Matt Slaby
by Mike Cerda
When thinking about what Denver-based photographers I would most like to interview, Matt Slaby immediately came to mind. An 6 foot 7inch tall EMT, Firefighter, photojournalist with a law degree, Matt Slaby’s less than expected roots have sculpted his thoughts as well as his unique aesthetic as an artist. His photographs exhibit a documentarian's sense of the fleeting, calling into question what lies beneath these captured moments. On a mild fall afternoon, Matt and I ventured out east to a small rural town shooting photos, discussing his journey in photography and how partial color blindness can make work challenging for a color photographer..
How did you go from being an EMT and a Firefighter, to being a lawyer and then transitioning into photography? How did those things unfold?
That's a long story. I started working for an ambulance company and volunteering with a fire department when I was eighteen. [I] ended up going to school for English Lit with the idea that I would write. The ambulance company seemed at the time to fit that trajectory because you have a real opportunity to see how people behave in some really intense situations. So you're just an observer and you can just take that in, and really ninety percent of what you do is just drunks and people that are crazy. That's h
ow I started paying for school –doing that in the winter.
I [also] got involved in the forest service and doing work with the "Hot Shots" – you're a national resource so you go to large inaccessible wild fires. It's not the small one acre fires, but you're going to the stuff that’s burning 20,000 acres… You travel around all the western states through the whole fire season. Just going from one fire to the next. I started doing that in the summer, and that's a good paycheck if you have no skills. You're always on fires so you have no place to spend your money and you come home with a piece of cash.
I think that's probably where I really started getting interested in people. Everybody comes from really diverse backgrounds. What happens when you're stuck around people for six months at a time, twenty-four hours a day and you can't get away from them, is that all your pretenses about who they are as people go away. A really good friend of mine [would] drive into work fifteen minutes early everyday and if he saw a coyote, he was going to pull over and shoot it. In my real life, at the age of eighteen, I would not have gotten along with him. But when you're stuck around people like that, you see their human side. You see that they behave the exact same way as you under the exact same stress and circumstances. Being isolated like that... you can't not get along with these people – and then you become really good friends.
So [for me] photography explores that.
Photography lets you put away all your pretenses about what people code as – you know, what they want you to think of them: I'm the mean biker, I'm the smart lawyer, I'm the witty comedian, I'm the rock star – all that stuff goes away at least when I'm shooting – and that's interesting because it really gets to a deeper truth about who we are as humans.
So exploring your interest in people pushed you towards photography?
Yeah. I started shooting, then I went home from work one day at the ambulance company in the winterI had extra money so I figured, if I could go to the camera store and buy a darkroom for two hundred bucks, I'd do it. I went that morning [and] I bought a darkroom. I started teaching myself pictures – but not seriously. I didn't think you could do it professionally. I didn't think it was accessible. The people that did it for a living were elves and mythical creatures right?
I'm colorblind, so I only did black and white photography then. I gradua
ted from college, continued to do the ambulance work, continued to do the fire work, went traveling with some of the money I saved from the forest service – really thinking about what I wanted to do.
9/11 happened when I was over in Europe, and it really polarized my politics. I was watching the speeches and the stuff happening back in the U.S., but having a totally different experience of the world than what we were being told to have on the television – that people weren't scary, that people were kind, and even in places like Barcelona, a hugely Muslim city, and people were incredibly kind, and scared, you know? Because nobody knew where we were going to go bomb.
That would've been an odd experience, seeing it from Europe – and seeing how people there were responding to the events.
The day that Bush gave the speech about, "Make no mistake about it, America will be open for business tomorrow," I was in Ireland. Bush gives that speech, but that week Ireland shut down out of respect. Everything in Ireland shut down: pubs, restaurants, grocery stores, clubs. People were lined up around the city block – [around] the place I was staying – to sign a book of condolences. Because everything was shut down, I couldn't find food and there was a guy who was stocking his shelves who invited me in and just handed me food to take back to the place where I was staying... for free.
So America stayed open for business and here's another place that's like, “Out of respect, this is not about business, this is about human beings and we're shut down.” So it was really different. I decided there that… the law was probably the right place for me – a good place to go advocate for the kind of things that I wanted to see happen.
