Sam Abell: The DarkTopo Interview

Sam Abell speaks about his new book, the culture of National Geographic, and the cost of photography.


© 2008, National Geographic

Earlier in the week, National Geographic contacted me with news of Sam Abell’s new book, The Life of a Photograph. From the Geographic’s press release: “Sam Abell, one of the foremost photographers of our time, shares some of his most powerful and unforgettable images and answers the question, ‘What gives life to a photograph?’ Drawing on 40 years of Abell’s fieldwork, the book takes readers on assignment and inside the heart of this master photographer to witness the making of nearly 200 truly great images.”

I was offered the opportunity to interview Abell via cellphone. The text that follows is a transcript of our discussion of the The Life of a Photograph. Following that are 10 mp3s from the remainder of the conversation, in which Abell shares insight and inspiration with his trademark candor and honesty.

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MC: So tell me about the new book.

SA: Well, it was an outgrowth of a talk I gave a few years ago, which was on The Photographic Life, which was the title of my book that came in out 2002. It was a retrospective and included photographs of my life, my past as a person, and my past as a photographer, as well as pure photographs. I was giving a lecture based on that book, and I got to a point in the lecture where I was through with the biographical portion of the slideshow and I simply said, “Well, enough about the photographic life, now let’s talk about the life of a photograph.” And the light bulb went off in my mind when I said it, and I thought, that should be the next book that I do, it’ll be a natural follow-on to The Photographic Life.

And I put the idea out there to my editor at National Geographic, Leah Bendavid-Val and she’s the head of the book division—

MC: And she wrote the forward to The Photographic Life, which was excellent.

SA: Yes. That’s right. And her job is that she’s in charge of photographic book publishing. They do a lot of book publishing at National Geographic, but an important area for them, obviously, is photography books, and she’s in charge of that division. And together we worked on it for about three years, pulling the photographs together. And it went all the way back through my published, and especially my unpublished work, over—Well, the first picture in the new book, the earliest picture, was taken in 1967 when I was a summer intern at National Geographic, it’s a picture of an African-American young man at a diner in Washington, DC, and he’s looking out the window, with a pre-occupied and long-distance gaze on his face, and he’s eating a hamburger, and he’s got a soft-drink there, and his hands are in his lap, and he’s leaning forward, and it’s never been published and no one’s ever seen it. And those are the kinds of pictures that I wanted to bring forward in this book, that—in short—pictures that have had a life, maybe only to me. They’ve never been published, they’ve never been seen, but they’ve never gone away.

In fact, their durability became to me a very important aspect of their life. They didn’t die. They had a life simply because they lasted, [not] because they got published, or they made money, or they helped my career, but they were photographs that had, apparently, a permanence. And why did they have a permanence, and what are the characteristics that give a photograph its life?

Not all photographs have a life, and many, many of mine do not. But some do, and I isolated those through an intense editing process, and brought them together into the different groups that you see, in to the different chapters. Do you have a copy of the book?

MC: I do not, but I have seen the press release, and the photos that accompany that.

SA: Ok, there are eleven chapters in the book. And that photograph that I described is in the chapter called ‘Portraits.’ Some of the chapters are pretty simple, like ‘Portraits’ and ‘Landscapes’ and so forth, but some are particular to me. One of the unique chapters is called ‘Just Looking.’ And we know that phrase; you go into a store, and the clerk says ‘May I help you?’ and you say, ‘No, just looking, just looking.’ So ‘Just Looking’ implies a kind of casual and formal—but careful—looking, that’s not pertinent, in my case, to my assignment.

Let’s say my assignment was on Tolstoy, and I’m in Russia, and there’s been a lot of vodka toasts in this rural village, and I go to the men’s room. And in front of me is this broken down, kind of battered, bashed, men’s room. A sink has been slammed right into the top of the wall, and there’s this particularly Russian hand cloth above it. And I stop, and I take a photograph of it, because it appeals to me. Nothing to do with Tolstoy, nothing to do with National Geographic, nothing to do really with the party, and the toasts, and all that stuff. I’m on the way to the men’s room, but I’ve got my camera. And I like, I like the way that it looks. I like the light, the color, the shape, the space, and the funky, particularly Russian way that this closet has been slammed into being a men’s room. So, in a way, in a dim way, I guess a distant way, it’s about Russia. But mainly it’s about me, and the world in front of me. And I raise up my camera . . . and I make a picture of this. Now it’s not going to run in the Tolstoy article, no editor is ever going to edit it in, but I liked it when I saw it as a photograph, as I had liked it in life. And it’s in this book. And it’s an emblem of the idea, ‘Just Looking.’

