Episode 1: David Schalliol and Carlos Javier Ortiz
Carlos Javier Ortiz (left) and David Schalliol (right)
In this episode, photographers and activists David Schalliol and Carlos Javier Ortiz join Kristin Taylor, MoCP's curator of academic programs and collections, to discuss activism in documentary photography. Their work focuses on the demolition of homes and communities and the tragedies that proceed this destruction on the south side of Chicago. David and Carlos explain ethical obligations to communities and landscape as well as what it means to be an activist in 2019.
Their work is featured at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago as a part of the exhibition, Chicago Stories: Carlos Javier Ortiz and David Schalliol, until July 7, 2019.
Works discussed in the podcast:
Fazal Sheikh (American, b. 1965)
Gabbra Matriarch, Seated at Center, with Gabbra Women and Children, 1993
Alejandro Cartagena Gonzalez (Mexican, b. 1977)
Business in Newly Built Suburb in Juarez, from the "Suburbia Mexicana" series, 2009
Interview Transcript
Episode 1: David Schalliol and Carlos Javier Ortiz
Kristin Taylor:
This is Focal Point, the podcast where we discuss the artists, themes, and processes that define, and sometimes disrupt, the world of contemporary photography. I'm Kristin Taylor, Curator of Academic Programs and Collections at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College, Chicago. Today, I'm joined by Carlos Javier Ortiz and David Schalliol. Carlos and David both use documentary, still photography, and film to consider segregation and systemic racism in Chicago and beyond. We've asked both artists to select one work from the museum's collection to discuss in conjunction with their own practice.
David Schalliol is a sociologist, photographer, and filmmaker who is interested in the relationship between community and place. He is the principal with Scrappers Film Group, where his directorial debut, The Area, follows the story of a multi-billion dollar intermodal freight company as it buys and demolishes over 400 homes in the Chicago neighborhood of Englewood. The film closely documents the story of one community activist, Deborah Payne, and her fight against the development. Additionally, his still photographic series, Isolated Building Studies, pictures lone buildings centered between vacant lots, challenging us to consider the wider narrative or causes of urban transformation.
Carlos Javier Ortiz is a director, cinematographer, and documentary photographer who focuses on urban life, gun violence, racism, poverty, and marginalized communities. His short film and photographic series, A Thousand Midnights, considers the ideals and realities of those who moved to Chicago during the great migration from the South and another series, We All We Got, focuses on communities in Chicago repeatedly affected by gun violence.
Their work is included in the museum's permanent collection, as well as its Midwest Photographers Project, and it's also featured in the exhibition, Chicago Stories on View, at the MoCP until July 7th, 2019.
I am standing in the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago's vault space right now, where the museum stores its collection of approximately 15,000 photographs. It's a quiet, climate controlled room that's shut off from the rest of the world. I'm in here with David Schalliol and Carlos Javier Ortiz, looking through some prints that they selected to talk about today.
David Schalliol:
We're looking at a business in newly built suburb in Juarez, by the Suburbia Mexicana series by Alejandro Cartagena Gonzalez. This is a print that I'm really excited to see in person. It's a photographer whose work I've seen online, but never had the opportunity to actually see in person. So, what we're looking at in the photograph, it's a photograph of suburban Juarez, but it's part of the series where he's looking at the development of suburbia on the outskirts of Mexican cities. One of the things that really draws me to this photograph is that there are these clear signs of life in it, and so, you get a sense of suburban development and its hugeness, but at the same time, you can see someone setting up a sign in front of a restaurant, that you see the advertisements, the signs of life that don't fit into that rigid, orderly new construction.
Carlos Javier Ortiz:
I'm looking at these three images next to each other, and they're from a refugee camp. And in the images to me, it's mostly women and some boys, but mostly women, look really powerful, all looking at the camera, beautiful portraits. Each portrait is like a landscape to me, like a long panoramic image.
Kristin Taylor:
Carlos, you chose Gabbra Matriarch, Seated at Center, with Gabbra Women and Children, by Fazal Sheikh. Can you tell us a little bit about why you chose this picture?
