Say hello via text message and join in the conversation!
In this episode of The Mood Podcast, I talked with Pie Aerts about his transformation from a man who channeled his corporate acumen into talents for portraying human impact narratives, raising millions for conservation along the way and capturing riveting stories of the coexistence between humans and nature, through the lens of his camera.
We also discussed his expeditions, grounded in respect and educational engagement, offering a lens through which one can view the delicate balance between preserving cultural heritage and navigating the challenges of modern influences. Beyond the art of photography, we talked about how passion can fuel purposeful change, using social media as a powerful tool for fundraising and fostering a global community committed to conservation - an instrument for good....for once...?
Inspirational and enjoyable for me, this episode I hope will evoke the same in you.
Find Pie's incredible work across his socials:
instagram: @because.people.matter, @pie_aerts
website: pieaerts.com
_____________________________________________________________________________
Thank you for listening and for being a part of this incredible community. You can also watch this episode on my YouTube channel (link below) where I also share insights, photography tips and behind-the-scenes content on my channel as well as my social media, so make sure to follow me on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and TikTok or check out my website for my complete portfolio of work.
yoreh.
www.yoreh.co
discount code: moodpdcst.23
My FREE eBook:
www.form.jotform.com/240303428580046
My FREE Lighting Tutorial:
www.mattjacobphotography.com/free-tutorial-sign-up
YouTube:
www.youtube.com/@mattyj_ay
Website:
www.mattjacobphotography.com
Socials:
IG @mattyj_ay | X @mattyj_ay | YouTube @mattyj_ay | TikTok @mattyj_ay
Say hello via text message and join in the conversation!
In this episode of The Mood Podcast, I talked with Pie Aerts about his transformation from a man who channeled his corporate acumen into talents for portraying human impact narratives, raising millions for conservation along the way and capturing riveting stories of the coexistence between humans and nature, through the lens of his camera.
We also discussed his expeditions, grounded in respect and educational engagement, offering a lens through which one can view the delicate balance between preserving cultural heritage and navigating the challenges of modern influences. Beyond the art of photography, we talked about how passion can fuel purposeful change, using social media as a powerful tool for fundraising and fostering a global community committed to conservation - an instrument for good....for once...?
Inspirational and enjoyable for me, this episode I hope will evoke the same in you.
Find Pie's incredible work across his socials:
instagram: @because.people.matter, @pie_aerts
website: pieaerts.com
_____________________________________________________________________________
Thank you for listening and for being a part of this incredible community. You can also watch this episode on my YouTube channel (link below) where I also share insights, photography tips and behind-the-scenes content on my channel as well as my social media, so make sure to follow me on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and TikTok or check out my website for my complete portfolio of work.
yoreh.
www.yoreh.co
discount code: moodpdcst.23
My FREE eBook:
www.form.jotform.com/240303428580046
My FREE Lighting Tutorial:
www.mattjacobphotography.com/free-tutorial-sign-up
YouTube:
www.youtube.com/@mattyj_ay
Website:
www.mattjacobphotography.com
Socials:
IG @mattyj_ay | X @mattyj_ay | YouTube @mattyj_ay | TikTok @mattyj_ay
This is a bold statement, but I think media in general is a bigger danger to humanity than climate change. If this is the beginning. Where are we going to end, Jesus?
Speaker 2:2018,. You suddenly basically give up one life and start another. What did that feel like and what was going through your mind.
Speaker 1:I was kind of exhausted by the lifestyle of not giving back, just taking, taking, taking. If you would have told me in 2018, this is where you will be now, I would have laughed loudly.
Speaker 2:What are you hoping viewers take away from this project?
Speaker 1:We focused all our energy in building this non-profit organization into 2.1 million dollars raised in three editions, with 275 wildlife photographers from more than 40 different countries, making it the biggest print fundraiser in conservation space and history.
Speaker 2:Where to start with earning money from photography in 2024?.
Speaker 1:How to monetize your work should never be the first question. So, one thing I want to say about it.
Speaker 2:Welcome to another episode of the Mood Podcast. I'm Matt Jacob, and today, in this episode, I'm talking with P Aerts. P is a Dutch documentary and wildlife photographer with a visceral interest in human and wildlife coexistence stories. Through his art, he examines the intricate relationship between animals, humans and nature, and as we become increasingly distant from each other and ourselves. He uses photography to search for the cause of this disconnect.
Speaker 2:It was truly fascinating to meet P, and even more meaningful to give ourselves space for discourse surrounding topics that he believes in, as well as his philosophies and opinions surrounding photography, cultures, society and life in general. We discussed many purposeful topics, including how to make a difference, telling real and lasting stories through photography, balancing ethics with art, the role of media, finding hope versus experiencing despair, philanthropy and doing our part, and finding what is truly important to yourself as a photographer and artist. I really mean it when I say we didn't have enough time to go deep enough and cover all that I wanted to, so I really hope I can do this with him again soon. In the meantime, though, please do check out P's work. It's extremely valuable and inspirational and, of course, please enjoy this episode. It's a special one. So now I bring you P Aerts, p Aerts, yeah, welcome to the Moon Podcast.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Great to have you. Thank you. What brings you to Bali?
Speaker 1:Yeah, long story. I've been working on a longer-form project in a place called Sumba Island, which I'm sure you know about an hour and a half flying from Bali, and I just returned from that beautiful island.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we haven't been yet, but it's definitely on our list. Here's so many good things about it. I thought we'd start with a little bit of your background, just so the audience can get to know who you are. I mean, we haven't met before today, so I'd love to know a little bit more about your background as well. We've been talking a little bit off camera, but just for the purposes of audio video, it'd be great to hear a little bit about you, and I wanted to phrase it in a way that was a bit different, and I was thinking about this the other day. If an alien landed on Earth right, and you were tasked of explaining to them two things First of all, who you are and what you do, and, second of all, what is society and what position society is in on earth right now.
Speaker 2:So let's start with the question the easier one. If you were to explain to an alien who you are and what you do, how would you? How would you explain? This is?
Speaker 1:the beginning where we're gonna end. Oh, thank god. Good question. Um, yeah, I would speak english first of all. Do?
Speaker 2:that alien?
Speaker 1:yeah, I'm joking, yeah so, uh, yeah, I try, I try to look, try to make sense of the world through a camera, through a viewfinder. I think that's what I mostly do, uh, not necessarily photographing the world, but I'm just trying to investigate how the world feels and looks like and uh, that that's one thing. Uh, society, yeah, that's a big question. I mean can't really deny we're in uh hectic times. Uh, from god, it's a really tough question.
Speaker 2:Let me rephrase it yeah, how would you describe earth right now and specifically the relationship between humans and nature?
Speaker 1:yeah, so my work very much happens on that intersection, um, and I do see lots of bad news and tragedy and conflict stories happening, but while using my camera on that intersection of where people and land meet, I also do see lots of hope and resilience and coexistence. So I always, uh, when talking to that alien, I would always emphasize the positive side of the story, even though there is so much negative news these days. I keep searching for that hopeful spirit and, uh, always trying to choose coexistence over conflict, if that makes sense, because I do see so much hope everywhere, everywhere I go, but there's just too little attention and time to speak about those hopeful stories.
Speaker 2:Bad news sells right yeah, well, of course yeah, let's let's not get into that yet, but, um, maybe social media can come a little bit later, or media generally. Yeah, what, what is? Give me an example of the hope that you see well.
Speaker 1:So I mean, the big narratives are always ecosystem degradation, species going extinct, cultural degradation, climate change. That's like the big narrative, but if you start digging for more like of a whispering narrative, you find a lot of individuals living and working in those spaces that are always looking for a hopeful angle, that are always looking for a hopeful angle. So it's a matter of how much are you willing to dig into that big narrative that is negatively framed in most of the cases to more of an individual level of people nonstop fighting for change, fighting for hope, being resilient, always trying to find an angle that gives them more of a hopeful perspective.
Speaker 2:So where did this for you kind of take hold? Give us a little snapshot. I know you answered it very briefly. I love that answer, by the way. Not photographer, but investigating the world through your lens, right Before you picked up a camera, before you started photography. What were you doing and how? How much influence do you think that has in those kind of stories that you seek?
Speaker 1:yeah. So I mean, I've always been very, a very curious kid. Uh don't really have an artistic background. Uh always had kind of an artistic spark. Uh, photography was never really a feasible career path in life.
