Tell us about your approach to photography. How it all started? What are your memories of your first shots?
MS: My dad is a wildlife photographer, so I would spend time with him taking pictures - but it was more just getting outside. After childhood, I didn't take pictures for a long time, until a friend and I spent time taking pictures at night in Chicago. I carried around my grandfather's old Rolleiflex. I took portraits of my friends. It was very much all over the place. I enjoyed all of the technical aspects of it, and working with cameras, and exploring. I wasn't taking pictures with any purpose, but I enjoyed having a tool with me and finding out how I saw things.
How did your research evolve with respect to those early days? Tell us about your educational path. What was your relationship with photography at that time?
MS: I was about 30 when I moved to California. I was working as an actor, which meant I usually worked with a bunch of other people around, so when I had time off I wanted to spend it alone. I had a small dog and a truck and nowhere much to be so I bought a couple different medium format cameras and spent the first few years I was here just driving all over southern and central California. I explored the ways people interact with the landscape. California is a good place to see that.
© Matt Shallenberger from the series 'Counterbrand'
What do you think about photography in the era of digital and social networking? Do you have any preferences in terms of cameras and format?
MS: I have no qualms about digital but I don't like social networking, and maybe more honestly I don't like networking in general. While I enjoy meeting other photographers and sharing work, I'm sorry to say that the community aspect of it is much less important to me than the process of being alone trying to make photographs. I convince myself that it's good for the world that everyone has a camera with them, but I have to believe that it's just a whole different animal... that maybe because people experience 10 times more images today than they did even a few years ago, that there's even more importance in images that are lasting... but it's harder to cut through, obviously. Maybe there will be some kind of pendulum swing back the other way - towards images / venues / experiences that are more meditative or durable... I started shooting almost entirely large format several years ago. I'm sure that's in part a reaction to the over-immediacy of the whole process. I like all of the technical qualities of large format film, but I'm sure I also hope that somehow the more meditative, purposeful process of making the photographs will carry over in to the images themselves. I shoot 4x5, almost entirely with 125 and 135 mm lenses.
About your work now. How would you described your personal research in general?
MS: For the last several years it's been consistent. I find a book that's interesting to me, and then try to illustrate that book with photographs. I'll collect other materials along the way, and take a lot of notes. Sometimes I'll base the whole project around something else, like a map, or a small story. But that's the process. I usually only work on one project at a time.
You were born in Hawaii. In many I believe we have a somewhat stereotypical view of the American archipelago. I remember as a child I looked at Magnum P.I. and I dreamed of running along the coast with a Ferrari. Today I ask myself what it means to grow up in a country that is part of a superpower nation, but all in all it is bound far away in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and with strong native traditions. How does all this influence your way of looking and relating to the world in everyday life, even before photography?
MS: Obviously I can only speak for myself, but my way of relating to the world is absolutely a product of the Hawaiian environment. We moved around a lot when I was a kid, but my first connection to the landscape was in Hawai'i. There's an ominous quality to it, a harshness, an imposing character, that isn't part of most people's expectations. Hawaiian mythology reflects that much more than any outside conception. I used to make maps as a kid, not just in Hawaii, but afterwards, when we lived in Virginia and Oregon. I made maps of the woods near our house, and imagined long-dead civilizations in them. Hawai'i (especially the Big Island) breeds that kind of perspective, I imagine.
© Matt Shallenberger from the series 'The Leaping Place'
© Matt Shallenberger from the series 'The Leaping Place'
© Matt Shallenberger from the series 'The Leaping Place'
'The Leaping Place' is a strong body of work exploring the history and mythology of the Big Island of Hawai'i. It's also a personal journey through your family roots. Tell us about...