Carlos Javier Ortiz:
I was really attracted to these three images together, and then mostly, it's just the subject matter. The women, the matriarchs, and now that I read the caption on the picture, it says matriarchs, so the matriarchs, the women who hold it down around the boys and the young girls in this camp, and it's just really full of life and dignity. Most of the pictures you see in camps don't look like that.
Kristin Taylor:
Something that you and Fazal Sheikh have in common, I think, is that you're trying to photograph a situation that is different than how you would see it in the news and how you'd see it in the media. Can you describe Fazal Sheikh's style a little bit for people who maybe don't know how he photographs and how it's different?
Carlos Javier Ortiz:
Yeah. So again, another thing I relate to is the landscapes and the relationship of landscape and people, and I try to do that in my work, is make this connection of people and landscapes. So, he makes these simple portraits of people looking at directly at the camera, but they're very powerful. They're very beautiful. There's a lot of respect and beauty in the folks that he photographs. I try to do the same way when I photograph people. It's just about empowering the people that allow us to be around them for either for years, 15, 20 years, or one day, and you can never pick that. You can never choose that moment of like, how long are you going to know someone? It's people choose it for you. They also choose the moment that they want you to see, as well. We always think we do, but most of the times people let you do that.
David Schalliol:
For me, the ideal kind of project is a project that you can ease your way into and build relationships, and not just feel each other out, but really try to figure out what you're going to create together. And so, while in a lot of ways, as Carlos was saying, the emphasis is often on the agency, the photographer, but instead thinking about it being about a dynamic and it's a collaboration and the photographer does play a particular kind of role. The people who are part of the process in a different kind of way may play a particular role, but ideally, the thing that we're doing is we're all trying to figure out what our relationship to each other is and what we're going to make. And so, time and being able to develop over time, just provides the opportunity to develop these deep, meaningful, close relationships. I think that the strongest work is the work that comes out of that kind of experience that kind of really mutually giving collaboration.
Carlos Javier Ortiz:
People in the communities know each other, and you always have to approach with respect and kindness and they need you and want you to be there almost a hundred percent of the time. So, I think that's part of the process, is just listening and looking and understanding the history of the places that we're working in, and if you don't understand that, you'll find your way around it.
David Schalliol:
I think, also to the piece that we're spending a lot of time talking about, relationships and relationships with the people, and, of course, starting from this photograph and seeing this clear expression of a connection, but even thinking about landscape work or other kind of work that emphasizes the built environment, I feel like that even in that sense, that there's something about having that longevity, really having that, building those relationships really informs the way that one can understand place. It reveals meaning in a different kind of way, then that drop in, drop out kind of approach that we often see in photographic work.
Kristin Taylor:
I was actually going to ask you a question similar to that soon about if the same sort of code of ethics applies to photographing architectural structures in the built environment, because with people, the questions are obvious about mutual respect and vulnerability, and how that image will be used, but what are the rules with photographing buildings and places where people lived their lives, and what have you come across in doing that project?
David Schalliol:
Yeah. I try to approach it in many ways, in the same way. I don't always have the same connection to that particular place that I might have with a connection with a person. But, I try to approach projects that are about buildings or involve buildings as a way to talk about these other things in a similar kind of way. I think respecting where they live or respecting where they spend time, where we all spend time, where we live is an important part of acknowledging people's contribution to communities, to neighborhoods and vice versa.
Carlos Javier Ortiz:
Yeah. And since we're talking about that, can we also talk about, so Chicago, we've lost a lot of architecture. We lost the major projects that existed here.
Kristin Taylor:
Robert Taylor Homes.
Carlos Javier Ortiz:
Robert Taylor Homes, Cabrini-Green ...
David Schalliol:
Stateway Gardens.
Carlos Javier Ortiz:
Stateway Gardens. I mean ...
David Schalliol:
You name it.
Carlos Javier Ortiz:
And then, the area where you worked, that was a historical neighborhood. When I came to see you and you actually explained it to me, because I would see the neighborhood as I drove by to go West on Englewood, I would look at the lots, and they just kept getting bigger and wider, and the nature kept coming and taking over the landscape. And then, the dignity of people's homes, like when you look at a building as it's getting the mileage, because you've seen so many get demolished. What do you think about ...
David Schalliol:
I mean, with the demolition process, both slow and long.
