Ep 005: Ryan Pfluger
A SHOT: To start, can you describe the photo that you picked?
RYAN PFLUGER: I actually picked it because it was a very personally poignant photograph. It was, like, the day before I decided to stay in LA. I was on the road, driving back to New York. It was, I think, my fourth day on the road. And I had a really nice day in a hot springs. It was in the middle of...or the beginning of January. It was right after New Year’s. I saw that dog in that car when I came back, and there’s this cardboard writing in the back, and it says, “Love is the way.” And it was this moment where I was like, “Huh, I need to love myself a little bit better right now,” because I was rushing back to get back home [to New York]. And I realized that I didn’t want to go back.
What about loving yourself meant LA as opposed to New York?
It was about three and a half months that I had stayed for my last road trip out to LA. I had stayed with a girlfriend, and I realized that it was the first time I was giving myself mental space. I think it was because I had so much less responsibility. I didn’t have a house. I didn’t have an apartment. I was staying in a friend’s room. Doing that in your mid-30s is very like, “Am I having a midlife crisis?” In some ways, I kind of was. I had recently gone through a separation with my husband, and it just shifted a lot of things for me in terms of importance. The time that I was actually happiest was when I was on the road, and I was like, “This is not sustainable,” at least at this time in my life.
But LA became this very freeing experience for me. I was spending the fall there, usually when I was in my, like, more season-depression mode in New York. And I just felt good. Again, the lack of attachments, it was the first time having that in my life as an adult. It’s one thing having relationships that last through time and it doesn’t matter the distance. But it was really the first time I’d ever not lived in New York. So it was also the first time I was experiencing living somewhere else. I had this ideal version where I was like, “I’ll just live both places.” Then when I left for that last trip, it took three days for me to realize I don’t need to go back. I guess that dog told me that.
Do you remember where this was specifically?
Yeah, it was about an hour and a half outside of Crater Lake National Park in Oregon.
And why did you find yourself there?
So I was actually driving, kind of in tandem, with a friend that was leaving LA to move back to Portland. I was like, “Well, let’s not rush the trip,” because we were going through New Year’s. I was like, “Let’s do some outdoors stuff.” I had my yearly national park pass from doing all of my road trips, and I’ve always wanted to go to Crater Lake. So I looked up a couple of other more secret spots that weren’t gonna be highly trafficked that just happened to be on the way. And I was like, “What’s better than hot springs in the middle of winter?”
So this is the parking lot at the hot springs?
This is the parking lot at the hot springs, yeah. When we had gotten there, there were two other couples, and that was it. It truly felt totally detached from the world. And for it being so close to the holidays, I had never not been with either my dad or my husband at the time. I’d always had holiday times with someone. So it was very interesting doing it with a friend on the road.
What’s your setup for when you’re taking a photo like this?
I know you know this. I’m usually a film shooter. Once I started doing the road trips, it was the first time I felt comfortable shooting with a digital camera. Pretty much all my landscape stuff and things that aren’t portrait heavy are all shot digitally. It was definitely more for me, like this is my visual road diary. I didn’t really care that’s not what people associated me with. It was the first time I was just making photographs to make photographs, not for a project, not for “the larger scope of my body of work.” It just felt very natural because I’m not an off-the-cuff shooter. I’m usually very regulated with how I shoot. I was starting to see the United States how I approach my portraiture but in a very different way — not being as precious about it but still focusing on these very quiet moments. That’s what I like about this photograph so much. The dog the entire time was barking at me. This was at the very end of me standing there that we just started staring at each other. It was nice to be able to get that quiet moment. That’s what I was standing there waiting for, I think.
So how quickly do you take this photo?
That’s the thing with digital for me; I don’t think about it as much. I know this one was after me standing there for 15 minutes, but I’ll take one photo. It’s not like I do a bunch and change my angles. I’m very just like, “Okay, that’s it. Done,” which is similar to how I approach portraiture. I’m methodical. I don’t need to take 8,000 pictures. It’s that one picture, and we’re good.
What did you see in this scene that made you want to take this, and at the same time, what are you looking for?
