Becoming a Professional Photographer: Meet Maine Creative Kari Herer

Lisa Belisle: Hello, I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to or watching Radio Maine. Today I have in the studio with me photographer Kari Herer. Nice to see you.

Kari Herer: Nice to see you. And thank you for having me.

Lisa Belisle: Thank you for coming in. You and I live in the same town, so at least the drive here was not too far.

Kari Herer: No, not far at all.

Lisa Belisle: But you actually have traveled far and wide, so your travel today was not far, but you've been a lot of places, a lot of interesting places.

Kari Herer: Yes. Photography has brought me to many places, and without it I don't think I would have traveled as much. So I'm grateful for it.

Lisa Belisle: What is your Maine connection?

Kari Herer: My Maine connection? Well, I didn't really have one. I was working in Rhode Island at the time and I had the opportunity to move up here for another job, and I took it because I wasn't very happy in Rhode Island. I don't have any family on the east coast, so it was a big shift when I moved from the west coast to the east coast. But Maine felt more like home to me. I've landed here and I'm staying.

Lisa Belisle: If it feels like home, what does home feel like being here in Maine?

Kari Herer: I think it's just the lifestyle. It's the people and it's the environment. I actually come running on this island a lot because I find it so beautiful. More walking now than running, but I'd like to get back into running in the spring. And then Maine has given me all the opportunities to raise my kids the way I wanted to raise them. Small community, comfortable. The pace is not as sped up.

Lisa Belisle: You got your BFA from the University of Idaho. What was that like?

Kari Herer: That was an interesting change. I was in the UW system in Wisconsin because I grew up in Milwaukee, and a friend of mine and I wanted to move out west just to see what it was like. There was a program back then, I don't know if it exists now, but it was a great program. You could do a national exchange and pay in-state tuition. We both decided Idaho was, our schools both had a reciprocity between the two. So we picked Idaho randomly and loved it. I ended up getting residency out in Idaho and staying for six years. I loved Idaho a lot. I really loved the West Coast.

Lisa Belisle: Milwaukee. That's interesting. I don't run into that many people that have that as their hometown.

Kari Herer: I was in a little suburb outside Milwaukee, kind of like Yarmouth is a little suburb outside Portland, and I was right next to Lake Michigan, which looks like an ocean, but I never actually enjoyed it as much as I've enjoyed the coast of Maine.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I've only been to Milwaukee one time and it was the big city. It was not the suburb, because I got my master's degree from the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Kari Herer: You did?

Lisa Belisle: Yes. And I also remember there's a zoo out there. So those are my two main rememberings: that it's pretty urban, but there's a zoo. It also kind of felt to me like a little bit more accessible than some of the large cities that I've been to before. I wonder if you've had that same feeling about being in the greater Portland area and living in Yarmouth.

Kari Herer: Absolutely. I really feel like being close to Portland gives us all the opportunities to the music and the culture and the food so close. That's really important to me.

Lisa Belisle: When you were growing up, did you think photography was going to be your path?

Kari Herer: I didn't. No, I didn't. I always had it in my life in high school and even before then, but I didn't think that I would end up doing that for a career.

Lisa Belisle: So what brought you in that direction? When I talk to people who are interested in photography, sometimes they shy away from it because they feel like, oh, it's going to be bar mitzvahs and events. Not that there's anything wrong with that, because I think those are very important, but that's not what everybody wants to do. There's a little bit of uncertainty built into this as a career, I think.

Kari Herer: Absolutely. And I feel that more and more today as things shift and as more cameras get into people's hands. The line is getting blurred between professional photography and amateur photography with the tools that we can use these days, which I think is really great. I think more cameras in more people's hands is more important. But when I got really serious thinking, oh, I might be able to do this as a career, I was working down at William Arthur in Kennebunk. I was the marketing designer taking photos of cards, and I had a little bit of time with the design jobs, so I spent a lot of time lighting and trying to make the cards look dynamic, which is really hard to do, to take a picture of a flat square. I spent a lot of time in that little makeshift studio at William Arthur teaching myself how to photograph a product. I loved that opportunity down there. It was great. But I ended up leaving that and starting to do more things like families and weddings, and that was able to give me an income which I could use to launch my career into more product and print sales.