Carlos Javier Ortiz:
Yeah, yeah, and even looking in someone's house. These were walls where you put your photographs or something on them that was of value to you, right?
David Schalliol:
Yeah.
Carlos Javier Ortiz:
And we take that for granted. But, what comes to mind when you just, anything? I don't know.
David Schalliol:
Gosh, I mean it's ...
Carlos Javier Ortiz:
Just wondering, I'm curious.
David Schalliol:
So much, a lot of what it is, I have the same kinds of thoughts, whether I see a building immediately coming down or if a building that has, for a variety of reasons, been put in a position where it's become derelict. And, but the experience of seeing the actual, the visceral experience of demolition is something that, I think, it sharpens all of the feelings. And so, when I'm seeing buildings that are derelict or buildings that have been left on their own, to put it, another way, is to say that people have been able to hold on and make this building a site of resilience, that when see all of that, I'm seeing history, I'm thinking about people's experiences in those places.
I'm thinking about all those stories that people have of a place. And then, that erasure of that. I think about it in that bigger socio-historical context that, what's happening on the South side of Chicago and the West side of Chicago with structural disinvestment, thinking about the way that particular groups of people have been privileged and others have just been put into the position and again and again, where they have to fight. I'm thinking about all of that as I see the building come down, whether it be in that short term, like there's that demolition, or that long term, what's happening to this community?
Kristin Taylor:
That leads us into a good segue of you discussing the piece that you chose, which we haven't yet done. Can you tell us a little bit about what you noticed about this piece or why you chose it among all of the 15,000 photographs in our collection? What stood out to you?
David Schalliol:
Yeah. So, when I was going through the collection, I was trying to think about work that could connect with some of the issues of the exhibition, and do that in a pretty straightforward way. And so, this photograph that I chose, the intention of the photographer is to engage these big conversations about what's happening in Mexico in relationship to urban planning, into commerce and commercial construction, to thinking about even the experience of drug wars and cartel work. And so, in the same way that when I think about Dawood's work is responding to the expression of racism and resistance in the South, I think about Carlos's work and relationship to again, the same sort of processes, the same kinds of experiences in the North. I think mine also falling into that same category, but obviously we're all doing it in very different ways. I think about this work as also trying to engage those conversations in Mexico. Just how do we see the built environment as an expression of the contemporary conflicts and the historical reasons for the manifestation of them in these particular ways?
Kristin Taylor:
I feel like his work is almost the opposite of yours, even though there's the same intentions in a lot of it. He's photographing the sprawl, more like the suburban growth outward, and you're photographing, trying to keep and preserve parts of the city proper. We have one photograph in our collection that I'm surprised you did not pick by him, of a chapter of the series called Urban Holes.
David Schalliol:
Yes.
Kristin Taylor:
It's directly the opposite of yours, in that there's a building on each side and in between, it has been demolished and yours is on either side, it's been demolished and it's one standing. So, I thought that was a really, when you said that this is the piece that you picked, I immediately wondered why you picked this one instead of the inverse of your work?
David Schalliol:
Yeah. I really did think about that other image, but one of the things I liked about this one is that we see the whole community here. We see the plan and in the uniformity of the buildings or almost uniformity of the buildings, we see the intention of developers and we see the intention of the creation of the suburb. And so, I like the idea of thinking about all these dynamics in a place that is seemingly whole, even if it is this speculative kind of thing. Thinking about that as a different kind of counterpoint to the kinds of issues that my work and Carlos's work in particular investigating and the resistance and at the same time, oppression that manifests in the city.
Kristin Taylor:
I think with Fazal Sheikh and Alejandro Cartagena Gonzalez, I hope I pronounced that right-
David Schalliol:
Perfect.
Kristin Taylor:
-and both of your work, you would all be classified as artists/activists. Do you agree with that term?
David Schalliol:
Yeah.
Carlos Javier Ortiz:
Yeah, absolutely.
Kristin Taylor:
Do you think of yourself more heavily in one side versus the other, or what is that balance that you toggle between just pure research of what you're doing? I mean, because you both also spend a significant amount of time reading about the subjects and learning and talking with people and interviewing and building that brain behind your work, that data that you have, how much of your time during the day is spent doing that versus just capturing images, or what does that balance between artists and activists for you?
