Séan Alonzo Harris: Slowing Down with Art in a Speed-Obsessed World

Lisa Belisle: Hello, I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to or watching Radio Maine, our video podcast where we explore and celebrate creativity and the human spirit. We are sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine, and today we have with us photographer Séan Alonzo Harris, who is with Séan Alonzo Harris Photography. He is really an esteemed member of the Maine and, I would say, the United States photography community. So we're really fortunate to have you here.

Séan Alonzo Harris: Oh, thank you. Thank you for having me. It's great to see you again, by the way.

Lisa Belisle: It's great to see you too. I think we used to overlap and intersect quite a bit, and then it's been a little while. So I've been really intrigued by what I've seen coming out of your work over the last few years. Tell me how you think things have evolved for you, and things that you're doing differently than perhaps when you and I first met a decade ago.

Séan Alonzo Harris: Well, life, just maturity, and things happen, and the world has changed so dramatically over the last year, six months, two years, five years, whatever. So the pattern of thinking has to change. Right now, the body of work that I'm most passionate about, that I'm working on, I haven't even shown yet, which is the exact opposite of anything that I've ever done before. It's more meditative, and there are no people in it. It's very quiet and soft, just a reflection, going back and taking a respite to think and gather your thoughts so that you can go on and be creative, or make it through the world, or make it through the day.

Lisa Belisle: That is interesting, because I was looking at your series Play Hard, and also I'm Not a Stranger. Play Hard obviously is very action oriented, and I'm Not a Stranger and Play Hard are both very people oriented. You have a lot of people that appear in your work. So what caused you to turn in the direction of not figures at all?

Séan Alonzo Harris: Play Hard is a portion from a larger body of work, and that was based from Fox Field, or Bayside, Portland. That body of work was about gentrification. And I Am Not a Stranger: my wife works at Colby, so we moved to Waterville, and Waterville Creates and the Colby Museum of Art partnered to sponsor me to create these works of a changing Waterville, what it looks like now, and thinking about it right now to a hundred years past, and seeing what that is, and claiming that I am not a stranger, claiming that the place of Waterville, all people are welcome. That was also a nod to another photographer, one of who I call my masters, Irving Penn. I adopted some of his ways to create that space for the people in Waterville to take ownership, almost like being on a corner or in a corner. So it's very exciting.

Lisa Belisle: So those were bodies of work that had some sort of a foundation that you were working on. And this current body of work is a very different foundation.

Séan Alonzo Harris: I did an artist residency on Surf Point, which is right on the beach. So I'm there, and I had all these grandiose ideas, and I'm like, okay, I'm going to do this, this, this, this. And you get there and you're on the water, you can hear the water as you sleep, and I'm like, wow, this is really therapeutic. So I started thinking about this, listening to music, and waking up at the first light and taking my camera out and shooting throughout the day. And then after a while, you're learning characteristics of what the ocean is doing. You're like, wow, the ocean looks big today. The ocean looks small today. Oh wow, it was blue yesterday, now it's green. All of these different characteristics that happen. And then you start thinking about the history of what goes on the ocean, and thinking about how powerful the ocean is, how soft the ocean is, how relaxing, how scary it is. So just by going and doing research and thinking things through, and the whole time I was doing this, I was listening to music most of the time, trying to listen to complicated pieces, more things that challenge your hearing, but also at the same time looking at this very powerful thing that's coming in and out at you, and thinking about the time that a song plays. If I listen to a piece that's nine minutes, could an individual look at a photograph for nine minutes today? Just kind of playing around with that, thinking things through, really wanting to create a body of work to challenge the viewers to sit with something for a while and hint at meditative or critical thinking through an image.

Lisa Belisle: This reminds me of something that you were talking about before we started recording, which is this idea of people's attention span. I know that your background, you studied formally at the Art Institute of Boston, you spent time training at the Maine Media Workshops. You have a very rich academic, intellectual background in photography. You also have a rich experiential background, so you understand the history and the context and the making of photographs. And in this day and age, that's not true of everybody, and people's attention spans are not maybe as long as they once were. So what you're describing as your current body of work, it almost sounds like kind of a response to that lack of attention, and an invitation.

