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Studio Sessions

Matthew O'Brien, Alex Carter

Discussions about art and the creative process. New episodes every other week.

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S4 · E3
Tuesday · 1 hr
83. Not Everything's Worth Optimizing
Alex spent years feeling he was wasting his time, and now thinks he was filling a bucket that’s finally pouring out. One of the things pouring out is an acting workshop, which takes Matt back to acting school, where he spent most of his time managing his lines instead of acting. Improv was the only performing he loved, because it’s all listening and responding. Alex thinks improv is writing without the edit. Matt says it feels like the old Alex is back, after years when making things for a living had him going through the motions. Alex also built a new website for the show, and Matt sees their differences fitting together in it. It holds every word we’ve said, so you can follow how our thinking has changed. On AI, we agree that image generation misses what a photograph is, something captured. Alex argues that writing a personal letter with AI skips the reason to write one, which is finding out what you feel. Near the end, a young customer at a friend’s shop thought the staff picks weren’t for sale, and we figure she’s never known a store where the staff point out the good stuff. -Ai Mentioned in this episode: studiosessionspod.com, GeoCities, TCM’s The Plot Thickens: Stanley, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Whose Line Is It Anyway?, Office Space, Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, Claude, ChatGPT, Home Alone, Slap Shot, Jackie Chan’s Police Story. Support the show If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#ask Website: https://studiosessionspod.com
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S4 · E2
September 29 · 1 hr 15 min
82. Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't: Give Yourself a Year
Once a week, a cozy bar in Omaha has jazz, and on certain nights the room feels like magic. One of us wants to make a concert film there in the spirit of Jazz on a Summer's Day and The Last Waltz, on the original Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera, an old Super 16 digital camera that records to one SD card. Between us we own three, and they're tougher than we expected: a 256 GB card holds about 90 minutes of raw CinemaDNG, and others have shot past an hour without overheating. The short film one of us wrote is pushed to spring, and the jazz film is how he means to keep moving until then. Brian Eno came to treat his work as a practice rather than a job. One of us wants that, with his friends' names in the credits as the most permanent record he can leave. The other has old hang-ups about being on set and would rather help edit, as long as the edit doesn't swallow weeks of family life. We riff on the 6-hour cut of a 14-minute short. Talking over that script, one of us saw the other recognize his own younger self, which leads back to 2008, before the Canon 5D Mark II, when there was one narrow way in. Short films still earn nothing, we agree. It ends on Hollywood, where one of us reckons talent without attention is no currency. Mentioned in this episode: Bert Stern's Jazz on a Summer's Day, Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz, the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera, CinemaDNG, Brian Eno, the Canon 5D Mark II, the Black List. -Ai Support the show If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#ask Website: https://studiosessionspod.com
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S4 · E1
September 15 · 1 hr 22 min
81. Creative Momentum and Obstacles As The Path
At a yard sale in Malvern, Iowa, one of us asked the woman running it about old cameras, and her husband climbed into the rafters of his barn and came down with a dusty 8x10 view camera, which he gave us. The bellows are full of holes and there's no lens, so it needs a restorer. One of us has been in a creative flood for 3 months and fears that if he stops, it all stops; the other's momentum feels more like a frenzy. The one in the flood passes on an idea he heard: the obstacles are the path itself, and each one is a chance to be creative. An Instagram video mocking cliché photographs, like a faded pink door on a brick wall, gave one of us a small crisis, since he's taken plenty of those. Whatever you've scrolled past, we agree, steers your eye. Martin Scorsese started with about 40 years of film history to absorb, and anyone starting now has 130, which one of us calls an advantage. Brian Eno played Fela Kuti for Talking Heads as they made Remain in Light, and it changed the record. Near the end come Eno's Oblique Strategies cards, which one of us has put on his website. The first says to push to an extreme, then ease back, and the last asks for the simplest fix, which one of us learned to hunt for in Apple tech support. Mentioned in this episode: Winston Churchill, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Stanley Kubrick, Adam Sandler, Orson Welles's F for Fake, Stone Temple Pilots, Talking Heads' Remain in Light, Fela Kuti, Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies. -Ai Support the show If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#ask Website: https://studiosessionspod.com
