Citizen-Times Portfolio: Max Cooper

Many thanks to the Citizen-Times for the chance to talk about my work in the Arts & Living section.

I'm long winded, and they cut a couple of answers for space. Here's the whole thing:

Name: Max Cooper
Home: West Asheville
Studio/gallery: Studios are for sissies.
Medium: Documentary Photography
Contact: cooper [at] darktopography [dawt] com, 828.808.7777
Price: Print prices begin at $100 for a framed 11x14 digital C-print.
Available: Darktopography.com, declarearms.com, and maxcooperphoto.com

How do you describe your art?
Honest photography. I grew up in western North Carolina, so my photos investigate the region’s deep faith, strong rural roots, and fierce individualism. This takes several forms: most significantly, a series of night shots called A Dark Topography that addresses faith and human endeavor from an existentialist perspective. I also have an ongoing project, A Declaration of Arms, that deals with the pathos of bearing arms—gun culture, if there is such a thing. So, to sum it up: pictures of crosses, churches, guns, roads, fires, bridges, floods, trains, rivers, ghosts, darkness, and the sovereignty of will.

Tell us about your latest project/show.
My last show, called The District, was a collection of photos shot in Asheville’s River Arts District. It was an extension of the Dark Topography idea, looking at art as a fundamental human endeavor. The show was up at Pump Gallery for the month of August, and was very successful.

What are you doing that no one else is?
Asheville is full of photographers concentrating on beauty, and rightly so. We’re blessed with a beautiful place to live. But I believe that photography’s strength is its authenticity, and the landscape I depict is more honest than beautiful. Rather than the mountains, the architecture, or the fall leaves, I focus on a sense of place as a whole. We have these beautiful things, but we also have railroad crossings, shooting ranges, gas stations—the places where our lives and passions play themselves out. I believe that when a landscape is rendered honestly, beauty will take care of itself.

The other thing I do differently is ignore the typical “Art World” conceits. I embrace the blogosphere, I shoot pictures with my cellphone. I’m not afraid of film grain, lens flare, or reciprocity failure. And I don’t price my work out of my audience’s reach.

What influences your work?
Photographers that came before me in the documentary tradition: Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Eugene Smith. But also non-photographic influences like the Bible, cinema, and heavy metal. Thinkers and philosophers like Stephen Hawking, Ayn Rand, and Thomas Jefferson.

When is your most creative time?
Dusk till dawn.

How did you get started in your art?
That’s a long story. My dad is a photographer. Somewhere around 17 I realized I was good at it too, and I started to document the crazy places I’d find myself with my friends—exploring abandoned industrial sites, wading down the river at 2 a.m. Art in general comes at a pretty high cost, and it took me a few years to decide if it was worth it. When I did, I was laying underneath my tripod in the dead of night, in the middle of a forest fire, counting down the seconds of the exposure. And that was the moment I realized that, whether it was worth it or not, I was already doing it.

What (or who) is your favorite muse?
My muse is the light coming in through the viewfinder. The strength and weakness of photography is that it doesn’t come from within—it’s a response to the world, a way of living within the world, that other art forms are not. In other media, you’re inspired by something—love, tragedy, conflict—and from that comes a creation. In photography, you see the creation, and your challenge is to capture it. It’s not a passive pursuit of a muse, but a white-knuckled grip on the moment.

Who is the artist you most admire?
Easy. Sam Abell. He’s a man who was not afraid to take quiet photographs for the most dramatic magazine on the newsstand, National Geographic. He embraces the subtlety and nuance of the moment, and his pursuit of that embrace is a drama in itself.

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On a related note, I hate self-portraits. Hate hate hate. That was exacerbated by an art curriculum that requires self-portraiture in EVERY FREAKIN CLASS. As far as I'm concerned, there is no greater waste of time, except drawing fat old people naked and making teapots out of clay, both of which I was also forced to do.

So, for revenge, I make all of my students shoot self-portraits. I thought I'd leveled out the art-education karma by passing on all that pain of self-examination, but what do ya know, the CT wanted a picture of me, and I'm too OCD to let anyone else do it. So . . .