I loved that the dog was in the driver’s seat. There was something really kind of… and this cracked window. This was clearly one of the couples that I ended up seeing in the hot springs, and it felt very like, “Oh, I can learn so much about these people just by the simplicity of this photo.” Clearly your dog is going to be in there for a long time. Clearly it’s freezing outside. And then there was a part of me that was like, “I didn’t start going on the road until my dog died,” because that was always such a thing for me, where it was like… Even work trips, if I’m gone for three days, I get anxious about being away from my dog. You know, then thinking about the people that had this dog, they’re probably on the road themselves and the logistics of you can’t bring your dog everywhere. So it’s in one moment feeling like, “Ugh, there’s something really uncomfortable about this scene.” And then just standing there for a while and being like, “I kind of get it. I understand why he’s there.” And then, just that sign. There’s something so pure about that. These people have good intentions. I appreciated that. Again, I was waiting for that… Because it would have read so differently with the dog barking at me the whole time, so I was really waiting for that quiet moment. That’s the beauty of being a photographer. You have literally this millisecond of a moment, and you don’t have the before and after. You don’t have the outside of what my frame is. So I was able to kind of make it into what my work is just by standing there.
How actively are you looking for something to take a picture of when you’re in a situation like this?
I’m not the person who brings my camera everywhere. So in situations like this, I need to make it a plan for myself, where it’s like, “Okay, I’m on the road now for two weeks, so this is any moments that I have to be looking for something, that’s when I’ll make photographs.” Otherwise, even in LA, I never bring my camera outside of a planned shoot. I think because of that, I’m very much more specifically looking for things when I have this plan, even if it’s as a simple as I’m going to be driving from [Los Angeles] to San Francisco. It’s always when I’m in transit to another destination that I actually plan to be looking for photographs.
What does looking mean to you?
I know I’ve said it a bunch… I am always looking for the quiet. I’m always kind of looking for something that I know is going to be, for me — because at the end of the day, that’s always what’s important — for me, going to make me feel something six months from now. I try to deal with nostalgia in a way that isn’t nostalgic, if that makes any sense. I’m very precious about time and people and moments. So these trips and when I’m making these kind of photographs, I really have that in mind, where I’m like, “What can tell a non-sequential story that really gives you an insight into me and what my mindset is?” That’s the other thing: There’s always a complete lack of people in any photograph that I make that isn’t a portrait session. That’s another thing. I’m often waiting for people to not be there. And that’s kind of also what I’m looking for. I’m looking for the before and after of human presence and the stillness of that. Especially in this photograph, the human presence is still there.
So this is part of your travel project called “The Passage.”
Yeah.
How does it fit into that project as opposed to something else that you might be working on?
The first trip that I took was, like, two months before the 2016 election. Had never done a road trip by myself. Had never left without any plan. That’s actually kind of where “The Passage” comes from. It’s this idea of a journey of finding one’s self and being in the moment without any distractions. That’s what I was always looking for. It took me, I would say, probably about a week the first road trip I took to even start making these photographs. I didn’t know what I was looking for. I didn’t know why I was on the road. And that was very strange for me to be in a position of just like, “Okay, I have no destination, and I’m just driving, and I don’t know why.” I just had this urge.
Then what did you see that made you feel like you were shooting something?
I can remember the first picture that I took. It was in Pennsylvania. This was before I started really taking these photos. I had gone to this weird basically, like, temple. I think it was called, like, the Golden Temple. It was this project that was supposed to happen that never did. Or was constantly under construction. I remember taking this photograph of this temple with all this plastic covering over it. A few days later looking at it when I was just going through my card, I was like, “Huh, this is kind of what I’m looking for.” It’s not that I’m looking for things that are depressing or America’s past or anything like that. I wasn’t going into it with that “American photographer road-trip mentality.” It was more like, what is it about the US especially that draws me in and makes me feel like this is so specific to this place but also so specific to me. So I think that this photograph fits into that narrative. Again, it’s hard when something isn’t sequential storytelling or dealing with a specific group of people or location. This is just like a broad…this is what it’s like to be in my mind traveling. And I think that it’s a very specific viewpoint. I was very unsure of that, especially because that wasn’t what people considered my wheelhouse. But it was also something I knew that I loved doing. I just didn’t know why.
So you’re primarily a portrait photographer. Would you agree with that?
I would agree with… Yes, I would agree with that. I hesitantly say yes. I agree with that.
The only reason I say that is, I wanna know how do you shift or change your eye when you’re shooting something like this that you said you’re looking for people to be removed from the image?