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S3 · E26
September 1 · 59 min
80. What Happens To Your Ideas When Algorithms Leave?
madebyalex.online Last episode of "season" 3! One of us has a Squarespace site he means to redo, and watching the other build madebyalex.online with Claude has him tinkering. The builder has wanted his own corner of the web since customizing MySpace pages in 2004 with Web Design for Dummies from the library. AI finally let him build one without years of learning to code. He's off almost every platform now, and the other runs the podcast's YouTube channel so he never has to see its numbers. His reason is what he calls effective creative entropy: an algorithm deals you 6 cards when you think you're holding 52. Every story and essay on the site can be printed, and he sees it as the center everything else grows from. He wants people to find something there, then go live their lives, and thinks of the site as a garden, planted a little at a time. He'd like to hand the homepage to guest curators, each choosing and ordering 5 of his photographs with a note on why, so he can see his work through someone else's eyes. Nothing is tuned for search engines, and it does all a site can to keep AI models from training on it. Near the end comes the old habit of keeping 10 bookmarked sites to work through on an afternoon. The last question is whether the site has him making videos again: loosely, he says, just him talking to a camera. Mentioned in this episode: madebyalex.online, Squarespace, Claude, the IndieWeb, Neocities, GeoCities, Kevin Kelly's 1,000 True Fans, Tim Berners-Lee, Louis C.K., Buy Me a Coffee. -Ai Support the show If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#ask Website: https://studiosessionspod.com
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S3 · E25
August 18 · 1 hr
79. We've Been Sold Enough Chairs - Thoughts on The Future of Ai
One of us is convinced the next big change in computing is an operating system you talk to, one that writes whatever you need on the spot, down to a VHS effect for the video you're editing. The other doubts anyone is waiting for new hardware. When his MiniDV capture broke, an AI built him an app to fix it in about an hour while he read, and his cameras and computer haven't held him back in 7 years. We disagree about most of it, happily, down to whether a perfect assistant would make most people's lives much better. One of us expects a backlash from people so burned by technology that they'd rather work with their hands. The other offers a chair: whoever invents it can't own it, and nobody goes back to the floor. The reply is that we've been sold too many chairs, and the rock was fine. Later the chair's champion concedes that inventions start simple and grow into new problems, like the Seinfeld where George gets a security guard a chair and the guard sleeps through a robbery. Then the chair gets turned on the website one of us built for his writing and photographs, which he owns and hopes will wear in like a watch, and where the only number shown is how many pieces are up. The rest waits for another episode, because the other has a Friday drop to post. Mentioned in this episode: Apple, OpenAI, ChatGPT, Claude, Seinfeld. -Ai Support the show If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#ask Website: https://studiosessionspod.com
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S3 · E24
August 4 · 1 hr 17 min
78. Waiting to Talk - Conversational Narcissism, the Ego Myth, and Reading a Room
We start with the show. Owning our own feed means no platform can switch it off, and when we finally have guests, we'd rather hear how someone thinks over a long conversation than listen to the story they've rehearsed about themselves. That leads into how friendships last once everyone is an adult with too much to do. Most of our closest friends turn out to be the people we're making something with, because a shared project is what keeps a phone call from feeling like time stolen from the work. One of us picked up a phrase that's hard to un-hear: people are either listening or waiting to talk. We use it to get at conversational narcissism and the industry that sells ways to transcend your ego, and why we'd both rather learn to work with the ego than pretend to be rid of it. We think making art works the same way. You work something out in yourself and put it into the world, hoping someone else finds a piece of themselves in it. The second half is a study in reading a room, set mostly in restaurants, with a waiter who refills the water mid-sentence and a steakhouse where one of us warns the staff to expect a three-hour dinner. It ends back on photography, with our photo walks and the gallery we keep talking about opening. Mentioned in this episode: Marc Maron's WTF, Rick Rubin's Tetragrammaton, conversational narcissism, and Omaha's Au Courant, Yoshitomo and Sullivan's Steakhouse. -Ai Support the show If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#ask Website: https://studiosessionspod.com
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S3 · E23
July 21 · 1 hr 11 min
77. The Camera Opens Doors
