Looking in the Mirror / Looking at America
An Interview with Photographer Dave Kasnic
By Dave Kasnic
Interviewed by Jessica Pierotti
Jess: I'm not sure exactly when you started photographing the protests and Trump rallies—looks like you started posting [on IG] in July. What got you started making these images?
Dave: The end of 2019 was sort of the setup for these pictures. At the time I was wrapping up a grant project and had come to a stopping point with the work sort of unintentionally. My marriage was in a rocky place, and I was carrying around an immense sense of guilt and frustration. I hit a really low place with depression and anxiety in January. I didn't leave my house a lot, I didn't have much contact with anyone, I was just in such a bad spot mentally. I started seeing my own therapist and the few in-person sessions (that ultimately went to zoom because of Covid-19) were exhausting but informative. I completely dropped the mentality I had been operating with––this sort of "I will fix this" mindset, and things became easier for me to navigate. By early March I was feeling better, and then the world really shifted from go-go-go to a complete stop unless you were an "essential worker”. The middle of that month I really leaned into the depression and anxiety I had been struggling with, and started writing down the things that were bothering me. The first one being, "I'm depressed because I've lived away from my family for so long that I wonder if I'll ever truly be a part of their lives ever again." My parents are my closest friends other than my wife, and we've always had a good relationship. I love being around them and I get anxious as hell thinking about which trip will be the last time I see them. My dad is in remission from skin cancer and still on light therapy, and my mom works so much that it's starting to affect her health. I wonder if my sisters' kids are going to know who I am when they're older if I'm never around? The likelihood of being able to live where they live is slim, at least for the foreseeable future, and it's something that has driven me crazy for the last 14 years since I moved away.
The second was, I don't really know who I am because I've constantly worked to avoid a real confrontation with my identity. And when I say "identity," I think many loaded terms can be unpacked—whiteness, gender, sexuality, class, so on. I grew up in a really conservative small town three hours from Seattle. When Trump came around I really saw where I came from for the first time, and started to question whether this was me. I started to question a lot of my youth, things I have said, and who I could have become if I took a different path. I think it’s important to mention that oftentimes when I’ve looked at myself in the metaphorical mirror I haven’t liked what I’ve seen. When I first moved from my hometown in Washington State to Kentucky for undergrad at 18, I was such a mess. I told folks I was from places that I definitely have never even been too, I lied about my family and generally anything that mattered...it was a disaster. I don't think I ever truly came up out of that stage of my life until 2020. I mean, yeah, I mended relationships, was able to get myself through school, and landed a pretty decent internship in New York after graduating, but I never confronted that time period in my life, not really. Fast forward to March of last year, I started making a conscious effort to photograph at a lot of different events and in different cities—something I hadn't done in the past—and to lean into my mental struggles instead of avoiding them. I found myself in situations that all connect for me in a weird way. Trump rallies, protests against the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd (and so many more names), at home in Chicago, with my wife's family in Kentucky, with my family in Washington, the RNC, and the American South in the summer, where Covid felt like something that never happened. For the first time everything connected for me. I was consciously leaning into a metaphorical road home as a more literal way of understanding who I am and what I represent in America.
J: I was so struck by these images, and immediately felt like no one was covering what was happening in America quite like you. There's a sense that as the photographer you are inside and outside of both groups. You have the ability to pass and be accepted, or at least ignored, and capture such unguarded moments. The image sets you have posted often juxtapose content in a way that I find really impactful. There can be an intense image of a protestor, next to an absurdly large cross on a hill, next to a perfect pair of legs in the sunshine. This resonated with me as, "Well fuck, this is all so complicated, and beauty just keeps existing at the same time as all this suffering."
D: There's the in-person experience of making these kinds of pictures, out in the world with strangers, interacting and having specific memories from different situations, and then there's the pictures themselves. The two have little to do with each other but I still struggle with the separation of the two. If I can draw any sort of conclusion so far from the pictures it would be pretty similar to your observation about complication, where beauty continues simultaneously with suffering. But all of the various situations within the work connect for me. An example would be May 30th in Chicago, thousands of people flooded downtown Chicago to protest the murders of Ahmaud Arbery by two men in Georgia, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd both at the hands of police. I looked at people sort of on the outside of the protest or at least folks that weren't in the center of everything. I was curious about their motivations for attending a protest centered around the unjust killings of Black and Brown people in the US, often at the hands of law enforcement. Are their intentions authentic or is this where the party is for the day or week or month? Of course, I can never really know that, but three pictures really stick out to me from that day. One of a man inside of his fairly fancy car, the suicide doors are up, he's stuck in traffic and blasting music while protestors march by him. Another of a man in a crowd that spotted me, making some sort of blurred hand gesture at the camera while CPD lethargically blockade protesters. And another of a father and daughter, the father is a white male wearing a shirt that he wrote "What Could Love Do?" on with marker while his daughter is barely in his arms, nearly falling out.
