On Photography Transcript (035)

DAVID LaROCCA: Greetings! This is David LaRocca, and you are at the Point of Learning with my friend Peter Horn. In this episode, Pete will be talking with photographer and professor John Opera, whose artistic innovations I began writing about some 20 years ago. More recently, I engaged his work in a chapter of the book Photography’s Materialities [Leuven University Press, 2021] and interviewed him for the journal Afterimage. For me, John’s always evolving body of work offers up an exceptional opportunity to explore the nature of art, especially in the literal sense, bringing natural materials into conversation with manufactured ones. John provides occasion to consider the dynamic, uncanny zones of overlap between photography and painting. I met John when we were nine years old, and a while later, in high school, he and I shared many hours taking photographs on the streets of Buffalo, New York and developing film and prints and our friendship. We also reveled in more than a few adventures with our beloved host, Pete. You’re in for a treat. Enjoy the show!

[01:28]

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show, artist and professor John Opera.

JOHN OPERA: The goal is not to take an ordinary photograph of an extraordinary subject. Anyone can go to Niagara Falls and take a halfway decent photograph. It’s really about going to the ordinary, or approaching things that we might feel are banal and trying to transform or transcend what they typically stand for, what they’re typically about …

[VO]: Opera shares some of how and why he came to push at the traditional boundaries of photography:

OPERA: Photography is a medium about recollection and repetition. It’s not a medium where you generate new things, typically, which is maybe why I really want to—

HORN: Bust that wide open!

OPERA: Why I do that. Now I do that.

[VO]: And some of what art does and does not say about the artists:

OPERA: I’ve never really felt compelled to reveal myself too much to the viewer because I don’t think that’s why I make the work. And that’s not what the work is about. I think of myself as being really present, and kind of reconfiguring things in a process, for example, to see what I can discover, and it always has to be about perception. I mean, we’re ultimately talking about visual reality here, and visual language. So I think I’m just always looking for that surprise.

[03:13]

[VO]: Assistant professor and head of the photography program at the State University of New York at Buffalo, John Opera has exhibited his critically acclaimed photographs for over two decades in dozens of galleries, from New York to LA, from Mexico City to Basel, Switzerland. His work has been featured in numerous reviews, articles, and other publications, from Artforum to The New Yorker. Admired by new creators as well as established artists who are now in their 80s, John often invents tools and techniques to push the limits of photography, sometimes putting a new spin on nineteenth-century processes, sometimes developing a completely novel apparatus, for example involving a homemade turntable or a laser, as he explores fresh modes of painting with light. The son of a scientist and a social worker, Opera is an artist keenly focused on how we see the complexity of the multifaceted world around us—and within us. He’s also my oldest best friend—since 5th grade—and we talk or text pretty much every day, so despite that I’ve wanted to do an interview with him since I started making podcasts, I always worried that it would be hard for us to stay on task. I was right about that, but fortunately I’ve had some time in the three months since I recorded this interview in mid-August to think about how I wanted to shape hours of raw tape into the highlights you’re about to hear. As the lucky beneficiary of a mini-gallery of Opera pieces amassed over the last 30 years, I think the thing I love most about John’s approach is that he explores each path he takes as fully and painstakingly as he can before embarking on some tangent that is more technically challenging and interesting to him, which opens new ways for the rest of us to see. As I lay out in just a minute, I relied for inspiration for some questions on Susan Sontag’s 1977 collection of essays called On Photography.

[05:24]

HORN: I’ve wanted to have you on the show for a long time, because I’m a huge fan of your work. But part of the challenge is we know each other so well and I feel like we could talk about just anything, so I went ahead and read Susan Sontag’s On Photography, which is a book I’ve wanted to read for a long time, and this was a nice excuse to do it, in order to use some of her ideas as a kind of harness, or a point of departure. And so to start with, there’s something magical about the power of images. Sontag talks about even the simple act of tacking a poster above a bed, or keeping a picture of a loved one in your wallet—nowadays in your phone—or having a political person that you support, a candidate on a lapel pin; these images help us, in her words— They can be seen as “attempts to contact or lay claim to another reality” [p. 16]. And I realized when I read this, that there’s something always something magical about what photographs convey or maybe how they convey me when I look at them. But it’s just that there are so many photographs in our world today that I don’t often stop to pause and think about the power, the kind of magic that is contained in the photographic image. How does that resonate with you?