Got back from there and didn't have funding for school. Law school's expensive! So I started applying for scholarships at the University of Denver. I didn't get them the first year I went, so I went back to the forest service to do another year of fire. Went back to the University of Colorado to take some classes while I waited to see if I could get into law school… I got in, [but] I couldn't get the funding... So [I] reapplied for the scholarships, took some classes at CU. The art department wouldn't let me in their classes – I don't know why – but a guy in their photojournalism department did. All I wanted to do was learn how to take color pictures. I sat through ten minutes of his class and was sold. So the doors for photography opened up… and the funding for law school came through then too. I figured that the best choice was to do both.
So when you finished up the education in law, was there a moment where you thought, "Am I supposed to be a lawyer?" When did you decide you wanted to stay on the photography side of things”?
I took a semester off to intern at U.S. News – shooting in the White House and the Capital for them. I kind of knew that I was headed in that direction, but there's a lot of pressure I think internally from people… friends of mine who are practicing lawyers right now. I think they expected that I would follow-through and do law as a profession because I was fortunate enough to get funded to go to school. I figured what the hell, I did all these years of school, I'm going to take the bar exam… but somewhere in studying for the bar exam I listened to an interview. Terry Gross (on NPR) did an interview with one of the guys on the Daily Show [who] went to NYU on a full scholarship to be a lawyer. [After] two years into the program… he decided he was going to be a comedian by literally locking himself in his apartment and thinking, "What if everybody in the whole world shut up and didn't tell me what they wanted or thought I should do. What would I do? I'd be a comedian." In the interview he's like, "I walked into school the next day, I dropped out, I went across the street and started doing stand-up on the open mic and that's how I got started.”
I heard that and thought, all the external pressure that there is, we all really do die someday. If you're living your life for something that's not conscious of that… like I could be a lawyer… but I wouldn't be fulfilled doing that. What good is it? What are you really doing? That interview was pretty much the final push.
One of the things that’s really intriguing about your work is how you not only capture the documentary or photojournalistic moment, but then there’s an artistic aspect to your shots as well. There's a bit of a stylistic thing happening in your work that takes the usual documentary type shot to a more artistic level. Do you think that comes a strong sense of composition developed from starting in black and white? Or do you think being a bit colorblind could be a factor?
Yes. (laughs) I don't know. I think that the answer is strangely inside of law school. I went there with this idea… that the judge or whoever's deciding the law is this big objective thing. That all the subjectivity gets sorted out, and the big objective god does what it's supposed to do. People have this idea of journalism [that] the journalist is this big objective god. I really get tired of talking to journalists that explain that they are objective, because they're full of shit. You can have all the checks and balances that you want, [but] human beings are emotional, irrational creatures that make decisions based on how they feel. (laughs) That's why they do things that are not in their interest, you know? I figured that out in law school, [it] was like I had an agenda – everyone had an agenda, the judges, the professors – they all had an agenda. Incidentally, I saw in law school [their agenda was] very much formed by their background. So race, class, gender, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, general life experience – all that plays into who you are as a person, how you interact with the rest of the world, and in part, how you go about pretending to be objective.
So you think about that inside of pictures now, or inside of journalism. I feel like the most honest form of journalism is where somebody says, "Look I'm a subjective human being, I have the following subjectivities… Here's who I am, take it." In law school, I was writing about stuff I was doing, thinking that you could make a very objective argument to people [and then] getting through law school and realizing that there's no such thing. I am subjective. How does that play into your compositions then? The stuff that you make is – well, there's a thesis, t
here's a point to it all. There's something that I want people to experience from the pictures that's above and beyond this sort of like newspaper-ish idea of, "There was an event here, and here's the dude that was there."
I was just talking to somebody about political shooting the other day. When you see pictures that generally run in the paper – the politician that's appearing in front of that big blue back drop, has a whole PR staff that's in charge of framing, making that picture possible. So the photographer just has to stand there, and they get a nice clean picture of this guy with great light. All they do is sit and wait for him to lift his finger. That's called objective. But really, the subjective actors behind the scene – the guy that's like, "What messaging are we going to put on the boards on the podium behind him? Where's the lighting going to be? How's he going to enter the stage?" All of that stuff – that's the person screwing with your objectivity [as a photographer] and making you pose their subjective points as objective points! (laughs)
So how then, if they're subjective on their end and you're getting duped into pretending to be objective, how do you pull the sheet off of the fake ghost? How do you look at it from the bigger picture? To me, the question of politics is, “What's the production of it? What is it like to actually be there? What's it feel like to be there?” Those pictures should try to communicate that my thesis of politics is that it's produced and how do you show that.
So the artistic nature of your shots comes from owning your own point of view when you’re shooting? Or understanding what you point of view is and then trying to bring that across?
