Season 1
4. Artist in Residence, Susan Patrice
Transcript
Luca: Susan is a documentary and contemplative photographer. Her photography and public installations focus on the Appalachian landscape and its people, and feature intimate images that touch deeply into questions of place and belonging. Since 2016, her work has primarily explored the nature of visual perception and its impact on her feelings of kinship with the natural world. She engages in intimate, gestural conversations with the land through the use of hand-built cameras designed in response to place. She lives in Marshall, North Carolina, where she is the director of Makers Circle and a co-founder of the Kinship Photography Collective. Susan was chosen as the September Artist and will be in the park from September 9th through 30th. Susan, thank you so much for being with us. Susan: Thank you all. Tom: Yeah, thank you so much. So my name is Tom and I work in the media department, and this is our fourth podcast. We're here with Luca as well. Luca. Luca: Hello? It's me. Luca. Media Intern. Tom: Yes. Welcome back. yeah. Again, thank you for joining us. I'm Susan. We've been really excited about this conversation in particular. Not that we don't love our other artists here, but Luca is probably close to, mine and Luca's hearts because we work so much in visual media and photography and videography, and we are very excited to learn about your, interpretation of photography in the park. So I say we get right into it and, start talking about photos. Luca: Yeah. well, on our drive up here to Loft Mountain Campground, Tom and I couldn't help notice that the entire national park is shrouded in thick, thick fog right now. There's a little bit of danger to that when you're out driving, but there's also, beauty to that, especially with all the fall colors. And as we're sitting here right now on this patio, we just see all the fog kind of in the background. Susan, do you wanna talk a little bit about how the weather has maybe impacted some of your work and just your thoughts and feelings about fog? Susan: I have been loving this weather. So normally I photograph in early morning and late evening. I build cameras that actually photograph round. There's a long story about how I came to do that work in that very particular way. But within that frame, that round frame, I'm usually looking at these very intimate, entangled relationships between their the kind of their own little ecosystems in a way. Right. And so because the work is already really complex, if you add a really contrasty light or you add these other elements of you know what I’m saying, so there's something about the fog or late afternoon, early evening. There's this way in the morning, you almost feel the light start to emerge out of the subject. And then in the late afternoon, there's this way that light kind of clings, right? It almost holds. And I love I love that quality. There's a kind of intimacy of the light in contact with the subject. So if we think about a tree, at those times a day, there's the way that you can still feel almost the light wrap around it, or sit kind of softly on the surface of the leaves. And especially in these kind of foggy environments, when the light is really bright, it can be hard to track those very subtle changes that can arise. when you're intimate with a place. And so, yeah, I've been loving the weather. It's funny because you're right at this edge. You want it to be foggy, but you don't want it to be getting your camera wet. Tom: Don't wanna be engulfed in the fog. Susan: You know, so you're, like, trying. I'm always, like, walking out there. And because there's mist, which is going to be wet, but then there's rain, right? And so, Yeah. So it's been, it's been fascinating also just to see it in, in different, different times a day and yeah, the weather's been this is my favorite weather, so, I'm thrilled about it. This other thing I want to say about light as photographers, like light, is our medium. Like, that is what we do, right? We work with light at the end of Einstein's life, that one of the things he lamented is that while he understood the deeds and properties of light, that we're no closer to really understanding the mystery of what light is. And in essence, we only know light by what it touches. So I love, I love that. I love that, and I think of that similarly around the role that art plays or even the best of us in the world, we're made known by what we touch, by what we illuminate, by what we, you know, our seeing, our awareness, our consciousness is the way our light touches, right touches the world. And so now whenever I see light, there's a way that it it feels tender. It feels intimate. Right. So you're actually seeing the objects that you're photographing. You're actually seeing it's response to light. So it's already a conversation. The light is in conversation with the subject. And that conversation in that tone of that can change radically from minute to minute. But and so it's easy to see right in the mornings or whatever when things are contrasty and really dramatic. And I think you I think you're talking about that a little bit, this idea that we're supposed to we're always looking for that great shot, that really special moment that, you know, Tom Rankin, who is the former director of the center for Documentary Studies, says that most photographers think their next great photograph is a plane ride away. Right. The next big trip. Right. But I think for those of