Almost Everything with Jeffery Saddoris Jeffery Saddoris

Last week, we recorded the last episode of On Taking Pictures. If you’re a longtime listener, you may think you’ve heard this before, and you’re right, you have. But this time it’s different. I’ll get to why in a minute, but first I need to back up. 
In 2008, I was teaching Photoshop at Tri-Community Photo in Covina, California. One of the other instructors and I started doing photo walks with some of the students on the weekends. As they got more popular, we put up a simple web page called Faded & Blurred that had details about the upcoming walks. It pretty quickly evolved into a full-blown site, complete with a blog, spotlights on some of our favorite photographers, and a podcast called Q&A@F&B, which was a series of long-form conversations with photographers who were willing to sit down with me for an hour and talk about their work. In addition to getting to talk with photographers like John Keatley, David duChemin, and Ibarionex Perello, I also spoke with Bill Wadman for the first time. Bill and I hit it off straight away, and in 2012, when he was thinking about doing a weekly photography podcast, he started auditioning potential co-hosts. He reached out to me and asked if I’d be interested. I said sure, and my audition ended up being the first episode of OTP. For the next 6 years and 325 episodes, my Tuesday mornings were spent recording the show, with me in Rancho Cucamonga, California—at least to start—and Bill in Brooklyn, New York.

If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, I’d love to know why. Email me at talkback@jefferysaddoris.com.

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Website: https://jefferysaddoris.com 
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Email: talkback@jefferysaddoris.com

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Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

The artist Richard Serra died recently, and I know he’s considered a big deal in the art world, but honestly I’ve never really gotten what all the hype is about. I suppose I can appreciate the scale and the forms of some of the work in the same way that I can appreciate the architecture of Frank Gehry, but overall, it just never really grabbed me. Anyway, one of the posts that came up in my feed contained a quote by him that goes:
“Art for the most part, is about concentration, solitude and determination. It's really not about other people's needs and assumptions. I'm not interested in the notion that art serves something. Art is useless, not useful.”
LINKS
Conversation with an Artist: Richard Serra
Richard Serra - Talk with Charlie Rose (2001)
Richard Serra on his Drawing (2011)
If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, I’d love to know why. Email me at talkback@jefferysaddoris.com.

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Website: https://jefferysaddoris.com 
Instagram: @jefferysaddoris
Email: talkback@jefferysaddoris.com

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After recording last week’s episode of On Taking Pictures, Bill sent me a link to a video that’s both fascinating and deeply disturbing, called “AI vs Artists: The Biggest Art Heist in History.” The video presents some of the grim facts around how images, including the 5.85 billion uncurated images in the LAION-5B dataset, are being illegally scraped and used to generate derivative work. The dataset was initially intended for research but has since been made available commercially and has been used to train AI models, including MidJourney and Stable Diffusion. While it does contain images from the public domain, it also contains millions of copyrighted images, as well as explicit content. As they say in the video, no consent was obtained, nor were artists given the opportunity to opt in or opt out—and this is really at the core of why so many artists whose work has been stolen are so upset.

LINKS
Juxtapoz article
Wolfe von Lenkiewicz
AI algorithms
Discussion on Threads
Gagosian

If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, I’d love to know why. Email me at talkback@jefferysaddoris.com.

CONNECT WITH ME
Website: https://jefferysaddoris.com 
Instagram: @jefferysaddoris
Email: talkback@jefferysaddoris.com

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About a week ago, I jumped back into using Photoshop for the first time since 2018 and I’ve got to tell you, it was kind of like putting on a favorite pair of jeans. Yes, the interface has changed a little and a bunch of terrific new tools have been added—especially Object Select, which I’ll come back to in a minute. But even after such a long hiatus, it was still so familiar that straight away it got me thinking about why I stopped using it, and in a broader sense, about some of the decisions we make around the tools we use.

If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, I’d love to know why. Email me at talkback@jefferysaddoris.com.

CONNECT WITH ME
Website: https://jefferysaddoris.com 
Instagram: @jefferysaddoris
Email: talkback@jefferysaddoris.com

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Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

I started this Iteration on February 29th—Leap Day—and for me it was a good day, which, frankly, I really needed. In the last Iteration, I talked about how difficult 2023 was for me and in the week or so since I shared it a lot has happened. Probably the biggest thing is that I’ve started going to therapy. I’ve danced around it for a long time and I think it just got to a point where I could no longer keep pretending that everything was okay—that I was okay— and that whatever was “wrong” with me, I could either fix it or just keep pushing it down. Neither of which is true, of course.

If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, I’d love to know why. Email me at talkback@jefferysaddoris.com.

CONNECT WITH ME
Website: https://jefferysaddoris.com 
Instagram: @jefferysaddoris
Email: talkback@jefferysaddoris.com

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I’m not going to bury the lede—2023 was not a great year for me, especially financially. In fact, I think it was one of the worst years I’ve had since I became a solo creative, and for the most part, it was nobody’s fault but mine. One of my favorite movies is High Fidelity (get the book here) and in it, there’s a scene where Rob (played by John Cusack) is going through a particularly frustrating time and says, “I’m sick of the sight of this place. Some days I'm afraid I'll go berserk, throw the "Country A through K" rack out on the street and go work at a Virgin Megastore and never come back.” I can definitely relate to that and it’s kind of where I was at the end of 2022. But I thought I would give it one more year to see whether I could come up with some new ideas and new work and maybe figure out a way to navigate the changing landscape of trying to eke out at least a partial living by being creative. And I know that phrase “being creative” is pretty loaded and it means different things to different people. For me, by and large it means painting, writing, and podcasting, or some combination of the three. Photography is in there somewhere too, but I’m still not really sure where.

If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, I’d love to know why. Email me at talkback@jefferysaddoris.com.

CONNECT WITH ME
Website: https://jefferysaddoris.com 
Instagram: @jefferysaddoris
Email: talkback@jefferysaddoris.com

SUBSCRIBE
Subscribe to Almost Everything with Jeffery Saddoris in your favorite podcast app. You can also subscribe to my newsletter on Substack.

MUSIC
Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris