Caleb Stein: Meaningful Connections
May 24th, 2021
There is something deeply emotive about the work of artist and photographer Caleb Stein. His images are at once nostalgic and yet also contemporary; asking us to consider memory and its fallibility through their style and relationship with subject. Photo-literate and image obsessed, we caught up with Caleb to learn more about his long-form documentary projects, artistic partnership with Andrea Orejarena, his love of artist books, and what makes photography such a magical medium.
POL: To start off, can you introduce yourself, your background, and how you would describe your photography?
CS: My name is Caleb Stein. I was born in 1994, in London. I've been back and forth between the UK and the US, as I have family in both places. And so as a result, I've always sort of felt that I'm slightly on the outside of each.
I first fell in love with photography in high school. It had the most wonderful darkroom which I came out of one day with a really under exposed nothing of a photograph. My teacher, Andrew Stole, was kind enough to say that it reminded him of Ray Metzker. He had this wonderful photo book library, through which he showed me what he meant, highlighting Ray Metzker’s work and Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind’s photography, all of whom were teaching at the Chicago Institute of Design in the 1950s and 60s. I was immediately captivated by it.
As a kid, I grew up watching film noir, and was really in love with their visual timelessness - not so much the acting or the scripts - but the cinematography. It was something that I was always super drawn to. And so when I saw those Metzker and Callahan photographs, it felt like there was sort of a photographic equivalent to film noir, that could be made without all of the coordination of a huge team, and without needing giant budgets. That's when I realised I wanted to be a photographer, because before that I thought I wanted to make movies.
POL: So how did you turn this spark of connection into a photography career?
CS: I realised that photography was a much more affordable, feasible, way to create. So at that point, I started photographing obsessively, and looking through Andrew's library. He was very kind and trusted a teenager enough to leave them with the keys to the school darkroom. After classes, I'd stay and I'd print for a few hours, and then I'd clean up, rinse the chemical baths and lock up after myself. I did that for a couple of years when I was in high school. So I had that brief introduction through Andrew’s library, but after high school I didn't study photography formally in any other capacity.
“That’s when I realised I wanted to be a photographer, because before that I thought I wanted to make movies.”
I worked for several years as an intern, and then as a studio assistant for Magnum Photographer Bruce Gilden. He’s most well known for the work that he made in the 1980s and 1990s on the streets of New York, and he has made over 20 books. Basically, I was charged with running his archive and his Instagram - using his archive to find unseen material and building up his online following. That was my real education, seeing 50 years of work.
There are a lot of things about Bruce's work that I don't necessarily identify with. He has a very different background from me. I think we make very different pictures with quite different people. But the thing that I was most drawn to was his resilience, and his capacity for work. And his love for photography. He said that “there is no such thing as geniuses in photography, there are only people that work hard” and that sort of demystified it for me. It felt encouraging, as though a career was somehow possible for me
POL: It wouldn’t be unreasonable then to say that you fell in love with photography as a medium?
CS: I guess I've had this relationship with photography where I'm simultaneously very sceptical of the power dynamics involved in it, and its place in the world. But I’m also completely in love with it as as a medium, and its capacity to allow me to respond in a personal way to what I'm seeing. With photography there is an exchange between people and myself, or between the environment and myself, and so every image functions as a document of personal expression in a response to a stimulus.
I think that occasionally photography can have this capacity to be something poetic and even magical. It shows me things about life and people and myself, things that I don't think I would know unless I made photographs. That has been very rewarding.
POL: For many photographers of your generation, their first experience with photography is very digital. Do you think your first experience with art photography being one focused on physical medium, helped in the way that it captured you? Rather than it just being on a phone.
CS: Maybe initially that was a part of it, because it's a very contemplative romantic experience to go into a darkened room and see an image appear from nothing. That said, I haven't worked with a film camera in seven years. And all of the work that I've made that anybody has seen has been with a digital camera.
I encounter a lot of people that have this obsession with film, maybe as a response to the over saturation of digital images, so for them the use of film is a way of connecting and slowing down. But, for me, it was really just about the introduction. And after that, my work was about making photographs, and about how making photographs could change the way that I looked at the world and myself. The technical details don’t interest me. The outcome has always been my main interest.
