ArtStorming

ArtStorming the Art of Remembrance: D. Matthew Smith

• Lili Pierrepont • Season 2 • Episode 7

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In this episode we  explore how photography shapes memory, culture, and legacy with visual effects veteran Matthew Smith, tracing a line from 19th‑century spirit photos to AI deepfakes. The camera doesn’t capture truth; it curates stories, and we can choose how to author ours.

 I want to take another minute to remind you listeners that ArtStorming is a listener-supported non-profit, and we need your help to keep the conversation going. Every dollar goes directly into programs that support our mission. That means more compelling stories, more in-depth articles, and a greater impact on our community. If you love what you hear, please consider making a contribution. Visit our website for more ways to engage, and thank you for being an essential part of our work.

 We're going to pause here for a moment to speak to our listeners. if you like this content, and want more information on our guests, their projects and more indepth ways to engage with us, you can find us on ArtBridgeNM.org or our ArtBridge Substack. Please read, follow and share our content. Your subscriptions, shares and contributions help us grow our artistic community. Thank you and now back to our conversation.


Music for ArtStorming was written and performed by John Cruikshank.

SPEAKER_01:

Have you ever wondered what makes creative people tick? Where do their ideas come from? What keeps them energized? What kinds of things get in their way? Is their life really as much fun as it looks from the outside? Hello, I'm your host, Lily Pierpont, and this is Artstorming, a podcast about how ideas become paintings or poems, performances, or collections. Each episode, I'll chat with a guest from the arts community and we'll explore how the most creative among us stare down a blank canvas or reach into the void and create something new. In our inaugural season, Artstorming the City Different, we dipped our toes into the vast ocean of creativity with a focus on some of our favorite creators of Santa Fe, New Mexico. That conversation was enjoyed by artists and non-artists alike because it showed us how we can all benefit from learning how to generate something from nothing, dream bigger, charter new territories, and solve problems in new ways. In season two, we're going to take that concept of generating our lives with intention to the next level. This season, we're talking about legacy, art as legacy, and how the most creative among us tackle this rich and deeply personal subject. Welcome to Artstorming, The Art of Remembrance. We often treat photo albums like archives, as objective reportage of the lives we've lived. We look at a photograph and think, that was how it was. But what if we aren't actually reporters of our own lives? What if every time we click the shutter, we're actually acting as curators? In this episode of The Art of Remembrance, we're challenging the idea that photography is a fixed record of the truth. Instead, we're looking at it as a malleable art form, one that is just as open to our interpretation as our own memories. Today I'll be artstorming this blurred line between fact and fiction with industry expert Matthew Smith. With a career rooted in fine art and forged in the world of high-end visual effects, with directors as well known as Francis Ford Coppola, advertising spots for major national brands, as well as photographic art books collected by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Los Angeles, Matthew understands better than anyone how images from 19th-century spirit photos to modern AI shape our cultural stories. In the journey of remembrance, are we documenting reality or are we creating it? Join us for a deep dive into the stories we tell ourselves through the lens of photography. I'm talking to Matthew Smith, and I'm so glad to meet you actually. Um my friend Chris Yurko, you were writing partners? Is that no?

SPEAKER_00:

No, I was his cinematographer. I worked for a number of years um with him on on a lot of the projects he did.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay, and I noticed from your resume that you also I don't often read resumes just because I want to like meet you as if I'm meeting you at a cocktail party, but I did notice that you've worked with some pretty big names and you've been working at this for a pretty long time. So Yeah, well, there's a couple of things.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, my background is unique sort of in the industry and unique in teaching because I have a master's degree and an undergraduate degree in art, typical art school brat, you know, I went to the artist in Chicago and then the University of Arizona for a master's degree. And I studied photography, and I basically got out of school and immediately didn't do art, but got into the industry, the commercial film industry, where I spent basically my adult life filming not just commercial work but films, but also visual effects, special effects. So right from the very start is basically manipulating reality. Of course, my interests are always surrounded around the nature of photography and its its uses. Because it's such an ubiquitous technology, we don't think much about it. You know, it's just it's just everywhere. There's photographic images everywhere. They define more or less reality. Of course, I decided to work through an industry where none of that's true. In fact, we spend our entire our capital and our best thoughts on how to bend and manipulate reality significantly. As this has gone on, and as I worked for 25 years in the film industry, I began to notice a distinct change in how photography is being used by the general public. And when I talk about photography, I'm not talking about art photography. Not that I have any problem with that. I love art photography. It's has a very warm place in my heart, and I pay a lot of attention to it. But my interest in photography is really how it's works through our culture. It's almost like a virus. I consider it like a virus and how it's changed our even our sense of reality. And I'll give you an example. For example, ghosts. Let's talk about ghosts for a minute. Uh-huh. We have an idea what ghosts look like, right? They're transparent, floating apparitions. Well, they weren't always that way. In fact, in the 18th century, ghosts were not transparent. They were solid. They looked like you and me. It was hard to tell the difference between ghosts and humans in all the literature and all the writing. Ghosts became transparent because in the 19th century, a guy named Mungler just started to photograph um what we call basically spirit photography. And when he did it, in order to make it work, uh, he was a fraud, of course. Um, but in order to do it, he had to do a superimposed image on another image, which made it transparent. Believe it or not, there is actually no literature that references ghosts as being transparent until that time. All the literature subsequently lists ghosts as being transparent and floating. That has nothing to do with religion, that has nothing to do with cultural history, it has to do with photography changing how we understand the world. I mean our new reality or or the metaphysical world, or the things that we believe. So my interest is what is mechanical vision of photography, which is what it is. How has it molded us, not just us, the it, but it us? How has it splashed back on us and changed the way we see the world so that we're not seeing reality? What we're seeing is the image that photography gives us of reality and and we've absorbed it as our own. This is called in many, many, many places. And the course that I taught, I thought up this course. I I teach cinematography now. I'm semi-retired, and I teach production work. It's all about business and how the industry of film works, because that's my expertise. But my interest, my love, is how photography, in particular with my background of special effects, how it's not just in fantasy worlds or in theaters, how it's in everyday life changed who we are. I go as far as to say in my course that the introduction and the proliferation of selfies is a psychological state induced by photography. And if you think about it, I know that's a broad statement, and it's a it's a broad reach, I realize this, but if you think about it, what are selfies? Selfies are basically you showing yourself in the best possible life, having the best possible fun with all your friends all the time. It's what makes people depressed when you look at the internet because nobody feels that happy all the time. And selfies are really forward. Essentially, a psychological state of performance for culture. And it's what I'm going to show you. What a great time we're having today. The rest of life and how it really is has nothing to do with it. We absorb them and think, oh, look, someone else is having more fun. Look, this other friend of mine is having fun. It's like a weird psychological state of me, meaning me, meaning the royal me, you know, us. Right. And that's just one aspect of the class. Anyway, I just I wrote a class about this subject. In the class, I decided to call it the theory and practice of photographing supernatural. Now, I was in advertising for a bunch of years. Obviously, the title is a draw, it's meant to draw you into the class.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, drew me to you, because like who doesn't want to talk to somebody who knows how to photograph the supernaturals.

