Artist Interview - Tom Kirkendall
Although categories are always blurry, much of your work falls into the nature, outdoor, adventure realm. What attracts you?
When people find out that I am a photographer they ask, “What do you photograph?” My usual response is “I am a travel landscape photographer where most of my best work starts three miles from the nearest road.” It is the solitude of the back-country environment that I am drawn to. I do some street photography, city-spaces, sports, and industrial work that I totally enjoy doing, but it is the "Way-Out-There" work that I most enjoy.
Tom Kirkendall
Why is landscape photography so difficult? What do most people get wrong? Yours are so good, what's your secret?
Photographing a landscape is easy. Anybody with a cell phone can do it. Go on Instagram and you can see billions of landscape pictures that you will wiz by with little more than a raised eyebrow. To create a portrait of the land that makes you stop and go “WOW!” is a a whole new level of image creation. Mostly it comes down to understanding composition.
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Understanding what belongs and makes the image flow through the frame is a difficult thing to master. Look at any well published landscape image, it will have a clean uncluttered flow, no matter how busy the image is.
Most important to me however, no matter how goofy it sounds, you must become one with the environment and let it speak to you. Where are you? Is it quiet, noisy, calm, frantic? What is the air like? Hot, humid, dry, cold. wet? What is the ground like? Muddy, dry, wet, rocky? Breath the air, feel the ground, feel what is around you. Make THAT your photograph. The landscape is there, but how does the environment relate to what you see. Photograph the place, not just the land.
As difficult as the genre is already, you prefer film and large format cameras, heavy equipment, slow process. Why?
I grew up with film. Film is not difficult. Sitting in front of a computer, now that is difficult! With film you have to be a little more careful, a little more aware, a little more selective because there is no “I can fix that in post.” Yes, you can do some real darkroom magic and wrestle out some fantastic images from questionable decisions made at exposure time. For me there is something more unique to a good darkroom print. As any good wet process printer will tell you, "No two prints are the same." Minor changes from print to print will make each a treasure, unlike any other. If you see a wonderful digital print and would like another, with a few clicks of the mouse and you can have a print ”exactly” like the one you saw. Nice, but is it unique?
Are large format cameras slow? Well yes. They take a little more time to get the image. But that slowness gives you a bit more time to experience where you are, to feel the environment and make it part of the image. I often tell people that the tripod is not just a steady tool, it is a thinking tool. It gives you time to think.