What fueled your interest in the heritage of everyday image-making?

I've always come at photography with a slightly different bent than most photographers. I studied anthropology in college, and I've always been interested in how we talk about photographs, the technology of photography, and the language that we wrap around it. It almost makes me less interested in the images we make, but about how we make images. That interest has led me to several different projects looking at the technology of photography specifically, and the language around it. Found photographs, vernacular photographs, and everyday photographs keep popping up in different places as just a recurring thread, one of many throughout my practice. This project, titled 7 pictures remaining, is one of them. 

When I was living in Providence, Rhode Island during my grad school years I found a box of photographs in the basement next to the washing machine, and I started going through them. My housemate and I did a deep dive into the box and we found the name of the person eventually and retraced his life through the photographs. We did a little genealogical research and found someone to connect them with. We reached out to that person, and they had no interest in the photographs. We were devastated because we'd spent months caring about these photographs and stewarding them, and that family did not care. I have sneakily used those photographs for years in teaching. I had my introductory students write fictional paragraphs about some of those photographs. I always adored this conversation about what photographs that theoretically have no meaning to us, and how we can still wrap meaning around them. I use that a lot in my teaching, and less so maybe in my practice.

What are you looking for in everyday imagery? What has your attention? 

Humor almost always has my attention. Humor is broad and can be created in many ways, often by accident. I love people who are aware of the camera creating a funny moment. I love games, I love jokes, and I think photography is often hilarious, and I love it when that bubbles up.

Could you please tell me how the initial idea came to you to go into the camera vault of the California Museum of Photography and open up the backs of cameras kept in the collection? 

I went to that collection because of a different project of mine. I had been photographing the icons on camera bodies and have a long-term obsession with the fact that it's a woman's head that represents portrait mode on cameras, for example, and the fact that that is a gendered visual association. I targeted the California Museum of Photography collection because it is relatively geographically close to me, and they have one of the larger collections in the country. I made an appointment to spend part of a week in that technology collection, just photographing camera parts. It was in that context that I opened a camera. I don't remember why I opened it, but there was a film in it. I said: “Oh, shit”. And I closed it. I looked at the curator and she was like: “So what”? And I was like: “Wait, what do you mean? I just ruined that film.” She said: “Somebody had probably already done it, right?” I said: “That's probably true. Well, what do you do with this film?” And she said: “You wait for an artist to come along who wants to do something with it.” 

And then they had this administrative conversation, as to whether or not they own the film that comes with the cameras, and they concluded after a lovely conversation that I could have it. They collected the cameras in the context of the technology collection. I collected about 10 more rolls that we found during that visit and I came home with them not knowing what was going to happen. I processed them in my darkroom. There was very little success. It's a lot of chemical ruin and light ruin over the years. But there was enough that I said, this is something interesting. And then in dialogue with the curator, I went back and we looked through every single camera in the collection.

Was there a particular finding at some point in the project that made you decide this is not just a side quest anymore? A finding that inspired you to deeply engage with these images? 

It was these images of a city that happened to be taken on the same roll of film with this guy.

Photograph from the camera vault of the California Museum of Photography, now part of Meggan Gould's collection

The guy in this picture was upside down, just peering into the camera with a sad gesture of “Is this working?”

Photograph from the camera vault of the California Museum of Photography, now part of Meggan Gould's collection

We all know that test shot.I think I developed his picture at the same time as this guy, also peering into the camera. I found those three quite early on, and then I couldn't stop.

Photograph from the camera vault of the California Museum of Photography, now part of Meggan Gould's collection

After my second museum visit, I came back with 100 rolls, so it was a mass-processing moment. I was not conceptually processing what I was getting, or I was just crossing my fingers that there were going to be salvageable photographs. I was confident at that point that it would be something to work with, but I had no idea what shape the final project would become.

What did you learn regarding the technicalities of how to process the images? Were there particularly interesting cases to struggle with? 

