Light Painting the Still Life Success Stories - Garreth Broesche

This is the third in a series of "Success Stories";  interviews with my students who have met with success. In this post, I'd like to take a moment to discuss the meanings of “success”, which can be different for different people. Interestingly, Garreth Broesche, the subject of this post, speaks to this concept himself in this interview.

Some people equate success with money, or with Gallery representation, or with the publication of an article on their work, but I would say that success can simply be the sense of accomplishment and improvement in some undertaking.

Garreth is a terrific example of this latest metric… He began the course with virtually no experience in Photoshop and has, through practice and dedication, improved tremendously in his creation of still-life light painting images. He has also struggled with a personal challenge which he'll explain in the interview.

Garreth has a lot to say here, but I think all of it is interesting, so please take the time, if you can, to read the entire interview. Thank you - Harold

All images © Garreth Broesche

*****

"Still Life with Pomegranate and Grapes"

*****

 Garreth, Thank you for agreeing to do this interview!

Thank you for this opportunity to talk about my work. It’s an honor to be included in your series.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself… Where do you live, and any other details that you find pertinent?

My wife and I moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico about four years ago. We’ve been enjoying it here. It’s always been a haven for artists - there is just something about the light in New Mexico (altitude? latitude? I don’t know…). It was the gorgeous morning light here, in fact, that first got me into still-life photography. 

You are a very accomplished musician and singer. When did you begin making photographs, and what motivates you to make photographic images?

I’ve been more of a musician all my life, but photography has always been a secondary artistic interest. My dad was a very good amateur photographer, so certainly that was an inspiration. He gave me my first camera (a Minolta X-370) for my 13th birthday. I took a lot of (probably bad) photos with that camera and I still have it today! For many years, I was a vacation/tour (as in on tour as a musician) photographer. I’d have some run-of-the-mill digital camera and I’d drive my friends and family nuts by constantly clicking the shutter while everyone was trying to enjoy their vacation. 

In 2014 I suffered a brain hemorrhage, which changed my life forever. At the time I was a college professor, but that career came to an end due to my illness. It was around this time that I asked my dad for a camera for Christmas. He gave me a Nikon D5600 and I finally started to learn a bit about the technique and craft of photography. I sought out some professional photographers in Houston (Lynne Lane and Geoff Winningham) for some tips. I started taking my photography a bit more seriously. I got into film cameras and acquired a few, my favorite being a Canon P.

When my wife and I moved to New Mexico, I needed to find some work. Due to my illness, I don’t have a whole lot of good options, but I thought that real estate photography would be something I could manage, so I got a job doing that. I learned a lot more about the basics of photography in doing that job.

I love the frame of mind that photography puts me in. When I have a camera in my hand and I’m looking for images to capture, it forces me to look closely at my surroundings and look for the beauty or harmony wherever I am.

"Music Theory Vanitas"

*****

What drew you to Light Painting?

It’s a bit funny actually. I was doing some training for my real estate photography gig, learning how to do twilight shoots. Light painting is a technique that can be useful when doing a high-end twilight. Let’s say that there’s a bush in front of a lit-up window. To create the illusion that the bush is illuminated by the window light, one can do a light-painted capture of the bush. Personally, I have never done any light painting on a real estate shoot (to be blunt, I don’t get paid nearly enough to go through the trouble), but that’s where I first learned of the technique.

I had been shooting still-life photos for a while by this point, using that gorgeous New Mexico morning light. But I wanted to achieve softer shadows, more drama, and have more control over all the elements in a scene. I tried a few homespun approaches, but nothing really clicked until one day I thought, “Huh, maybe I could light paint still lifes”. This turned out to be one of my better ideas (it is of course an idea that many others have had, but I didn’t know this at the time), but it did take quite some time to get the feel.

Around this time, I discovered your photography. I remember thinking to myself, “How on Earth does he do that???” I mean, you take something that most people would completely overlook as an art object (an old hammer, for instance), and you light it so beautifully that one isn’t quite sure if it’s a photograph or a painting. You are in complete control of everything in the frame: every fleck of light, every detail in the subject matter. I knew that you were light painting, and I even bought your diffusers (and the flashlight you recommend), but I couldn’t even approach the look and feel of your photos. It was little more than a tantalizing clue at this point.

I light painted on my own for about a year. I came up with a few good images, but there was always something “wrong” that I didn’t have the technical ability to fix. I finally decided to pull the trigger on buying your online course. Everything changed.

"Still Life with Cherries"

*****

How has Light Painting changed your creative approach to photography?

To put it simply, as I just mentioned, it has changed everything.

I think I have always been drawn to the dramatic use of shadow and light in art. I love the way that great painters are able to capture light. One looks at a painting by someone like Vermeer or Mark Maggiori and it’s as if the canvas itself is glowing. (Music can do this too - just listen to the first movement of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. There is light and shadow everywhere.) It seemed like your approach might give me the ability to capture light in a way that truly great artists can.