“Every image functions as a document of personal expression in a response to a stimulus.”
POL: Thinking about your relationship with Bruce Gilden though, your photographs are very different because he's very well known for being quite confrontational with his imagery. Your images are a lot softer and more relationship based. How do you kind of find the people you photograph and how do you build that emotional connection with them?
CS: I think it's project specific. I Love This Cloud I’m Under is an ongoing series made in North Uist, and is about my family and the land. It's a place that I've been going since I was born. It's a place that my family has been going to for generations. It is incredibly flat, there's absolutely nothing there, and I pretend that I'm a unit photographer on a Tarkovsky or Ingmar Bergman movie as a sort of framework. I like to sort of set myself these assignments.
Down by the Hudson, is all work made in Poughkeepsie, which is a town in New York state where I lived, and worked, and studied, on and off for seven years. A lot of that work was made at a watering hole. I used to be on a swim team and I love to swim, so while I was working there, over several summers, I would go to the watering hole to swim and then to photograph. I think because I wasn’t just around to get photographs and then leave, people could sense that and it changed how they respond to me as a photographer. I could build relationships because I was part of the rhythm and the repetition of the town. That meant that those relationships could happen quite naturally, regardless of whether it was someone that I saw every day for months, or if it was someone that I met for two minutes. People would talk to me because I’d seen them or they’d seen me walking down the street ten times before we had an exchange and made that photograph together.
I think in both bodies of work, the photographs just came quite naturally. In the beginning, there was much more of a concerted effort on my part to go out and find people to photograph. But I don't photograph people without permission. I'm just not interested in working that way. I think that there's definitely a space for it, but it's not a way that I feel comfortable working. I don't feel true to myself when I do work that way - which is why I haven't since I was a university student.
For me it’s about emerging yourself in a project. Long Time No See, which is an exploration of the memory and legacy of the Vietnam America war, made as part of an artist duo with Andrea Orejarena, is a collaboration with Vietnamese veterans and younger generations - made over a two year period with a group of people that we saw every day. So all of us were quite intimately involved in every aspect of that creative and editing process.
POL: You can really see from your images a sense of community and your immersion into the world that you're photographing rather than being an outside observer. And that's part of why you can get a sense of narrative in your pictures, everyone you photograph has a backstory and a life. Can you tell us a little bit about how narrative impacts your work and image making?
CS: Yeah. In the same way that I say that I'm simultaneously in love with photography and I'm very sceptical of its power dynamics, the same applies for narrative. I'm a big believer in photographs having the visual strength to stand on their own. And in the sort of rigour that that sort of mentality can produce visually. I like to respect the viewer enough to think that they can make up their own mind about what's going on in the photograph. Any story that I would give is not going to be as powerful as the one that someone can make themselves.
“I like to respect the viewer enough to think that they can make up their own mind about what’s going on in the photograph. Any story that I would give is not going to be as powerful as the one that someone can make themselves.”
At the same time, I think that photographs need to be contextualised or they can so easily be misused. It's important to find ways of acknowledging the power dynamics involved in making a photograph, how easily they can be decontextualised, removing what the intentions were, what the creative process was, and what the questions it was asking were.
I think that there's a way of creating space for both. For example, right now Andrea Orejarena and I are working on on a book of Long Time No See, with a wonderful designer, Brian Paul Lamotte. We have had so many conversations about how to deal with this contradiction. What we've settled on is that there will be several perspectives that are offered in the text component of the book. Each those perspectives will be spread out, but then there will be moments where you really just go into visual flow.
To paraphrase Dayanita Singh, for photographers, making the photograph is just one aspect of the work. It's then how you position it in the world, and what decisions you make about sequence, and editing, and materials, and design, context, and the texts that are associated with it, and all the people you enlist to have conversations about the work with. Even this conversation right now, in a way, is a part of the work because it's about finding ways of creating a context for the pieces.