But, the phrase, to me, has a second meaning. And that means looking in a just way. And that, to me, means a certain thing. It’s different for you, it’s different for Mary Ellen Mark, she would’ve tilted the camera, and that would have been “just.” That would have been “just right,” or “just so.” We all have our idea of what right-looking, or right-composing, or right-seeming photography is. And mine is a certain space, with certain things in it, seen in a certain level way, without special angles or lenses or anything. It’s just so, by my reckoning. And so the phrase ‘just looking’ has this double meaning. Casual looking, but also right looking. Or, you might say, just so.

So, that’s one of the chapters that’s in the book. And in each chapter, I take up what gives, to me, these portrait photographs their life. And just to isolate that: What gives them their life is that the people aren’t smiling. What gives them their life is that the people who are portrayed are, to use a phrase of mine, within themselves. They’re quiet, these people, they are maybe smoking a cigarette, looking out a window, they’re thinking. They’re not happy, they’re not sad, they’re not emotional, apparently. And my thought about that is, they have a life, because you can’t memorize their emotion. You stay with the picture because it’s enigmatic, emotionally. Not sad, not happy, but—and the only phrase I could come up with to describe them as a group, to repeat myself, is that the people are within themselves. And I find that to be a durable state of being for the people—people are in that state very often, they just don’t get photographed in that state. They get photographed when they’re smiling, or when there’s a tragedy, when there’s a big-time emotion, in photojournalism, anyway. And studio photography too. It’s hard to get people within themselves.

MC: And in casual photographs, you smile and say cheese, and that’s what’s on people’s refrigerators—you see them either in a big-time emotion, or feigning one.

SA: Right. That’s right.

So, I isolate, in that chapter, that the thing that gives these portraits their life is, they can’t be memorized, or easily understood, even. And then I take up what gives a life to landscape picture, and what gives life to a wildlife photograph that I’ve taken.

I’m not a specialist, so—I’m just, as I say about my wildlife photographs, I’m a person with a camera, and the camera has a 28mm lens on it, so I’m obviously not out there with a long lens, and camera traps, and bait, and all the stuff that commercial wildlife specialists—

MC: Or Michael Nichols, for example.

SA: Right. He’s using camera traps. In a big way. He has some pictures that are confrontation, or encounters. Those are my favorite Nick Nichols pictures. Those are my favorites of his, where you feel present with the animal. In my modest, but I think, alive-looking pictures of wildlife—their life is their intimacy, their immediacy. It isn’t like looking through binoculars, and it isn’t like a camera trap that gives you an impossible-to-be-there look. Mine are all—my wildlife pictures are like my pictures of people. You’re present with a 28mm lens, you feel present.

MC: And you’re talking, I guess, about the three-toed sloth, carrying its baby along the beach?





SA: Yes. Yeah, that’s a 28mm lens.

MC: Wow, so you were close.

SA: Yeah, I’m close. That’s right. That’s exactly right.

MC: That’s cool, because it does definitely have that same intimate quality as some of your other work. You know, I saw that, and I’m used to your other work—the cowboys in Montana, or the pears on the windowsill…

SA: Right.

MC: And the sloth kind of surprised me. But, visually—in terms of the visual signatures there—it’s the same.

SA: Right. That’s right. The visual signature is the same. And that’s different for wildlife. It’s just unexpected. And so a person inside that chapter, testing the idea of what gives this picture its life—does it have a life?—could, as I have, answer it in the affirmative. I feel just as present here as I do with the cowboys branding. I try to—that visual signature idea is important to me, that I not be—I guess I’d most like to be known as a photographer who was present, and who put people—who allowed people to feel present in this photograph, and I just don’t think you can get that with long lenses, and super-wide lenses, where the camera is the story, or the lens is the story. People feel that.

MC: They absolutely do. To mention the branding scene; that photo happens to be my favorite photo of all time. And I was—

SA: Oh, thank you.

MC: You’re quite welcome. In The Photographic Life, I was very enthralled to see the frames that led up to it, and the process that goes into that. Is that something—I assume you’re going to be showing the frames around the famous images in the new book?