us that practice in nature start to realize that the next great photograph is the next walk away. It's the next inch away. And the more intimate we become with the place, the more we know it. And we know that about portraiture, right? That we have to be in conversation with our subject. We need to have a feel for who they are and what they offer. And, it's hard to condition people out of this, what we call kind of camera club ready, camera club consciousness, where there's like the ten great photographs and re-engineer that so that really the camera is a tool for connection. And it's a way of another way of listening in a way. And it's hard to think about a site based medium as being a form of listening. But, I think there is visual listening, like really watching. Right? So I think as photographers, we have this really, really unique relationship because, I also work in other media and I can go and have an experience, but as a poet, I might go back and interpret that experience. But photography offers one really unique thing, which is we make our work in in relationship to matter. Like the world has to be there. Yeah. Unless you're I mean, there's Luca: Ways you can stage. Susan: I'm using photography in a very like wide and generic sense, but the work that we do through the Kinship Photography Collective, and then I do when I teach, in which we'll do a wonder walk, for the arts in the park. That'll be really great is kind of re-engineering that, shifting that relationship, kind of flipping it over. What if the camera is a tool for intimacy? And what if the climate crisis is actually just a crisis of intimacy? What if the more we pay attention, then there's something and y'all know it, right? In photographing, there is an emotion. There is a feeling akin to love. Luca: Yeah, yeah. Susan: That emerges through our quality of attention. And attention becomes care. Care becomes action. I think it's a much better path than the path that we've been trying, and I think failing at in a lot of ways, which is to scare people. Yeah, guilt people. And shame people. And I think we need to be guilted and shamed. I think we humans have done a lot of damage. But I do think love is a straighter path. Yeah. and what we notice when we teach and we iPhone users, whoever, when we say what happens if this becomes a tool for curiosity and wonder what happens if we come in with the kind of curiosity that includes humility and decenter? You know, we're human centric, so let's decenter the human and what does it mean to start listening to the land and get curious about what the land's experience might be? And so that sort of the, that's sort of the, the, the path in, in terms of how we, how we teach and how we, how we do our own work or the collective that I'm in. Most of us work and think that way. Yeah. Tom: So there's a huge emotional connection between not only you and your environment, but your camera and the environment as well. So you have to really you said earlier, you can't just take a plane ride to somewhere for a day or two and capture an amazing shot. You have to become engulfed, intimate with your environment as well, so you can know it, feel it, and then you can show it in the end. Susan: Yeah. Luca: And I feel like that is like especially true when you're talking about nature photography or wildlife photography. You know, you brought up portraiture and how, you know, you kind of have to have this relationship with your subject that you're photographing because, you know, you can have the best camera or the best composition in the world. But if the person you're photographing doesn't feel comfortable and they just kind of look awkward, you're not going to get the greatest photo and just kind of what you're saying. Also about visual listening, just so many kind of things are going off of my head, especially as a bird and wildlife photographer, you have to literally listen, in order to hear the bird calls, in order to identify what bird or where the bird is at, and you have to be familiar with the bird, you have to know if, oh, is this the bird that hops around on the ground? Or is this the bird that's going to go from tree to tree to tree, or just the bird that's going to sit in one spot and then call and then go to the other spot. And you really have to become familiar with them. And in one sense, kind of part of your duty as a nature photographer is you need to have this relationship, but there needs to be a healthy distance, obviously, between you don't want to get too close to the bird's nest, you don't want to disturb its natural. you know, the goal of me as a bird photographer, I want the birds to not even know I'm there so they can just go and do their thing, and I can get the shot that really showcases their true natural behavior. So you have to have this deep relationship. But sometimes, especially in a natural world context, that relationship has to kind of have this respectful distance. And I feel like that really comes from not only loving the process, but, you know, I love the birds, so I don't want to mess up their natural way of life. Susan: The care, the care that emerges in that space. Yeah. My process, a couple things I want to respond to that you said. One, back to the camera. I mean, I think we often that we forget that there is there is a triad in photography, right. It's self other. And then we do have equipment that we're mediating this conversation through. There's a medium through which this conversation happens. And