© Mike Belleme, from the series 'Mise en Scéne' 

Hi Mike, could tell us about your approach to photography in general. How did it all start? What are your memories of your first shots? How did it evolve from the early days?

Mike Belleme (MB): Photography has a big role in my life, so my approach varies depending on the way that I’m engaging with it. First of all, it’s how I make a living, and even within that, there is such a spectrum of types of work that I’ve done over the years. These days I have managed to narrow the work spectrum to more closely align with my personal interests and sensibility. Both in personal work and commissions, my goal is to seek connection and use the camera as a tool to spark that connection, or deepen it. My philosophy is be emotionally available enough to truly feel the story and let it live inside me, so that I can be a better conduit to then pass that story on to a viewer. Photography has also always been an amazing tool for exploring curiosity.

© Mike Belleme, from the series 'Mise en Scéne'

My early days in photography were a bit more rigid. I had a lot of categories in my mind, and I wanted to be a particular kind of photographer, and was concerned with how you are ‘supposed to’ do that. The evolution from there largely came form making mistakes and feeling the consequences. Sometimes the consequences of telling someone else’s story wrong are severe, usually for the person who’s story is being told, not the storyteller. So that’s a painful thing to know that you have caused harm, but that’s how you learn to do it right. You have to learn to anticipate any possible way that you could have a negative effect on someone’s life by taking their picture and putting it out in the world. That is more important to me, then being an ‘effective’ or ‘objective’ story teller.

© Mike Belleme, from the series 'Mise en Scéne'

What about your educational path? Did it have any impact on you? Any lessons learned?

MB: I didn’t study photography formally, but I had some amazing mentors. My Dad was the first. He was a photographer, although never full time, and he got me my first camera and broke down the technical aspects and gave me a scientific understanding of how a camera and film works. From there, I had a close friend that started in photography around the same time as me, Bryan Derballa, and we were both heavily influential in each other’s development. Then I had some older photographer friends that became very important mentors. I had a photojournalist buddy named Frank Bott, and a studio photographer named Jon Menick, who was probably the most influential. I did a formal apprenticeship with him and he was an amazing teacher. Many of the things he taught me, were very important things for my development at the time, even if I disagree with them now. He was extremely anti flash, so I learned with old movie lights, in his studio, and used mostly natural light for years. Now I use strobes, but I believe that it was great advice for that state of development.

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

MB: It really just comes down to the word connection. Everything I do relates to that in some way. I also make work about disconnection, but that’s still about connection. This mostly started about ten years ago when I met some folks living in an intentional community in the woods. Very primitive living with no power, no running water, cooking only over fire started from friction, etc. I spent a lot of time in this community, but didn’t shoot that much. Mostly, I was learning to identify wild foods, how to build houses using no metal materials/fasteners and only materials gathered from around the site, and so on. This had an enormous impact on my life. I soon moved into a tree house in the woods with my girlfriend (now wife) and began applying many of these new skills in my own life. To this day, I spend much of my time foraging, gardening, and preserving food, as well as building, splitting wood for winter, and other homesteading activities. Once I started to actually feel what connection means and realizing how removed most of us are from the people and landscape around us, that became the backbone for everything I’ve done since. 

What It's Like to Live Off-Grid in the Woods. Meet a group of people in the mountains of North Carolina surviving on what can be gleaned from their surroundings. Text by Daniel Stone. Photographs by Mike Belleme. National Geographic, 2017

From a methodological point of view, what is your approach to the medium? How do you envision or conceptualize the projects?

MB: That depends on if it’s a commission or a personal project. For personal work, it’s all about less time shooting and more time talking or experiencing. I’m getting to a point where I’m less concerned with how ‘good’ the pictures are. My main concern is having an experience and a greater understanding of the thing that I intended to learn about, and developing relationships with people or the non-human world. With commissions, the main concern is making images that I feel good about and serve the purpose of the commission. In that case, the process is usually much quicker paced. I still want to allow myself the flexibility to make all aesthetic and conceptual decisions in the moment. That is, after arriving on the scene, but sometimes I have to do that very quickly. So that becomes the main muscle that I have to develop. Thinking very quickly, about how best to capture the thing that I’m feeling in the moment. I love that process of quick thinking though.

Mike Belleme, 'Climate Bankruptcy'. The story, written by Christopher Flavelle, published in The New York Times under the headline: Climate Change is Bankrupting America’s Small Towns.

Do you privilege any camera or process in particular? Tell us about your equipment …

MB: I’m not someone who gives much thought to gear, but I do think that certain equipment and the processes that they prompt, can greatly shape the outcomes. I use lighting a lot, but try to keep it fairly simple. 1 or 2 light setups max. I don’t want the light to be my main focus, because it should always be the thing in front of the camera that is getting most of my intention. I often use medium format film cameras as a way to force myself to pay more attention. It’s amazing how I’m more likely to get a good shot on 10 frames with my Mamiya rz67 than with hundreds on one of my digital bodies.

