Ep 031: Beth Garrabrant

A SHOT: To start, can you describe the photo that we’re going to talk about?
BETH GARRABRANT: Yes, it’s a photograph of a woman on a motorized scooter, and she’s across the street from where I was standing in Tonawanda, New York — I hope I’m saying that right, gosh — on a beautiful blue-sky day. And she’s zooming by. 

When was this photo taken?
This photo was taken in 2015. 

How do you end up with a photo like this?
A lot of my work is staged. It’s planned, or it’s spending time with a subject and collaborating and making pictures and coming up with ideas as they go. But in this case, it was this beautiful day, and where I was on the side of the road, it was in the middle of nowhere, and I actually saw this woman coming. I heard a zoom, like this “zzz,” and I did have my camera. I was driving with a then-boyfriend. We were visiting his grandparents, and I don’t remember why we were pulled over, but I think I was bored. It was a really cold but sunny, beautiful day, and as she came by, I was like, “Oh!” I saw this brilliant pink T-shirt. So I was just like, “I have to have a picture of that.” I think we were also having a really bad car trip, so that was a nice flash of something that was amazing. She came out of nowhere. And I don’t know where she was going. There really was no obvious place. And she was going so fast. I remember thinking, “I don’t know what that picture’s gonna be, but I’m happy I got it.”

I have a lot of pictures like that, where sometimes I think about it too late but I get the back of a picture. Like a similar picture, I was once in Omaha, and I saw a furry walking their pet human. I was so taken aback. They were incredible. I saw them coming. They walked right in front of me, and then I was like, “I have to get a picture.” But I just have the back in the distance of them walking hand in… Or, the wolf pulling the man by a leash. The picture’s fine. I look at it, and I’m like, “Why didn’t I take it?” In this case, I assumed it would be the same: “Oh, man. What camera do I even have?” Then when I got the contact sheet back, I was like, “Oh, I like this picture!”

Do you feel like the world changes around you, or the way you see the world changes around you, when you do have your camera and you know you have your camera with you?
I do. When I have my camera, I’m usually a little more aware of my surroundings. Maybe I’m not listening to music or distracted with something else. If anything, it just makes me more present. I found a few years ago, too, I realized if I’m walking, especially in New York, I was always listening to music, and I stopped looking around. I was so laser-focused on walking to the subway or walking to wherever I was going, and I stopped looking. I think one day I just left my headphones at home, and I finally just had a really nice walk, and I saw so much on this same walk that I was taking every day to the N, Q, R [trains]. I realized I was kind of holding myself back. You really become insular when you have technology or music or you’re on the phone, and I feel like sometimes we all tend to do that in our downtime or when we’re in transit. When I have my camera, I don’t have my phone anywhere near me, so I see so much more. 

In this instance, did you have it with you because you knew you wanted to make pictures?
Yeah, I knew I wanted to make pictures, and at that time, I was living in New York. Any time I would leave the city, I was so excited because I was in this really little, small apartment. Oh, we hated our apartment, and it faced a brick wall. Our windows, there was no light. So any time we could leave the city, I though, “Oh, finally!” I would be so excited. It didn’t matter where we were going. And this drive, when you drive to Buffalo, some of it’s really beautiful, but it’s a lot of just long highway driving. I was thrilled. I loved it. I feel like I was really inspired because at that time I was living in Midtown. I needed to get out. I guess that would be my answer, too. I was carrying my camera around whenever I finally can escape wherever I am and feel like, “Okay, let’s get out of your day-to-day.”

Is there anything specifically that you find yourself looking for? Like, how did you recognize in this instance that this was something you wanted?
It was so strange. I really feel like when I leave a city, or it’s quiet, and you’re just stationary, whether you want to be or not — in this case, I think we had some car issue — then you’re just listening to everything around you. And she came out of nowhere. It was a picture that had to be taken, and I was glad because I still think about the pictures I didn’t take. It’s a terrible thing to look back on, but I do. Some of them really haunt me. And maybe it was out of spite for the argument I was also having. I’m trying to ignore the person I was with, thinking, “I’m busy. I’m gonna do this now.”

I like that you mentioned the idea of stopping because I think a lot of times when we think about going out and taking pictures on a road trip, the idea is that we’re always moving and we’re always looking to find something, but what solidified this for you was actually the fact that you stopped. 
Yes, the pictures I like the most are from those moments. Unfortunately I’ve had some bad cars, and when you have car problems, you’re stopped in a lot of places, and you meet a lot of people. And it’s a slow process of getting something fixed. Again, there are so few times now when you really can be stationary, looking around. I really find everybody, we all move. It seems like an obvious thing to say, but everyone, we’re moving, moving, moving. Or if you’re sitting, you’re looking at something, or “Oh, this is my moment to call my mom back or check on work.” With car problems, it’s a bad place to be, but then you kind of can’t look at anything, so you start looking around. Or usually you’re waiting for someone to come help you — AAA. But that’s when you start seeing. You’re really stuck. 

