Ep 011: Jake Michaels
A SHOT: So to start, can you describe the photo that we’re gonna talk about?
JAKE MICHAELS: The photo that I chose to talk about is an image of Mennonite children on a Saturday afternoon playing in a small Mennonite town in Belize — kind of the last light of the day — and it’s kind of an image of pure joy.
So why were you there?
I was there on an assignment that I gave myself that I later pitched to The New York Times, and they ran the story in December of 2018. It was during a time where I was really interested in trying to photograph Mennonite culture. When I did more research, I first started in the US. Then it went into Mexico. When I was first interested in this project, I was doing a huge Google image search. Sometimes my projects start from just Google image searches. Like, whatever I’m interested in that day or that week, I’ll just catalog a bunch of images and put ’em in a folder, come back to it, maybe check the metadata, like really weird geo-tag things. I spent a lot of time also on Google Maps. I’ll just spend time clicking on locations, small towns that I’ve never been to.
One day, I was in northern Mexico on Google Maps, and I found a Mennonite family, just a picture that was tagged at a location. I did more research on that, and I found a photographer. Her name is Eunice Adorno. She’s based out of Mexico City. She actually had a huge project that she had done in northern Mexico on the Mennonite women. I started contacting her, and I was like, “Oh, I’m interested in photographing there.” And she’s like, “It’s good that you want to photograph there, but right now, it’s not the best time” because this was mid-2018, and she’s like, “There’s a lot of cartel activity happening in that area. I wouldn’t suggest you going to do that, but I just had a show in Belize.” It was based out of this Belizean consulate, but in this small town, there’s a whole Mennonite community. She said, “I’m handing you off this project that I’m not going to do, but I can introduce you to people down there.” So I ended up hiring her actually as a fixer, her and her partner, so they facilitated the production aspect of it. They had gone down a week prior to meet with the Mennonites. By the time that I was there, it was pretty seamless.
What was the first thing that interested you about Mennonites?
Working in a commercial world, I kind of wanted to photograph something that wasn’t time specific. There’s no branding there. There’s no anything that can identify a certain time or a place. So for me, where I was at photographically, I was very interested just in the simplicity of how your eye can see something for the pure emotion of it. I think that I’m interested in traditions too — theirs being religious and the religious doctrine kind of determines how they run their life. It’s almost that during a time when there’s so much chaos in our own world, even just on a personal level being surrounded by Instagram and by the news, I almost wanted to do something that I was completely separated. So my interest lied in being on, like, a vacation for my mind there but also interested in seeing happiness in a simplistic way. For me it was kind of stripping down and seeing a world that I never even thought of existed.
You mentioned that the woman had worked as kind of a fixer, someone who’s gonna give you access. Did you get a sense of the work that she had to do in order for them to accept you?
Before I even shot there, I had to get access and permission from one of the pastors of the villages. And [Eunice] thought it would be important — and I agree 100 percent — about just communicating what I had in mind. Before I even started shooting, I wanted to make sure, “Oh, here’s what I’m doing. Here’s where it could potentially end up. I only want to do this if you give me permission.” Because for me, photographing people especially close-knit communities, it’s about putting everything out in the open so that there’s no surprises. In the town that she had the photographic exhibition, that is the main city in that part of Belize that all the Mennonites go to get supplies. So I don’t know if there were people that had gone, that were were Mennonites, to the cultural center to see the project, but I think that there was some sort of correlation between that. She had gone down there and sent me these scout photos, and it was already just “Wow.” The images that she had taken on her phone were already so engaging. She’s speaking Spanish to them. My Spanish is not that fantastic. So she had talked to them about what I was going to do. So there was definitely a lot of preparation on her end, but she made it seem pretty seamless.
Then is she with you when you’re shooting, in order to help communicate and that kind of thing? Or are you just on your own?