Speaker 1:Uh, I mean, I've been shooting for about 25 years 20, 20, 25 years ago I'm old already it's always gone confronting you're older than 25 I certainly am, um, so I've been shooting for a long time but never really understanding that it could be become my full-time profession or even my life, which it is now. So I kind of deviated from that whole idea by following what people consider the rat race, so kind of got stuck in in going to university and then ending up working in a corporate firms. I'm sure I was always shooting on the side but never really understood the potential of it. So my background is definitely not in the creative space, it's in the commercial space.
Speaker 1:Uh, up until the moment, I had kind of a realization like this is not going to be, not going to be doing this the rest of my life. It's something has to change. And when that started to brew in my head, somehow I started to understand the potential of maybe one day, uh, cutting the ties and just starting, all starting all over, and I did that in 2018, which is now almost six years ago. I left that first bit of my life and started taking photography way more serious, and that was kind of the beginning of the second half of my life, which is now ongoing for six years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and what a six years it seems to have been. I mean, your work is truly astounding. My life, which is now ongoing for six years, yeah, and what a six years it seems to have been.
Speaker 2:I mean your work is is truly astounding. So, um, inspiration to to many, many people. I know that, um, one being myself, and it's great to have finally found you. Um, give us, uh, an insight quickly, before we move on, as to what that transition was like. I I know we talked a little bit about COVID coming in at the wrong time, but 2018, you suddenly basically give up one life and start another. What was that? What did that feel like, and what was the kind of what was going through your mind that first year?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So one thing I want to say about it that's maybe encouraging for people facing a similar situation this is never like a cold turkey one day to another day snap. It's always a gradual transition that takes months, years, maybe even a lifetime. So it's not like I woke up on one day in 2018 and I was like, no, I'm cutting the job, grabbing the phone and starting a new life. So it's been in the making for about I think that whole decision process was ongoing for three years and gradually I started to say goodbye to more elements of that previous job and kind of first mentally, but later also physically, and I was kind of exhausted by the lifestyle of, or like not giving back.
Speaker 1:It sounds cliche, but not giving back, just taking, taking, taking. It was very it was. I mean, it's like double digit growth is expected in this job, like that, on a daily scale. You're constantly growing, growing, growing. There's no break on growth and that was kind of eating, eating my spirit from the inside, if it makes sense. I just wanted to give something back and I know I had the means of being able to tell a story through visuals. So that's one thing, and then call me a millennial, but I was also really fed up with more aspects of that ongoing rat race of always wanting to grow, so it's been in my head to make the call, and then, over time, 2018 felt like the moment. I had no kids at that age yet, so it felt like this is perhaps the last opportunity I get with a couple of more full years of freedom ahead of me. If I want to do it, I have to do it now.
Speaker 2:What was the final trigger?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so, as I said, I was exhausted so I kind of burned out on the job. I was running two lives at the same time simultaneously. I was shooting every single down hour. I was in india on, uh, in patagonia, uh, himalaya places I I dearly love. So I was working on. On the one hand, I was working about like an 80 hour job in corporate and on the other hand I was using every single available hour to kind of keep building portfolio in the photography space and that combination was just lethal at some point in which you I was physically exhausted, also mentally, so I just burned out. So that was kind of the switch. But it was also the wake-up call like wait a minute. So if my body is now telling me, stop, stop this rat, race bullshit, just go for it and listen to it. But it was scary. I mean it was a big.
Speaker 2:It was a big leap so do you feel like the curiosity you have with human and and natural stories, in the wild or or otherwise? Do you feel like that is your way of giving back that you missed out on? For you felt that you missed out on for so many years yeah, in some way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I uh, I drive on human connection way better than on commercial profit making, so I was just missing that connect. I mean it was a great life, I had a great job, I had amazing friends and colleagues and I'm looking back with just pure joy at that time.
Speaker 2:But I was just missing a deeper meaning, a deeper connection on a human skill interesting, yeah, so what does that look like now, like present day, your, your business model, essentially? How does that get formulated on a on a day-by-day basis?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I'd say 90% of my work is personal work, which has always been my biggest value. One thing I was missing in that previous life was freedom. I mean, I'm not particularly a person that likes to be told all the time what to do or what not to do, so I was really craving.
Speaker 2:She's laughing because it's like looking into a mirror.
Speaker 1:Lovely. So I was like, yeah, what? What happened to the freedom? It was gone. So I decided from day one moving into this new job that's my highest value in anything I do uh, to maintain that high degree of freedom. So I in the past couple years I could have made different decisions by doing more client work or more assignment work, but I consistently been pushing myself to keep that high degree of freedom by focusing on monetizing personal ids and beliefs and stories into something that also brings you income, which has been a challenging journey, with lots of mistakes and falling and getting up again, but I think that's the beauty of the process. Uh, so by now I'd say 90% of my work is self-created and kind of self-funded call it personal work and about 10% is client work, which is also great.
Speaker 2:But so when you say personal work and self-funded, give us a few more details about what those projects are and specifically the stories that you're chasing, yeah, so I'm doing heaps of different things.
Speaker 1:Most of them are long form, so I'm not really jumping from one project to the other. So I'm now working on three long form, multi-medial, multi-year projects. One is happening in Chile, in Patagonia, which I'm releasing as a book and an exhibition, hopefully in 2025. I can speak more about it later. One is happening in a place called Ladakh, in Himalayas in northern India, which has a similar approach long-form, consistently going back to a culture, building foundational relationships with the people you portray or the people you document, the story you document as a base for building a story. That kind of matters, in a way, right. And the third one is happening in Sumba. So I'm working on three long form stories, but next to that I do produce books, print collections, I run photographic expeditions to various places in Africa and Asia, which are like kind of guided photography workshops in the field, 10 days long.
Speaker 1:Then I'm doing masterclasses at home. I'm doing mentoring, one-on-one mentoring. So I'm doing lots of educational. There's lots of educational aspects in my work which I kind of integrated because it gives you that degree of freedom as well as a certain amount of income. So I always like teaching. I like, I always like sharing experiences with like-minded people. So education became somehow over the last couple of years a big part of my job, which gave me also kind of a right to exist in that space of self-funding and self-creating work, because I was using that income coming out of these expeditions, masterclasses and workshops to self-fund these long-form projects. So it took a couple of years, but over time you start to figure out that the model starts to work the way you want it to work.
Speaker 2:Was that by design initially in 2018 when you made the transition, or did it kind of evolve organically?
Speaker 1:There was a little. There was very little plan in 2018. Okay, I have to be honest about it. I mean I had a bit of a vision and dreams we all have dreams so I was hoping. I think I could never have wished for where I am now in 2018. If, especially if you consider you just highlighted it already but COVID was a major blow, like in terms of losing projects and but I mean people are losing jobs everywhere in the world. So I mean, yeah, not, I'm not complaining at all at all, but creatively, it was a big setback because I felt, after one and a half years of building, I came to a point the moment when that pandemic started where I started the execution of a few big IDs. So that was put on hold. But back to the question. So if you would have told me in 2018, this is where you will be now I would have laughed loudly. So, no, I'm feeling very grateful for all opportunities that came my way and just trying to make the most of it.
Speaker 2:When it comes to your teaching, and I'm really interested in mentoring, because it's just a different form of education, isn't it? It's more, I, I guess, lead by example and shoulder, to cry on and just kind of like a support figure, if that, if I'm describing that well, whereas the kind of the workshops and the classes and all that kind of stuff much more kind of direct education. Yeah, how do you differentiate the two? I mean, I'm because I'm I'm I'm asking about how you started, where you are now and how different they are, or what thoughts you had were different back in 2018.
Speaker 2:How do you advise your students or people that come to you to learn, not just about photography and we'll touch upon that later but where to start with earning money from photography in in 2024, with no, with no significant audience, no backing, nothing, just someone off the street. They've got something. They. They want to learn photography, they want to be better at a point where they think they can monetize it. They just they don't know how and they want to make a living from it do you offer that kind of advice to them?
Speaker 1:yeah, see, I totally. I mean it's, it's easy for someone who kind of been through it all and seems established in a way. But uh, if I'm completely transparent and honest about it, I think the big question how to monetize your work should never be the first question. To begin with, it is an important question because it just pays the bills and it gets you going. But I think it's way more important these days, in like full content, overkill and images everywhere and every story seems to be told already a couple of times that you kind of embark on that inward journey of going back to the essence of why are you picking up a camera in the first place every day? Like what gets you going on telling visual stories and connecting with the people you photograph? And I think when you start answering those questions they seem like easy questions. But to answer them properly and briefly, also on a one pager, I think that's a great start. Not even asking about how to monetize this passion into a profession.
Speaker 1:I think it's way more important to just go back to the essence, like what do you believe in, what do you value, not necessarily as a storyteller, as a photographer, but as a human being, like what is important to you in your life, and what I see happening now a lot in these mentoring sessions is people that kind of feel this is the story I should tell, because society needs it or because my parents made me believe so, or my friends are expecting this, and barely anyone these days is asking that very first question what do you care about?