POL: That’s one of the big questions within photography, but particularly within documentary photography: the idea of having something that is natural and true, when photography itself is a construct and there is a creator in it who is purposefully making something. So finding that balance, when making work, must be very difficult.
CS: It is difficult. But I think that there is a way of creating something that can function as a document, or that can at least function as a launching point for critical reflection. Whilst also allowing that photograph to function as a launching point for something more personal and poetic, I think done right the two actually help each other. There's definitely a way for it to coexist.
POL: So, let’s talk a little bit about your aesthetic in your work, because overwhelmingly in the past you’ve tended to shoot exclusively in black and white. How did you come to decide on this visual style?
CS: It's funny, because the next project that I'm working on, also as an artist duo with Andrea, is pretty much only going to be in colour. I think that's why I said at the beginning that I’m a project based artist, in the sense that I will respond to something and then create my own the conditions for that project. So sometimes my work employs a very classical approach, and other times it takes the form of multimedia installations. Like in Long Time No See, the project includes a three-channel video installation, creative exchanges with the subjects who are contributing drawings, and then photographs that are also being drawn on with ink - so it's black and white, but there are visual differences between the projects.
I think that one of the reasons that I'm drawn to black and white is that it feels deeply tied into our understanding of the past. It feels like black and white is strongly associated with memory. Memory is something that I'm very interested in - the fragility of memory.
“It feels like black and white is strongly associated with memory. Memory is something that I’m very interested in - the fragility of memory.”
A lot of the work that I've done is about my relationship to the USA, which is my adopted home, and the mythology surrounding the US, both at home and abroad. This has taken the form of trying to understand a small American town that is suffering from post industrial decline, and finding refuge in a utopian space within that, but also looking at the Vietnam America war, which I think is one of the critical turning points in how the US was perceived at home and overseas.
My next project with Andrea Orejarena, which is called American Glitch, is sort of a riff on an American road trip. It is also about understanding our relationship to our adopted home. Andrea came here from Colombia for political asylum when she was a kid - so we both have very different entry points into the US, but together we explore the ideas of what the US means to us. I think that with Long Time No See and Down by the Hudson, using black and white was a way of dealing with mythology and dealing with memory - a visual way to get everyone into that mindset. Black and white is a widely used shorthand for the past. For example, in a movie, if something is a flashback then it can shift from colour to black and white and we all understand what that means.
It's a way of abstracting things and slightly removing them from the here and now. Asking the viewer to disassociate in order to associate with other meanings - does that make sense?
POL: Definitely. And I think what's interesting about black and white as well, particularly in your work, is it gives an almost timelessness to your images. In Down by the Hudson, for example, some of those images could have been taken in the 1940s or they could have been taken two weeks ago. Using black and white makes it so much less about a particular point in time, and more about a wider moment or metaphor.
CS: Definitely. I think I'm interested in creating a sense of timelessness within all my work. Recently, I've been thinking about this a lot because although I didn’t study photography formally, I'm a student of photography. For example, on my computer, I have these all these folders. I have something like 750 of these “photographer profiles”, where I'll pull images from around the web and create my own library. One of the things that I noticed is that certain styles of photography date incredibly quickly. But there's some work that just doesn't date.
I’ve realised this timelessness exists in work in which the photographer can still be creative, and still be personal, whilst being direct and clear. Pieces where photographers can get out of the way of the viewer, and respect the viewer enough to engage with it on their own terms. A lot of this work, I’ve found, was made as a part of the Farm Security Administration by people like Dorothea Lange. All of that work is still incredibly contemporary.
“I’ve realised this timelessness is in work in which the photographer can still be creative, and still be personal, whilst being direct and clear. Pieces where photographers can get out of the way of the viewer and respect the viewer enough to engage with it on their own terms.”
That's the reason that Sam Contis can come along. Contis is a fairly established but still emerging contemporary artist, who did this incredible book Deep Springs, about a male college in Colorado. They’ve also recently been reconfiguring Dorothea Lange's archive, and placing it, in some cases, alongside their own work. You cannot tell the difference, even though some work may have been made in 2015 and other work was made in 1940, because both photographers are being clear and direct. They're not imposing a style. I mean, obviously, there's a style, but it's not a strong imposition. It's hard to pin it down.
