© Drew Leventhal from "Yosh"

What was your everyday life like before you identified as an artist or a photographer? Did your initial environment influence your perspective? Was there a distinct catalyst or experience that pushed you towards an artistic path?

Drew Leventhal (DL): First off, thanks so much for having me, it is an honour to answer some of your questions! I don’t think I ever had a life outside of art. In some ways I always had the mentality of an artist. But my relationship with photography specifically has always been a slow one. So many photographers I know talk of that kind of “eureka” moment when they realised they wanted to dedicate their life to taking pictures. Usually it is a moment in the darkroom where they see a print develop or they look through a ground glass for the first time. But I never had a eureka moment. Photography was always something I kind of did on the side since I was a little kid. It was always something I enjoyed and was decent at. But it was just one of many things like that. Slowly but surely as I got older, all the other things fell away and by the time I graduated from my undergrad degree, photography was the only thing that made sense.

You attended the International Center of Photography and completed your MFA in photography at the Rhode Island School of Design. Tell us something about your educational path and how it has informed your journey? Has anyone been instrumental in guiding your visual consciousness and practical evolution?

DL: My education has absolutely informed the way I look and photograph the world. It starts even before I went to school. Both of my parents are anthropologists and so I was always having discussions with them around culture and representation, even from a young age. I would go out and do fieldwork with them in North America or Central America. When I went to Vassar College for my undergrad, Anthropology was the only thing that clicked for me. I ended up combining my life long commitment to anthropology with my love of photography by focusing in visual anthropology.

Still though, when I graduated from Vassar I did not consider myself an artist. My time at ICP really sparked something that would develop a few years later. My time in New York showed me that there is so much possibility to the world of photography, so many more options than what I was doing at the moment. I got my first 4x5 camera in 2019 after a former ICP professor convinced me to buy one. That is when I think I started taking photography really seriously.

My time at RISD was where I began formulating a coherent worldview. What did I care about? Where and how did I want to be looking at the world? What is my responsibility as an artist and anthropologist? These are the fundamental questions I was asking myself there and continue to investigate.

What are the themes that interest you, what generally attracts your observation and why?

DL: I think the job of an artist is to be professionally curious about the world. So, when I am out in the field photographing, I am drawn to those small things that seem slightly out of place or time. Those things that make me curious, that make me want to know more. I like to think that some of the images I make are about anachronism. Not nostalgia, but the literal meaning of anachronism, “in the wrong time or out of time.”

This line of thinking, the curious, the out of time-ness, is the same mindset that makes a good anthropologist. Both photography and anthropology are interested in an investigation of another. This is very different from the increasingly common and popular notion of the “Other.” What I think good anthropologists and good photographers do is acknowledge that there are people in the world (yourself, your neighbours, your fellow countrymen, somebody across the world) and engage with them in a dialogical process of creative understanding. This means that to engage others (again not the “Other”) we must come to the encounter on an equal playing field.

© Drew Leventhal from "Mason & Dixon"

My work is generally interested in the nuances of such encounters, how they can evolve to create understanding and meaning, and the limits of such understandings.

What is your approach to the medium? Do you privilege any camera or process in particular? How do you envision or conceptualize the projects?

DL: The ideas for my projects can really spark from anywhere! Often it comes from a book I read. I have a bad habit of creating the title for a project before I have started it. In terms of process, I am always riding that line between tight, controlled imagery and unrelenting wildness. I often use a wide range of cameras in my work, whatever I think will work best for a situation. This ranges from Super 8 film cameras up to 8x10 large format film.

Let's focus on the series "Yosh". What are the motivations behind this work and how you developed it? Who is Yosh?

DL: “Yosh” was my first “serious,” I guess you could say, photo project. I had just gotten my 4x5 camera and this was my first time using it.
I have a long family connection to the country of Belize in Central America. My dad, an archaeologist, has been digging there since the 1970s. On one of his first trips down there, he met this guy, this British ex-colonial officer named Don Owen-Lewis. Don’s nickname in the Maya language was Yosh, meaning “godfather.” They became fast friends and our families have been tied together ever since.
When Yosh passed in 2018, I began photographing his grandson Eddy, who is around my age. They were close and Eddy and I decided he should play act as his grandfather, imagining different possible scenarios he might have found himself in. Eddy became Yosh through our collaborative picture making.