I wanna step away from this photo a bit to talk about your book, Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard, which this photo is a part of. How did this project begin, and how has it developed throughout the years you’ve been working on it?
Some of the pictures in this book I actually made when I was in high school in 2000–2001 and through 2004, 2006, 2010, so every few years I would pick it back up again. It started actually when I was a child. My babysitter — who later on was my first boss (she was the photo director at Travel + Leisure) — she was in school, in college, and she was a photo major and would photograph my sister and I for her work. It was the late ’80s, and I remember she would say herself that she was in her Sally Mann phase. She would always take portraits of my sister, Katie, and I. Then when I went to school, I had been photographing my friends and my sister a lot in high school, but I was in Photo, and I had some project, and my mom suggested, we knew a family there, that I photograph the daughters the way that our babysitter, Katy, had photographed us. I admit, I thought it was like, “Oh, mom.” But then I actually did it, and one of those pictures is the cover of the book. And I loved photographing these sisters and their brother. For four years, I did just that. I photographed them a lot. When I went to ICP, I stopped making that work, and then a few years later, I started making it again because I was looking at those pictures thinking, “I wish I’d continued with that.” And that’s kind of how that work always happened. It would be a few years, and then I would look back on it and think, “I really enjoyed making those pictures.” There are a lot of pictures that are not in the book. So this was really just a slice. Some of the subjects appear more than once, and those are the families I was able to spend more time with, over longer periods, several years. And that to me was an homage to being in the projects of Katie Dunn, who was the photographer that was my babysitter. 

The edit of this book feels super important. I really love how concise it is. I think my first time through it, I kind of felt like I wanted more, but it also brought me back to the beginning of it immediately, and I started flipping through it again. And the more I looked through it, the more I realized all of the pairings throughout it were so vivid that I didn’t know if there was anything more that needed to be said. And I really love that even within a relatively small selection of pictures, there are movements and groupings within that. Can you talk a bit about your strategy for editing, what you wanted to convey and how you went about digging through the work?
I was looking at all of the work, and what I like to do is you make your test prints, and you have these 8x10s, and you’re just laying everything out. Some were also just old C-prints that I had from college. Everything. I noticed there was a lot of repetition and sometimes in a really funny way. I like that there’s a little bit of humor that’s maybe not so obvious — the matching bun of a ballerina to a roman statue in a pet graveyard. There’s these things that I kept seeing, and that then started to guide the edit in a way. Because so much of the work was copying something I had done before, of like, “I really always liked that work; I wanna do that again,” and trying to recreate something, there’s such a mirror to some of that. The stances of one boy and Britney Spears, I really liked finding that. And I think it made sense too for the tone of the work because it can feel really serious, and I didn’t want it to just be a book of sad children. 

I feel like there is joy in this book even if there are few actual smiles. I think there are a couple smiles in the background. Why is that?
Honestly, it’s funny. I’ve noticed no matter what year it’s been, when I photograph a young person, actually a lot of people, when they settle in for a portrait, that is, without prompt, that’s always how they would pose. We think that the younger generations are so different. Or that they’re so much more self-aware, which I know they probably are, but when it comes to these portraits, I felt it was the same as it was in 2004. 

How did you realize that the edit was done, that this project was finished?
I didn’t. I still look at it, and I’m like, “Nooo! What made me not put this one in?” Because I always felt like, “Okay, what is this?” You feel like, “Do I have this? Is this done? Will it ever be done? How does anyone ever know?” I think I was always a very nostalgic person, even when I was little. I find myself being less nostalgic now. So for me, making these pictures… And I think nostalgia is dangerous, right? In so many ways. We’re learning that right now. To always think, like, “Oh, it was so great then…” I wanna document young people, and it’s still interesting to me, but I think I’ve changed. Maybe with how the world has changed, it feels like it was the time to put the period on this work. 

When you make a photo like this one that we’re talking about of the woman on the scooter, do you instantly see how it might fit into a larger project like this?
No, because it’s not an obvious picture, and it is a book of… The subjects are young people, and this is not a young person. But I love the midway zoom-through of her going on this scooter. She must seem light as air in that moment and childlike. I’m almost 40, but I don’t feel that way. At one point you just don’t understand how you got so much older all of the sudden. And this woman, I liked that she was going at such a speed, and I don’t even know where. 

You’d mentioned that this was one of the photos that was potentially on the cutting room floor when you were finalizing your edit. Why did you feel like you wanted to remove it?
I think it was more feedback. When I worked on the edit, that was a picture I found myself having to defend or be like, “No, no, I really wanna include this one.”

