JOEL SIMPSON

How and when did you start photography, and what was your learning path?

Like many boys growing up, I was fascinated by rocks and fossils, which I collected (I was dubbed “fossil face” in the 6th grade), but eventually even more by photography. My uncle Sidney, a photographer and movie maker himself, gave me a simple 35mm camera for my Bar Mitzvah (age 13), and I started shooting with Kodachrome I, ISO 10. The camera, a Kalimar A, had a fixed 45mm lens, no range-finder (so I had to estimate distances), and had problems with its winding mechanism, so I ended up with unintentional double exposures and bizarre juxtapositions. In one case a single slide combined Adlai Stevenson and a closeup of my dog’s puppy—and I hadn’t even heard of Surrealism! Meanwhile, I read a book from the town library entitled 35mm Photo Technique, and that was my initial education. Right away I wanted to shoot landscapes. My father drove the family from New Jersey to California in August of 1960 (in an unair-conditioned Rambler station wagon), and all I wanted to shoot were scenics. He wanted me to document the family on vacation—and he had bought the film! When we got back, I projected the best ones on a sheet I hung in a doorway, trying to imagine myself back at the Grand Canyon.

The following year he bought me darkroom equipment at the old multi-storey Willoughby’s in New York, and I began developing and printing black-and-white. I became class photographer in Junior High School (as it was called then), and yearbook photographer in high school. I had a bulky electronic flash, an Ultrablitz Meteor. I soon graduated to an SLR—a Besseler Topcon, and we visited Niagara Falls. I developed an earache, so in compensation, I got to take a helicopter ride above the falls—for the serious price of $15. I still have the slides. (I recently spent over $600 for a helicopter flight over Hawai’i). I bought a subscription to Popular Photography, which introduced me to the work of the great photo artists and where I learned to improve my technique. I became a big fan of Cartier-Bresson, and others, who opened me up to street photography. I won a photo contest in high school for a telephoto shot of a bird silhouette against the glistening water of Chesapeake Bay. In college I acquired a Nikon F and shot “pretty girl” models for the monthly calendar. I used the student darkroom, for which one paid 10¢/per hour, and kept one’s chemicals in a locker. I was looking at lots of photographs. It was the mid-1960s, and I did a certain amount of what we now call social documentary in New York and later in France during my junior year abroad. Some of these are still quite interesting. Meanwhile, I was pursuing an academic education in languages and literature. I had my first show at the Brown University student center, while I was in graduate school: black-and-white prints, bleed mounted on cardboard and hung with string and library clamps. No reviews. While at Brown I audited a photography course at the Rhode Island School of Design, next door, where the first assignment was photographing clouds. The class was also visited by Yosuf Karsh and Aaron Siskind, who taught there. Karsh encouraged us to have fun as photographers. In the late 70’s I switched to color prints, made in labs. Whereas I had kept my monochrome negatives in glassine envelopes in boxes, I kept my color negatives carefully filed in large looseleaf notebooks, and my prints in similar ones but with fancier, plastic-embossed covers. I had my favorites enlarged. My education still consisted in learning from the photographers I admired. After five years teaching English in New Orleans, I switched careers in favor of jazz piano in 1978. By 1985 I was pretty good at it, with photography still a constant in my life, documenting everything, now including two daughters, and capturing the wilds of Southern Louisana—wetland forests, flooded fields of cedar stumps—and occasional trips to Europe. Wherever I went, however, I paid special attention to the rocks. Perhaps it was a fascination with natural abstractions, but their geology also interested me. In the 90’s I created an interactive encyclopedic history of jazz piano with Dick

Hyman, whose sales helped me move back to my native New Jersey in 2000.

On the doorstep of New York City, the art world with its numerous photo galleries offered a rich photographic education. In addition, I read a lot in photo history and criticism and the same for modern art. I immersed myself in the history of Surrealism. With my children now grown and on their own, I was traveling more. I went back to teaching from 2001-2006—French, Italian, and jazz history, in addition to English this time, but always as an adjunct. Tired of being exploited, I quit in 2006 and opened my doors as a wedding, portrait, and event photographer. Now I was attending seminars and 3-day long workshops to broaden my skills. But I had declared myself a professional photographer in 2002. In 2006 I received permission from the French government to photograph an 18-meter frieze of animals and human figures carved 14,000 years ago in Western France: the Roc aux sorciers at Angles-surl’Anglin (Vienne). The human torsos in this group became my inspiration for a series of body projections that I did in my studio, using multiple slide projectors and various background strategies. In 2008-09 I was invited to show fifty of them at the Museum of Eroticism in Paris (le Musée de l’érotisme, now closed), and I was featured in a local publication and on cable TV there.

