Fanny Keifer from Studio 4 interviewed Art last week prior to his 2 successful events in Vancouver, BC.

Our workshop instructor Jay Goodrich is continuing his interview series with Art. Today he is discussing the future of photography and the age of digital. For more info on Jay you can visit his blog or website.

Jay Goodrich

You had a recent article in ‘Outdoor Photographer’ about stock photography and with the seemingly collapse of stock photography industry, where do you think the future photographers will be able to make money?

Art Wolfe

I think photographers will always make money and I think that we’re looking at pretty tough times right now. I think that we’re looking at a time from when we were represented by large corporations and that has really been undermined, to the time where we can use social media, Internet, and all of that and find our new way and using new means of presenting our work through the Internet. I think there’s a lot of opportunities.

I can’t say unequivocally this will happen but I have every reason to believe that there will be new markets, new means, new showcases and in many ways they’ll be easier than before to get one’s work in front of mass audiences. Before you had to rely on the whims of the editor, like Getty or any other stock agency, the whims of whether a book publisher wanted to publish your work. You were really at the mercy of somebody else’s decision. The entrepreneurial photographers can grow and succeed.

It’s not like it’s just plug it in and it’s a done deal. Everybody’s going to have to work. I think the challenge is to come up with unique work. I think that we live at a time where people are inspired by the work of others to the point where they just simply go out and copy and I don’t think that’s going to work. I think people have to find new ways and in fact I’m seeing it happen.

There’s a lot of new energy out there, a lot of new ideas. So I have a hopeful look towards the future but I also know that it’s no longer going to be just simply appropriate that people photograph nature and make money from it. I think it’s a moral obligation that people that make a living from nature, or even a little bit of money from nature, care about what they’re photographing and try to preserve it so that they’ll have subjects, we have an environment, down the road.

Jay Goodrich

With the advances in digital cameras, do you think photography is going to lose its medium? By this I mean will there no longer be anything tangible to it? Will it all exist on a computer as a file that sits on someone’s hard drive and if so is that a good thing or a bad thing for photography?

Art Wolfe

It is a kind of interesting thing, because I’m, as I said before, I was kind of brought up with tangible things. Paper, brushes, wet ink, wet paint. Film was something you had in your hand but the minute you turned that digital capture into a print you have something tangible. And it’s just you have to be comforted with the fact that, for me to actually do a dissertation of what digital actually is, it’s almost laughable. But I get what it is. It’s a series of pixels that are captured and laid out. I’m fine with that because I know that I can capture, even though it’s not a tangible something I hold, it’s something way better than what I could have had before. In other words, film, a romanticized film, but it had its limitations. It could go away easily and so if people are resolute about maintaining their digital capture and refreshing it every once in a while, you could argue that is so much pure of a medium in terms of being able to make identical copies and preserving it, where film could change if somebody was right on it, with the latest technology, you just keep rewriting it until a pressure copy.

Jay Goodrich

Do you think that digital photography has opened up your creativity to levels that you’ve never thought possible?

Art Wolfe

Oh absolutely. There’s, and I often say that during the course of my classes where I show a photo taken of two fur seals fighting on a very dreary dark, dank day in South Georgia Island where I’m bouncing up and down on a raft right at the ocean’s edge. I couldn’t even have imagine taking a picture that was worth anything six, seven years ago and yet now I can pop up the ISO to 800, take a crisp sharp shot of the jaws agape and fighting, with the water splashing, and get a shot that I can use. That was just a fantasy before.

So I embrace the technology, I certainly love the ability to stitch together individual images and to make up a very large file that I can blow up large on a wall. I can pre-create formats that I couldn’t have done a handful of years ago. I would have had to bring, as I did, panoramic cameras and 35mm cameras. And even on one occasion a medium format camera. Today I can use a 35mm and build whatever format I needed.

Jay Goodrich

That’s good. What advice would you have for an aspiring pro?

Art Wolfe

I think to know your field, know who’s doing what, find out what stories might be under photographed. Environments under – you have to be newsy these days. Again there’s an entire genre of nature photographers that are just content photographing in their new local neighborhoods or in their national parks, at their own back door, and I think that’s fine.

It really boils down to whatever makes you happy. If you are an aspiring professional photographer I think you’re going to have to push yourself a little harder than the tens of thousands of recreational photographers that are pleased just to take a picture that makes them happy. I think everything’s valid in that world, but certainly the professionals will have to become a little more business orientated. There’s so many out there now that you just can’t decide you’re going to go through the South West and photograph the great national parks and make a living from it. It’s just not going to happen.