OPERA: First of all, when you’re talking about the ubiquity, or the hyper-prevalence, or the saturation, of images in our world—you know, everything that surrounds us … in a way, I think we have become very desensitized to images. Maybe the magical aspects don’t immediately register today, just because of how ingrained they are. But the thing you brought up about Sontag: it’s a  really interesting  idea, a condition of the medium, that’s been reframed and described many times. That passage that you’re speaking about from On Photography, Sontag’s book, reminds me very much of a very compatible idea that [art theorist, critic, and professor] Rosalind Krauss put forward around the same time. The way she frames it is that a photograph is indexical, that it literally points to something in the world, but it is not that thing. It’s a departure from that thing. And it has these, maybe magical properties in the sense that we allow ourselves to enter into the reality of photographs, mistaking [that reality] for our own. But I think the magic, or the point is it’s not our own world. It just shares in—to quote another writer I love: [American art historian and critical theorist] Kaja Silverman says it has all the surface appearances of the world, but that’s about it. And, that’s maybe a deceptive attribute. But also, you know, I think where the magic resides—the strangeness or the uncanniness.

HORN: You mentioned the ubiquity of photographs, photographic images. We all—any of us who have a smartphone today—are carrying around a camera that’s probably as good as anything anybody could have gotten in terms of a digital camera at 20 years ago. And everybody’s got one. But still there are people who will—you know, seventh-graders and what have you—get fired up about like getting a Nikon, getting a Canon, like an old-fashion camera (sometimes with film) and walk into a situation and have the camera strap and the camera and go into it. And there seems to be something different about that engagement with your environment, that engagement with other people, when you have a physical camera—as opposed to just, you know, taking out your iPhone and snapping a few photographs. How do you think about that difference as somebody who has navigated the world with a camera and an iPhone? What happens, in terms of how people react with you or how you feel? What is different about those experiences?

OPERA: I think part of the answer lies in how technology has developed over the last 150 years. For example, with photography, as it’s evolved since its invention, or since its harnessing—however you want to describe that moment in history—this kind of began with Ford, Henry Ford, “Fordism,” and Kodak, where one of the first things they wanted to do was really hide or obfuscate the process of photography. And that’s what democratized photography too; you know, simplifying the process and basically creating a black box scenario where we’ve become further and further distanced from the source of what makes a photograph a photograph. And I think that’s part of it: when a student holds—you know, like you said, a Nikon or a Canon in their hand, that then I think is a moment of awareness, of this is about perception. This is about an intentional investigation into perception. But I also think that that happens because they’re closer to the process. They’re inside of it instead of separated from it—or they’re at least closer to being inside of it, say loading a roll of film, and then taking that film and having to learn how to load it on a reel in complete darkness and so on and so forth. The other thing that I think students don’t realize they’re going to encounter initially is the latency of photography. You know, for many, many years you would take a photograph and you wouldn’t see the results for two weeks, six months—however long it took you to develop that roll of film. And whatever the temporality is of it, that distance between the moment of capture and seeing that image literally emerge in a darkroom, it’s very different than the instant gratification of cell phone technology. And that really mirrors, you know, many other aspects of our culture today, this disposability, the immediacy, the, you know, all that stuff, the dopamine—

HORN: The dopamine hit.

OPERA: Yeah. Let’s take that hit!

[13:08]

HORN: We are sitting here, oddly enough, in a place that is your studio—

OPERA: Correct!

HORN: But seriously, oddly enough, through whatever coincidence these things happen, it was once upon a time, decades ago, your dad’s elementary—was it his second grade classroom? We are sitting in a defunct school.

OPERA: I don’t know. He thinks fourth grade, but I don’t know. There was a fire in this building in the ‘50s. And there was another floor to the building. I mean, it was a different kind of building; I think it was originally built in 1898. But yeah, when he came to visit me for the first time, he didn’t know that I rented in this specific spot, and in the parking lot declared, “I went here! I went to school here!” and so that’s a wild thing. But the fact is Buffalo small, and my father is from this area in Buffalo, Tonawanda, and his childhood home is about two blocks from here.

HORN: Okay. So on the subject of your dad, before he had a long career as a science teacher, he worked as a geologist for New York State. And I think part of his job as a geologist was to use photography to document structural rock formations and so forth, whatever it was that he was studying. But he took lots of pictures too, avocationally, out hiking—your dad is a lover of nature, as are you—and of course, of you and your sister when you were kids. Was it for you as a kid seeing and enjoying the pictures and slides that he took—do you think that’s what kindled your original interest in photography, or where did it come from?