Séan Alonzo Harris: Let's look at where we're at. Anything that you want to do, we have computers, we have phones, we have watches, we have TVs, all of those things that come at us. Me being a creative, I'm always going toward something and sitting with that thing for a while and trying to figure it out, problem solve. For instance, if you go to a museum today and you see how people go through a museum, or even the gallery, people don't sit and look and study. When I was growing up, people did sit and study. You had to wait for someone, you were polite, and that person could be there for ten minutes looking at one thing. People used to go to the galleries for four days because that was the time that it would take someone to get through a show. Today someone goes through and they're done. And the artist itself could have taken, I do platinum plate and printing, it could take me three days to create a print that I'm satisfied with from start to finish in the printing process, not the shooting. I just feel that we miss so much in the middle. We don't think about all of the learned experience in the middle. That stuff we don't do anymore. So it's almost like, if you bring up a ChatGPT, it's like, I love doing puzzles. I'll do a puzzle and it'll take me three days. I'm going to hire this robot and I'm just going to say, complete this puzzle, and that's my prompt, and the puzzle's done. Someone comes over and says, wow, that's a great puzzle, that must've taken you a long time. No, it took me two minutes. But they didn't touch the pieces, they didn't try, they didn't see, oh, this is upside down, backwards. It's gone. It's almost like our greatest attribute as humans has kind of stepped aside. So I hope that there's a resurgence. It's great to see albums being sold again, people literally have to get up and turn it. It's great that film photography is mentioned in the breadth of this. And people sewing their own clothes. Those things are so awesome to happen, but we just have to create a space. We have to continuously create space for that.

Lisa Belisle: I'm thinking about my granddaughter. She was born in March, and before I even knew she was a twinkle in anyone's eye, I began knitting a baby blanket for her. It took me a very long time, and it's a very small blanket. Woven into that are the places that I took it while I was knitting it, the mistakes that I made, the stitches I had to go back and pick up again, the kinesthetic element of that. So what's coming up for me as you're describing this is the experience that ends up having a piece of art being imbued with meaning because of the process of creating that art. So how do we convince people who think that art is essentially a visual medium in the moment, you just need to stand there for a minute to get an impression? How do we convince people, or invite people really, would you like to slow down for a minute? Would you like to stand here a little longer? Would you like to be here with me as we enjoy this art together? How do we make that alluring to people?

Séan Alonzo Harris: That is a paradigm shift. I think that as creative people, we have to make that a part of our practice as well. How is the viewer going to take this in? Are there prompts, I'll steal that from AI, are there prompts that we could weave into our work that can pause people? Or have them think, wait a minute, there's this over here and I have to go way over there to actually get the final piece. Things that will involve people to actually engage with what they're doing differently. I think that we have to think that through a little bit, because the greatest thing I believe that humans have is their creativity. So we'll always create no matter what, and it will evolve no matter what. We just have to think differently. We've got to think beyond Instagram, beyond those kind of things. As a lover of art, we also have to respect what we're looking at, and give it the thinking. Someone painting a painting from hand, that painting might've taken years, and it deserves more than a minute of viewing, because there's certain things in there that you're just not going to digest. There's no way that you can digest years of work in a minute. You can get the gist of it, but not the full body or the breadth of it, the weight of it. So I think as viewers, we have to respect that space as well.

Lisa Belisle: I was interested to read about some of your inspirations as an artist. You talked about Helen Levitt, James Van Der Zee, Langston Hughes, Nina Simone. That's a very rich grouping of people across genres that are inspiring you. It seems as though you're drawing from the creativity that occurs not just in the visual field, you're drawing from creativity that really is from all around you. Has that always been the case for you?

Séan Alonzo Harris: I think that's also maturity. I believe that as a creative, you have to create your own encyclopedia. And within that encyclopedia, for me, it should be painters and sculptors and writers and musicians and historians, and just pull from all of those. Because if I was just to study just photography, then I would be missing so much of the world. My voice would be, I could take beautiful photographs, but my voice itself would be a lot smaller. Sometimes when I talk with young photographers, I say, listen to something that challenges you, something that you're like, oh, I hate it. But listen to it beyond that and challenge yourself, and try to figure out cues within that so that you can say, oh, that's interesting, versus just like, oh, I hate it, so I'm not going to listen to it. A lot of times the people that inspire me, the first time I might've looked over them. And over time, I've grown to appreciate what they bring to the table, because it happens very often where I see a body of work and I'm like, oh, it's not that much. And then I read about the person, and I'm like, oh, I get it. Because I think some art is created just for art's sake, but some art is created because people have to do it, and their story is just as important as their art. How they got to their art is sometimes so incredible and precious. So you should go out and challenge yourself, stepping in waters that you've never been in just to see what happens. I also think it creates layers, tonality, to whatever you bring to the table. It makes you much more interesting to talk to, because you're coming from so many different places.

Lisa Belisle: That I think is very true. As we were coming into the conversation today, we were talking with my husband, Kevin Thomas, who has his own podcast. He does ham radio. He now is sponsored by a company within the ham radio world. And you said, oh, that's so interesting, I have this interest in tube amps. And I said, wow, ham radio, I never knew anything about, but here's Séan Alonzo Harris, and now he's talking about tube amps. What are those? Tell me about tube amps. Because you're so right, it's so interesting when you learn new things about people.

