Sam Abell learned to make photographs from his father, an amateur who, as Abell puts it, “came alive when he had a camera in his hands.” In the introduction to a chapter of his new book, The Life of a Photograph, Abell writes, “I was taught to see settings by my father. I never saw him force a photograph. Instead I’d watch him size up situations, then wait.” Abell built a three-decade career as a field photographer for National Geographic based on the lessons he learned from his father and a way of making photographs that he evolved along the way. Abell spoke with PDN from his home in Charlottesville, Virginia, about his work for National Geographic, the way he shoots photographs, and how he brought the two together to create his new book.

PDN: How did you come up with the idea for The Life of a Photograph?

Sam Abell: I was giving a lecture in 2002 about a book that had just come out called The Photographic Life, and at a certain point in this lecture I said, “Well that’s enough about the photographic life, let’s talk about the life of the photograph.” And as I said that, I thought, that should be the title of the next book I do.  It would be a sequel to the book that I’ve done, and it’s a subject that I care about a lot—where photographs come from.

PDN: What was the book concept?

SA: The part of the [2002] book that photographers liked most was called “Seeking the Picture,” which was basically the story of 40 published photographs. There was a small amount of text and the pictures that led up to the picture that was chosen for publication. What I cared about in my photographic life and what I cared about in books that I loved was a sense about the thinking or the process of photography. So my editor, Leah Bendavid-Val, and I put together the philosophy of the new book. Her thought was this: By making the process pictures smaller than the [published] pictures [in the previous book], we were setting up a value system. What she wanted in this new book, and what I also thought was a good idea, was to take the most telling picture from the process and play it up the same size as the chosen picture, so readers, on their own, could value the pictures.

PDN: What do you think that suggests about the process of photography?

SA: It suggests two things. One, that the intensity of thought is approximately the same for the picture that makes it through and the next best one, the one that didn’t get chosen; and two, not only is photography subjective, but editing is subjective. As I wrote in the book, “The life of a photograph is never truly over because time and thought continue to create this life.”
    There are pictures that were part of the process that now I like better than the pictures that were chosen some years ago. I was a different person, and the influences on my decision-making were different. For example, I can look at a picture that is tighter, that was chosen say ten years ago, and now I like the picture that’s more stepped back, that’s more inclusive and less concentrated or less intensely composed. It’s just how my mind has changed. And also how the work of other photographers has changed me.

PDN: Can you give an example?

SA: When I was coming up I looked at the work of Ernst Haas and [W.] Eugene Smith, and it was very tight and declarative. And since then the photographers who I’ve looked at, Joel Meyerowitz and Joel Sternfeld come to mind but there are others, their work is more stepped back and more inclusive. They’re confident that they don’t have to go in and tighten it so that there’s only one response you can have—one place to look…. Robert Capa had this influential statement: ‘If your pictures aren’t interesting, you’re not close enough.’ And over the last 20 years of my career, I’ve stepped back, and I think I want to step back until I feel that the picture is falling apart. Leah and my operative word for editing pictures was “involving.” Involving might mean that it’s full of questions instead of full of answers.

PDN: What was the goal for the text you wrote for the book?

SA: One was concision. The other thing was to walk the line between explaining and not explaining. I wanted the text to be involving and that meant open-ended and stimulating and not so declarative. The two-view idea is probably the strongest idea in the book, and it’s two views about taking pictures and it’s two views about editing pictures. I think that by having two views you put the viewer into the field and you put the viewer into the editing chair, and so that’s how I went after illusive involvement.
    I’m thinking of a pair of pictures: It’s a photograph of a hunter cleaning his gun at a deserted hunting camp in the Missouri Breaks, and everything, even with him in it, is about that mood of remoteness, rusticity, abandonment. And then the second picture, he’s not in it. It’s just the couch and the land beyond and the Missouri river. That pair of pictures does quietly ask the question: what’s more interesting? in the world I come from, the picture with the hunter in it is probably the only candidate to be published. The truth is I took the picture [without him] first. I’m someone who believes in the power of quiet pictures. Plenty of photographers believe that, but they don’t have careers in editorial and magazine photography as I have had.

PDN: In one of your texts, you write, “As a photographer, my intent is to bring the world under my aesthetic control.” Did this ever run contrary to your work for National Geographic?

SA: I am very grateful to say that I was never excluded from National Geographic, but I don’t think that anyone there, my colleagues or editors, would say that I was a mainstream photographer by inclination. I brushed up against resistance that was at times strong. My career actually was put under the microscope there, and the reason was, “Your pictures are too quiet.” And I had this constructive, angry reaction to that, because I thought what’s the opposite of quiet? Noisy, and I’m not going to do that. So my reaction to being told that was that I had to take my pictures better, I had to make them more powerfully quiet.
    A really good example of succeeding at that is a couple of pictures I took from within hotel rooms; one in Japan of a tree in a courtyard framed by glass and another of pears on a windowsill. And those are exceptionally quiet pictures. I’m not out on the street; I’m not even out of my room. And yet I’m taking pictures that they ended up publishing, and that I think they were proud to publish. So I never abandoned my core ideas in quietude.

PDN: One could certainly make the argument that it’s a more challenging task.