OPERA: To answer the question did I enjoy looking at my dad’s photographs? Not really, because I remember as a kid—this would have been the early 1980s, when slideshows were really popular and my parents would like—

HORN: Force other people to watch their vacation slides—

OPERA: Right, and I’m like, oh my God. And I remember not really caring much about it, but I think, eventually, obviously—I have other things to say about my dad’s photographs and my development—but I do think like one thing my dad always instilled or, something that I learned by watching him, was this kind of obsessive relationship with empiricism, with observing the world. I was thinking about this this morning because my sister and I used to have a joke: we’d be driving with my dad and he would just, you know, blurt out “A hawk!” and you know, I think in those days [hawks] weren’t as commonplace in this area, but my dad was always doing things like that.

HORN: And so he’d see a hawk flying by outside, and—

OPERA: Yeah, but he was just hyper-aware of his environment. And then, you know, I mean, we would be then hiking a week later and there’d be pellets that he would identify as belonging to a hawk. So I think all these things he was observing—that I was observing him observing—added up to some kind of holistic whole. I think my dad has a kind of sensitivity to nature and ecosystems and that has to do, of course, with his education. But I think I developed a sense for that kind of thing long before I got into photographs. But as far as his relationship to photography, I think at a certain point, I was like, “Wait a minute. What’s he doing there? I want to do that too.” The first time I remember I got to use my dad’s really good camera, his Praktica which was an East German camera [fact-checked—Ed.] with a Zeiss lens. Kind of like the Volvo 240 of cameras. I mean, I was maybe 12. So yeah, and I mean, I think one of the other things— I’ve talked about this before is I really do think that when it comes to the photographs I’ve made that are lens-based images, the landscape period, from, you know, now 15+ years ago, I think it was a complete reflection in a way of my dad’s sensibility in taking pictures, a very kind of clinical, deadpan, you know, empirical kind of way of taking a photograph. There was really no reason to do anything tricky or gimmicky with vantage point or depth of field. I mean, there was always the sense that the purpose was to photograph what was in front of you. And so I think, in a sense, my training or my early growth—there was this almost classical approach to photography. And I wouldn’t say, you know, “pedestrian” or “amateur.” I mean, I think my dad actually had a really good—I mean, I looked through his photographs—I organized his slides a couple of years ago and I was like, Wow! He’s a really good image maker.

HORN: It’s just interesting that you should say that part of what you recognize about it, looking at [your dad’s photography], was that it was pretty much straight-on because I think sometimes when I think of some of your landscapes or some of the photographs that you took when you would go out hiking or something and come back, it was as if I was there with you, and you were saying like, Hey, take a look at this! Like, isn’t this cool? Check it out!

OPERA: Well you were there for one of them—“Zoar.”

HORN: I was there for several. I was there for a number of trips where you were taking photographs, but it’s kind of cool to look at the image—it’s as if you were saying through the image, you know, like, Hey, check out this very cool thing to look at. And I—you know, it’s true for me—I may have walked right past it, you know? And so it’s somebody with your eye calling attention to it, but without a bunch of artifice.

OPERA: Yeah, I mean, I think another way you could put it as that it’s a kind of classical human vantage point, that it’s very much about human vision. You know, it’s not on the ground and it’s not a caterpillar’s vision, but the camera was more or less 60 inches or so above the ground. And that, in a way, mimics human sight, which is something that is ultimately behind the very structure of photography, or what we know photography to be.

[21:05]

HORN: There are different ways that people categorize your work. We talked about landscapes, for example, I mean, things that you were into in a different period. And you could talk about it as the method of production; for example, anthotypes, where you’re using pigments and dyes from, you know, fruits and tea, I guess—natural pigments to produce the images. One of the ways that I think about it when I look at the different kinds of photographs that you have made is that there is a category of photograph that, you know, maybe somebody else with a really good eye and a good camera who had exceptional painstaking attention to detail—maybe somebody else could make that image. But now, you know, with some of the things that you are doing either with processes that are just so antique that very few people use them—anthotypes, I think, would be an example. It’s a very 19th-century process that probably wasn’t very popular at the time. And some of the work that you’re doing now with lasers, you know, where you build your own apparatus and an armature to be able to support and render these images. So the second category would be: some of the things you do, I don’t think anybody else could do!

