The last time we spoke it was in a very different context: in 2001 and 2004, when your pioneering Internet telephony firm Vocaltec was in a partnership with Deutsche Telekom. Now, we are meeting you again as a photographic artist. What happened in the intervening years?
Ganor: I retired from my role at VocalTec in 2005. Of course this decision didn’t come out of the blue: I always had a strong affinity for photography – I got my first camera at my bar mitzvah and have taken pictures ever since. Originally my plan had been to retire from business at 50 and become a filmmaker. But when I attended a workshop by Adi Nes, I realized the full potential of still photography and decided to enter a full-time program at the Hamidrasha School of Art in Tel Aviv.

But in terms of subject matter, you didn’t leave the world of business and finance entirely…
Correct. My first project was a Photo series called Wall Street, which I shot in New York City and Israel over the course of three years while I was a student at Hamidrasha. It consists of seven staged photographs that represent my view of Wall Street after having being the CEO of a NASDAQ-traded company for more than a decade.

… and it’s not a rosy view.
That’s putting it mildly. During my years as a CEO, I encountered so much immoral, corrupt behavior by investment bankers that I developed a disdain for Wall Street culture. They cared about only one thing: making money – at any cost. I experienced this first-hand: in 1995, VocalTec was approached by Netscape, who wanted to acquire us. I declined the offer and we decided to go public,. The lead bank was Hambrecht & Quist. Three days before our IPO, Netscape announced the acquisition of a direct competitor of ours. The investment bank? You guessed it: also Hambrecht & Quist! As a result of the acquisition announcement, our IPO was marred, and our shares dropped from $19.00 to 16.75. ( It did recover later)

So Wall Street was an indictment?
Art became my way of expressing my sentiments about Wall Street. I have a medical background, and my training included psychology. The book “Snakes in Suits : When Psychopaths Go To Work” By Paul Babiak confirmed my own analysis: it claims that the investment banking industry, in effect, recruits psychopaths– people who will do everything they can, amorally, to earn money. This book confirmed what I knew. Of course I know a lot of great human beings who work in investment banking, but they are in the minority. I became convinced that when so many sociopaths congregate in one industry, something is bound to go very wrong. The work was my way of warning of things to come.

What were the reactions?
My Wall Street series premiered at a Tel Aviv gallery on 21 August, 2008. Three weeks later, Lehman Brothers collapsed. At the time, the work was described as prophetic. I got dozens and dozens of calls after the Lehman crash, all asking: How did you know? The answer was simple: I experienced the problem firsthand.

Your new series, The Box, marks a departure from Wall Street – both in terms of form and content. How did it come about?
I’m the type of photographer who always carries his camera with him. One day, I found myself in a new seaside restaurant in northern Tel Aviv. It had a cupboard that was open on both sides. Like many photographers, I’m a peeper – who shoots things just to see what they look like through the lens. When I saw that cupboard, I couldn’t resist the temptation of finding out what the beach would look like framed by the shelves.

I was so intrigued by the results that I kept coming back to the same restaurant, simply to shoot through their cupboard. Carrying a cupboard isn’t very convenient, so I asked a carpenter to build me a set of wooden boxes in different shapes, colors and sizes. I would carry them with me to see how the results would be.

What does the box mean?
Once I found myself walking around with boxes, and people on the beach saw this strange man shooting through a box, I had to do some thinking about what got me hooked on the box (laughs). Art photography has many definitions – the one that speaks the most to me is that the photographer is a sculptor whose main material is light. In that context, The Box is a study of rays of light, a study in physics. When you shoot from different positions with the box, or at different times of day, you get light from different angles, and you get dramatically different images. With the wooden box you help shape what you see.

A means to amplify differences in the quality and shapes of light?
Yes, and it also serves to emphasize specific elements, and hide others. It’s a very primitive wooden lens that yields interesting results when combined with an highly technological tool such as an advanced camera.

When you look at the outcome, 80% of the image are the sides of the box – what would classically be considered the subject is only 20% of the image, essentially, a slit. But to me, the real subject is both the light on the box and the slit – the two add to each other. It’s a physical game of perspective. You know how photographers and kids will sometimes frame a subject with their fingers? That’s what the box is about – except that boxes come in a much larger range of sizes than fingers, so there is no natural reference point. This throws the viewer off and creates an enigma. For example, many people think it’s a specific location that I’m peeping through. But in fact, my peephole travels with me.

Where to?
So far: all over Israel, both on the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea, and internationally to Spain, Cuba, the USA and others. It helps me in my quest to create something sublime in its beauty. Of course you never get there, but you reach for it – and the beauty that comes out of the box is often quite poetic.

_See more of Elon’s work here. _

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You were originally an architect. How did you get into photography?
Vitkon: I studied architecture at the Pratt Institute in New York from 1996-99. In my last year, architecture and photography started to become enmeshed. I did a project called_ Liquid Architecture_. It was focused on the urban landscape in New York City. What fascinated me was the contradiction between the rigid horizontal and vertical grid in New York on the one hand, and the rounded reflections of buildings in windows on the other.

So I decided to make this contradiction intentional: I built a set of mirrors to stage reflections instead of using windows. This was very different from my strict architecture, which was all about simple and straight lines. My images became a counterbalance to my architectural designs. I continued this work on 9/11, and shot the Twin Towers reflected in my mirrors from my studio in Dumbo (a part of Brooklyn right across the East River from Manhattan).

The reflections on 9/11 must have been quite different from any that came before. How did shooting on that day affect you?
This day also triggered a shift in my work: until then, reality seemed real and I delved into the surreal. On September 11, reality became more surreal than anything you could imagine. My response was a series called Urban Landscape, breaking down images into something surreal. Urban Landscape has an apocalyptic feel – everything seems shaky.

When did you become a photographer full-time?
The last project I did as an architect was 5 years ago. Since then I have turned totally to. In architecture every project is exciting only for a very short time, at the concepting stage. After a month or two, you have very hard, often boring, work for years. With photography, it’s something new and exciting every day. I appreciate that there aren’t hard and fast rules the way there are in architecture. I find myself even embracing mistakes and incorporating my art. Photography for years was my getaway from my profession. From there, it was only a short mental step top wanting to make it my profession.