Whereas, for example, there are a lot of photographers that seem to embody technological shifts. So, for example, when wide angle lenses were introduced, particularly in the 1970s, all of these photographers that used them made work that can look so dated now. They have all of these oblique angles, there are a lot of distortions of the corners, and they're trying to fit a thousand things in the frame - like they’re doing some sort of male ego flex with what they can do with their compositions. It's first of all boring, and, second of all, it's just like, “Ok, you got a wide angle lens, and then you played with it”, you know? So for me, I think that there's a way of being clear and direct that allows work to transcend the time it’s made in.
Also, I think a lot of work that transcends is very emotional. There is the human connection that really helps with that timeless feeling. The idea that no matter what you’re looking at, whether it's a person or a landscape that people have clearly inhabited, there is that feeling that there are people there to be understood. That similarity between everyone that photography can explore is touching.
“I think a lot of work that transcends is very emotional. There is the human connection that really helps with that timelessness feeling.”
POL: Definitely. One of the things you can also see in your work, is that there is that knowledge of other artists. There's an art history literacy to it. You can see relationships between other photographers and the past, but it never feels like you're copying them. I think that is one of the things which is really very contemporary, and what lots of great young new photographers are doing now: understanding of the past and reflecting that in the now. We’ve already touched on it but can you tell us a bit more about your influences?
CS: My influences are wide ranging. Photography is very important to me, but I'm also very drawn to other mediums. Long Time No See is is a multimedia project, for example. It involves installation and video and drawing and photographs. We’re about to do a solo exhibition which involves sculpture and installations, and layering of all of those things. So in some ways, I'm moving away from a sort of classical love of photography and thinking about how all of those mediums can sit alongside one another. So my influences aren’t just photography based. Some of the people I've been thinking about in particular, include Broomberg & Chanarin. They are a recently deceased artists duo; but they actually didn't die, they just decided that they were going to kill off their work as a pair, which is a great performance in and of itself. I'd also say I’m influenced by people like Roni Horn too.
In a pure photographic sense though. I'd say there are two schools of artists which I'm particularly influenced by. On the one hand, there's the direct, emotional, psychological, charged photographers who show this photo equivalent to film noir; and that's people like Leon Levinstein, Lisette Model, Bruce Gilden as well, and to a certain extent, Rosalind Fox Solomon. Then, on the other hand, I’m drawn to work that has a lighter touch.
For me, my photographic god is Koudelka. It's not that I love all of his work, because I think he starts to spin his wheels a bit after a certain point. But I did look through his entire archive before Magnum took their archives offline. I looked through something like 10,000 photographs that Koudelka had made, and just spent a month in my room looking at it, in complete shock at the strength of that work. At its best his work feels free: there's breath, there's life, there's energy. It doesn't take its strength from putting people down or from misery, it's life affirming, it's filled with joy. It's open to something poetic and spiritual. And I love the images of Koudelka just sleeping wherever he happened to come across that night, under a blanket of stars. I have this romantic idea of him doing that.
“At its best his work feels free: there’s breath, there’s life, there’s energy. It doesn’t take its strength from putting people down or from misery, it’s life affirming, it’s filled with joy.”
I met him once very briefly. He shook my hand and I watched him walk down the street. Andrea Orejarena was there too, and we were both in awe. This is a man in his early 80s, and he's worked like a dog his whole life, but he's bouncing down the street. He's actually practically levitating. And he had so much kindness. His work is a celebration of life, and it comes from a place of love. That's the type of work that interests me - it does not from a cynical place. So Koudelka is a big influence in that way.
I mean, loads of people have inspired me recently though. I've been thinking much more about work made about the American landscape - the New Topographics for example. The only woman included in the 1975 New Topographics exhibition was Hilla Becher, who was part of a photography duo with her husband Bernd Becher, but there was a lot of work being made by women that could have fit into the exhibition - people like Mary Frey and Mimi Plumb. Those are people that I'm really drawn to too.
