Intro. [Recording date: May 5, 2022.]
Russ Roberts: Today is May 5th, 2022 and my guest is fine art photographer, Jessica Todd Harper. Before starting today’s episode, you may want to visit her website, jessicatoddharper.com, and look at some of her fine art photographs.
I want to thank Plantronics for providing the Blackwire 5220 headset.
Jessica was a National Portrait Gallery Outwin Boochever 2016 Prize winner–probably butchered that name. Her work was included in the 2016 Taylor Wessing Portrait Competition at the National Portrait Gallery in London. And, her work will be featured in Kinship, which is a show due to run at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery from 2022 to 2024.
She has published three books of her photographs: Interior Exposure, The Home Stage, and her latest with the title, Here. In the introduction to that book, the painter Bo Bartlett writes about Jessica’s work,
Her photographs often capture private moments, most of close family, seeming slices of life, which teeter in imbalance and team with the everyday chaos of life. There is something classically trained about her work, an awareness of the Great Masters of Vermeer-like formality.
I would add that Jessica’s work has a luminous style that grabs you. Her pictures seem to glow with the intensity of family and connection, but sometimes also with disconnection, which is very appropriate for families. And we’ll talk some about that I hope. Jessica, welcome to EconTalk.
Jessica Todd Harper: Thank you very much. I’m very honored to be here.
Russ Roberts: We’re going to start with some of the basics of fine art photography, a world that most of us have no familiarity with. Every one of us in 2022 thinks we know something about photography. But, we’re going to start with what’s peculiar in particular about your world. And, then we’ll go deeper into the art. And, I expect along the way, we’re going to talk about family. What is fine art photography? What makes it different?
Jessica Todd Harper: Well, you’re right in that everybody has a camera in their pocket these days. So, there’s a ubiquity to family photography in that everybody photographs their family and everybody’s a photographer. But, fine art photography seeks to be in the art category. So, not just for a casual pleasure or to make documents of family moments or copies of receipts, the way that we use our phones every day, but it seeks to be something that people might find in a museum like a painting or a sculpture.
Russ Roberts: Is it something that you hope has a timelessness to it, in that sense? Unlike my picture of my kid?
Jessica Todd Harper: Yes. I often think–one of my favorite artists is William Morris, who was part of the arts and crafts movement in England in the 19th century. He was fond of a Latin expression, ars longa, vita brevis, which means life is short, but art is forever.
And, I think that humanity leans toward a yearning for the eternal. And, when art works, it references that: It’s relevant even 500 years later. It’s moving to people who don’t know the artist.
Russ Roberts: I have to ask you a personal question. Do you have a smartphone?
Jessica Todd Harper: Yes.
Russ Roberts: Do you take photos with it?
Jessica Todd Harper: I do. Yes. I do because I’m a mom and I’m an American and I use it for all kinds of practical purposes as well as just quick snapshots. But, I bring out my camera when I’m in the art mode. And in my mind, it’s very clear whether I’m just taking snapshots for every day consumption or if I’m making something for art.
Russ Roberts: So, I take a lot of photographs with my phone. I used to use a mirrorless camera, and I take it somewhat seriously–not as seriously as you do, but I take it seriously. And, a lot of people think I’m a good photographer–or they’re lying to me. It could be both. But they say nice things about my work. Words that you’ve heard: ‘Wow, that’s a great picture.’
What I don’t tell them is that, for me, except for one little thing that we’ll maybe talk about later, most of my art–the artfulness of my photography is a big denominator. I take in the digital world, take a lot of pictures. I think I’m pretty good at picking the good ones. Maybe. Maybe that’s something of a skill.
But that’s not your usual mode. You’re not going to take hundreds and hundreds of pictures and hope you get a couple of keepers. Is that correct or not correct? A better way to say it is do you compose your pictures in advance or just hope something comes out good and then take it if it does?