One of us pulled over to photograph an old pickup and a beat-up basketball hoop, and 30 seconds later the owner was walking him through his garage. The man, in his 80s, has a '69 Camaro under a cover and a drawer of hot rod t-shirts he's never worn. He turned down a portrait, but gave his address and said to come back any time. None of it would have happened without the camera, and neither would the portraits one of us took of a woman who cried as she sold him the Nirvana shirt she'd bought as a teenager. A topic card about quitting sends us two ways. One of us thinks of the line in Mad Men about Don Draper only liking the beginning of things, and wonders if that's why he left acting and screenwriting. The other hears it as advice to deal with nagging chores at once and keep a room like David Mamet's, with a typewriter and a bed. The one who left screenwriting once wrote five pages a day for years in LA, and a spec script went out to every studio and didn't sell. Facing two or three more years to get that close again, he felt like a 37-year-old still in single-A ball, and stopped. It ends in a sauna with two strangers who talked about their plans like Tarantino characters. Mentioned in this episode: Mad Men, David Mamet, Alec Soth's Sleeping by the Mississippi, Ingmar Bergman, Louis Malle, Casey Neistat, Stephen King, Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, the Nikon F5. -Ai Support the show If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#ask Website: https://studiosessionspod.com
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S3 · E22
July 7 · 1 hr 12 min
76. Matt Went to the Movies
One of us stayed out for a 9 o'clock showing of Backrooms and came out more excited about a new movie than he'd been in years. It reminded him of Primer, a cheaply made film about 2 engineers who invent a time machine by accident. With Sinners and Marty Supreme doing well too, we wonder whether original films are coming back. Asked for the best feeling he's ever had leaving a theater, one of us starts with The Matrix, then goes back to summers when his dad, a teacher, took the kids to Terminator 2 at a single-screen theater in Crystal Lake, Illinois. He takes his own kids to the movies now for the same reason. Horror is where we split. One of us grew up on a great-aunt's ghost story about a little boy's orange tricycle that moved on its own after he died, and loves scary movies because they're a ride you can get off. The other can't suspend his disbelief for horror, though pro wrestling gets him, since the best storylines have some truth in them. The Shining lands differently after marriage and kids, when you can see a sliver of Jack Torrance's self-importance in yourself, though never what he does with it. We both know the frustration of being pulled out of a draft the way Wendy pulls Jack out of his. It ends on the idea of going to photograph some local pro wrestling. Mentioned in this episode: A24's Backrooms, Shane Carruth's Primer, Ryan Coogler's Sinners, Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme, Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread, The Matrix, Terminator 2, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, Film Streams. -Ai Support the show If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#ask Website: https://studiosessionspod.com
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S3 · E21
June 23 · 42 min
75. Leave Room for the Accident
One of us is back from a family week in Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park, and like every trip, it makes Omaha look better. He counts trips like that as a form of creative expression: a loose plan with room for things to unfold. An article says Anthony Bourdain made No Reservations that way. One of us once spent a film-school weekend in Berlin with no hotel booked. Then we get to the friction that keeps one of us from riding his motorcycle to Nashville through the Ozarks. The other would like to drive the old highways across Nebraska someday, through the small towns I-80 skips. One of us filmed a video at the NAB trade show on an old iPhone and put the effort he saved into the edit. With 2 days left and a shootout in Kill Bill still unshot, Quentin Tarantino replaced all its coverage with one long crane pull-back and called it the best shot in the movie. Louis Malle narrates God's Country, his documentary about a small Midwest town, from behind the camera, and it still holds up 40 years later. One of our topic cards asks whether mastery costs something, which brings up Kubrick following 2001 with A Clockwork Orange. It ends when one of us gets a sweet call from home, just as he has to leave for a 9:15 movie. Mentioned in this episode: Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, Rocky Mountain National Park, Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, Louis Malle's God's Country, Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, David Lynch's Twin Peaks, John Ford's The Searchers, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, John Huston. -Ai Support the show If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#ask Website: https://studiosessionspod.com
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S3 · E20
June 9 · 1 hr 15 min