Speaker 1:What is the story you value? And I deeply believe that you can only convince other people to believe in the story you tell if you are the first believer in that story and if you kind of deviate from that, which has often happened unconsciously, you're telling a story that you believe you should tell. In a way, then it's really hard to ask that big question after a while how to monetize it. Because people will feel if you believe in what you do, that you it's easy to radiate that energy and people will understand. People will see he's in it for the right reasons and it then eventually it will be way easier to monetize a project into something that gives you an income and an income you can use to keep building that body of work that means something to you yeah, very well put, I I think radiating that energy is, yeah, it's so important, it's infectious, right, people?
Speaker 2:people wonder why some guys do better than other guys. And you, you, you meet them in a room next to each other. Well, it's obvious, yeah, they, they radiate this belief about what they do, not just passion, not just interest, not just happiness, not just enthusiasm, like belief and like true, unadulterated passion. For just I'm what I'm gonna do anyway. Yeah, it's because what I want to do is the story I want to tell, and and for clients, for brands. Whoever you know might want to pay you for that. They can see it as well. They're human. There are still, we have humans behind those kind of systems and they, they can tell, they see it. So I think that's an easy thing for us to say.
Speaker 2:It's like kind of monetization will come you know or don't worry about it right now, but I think yeah exactly.
Speaker 1:You know it's. It's easy to say if money already is coming yeah right. So I'm fully aware of that and uh, but it is very important to realize that if your first question is how the hell can I monetize my passion into a paid job, it's going to be a tough one for you your belief in yourself, the world and stories that you want to tell you know.
Speaker 2:Give us a few more details about those projects and specifically the story, if you can and if you want to, the stories that you want to to tell in those narratives yeah.
Speaker 1:So a good example is a story I'm working on now for about five years in chile, which is a story about, um, the big narrative of people and land having a shared history, people and land having a shared uh story. Uh, in a place very, very south in patagonia, in chile and patagonia, where we, together with a team of filmmakers, are working on like a multimedia project that will be a feature film as well as an exhibition and a book on a culture that I wouldn't say it's gaucho culture, but it's kind of gaucho related, so cowboy related. We're following a group of about 14 individual in spanish it's called puesteros which is uh, like a lone, lone, gauchos, lone cowboys that live on big estancas owned by wealthy families to look after the cattle and the farm.
Speaker 2:Long cowboys.
Speaker 1:No, it's like cowboys.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Let's call them cowboys. Okay, they're called gauchos in Spanish, but gauchos are existing all the way from Central America down to South America and almost every country, so it's essentially Spanish for cowboy. But the guys we are filming and following for the past couple of years are individual characters that live a kind of like an almost completely isolated life and looking after the farms of wealthy ranchers Just themselves. None of them has a family, none of them has kids. They all traveled down a couple of decades ago. All the 14 characters are in between the age of 50 and 85. So they're like kind of lonely man living in very remotely abandoned farms. A story, a completely forgotten culture, a completely forgotten story about almost a forgotten land. And the story came on my path when I was on a long road trip in 2018, 2018 into 2019, with a camper van crossing the entire length of Patagonia, not necessarily looking for these gauchos, but just happened to bump into a few of them. I started reading about them, doing research, and while doing that research I bumped into an Australian-Chilean film director from Sydney who was working on a short film about the same culture. So I just sent him an email like I kind of like what you're doing. I saw the nine-minute film which I highly recommend people to watch it's called Campesinos on Vimeo and we kind of got into touch and speaking a lot in long calls between Amsterdam, where I live, and sydney after returning from patagonia about our shared passion for seeing if we could tell the story of those men because it's never been told before and it was really happening. On that on, on that intersection where I deeply believe in we should provide more of a hopeful coexistence narrative where we can show people that the harmony and the balance of that, those two elements, people and land with a different approach, can give so much hope to people as well. So that kind of that's how the story started. But then when digging deeper into the into the matter, we found the story had, besides that relationship between people and land, way more dynamics about mental health, about masculinity, about isolation, like lots of social, social elements to the story, and it encouraged both of us to really wanting to build something bigger than just that, that initial idea.
Speaker 1:But then covid came, so australia went into a full lockdown. The boys, like the film director, was working with a cinematographer. They couldn't leave the country for two years. So we kept working on the script and then we were literally on the first flight out when the world opened up again and did three consecutive years of six weeks of production each year in the region, in which we did long interviews with all those characters in their homes. We followed their daily lives for six weeks a year and just had the last production lag last year.
Speaker 1:So we're rounding up the field work now, moving into the editing phase of building the framework for the film. The film will be about like a 90 minute 100 minute documentary style film and I shot the entire story for the book and, hopefully, an exhibition in the future. We we have a bit of a funding team which is backing us up now applying for international grants and funds to see if we can get money to get the production started. So yeah, so this is a good example, I think, of a story that started as kind of a passion project but over time, by going back and investing into the relationships we were having with these, with these men, as the foundation of friendship, and I think that strong foundation of friendship later in the production proved itself extremely valuable in telling a story that is intimate and emotional and like we're really trying to allow those men to tell their story that has never been told before.
Speaker 2:Wow, Fantastic. I mean my excuse, my cynicism. My immediate thought was how are you funding? Or I mean it's a it's just so big, and you know, I know what goes into all this, and then you add in a film as well and um, yeah, so it's, I mean, biggest hurdle yeah, it's a big hurdle and it's so far self-funded.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's a small team. It's just me, matthias the director, and Milla the cinematographer, so it's a team of three on ground, which is overseable. Matthias is having Chilean roots. His grandparents are from the region, so he speaks all the local dialects. He has the local network. So we don't really work with fixers or translators. It's just a very small production crew which works very well, because we always have one film camera and one photographer working at the same time. They're very small spaces because we almost all happens in the small homes of these guys. It's it's very intimate, right. So it's very intimate, right. So it's not a big production budget. We travel on very strict budgets, but now we're moving into the production of the film as well as the book. Suddenly there is more cost coming to the table, right.
Speaker 2:Books are expensive, let alone films.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I mean the edit is very pricey to hire people to make the footage go into a first cut for a final film. That whole process of drilling the fruit, the footage of building the framework, building the story arc, not even talking about producing the final piece with sound design and composing music and grade grading. And then the distribution network of the film, and it's, it's a lot, but we're so far all doing it ourselves.
Speaker 2:Amazing. I love big projects like this because as a photographer, I find it people always talk about oh, you need to tell a story in your image, like I feel like it's. I think that's overdone and people talk about that too much. You can't tell a story in one image. You can tell aspects of a story in a bit of context, but when you throw in you know five years of going back and forth, back and really knowing these people and and you know that a really true, authentic story that started as a concept and, okay, we can tell this overarching story of of these cowboys and their lost relationship with the land and nature.
Speaker 1:But when you actually dig deep and you actually get to the nitty gritty of it, the individual stories and their struggles and whatever they're going through really start to take hold right and that's just really how you tell a story, see, and so in my case, this happens far away from home, but I would, so this is one thing I'm always telling people in mentorships and masterclasses you don't need to travel far and wide to be able to find these stories. It happened to us that during this road trip, we bumped into this story that sparked my interest. But the one thing that people should understand who are starting this job is that these stories happen everywhere. It just depends on how you look for them and they. They happen everywhere you live, in your street, perhaps even in your home.
Speaker 1:Try to make it as intimate as possible and see if you can invest longer windows of time into building a story close to home, because it's cheap to stay close to home. It allows you to keep going back, and what I found during the first couple of years of working on these long form projects is you find so much meaning in building relationships first, and then only the last step of the process is photographing or documenting it, and I'm not saying that you should become best best friends with everybody you photograph, but if the foundational quality of your story is mutual interest, respect, human dignity just core values that I think are important being human, you will get high return on the quality of the eventual story yeah, I completely agree, especially with portraits.
Speaker 1:Right, if we're talking just just portraits, yeah, yeah human, human stories.
Speaker 2:Yeah, human, um, nature. I think I talk about this all the time as well and I mentioned we just came back from a short trip to varanasi. I was it wasn't, it's kind of a personal thing I was with a client there. He wanted to learn some stuff. So we went to varanasi and we were only there for five, excuse me me, five nights, four, four days. And I just said, like what, what can we really expect?