SPEAKER_00:

That's right.

SPEAKER_01:

And that we're talking about.

SPEAKER_00:

And my my my titling has worked better than I've ever been. I've taught the class three years in a row. I have to cheer away 30 to 40 people every time because there's no room. Uh, I get the best review of the school. They can't wait to get in the class. The reason is it's not obviously about supernatural. I don't believe in a supernatural devotion. I'm an atheist. I don't believe in God. I don't believe there's aliens. I don't believe their ghosts are ghosts. What I believe is we are incredible story generators, humans. We can't stand not having a story. And if that's a and if we don't have a story, we'll make a goddamn story up, even a bad one, which is what I think religion is. But it doesn't matter. I don't think we riled up religion because I think about it in all aspects of the supernatural dimension, I don't believe they exist. But we're compelled because of our predictive brain and the way human consciousness works to make up with lentless stories. In a way, I think people think I'm criticizing this. I'm not. I'm I'm astonished at the creativity and the energy the human mind has to produce endless stories about everything that it can't understand. Whenever we didn't understand anything, if you go back, I've read literature from the 14th, 11th century, 13th century. Everything that's unexplained in those centuries is described as a miracle. Why? Because there was no story to describe it, no actual story, no science with it. All there was was the fact that it was something we didn't understand, and somebody made a story up about it. It turned out that it happened to be miracles because that was what was handy, and it left the uneducated masses, which was basically everybody, to pay attention to what I was saying, what the religion was saying.

SPEAKER_01:

So let me ask you this. So, given that opening, considering that photography is a technology, and when we have these advances in technology, sometimes we get more insight into the human brain, into anthropology, the study of human culture and all of that. And so, what's consistent over time, even when the technology wasn't there, was as you're saying, people had stories to explain the unexplainable. But as we learn more and more about the human brain and the human capacity and science given the quantum field and all of that, how does that tie into your understanding? So many of the stories seem to resonate over time. There's something similar about the way we're wired that we want to explain things in a certain way. And science seems to be catching up to some of these stories.

SPEAKER_00:

That's a that's a very interesting that's a that's a really interesting statement. And I have some thoughts on it, but um I mean, this is something that's been this is not a new idea on my part. Obviously, there's I mean, it is maybe my particular little niche, but there's the hero with a thousand faces, you know, all of myths, all of man's myths come from virtually the same story. You know, they they everyone laughs in the in the script world in Hollywood because there's like seven stories, you know. There's seven scripts here written over and over again. And people say, well, isn't that terrible? That's they should come up with some original ideas. That's not what the stories are for. The stories aren't for being original. The stories are to explain to you or me or anyone jealousy, love, rage, revenge, all the things that are in Alboradians. And we're happy to hear those stories over and over again because they redefine who we are and how we should act in society and interact. And these stories are, I think they all come from the very same place, and they come from our mind, which, as you mentioned, the current scientists that I've been reading and looking at and hearing, listening to, they're now talking much more about our predictive brain. Meaning, for years we thought, well, we look out in the world, we collect, you know, objective data, and we use that data. We use that that I those things that we've learned. A lot of now neuroscientists are saying it's probably a lot more takes place in the brain than we think. Meaning we do collect things, but we don't see light and we don't see objects. Your brain doesn't see any of those all fees of electrical impulses. How we parse those things is how our stories happen. And that is a they're realizing that the bold ones are saying we don't really live in reality. We, or is I think the famous woman writer, Amos Nin, is that her name? Nin? Anayas, excuse me. Okay, well, her.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Uh I think she has the best quote at all. She says it the world isn't how it is, it's how we are. And I really, I really, really believe that. And the more I've looked into it, and particularly around photography, which as what was considered basically the objective truth of the world, this technology came to us at a very important time. And I'm going to go into that because it's important, but um, and the reason it's important is what's happening right now with AI is exactly what happened with the induction introduction of photography in 1839, and would explain what I mean. So the last 50 years of the 19th century was the most astonishing time for technology in the world. A bunch of things happened. The telegraph became usable in about 1842. This is a device that, at the speed of light, could transmit messages across thousands of miles without a pony horse, without a carrier of Hidgin, without a human, instantaneously make a message appear in another place. This was considered by most of the population who didn't understand the technology of telegraph as a modern miracle. Literally. I mean, people would say, how do they do that? How does Lincoln talk to troops in the field in 1865? They used a telegraph. It was like considered like magic. That's around 1842, was when it started to be in use. Don't forget. Nothing is electrified in the world right now. Electrification doesn't happen. It starts in New York by Edison. 1880. We still live by gaslight at this time. But what does come into the scene in 1839 is photography. So photography is invented. And I'm not gonna go to the whole history, you know, it's Deguerre and and Foxtel that the two British and French guys, they both developed different processes and you know, whatever. But that all happened in 1839. And so what you have is this coming of age of this technology among many technologies electric lights, the telegraph, and photography. Also, what happens at a time is the American Civil War. Thousands, hundreds of thousands are killed in the Civil War. Loved ones want images of their loved ones and have fallen in battle, photography steps in. All of a sudden, now this photograph tin types of every soldier who gets a commission, get the tin type, and their family gets to take it home with them so they can see them.