74. Proof of Work or How the Floor Gets Raised
Daniel Arnold's new book from Loose Joints has no text beyond its title, only pictures sequenced by an editor at the publisher and a few blank pages we puzzle over. One of us, close to finishing something long, remembers Josh Safdie sounding close to tears in an interview because the first question after Uncut Gems, a decade in the making, was what's next. He still sees the appeal of moving straight on. Arnold built his book walking miles a day with a camera, and now anyone can flip through 10 years of those walks in 20 minutes and ask when the next one is out. One of us is weighing a group photo walk on Saturday. We've walked downtown with cameras for 6 years, and one of us can't name a keeper from those walks, because good pictures seem to need you alone. Then again, we met through a Facebook post about getting coffee. That opens a talk about Omaha, where one of us rarely sees work that sends him home to try harder, the way a friend's table read did. When Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute mile, others soon followed. If one of us optioned a script, the other would buy the drinks and then go home and write. It ends with one of us feeling less of the why-bother he calls a sickness, the kind that hands him an excuse to stay home and watch TV. Mentioned in this episode: Daniel Arnold, Loose Joints, Josh and Benny Safdie's Uncut Gems, Roger Bannister. -Ai Support the show If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#ask Website: https://studiosessionspod.com
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S3 · E19
May 26 · 1 hr 37 min
73. That's a Pretty Good Tree
One of us came out of an Omaha used bookstore with a $25 book on Henri Cartier-Bresson, after passing up a $75 Martin Parr on the display. Reading about a photographer who came from money lands differently in a tight month. His weekly drop of new finds at a vintage shop, the other suggests, has taken the place of the shoot-and-post cycle that can be toxic to photography. His YouTube video predicting that Apple will bring back its Aperture software went from 800 views at bedtime to 25,000 by morning, a thrill that sits oddly next to a thin business account. Then we read to each other. Cartier-Bresson spent whole days on the streets, tense and ready to spring, and suspected that only children could still express themselves freely. John Ruskin measures an artist by how many great ideas his work holds. In Proust's Swann's Way, a phrase of music makes Swann want to start his life over. The longest stretch is Italo Calvino's essay on the written city, where words on a wall, which nobody can avoid reading, amount to a kind of tyranny. The talk turns to yard signs and sports flags crowding a walk that should be about the birds. It ends on the husks of old trees one of us photographs like tombstones, including a 12-foot trunk stripped of every limb that has started growing back. Mentioned in this episode: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Martin Parr, Peter Wollen's Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, Apple's Aperture, John Ruskin's Modern Painters, David Lynch's Catching the Big Fish, Marcel Proust's Swann's Way, Italo Calvino's Collection of Sand, Jackson Street Booksellers. -Ai Support the show If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#ask Website: https://studiosessionspod.com
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S3 · E18
May 12 · 1 hr 35 min
72. The Critic Problem: Why Great Art Resists Easy Explanations
In 1903 Rainer Maria Rilke answered a young poet who had sent him verses to judge, and began by saying that criticism is the thing least able to reach a work of art. Then he told him to stop looking outward and ask himself, alone at night, whether he truly had to write. One of us reads it still frustrated by opening night at the Joslyn Art Museum, where a show of photographs from the Amon Carter Museum began with a talk neither of us liked. One of us found it narrow, the other underprepared, when all it had to do was unlock the work. An Alec Soth talk in the same building had done exactly that. The photographs were another matter. One of us stood two inches from an Eggleston print, and a huge, staged Gregory Crewdson moved him more than he expected. We notice who's missing, like Walker Evans and Stephen Shore, and one of us wishes the Joslyn would take a risk on someone new, the way John Szarkowski did with William Eggleston's Guide. One of us wants wall labels about form, not the concerns of the moment, and the other has stopped reading them. Saul Leiter's idea that a photographer finds what a painter has to make explains to one of us why estate sales and street photography feel like the same work. It ends back with Rilke and his case for solitude. Mentioned in this episode: Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, the Joslyn Art Museum, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Alec Soth, William Eggleston's Guide, John Szarkowski, Gregory Crewdson, Deana Lawson, Gordon Parks, Saul Leiter, Tomas Leach's In No Great Hurry. -Ai Support the show If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#ask Website: https://studiosessionspod.com
