Interview: Alexander C. Kafka

The Mind Behind the Lens

By Christine Stoddard
QuailBellMagazine.com

You could say that I first met Alexander C. Kafka over a lunch special at Pesce in Dupont Circle. But that clammy day almost a year ago did not mark our first true encounter. It merely marked our first face-to-face one. By that point, Alex had been sending Quail Bell poetry and photography submissions for several months. The Bethesda artist had stumbled across the website via Craigslist and thought Quail Bell might give his surreal work a loving nest. He thought right. 

Since summer 2011—before the site was fully fledged-- Quail Bell has welcomed Alex's creations to the roost. You'll find his poems and photos on The Unreal blogroll and a few of his portraits of yours truly in the About blogroll.

I recently emailed Alex a few questions about his journey through his photography. After all, avid Quail Bell readers are probably just as curious about the mind behind the lens as I am. Alex generously replied (in long-form!) before leaving town for the holidays. Here are his responses:

Oracle
© Alexander C. Kafka. All Rights Reserved.

• When did you first get into photography and how long have you been doing it now?

The short answer, for those who are impatient and want to skip to the next question maybe, is a couple years, and maybe I should just leave it at that. But I won't. The medium answer is that I started out as a photography fan boy and was a late bloomer as a shooter. And here's the improbably long answer, in case anyone but me actually gives a hoot:

I've been a newspaper reporter and/or editor since the mid-1980's and, particularly back when I worked for smaller papers in Florida and Texas, I was sometimes asked, as were most reporters, to bring a point-and-shoot or “sure shot” (in other words, idiot-proof) camera to snap a few pictures to run with the story I was writing. I recall taking some shots of a chrysanthemum nursery I was writing a business section piece about, for instance, when I interned for the Fort Myers (Fla.) News-Press in 1986 and, a couple years later, when I worked for the Corpus Christi (Texas) Caller-Times, taking some shots of a very senior administrator at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln whom I was profiling because he was headed to South Texas to run a university there. I admired the real news photographers for their versatility and sheer ability to haul ridiculous amounts of heavy equipment, but I didn't, at the time, have any urge to join them.

Even before that, when I was a kid, I sometimes took my Kodak Instamatic skiing, a sport which my Austrian-refugee dad started my two older brothers and me on when we were preschoolers, and every now and then I got to use my dad’s heavy grown-up Canon and even his 8-millimeter movie camera. He and my oldest brother were fairly serious camera buffs, I think it’s fair to say, and would carry cameras around with them on the slopes and on trips in their backpacks. My dad, a psychoanalyst and very talented amateur painter and sketcher, was the classic slide-carousel-sharing vacation photographer. I still have, now on DVD, some 20 minutes of film footage he took of a lion eating a zebra during an early-1970s African safari in Kenya. At the time, it turned my stomach and embarrassed me when he showed it to dinner guests ("Wow, are those entrails?" "More wine?"). Now I’m sort of fascinated by it and just by the fact that he shot it. Bringing cameras was automatic for my dad, like packing strikingly dry cheese sandwiches and iffy looking pears for lunch. It struck me as ridiculous at the time. Now it doesn’t. Even better, my dad is still traveling at 91 years old, and still bringing a camera.

Tree Woman 1
© Alexander C. Kafka. All Rights Reserved.

When I took my first full-time newspaper job in Corpus Christi in the late 80s, my friend Beth (now a newspaper editor in New York) had done a lot of photography too as a journalism student at the University of Kansas, and had these great black-and-white and sometimes gently hand-colored prints in her house. If I recall, there were some Midwestern landscapes and sweet fond pictures of her family, her cats, and so on. They made a gentle but strong impression on me.

Over the years, living in Boston, Florida, Texas, and New York, or on trips, I took snapshots of friends and family, the occasional landscape of Texas chaparral or shoreline, or a Los Angeles or San Francisco cityscape, but I never really gave it much thought. That started to change in 1994, when I met my now-wife, Lauren. 

I was living in Manhattan and working for Newsday at the time as a crime reporter, and she was in my native D.C. working as a writer and editor for Museum News. She’d gotten a joint undergrad degree at Tufts and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, worked as an assistant to the famed photographer, photography professor, and book publisher Henry Horenstein in Boston, and then she’d gotten a master’s in photojournalism at the University of Missouri. She’d come to D.C. to work as a photo editor for Agence France-Presse before going toMuseum News. She’s a really good shooter, especially documentary-type projects, and a fabulous (and sometimes ruthless) photo editor. And, like my dad, back then she wouldn’t think of going on a trip without her big ol’ Nikon and assorted lenses, film, and sometimes flash, light meter, etc. 