What does it give the book that this isn’t kids and teenagers?
So much of life when you’re younger is waiting. And so maybe it was also just feeling like this was a perspective. Seeing it as a small moment that happens that you notice, I just feel like so much of childhood is watching and waiting, constant waiting, waiting for the bus, waiting, and always looking, and all of these little things are happening in the world moving around you. You’re usually pretty stationary because, depending on how old you are, you have to be with an adult, or you’re waiting to cross the street. You’re not driving. So it reminded me of that, this kind of waiting in the car at the grocery store. It reminded me of that kind of looking. I feel like that’s the most pure time that you ever have, where you’re just truly an observer. Maybe less now because kids have iPads, but we didn’t have that. And we didn’t travel with anything. It would just be, like, “Look out the window.” So it felt like that. It felt like something you look out the window and see. 

How important is place to this specific photo?
I grew up in the suburbs, so to me this reminded me of, gosh, it really reminded me of one of the bus stops. It’s always kind of at the end of a main road. It’s usually just fast cars going by. There’s nothing really across the street. Being on the road, if you rode the bus, was so much of where things happened, especially if you had to wait with other kids, but you would just watch people go by, bike by, drive by. It’s so much waiting. And we’d have to get there so early, unless it was cold and my mom would sit with us in the car, but you would see so many things. It felt like a familiar place, even though I’d never been there before. Especially the cracked pavement. That feels like a lot of roads that I grew up on. 

Maybe it’s just because I’ve known you for a long time, but in this book I often feel like I see young people who seem to resemble you, particularly the girl on the cover. Like I was wondering is this person part of your family. I didn’t know. But how personal is this work to you?
Oh, very personal. That’s part of why I started photographing that family. They reminded me of my sister and I, and again the pictures that had been taken of us. So I kept finding that when I photographed some of these kids, I just saw these scenes that I was trying to re-create of my sister and I. And they didn’t have to look exactly like us. Sometimes they just did. And then I also kind of liked that idea of because there’s so many years in between. There are three families, and there’s roughly 10 years between each grouping. It’s this re-creating that with another pair of two sisters that appear in the book, and then there was re-creating that with a girl and her two brothers. I started seeing again a lot of the same coming through again and again. 

I get the sense that in working on this you’ve somewhat freed yourself from the idea of a universal statement or, like, an Everyteen. And that’s where the personal engagement comes from. What did that allow you to do, not necessarily saying “This is America” or “This is the Midwest”?
That would be a totally different body of work, and especially today, I feel like to document teenagers and their experience now is very different from the experiences… Maybe at its core not so much, the humiliations, the traumas, the losses and then all these joyful nothing moments too and the waiting around that we talked about, those can be really universal feelings, but to document kids in America to me is a different project. I’m not sure I would do that because I think there are also so many different types of teenagers. They’re certainly not all depicted in this book. When I was always trying to create those portraits, it’s this hyper nostalgic trying to get back to something or feel something again, and it was always personal. 

Yeah, it’s almost like how would you finish this and end this? How would you get to an endpoint with something that is like, “This is what it’s like being a teenager in America”?
Oh, yeah, I also think the best person to tell that story would be a teenager. Because the best part about being a teenager is all the secrets and lies you tell. It’s a life shrouded in secrecy. I feel like there were so many things I was embarrassed about or definitely didn’t want my parents knowing or even my friends. So much of who you are can be a secret when you’re growing up. Not all in a bad way, but as you’re getting older, you do have a couple different lives happenings all at once. 

And it’s interesting because I do feel like there’s a level of guardedness that’s conveyed in how they are in front of your camera. It’s that extra level of “This person does have a secret,” or “This person does have something they’re not telling me.”
Yeah, oh, god, there is a certain level of embarrassment that you feel — I mean, I felt it even past high school — of this kind of discomfort with who you are, your body, your relationship with your friends, your parents, school. The main feeling I had growing up was my level of embarrassment at all times. There are some subjects that have more confidence or were able to be in front of the camera in a certain way. There’s a tension of I don’t know if everyone’s ever truly themselves at that age. I guess I wouldn’t say that, though. You are yourself. There’s a pure sense when you’re really young. But there’s a performance too depending on who you’re with. And I’m not a peer, as much time as I spent with them, so I do know that, too. 

I read you say that when you’re making photographs you’re often thinking about the quiet hum of a room. What does this photo sound like to you?
Well, there’s the “zzz” on the gravel. There’s always a hum in the air, too, in the sky. Airplane hums. When I think of the sounds of being young, I think of, maybe this will sound so stupid, but I think of geese, when geese fly overhead. And if you’re in gym class, you’d just at one point be looking up. I was so bored. I was so bad at gym. I would just watch them honk by. The sound of planes overhead. It’s harder to hear in New York City or if you’re in a city, but if you’re in a suburb, the sky, the sounds that you hear. And again it goes all back to waiting, and being oftentimes bored, and you’re just listening, and you’re looking. Those sounds, I can really still feel that and the smells, too. There are pictures in that book I can smell, especially the carpeting. 

