger organizations to do some product photography, public relations photography,

01:02:00

SL: stuff that was hopefully going to be a little bit, you know come back and sell off images to the client and then I got a couple chances to do some larger industrial jobs that were job wise, scale wise, much larger responsibilities than anything before you know very intimidating, you know, not a lot of fun to think about very anxiety provoking you know because for someone who hadn't done it before there was a lot that could go wrong. You sell yourself like you know how to do everything in the world when in fact you look ridiculous. And those relationships seemed to be going well so I gradually built that kind of thing happening and then my clients move on and new clients hopefully appear and it's never really a complete picture but it is something that I've been able to depend on for the last couple of years and it's something that does continue to be healthy and I've gotten to a point where I did decide that actually I am shifting priorities for this year to try to give this other thing, that I tried to do in the first place, the artwork, more time and energy. The idea was that I'm going to do this business and I can do the artwork, and I'm going to do this business without letting it swallow me and become my own enemy.

01:03:50

SK: Have you been successful with that in this first month, or are you still getting calls all of the time?

01:04:00

SL: No, it has been successful. I have a couple really big clients now that, really big for me in that they support me, I'm very lucky to have that because there are a lot of photographers who have found a lot of their traditional clients drying up, it's been tough for a lot of people and a lot of people are talking about it and complaining about it. What I've found is that a lot of my smaller clients have done that. Like disappeared, gone. And I haven't gotten work from them in a year, just gone. So what that really means is that I'm taking some kind of a risk, that I'm comfortable enough with the clients that I have that I'm not going to actively pursue new work, new commercial work, take the chance that I'll maintain and I'll get work here and there, but I'm not going to pound the pavement at this point drumming up new stuff. And that was a real decision to make, you know it's a sobering decision to make but it feels like the good time to do it, like the right time to do it. It feels like a very important time to do it. It's also pretty exciting.

01:05:31

SK: So tell me a couple more things that I want to hear about. I want to hear about: the work at AS220, what it's like running the darkroom, I want to hear about the photographic memory project, I want to hear about the major works that you're wrapping up now, and what your currently working on.

01:05:51

SL: Okay, the darkroom. The darkroom has been, you know I think the darkroom, it's very unique, and it's very unique in a

01:06:00

SL: lot of the ways that AS220 is unique and it's unique in that in that its small, well I think it, this is why I think it's unique, I think its unique because really it's a very small operation but its just, we just spent the last year moving our facility from the basement of AS220 to the second floor. We did that because we were in violation of fire codes in the basement, we weren't, it came as a bit of a surprise to us because, basically because of all of the attention that's been paid to fire codes now a lot of things that weren't considered, were technically not completely up to the books were given a look to see if there was really a problem in its context. But now everything is a lot more to the book and so we were shut down so we had to move that facility from the basement to the second floor. That took a year, it took a year of fundraising, it took a year of figuring out where it was going to be and then the build out and we've just opened again. But generally we've had a small operation that was really a kind of cool resource for people that wanted to do photography. You know, we provided really, really cheap prices and anybody that really wants to be a photographer or anybody that wants to use the darkroom, can use our space. Money is not a factor.

01:08:00

SL: We're an open door. We provide the equipment, you know the maintenance that it takes to come in and use the place, and you can come in and get these really fantastic experience as an individual, we open up the darkroom to other classes so that we can host, we can be a host and let other people come in and use our facilities and then the facilities are there if you want to come back and use them. You know, a lot of people in a college situation, they take a class at a college have access to a darkroom there and then when that class is done, then they're done. What can I do? So we're an ongoing presence and we also started up Photographic Memory. But just working in the darkroom in general, it's just really, it's really nice and when I can do it exactly the way I want to do it, which I'm organized and have all of the time at my disposal, you know it's just a really awesome thing because there's only one reason for putting that programming on and it's just a very sincere desire to make a resource available. It's like, you know, I do get paid, I do get health insurance and that is really, really seriously cool and I don't take that for granted but there is a certain amount of work, there are some headaches you have to deal with managing this thing you know doing this and that but the reason that we're there is because we have a real contact and a real dialogue with people that you wouldn't ordinarily meet. We do get to help out some people, like our youth program, you know, really does help out kids….

01:10:00

SL: and that is very cool. There are just a lot of people, some of them very amateur and some not amateur who use our darkroom who just wouldn't be having this kind of interaction A. just with the space, and B. with some of the people that are in AS220. So you know they bring something among themselves, there's a social aspect to it too. And that is very cool and it's often been a very, especially when I was starting commercially, working at AS220 was a really nice counterpoint to a business culture that I wasn't familiar with and was getting used to. You know I thought it was kind of cold, you know, lacking, you know, whatever, you know brotherhood. So that part of it, working at AS220 that way has just been fantastic. And also you know as long as your program, if you're running a program at AS220, which I am, if I'm doing a successful job of it, I get the support I need, but I also get a lot of leeway to try to run it in a way that makes sense to my schedule. You know if I come up to a lot of organizations and say I'm a freelance photographer, you know I want to start this darkroom program, but you know I can't really give you any hours that I'm going to be here – some weeks I'll be here a ton, some weeks I won't be here at all, you know, but I'll answer these phone calls – it just sounds like a weird way to run a program. And I'm not perfect at it, but I'm really psyched about the way that it's going now and it is a benefit.