Lisa Belisle: Going back to this idea of photographing cards, and the idea that they're not multi-dimensional, that lighting has to be a very specific way, I would assume. How does one make cards come to life and be more dynamic?

Kari Herer: One thing about William Arthur is they had letterpress and engraving in the building. So we got to see the process, which I was in love with. There is a little impression in letterpress, a tiny little raised impression, and engraved, and if you light it just so with really dynamic, low lighting you can get that texture out. We used really fine papers too, so you could get the grain of the paper. I just fell in love with the shadow and the light around letterpress and engraved cards, which is something I haven't thought about in a really long time.

Lisa Belisle: Now, having spoken to a fair number of artists, it's interesting that printmaking comes up a lot. I know that this is not printmaking, what you're describing, but there is something interesting about that, that it seems to be kind of a continual theme. The idea of letters and the idea of language and how it interfaces, in this case with product, but also with art. So I wonder if your having the opportunity to focus so specifically on something for some period of time, if that in any way contributed to your future process.

Kari Herer: Yes, absolutely. It was an intense scene, I think, and focusing on just really one thing, a card, for three years.

Lisa Belisle: So how do you translate that into a working-with-people situation? Because in one case, the cards will just sit there and they'll do exactly what you tell them to do. People don't do that necessarily, especially not small people.

Kari Herer: It's a very large leap from going from that to where I am now in my process of photography. But you're right, it's really the same process. It's setting up a scene or setting up that background first and letting the people enter into that space, letting life happen into that structure or space, which is so much more interesting than photographing cards. But also with my family photography that I did for a long time, history repeats itself. So if a child does something funny and they get a laugh, they're going to do it again. So you can anticipate those moments and predict when they're going to happen. And if you're focused on the background and let that happen naturally in the foreground, it's the world's meeting you halfway.

Lisa Belisle: I really love that idea that you somehow control what you can control, to the extent that that's ever possible, and then you provide space for something that you really can't control, but you think maybe you can anticipate in some way.

Kari Herer: Definitely. And I think that happens in every aspect of our daily lives too. If you prepare yourself, an opportunity even just comes if you're prepared for it.

Lisa Belisle: There's so many different directions, and my mind is spinning here with the different examples of what you're describing. But I want you to tell me about some of your travels, some of your farthest-flung travels and some of the exotic places you've been to, and some of the contrasts and comparisons with your current everyday life.

Kari Herer: I did a lot of traveling and photography was able to take me to those kinds of places, but I don't know how exotic they've been because I've done a lot of work with a hotel chain. The fun part of it for me, even though they were a lot of all-inclusives, like in the Dominican or Jamaica, the staff and the behind the scenes was really interesting to me. And I think that's why I got hired again, because it wasn't a typical photo of a palm tree and a coconut. It was the staff washing windows or preparing meals, or in the kitchen behind the scenes of the buffet bars. I loved that. It was a really wonderful position and I was able to travel with my children. Then unfortunately Covid happened and we haven't done it since. So I'm trying to bring that little bit of travel back. But my kids are a little bit older now, so they don't really want to leave school anymore, even though I want to pull them out of school. We'll see in the future if that happens.

Lisa Belisle: When I'm thinking exotic and far flung, what you're talking about is the people in those places. Which is really great, actually.

Kari Herer: Yes. I really enjoy the culture and meeting the people, being able to be brought to places that typical vacationers wouldn't be brought to. That's always really fun for me.

Lisa Belisle: There is this sense, I think many of us have, and I've had this before myself, where you sort of create this idea in your mind that a place is this exotic thing that you've seen in a movie before, and you're going to go there and you're going to exist as if you're in a movie, and then you show up and people are going to work and they're having breakfast and they're just doing what we do all over the world really. And even though people can be very different, there's a sense that actually there's more that is similar amongst all of us.

Kari Herer: Right. And that repeats itself in photography. For example, at a wedding, the moment the groom will put his ring on, he usually doesn't have a ring on that finger, so he plays with it a lot. Or when the bride, they're just announced and they're about to walk out the aisle, and she forgets her flowers. There's always a moment there. And that happens in every culture, in every place that I've photographed, not just the ones in Maine. It's fun to watch that history. We're all human.