Carlos Javier Ortiz:
For me? It's actually, the opposite is because I'm dyslexic, photography and filmmaking is a way of channeling the communication of reading and the process of sitting down and reading a book and observing it, but the photography and the filming, what it does to me, it triggers knowledge. And then, most of it is contemporary history as we're looking at it and making it. And so, I go backwards and then I really start getting into the books, and that triggers that part of it. And then, the other part of activism for me, again, it all revolves around the photography and making films. And, but I let people tell me that I'm an activist. I don't like to say I'm an activist, because then I really would put it all down and start fighting and protesting, and I mean really fighting for these, which I try to do at my work, but I believe that that's where my talent lies. So, I don't want lean on just becoming an activist overnight, but I think the work over time is about activism. It's about getting the word to the public.
David Schalliol:
Yeah. Yeah. I can relate to that. To throw another piece in that also as a sociologist, there's this whole other thing of thinking about all of these ways of, just all these different kinds of intersections. And so, there's the act of making work is research in a lot of different ways. It's research about learning about the world and its research, and it's learning how to connect with people and to build another world. It's also research maybe in a more traditional sense, where it's trying to figure out how do you then take this material and transform it into something else.
Not that I frame everything as research, but it's like at each aspect of what it is that I'm doing, I feel like there's just this tremendous amount of overlap. And so, yeah, that's reading books and there's talking to people and they're doing things like this, where we're having this conversation, which, of course, goes back and informs the work that I'm doing, I assume the work that we're all doing, as we try to figure out what's the best way to articulate these essential contemporary problems that have these just huge histories that you can also weigh on us.
Carlos Javier Ortiz:
Like if you weren't a sociologist, you're a real, real, real photographer. You just have a different perspective of the world, not just the sociologist perspective.
David Schalliol:
No, I think that's true.
Carlos Javier Ortiz:
I see that in your work a lot.
David Schalliol:
Yeah. Well, and of course, I think about all these different things that you're drawing from, too. I think that's one of the things that's, I've always found your work so compelling, is this richness of drawing from all of these different kinds of experiences and trying to be really thoughtful about how to, what to do and how to do it. I think also Dawood's work, is another just really great example of someone who is being so deeply thoughtful, and also intentional about the way he interacts with people. And so, I think that thread connecting the work, I think it was really important.
Kristin Taylor:
Personally for me with the intersection of art and activism is that, again, considering the differences between like Fazal Sheikh's work and when we're really looking also at pictures of people, and that difference between when you read a story in the news and you know that something horrible is happening in the world and with his work, it's about refugees in Kenya and a refugee camp, but you don't see anything else in the environment. You don't see war going on in the background. You don't see what the camp looks like or what their home looks like. You just see the people experiencing it, and really, there's a lot of connections to download Bay's work in that style of just connecting with the gays so intensely and portraiture's power there.
With your work, you don't as much do, there are direct portraits, but there's also a lot of different types of photographs that you take, and there's one picture that made me stop in my tracks when I saw it, and it's up right now, of a man holding a baby. I assume that it's his baby and in the background, there's a woman that used to be the baby's mother. At first, it just seems like this sweet family photograph, the baby's arm is reached up and the kid's grabbing his mouth a little bit. And then in the background, when you sit with the photograph for a little while, you notice that there's police tape in the background, and then that's in a soft focus. I think about how different that picture would be if it were taken for the story, that it would be the other side of that tape. And so, with Fazal Sheikh's work and your work, it's to me, more powerful to slow down and really get to know that story through your type of imagery, because we get so overwhelmed by headlines and imagery, that is so dramatic at times.
So, when I spoke once, I accidentally said you're a photo journalist. I think I was thinking, because I've seen your work in magazines and I've seen your work at crime scenes and in a certain way, my brain fogged it up for a minute, but it's very, very different. Can you maybe talk about that a little bit? The difference, and this is a conversation that happens in our museum a lot, about what photojournalism is and what documentary photography is, and what a portraiture photographer is. And are those categories important to you or ...
