Ep 004: Kyle Johnson
A SHOT: Can you describe this photo to me?
KYLE JOHNSON: Yeah, so this is, the very basics of it, a photo taken out of an airplane of a mountain range near Bristol Bay, Alaska, that was taken in 2016.
Is it a commercial flight?
No, so it is out of a... I actually looked up a few things for this podcast to remember the specifics. It’s a pretty cool plane actually. It’s what all the Alaskan fishing lodges and bush people swear by. It’s called a Beaver, and it’s a float plane. Almost all remote Alaskan people, guides and stuff, use these planes because they are just, like, the perfect float plane. People have been restoring them and keeping them going, but the design hasn’t changed since the ’50s.
What do you mean by a float plane?
It’s a little Cessna-type plane that can land on water.
Were you on assignment for something?
Yeah, so it was actually a Bloomberg Businessweek assignment. And I also like picking this photo because, as you know I’m sure, sometimes you get the best personal work out of a shoot that is for assignment that they don't run anything of the stuff that you might think is the best of what you got. And they ran a lot of good stuff. But it was about walruses actually. The story was about going and doing eco-tourism. It was actually, sorry, for Bloomberg Pursuits, not Businessweek. And it was about eco-tourism as a new kind of business for people to go explore and see wildlife. It was awesome because I got to go to this remote fly-fishing lodge, which as an avid fly-fisherman, I knew exactly where I was going. It was not the point of what I was doing, but I was very excited to be in that zone. So that was one of the days when we were flying out to the area where the walruses can be seen. En route, you go over this mountain range. And I was just blown away at the… You know, you’re so close. They fly really low. So it was pretty scary but also cool because you’re looking at these glaciers. As you can see, it’s kind of this dizzying pattern of snow and black soil or — I don’t know the exact terminology — but it was basically a mountainscape.
When you’re on a plane like that, do you have your camera ready? Are you looking to take photos like this?
I definitely try to. I mean, I think shooting out of a window is not ideal. There’s people I’m blown away with what they get, like I feel like Tom Prior is a good example of somebody who, even on his phone or whatever camera, gets photos out of an airplane, just a commercial flight, that I would never think I could get. So I always have it in my lap. For this one, I definitely got a lot of cool stuff on that flight because [the pilot] was at interesting angles, and the window was pretty clear and clean. It didn’t appear too glare-y, and I didn’t have any weird refraction or anything like that. I ended up getting a lot of nice landscapes that didn’t feel too aerial. Sometimes it feels a little too drone-y or something, where I feel like this one is cool because you can’t really quite tell where I’m at.
Since this was part of the assignment, was most of that stuff shot out of this plane? That walrus stuff is very cool.
So we actually landed. It was pretty cool; we landed on the beach, and we hiked up this sort of cliffside, and then we were in the bush because they don’t want to scare [the walruses] or be too close to them. So we walked up on this hillside, and we basically had the vantage point from above them within 50 to 100 yards. So pretty close. But we were above them. Then I got some shots from the beach looking directly at them, but I was like 100 yards away.
When you shot this photo, did you know it was the photo you wanted to take?
I definitely saw those patterns with the snow, and I got really excited about it because it’s definitely the, sort of, abstract landscape that I really like, which it’s not as expected as a lot of Alaskan landscapes that you see. So I definitely was excited to edit this photo. And I think the interesting thing about it is the color version and the black-and-white version are almost exactly the same. The black-and-white version, which I gave you, is a little bit different that I think I prefer the most. But it’s more or less what that looked like. It’s a very grayscale kind of image.
I honestly couldn’t tell if this was full black and white.
Yeah, that’s another thing I liked about it, like if you had seen the camera RAW file… So this is a digital photo, and it was on my Pentax, and it was 150 millimeters, so I did have a longer lens on. Which I feel like proved to be a good choice for that flight because I feel like it got me more of an interesting perspective than just that classic wide landscape that you often see from flight shots or aerial shots.
Did you end up cropping in on this, or is it the full frame?
It’s more or less the full frame, but I cropped in to just a little more aesthetically pleasing… Like, I forget if it’s a 4x5 or 8.5x11. I usually crop all of my files to one of those two.