Yea, just realizing that you're part of something that's bigger than the person on the stage. Politics is such a good example because there’s a dance that happens between the press and the people on the other side of that little red rope. Every person is a participant in that, and really is not immune, in my opinion, to being covered.
Now that you're working outside of the political circus and shooting everyday people, do you bring those same sensibilities to communicate what's the reality of the situation or...
Yea, but not objectively. What does it feel like for me to be there? I try not to photograph things that bore me too. Because, what's my picture going to be? It's going to be really boring!
Have you had any assignments that you weren't really excited about, but then in the process of shooting, you got a new respect for?
No. As much as I say I don't shoot things that bore me, I have trouble thinking about what actually bores me. That thing for Time [magazine] was on quiet suburbia, and that doesn't bore me, because how do you communicate suburbia? How do you contextualize that?
Do you think this is all about the frame of mind you're in while shooting? This idea of getting out of your head and being so present that you see beauty in things that you wouldn't necessarily think were beautiful or interesting? Would you say there’s a kind of spiritual aspect that comes into play while shooting?
I don't want to sound religious about it, but it's really hard not to. Here's the thing, in my daily life…. my lawyer head is constantly on and I'm going through the world like, “Alright, how much does this cost per ounce? Am I getting a good deal on this? What's this person actually thinking? What's their real motives?” So, contrast that with photography, all that stuff shuts down. I can take the world at a different value. The camera is about putting brackets around things, and finding beauty in stuff inside of those brackets. There's stuff that's obviously beautiful, like balloons and clowns and stuff like that, almost to the point of cheese, everybody sees that. But it's when you're looking for beauty in places where it isn't obvious, and you find it, you start to see that there's a common plan. That no matter where you look, everything has some sort of sense of beauty. It's in everything. It's common. It unites. It connects you – the big ego that's worrying about how much you're paying per ounce – with everything else – and puts all that in context. Sometimes [when] you put the brackets around something, your head's moving so quick that you don't see it, but once you can shut down and switch that off, I feel like shooting pictures is a practice in the same way that people practice meditation.
That makes sense, because you have to really connect with everything around you...
But you don't connect with it though, because your whole goal is to not be there. To not be. To not be the 6' 7" guy with the camera in your face. It's just to see and not be overt.
Do you pull inspiration from any other art forms outside of photography?
Yea, all of the above! Like music and art. I'm interested in stuff that has emotional charge – and I don't mean like people screaming or stuff like that, I just mean that has a good sense of purpose. I guess I'm weird about intellectual art, sometimes I get it, and I like it, but I see it on a different side of my brain. So if art and art history is a bunch of movements, and each movement is unique for certain traits, the way that you move stuff forward is by not being cliché and not repeating stuff inside of that. Sometimes to push art forward, to break out of whatever mold that that movement is stuck in. Like John Cage would sit at his piano, in total silence. There's a bigger question about that, like, "Is that really music? What is that?" It's breaking out of a mold that's forcing you to put brackets around this whole time period. Here's the ambient noise. Here's your existence. That's what just happened. It just past. It makes sense in an intellectual sense, but did the music do anything? I don't see that on the same side of my brain. The side of my brain that wants that emotional charge, I [don't] give a shit about it because it doesn't have that. The part of my brain that’s analytical is like, "I totally get it. It makes sense." It makes sense in the same way that an argument does.
So you can grasp it intellectually, but it's like you don't feel it? Like it's lifeless or something?
Yea. So now contrast that with Townes Van Zandt. the stuff that he does speaks directly about common experience that's moving, that's beautiful, and that's true. It's true at a very base level. It's not true in this lofty intellectual level – where you wear your black turtleneck and everyone talks about how smart they are – it's true at a level that everybody gets. It's common. A bigger common thing, that the other side of my brain gets. I don't know, I don't want to put value on either one.
Do you do much post or retouching? What are you're thoughts about how much to affect your images?
I can't see half the colors in the pictures. I like dark in a photograph, so I'll set a black level, I'll set a contrast level, if there's an exposure problem I'll change that, but usually I don't touch much more than that. In part, because sometimes there are color-casts and things that happen that I don't see.
Is that mostly blues and greens?
I see green. I see one color of green properly and I've gathered everything else is not right...
Do reds get into that to?
I'm sure they do, but green's my favorite color, and it happens to be the one particular shade of green that I see. I hate fall because there's no [color] everything just goes flat. I think that's part of the reason I hate it, because I don't experience it in the same way. But spring and summer, a green time... I can't stand this fall. It drives me nuts.