Jay Goodrich

That leads me to my next question. Most people don’t know that you were a teacher. Tell us a little bit about that.

Art Wolfe

Well, I’m one of those people that sees nobility in teaching, and I love sharing ideas, I always have. Every book I have done over the last 20 years had certainly a lot of information about what I used and how I photographed it and the F stops and so forth. I’ve done a couple of books that were moderately successful, probably the most successful was called the Art of Photographing Nature. I like inspiring people and I like teaching. So – I learned through the teaching process. Right now I’m about to embark on a major swing through America at the end of May and early June, teaching full day seminars in New York and D.C., Toronto, Chicago, Minneapolis, Los Angeles. And the idea is concentrating really on finding and photographing subjects, because whether you’re a professional or an amateur, the challenge for all of us is finding out there in that 360 degree view, subjects. You know, pulling it out, to see it with the eye and your imagination, framing it and making and maximizing the most compelling and emotionally impacting photos is the challenge, and that’s what I’m going to concentrate on.

I’ll draw from 30 years of travel and find some of my most iconic images, but also the photos leading up to those images, and so it’s a natural step. You know, a lot of people have this misconception that one walks right up to a photo and takes an iconic image and just walks away; one click of the camera. And in fact it’s usually a series of incrementally better framed photos to where you arrive at the best shot, or so you think. So I like to show that; I call that deconstructing the image, and there will be certainly many, many series exemplifying that. And so, I think, you know, through the – through a fairly thoughtful explanation and a series of photos to back up the explanation, is a really great teaching method, and that’s what I’m going to be doing.

Jay Goodrich

I’ll ask you, but you kind of just answered it, maybe you’ll agree or not, but I’ve seen many of your instructional lectures in your workshops. You used your work in an inspiring way to show people how to become better photographers, and has your teaching background been a driving force behind you creating those lectures and giving that information?

Art Wolfe

Yeah, I love the challenge of actually conveying ideas and thoughts to people. If you really boil down the work that I’ve done as a photographer, it’s really about educating people on why this might be important, what’s special about that environment. Almost everything I’ve ever intentionally photographed has been uplifting and inspiring. And I draw from that. The way I live in my house in Seattle, as you look around this room where we’re doing this interview, there’s a lot of artwork on the wall. The window showcases a garden out there that I’ve worked on. Everything I do is uplifting; it’s educational. I try to bring importance to that twisted tree outside the door or that piece of art work over there or the photograph that I’ve just taken. And so, it’s about educating, inspiring, uplifting and I do that through the teaching process.

So I teach through the photos I take, and I don’t know how I can easily close that in a very eloquent way, but I think you get it.

Jay Goodrich

What are some of the challenges in teaching and how do you overcome them?

Art Wolfe

Well, I don’t think that there’s many challenges. Actually I think that the biggest challenge for me from teaching really is getting the people that would always take a class from you informed that there’s actually a class. So I think this harks back to the age of digital now where we can use the internet, digital – let’s not say digital but the internet on getting the word out there. Certainly blogs like what we’re discussing this for is a way of actually imparting information out to people, letting them know what’s coming up so they have the ability to sign up for class or not or know about a body of work or not, or know what our colleagues are doing. I think it’s a great age we live in, where communication is going to be and continue to be right at our finger tips.

Jay Goodrich

And can we expect more workshops from Art Wolfe in the near future?

Art Wolfe

I think you can not only expect more workshops, but more and varied content. You know, whether it’s the form of the TV show that I host, the new black and whites that I’m doing or whatever project might be floating out there, there’s a lot of books that I’d like to tell the story of. One of which might be about climate change and how it’s going to increase the number of climate refugees out there. I think it’s a great story to tell. It’s not a happy story to tell, but I think you can tell that story eloquently and with emotion, and make people feel what that’s all about….

BLOG: Migrations – Images by Art Wolfe

Photographer, writer, and podcast producer Jim Goldstein spent a little time interviewing Art about the current status of digital photography.

Jim Goldstein

As more people take an interest in photography, the debate seems to surface frequently to the merits of using digital technology to enhance wildlife, nature and landscape photographs. It’s been over twelve years since the Atlantic released its article “Photography in the Age of Falsification” and yet much debate on this issue persists. Whether you call it digital editing, photo manipulation or photo fakery, I thought it might be of interest to a wide audience of photographers to revisit this topic with you.