I'm also always looking at work that's being made now. I think it's a wonderful moment for work. I mean people like Rahim Fortune, Elle Pérez, Farah Al Qasimi and Kathryn Harrison, there's a lot of very good work being made right now. I'm looking at work all the time, so I could name another 100 people, because I really do look at photographs every single day. I don't photograph every day. I sometimes don’t photograph for months. But I have a sort of obsessive relationship to photography and look at a lot of it.
“I don’t photograph every day. I don’t sometimes photograph for months. But I have a sort of obsessive relationship to photography and look at a lot of it.”
POL: How do you think this relationship with other people’s works impacts how you produce your images?
CS: There are definitely certain people that I'm thinking about when I’m making work - those people whose work I have a relationship with. When I go out and photograph, I think about how they would approach the same subjects. I don't think about it in a conceptual way, or an esoteric way. It's actually very grounded. If I'm taking a photograph of a dog, then I think “what are the photographs that I've seen that have dogs in them? and what visual solutions do those photographs offer to the visual challenges that I'm being confronted with right now?” That’s the way that I engage with photography and influence.
Then there's also the personality aspects, and the sort of freedom, and poetry, and love, that comes with some people’s work and using that as a guiding emotion when I’m creating.
POL: I think you can see that in your work. Because whilst, the topics can be very political, the work isn't about exploiting depression, sadness, or shock, and, at the same time, it's not incredibly sentimental. It's about approaching a subject and finding an emotional place that has meaning, without making it soppy or taking it aggressive.
CS: Yeah, exactly. I try to make work which is somewhere in the middle, because that's the direct way of looking. That allows for people to approach my work on their own terms, which is one of the most important things for me.
POL: Thinking about subject matter, if time and money were not an issue, what would be your dream project be?
CS: I'm going to be doing it soon in the form of my new project with Andrea Orejarena, American Glitch, which has been in development for many months. We have a studio intern, lovely guy called Theo, and he's been helping us to create this binder filled with locations, so we've got something like 250 places that we're going to visit so far. We’re going to explore the land, and what the land can tell us about our relationship to the US. If money were no object I would just be doing that - but more of it.
“You can take thousands of photographs and none of them can be particularly good. But it’s only through allowing yourself that process that you can arrive at something strong.”
I believe that it may be possible to make a striking viral photograph by chance, and the prevalence of cameras, and the relative accessibility of cameras compared to what it was a few years ago, increases the odds of those sorts of images coming into circulation. But to actually produce a body of work that's consistently engaging over a certain level of visual standard, and that’s consistently engaging with a set of concerns and questions, is really challenging and very time consuming.
In some ways, photography is chance based. Since I don’t really believe in the cult of genius, I have to acknowledge that a good project just takes a lot of work. You can take thousands of photographs and none of them can be particularly good. But it's only through allowing yourself that process that you can arrive at something strong. So, if I could, I would just give myself more time. I know that if I have more time to only focus on making work, and not dealing with any other sort of administrative obligations, then there's a higher chance that we'll be able to make better work. I think the thing that I really crave is just freedom, you know, the freedom that creativity can afford.
POL: So you’ve been preparing for your new project for months now - when is it going to come to fruition?
CS: Currently we're only in the research stage, we haven't made a single photograph. For me this is a more conceptual project, because so much of its success is dependent on pre-production. But I think that that pre-production period is going to wrap up within the next two months, and then the remaining project, which will also include a video installation, will probably take one to two years. Then we'll start to think about making the project a book as well.
POL: So, in terms of your projects, these long timelines are quite standard for you? You obviously spend a lot of time working on large series, but do you ever do quick, short burst projects too?
CS: I do sometimes if it's commercial or editorial. Recently, I did a still unpublished shoot on COVID vaccine lines for the New York Times - and that was just a two day shoot. If there's a commission, I can make work quickly. But Down by the Hudson took seven years and I’m still figuring out how to translate it into an artist book.
With Long Time No See, we started the pre-production and developing the conceptual framework for it in 2015. And then the bulk of the work was actually made between 2018 and 2020. Following that, over the last year, we've been working on translating it into this book.