SPEAKER_01:

I want to interject one quick because this is fascinating. I've never really thought about the history of photography like that before. So it sort of democratizes this opportunity to memorialize people's loved ones.

SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. And and even and my and what's more important to me is no one really understands how it works. Because they're not like you and me. They don't have educations. Most people, you know, literacy is good in the United States, but it's not perfect. There's not a lot of discussion of technologies, you know, in schools. They teach them Latin still, they teach them how to read and write. So these technologies are a little bit mysterious, do dare I say supernatural in a way. There's a couple of things that are happening that really, as I started to dig, during this period, right around the time of the Civil War, also what starts is a movement in the country called spiritualism. I don't know if you know anything about this. It's not another religion. It's a it's a it's not a denominational religion, it's a group of people who believe they can communicate with the dead. Yeah. How many could there possibly be? Well, it turns out at the height of spiritualism, by about the turn of the century, there's as many as two million members of this group in the United States. Bizarrely, where are they located? Where does spiritualism start? Got me. In a style? Nope. Rochester, New York. Where have you heard this before? There's a couple sisters that were famous for because this does tie into this gets complicated because it ties it into an entertainment industry. Everything is happening at once. All these technologies come together, spiritualism comes in, they they begin to do what we call what we would call seances, where where mediums come in and say, I'm going to contact your dead relatives and you should all be here. It would be like, but really, what it is is almost more akin to charler entertainment. And these spiritualists would hold meetings at at well-known, respected, muddied patrons' houses and invite their friends, and it would be an evening on the parlor floor. This is Victorian, the time of Victorian England, where you'd all come in and they'd they'd say, Who's the who's who's running the meeting tonight? It'd be so and so, oh, I hear she's really good. She really connects with the dead. So these people became like stars, like stage stars, but they're really entertainers. You know, people don't look at it that way, but moving tables, chairs, voices, knocks, moaning from the Vion, all these things are propagated in these meetings, and the spiritualist love it. Now, all of this is happening at one time. This the spiritualists are giving these shows. The shows get bigger and bigger, and to the point where they are now. You could go to a spiritualist show in downtown Chicago in an auditorium with 600 people, where who's playing tonight? Who's who's who's who's conjuring the spirits tonight? People would say, Oh, it's so-and-so from New York or so-and-so from New Jersey. They say, Oh my god, I'll go to this. And people would show up to these meetings where they would attempt to contact the dead. Now, the meeting the the spiritual show has got complicated. It wasn't just about contacting the dead. Then they would do things like there'd be optical tricks, like they'd show them the kininograph or kinograph, you know, the thing that started animation with flopping pictures and how they moved. And they'd do they would do some color light tricks and then so the show was like a variety show of the spiritual world. Photography was just caught up in this uh, I would call the landslide of technology, not great education, and not misunderstanding of technology's nature as a technology. Entertainment, which is becoming a thing. There was no such thing as television, obviously, no television, no radio, no way to do scroll. People spent their time entertaining in their parlors at home, and they need something. Guess what else happens at this very time? The very same time that all this is happening, what becomes one of the most popular game games that can be bought? Ouija board. The Ouija board. Yeah, why? Because a company starts. It's making these around the turn of the century and selling them everywhere. They sell millions of these spiritual games. This is an entertainment industry. This is not about ghosts or anything. This is about entertainment. So photography and photography's place in it is significant. A guy named Mumler in Boston is not a terrifically successful photographer. But he's married, and I this is a terrible thing. I can't remember his wife's name, but she's the brains of the operation. She just devises a way to take pictures of a city guest, process it, and give that to them with a picture of their spirit choice with them in the room. It it the now, where does this happen? Rochester, New York. What else happens in Rochester, New York? Rochester, New York is a headquarters for the Eastwing Kodak Company. I don't think it's just a coincidence. There's nothing I don't have any more information at all. I'm just telling you. The man who popularized photography builds his factory in Rochester, New York. Where? Where the goddamn spiritualists are. This is this is like it's literally like an incredible confluence. Confluence of crazy shit all at once that made us think that photography could photograph dead people. I mean, it's like all of these things, the the loss in the civil war of so many family members, the telegraph electrification that made it so we could work at night and have the streets lit up. 200 years before this, these would all be called miracles. But the mindset of Hugh and the average American and everyone else was that they were miracles. This guy Mumler convinces people he can do it. Hey, let me have you seen Mumler's work? Maybe you have. I'll show you some of Mumler's work. I'm gonna share something with you. I want you to see it just quickly.