Séan Alonzo Harris: I can tie this into my photography, actually. Throughout the years, in the darkroom, I've always picked out a slew of music that I would print to, and I started with the same music and I ended with the same music, because it all had to do with rhythm and timing. In the darkroom, you're dodging and burning, you want to keep that same cadence. Or I can even go back further. When I was in college, I lived right next to a used record store, and I'd walk by the record store every day and I'd see these beautiful album covers, and then I'd go in. So I'd start buying jazz album covers, so gorgeous and beautiful, but it hints to the darkroom, to the practice with listening to music, and then to talking with other photographers, older photographers who I figure as mentors. And we end up talking about music sometimes more than photography. We talk about music in terms of tone and layers and texture and space. And hence to today, where you talk about something like a tube amp, where it has distortion, but it's good distortion, which creates space and layers, so it gives a more three-dimensional sound. So it's so intriguing to listen to that. Because with a tube amp, you can pick different tubes to create different sounds, you can have something that's a warmer sound or a brighter sound or something with a larger soundstage. So it's almost like you're developing your own personal sound through this electronics that was made, some of the first listening devices that we had back in the day. You can do this all with equalizers and stuff too, but it doesn't have the same residence, I guess I should say. If you're a printer and you're looking at a black and white, traditional black and white print to a digital black and white print, if you're a true printer, you'd be like, that's digital, because you're so far advanced in the viewing process of that. So if you're listening to a solid state amp versus a tube amp, you might be like, wow, that sounds really good, wow, that sounds really good, but you might not hear all the nuances. So it's something that I enjoy. I can't play an instrument, but I can listen, which is good.

Lisa Belisle: I do love this idea that you are working with layers in photography, even though when most of us look at an image, we think, oh, that's flat. And technically it is two dimensional, but this description that you have of photography being a layering process, it changes the way I think about that art.

Séan Alonzo Harris: As a two dimensional artist, it could be really boring if you thought about it as two dimensions. So what we do have is foreground, background, we have horizon line, all of these things. We can play around with the shapes in our image, we can play around with the tonality in the image. We have to use so many different ways to create that space and layering. It could be through tonality, it could be through placement of what's in your image, it could be through framing. One of the interesting things about thinking about photography and music is, with music, if you have a note, you can go above and below and you can play around with different things in different places. It's very similar if you look at some legendary, like Paul Caponigro, who was a classical pianist. That's how he thought about printing. Or even Ansel Adams. And I'm sure that there's tons more out there that approached it in the same way. So it's not a foreign idea. It's actually a tried and true way of approaching a visual language. It's this amazing way to think about it, because you have this window of something. There was this one photographer who said, he was on the Charlie Rose Show, and he's like, is there something that you haven't photographed that you want to photograph? And the photographer said, the wind. And you think about that in terms of, how can you photograph the wind? You'd have to think outside the box, but also you could say the same thing about sound. That sounds to me like someone who listens to a lot of music, because the wind does have a sound. And if you could capture the wind, then your image potentially could be considered sound, which, I don't know, that could be a little bit farfetched, but you know what I'm saying.

Lisa Belisle: I do. And I think one of the ways that you and I intersected way, way back was that you also do work with words. You work with people in print, so you are working in parallel with somebody who writes, and you are bringing your own version of that story. You're not necessarily telling the word story, you're bringing your version of that story, and you're putting it next to these words, and they still have to work together. I think that is really different than the way a lot of people think about it. A lot of people think, here's the words, the photographer looks at the words and says, oh, I'm going to go take a picture of that word, just in a visual. But that's actually not the way that stories evolve, at least not in my experience of writing. So how do you manage working across mediums when you're trying to bring a story into the world?

Séan Alonzo Harris: I love collaborating. First of all, you have to give great respect to writers, because of what they bring to the table. And you also have to be curious about your subject matter and your subject. Those come about by just listening, being curious, asking questions, and also inviting people into your process, so that your process can grow and be better. When done, it's an incredibly rewarding and enjoyable thing to do. It's something that I wish I did more of. Some of my favorite books are Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava, The Sweet Flypaper of Life, which is an amazing book. It's Langston Hughes' poetry and Roy DeCarava's imagery, and it's just wonderful. They were done at different times. And there's also this beautiful book that I got just recently, and it was Richard Avedon and James Baldwin. This was a magical world that's created between these two masters of their field, and they're collaborating in this way with words and images. I wish I could do it more, but it's really hard. In the editorial world, it's like, well, I like your style of photography, I like your style of writing, and we think you're right for this, go and do this. But in the fine art world, it's a little trickier, because when you're creating in a space, artists are really private. They go into their battlefields and they battle it out, and then they go into their workshops and they work it out. And then you have to open all that up. That's a scary process, because that space that you've created to protect whatever you're doing, you open it up, and that's a different kind of vulnerability than other types of vulnerability. So you have to strive towards it. You have to really work, realizing that everyone around you is in that same boat. It's not just you that's doing that, they're doing it too. And how do you collaborate in a way and create that synergy to create a piece of work that everyone's proud of, not just you?