Pool chlorine. 
Yeah, there’s really potent smells. Which I don’t feel like I get to smell that many things anymore that we did when we were younger. I took swimming lessons at the Y, and that chlorine smell in the locker rooms, I can still smell that. 

So the filmmaker Kelly Reichardt wrote really lovely bit of text to begin the book, and one thing that really stuck with me is that she mentions how your photography allows people to approach the work with their own baggage, and it lets each person see the photo differently. So I was thinking about this particular photo last night, and I’m curious how you see it. I though of two words that it made me feel. But I’d be curious first to hear what two words you might connect to this photograph.
Airplanes and Tic Tacs. Orange Tic Tacs. My grandma always had Tic Tacs. I don’t even know if they make them anymore, but to me, that is this. Planes and Tic Tacs?

I mean, that’s what the baggage that you bring to a photo is. TiC Tacs remind me of the checkout line at the grocery store and being able to be like, “Oh!” and grab them and put them in the cart. And the orange ones were always delicious. 
You just chew ‘em up. No one ever sucks on those. My grandma would always have Tic Tacs, and we’d have to go to church on Sunday, and she was a little hard of hearing, but she’d, like, whisper slowly, “Do you want a Tic Tac?” but it was so loud, and then she’d tap it. Tic Tacs were a huge part of my upbringing. I feel like they were always around. But airplanes, yeah, airplanes and Tic Tacs. 

I think it works. 
Does it?

Yeah, you’re approaching it from having lived with this photo for a long time. And I’m approaching this as a person whose used this photo to then write deep questions for you. So the two words that I arrived at were acceleration and impatience. And I think one of my favorite parts about this book is when the young people in the book start going through their stages of what feels almost like adult cosplay, where they’re at their summer jobs, or there’s the photos of the girls in their business attire. And the thing I connect with most is that feeling, as a kid, when you just really wanted to grow up already. Like I remember a business-achievers class where we, like, learned how to shake someone’s hand in a business meeting. And how we all felt so eager to just become adults already. And then ultimately, here you are in this photo, and your life is kind of behind you a little bit. 
Yes, you know, another word I’d wanna say impermanence, this idea, too, of this time that was loudly coming, and I waited, and the picture came, and then you could hear the “zzz” disappear out, and then she left a little trial, too, but then she was gone, and you couldn’t hear the sound anymore. I like this idea too of all the people in this book will also grow old and this idea of constant movement forward. As much as we look back, it’s interesting when you wake up one day and you’re like, “Oh, wow, I’m older than my parents were at the age that I really remember them at.” I always feel like I make fun of myself when I think “the passage of time” but it is, the impermanence of that moment and the impermanence of life. That, too — the title of the book [Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard] came from a Kay Ryan poem of the same name. My friend BJ showed me that poem a couple years ago. My interpretation of that poem is talking about a life lived. You have to have these grooves on the house, the worn-in doorknob, the idea of leaving a mark, and the importance of every life no matter whose and that we should all be leaving these marks. These shiny and new things don’t allow us to do that. I liked that when I was thinking about these pictures. Things shouldn’t be so hard to penetrate. Everything should be penetrable, that you leave a mark, that it shouldn't be so difficult to put your grooves into and impact. 

What do you think we can learn about you from the choices that you’ve made here?
Seeing something like that, I was drawn to that. I was drawn to seeing something that felt pretty strange in the moment and quiet. It’s just a real quiet, solitary moment that this woman was having, riding, to where I don’t know. And she wasn’t with anybody. She wasn’t talking to anybody. She was on this solo mission. She didn’t even notice us. Maybe she saw us when she was coming this way but never looked or waved. We didn’t have any interaction. But you witness these things, and they just come and go, and it’s not the kind of thing you talk about with someone later after the fact. I like seeing those things and again, being present to witness something, but also then you get the picture. It is a reward for being patient or also looking because I feel like that’s something you more and more, or at least I more and more, have to remind myself to do. Because you can stop and then something kind of miraculous will happen. And maybe it wouldn’t be to anybody else, but to you it is. You don’t always get that picture, but yeah, I liked how quiet it was, and private. It seemed also like a private moment. Not so private as if I was interrupting it. I don’t know, maybe she does that every day, too, and maybe if I was there every day at the same time, I would see it. But I also like not knowing. I love work where there’s no obvious beginning or end, and you’re just seeing this one part, and their lives have continued on, and you only got to see this section of it, and I think this picture makes me think of that. 

Interviewed on November 15, 2024.
(This transcript has been edited for brevity.)

Links:
Beth Garrabrant
Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard
”Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard” by Kay Ryan