112 - Mark Steinmetz | A Small Voice: Conversations With Photographers

112 - Mark Steinmetz

Mark Steinmetz is an American photographer who makes black and white photographs "of ordinary people in the ordinary landscapes they inhabit” and "in the midst of activity”. His work is held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hunter Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the New York Museum of Contemporary Photography, to name but a few. He is the recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship and his work has been exhibited in too many major museums and art galleries to list. He has produced 15 photobooks, such as South Central (2007), The Players (2015), Fifteen Miles to K-Ville (2015) and the Angel City West trilogy.

Mark was born in New York City and raised in the Boston-area suburbs until he was 12 at which point he moved to the midwest. At age 21 he moved to New England to study photography at Yale School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut. He left that MFA program after one semester and in mid 1983, aged 22, moved to Los Angeles in search of the photographer Garry Winogrand, whom he befriended. In 1999 he moved to Athens, Georgia where he still lives, with his wife, photographer Irina Rozovsky, and their young daughter.

On episode 112, Mark discusses, among other things:

Delving into the archive
Angel City West
First darkroom in Iowa
Going to L.A. and meeting Winogrand
Earning a living
MOMA show
Bring drawn to The South and shooting there
Why he works in B&W
His aesthetic and why he still prints his own work
Meditation and avoiding distractions

Referenced:

Website

“There’s this beautiful thing and it’s the main thing and it’s the important thing and sometimes perfectionism can just cripple that. You know, why is one picture alive and another dead? And often it’s just, who wants something perfect, you know? It doesn’t ring true really. So I do like some sloppiness but I try to be smart about it.”

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