Jordan Swartz

Where are you from/based now?

I was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania & am now currently based out of Washington, DC


What is your background in Photography? What keeps you interested?

I grew up reading skateboard & bmx magazines & was always interested in the visuals, both photographically & design, though maybe didn't know it at the time.

When I was 12 or 13 I started taking pictures with my dad's old camera & then eventually got my own. When it came time for college, there wasn't anything else I really was interested in at the time.

The answer to what keeps me interested is two fold. What keeps me interested in still photographing is that I have a constant need to document & it has sort of become a feeling of needing to document for those around me as well.

What keeps me interested in other photographers, is that gut reaction you get when you see that perfect photograph. It sort of comes in waves, this sense of awe & wonder in how beautiful or striking the image is & then that frustration that you didn't take the image.


What equipment do you use?

I sort of use whatever is around at the time, whether borrowed or my own. But I recently have been shooting a lot with my Hasselblad & my Fuji x100. I also almost always have an Olympus film point & shoot on me at all times.


How often do you go out shooting?

As I said I usually have at least a point & shoot on me, but it's hard because most of my "work" is made while in transit. If I'm not traveling I still am shooting, & forcing myself to make images, but they often never see the light of day. That being said, when I am in transit I shoot constantly. On a 20-30 day tour, I will shoot a few thousand digital images, as well as probably 80-100 rolls of film.


Could you tell us a bit about the book you have just made?

"I'm Alright To Drive" is the document of the life of a band. My best friends from high school had a punk band & when they started touring I just went along & by the end I was the non official 4th member. I first saw a lot of the United States with them & also parts of Europe. It was weird summing up 6 years of huge life moments into 60 pages. I wanted to focus more on the downtown of tour, rather than the live shot/ music part. I figured out the ratio at one point & on a 30 day tour, something like .014 perfect is actually spent playing music.


Is there a particular photographer, site, set of images or a photo book that you keep coming back to for inspiration?

Chris Berntsen is an awesome photographer & has a book titled "The Ritual of Nothingness" that still hits me right in the chest, every time I look at it. Ed Templetons books "The Golden Age of Neglect" "Deformer" are both really amazing visually. Philip di Corcia's "Thousand" is probably the most perfect book ever made. This list could go on forever.


Are you working on a project at the moment?

I have a couple projects right now, one is based on John Steinbeck's "The Winter of Our Discontent" & I'm photographing a sort of compendium for that.

I also have a much larger project that I'm sort of planning & doing a lot of legwork on trying to get some funding, but it's going to be a historical document of American history that interests/ pertains to me.

Also I run Empty Stretch, a photo book publishing company & we have a ton of stuff coming up. We are going to be in Los Angeles for the LA Art Book Fair. We have two new releases coming out there. We have another 2 releases in the early stages right now. So making books keeps me busy.

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I'm Alright To Drive

Empty Stretch

Michael Wriston

Where are you from/based now?

I'm originally from Maryland, but work and life have taken me all over the place. Right now, I'm living in California.


What is your background in Photography? What keeps you interested?

I'm just a hobbyist with no real formal education in photography. The closest to formal education I've received is when Patrick Joust taught me how to develop black and white film in his apartment in Baltimore. I got my start by taking long exposure photographs at night when I lived in the Baltimore area, just experimenting with exposures and compositions. I learned the ins and outs of the art either by accident or by finding other people's photographic work that resonated with me and reverse engineering it.

What keeps me going is the act of creativity, the sense of exploration. There are very few frontiers left to explore, but I believe that today, photography enables us to re-examine old territory with new perspectives, and to discover from a photographer's perspective something new in well-trodden places. Sharing work with a wider audience on sites like Flickr, Tumblr, and Instagram is compelling to me. It's a chance to share a perspective on the world and also gain some insight into our fellow humans. And that is inspiration enough to want to create and feed into that greater cycle of creativity.


What equipment do you use?

I used to shoot a lot with medium format film cameras, specifically a Kiev 60 and Yashica Mat 124G. These days, I've made the switch to digital and am shooting with Olympus' Micro 4/3 cameras like the E-PL1 and OM-D E-M5. I'm still a sucker for manual focus lenses, and use a Voigtlander Nokton 25mm f/0.95 lens. I also shoot a lot with my iPhone. I edit my digital photos in Lightroom using the filters from Visual Supply Co. I think they make subtle improvements in my photographs that grant me some aesthetic consistency and expediency in my workflow.

In the photographic community right now, there is a pretty heated divide between analog and digital photographers, and I'm not sure why. There are so many communities that are film only or digital only, ostensibly with the purpose of separating "superior" photographs from "inferior" ones. This has given way to a new generation of photographers that have adopted a format as their photographic identity. No longer is someone just a photographer, they are a film photographer, or an iPhoneographer, and so on. I used to spell out exactly what gear I used to take each shot, but I found that in transitioning to digital, many people stopped paying attention to my work when I indicated I had used an E-PL1 to take a shot rather than an Asahi Pentax. Now, I don't overtly outline what I'm using, and let the photos stand on their own.

I would encourage new photographers to pay no mind to any of it, and to focus instead on taking good photos with whatever they can get their hands on.


Do you take one shot of a subject then move on or will you take several and decide on the best in editing?

Shooting film always had me thinking cost, so I would be quite selective when I took a shot and heavily considered every angle, every exposure, every frame. It's a mindset that has served me well in digital photography, as well. I want to get things right in camera as much as possible, and I want to be selective. So mostly I take one or two shots, and then move on. This is to help keep editing to a minimum, and also because limitation breeds creativity.

When I was starting out, though, I shot hundreds of photos at every combination of F-stop and shutter speed, from a variety of different angles, in myriad different lighting conditions. I think that was an important step in developing technique and style. Sorting the photos out afterwards helped me develop my eye as an editor, which is every photographer's second job. After a while, that selectiveness becomes second nature, and you can start to apply it out on the street.


How often do you go out shooting?

Much to my wife's chagrin, I have terrible wanderlust and an almost endless case of cabin fever. I'm always clamoring for an opportunity to go take pictures. Thankfully, she's very supportive and understanding of what could be considered my photographic "addiction." Usually I make it a point to get out once a week, and mostly on Sunday mornings. I think Sunday morning is perhaps the perfect time to make the kind of photos I strive to make, when the world is very sleepy and exhausted from the weekend, and the streets are empty. There's a kind of loneliness and vulnerability in a Sunday morning that is challenging and invigorating to capture in a photographic medium.


If you could spend the day shooting with another photographer who would it be?

I had the distinct pleasure of shooting with several of my photographic idols this last year, such as Cait Kovac in Atlanta and Chris Hall in San Francisco. I got to catch up with my friend Patrick Joust while he was in Monterey this Autumn, and that was great.

If I could, I would love to explore the American South with Missy Prince, whose work is as close to perfect as I have found. After that, I would relish the opportunity to spend a week roadtripping with Kevin Russ, who shoots the most amazing landscape photos with just an iPhone.


Is there a particular photographer, site, set of images or a photo book that you keep coming back to for inspiration?

There's not one particular photographer, no. I think my Flickr stream is a very inspiring place. Right now, Carlo Alberto Danna's portrait work is a huge inspiration, as is Steven Brooks' Seattle night landscape series.

Are you working on a project at the moment?

I'm unfortunately very scatter-brained, and haven't had the focus or time to work on any set projects. I'm hoping to do some landscape work in a couple National Parks in 2014, which has been a goal of mine for some time. I would also like to do some social landscape work in the Pacific Northwest. The only project per se I've been working on is an exploration of an abandoned Army post in Central California. I would like to someday start taking street portraits again.

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