Capturing the Moment in the Age of Instagram
Author Christopher Wallace on photography
When I heard the writer Christopher Wallace was working on a biography of the photographer Peter Beard, my first thought was, “Of course he is.” Wallace isn’t your typical biographer, and that’s what made him such a great fit for a complex figure like Beard, who was a mix of brilliant, gonzo, existentialist thinker, iconoclast, and asshole all rolled into one. The way Wallace approaches Beard, who died in 2020, is the way I’d love to see more books on artists done. Twentieth-Century Man: The Wild Life of Peter Beard is about Beard, but Wallace is always there. He guides us through Beard’s life and times by making it personal, but not too personal. Wallace tells his story of finding Beard’s work, adding some much-needed context and depth to Beard’s life and the reason Wallace wrote the book in the first place. When Wallace was younger, he was in search of guidance. He was a jock, a football player, but he wanted something more. So he started gravitating towards the sort of literature and thinkers that young men in that frame of mind are often attracted to and get stuck on: Hemingway, the Beats, and “other mad-bad artists living out loud,” as he puts it. Some people read those couple of authors and they think they’ve read all the books they need, but Wallace’s quest was just starting, and somewhere during those early days, he found out about Beard.
But there was another reason I thought Wallace was the person for the job when it came to writing about Beard. I’ve been a fan of his photography from his travels he often posts on his Instagram. In an age of influencers doing yoga poses in front of sunsets and giving the peace sign in front of holy shrines, Wallace opts for something else. He is more interested in a beautiful sign he saw in the American West, an apartment building in Beirut, or a flower cart in Vietnam. The way he shoots and presents these things reminds me that there was once a time when traveling seemed truly interesting. I look at his photos and have to remind myself that once upon a time people only had a few magazines to give them hints as to what a destination looked like. I like looking at his Instagram from time to time because it makes me feel like I’m in the middle of the 20th century and I just cracked open an issue of Holiday or National Geographic.
This past summer, when Wallace asked me to interview him at McNally Jackson for the launch of Twentieth-Century Man, I had hoped to talk a little about his photography, but we only had so much time and the point was to get people to buy his book, so we didn’t get to touch on that. Since I had the questions, I decided to shoot him an e-mail. I think he was in Paris when he answered, but was kind enough to take the time to answer me and said I could share them with friends of The Melt.
I am really interested in the iconography of a place — the sort of visual and cultural shorthand we use to tell ourselves the story of… Paris, say. Whether that is the Eiffel Tower or Michael Gambon’s Maigret or whatever. And then maybe I sort of approach those things a little bit sideways or my own way to try to find what it is about them that I want to understand, want to sort of enshrine in a picture. But then the thing that I loved about taking pictures in the beginning is that it is so instinctive — that, right there, that little vignette or that shock of light appeals to me. What is it? How can I sort of study it or collect it or something. So I kinda like to just allow for the tractor beam to hit, whatever it is. I wander and wander and wander. Looking and kind of chasing pretty light.
I started off only ever using iPhone and they are great. They have their own particular qualities and I can’t do now on my old ass Nikon film cameras a lot of what I got in the habit of doing with them — I don’t get crazy inky shadows or anything now for example, don’t pull my highlights way down to over saturate images like I loved to do with iPhone pics. But again I think it is super personal and finding little vibes you like is the whole thing. I’d say give the zoom a chance. What does an image look like if the background is sucked way forward and the foreground flattened out. And maybe think about where the main light source is. I have friends who hate, hate, hate backlight, but was it Truffaut who said when in down shoot TOWARDS the light. Again it is a find your groove thing. Oh, another very true observation — maybe from Robert Capa — is if your pics aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough. But I might almost argue the opposite, with see above re: zoom. To each his own.
I now use a Nikon FM2 with a sort of wonky 35-105 lens. And am out and about right now with my Nikon F100 (which I got as a less expensive replacement for an F6 that went kaput) with a wild 28-200 lens.
I am a very go-with-the-flow sort of a wanderer, photographer. I will certainly have built an entire moodboard, a dek, a reference library of images, and a sort of narrative framework for the visit, but once I am there I am all the way off the cuff. I have even caught myself loitering around spots where I thought something jazzy might happen, like a cop sitting in a speed trap, and I know it is wrong, and truly nothing ever good comes of it. Sometimes I feel some sort of weird itch, an awareness that something really rad is happening here with these trees and the street and whatever and I will shoot the shit out of it because I can’t quite figure it out. And sometimes there is something in that. But all the best moments are like a perfect free throw when it rolls off your fingers and you just know yeah that was right on. I guess travel
Photography is a flow thing as much as anything else. There will be rolls where like 20 frames in a row from all different places are just awesome. And then there will be ten whole rolls of throat-clearing or awkwardness. A lot like my draft pages probably.
I am an absolute sucker for Venice. It is candy land for the eye. But as I say I am in Istanbul right now and that could certainly make a claim. Ditto Tangier. I think there is something for me about great old architecture by the water where the light can get all groovy and molten that I just love.
Ahh, love Istabul. Go to Kusadasi if possible— short flight.