SPEAKER_01:

I can just we'll be able to we'll be able to put some of these in the podcast notes. Oh, yes, I think I have seen. Oh wow, look at oh, cool, look at that.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, Mumler just starts to make images like this. Now, he made a hundred thousand of these, which is an astonishing thing. Well, and his but the thing is, his wife really figured out how to do it. And that's off I'm not gonna go into how it's done because that's not the interesting part. It's just a it's a sham, you know, and it's a photographic sham that's easy. But again, if you don't think they're significant or or people saying, well, this was just a side thing. What's the most famous photograph ever taken? Mary Todd Lincoln and her dead husband is the most famous one. Mary Todd Lincoln, the president's wife, had a spiritualist come and take spirit photographs of her with her dead husband.

SPEAKER_01:

Will you send me one of those images so we can put that in the podcast?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I'll send you all this stuff.

SPEAKER_01:

It's kind of like Photoshop is now, right? In a way.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, that's yes, yes, I'm gonna we're not there yet. Yeah, we're only in the 1900s. Yeah, this is this is all happening with no electricity. Remember, there's no electricity. People have gas lights, they still light their houses with gas. So when I when people say, Well, no, people are smarter than that, no, they're not. They live almost still in a cave.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

So this is happening when that's going on. So now, Mumler makes a big impression. People love him, but of course, there's lots of people who think he's a liar. So it goes on and on, and that history is a that is a black hole and a fabulous one to go down because Mumler's life is fascinating. His wife is brilliant and fascinating, and there's a number of books, one's called the apparitionists that talk all about their lives. Not my direct interest. I I talk about in class because that's how we're getting to where we're going, but it's a very interesting story. So these guys they make these images um and they become really, really popular. There's a number of people. Uh Petey Barnum, of all people. Talk about entertainment industry. Petey Barnum said, Oh, this guy Mumler's a liar. He didn't believe him. And I think, I think he's the one who brought that suit in New York or Boston, did courtsuit because he was lying, but they couldn't have applied cigarette how Mumler did it, so he kind of got away with it. And that made him even more popular. And so it's sort of like the best advertisement you could get in the entertainment industry still goes, which is any exposure, even a lawsuit, is good exposure. So Mummers said, Yeah, bring it on, sue me. You know, at least go ahead and try to prove that I'm not doing what I said I'm doing. So this is a whole that's a whole nother solution to write a story just about that. It's so fascinating. But to get back to photography, right from the very start, photography was a manipulated medium. These images of mummers are happening in the 1860s, 1865, 1870. But, you know, uh the guy, what's his name? Uh Rylander, this guy. Look, I'm gonna show you this. This is an image from 1857, completely synthesized. It's a not a real image. It's like a collage of photographs put together. It's this image here. Wow. This is an image called the two ways of life. And the it's one of the earliest examples of uh a comp photographic. All the people are taken to different places at different times, they're posed, photographed, and then carefully assembled on the in the on the photographic print. This was all done by handiwork, and you had to be very talented at it.

SPEAKER_02:

Wow.

SPEAKER_00:

And that but that's as early as 1857. So almost right from within 15 years of the beginning of photography, the invention of it, people are already saying, oh, reality chanality. We can make up make up stories with it just like painters do. This was always the case with photography. It's a myth of photographic truth. It never really existed. I'd make my students do an exercise in the class that's called, um, I want you to make crime scene photos for me. Turns out the crime scene photographs are photographed very, very specifically. And I mean, I have them use the FBI manual for how to photograph a scene. I believe it or not, they publish one and it's an interesting book, but it's all about how what their rules are for taking evidence photos. And what's fascinating about that because they're going to be used in court, and it's very, very important that they're taken procedurally correctly, because that will come up in court. If they're not, simple lawyer will say, How were these were these stop following the FBI, you know, whatever? And if you say no, the photographs become invalid. So finding truth in photographs is very important in our culture. But the truth is without a context, the photographs don't mean anything. And if you and when we take, I have my students all take photographs without them talking to each other of crime scene. When we get them and we look at them on the board, they look all the same. They have no authorship because there's no context for them. They're just pictures of like scenes with pieces of broken glass on the ground and maybe a stain of some unidentified subject, and then maybe some broken furniture. All the students produce the same kind of images, and that's because it has a genre just like landscape. I mean, evidence photography is a photographic genre, even though it has no place in the art world. It's a it's a type of photography, and it that which means its meanings derived from the style of how it's done.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. And so, so that's so I uh so many synapses are firing right now because I'm learning so many new things.

SPEAKER_00:

How do you think I feel? I can't stand it. I feel that just will not stop. It's like a fire hose. It just, I mean, it's an incredible story. To me, it's an incredible story.

SPEAKER_01:

It is well, what you're really pointing to is this whole idea that reality is this sort of shape-shifting, contextually driven, store-driven made by here in our minds. And so, you know, here we're doing a conversation about the art of remembrance. And since memory is so patently unreliable, we think here photography is coming along to help us ground us in some kind of further reality, but it's just as subjective as everything else.

SPEAKER_00:

So I think we should say my point, main point about our culture is we've given ourselves a wink-wink nudge-nudge. Let me look at that evidence photography include without really admitting that we're not looking at truth. We're looking at an organized idea that a photographer wants you to know. You're not looking at truth, you're not looking, there's no such thing as objective to the I mean. I can show you that famous image. I smile every time I look at it. Have you ever seen this image?