Jessica Todd Harper: Yeah, that’s a good question. Also, thinking more about what you asked before, perhaps a good analogy is a writer. A writer uses email all the time. Probably composes many, many emails or even texts every day. But, that’s not necessarily what he’s going to put into his novel. Right? So, as a photographer, I use imagery every day, but when I’m composing for fine art purposes, it’s with a different mindset.
Yes. So, I try to be very precise. I don’t take hundreds and hundreds of pictures. In part, I think it’s because I grew up in the film era when that would’ve been very expensive and you had to train your eye to be very precise and careful. My early teachers were always emphasizing to compose the picture beforehand: Shoot full frame, which means you don’t plan on cropping it afterward.
You had to be very precise because you only had, depending on what kind of camera you’re using, the really good medium-format cameras, you had 12 shots to get it right. With that background, I don’t shoot a ton. That said, the pictures that the public consumes are the best ones, and there are many bad ones that nobody sees. And so, there is that, also.
Russ Roberts: Again, even an amateur photographer learns that sometimes the light is only the way you want it to be for 30 seconds. You have a very short window to get a particular scene the way you might want. And, sometimes you miss it and nothing comes out, right?
Jessica Todd Harper: Yes. The preface should give an example. So, the cover of the book is a picture of me with my infant son. And, I noticed the light in my bedroom was really good at 2:30 in the afternoon in January. There’s not a lot of light in the winter. I live outside of Philadelphia. So, I tried to kind of get together this picture and time for the light, but it was gone within 15 minutes.
And so, I knew that I had to plan for this picture to happen, which is fairly typical. And so, I looked at the weather forecast; I saw it was going to rain the next couple of days, but I was going to get ready.
And so, by the third day, I had my camera on a tripod, and I had the framing set up–so I knew what was going to be in the picture and what was not going to be in the picture. I was very cognizant about the edges, in particular. So, I remember removing some diaper trash bags and various debris that wasn’t going to contribute to the picture in a positive way.
I also made sure to have the nursing schedule set so that he would be fed and awake during that 15 minutes. I made sure to wash my hair. I had the curtain set in just the right way, so that then when the moment came, I was ready and I was able to make maybe seven or eight exposures before he started fussing and the moment had passed.
That’s another question you probably would have, is: I set the camera on a tripod with a timer.
Russ Roberts: Yeah, I was going to ask you that.
Jessica Todd Harper: It’s an automatic timer. Yeah, a lot of artists will use a remote. Right. I never got into that. So, I set the camera on a timer and I jump into the picture and I’m lucky when it works. And those are the only ones that the audience gets to see.
Russ Roberts: So, let’s talk about mindset. You said, ‘My mindset when I’m taking a photo like that is very different than when I’m say taking a quick snapshot on my phone.’ Could you describe that? What’s different about the mindset?
Jessica Todd Harper: Well, again, referencing that William Morris quote, I think there’s something eternal, ideally, in a well-executed piece of art. And when I’m trying to create something of beauty that’s going to last beyond me, I’m seeking to reference some of those eternal themes of what it is to be human. For me, I choose to work within the family–I use my own family, and several other families also feature in my latest book. So, over the last seven or eight years, you can see these families develop.
And, I think, in part, it’s because I grew up in a family that was very interested in stories. My grandmother would tell stories of ancestors from five or six generations ago. My mother was a big storyteller, and my grandfather was a big storyteller. And I was always very interested in the way that narrative shaped the way that we perceived reality.
It’s a easy entry point. I mean, back to The Odyssey and forward, humans love storytelling as a way to understand their own existence.
For me, relationships are particularly attractive. This became more interesting or more obvious to me during the pandemic when so many of those relationships were cut out and we weren’t able to see so many people that–all of us were not able to see so many people that we really yearned to see. And not only individuals like elderly grandparents or parents that you were trying to stay away from, but just casual interactions in the grocery store or walking your kids to school and all those acquaintances that make up the fabric of life.
I found I was really reminded of–in Genesis, before Genesis 3, so, before the fall–in that story most people are familiar with: On the first day God created light. ‘Let there be light,’ is the first thing that God creates.