Question number one, back when you put together Migrations, the book that was the heart of controversy in the mid to late ‘90s, what was the motivation to create digitally altered photos at this time?

Art Wolfe

You know, what I maintained back there, and you say it’s ten years or 12 years. Anyway, what I maintain when I debated my critics, I have never waivered. I have never waivered on what I said. I found that digital, and we called it digital illustration, right from the get-go, right in the opening paragraphs introducing this body of work, that there are different places and usages of content – whether it’s pure photography, enhanced photography, artistic photography, and what I tried to do is bridge the gap between artistic photography and nature photography. I believe I pushed the boundaries as any artist actually should do and grow through the experience. I maintained that what we were digitally illustrating was natural and not falsifying numbers. And in most cases, in that book, it was taking one or two elements and changing or filling in the gaps of sheer numbers.

For instance, it was, you know, swarms of bees or flocks of birds or herds of mammals, and we were just filling some open spaces to complete a pattern because this truly was what the book was about. It was an artistic designee book about patterns in nature. Had I called it ‘Wallpaper’ it probably would not have been as controversial as it became. It’s interesting to note that designers and art critics throughout the world rallied around the book while some photographers took exception with it and downright condemned it. I think had we not introduced it openly and honestly in the beginning of the book and called some of the contents “digital illustrations” we would be really held up for criticism. But had – since we did do that I debated very vociferously that what we were doing was fine.

Jim Goldstein

Okay, that’s great. Even though as you were quoted as saying “Out of the million photos I’ve done, less than two hundred have digital components, I am still not using the technology all that often.” Why was creating digitally altered photos considered so controversial?

Art Wolfe

I think that people have this perception and certainly within the bastions of nature photographers, there’s this perception that photography is real, and that whatever you aim the camera at is a pure recording of reality and I’ve never maintained that. I’ve never maintained that whatever I was photographing was absolutely real. I could alter its content by compression through the use of telephoto lenses, I could conversely distort the angles by using wide angles, I could change the color depending on the film I chose, I could change the reality of the image by what I chose to include in the composition and exclude in the composition.

For instance, if there was a telephone pole along a beautiful patch of forest if I just simply zoomed in, and eliminated it from within the frame, it would just imply purity and pristineness. So I’ve always looked at photography as no different than any other medium of artistic endeavor. We have so much control and photography has always been really a reflection of how the artist could use that tool. I think Ansel Adams was exemplified – the fact that he could take an image and through the black and white process, burning and dodging in the zone system, really make that image, that perhaps was very bland in initial capture, and turning it into something magnificent and artistic. Had he been alive today he would definitely have embraced the digital technology.

Jim Goldstein

What lessons – what lessons were learned that you could share with other photographers that relate to the current state of wildlife, nature and landscape photography?

Art Wolfe

Certainly what I learned from this whole process is some of the people that had the most vigorous debates with me were not all that agitated over the use of digital illustrations, and I – I refuse to this day to recall it manipulation, I think that the very word implies something derogatory or negative. I think even the word ‘altered’ implies something different than what I was trying to do. Certainly what I’ve learned is the press would write without quotes, would write without confirmation and often – and this is a very small part of the press I might add, the very conservative [indiscernible] Monthly or U.S. News and World Report, would not have access to me, because I was travelling in South America at the time, and they simply filled in what they think I would have represented which was often far from the truth. So I’ve learned that the press is often not, you know, waylaid by truth. They will print what they think is correct and stand by those words.

Jim Goldstein

What are your feelings on the terms photo manipulation versus digitally altered versus digitally enhanced? Is there an undertone that you think is fair, or more accurate other term than another?

Art Wolfe

I should be clear that I have led the way, I think, through the whole debate, that identification is key. If I know that I’m looking at a work that has been digitally illustrated, then I would look at the work somewhat differently than had I not been informed. I think the legitimate criticism of Migrations was on the fact that we didn’t identify each and every image that had been altered or illustrated. And I think that’s a legitimate concern, it was something that we went into eyes wide open. We debated within my staff on how to present this work because do we in fact just ‘carte blanche’ as we chose to do, introduce this book as containing it or do we try to illustrate or identify every element that had been changed within a photo. And there was, out of a book of a hundred images, there were no more than 30 images that had some sort of change. And some were radical and most were very innocuous, something that most people would hardly even register. And so, rather than illustrating what was done in every photo and the idea was to avoid making this a book of “How to’s” we simply looked at this book as an art book based on nature, and we thought that if everybody understood that this book contained illustrations, they would just look at the work as a body of work and a body of art. And many people did look at that, because they’re actually intellectual, but there were certainly a lot of people that loved to see the world in black and white which I’ve never done.

