Contemporary Photographer Series - Nate Larson

from the series Geolocation © Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman

Nate Larson is a contemporary artist working with photographic media, artist books and digital video. He holds an MFA from Ohio State University and his work has been featured globally in such publications as the New York Times, Wired Magazine, VICE Magazine and Gizmodo. Often Larson works in collaboration with creative partner Marni Shindelman, with whom he created the bodies of work, Hashtags and Geolocation. He currently teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD and will act as Chair for the 2014 national conference for the Society for Photographic Education. He was recently interviewed by David Gwaltney for our Contemporary Photographer Series (CPS).

You often work with a collaborator, Marni Shindelman, on some of your projects. In terms of working in a partnership, how is the work divided? Does ego ever get in the way of sharing credit for a work?

We work collaboratively, so everything bounces back and forth a lot. It's hard to specify divisions because of the fluidity of the exchange. With the actual photographs, we used to photograph together and make the decisions together with the camera on the tripod. We've grown into more of a rhythm of shooting independently and editing together, which allows for some individual space in the context of the collaboration. The concepts grow out of that collaborative dialogue so it feels right to exhibit the work equally under both names and we don't specify publicly who shot which image.

What led to your interest in using Twitter as the impetus for the Hashtags and Geolocation series?

We listent to whispers on social media and link them to places in the physical communities that originated them. There is a digital noise surrounding us, invisible chatter, and we spend time listening to this in each city we travel through. These photographs serve as a means of memorializing these brief virtual moments.

We make a conscious effort to not include people in the photographs - our primary intent is to link the place with the thought expressed in the post. Twitter has over 350 million posts a day and we see ourselves as archivists, pulling down and preserving a small fragment of them that would otherwise be lost to the vastness of the internet. Our photographs anchor the post to a place - this happened here, someone felt this here and this was experienced here. In some ways, it is similar to a historic plaque for a battle on the side of the highway - a marker speaking to the history of place and the power of location.

We see patterns in each city. There are a majority of tweets about love and relationships, then a subset of those about loneliness. There are tweets about jobs, work and some about overall economic conditions. Each city has some specific to certain political climates or local culture, and we research those contextual elements when we come across them.

There is a lot of sociological study and journalism that suggests that even though we are more connected than ever, higher feelings of loneliness are reported. The first tweet that we shot for the project was a wry commentary on losing a job. It is astonishing to think about people putting that information out there in a public way, rather than limiting it to a few close friends. We also put more personal information out there than ever before and we have serious privacy concerns - who is using that data and for what purpose? Corporations mine it to market to us and there are a number of crime reports with criminals determining your locations through social media. The potential is boundless but we are also mindful of how this information persists on the internet and the unintended consequences.

from the series Geolocation © Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman

When creating works for these projects, how did the contents of the tweets influence each photograph?

We think of it as a constraint-based practice - once we arrive at the coordinate, then it becomes a challenge to make an interesting photograph. We shoot a lot on each site to make the best possible image. Frequently, I think about what the person might have been looking at or contemplating. It's ultimately an interpretation on our part as we have no contextual information other than a dot on a map.

The cities that we photograph in also influence the nature of the tweets. Our previous site-specific projects are centered around the Baltimore/Washington DC metro area, Western NY state, the Atlanta metro area, Saint John in New Brunswick, NYC, Palm Desert in California, and Derby in England. We are also finishing a public arts commission based on tweets in the Indianapolis Public Airport that premieres in July. And we'll be shooting a new site-specific series this summer in the DUMBO neighborhood in Brooklyn.

from the series Hashtags © Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman

The landscape seems to be a central focus in your work, specifically in Geolocations and GPS Drawings. What draws you to location-based work?

Hard to say precisely but my work is becoming more and more of a form of mapping or cartography. My interests always seem to be driven by the human touch on the landscape and there's something compelling both about where we live our lives but also the history of that site and the way that landscape persists beyond the human conception of time.

I'm working on a solo series right now that traces John Wilkes Booth's escape route out of DC to his death site in Virginia and another series that documents Civil War Witness Trees, trees that were alive during the battles. I think that these have come out of the same interest in what happened on a site that you see in the Geolocation project with Marni.

When Marni and I travel to work on Geolocation, we usually let Twitter guide our movements, so depending on which posts attract us, we end up exploring the cities primarily based on the locations of the users. As a result, we have gotten to know areas of the cities that tourists might not normally discover and, we feel, places that are more authentic to the lives of the people that reside there.

from the series GPS Drawings © Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman

Looking at Witness, work that centers around the idea of psychic transference, there seems to be a common thread with your Twitter work: transmission of information. Is it not possible that we are all now amateur psychics, able to instantly transmit our thoughts and locations to others? With that, how do you wish to use your newfound powers of transmission?

We think that social media has changed the way that we relate to each other and it is amazing to be able to maintain a low level of contact with a vast array or people from all stages of our lives. The New York Times and Wired writer Clive Thompson calls this "ambient awareness", suggesting that we have a technological sixth sense to the know the minds of other people. If I see you on the street and you just posted about an awesome new life event on your Twitter feed, we can jump a step in the conversation and focus on the latest news without getting lost in the small talk.

But mostly, it comes down to a desire to know the minds of other people or understand something about the inner life of those around us.

from the series Witness © Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman