Read our interview and don't forget to pick up a copy of PIX, available now at the office Newsstand.
Talk to me a bit about how the concept for PIX came about.
So, essentially PIX is a sort of call and response. As a photographer I find that very often when I see an image that moves me, I’ll think of one of my own that’s in my archive or I’ll think of how I can take a photo that may respond or work with that image—just my thought process. Over the years, I’ve discussed this with other photographers and found that a lot of people have the same feeling or intuition. I used to do a zine in 2014 called Spotzine and that was a collaborative thing where I’d pool different artists and put them into one book—I tried to work with people who didn’t know each other and then for each zine release we’d have a party and a band play. So, it was all these different scenes merging and a bit of a community thing.
Breaking down some creative walls—I like it.
Yeah—it was painters, photographers and so on. I wanted to circle back to that a few years later and I thought of this ‘responding to one image’ idea. It’s a return to trying to form some community, throw a party and get people together in a room. I also wanted to take advantage of digital benefits as well, so we’re showing online portfolios of the submission responses that are even bigger than the zines. That way, we can include more people, including people that aren't based in the immediate area—it became way more international than I expected, but that’s great.
Has that always been important to you as an artist—building bridges between different creative communities? I know in the photo world you’ll find lots of different ‘lanes’ and cliques.
Oh yeah, I think it’s a benefit for everybody. Share some thoughts around your actual process for work and also just talking to people who think about things differently, who see things differently—I think that’s very beneficial, for my work, for everyone. Even outside of the work, just between people, it’s good.
I appreciate that, especially because in the age of Instagram, with visible follower counts and things like that, there’s a lot of competition rather than collaboration, and I don’t think that benefits anyone. So, projects like PIX really help people.
I think it’s a real issue—and I think it’s weird how Instagram promotes like, cliques. Cliques have always existed obviously, but it’s like a whole new thing. This project definitely has a lot of that in mind—I tried to do as few rules as possible. On the website, I encouraged all kinds of work, like you can submit collage. I just want it to be photo-based. Maybe moving forward, I’ll do some other things with the publishing side of it, but this seemed very honest and—surprisingly—complicated to some people. I got a lot of e-mails from people being like ‘This photo is so crazy, I can’t respond to this,’ and I was like, ‘You can!’ A lot of people took it really seriously, which I appreciated, and some people took brand new photos. I respect all the different approaches—it’s cool.