And, then He goes on so forth: He creates the animals, the plants, the sea, the sky, the heavens–everything. And everything God creates, He says afterward, ‘And, it was good.’ Right? And, the only thing that wasn’t good in all of creation and that whole narrative is when, after He creates Adam, He says, ‘It is not good for Adam to be alone.’ And so, He creates Eve.
And I found myself thinking about that text a lot. It is not good for man to be alone.
And, during the pandemic, I think we really felt that acutely it wasn’t good for us to be isolated, to be alone. In my work, I am really interested in those relationships that bind us and that we navigate through the course of our everyday lives, which is your family.
From the dawn of time, human beings have been living in families. How does that shape how we navigate our lives, how we see ourselves, how we construct meaning?
So, when I’m making pictures of my family, I’m trying to interface with those issues: How are we constructing meaning in an internal sense?
Russ Roberts: So, I think anybody who looks at your photographs for more than 30 seconds, sees a handful of them–and the more pages you turn, the more it becomes apparent–that one of the things that’s distinctive about your work is the look in the eyes of the people you’re photographing.
You take a lot of photographs of your sister. She has an incredible gaze–at least in your photographs. I don’t know what she’s like day to day. You have a very strong gaze. Your children have very strong gazes. And, to start with, when you–and ‘strong’ is not just the right word. It’s a cliché: Eyes are the window to the soul. There’s something both riveting and disarming and vulnerable about a lot of the gazes of your family members that you capture.
So, my first question is a little bit personal: When you jump into that frame as the mother of that infant that’s on the cover of your new book, you’ve set up this–you’ve done a bunch of logistics. You’ve made sure this is–it’s framed the right way you want, you’ve set the timer, you’ve cleared out the clutter, you’ve put some back in because it makes it look homier. You’ve got it the way you want–your child is there, your child is young, your child doesn’t take instruction–but you’re telling yourself something when you climb back into the frame, literally the bed frame as it turns out in this particular shot–other pictures, it’s just the photograph’s frame. What are you thinking as you prepare yourself for that shot? What’s your head saying? What are you saying to yourself?
Jessica Todd Harper: I think there’s something about motherhood that reminds you of man’s ability to be–to experience the transcendent. Having a child is much bigger than yourself. It’s awe-inspiring. And, when you’re so close to the advent of that life–and so this is an infant baby–you’re daily reminded of that miracle. But at the same time, you’re dealing with lack of sleep and lots of diapers and crying. And in my case, other children who need you, too.
There’s a lot of very mundane concerns. And so, isn’t that what it is to be alive? Right?
So, ideally, we remember our eternal selves, our immortal selves, the part that can be much bigger than ourselves. But, we also are rooted in the quotidian. We have daily concerns that need attention. We can’t just be thinking about beautiful, abstract thoughts all the time, or our children would starve.
So, there’s this duality. I think it’s–isn’t it St. Augustine who talks about the City of God and the City of man–this idea that you have to navigate both.
And, so I think when I was making that picture, both of those themes are swirling around in my head. And I’m reaching out to this baby and there’s a sense of the miraculous, but there’s also–it’s rooted in the real world and this is a real bedroom. It’s not exactly a madonna-and-child picture. It’s not completely perfect and idealized. It’s a mother who is tired, and a baby who is living. His limbs are moving during that picture.
And, like children who are older, he can only take so much before the photo session is over. I’m also trying to be as precise and efficient as possible, which is something I’ve gotten much better at ever since I became a mother because you lose the veracity of the moment if you take too long. As any parent who’s taken a child shopping for shoes or anything would know. You only have a limited time, and then they’re done.
Russ Roberts: So, if you were taking a photograph of me with my child, would you ask me to think about those things? Did you deliberately think about those things? The way an actress would in a role, right? An actress or an actor tries to put their head in a certain place? Would you say that’s what you’re doing as you lay back down in that bed?
Jessica Todd Harper: Yes, there’s definitely a degree of acting that’s taking place because I’m trying to create a moment which couldn’t have been just captured secretly, since I’m also the artist.