MS: I am a big believer in creativity coming from limits. I was looking to shoot some pictures about my family history on the Big Island (my family immigrated from the Azores, Madeira, and Germany, between 1880-1900), but couldn't find a structure for it. I didn't want to just go out and shoot pictures. And I wanted to find someway to explore that smaller immigrant story in a larger context. I was reading a lot of Hawaiian mythology at the time, and found in it descriptions of the landscape that were unique, and true to my experience of it. So I started looking for repeated imagery and symbols in that mythology to try to find a context for shooting, which I eventually found in the Kumulipo, the Hawaiian creation chant. I knew of the leaping place concept from elsewhere but found it again in the Kumulipo. The 'leaping place' idea is present in various Polynesian mythologies, and describes places from which ~!!departed souls begin their journeys to the underworld. After spending a couple years with the mythology and the landscape, I came to think of these places as symbolic bridges between seeming opposites (a regular motif in Hawaiian mythology and poetry)... concepts like male/female, fact/fiction, history/myth. Of course it's symbolic of exploring my own ancestry. Leaping places are where the soul travels backward through time. But it is also meant to invoke a sensibility that is present in Hawaii, where the lines between opposites are permeable. Something is not, in the traditional western sense, true or false, or history or myth. There is room for ambiguity and duality. I think that sort of mystery is evident in the landscape, and I wanted to see if I could embrace it in the photographs.
© Matt Shallenberger from the series 'The Leaping Place'
© Matt Shallenberger from the series 'The Leaping Place'
© Matt Shallenberger from the series 'The Leaping Place'
You mention 'Kumulipo', the ancient Hawaiian creation chant, and how this affected your connection within the landscape. This is rather unusual. An approach that goes beyond an organic or environmentalist vision. There is something more. It recognizes a more profound dimension...
MS: The Kumulipo is a memorized (there was no written language pre-foreign-intervention) chant-poem of more than 2000 lines, used to commemorate the birth of a new royal son. It describes the cosmological beginnings of Hawai'i, through to a taxonomy of the plants and animals, including various stories of gods and people, and eventually 1000 lines of straight genealogy. It was used to connect the new royal birth to the origins of the islands and the Hawaiian people. The chant itself is divided in to several sections, but I chose for my project to structure it in the same way that the translator, Martha Beckwith, did in her research. I took her chapter titles, many of which relate to particular sections of the chant, but some of which describe larger concepts or context, and used those as the titles for my images. I went out with those titles and their concepts in mind, and shot pictures to illustrate them. Generally, I explored the parts of the island where my ancestors had lived, with all of my notebooks with me. I had by then printed my own copy of the Kumulipo and filled it with my own notes - I compared the stories across Polynesia, and I looked to see what images repeated. I tried to find those images in the landscape.
© Matt Shallenberger from the series 'The Leaping Place'
At the end of the day, they're photographs of places, so it's foolish to hope that my research and thought would necessarily translate in the image. I assumed only that the mythology and the chant were a product, in part, of the landscape, and that if I were steeped in that mythology that I would better be able to make images that were sincere, and that captured something of that character that inspired the chant-tellers.
'The Leaping Place's is also going to become a book. A book that includes many layers (40 color photographs, 20 black and white photographs, 25 vintage photographs and graphics, several excerpted pieces from the notebooks and essays). Tell us about how you are managing this complex editing, and what are, so far, the take aways of this experience?
MS: The editing is in process, I'm just about done. It's going to end up being a little more of my own work and a little less of the vintage photographs. Most of the vintage photographs were taken either by or of my great aunt, who took many pictures of the island in the 1930s. On one level, the editing is simple, in that I'm combining the inspiration for my photographs with those photographs - but beyond that, I'm trying to tell a few different stories. I had to break it down in to smaller pieces to wrap my head around it. The black and white photos are their own section, paired with a particular story from the Kumulipo, and they as a series illustrate a journey to a leaping place. In the second section I illustrate the scattered journey back in to my own family history.. my notes, my great aunt's photographs, images I made of remnants of early industry, etc. And the third section is the Kumulipo: 18 images for the 18 chapters from the translation. Once I decided that it was three-books-in-one instead of one giant narrative, it was more manageable. If I learned anything useful, it's about my own methods of thinking. I haven't decided if the next time I do this I should employ more structure or less. I might shoot pictures and incorporate them in to my notebooks, rather than having the research and the images be two separate works to be combined later in a book.