It’s also made me hyper-aware of light in photography. This may seem obvious, but I think a lot of aspiring photographers think only about the subject and not the way it is lit. Light is everything in photography. At this point, I basically don’t even want to take a picture unless I am controlling the light, or it is golden hour. Anything else just looks flat and lifeless to me.

A more intellectual way to answer your question touches on something that Daniel Remer brought up in his recent interview with you: Walter Benjamin’s concept of the "aura" of the artwork.

This is something I have thought a lot about ever since being exposed to his ideas many years ago. I have a different interpretation of how Benjamin’s ideas relate to light painting than does Remer, and I will try to explain my point of view. 

Benjamin frames the “loss of aura" not as something inherent in individual works but as a society-wide shift in how we perceive art. I think he is fundamentally right, but I also think that artists of all stripes (whether consciously or not) have all manner of compensatory strategies to attempt to bring back the "aura" in a work of art. I think all artists have an inherent sense of the "aura", its loss, and how they might create a simulacrum of it. And I think consumers of art are also aware of the stakes in some way.

Audiophiles, for example, are an interesting example when it comes to music. It’s not uncommon, among the audiophile community, to find people who have spent upwards of $50,000 on their record player, speakers, etc. All this is done simply to reproduce the “natural” sound of musicians playing live in a room (an experience that arguably contains a stronger sense of aura than listening to a recording). All that money and time spent on the mediation is meant, ironically, to make the mediation disappear.

Let me explain how I see this relating to photography. What drew me to still life, and eventually light painting, was, as I mentioned earlier, the lovely New Mexico morning light. One morning, there were a couple of lemons sitting by a blue pitcher on our kitchen counter. The light on them was absolutely lovely. It might sound silly, but it was an emotional experience seeing those lemons and that pitcher in the morning sun.

Of course, the first thing I tried was to grab my camera and take a picture of those lemons and - of course - this came nowhere near capturing the emotional valence of the subject. My still life path has been more or less all about trying to recapture the loveliness of that natural light I saw on those lemons that morning.

I believe that light painting contains a similar irony to audiophilia. The way to capture the feel of lemons sitting on a counter in the morning sun is, ironically, by adding more and more layers of mediation. The light painting process that you teach is, among other things, a very involved process. It includes taking multiple captures of a scene (even a simple still life scene might include upwards of ten individual captures), then combining them in Photoshop in very specific ways. In a sense, the objects in a still-life scene are painted twice: once during shooting and again in the masking process in Photoshop. 

"Still Life with Violin"

*****

The point here is that these images are highly mediated/manipulated. But here’s the magic: when I look at a well-done light-painted image, it contains more of the feeling that those objects might contain, under good light, to the unaided eye. It’s not exactly like audiophilia; light painting doesn’t strive to make itself disappear. However, I believe that the additional layers of manipulation/mediation lead to a more immediate experience of the objects captured. 

Light painting has the power to reveal more of an object’s “soul”, for lack of a better term, than more conventional methods of photography.

"Still Life with Pear"

*****

Can you briefly describe the process that you go through when creating a composition? Do you use sketching or drawing to work up your concepts, or do you gather subjects and “play around”? Or, is there another approach that you use?

Oh my gosh, no, I can’t draw at all… 

Honestly, it’s a pretty time-consuming process to set up even a simple still-life set. With your approach, it’s tricky to make changes to a scene once the shooting commences, so I have to think critically about every element. You have a fantastic way of boiling down complex concepts into simple-to-follow rules, and you’ve done the same with composing a still life. These guidelines help, but of course, they don’t make good compositions on their own.

I spend a lot of time Googling “still life images” and having a look at other peoples’ work. I think a lot of good art - perhaps even most good art - begins as a copy of someone else’s work. One has to find one’s own voice, of course, but mimicking is a pretty good place to start.

That said, I think it’s really about finding interesting objects that make sense together. It could be context, color, shape, a message, or one (or more) of a lot of other factors. One thing I love about being so deep into this is that my mind is always passively seeking still-life ideas. Whenever I’m at a store or a friend’s house, I’m always thinking about how I could use objects to create a still life. A pomegranate is no longer just a pomegranate; it’s a threshold to a beautiful image.

I will often play around with a composition for a week or more. I do my shooting in my very tiny (and overstuffed) garage. So I’ll place some objects on the cabinet that I have in there, and I’ll just play around with them in my spare time here and there. I try to shoot at least one still life every Thursday morning, so the rest of the week is for editing, tweaking an upcoming composition, or looking for interesting items. 