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S3 · E18
April 28 · 1 hr 19 min
71. What If Success Is The Unmeasurable Part?
One of us watched a video of a woman of 93 still repairing oil pump valves and teaching a man in his 40s the job, and saw his own future in it. He studied fine arts and expects to work forever, by choice. That opens a talk about the usual measures of success, like the house and the 401k, and the pressure they put on anyone who lives otherwise. In 1927 E.M. Forster wrote that a novel can't escape its humanity and is lifeless without it. We borrow the idea: strip the humanity out of a family's life and what's left is a house full of things. Then one of us, who photographs estate sales once the owners are gone, describes a house call to buy records from a man still deciding where his things will go. They met at a thrift store. The man walked him through every room and a lifetime of collections, down to baseballs signed by Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle, and asked only for a donation to the thrift store where he volunteers. That turns us to our own things, and the hope of finding each a person who cares about it as much as we do. Some objects carry a story, like a Cubs mug a friend mailed, or the damaged thrift-store books this man pays a woman to rebind. It ends on one of us hoping to go back and photograph the man. Mentioned in this episode: E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel, John Sayles's Lone Star, Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle. -Ai Support the show If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#ask Website: https://studiosessionspod.com
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S3 · E17
April 14 · 55 min
70. You Output What You Input
We switched off the bright light because it wasn't the mood, and let the cameras suffer for it. That starts a talk about living with things of quality, which isn't the same as expensive. One of us spent nearly four hours picking through a man's house after he died. The other thinks AI is making physical things matter more. The man had built his own stereo receiver from a Heathkit, a box of parts he soldered himself, while one of us used to ask a HomePod mini for jazz and never learn who was playing. Knowing how your things work is worth something, down to a record player's belt. One of us has had a flip phone for two years and set up his studio so nothing pulls at his attention. Back on quality, we get to enshittification, where a company that started out caring what it makes ends up cutting corners, like McDonald's in The Founder once Michael Keaton's character takes over. We try to vote with our money and our time, and still order from Amazon. One of us posts Instagram stories for a friend's shop and scrolls with his morning coffee. He takes in most media the way we do street photography, waiting for something interesting, like Judge Judy on a giant screen above an empty courtyard. It ends with the one on the flip phone agreeing, as long as you stay out of the algorithm's bubble. Mentioned in this episode: Heathkit, the HomePod mini, the Porsche 911, John Lee Hancock's The Founder, Michael Keaton, Patagonia, Liquid Death, Amazon. -Ai Support the show If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#ask Website: https://studiosessionspod.com
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S3 · E16
March 31 · 1 hr 15 min
69. What If Your Best Work Needs Less Sharing
If making the work is water, content is food coloring, and once it's in there's no getting it back out. One of us never expected what his video channels would bring: a feeling that an audience is waiting, like a plant that dies if nobody waters it. He had begun them partly as an archive of his own life, the kind he wishes he had of his father's, even a staged one. Vivian Maier took her pictures while working as a nanny, which makes us wonder whether a day job keeps the water clean. Offered an imaginary patron's $100,000 a year, one of us would take it and still wonder whether the content plant had died by the end. The other laughs off the idea that universal basic income will set creativity loose, since conflict seems to be part of what makes people make things. The conversation started when one of us was drawn at once to one photographer's book, then felt something missing from new work by another, who also makes social media content. Near the end, one of us describes what he calls is-ness, a scene that simply is what it is, like the light and dust on an estate-sale end table that morning, or two telephone poles on a hill above a ditch of dirty snow. We close on how hard that is to say, and how much our language leans on the image of a line. Mentioned in this episode: Vivian Maier, Alec Soth, J.D. Salinger, Garry Winogrand, Leo Tolstoy's What Is Art? -Ai Support the show If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#ask Website: https://studiosessionspod.com