© Drew Leventhal from "Yosh"

© Drew Leventhal from "Yosh"

© Drew Leventhal from "Yosh"

Over the past year or so though the project has begun to change. It is no longer about this historical connection. Instead I have become more interested in my own relationship with Eddy. This is a project about the present, about us growing up together and discovering who we are. In some ways now I am the Yosh figure, the European/American who is continuously drawn to Belize. So, it has become a rather complicated portraiture project.

Blending elements of truth and fiction, documentation and interpretation, what's the purpose of such a narrative, and what does this mean to you?

DL: To me these dichotomies and paradoxes get at the heart of what makes photography special. It is not a narrative so much as it is a possible paradigm for understanding photography. I actually think anthropology, specifically the practice of ethnography, has a lot to teach photography. Ethnography, literally “writing about culture/people,” is a discipline that must live in its own uncertainty, that much be comfortable with imprecision and multiple subjective interpretations. That doesn’t mean it is not useful for understanding people, simply that we must change the way we understand such documents. Similarly, we must change the way we interpret and understand photographs. If we look at them as open-ended ethnographical texts, where their meaning is continuously open to interpretation and reinterpretation, then lots of possibilities open up for what photography can become and how we can put language to it.

© Drew Leventhal from "Yosh"

It is not so simple as saying photography is both truth and fiction, is both document and interpretation. I want to end by quoting from one of the best analyses of ethnography, the 1986 book "Writing Culture", edited by James Clifford and George Marcus. They write, “even the best ethnographic texts — serious, true fictions — are systems, or economies, of truth. Power and history work through them, in ways their authors cannot fully control. Ethnographic truths are thus inherently partial — committed and incomplete… But once accepted and built into ethnographic art, a rigorous sense of partiality can be a source of representational tact.” Just sit for a moment on some of these phrases. Serious, true fictions. Economies of truth. Inherently partial. There is great power in these ideas.

How do local people get involved or participate in your research and practice?

DL: It is funny I wax poetic so much about anthropology and ethnography but many of my projects are rather lonely exercises. While working on “Yosh” in Belize I am deeply engaged in singular relationships: my relationship with Eddy, or my friendships with his mother Francisca. It is intense and daily, I rarely photograph or connect with others for this project.

© Drew Leventhal from "Yosh"

“Mason and Dixon” is different. Here I am concerned with this act of engaged wandering. I am inspired a lot by the anthropologist and writer James Clifford and his book Routes. Such a wandering practice requires a lot of time alone in a car, searching for the next thing or event to photograph. Again, it can be rather lonely. But part of the reason people are so important to this project is because I am concerned with this idea of creative understanding. When I do come across a fellow human, I always make the time to connect with them, to discover who they are before making an image with them. By having these dialogues, I am trying to connect with people I might not agree with or with people I might never see again. But that fundamental act of recognition from another human is extremely powerful.

The Mason-Dixon Line cuts through the ancestral land of the Lenapehoking, Massawomeck, Monogahela, Nanticoke, Piscataway, Pocomoke-Assateague, and Susquehannock groups. What motivated you to leave for this journey? What were your assumptions?

DL: It is true that the Mason-Dixon Line cuts through the ancestral land of many Indigenous groups in the US. I really had no assumptions of what I would find. I guess I did assume that there would be more of a defined border marking the Mason-Dixon line. But it turns out that the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland is largely invisible. You can cross it back and forth without knowing you entered into a different state.

© Drew Leventhal from "Mason & Dixon"

I wanted to go on this journey because it was my way of doing a road trip project, a classic rite of passage for many American photographers. Usually these road trips take place in the American West but I live on the East Coast so Pennsylvania, my home state, seemed perfect. What I discovered is that the Mason-Dixon Line acts as kind of a prototype for the creation of the American West. It is this survey line drawn across hundreds of miles of territory, marking and delineating and knowing the land. This is a similar process to what happened out West later on. So, the Line becomes a border between North and South as well as a frontier between the East and the West. Our notion of the frontier or the West started with the Mason-Dixon Line.

© Drew Leventhal from "Mason & Dixon"

© Drew Leventhal from "Mason & Dixon"

© Drew Leventhal from "Mason & Dixon"

You wrote that you are less interested in what things appear to be, and that instead you are searching for what they might mean, what small moments or gestures of understanding might tell us about where we are headed. Could you bring two images from the series "Mason & Dixon" as examples and comment on them?