Lisa Belisle: That's really interesting. Or the tapping that I've specifically seen men who are newly married, they'll tap their ring against things. Something to get used to that they haven't had before.

Kari Herer: Yes. But it's those moments that I'm looking for because it makes us all connected.

Lisa Belisle: That makes a lot of sense. Tell me about your interactions with Cindy Crawford and how you came to know her.

Kari Herer: Well, I don't know if she knows me, but I know her. I did have the honor to go and assist Sam Abell at a photo shoot in Texas at Cadillac Ranch. There's a long story that precedes it, but he was asked by Acne Studios, a fashion company in Switzerland, to photograph this new fashion line. Cindy was the model, and I'd been working with Sam for a while, and he asked me and his other assistant, Tom Daley, to come and assist him in that photo shoot. Her presence was just beautiful, of course, but also very professional. It was an honor to be around her and watch her work and watch her model and watch Sam on the set. She was in and out within one day. She flew in on her jet, flew out on her jet. But the best part of the whole photo shoot, I felt, was Sam only works in natural light, so we didn't have any lighting.

I had a bounce that I was using, but other than that we had no lighting set up, and he wanted sunlight, the first available light and the last available light. So we had set up in that way. She started getting ready at four thirty, I don't remember the exact time, but the sun came out. We started shooting and he probably photographed for 30 minutes, and then we had the rest of the day. So we went back to the hotel and we looked at the photos together, and she watched him as he edited and called the photography and gave her a little mini lesson. She got a workshop from Sam. Then we went back out on the set for sunset for 30 minutes. It was so fun to see how much conviction he had and what he wanted and how he delivered.

Lisa Belisle: It seems like if you're working with somebody that's been in this industry for a very long time, that it could potentially be just a little bit intimidating.

Kari Herer: Absolutely.

Lisa Belisle: Maybe not for Sam, but I don't know. How did you feel about it?

Kari Herer: I was nervous. I was very nervous. They had flown everybody in from all over the country, and I came from Maine, and we all met in Texas, Amarillo, so it was a tiny little town in Texas. Sam, his presence makes you feel comfortable. He has a calmness about him, and like you said, he's been in the industry for so long. So as long as I knew I had his back and what he needed, I thought we were going to be okay. And hopefully clouds weren't going to cover in the morning or the afternoon, because I don't know what would have happened. The world met him halfway that day.

Lisa Belisle: What you're describing is something that maybe people intuitively understand, but maybe not. And that is that, especially when you're photographing people or other living creatures that might respond to human energy, that there actually is a relationship there. When you're trying to bring somebody into the space, it's not just about the setup and the camera and the lighting and the stuff, it's also about how you create a relationship in a kind of constructed and potentially awkward setting for many people.

Kari Herer: Yes. It's not easy to get in front of a camera, and I know that because I don't enjoy it myself. The people that I do photograph, I try to make them as comfortable as possible and show them the results so that they know what I'm doing is with the best intention. I think it's probably like 10% equipment and technology and 90% the relationship you build with the person you're photographing. And I do feel like intent is important. It comes through no matter what your intent is when you're pointing a camera at somebody, or a child, or even an animal. They can feel that presence and that intent.

Lisa Belisle: I do think that this thing you're describing, where you can show somebody this is what I just took, this is what I saw through the camera, that makes a big difference. Because back in the day when we would shoot film and you'd bring it to the pharmacy and you'd come back and you'd be like, okay, here's these shots, you could maybe, oh, that's a little disappointing. And this is not professional photography obviously, it's just snapshots.

Kari Herer: Snapshots. Exactly.

Lisa Belisle: I think that immediacy and that ability to have impact on what others see and what the camera sees, I think that really does shift the dynamic somewhat.

Kari Herer: Absolutely. 100%. I think it's very helpful and it lets people let down their guard a little bit.

Lisa Belisle: Do you feel like maybe the filters and the ability to manipulate images these days has led us in perhaps unintended directions?