SPEAKER_01:

I see a can of Coca-Cola and uh a hand holding it. Yeah, I think what what color is the can? Well, the can appears to be red, but it's very pixelated. So I but do you see red? I do see red.

SPEAKER_00:

I think I'm gonna tell you something. There's no red in this image.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, she thinks like these little minds.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, it's not really a mind truck. What's happened, well, it is a mind trick, you're right. But what it is is your brain, your predictive brain, is chilling in this answer for you.

SPEAKER_01:

It's already saying, I know for a fact that Coca-Cola cans are red.

SPEAKER_00:

They're always red. And so what your brain is doing, even though my brain is doing the same thing I'm looking at, there is if I blow this up as big as it can go, and it I don't know if I can do that here. There's absolutely no red in this. It's all it's all white and glue. Your brain is making that color. It's actually not, it doesn't have any color in reality. Wow. And my my point of that is your predictive brain will fill in the gaps to protect you. It is sometimes tricked, but over in the long run, evolution has been kind to us by saying, I'm gonna be able, your incredible mind, I'm gonna give you the ability to do some shorthand. Even though this is an image of a coke can and it has the red in it, your brain says, I'm pretty sure that can is red. I'm gonna make it red. You're gonna see red when you look at this. It helps that the background is a complementary color to red, but your brain also says, I know what the complimentary is, it's green, red and green. All this is taking place without you having any control over it. You're generating reality. I just made you have a hallucination, basically.

SPEAKER_01:

That's so wild. Is somebody who is colorblind gonna have the same response to that?

SPEAKER_00:

I do not know. I don't know. If they've never seen a cup can be red, I don't think they would. Oh, that's this is about your predictive rain. It's about your brain reaching down and saying, Oh, I know what that is. It's this. You can stop thinking about it because we already know all about that. It's red. Right. That's what that picture does. Your brain saying, We don't need to spend any more time on this. Keep your eye open for that tiger, the tall grass. That's what you need to pay attention to. Our incredible brain organizes the world in a way, you know, a lot of short years, so that we can move quickly and hopefully safely through all the dangers and opportunities that humans come in contact with in the course of evolution. We're the winners. There are no Neanderthals anywhere. Why? They lost. We won. We're here.

unknown:

Right.

SPEAKER_01:

We haven't well no, it's not I know this starts to get into some psychology too, but there's like what a term that I'm familiar with called negativity bias, you know, where you start to predict where your brain, based on your past experience, you'll predict a certain outcome and so on and so forth. And we all are uh subject to to this kind of thing. But again, it it's so fascinating to me because one of the things we're trying to accomplish in this podcast here is sort of giving people a little bit more freedom and liberty to think about how they live their lives with intention, you know. And so part of what you're showing is like all these ideas, it's another way of showing that all these ideas that we have about reality are just completely invented, you know, and and that we can really um alter the course of how we go through the world based on a much more proactive, creative, or maybe we can't, maybe we're limited by our little brain, you know, mazes or whatever we're limited by, but I think you're I think you're right.

SPEAKER_00:

I don't think it's limited, but I do think there's social constraints that limit us, but not not no, I I'm while I don't believe in the supernatural invention, I have it. I'm a huge humanist, and I believe your brain and my brain are the best things ever invented. They're incredible, they're goddamn incredible what we can do with it. You can talk about AI all you want, but we'll get to that. But this photography for me was the straw that broke the camel back about human perception because something that was so much like what we imagined we were, it turns out we're not that at all. And I love the idea that we we embrace photography as truth. It gives us a false sense of what it can do. And I'm I'm fascinated by that. That's my that's my interest in life now. I'm I'm fascinated by how that works and why we think that way. Now, okay. I told you all about the extent of invention in photography and the the period of great advances that confounded most Americans and most everybody in the world, not just Americans, about technology at that period, the last 50 years of the 19th century. I carried over from spirit photography and all the other thing is you have to remember, around the same time, 1850, 1860, 1870, we are also seeing things we've never seen before. Astrophotography, microphotography, x-ray photography. Again, we're seeing images we think are miracles. I'm looking at an x-ray of this person's hands, I can see their bone right to their skin. If that's not like a miracle for most people, again, they don't have electric lights yet. But they can take a photograph and look to your skin. This is considered a miracle invention. The impact of it can't be underestimated today. I don't think people get it because we're it's so ubiquitous, we don't think any of them got it today. But at the time, it was astonishing to people. All really saying bumped us into the spiritual world. Because where where do we end up? Humans and our brains always wind up in the spiritual world because that's where we actually spend all our time. I didn't say religious, I said spiritual. And there's a difference. I'm not I don't believe in God, but I do believe there's a thing that's called that there is a thing called spiritualism, which has to do with how you communicate with everything in the world. We spend all our time. That's where we live. We don't live in reality. In fact, reality, except for staying alive on those cases when the pigers and the tall grass, has very little use for us. Our ingenuity, our communication, our relationships are driven in the fantasy world, in the spiritual world, and always have been. More so than even I imagine. I'm a guy who I'm a white guy who was born in the 50s. And believe me, I, you know, the people I grew up with thought they can control everything. The tides, the Mississippi River, space exploration, everything, the atom, all that comes only from one place. It comes from a spiritual storm that is constantly raging in humans' brains. That's what we do. And in fact, it may be the thing that finally gets rid of us. I'm not sure. We have to we'll have to wait and see. I don't know the answer to that. But but photography, the Soviet Union, every place, even in the 30s and 40s, Stalin used to paint people a lot of pictures all the time, whenever they were politically no longer uh expedient. He had a whole department that would photo, not Photoshop, but with paintbrushes, make photographs and just wipe people out of pictures so they didn't exist. And he had the entire apparatus of the Soviet government to make people disappear. And what did they use most? And the one that they showed is the most evidence of it? The photograph. Oh no, he's not part of the Politburo. See? Here's a picture of the Politburo, he's not in anymore. He was the same photograph taken two years ago, shows him standing right there. This is a this is a photography's been used to both prove things and to prove things that aren't true. It it has two parallel histories. That's my interest in how those two things have run in our society absolutely parallel without acknowledging either one. I think it's fascinating. UFOs, same story. Do I believe there's intelligent life in the universe? I absolutely believe it. I don't believe we're ever going to meet them, and I don't believe they're here now. This is utter nonsense. Go ahead and shake your head. I know they're not.

