If You Still Question Your Photography, You Are Not Alone, So Does Matthew Genitempo (Part 1)

The MOOD Podcast

Photographer Matthew Genitempo discusses his creative evolution from graphic design to large format photography, focusing on the creation of

Key takeaways

• Matthew Genitempo's photobook 'Jasper' was deeply shaped by the poetry of Frank Stanford.
• He transitioned from a highly planned, meticulous approach to a faster, more spontaneous method using 4x5 large format cameras.

Main topics

• Large format photography process
• Photobook publishing and curation

Notable quotes

The photographs that interest me the most are the ones that I kind of don't remember taking.

Conclusion

The episode provides a profound look at how letting go of control can

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) The photographs that interest me the most are the ones that I kind of don't remember taking. All we're doing is fictions. Sometimes I wish that there were two of me because it's so difficult to deal with your own work. Speaker 1 (0:13) Meet Matthew Genetempo, photographer, publisher, and the maker of three books, Jasper, Mother of Dogs, and Dog Breath. Jasper is my favorite photo book and after all these years I still imagine and dream about what it means. Unsure if I want the answer. if there is one to find or if any of that actually matters. Speaker 2 (0:33) Completely rudderless ship and I was just all over the place and then when I started moving a lot quicker and stopped overthinking things and and just made pictures and stopped questioning like what I was doing and stopped being so meticulous about all my decisions that I started getting more excited about my own work. Speaker 1 (0:51) We talk in this conversation about the critique that sent him into the woods and the time he spent there with men who had cut themselves off from society, about shooting a slow camera fast, about the people he dedicated his books to, and the boy who is the source of narration for Dog Breath without ever appearing in it. Speaker 1 (1:15) blinded him in one of his eyes. Speaker 2 (1:16) My mom said that he would just kind of disappear on the weekends and like just kind of go into these rural places. Did you see your dad in Speaker 1 (1:24) these men? Speaker 2 (1:26) Yeah, I mean, to some extent, yeah. Maybe I was dealing with being on the edge of, at the time I was on the edge of becoming 40 and kind of looking back at a lot of things. I had a gun pulled on me one time. I was shot at one time and like a week or two went by and I get this phone call from this unknown number. and it is Dove's aunt and she was letting me know that Dove had taken his own life. If Speaker 1 (1:52) you're an emerging photographer still getting in your own way, wondering what to say with your images and how to say them, this is a conversation about what it takes to stop, piece together something profound and what it might cost you in the process. Speaker 2 (2:06) I'm going to be an optimist about this one. I still have a lot of self-doubt about work, but like the one thing that I feel still pretty good about is if I just do the work, if I just go out and make the pictures and trust myself that something's going to happen, that it will find itself, it'll find its own way. Maybe we'll put more of an emphasis on the book and more people will want to make books and enjoy books and the future might be bright. I would give this advice to myself now and to myself 15 years ago, but... Speaker 1 (2:49) Matthew Genetempo, welcome to the Mood Podcast. It's a real honor and privilege to have you on the show. Thanks for joining me. Cool. Speaker 2 (2:56) Yeah. Thanks, Matt. Thanks for having me. Where do we find you right now? I am in my studio in San Antonio, Texas. Speaker 1 (3:04) Give us an insight into your kind of daily life and what that looks like in terms of an ordinary day for you over in San Antonio. Oh man, Speaker 2 (3:12) ordinary day. Dude, I feel like I've just been taking things day by day lately. Well, recently it's been kind of busy. You know, the fall is always so busy for the, you know, photography and photo book world. Speaker 2 (3:30) Just kind of, I'm applying for a grant right now, so that's been taking some time. What have I been doing? I've got a couple design projects I've been doing. Trespassers putting out a new book, so that's taking up some time. What else have I been doing? I've got a new dog, so I've been playing with her quite a bit. Trying to run every day. You know, painting a little bit in here. Speaker 2 (3:59) Dude, what else? I don't know. I feel at the end of the day, every day, maybe you feel the same way. I'm just, I feel like I don't have enough time to do all the things that I want to do, you know, and I feel productive, but at the end of the day, I'm just like, you know, sometimes I wish that there were two of me or something to get all the things that I want to get done. Speaker 1 (4:18) Yeah. I think I read somewhere that you said that with your photography as well. You kind of, you wish, correct me if I'm wrong, I could be completely misquoting this. um it was something like you wish there was a second version of you that could go and take the photos and and bring the negatives back that's Speaker 2 (4:35) like what i that's