Not only did I see prints of her work–a chronicle of an impoverished rural family in Maine, a photojournalism book she’d done as her master’s project about the Missouri river town of Boonville, travel shots from Latin America and the Middle East. But she also introduced me to a whole world of serious photography. That included Horenstein’s documentary/portrait shots of country-music stars, horse-racing tracks, baseball players, and burlesque performers, and his more fine-art style animal images. I saw her former teacher Jim Dow’s amazingly meticulous color-faithful, sharp panoramic stadium and ballpark photos, as well as his Americana road pictures and Bill Burke’s gritty, occasionally harrowing photo-journal-type black-and-whites of rough-and-tumble trips through Southeast Asia. I learned about the street and travel photography, and the portraits, by Harry Callahan, Inge Morath, Robert Frank, Joel Myerowitz. And she had lots of prints from her exceptionally talented classmates, teachers, and friends, including the incredibly versatile Seattle-based photojournalist Steve Shelton. I found myself abruptly more sensitized to the talents of photographers I ran across like the portraitist and fine-art shooter Mark Sink in Colorado, Tracie Taylor in California, and wonderful local D.C. talents like the ubiquitous photographer Scott Suchman, particularly his theater stills, and the ballerina-turned-dance photographer Brianne Bland. Lauren also drew my attention further to other astounding photographers whose work we were seeing every day, like Carol Guzy of The Washington Post. 

I’d studied Walker Evans’s work in college, but Lauren had this fine little library of photo books that further acquainted me with Diane Arbus, Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, Lee Miller, Robert Capa, and others. She had some great biographies as well, like Patricia Bosworth’s of Arbus. She showed me Judith Golden’s earthily surreal mixed media, Sally Mann’s exquisitely artful black-and-white portraits of her children, and Gordon Parks’s portrait, documentary, and later more-ethereal fine-art prints. Also, fashion photographers I was already vaguely familiar with like Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton, Patrick Demarchelier, and Annie Liebovitz. I’d done a fair amount of arts writing and reviewing, but not much on the visual arts besides movies. All of a sudden, though, I found myself moved by photography as much or more than I ever had been by painting, drawing, or sculpture. (In none of which, by the way, did I have the faintest talent.) And I tried to begin dipping into the writings of photo theorists like Susan Sontag, whose On Photography captivated me not just because of its unrelenting insights but because of her moving, weird love-hate relationship with photography. Patti Smith's Just Kids made me look afresh at Robert Mapplethorpe's less-naughty nudes and florals and portraits too.  

Finally, a couple years ago, we sold some classic but outmoded analog camera and darkroom equipment, some given to us by my sweet uncle, the late Daniel Stern of Kansas City, a biologist at UMKC who was also, among many other things, a gifted, published photographer. And with the help of those sales, we bought, for my birthday-plus-Chanukah, a Nikon DSLR with an extra zoom lens, and later an off-camera flash, tripod, and a couple on-sale studio umbrella lights. To understate it, those purchases, which I'd put off for way too long in a kind of masochistic anticipatory way, changed my world quite a bit. 

Epiphany
© Alexander C. Kafka. All Rights Reserved.

• Tell me about some of your favorite subjects and projects.

I’ve tried all kinds of photography: landscape, cityscape, skyscape, still life, Americana,  florals, fashion, performing arts, portrait, pet, etc. Since college, I’ve been fairly obsessed with the surrealists, and in the 90s during a creative-writing stint even wrote a cradle-to-grave psychobiographical screenplay about Salvador Dali (Antonio Banderas, call your agent!). And in the course of teaching myself some fundamentals of Photoshop, GIMP, and Photoscape, primarily, I compiled a weird group of manipulated, often layered, images into series called “Cabaret of the Surreal,” “Pierre’s Nightmares,” “Hallucinations,” “Chrome Cadenza,” and “Blossom Etude”--shameless but heartfelt riffs on Dali, Man Ray, Bunuel. “Pierre’s Nightmares” and “Hallucinations,” particularly, were triggered in a bittersweet way by the absurdly long illnesses and eventual death of that biologist/photographer uncle in Kansas City. They are conspicuous considerations of mortality, sorrow, regret, love, sensuality--combined, a kind of visual psychodrama about middle age, I guess. I hope they are stirring pictures, but they were also deeply therapeutic and cathartic for me in a difficult time. And lest folks think me not flaky enough, with some of these images and others, I also, as you know, wrote accompanying poems.