SPEAKER_01:

And I'm just I you know, to say that with such conviction, I I don't know. And I think it's one of the most fabulous things about being alive right now is to believe that it's possible and to still not know. I guess.

SPEAKER_00:

You know what made me recently come to that conclusion? Because I wasn't always that. I believe you, like I said, I grew up in the 60s. I loved UFO. I used to look at every UFO picture that came out. But but what makes me not think that now is the really the orbital telescopes we have. Because both uh the uh Hubble and the other one, I forget the name of it, uh whatever the other space telescope is that we're the brand new one that's working. They're showing us pictures of the universe in its sizes and distances you can't we can't imagine. We'll never, ever, ever. Even with singularity and the possible coming of, you know, uh quantum mechanics, amazing things are about to happen. Really, really, really amazing things are being discovered. I wish I was 40 years younger and I was a particle physicist, because what's going to happen in the next 10 to 20 years is astonishing what they're discovering. They're discovering that things in the universe, for some strange reason, seem to be able to look at each other and see each other, even though they're millions of miles apart with no connection. Molecules can be manipulated here and there. That's it. It's the very beginning technology for both the Chinese and the United States interests in quantum computing. It makes an encrypted uh it makes sending encrypted messages the most perfect encryption because the document doesn't go anywhere, it just exists at new places now by by the universe. It's it's it's about to be broken. And like I said, I wish I was 60, 40 years younger and study particle physics because that's going to be the most amazing thing in the world. And it's close. They're close. But anyway, I'm digressing. Sorry. I get very excited about these things. But I was where was I actually?

SPEAKER_01:

You were talking about you why you believe that you have not within reach.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. As these photographs have revealed, what you realize is that these distances are not manageable. We'll never ever, unless we figure out how to travel to time to time travel, which is a thing which is possible probably now, it turns out, and we're looking at what that is, we'll never get to those places because they're just too far away.

SPEAKER_01:

So then, but photography, it sounds like, you know, for everything you've said so far, then it becomes a tool like any other tool in the artist's toolkit, that it is it's a creation tool because we're actually just using it to form something from our imagination, to conjure something in our imagination, and then they make it appear to be real in front of us for the delight of engaging with something invented.

SPEAKER_00:

I think it's the same way, I mean you like you like to watch magic, hand magic with cards. We know it's not real, but the fact that your brain can be tricked so easily is delightful. And because we're intelligent and sentient beings, we enjoy. Being tripped. It makes us make it makes our brain we giggle a little bit. I watch a trick too as many times just because I love being tripped. I go, it's amazing. I know that's nonsense. How did you do it? Would I find this and so disappointed if I'd rather not know?

SPEAKER_01:

Because there's an an older art form before photography called Tromploy, which was what people would create the illusion of depth and architecture or you know, keys on a table or whatever it was. And it was really the folly of 18th century and and and beyond. So your photography in that vein is sort of the same kind of thing. It's just trompois. It's a to pull tool the eye, a trick of the eye. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

And I I think it's something we uh were we're more than capable and happy to make a story about. We don't call it that, you and I, or the general public, but uh UFOs have always been fabulously popular in the press. Uh by the way, interestingly enough, with more interesting stuff about that, when do UFO photos begin to show up? There's always been reports of unidentified objects in the atmosphere. That's an old story, and there's reports of comets and things for years.

SPEAKER_01:

But the contemporary idea of a UFO, any idea when they started, when they when they started Well, I mean, obviously it's gonna have to be with the advent of photography, otherwise it wouldn't have been captured.

SPEAKER_00:

So it's after that, obviously. Uh but when they became the most popular, I'm just telling you, 1947. Oh, so now think let's think a little bit. Let's think like historians for a minute. 1947. Hmm. What's happening in 1947? Well, World War II finished, one of the most ugly and disastrous and costly, and in lives and everything war in the US in the world. An interesting new technology was invented and introduced, the atomic bomb, which instantly vaporized 150,000 people instantaneously. Control of the atom. And an enemy US developed the same weapon and were plunged into a cold war. This is right about 1947, when UFOs begin to appear in the skies over American be photographed. 1952, a movie comes out called The Day the Earth Stood Still from Hollywood. If you haven't seen it, you might have, you might have heard about it. Watch it. And if when you watch it, you'll discover they're not talking about UFOs, they're talking about the kind the Russians as an unidentified object coming to America and talking about how things can get worked out. This is a reaction to the Cold War. And all of these things fall into a pattern of during intense cultural time like the end of the war and the Cold War, the beginning of the Cold War, we need new stories to describe our anxiety. I think that's what UFO pictures are. I think they're an explanation of our anxiety of the Cold War. And so the aliens that come, they're not from Russia, of course. I'm just saying they are. Or the idea that we're being observed. People in the movie talk about you know what we're talking about. They say they make reference to the communists by saying, Well, what if the what if the space news exists? Where he lands a ship in Washington. What if he says, Well, they're saying, Well, you know what they're up to? Meaning they don't say the word. What they're saying is the Russians. This alien comes out of the ship and he says, We just noticed you guys are you started using nuclear weapons, and that we were okay with you killing each other uh when you were just doing yourself. We we also know you're getting into space and you're taking the weapons into space. And he goes, if you keep this up, we have a society in space, our all our other members, and if you keep it up, we're gonna have to turn your planet into a cinder because you're dangerous and we don't like it. We want you to stop doing that. We have a robo, a series of robots that travel the universe and stop aggression wherever it happens. That's what the movie Synopsis is.