When you’re inside the plane, and you’re looking out, what kind of stuff is going through your head when you’re on an assignment like that and you’re not necessarily at the point of working yet?
Initially I was honestly kind of freaked out. I’m not really afraid of flying per se, but we were having pretty bad turbulence, and my assistant and I hadn’t really ever been in a little puddle-jumper like this. It’s pretty intense going through that mountain range. Like, it’s moving around a lot. I was getting pretty freaked out, and I think, for me, looking through the camera lens chilled me out where I was just like, “Okay, I’ll just focus on taking pictures and stop worrying,” because the [pilot] was like, “Oh, it’s fine; this is normal. It’s just mountains.” But I was like, “Yo, this is fucking scary right now.” So for me, looking through the camera was a nice focusing in on something else to distract myself from the turbulence. And then I was just looking for wildlife, looking for frames. I shot some grizzly bears that we saw from the air that were pretty small in the frame, but it was pretty cool to see that. Everything there was new to me, so I think for me, even though it wasn’t part of the assignment, it kind of was because it’s part of the story of how you get to the walruses. So they ended up running one of the landscapes actually in the article that was not as abstract as this one but a little bit more of a roving river that kind of snaked all through the landscape.
When someone’s looking at this photo, do you think it’s necessary for them to understand the context of it?
I think it does add something just because, at least for me, when I look at photography, I get a feeling from it, but I also enjoy knowing a backstory because sometimes it adds a whole level of either complexity or humor or an anecdotal thing. But for just looking at it, I think it’s just a very pleasing composition and a sort of abstract image, so I don’t think the background is necessary, but it’s cool to tell people a little more.
Can you talk about why you picked this shot?
During COVID, I definitely had a lot of free time in New York in my apartment [Ed note: Kyle was working in New York at the beginning of 2020 before returning to Seattle] and I was just going through hard drives and archiving and going through old stuff. I had never printed any of my own work for my own house, which is kind of odd. I had printed stuff for portfolios and for friends, but I’ve never had [my] art up in my house for myself. So I though it would be cool to print that one because I like it so much. That was when I kind of rediscovered it, and I was like, “That would be a great print.” I printed it really large, and it gave it a whole new life to see it really big, like a 40x50, which I ended up giving to a friend. I’ve now printed it a little smaller. I can actually show you.
Is there anything you had to figure out when you were printing it?
I was a little just debating levels on it because the white can really go pure white, but there are actually some cool mid-tones in there that I didn’t want to blow out, kind of the weird glacial ice.
It almost looks like a thumbprint or something that’s being pushed around on the left side.
Yeah, so I think I just played with it until I got it where all those details still printed well. Sometimes printing your work is a good way to fall in love with a photo that you never thought was that great or that you maybe didn’t think too much about.
If you close your eyes and think about this photo, what’s the first part of it that you see?
I think I see that pattern in the snow specifically. I feel like you kind of either see the black or the white first, but I think I see the snow. I don’t even know how to describe it. It almost feels like it could be like a land mass, like you’re looking at a black-and-white picture of a globe or something.
I think one of the thing I love about this is, like you said, it seems abstract to some extent, almost like it could be a macro closeup of an object.
I played with punching in even further. When I printed it, I tried cropping so you can’t see those mountains in the background. I feel like those kind of give it away a little more that it’s a mountain range. I mean, they’re still kind of obscure.
That’s your context, though.
Yeah, I tried cropping it in, and it was also a cool print, but I decided the full print was better.
In that sense of thinking about it as an abstract, you’re not necessarily really using any tricks or techniques to take this. It’s essentially just point your camera out the window and take the photo. Do you consider this photo essentially just what was in front of you?
Yeah, I mean, I dunno. I haven’t done as many, or many, fine-art–type projects that are more in depth, where it’s like years of though-out images that whether or not at first they have a context but then you put them into a context… I think I’ve struggled a little bit with that as an editorial photographer because I enjoy shooting people, and I like stories, but I feel like to put in the real time of a fine-art series… Like, this image looks to me like it could belong in a context like that, but I’m not going to pretend I had some grand story behind it of what it means, so I think it physically was just me reacting to seeing something that was very pleasing to my eye and interesting. Looking at it now, I’m like, “Oh, you know you could probably break it down a little more,” and maybe come up with what is it about it that I’m drawn and reflect on that, but going into it, it was just a shot.
