© Terry Ratzlaff from the series "Take Your Time"

Tell us about the project “Take Your Time’ selected for the Urbanautica Institute Awards. What are the motivation and the theme you addressed?

Terry Ratzlaff (TR): This work started with Craig, an 86-year-old man I met randomly one day, who watched and recorded the activity of trains from the parking lot of the Old Mill in Lincoln, Nebraska, from 1983-2020. (“The Watcher”-2018.) In attempting to understand why Craig watched without asking him directly, I inadvertently found myself traversing metaphysical quandaries of the self and physiological processes of seeing and not seeing. Taking a simple concept like watching trains and breaking it down into its constituent parts: photography, vision, desire, obsession, collecting, time, memory, history, capitalism, modernism, technological progress, and world-making, etc., I became obsessed with how all these concepts overlapped and intersected one another. Looking at the railroad’s vast and interconnected systems of travel, commerce, telecommunications, and information, I started to perceive trains as meaning-making-logic machines, a structural device that threads seemingly disparate worlds together. In the work, I photographically deconstruct three idiosyncratic characters: a man who watches trains (“The Watcher”), a collector of model trains (“Dwayne Sam and The Romanticization of The Last Coal Train Through Crawford”), and myself––an agent who tracks and mirrors these watchers and collectors (“An Echo Requires Distance”.) By coupling the characters, I analyze how obsession organizes a collection with the intent to control the experience of time. In this view, “Take Your Time” is a collection of reconstructed perceptions of time connected by the train.

© Terry Ratzlaff from the series "Take Your Time"

© Terry Ratzlaff from the series "Take Your Time"

© Terry Ratzlaff from the series "Take Your Time"

How do you envision or conceptualize the projects?

TR: When I start working on something, I have a general idea of what things will look like, but once I start photographing, nothing ever seems to line up with my original ideas. This is a disconnect between the idealization of my work and the reality of my work (the limitations of photography). Even when I have an idea of something specific and all the parts line up, I tend to call an audible, throw the original idea out the window, work more intuitively and spontaneously, and never return to the original idea. This is a way to negate disappointment and allow me to be surprised throughout the process. This has been happening for as long as I’ve been photographing. I never stick with the original plan. I’ve come to understand this as a process that welcomes change, movement, and change; of finding ways of letting go to embrace whatever comes next. It’s like being open to detours; you never know what will happen when you go a different route than originally intended. This speaks to my interest in the journey form as a narrative process.

© Terry Ratzlaff from the series "Take Your Time"

© Terry Ratzlaff from the series "Take Your Time"

From a methodological point of view, what is your approach to the medium?

TR: My photographic approach changes and adjusts to each project I’m working with. But in the last few years, I started to think of all my projects as one sprawling project of interconnecting concepts. Instead of working on a specific project, I’m constantly building an archive for all my work to live within. As time passes and images accumulate, I mine the archive to create books or exhibitions that fit the concepts I’m interested in exploring and putting into the world. I like working this way because I’m interested in how meaning changes depending on the sequence, arrangement, and context. However, I do not wander around making photographs of just anything. I’m always looking for things that align with the concepts that interest me. Still, I keep myself open to whatever might come my way. In one day, I’ll make an image that works in two projects. By resisting project categorization and embracing change and movement between projects, the work can grow and become new, perpetually, over time while retaining its past. I think photographs function similarly to memory; the original memory or idea changes the more it’s accessed for varying uses and contexts. Again, reiterating, it’s the journey form I’m interested in exploring.

© Terry Ratzlaff from the series "Take Your Time"

Does research play any significant role in your practice?

TR: Research plays a huge role in my practice. I read everything I can get my hands on. But, I don’t think of research in its standard term, but as a way of being receptive to the world and engaging with it on many levels. Being receptive is an inherently empathetic process; how much one feels the world ultimately leads to how much one reflects on it. I understand creativity not in terms of originality or uniqueness but in terms of reception and recognition. Being receptive to all forms of media; news, art, film, and literature; and to my immediate surroundings posits my work as being inherently referential and emphasizes what came before. This is what draws me to photography; I understand it as a way of recognizing what already exists and what has already been seen and recontextualizing it in a way that fits the concepts that interest me.

Tell us about your approach to photography in general. How did it all start? What are your memories of your first shots?

TR: My career has been a long and winding road up until this point. I’ve been working in photography and thinking about it seriously for 19 years, which has generally changed how I see the world and myself interacting within it. My early days were centered around skateboarding since that shaped my world since my early teens and into my mid-twenties, so it made sense to focus on it during my undergrad studies. Repetition is an inherent part of skateboarding photography, so I photographed the same thing repeatedly; patience also plays a significant factor here. This had more of an effect on my practice and work ethic than anything. But reflecting on it now, I see a throughline in my interest in repetition and mindfulness and how it relates to many of the concepts I’m currently interested in regarding my research on time and trains.

© Terry Ratzlaff from the series "Take Your Time"

© Terry Ratzlaff from the series "Take Your Time"

© Terry Ratzlaff from the series "Take Your Time"

What about your educational path?

I completed my MFA at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) in studio arts in the spring of 2021, fourteen years after my BA in photography. Grad school significantly impacted my practice because I think of it as my most selfish endeavor. It’s all about; “look at my work, come to my studio, what do you think about what I’m doing?” It helped me interrogate and probe how I approach making work and how to apply concepts more thoughtfully. Grad school is an excellent opportunity to pivot or redirect everything from the process to concepts to execution. Because of its reflective nature, I saw it as the ideal environment to create change in myself and my practice and use it as a lens to reevaluate how I view the world.

Do you privilege any camera or process in particular?

TR: I work with film for all personal work or research projects because I value the process, not in terms of material but of time. Working with film takes longer, allowing more time to think and reflect on the work, and can sometimes draw out unexpected concepts or ideas. Most of my work uses the Mamiya RZ67. It is slow yet somewhat efficient. I’m also really interested in the cyanotype process; I think of this not as an alternative process but as a process of process in the sense that I’m referencing the historical materialism within the context of architectural blueprints as a mapping of ideas as a process and structure. I’m also interested in how cyanotypes render duration, intensity, and movement; working and re-working the print retains the history of making the print within it. I like to make an exposure, wash, re-coat, re-expose, reprint, and repeat, like a palimpsest, but one that reaches a saturation point where it can no longer render information or differentiate between its past and its present. It is an ideal medium for expressing not continuity but discontinuity.

© Terry Ratzlaff from the series "Take Your Time"