SPEAKER_01:

Wow. Yeah, wow. That the the things like Star Trek and um and lost in space and all of these other things started to become part of it.

SPEAKER_00:

Go to wherever, Netflix, wherever you stream your movies, and watch the day the earth stood still. I will do it tonight. And because what you realize and listen to what people, even the the suck the secondary characters are saying, because they're talking about they're talking about the Russians, is what they're they don't say that word anywhere, but that's what they're talking about. It's a very interesting film. It was made before I was born, but only by a couple of years. And it sort of describes why I think UFL pictures are about anxiety. They're about our anxiety in the world and now no longer and having a you know, being lorded over a weapon technology that we made and now no longer control. That's what I think that it's about.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, one of the areas where photography and special effects are probably most prominent in the cinema world is in sci-fi related movies. And that's all, you know, you think about Star Trek and back to uh Joseph Campbell and that whole the Star Trek series story. Yes, and how that was sort of the hero's journey, you know, in space and uh all these things, but it it all comes back, circles back to that original concept that he raised about, you know, that we need to tell a story, we want to be remembered, and we want to be significant, and so we have all these different methods for doing that.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And you know, this is a anyone who thinks it's not like a thing, I mean, look at this image, for example. This is a plant that was put up in New Hampshire to note an alien abduction of a couple. Well, I mean, you hear about things like this all the time. I know, but this is an official city black put up by the government saying, yeah, this couple where they claim to have been abducted by aliens. Why would you ever do to me this is a fascinating part of culture that this would actually be a thing that a community would decide they should do. Of all places, New Hampshire? I know it that makes it even that makes it even crazier in my mind, but yeah. I just think it's fascinating that that um and then there's other things like we talk about not just this, we talk about the other efforts in storytelling, like for instance this guy. I love this guy, I love this book. It's called From Outer Space to You.

SPEAKER_01:

And that's so Hardy Boys.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Remember the boys, yeah. Well, what's great about first of all, I love the cover. It's like a blonde woman in a toga. Are you kidding me?

SPEAKER_01:

That's like a with a UFO behind her.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, somebody from advertising said, No, you gotta put a blonde on the cover of that damn book if you want to sell it. Anyway, this is a book written by this guy, Howard Venger. Howard Venger was claims to be an abductee. He was abducted, taken on a ship to a foreign planet. The book talks all about it, but guess what the book is when you read it? And this is what I love. And this is, again, my interest isn't the fact that it's a book about being abducted by an alien. My interest in it is that the guy who's writing it, it's written, this has got to be one of the first self-help books ever written. It's all about how the aliens tell him how to eat better, how to make electricity with less pollution, how to this. He goes on and on in the book, not about the goddamn alien, but how things could be better on earth because the aliens told him how to make it better on earth. This is a self-help book about living in America, but it's sheathed in a new space. This kind of weird, you know, the alien told me, so it's got some authority because this alien told me. Anyway, I love this book. I read passages out of the class because it's really an amazing book. There's even an image in it of a perpetual energy machine which will make electricity forever without doing anything.

SPEAKER_01:

So, so let me ask you, because we're getting low on time. I could totally get why you wanted to create a class about this, but I'm really curious about the transformation that happens to a student as they walk into the class the first, the difference between how they walk into class the first day thinking that they're going to maybe learn how to photograph the supernatural. And then when they leave your class, how do they leave? How are they changed?

SPEAKER_00:

What they tell me is they never really understood what photographs are about. Or what or why they're important or not important to them. And now they know why. And and this all this comes down, and I'll move quickly jump ahead. It's not the stuff I could show you, but basically, the reason I did it was with the advent of digital photography, not analog photography, I learned obviously, I spent 20 years, 30 years, I shot millions of feet of film, they love photography. Literally millions. What happened with the transition to digital, that's the most significant change. And that's not news. Everybody says it's significant, but it's not significant. My reason for speaking insignificant is not the same. Mine is because it took the photographic image, which was analog, and turned it into a digital roster. In other words, dots and lines, which are fully manipulatable. My interest my job in this in the visual arts industry couldn't have gotten where it was with analog film. The digital world afforded us, it turned basically the photograph into a plastic medium like painting, where things can be manipulated, re-juxtaposed, reintroduced, changed in color, change in texture, change in light. All that can be done by manipulating the numbers because now the image has been rasterized. It's called a raster. That's what it's called. So when that happened, everything changed. And and what it did, it made us lose our grip on photography. And to this day, as you know, if you look at the the flots of the internet, it's endless AI reality clips of things that look extraordinarily realistic, which are completely fake. There's no connection to reality whatsoever. Nothing. It's like the cart that got before the horse. We were the horse pulling the cart all these years with a photography and using it as a cudgel to prove reality. That cart has slid in front of us and now we're being dragged by it. And that's what AI is, and that's what the internet, that's what deep fakes are. They're the ultimate result of the technology from photography to digital photography to really just fantasy land. There's no there's no reality. My students, they can now, when they leave, they can re-evaluate what AI is based on what we've learned about photography and how it's the state that we're in right now, with AI in schools, art schools, anywhere in the normal public, news, information agencies and politics, is exactly where we were when photography was invented. The same confusion about the technology exists as it did that. AI isn't all that it says it's all cracked up to me. But because we don't really understand AI, and most people don't, everything that you hear, which are mostly most likely belched forward from investors in AI, are telling you what to think about it. But you don't really know what it's about, and neither do I, or where it's gonna go. This is the same, we're the same kind of crucible now that we were in 1860 with all those technologies that came online. It's happening again. I mean, now it's AI. This is the new, the new adjustment of reality. We're gonna have a new way to look at it. It's not gonna be photographic reality. Photographic reality isn't really gonna exist anymore. It's not gonna be a point.