Her and her partner were with me the whole time. So I got a hotel room for both me and for her and her partner. They ended up driving us there because to get there — we stayed probably an hour away from each village — so to get there you have to take a highway to a dirt road, drive down a dirt road for 30 minutes and then know to turn on this one road that led to the village. Sometimes when you’re on your own photographing an assignment, it can be good, but all eyes are on you versus when you’re there with someone else, especially… She wasn’t taking pictures, and her partner wasn’t taking pictures either, but they were just there engaging, so it’s a very family atmosphere. I treated it almost as more of me hanging out with them and not constantly taking photos. Experiencing the actual experience was just as important for me to show in the photographs.
At this point, you’re purely taking this for yourself?
No, I had pitched it previously to the Times. But I ended up fronting a lot of it. It was something that I was checking off my list. It was something that I was really interested in on my own. When you’re normally doing an assignment and you’re told what to do, it’s like you’re delivering one thing, but when you’re the one that creates the assignment, there’s no one being let down.
I’m curious about how much you plan for something like this. And I would assume that you had to do some planning since you had to present this idea of what you wanted to do to the pastor or the person in charge. What kind of plan do you develop?
With a lot of these kind of things, when I’m there it’s one [camera] body, two lenses, maybe a third lens and no flash. It’s kind of a very minimal setup. It’s a lot of making flights for the people that I hired from Mexico City and then for me to come from LA, making sure that you get the rental car, make sure you get the hotels. It’s all the logistics that normally go into a photo shoot. But once I’m presented to the pastor, you can tell them what your intentions are, but then you’re going to have to end up repeating this to mostly everybody that you meet because it’s not like there’s a communication system within the Mennonite community that they talk via cell phone. It’s like, no, you have to explain what your intentions are every time that you meet somebody.
When you’re shooting a project like this, what are you looking for?
Like, framing wise, I think of it as “establishing,” “mid” and then “close-ups.” So whenever I’m at a place, I think of it as like, “Okay, what’s the overall scene?” And then, “What’s the most engaging part of this scene?” And then, “What’s a detail of the scene?” So for me, I’m not a constant shooter, but I’m a constant viewer. When I’m photographing this experience, it’s about being prepared for the shot, but also being engaged. With this specific photograph, this was after we were invited to a Saturday-evening meal at one of their houses. I was out there on the porch with the husband and the wife and a couple of their kids and the people I was with. That scene just developed in front of us. I saw the light coming down, that one shaft of light coming down. In the background of that image is kind of a parking lot, but you couldn’t really call it a parking lot. You’d call it, like, the horse parking lot, where the people bring their buggies. And that’s kind of a general store. Being up on the hill a little bit, you could see down into that area. It’s a lot like my personal work, a lot of just looking and then waiting and waiting and waiting. If it happens, then great. If it doesn’t happen, then not. But a lot of my work is about letting things naturally happen and less about setting things up particularly.
What are you doing when you notice something like this? Are you shooting something else and you kind of see it out the side? Or are you just actively looking?
Oh, no. When I find something that I find interesting, especially a scene like this, I will just be stationary and not really focus on any other things and dedicate that time for whatever I think will be the best image of that moment. I wanna be engaging in the scene. My mindset’s different at this point. I’d already been in that community for four days at that point. There’s no cell service. Once it gets dark, there’s some gas lamps and candles. Your mind is shifting, so my mind’s not thinking in the way that it would in a city. I’m not being distracted, so my mind’s slowing down so I’m just viewing the scene itself. There’s probably, like, five images taken from that point of view. Out of college I used to do 4x5 work, so I’m used to not really spraying-and-praying. It’s being more conscientious on how to shoot.
So you were embedded for four days. Were you staying with them, or were you staying outside of the community?
I was staying outside of the community. They invited me one night to stay at one of their houses, but it was kind of like a blanket on top of a table. It’s like going to be at 7pm and waking up at 4:30. When you’re out there, you’re shooting for 10 hours a day. You need to be able to go out of it so that you can be refreshed enough to come back and be engaged. I don’t ever want to be a nuisance to somebody, so it’s kind of like respecting people’s privacy.