If I’m photographing you–so, sometimes people will see my work and they hire me to make pictures of their family that looks like the pictures I take of my family or the other families in my book.
And, so what I do in that case is I try to plan ahead as much as possible. If they’re local, I visit their homes. I go through their closets. I look at their furniture. I ask them: When is the light good in your house? I’d say 90% of the time, people don’t know when the light is good in their house. Even curators–even art world people who have hired me to take pictures of their family don’t know. Which is fine. I mean, there are millions of things that go on every day in my life that I take pay no attention to at all. My husband will attest to that. I can’t name any of the cars that our neighbors drive. I don’t notice them. I could maybe say the color, but I don’t know the make or year.
I’ll have them take pictures with their smartphones and I’ll say, ‘Well, when you see light coming through the window, snap a picture and send it to me and make sure that the time is available so I know what time of day it is.’ And so, we start guessing. And then, if they’re local, I will go and visit during the time that I think is best and then I map out what furniture is going to be included, what outfits are going to be included, if I have to change anything on the walls–which I do sometimes. I remember one time doing a portrait commission of–this family were fine art collectors–and I went to go move something on the wall, and one of the household staff stopped me because it was a Picasso and she said I wasn’t allowed to touch it.
Russ Roberts: It happens to me all the time.
Jessica Todd Harper: I try to be careful.
Russ Roberts: But, what about the gaze? What about the inner thoughts? What do you do?
Jessica Todd Harper: So again, if I’m photographing somebody else’s family, it’s their family, not mine. Right? So, it’s going to reflect who they are. By spending time with them, I watch them very carefully. Also, I’m in conversation with them constantly. I talk to them and I see what possibilities there are, and then I try to encourage certain directions.
Sometimes, you just have a very, very limited amount of time. One time, I was hired to photograph Sheryl Sandberg and I had about 10, 15 minutes in her home at 6:00 AM. That was the slot I was given.
Russ Roberts: That’s tough.
Jessica Todd Harper: And, of course, I couldn’t go there beforehand and think about her clothes, or her furniture, or any of that. So, I had an assistant and we had our lights; and we talked about what we imagined would be there and what we wanted to do.
The picture that actually run–I mean, she’s a busy woman, right? So, the picture that actually ran for that, it was a story in a magazine. She’s on her laptop actually, I believe emailing Mark Zuckerberg–because that’s what she’s doing at 6:00 in the morning. But, the way that the lines were with her fingers and the shape of the chair and the background, there was a synergy that worked. And so, you do the best with what you can. Every opportunity is a new challenge. It’s a new problem to solve.
Russ Roberts: But, for someone like Sheryl Sandberg, or if you were to, say, do a portrait to me or someone else’s family–we’ll come to your own family in a minute–do you tell them to think about certain things in advance of the shutter opening and closing?
Jessica Todd Harper: No. People in general–now, someone like Sheryl Sandberg is probably very used to being photographed. So, not much is going to faze her. But most people aren’t. If it’s not my family–who is bored, tired of it by now–most people, most adults in particular, children can be a little more naive and easier to photograph because of that. But, most adults are worried about things like their hair, or do they look fat, or do they look old or too young, or–I don’t know, whatever they’re worried about. So, my job is to make them feel comfortable. It’s akin to being a good hostess, a good leader. If you’re confident and you set the tone that you know what you’re doing and that they’re in good hands and that they’re safe, then they open up to you. And then you have to be ready.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. I think what I would say–for me, I’ve done a bunch of portraits for fun, and I often ask people to think about serious things or important things I think that they know about. But, what you’re saying, which I’ve seen, is that a lot of times if you don’t do the host/comfortable thing with them, you get a photograph that, quote, “doesn’t look like them.” You look at it and you go, like, ‘Well, that’s not them.’ That’s what they think they’re supposed to look like when someone takes their picture. And, that’s not the same as what they look like, which is a very strange phenomenon.