I had also become more serious about landscapes, which I captured during my travels: to the Colorado Plateau in 2002, to the Vancouver area in 2004, to Newfoundland in 2005 (first trip using digital photography), to Southern and Western France in 2006, to Wales in 2007, to the Northern Rockies in 2008, to the Northern Coast of the St. Lawrence in province Québec in 2010, to the Colorado Plateau and California in 2011 and 2012, around the world in 2014 (12 countries in 10 weeks, including Mongolia & Madagascar), to California in 2015, Italy in 2016, Ireland and Venice in 2017, India in 2018, Ireland, Brittany, Catalonia, and Corsica in 2019, the Colorado Plateau and later Oregon in 2020, the Colorado Plateau, California, and Hawai’i in 2021, and the Colorado Plateau so far this year. In 2019 I self-published a large-format 168 pp. book, Earthforms: Intimate Portraits of Our Planet, featuring mostly my color landscapes with emphasis on geology, and including a number of black-and-white images, many of them short-field captures, that I called “miniscapes.”

The COVID pandemic interposed a major turning point in my photography. First of all, it killed off my wedding and portrait business, but secondly, it gave me the time to concentrate on what I found to be my most intriguing images: rock formations in black-and-white. I developed the use of the RAW filter in Photoshop to edit the images in detail, so that my vision in them stood out clearly. In July, 2021, I connected with an excellent coach through the Arles photo-folio revue, Monica Suder of Freiburg, Germany, who, over the course of the next nine months, transformed my presentation, both in a printed book and on my website. She convinced me that I should privilege my most original work, the blackand-white rock, mud, and ice photographs, on my website; shut down my wedding and portrait site; and put my color landscapes and body projections away in an “archive” on the site. This way anyone searching me on the web would be directed to my strongest black-and-white images. My work with her culminated in a new edition of these images, Playgrounds for the Mind: The Surreal in the Real, with an introduction by photo historian and former photo critic for the New York Times, A. D. Coleman. It came out this past May (available on my website).

What led you to geological photography?

I loved rocks—their patterns and textures—since childhood. I was fascinated by an inkwell-paperclip holder-pen & pencil holder on my lawyer father’s desk that was cast as rough-surfaced fake sandstone when I was six years old. Later I collected rocks and fossils, and still later I read books on geology, but I never took a course in the subject, to my great regret. I found myself drawn to exceptional rocks in my travels, certainly as far back as the 90s. My friends would be swimming, and I’d be photographing the rocks. This was in Northern Italy.

Who are your main influences in both painting and photography?

In painting the Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists over all. But in particular, the late Surrealists, like Matta, Wolfgang Paalen, and Archile Gorky They abandoned realistic perspective (Dalí, Ernst, also influential) in favor of the flat surface, upon which the artist could imply fluid movement and temporal relationships—once perspective and the instant-in-time had been removed.

In photography Cartier-Bresson, Ansel Adams, Edward & Bret Weston, Wynn Bullock, Ralph Gibson, Jerry Uelsmann through the 80s and 90s. After 2000 came the color landscapists: David & Marc

Muench, Jack Dykinga, Mike Fatali, William Neill, Art Wolfe, Galen Rowell, Ed Burtynsky; the social documentarists: Raghubir Singh, Michael Ackerman, James Fee, Mary Ellen Mark, Susan Meiselas, Sebastião Salgado, Victoria Ginn, Xavier Zimbardo; Surrealists: Jan Saudek, Anne Arden McDonald, James Fee; and finally, the abstractionists, the ones who really pointed me in the direction of looking at rocks, mud, and ice for compositions: Aaron Siskind, Minor White, Hans Hajek-Halke, Lionel Feininger, and aerial photographers, William Garnett and Yann Arthus-Bertrand.