How do you see things progressing because of the internet? Either in photojournalism or photography overall?
Sorry, I'm listening to you. I'm just looking at that (motions out the window). They took the giant race dog off the top of that thing. I got in trouble for trespassing there a while ago. Not with the police, just some guy [who yelled], "What are you doing!" [I’m like,] “Wondering around your dog track. The fence is cut wide open, I couldn't tell by the other four hundred yards of chain link that I wasn't supposed to come in here!” (laughs)
Have you had any other experiences with people getting weird about you just walking around taking pictures?
Some guy punched me downtown, [when I was] photographing around a building. I didn't know that was coming. He was just being a jerk.
Just a regular office building downtown?
Yea, he was the maintenance guy there. When he was yelling at me, I blew him off, but I should've just been very forceful back at him and let him know that it's not appropriate to come up to me on the street and yell and scream and be in my face. When somebody's like that I want them to feel like they're risking something – even if it's not true, even if I'm scared of the other person – you're risking something by being that way.
You know when somebody's comfortable with you there. You know when they're not. The only time that I really get wigged out about that is, when somebody's a real sociopath. That's from the ambulance world too though. You get a feeling really quick. You get a baseline read on somebody in ten seconds. How they carry themselves, what their body language is, what their tone of voice is, the expression on their face, how they talk to other people, their posture, what they're doing with their eyes – in those first few second [they] let you know what they’re thinking. When people are violent they tell you five minutes before they're going to hit you without ever saying a word. So you just know.
When shooting pictures, [if] somebody is coding that way you have a few choices: you can leave, or you can be a big enough threat that they think different. I find that being very quiet and very direct back at somebody is a really good counter to that.
What do you think about the way the internet is changing the business of photography? Clients want to pay less, editorial rates are dropping...
Well how many days [you can shoot] are dropping. It's like, "Can you shoot fifteen things in one day? Can we just give you one day rate but have you do what should take half a month?"
Right. Well a lot of that is an effect of falling ad budgets, content being cheaper to produce (or at least in the minds of clients), delivery systems being more-or-less instantaneous...
A friend of mine was talking about this idea of institutional permanence the other day; that even when an institution becomes irrelevant in their initial function, [like the] March of Dimes, you cannot get rid of that institution, they change. But inside of those institutions there's a lot of very concrete thinking. eBay and Craigslist – everyone knew about the potential for those types of organizations to undermine advertising and classifieds. They knew about [them] in the mid nineties and they all just sat there. Because, to me, the institution is inflexible and it doesn't see that it's time to move a little bit in one way or another.
Like we're the giants, we're not really threatened.
Yeah, like watching that Charlie Rose interview with Mort Zuckerman last year. His response to all this is to get more efficient printing presses. (laughs) That's like Marie Antoinette right? Like, "Let them eat cake!" It doesn't even show any consciousness of what the real underlying issue is – which is a new generation has figured out how to get their information differently.
You have the Electronic Frontier Foundation, those folks think that all information should be free information in its raw sense, in fact, and numbers – like the idea that two plus two equals four – the concept of that [should be] free, but then when you extend it into all of these things where the people who are producing it – how are they producing that work? Not like, "Information should be free goddammit. You made a really great picture, now go back to your normal life!" or "go back to your day job!" Because it's a really arrogant thing for them to say. It calls into question what the new way to bill and to work is.
I know you’ve done some work with a Polaroid… Did you kind of go through a phase where you experimented with any other cameras/formats?
Sure. A Polaroid costs me ten dollars, so that's part of it. It's not a thirteen thousand dollar new camera! It's sort of this idea of scarcity. If your options are very limited, what can you really do with it? It forces you to push your boundaries a little bit more. The Polaroid is neat, because it costs more than a dollar per picture to make. So when you press that button, it's like "there's a dollar!" You think about it differently. It forces you to pay more attention to what you're doing. In digital – the cost – you don't notice it when you're doing it.
I've come across that idea reading about other photographers – mostly film guys. A lot of them say – and this is one of their arguments for shooting film – that you have to be very mindful of what you're shooting and make sure, when you hit that shutter, that you have a good shot and you're not just taking anything. It seems to be one of their big criticisms about the newer generation of digital photographers.
