Pictures & Blather

Site Hack Twit Dive

• Q & A with Noah Vaughn

  In preparation for writing my essay about Noah Vaughn for Chicago Magazine I subjected him to a series of incisive queries…

  

  Dmitry Samarov: Can you talk about your transition from painting to photography? Was it primarily a practical choice? (not wanting to haul an easel around on your bike, etc)
   
  
  Noah Vaughn: When I graduated from art school, I was making paintings of cityscapes either directly from observation or from drawings done outside and then worked up in my studio. Getting a full time job made this kind of work difficult since I had a lot less time to work during daylight hours. I started taking photos of places I wanted to paintings at thinking I could use them for reference materials in the studio, but as it turned out I hated painting from photos. I wasn’t sure how to proceed with my paintings, but I had these photos that were kind of interesting, and since I wasn’t getting anywhere with the one thing why not experiment a little with the other? That is pretty much how I moved from painting to photography. And yes, since I don’t drive, transporting photo equipment by bike is a bit easier than carrying a French easel and wet painting.

  

  
  DS: Is your attraction to industrial wreckage due in any part with being from Peoria (Caterpiller, etc.)?
  
  NV: I’m sure growing up in Peoria had some influence on my imagery. The industrial areas that lined the Illinois River was the most visually interesting thing in what I thought of as a dull suburban cityscape. There was a coal-fired power plant that I could see from my house and my high school, and I thought of the smokestacks as kind of a landmark. There was always that sense of industry being present.
   
  An even greater outside influence on my imagery was a summer job I had in college, working as an air sampling technician at asbestos abatement sites. The job involved a lot of hanging around inside empty schools, vacant factories, half-vacant strip malls at night, and soon-to-be-demolished buildings. The work was boring and the pay was not great (plus, there was the asbestos,) but I loved having the chance to poke around these normally off-limit places. I got a lot of visual inspiration from that job.

  
  DS: You seem to have been able to avoid the romanticizing “ruin porn” aspect of urban photography. Are there conscious choices involved in not fetishizing your subject-matter?

  NV: The “ruin porn” problem is always in the back of my mind when I’m out shooting. I have no interest in making photos that are about the esthetics of decay—peeling paint and rust and crumbling bricks, the whole “romance of ruins” thing, which just seems kind of boring and pointless to me. I just try to make a straightforward document of whatever it is I’m looking at. No dramatic lighting or weird wide-angle camera lens tricks. I also try to find ways to inject some humor or visual quirkiness into my images. It doesn’t happen often, but good things happen when it does.
  
  

  DS: Can you ever imagine doing what you do in a city other than Chicago?
   
  NV: Chicago is the only city I really know—I moved here from East Peoria in 1989 for college and haven’t left since—so it’s difficult for me to imagine living anywhere else. I do wonder what getting away from the street grid and flat landscape would do for my work. Living somewhere that I don’t know very well might force me to look for new subjects, or at least a new way to look at the type of subjects that I shoot. And it’s getting harder to find interesting places to shoot in Chicago, as gentrification and urban renewal wipe out a lot of potential subjects. But I always manage to find something to work with, so unless I’m given a compelling reason to move I’m staying put.

  

  
  DS: Talk a bit about your day-job (which I know you’ve had for nearly 20 years now) and the influence, if any, on your creative life.
   
  NV: I’ve worked for a law library maintenance service for 15 years, which is a lot longer than I ever imagined having this job when I answered the help wanted ad (“Oh, I’ll just do this for a year or two, save up some money, then do something else…”) Basically, I go to 4-5 law firms a day and do basic library stuff for them—update books, process library mail, catalog materials, photocopy articles…it’s all very exciting. Actually it isn’t, but I could never imagine making any sort of income from my art, and a steady paycheck and health insurance are hard to give up. I work with paper books and libraries are slowly going digital, so I often wonder how much longer this will last for me.
   
  I can’t imagine that the office environments I work in would ever influence my photos. My choice of subject matter—derelict buildings and cityscapes—is a kind of reaction against the sterile corporate spaces I spend so much time in. After a week in shiny downtown office buildings, spending a couple days wandering through industrial zones with a camera is a great way to unwind.  

  
  
  
  DS: I love ChicagoScreenShots and I know I’m not alone. Can you tell me what inspired it, how much time you devote to it (seems like it’d be really labor-intensive), and whether you see it complementing, conflicting with, or otherwise impacting your own photography.
   
  NV: The screenshot blog comes from my interest in archival photos of Chicago architecture. One of my biggest internet time-sucks is Googling for older images of Chicago street images, especially for scenes of places that no longer exist or have radically changed. Saving images from Chicago movies was just part of that same impulse. I started making screenshots from movies that I had some connection to, like The Package—I used to live in a house that was featured in the movie—or Running Scarred, the movie that made me want to move to Chicago (don’t ask.) I occasionally posted these images to my flickr page where they got a lot of interesting feedback, so obviously I wasn’t the only one interested in this sort of thing. I started the blog just to have a separate place to present these images—I wasn’t planning on updating it regularly, but now I’m a bit obsessive with the project. It’s been interesting to see how different filmmakers depict Chicago, especially the parts that are not the downtown tourist attractions. 
  
  The blog isn’t THAT labor-intensive—it’s really just a Sunday night hobby. Pausing a movie every few minutes to get a screenshot can be tiresome and time-consuming, and if the movie is bad the project can be a real chore. The Monitors had some great Chicago images, but the story was so dumb that I turned the sound off and fast-forwarded through most of the film. The good movies take more time because I actually end up watching them before I go back and pick images to use. Out of all of the images I get from a movie, I probably post half of them on the blog.  
  
  I do see Chicago Screenshots as being loosely related to my overall art practice. Part of the reason I take the photos I do is to have a document of what the city looks like, and the screenshot blog is another way to archive images of Chicago street life. I don’t think the screenshots resemble my own photos, though I suppose the images I choose to save show my photographic biases. A lot of images I save don’t get posted—they may have some architectural/cultural significance, but as still photos they don’t work for me. And the blog has started to influence my own photo ideas: after seeing so many different film images of The Loop, I’ve started thinking about making photos of downtown myself, something I really haven’t been interested in doing before. Maybe I’ll re-explore some old film locations, “Running Scarred Redeux” or something like that.

  

  You can see much more of Noah’s work here.

  27 Sep 2011 / 10 notes