What astonished me about the first three of these, Siskind, White, and Hajek-Halke, is that they did not look very far for their rock subjects. None did anything with the Colorado Plateau (parts of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona), where the geology is often bizarre and certainly spectacular. In fact, they didn’t seem particularly interested in geology. The subject by itself will take you to these and similar places around the world if only for textbook examples of tectonic, erorsional, and volcanic processes. Apparently, they simply looked around them and, inspired by the Abstract Expressionist painters, found similar compositions in nature. The one exception is Siskind’s trip to the lava fields of Hawai’i in 1980, where he photographed some very suggestive configurations evocative of a killing field (the Vietnam War had ended five years earlier). This series, which he named Volcano, has not been published, but examples are viewable on the Internet. Garnett and Arthus-Bertrand could not remain as parochial as the others, simply by virtue of their genre: aerial photography. As any air traveler knows, the earth’s surface from several hundred to thousands of feet up, presents a huge range of forms and colors, that lends itself to aesthetic compositions. Some of these contain suggested figuration, as in Garnett’s “erotic” images of Death Valley sand dunes.

The other thing that surprises me is that many of the surrealist painters visited the Colorado Plateau. Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning visited and lived in Sedona, Arizona, on and off from 1943 to 1957 and went to Bryce Canyon during that time. They were impressed by the formations, but neither they nor any of their visiting surrealist colleagues made the connection between the surfaces of Bryce’s hoodoos and various techniques the Surrealists used, like decalcomania and frottage, that replicated these surfaces. When I first visited Bryce in 2002, I was struck by the resemblance, and guessed that they had influenced Ernst. But I was wrong.

What is the part of photography in your life, and did that change your vision of the world?

It’s hard for me to imagine my world before photography. I know just by comparison with other people, that I tend to see more, to notice more, and I’m always asking myself if some part of my visual field would make a good photograph. Sometimes good ones just hit me, and that usually remains true when I get home and download it. It’s the same with music: it’s hard to imagine what, say, complex music sounded like before I studied it. Now I can drive pleasure and hear ideas very quickly—even from Bartók’s String Quartets. Perhaps the analogy to a foreign language would be even clearer. Before you learn the language it just strikes you as a series of odd sounds. After you learn it, you hear ideas and even subtleties.

Similarly, if photography has taught me to see, then the visual world speaks a kind of language that I quote and dramatize in my photographic images.

American poet William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) said this very thing in the opening to his famous poem “Thanatopsis” (1817): To him who in the love of Nature holds. Communion with her visible forms, she speaks A various language…. Amen.

How would you define your style?

That’s a hard one. For my closeup rock formations, I insist above all in clarity of idea. I try to eliminate or darken all elements that don’t contribute the main idea, and especially if they’re blurred. Once color is removed then texture—tactility—becomes more salient, which is the physical reality of the rock itself. This physical reality exists in counterpoint with the idea the image expresses, adding to the marvel that the expressive object of the photo was actually found in nature. This balance between the randomness of the surface, its texture and accidents, and the meaning of the whole is, I believe, a source of power for the image. That balance is centrifugal: its two elements come from and lead in opposite directions. The photograph, if it’s well done, brings them together. But their union is inherently an anomaly, one that only photography among the arts, can offer. This tension draws the viewer in. S/he is invited to grapple with these disparate elements that the artist has caused to work together in harmony. This gives the image depth; it sustains extended contemplation. When I achieve this in a photograph, I feel I’ve succeeded. I don’t know if this explanation of my aesthetic theory accounts for my “style,” but it’s very difficult for me to generalize about style, given the variety of images I come up with. I hope this explanation helps, though.

Are you looking for human shapes when shooting your rocks or lava images? And if yes, have you ever tried to get the same figures doing street photography and street portraits?

Most of the time the shapes jump out at me: faces, body parts, animals, common icons. But they are of an astonishing variety: reproachful, moralizing, monitory, jaundiced, misanthropic, threatening.

As for street portraits, I’m glad just to capture some emotion in a candid photograph, never mind a particular one.

How do you select your location?

I look for bizarre geological formations. There are many geo formations that don’t have any standout features. For example, for all the rock-based hikes I went on in Death Valley, I found very few provocative subjects. In nearby Valley of Fire State Park (NV), on the other hand, they were all over the place. The series of books by Laurent Martrès, starting with Photographing the Southwest is very helpful. I wish such books existed for states he doesn’t cover and for foreign countries, too. Often bizarre rock formations are celebrated by local populations, like the “Valley of the Moon” sites one finds in many countries. But a surprising number are not, for example, the extensive tafoni formations on the Cambria coast of California, or the hardened lava in the tidewaters of Egnazia, Puglia, Italy. They seem of no consequence to the people around them, yet I found them entirely absorbing. This has happened to me a number of times.