01:12:00

SL: And AS220 has the leeway to make that happen. It's kind of the flexibility of the organization and the people and everything that takes chances and you know and allows programming to happen that doesn't necessarily, it just doesn't have a financial payoff. And that's very rare, you know, that's totally rare. So I think working at AS220 has been good that way. And Photographic Memory about maybe about five years ago now I wanted to start a youth program in the darkroom and I wanted to start it basically because I was doing some teaching myself and I was always frustrated because that I couldn't really teach the course in the way that I thought was most beneficial, I always thought that there was always something being left out that would have been really good for students to know. It was always time restrictions of somebody else's complaining or whatever. So I decided, and I decided that the darkroom really needed to have a youth program to round out its generally programming. So we raised funds for a two-week, I think it was two-week. No, maybe it was more yes, it was more. It was six weeks. A six week program in the summer that would be free to kids and that would be intensive so we'd need another teacher and we'd each have a group of kids and so we fundraised for it, a lot of work, and got money, and then got some kids and we had this program and we did it for two, three years, we did it for three years.

01:14:00

SL: We found it very challenging to get the kids we wanted there which were kids that wouldn't have this opportunity otherwise. We found out that just getting those kids there was a real challenge. All of the kids that were very sincere and very talented and anything, perfect students, that we did get… you know we had a bout half and half. Half of the students were not nearly poor and half the students, the ones that we couldn't get, were the most extremely poor and those students were there and they were great but we just kept thinking that these are the students that don't need this, they could get a similar experience somewhere else, they could go to RISD or wherever, you know, their parents were dropping them off and picking them up. They had things; (inaudible) they had a lot of support. And then AS220 started up its larger youth program called Broad Street Studio and that started out working with students in the Rhode Island Training School, which is for juvenile delinquents, juvie jail, and then we got a physical space in south Providence where students from the training school could then come out and participate in these same arts activities, they were just participating in the training school outside, sometimes with the same teachers so Photographic Memory became AS220's year-round youth photography program so it basically had trail runs those three previous summers, that program, the summer program, was called Focus. So we did Focus 1999, Focus 2000, Focus 2001 and that's what gave a curricular for how to approach this kind of rolling admission kind of idea of a year round program at Broad Street Studio.

01:16:00

SL: And then that became terrific because when I was working, you know when I was doing that, I didn't have to fundraise and then AS220, the program was set up to try and keep track of the bureaucracy of trying to get students there, trying to get students back working with students in group homes dealing with that bureaucracy of group homes and all this kind of thing so that was really liberating because it meant that I could just teach and I could do it year-round and then we had during that time we had a lot of dedicated students and that was very cool. We had one student that got into RISD and that was very cool, that happened through Broad Street Studio Photographic Memory it was very awesome and recently about a couple months ago I just handed the teaching of photographic memory over to a woman by the name of Diane Parham, who I'm really excited about teaching the program. That allows me a little more time to manage the darkroom to do some of these other things too. But it also really feels like the darkroom is now a stronger presence because I'm not managing and teaching and now it's like I'm managing, Diane's teaching, my monitors, who are another face of the darkroom to the public, they're the people who are instructing people how to use the darkroom, you go through a couple monitor sessions and then you get a membership and you get to use it on your own but it really feels nice that the darkroom is more than me,

01:18:00

SL: it's not so much a one-man army kind of thing. But like today, we're going on, and I'm going on this, well one of the things that I am doing with Photographic Memory is organizing fieldtrips and doing some of these things that I never felt that I had time to do before so that we can get them out and show them how people are living in these fields, visual fields. So we've been to a couple professional photography studios, we've been to, you know we've met with fine artists, photographers, who you know are well enough known so that you can glean something from how they get out there and work. And also today we're going to an ad agency and then sometime in the future we'll be going to a printing, you know a big commercial printing shop to see you know, this is what you do, now what happens to it. Or this is something you can do too! Look all this is around you! Because that was a big question for me, what the hell do I do? You know, as a young person it was like, "How the hell am I going to do this?" You know, it's like, "I want to do this, but how do you do it? What is it?" And it's like nobody takes the time to tell you, nobody. And it's hard, and it's a big mystery. It's not like there's a book on how to become a commercial photographer. You know or at least not in the way that I went about it, which was art school. And so we're trying to, that's part of this program too. We're trying to give these kids some ideas of what is out there so that it's not a complete mystery; you know at least you'll have a visual experience, an experience you can remember. Just at least something to think about. And I am involved that way and that makes me feel cool.

01:20:00

SL: And that's cool too because I'm also using some of the contacts and resources that I've built up, you know. And after having been here, having been part of the community for so long…

01:20:11