'Counterbrand' is a place but looks like a mental state some way. It also seems to speak of different places at the same time. A series that is made of perceptible signs in a crepuscular, and nostalgic climate, magic as the night can be. Tell us about it...
MS: 'Counterbrand' was shot in the Antelope valley of southern California, which has seen the rise (and sometimes fall) of several industries: mining, agriculture, aerospace.. The way the desert slowly destroys things leaves evidences of all of these histories on the landscape. I shot the images after sunset because I wanted that low-contrast, muted mingling of all of those evidences. I liked the idea that this place had layers within each landscape, and that there was some magical time of day where you could see them all present at the same time. The title comes from a ranching word, describing a new cattle brand placed next to or on top of the old one.
© Matt Shallenberger from the series 'Counterbrand'
'Tres, Stars and Bords' is a silent series, in which the gaze slows down to settle on natural fragments. Moments. How important is nature in your daily life?
MS: We live quite near the mountains where all of those images were shot, and I've spent hundreds of hours up there, almost entirely by myself. Since we had a daughter last year I've had less time for it, but it is my preferred state. I just find exploring very calming. A friend of mine was looking at my photographs, and said "I can tell you were alone when you took these," which was about as nice a thing as anyone's ever said about my work.
© Matt Shallenberger from the series 'Trees, Stars, and Birds'
© Matt Shallenberger from the series 'Trees, Stars, and Birds'
© Matt Shallenberger from the series 'Trees, Stars, and Birds'
'False Pond' again touches aspects of the relationship between man and the environment. Tell us about this geography and the motivations that led you to tell these places.
'False Pond' began by accident. I was shooting pictures in the afternoon while scouting locations for the Counterbrand series. I began noticing that I was shooting a lot of pictures around water infrastructure. We were at the time in the middle of a profound drought in California. I started looking at landscapes that in some way referenced the massive directed travel of water from the north to the south here.
Is there any contemporary artist or photographer that influenced you in some way?
MS: There are several photographers whose work inspires me. I think Cody Cobb has a wonderful eye for the mythical, as does Robin Friend. Robert Darch and Laura Pannack both make wonderful photographs that combine landscapes and portraits, which I'm not very good at, so I'm terribly envious. And there's a formality to the landscapes of Eliot Dudik, Elger Esser, Toshio Shibata, and Mark Ruwedel of which I'm constantly in awe.
Any book you would recommend?
MS: I'll always recommend Joseph Campbell. 'The Hero with a Thousand Faces' is the go-to book of his, but they're all wonderful. I think reading mythology is so often the best way to see what makes a culture unique and what makes us all the same. And as a landscape photographer, mythology is a wonderful resource to see how a culture viewed their own landscape.
Is there any show you’ve seen recently that you find inspiring?
MS: The Mark Ruwedel show at Gallery Luisotti in Los Angeles was lovely. I like when things are presented in a way that allows the viewer to have a little bit of a private moment with each image. Usually that's some combination of size and separation and such, but it's hard to decipher. There are a few places in LA (Rose Gallery also comes immediately to mind) where that always seem to be the case - where the images and the presentation are in harmony. Wiliding Cran Gallery is a newer wonderful space to see more varied work presented beautifully, too.
Installation view 'Mark Ruwedel: Rivers Run Through It' at Gallery Luisotti
Projects that you are working on now and plans for the future?
MS: Until the book is done in a couple months, that will be my main focus. I'll also be showing 21 of the images from The Leaping Place at a wonderful gallery on the Big Island this fall. I'm excited to bring them home so close to where they were taken. In the meantime I'm preparing notes for a new series, still based in Polynesian mythology. I have a wonderful old book that's a 'motif index' of images and symbols from mythology throughout Polynesia. It looks like a catalog of thousands of different fantastic ideas, i.e. 'spirit buries itself in the split of a tree', and then points you towards where in the Tahitian diaspora those symbols appear. I would love to shoot pictures to illustrate those symbols. I'd like to chase them all around the south Pacific.
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