It’s such a shift. I actually really relate it to on a commission when someone’s like, “Can you do photo and video?” Those are two very different things. My visual vocabulary is also very different when it comes to those two things. And it’s hard to shift in and out of them. It’s like bilingual speakers who sometimes will start speaking in a different language and not realize it. When I’m making work like this, it’s so much more waiting for that decisive moment but also searching for it, [whereas] for me, portraiture, it’s like a very specific “Oh, okay, I know who I’m photographing. What the location’s gonna be?” It’s very methodical in a lot of ways. I’d say this work of doing landscape and still lifes and, kind of, street photos is also a little bit more busy than my work normally is. So it was figuring out this way to create this new dialog for myself that was still these stripped down almost like monuments to places and experiences but had a little bit more information for the viewer because I’ve always…with my portraiture, I like to keep it where you have to really look for specific nuance as to having clear indicators of like, “Oh, this is who this person is and what they are.” I like the ambiguity. And this was the first time I was really looking for specific things that would start informing each other.
I think most people would walk by this scene in real life and not think twice about it. These are the sort of the things we’ve been conditioned to ignore, like we look at it as feeling ordinary, but what about this feels less ordinary to you?
I’m glad you brought that up because that’s also part of why I started making these photographs. That was always the stuff that I was most… You know, driving through an amazing, beautiful landscape and seeing places in the country that I had never seen before, I would never make photographs there. It was when I would go out of a national park and go into this small town that’s 10 miles down the road where there would be something on the street that would be so almost banal. But at the same time, so odd. I would find myself standing and staring at things looking like a crazy person because I’m just by myself with my camera. And thinking about it, thinking like, “Why am I so drawn to the simplicity of something that literally everyone would walk by?” Same scenario with this car. Anyone would just be like, “Eh.” Either that’s something I don’t want to be walking by or wouldn’t even give it a second thought.
So then why are you drawn to it?
You know, I like the underdog. I think that has always been my thing. I’ve always been intrigued by… Like, using as a reference point for my work, the work that I was making in grad school where I was photographing people that looked like me but weren’t necessarily unique in any way. I wanted to show the nuance and uniqueness and the idea that if we spend some time with anything, we can find real beauty in it. I think that is what my goal started being: finding, even if it is slightly sad in some ways, or maybe a little bit melancholy, there’s still a real beauty in it. I think that’s something we all need to do a little bit more of. That’s something that in the time that we’re in now, we have more appreciation for. It’s like you think about all the things that people are trying to do to keep themselves occupied that they would not have normally done in their normal life. And I think that was also the other thing: What wouldn’t I do in my normal life because if I didn’t have my camera with me, I wouldn’t have stopped and just starred at this dog. I would have been like, “Huh, that’s funny,” and walked away. It also felt like a challenge. It felt like a challenge finding things for myself that in most contexts would be considered ordinary or simple or just not worthwhile. I liked the challenge of just sitting with things more and appreciating, one, that I had the time to be able to do something like this and, at the same time, really appreciating the time that I was experiencing, like appreciating what was right in front of me, even if it was something as simple as a parked car in a parking lot.
It’s funny because there’s a photograph that I made maybe six months after this one that was another parked car that the passenger-side door was a different color than the rest of the car. And it was the only car in the parking lot. Most people would just walk past that. And I just stood there staring at this car being like, “There’s something so special about the isolated-ness of this. This is just here by itself. No one else is around.” It may be something that you see every day, but again it’s that mental framing of let me just look at this car for a while. Why? What is it that I’m appreciating about it? And then figuring out visually how these things start communicating with each other.
I know loneliness is a theme that you explore in your work. How would you say loneliness relates to this image?
A lot, actually. That goes back to the melancholy thing. For me, I find so much joy in my work, and at the same time, I know that it’s sad. But it’s an appreciation of that. And from a personal place, I come from a pretty damaged upbringing — a lot of the being made to feel bad for having feelings and not embracing them and kind of what they bring to the whole story. And I think there is something really sad and lonely about this photograph. Again, it’s that juxtaposition with the dog and the sign, and at the same time it’s also thinking about why things are sad or why we associate loneliness and sadness to something and flipping that narrative. It’s not a bad thing. It’s something that we all feel, and a lot of times, we don’t give it the value that we need to because that’s really the only way you can work through anything. Truly that’s what that entire body of work is: me working through being alone and what that meant and the fact that I was able to still create and make things that I was proud of even at one of my lowest lows. That mindset was definitely injected into the work, unconsciously, but I think there was also a real joy in that process. What came out of it was me a better person on the other end and also making this work that was so different than anything I’d done before.