so I do think whatever materials people choose to work with, whether it's their iPhone, there is a way of getting to know and resonating with the equipment. Right. And the other thing is how coercive I like the even the language of photography has some violence in it, right? Taking shooting. Right. And so what we often see is that people come in with an agenda, I'm coming for the weekend. I'm going to get a waterfall, I'm going to get a vista, I'm going to get this bird. I'm going to get whatever. And it it has this kind of like linear trajectory that you're the world is supposed to deliver up for you, right? Tom: Take a list of chores you have to do. Susan: Right. And then I've got this lens and I've got this thing and it's all there in service to me. Service to my photograph. Right. And like, that's part of the practice of not having like in a way it's another extractive relationship. Not as bad as sound extractive relationships, but still extractive. But even what we notice is even if people start in that kind of extractive way, the love still happens. if they're if they're open to it, if they're if they're curious, if they're, if they're willing for that to kind of unfold. And what we notice is that when we really slow down and let this power of beauty have its way with us, it also contains something of a quality of love and wholeness, and that people feel incredibly nourished by beauty. And we equate beauty often with pretty. So we make this mistake of like, oh, I'm going to go see the perfect pretty waterfall. But in the end, that that beauty, once we start to learn to see it and respond to it, that it's like it doesn't always happen for me. Like I can go out and I'm kind of photographing and can feel very forced. My first week here was like a very forced week, and I'm trying to get to know the place and I'm like, somebody gave me a residency and I better produce some decent photographs and just all on top of myself. And then also annoyed, annoyed with the camera, annoyed with the tree, enjoying it. Like you can feel what that creates. Then there's a way after the letting go, the photography feels a little bit like the open hand. And when we start to resonate with the qualities of our medium, what we really have is a medium of sensitivity, a medium of openness, right of medium rooted in time and multiple kinds of time. And so now the way I try to describe it to our students is that you come in, you've got this moment where you can really just observe, get really curious. Sometimes I'll even ask questions and they're they're anthropomorphized questions, right? They're human centered questions. But the question of I wonder what wants to be seen today? I wonder what it kind of, Robin Wall Kimmerer, who wrote the book Braiding Sweetgrass. She had this question that she asked her students and and on one hand, the question can seem very human, egocentric, and on another hand, if you think about it. So she asks her students, do you think the earth loves you back? So on one hand it's like, oh, we're only going to love something that can love us back, which is kind of egocentric, right? Right. But it's really if you get the magic of the question in the way she asks it to ask, does the Earth love you back implies an agency on the part of the Earth, right? So to ask that question is to radically change the conversation. Oh, is a relationship possible? So the work that I do, which is a stretch, I think, for some people to think about it this way, I think about it in terms of a collaborative, like, I feel like what I do is collaboratives near Asheville. So in the Appalachians, I photograph the same three square miles. Originally it was just going to do one year, every single day, no matter what, no matter what was there, showed up. And that did get extended to three years. But, I kept everyday asking, I wonder how I wonder what wants to be seen today? I wonder how it wants to be seen. Like how what would need to change in me? And then I talk to indigenous. I talk to scientists. Now, I discovered Arthur Zajonc and, plant spirit medicine people like, I was talking to everybody and I was like, if you are going to have a conversation, how do you prepare? Like how do you prepare yourself what's really possible? And some of the advice that I got, one of the most interesting was from a botanist who said, well, you know that photosynthesis and light like you already have a medium, so you have a medium of light. I would focus on that as the primary language of your conversation and see what happens. Then I talk to this other person, this amazing herbalist actually from this area, Kathleen Meyer, and she teaches this practice called Expanding Peripheral Vision. And it's a lot to do with the fact that we're very tight in our eyes, and we look at screens and we're very we're just we're very tight. And what does it mean to start to relax the eyes and to, you know, expand peripheral vision. And Kathleen's amazing. She's amazing teacher. She won't tell you what to expect. And then I was working with this man, Warren Grossman, who wrote a book To Be Healed by the Earth. And he also is, a somatic, practitioner. He's a amazing psychotherapist that uses all of these wonderful kind of physical practices grounding, listening, all these expanded. So when I was working with Kathleen and Warren, what happened was as I was going out and asking these questions, you know, like, how can I get more attuned to this place? I was doing this expanding peripheral