And so, I think I’ve – since that I actually insisted that Getty changes the way they label photographs that had been changed or altered, if you will, through the digital process. Certainly, I created a handful of images after Migrations that were purely commercial in nature. They were combining two very radically different elements into a final illustration. It was pretty obvious that that had been done and that was sold strictly to advertising and yet within the edge of the image it was embedded “this is a digital illustration” and Getty adopted that as identification, probably for the next five to ten years. I think that whole resolve and issue has kind of subsided as people have seen all sorts of incarnations of digital illustration or altering. I remember clearly a lot of the debate was not so much the exception of how I introduced it and what I did, but they – a lot of the ‘naysayers’ said that this would inevitably lead to people going overboard with it and to not identify what they were doing and to sell it as real nature which was never our intent.

There has been a handful of photographers that have created pure fantasy and tried to palm it off as being real, so I never believed that that was possible but people have done it and so I was proven wrong. I would argue that they would have done it whether I did Migrations or not.

Jim Goldstein

Is there a term you prefer used over another and you’ve already said that you prefer digital illustration over any other. Given your background as a fine art painter prior to photography, how does photography fit in with your perception of art?

Art Wolfe

Well in fact I teach quite regularly the connection between art and photography. I show through demonstrations and fairly lengthy thought out lectures how I make a connection between impressionists as painters and photography through abstract expressionism and photography, I draw largely from the art world to find – help me find and define my subjects. So I’ve completely given over to the art world in the realm of photography and in fact in more recent works I’m blending the two. I actually do paintings and photography of the same subject, combining those two medium. So I’m not, you know, a naturalist. I should say I’m actually a naturalist because I certainly know what I’m photographing but I don’t try to come from a naturalist bent to the work that I do.

Jim Goldstein

Taking this question one step further, how does digital editing lend itself in your eyes to photography as art?

Art Wolfe

Okay, let me take a stab at it. I mean I will be the first to say that since the book Migrations, just a handful of photos have been illustrated digitally where, if we’re very clear what we’re talking about here, where we’re bringing in two very different elements into a final proposition, that has a very small part of what I do, a very small part. In fact, I can’t even remember how many years ago since the last one we created. It was a specific project, Migrations, did it moved on from there to some illustrations for Getty, and beyond that it’s just one book out of a career of 30 years and 60 books. And, so, probably the last ten books there’s been no reason – or no reason to actually include digital illustrations within the pages of the book. It’s not that I was firmly rebuked, it’s just that identifying a appropriate place for that. Migrations was, again, a art book based on nature and that’s why we – and that’s what we said in the Introduction. I think that if we’re talking about digital enhancing colors, certainly every single digital capture I take, goes through a series of adjustments, whether we’re boosting the contrast and the levels and saturating the color a little bit to resemble the film that I wound up using during the last five or six years of my film taking. It was Velvia, and so a digital capture is somewhat flat compared to that and we just restore it to look closer to the film that we liked.

Jim Goldstein

For those who find this debate of constant curiosity, what do you feel is the most important take – sorry, most important take away to remember as they evolve as photographers?

Art Wolfe

Well, I mean I think it’s how they see themselves. The photographers purely see themselves as natural history photographers, recording the rapidly diminishing natural world. I don’t see a real natural place to use digital illustration. If you’re a photographer that loves the art, and you’re making art work for art galleries, I think everything is subject to interpretation. So it really depends on, I wouldn’t consider using a natural history photo to build a campaign to preserve this environment or that. So I believe that there’s a perception of purity in the capture. Even withstanding what I said earlier about how you can really alter the impression of the environment through choice of lens, and angle, and composition, I still think we know what we’re talking about here. If it’s digital illustration, where you are combining elements, I don’t see a logical place for that to appear in any kind of natural history preservation campaign. So two different uses depending on what you want to do with it.

Jim Goldstein

Do you feel there would be any differing takeaways for editors, gallery curators, et cetera?

Art Wolfe

Well, you know, I think that this debate about digital illustration versus “purity” has been lost on many of the young editors that have come into the field in our magazine editors these days. I find that many of these young editors have a very minimal background in natural history knowledge, and so consequently, you know, photographers that create fantasy can probably get those photos often passed and the editor’s notice, and I’ve been one of the first people to rise up against that and to criticize the photographer for not being truthful to the editor and for the editor for not simply knowing what they’re publishing.