What effect does the presence of the dog have to this image?
It’s a really personal thing, but for me, I like dogs better than people. It goes back to that purity thing. There’s something just so pure about dogs. And the sign, “Love is the way” — for me, dogs are the most unconditional love, even if they seem aggressive. And that was the thing. It was the first time I had seen a dog that was being slightly aggressive and just waited until he wasn’t. There was something really sincere about that, seeing this direct eye contact with me of just being like, “No, I’m just appreciating you.” It’s something I would normally do without my camera. So there was something really special about that moment finally happening.
What effect does it have that you can’t see inside the car? There was a part of me when I was writing questions for this that I was like, “Wait, is there a person in there?” And I couldn’t tell.
I like the ambiguity of that. I think it’s really important. I’ve used that ambiguity in my work a lot. I like giving just enough away that makes you question but doesn’t reveal all the players. I like the idea of it not being a definitive thing like, “Oh, okay, there’s a person in there. Everything is fine.”
How important is the space around the car?
Again, it’s ambiguous. It gives just enough away. You can tell this is in the woods somewhere, but you don’t need to know where. I could have taken the same photograph from where my car was, and you would see that it was this big empty lot, and it was just that car there. I didn’t want to give that much information away because I think that it actually changes the narrative. I’m close enough that it feels like I know those people that are in that car, and that’s also what I wanted to allude to. You didn’t know whether I had a relationship with it or not.
What about this photo feels familiar?
For me, it reminded me of my childhood with my cousins in upstate New York because that was always the thing of the car windows frosting up, and if you ever needed to go anywhere, you had to warm up the car. There was something, a very quick memory dive as soon as I see things like that. That was the immediate gut reaction. When I saw it, it very much reminded me of my late childhood years.
That was the reason I was drawn to it because vacations when I was a kid were always road trips, and it was in a blue Honda Civic hatchback. This isn’t a Honda Civic, but this is what it looked like. This makes me think of driving to the Pacific Northwest from St. Louis.
Yeah, and also I didn’t wanna say it, but my entire childhood my dad had a blue Subaru that looked exactly like this car.
Do you ever think about this photo in the context of before or after it was taken? I mean, we talked about it a little, and you mentioned that you liked that you froze it out of that context, but do you think it’s important to consider that? I mean, it’s a car. It was somewhere before this, and it will be somewhere after this.
Yeah, a lot of times when I make photographs like this, I will actually wait — like, I’ll put my camera back in my car — for my own personal curiosity to be like, “I wanna see who these people are.” It’s not important for the photograph. It’s not important for me to make another one. But for my own imagination, I’d say almost every time I do that, especially when I find moments like this where I’m like, “Ah, there’s such a before and such an after of this moment.” I think about it all the time. I think a lot of, if not all of, this work is very much about that. I’ve made these very specific moments, but I’m even more curious about the before and after. And I like not knowing it.
Who’s this photo for? Who’s the audience?
At the time of making it, and I’d still say now, it’s one of the few bodies of work that very much was for me, in terms of I didn’t care who the audience was. I didn’t care about the context of how it was going to be perceived. As someone that has been very much an activist in some ways with the work that I make, the kind of people that I photograph, it was really nice, at the time at least, to make work that didn’t have the stress of that, or have the weight of that. This was very much an inner journey. It’s about two years where I was making work like this, and even now I’m kind of… I love when people appreciate it or bring it up or say, “I love this even more than your portrait work.” There’s something about that that personally brings me a lot of joy because I’m like, “I kind of do, too.” But at the end of the day, it was probably the most selfish work I made. So audience-wise and who the viewer was didn’t matter to me. And it was the first time making that decision to make work like that.
I think you can gain a lot of strength by embracing selfishness as a creator.
Yeah.
And we don’t do that enough.
No. It also really reminded me why I love photography so much. It’s not just my profession. It’s not just what I do to make money. It’s so much connected to my mind and my heart and what gets me up every day. I rarely relish in that for myself. And that was what was really empowering, being able to give myself the time to just like, “I’m just making photographs that bring me happiness and bring me joy, that aren’t for anything else, that aren’t for the idea of maybe I’ll get commissioned to make work like this.” I just didn’t care. I think a lot of photographers could really gain a lot for themselves even just in terms of the connectivity to their work by embracing having moments like that. We were talking about it earlier, of doing the grind and feeling the guilt of like, “Oh, if I have these two weeks where I’m not working, where I’m not creating…” And it’s like getting rid of all the guilt and shame about it and just being like, “No, this is just like someone who has any sort of thing that brings them joy.” I think that when you also do it as your profession, sometimes you forget. I still need that joy. I still need…it’s like that butterfly feeling when you first meet someone you go on a date with. I kind of was forgetting that about photography. And that’s what this brought me.
