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 | | Interview with Phil Trager
by Mark Lapin TGP interviews fine art photographer Phil Trager about his two most recent books. For the story of how Trager took a risk and followed his bliss to the heights of fine art photography, read our bio and background article. For much more of Trager’s advice about photo books, see the tips and techniques section of this article. Article rating: 6.71 |
TGP: Did you always intend to be a photographer?
Trager: Well, I did some photography before and during college but I didn’t plan to make a career of it. I went to law school, and started working as a lawyer in Connecticut. I was doing commercial real estate law and occasionally representing artists, which was a little bit better than real estate but still lawyering. Even when I was in my law office, however, I would be daydreaming about photography. It was always on my mind. I kept thinking about what I wanted to photograph, how I would do it, what equipment I would use. Finally, I just did it. Photography was in my blood.
TGP: What role have books played in your career?
Trager: I’ve always worked with a book in mind. It usually takes me years to finish a book project. My work on a book will last three, five, even seven years. Some people take eight to ten years, or even longer. People who are artists and photographers and want to do books feel very fortunate if a good publisher is willing to help and get the work out there. For one or two of my books, I spoke to a publisher at the beginning of the project. Wesleyan University, where I went to college, published two of my early books of architectural photography. But generally, I did the work first and then went out to look for publishers.
TGP: I understand the last couple of years have been particularly busy and productive for you in terms of publishing.
Trager: That’s right. I’ve done two books in less than two years and it has been very busy. One is a retrospective book that’s due out next Fall. The other is FACES (a collection of close-up portraits of dancers’ faces) which came out in 2005. They’re both being published by Steidl-- http://www.steidl.de/ -- in Germany. I think he’s doing the best fine art photography books in the world now. He is fantastic and works in a very collaborative way. I like that because it’s very important to me that the books come out looking the way I envision them. I’m involved in every aspect of the design.
TGP: Maybe we should begin by talking about the retrospective book because it tells so much about your career.
Trager: The retrospective will cover my 40 years of photography, and it will accompany a traveling exhibition. This book has photos from all my projects, starting in 1966, including smaller projects that I had completely forgotten about. That’s one of the great things about a retrospective. It will have 150 plates, 66 illustrations and over 300 pages. It will also have more text than any of my other books. All in all, it’s been a very complicated project, involving a lot of travel back and forth to Germany.
TGP: Can you tell us something about the text?
Trager: The introductory essay is by John Wood. He’s a wonderful writer, and a poet, and also the editor of 21st, The Journal of Contemporary Photography - www.21stphotography.com/ - a very high-quality publication for collectors that comes out once a year. There will also be an essay by Andy Szegedy-Maszak, a classical scholar who is also a photo historian. His essay is from a personal viewpoint because he’s been a friend of mine for many years. Then there is an essay about my architectural photos by Barbara L. Michaels, an art historian. She had reviewed them, and I really responded to what she said so I asked her to contribute. Then there is a piece about the dance photography by Norton Owen, who is the curator of the Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival and well known in the world of dance. There’s also a wonderful one-page essay by Eiko Otake, a dancer and MacArthur Award winner. She and her husband posed for some of the photos in FACES, and she writes about what it was like to work with me, posing in little clothing in freezing weather on the ice. Finally, there are all the things you’d expect in a retrospective book, bibliography, chronology, a list of exhibitions. There’s also a long interview of me by Stephanie Wiles, who spent days with me in 2004 and 2005.
 TGP: What about the printing and design?
Trager: The printing is in tritone with a varnish. With tritone printing, you have three different inks going down, black and two other colors. Sometimes you’ll see photo books where the blacks are very black, or they may look brownish or more purple. That comes from varying the second or third ink color. Tritone gives you a much richer reproduction. It’s the way to do it if you possibly can but, of course, it’s more expensive than duotone. In this book, a varnish is applied over the images, and varnish can be mixed so that it’s more or less glossy. The paper size and thickness are very important considerations, and paper can also be more glossy or more matte. So there are many aesthetic choices, and I’ve been involved in all of them.