Similarly, you can get people who don’t photograph well. I wonder if it’s because they’re hiding. I don’t know. But, I do think people hide. I think more open people, when you say, ‘I’m going to take your picture’–as opposed to a candidate, which is a whole different thing. But, when you’re taking someone’s picture deliberately, some people are going to open their heart and soul and say, ‘This is me, take a bit.’ And, of course, there are other people who don’t like to have their picture taken. And I think it’s partly because they don’t want to be seen. Even a bad photograph is somewhat eternal in today’s world; and they’d rather not be seen. I don’t know. What do you think?
Jessica Todd Harper: Yeah. I think there’s some truth to that. In the same way that people don’t like to be stared at. You have to create a very comfortable space for people to feel comfortable in that environment. Maybe that’s a bit of a solipsism. You have to make them feel that you’re taking care of them and that you won’t use this opportunity in a bad way.
Russ Roberts: Let’s talk about photography generally. It’s a funny art because I think a lot of people think, ‘Well, photography, that’s not an art. You didn’t think of something, like a real artist. All you did was take a picture of what anybody could see.’ What do you say to people like that?
Jessica Todd Harper: Sure. So, photography has struggled with those issues a little bit from its beginning. It was invented in 1839, both in France and England at the same time. The English gentleman who invented it was William Henry Fox Talbot. He was part of the aristocracy. When he presented his work, which he called Pencil of Nature, he was talking about it from a scientific point of view: Look at the utility of this invention. And he showed how photography could be used to inventory his glassware collection or to make a copy of some of his rare manuscripts.
And also, he did try out a genre scene, kind of like a Dutch painting of a broom against a door opening. He showed that it could be used to do that, too.
And so, then in France, Daguerre invented the daguerreotype, which is this kind of silvery unique image that perhaps people can–if they’ve ever seen a daguerreotype, you can only see the image if it’s angled in a certain way. Otherwise it kind of looks like a mirror.
And it would be kept in, like, a little folding book. So, you would take it out and look at your loved one and then put it away again.
And, he was very savvy, commercially. Before that, he painted–he constructed really big dioramas–these scenes that people would pay money for to enter and see this really interesting scene that he painted. And so, he had a commercial mindset.
And so, I think photography from that moment has struggled always with people thinking, ‘Oh, is it a science? Is it there for documenting things? or is it really commercial?’ When you think of–I don’t know–the cheesy wedding photographer or getting your portrait done at Sears; and like those cheesy 1970s and 1980s portrait sessions that people like to spoof.
So, it has always had a commercial and scientific utility to it.
But also, from the very beginning, artists saw it and experimented with it as an art form. And, by now, museums take it seriously. It’s in major collections, and there’s a lot of money in–into–collecting fine art photography.
But, for the layperson, I think there’s still that mindset that if I can take a picture, then the hurdle is crossed. Whereas I know that I can’t sculpt, like, Michelangelo and I certainly can’t paint like Da Vinci. That’s really obvious to me. But, I could take a picture. Right? I mean, I could take something, and it would be there. And maybe even a monkey if given enough opportunities with a camera could get a really beautiful picture–whereas a monkey is just never going to sculpt David. It’s not going to happen. So, I think there is that hurdle.
And then also, in America in particular, in our education, we have 12 years devoted to how to interpret texts. We call it reading. Right?
So, children are instructed on how to decode, how to extract meaning from text. They’re even given, hopefully, some training into how the author affects the way the text is constructed.
So, I remember in high school, we had a class where we subscribed to all the major publications, and we had to write essays about the slant of the author–what kind of political slant he had or what personal biases he had. And, that was a total revelation to me. As a 14-year-old, I didn’t realize that anyone had any–I thought that anything I read in a magazine or a newspaper was, like, coming down from God and was fact.
And, so, I think most adults understand that writing is informed by the author, at least at some level. Right?
Photography is the same way. And, we don’t have any art education. There’s no art history in schools, in mainstream education. There is no careful instruction on how to read images and how to understand visual language.
And, so I think it’s just a more alien concept for people to look at an image and think, ‘Oh, well, the person who created it had a huge effect on what I’m seeing.’ That, this is a construction, that it has a particular slant, that it has a particular agenda.’