Speaker 2:Like, we work on some technical stuff, but in terms of a story or in terms of a narrative about either this location or the people, or the sadhus or the religion or whatever we want to focus on as a story that you are interested in four days is is not even touching the surface. You know people don't quite understand that. It's not like you go onto the street and just snap a photo of a human. If you were to put two photos either side, exactly the same setup, exactly the same lighting, exactly the same person, exactly the same composition and one of the photos, the photographer had spent weeks or even years with that person and knew them inside out, like you said, not best friends or anything, but just knew them right, and the other one was a stranger.
Speaker 2:You'd be able to tell the difference in a heartbeat yeah and that's the real power of photography that people, I think, take a long time to learn just through experience, through talking to people like you and and and going on classes, but actually doing it right, going out there and doing it, whether it's, like you said, in your own home or the other side of the world, and I think people are so quick to. I get questions all the time what gear do you have? Tell me, how about lighting? And all this is like okay, of course that's important, but like it's not. What's really important is, especially if you're talking about portraits, is the collaboration you're collaborating with. A photo is a collaboration between the artist and the subject that's it 50, 50 and you cannot get a good photo.
Speaker 2:You can through luck, but it's very, very difficult to get a good photo, let alone a good series and story, which is what we're all after, yeah, without really spending time with these people and getting getting to know it.
Speaker 1:So yeah, and I mean I'm not telling everyone to follow that track. Yeah, I mean, one of the uh, one of the uh like side industries and photography I also deeply care about and highly appreciate is street photography. That's how I started back in the day and it's super candid, which is, I think, one of the craziest art forms and photography to be able to deliver, consistently deliver interesting compositions, stories, use of light on the streets. So I would not, I would never tell a street photographer to do like months of research before going into a subject, so it doesn't count for everyone.
Speaker 1:But over time I learned that for me, like I'm trying to approach building a new body of work as almost, whether I'm shooting uh, natural objects or people or still lives, I'm trying to have that almost like a still life approach to every, every setting in which research comes first and I'm slowing down the whole process. I'm shooting exclusively from tripods for these. I'm shooting exclusively film also, so that methodology of shooting film and always working in a tripod setup allows me to slow down and then the result of that is you can feel it in the story. So it's becoming a very slow, mindful process for me in which research comes above anything else, and that is something which is important to mention, because people sometimes believe if you're a photographer traveling the world, you kind of look like Indiana Jones, but a couple of bodies strapped around you you know and you're just running from one place to the other.
Speaker 1:The reality is I'm spending about 60 or 70% of my work behind a desk, behind the laptop reach, like researching the things I care about, uh, speaking to people on calls who know things about the places I care about, and then only that last final 30 is field work and documenting it and building the relationship. So it's not as sexy as people people make it look like. I mean, it's a very my, my job is a very research driven desk job mostly. Yeah, it might be surprising to some people, I don't know.
Speaker 2:No no, not surprising to me. I mean, I'm the same.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's um and I love it. I mean, I, I, I, I couldn't see myself always being in the field. It's exhausting also. It's like then I rather come prepared and those six weeks of production, I know exactly what I'm, what I'm here to do for and what I'm you know, you get it yeah, well, I you mentioned something.
Speaker 2:There was first time someone's ever mentioned mindful, kind of mindful photography. I talk about it all the time and again, only specific to kind of our style or portrait photography or those photographers wanting to tell a longer story. But having a mindful process, whether I shoot medium format digital but medium format digital is, like, you know, old school cameras, they just the whole process is you have to think about it a lot more. You know you don't have a all the the gadgets, you don't really have an autofocus, you know just little things that enforce you to slow down a little bit and think that's where the planning comes in, that's where, okay, well, I know I'm going to have. You know I need to just focus on my camera at this time and so 90% of my this project is just going to be research, planning, recceing, location scouting, meeting people, getting to, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 2:So it was nice to hear you talk kind of mindfully, yeah, and meeting people, getting to know, etc. Etc. So it was nice to hear you talk kind of mindfully about it, yeah and I mean I do shoot.
Speaker 1:So I do all different kinds of stuff. I do wildlife as well, which we haven't even talked about. So next to my documentary projects, I do wildlife kind of wildlife books and print collections which I shoot digitally, because shooting animals on medium format film is not ideal.
Speaker 2:Come here, come here With the manual bellows and all the mirrors. Can you just get that rhino to move a little?
Speaker 1:not ideal very expensive also. Yeah, I mean the hidden, the hidden writ. The hit and miss rate is slightly different with animals, so wildlife is for me a digital digital work field. But by combining doing long-form documentary work on film and wildlife work on digital cameras, I started to understand the differences. And what I learned over time is that shooting film for me is kind of cultivating a relationship with failure, whereas shooting digital is like building or embracing the rhythm of success, if that makes sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:And for me, growth was happening, happening in that playing field of learning to deal with failure right, and the methodology methodology in the process of film was just forcing me to embrace that imperfection and that consisting, that consistently failing, and that just like skyrocketed my appreciation for the art form as well. So now, using these two mediums at the same time digital and analog is just the best thing.
Speaker 2:What do you shoot on film-wise?
Speaker 1:I work with Mamiya.
Speaker 2:Mamiya, yeah, medium format 120?. Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 6x7. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Why did you choose? Were you just experimenting with film and then you kind of realized, oh, this is something I need to crack.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I was in the first bit of moving into these deeper, long form projects, I kind of felt the need to.
Speaker 1:Well, it's an open door, it's kind of cliche, but I wanted to slow down Like I was not really caring about, like the frame rate talks you know what I mean, it's like, which I deeply care about in wildlife.
Speaker 1:But I was kind of disconnecting from that whole notion of cameras can shoot anything at all times with all ISOs, and like the technology, the advancement in the technology space was just working against me and the speed of and the willingness to really take the time to, uh, to dig deeper right. So I felt like a disconnect, like increasingly growing disconnect with the digital medium. And then I started to explore with 35 millimeter film first, and it's not really bringing what I was looking for. And then I started moving into the 120 which I I mean I've been trying heaps of cameras, like almost every 120 camera I tried, and then I ended up using a very old rb, mamiya rb, which is my first. The first time I was like, yeah, this thing works for me, like the way the camera operates, the way it renders space, the way it renders space, the way it renders light color as well, and then I slightly moved into an RZ and I'm now using those two cameras simultaneously, so I'm working with two Mamiya bodies and, yeah, that was like a major?
Speaker 2:What lens are on those 50mm or so?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it depends on the image, but I've got a bunch of Mamiya native Mamiya glass.
Speaker 2:yeah, Got the Hasselblad 500CM.
Speaker 1:Yeah, great camera Beautiful, I don't shoot with it enough.
Speaker 1:Just dabble and you know do the old portrait in here, but See in all honesty, when I was moving into shooting film, I was not having the funds to afford it. So I kind of of, I mean, it's expensive. It's expensive and not if you shoot one or two roles a project. But I was really planning to move into it full-time, step by step though. But looking at the amount of film I'm shooting now, I actually still can't afford it. But I deeply believe. I deeply believe in in, in the methodology and then eventually, the aesthetics. So still, it is always a bit of a gamble, like will this one day bring what I hope it brings? But I just love the methodology so much that I can't.
Speaker 2:It's like addictive are you happy with your body of work?
Speaker 1:yeah, yeah yeah, I mean I haven't shared much about this project I just talked about in chile. I haven't really shared anything about it. It's I'm still keeping it kind of. I did bits of pieces, but I'm dying for the day that this will hit the light of the day, do you?
Speaker 2:have an idea of when the book, at least, will come out, and will it be concurrent with the film?
Speaker 1:yeah, so these timings are moving all the time uh, very much depending on, first of all, funding and, second of all, available time, because there's many projects happening at the same time, but it kind of becomes priority now. So we're moving into the second phase of the production, which we're looking at, maybe hopefully beginning of 2025, q1, q2, probably closer to the summer of 2025 that we're planning to launch and ideally that would happen in one big uh event, as in the film, the book, the exhibition would all launch at a set in a similar time frame what do you, what are you hoping viewers take away from this project?
Speaker 2:or is it that you just actually don't care about that?
Speaker 1:it's for you, it's your baby, it's what you're putting out there and people think well so one thing that's really started to grow in me during the making of this, this new book, is how we uh define the whole concept of masculinity okay in a way that, um, the whole notion of man don cry.
Speaker 1:I think that's very prevalent in many places in the world, especially in Latin America. That's like a daily reality. But I think it's also the birthplace of lots of mental problems everywhere in the world and I hope you agree that a bit more feminine energy would heal a lot of things on this planet.
Speaker 2:Oh my goodness, yes.