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S3 · E15
March 17 · 1 hr 6 min
68. Protect The Work At All Costs
We start on a worry that making videos about photography turns the pictures into content. Good work takes time: photographs one of us shared, taken over three and a half years, had no thread until he had a reason to look. One of us used to stock a friend's shop with any t-shirt that had The Exorcist or a band on it, however badly made, until the friend asked what those shirts said about the place. In photography, the cheap shirt is a lens comparison video made because those get views. One of us compares his first YouTube channel, built by copying Peter McKinnon and Matti Haapoja, with his second, made because nobody made the videos he wanted to watch. William Eggleston once said he loves his own pictures and doesn't much care for other people's. That put one of us at ease, since he has long worried about liking so many of his own photographs. The other edits hard. An amateur's painting of a barn from an estate sale stands for a fear: that a body of work adds up to an earnest try and never a Monet. After some 40 viewings, the critics in the Garry Winogrand documentary sound like comedy to one of us, and we talk about the thousands of rolls Winogrand never developed. It ends on a Leica M11, bought partly to shoot alongside friends who have Leicas, before we leave to take pictures. Mentioned in this episode: Garry Winogrand, William Eggleston, Saul Leiter, Alex Webb, Grainydays, Peter McKinnon, Matti Haapoja, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Ross. -Ai Support the show If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#ask Website: https://studiosessionspod.com
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S3 · E14
March 3 · 1 hr 12 min
67. Leica Luck
More of a fun for us one here. One of us opened Facebook Marketplace to find a Leica M11 and a Leica Q2 for sale, listed by a woman selling her father's cameras. He offered to make a short film about her father's photography in exchange for a discount, but she preferred cash at the price a used-camera dealer had quoted her, and the M11 dropped from $7,500 to $4,800. The other, who happened to call that morning, came away weighing the Q2 at $2,500. We half expected a scam, until a young family let us in with the Leicas sitting on the table. We each walked out with one. For one of us, every camera kept and not shot is a small guilt, so he'll sell a shelf of digicams to pay for the M11. The other has lent him a Zeiss 35mm lens that had sat unused since its last service, in exchange for the use of a viewfinder. Now neither of us has an excuse not to shoot. One of us wants portraits of the people he meets on buying trips. The other is glad his partner will finally have a camera of her own when they go out shooting. It ends at a flea market booth packed with unworn Sturgis rally shirts at $3 each, where one of us showed restraint and took 25. Mentioned in this episode: Facebook Marketplace, the Leica M11, the Leica Q2, KEH, Zeiss, the Ricoh GR, the Sony A7 IV, the Hermes 3000, Grainydays, Sturgis. -Ai Support the show If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#ask Website: https://studiosessionspod.com
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S3 · E13
February 17 · 1 hr 5 min
66. Back to Square One