How conscious were you of being an outsider here while you were shooting?
Once you get past the people looking at you, they’re kind of made aware of your existence after 10 minutes anyways. If you establish and they’re okay being photographed, I don’t really feel I was an outsider. It’s more someone who was engaging in a community. Because there were definitely different places… Like there’s one shot, one of my other shots from this project, that I went to this bean-storage unit. Not a bean factory, but there were these women working at these bean sorters. They had no idea that I was coming into that room, and then all of the sudden there’s a guy that shows up with a camera. That, yes, there I felt… They were like, “What are you doing?” But they didn’t really wanna engage with me anyway. That was almost like a temporary tourist of that moment, and then you’re out the other side, and then you’re back with the people that you’re with. I felt very included. They were a very hospitable people. I had a lot of milk pie and soup.
Do you think there’s importance to the fact that you did spend four days there?
Oh, I was there for six days. It’s funny because they were such a concentrated six days of that time, and I created a book that I ended up not putting out. But that book has, like, 150 pages of images, and it looks like I spent six months at this place, but it was such a concentrated amount of time because we had gone from like aluminum smelters to the bean-sorting place to the pastor’s house to this one grandfather who then took me to his grandkids’ houses. The thing is a lot of it is similar to when we do editorial work. You can do a photo of a celebrity, and they’ll say, “You have five minutes.” Some of the [Mennonite] people that I photograph will be like “Oh, I’m only available for five minutes because I have to go work.” And then one of the guys that I photographed, we spent two hours playing games, like this marble game. Being there and being aware and participating with this person while not photographing but just being there and participating was just as engaging for me as photographing the scene itself. When I look at the photo that we’re talking about, I think about the meal that was prepared that day. I can have my own feelings from the photographer’s point of view that is my own memory, but then someone can also be like, “Oh, this reminds me of where I grew up.” I enjoy that the viewer can have their own experience, but for me, I have my own memory of that time.
So did you eat dinner with them that day?
Oh, yeah. I had dinner with them several days, like I told you — the milk pie and soup. But that was… I forgot what it was called, but they were almost like tostadas because there’s a Mayan influence mixed with the Mennonite cuisine because they live close to the Mexican/Guatemalan/Belizean border. And the thing is, this was a commission, but this was all made from a Google image search.
So when you’re taking a photo like this specifically, with multiple subjects in it, with kids in it, how much do you consider how the subjects are regarding you? Like, how important is their awareness of you to this photo?
When I normally take a lot of photos, I want people to be engaged in the scene. For me a successful photograph is the subject not being aware of being photographed. But in this case, it kind of lives in both of those worlds. The girl being highlighted by the light is completely in the moment of that image versus the two other ones are looking directly at me. You have this moment of it’s completely spontaneous. They’re reacting to me because I’m taking a photo, but you have the girl, her dress is being lit up while she’s looking at the boy and the other children below on the ground. Everything happened for that moment. That girl’s in the light. Then that girl’s jogging away, and then the other girl’s holding on to the fence.
Did you look to engage them?
No, this is giving no direction to the kids. The girl fell into the light on her own. Like, this was kind of I walked toward them, and they scurried off like that. Originally when I first wanted to go take the image, it was all of them looking over at the other kids, and the two girls on the right side of the frame ran out versus the one in the light stayed in the frame. So it was kind of like a happenstance movement. I saw the girl in the light, and then that other reactive thing happened, and that made it that engaging.
So was your intention originally just to capture the girl who was standing in the light?
My intention was to capture all three girls looking over because the boys were in the second level playing, and they were yelling from the top, so for me it was just photographing the pure joy they were having. Later, after this, one of the Mennonites let me and the people that I was with take the horse and buggy for a ride, so those kids in this image were running after us while we were going up and down the streets. I had spent the whole afternoon with them, so by that time their interest in us, because we were new, kind of faded away a little bit. They were kind of like, “Oh, let’s go back to play. It’s cool that these people are here, but we’re religious; we wanna have fun.”
