Our June photograph (the eerie womb of a hotel room on our main page) came to us from Chris Marstall, creator of Tourfilter.com and friend of Open Letters. We had some questions about his photographic work and he was kind enough to share his thoughts.

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OL: How often do you take pictures, Chris? Is it a part of your daily life, or something you save for unique occasions and excursions? and what kind of equipment are you swinging around?

Chris: These days, very occasionally. What is the point? I sometimes ask myself. So many pictures have already been taken of anything i might want to photograph. If I am dating someone, I will take a thousand pictures of her in every kind of place.

I don’t have a film camera now. I have a slim Sony Cybershot T7 digital camera but I lost the charger; so if i take photos these days, and it’s rare, i will buy a disposable camera. Sometimes the results are amazing. I bought one on a recent trip to South America and it malfunctioned, leaving all of the photos looking instantly ancient, and not in a good way.

OL:Where was the hotel room picture taken? What’s the story there?

Chris: Cairo. it was my first night of a 6 week trip to the Middle East in 2003. I was scared of what might happen to me, an American, in the Middle East, so I gave my worrying mind an unusual luxury and reserved a room at the Nile Hilton for the first three nights of my stay. It’s the grandest, coolest, old-schoolest hotel in Cairo, right on the river. I thought my room was beautiful so i took a picture of it.

OL: What drew you to the Middle East? What did you see?

Chris: I went to Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Israel for 6 weeks in 2003. I wanted to see this place which I was suddenly being told was our enemy, a new USSR. I also had visions of classic North African romance from movies like Casablanca and Lawrence of Arabia. As it turns out those classic places are rare in Cairo and have become tourist museums, for the most part. There are a lot of new rebar concrete towers, etc. However it was still a dense, multilayered place and there were lots of beautiful things to look at and peer into. Everything was new to me. I tried to capture some cultural things and photograph people I encountered. Like the young men who invited me into their home (which was scary at first) and smoked me out. Or the clueless Italian tourist in a short skirt who fell asleep at the port and flashed her panties at 200 Palestinians on a religious pilgrimage.

OL:For a time you were keeping a sort of photo journal online. Do you think it changed you as a photographer? What kind of feedback did you generate? How did you decide which pictures to post?

Chris: A few years ago I got this amazing camera, a Sony Cybershot U30. It was about the size of half a pack of cigarettes and charged through its USB port. I could carry it everywhere and it was a minimal hassle to get photos onto my PC. I told myself I would take a photo every day and have an evening ritual where I chose one and uploaded it to my photoblog. I kept it up for a year or two and at one point about 80 people were viewing each photo. It was an exciting time in my life because my best friend and his family were living with me and I had a new girlfriend and a new job, so there was lots to take pictures of. i would love to have that camera back and get back into the habit. I really appreciate your featuring my photo and it inspires me.

I used to make personal videos — much in the same way i described my photography process: taking a compact video camera with me everywhere and becoming known as someone who would and could whip out a video camera in any unexpected occasion. I edited together several 5-20 minute short diary films. i was living in San Francisco and everything around me was so exotic and beautiful. At that time i developed a brutal approach to choosing what clips to keep and what clips to toss. Basically, i kept only clips that worked on every level. technical, visual, emotional, etc. if i caught myself saying “oh but that was such an amazing night i have to put something from that in there” i would say no, only good stuff goes in. I use the same approach with photos; nothing matters except whether it’s a good photo.

I enjoy writing captions for photos and I think they can add a lot. i was inspired by Bill Owen’s Suburbia and Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, among others. I admire their neutral, minimal, yet piercingly personal approach to caption writing. They focus on the reportorial four W’s, yet in a way that makes you love, understand and admire the people in the photo. I think the best photography takes you inside.

OL:The hotel room shot is an exception, since the balance of your best shots frame your subject off-center. The way you do it often conveys motion — these things were seen in passing — but you’re also interested in depth: there is usually either a brightness or a darkness that the image plunges into (the doorway of the bookshop, the street beyond the arch, the darkness around the wall). What catches your eye when you’re out with your camera?

Chris: My ideas about composition are pretty basic and instinctive. Get close to the subject, but not so close that you don’t get a sense of their setting. Look for strong lighting. Hunt around in the frame for visual balance. Take pictures of beautiful, interesting things.

I try to take myself out of the moment and ask if someone would find an image interesting, not knowing any of the context, or knowing only minimal information, like what you would put into a caption.

OL: What kind of shots do you throw away?

Chris: I throw away almost everything I shoot. If a photo is bad, or if it makes the subject appear unattractive, there’s no reason to keep it, even if it’s a picture of someone or something you love.

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Jeffrey Eaton took this month’s cover image, “West Unity Road,” in late December. A longtime friend and contributor to Open Letters, Jeff’s striking landscapes lead off our April and November issues from 2007. His 2008 review Two From No Tell Books digs into poetry by Shafer Hall and P.F. Potvin and his recent essay Raging Bull recasts the Library of America’s Debate on the Constitution Night of the Comet psp volumes in a uniquely contemporary light.

OL: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid video From a different angle or a slightly altered spot, West Unity Road wouldn’t be half the picture it is. (The title seems almost ironic, it being a picture of at least as much sky as road — as contrasted with your Fort Tabor pic from last year). What kind of decisions did you make when framing the shot? did you take lots of them, or just the one?

Jeffrey: The sky is the central element of the picture, but it was the road that initially drew me to take out the camera. I particularly like that stretch of road because the stubborn Yankee farmer whose farm stretches across it fought to keep telephone poles from being installed on it. I don’t know if he had a rationale aside from being an old coot, but he did succeed at preserving an aesthetically beautiful section of rural road. The utility company ended up putting the poles through the woods to cut around his property, rather than fight him.

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I usually take many pictures around a single idea, but in this case I was driving and not by myself, so I only had time to take two. The composition is mostly what I was going after, though I think the final product is unbalanced. A little more time (or a slightly wider lens) would have helped give the road some more margin on the right.

OL: Was the picture inspired by current events? The big Obama/Hillary rally, say?

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Jeffrey:

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Forbidden Planet the movie It’s true that this is the New Hampshire town where Obama and Hillary buried the hatchet in June, but it’s also the town where my aunt and uncle live. I can honestly say there is no intentional political content to this picture. That is, unless the Obama team thinks the sky represents our hope for the future and the road is the path out of the current economic depression, in which case I will sell it to them at a firesale price.

OL: You weren’t always such an accomplished photographer… at some point, you picked up a camera and began to take it more seriously. Were you surprised by your own interest in the art, or in how much satisfaction it gave you? What’s surprised you most about the clicking life?

Jeffrey: I’ve always enjoyed taking pictures, but it wasn’t until the digital camera that I could see it as a hobby. To get good pictures you have to take a lot of pictures, and I have no use for zillions of prints. Film photography is also unappealing because much of the output is determined by the settings on your local CVS’s one-hour photo machine. At the time I got my first digital camera, I also started taking lessons in Photoshop which gives digital photographers a lot of post-shutter control over white balance, exposure and other settings.

I do find photography very satisfying, and the most challenging thing is keeping it in check. I try not to be the guy who is inseparable from his camera, always living life from behind the lens. In this regard I err on the side of not bringing the camera along, even if it means missing a few opportunities.

For me, taking pictures with an artistic intent (as opposed to snapshots) is too much of a solo enterprise to be compatible with sociability. Going out to shoot by myself is generally the most satisfying, though those are not necessarily the times I take my best pictures. Good pictures can happen at any time.

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