Lisa Belisle: Another way that I got to know you was as a teacher, and it was by reputation. You've never taught me, much to my chagrin, of course. I think being able to translate what you're saying into something that somebody who's a learner can hear is its own set of skills, its own very special creativity. So how have you evolved as a teacher, as an instructor, as someone who's sharing your own knowledge, your own love of this genre, over the years?

Séan Alonzo Harris: How I approach it is, for instance, photography, I try to teach photography through life experiences. Ask questions about what's going on and tease out, because my goal is for people to find your own voice, whatever you're doing, so that you can continuously develop it. That doesn't mean everything you're going to do is the same. Your voice can change, your voice changes constantly, or your views change. But to have that knowledge of understanding. So first I have them study. I say, pick out someone that you like, whatever it is, study them. Try to pick out cues that continuously come over, and then go back and revisit all of that material, because you'll find a thread, and then you'll start to understand the link that they're trying to do. If it's a writer, then it wouldn't be a visual, but they could be creating visuals for you to think. Start there, and then apply that to life experiences. There was this one time when I was teaching this guy who was an architect, and he wanted to do photography. He brought his body of work, and he had people, he had animals, he had family, and he had these interesting doors that he would photograph. And through looking at his work, I realized, wow, this stuff is good, but this stuff right here, I can see this is where you understand this. This is a very unique way of you seeing this. You're bringing, this is just a plain door, but the way that you approach this door is very unique. You're approaching this door through the lens of an architect, where you're giving me more information than I had from just walking up to it. And he's like, wow, I never thought about it that way. So just teasing out those things. And then I'm like, go study Frank Lloyd Wright. Study these other architects, and there's photographs in there, read their writings. So then you can build up the vocabulary, you can build up these other nuances about, if this is where you want to go, if this is part of your voice. And also, because photography or art is therapeutic in a lot of ways, sometimes you have to tease out other things as well, just to get to the root of, why are you here right now?

Lisa Belisle: So meeting people where they are and trying to walk along with them.

Séan Alonzo Harris: You don't have to be a professional artist to use art as a way of being a better person, or being creative to be a better person. I think that that itself could be a study in self. There's a lot of critical thinking, there's a lot of failures, there's a lot of successes. There's, I don't know what this is. Those are all questions that we ask ourselves every day, but in a safe space where we can analyze them in a different way. So I think it comes back to just being observant on what's going on, so that you can go ahead and create, and also live a better life, be more mindful.

Lisa Belisle: I'm really looking forward to your meditative series. When do you think that this will be finished?

Séan Alonzo Harris: It's kind of finished right now. It's more me trying to, it's such a departure from what I've done before. It's one of those things that I really have to think deep and hard about, what and how relevance. There's so many questions I still have about it, and that's a good thing, because I'm going to tease out so much more. So hopefully next year, maybe give me two years, maybe, I don't know. I haven't had a solo show in maybe three years or so. So I'm due.

Lisa Belisle: Well, whenever this is brought into the world, I will be very interested in seeing it. It seems like something that we all should be paying attention to, the sitting and being present and experiencing the world in a little bit slower way than we have been.

Séan Alonzo Harris: The world's moving really fast, and it's up to us. I think sometimes you feel like if you don't move at the speed of the world, then you're losing out. And that's not true. A lot of times you're moving at the speed of the world and your relationships suffer, your health care suffers, all of these other things suffer, because you feel like you have to keep up with everything. And I think sometimes you have to step off and just like, whoa, wait a minute. Grab your bearings, refuel, reenergize. And then if your need is to get back up there and do that again, maybe you'd be better at it, you might be stronger, so you can keep up with it a little differently. So sometimes we just need to pause for a second.

Lisa Belisle: I really have enjoyed reconnecting with you, Séan.

Séan Alonzo Harris: It's been a pleasure. Me too.

Lisa Belisle: It has been a lot of fun. I will encourage people who are interested in learning more about Séan Alonzo Harris from Séan Alonzo Harris Photography to go online. And I'm sure that once the show is announced, that will be on your website. So then hopefully you'll go in person to see this work, because I think that's what it really deserves. But in the meantime, it's been a pleasure to talk with Séan Alonzo Harris here on Radio Maine. I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you've been listening to our video podcast where we explore and celebrate creativity and the human spirit. We are sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine, and certainly I would count amongst our wonderful Maine creatives Séan Alonzo Harris. So thanks so much for coming in today.

Séan Alonzo Harris: Thank you for having me. It was fun. Had a great day.