Your latest series, Thorns, catches the eye wherever it’s shown. How did you come up with the concept?
My series before Thorns, Wander-Fool. It was all about soap bubbles. They’re beautiful, but also fragile. I thought of them as a metaphor for life in Israel – in a sense, you don’t know what the next day will bring. But two years ago, I started feeling that a soap bubble was too naïve a metaphor. Then I discovered thorns for myself. The soap bubble and the thorn are two things that go together – the way that rock-paper-scissors does.

Two years ago I was asked to do a tribute to Sol Lewitt, who made sculptures out of white brick. So I created a brick out of thorns. Thorns are the most typical plant in Israel – you see them everywhere – so much that nobody even takes notice of them. At the same time, the structure of the thorns is amazingly complex. And opposed to Lewitt’s view that everything is simple, the reality in Israel is complexity. The thorns reflect that.

The thorn as a metaphor for Israel?
Precisely. In Israel, we think of ourselves as Western, but we’re also Middle Easterners. Holland is symbolized by the beautiful tulip – all soft, rounded lines. We Israelis are thorns: warm, but also hard and very direct and prickly; sometimes, we can even come off as rude. Americans can be very polite but you can’t always be sure if they say what they mean. We Israelis don’t have that mechanism: we say it as we see it. That’s not always pleasant. Traditionally, our national plant is the Sabra- a fruit that’s very sweet but covered with thorns. After 60 years of living under difficult conditions in this country, the sweetness is gone and we’re left with the thorns.

As I look at the reality of life in Israel, everything is better than it’s been, and also worse. There are so many contradictions in our daily life: the weather is wonderful, but everything is about to explode all the time. The people are wonderful, but they are also irritating because they tend to go over the line. That’s how the series came about: taking the softest, sweetest, most intimate moments of the day – and projecting it on a prickly, rough surface. That creates a new image that describes my existence in Israel, and my feelings about it.

How do you create your Thorns images?
I collected the first thorns on the family farm where I grew up and brought them to my studio. Today, I have thorns from all over Israel. I select images I want to work with, create a 7’x7’x3′ pile of thorns and project the image over the thorns, then, I shape the thorns in the shape of the image.

… which creates the most 3-dimensional images I have ever seen in 2-D.
After I finish the composition, I create the image of the thorns. In the studio, I have controlled conditions. This allows me to shoot very long exposures with a small aperture. I wanted to achieve an effect where you see the image from afar, but close up you see only the thorns – so ironically, the closer you go, the more the image disappears.

Check out more of Vitkon’s work on his Website.

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BJ and Richeille Formento are a husband and wife duo who first met on an assignment in 2005. As their romantic relationship grew, so did their collaborative effort as photographers. Within the past few years, the couple transitioned away from fashion photography and more toward fine art. Their recent series, The Japan Dairies is testament to their fashion-roots; meticulously-styled, incredibly cinematic, erotic and haunting all at once, the Formentos have nowhere to go but up.

Marc Erwin Babej: It’s not every day that an artist’s career starts with a love story. In lieu of asking “how did you get started in photography”: How did you meet and get started working together?

BJ Formento: I was freelancing in New York, and Richeille worked at the company. The London team came to Miami in the winter of 2005 and needed a photographer…

Richeille Formento: …I originally told my boss that I didn’t want anyone from New York, but my boss persevered. Had she not, we would never have met.

MEB: Love at first sight?

RF: We spoke a lot over email before. The first night, being Brits, we got shitfaced at karaoke. He could sing. Then we danced. I thought ‘he can sing and he can dance – that’s not bad.’

BJ: the following night we pretty much hooked up and moved from my hotel room to her hotel room.

RF: And suddenly he got all the good assignments (laughs)

BJ: Yes, the week turned into a month.

MEB: So – love at first sight, and collaboration from the first moment. What were the first projects you worked on together, as an independent team?

RF: As life will have it, it all worked out. I was laid off while we were on honeymoon in Egypt in 2005. So BJ said: ‘Why don’t we start working together?’ We started freelancing, traveled on commercial and fashion assignments to Cuba, Cape Town and Hawaii

BJ: … it was a very good summer (laughs).

MEB: You made a successful transition from editorial and fashion to fine art photography. What made you decide to make the switch?

BJ: It was the beginning of the 2008 recession – we had worked as a team for three years now – and the jobs didn’t come through. We had always dreamt of owning an Airstream. We bought one in the winter of ’08.

RF: Again it was a matter of making the most out of things not working out. Before we knew it, we were driving across country with our two cats… and the five kittens they just had.

MEB: This was the trip that led to your first series, Circumstance. What does this first series indicate about your work in general?

RF: It’s when we truly found ourselves.

BJ: I’m originally from Hawaii, Richeille from England. We thought we could do fashion, give it a cinematic feel and create a heartbreak series – homage to Hitchcock. We are such big fans of the atomic age, that we had this romantic vision of America at that time – things were, or at least seemed, more positive and simple.

RF: It was a depressing time – pretty much everyone we met had a sad story, no one was working, people were losing their homes, downsizing.

BJ: We were experiencing what they were experiencing – we were without a fixed home, living out of a trailer. It was a very sad, and also a very romantic view of the American dream. The following October we took a different route and traveled for 5 months.

RF: This time, we focused more on the abandoned America.

BJ: In 09, the shit really hit the fan and we wanted to show the emptiness – abandoned churches, hospitals, and cities.

RF: Gary, Indiana was a real ghost town, and dangerous. It was almost a visual diary of a trip. But it got picked up online. In 2012, a gallery in Paris, discovered our work, and our first book, Circumstance: America Down on Bruised Knees, was published in 2013.

MEB: Your current series, Japan Diaries, is about a very different place and touches on different themes in a somewhat different style…

RF: Japan is like landing on the moon – it’s so foreign and alien to a Westerner that it hits you. It’s confusing and enlightening all at once.