vision. And the most bizarre thing happened is as a photographer, I'm in the outside of the world looking at it right here's me, here's the world. And even no matter how much I was doing that, I'm still an outsider. I'm looking at nature. I'm not necessarily a part of nature. I was, you know, was I had a. Slow road home, basically, to. Say that and what would happen is my peripheral vision would start to expand. Something really strange happened in my sensation of being in the place. So instead of being on the outside looking in, I suddenly it shifted that I was in the center of an enveloping landscape that I was also a part of, and this sense of separation completely disappeared. And you can't hold that for very long, like your body's so geared. Right? So my vision would snap back in, and then as soon as it would, I could feel myself pull back out to the outside. I was like, whoa, what just happened? And then I would do it again. And it would be like, it would be like the world's kind of linear this way. And then I would get inside of it. It would just almost start to turn. And then the more I practiced that, it took a while. And particularly people who have had trauma or high stress, their vision is even more constricted. So then you think about trauma, traumas, often this feeling of being outside, right? You don't feel, you don't feel like you belong. Sometimes it's part of that thing. So as it started to soften and widen and soften and widen, all of a sudden I had this strange feeling of almost like a pop. And then I realized, of course I. Should know this. Because I work with lenses. All lenses see round, right? So our eyes are lenses if we really relax and now I have a hard time, like I have to practice pulling it in. But if you relax your vision and just notice, you're actually always seeing round. But we're trained in linearity. We're trained to see everything. You know, windows square like everything, right, as it were. And so we forget that the natural way of seeing is round, and that cycles around like you kind of return back to this, the sense of the circle. So I hand build cameras once that happened as like, okay, I see the world differently now. How can I construct a camera that gets closer to the way I see? And I didn't want it to be fisheye, because that's a kind of weird distortion. So I when I say I build cameras, I take lenses from one camera and back from another camera and bodies from another, and kind of Frankenstein them together so that they can, so that they function together. So when we think about a lens, it captures round, but the sensor, the film is a small part of that space. So to build these cameras, it's the opposite. The film has to be larger than the image circle area of the lens. And then like you can see they create basically circles like on the film. You're getting the actual full circle of the film. and so what you notice in the images is that there's, it's round, certainly. Right. But there's also a little bit of a feeling of a curve because I use lenses that are older lenses. So they, they're not perfect. Right. Because you could get really lenses that are almost perfect from the center to the edge, but they fall off. And it's true of eyesight too. It falls off at the edges and these are cleaned up. Of course we come in because if you look at the negative like those circles aren't that tidy. Yeah, they bleed off into the thing, particularly where there's light area. But that circle. Luca: As you're holding up those negative almost looks like. Susan: Eyeballs. Luca: Like eyeballs. But it looks like petri dishes. Susan: Love that. Luca: Yeah, yeah. Susan: Okay. I want the picture. Luca: Your own little ecosystem there. Susan: And that you just. You hit it exactly on. So why, what is circle matter? I think there's when you when I think it, I think about beauty. And this comes from studies of the contemplative. A lot of people don't know that the contemplative writer Thomas Merton was also a photographer. When you look at Thomas's writings, there's a point that photography came in and you can look at his contemplative, and certainly he's saying a lot of the same things, but then he starts photographing. And I swear that I can see in what he wrote later, after being a photographer, it wasn't that big of a portion of his life that he started writing about this thing called a hidden wholeness. And anyone who's photographed knows it, they know that experience you're looking through, and it's not like we get to construct the world. I mean, you can if you're making still lifes or whatever, but, we're, speaking about photography in nature, and even as a documentary photographer photographing people. But let's just take nature. So you're looking and there's this way that you're just moving and you can feel it like you feel it in your body, right? And then all of a sudden there's this, like, what is that? What is that? That knows that. That's right. That's whole. That's beautiful. Right. And it can be so subtle just like tilt and all the sudden. And he calls that a hidden wholeness. There's a kind of resonant, yes, in beauty that, that when we know it, when it hits us. Right. Because you can come off of a day of photographing in that way, and you feel so nourished, so alive in, there's a there's a kind of reciprocal radiance that can kind of come back, like, I'm always at my best, and you feel like why do you. Look like, and I'm like, I’ve been out photographing. When you're when you're in your stride, right? When