Carlos Javier Ortiz:
Yeah, I think they all blend into each other in a way. I think they're all bred in a way from the portrait end. And then, when the cameras got faster, it became photojournalism, and then it became documentary. I'm drawn from photojournalism. The importance of it is, I can't state how important it is. I think there's a lot of laziness in the way the news gets told. It's so fast and it moves so quickly and people forget that the real stories are over time, and sometimes we need to tell a everyday story, but we don't usually tell the longer period of story. So, and that's the important part of a museum. There's stories that would last longer than a newspaper image, and I'm glad the Black Star archive got saved, because a lot of these pictures get thrown away, and we have it today.
Kristin Taylor:
That's that connects nicely to also what, David, you're doing with your film, The Area, and Deborah Payne, you call her the main protagonist in the film and a producer in the film. Everyone now is learning about this rail yard expansion that happened that cleared away, is it a 20 block radius of Englewood or how many blocks?
David Schalliol:
More or less, there's a metro block, but yeah.
Kristin Taylor:
400 homes, right?
David Schalliol:
Yeah.
Kristin Taylor:
So, I said to her this morning, we were commenting about how you and Deborah are touring around and showing this film in multiple screenings all over the country. I said, "It's too bad that this wasn't happening while the expansion was happening." She was just like, "Yes, exactly, that's exactly what should have happened, because unfortunately we're all learning about this expansion now that it's completed." Really, it'll be interesting to see in the museum, how much people are aware that this happened, but in my circle whenever I talk about your work and that we're doing this exhibition, most people don't know that it happened, even though it's this terribly tragic thing that happened, right a few miles away in Chicago. This is a kind of thing that happens often, where the reasons for buildings getting destroyed are the reasons for people being taken advantage of. I think you're so successful in your documentary because you just follow her, and you're able to connect to this one person and focus on one person instead of the 400. That can become abstract, and you don't know how to register, how to feel empathy with a number that big.
David Schalliol:
Yeah, and I think you connect back to this. This is not the first time this has happened where communities of color have been displaced to make way for progress, effectively meanings for someone to make profit. It's such a complicated situation. One of the struggles with trying to figure out how to tell the story and how to share the story, was to figure out how to represent the experiences of a community without, as you were saying, without showing everyone. In the end, Deborah really ended up emerging, in part because of this connective role that she played in the neighborhood, and the way that she brought people together and her strength was something that was a uniter and was one of the reasons that we met in the first place.
And then, of course, there's some other people who also pay key roles in the film. And so, guys like Tigga and Wheezy, as they're working through what their experience is of being born and raised in a place that no longer exists, and what does it mean to move somewhere else when you're so associated with one community. But yeah, there's so much of it is about anchoring it in people's experience. One of the things that I thought about a lot at the very beginning, in fact, the reason to make it a film in the first place, was to make it something that could be shared in the way that a film is shared, where people sit down and they have an experience where they expect to sit down and experience something unfolding, and to be able to structure something that would give people some sense of that timeframe, some sense of that experience and development and the consequences.
And, of course, the horrible injustice along with the possibilities of resilience that we see really expressing at the end of the film, but to be able to do that and the movie format really seemed like the clear way to do it. I guess the only other thing to say about this is that we thought a lot about, is this something that should come out earlier? We did put a short out in 2013 in order to, while things were still very much in process, but there were some strategic questions about how do the neighborhood residents want to negotiate? How do they want to proceed practically? And, in the end, I think what we're hoping is that the film can be an opportunity to have these meaningful conversations. Of course, if the idea that A, maybe doesn't happen next time. And then B, if it does, people understand who to talk to and what the process is like, but, of course, hopefully, it's not just documentation, but it's a community building activity.
Kristin Taylor:
Well, I don't want to take up too much more of your time, but what's one thing you always carry with you throughout the day when you're photographing or otherwise, if there is something significant? If not, we can scrap this question.
David Schalliol:
I always take a camera with me.
Kristin Taylor:
Yeah. Everywhere. Yeah.
David Schalliol:
That was easy. I say that in a joking way, but I really do. I always try to have my camera with me. And so, no matter what it is that I'm doing, and it's always, when the, I don't know, I'm rushing out the door and I think, "Oh, should I grab my camera?" I'm like, "Oh, no, I'm just going to go quickly into the grocery store and I don't need it." And then, clearly I needed my camera, but no, I mean, but really there is this thing about always having it with me and that thinking about making work as something that's just this constant activity and trying to make that part of my life ...