What do you like about conveying something that feels real in your photography?
I think I like telling stories, travel work like this — even though it’s about these walruses — the story of going to this place in remote Alaska and, you know, meeting the pilots and the guides and getting out there in the bush and flying there, telling that whole story. I like imagining a page, like an edit, that if it was your layout, I love imagining the layout of a story. So I feel like that’s something that’s good that helps me going into a travel story, thinking about it’s not just the beauty cover shot or, like, the double-page spread. It’s those little details of this or the propeller or the bear footprint in the sand, all those little things for the story that help bring you to Alaska. That’s what I like about this kind of work.
How do you notice a detail then?
I just keep my eyes open for things that strike me as visually interesting but that aren’t necessarily always the most grand beauty shot. So I think I’m always looking for cool textures or cool little details that help tell an actual story that we’re talking about. Or something abstract where it’s like this, where this could easily be thrown into a grid or have a whole page of it and it could just be like whatever mountain range en route to seeing the walruses. It doesn’t mean it has to be abstract. But I think this could work either way.
Do you think there’s anything about this photo that feels familiar?
Growing up in the Northwest, it feels kind of familiar just to see the snow patterns on mountains in the background, like even from a distance. Mount Rainier you can see from Seattle proper; all over the city on a nice day, you can see it. So I think subtly I probably have just this familiarity with mountains and snow. But then looking close at it, the thing about the globe or the map, there’s something kind of topographical about it, like kind of a topo map you would see at a cabin. My dad or mom would have those old atlas guides and stuff like that, so I feel like there’s this sort of subtle familiarly of maps and atlases and topo maps.
So I asked what of this shot feels familiar because I know you’re based in the Pacific Northwest, and while it’s not Alaska, I’d imagine you’d have more memories from growing up of being in the wilderness than someone who might be based in New York City.
I mean, it’s not particularly snowy here, but we are close to the mountains, so I think the only memories it jars up is… I wasn’t a big skier or snowboarder but going to the mountain occasionally with friends or a cabin with family or something like that, renting one. Those drifts of snow and kind of that moment where it’s either covering rocks or trees… I kind of have a familiar image on the side of a hill where the snow isn’t big enough to cover everything. It does evoke that same patterning that happens. I’d definitely never seen that black sand Alaska mountain before, but the snow patterning feels pretty familiar.
What effect does the idea of scale give to this image?
I mean, I think the scale is huge on this. I’m so happy I had that 150 [millimeter lens] on because I like trying to shoot landscapes that aren’t always the most wide. I’m not a big wide shooter. I’m more of a portrait shooter. So any time I can play with scale and punch in on something and give it maybe a little different crop than the postcard photo, that’s always a cool thing to do — especially for even on a travel story for Bloomberg where it’s not the edgiest thing but they’re gonna still run something that’s beautiful. It’s just maybe not what the average person expects. So scale for this one, it helps bring you into that mountain in a way that you wouldn’t think if you saw it from… If I would have had a wider lens on, I think you would have been like, “Oh, that’s a cool landscape,” but you wouldn’t really give it a second look. [Whereas] this really makes you look at it a few times and kind of like, “Well, where is that exactly? Are you on a mountain? Were you hiking when you took this?” I’ve had people think that I was mountaineering or backpacking when I took this.
There’s so much of the patterning in this that kind of looks like the hide of an animal.
Totally.
There’s, like, a cow spot, or it’s like zebra stripes. And it’s kind of amazing to me that the scale of this is miles and miles of mountaintops, but it’s real, and at the same time, it reflects something that can just be a few feet across on an animal.
Totally. Now that you say it, that could be the arching back of of a cow, straight up.
Would you describe this photo as simple or complex?
I’d say complex. I think it’s simple in my thought behind taking it. But then that’s what kept me coming back to it for years now. The fact that it was four years ago and I’m still looking at it and getting excited to see it is complex.
Is that something that you look for in your work in general?