That's fair to some extent. But, I think it's not about the camera, it's about the personality. If you listen to a press conference – when there's lots of photographers around and listen to the motor-drives – like listen to somebody take forty pictures in a span of five seconds. For what? What is that about? It's like somebody hot rodding their Challenger or something! I mean, you see the photographers with all these things, the photo vest and sixteen lenses hanging off of them, two, three, four cameras. I get it if you're really mindful and you have a project and you're focused on how you're approaching it on the one hand, on the other hand it's like those machine gunners – watching those guys versus the sniper guy. The sniper guy is one bullet, and the machine gunners have a million. Sniper guy will hit it every time, because he concentrates and he focuses on what he's after. The machine gunner's just – they're playing the odds. You know they both can work. So it's about personality.
How did your Diving Bell series come about?
I shot that series while driving through Wyoming on a different assignment for Mother Jones. There's a blurb at the front of the gallery that explains how it came about as I laid back to sleep in the rental car I was driving in. I wanted to get more days out of the trip so I turned the car into my bed each night and used those port hole windows to focus on iconography of Wyoming.
How do you think the series challenged you? Intellectually? Emotionally?
I don't know that making the photographs was really an intellectual or an emotional challenge as much as it was a really focused way give the viewer a very pointed sense of place. So the biggest challenge of the project was just a matter of driving around and having an idea that you're really trying to convey on the backburner the whole time so that when you pass by whatever it is that illustrates it, you stop. I guess, in that regard, stopping the car when you're traveling from point A to point B was the biggest challenge.
That series was recently exhibited right?
Yea. It appeared at a fundraising show in New York. One of the images, that's it. I haven't approached a lot of galleries about the work. It's on the list, but it's not high on the list. There's only so many hours in the day!
That’s a whole other aspect to things right? The fine art aspect or photography?
Yeah. Figuring out each subset of people that are into photography or into it for different reasons. There's the personality traits that prevail in each one that takes some figuring out. Figuring out what actually is going to move them.
I hear a lot of photographers talk about needing an audience, and really–this is just my approach – if the audience happens to find me, that's fine. If it doesn't then the picture's still important. The picture's important [even if] nobody sees it.
So are you talking about doing the work for yourself versus doing it for an audience or for popularity?
Yeah. I mean you can imitate everybody and that's an easy way to get an audience right? But that's not pure. In the long run, purity is what counts. In the short run, think about the aesthetic right now, bright white, blown out, everything's fill – hyper realistic photography. When you do that fill stuff, there's no real shadow in your picture, it's like a drawing. It's an aesthetic that you can imitate, and it's an aesthetic that has people hiring for – especially commercially– but is that going to define you in twenty years? Like it's not really your style. It's not really anybody's style. It's just a taste. It's like the whole reason why people chose certain colors in the fifties, or in the seventies. The reason why people listened to 3 Doors Down in the nineties. Why? (laughs)
What? You weren't a 3 Doors Down fan?
No... (laughs)
Were you a fan of any of the hair bands in the early nineties?
I mean there's something to all of it right? There's something that you could figure out that's appealing and nice about all of it. Even 3 Doors Down. Just think about it in a five hundred year range. Like who cares about bad art in five hundred years? It gives a footnote that talks about what was going on – like here's a cultural baseline – here's as low as it could've got! (laughs)
It’s interesting because our current theme is "Fantasy vs. Reality" and in a way, you seem to be touching on the fantasy and reality aspects of photography – the business vs. the art. So focusing on the trend is the fantasy or illusion aspect, and the reality of photography as an art, is more about having a personal vision?
Think about the impact of abstract expressionism right? Well the reason it was important was because it took the existing mold and took it a step forward. That's the left-brain thing about why abstract expressionism works – it moved the aesthetic forward, it broke out of a traditional mold. It's valuable in that sense. You can imitate Kandinsky, that doesn't mean it's fucking good! It just means that you were successful in copying something that had been done, but you don't understand your own place in the trajectory or art. It's been done, so what?
How have you been finding your way in those terms? Does it come from experimentation? Practicing a lot? What has helped you the most in that regard?
I don't know, because the answer to that is like...
The answer to everything? (laughs)
Yea... Well and it's also where I dip into saying a bunch of shit about my own stuff that I don't know is true or not! I don't have an answer to that, but I'm conscious of it. I'm just trying to figure out a new way to approach stuff, and I feel photography is young enough [that] it's easier to figure out what is a new approach than say a medium that's been around for a millennia.
So how do you see yourself progressing from here?
My goal is to be creative (laughs)… and how I fund that is another question.
View more of Matt Slaby's work here
.jpg "Ryan Riss | November 4 - October 28, 2011")