you're when you're able to really be resonant in that way. And, so that's what started the round work. And then within that, there was something like you said about the petri dish that it became this kind of ecosystem and this, this kind of intricacy of the of what? Of what's in relationship to what else. And I feel like my ability to hold complexity now is considerably more, you know, because before it's kind of like singular. There's a leaf and maybe there's the spider web. Right. But, the awareness that I'm starting to have of profoundly different time scales, which is what attracted me to come here, is there's the more I think about the time scales inherent in our practice. And it started because I was at Rocky Fork State Park and there was a tree over rock, right. Which is pretty common thing. Right? Tree grows around the thing. I was thinking, wow, that's an intimate relationship. Like that tree and the rock and what it's getting. And I was like. Or for the tree, actually, because the tree's time relationship to the rock is so significantly different than the Rock's time relationship to the tree for the rock, the tree is a mosquito landing and taking off, right? Right. Yeah. To the tree. It's all it's ever going to know. And then I got really obsessed with it. So I would create these photographs and I can show you some of them later and, send them out and I'm going to leave some for y'all when I do the workshop. and I would ask people who look at the world very differently, whether you're a botanist or maybe you're a poet, or maybe you're a, geologist, to annotate the photographs, because I was just really interested. What do you what do you notice in these relationships? So one person was like, they tracked weather they were super interested in weather and they could see a drip coming off of the trees. They knew it slightly raining in there like that raindrop has been recycling probably that particular for like a million years. That drop spends maybe can be 20 minutes to like 12 hours before it evaporates, right? Literally. I can probably tell the time scale wrong, but it was more like have 2.5 billion years. I have a tree that's 70 years old. I knew nothing about the lichen. Like, what's the time scale of this lichen? And then there's a fern. Is it perennial? Like, my brain just got really obsessed with the fact that every piece of time that I would understand was always human time. What does it mean in relationship to me? So when this residency became available, I was working with a geologist there, and he's like, you should apply for the Shenandoah National Park. Because you are talking about some time scales. Tom: Billions of years, just bonkers. Luca: Yeah. Susan: Yeah, yeah. So my mind, I've been trying like, it's very slow, to think about deep time in that way and to really wrap my mind around. Tom: Right. And as a photographer, you get an opportunity to kind of freeze time in a way. And then in that infinite time scale, you're just a little blip. And that little spot that you took that photo is even a smaller blip in that blip, and you get to have the experience to show it to people, and they get to interpret it as anyway they want. Susan: It is weird, isn't it? The Greeks have two words for time that I think photography plays with both. Right. So there's Chronos, which is chronological time. It's that thing you just talked about, and it's what we think of with photography, right? This, this like immediate slice of time and then Kairos time is what's considered timeless time, right. So we can see sometimes photographs have that bit of mystery, that bit of magic. Right. Love is kind of timeless, right? It's indelible in a way. so there's I've been I've been just curious about it. And one of two people, Kate Savage and Eric William Carroll, two amazing photographers who are part of our collective. They asked this question of like, if the planet's been keeping chronological time for. Over millennia, and photography photographs in this little like slice of time, are there ways we can use photography to expand our sense of time? Right? Like, is it or are we kind of stuck in our medium with these time slices? And, so I, I've been thinking a lot about time fullness and then timelessness and beauty has that to it, doesn't it? Do you know that thing where you just are like, so struck by something? There's like, not to be morbid, but there's a little almost that feeling like I could die right now. Like feel so whole. Tom: Like my life is complete. Susan: Complete. This is a great way to say it. And I think photography can touch that. I think it can touch that wholeness, and get into that kind of kairos, timeless time and date. Luca: Because in a way, it's like photography. It's such a small fraction of a time. I mean, the longest most cameras can capture is like 30 seconds, which even that, compared to just a day or a year, is such a small fraction of time. But there's something about and this kind of also ties into the kind of the wide vision versus like the narrow vision, you kind of have to have that wide look to see a whole scene, but then maybe narrow down into one particular part of the scene. Yeah. And that one moment of time, somehow just one small fraction of time when you can really sit and focus and enjoy that, that gives you this timeless appreciation for the whole kind of concepts or the whole place that that one small little part of one scene at one point of time represents. So in a way, just a small