Speaker 1:So I'm not saying we need less masculine energy, I don't know exactly, but I'm exploring that whole field of what is, what does it mean? What is masculine energy? And and in this story, trying to shine a light on different notions of how we can deal with that, by being with these men, by living with them and by kind of pulling back the curtain, the stoic curtain of that traditional gaucho that for the outside world seems to be like almost an epic, like character of roaming the open pampas on horses, yeah, yeah but if you so, we've been succeeding, I, I think we've been succeeding, uh, in pulling back that curtain a bit and revealing, like the intimate world of uh, these men dealing with major mental issues everybody in the world deals with in their own way, which is, in some shape and form, alcoholism, or abuse, or neglect, or uh trauma, trauma
Speaker 1:yeah, lots of, lots of uh emotional aspects of of what is possible when you kind of choose a vulnerable, hopeful angle in opening up, pulling back that curtain and exposing that story to the world, and we do it through the eyes of these men, so they really are telling their own stories. If there's one thing I hope people will take away from it is to consider that there is different ways to look at that masculine energy.
Speaker 2:How is it for them? In their culture, by the sounds of it, they're extremely isolated, so they may not have those types of interactions. But in their culture, is masculinity a thing? Is it a problem? Is it like this machoism that they've just been brought up with?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so traditionally, historically, it's a macho driven culture, but they also see themselves which is interesting they see themselves also as kind of a perpetual victim of the circumstances. So historically they look at themselves as they don't feel like they have a way out of this. They've been like. For generations these cultures have been doing this work. Now that comes an end to it, because younger generations don't really want to live the isolated life and this whole ultra connected world that live in that identity and in that tradition in the region, which is kind of, on a bigger scheme of things, also speaking for the entire continent, I reckon, right.
Speaker 1:So what I see there is because I really see them as friends rather than as people I photograph, but speaking to them for years and learning about, uh, how I mean they kind of carry the degradation of the culture, the fading of their identity, with pride, in a way that they kind of feel proud that they can serve as, uh, the people telling the story of the last generation of gauchos in this region as a dying profession, a dying, disappearing thing, and that that was a great uh uh find in the making of this project to see them wearing this with pride rather than with sadness and grief, and so it's a. It's a tough life, you look. I mean wish I could show you some visuals now, but I I can't.
Speaker 2:One day next year. Can't wait.
Speaker 1:No, but it's a tough life. I mean, the romantic image of these gauchos is not at all what we discovered when being there. It's day-to-day survival in full isolation, but still carrying that with dignity and pride.
Speaker 2:Well, I can't wait to see it. I'm excited.
Speaker 2:Move quicker. Hey guys, before I let you continue with the video, just indulge me for a few minutes. I want to briefly talk about my new brand, Yore. Founded with my business partner and photographic artist, Finn Mattson, we're proud to bring you a new artisanal jewelry and specialty coffee brand. Yep, what on earth do they have to do with each other, or anything at all? Well, they're both our passions. They've always been another artistic outlet for me, now for over a decade. So, for those that know me, coffee has been my other obsession since I was young and as a result of it, I'm a qualified SCA coffee specialist. So when I met Finn some of you might have seen my podcast with him when we barely knew each other our love for art and jewellery had a home, and that home is here House of Yoray.
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Speaker 2:And if you ever find yourself here in Bali, please come and visit us. Our cafe and community-driven art house is a haven for creatives just like you. So before we head back into the video, please just take a moment to explore Yore's collection. And as a special treat for you, my wonderful audience, Yore is offering an exclusive discount. Head over to our website and use the code below for a 10% discount off your jewelry purchase. The link and details are in the description. Anyway, thanks so much for listening and I'll let you get back to the video. Now let's touch on briefly. Before we talk about wildlife stuff, let's talk about uh, zumba and uh ladak tell us a little bit about those stories yeah.
Speaker 1:So ladak is, uh, also a story very close to my heart. It's a place very close to my heart. I've been doing work in the himalayas for a couple of almost a decade now in various places. I always felt a strong pull towards Tibetan Buddhism. Wouldn't consider myself a practitioner of Buddhism, but I read a lot about it. I really, really appreciate the philosophy behind it. So I think the first thing that kept pulling me back over the last decade is Tibetan Buddhism into the region.
Speaker 1:And then I found this like high trans-Himalayan region called Ladakh in India's northern state, next to Jammu, kashmir, which is relatively unknown on the Himalayan map. It's a place not many people go to but with extreme cultural and natural beauty, and I went there three years ago for the first time and just instantly I mean some places you visit you instantly feel like this is it right? The way this place feels and exists and the way how people live, and so there is the whole Tibetan Buddhism side to it. So I've been spending countless of hours and times and hours and weeks in monasteries. So one side to the story is very buddhist focus. But I also learned a lot about in that time, about the changpa nomads who live on the changtang plateau. It's like a semi-nomadic uh herding community of pashmina herders who live on a very high, almost mongolian, more than.
Speaker 1:Indian. Yeah, so they're Tibetan refugees. So they during the in 1959, they've been all the Tibetan people pretty much been kicked out of the country by China and they moved into Ladakh and they were welcomed by the Indians with open arms so they settled. We're looking at third generation now. So it's Tibetan refugees, Tibetan Buddhist refugees, that moved into Ladakh and that settled on the high altitude plateau that is called Changtang. So the Changpa means people of the north, and that herding community had such a strong pull on me that I wanted to do a long form story, which I'm doing now, on them. And what is interesting about it is that just to try to keep it really short because I could speak about- it for weeks.
Speaker 1:But what is interesting about it is that they believe in something that's called guardian spirits. Okay, so they have a different cosmic relationship with the earth, something we are complete. I think we lost it already. We're not losing it. We lost it already in the western world, which is defined as if you break the relationship with the guardian spirits, then the result of that will be the destruction we're seeing now, when what people refer to as climate change or give it I mean you give it a name.
Speaker 1:So in their culture, maintaining a relationship with those guardian spirits is a way to keep a strong relationship between people and land, if that makes sense, and the way how they communicate with those spirits is through their cattle.
Speaker 1:So finding that story and seeing what impact it is having on the relationship and the dynamic between people and place, that was incredibly interesting, and over time, I started to spend time with a couple of those nomadic families, learning about how they. It's a completely different outlook on the world than what you and I know and most people know, but that made it incredibly interesting too, and it is I mean, it's it's it is a story about hope and resilience, but it's also a story about, let's say, a capitalist notion making an entry into a culture that is not built on capitalist values, and that's what we're seeing now in the region. There's lots of development happening in Ladakh, like a big foreign boom of investment coming in and people are discovering the region, and what you see happening is that that capitalist impulse is now, for the first time, having a pretty destructive impact on the relationship these people are having with the land, with the religion Buddhism, and with the land with their religion, buddhism, and with each other.
Speaker 2:It's hectic so how do they feel about that generally? Because if they do, they feel that the relationship or the link between them and the guardians, guardian spirits has been broken already with within their environment.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So they try to keep that relationship alive. But external impact is disturbing that relationship, which makes them suffer as well. So they look at Ladakus having major major issues, where the place has very little rain, it's drying up, it's like almost becoming a high altitude desert and they see that as this result of the broken, disturbed relationship with the spirits but they haven't broken it.
Speaker 1:It's us that have broken it well it's not a culture that that likes to point fingers? Yeah, but they, they. If you ask him, they would never tell you who did it, but it's increasingly disturbed.
Speaker 2:So how do you balance the kind of, I guess, not being part of the invasion as such, because I know you do expeditions there. Yeah, this is a good question.
Speaker 1:It's in a dialogue, in a struggle, but I've seen over the years that tourism done right and I'm not saying that I'm doing tourism right, but I'm trying Tourism done right has the power to provide to these kind of cultures also.
Speaker 1:So what you see happening is, because of climate change and because of the disturbance of that relationship, people are increasingly losing income from livestock, which is their major income source. At that high altitude there is no agriculture, so they're living from selling pashmina wool and yak wool and they're losing that potential because the region is changing. So tourism done right has the power to give them an alternative source of income. So what I'm doing in all my expeditions that's number one question I'm asking is how can we help these people and how can these expeditions in some way, even though we expose the culture which you could see as part of the capitalist uh movement going into these places? But how can we do that in a way that we uh help them, like support them? It's a big question and it's not really one answer to it, but I think constantly putting that over anything else is the way forward at least having that intent to begin with and having that at the forefront of the goal will always help.
Speaker 2:What does an exhibition look like there for people who might be interested? Lay that out for us.
Speaker 1:So they happen in many different places. Let's stick to Ladakh for a moment, because we're talking about that story. So it's about 12 days in duration. It's a group of eight people. Most of my expeditions are between six and ten people, so it's intimate. It's small groups. Uh.