SPEAKER_01:

Because it's so highly manipulatable that basically, but what going back to the perspective of humanist that you expressed, because now as a human, if I want to create my own memory of something, I can actually create an image of that memory to prove to myself that that's actually how that went down. I mean, we're all seeing that in the political realm right now. I mean, it's like what's happening, whack the dog, all that.

SPEAKER_00:

You're and you're exactly right, because think about it. And and what's here's one of the most important things. I'm sorry I haven't mentioned this earlier, is the most important thing is the digital technologies, including cell phones, which put lots of image and uh internet apps on so you can take pictures and hold on, wait for it, manipulate those pictures before you upload them, change their color, put a filter on them, do this, do that. You're not publishing pictures of what happened, you're publishing pictures of what you wish happened. That's the two different things. It's just like Din's statement. If the world isn't what it is, it's what we are. That's what you're doing. And and all of the Instagrams and all these filters that you can buy and you can change things, there's no longer a photographic history. All there is is a photographic desire of how things we'd like them to be. It's like saying bluer skies, happier outcomes, selfies, and no really reality, no, no, no content that has anything to do with what we would consider actual reality, even though it's her.

SPEAKER_01:

So, what this is making me think of, and I had one of my Art of Conversation dinners last night, and one of the things that came up is this the idea of this artful exit. Like if you could create the ceremony at the end of your life, non-religious, like that, how do you go out? But if you can write your own eulogy and you can write your own production of your own life the way you wish it had happened, how would you create that like what you said is so expansive and so interesting to me.

SPEAKER_00:

Honestly, if I had the money to invest, I'd start a business doing that for people.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I'll just be in the same business.

SPEAKER_00:

On their way out, on their way out, we would make the reality that they want to see it there uh repeated about them.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, that's actually what we're trying to do with this whole initiative is to get people to think about it in their midlife instead of sort of end of life. And hopefully, even though I'm in my 60s, I'm still considering that semi-mid-life. But it's trying to get people in their 40s and 50s to be thinking about this as if they were to be the director, producer, creator of the movie that is their life, the the museum exhibits that is their life. What do they want to curate? What do they want to see in there? What do they want to do with that? And then do it, you know, instead of like wishing they had.

SPEAKER_00:

I I love that idea. It's it's so both crazy, stupid, and wonderful at the same time that again, in my opinion, that describes humanity to me. I'm not offended by that. I think true creative, both in science and politics and in religion, is unpredictable at best. And I and I find that um it's the only thing that makes me get out of bed in the morning. Otherwise, I don't care, I don't care about any of it. To me, this this weird thing, this weird technology that we we leaned on to help us realize what reality is, has become so embedded that I call it like a virus. I call it it's it's a presence is invisible, but it's it affects how we see everything in the world because we judge everything using it as a meter stick of reality. And to me, that's an astonishing thing and amazing weight to put on photography when you actually understand how photography works. It's not any of those things, it's the weakest um not robust thing. All the stories that it makes up. That's why photographers that do that, like Lee Friedland or any of the great photographers, his photographs, he has to make the story with those things. That doesn't just happen. People think he just takes pictures. No, he doesn't. He what what he doesn't do is he doesn't take pictures. He only takes pictures where he can make a story out of them. It's not that he takes pictures, it's the opposite of that.

SPEAKER_01:

He makes stories creating reality, right?

SPEAKER_00:

That's making, and that's what makes him or anybody, you know, the Americans, you know, Robert Frank. His book is a story because he he has an opinion about how the world should look and he finds images that do that. Not because the photographs do it. They're actually valueless. They have no without the context of his impression of the world in his made-up goddamn mind, it has no value. That's what makes it rich to us and want to hold it and think it's precious. It's because it's not the photograph, it's us.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

We could that that's the perfect place to leave it. I really appreciate you coming on today.

SPEAKER_00:

This was a treat, and you were a good listener, and you were also you had really interesting things to say as well. It was great. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you. So thanks for joining us today. Artstorming is brought to you and supported by Artbridge NM and listeners like you. Look for us on your favorite podcast platforms or wherever you listen. Your subscriptions, likes, comments, and shares help us to reach more listeners and attract the support we need to thrive in these challenging times. If you love what you hear, please consider making a contribution. We rely on your help to keep these conversations going. Every dollar you contribute goes directly into programs that support our mission. And we've been offered a matching grant that will match every dollar that you contribute. That means more compelling stories, more in depth articles, and an even greater impact on our community. Please visit our website at www.artbridgenm.org and thank you so much for being an essential part of our work.

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Lili Pierrepont

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