Does research play any significant role in your practice?

MB: I don’t do much research before starting a project. The research is taking the time to listen to the people and the place itself. What does it have to say about itself. Later, as I’m wrapping my head around a body of work and looking for more context in order to understand what I’ve seen on a deeper level, that’s when I start reading books and articles. At that point I already have a basic understanding, but I also know my limitations and broadening my perspectives is important.

© Mike Belleme from the series 'Kids Of Hate And Love'

Do you dialogue with other experts when developing your work?

MB: Absolutely. The photographic community is so important to me, and I owe so much of my personal development to peers in photography, as well as experts, in other fields that may be related to what I’m focusing on. The Mise En Scéne project was a great opportunity to collaborate with an expert in a different field. That work was made in collaboration with Chris Reed, who is an urbanist, landscape architect, and professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. The project was his idea and the only way it could be done was for me to go deep in conversation with Chris and start to develop some understanding of the work he does and the way he sees the urban landscape. He picked me as a collaborator, largely becuase I was an outsider from his field, so I didn’t need to take a PHD course or anything, but it was important for me to at least understand the fundamentals of his thinking and approach to design.

Tell us about the project Mise En Scéne selected for the Urbanautica Institute Awards? What is the motivation and the theme you addressed?

MB: This collaborative project took shape in process, but was prompted by Chris Reed, who reached out with the idea. The two of us had never met, and I had no previous experience working with landscape architects. After several brainstorms and deciding on what US cities we would focus on, I began shooting. Early in the process while making the work, I couldn’t have told you what the book was about. I’m not sure if Chris could have either, but we were clear on the ideas that were prompting the work, which was the complex web of overlapping dynamics that make city life what it is. As a landscape architect, these forces, such as climate change, sea level rise, socio-economic factors, racial tensions and devision, are just some of the influences that inform decisions at all scales of urban design. As a photographer, these forces and dynamics are of interest from a psychological standpoint. They represent the often unseen undercurrents that shape human behavior. So Mise-En Scéne was a way of having a multi-disciplinary conversation about how design shapes life and how life shapes design.

© Mike Belleme, from the series 'Mise en Scéne'

© Mike Belleme, from the series 'Mise en Scéne'

© Mike Belleme, from the series 'Mise en Scéne'

What are the practical difficulties you faced in its development?

MB: Once Chris and I were basically on the same page about what we were looking for in the images, making the work was mostly just a matter of time. The shooting took place in seven cities over the course of about two years with multiple trips to most of the cities. The gathering process was fairly fluid, and didn’t require over thinking. Nothing was out of bounds, so I was able to just respond in the moment to whatever made me curious. The later phases of making the book, and organizing the material were an enormous challenge. There was so much breadth, not just to the photographic body of work, but also the writing, and drawings that were incorporated offered another level of complexity. Those other elements did give the project somewhat of a backbone though, and eventually we were able to figure out how to layer in the photography in a way that had its own autonomy, but was in conversation with the other voices in the book. The hope is that the book offers many entry points. If you come into the book as a design enthusiast, you will find the book to be quite different from most design books, and we hope that it will expand your thinking a bit outside of the academic, and discipline-specific thinking that dominates the field. Likewise, if you’re a photo enthusiast, you will find this book to be more expansive than the average photo book. This approach expands thinking on both sides. It is also meant to be approachable to viewers who are laymen to both disciplines.

© Mike Belleme, from the series 'Mise en Scéne'

From an editorial point of view, what choices guided you in the selection of the final portfolio?

MB: Because it was such a rewarding challenge to find the narrative threads for each chapter and how to flow the entire project into book form, it’s been really fun to rethink the project in more concise forms. Chris and I have been doing some talks, and I’ve made smaller edits for different purposes, and it’s fun to take some of the threads that we created in each chapter individually, and find points of connection between the cities. So when I put together a small edit, I’m trying to do two things at once. First, I’m looking for some of my favorite stand alone images, that have immediate impact and don’t require much background understanding, and second, I’m trying to create some sense of a cohesive body of work and touch on the main themes without exploring any in depth. It’s a difficult balance to strike, but also fun. For the tighter edits, I often gravitate more toward the quiet landscape-centric images. The book balances those out with more densely populated and active scenes, but it can be hard to achieve multiple moods in such a tight selection, so I looked for interesting visual and conceptual relationships within a certain range of types of images.

© Mike Belleme, from the series 'Mise en Scéne'

© Mike Belleme, from the series 'Mise en Scéne'

How does this work fit in your identity statement as a photographer and if relates any with your previous works?