Yeah, I mean, as a photographer, we’re always hoping to make something that lasts a while. The word timeless is not wrong. I feel like I can only hope I have a few timeless images that last longer than I do just because that’s what I love about photography and looking back through whether it’s a friend’s work or an iconic, legendary photographer’s work or up-and-comers; there’s photos you see that you’re just like, “Man, that is timeless.” That’s something I really like about it.
What makes a photo timeless for you then?
I think just something that feels really classic. The thing about it you’re noticing is not necessarily the color or the outfit. It’s more about the expression if it’s a portrait or the feel of it. For a landscape, it’s also the feel. Just the tone and feel of an image, versus something that’s very dating like, “Oh, my god, can you believe they’re wearing… Look at this outfit.” I think that’s less timeless than something where it’s just a true moment in time.
I think about with photos, too… You know, people put paintings up in their homes and discover new things in paintings the more that they look at them. With photos sometimes that’s a little more difficult because, you know, this is a photo of mountains, and it could easily just be a photo of mountains. To me some element of timelessness with it is just the fact that you’re going to see something in this photo two years down the line of looking at it every day that you might not have ever noticed before.
I’d hope for that out of something I’d put on my wall. It’s not to say that I wouldn’t put a portrait up because I actually do love looking at portraits on a wall, which I think more people should do, but there’s something about that coming back to it, like you said, that is what makes me want to call an image timeless.
Who’s this photo for? Is there any audience?
I don’t have a good answer for that because it’s kind of a dark photo to me. Less literally and more just it does kind of evoke a moody, dark vibe to me that’s not necessarily what I see certain people putting up in their home or appreciating. But I think if you appreciate a darkness in life, as well as a lightness, that’s who it’s for: people who appreciate a composition that is interesting to look at but kind of evokes a dark feeling or a dark mood.
We already kind of talked about you printing this, but how would you want your audience to view this image?
I think after seeing that big one, I almost wish I still had it, even though I printed it small again. Now I have it 11x14 or so, and seeing it that size, you really walk in and see it, so my ideal way for people to see this would be in a gallery or a home but at 40x50 size because it really catches your eye. That’s where I think your scale thing also comes into play. If you see it that big, you’re gonna walk in and notice it, where it’s much more of a statement. Whereas if you see it on Instagram, it’s interesting but you’re gonna maybe zoom in or have to give it a second look. But if it was up to me, I would love people to see the big print.
What about this photo feels like a Kyle Johnson photo to you?
The center weighting and the soft black and white… It’s not a super-contrasty image. I think those two things feel very Kyle Johnson to me. I like a tight, vertical 4x5 center-weighted composition a lot, and for black and whites I’ve definitely gone into more pasty grays instead of crushed blacks.
What do you like about that?
It just gives a softness to it, which to me resonates more with what I like about the scene, as opposed to sometimes I feel like with crushed blacks it’s just so intense. It just seems more old-school but not necessarily what I like about black-and-white photos.
What do you think Kyle 10 years ago would say about this photo?
It’s weird. I look back at old work, and sometimes I think it holds up really well, and then sometimes I think it’s terrible. But this would actually hold up with 10 years ago. I did a lot more minimal film landscapes 10 years ago because I was hiking a lot. That’s when I was just getting started and doing personal work a lot in the Northwest. And this actually looks like a photo I could have taken then but maybe just a little bit better executed. Yeah, it might have been a bit wider 10 years ago.
I do think that we — especially in reviewing old work — we do find things that we’ve kind of abandoned. You learn more, so your style of photos changes because you have more knowledge, and in changing that, you kind of abandon some things that make your older photos great.
Totally. There’s some real gems in there when I was digging through old stuff. I was doing all these really close Hasselblad film portraits. And some of those I really like still. It’s a good reminder to get super close sometimes, even though I never do that as much.
How do you think your eye has changed?
It’s just gotten more confident, which I feel like I would hope if someone’s been shooting as long as we have now that you get confident, and I don’t spend as much time trying different things, especially for a landscape. Like, I don’t mess around on the same photo as much. I hone in on what I’m interested in about it and take it. I might take two or three for focus, but I’m not trying three lenses on the same photo, so I think it’s more just that I’m quicker and more confident.