More recently, a great portrait class with Sora Devore at Photoworks in Glen Echo Park (Maryland) turned my head more in that direction. (Not only does Sora have a superb eye and great technique, she is also a masterly good photo editor, from selection to delicate, efficient, and wise retouching. It’s a marvel to watch.) She showed us this fun documentary about the renowned British fashion photographer David Bailey, and around the same time, I started shooting some fashion editorials (a couple with Maria Esquivel's Photo Hispana group) and events, for experience and fun, but also because I was drawn to the sheer beauty, elegance, and imagination of fashion work. I’m about to take a class at Glen Echo with Scott Davis on photographing the nude, and I’m shooting portrait, fashion, and news/event assignments pretty regularly. 

I’m inspired by a number of online photographer friends. The Italian photographer Anna Morosini, with whom I've had the honor of collaborating a few times, does these really lovely, relaxed, intimate portraits and nudes. North Caolina’s Dan Smith shoots polished but calm, confident, and graceful portrait and figure studies. Atlanta’s Derrick Tyson shoots witty, theatrical, spooky set pieces in an otherworldly black and white. (He's also an exceptional poet.) D.C.’s own Keith Fred, a friend of our family, shoots large-format light-filled still lifes. Another pal, Frances Borchardt, has a portfolio chock-full of great travel, landscape, still-life, and other shots. Carrie Schechter and Sandjer-Martin, widely published portrait and fashion photographers, were kind enough to let me include their works in a webzine I edited for a while a few years ago. And so on. Various days, various pictures will fill me with admiration and joy and I’ll run off trying to do what these wonderful artists do. They are, for the most part, many levels beyond where I am and maybe ever will be, but I’m always grateful for the ways they ignite my imagination.

Untitled
Even after the Foil Dancer melted, she whispered sadly, "Just one more. I love this song."
© Alexander C. Kafka. All Rights Reserved.

• You've gotten involved with AllThingsFashionDC.com. When did you begin shooting for them and what has that experience been like?

I’ve been shooting events for them since early summer, 2012–book signings, store and salon openings, pop-up shops, galleries, trunk shows. I love it because it gives me the chance to work on fashion, portrait, and event elements all in a real-time way that doesn’t allow me to obsess, which I’m prone to. I can work on fundamental technique, and, because I usually file these photos same day, I get repeated crash courses in photo selection and sometimes basic editing, like color and level adjustments, cropping, that sort of thing. It’s a great chance to practice all these skills in a fun, invigorating environment. Like so many people these days, I spend way too much time in front of a computer and in a cubicle. Fashion and fashion-event shooting gets me off my butt, out of my routine, and out into the city.

• Which camera and lenses do you use most often?

My equipment is highly “unexotic”--you'd see a dozen setups like it in the audience of any middle-school choir holiday concert. I use a Nikon D3100 with the 50-mm kit lens plus a 200-mm zoom, a battery-run Nikon SB-700 flash, sometimes a Slik tripod, a LensBaby Muse kit for when I’m feeling artsy, and those couple of umbrella hot lights I bought on sale (they were floor models). Someday I’d like to have a studio and experiment more with backdrops, strobe lighting, and all that, but that’s probably a pipe-dream. And temperamentally, I’m more suited, maybe, to on-site and available-light sorts of shoots. Besides, I'm a total tightwad and kind of clumsy.

• What are some photography goals and projects you have in mind for 2013?

I seem to be drifting from the manipulated, layered surreal images and heading for the starker, calmer, more classic and maybe elegant waters of candid and environmental portraiture, fashion, figure studies, and still some news and event work for our synagogue and elsewhere. I’d love to shoot some more performing artists–musicians, dancers, actors–in both portrait and live-performance type situations. All in all, I’d say I’m heading into the realm of less is more. Fewer tricks. Fewer image adjustments. More just getting out of the way of my subject and letting it have its poignant, beautiful way. Does that make sense?

• Where can would-be fans check out more of your work?


You’re kind to ask. I’ve been fortunate enough to be published in your pages,The Washington Post (in a travel-photography contest), Mongoose, Forty Ounce Bachelors, and Whisperings, as well as AllThingsFashionDC.com, Washington Jewish Week, and some other spots. But I guess the best hub for my work is my Flickr collections page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexanderkafka/collections/. From there, folks can investigate further whatever category they might be interested in. Obviously, I love to talk about photography and to learn about other photographers' projects. So readers should feel free to email me via my Flickr profile page (the email icon's at the upper right corner).

Untitled
"I'm fine," she told everyone. 
© Alexander C. Kafka. All Rights Reserved.