Kristin Taylor:
Do you carry anything, Carlos?
Carlos Javier Ortiz:
Well, I always have these bracelets on my arm with me as just a reminder of my family. And then, my wife gave me these, and then I have, obviously, my camera. So, those are like the two things I always have. And if I don't have one or the other, it feels strange and obviously I have a phone, so if I forget the camera, that it's a second hand tool.
Kristin Taylor:
So, would you say that that is advice you would have for anyone trying to do what you do is to never leave home without their camera? Or what kind of advice would you have for someone who's aspiring to do work like you?
David Schalliol:
I'd say that, obviously people work in all these different kinds of ways and it may not always make sense to. You're maybe not the kind of person that's bringing the camera around all the time, but certainly doing the kind of work that I do, I think that work that Carlos does, that seems like great advice. I'd say maybe more generally, just to always be working. I don't mean that in the sense where you're pushing your family aside, you're doing whatever. But I mean, instead to be thinking about, making small projects and just continuing to build, and that, for me, at least with my experience with making projects, that it's through making work and all the ways that we've been talking about that over the last, however long this has been, that a lot of meaning is really revealed. Sometimes, I don't fully understand the meaning of an image until I've made 20 more and start to understand why it might be something that's important. And so, this idea of always working and always thinking about work in this abstract sense has been really helpful to me.
Carlos Javier Ortiz:
Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't disagree at all. I think the life of an artist does revolve around work and it doesn't mean that you can, like, I want to be with my son all the time now and my wife. So, it doesn't mean, and my wife's like, "Go work and go make money and go do-" It was like ...
Kristin Taylor:
Don't be around us all the time.
Carlos Javier Ortiz:
Yeah, and she never told me this before, but I believe the life of an artist does revolve around the discipline of making work and creating your vision and refining it. Going back to the activist question, photography is a freedom of speech for me, freedom of creation. And so, it's making the same discipline with making films and it just all comes together. I think Louis Armstrong said that somebody asked him if he was a master at the trumpet, and he was like, "Hell no. This gets harder as you get older, so don't think if you're a young cat, it's going to get easier. This is going to get harder and you have to do it. You have to do it and think about it and open your mind to it consistently."
David Schalliol:
Well, I'll say the one other thing. Just, as I'm sitting here and looking at the two of you, is also just having conversations about work, and constantly looking at other people's work and listening to the people who are around you and that means the people you're working with on photography projects or whatever, but it also just means the people you love and the people who love you and just trying to figure out how you build from there.
Carlos Javier Ortiz:
Yeah, and don't let Instagram fool you. It's good, but go to the museums. Look at archives, look at physical materials. Instagram is just another tool to getting it into the world, but look at the physical material that people make. We see that three-dimensional world. On a flat phone, it's fine, but you need to get out and think about it, bring it into your soul. So, go to museums. Support museums.
Kristin Taylor:
Come to our museum.
Carlos Javier Ortiz:
Yeah.
Kristin Taylor:
That was a good closing.
Carlos Javier Ortiz:
[inaudible 00:33:28].
Kristin Taylor:
Well, thank you both for coming here.
Carlos Javier Ortiz:
Thank you.
David Schalliol:
Thank you.
Kristin Taylor:
Thank you for listening to Focal Point. Focal Point is presented by the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago, in partnership with WCRX FM radio. Special thanks to professor Matt Cunningham and student production intern Wesley Reno. Music is by Xavi. To see the images we discussed today, please visit mocp.org. You can also follow The Museum of Contemporary Photography on Facebook and Instagram at mocpchi and on Twitter at MoCP_Chicago. If you enjoyed our show, please be sure to rate, review and subscribe to Focal Point anywhere you get your podcasts.
Speaker 4:
Did you enjoy the podcast? Be sure to check out WCRX's variety of podcasts, including Profile, hosted by Katelyn Moore, which explains the unique artistic endeavors of a plethora of students at Columbia College, Chicago. Hear about each artist's inspiration, accomplishments and goals. Check it out.
Speaker 5:
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Speaker 4:
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