I will also add that all artists are hemmed in (to a greater or lesser extent) by their technical abilities. I’ll never be able to play guitar like Bill Frisell, or sing like Jeff Buckley, so I have to find what works for my abilities. Same with photography. While my technique has grown by leaps and bounds and gets a little better every time I shoot a still life, there are still lots of subjects that I would love to shoot, but either know I can’t, or fail at trying to capture. Last week, I set up a nice composition that featured a silver pitcher. I simply could not manage to shoot that pitcher effectively. Someday, however, I will, so this provides another motivation to keep working and improving.

All that and the fact that I really love photographing lemons!

"Still Life with Lemons and Blue Vase"

*****

Do you ever have periods during which you struggle with inspiration or energy to make images? Judging by the number of images you've created since I've known you, my guess is that your answer is "no". Am I correct?

First, I will say that I don’t really believe in “inspiration”. I believe in work. If inspiration exists, it is somewhat inaccessible a majority of the time; it doesn’t necessarily come when called. But work? Work is something someone can access at almost any time.

I struggle with energy every day due to my illness. However, choosing to take the time to work in a creative space gives me energy rather than taking it away. 

I would love to have the energy to be out and about all the time, taking day trips, vacations, going to concerts, etc, all with a camera in hand. But this, unfortunately, is not a life that’s available to me. Light painting the still life is so wonderful for my life because it works within the limitations that have been placed on me. I can create beautiful photographs right here in the comfort of my home, on my own time.

I will add that photographing the still life is wonderful for my mental health, which provides additional inspiration to keep going. I can’t stress this point enough. Producing “beautiful” images is honestly more of a nice by-product of time well spent, rather than a goal in and of itself.

Can you tell us a bit about your long-term goals for your photography?

It would be great to make some money off of this at some point. And I’m like anyone else. I like getting “likes” on Instagram; I would love to have some gallery shows, etc., in the future.

But honestly, I’m doing this for myself. It brings me a bit of joy every time I spend time creatively. Before bed every night, I scroll through the good still-life images on my phone and think to myself, “Yeah, I did that.” I think that’s enough for me right now. If other things happen with these, great. If not, that’s fine too. 

I’m interested in putting in the work to make images, not so much in all the auxiliary stuff an artist has to do to get “discovered.” If someone sees my work and likes it, great, but I don’t place my self-esteem on that and I’m frankly not willing to put in the work required to get more eyes to pay attention to me.

I also take pride in the work I do, and you have set such an incredibly (note that I did not say “impossibly high") standard that I know the only way to get close is to keep working. 

If you were forced to choose one of your images to represent your work and photography, what image would that be?

Something with a lemon in it! Ha!

Or maybe something that’s a little more representative of me, my history, and my worldview. I don’t have a lot of these yet, but I did a nice one with my Canon P and a bandana in it (when my photographer friend Emily Seiler saw this, she was like, “Dude, that photo is you!”), and I did another one that was very personal - kind of about how music theory and academia led to my health collapse and, quite literally, almost killed me.

But I’m not certain that meaning, or even expression, necessarily has to be the point of art. I’m sure a lot of people would disagree with this statement, but it seems to me that the world is a hard place to be in. Isn’t there value in beauty for its own sake? I think so.

But the real answer is that I have not produced that image yet.

"Still Life with Canon P"

*****

What advice would you give to a beginning photographer/artist?

I have three ideas.

First, just go shoot, or paint, or play, or whatever is it that turns you on. 

I know that our culture puts a high priority on making money, and we tend to define “success” by that standard. Am I an artist? Are you an artist? I think there are two ways to view this. Do you make money as an artist? Maybe not - and by that definition I am not an artist (or at least not a good one). Do you create (or at least try to create) art every day? Then you’re an artist! If you want to be an artist, make art. It’s that simple. Write a song, a poem, or a short story. Take a picture or paint one. It doesn’t even matter if it’s good. It’s the doing that matters. I believe deeply that an artist is someone who makes art, period. 

Second, you must learn your craft. 

A couple hundred years ago, there was no real distinction between “artist” and “craftsman” and I think we’re all a bit poorer for this distinction being in place in our culture. Take your craft seriously and learn how to use your tools; learn the mechanics of your chosen medium. This may or may not require some art education, or a great teacher. There are as many ways to learn as there are people. Art is mostly craft and work and only a little bit “inspiration”.

Third, show up on time, and don’t be a jerk. 

You might aspire to be as successful as Bob Dylan or Picasso, but if you're not as talented, you'll likely need support from others to succeed. You’ll probably need some people to be on your side in order to succeed. Too often, young artists think they need to act like some misguided impression of how artists behave - drinking too much, showing up late, being a boor, and the like. No, no, no, no, no. Be a nice person; you’ll get a lot more doors opening for you.

And find your lemon.🍋

"Still Life with Lemon and Blue Pitcher"

*****

Links and info:

Please check out my band Winter Barn. We’re available worldwide on all major streaming platforms. Or go to our website www.winterbarnmusic.com to find out more.

You can see my photos on my Instagram: @garreth_paul_photography

I keep a personal website (mostly) up to date: garrethpaulphotography.com