Kari Herer: I do, unfortunately. I see that with my girls and how they use the camera and what they're pointing the camera at. I teach in my own teachings, and studying through my mentor Sam and his philosophy about photography as straight photography. He is the extreme: no cropping, even no editing, and no filters or post-processing applied. I found that when I've studied this philosophy and did it in my own practice, the images last longer for me. And I think that they feel more honest to me. I consider myself a photojournalist in my personal photography, so it's very important to me to not use filters. Even in my wedding photography I won't, because in 50 years I don't think you're going to want to look at that filter. You're going to want to look at the bride and groom and who they were and what they looked like.

Then in that moment, my philosophy in head shots is, if the thing you want me to Photoshop out is going to be there in two weeks, I won't do it. But if it's a blemish, or somebody had a bad hair day, hair was flying around, we will talk about that and I will do it. But I'll bring that up ahead of time. So if I'm talking to a client that I'm going to photograph, I'll say that before we photograph, and I might not be the best photographer for that person. They might want to go with somebody else. But I do think it's a big question in our culture and the industry right now: authenticity. I actually think, like my children are on the cusp of it, they're intrigued by it, but they're also finding the straight photography enticing and interesting too. So I think we might see a shift soon in the other direction, especially with these new filters. I think TikTok just brought one up. I don't have TikTok and my children don't have social media, but I did hear it's pretty extreme, so I think it's a fad. I'm going to let it go. They can play with it for a little while.

Lisa Belisle: And I think even in what I'm seeing, and I don't have social media anymore, I've made a conscious decision not to have it, I think that we've even gone through this ultra-ugly social media phase, where people seem to be doing things, sticking their tongues out or trying to appear as strange as possible. Which I think is also kind of funny, because that's also life, right? That is, I mean, we are the range of human emotions, all of us.

Kari Herer: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Lisa Belisle: So I do wonder about, as a professional photographer, how you've been impacted by the digital industry and the ability just to make a living. It's one thing to say, sure, let's make this available to everybody, and it's another thing to say, but this is the work that I do. So what is your take on that?

Kari Herer: The older I get, the more I see photography and the more personal philosophy that I have with my own personal photography. I'm just using my camera as a tool to get my client what they need, and I just happen to make money at it. It has done so much more for me, in my growth, in my kids' lives, in my relationships with other people, that I didn't really understand until I started looking back at my photography and using it more like a journal and learning from it on a personal level, more than just making money at it. I think that today it's a hard living. There's a lot of travel. It's a lonely profession too, so you're alone a lot. You're editing a lot. Like any other profession, there's its pros and its cons, but what it's doing for me now is so much more important, I think. And the fact that other people have this really powerful tool in their hands or in their pocket and they can use it in ways to learn about themselves is really interesting. So I'm so grateful for digital technology and photography and getting the cameras in other people's hands. But as a job, I feel like it's almost two completely different objects.

Lisa Belisle: Well, tell me what you've learned about yourself in your own use of photography as a means almost of journaling, looking back at your own experiences.

Kari Herer: Well, I've noticed patterns through the years through my photography. And I've noticed things that I enjoy in my photography and what I don't enjoy. I've certainly seen the relationships of my daughters build. So I'm kind of doing a long-term project on them. It's very personal. I haven't really done much with it, but I've just taken pictures of them being siblings, and it's brought me back to my own relationship with my sister and how we had a relationship and the kindness that we had towards each other, but also the complete opposite. I didn't want to be anywhere around her. I didn't want anything to do with her. But being in a physical space with a sibling, it's been so interesting to me to watch my children at different stages and looking back how they treated each other and the relationship that they've built to today, in middle school. So personally that's been a really fun one to see and photograph because I'm so close to it. It's an ongoing personal project.

Lisa Belisle: I'm wondering, as time has gone on, if we will look back and find this rich treasure trove of imagery that somehow we can use in a different way. When we've, in say for example qualitative research, a lot of qualitative research is interviews with people and conversations with people, but I know that they now are doing research where they actually ask the subjects to contribute their own images so they can represent themselves, so that it doesn't become the researcher and that person's interpretation of the subject. It's the subject saying, this is actually what I think, this is my own narrative. So I'm wondering how that might end up shifting how we understand each other as humans.