I found the resources available. I did not develop all of the films myself, because I couldn't. There were a lot of older formats of film that I did not have the reel sizes for. Instead of risking ruining them myself by trying to be too ambitious about making a DIY solution, I sent them to people who specialize in just that. There is an amazing company called Film Rescue International that does an extraordinary job looking at each one, testing the film, and processing it if possible. I sent them a lot. I processed everything I could myself in my bathroom and my darkroom, and just let experts handle the rest!

In a lot of cases, people who find great archival materials or family albums, care for these albums more than their own albums. Was it your experience during the process?

Yes, I think it is true in a sense because this whole process is so delicate, vulnerable, and unrepeatable, right? If I mess up something in my studio, I can go back and do it and have confidence that something better will happen the second time, or I can get angry at myself for doing something wrong. But in this case, it's a one-shot. I was very aware of my limitations in dealing with them.

When you decided to publish your findings in a book format, what was the initial narrative you wanted to build? What were the criteria to choose the images that were published in the book? 

From the hundred-ish rolls that came out of the whole process, the vast majority was blank. In the digital archive I've made of the scans, there were probably about 350, 400 photographs. So that's not many from the whole camera collection. The book selection process was about looking to edit out redundancies. I've looked at a lot of photographs over the years, and I have learned to somewhat trust my intuition. It was a process of intuition and editing and sequencing and thinking about both trying to balance the content that I kept finding with some inclusions of chemical abstractions, some play with where redundancy can be valuable. I was being attentive to creating a representative swath that was as visually diverse as possible. There was a lot of trial and error and back and forth, and trying to allow the images to be responsive in some places to the language and then allowing the language to be responsive to the images. I think of the selection process as a vast game of chess pieces. It will be a slightly different process for the exhibition where it won't be the same collection of images that are enlarged for the exhibition. 

You added diary-like textual elements and quotes to the book sequence. Were these texts created during your research process or slightly after when you were able to grasp the nature of your findings?

I wrote the texts after everything was processed and in the space of maybe a year of sitting with the images, beginning to work with them, beginning to edit the scans, knowing that I had something there, knowing that it was going to take a book format. The format of the book is a play on the first book I made titled Sorry, No Pictures.  I wanted Seven Pictures Remaining to end up as a companion volume to that. I like to make very humble books that are easy to hold, easy to read, and cheap. It's important for me that they are not difficult to disseminate. I am used to this style of vignette writing, and allowing them to be woven together like this is my go-to style for better or for worse. 

One particular thing I enjoyed very much is your decision to involve some quotes in the textual elements. 

I'm not a scholar, I'm not a historian, I'm a maker. It's hard to write a book of this sort that does not fit into a genre. And I'm playing my own game at this point, which is fine. I'm always very attentive to the fact that many people have said many very similar things over the years. What I'm adding to the conversation is my observations, and I feel like it's very important to nod to the many other beautiful thinkers who have done much more well-researched work around so many of these ideas.

Why do you think it's important for you in your practice to shine a light on this imagery that is often referred to as banal imaging?

My interest in vernacular photography is almost anthropological. It's a curiosity at how we use the medium because that affects how we use it as artists, right? Everything we do as “contemporary art” and “fine art photography” is reliant also on the history of how the medium has been used in a more banal and vernacular way. They are mutually inextricable. And as I teach photography, I can't separate them, as they're both vastly interesting and reliant on each other. 

I feel like I am always turning my head and looking quizzically at the medium and saying, why do we use it this way? Why are there expectations that that birthday party needs to be photographed, as opposed to another reality that we don't think to photograph? Why do we use it in this certain way? Why don't we use it in other ways? I'm interested in all the rules that surround it. My interest in that history of vernacular photography is, again, not necessarily an incredibly content-based decision but an anthropological question for me. Why do we do it and why do we inherit rules and why aren't we rule-breakers more often in how we use the medium? We are bound to it in such boring ways. And I feel like the more we can just take a breath and look at this history and think about the ties that bind us, the more interesting the work we can make will be.