SA: It was a test for me, I’ll say that. In this book there are plenty of pictures that never were seriously looked at, at National Geographic, even though I did them on assignment. I was operating on my own aesthetic a lot of the time. So you’ll find a picture that I got very devoted to for an intense three or four minutes was a picture of soap on a towel on a bedspread in an aboriginal guesthouse in Australia. The pictures are in the book that National Geographic chose; one of them got onto the cover, the Aborigine in the water with his painted face.                Meanwhile, maybe the same day I shot that I was with equal intensity taking a picture of a bar of soap. I haven’t really ever gotten a license to publish those kinds of pictures. I could make a vision of my life in a book with just those kinds of pictures, I think.

PDN: This book is different than your previous books because of the more personal photographs. Is the audience also different?

SA: Well, I’ll find that out. The audience for The Photographic Life that I wanted, and I think it will be the same audience for this book, is ardent photographers. People that really care about not only their own results in photography, but they care about immersing themselves, and being able to view photographs that are driven by a photographer’s imagination and instincts separate from some assignment that was given to that photographer.

PDN: What was the toughest lesson you learned as a photographer?

SA: I had some surprises, but there is one part of The Photographic Life book that pro photographers have sought me out and thanked me for. It’s a photograph of me under the spell of depression from photographer’s block. And the picture’s of a black-and-white TV in a cinder block motel in Newfoundland in winter on my first assignment.
    The loneliness that I felt when I first started working at the Geographic was a total surprise to me. I thought it was going to be the magic flying carpet ride of photography and it was about the opposite. I knew no one and I didn’t know how to proceed as a photographer.
    Photography to me had always been this socially involving thing. I had worked on the Louisville Courier Journal, which had a rich photography culture and people at that newspaper would work hard, get great results in my opinion—one of the photographers had won two Pulitzer prizes—and when you came back at the end of the day, you developed film, you were in the darkroom, you printed pictures, and then you went out to a bar and you talked about photography. It was rich. Geographic less so, because you could go a year without seeing an individual photographer because of schedules. So I was without a culture of photography, I was without companionship or any kind of cultural context.
    The day came when I didn’t want to get up, get out, get in my car and drive around aimlessly in Newfoundland looking for photographs. There weren’t any. Now I realize that I was looking for too elusive and too rare a photograph. I didn’t stop photographing, I photographed my depression, so I guess that my diary kept my head in photography…. I learned how not to be lonely and how to proceed.


PDN: One of the interesting stories that you tell is about struggling to find anything to photograph in the Amazon, which was to me surprising. The photograph that you selected of the jungle framed by the glass table suggested that composition might be more important than subject.

SA: Every photographer has a sort of book on them, a reputation, and mine is “Guy who will miss the moment in favor of the setup,” basically, the composition. The first chapter in the book is called “Setting the Scene.” So I’m a guy who sets the scene first, and sometimes only does that. “F8 and be there” is something that was drilled into my head as a young photographer. I like the F8 part, but I don’t know how photographers get moments and the composition simultaneously consistently. When I teach I misrepresent how it happens in real life a little bit. How it happens in real life ideally is that you see both the setting and the subject, that interaction, simultaneously. I really break it down when I teach; the first assignment that I give serious photographers is, “I want you to go out and produce a set of pictures, I don’t care if it takes all week, that have nothing going on. I want you to identify to yourself and to me what background or setting or scene or composition or graphic you respond to, minus the midget on the unicycle.” I don’t want to see subjects here. Subjects aren’t hard. What’s hard is the fully formed, fully finished photograph, where if I took the subject out of it, there’d still be something there.

PDN: Patience is obviously an important part of your work, but I also wondered about anticipation. Did you reach a point where you knew this is where the photograph is going to happen and you could set up and wait for it, or are you simply making the best guess?

SA: It’s judgment. Sometimes you see the subject evolving or the scene evolving and you quickly orient yourself to that possibility by looking at the background. And sometimes you see the background first. If the scene is evolving, and I think it has promise, then I orient myself to the best available setting, the one that works for me aesthetically. And I make sure to tell students that their aesthetic is not my aesthetic. And that’s why I give them this assignment, because I want them maybe for the first time in their lives to think about their design sensibility, their sense of space and light and color, minus subject.

PDN: Do you think it’s fair to consider this a bit of a philosophy book?

SA: Yeah, I do, in a modest way. I positioned this book as an answer to a question, and the question is “What’s the difference between a picture that has a life and a picture that doesn’t have a life?” This book talks about the beginning of a photograph’s life, what gives birth to a photograph, what ideas, thoughts, sensibilities, instincts, experience, accidents; and I tried to make a rich book about the beginning of the life of a photograph and to contribute really to the photographers who give authorship to photographs.

PDN: Doesn’t the book also begin a conversation about the philosophy of taking quiet photographs?

SA: I did a book together with Leah called National Geographic: The Pictures. And those are all dynamic, highly charged editorial photographs, and there’s no question about the audience for that or the sort of life that that book’s had—it’s had a big life. [This book] presents a body of work that depends for its life on the taking of quiet photographs. I [took] quiet pictures when there wasn’t an editor, when there wasn’t an art director, when it was just me in the field for months at a time. So this book is a very clear and complete idea of what I did at those times when I was just privately and quietly living out my photographic life in the field. And I’m really lucky, it’s a lucky book to have and for that I really owe a debt of gratitude to Leah, who really sees in those photographs what I see. She wanted to give them a chance to have a life.

PDN: Isn’t that also a validation for your particular philosophy?

SA: Yeah, it is. I’ll leave the scene eventually, and I’ve had a long photographic life and I’ve lived it out in the way that it was best for me. But years and years from now, someone coming across the book would have a very good idea of who I am.