There’s something that’s inherently performative in this Mennonite series. It’s like a series that feels very welcoming and very playful. And in a lot of instances, it’s almost like they’re kind of putting on a show for you to some extent. Which kind of feels very different than a lot of your travel work, which maybe exits more from like a silently observational or voyeuristic perspective. Did you get the sense of that here?
It’s interesting that you say that about the performative aspect of these images. The viewing aspect of my street work and my travel work, that all to me is considered scouting and kind of awareness. Even though I said a lot of it is giving no direction, it’s like there has to be some parts where you’ll have to be able to give direction if something happened and you really wanna recreate it again. I started doing street photography because I had a fear of taking photos of people. So I started doing street photography so that I would get over one day being able to ask somebody, “Can I take your photo?” But for me, the Mennonite series is a step forward from my street and travel work. Maybe from your point of view or a viewer’s point of view, it could look performative, but in a sense, they’re just going through the notions of what their daily life is.
Does that kind of mean that it’s maybe more honest?
For a lot of these things, there is an honesty, but the parallels between my personal work and this work exits because a lot of it is not saying, “Hey, can I take your photo?” A lot my work now is being observational. With the street work, I’m still trying to figure out a way where I can get to the Mennonite aspect of it where I can be more engaged on a personal level. But the work that I do, it doesn’t have to be. They don’t have to compete with each other. These photos, even the photo we’re looking at, there’s an honesty to them because that was what existed at that moment.
I think part of the performative thing that I’m talking about is I clearly see you as a part of this image, just in the way that they are reacting to you. They are going about their day, but I see you holding space in this image holding your camera.
Yeah, because if you think about my other work, you never really see me being a part of the image. So for me, being a part of this image is curious because it’s kind of using the same themes that I enjoy with heavy light and strong color but then finding a way to have me be engaged. When I look at people whose work that I really enjoy, especially like old street photographers… I really love Fred Herzog and Saul Leiter, and you don’t really see them engaging, but there might be a few images where you do see them, and you’re like, “But that’s not necessarily like the same work that they have.” But there has to be a point where you can’t always be anonymous. You can’t always be a fly on the wall. Sometimes a fly becomes a bit of a nuisance, and then you are aware of it.
Do you think that you liked that you were kind of holding space in this work?
Yeah, because if the image was just of them looking away, it would have a certain gravity, but because of them looking back at me… Depending on where it’s printed, it’s like if it was printed dark, you would never know that those girls were looking at me. There’s almost a weird secret that exits. There is an engagement depending on how people look at the image. And the thing too is I’m not afraid to crop. I don’t believe that everything needs to be full frame. But this is one of the rare instances where there’s no crop. This was the full frame. This exists as it exists. But then there’s enough to identify myself in that image.
Your photos always use shadow really skillfully and kind of in a way that’s a bit distinctive to you where you’re creating structure with your shadows. How did you use shadows in this image?
Being able to make images that are not fabricating the light is important to me. Like, obviously this is a rare instance of end-of-day, so the light was very engaging for where it was in the scene. Composition is very important to me. Once the composition is set, the content can then be the star of the image. You’re building an image, you can build three quarters of it through composition and through time of day, but then there’s the human element, or maybe there’s not a human element, but there’s some sort of engaging element in the image. For me personally my enjoyment exists in that type of imagery because it just brings you into the image.
Yeah, especially in this image, there is something that you see first, and then there’s something that you see next and then there’s something that you see next. So the way that you use shadows here, it just holds your attention.
What’s funny is even when I’m looking at this image — and I’ve seen this image probably more times than most people have seen this image — I now am just noticing the shadow below the horses feet with the girl with the green dress. And I never noticed that was the shadow of the girl in the image in the foreground. Structurally I should be able to understand that fact because obviously with the way that light works, that’s what it was but because there’s so many other things going on, I never really focused on that aspect of it.