MB: It’s interesting because at first I didn’t think it related at all to my previous work. I was very confused that Chris reached out to me at all. I have never lived in or made work in cities. I don’t even like spending much time in cities generally, so I was not an obvious choice to do a deep dive into urban life. I felt a lot of imposter syndrome at first because Chris and his colleagues are some of the leading minds in the country on some of these nuanced ideas about how cities work, and he’s asking me to make a book about my observations on cities? What could I possibly have to offer the topic? As it turned out, I think my “outsiderness” served me very well in this project. Partly becuase my work just looked different than most urban street photography or urban landscape work that had come before. Second, I could follow a genuine sense of curiosity rather than leaning on the familiarity that guides a lot of my more rural work. But perhaps most importantly, I was able to apply my way of working in rural spaces to a new landscape. Even in densely populated spaces, I tried to feel connected to the space and the moment and take a slow pace, talking with people and trying to build relationships. I think this ‘country boy’ approach to the urban setting sets the work apart, while tying it to my previous bodies of work.

Mise-en-Scène. The Lives and Afterlives of Urban Landscapes by Chris Reed and Mike Belleme, Oro Editions 2021

The scenario in which photography is presented and discussed have 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?

MB: It’s really tough, I don’t have much good to say about it. As someone who focuses primarily on grounded connection, this era is at odds with my goals at every turn. I just have to try to find ways to meet people where they are at. That being said, I try not to cater my work or presentation of my work to the realities of the time. I would rather someone not engage with my work at all, then see it in some overly simplified version that is geared toward short attention spans and click-bate culture. For me tools like social media are less about sharing work and more about having a presence, becuase that’s the only way you can expect to get commissions. Due to the current pace of digital life, career wise, it doesn’t matter much what you did two years ago, it mostly matters what you did this week.

It's not easy to pursue the authorial path, it requires time, energy and resources. What strategies do you adopt?

MB: This was my first time completing a project at this scale. Making a book is a marathon, and I am still unsure if I’m capable of doing it on my own. Time will tell. But in this case, I was fortunate enough to have a team of folks helping with a lot of the heavy lifting and managing deadlines etc. Chris’s company, Stoss, has an incredible staff of folks who were instrumental in the process. I have several projects that I hope to publish as books, but this process taught me what a huge investment of time and money it is, so we’ll see if I’m up for doing it all over again.

© Mike Belleme, from the series 'States of Fear'

© Mike Belleme, from the series 'States of Fear'

© Mike Belleme, from the series 'States of Fear'

Any interesting books that you recommend and that recently inspired you and why? (Not just about photography)

MB: I just finished The Nutmeg’s Curse by Amitav Ghosh. I got it as a form of research for an ongoing project I’m working on about the Caribbean cruise industry. The project focuses a lot on the colonial history of the islands and how that past shapes the current socio-economic dynamics. Ghosh’s book was an incredible resource for understanding a more zoomed out scale of how the world works and how we got to where we are today, and at what cost.

How important it is to showcase your work. What about exhibitions or other forms? Any tips or experience to share?

MB: I feel like I’m at a bit of a crossroads in terms of my relationship to showing work. On the one hand I’ve come to a point where I’m willing to accept that I’m not going to change the world or have some massive impact with my work, and I can just appreciate the experience of making it and have less attachment to expectations about how it will be received. On the other hand, becuase I have felt the disappointment of having work not land in the way I’d hoped, I am left unsure about what IS the most appropriate medium for sharing my work. I think books are one great way, but the amount of resources it takes to make a book can be daunting. I have found some gratification in smaller scale sharing. I think anything in person is ideal. Talks can be a wonderful way to engage and audience.

Who or what does influence your work in particular? Is there any contemporary artist, photographer or writer you'd like to quote or mention

MB: I would say my main inspiration is the author, Robin Wall Kimmerer, particularly her book Braiding Sweetgrass. I also tend to get a lot of inspiration from photographers that I know and interact with. I would say Tristan Spinski and Susan Patrice are two such people that constantly inspire me in their photographic practice and in how they move through the world.

How do you see the future of photography evolving? And Anything else you wish to add that was not covered here...

MB: I want to see more cross disciplinary collaboration. Honestly, this project with Chris has helped open my eyes to so many possibilities. It’s so rare to find collaborators who are open to working with photography, not just as a way of illustrating their ideas, but as a way of having a conversation with another person with their own perspective. We all exist within the bubbles of the professions or communities that we live within, and that can be a powerful thing to share with likeminded people, but I love the idea of gathering minds from vastly different background and seeing what emerges through the harmonizing of multiple distinct voices.

© Mike Belleme, from the series 'Mise en Scéne'

And do you have any projects in the pipeline? Or topics you would like to address?

MB: Yes, too many to mention. I have the cruise project I mentioned earlier that is hopefully wrapping up soon, and several others at various phases. Lately, I’ve been really enjoying a whole new direction of making macro images of leaves and other woods life around where I live. At this point the work is more about the process than the end result, so I don’t have any sense of an end goal, I’m just loving the freedom of making work for the sake of the process.

Mike Belleme (website)
Mise En Scéne book