Where is your best location?

There’s no single one, but here are several: Bisti Badlands, New Mexico; Valley of Fire State Park, Nevada; Fantasy Canyon, Utah; S’Alquería petita, near Dalí’s house, Cadaquez, Spain. All of these have exceptional formations: capstones at 90º angles from their supporting hoodoos (Bisti), “bouquets” of thick cudgel-like rocks (Fantasy Canyon), multiple layers of eroded rocks (Valley of Fire and S’Alquería petita).

How do you prepare for a shoot?

I make sure batteries are fresh, clean my lenses, study the site. I also figure out the most ergonomic way of carrying my camera and two additional lenses and determine if I can use my drone.

What was your favorite photographic experience?

I’ve had many. But a typical high-exhilaration one was at Utah’s Fantasy Canyon last April 18. The formations we so bizarre and so densely packed that it was “hard to take a bad photograph.” I put that in quotes because I worked very hard to capture meaningful images, working so that elements wouldn’t overlap, or that the sky was in the right place. But the raw materials were there in great numbers.

In a video interview, you say you are sometimes frustrated by the framing and some parts missing. Are you compensating for this by using wider lenses and cropping the image to get the perfect frame?

The only thing you can do is learn from your errors and try to be more aware of the edges of the frame at the time of the shoot. I often find myself photographing a particular subject several times, changing elements such as the cropping, the horizontal and vertical angles, and the exposure, until I’m satisfied. I’m better at it than I was two years ago, and I’d like to revisit some places with what I hope are more advanced skills.

Sometimes I figure out how a judicious crop, or flipping an image upside down, can turn a mediocre image into a powerful one. This usually happens more than a year after I’ve captured the image.

What equipment do you use (camera, lenses, filters)?

I’ve been using Canon equipment since the late 90s. I presently use a 5D Mark III for everyday shooting, and a 6D Mark II in my travels. I have a Canon EF 75-300 mm telephoto zoom, which I use 5% of the time; a Canon EF 24–105 mm normal range zoom, which I use 85% of the time; a Sigma f/4 DG 12–24 mm super wide angle zoom, which I use 10% of the time. I used to use it more in street photography. I also have a Sigma f/3.4 EX DG 8 mm circular fisheye, which I occasionally use, and Tamron f/2.8 SP 90 mm macro lens, which I only use in the studio. My travel tripod is the Sirui T-025X, which is light, compact, and uses a simple but ingenious head system for panoramics, enabling me to do them in less than 4 minutes. It requires a bracket to be screwed to the camera, but the ease of panos more than makes up for this slight inconvenience.

I now use ThinkTank bags for camera and the two other main lenses, avoiding a weight-concentrating gadget bag. As for filters, I use a 77 mm variable neutral density filter for my main (24–105 mm) lens and a 4–stop 58 mm ND for my telephoto, which are mainly for waterfalls. The 58 mm one is invaluable for photographing the ice of partially frozen waterfalls in winter. But I need to use my studio tripod, which is heavy enough to hold camera and telephoto lens absolutely still for the shot. It’s a Manfrotto 190MF3 with a quick-release trigger-grip ball head.

Are you using or planning to use drones?

My DJI Mavic Pro 2 Zoom drone is an essential part of my equipment. Its software enables me to capture panoramas, which it stitches together while the drone is suspended in the air. However, I’ve created very effective 2-image panos by extracting a number of images from a drone video and then choosing two that fit well together to make a square or near-square final image.

The use of a drone takes some serious practice, and I’m still not where I want to be with it, but I tend to use it only on trips to wilderness areas. There is a drone users’ group in my area, as there is in most places, which offers practice and advice.

I like to understand the intent/vision of a photographer. For example, do you have a specific intent when you are on location and have a particular final image vision, or do you work on getting a well-composed/exposed image and finalizing it with experimentation during post-processing?

The most critical element in capturing the kind of images that I seek is choice of location. Certain locations have so much bizarre geology going on that I’m in a heightened state of consciousness when I’m there, taking over 100 photos an hour in some cases. I don’t know what to expect, leaving it to my intuition and the large store of images in my unconscious to capture enough material to make some good end-products at my computer. This is why I travel so far to find these places. And not all badlands are created equal! Bisti is far more interesting to me than, for example, Badlands National Park in South Dakota. But the North Dakota badlands, called Theodore Roosevelt Memorial National Park (the main two sections), are quite interesting.