BJ: Richeille had always been fascinated with Japan – both the traditions and its pop culture. My dad had been in the US Navy and growing up, I saw a lot of photos from his travels in Japan. So we decided to take our approach – which is about immersion in a place, it’s culture and peculiarities – to this unique, fascinating alien country.

MEB: How would you describe the theme of the work and its execution?

RF: With Circumstance, we found that we made good connection with women. In Japan, we had intended to show the culture of Japan, but much of that old culture is dying out. Most young women didn’t know how to tie a kimono anymore. We wanted to capture the peculiarity, even idiosyncrasy, of Japanese culture before it is diluted beyond recognition through the influence of modernity.

BJ: At the same time, authorship means balancing the specific and the general. The specific is Japan, and the general is expressing the romance and, allure and the feelings of a place on a still image.

MEB: Your work mystifies me: it’s staged but at the same time visceral and impressionistic – unusual but also relatable.

BJ: We’re touching on universal experiences and chapters in people’s lives: Growing up, transience. People can superimpose their own experience onto it.

RF: Even our locations are consciously chosen in that they area unusual but also generalized. They help generate a feeling of familiarity that invites viewers to immerse themselves in a plot that is not directly from their own lives, but which they can relate to.

Formento & Formento’s next solo show is at Fahey Klein Gallery in Los Angeles, from July 24 – August 31. See more of their work here.

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You’ve had an unusual beginning in photography; one could even say you stumbled into it. How did you discover photography for yourself?
I certainly don’t have the classical school background. I was 20 when I realized that if I didn’t choose something to channel my energy and passion into, I’d be doing office jobs every day of my life. I was working as a receptionist at the time. So I started going to museums and art shows, and wanted to see if I could draw or paint. When I was 21, I came across the Eggleston exhibit at the Getty Museum. Within one week, I bought a used Nikon N90-S and equipment on EBay – from a lady who was divorcing her husband and getting rid of his stuff. It cost $80 and came with a manual on how to use darkroom equipment.

There’s a long way between a first camera and a career in art photography.
I was really excited about the pictures I was taking. Now, I’m mortified at them. I was developing pictures at night in the darkroom until 3 or 4 a.m. Above all, I felt like a picture wasn’t totally done until I had an audience to react to it. I still feel that way

How did they react, and who we’re “they”?
At the time, I was living in an apartment building in Korea Town. I used to hang up pictures in the laundry room and in the morning I would see which pictures were gone. That way, I could see what people liked.

When I started showing in galleries, people would come up to me and tell me what they were feeling about the work. People were telling me that the subjects reminded them of people they knew, that images were reminding them of scenes from movies. I was trying to give people something that felt vaguely familiar to them?

Why?
It’s the same way I use color to get people’s attention, and then to have them discover something underneath that’s not as cheery.

Your images are often described as having a filmic quality
I try to create a slight exaggeration of real life – something that is more intense and dramatic. A heightened representation of real life, like a parallel universe. Much of the filmic feel in a still photo comes from the lighting: Your lighting is really cinematic, so is Gregory Crewdson’s and so is mine. Your work reminds me of the movie Wings of Desire: it has that glow to it, but in dilapidated old scenes, and the subjects look like angels.

Which kind of movies inspire your lighting?
I love the lighting from Hollywood movies of the Golden Era, from the movies of the 1920s until the 50s. With that kind of lighting, anything can happen. It draws you in. There can be a lot of dark things happening – things that might not have been pleasant to watch, but the lighting aestheticizes them and makes watching the movie irresistible.

Orson Welles once said: “”I passionately hate the idea of being with it; I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.””
I want to communicate to the culture that I’m part of and live in. I want to be half a step ahead, but never out of step. It’s important to me to connect with people who are around me. I don’t want to die and 150 years later people go: “Alex Prager… now I get it!”

…Recognition in your own lifetime?
Not really. It’s more about having a place to connect. Because maybe then you can change some ideas about culture a tiny bit, or to inspire people to do things that they wouldn’t’ have done before.

What kind of ideas?
For one, “what is beauty?” It’s not so much about answering the question as about asking it –and showing a variety of answers. I find it really beautiful to have a colorful crowd with interesting faces, with unique noses, ears and fingers. Some people might find a six foot tall Brazilian model with a perfect ass beautiful. But when something is perfect, you look away because you feel you’ve seen it before. I’m more interested in things that are off, unique and strange.

Another idea I’m interested in is the role of a female is in our culture. When I first started to have the female as heroine it was more because I’m a woman and I knew it better. But when people reacted to me being a woman shooting women, in my first series Polyester and The Valley, I became aware of women in our culture as a theme.

Your recent work focuses on crowds.
Crowds fascinate me. Above all, what they see or don’t see about their lives – what they connect with, or don’t connect with. The crowds in my images include a range of people: My sister, who is also my best friend, is in all my pictures; but there are also strangers I found on the street and people I find through casting companies. The pictures were created in a staged setting, but after a while, things became real. People start acting differently once they enter the crowd – because they’re people after all, and they connect or not. That’s when unexpected things start to happen.

You almost sound like a biologist looking through a microscope
I am detached in that I use people whom I don’t know as props. But there are also people I know, my sister and very good friends. That’s very important. I’m not trying to reenact crowd scenes, but I’m trying to show the separation and disconnect between people. I’m very aware of the energy that surrounds my sister and me when we’re shooting, and that energy influences the reactions of others. Insofar as there’s an experiment going on, we’re all part of it.

What are you working on now?
It’s a secret. I feel when you have an idea and you tell someone before you’ve made it, you release some of the energy you have in it. You get a reaction, maybe even an acknowledgment. It lets the air out of the balloon a bit.

So, as much as you like the reactions to the images, you actively avoid reactions at the concept stage?
Yes. Because, in my view, I haven’t made anything yet. The concept, after all, is not a thing, but just an idea about a thing. And as a visual artist, the only thing that really counts for me is an image that I can show people.

See more of Alex’s work here.

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Julian Sander was born into the art business. The owner of Feroz Gallery in Bonn, Germany, Sander is also the great-grandson of the German documentary photographer, August Sander, who was best known for capturing images of German life in the early twentieth century. This year Feroz Gallery is curating an eight-part cycle of August Sander’s work. The gallery is currently showing the fourth installment, People of the Twentieth Century: “The Woman.”