OPERA: Large aspects of photography—most of photography—is very duplicatable, in the sense that if you, you know, have the same camera, the same lens, and maybe go stand in the same place around the same time of year at the same time of day and wait around long enough for atmospheric variables or whatever, you know, then you could more or less make something that resembles someone else’s style. And this is one of the paradoxes or limitations or deceptions—complexities, there a lot of ways you can describe this condition— Programmatic. This is a word that I use quite a bit, that most of photography has evolved and has been homogenized into pretty programmatic media. And that very much has to do with, I think, photography’s goal all along to get really closer and closer to human vision. And in some ways it’s surpassed human vision. I mean, it’s become hyper-real. Think of a photograph made by a satellite, you know, but that, I think, that is related to what you’re saying, this repetition that’s inherent in the medium. Basically, I think there was a motivation for me to remove myself from that structure, that system, and maybe that’s partially my ego, in the sense that I want to make something that is not really around, or that feels new. I want to make something that feels surprising to me even, and as I’ve evolved over the years, I think I’ve been inching closer and closer to basically reconfiguring photography as I see fit in terms of the apparatus, and photography is so linked and intertwined, entangled with apparatus. The way an apparatus is configured has a profound impact or effect on how it frames the world. So when we look through a telescope, there’s a certain set of data we can visually acquire. We can see the stars, we can see planets, we can see the rings of Saturn. At a certain point in my development, I found it necessary to design my own tools in order to discover new possibilities in terms of what a photograph can do or what it can say. And I think for a long time, I got really just tired of, or bored with, the more kind of programmatic approach. And I think there’s always been something about my work that has felt to be about photography itself; even the landscape works are about this relationship to empiricism and observation. But at a certain point I really wanted to invent and I wanted to expand. And I think a lot of those landscape images—I had such rich interior feelings that were associated with why I made those images and what was going on. They were of course images of a landscape, but there were other things kind of churning in me in terms of maybe an interior topography, and it never felt quite expressed in those photographs. And I think I was just kind of hungry to discover something, but it was also, I think, this desire to get to the source or to the more elemental qualities of photography. A lot of my work, when I start doing it, or when I start doing something new, you know, I really don’t think; I just do. I think, now in retrospect, I can understand this, but it goes back to this relationship between the apparatus and the outcome. And so I think I was just kind of remixing photography, including, you know, paying tribute to its history, to its evolution. When I do reach for an antiquated process, whether it’s an anthotype, or now the cyanotype canvases, it’s really important to me that the expression feels contemporary. You know, that it’s not quaint, or twee, or—what would be a good name? Nostalgic—even though it is nostalgic, but I think that’s just a symptom of our time. But again, I wanted to do something new.

[28:29]

HORN: Well, you know when I was reading this Sontag collection of essays about photography, like Here, this is it! This is part of what John does. It’s something I’ve gotten used to because I’ve been fortunate to be kind of alongside you and hearing about your discoveries and movements and inventions of various apparatus as you’ve done it. But this is part of what is so different. She writes, for example, at one point—and I think she’s trying to draw this distinction between, you know, what photography does and what painting does, right? But she has this moment where she says, “the identification of a subject of a photograph of the subject of a photograph” and I’m thinking of like a portrait or something perhaps—“always dominates our perception of it—as it does not, necessarily, in a painting. […] The formal qualities of style […] are, at most, of secondary importance of photography, while what a photograph is of is always of primary importance. The assumption underlying all uses of photography, that each photograph is a piece of the world, means that we don’t know how to react to a photograph if the image is visually ambiguous: say, too closely seen or too distant, until we know what piece of the world that it is. What looks like a bare coronet—the famous photograph taken by Harold Edgerton in 1936—becomes far more interesting when we find out it’s a splash of milk” [pp. 92-93, emphasis added]. So like, this was the moment where I was like, this is what John does. These are photographs where there are photographic processes, but we don’t necessarily know—I don’t necessarily know when I first look at one to say like, Oh well, that’s clearly a detail from this or that, or That might be this or that. You’re making abstractions [in much of your recent work], you’re painting with light, essentially. So I think while what she said here in the 1970s is probably true for most images created by photographic processes—probably—it doesn’t seem to apply to what you do, or at least what you’re doing right now. You know what I’m saying? So I think that’s part of what’s so interesting, but it’s also a little bit disorienting for a viewer of some of your pieces to say, like, Huh, what is happening here? It’s a very different experience from looking at, you know, say, a standard photograph.

OPERA: Yeah. I mean, I think what Sontag that passage is basically saying is that the subject is primary. The thing depicted is really what is pushed forward in a photograph. I mean, Rosalind Krauss would have referred to “the transparency of the medium.” We tend to just look right past the materiality of a photograph into the space where the subject resides, or the representation of the subject resides—

HORN: I’m sorry. Materiality. So that’s like the material, like what it’s actually printed on, the process that it takes to get it there, all that stuff?