What kind of software and plugins are you using?

My main software tool is Photoshop’s RAW filter. It has replaced Aurora and Topaz Adjust for subtle and precise image modification. I also use Photostich to create panoramas from their (vertically) captured elements, Topaz’s A. I. Gigapixel for flawless enlargements, and OnOne’s Silver Efex Pro for monochromatic renderings, although I can also get good results by completely desaturating in the Photoshop RAW filter then adjusting contrast, clarity, and texture among other sliders. I create a lot of resizing actions to streamline my workflow and use Photoshop’s Contact Sheet II (File>Automate>) for compositing. The ease of painting in modifications (exposure, contrast, sharpening, clarity, etc.) in Photoshop’s RAW filter renders the local adjustment system based on control points (as in Silver Efex Pro) obsolete. I use Adobe Lightroom for initial processing.

Can you describe your processing workflow?

First, my storage system: the evening after a shoot I download my CF and SD cards onto a 1 TB very portable Seagate hard drive, via my laptop computer. After returning home, I process each day’s shoot in Lightroom, giving them ratings from 3 to 5 stars, or no stars if they simply document the trip. I export the images into a highresolution (HR) folder of 24 MB images (an 8x12” print), a mid-resolution (MR) folder of about 2.5 MB (7” at 150 dpi—for email and Internet), and those that receive 4 or 5 stars into a very high-resolution (VHR) folder of 56 MB images (13x19” or larger prints). Then I go back through the VHR folder and choose the ones to work on. I often return to those folders and to the HR folders and find images that I see new possibilities in.

Finally, do you have one great piece of advice for aspiring landscape or geological photographers?

Nourish your imagination. In whatever kind of photography you choose, seek out the best artists to learn from: what brings you the greatest joy is the direction you need to go in. If you follow what gives you pleasure (“follow your bliss,” said Joseph Campbell), you may end up inventing your own kind of photography. Our art is the easiest one to get into and the hardest one to be original in. But also, look at non-photographic art for ideas and inspiration. Photographic genres have become quite incestuous. There is a huge amount of sameness in the standard genres. To get out of this imagination-constraining circuit, you should travel—and look at other art: painting, ethnic arts from around the world. Go to galleries, museums and art/photography fairs.

Social media and curated sites are the best way to distribute images. What is your favorite one, and do you have a specific strategy to use them.

I learn a great deal from Instagram. It is vast and furnishes high-quality images that will inspire your travel and your creativity. There’s also an awful lot of mediocrity and imitation. I only use Instagram for my color landscapes, that is, images that I don’t intend to sell or to promote as my main artistic body of work. These latter are reserved for my website ( www.joelsimpsonart.com), where I can control galleries of my best work, rather than seeing it fade from view as it migrates down the Instagram page. Facebook is more for keeping up with friends and family, and can be a serious time drain. It’s designed to addict you, which makes their advertising more profitable, at the cost of your productivity. Beware.

Pinterest is strictly for amateurs. Great for recipe exchanges. Behance is a high-minded showplace. Good for inspiration and for sharing a curated body of your best work. There are many ways of finding sites for spreading your work around. One of my favorites is to choose a photographer you like and go to their publications page. Then check out the publications they list. Repeat with other artists. You’ll also find grant sources this way.

Do you have any upcoming projects you would like to mention?

My book, Playgrounds for the Mind: The Surreal in the Real (available on my website), came out very well, thanks to the excellent design skills of Henk van Assen, whose company is HvA design. But I already have a new body of work from the trip I took to Utah and Arizona in April of this year. My next book will feature this work plus the work I’ll do in the next two years. The key question is where will I be traveling. I hope to get to Portugal, Scotland, and Iceland in Europe, and also Namibia, Ethiopia and hopefully back to Madagascar in Africa, and to the Altiplano and environs in South America. When I see a compelling location on Instagram, I copy it down. Some day, I’ll prioritize them and figure out logical itineraries.

A word on itineraries: I cast them as spreadsheets, listing destinations, time and distance between them, accommodations with contact info, plus sunrise and sunset times and the same for the moon, to indicate when I have to go to sleep and wake up, and which nights will be dark enough for star photography. Sometimes you have to plan your whole trip around these times.