You’ve had an unusual beginning as a gallery owner because you were born into the art business: Your great-grandfather, August Sander, is widely considered one of the most accomplished and influential photographers in German history.

August Sander was, effectively, the first conceptual artist. He understood photography as a documentarian medium. But from the outset, he stepped outside of pure documentation. With People of the Twentieth Century, he created a multi-faceted body of work that amounted to a typology of German culture in the first decades of the twentieth century. He conceived of it this way from the very beginning, and worked on it for more than 60 years, until his death in 1964.

Sander’s first book, Antlitz der Zeit, though later forbidden by the Nazis, made its way to the United States and influenced, among others, Walker Evans Irving Penn and Richard Avedon. In Germany, photographers such as Bernd and Hilla Becher. Sander influenced their basic understanding of photography because he had the rare combination of being conceptually strong, and at the same time a masterful creator of images. It has influenced people as far as modern-day China’s Jiang Jian, who worked with the same ideas and methods as Sander in China in the ’70s and ’80s—without ever having heard of August Sander.

How has his artistic success translated into financial success of his work?

The work has continued to increase in price over decades. When the art photography market was still nascent in the 1970s, the price for a vintage print was about $20,000 in today’s dollars. In the Sotheby’s auction in New York this April, his image of the painter Heinrich Hörler, sold for $170,000. The highest price ever achieved at auction was £486,000, for his 1926 image Working Students. The highest price ever is for an exceedingly rare print of his 1928 image Pastry Chef, which is on the market for €1 million.

Those are lofty prices, particularly for photography. How do you account for this increase in value of his work?

The biggest factor is the rule of supply and demand. The vintage photography market has continued to reduce in quantity because museums have been consistently buying up work. At the same time, the contemporary photography market is realizing the value of Sander’s work because they have found a dead end in the technological development of photography.

For the longest time, people assumed that technological mastery was required to create great photographs. But technology alone doesn’t account for better pictures. Technology in itself is not meaningful, and Sander’s work is all about meaning. That kind of insight doesn’t come with the right camera—it takes a certain person. And Sander’s work is among the earliest to crystallize this difference, in a way that is relevant today as it was back then, because he captured a certain timeless essence of his subjects.

You’re in a rare position as a businessman: in charge of a multi-generation family business, and your most important business partner is a great-grandfather who passed away before you were born.

Yes, that’s true. We’ve been doing this in this family for four generations. I’m the third generation art dealer, fourth generation photographer, and second-generation gallery owner. I come with a loaded deck. But the story of our business also includes experiences one wouldn’t wish on others – such as not having enough money for food when the work wasn’t selling. Or showing work of Sander’s that I believe in, knowing well that sometimes it’s harder to sell.

Do his landscapes fall into that category?

Yes. They’re harder to sell because they’re not as strongly associated with him, and therefore are deemed less valuable. That said, they’re considerably more rare, and they have a very interesting back-story. He learned to love landscapes and nature through his grandmother, and found in them an escape from the horrible events of Nazi Germany.

His book had been banned by the Nazis and he was ostracized by society as a result. This even though, even after his banning, there were Nazis who asked to be photographed by him. He wasn’t forbidden to work, but went into a kind of “inner exile” during the Third Reich. His oldest son, Erich, was imprisoned on political grounds and died in captivity because he was refused medical care for appendicitis.

As a business, and as an artistic venture, how do you see the future of your gallery, Feroz?

I have effectively reinvigorated the market for August Sander by placing it in a contemporary context, starting with the Sao Paulo Biennale two years ago. This year, Feroz is doing an eight-part August Sander cycle. We are currently opening Part 4: The Woman. Considering the historical background and expertise in contemporary art and technology that I have, I believe we will continue to succeed.

How does technology come into play for a photo gallery?

The way we consume visual information has changed dramatically in recent years. On the one level, it has forced a layer of abstraction. People are looking more for patterns in pictures than just at pictures themselves. The sheer quantity of pictures is another factor: Take a web page where you see grids of images, such as Tumblr or Google images. In choosing one image, you become its discoverer, in a sense. That process is very different from a specifically curated process where an expert chose one picture and designs the space around it, the way Joseph Duveen did. Nowadays, people don’t respond when there isn’t a certain loudness and density of images.

Has August Sander influenced the way you do business?

In our family, we focused not so much about the importance of Sander as an artist, but on his humanity and understanding people. The arts were the language he chose to speak with, if you will, the brush he chose to paint in. That core understanding has been with us ever since. My father has shown us how to deal with the arts, how to embrace them. This also extends to how we do business, the level of humanity we bring to it. My parents didn’t want us to focus on money, or fame, but rather on the artistic merit and the content of an image.

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Gregory Crewdson is best known for his elaborate and surreal imagery of small town America. His photos almost always depict peculiar, and at times downright disturbing scenes of horror, chaos and mystery. We recently chatted with Mr. Crewdson, to dig a bit deeper in the sub-conscious of a most-intriguing photographer.

How did you come to photography? Crewdson: My interest was piqued early on, when my father bought me to the Diane Arbus retrospective. I was ten years old at the time, and it gave me an inkling of the power of pictures. But I didn’t start taking pictures until I was in college. I had a crush on a girl who was photo major, and followed her into a photography class. My Photo 1 teacher was Laurie Simmons, and my crush went from the girl to my teacher. As soon as I took my first pictures, my crush shifted from the teacher to photography.

What was it about the photography that made you fall in love with it? The stillness. Photos are fundamentally different from movies or literature, and this frozen aspect is particularly compatible with the way I think. I have dyslexia and still images make more sense to me – I think in terms of still images, and I know how to read them.

Ironic, considering that “filmic” is often used in connection with your work.
I always loved movies and the look of movies. I’m also a huge student of movies – but could never make one. Working in a linear fashion is foreign to me. I was always interested in using aspects of film production towards a single image – the relationship between movie making and still photography – and blurring the lines between the two. I’m fascinated with telling a story in a single image rather than through time.

