WALKING WITH SLACK
I recently interviewed the Los Angeles-based photographer Mike Slack for the British Royal Photographic Society. Inevitably a certain amount ended up on the cutting room floor and some of that concerned walking. Mike is creating a series of books with the overall title Walking in Place, in which he walks around various cities, photographing what he sees. The first book featured New Orleans. This is a spread from the book:
Perhaps inevitably, psychogeography raised its head in our conversation. I’ve learned through experience that when you mention psychogeography to most civilians their eyes just glaze over, so that didn’t make it into the final interview edit either, but here’s how the exchange went:
*GN: I see that notions of walking, maybe psychogeography, pop up in your work. Can you say anything about that?
MS: The aimless wandering aspect has always been a really fruitful method for seeing new things and making new pictures. An increasingly important part of it for me is the randomness, just rolling the proverbial dice and ending up somewhere and zeroing in a specific scene, a picture, at whatever scale, which always seems to link somehow to another specific picture from another time and place, and so on, all of the pictures somehow connected. I don’t know if that’s strictly a psychogeographic approach, but the “game” aspect of it is really appealing, using playful methods to tune into your immediate surrounding, and letting chance dictate the content or pathway. *
The interview has somewhat mysteriously disappeared from the RPS website. When, and if it returns, I'll put a link here.
Meanwhile, here's Mr Slack with an image that appears in the New Orleans book:

Perhaps inevitably, psychogeography raised its head in our conversation. I’ve learned through experience that when you mention psychogeography to most civilians their eyes just glaze over, so that didn’t make it into the final interview edit either, but here’s how the exchange went:
*GN: I see that notions of walking, maybe psychogeography, pop up in your work. Can you say anything about that?
MS: The aimless wandering aspect has always been a really fruitful method for seeing new things and making new pictures. An increasingly important part of it for me is the randomness, just rolling the proverbial dice and ending up somewhere and zeroing in a specific scene, a picture, at whatever scale, which always seems to link somehow to another specific picture from another time and place, and so on, all of the pictures somehow connected. I don’t know if that’s strictly a psychogeographic approach, but the “game” aspect of it is really appealing, using playful methods to tune into your immediate surrounding, and letting chance dictate the content or pathway. *
The interview has somewhat mysteriously disappeared from the RPS website. When, and if it returns, I'll put a link here.
Meanwhile, here's Mr Slack with an image that appears in the New Orleans book:


Published on May 19, 2018 20:04
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