DL: I think the best photography searches beyond the surface and attempts to get at what things mean. That seems vague but the creation of meaning is foundational to our sense of self and our sense of community and culture. A couple of my pictures do this well. One example is the picture “Home, Maryland.” It depicts a home photographed through a rainy window. When you stand far away from the print, you can see the outline of the home. But when you zoom in or get closer, you start to see the individual droplets on the window. These are lenses onto whole other worlds themselves, thousands of them. So, this picture, in the physical way you look at it, kind of alludes to the ways cultures or communities are made up of so many individual stories and worlds.

© Drew Leventhal from "Mason & Dixon"

The second picture I want to use is “Battle, Pennsylvania.” Here we return to the concept of anachronism that we talked about before. The scene depicts a reenactment of the Battle of Gettysburg. But what I love about this image is that the reenactors are mixed in with the spectators. These reenactors are operating in the wrong time period, the past is happening in the present. I also find this image speaks to the spectacle of war and why we find it fascinating from a distance.

© Drew Leventhal from "Mason & Dixon"

You have written, almost as a premonition, that now more than ever it is important to critically engage with this region. After the shooting at the presidential rally in Butler how do you feel about it…

DL: Well so much has happened in just the past few weeks that it can be hard to wrap one’s head around it all. As for what happened in Butler I wish no violence upon anybody but it was not unexpected. America is extremely divided. America also has a tendency towards political violence. Those two factors seem to be escalating and combining as we approach the upcoming election. I have been photographing in Pennsylvania for 4 years now and I have seen the tensions grow. The assassination attempt is just a symptom of these larger forces coming to a head. That is why it is so important to attempt to engage in dialogue, to see others as humans. I have my own political perspective and alignment. But find it fascinating and important to talk with people who have different worldviews or experiences than I do. What we must never do is renounce each other’s humanity.

© Drew Leventhal from "Mason & Dixon"

“Mason & Dixon” is a timely project but I hope that it lives on beyond this fraught political moment, as a warning or as a call to action.

The scenario in which photography is presented and discussed has changed considerably in recent years with the spread of ICT and the digital world. How do you relate to social networks and this expanded field of photography? How do you see the future of the medium evolving with regards to the importance of education and understanding of representation in image-making?

DL: I am not quite sure what ICT is but I am assuming it is related to AI image generation. In terms of social media I am personally very against them as they cause me a great deal of anxiety and depression. I think a lot of people feel the same way. but one must not make the mistake of seeing only the bad. the internet and social media have given rise to whole new visual languages. There is something linguistically and anthropologically powerful in that. We have found a way to communicate and connect at a very root level through this technology of distancing.

As for AI images they’re here to stay and I find them interesting. I haven’t used much of them yet because I am kind of old school and analog. But photography cannot fall into the trap of getting defensive. The best artists are the ones that can adapt to changing times. That doesn’t mean we all have to go out and embrace using AI for our work, but you have to acknowledge how it changes the theoretical landscape and find your own niche in that new world.

© Drew Leventhal from "Mason & Dixon"

In this fast changing environment have there been periods where you felt the need to redefine or pivot your artistic direction? Or to find your grounding again? How do you handle evolution in your life/work and transformation of visual-identity?

DL: Oh absolutely. It feels like every few months I am trying to redefine my practice or find my footing. These things come in ebbs and flows, ups and downs. It is just something to be aware of.

Like I said earlier, I really have only been photographing seriously for about 5 years. I still have so much to learn and try and get better at. I find that my time in Belize working on “Yosh” acts as a marker of growth for my practice. Each year I go I make new images, images I never would have thought about a year ago. I can see myself getting better and better. Having those self-comparisons has been really helpful for me to put into perspective how far I have come.

Any interesting books that you recommend and that recently inspired you and why?

DL: I have a few books I think would be inspiring to many photographers. Many of them connect photography and anthropology if one takes a few leaps. "Writing Culture" by Clifford and Marcus, "Time and the Other" by Johannes Fabian, "Simulation and Simulacra" by Jean Baudriallrd. In terms of photobooks I have been inspired a lot by: Curran Hatleberg’s "River’s Dream".

Which photographer would you like to read an interview about in Urbanautica Journal? Why?

DL: Jason de León. Jason is a trained anthropologist who uses photography and video to create stunning ethnographies of communities on the US - Mexico border. I think he would be the perfect person to have on the site or the podcast!

Drew Leventhal (website)