Speaker 1:I'm leading the trip together with a guiding team of local guides I've been working with for years, who come from the communities we visit, so, above anyone else, they know exactly what these people uh benefits. Uh. So I have a very strong team of local guides and together with that team we I run like kind of a photographic. Uh, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say it's like it's not a really a photographic trip. It's more like a group of people brought together who have similar interest, and it's not all photographers.
Speaker 1:Sometimes there's musicians or sometimes there's writers or entrepreneurs, but they all kind of have a desire to experience Tibetan Buddhism, to learn about the region and to just kind of make an unforgettable, once in a lifetime memory with a group of complete strangers that turn out to be friends after the trip. So it's a very cool dynamic of all people from different backgrounds coming together and trying to use photography as a medium to engage with a culture they don't know much about, and that encounter always comes first. So you see that going into these communities, sitting down with these people, learning about each other's lives, is the foundation, and then only the last step is like we documenting a true photography. So I wouldn't say it's branded as a photographic expedition, but it's way more of like it's actually an expedition. We all bring cameras, but it's not necessarily needed. There is some teaching that you give.
Speaker 1:So then there is, if there is. So the groups are always formed in a way that there is people with a photographic agenda but also people without, and I'm kind of balancing that act. So if there's people who are really coming with a photographic agenda, I will cater to that. So there will be lots of photography involved in the trip, obviously. So there is one-on-one tuition tuition which can be about way more than photography only. It can be about anything we are talking about today. And then there is like group group tutorials. There is also image review sessions we're talking about. If you want to talk about gear, we can talk about gear. It's not my preference, but we can. But we mostly just engage with the culture. We stay in beautiful camps.
Speaker 2:Uh, just have a good time yeah, well, you might see us in September, definitely interested. Talk to me a little bit about Sumba, then, just because it's the third and final yeah, so Sumba, kind of.
Speaker 1:I bumped into the story a year and a half ago, so it's kind of a fresh story I'm working on now, but it's once again a place that has a certain quality that just got me and mostly I'm working on now. But it's once again a place that has a certain quality that just got me and mostly I'm working mostly in the kodi region, which is the western region of the island, where there is a blend between christianity and marapu culture. It's like an animistic belief, like the whole marapu culture is also kind of fading on the island, which is a very, very unique, uh, way of looking at the world and that, combined with the natural beauty and the way, the welcoming spirit and the way these sumbanese people just look at each other and their culture, is something that really got me. So I've been going there three times now just returned and slowly I'm building a network that might in the future lead to a long-form story. But my priority now is in delivering first Chile and afterwards, most likely, something about Ladakh, but yeah, it's the beginning stages.
Speaker 1:So I just talked about Chile five, six years ago. I kind of feel in a similar way about Zumba now, but on the other hand, you see that people refer to Zumba as like Bali 60 years ago and there's already a massive spike and boom in investment. So you do see lots of foreign investment coming in. So I mean, I don't know what happened to the island. It kind of feels like a turning point now If you look at the local development happening as well as the mindset change amongst local people. So the island has a few challenging years ahead.
Speaker 2:We'll see how that goes A lot of tourism as well. Tourism is coming, yeah, like everywhere in the world, but yeah. So if we cycle back to hope, where are we getting that from at the moment? You know, you see a lot of these cultures getting modernized, westernized or disappearing through climate change or geographical circumstances? Where do we turn to Okay?
Speaker 1:yeah, I think we should all be a bit more vulnerable, uh, on an individual level, but also definitely on a society, community, uh scale. I think vulnerability is the first step to finding more hope. It's easier said than done. I mean, there's so much ego and and and evil, greed and and wrongdoing in the world. Yeah, yeah, it's a big question I don't necessarily have the answer to, but over the last couple of years I found myself finding more hopeful narratives by daring to be very vulnerable myself. It was a big step also in talking about the Chilean story, to open up to that whole notion of looking at masculinity in a different way and including my own history as a human being in that within that topic.
Speaker 2:That was like scary slippery ground, but now I'm getting more, gaining more confidence and opening up like, uh, perhaps for another podcast not for now, but becoming more vulnerable vulnerable on these kind of topics really showed me the power of opening up and speaking about these things and and then finding hope I was asked a question on a podcast the other day about um, whether I saw myself in my images, and I'd never kind of thought about that before. But obviously there is a part of oneself in the images they produce.
Speaker 1:I think in every image it should be yeah absolutely, and I think it's impossible not to.
Speaker 2:But it's just a matter of degree and I think when you're doing a story like that, it serves as a mirror to look at yourself and your own masculinity or whatever that narrative is, and that's why photography can be so powerful to the photographer.
Speaker 1:As much as the audience member and that is happening to me as we speak big time yeah yeah, welcome for you talk to us to speak of hope.
Speaker 2:I mean, we're huge animal lovers, huge wildlife lovers. I don't photograph it but, um, you know, it's the top of our list when it comes to um, altruism, or interest, or just pure enjoyment. Um, it's sadly we had, we had, we had to put one of our cats down yesterday, and we're talking about masculinity and I haven't stopped crying since, you know. But maybe three, four years ago I would have been something different. But you know, and there is still that thing in the back of my mind, like, well, it's just a cat, you know, speak to, let's say, I don't know, one of my friends in the west. I'm going, why are you getting so upset over a cat? It's like, well, I don't know, you know, it's just it's. She was part of our life for 10 years.
Speaker 1:Good on you. Yeah, I mean, I think it tells it's extremely positive what you're telling me now, the fact that you care about a cat dying. I think it's a sign that you sorted your life in the right way yeah, maybe there's some guilt in there.
Speaker 2:Maybe you know a lot of things, but my what I wanted to get on to was your wildlife photography which is some of some incredible images, some very powerful images as well. What tell us more about that, where that sits in your business model, in your portfolio, and what kind of projects you're you're doing at the moment with regards to wildlife?
Speaker 1:yeah. So uh, before I keep referring to covet, uh, because it was such a game-changing moment. But when covet happened I had to make a decision when I was losing all my pending projects, like what am I going to do if this really takes more than a year, or even more than six months, because I was just out of business and and we all know it took about three years. So I kind of started to look on the map and do a bit of research. What kind of countries don't necessarily believe in COVID and will not immediately close their borders? And while I was kind of moving away from wildlife and moving deeper into human interest stories, I figured that back in the day Tanzania was a place where the president back then he was complete disbeliever in COVID. Ironically enough, he died of it a year later. But he announced, like he announced, this is non-existent. It's one big joke, we're not closing the borders, we're open. And that kind of that spirit kind of radiated into Kenya as well. So I was like if there is a place that kind of allows me to visit on a consistent base, it will be that part of the world. So I made quite a bold move, but a great move back then, looking back now to focus all and channel all my time and money and investment and whatever in going to Kenya. So they were closed for three months and the first trip I was on was in August 2020. And for a window of three years I think I spent about 60, 70 weeks in Kenya on multiple trips.
Speaker 1:So I was doing already lots of wildlife work and work in Africa, but I decided to just pick one place and see if I can once again, with this long term approach, create a body of work that explores not only my personal relationship with the place, with the landscape, but it also kind of explores what it means if tourism just overnight disappears, which happened and what is the impact on people and place in the context of Kenya. So I did field work in about 10 different national parks and in the surrounding communities and a new body of work started to exist, not only on that intersection human and wildlife and nature but also my first real kind of I wouldn't say I hate the word fine art, but it's kind of fine art-y a print collection, and that print collection was the result of three consecutive years of doing work on the ground in Kenya. So for me being there I mean. So first the plan was to go for one year, a couple of times up and down or longer windows, but then this pandemic was extended into a second year and into a third year. So I kind of kept going back and decided to keep, even though other places opened up, keep them on hold and first finished this wildlife project that was working on in kenya which is involved.
Speaker 1:It's entirely black and white, it's fully shot on digital cameras, uh, but it kind of explores my personal emotional relationship with in, with being in that landscape. That is usually we've pre-covid, flooded with tourism, but in my first year and a half there was no one. It was a big hassle to get into the country and lots of paperwork and documentation and bureaucracy, but every time I was there I was the only one in a landscape that is usually like. I'm talking about places like massamara and buseli littered with chinese and russians yeah, yeah, yeah, and with anyone else.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's, it's. It's a busy place, but we were there in many, on many days. We were just the only people, wonderful one, just one car, and that was such a surreal experience, uh like going back in time decades did you get discounts as well?