OPERA: The piece of paper … yep. Right.

HORN: We just go right to What’s this of? Okay.

OPERA: Yes. And in the case of abstraction, I mean, I think what’s happened in my work over time is that I maintain these basic photographic ingredients—something light-sensitive, a substrate. But it’s kind of like any system—pick any system that comprises many elements and you start removing elements one by one, and, you know, when does it stop being that system? That’s kind of what I’ve done with photography is that I removed the lens, I removed the relationship between material and device, and I think with this work I’m really trying to find that line between what defines a photograph and when does it maybe push out into other kinds of experiences. For me, that’s I think the big metaphor in the work is this possibility of expanded vision. Not necessarily achieving it, but, you know, somehow pointing in that direction.

[33:29]

[VO]: Because you’re still listening, I’m gonna guess you are part of my target audience, which is smart people curious about what and how and why we learn. Today we’re mapping some of the terrain John Opera has taken as he has learned and relearned the art of photography through invention, imagination, and lots and lots of trial and error. If you are currently a financial supporter of Point of Learning, thanks so much! I’ll get back to highlights of my conversation with John in just a second. If you are not yet, please check out the show page or visit patreon.com/pointoflearningpodcast to find out how you can support this passion project of mine for as little as 10 cents a day. To keep it real, while I do pledge to two public radio stations and support a few podcasts I love with monthly donations, I don’t support every single one. But also, I don’t know of another solo-produced podcast that makes high-quality episodes that I still learn from when I listen to them years after they dropped! Your dollars help me pay for transcripts for each episode, batteries for recording equipment, stipends for musician and designer friends, and gas money, for example, for the road trip to Philly I’m taking next month to record my next interview—more about that at the end of the show. Thanks for your consideration. Back to John!

[34:58]

HORN: I have a friend who is a talented woodworker and furniture maker, and he talks about taking inspiration for the lines of some of the pieces that he makes, the form of them, from the architecture of bridges. Is there anything that you go back to—I know you’re a lover of nature, and you go hiking frequently and so forth and you look at the stars sometimes … but is there anything in either the natural or built/made world that is a continual source of inspiration for you, or does it shift?

OPERA: I laugh because I’m thinking. As you know, I’m a creature of habit. And I think—I don’t know—my routine is really important to me. I mean, it’s changed. I think you know I return to certain songs—certain music, you know—are always present when I’m making work. I mean, a friend of mine, Phil Vanderhyden, who you know—we have the same thing we do, which is we can both listen to a song on repeat like a hundred times in a day in the studio. And, you know, that kind of puts you into a trance-like situation. I don’t think Phil does it much anymore because I think he was doing it when he was painting.

HORN: Would that be like a Brian Eno Music for Airports type of thing?

OPERA: Yeah, Brian Eno, or it could be a Guided By Voices song, or yeah …

HORN: So it could have lyrics in it, but obviously at the hundredth time, you’re not listening

to lyrics.

OPERA: It’s like an energy field. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, Brian Eno’s Discreet Music has been in the background of me making these works for the last six years. I mean, I will listen to it on repeat while I’m making the work and, you know, I mean, some of the radial works take two days to make—15 hours. And I’ll listen to it so much, for example, I’ll be driving home and I’ll still hear it. Like, you know, auditory hallucination. Nature is still this kind of comfort for me. I think I don’t do it as much as I should anymore, but yeah, I think when things are not going well in my life, or I don’t feel like they’re going well, I’ll often go for a hike or return to those kinds of spaces. But I think my process has become a lot more interior. And that’s because I’m not going out into the world to find images; I’m [now] generating them from within the medium. So actually, this room, my studio is a really important place for me at this point.

[38:21]

HORN: Leaving aside, your professional projects for a moment, you also maintain at least one very well trafficked Instagram account that is mostly snapshots of your environment. This would be the quick like iPhone-type snapshot, quirky, often hilarious, sometimes disturbing snapshots of what you might see from your window at home or walking around. Is it ever tough to turn off that impulse? And this is me speaking. As you know, for a couple of decades there, I was a professional English teacher, and I would often have difficulty reading something for pleasure, like picking up a copy of Harper’s or just a novel or something, and like turning off that part of my brain that says like, This would be a great passage to teach. I could teach this story, maybe this poem over here. You know, it was hard to kind of turn that off and just enjoy it for what it was. So I guess I wanted to ask, is it hard for you when you’re just walking around to try to unplug and not say like, Oh, wait, that would make a pretty good photograph, to turn off that part of your brain? Or is photographic seeing pretty much just always a part of how you look at the world.