Yeah, in the same sense, do you think there’s anything you’ve learned that gave you the instinct to take this?
It’s the frame. I think it’s the knowing that I was like, “Okay, I see this cool mountain out of the plane,” but I want to punch in on it and capture this little abstraction within it. That was the subconscious thought that I think my style influenced it.
How do you think you established your frame? That’s kind of a hard question, but we do all have the way that we frame up a photo.
I don’t know why. You just start noticing a pattern in your own work or at least the stuff you like. I tend to like center-weighted framing, and I tend to like certain types of really moody… Even though I said this wasn’t super contrasty, I do like intense light where you get those high-dynamic-range situations, or softbox northwest light, which is what this looks like. I do feel like I tend to be drawn to those two things, so when I see really epic end-of-day or moody shadows, I love that kind of stuff. And then I think looking at years of work, I always tend to like those moments. So it just informs your style a little bit.
When we were working together, when I was commissioning you for photos in Seattle and around that area, you were mostly taking portraits. And now when I look at your portfolio, at least what you have up online, there’s so much travel work in it. At what point did travel become such an essential part of what you want to be shooting?
I think it was just doing some travel assignments and realizing how much I liked it. Right now it just bums me out even talking about it because I don’t even know when that’s ever going to be a thing for work again, but I’ll always love traveling. It’s like figuring out that puzzle of a story and seeing the grid of what images tell this travel story. A couple of those big ones, like the Airbnb job I got where I got to go to Finland, that was one of the first really big travel assignments I got, and that was a life-changing assignment, just getting to go somewhere I never would have gone, and in the winter as not being a winter-sports guy, that was a trip that just showed me you can really do this and tell an amazing story about a place by being hired to go there. So I think that was when I geared my sight more toward trying to get more of that work because I liked it so much. And it’s led to some pretty awesome work.
There is a barrier to entry, to some extent. I mean, you can travel on your own and do work, but having an assignment means that people all of the sudden on the other end say yes.
The other thing about travel work that’s really hard is that you have to get a lot in a short amount of time because budgets are always smaller these days, even with commercial, so even on that Airbnb job, it was like packing in seven things in a day. So you can’t always get your perfect light that you would want for a certain landscape, or you can’t shoot this portrait at sundown. You have to do it in the middle of the day. So it’s a good challenge to obviously bring your lighting and ideas and make it work, but that’s the fun challenge of travel, so when someone trusts you to do it, that’s exciting but also stressful because sometimes it just doesn’t go the way they envision it because they weren’t there. And you still have to make it work.
So to close, how does it feel to review your work like this?
It was fun. I mean, I definitely was a little nervous because like I said, I have my own self-doubt about being an artist and talking about my work in a fine-art sense, but I think it was fun to physically just break it down and see what you and I both see in it but also talk about it. It was fun to look up the metadata and be like, “Wow, that was 2016.” That was probably when I first started using that camera. And that kind of speaks to the fact that I’m still using it, which is kind of crazy. In camera years, that’s quite a long time.
Is there anything unrelated to photography that’s feeding you creatively right now?
I feel like I’ve done this for a long time, but I take things that I’m interested in or maybe that I shoot and then try to embed myself in that world a bit more to understand it. Maybe it’s because of COVID that I’m also secretly hoping for another line of income or another project of something to start that isn’t photo work, but admittedly, wine and farming and cooking, those three worlds, they kind of go together. I’ve been spending a lot of time shooting and spending time at farms and people doing stuff I admire in that world. So I’ve been helping work on the actual farms but also take photos and kind of document that world. So I’m kind of diving deep into that lately. I just spent four days at a wine farm that I really love what they’re doing in Oregon. It’s a biodynamic, permaculture farm with all sorts of animals. It was awesome. I could see myself easily, not necessarily starting a winery but working in that world a little bit and not just shooting it.
Interviewed on October 19, 2020.
(This transcript has been edited for brevity.)
Links:
Kyle Johnson
Bloomberg Pursuits: “A Once-in-a-Lifetime Trip to See the Strangest Animal on Earth”