So when the light is disappearing like this at the end of the day, is there anything different that you find yourself looking for?
Yeah, when the light’s disappearing at the end of the day, I just like to see where the light still is. Like, this was a very fortunate image to happen. And because of the slight movement of the dress, it makes it more engaging. So even though the girl’s still, you can tell that she’s in movement. Movement is so important in my work because there was a part where this all had to come together to happen. That girl happened to go into that light right there, and then the other girls ran out of the scene. I had seen that light, and then they just went there, and it was like, “Well, pack it up for the day. We don’t need anymore sunset images.” With photography, it doesn’t matter about what the best camera you have. You could take the best photo with a pinhole camera or, like, the first-generation flip phone. If it’s a good image, the image will be a good image. For me, I’ll shoot into the sun. I’ll break all the rules and then also still use all the rules while I do it. When the light’s ending like this, it’s like, “How can I shoot as much before I transition into shooting at night?” Once the light’s gone, I’ll then have some time to just enjoy or just have time to reflect.
I also think that at the end of the day, there’s some fun in working in the restraints of like you were saying, “Oh, the light’s only here. So we gotta kind of do something here because it looks great here,” but it’s just this tiny little sliver.
I enjoy working within the restraints. This image exists because that’s the only image that exists at that point. It’s not like creating something in the studio where you can then re-create that light over and over and over again. This was a complete documentation of that moment of that day. But one small interesting detail about this image especially that happened throughout the whole project is the clouds that existed… There were no filters used on this project. There was no [neutral-density] or polarizing filter used on this project. The clouds existed on the frame without having to expose for the clouds. It was crazy to have that happen. When you think about the logistics of re-creating this, it’s like it looks like a stormy day plus having light come through. There’s so many natural things that exist.
You’ve also shot this photo on a tilt, which is something that I do a lot. Usually when I do it, it’s creating an exaggeration of lines, or maybe an action or movement, kind of emphasize that. And sometimes it’s just because I literally can’t fit everything that I want to fit into the frame if I shoot it without tilting. What effect does the slight tilt of your camera have on this image?
Actually, as we’re going, and I know this is probably not the best, but I’m doing this just so I can see. I’m going to actually do a crop to see what the image looks like when it’s straight.
Some good podcast content right here.
So now that I made it straight really quickly by making 90 degree angles of the wall, the image looks almost fake now. It’s like the tilt brings a reality that it was almost done, not haphazardly, but it was done in the moment versus it’s not like a scene like Jeff Wall is doing where everything was articulately made up like an 8x10 photograph. The tilt gives the spontaneousness of the image.
It’s weird to say, but it feels like it adds a tenderness to it.
The spontaneity kind of parallels the meaningfulness of it. There’s more of the human touch when things aren’t perfect. It’s almost like the kids running out of the image is just as important as the image being tilted. There’s the moment where the tilt reflects the action.
There’s also the balance in it with the flowerpots, which is such a cool element because the flower pots are tilted in the opposite direction.
What’s very interesting for me is I never like a lot of chaotic imagery. I don’t like a lot of things crossing each other. I like things to be clean. So for me, when I see that image, the girl’s dress is against a gray wall, so the dress color, you can see it the best because there’s nothing competing with it. There’s so much chaos in this image, but in the sense that it all doesn’t affect the structure of the image itself. Everything is in the place that it needs to be.
Yeah, and also to some extent, the shadows sort the chaos.
The shadows definitely sort the chaos. A darker foreground, especially for later in the day, is important to me because it then allows the engagement to whatever your eye is gonna go to. There’s enough detail still in the shadows that you can see all the things that exist in the image, but at the same time, you’re taken straight to the middle third. This isn’t traditionally like a composition that I would normally do, but it worked.
That kind of jumps onto my next question: An obvious characteristic of this image is just that it’s dark. It’s dimly lit. What do you like about that?