OPERA: Yeah. That’s a good question. Yeah, the phone has become an interesting tool for me. Yeah, I mean, in the case of the Instagram account @grant_and_potomac, I think you’re referring to—

HORN: I didn’t know if we could use names!

OPERA: Yeah, I mean, that kind of developed very organically. And it really started with me coming to the realization that the neighborhood I lived in was incredibly diverse and just had some real characters in it. And I mean, I think for me that that account is really the way I kind of keep in touch with my source as a photographer, but also I think it’s a reflection of all of the things that I never quite could fit into my work, but swirled around in my head. So yeah, there are some images on that account that are funny, some that are downright disturbing, or too real. And the context of those kind of, you know, intermingling, creates a certain kind of vibe. I mean, I think that that Instagram thing fulfills that for me, but in terms of do I feel compelled, or do I need to make those pictures? Not really! But as far as going out into the woods, I never take my camera anymore. Or rarely, very rarely—not unless I have a specific thing I’m looking for, like, you know, I mentioned to you, I wanted to go back to Zoar [Valley in Gowanda, NY] to try to look for water diffraction. But I when I enter those spaces, I think I do still see things photographically, and I think to myself, Oh, that would be a nice—that would be a really beautiful picture. But then I guess it goes back to that repetition thing that I told you I was trying to avoid, when I left those earlier ways of making photographs … even though now I’m kind of inside of a different kind of repetition with the abstractions. But I think it’s folded back more onto, you know, empiricism, and still being sensitive to my surroundings. Well, it’s interesting. I notice everything. I really do. I mean, not everything—that sounds egotistical, but I notice minutia that I know a lot of people don’t, or at least that’s what I’ve been told.

HORN: Is there something in my teeth?

OPERA: No, no. You’re good.

[42:22]

HORN: Well, you talked about things in the @grant_and_potomac account, they’re very funny, you know, some funny images in there, and this is a point that I did think of as a question. You are one of the funniest people in my life.

OPERA: That’s true.

HORN: Maybe I should meet more people? When we talk on the phone, we can talk and crack each other up, and you know it’s a good thing. The very start of this interview, for example, I probably will use as an outtake at the very end [of the episode], because we couldn’t hold it together, but do you see humor in your work? Like, in your stuff that you show, is that in there? OPERA: Not much.

HORN: Yeah, I mean, has that ever been anything that you’ve thought about?

OPERA: No, I mean, you’re not the only person who has pointed this out. In many ways, my work, I think, comes from a much deeper place that I don’t show very often. And that goes along with a couple things that I think about a lot. One is that your surface attributes are what you externalize to the world. I never feel compelled to put that in my work. I think for me, my work has always been, in a way, very foreign to me. But also, it comes from a very deep place. And I often say this to people, and I really believe it: I follow the work. There are things that I know I need to do in the work, in order to get to the next level of understanding, for example.

And I don’t know, I’ve always had that tendency—I mean, even as a child, I would take things apart in the house. And I don’t know if you remember when I used to make models. This is before I knew you, but when I was like seven or eight, I mean, when I look at them, they’re kind of disturbing because they’re very well detailed. So I mean, they’re not disturbing, but they’re surprising. And I don’t know, I think that’s always—you know, people have a lot of contradictions, and I’m a person, just like you are. And I don’t know. I mean, there are parts of my work that I don’t feel like want to explain it, or I don’t necessarily want to understand it completely, you know, because I think there’s always been something about what I do—I know to proceed in my work when something really surprises me, something that kind of comes out of the ether, if you will. I mean, maybe something that really wasn’t part of my conscious decision-making, but it just kind of appeared, if that makes sense. It sounds really out there, but—

HORN: It does. It makes sense. It resonates. And I think that that’s probably a good point, that you don’t need to. You know, there are plenty of people making whimsical art, photographs or other art that’s a little bit like tongue-in-cheek, or so forth, and if that’s not what you want, you know, if that’s not what you feel called to make, if that’s not what you follow, that makes sense. It’s just, you know, it’s interesting, and it’s something that I had never focused on. And then I had this thought as I was prepping for the interview, and I was like, Wait, what if I’ve gotten it wrong and there is something that John thinks is funny, but I’ve just missed it because maybe my sense of humor isn’t very good!

OPERA: I mean, I think it’s funny that I’m willing to spend 15 hours making something only to have it not turn out. I mean, that happens a lot, and that’s a moment where I’m like, I could either cry or laugh and, you know—

HORN: [Deadpan] That’s hilarious!