Speaker 1:just yeah, massive yeah yeah, so, yeah, that kind of became a new print collection without even planning for it. So I think it just happened to me and I really followed, like my gut instinct in wanting to go back and wanting to strengthen that body of work. So I kind of launched that in 2022 as a print collection and it's I'm a bit on the down low now because my resources are more into the human interest stories I'm working on, but, uh, it's still uh for sale as I'm doing all under my own umbrella, so I'm not working with galleries yet, but it's a print collection that sells on my website and the money goes to charity yeah, so a percentage goes to charity.
Speaker 1:Uh, I deeply believe in giving back. I think when natural, when the natural world, is your business model, you can't really, you can't not, you cannot not give back. If that makes sense, definitely. So I'm donating 10 to charities that help me realize the collection. And, uh, during, we haven't even spoke about a second initiative I launched during covid, which is a nonprofit called Prince for Wildlife. It's on my list.
Speaker 2:Here we go, let's get to it now, talking about research.
Speaker 1:So I felt like during that COVID window, I wanted to try and make an impact that was going beyond the stories and the images I was creating and I was reading a lot about in those early days, reading a lot about. But the days reading a lot about, but the whole world was like finally, the planet has time to breathe. We're not flying anymore, we're not.
Speaker 1:But in Africa what that meant was that millions and millions of people are out of business from one day to another because the industry, the conservation world, is heavily relying on incoming money from tourism.
Speaker 1:So the impact was destructive uh, on a very minor scale, on a major scale, but on a minor level. So people literally losing their jobs in tourism guides, gardeners, mechanics, housekeeping staff and lodgers, rangers and all families depending on that one sole income earner. Their entire families were put out of business, and that kind of got to me in the first stages. And then I ended up having a conversation with a photographer, a lady from Austria, Marion, and we never met before, but we kind of both were exploring that whole world of what does it mean if tourism just stops for a continent like Africa? I had to come to action and just start at least a little like a non-profit online print sales campaign which we started with, in a circle, 50 photographers from our own networks or wildlife photographers, and we asked them to donate one image each and we sold them in series of 100 per image on an online platform in runs of 100 okay and not really having a plan, not really having a goal in mind.
Speaker 1:We were dreaming up the first target, which was about like it was a big dream to realize $100,000 for charity with that first campaign and then we hit that in the first 24 hours of that first campaign. So then we were just on a Zoom call. I'll never forget that moment and just laughing like this can go big and we should make it happen. So we focused all our energy while I was doing the work in kenya. We focused all of my time at home in building this uh, this uh non-profit organization into yeah, 2.1 million dollars raised in three editions, with 275 wildlife photographers from more than 40 different countries across three annual print sale campaigns, making it the biggest print fundraiser in conservation space in history. Just born from a very small spark of wanting to make a little change and with full dedication of 275 photographers all being out of business because nobody could travel to africa, but they were still willing to generous, generously donate their work which is the most image, though each.
Speaker 1:Well, many, many were like you can have all my work, so that the fact that all these people were just willing to give was the most, uh, maybe the one of the most touching moments in the last couple of years, seeing all these people who usually work in these places witness the whole impact that pandemic was having on a continent-wide level and all wanting to come to action. So the I mean all we did is facilitate the platform, so the power of the campaign is 100 percent, um, contributable to, uh, the, to the photographers where did you market it?
Speaker 2:you know how do you think you got so much exposure?
Speaker 1:yeah, so it's. I think the success of the campaign is, uh, very social media driven. Okay, um, the elephant in the room, no pun intended. So, um, it's very so. It was a very strong social media campaign in which we tapped into the peer-to-peer potential of photographers talking to their own audiences. So if I learned one thing in the course of my five-year full-time career as a photographer is the power of community is more important than anything else, regardless of the size of the community. But if you focus on involving your community and talking to your community in a respectful peer-to-peer manner, you can talking about monetizing your work. You can convert a person looking at your work into someone buying your work, but with the right intent and with the right strategy. So what we did is we just inspired those 275 photographers with a spirit they could shoot into their own audiences 275 times and that created kind of a snowball effect within that fine art wildlife space of people wanting to buy a print and wanting to make a difference, purely driven by social media.
Speaker 1:So we didn't do the first two campaigns, we didn't do any online advertising, we did no paid advertising at all.
Speaker 1:It was fully organic, mostly driven by a strong newsletter campaign, and extremely well set up social media campaign on Instagram.
Speaker 1:So the majority of the sales I'd say 95% of the sales is coming out of social media driven initiatives, which is wild, because if you look at the traditional media, I mean I'm still a believer in the traditional media, but media in general, I think is and this is a bold statement but I think media in general is a bigger danger to humanity than climate change at the moment, and realizing that over the last couple of years also made me understand that I wanted to step away with this campaign from the traditional media segment.
Speaker 1:We don't need newspapers, we don't need magazines, we don't need online outlets to talk about this. All we need is like an army of people believing in the same values that you believe in and talking to their audiences about that purely through social media. And, of course, social media also has an extremely destructive, can have an extremely destructive impact on anything, but we used it for good and the people I mean my relationship with social media is very dual, like the duality in that relationship is just weird. I mean, we all experience it. I think it has a beautiful potential but it's very dangerous as well.
Speaker 1:But what we try to do with this campaign is really show people and this has been a personal mission that there is an amazing, inspiring side to building online communities that can encourage people to come to action and make change, ignite change. So yeah, as much as I hate social media, I absolutely loved it in building this little charity organization and I hope I was on a like kind of a personal mission to show the world that, if well executed, social media can be such a powerful tool.
Speaker 2:Tool. It's a tool, yeah. You can either use it for nefarious activities or you can use it for good. So it's what an inspiration that you've used it for good. And the prints were all $100 each, flat rate.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they were $100 each and they were one size only 30 by 45 centimeters.
Speaker 2:So you're giving people value, and then you're getting something in return. Quick maths, that's 210 000 people buying prints just through social media uh, right, yeah, yeah, if you do your math, right yeah yeah it's not my strongest side mathematics 20, 21 000 21 000 both photographers for no reason um, still like just just incredible, um, but I now I mean it's a drop in the ocean.
Speaker 2:It's the amount of money needed to help people in these places yeah, you can never do never enough you know that surely has spurred you to do something like this again, or to reignite the same project yeah.
Speaker 1:So what it really showed me as well is that when you talk about making an impact, it doesn't necessarily have to be a monetary impact. I mean, we collected 2.1 million dollars, of which 100 went to charity to an organization called african parks network, which I deeply believe in their philosophy. So the money is in the right hands. But what was way more interesting is the fact that we became their number one storytelling channel.
Speaker 1:So we started to speak about the whole narrative of what happens to these places if tourism stops, and we became kind of a channel for them to tell the world about waking up people like, literally, it's not good that we're stopping tourism in africa. In fact it's really bad. And that was way more powerful than the monetary impact we made. And the beautiful side side effect is also that we kind of uh tapped into a new audience for african parks as an organization, in which we saw a conversion of lots of new donors coming in out of the awareness we created as a storytelling channel. So the impact was way bigger than the $2.1 million we raised. It was on a storytelling scale, but also on bringing long-term new donors in who are funding probably way more money than the $2.1 million.
Speaker 2:Wow, and we can still buy prints now.
Speaker 1:No. So the sale stopped last year. We took a one-year break. We had a three-year consecutive three-year window in which the momentum was very COVID-based. So, with COVID disappearing from the global map, we had to reframe our strategy, so we needed to take a break. The team also grew from me and Marion into about like 15 people, so there was more and more complexity coming to the table. So, after taking a gap year, we are now entering the first stages of building a new strategy and wanting to come back either in the end of this year or early next year. I can't say too much about it, but we're considering different routes, but we will probably come back.
Speaker 2:Well, watch out for it. I wanted to just we're wrapping up here a little bit, but I wanted to. You talked something there that kind of made me think and reflective of my own thoughts as well about media. Now I don't really want to talk probably too much in this show about social media, because it impacts us as photographers quite vehemently. But you know, when you think about the power of these platforms social media when you have the echo chambers that you have, or big media, when you have things like the illusory truth effect and people saying the same thing over and over you start to believe it, whether it might be true or not. Tell us a a little bit more about your statement in terms of media being more dangerous than something like climate change, and can you tell us why?
Speaker 1:Well, the technology advancement is just going so extremely rapid at the moment and we haven't even talked about AI. But I think that whole emergence of AI in the context of media, now completely blurring the lines between fiction and reality, is extremely dangerous. I think we can all agree, and what media does to me as well, unrelated to AI. But I think it's very easy to believe, if you work as a photographer in this space, that it's about competition People always.