I think also we spend so much of our time when you’re concerned about it for your career of just making something that is impressive as opposed to making something good.
Very quickly we — and this goes for all creative fields in general — you quickly become associated with something. The beauty of being an artist or a creative of any kind is experimenting and doing things that are not necessarily what would be option one, two or three for you, especially the further into your career you go. It’s like you have less space and less choice sometimes in a matter of being able to be a little experimental with how you make images or how you’re expressing yourself. And that’s also something I forgot for myself. I know now personally it’s so, so important… The amount of times in my career I’ve said, “Ugh I’m so burnt out,” or “I just don’t want to be creative right now.” And it was like, “Oh, but I can be.” This is the one thing I know I will always love doing. It’s that constant re-finding it for yourself.
What about this photo feels like a Ryan Pfluger photo?
The stillness. That’s the thing that always feels like my work. Even if something is so active, I always am trying to find how do I stop that, how do I make it that it feels almost tranquil in some ways. Especially with my stuff that isn’t portraits, I think that’s how you can immediately tell that it’s me. And it’s also, aesthetically, framing wise and stuff, all of my work like that is slightly not how it’s supposed to be, and that’s also a dead giveaway. And something slightly being off.
What do you mean by “not how it’s supposed to be”?
You know, like, my framing of just… The back of the car is cut off; the front of the car has just a tiny little bit of space in it. There are so many other ways I could have made this photograph, but I didn’t. Again, that comes down to being less… I’m still formal, but I’m so much less precious about it. Normally all of that stuff would bother me making this work, like I was like, “Oh, no, that’s why I’m making this right now,” where I’m not overthinking it.
What do you think Ryan 10 years ago would have to say about this photo?
He’d be like, “You didn’t take this.” That would definitely be the immediate response. Ryan 10 years ago was also very full of himself. And in some ways I had the right to be because it took a lot to get where I was. Very much so in, I’d say, the last five to seven years, humility has been a big part of my work in terms of how I think about photography, how I think about making images. It’s that same conversation of something that is so ordinary and taking the time to realize that it’s special. As special as I think that I am and my point of view is, it’s taking the time to remember that it’s still ordinary. That’s been my biggest learning lesson as a photographer. And 10 years ago, I definitely did not have that mindset for myself.
What do you think you’ve learned that has give you the instincts to take a photo like this?
Being comfortable by yourself. Being comfortable by yourself in places you don’t know has really truly informed the way I even make photographs now because I totally took that and have moved it into the way that I make portraits. That was a skill set that I didn’t really have. I was a total creature of comfort. And every five years I figure out something that I know is going to make me uncomfortable and, kind of, taking that experience to reevaluate myself and figure out why does this make me uncomfortable and how can I flip this into a way that makes really interesting photographs.
What’s something unrelated to photography that’s been feeding you creatively lately?
Feeding me creatively? I mean, this is a tough time. I had very grand plans when quarantine started because I moved into my house that I’m renting a year ago, in October of last year. All of my stuff is still in storage in New York. I hadn’t really made a home, so I had this idea of I’m going to be that person and creatively — even though it’s not a house that I own — I’m going to make this house my own, and that lasted for two months, and then I was like, “I can’t do this anymore.”
But I would say that my dog, truly, to really circle it back… I got my dog three weeks before quarantine started, and she was three months old. It’s crazy to think that a year has almost passed. And this creature has given me so much joy and also so much anxiety at the same time but has kept me actually in a place where I can be creative. It’s amazing that something as simple quote-unquote as an animal can really do that for you mentally.
What do you think it is about a dog that gives you that?
It’s not even the unconditional love of a dog. There’s something so sincere. What you see is what you get, and being reminded of that on a daily basis is really grounding. Because it’s like with people, I don’t know if they’re gonna be in a mood today or not. There’s something about that routine and knowing that I’m going to come home and this dog is going to be so excited to see me that it really can flip your day. There’s been a lot of days where I don’t want to do the simplest thing as cutting down negatives, and there’s something really special about that.
Interviewed on October 23, 2020.
(This transcript has been edited for brevity.)