If you had to pick one movie that has shaped your work, which one would it be? David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, without question. That would be the movie that defined me as I was coming of age. I encountered it when I was a graduate student at Yale. I remember feeling deeply connected to how it used the American vernacular, and revealed something more dark and sinister underneath it. I was also completely connected to the way it looked: the use of light and darkness. I’m not saying it’s the best movie ever made, but the one that defined me the most.

Cinematographically, your images also evoke the work of two earlier directors: I’m thinking of the interior shots of Yasujiro Ozu, or that famous scene in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane – when Mr. Thatcher signs the contract with Charles Foster Kane’s parents in Colorado, and young Charlie Kane is seen through the window, playing in the snow with Rosebud…
Absolutely, both Ozu and Welles are important influences. Take Welles’s use of deep space, this great depth of field where the story has several layers, and everything means something.

You’ve once said that “every photographer has one story to tell” – with the emphasis on the word “one.” What’s your one story? If I knew exactly what the story was I wouldn’t need to make pictures. In my own head, the story is undefined and murky, impenetrable. My whole need to make pictures comes out of the urge to understand what that story is.

But there are themes running through your work…
I’ve always been interested in the commonplace, in finding a sense of beauty and mystery in everyday life. I’ve always been interested in the psychological nature of picture, in trying to explain my own fear and anxiety and desire in photographs. The pictures are my means of trying to find meaning in the world.

What are your fears and desires? A theme that runs through the work is trying to make a connection. All photographers feel alone in a sense: taking a picture is an act of alienation, of separating yourself from the world. The feeling of being alone and wanting to connect is a theme in my photography and in my mind.

Spoken like the child of a psychoanalyst… There’s no doubt that my father being an analyst has shaped my view of the world. He didn’t act like a psychiatrist with us, but he was very present for us, particularly since his office was in the basement of our house. We witnessed on a daily level what he did; saw the patients coming in and out. When there was a family issue or one of us had a problem we would go to his office to talk about it. Not as a therapy session, but as a safe place – inside the house, but also separate in a sense. All that did have an influence on me and I brought some of that my relationship with my own children.

Do you also bring some of that to your work? Psychiatrists have a kind of distance from the world, but at the same time they also have a kind of empathy. What I adopted from him was that combination of distance and intimacy. My pictures portray intimate moments, but at a remove.

You speak of photography as a means of self-exploration. Roger Ballen describes his motivation in similar terms. But the resulting images are quite different. Ballen’s work evokes a sense of close quarters. Your images are often noted for their expansiveness. Yes and no. There’s expansiveness, but also claustrophobia, in my images. People being caught in doorways and the like. I’m fascinated by the figures and the setting – people looking for a way out, a possibility of something larger, something outside their own existence. I would argue that a theme in all my work is entrapment and expansiveness at the same time – because that’s a theme that runs through my mind.

Your images require production like a movie, and often cost as much to create. But you haven’t even mentioned the technical aspect yet… It’s almost ironic that my pictures are so technical, because I’m not so good at that stuff. I have an idea in my mind and figure out how to do it one way or another. Photographers have to be problem-solvers on a very practical level. Photography is so dependent on the world; you cannot disregard the practicalities.

“Perfectionist” is another term often bandied about in discussions of your work. It’s undeniable that I have control issues, that I want to do everything I can to make a perfect image. But at the same time I know that perfection is impossible to achieve. Much of the tension and the mystery of photography to me lies in my desire to create this perfect world in a still image – and the impossibility of doing so. That’s what keeps me making pictures.

Doesn’t that mean that frustration is pre-programmed? Frustration is key to making art in general. To make art is to will something into life, but there’s always something that goes against you. Be it technical issues with the camera, or weather problems. You can’t count the ways that a picture can go wrong. Frustration and resolution are key to my process of taking pictures.

Most of your images include human subjects, but they are presented in a detached manner. How do you relate with your subjects – during a shoot and conceptually?
We get them through a casting process. They’re always given a description of the picture before we start shooting, but I want almost no contact with them outside the making of picture. I don’t ever want to know my subjects well. I want them to feel foreign to me in a way, because I want that feeling of separation to be evident in the picture: a private moment, but photographed in a detached way.

That sounds remarkably like an analyst describing his relationship with patients… Absolutely! What fascinates me is that tension between the detached form of the therapy session and the private things that are said in it.

To get an in-depth look at the unique shooting methods of Gregory Crewdson, I highly recommend Ben Shapiro’s documentary Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters.

Photos courtesy of Gregory Crewdson and Gagosian Gallery.

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Photographer Roger Ballen teamed-up with filmmaker, Ben Crossman, to get a first-hand look at the creative process behind his new book, Asylum of the Birds, which you can view below. We also chatted with Ballen, who offered us an even deeper take on the circumstances behind his eerie imagery.

To date, you are best known for environmental portraiture. Your latest book and video take your work in a different direction. What made you so interested in birds?
Ballen: All my projects gradually come together. In 2000, when I was working on Outland, I was at somebody’s house, and a bird was tied up to a closet by the leg. That became my first bird picture, Tethered Dove.

What do birds represent to you?
They are a symbol of purity, peace, and the archetypal link between heaven and earth. I began to see this creature as having very important metaphoric qualities. Over time, I began to see the possibility of linking the bird and what it symbolizes to my psychological aesthetic universe.

What does the universe of Roger Ballen look like?
It’s a universe of chaos, of breakdown, anarchy; of irrationality, even madness. A universe of the absurd. In Asylum of the Birds, the bird has become integral to the images – sometimes as a participant, sometimes as an observer. It’s not necessarily a whole, living bird; it can be present as a feather, or half-eaten, it can be a rooster on the side of the photograph, or a toy bird. In each picture, birds represent something different.

(If video does not initial load, please re-load the page)

“Asylum” is a very relative term in Asylum of the Birds. In the video, we see a bird being decapitated, its headless body flailing around on the ground. What does it say about man’s relationship with animals?
After spending nearly 64 years on this planet, and working many of these years in the South African bush as a geologist, it’s quite apparent to me that the relationship between mankind and animals is not harmonious at all. It’s a one-way street where the animal is put in a situation where it is not able to cope. Man is an exploiter of nature. It’s easy to say man is part of nature, but the balance is so one-sided, so overwhelming and out of control that man does not have a foot in the natural world anymore.