Speaker 1:If you would ask me, I think if you would ask a hundred photographers what is a big, how to say what is like one of the setbacks of your career, they would be like it's such a competitive industry. But good storytelling for me is collaborative instead of competitive. Good storytelling should be about coming together rather than on be like assuming that it's a competitive pursuit, of finding a story that never has been told before and just keeping it for yourself as long as you can until you release. So I think what media does believe media really really triggers is that in becoming really individual as a storyteller within the space to just really so you get, you get where I'm heading to right absolutely and that, combined with that spiral, you can then easily and I mean, it's so easy to believe stuff that you would never in a million years have believed without the power of that media. It's.
Speaker 2:I mean, I'm not sure if that answers the question, it's very important, I think, for for people to hear about this and to understand.
Speaker 2:For us to I think it's for me anyway it's incumbent upon mature adults who are professionals in their arena, or at least trying to inspire change not necessarily make change great in our small way, but it certainly inspires some kind of difference.
Speaker 2:I think I've personally I'm not talking for you at all, but personally I feel we have a responsibility to at least enlighten people on our experiences or our thoughts or our opinions on something like media, because it's so easy this is what we're talking about so easy for people to just get brainwashed, yeah, or just focus on their channel, what they, they want to talk about, that could be full of misinformation, disinformation, that is, is not, you know, goes past any kind of fact-checking protocols. So I I think it's it's hugely important because it it shapes beliefs, it shapes ideas, yeah, and that's all society is. It all comes back to our own beliefs and our own ideas, and the thing that drives that, unfortunately, is some fucking rich conglomerate who owns a media company and dictates what should be the output of that media company. It's so fucked up. I'm amazed that we all buy into it, but we do. It's just human nature, right? So I? That's why I kind of wanted to circle back on that. I think it's important, people, and we're part of it.
Speaker 1:This channel is part of it we're media yeah, but we're trying our best to to have you know, to have a voice, whatever that might well, and and that is also really interesting in this like crazy rise and surge of social media, because you becoming a media channel that is, in potential way more powerful than any traditional media channel has ever been.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's exciting times we're living in, but what I also see, that the like I think it's really important to never lose your import, import charity and it's all. We're living in an age where you, as a person working in media, as a photographer, you almost you can't get away with not picking a side right. But back in the day, you, as a person working in media, as a photographer, you almost you can't get away with not picking a side Right. Well, back in the day, you always had a neutral position, and I think that is something we should speak about more as well, not now, but in general in the world, about. We are, in fact, independent documenters of life and reality and you don't always have to pick a side. But now we're living in a time where you're almost forced to, black or white, right or wrong, pick a side yeah, there's no nuances, there's no moderation, there's no no, even disagreement we don't embrace anymore, we fight against it it's like you disagree with me.
Speaker 1:Well, fuck off, I don't want to know you kind of thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's it should be the other way around. Yeah, it's like let's.
Speaker 1:It's okay to not see life in exactly the same way yeah, and I think it's also okay to not have the answer to every question absolutely and just speak about that, and that's why I so deeply believe that the profession of photography should not be about competition, but about collaboration yeah in any minute of the day, in any part of your work, open up to the world and to speak vulnerably about also not having the answers to all the questions and ask for help, and let's do it more together.
Speaker 1:I mean, if people really work together, everything is possible, I think. I mean I'm not a climate specialist, far from that but I think many of the problems we are now presented as like the six max, of course it's happening, but we have so much power to come together and work together and make change well, it's, it's um famine, global famine.
Speaker 2:We can solve that tomorrow if we wanted to. We have the means and the money and the resources to do that. We just covet COVID, perfect example. Let's all come together as a world and figure this out, but no, no, no, we just went the other way. Yeah, so exciting times. So despair over hope.
Speaker 1:Yeah, gosh okay let's end on a different note.
Speaker 2:But just to wrap that up, you know I wrote something down here in terms of kind of something similar, but I'm more concerned with people now coming into this space and looking at yourself and going well, I want to be just like you. I want to do what you do. How do you do it? But from your side of things, how do you communicate to aspiring photographers to have a voice or to to find something that they truly believe in? If that's important, or use that? You know, when you talk about art, how can they use that art and their voice for a positive change, whether that's a tiny little change in their own home or a bigger impact?
Speaker 1:yeah, I think I spoke briefly about this in the beginning of our chat, but I think you should really focus on creating for yourself rather than for any any anyone else or any, any anything else, and I'm probably repeating myself then, but I think when you focus on starting by convincing yourself about believing in a certain story, a community will follow 100, and I think you also have to embrace the fact that, as a starting photographer, it's a very slow process. People always asking for like top 10 tips, top five tips, top three tips to success.
Speaker 2:Shortcuts. I'm going to cross that question out.
Speaker 1:There is no short list with like 10 tips to success. Let me tell you one thing it will take time, yeah, a lot of time. It will take years and years to build. But when you look back famous chief Steve Jobs quote all the dots will connect. They will connect if you look backwards, but of course they never connect if you look backwards, but of course they never connect if you look. Nobody knows if they will connect in the future.
Speaker 1:But if I look back now at the last six years, or maybe, in the bigger scheme of things, at the last 20 years, it all made sense and a good metaphor is to I once heard this in, I think, a TEDx call or something. So never, never created this myself, but it's a very good example. If you look at your life as a photographer as being the life of a tree, if you sit under a big oak tree and you look up, you only see the leaves moving, but what you don't see is all the wheels in motion in the inside, the roots bringing all the nutrition up into the, into the top of the tree, the seasonality of the movement of the tree, the fact that the tree has been hundreds and hundreds of years in the making right, right. So and this is how you should look at your life as a photographer as well you invest in the roots and the tree will grow eventually, but it will take time. It's all little mini steps that if you look back in a couple of years, they all make sense.
Speaker 2:What a wonderful way to end and although I totally agree with you, having made those mistakes myself, it's very easy in such a fast-paced world when you throw in social media and other media, companies and just life in general, and globalization and digitization and AI and everything, go, go, go. It's like short form, short form, short form, this that next Fill my day, fill my day. It's very easy to get wrapped in. Well, I need it to happen now. I need it to happen now, I need it to happen tomorrow.
Speaker 2:Like give me something that I that can fix me a better photographer today and to be able to understand that that will never happen and to, to, to be, to have an impact at least. Yeah, you can learn the technical concepts and the, the ways to create a visually nice image like monkey can do that. But to have an impact, to tell a real story that's meaningful and and hopefully inspire change, to really have that skill, have that creative vision and have that just ability to do that just takes so long and life experience.
Speaker 1:and I think, um, one of the most powerful aspects in art is the one thing you don't really understand. And I think the time we are now living in, if you look at the arts and in the whole digitalization of the world in general, is kind of finding shortcuts to cut out that whole process of finding something that you don't really and never will understand. And I think that is the beauty of art and that is why it's so dangerous that this whole technology, technology advancement is kind of especially ai coming up now in the early years, kind of completely skipping, making like the result, making the commodity and the result more important than the process, whereas the beauty and the power, making the commodity and the result more important than the process, whereas the beauty and the power is in the process. And that's why I'm saying it's such a slow, slow paced. If you choose to be a photographer, you choose for a slow paced life and there is absolutely no way you can speed that up by cutting out the process, because then the end result will be meaningless.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, speaking of which, we're out of time, so we've got to speed it up a bit. Um, it's been an absolute joy.
Speaker 1:We're going to end um with a lucky dip card, so just I'll hand face down if you pick one out and then and then pass it over to me, just one.
Speaker 2:It's up to you, you can answer more than one, if you want I'll pass to you. Sorry, I'm gonna put you on the spot, here we go. Okay, if you could go back in time and change one specific moment in your life, what would it be and why?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I think as much as I believe in that there is a path for you laid out in life. All you have to do is walk it. It's an open door. But I deeply believe in that, I think I would have made a decision to move into photography full-time earlier. Okay, easy, easy answer.
Speaker 2:It's literally like looking in a mirror because I regret. Regret is a strong word, but I do. Everything has happened in my life up to this point for a specific reason. It's made me who I am and I'm very grateful for that, but I wish I got into it soon as well. I'm 41 years old now. I wish I picked it up when I was 30.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm not. I mean I. I wouldn't have such an easy start into a photography if I wouldn't have had that first half of my life before that I mean so it's, all it all plays its role. You know what I mean, of course, but a couple of years earlier, five years earlier maybe, yeah yeah, would have been great we can talk about determinism another day, but let's let's end it there.
Speaker 2:It's been um an absolute pleasure, yeah really really, really interesting and and um, like I said, often a lot of the things you said was like looking in a mirror, so I think we have a lot in common, but I wish you the very, very best of luck with all of your inspiring projects that you're taking part in. And hopefully we can collaborate at some point, but until then you know where to find me.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you. Cheers Thanks.