Each of these photographs isolate men in crowded and chaotic scenes and slow the situations down, at least enough to where I have a brief encounter to question intention. Pictures of men at rallies are similar for me because I'm still asking the same questions with folks that mostly look like me. The responsibility behind those pictures has changed rapidly throughout the past year but especially after last week. I'll loop into what you said to me, "I also appreciate that the images don't flatten the humanity of either side, it's easy to make Trump rallies look barbaric, but your images make them seem more heartbreaking than anything else." From the start I've tried to avoid the overtly obvious, or the shock in these situations, because I wonder who benefits from those pictures now? It's important to ask "who will benefit from this other than me?" Perhaps the heartbreaking aspect or aesthetic that you've identified stems from the fact that I grew up with conservatives, who in early 2016 decided they too loved Trump, so there's a personal connection.
J: I'm curious about how you felt when you started making this work? Did you feel some sort of responsibility to try to tell this story, or capture what was happening? In what way was this impacted by your identity as a white male?
D: I haven't set out with that mindset. I've just felt compelled to photograph, specifically during what I think is the craziest time period of my life thus far. I know that may sound naive or too simple but it's the most honest answer I can provide. But it’s not simply that these pictures are the result of 2020. Last year everything boiled to this point for me personally as well as nationally—this work feels like it’s the culmination of so many things in my life. Somehow inevitable and necessary. The pictures do unpack certain topics that obviously come with responsibilities. A great example would be protests, which are tough because there's potential of getting people in trouble and hurt with certain pictures. There's also the argument that someone like myself isn't the best person for some situations, which I agree with. That's one of the reasons I'm sort of drawn to being on the outside. There are moments and situations that just aren't for me personally. I know that's been a big conversation and things can get tricky, I try to use my privilege and access in these spaces to make images other people might overlook. It’s hard to come up with any justification for what I’m doing, because I’m critical of other image makers, and I should be equally critical of myself, and I am. I’m well aware I’m part of the system myself and my hands aren’t clean. I don’t think there’s a 100% ethical way to make images of anything. This work has been a personal project, but I also work in editorial and photojournalism and it’s a complicated industry. It can be so individualistic and ego-driven. I feel so small sometimes, especially in D.C., unrepresented, just shooting with this funky Pentax. It makes you really think about the structures of media, credentials, and access.
I've been increasingly more and more interested in the abundance of cameras than anything else. Moving forward, I'm unsure of going out anymore because of that very factor. There's times when photographing what I'm specifically interested in, let's just say for example, the picture of the person blasting music from his car while protestors march past him, seem counterproductive because I'm clumped in with the hundred or so other folks that are there with a camera. That's not to say that picture won't be interesting or important down the road but right now there's just too many cameras.
J: I feel like I have a good sense for your process when you are out making pictures, you seem to be operating intuitively while also staying, perhaps, emotionally engaged with what you are seeing and what you are feeling at the time. Does that make sense? So then I wonder, especially when you are inevitably amassing a huge archive of images, how do you work through the editing process? How are you avoiding creating too tidy of a narrative, or too seductive of a world for viewers?
D:That process hasn’t necessarily started yet persay. It’s more like, I get my negatives back and I make digital contact sheets. Our local lab in Chicago doesn’t do that, so essentially I cut the negs, sleeve them, look through and then share rough scans off of that. I’ve been cool with that process so far because I haven’t really had a choice. You can’t sit and stop and look for too long because of how fast the world and this country has been moving over this past year. I have a rough idea of what’s happening, by reviewing the negatives as I go—I’m not blindly stumbling around taking pictures—but I haven’t been approaching it with a concrete agenda.
I have been kind of looking forward to the chance to edit. I’m at a weird stopping place with what I want to do, and where I want to go. I’m really looking forward to hunkering down in Chicago this winter to see how I want to shape the project. I’m not sure what I’m looking for yet. I think it’s just in the work. It just takes the process of sitting with it and carving away at it.
I do feel conflicted about sharing images on instagram, I hate the app like everyone, and that it’s the only space to share photography. I do try to digest things for a while before posting, I don’t rush to post immediately after getting my film back. I don't want to say that it's bad to work with more immediacy, it’s just not for me. I’m trying to work differently and personally digest this as I go through it. I would imagine a lot of folks are entering these pictures for awards and contests, and some folks have mentioned that to me, and just as a rule, I’m not sure if that world is for me. It probably should be, for career purposes, you have to play along a little bit. But that world allows for a lot of harm and exploitation, has a lot of toxic competition, and while a lot of great work is produced, we have to think about whether the costs outweigh the benefits.
J: Absolutely. Criticality is key! There’s no silver bullet when it comes to making visual art or photojournalism more ethical. We have to think critically about where our images are going, who benefits and who is harmed. Every. Single. Time. Not just when the culture has been called out, not just when we are in crisis. And long-term we need to build better places for images to live and build better communities for image-makers to work within.
D: I’m happy to be sharing this work in a space like this. I’m basically just sharing a string of thoughts and images that I’m still trying to process, and this is pretty vulnerable stuff for me. I really appreciate the chance to have a conversation like this that helps to expand my thoughts around the work. Thanks for inviting me, Jess!