OPERA: —it’s usually somewhere in the middle. But I’ve never really felt compelled to reveal myself too much to the viewer because I don’t think that’s why I make the work. And that’s not what the work is about. I think of myself as being really present, and kind of reconfiguring things in a process, for example, to see what I can discover, and it always has to be about perception. I mean, we’re ultimately talking about visual reality here, and visual language. So I think I’m just always looking for that surprise.

[47:34]

[VO]:John has taught for nearly 20 years, mostly at the college and university level, but also some precocious high school kids. I asked him about the kinds of things he asks them to think about as he prompts them to think about images more critically.

OPERA: I think what I try to do with students is start talking about cliché as soon as possible. You know, photography is a funny medium. I mean, again, going back to this idea of repetition and ubiquity and embeddedness in the world, I often say this to students, I say, “You know, I’m sure, if this is your first photography course, maybe you’re taking this because you saw a photograph at some point and you wanted to learn how to make that photograph, or make a photograph very similar to that photograph.” And that’s something that is just intuitively, automatically a part of it. So I think you really have to resolve that, and identify it in process and deal with that before you can really start to do things that feel like more personal expressions.

And you know, in the beginning, I take a very kind of intuitive, organic approach. I don’t really talk to students about what to photograph, but I do talk about what not to photograph. With a student who first picks up a camera, you can almost predict what the roll of film, or the 70 images might include: a picture of their feet, a stop sign, a fire hydrant, their dogs …

HORN: A sunset?

OPERA: A sunset. Yes, absolutely. So I want students to kind of discover what’s that thing that’s important to them. I think they really need to do that on their own. And in the beginning with a beginning student, you know, it’s very much about just learning the mechanics, like learning the violin, learning an instrument, being intuitive with it. I think in learning about the camera, you kind of have to learn it as an instrument, and there are stages or steps of development that I think every student of photography has to go through. And I think, you know, those cliché moments are actually really important, because they create discussion and dialogue.

HORN: I remember our talking about this—I don’t know, 10 or 15 years ago. I think it was shortly after you began to teach, and we’re talking about, you know, clichés and so forth. And I was like, Yeah, you know, I’ve seen a fair number of photographs and so forth, but don’t you have to have a certain amount of experience, in any kind of conversation that you enter, to know where the conversation has been? So if you’re talking about the conversation of images, like how would I, as a 13-year-old, or even a 17-year-old, know that everybody’s photographed their feet before, for example? Like you wouldn’t, necessarily. Or maybe it’s that question, as you said, like, Think about the photograph that you saw that maybe made you want to figure out how to make it. It seems easier to do with a certain amount of experience, but harder to do with less experience, to know [what has been done before].

OPERA: Well, I mean, I think it’s like levels of understanding, levels to the conversation. And again, I think it’s important that students go through those levels, but, you know, as someone who’s hyper-committed to the medium, I also want to kind of push them along. So they get to that point where it’s not about repeating what you see. I often say this, that photography is a medium about recollection and repetition; it’s not a medium where you generate new things typically, which is maybe why I really want to—

HORN: Bust that wide open!

OPERA: Why I do that. Yeah, I do that. Now I do that. But in a traditional way, or maybe in a more elemental way, you know, as someone’s learning about images, that’s the trap. But it’s also what’s interesting about the medium, and it’s interesting because of the way it reflects back onto human behavior. You know, where repetition and repeating, that’s really about belonging and understanding, or supposedly understanding. I mean, we could talk about how images influence culture. I mean, that’s a for another podcast, but you know, these things are such powerful mirrors. And I think, I know, as an educator, this is the thing I want students to understand, whether they want to work within that program, or however they approach the medium. It’s really important to me that they think about it, not so much skeptically or cynically, and I’ve had students tell me that—

HORN: Well, skepticism’s great. Cynicism, not so much!

OPERA: Yeah, but really for me, I would describe it as self-consciousness, that your decisions, I hope, eventually are made because you understand, or at least you have a better understanding of why you’re doing what you’re doing with the camera.

HORN: Yeah. I imagine it’s like a beginning songwriting student really loving something they wrote and then realizing it’s like Beatles or Bob Marley or something, and they are like, Whoa, I like this phrase because I’ve heard it many times!  

OPERA: A-E-D, A-E-D [chord progression]. Buddy Holly! Totally.

