Welcome to Quo Vadis with Camillo. This podcast is about photography and film, less so about the work itself and more about the process of making it. I myself am a photographer and each week I plan to speak with others in the field, professional and amateur alike, about what goes on through their head when they’re working on their projects and why they choose the projects they do. For our first episode this week we have special guests Ryan Del Rosario, Fiona McCarthy and Elijah DeBille. All three of our guests tonight value the weird and art. You’ll learn what I mean as you meet them. I wanted to find out what draws them to their subject matter, what they think of when shooting it and what got them started with their projects. While you learn about their processes it may help you get into the world and shoot something you might consider weird or strange.
First off we have our interview with Ryan Del Rosario. Ryan’s been a photographer for a number of years and has been well established within the photography community here in New Mexico.
So I brought you here today. I wanted to do a quick little story on photographers and how they find all their things, where they go to shoot, how they do it and you’ve shot in some pretty incredible places. What’s the secret, Ryan? What’s the secret? What’s the secret? What do you mean? Well there’s one photo for example that you have that I really love and it’s of a dead cow in an abandoned house I believe. How did you come about that? Why did you decide to shoot that of all things?
“Well I would say that most of my work is happenstance. It’s probably 99% happenstance and 1% deliberate planning, lighting, shooting. So that picture that you’re mentioning I’ve called it, it’s titled Estancia Cow and that’s a home or a former home that’s from a Sears catalog that’s one of the most photographed places in New Mexico. I mean it’s one of the most photographed abandoned houses in the state and I photographed it a bunch of times but this particular time when that image was made about two years ago was the first time I ever chose to venture inside. I went in, the floorboards were all dusty and broken and all of this stuff and I stumbled upon this cow and it was basically mummified. So that was a happenstance picture. It wasn’t necessarily something that was planned or that I knew I was going to find. I’m happy I did. Sad for the cow but ultimately it wasn’t planned. It was a coincidence.”
When you go out and shoot like strange photos like that for example, what do you think? Like what do you go through when you see something like that? Do you immediately jump to thinking about lighting it? Do you jump to composition? Like what’s the first thing or rather what’s what are the steps you go through?
“Well when I when I find things like that you know something that is really common in my workflow is death. I am weirdly obsessed with it. If I see a roadkill or something I always have an urge to stop and to photograph. So ultimately my first step is to get out of the car and to see and look with my eyes. Composition and lighting are usually second to that. I
mean the composition is usually found ultimately but the lighting is is more than more than not what is already there. So it’s not something that I’m doing bringing a light or bringing a flash. There are instances of that but again most of my work is happenstance. It’s not it’s not something that I intended to make in the morning and went to sleep proud of making. It was something that I didn’t have any any dream of making and then it happened and then I go to sleep proud of it. So that’s that’s how I work.”
Next up we have Fiona McCarthy. She’s been making films for a while and is set to be visiting Cannes Film Festival this May.
When you’re shooting kind of something like the taboo how do you do it? Like what’s your thought process?
“Can you define the taboo?”
So just things that people normally would find strange or something that just is like not normal to shoot to a lot of people.
“Well truthfully when I was a little kid in like kindergarten everybody for some reason had to make these like little books these picture books and then we would have to present them or it wasn’t everybody was like a select group of people. Anyways I had to make this picture book to present to like a whole group of people of different ages like older people, people my age, younger adults and I spent like the like I don’t know at least a month making it. It was like a long project and then when it came to presenting it I don’t know why but I was so nervous to do it that instead of reading it normally to people I like flipped it upside down and inside out so that I like they couldn’t see the pictures correctly or the things that I drew they couldn’t read the writing right so I could read it and understand it but they would be getting like a backwards version of it and I think I’ve like lived by that. I like things upside down and inside out.”
Elijah DeBille better known in the New Mexico film community as DeBille has a different approach.
What’s like the first thing that you go for is the first thing you work on like step one once you get at it?
“I don’t really try to be weird I think it’s just like the way that I see like a lot of my pictures are just like candid I pick up the camera and point it and take a picture without thinking like I don’t think about it and there’ll be days where like I’ll look at the film from that day and everybody’s faces will look like all distorted like I’ll catch people right at weird moments or like I don’t know I think it’s just the headspace I’m in I don’t plan it out just let that headspace be.”
Shooting the weird isn’t for everybody some people believe it’s too taboo to try and shoot the strange if you ask me I believe more people should shoot unusual subjects to expand their horizons and grow their visions. Next week we’ll be talking about shooting landscape photography with people without focusing on the person frame. If you’ve got anything to share on the topic or you believe something was left out or forgotten this week please don’t hesitate to reach out to me on social media or at CamilloCretara at gmail.com. Quo Vadis Camillo. We will see you all next time.
