Yeah, officially.
CF: And I didn’t do any art until freshman year of college.
Yeah I never did any of that, I took photography in high school, and I didn’t know what I wanted to take photos of at all — I had no idea what I wanted to do. I just knew I didn’t want to work in a suit in an office.
After that, I had no idea. So I took an anthropology class and a few other courses — Philosophy really helped me.
Growing up, I was horrible at reading and would just get distracted all the time. Philosophy was the first reading I like slowed down and made sure I understood it. It’s not like you can necessarily do a whole career in philosophy, but it let me know that there are options out there. I took a darkroom photo class during my freshman year and I loved it. I was horrible at it technically — like technically I am so slow. But, visually, I could see things, and I just loved what you can put in the camera. You know. So much different than what you see. And so it wasn’t until probably like the second darkroom class I took that I really understood F Stops, Aperture, and that sort of thing.
Once that caught up with what I was trying to show visually, then it became very addictive. My sophomore year, I was still at UCD I took a class where we were using a digital camera. That helped me a lot to find a style and find what I want to phonograph.
Yeah. You can photograph like you could take like a thousand shots a night. I was mostly following my friends around at like eighteen, nineteen years old — when I went back to film, that’s when I really understood framing. With film, you only have like 36 [exposures] in a roll, so you have to think about it a little bit.
I’d say like 90 percent of them are polaroids. I didn’t get into polaroids until probably like 3-4 years ago. It was like the last camera I learned. — I had my style at that point. I understood framing, I understood the functions of the camera. So the Polaroid on the surface is like the easiest to operate. But you still have to think about framing — and there are only eight shots. I love that there’s only [eight] — You don’t want to fuck it up, you know?
They could be just because there is so little control — I was learning how to manipulate things with Polaroid [film]. Like [polaroid] say to “put it in a dark place for 30 minutes” so I would just take it out after 10 minutes and then on the back of the Polaroid, there’s a little pocket on the bottom of the backside of it. And that’s where the developer is. And I learned that when Polaroid went out of business and impossible project took over, they don’t have that patent. So they’ve got it really close, but it wasn’t exactly the same. So what you have to do is when you’re ready for it to be done you cut the top of it so that when a developer stops.
Because it will slowly just keep going and then, you know over time the colors in the image will change — I have seen them change and they are pretty unflattering.
The bottom, the backside of it on the very bottom is a little pouch, and so I cut that, and it stops the developer.
I could take a polaroid in the middle of the day, really sunny. And then like five or six minutes after taking it I’ll take get it out and cut it, it will look like you took it in the middle of the night.
Right now, I’m building my website for clothes — I just bought my domain for the e-commerce site where people can order the shirt, and pay for it online — So that would be a big step. Up until now, I’ve been doing a lot of one-off with prints on. Just to see how they look.
You know you maybe two or three — there’s a store in town I’ll give them to, and they will sell them.
It’s called Spectra Art Space. This one and they’re planning a show for me, but we don’t have any dates yet, so that will be awesome — The website that’s going to take a while. But that will give me another avenue to sell them.
Right now it’s just shirts but I’m hopefully be trying to expand to stickers, and trying to expand to other items of clothing —
Getting it introduced to the public and have it as kind of a symbol. So that they can kind of digest it a little, I think it’s better to go that way than just to throw a bunch of shit at people.
I mean, I think one day it would be great to have both. You know, when I first got out of school, there were two galleries that started to show my work. One is in L.A., and one is in like New York — I’ll take like just a single Polaroid. And I’ll blow it up to three and a half by four feet. Then I’ll get it framed, and they will sell it for me. But what I learned from that is you know it’s hit or miss. I can make like a bunch of money in like two or three months and then not see any money for a while. So I was trying to think of a different avenue. I don’t just rely on that. I always liked clothing and that way you can get one image out to a whole bunch of different people in a pretty affordable way. And a shirt is such great advertising. And to get people’s opinions because if someone likes it, they will just come up to you and say it, and where they can get it — So you get feedback back that way.