[53:51]

[VO]: At the end of our two-hour conversation, I asked John to describe what to me, as an educator, is one of John’s most poignant current projects, an ongoing series of dozens and dozens of portraits of his own students using the 19th-century anthotype process, which, as we’ve said, relies for color on dyes and pigments from plants that are inherently unstable; that is, they will necessarily fade over time.

OPERA: I returned to the anthotypes because I was really, I think, rethinking, re-evaluating what it meant for an image to fade. And of course, all of these associations with memory and experience and people and life, you know, start to come into play. And I wanted to make photographs again. I wanted to make images of something that I felt invested in and that I was in close proximity to. And this is another thing I’ll often talk to students about is that, you know, the goal is not to take an ordinary photograph of an extraordinary subject. Anyone can go to Niagara Falls and take a halfway decent photograph. It’s really about going to the ordinary, or approaching things that we might feel are banal, and trying to transform or transcend what they typically stand for, what they’re typically about …So I just started photographing my students. I mean, I have very close relationships with some of my students in the classroom, and teaching is a really big part of my identity at this point. So I thought it was interesting, and I don’t talk about that body of work very much, and I really haven’t exhibited it because my plan is, you know, I kind of want to get to like a 100 or 150 [student anthotype potraits]. I want to have a lot before I have a show.

HORN: But then you are exposing these, right, in a greenhouse?

OPERA: Right. Yes.

HORN: On campus [at the University at Buffalo].

OPERA: Yeah. Right. Right now, currently.

HORN: And then you just check on them periodically.

OPERA: I do. Yeah. A person in the biology department has allowed me to use the greenhouse, and one of my colleagues kind of helped facilitate that, who works in the bio art lab at UB. So I’ve been really lucky to just be able to do these things year-round without worrying about weather and things like that.

HORN: And so you bring them in and scan them at various intervals. Is that what you’re doing?

OPERA: No, no. I mean, right here on the table, we have the raw prints. And I have exhibited them. I exhibited 12 of them and there I put the actual objects, the actual prints into the frames. And their kind of fugitive nature [i.e., apt to fade] is part of it for me. And I think I recently said to someone or in a talk that strangely enough, it’s kind of comforting that things change, you know? And I don’t know, I think, you know, of the fact that probably by the time the image will fade, the person that I photographed is going to be a very different person. They’re like anything else in the world; they don’t last forever. So yeah, again, this is following the work, that body of work. I don’t know when it will be exhibited honestly, but every year I just keep doing it. And it’s also a way to open up a conversation about photography with my students. I mean, it really is a teaching aid in a way. I can talk about more metaphysical things about light and photography’s relationship to the natural world. So that is also a part of, I think, one of the ways in which I try to get students engaged in thinking about the medium in a different way than maybe how they were thinking when they walked in the classroom.

HORN: I think there’s something very poignant and beautiful about it. I always remember hearing you describe it and then seeing the images for the first time, because I think for any teacher, it’s going to suggest, you know, the connections, the relationships that you have with individual students, but then also to recognize that these things fade and change over time, you know, the influence that one has on one’s students, but also that they have on you—but that, you know, it fades and changes.

OPERA: Yeah. I mean, I also think there’s something interesting—like images don’t have to be attached to objects, too. There’s something about the life of an image that lives off of the object, in a more interior space. I mean, you know, either one of us could probably in our mind right now recall an image that’s not in front of us. Maybe it’s a photograph, maybe it’s a person in your life, it’s whatever, but there’s something about [these images] being turned over to the ether that I think says something, you know. I’m not exactly sure. I mean, I’ll go along with Susan Sontag’s [1966 collection of essays] Against Interpretation right now. I don’t think everything needs to be explained.

[VO]: That’s it for today’s show! My great thanks to John Opera for joining me, not to mention for his friendship since 1985. Thanks to you for listening to, sharing, rating, and reviewing Point of Learning. Thanks as always to Shayfer James for intro and outro music, and special thanks this time to violinist Thomas Halpin—my former teacher, and star of Point of Learning episode 009, if you’re inclined to visit or revisit that show from three years ago—for permission to use his recording of Philip Glass’s composition “Einstein on the Beach” as featured music for this episode. This recording comes from a live performance attended by Philip Glass himself, who called it the most “elegant” rendition of the piece he had heard. A member of the Lyceum consortium of education podcasts, Point of Learning is written, recorded, edited, and mixed by me here in Sunny Buffalo, New York. I’m Peter Horn, and I’ll be back at you next month with radio visionary Bill Siemering, who wrote the founding purposes of National Public Radio in 1970, and then helped to create All Things Considered and Fresh Air. See you then!