fraction of time transcends its small fraction and just becomes like what you're saying, the whole fullness of everything. Tom: You talked about gestural, gestural photography. Yeah. How do you show that with, we're talking a lot about time, but how do you show the gestures of objects that don't move? Like we were talking with the subject, you could know your subject and pose them in a different way. And to show emotion or drama. How do you do that with trees or. Yeah, rocks or, waterfalls. Susan: Yeah. You know, and I think what's really fascinating when we, when we work with new students and we work with students all the time, often there is a kind of you'll start to see over time, certain qualities, movement, whatever compositions that resonate for them. So one of the hardest things we have to teach with folks is to get them physically moving again, like your body moves. We think that this thing photography is almost like eye level. I don’t even have feet. Pointing down, pointing up, pointing sideways and then getting people back in to the fact that they're in order to connect to an animate world, you need to be able to be in your body again. And and part of that is, is understanding how you animate your own physical. Right. So when we look at kind of gesture, we could also just call that movement. Or we could call that, and I tend to be really attracted to these very subtle things, you know. So we have this big rock pile and we think, oh, this photograph is about the rock pile, but what it might really be about for somebody is this really tender little way that these twigs are this little bit of life is kind of reaching out from the rock. Once people actually get into that rhythm of just responding to what speaks to their heart, there's the photographs are just in in them. You feel them in them. You know, it's, And I don't like to say that at first in our teaching, because if you say you're in them, then it goes back into this egocentric thing of like, every photograph is a reflection of me. Luca: I think there's something really beautiful about being able to see someone in their photographs, you know, kind of besides the egocentric angle of it. There is that relationship where, you know, especially in this kind of nature context, that tree would be existing in the same way it would be whether or not I was here photographing it or not. But I think it kind of also has this sort of humbling effect to know when you see a photo, you know, someone was there to take it. And part of that is also knowing that it's what they saw as themselves and their perspective on what they wanted to take it at. So, you know, even though as photographers, it's literally the reality that you're capturing and putting onto your film or onto your sensor, but it's that person's specific reality. So it's also kind of this reminder that the photograph is telling their story and not the entire story. Susan: I love what you're saying. I really love that, because I do think one of the practices we do when we think people are too, they're too worried about losing their style. But what I do like to remind people of, as humans, we are we've been very, conditioned. We miss a lot. So when I say be, you, be you at your most expansive self, in addition to what I do, here, I am, I do a lot of curation. I do a lot of exhibition curation of other people's work and particularly love this thing. When you put out a question into a community and then ask everybody to kind of explore that question together, that's what we do at kinship. And when you get in a group of people asking a similar question, it gets in. The question sits in the center right. Then you don't have to do the whole thing. You just need to take your seat. Like, what's your story to tell? What's your unique perspective on this thing? Leave it to the group to weave the whole. And so exhibitions become a way that it becomes almost like a chorus, like you're part of the answer to that question is going to have this amazing relationship to somebody else's part, and, so exhibitions and books and things like that. Luca: Tying that into what we were talking about at the very beginning, talking about ecosystem and the climate crisis and solving that with love. I think a lot of times people feel so overwhelmed by, you know, problems with the environment and they feel so removed. They feel like I'm here and the environment is out there and everything I'm doing is just destroying everything out there. But kind of tying in what you're saying right now, we are part of the ecosystem, you know, in good and in bad ways. Yeah. And it's not up to just Tom or just Luca to, you know, solve everything. And you can just kind of think of the whole world as this big exhibition. And maybe what you do best is you go out there with your crazy Frankenstein cameras, and you capture the gestures of the trees in some way that moves somebody who knows this scientists and this whole chain, just like how the whole ecosystem is connected. And, you know, it's not up to just, you know, the eastern phoebes to keep everything in check. They play their part and they're really good at what they do. And, you know, it's not just up to you to solve all the world's problems. Like, just do. Susan: You feel overwhelmed? Yeah. Luca: Right. And when you feel overwhelmed, you can't put the love in it that it really needs. Tom: We're all one piece of the puzzle. And so we are in the ecosystem in that way. Susan: Exactly. And you know, the thing I like to