But cruelty to animals is not a recent phenomenon. One could even argue that today, people are more sensitized to animal cruelty – think of bull fighting, or cockfights.
Man is more out of touch than in the past. People get squeamish when they see a chicken’s head chopped off, but they don’t flinch when they see 500 chickens in plastic packaging in the supermarket. Man now is so cut off from the process that there’s no balance between nature and mankind anymore.

In the Western world, we find all kinds of ways to console ourselves – stopping people from wearing fur coats, or taking care of the pandas in the zoo. But that’s just window dressing. The reality is that we’re living in a diminishing natural environment and that this trend is irreversible. At the core is not just ecology but also disassociation from the natural world, and, on a psychological level alienation and rootlessness.

The video marks the first look behind the scenes of your work, and into your relationship with your subjects. “Exploitative” is one of the terms that has been used in relation to the kind of people you choose to portray, and how you portray them.
I don’t know why one would call that exploitation. Taking a picture of someone is not necessarily exploitation. Ultimately, what matters is the relationship of the exploited to the exploiter? What if he or she doesn’t feel exploited?

In a conventional ethic, the downtrodden “should” be portrayed in a way that conveys empathy for their plight – and your images don’t convey much in the way of empathy.
We live in a world where most of the images we see are contrived. What people consider empathy is sometimes used to exploit people as consumers, as voters, or as members of a church. “Empathy” is a very subjective term, as is “beautiful” or “poor.” If someone is wealthy but psychologically poor should one not photograph him, out of empathy? I would posit that people who raise such objections haven’t been able to integrate their own darker side, and attack anyone who doesn’t submit to their “rules.”

Still, the video shows an educated, properly dressed upper middle class man taking images of homeless people.
I have worked with many of them for five years or more. That wouldn’t possible without a relationship founded on trust, friendship and mutual respect. Places like the Asylum of the Birds aren’t safe or harmonious – they’re fundamentally violent and full of unresolved social, and political issues.

I give them attention, a voice – they do drawings with me; we build the sets together. They derive a lot of purpose from our collaboration. They are so marginalized that getting attention from someone who is not an outsider gives them a sense of identity. I hear from some of them every day – I get at least 20 SMS messages, for me to call them. Some are desperate for money; most just want to talk.

It sounds like the job description of a social worker…
In a sense. I’m a father, a priest a doctor, a lawyer, a friend, a psychologist to them. I’m one of the few outside relationships they have in the outside world. No one on “my level” would deal with them – and if so, then on a master-slave relationship.

What do they represent to you?
They represent human nature in its most raw, bare-bones state. It’s always been part of my photography and psychology to reveal the more basic aspects of the human personality: violence, the will to power, sexual domination. And above all, that most fundamental of human instincts: survival. These people are one the edge of survival – and in that condition, the more primitive instincts reveal themselves.

Asylum of the Birds by Roger Ballen is published by Thames & Hudson on 24, March, 2014.

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Howard Schatz is one of those individuals who seems to excel at whatever he tries. An accomplished ophthalmologist, Schatz successfully switched gears from medicine to photography mid-way through his career. His body of work is impressive, with 20 published books under his belt, and a client list that is both long and impressive. His most reason book, “Caught in the Act: Actors Acting“, is a fascinating look at the creative process of 85 notable actors and actresses. Marc Erwin Babej, also an accomplished fine art photographer, recently sat down with Howard and took a look back at his illustrious career to date.

Marc: How did you get started in photography?
Schatz: In 1964, at a party during my third year of medical school, I was 23 years old at the time. We were all doctors and medical students, and one of the young doctors there had just come back from a tour of duty with the Armed Forces in Japan. He had an amazing new Nikon F camera, and we were all fascinated by it. So I asked the cousin of mine, who was also stationed in Japan, to buy one just like it for me.

_ … a party with lasting impact_
That was only half of the story – both as far as the party and my life were concerned. At that same party I also became fascinated with ophthalmology. I was planning to become a cardiologist. But, as luck would have it, I met a first – year ophthalmology resident who had an infectious enthusiasm about his field. Before long, I realized it was the field for me.

Over the next years, a pattern in my life developed, from Monday to Friday, I was a retina specialist. I was working as a researcher, the teacher and a clinician full-time. I was a lecturer at Harvard, written 100 scientific papers, 7 textbooks, put on two workshops a year and a large symposium. But every Saturday was devoted to photography. My colleagues would spend their Saturdays on the golf course; I would spend mine shooting.

Not every photo enthusiast becomes a photographer, especially when he has a successful career…
Credit my second wife, Beverly Ornstein. Beverly was not just a great partner, but could also relate to photography because she was a highly accomplished TV producer, the head of news and current affairs for PBS in San Francisco. In her capacity as a producer, Beverly had done many projects about women of accomplishment. I felt it was a fascinating subject, so the first series in which she was my producer, Gifted Woman, focused on women who were famous for what they achieved not how they looked.

As a producer, Beverly knew everybody – and we reached out to everybody. Condoleeza Rice, at the time, was a professor at Stanford; Nancy Pelosi was in the House of Representatives; Barbara Boxer was also in the House (she now is in the Senate).

Joe Folberg, who owned Vision Gallery in San Francisco, loved the work and showed it. Before long, it was bought by the Oakland Museum. The women were there and it became a book. I was off to the races as a photographer. What an experience!

From then, I worked on a wide range of projects, each of which became a book: first Redheads; then Homeless. I walked around San Francisco every Saturday for a year, about 20 people a week – that makes about a thousand people. That project went to 18 different museums around the country over the next 5 years.

In 1987, it became clear I couldn’t keep up with my art work, my commercial and my editorial work and at the same time be a retina specialist. I was winning all kinds of awards… and then there’s Beverly, probably the only Jewish woman to marry a doctor and turn him into an artist! One day, she suggested: why don’t we take a year sabbatical and see if you can’t do photography full-time.