One of us sold an old Nikon lens on eBay for $425 to a buyer in Switzerland. Then a stranger on TikTok pointed out it was a rare early version, with a very low serial number. He prices more carefully now, and it paid off: a sealed Donkey Kong 64 he paid $30 for turns out to sell for around $1,000. The gallery we spent two episodes planning has fallen through. The artist already working in the space got the chance to take it over, and sharing it would have meant every decision went through a committee. We stepped back, and we're still on good terms with the artist. What we'll miss is the community that came with that spot. The rest is about getting back to work. One of us hasn't loaded a single roll into the Leica he had overhauled. The other has joined a darkroom and wants to start loading his own Tri-X, so he asks listeners which reusable canisters hold up. With William Eggleston's Guide open on the table, one of us wants to pair his buying trips with time to shoot, maybe a portrait of every stranger he buys from. A Rick Rubin interview with George Saunders, about how the work only exists once you do it, leads to Tolstoy's definition of art as feeling passed from one person to another, and to the idea of finding your own definition instead of the right one. Mentioned in this episode: West Coast Choppers, Donkey Kong 64, Kodak Tri-X, William Eggleston's Guide, Garry Winogrand, Rick Rubin, George Saunders, Tolstoy's What Is Art? -Ai Support the show If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#ask Website: https://studiosessionspod.com
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S3 · E12
February 3 · 57 min
65. Attempting A Low-Stakes Space For Photography And Conversation: PART 2
We still don't have a name for the space. An hour of brainstorming with ChatGPT, until one of us hit the usage limit, turned up mostly pretentious ideas like the Greek word kairos. A few names stuck anyway: Room, and Keyframe, which one of us read out from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, where it means a moment that seemed like nothing when it happened and turned out to begin a new chapter of your life. Our friend's shop is called Lost, the kind of name you hear once and know is right. Every name in Star Wars works that way, and so do Chicago and Seattle. Rather than a sign asking people to put their phones away, we'd like a room where they forget them. Then we describe the space itself. It should sit somewhere between a white-walled gallery and a shop crammed with things, with furniture arranged like a half-remembered living room at your grandparents' house. What we want is a scene, the kind that grew up around Warhol's Factory or the Neistat brothers' studio, where people show each other their work and push each other to make more, right here in Omaha. One of us pictures a running list on the wall of the photographers and filmmakers who have inspired us, for visitors to look up later. It ends on street photography, where the picture comes from being open to whatever happens in front of you. Mentioned in this episode: ChatGPT, John Koenig's The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, George Lucas's Star Wars, Cameron Crowe's Singles, Andy Warhol's Factory, Casey and Van Neistat, Gregory Crewdson. -Ai Support the show If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#ask Website: https://studiosessionspod.com
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S3 · E11
January 20 · 49 min
64. Attempting A Low-Stakes Space For Photography And Conversation: PART 1
A friend who deals in antiques and vintage in Omaha's Old Market has a bigger space sitting free for a few months, and we can sublease it cheaply. We've wanted somewhere to show photographs for years. The man behind one empty building laughed at the idea in a voice message, and a gallery owner one of us approached wanted the show to be his. This one would be ours, beside our friend's furniture and glasswork, with no price tags. We picture a place people come to hang out, with slide viewers so visitors can build their own slideshows, and a pot of coffee on for street photographers starting a Friday walk. One of us is glad it's on tape: if it fails, in ten years we can still say we tried to open a gallery. It's also a relief after so many conversations about art and commerce. With nothing to sell and little money at stake, the walls can hold whatever we find interesting, in thrift-store frames if need be. One of us has just put together an old Leica from an estate sale, and he suspects the pictures in his head are better than the first real ones will be. The space scares him too, but differently: it might turn out great just as the lease runs out. It ends on our friend, who keeps saying he wants the room to be something special, not corporate. Mentioned in this episode: Omaha's Old Market, Alec Soth, the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha's Workshop and A Priori, the Leica IIIf, Leica's 35mm Summaron. -Ai Support the show If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#ask Website: https://studiosessionspod.com
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