Kari Herer: That's so interesting. And it would be, every day about a couple years ago it was 6 billion photos get taken. Now it's completely different. I don't know that number. I wish I knew that number. That would be a good number to know, the dialogue that we'll be able to see unfolding in research. And especially with AI and algorithms, what we'll be able to put together from those photographs is very interesting. It's going to be one hell of a record.

Lisa Belisle: That's true. Even now, where we have people who have grown up in the digital age and they've grown up in the age of social media, and we hear stories all the time of people who did something when they were 20 that really doesn't represent who they are now, that they're twice that age. I think it is unfortunate in some ways. It's wonderful and rich and healthy in some ways, but then on the other side of things, it just creates this kind of ongoing glare of a spotlight on younger lives. I've made so many mistakes in my life, I think we all have, that I would not have wanted captured on film and then put out there for all to see. And at the time I wouldn't necessarily have known that I didn't want other people to be able to go back and reference that. So I just wonder what long-term impact we have of not being able to actually make mistakes in private.

Kari Herer: That's interesting. It's like our journals. I think I threw a couple of my journals away because I just didn't want to read them after college. I certainly wouldn't want them online or in the public's side. Now I think kids are editing themselves a little bit because they know that that is a possibility, whereas I don't think we did as much in our journals or our personal lives. But it will be interesting. On one hand, there is a lot of damage that could happen, but on the other hand, it's a bit of maturity that younger kids have to have before they kind of enter into that media world. Hopefully they're being taught that.

Lisa Belisle: I think when we started this increased access to digital work, we probably didn't understand that we needed to understand digital literacy and that we really needed to have some caution perhaps around it. And I'm hoping, and I'm thinking, knowing that I work with educators, that this is a focus that we have put some time and some thought into.

Kari Herer: Right. I know my kids' schools are doing programs on it. I'm not letting my kids have social media, and I know that there's a lot of other kids who, because of the research that came out in the past few years, are waiting before they're a little bit more mature to be able to get it and access it. I think that's just a good thing. But many others don't, and we'll see, that research hasn't come out yet. So it will, and it'll be interesting to find out what the consequences, good or bad, are.

Lisa Belisle: So you mentioned that one of your intentions is to get back to traveling if your children's lives will make space for it, in the post-Covid world. What else is coming up for you in the future?

Kari Herer: They're so fun right now. They're at good ages, so I would like to travel with them if that presents itself. But most recently I've been working on a film of my mentor. So I've been traveling with him a little bit and filming for the last year and doing voice recordings and interviews, and now I've got all this editing to do. But I'm very excited because, him as a photographer, his name is Sam Abell, I don't know if I mentioned that. He did work for National Geographic for 35 years, and I've been working closely assisting him with his workshops and filming them as we go along. So I've got a lot of content. But the film that I want to do isn't about him as a photographer. Everybody knows he's a good photographer, but not necessarily a teacher.

And the way he teaches is so effective for students in photography. I've seen it because I've been to eight years' worth of workshops of his, and the lives that have been changed through his teaching have been really substantial. So I want to capture that, and I want to capture his lessons and his critiques of other photographers. It's been a really fun and creative and collaborative project with him. I said I was going to film for a year. It's been a year. I'm going to keep continuing filming until we get farther along. But I'll edit along the way and we'll see what happens. I'm thinking about doing a series of little talks, put together a little film series, and we'll see what happens. But as long as he's doing workshops, I want to be invited to film them and attend them.

Lisa Belisle: I look forward to seeing the outcome.

Kari Herer: Yes, definitely.

Lisa Belisle: Well, it's been a pleasure to have the time to talk with you today, and I wish you all the best on your future journey as a photographer and also as a mother of daughters. I personally have two daughters as well and they're wonderful. And my sons are also wonderful, so just putting that out there, sons, if you're watching or listening. But it is certainly very special to have that bond. It's nice to know that you're on that journey as well.

Kari Herer: Thank you so much for having me.

Lisa Belisle: I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you have been listening to or watching Radio Maine and my conversation with photographer Kari Herer. Thank you for joining us.