That first year was so hard, so exciting, so wonderful and difficult, so eye opening. We would go to back nervously and giggling every night. After a year, I re-upped the sabbatical, and then again the next year. The first two years I kept up my medical knowledge – then it was clear I wasn’t going to return. Now it’s 18 years later, and here we are.

How many percent of “Howard Schatz” is Beverly Ornstein?
That’s easy: I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Beverly. I would be seeing retina patients, writing research papers – and taking pictures on my weekends for fun. Secondly, she is my editor, and she loves me enough to be brutally honest: I’ll do a shoot, maybe 500 pictures, and select 20 or 30 and show them to Beverly. She might say: “I like this one, I like that one – but I don’t see anything here that moves me. There’s no substitute for having someone like that.

Do you ever miss your old career?
Very much – I miss the patients, and the research. Almost everything about it. But in my mind, ophthalmology and photography are two sides of a coin. Except for one crucial difference: in retinal surgery, there are no mistakes – you make a mistake, your patient loses an eye! Imagine the force of that. In photography you can make all the mistakes you like – you look for mistakes. You can be playful, you try things. The freedom to try things changes you.

As a retina specialist, I was serious, thoughtful, careful, and somewhat obsessively compulsive. Every patient I saw had a potentially blinding problem. I had to walk into a room and make him feel that now he can relax, that he’s in the right place. As a photographer, I can let loose. But that seriousness, and this trained ability to inspire confidence in a stranger who might be a bit nervous, helps me make portraits.

A portraitist’s interaction with his subjects is as much a part of his style as the images themselves. How do you interact with your subjects?
I’m friendly, I’m relaxed. I talk about them, not me. Getting a portrait taken is a narcissistic experience – I let them have it and enjoy it. I often tell them a little story to get them to react, and their face to change. Through that range of expression you get a fix on a person.

Photographers who gave up a career to become artists tend to do so to focus on a certain subject matter. Take Roger Ballen’s search passion for turning his psyche into images. You’re all over the place.
In a sense I am. But there are common denominators. I’m interested in physical structure and movement. Soon after I came to New York, I worked on dance for a year or two. Then I photographed dance under water. And athletes. I’m currently working on a project about motion. We leave the camera open and provide light – there are infinite possibilities. I love seeing; there’s never enough that you can see. Another common denominator is, of course, portraiture. I love photographing people.

Your latest book, Caught in the Act, is all about people. Famous actors – 85 of them. How do you get 85 well-known actors to sit for you?
It’s less impressive than it may sound. Between Beverly and me, we know about a thousand actors and we contacted them all. We got 85 – that’s a great rate if you think about it. Photography is about access, and access comes with rejection. The key is that rejection doesn’t phase me. Early on, I would submit to dozens of publishers, and of course a lot of them say no. My attitude is to look for “yes”; somebody out there will like the book – my job is to find them. I sent my Redheads book to 50 publishers. One of them said yes – that’s all I need.

Most portraitists try to get their subjects – especially actors – out of character, to reveal something about their “true” personality. In Actors Acting, you’re pursuing this goal by doing the opposite: by giving them roles to play and getting them into character.
For a great actor, acting is not something they do; it’ who they are. Take Jeff Daniels – performing is in his blood. He needs the audience, and he’s not happy when he’s not performing. When he’s not in a movie or a play, he travels the Midwest with a guitar and performs songs in little cabarets. John Malkovich put it very well: “My emotions are right under my skin. It’s like a computer keyboard – I press this button and I get the emotion that comes with it.”

By creating situations in which they are pressing their internal computer keyboard buttons – in a sense by synchronizing my shutter release button with their computer keyboard – I can capture aspects of them that wouldn’t show in a more conventional portrait. See more of Schatz’s work here.

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Muhammad Ali

Muhammad Ali

New York City

New York City

New York City

Ex-GDR

East Germany

Thomas Hoepker has spent the last 60 years working as a photojournalist, is a former Magnum president and has been a member of foundation since 1989. This October he will release a comprehensive retrospective of his career: Wanderlust: 60 Years of Images. Here, he looks back on his career and speaks with Marc Erwin Babej about the changes in the industry and what it is like to be a Magnum member.

Let’s start at the beginning: How did you discover photography?

In 1950, I was 14 at the time, my grandfather gave me a 9×12 camera. It used glass plates and fascinated me. It was primitive, even for the time, but also very traditional. When I finished school, I bought a modern 35mm camera. My father wanted me to get a “real job,” so I began studying art history, but I already knew that what I really wanted was to become a photographer.

Before I knew it, I got an offer to work for a Munich newspaper as a photographer. I had barely started there when the paper shut down. Next, I moved to Hamburg to work for the magazine Kristall, and was sent around the world on assignments. One day, my editor asked my writer partner Rolf Winter and me if we would like to go on assignment to the United States. Of course we did! We spent three months traveling across the US, all expenses paid. It was a fantastic opportunity for us.

Your story begins to remind me of Robert Frank, who traveled across the US 1955-57.

Robert Frank’s book, The Americans, was a guiding star for me. It showed me how one can approach a large theme. Just before I left on the assignment, I bought the book.

Shortly after, you started working for Stern, correct?

In 1964, I received a call from the editor of Stern, Henri Nannen, who made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. And I didn’t.

If you had to choose one project you did for Stern that really defined your work, which one would it be?

Muhammad Ali. I owe him a great deal: he made it possible for me to shoot him not only as a boxer, but also—no, I should say above all—as a human being. I didn’t know much about boxing at all, and wasn’t particularly interested in it. I shot Ali only once during a fight.

I got to know Ali at a very interesting moment in his life: he had just converted to Islam and was almost incarcerated because he didn’t want to join the military and go to Vietnam. He was a complex person: a bigmouth on the one hand, and on the other hand a disciplined and hard-working athlete. He was an incredibly funny and spontaneous man, who knew how to market himself.