remember is that overwhelm is a quality of trauma. Right? So we whatever. But one of the outgrowths of that is what we call immobility. You're frozen. And I do think something is happening where people are getting more and more afraid. And we wanted that fear to motivate people. But we forget that fear can also create immobility. So we're using fear to hope we're going to generate agency. And I don't know I don't know that it's having the effect that we want it to. Right. And that when we don't feel a part of that thing of that web of community that y'all are both describing, how is it for you here at the park? Like because you each have your role, do you get to feel the kind of chorus of of like that, the camaraderie, but also like, do you do y'all ever get to really feel the whole picture? Do you do you ever get all in the same room or. Tom: Oh, I don't think we've ever been all in the same room. Yeah, if if so, it's very rare. But we get to meet people individually and we kind of get to tell their small part of the story of the whole picture. Susan: And then you can sort of piece together. Tom: Yeah, not even that. We put them up. or we just show them individually and then other people can make their own interpretation out of it. So we could, tell the story of a botanist or, an ecologist, anybody, the plant crew, the trails crew, the media team, search and rescue, interpretation, education, everybody in the park. I'm sorry if I'm missing anybody but anybody in the park. Everybody comes together to make the whole thing happen here. And I think if we lost one group of people, then the whole ship would go down. Susan: Like we were down at Dickey [Ride Visitor Center]. We were like, calls are coming in like lady broke her ankle you know. Yeah, like, wow. You probably get 20 of those a day you know, like deer in the road. I mean, there's just. Oh, yeah. Tom: Yeah. it's something different every day. And that's kind of the. Susan: I'd love that. Tom: The, the, I don't wanna say beauty because someone breaking their ankles isn’t beautiful, but that kind of the you know what I mean. Yeah. What makes everything ever changing? Kind of. Maybe the whole. That's kind of what makes our job gestural, in a way you know. Susan: Like, what is a gestural I mean I appreciate your question about the gestural. But I do think I use that word more because there is a way that I think we can forget that everything is moving, like all the time. Like we forget that things can feel very calcified right into me. Luca: Gesture like movement versus gesture. Gesture feels a lot more like it has more like personality and more intentionality to it. Like, yeah, the tree moves when it blows in the wind, but the way that the tree gestures, its branch that has been growing for 20 years is like, oh, it's literally reaching up towards the sun so we can get meaning. Yeah. Susan: I've still been looking for a better word because people get very spooked. They either really like the kind of overly spiritualized language about it, right, which misses that light and matter part of it, you know, which is the part that fascinates me the most. It's that there is light in matter that I think, at least right now, I think that response to the quality of how we show up. Luca: And I think photography is very interesting media medium, because it kind of forces you to compromise between the kind of technical aspect of things, the reality that's out there in the world, but then also how you kind of can introduce a little bit of mystery to it and a little bit of, you know, there's a way to shoot a photo of a tree where it's like, okay, this is a really good, simple, scientific good photo of this tree. You can see the structure, and there's another way to do it that shows the gesture, that shows the artfulness. yeah. Of it. And so yeah, I think photography. Yeah, it kind of forces you to do that interesting compromise. And just what you're saying, how do you merge the kind of scientific aspect of, you know, the environment and the spiritual aspect of it, to way and nothing is going to reach all people, but in a way that's compelling to a lot of people. Susan: Yeah. And I think photography is a way of pointing, without naming, like, I do think there's a way that we think we name a thing, we know it. And so then there's just like every oak tree is an oak by every oak tree is so profoundly different. And then I think there's something in science that got to this point to name it, is to know it. And I don't think names can. Right. They can be. But, showing up every day, just that practice of showing up every day to and letting it be fresh. Right. It's a, it's a, it's a hard it's a, it's a beautiful practice, but it's a hard practice. And it's not that hard. It's not as hard in the natural world as it is with people. Like we think we know a person. We have a story about a person, and people tend to not be. I mean, we change and surface change. It's like we're in a good mood today, bad mood tomorrow, whatever. But then when I learned that we're more not us than us, and that, like our microbes, can determine our mood, our cravings, our desires, like that, that starts to really tear at that kind of fundamental fabric of identity. And then we're more like, we're more lichen then we're then, you know, we're more. So I like just I like being disoriented in that a little bit. I think it helps. I think it helps with art to allow some disorientation. Luca: Yeah. I think one of my favorite things about