Then I Love This Cloud I’m Under started in the summer of 2018. But, because it’s based on a place I’ve been going with my family my whole life, in many ways, it came from ideas that I've been working towards since childhood.
So my projects are really slow. It's definitely not an approach that's conducive to the economic framework that we all find ourselves in. I mean, capitalism wants you to be producing all the time. I think there's a lot of pressure on artists to be making work all of the time, which is just not possible. And it's not healthy. We want to get it right, and we know that we don't know all the questions and answers at the beginning. So we need to leave time for us to figure out what the questions and answers really are in our work.
“I think there’s a lot of pressure on artists to be making work all of the time, which is just not possible... we know that we don’t know all the questions and answers at the beginning.”
POL: You've also mentioned quite a few times turning your projects into artists books. That is one of my passion projects and I love to work with artists to make books. So I'd love to know why you enjoy doing it - what is it about publications that interests you?
CS: I think it's the best form for photographs, and even for art that has nothing to do with photography. I think it's a great way to avoid the transience of an exhibition or a magazine. It's not that those spaces don't have value, and that they can’t contribute to a conversation about a work, but it's somehow much more thoughtful to be dealing with a book because it can take decades to do it right.
It’s also very personal, because it's a direct channel of communication with another person. There’s an intimacy to books.
I guess it's also just the use of materials. It can be very tactile, it can feel confessional, almost like you're looking at someone's diary. For example, There I Was by Collier Schorr, is about a man that goes to fight in the Vietnam American war, and he keeps a car with all of his friends in a small town. They maintain it and keep it in races while he's gone. The book is a combination of drawings, words, and photographs. But you get such a connection by holding it - in how the paper feels like something that you would draw on.
Or Wild Pigeon by Carolyn Drake. It’s full of different paper types, it's not something that's reduced to one format, or style, but it's sort of haptic. In that way, it feels like it's far closer to how we as people think and how we feel. Our brains are not always linear and organised.
But I'm also super drawn to books like Edward Ruscha’s 26 Gas Stations, which is very straightforward - but kind of funny and kind of cheeky. What I love about that book is that supposedly when Ruscha heard that it was becoming very expensive to buy a copy, he flooded the market with another 3000 copies. I like that sort of thing, books can be super playful as well. There's just so many routes that you can go with an artist book. And it's such an engaging process.
Ultimately an artist book can shift your perception, or help you learn something about your relationships to the world. Even if it’s only one person that picks up your artist book and has a personal response to your work, then that's still pretty meaningful.
“Even if it’s only one person that picks up your artist book and has a personal response to your work, then that’s still pretty meaningful.”
About Caleb Stein
Caleb Stein (b. 1994, London) graduated from Vassar College in 2017. His work explores the fragility of memory through an embrace of community and the dynamic, energetic interactions that occur within it. Questions surrounding mythology and narrative as they relate to the United States and the international influence it exerts sit at the core of much of Stein’s work, as he grapples with his relationship to the country that has become his adopted home.
Down by the Hudson (2016-20) is his ‘ode’ to Poughkeepsie, a small town in upstate New York. The photographs are often a celebration of people communing in havens, little paradises, amidst the current backdrop of deindustrialization and political tension in the U.S. They are an exploration not only of how Stein’s conception of small town American life has been informed by ‘Americana’ in the vein of Norman Rockwell and Grant Wood, but also of the dissonance between these inherited mythologies and Stein’s personal responses to them, informed by his engagement with the spaces and people of Poughkeepsie.
Long Time No See (2018-2020) explores the memory and legacy of the Vietnam-America War made as an artist duo with Andrea Orejarena (b. 1994, Colombia). The work brings together a fragmented constellation of paintings, photographs, and video made in a collaborative, visual exchange with Vietnamese veterans and their descendants at Làng Hữu Nghị, a residence in Hanoi for veterans and younger generations affected by Agent Orange, a chemical weapon used by the U.S. during the war. This visual exchange focuses on deconstructing the traditionally rigid divide between ‘subject’ and ‘author’ while opening up a space for Vietnamese perspectives and authorship that offers a counterpoint to the war’s dominant, western-centric historical narrative in the U.S.