Editing and sequencing are absolutely essential elements of a book. The work should be edited so that it’s absolutely at its strongest. A book has to have flow and rhythm. It has to make sense as you go through it.
TGP: Maybe that’s a good segue into FACES, your other new book. I was certainly struck by the first two images. How did you decide to open with the faces of those particular dancers?
For the kind of books that I do, it’s purely an aesthetic decision. I’m not doing a documentary or anything with a chronological or geographical sequence. With FACES, I ran up proofs of the portraits in various sizes and started laying them out on the pages, moving them around, seeing what was working well.
I ran up three or four sizes for Kathy Rose (the dancer on the first page). A lot of sequencing is emotional aesthetic, so it’s hard to describe. I just knew that the photograph after Kathy Rose should be John Kelly. I wasn’t thinking about the difference in their ages or gender. It was purely how the two faces relate, the impact of the two images, and then the one after that. How they flow. Sometimes you get to the end, and you have one or two images that really don’t work together and you have to go back and find a way to work them into the flow.
In this book, the photos are all on the right-hand page because I thought they looked best with a blank page on the left. In other books, photos may work so well together that you want them on facing pages.
TGP: You wrote that some old photos of your wife Ina were the inspiration for FACES. How old were the photos and can you tell us more about how you came up with the idea for the book?
Trager: Well, Ina has been an inspiration and a support for most of my work. The portraits of her started in 1981 and 82. I shot them with the same camera I used for all my dance work, a 6x4.5 Mamiya.
But what happened with FACES is that my publisher, Steidl, wanted to publish a book of my work before doing the retrospective. So I started to think about what would work, and the idea really came to me pretty quickly that FACES would make sense. I was also interested in faces because of portraits that I’d taken of Ina thirty years before. And also because John Stauffer, a professor and writer, came down to look at my work for a photo essay in 21st, and he was very drawn to the portraits of the faces of dancers, most of which had never been published before. So a lot of different things came together, and led me to think of portraits, even though they were so different from my other work.
TGP: In your artist’s note to FACES, you mention the ‘floodtide of energy and renewal’ you felt in making the portraits. Did you feel that with other projects?
Trager: Yes. I’m really a believer in the whole concept of flow-- that feeling where time just flies past because you’re doing something that you really want to do, it’s challenging but not so difficult that it becomes stressful, and you’re completely absorbed. It’s a great feeling when it comes but it doesn’t come every day, and it’s easier to feel in some settings than in others.
But even working in the streets of New York, there have been times when I got so absorbed that I kind of forgot where I was. Once I was photographing Grand Central Station and stepped forward to put my tripod in the middle of the street. A taxi would have run right into me if my wife Ina hadn’t pulled me back. There were also a couple of times when I was so intent on capturing a certain New York view that I got too close to the edge of a roof.
It was much safer to forget myself in Northern Italy when I was photographing the villas of Palladio because these were quiet, historic sites where you weren’t likely to get run over.
TGP: Your architectural photos are of immovable objects with few or no people in them and your dance photos are of moving people in natural settings without buildings. Is there something similar in the way you approach both subjects?
Trager: There is. Whether I’m photographing a building or a dancer, I’m not trying to create an illustrative, literal portrait of what’s there. The photo may or may not look like the actual subject but, to me, a successful photo transcends its subject in the same way as a good poem does. ^ Back to top
| Comments About This Article |
 | I knew Phil Trager and his wife Ina growing up in Connecticut more than 50 years ago. By chance I recently became reacqainted with him - by telephone, e-mail and learned of his work - copies of which now reside in our home and more of which I intend to add. This interview clearly communicates Phil's passion for his subjects and committment to his craft. Posted by: Peter Braun Jun 15, 2007 @ 11:13 AM EST |
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