Russ Roberts: But, I think that that’s the narrowest part of, say, an artist or an author. Right? Let me try poetry. There’s thousands of poems that you can’t understand the first time and you learn to understand them through either practice or learning with a masterful teacher or reading essays about how poems are constructed to get a certain effect.
Is that true? I assume you’re saying that’s true of photography as well–that not just–I don’t think about the author. I can’t even, perhaps, understand what the author is saying–right?–in the case of a photograph. Because, as you have alluded to: I’ve seen a person laying in bed before with a kid. I know what that looks like, so here’s another one.
Jessica Todd Harper: Sure.
Russ Roberts: So, what’s deeper–or a better way to say it, I guess, would be what’s artistic about a great photograph that is not obvious to a person who hasn’t been trained in these ideas?
Jessica Todd Harper: I think that’s a really good analogy because I find that to be true with poetry all the time. I usually don’t understand it on the first pass. And, the more I hear it and then if I talk about it with other people also and they help me to understand it, I get more out of it.
So, it would be really easy to say, ‘Poetry is boring, I don’t understand it.’ Or, ‘It’s just a mass of words. Anyone can do it.’
But, the more practice I have in being familiar with reading poems, the better I understand them.
And, it’s true of classical music, too. Right? Classical music is something maybe not everybody understands or knows about. Or jazz, or even hip hop–any genre that you’re not familiar with at first might just sound boring. That’s often the word that comes to mind, right?
Russ Roberts: Yep: ‘I don’t get it.’ That would be the–
Jessica Todd Harper: Yeah: I don’t get it, or it’s not very complicated: There’s not much there.
And, so, I find one of the reasons that I can work quickly or I have a sense of what I want to do when I’m making a photograph is because I’ve spent almost my whole life looking at pictures. My mother would drag my sister and I to art museums all throughout our childhood.
Sometimes it was fun and sometimes it was boring. Right? She would give us crayons or pastels, charcoal to copy the works in the museums. We lived not far from the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, which has a wonderful collection of 19th-century works, mostly Impressionists. And so, my childhood heroes were Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sergeant, Renoir. I loved that work. It was the late 1880s, early 1890s, too. So, there was a certain–I feel like the fashions were leaning towards Impressionism, anyway.
And, so that began very early. And then I was an art history major at Bryn Mawr, where I did my undergraduate work and looked at a lot more images then. And, as I just always think of Aristotle, who says, ‘You are your habits.’ Essentially. Right? And, so, that’s why it’s important what your education is or who your parents are, because you become what you do.
So, these images that I’ve been looking at for years and years and years are just lodged in my brain and they informed the way that I see things.
So, when I’m making a picture of somebody lying on a bed, I’m–in my head somewhere is probably, there’s a Modigliani of a woman lying on a couch. There’s Andrew Wyeth. There’s lots of precedents for that. I’m not the first person to engage with that material. And so, it’s in your mind and it informs the way that you see the world.
So, especially if I’ve had children and I’ve had to work much more quickly, I feel like that is–it’s useful. That it’s in my mind and that I have that at my fingertips.
Russ Roberts: Is there something–let’s say in that cover photo that we’ve been talking about–is there something I wouldn’t understand the first time I looked at it, maybe, if I’m not a skilled observer?
So, I’m not a skilled observer. Art wasn’t part of my childhood. My daughter liked to draw and my wife and I decided we’d learn how to draw because she liked drawing. And so, we bought the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain at the suggestion of a colleague, and we started sketching. And we got better at drawing very quickly. I never got very good. My wife is much better than I am. But, what’s amazing about it is, when you start drawing, you realize it’s not that I don’t know how to draw. I don’t know how to look. I don’t know how to see.
Jessica Todd Harper: Oh, yeah. Yeah–
Russ Roberts: Because you’ve studied art for so long–deliberately–in the study of art history and less deliberately when your mom was exposing you to all kinds of images–you see the world differently than I see it. And I assume you see that cover photo differently than I see it. What might you see that I don’t see? [More to come, 37:33]