On my first visit to Ali, I arrived with Stern reporter Eva Windmöller. As a black Muslim, he didn’t want to talk with white women or be seen with them. So we agreed that we would just be observing him. It was the best thing that could have happened to us: being bystanders to his life allowed us to get a front seat on the life of a thrilling, fascinating character. One moment he could be falling asleep in the car; the next he would play-box with kids on the street.

Muhammad Ali

When did you last see him?

About two years ago, in London. Unfortunately, his Parkinson Syndrome has progressed a great deal, and he didn’t recognize me.

You can look back on a career of more than 60 years. How has photojournalism changed in that time?

In a word: fundamentally. At Stern, we had 15-20 staff photographers, who were paid generous salaries. Today, this is unimaginable. Last year, Volker Hinz, the last staff photographer at Stern, retired. Today, magazines buy photos from the Internet and use freelance photographers once in a while.

Looking back, working conditions back in the day were a dream. We got great salaries, flew business class and were given the time to do the job right. There were even occasions when the photo editor would say: ‘the images aren’t quite right yet. Travel back there and get some more.’

And today?

Editorial departments of the big magazines only rarely have budget for photo productions. On the other hand, they have access to images through photo agencies. This change in the market hasn’t been all bad for photographers: as freelancers, they have more opportunity to develop their own style and vision, rather than operate under the vision of an editorial department.

Conventional wisdom has it that the rise of TV marked the beginning of the decline of photojournalism.

TV has been operating in parallel to printed images for decades. True, people spend a lot more time in front of the TV screen than with magazines. True also that TV is immediate in a way that printed images couldn’t be. But for us photographers, this spelled not just a threat, but also opportunity: we have more opportunity to present our own point of view and style.

You were the first full member of Magnum from Germany, and from 2003-2007 president of Magnum. How did you get there?

In the late 1960s, I received a letter from Elliott Erwitt, who had always been my idol. He invited me to join Magnum. But I had just started at Stern, so I declined. But when my contract as a foreign correspondent at Stern expired in 1989, I resigned and went to Magnum.

And you’re an active member of Magnum to this day. Magnum has a mythical status – how does one become a member?

Magnum was an exclusive club from the very beginning, and remains so to this day. One can’t just join, but has to be appointed – following a long and difficult procedure. Every year, we receive more than a hundred credible applications. By the time we’re done reviewing them, there are two or three left. These become nominees. After two or three years, they can become associates. A few years later, they are either brought on as full members – or they have to resign. We have excellent photographers and have only made few mistakes over the years.

Magnum is a collective… comprised of individualists. How does that work?

It’s not easy, because we have to deal with big egos of big photographers. But it’s worth it. It makes for interesting friends and colleagues – sometimes also enemies and competitors.

Magnum was founded in 1947. In the past 65 years, photojournalism has changed fundamentally. How is the Magnum of today different from the Magnum of the 60s, or even 80s?

At heart, Magnum has remained the same: we’re reporters who describe reality. But many of us have also moved in a more artistic direction. With assignments becoming a rarity, photographers create series and then offer them to media. Today, I earn my income with books, and with prints that are sold on the art market.

Like a fine art photographer. Do you see yourself as an artist or a journalist?

In the beginning, I was reluctant, because I wanted to be a journalist, not an artist. Magnum has influenced my views over the years. Magnum photographers are both journalists and artists. A truly strong photojournalistic image is a reproduction of reality, nothing about it can be faked. But today, there’s more room for interpretation of reality by the photographer: style, eye and aesthetic all matter. Even at Magnum, everyone has to make his own decision how far he wants to go in presenting reality through his own eyes.

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Since his youth, Marc Yankus has straddled the worlds of photography and painting. His new series, “The Space Between,” uses aspects of both to create images that are both familiar and strange. Here, he speaks to Marc Erwin Babej about his process.

How did you get into photography?

For many years, I was a bit torn between painting and photography. At the High School of Art and Design, we had majors, which is rare in high school, and I picked photography. When I did my Bachelor of Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts, my major was painting.

While I was at school, I was experimenting with collage. Over time, I felt limited in what I would create, so I started creating my own images. That opened up a whole new world. It didn’t take long until people started calling me a photographer.

Why did you turn to photography proper?

I started photographing cityscapes in the late 1990s. I was always interested in light, shape and form, and New York City is rich in all of these. It’s my canvas and model. When I was 11, after my parents got divorced, my mother and I moved into the city with my siblings. I remember leaving the calm, suburbs of Long Island was a big transition—going from green to gray, and to find myself in canyons of the city that were overwhelming and exciting to me. For me, the city became a safe haven because my home life wasn’t. To find peace, I had to go outside my home, and so I spent a lot of time exploring the city.

Your work features buildings prominently, yet it doesn’t come across as architectural photography

I never saw myself as an architectural photographer. It’s not about the buildings themselves and their features, but about what I feel when I experience them. It’s about creating my own world, a magical space for my memories and imagination.

In my earlier works, soft focus became my visual vocabulary—a state in between in and out of focus. Soft focus was my focus, in a poetic sense. It invites to see images less in literal way, and more for their color, light and shape. After all, these were the aspects that mattered the most to me.

But your current series, “The Space Between,” is not soft focus

A few years ago, I started exploring sharp focus. I started to focus on individual buildings, not extraordinary ones, but buildings we walk by every day and ignore. Some of these started popping out to me, and I wanted to explore showing something different with them. I wanted to visualize what I was experiencing with these buildings. I could feel these buildings – the brick, the detail, everything around them faded away.

It sounds like they made an emotional impact?

They were kind of an anesthetic. For example, I was on the roof of a friend’s studio and noticed this building across the way. It was so unusual: tall, skinny, from the 1920s and had these unusual rectangles along the side. I felt drawn to it because it seemed flat and three-dimensional at the same time. I felt I had to capture this quality in a photograph.

In “The Space Between,” the buildings are visually separated from their surroundings. How did you achieve this effect?

I add texture to the image and fade out the surrounding buildings in post-production. In the portrait of the Goldman Sachs buildings, I deleted several buildings that seemed distracting and faded several others. I had never done that before, but it felt liberating. Not from a technical point of view, but in terms of placing what I felt was the proper emphasis on what had inspired me about the building in the first place.

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