Somehow, We’re Still Talking
Interview by Andrew Womack
What originally inspired your concept? Did it happen before you started taking the photos? Or looking at photos you’d already taken?
The original inspiration was two-fold. One, I really liked the lines. I’ve noticed that a lot of the stuff I shoot, especially most of my earlier images, has to do with lines, lines and angles. The other reason for the start of this project was a fact of where I was. The first poles in this series (the black-and-white images) were shot in Missoula, Montana. And this might sound ridiculous, but there are only so many beautiful mountain landscape shots you can take. Or, at least, that I could take. One of the things I noticed when I was out there was that a lot of the time you had to angle your lens just so, so that the telephone poles and wires weren’t in the frame-up of a setting sun over mountain peaks. After a while, I just trained my lens on the sky and the poles and the wires.
Where were the rest of the photos shot? How did you seek out the subjects? Did you have any sites planned already?
A lot of these images are from Montana. After I took the first couple I loved the way they looked and only wanted to shoot telephone poles. I started seeing them everywhere. And they are everywhere. That became kind of a marvel to me. Way out in the middle of seemingly nowhere those lines are ahead of and behind you. I’d be driving along somewhere and notice a particular cluster and either stop the car or make a mental note to drive back there. There was a particular grouping I liked down by these old train tracks in Missoula and I’d often go down there to shoot.
Some of the images are from Pittsburgh. I grew up there and I frequently go back to visit my mom and my brothers. Pittsburgh is densely crisscrossed with telephone poles and wires, as are many cities I guess. But I think having grown up there, it’s an overhead fabric to which I instinctively gravitated.
Then I became interested in the terminus of the wires, where they connected up to buildings and ultimately to us. There was a four- or five-story parking garage that I particularly loved. I’d go up to the top level, haul out my tripod, and shoot the wires connected to some apartment buildings. I was always kind of nervous that people would think I was shooting into their windows. But no one ever threw anything at me, so I just kept shooting.
What is your background in photography?
Photography began as a tool in the work that I did, and still do. I do ethnographic research—it’s a qualitative practice, sometimes called design research. It borrows principles and practices from anthropology. I interview people and observe how they use things, why they do certain things. For instance, the last project I worked on I went along with people while they went grocery shopping and observed while they prepared and cooked dinner in order to understand how meal planning plays a role in their lives. Anyway—doing that kind of research usually requires visual artifacts; you’re constantly watching for meaningful actions and behaviors. But photography quickly became more than that to me. I fell in love with it. I do both freelance photography and research now. And they feed each other.
The contrast and starkness of many of the black-and-white photos is truly beautiful. Also interesting is how in many of the photos the context of the wires—nature (the clouds, the sky, etc.), the buildings, other surroundings—play a huge role. What’s the reason for that? Does it say anything about us, those who rely on the communication wires?
In some of those black-and-white images, the wires lead you completely out of the frame. But I always liked that knowing what they were—they were leading you to someone. The sky definitely plays a huge role in those images. They’re both (the wires and the sky) overhead, a constant presence that you grow to overlook or forget to notice. It gets kind of messy, though, when you see how the wires are connected up to the buildings and the poles. I look at it sometimes and I just can’t believe that it works. This massive mesh rigged up and tacked to the sides of buildings—I mean, really, how does it all still work? Who knows what’s what anymore? But another thing we take for granted is picking up the phone and hearing a dial tone.
Do you think you may have discovered anything about communications—tele- or otherwise—and the way we use it, over the course of this project?
When I thought of the title to this project —‘Somehow, We’re Still Talking,’ it was because I’m as much mystified with the mechanisms of our communications as with the act of communicating itself. It can be so hard just to be understood. To make yourself understood. And to really understand what someone else is saying. But we do it. Or we try to. And it can be really messy sometimes.
What’s kind of funny is that I never made any real connection—until these questions—between my telephone poles and another photo project I’ve been working for some time—I call it (imaginatively) my ‘cell phone project.’ I’ve been working on photos of people talking on their cell phones for about a year and a half. I wanted to do the cell phone project because I wondered about the way cell phones can pull people completely out of their environment. The strange thing about the telephone poles is that they completely place people in their environment.