like, especially macro photography is that so much of like just naturally occurring things in the forest look so bizarre and so alien. And how can you capture something and make it appear like it's just so. Yeah, just disorienting. It's not from here. Even though in a way that weird, like fungus growing around is a lot more natural than the way we live our lives with our clothes and with our cars and everything like that. Susan: Right? Yeah, ya know micro world. I mean, that's just like I see pretty wide in my landscapes are pretty. And I brought, I brought actually some cameras this time to do more because I've started noticing that I'll see the big thing. And then within that is 100,000 million. You know, like little. Worlds that you could just be in that one place all day, forever. I just built this camera I'm really interested in. I haven't used it a lot, but I've practiced with a little bit. It was a mistake. Every camera has a focal range like from the lens to the film to the thing where how it can focus. And usually I do the math pretty well, or I have somebody else do the math right. It has to be about this close to something. Wow. So I ended up, I thought I was building like a big wide and I ended up it's like this. But what I found is when I photograph in that close up range, as long as it's not a bug or even a bug, right? It could be sitting in any direction. So I've been practicing doing these photographs that have no horizon. So they. And so if something's dripping down like that's an indicator that it's down. So the photographs don't have any sense of direction. Luca: Yeah. Susan: And the focus can move. And so I print them and they're these little holograms almost because the person can come up and they're round and there's a little thing on there to turn it. And the person can just turn it until it sits in the place that feels good to them. And no matter where they land, they look good. Right? They're very holographic that way. and it's fascinating to me. I did a small exhibition with these rotating images. How how much joy people get in orienting them the way that they feel good looking at it, and they move all the time. You'd think there would be one right way. They would sit and they get rotated. People nervous about touching them because it says, you know, like you can rotate it. Susan: I'm trying to think about a crank right now, because if people could rotate the image without touching it, I think they would play with it more. But museums and galleries right now, you know. So yeah. Yeah, I think for me, the one of the most fascinating and, and disorienting, things has been trying to wrap my mind around the scale of time that you can experience all at once here. Susan: And I just can't quite get a hold of 2.5 million years. Like, I just, the thing that has been the most remarkable. So if any artists are thinking about coming, what has been so incredible is how intimate the Rangers are with these different components of the park. So I keep a journal as I go. The days that I've been here. Susan: And so, for instance, I photograph this deer that was in the meadow but was just obsessed with this very particular root and was digging. And then I could tell the deer was afraid of me. So I was being really respectful and it would kind of back up. But that root was so compelling. So I took the photograph and I was like, okay, let's just look at this one image. How well do you think this deer is like, I go to Big Meadow all the time and the rangers will be like, oh, that's about a 2 to 5 year old. And I'll say, great, what's the life expectancy of this? And then what route do you think it was? And then somebody is over there picking out the plant and said, I must get that. A perennial like how long would that root have been in the ground? And just how tuned in to different kind of specialty areas people are and how much I’ve Like, normally I have to go to a place in this. I would have to be in a place way longer, and I'm done to a ton of research and read a lot of books. And it's like a living library here. Just gotta go out, drive, go to find a ranger, find out something really new and beautiful and exciting about where I've been. And, yeah, it's really it's it's it's it's not as experience I get to have that often. And, so I got to talk to a geologist. I got to talk to a botanist. and then each time I go, there's new marks on the map. Oh, if you want to see more of this kind of plant, go here.That's incredible. It's such an incredible and rich, opportunity. So I'm so grateful. Grateful to get to do this. Tom: We are grateful to have you here Susan. Thank you again so much for joining us and talking to us. I think, I learned a lot. it's definitely a very, very eye opening experience about your, the way you do photography and the story and thought process behind how time works kind of through your photos. So that was very interesting and very, very, this beautiful to talk to you. Susan: So yeah. Thank you. Thank you.
Join Luca and Tom as they talk to Susan Patrice, a documentary and contemplative photographer. Her photography and public installations focus on the Appalachian landscape and its people and feature intimate images that touch deeply into questions of place and belonging. Since 2016, her work has primarily explored the nature of visual perception and its impact on our feelings of kinship with the natural world. She engages in intimate gestural conversations with the land through the use of hand-built cameras