Color & Composition with Ian Ritter

Photograph by Ian Ritter

Produced by Worlds Through Minds founder, Macy Castañeda Lee.

- Name, age, where are you from, what format you like using, what are you currently working on if you are?

My name is Ian Ritter. I am a twenty-one-year-old photographer from Parkland, Florida. I am living in Brooklyn, New York right now. I mostly use a 6x7 camera and a tripod. I make pictures pretty slowly so I assume if I switch to large format, people will start bickering with me more than usual about sitting still. I don’t think there’s a huge difference between analog and digital anymore, especially now that everything for the most part for exhibition is digitally printed. But I like the tactility. It’s much simpler for me. And I like to wait a long time before I look at my pictures. Analog removes the temptation that an SD card permits.

- What about your surroundings/environments and upbringing interested you?

I spent quite a bit of time growing up in a small town in Idaho. I assume this is where my interest in small towns come from; the little holes in fences and dead-end roads that kids run off to, to get away from home. I have also always had a specific fascination in fiction, letting stories envelope me, getting tangled in them.

- When was the first time you met photography? How did you feel when you met it?

I suppose my mother was strange in that when I first visited New York when I was six or seven or so, she handed me a little Nikon Coolpix and encouraged me to take pictures of strangers as we walked on the street. It always stuck with me in a way, even though my process is so opposite to that now. When I was sixteen or seventeen it seemed to let me speak in a way I had not previously noticed. My silly theory is that most artists only really make art because of a complete ineptitude and inability to communicate properly. If everyone knew exactly how they felt all the time and could articulate it willingly to the people around them, art would hardly have a purpose. But then there’s this quote from a story I like: “Even when I like (poetry), it’s nothing more than a really oblique way of saying the obvious” and then “But consider how very, very few of us have the equipment to deal with the obvious.”

Photograph by Ian Ritter

- Tell us about current projects you have been working on (could be any, or just work you have been doing in general). Is this story inspired out of personal reasons, or others? What are you most excited about in these projects?

I have a very specific memory of looking for deer in a small schoolyard in Idaho. Most of the work I have been making for the past year makes some reference to that memory, driving around looking for deer, some kind of logic there. The pictures are coming slowly so I imagine I have quite a few years left before something cohesive comes together. Right now, it feels a lot like throwing pasta at a wall and seeing if it sticks, but I guess that prospect is interesting. It’s been interesting to see what sticks, I mean.

Photograph by Ian Ritter

- How did you find your visual literacy? Why are you attracted to certain images more than others?

I think some aspect of visual literacy is probably genetic and the rest able to be taught. I don’t mean that to seem dismissive in any way, but it does seem to me that composition is supposed to mostly feel intuitive; there is no sense in actually consciously practicing rule of thirds. And it probably also comes from an overactive imagination, constantly stimulated, and running wild with pictures in your head. At least that’s how it is for me most of the time. In terms of the taught part, I think most of the problems that constitute photographs today are upon the basis of the wrong questions being asked. There is a huge emphasis on the photographic referent, what is in front of the camera, the subject, the question of what you are looking at. This seems helpful within documentary pictures, but anything else, any sort of visual literacy gets lost there. Through the democratization of photography and the emergence of a post-document world, making pictures revolves exclusively around editing. Anyone can make a picture of anything. It is entirely more interesting to ask the question of why something is in the frame, rather than what is in the frame. That’s what visual literacy is to me.

I’m not sure exactly what causes me to like one picture over another. I am not relying so much on chance with my pictures, so I imagine it’s easier for someone who is, to explain why a picture that caught an interesting face is better than one without one. When I don’t like one of my pictures, it probably comes down to it working out better in my head than it does on paper. Maybe the end goal is something evocative. You don’t really want a picture that stays still and doesn’t affect anyone. That’s sort of nightmarish. I also tend to like what I think of as “boring” pictures. The New Topographics stuff from the 70s has always stuck with me and I tend to model my pictures after that kind of documentary tradition. I also tend to care more for pictures that are rooted in some theory, where I can identify their acknowledgment of being photographs but am not hindered in my viewing by their consciousness. For the most part, I am pretty uninterested in aesthetics for aesthetics’sake.

Photograph by Ian Ritter

- Imagine meeting someone who is picking up a camera for the first time. What do you tell them?

I’d probably tell them to not let the camera become the way they interact with the world. Have experiences and then make pictures. The pictures always end up being a sort of insular experience and to spend the time you’re supposed to be interacting, in your head, is generally a bad idea.

I make a specific kind of work and I have trouble understanding the motivation behind a lot of other photographers but I think most of it comes down to this: about half of the time you probably need to know why you are making pictures and the other half should be intuitive, or if you’re feeling particularly self-conscious and obsessive maybe know why you’re doing things all the time.

Look at lots of pictures obviously. You need to know what’s been done and how you can add to the conversation.

Oh, and read as much as you possibly can. Fiction and theory. It’s the best way to have honest conversations.