that would be maybe my number one dream as far as like photography goes like i wish there was somebody that yeah that was me that could go out and make pictures um and then the me that i am could deal with them um because like as you know it's it's so difficult to deal with your own work you know yeah um like i can see others work or like if i'm sequencing a book it's um not that it's easy but it's just like it's we don't have all of the context around how the pictures were made so like our relationship is like just with the pictures So, um, with my own work, it's a lot more difficult. So yeah, I like, um, I, I, I've said this before to students and, and, um, but whenever I, I get my, my photographs back, um, from the lab, the, the photographs that interest me the most are the ones that I kind of don't remember taking, um, where I can, I can see me in the picture. I can see, um, you know, uh, for lack of better words like my style or whatever like whatever whatever makes my pictures my pictures but um i can't um like pull apart like why i made the picture or the decisions um into how the picture was made Speaker 1 (5:51) And that's, you're comfortable with that. We talked off air a little bit about being in the gray area all the time. You feel comfortable, certainly in photography, kind of being in this gray area where you don't have answers and you don't necessarily want to have answers. And answers are boring, right? If you have solutions to things, and I feel like that's kind of what you're saying in terms of not really wanting to see why you made photos or the decisions that you made. And then you look at your... your other background, your other profession in terms of, uh, and design. And we were talking about the dichotomy and comparison between the two. Why is it that you feel most comfortable in that, those spaces? And we look at your books and we'll, we'll, we'll go through your books during this conversation. And that is apparent that you, you really revel in that, that fog and that mist of the, those. Speaker 1 (6:46) not explicit answers or explicit stories necessarily to to your work why do you think that is that you're you're comfortable in those those gray areas i'm Speaker 2 (6:56) not sure why i'm most comfortable in them like you know i i i'm always looking to be um Speaker 2 (7:06) to make some sort of discovery or to be surprised by my own work. And that's ultimately what I'm after when I get my stuff back. I feel like if I go through older work, and when I say older, I mean this work that was made 15, 20 years ago, I can very much see what exactly I was after or that I saw something and I thought it was worth making a picture of. Yeah, it's just there's so much more clarity in them. And I want to be able, I don't know, I just want to be able to revisit my work and look at it and pull something new from it. And like that's, to me, that's the strongest work. Like the books that I, that I, you know, visit over and over again, I'm always finding new things. You know, I'm always, there's always discoveries to be made, you know. Can you give me an example? Of just like books that... Last night I was looking at American Services, Stephen Shore, which is my favorite Stephen Shore book. And I got it on a road trip out to Marfa in 2007 or 2008. Speaker 2 (8:22) I went through the book last night and like one, I mean, it's just, it's, it's a brilliant body of work, but, but two, there was just so many things that I was finding, finding out and appreciating new things. Speaker 2 (8:36) And, uh, yeah, I mean, I think that's just, that just, um, speaks to, to, you know, how wonderful of a body of work it is. Um, is Speaker 1 (8:47) that because of the, the photography itself, do you think in terms of the subtleties and nuances and complexity of, of a good body of work, or do you think it's your perspective changing? I mean, you could, you could look at the same book. I mean, I did exactly the same with your books in, in research for, um, thinking about questions for the, for this episode. And I've gone through Jasper and Dog Breath and Mother of Dogs. I don't know, countless times, right? And I still, I did the same thing and I'm finding new things, but more importantly, like new ways of how it makes me feel. Do you think that's like the way we interpret ourselves in the images or is it just the complexity and the skill of the work itself? I guess a bit of both. Yeah, I think Speaker 2 (9:29) it's a bit of both. I mean, when I remember getting, when I, to go back to American Surfaces, Speaker 2 (9:38) One, when I first got that book, I hadn't traveled the United States very much, and the internet wasn't as prevalent as it is now. It just seemed like there was just so many stones that could be turned over when I looked at that book when I was younger. It made me want to hit the road. Speaker 2 (10:05) curious about the strangers in the book and the places he stayed and the meals that he ate and all that stuff. Um, and, and I still am curious about some of those things when I go through it, but like when I was looking at it last night, I was just, um, kind of just like really impressed by how much movement is in the work you know like the pictures are really still um they're they're uh you know it's just again it's just like pictures of like here's what i ate like here's where i took a piss like here's a stranger that i met like there's no there's no motion in the pictures at all but you can feel so much movement um just like driving across the country as you're as you're going through um and like a lot of the pictures are made with just that that um real like high flash so it's like they're very um like scientific is the right word but like everything's perfectly in focus um and and still so yeah, there's just like for a body of work that is, um, uh, so still there's Speaker 1 (11:05) just so much movement through that book, but yeah, Speaker 2 (11:07) I don't know. I was also just like found, found myself. I mean, there's a lot of pictures in that book, but there were so many pictures that either I forgot about or, um, pictures that I didn't pay attention to the first time. Cause maybe I wasn't interested in those types of pictures or, um, uh, my eye hadn't like built up, uh, to where it is now to, to appreciate those photographs. And then some of the photographs that I remember, really loving when I was younger, they didn't really do too much for me now. So I don't know. I think that that's, yeah, that's the sign of a good book is just something that you can revisit over and over again and your relationship can change to it and you can just find new things to appreciate. I do that with Gossage all the time. You know, I have a handful of his books and every time I go through them, I'm always finding new things. But yeah, I'm trying to think of other books that I've looked at recently that have done that. Speaker 1 (12:01) The wonder of photo books. That's the beauty of them. Quick one from me before we carry on. Now, most photographers I know do all of this completely alone, right? They think alone, ideate alone. They shoot alone. They edit alone. And they sit with questions about their work, about their process, about their brand. and they have really nowhere to take them. I know this because I did that for so many years. So I decided to build the room I always wanted to be in, and it's called The Mood Insiders. It's a private community for photographers just like us who want to go deeper than the scrolling feed or just posting their images and hoping to get something back. We meet online three times a week and a few times a year in person. We go through books that are important for learning in our craft, and we study and review photo books. We look at each other's work through intentional and structured formal critiques. And every so often, one of the artists from either the books or from the podcast comes and sits in with us. As well as that, all members have full access to my flagship video course, Voice Alchemy. They get access to masterclasses every six weeks, Q &A sessions, extra podcast features. posting platforms and chat forums, and so much more. It's a community of people who care about the why behind the work, not just the output. The community and resources you need to take the next step in your photography, not just another posting app or a sharing algorithmic platform, but a community that goes so much deeper. So if that sounds like your kind of thing, the link is below in the description. Go and take a look. And hope to see you inside. Right. Back to the conversation. Um, let's rewind a little bit for those that may not know who you are. Give me, I guess, without being annoying, give me kind of the short version of your life. You know, the way you would tell it at a bar, maybe give us a bit of an introduction in terms of how you got to the point where you had an interest in photo books and how you started seeing photography and how you got into photography. Cause I know you had a different background. Not a different background, but a different, I guess, skill set. So give us an introduction into that. Speaker 2 (14:20) I took photography in high school, but most of my attention was on playing in bands and just kind of being a teenager f***ing around. So like the camera was there, but it was... was more just to record what we were up to, you know, um, you know, most of it, honestly, most of it was, was, um, like a little handheld video camera, um, that my brother had. And so we use that quite, quite a bit, but we had to turn pictures in for class. So a lot of the pictures that I was taking then was just like, um, I don't know, skateboarding and, and, and shows and stuff that were playing. But then I studied, my undergrad, I studied graphic design. And for some reason, I thought that like, like, if I looked at, I don't know, like a CD packaging or something, like, I thought that it was the designer's job to make the pictures of the band, or if there was like an advertisement for like a sandwich, I thought for some reason, I thought that like, oh, the designer is also making the picture as well. So, um, I signed up for a bunch of photography classes in, in undergrad. Um, and the, uh, the first couple, I think it took three maybe in college, but the first couple were pretty good and it kind of piqued my interest. But the third one that I had, um, the main professor, she, she stepped out and they had, um, um, like it was, uh, uh, maybe it was a grad student that came in that was teaching the class. And so I was in school in Waco and Waco is kind