SA: In some. Like the sloth, I show every frame. And the pears, I show every frame. And there are about maybe half a dozen where I do that, where I show, sort of a cinema progression, kind of, sort of a sequence. But the thing in this book that I do is try to isolate it to two photographs, and there must be 20 pictures, 20 spreads in this book, maybe more, where the caption is ‘Two Views.’ Two views of the branding, you know, two views of the fish in the fishtank, in Japan. And two views of the train in Canada. Where I didn’t go so much into the longer sequences. For example, the branding has two pictures. I show the overall, and the picture that you know about. And I show them both full-size, and that’s a new treatment that I give to my most familiar pictures.






But the other thing I tried to bring to the book was brand new pictures that people who know my work haven’t seen before.

MC: As a photographer, your work is iconic. I mean, the picture of the pears has always been, to me, the quintessential National Geographic photo. That’s the kind of photo that makes National Geographic different from other magazines. Nick Nichols, Joel Sartore, those guys are great, but the subtlety of the pears and the cathedral is something National Geographic does that other magazines don’t. In exposing what goes on to make those pictures, and what has become your signature, do you have fears that this might de-mystify your work to your audience?






SA: When I do these books, I put out the book—someone asked me, when I came out with The Photographic Life book, “Who is your ideal audience, who are you aiming this book at?” And my answer was, “Myself, when I was 23 years old.” I put out the book that I would have wanted, a book that was kind of a blue print for how you live this life, and a blueprint for thinking photographically. I know I would have loved that if it would have come my way when I was 18 or 20 or 22. It’s the book I would have wanted. My parents are both teachers, and my brother, and my grandmother. I come from a family of teachers, and I think it’s in me to naturally go in that direction.

MC: Well, I’m 27, and I got that book when I was 25, and I think that that was definitely the book I wanted. I wanted to see what went into the seeing and the making of the images that I had seen in National Geographic.

SA: It didn’t seem like a risk at all to me to put those pictures in there, because I think it’s a valid part of the photographic life. Books that are greatest hits—someone’s best pictures—are monotonous and boring to me, they don’t grip me. They don’t have staying power, or gripping power. But books that have—that reveal something unexpected, and—let me just put I this way:

Leah and I had one thought for each photograph that was selected for The Photographic Life, and for the new book, The Life of a Photograph. One thought, one test, and one aspiration. And that is: Is it involving? Is it pretty, is it successful, was it difficult—maybe these are all questions you could ask about, and create a test about each photograph, but our test was: Is it involving? And that gets you into a great place mentally, about each photograph, and each pairing, and each spread, and each piece of text that you write. You write in such a way, and publish in such away, that each page, the majority of pages, will be involving. Because you know, and I know—well, I shouldn’t speak for you—but it’s not uncommon for me to flip a photographic book. Where I just page it. I’ve seen people do it, I’ve seen people do it to my books, and I thought, with The Photographic Life especially, I want to find a way to slow people down and involve them. And that led to the particular layout, and the decision to talk about process.

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The following MP3s document the rest of the interview:

On the pathos of the missed photograph.

“And that’s what makes a life in photography, I think, is that you live long enough, and work faithfully enough, that things recur, and opportunities present themselves. You learn, you grow, you suffer, you continue on. And, as I say, if you’re faithful, and you bear down, then there can be a result of the intensity that you put into something that didn’t work out, once upon a time.”

On the cost of photography.

“No matter what happens in my future, I will always say ‘I had an assignment at National Geographic.’”

On the Tolstoy assignment.

“I was called in at a certain point and told my pictures were too quiet . . . I don’t want to have a sex change as a photographer. I am who I am, and I believe in the power of quiet images.”

On the aftermath of the ‘Pears’ photo.

“I did better, and also they came toward me.”

On Newseek’s question, “Is Photography Dead?”

“Photography is a beautiful and meaningful way to be in life.”

On Art photography.

“Art photograph has taken . . . this remarkable departure from life.”

On documentary photography and his personal collection.

“I’m not entering the equation there. That’s an
intense thing that would be going on without me exactly that way.”

On the pictures on his refrigerator.

“A time-lapse of the river rising.”

On film vs. digital.

“I think more about getting out my dad’s Rollei . . .”

On “what if.”

“For a young photographer, the Geographic was kind of a lonely culture . . .”


All photos by Sam Abell, © 2008 National Geographic