When you get to the end of the day and you look out and then you take some photos and you go back and you review them, and you’re like, “This doesn’t look like anything that I thought that it looked like outside…” This was the rare instance where it looked like what it looked like that day. It’s almost because there wasn’t any other competing elements, artificially, like there was no lights competing at the same time that you would see if you were shooting a city scene. For me the darks are naturally the darks. There isn’t any burning done to this image. It’s contrasty, but they’re all still within the same hues.
And at the same time, it still kind of looks surreal.
Yeah.
It made me wanna know what decisions you made to this photo after shooting it. But it sounds like not much.
What’s happened with me a lot more as time goes on is, like I’ll use Capture One and Photoshop. I shoot digitally 99.9 percent [of the time]. I love film, but I like to do my own thing in the computer. I don’t do, like, a batch process that I jump from project to project. Every image that was from that time of day — and from that time of day from the other six days — I kind of colored the same. Once I had that, then I bring it into Photoshop and from there it’s usually three things: usually a contrast curve, some grain, and maybe some light dodging and burning depending. But I’ve kind of moved away from doing completely heavy work on my photos. And I think that’s just because, not that I’m trying to stay true to the thing that exists, but I didn’t wanna complicate it.
When I first started getting into doing work on the computer, I would spend, like, three hours making three different groups [of adjustments] on one file, and then turn them on and off, and then I’d be like, “Well, that made it worse, and there’s really no reason I should have done it in the first place.” When I shot this image, I should go back to the reason why I shot the image, not trying to make the image what I think it should be. I’m realizing this more and more as time goes by: You can do so much while you worry at the time, but then when a couple years goes by, you’ll look at the image, and you’ll be like, “I don’t care that that’s slightly cyan,” or “I don’t care that that’s overtly a little bit sharpened.” At the end of the day, you’re not going to think about those things that you were obsessing about for no reason.
What about this photo feels like a Jake Michaels photograph?
This photo feels like every stage of photography that I’ve ever existed in. It has the nuances of the beginning of when I got into photography, where I just liked taking photos of things I saw, and then it got into interests that I spent time to do research on that’s going to be for a commission, and then also then beauty and contrast. I can look at it and say it has every version of who I want to be and where I want to go.
What do you think you’ve learned that’s given you an instinct to take this photo specifically?
Things can be simple but yet be so engaging. As much as, like, craziness that happens, the simplest things can make you forget all of your worries. It’s okay to be completely removed from where you think you need to be. It’s like when you’re doing commercial work, you’re like, “Oh, when’s the next job? When’s the next job?” When I was doing this project, one of the nights I was there, I just stopped and looked up, and I was looking at the stars. It just made me realize there’s no place that I need to be than to be here right now because I’m just existing. I’m just existing doing something that I love doing. I love taking photos because it’s a way for me to engage with people, and I can bring what I think is interesting into the frame, and then people can be themselves, or they can be not themselves, and they can be engaged. It’s like there was nothing else that was distracting me or the subject away from the reality of where we actually were.
To close the conversation, what’s something unrelated to photography that’s been feeding you creatively lately?
Probably two things. There’s a GeoGuessr Web site where it shows you a Google Maps location by the street view and you have to guess on the map where it is. And then I think rediscovering reading, like an actual physical book. I’ll read like 10 pages, and I’ll go in the other room to tell my wife, like, “Look what I just learned!” So I think just going back to the basics of what I’ve always been interested in: geography and reading.
What kind of stuff are you reading?
There’s a book that I’m reading about Siberia. It’s a travelogue. I love travel journals. [Paul Theroux] is the saltiest guy but also the best describer.
Interviewed on December 8, 2020.
(This transcript has been edited for brevity.)
Links:
Jake Michaels
C. 1950 (Mennonites of Belize)
The New York Times: “A Simple Life”
Eunice Adorno’s “Mujeres Flores”