The Transcript

A Philosophy of Art for the Digital Age

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Stefanie Flaxman: Hello there, Editor-in-Chiefs. I am Stefanie Flaxman, and you are listening to Editor-in-Chief, the weekly audio broadcast that delivers the art of writing, updated for the digital age to help you become a stronger media producer.

I’ve talked a little bit in past weeks — little snippets here and there — about philosophy of art. You’ve heard a bit of my views on the subject, but I wanted to bring in someone who is an artist creating media in the digital space and online to get a different perspective of what it means to be an artist in the digital age.

On today’s episode, I’m going to share with you my conversation with Bryan Formhals, who is a photographer. He’s also a podcaster and an author, and he’s going to talk about all of the cool stuff that he’s doing for the audience that he’s built, and a lot of it is online. Here is my conversation with Bryan Formhals.

Hey, Bryan. Thank you for joining me today.

Bryan Formhals: Hey Stefanie, thanks for having me.

Stefanie Flaxman: I’m really interested in something that we were actually talking about before we started recording. I liked our conversation, so I wanted to jump right in so we can get it on tape — or digital, whatever.

I wanted to talk to you today because I consider you an Editor-in-Chief. What was interesting was that you were saying that you had listened to the first episode of Editor-in-Chief, and you identified with it, and that’s how you thought of yourself as well.

Why You Must Be Intentional about the Content You Publish Online

Bryan Formhals: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve always thought of myself as an editor. I have a Tumblr called Photographs on the Brain, and I’ve done a lot of stuff sharing photography, and people would always say, “Oh, you’re a curator of photography.”

I m like, No! I consider myself an editor, and I take that seriously. I take editors very seriously, too. I think that’s an incredibly important job. In terms of an outlook on the way content goes out into the web, I definitely can tell the people that are editors and that think that way.

It’s always been something that I’ve identified with internally. For a long time, I’ve always wanted to be an Editor-in-Chief in some regard or another. How we define that these days, there’s a million different ways to say things that people do with content on the web, but I really like that term and idea of the Editor-in-Chief. It means that you are ultimately the decider of what goes out and what has relevance for you.

Stefanie Flaxman: Right. We talk about content shock a lot. That idea comes up. At some point when everybody is producing content online, you really have to be intentional with what you distribute. What do you think is a difference between an editor and a curator, since you made that little distinction there?

The Difference between a Curator and an Editor

Bryan Formhals: I don’t mind when people say they’re curating their lifestyle and things like that. I think language evolves, and I’m not too uptight about looking down on people that way. Again, it’s another respect for what real curators in museums do, which is an incredibly difficult job and requires a lot of education. They’re making more choices besides just stuff that they like.

A lot of times I feel, essentially, when people are curating on the web, like, “Here’s stuff I like,” which is great to share, and I’m all for that. But I don t really think you’re doing anything else. To me, a curator, too, I keep it more in that revered, professional kind of skill. Whereas for you as an editor it s that I’m a media person. And editors are all part of that big media stew, and they’re an important, integral aspect of how stuff gets out to your audience — the public, your marketing audience, or your art audience, whoever it may be.

Editors are the people that have that judgment in terms of what type of news or content is going to be relevant for your specific audience and making those decisions — yes or no. This photo or no, not that photo. Somebody has to make that ultimate choice, and that’s the editor s job.

Stefanie Flaxman: Right, it s the specific lens through which that message is delivered. It stops with the Editor-in-Chief or whatever you want to call it.

You do a lot of different stuff. You have a podcast, and you have book that you co-authored, and you are street photographer, last I checked or we talked. I haven’t seen you for a couple years.

I’d love to hear about some of the stuff you’re doing and how that all came about.

Bryan Formhals: Sure. We can go all the way back to when I graduated out college. I studied journalism and communication. I didn’t really want to go work for a small-town newspaper, so I decided I was going to more into the corporate world. I ended up working on the Internet, doing things with Internet monitoring. My jobs have always revolved around the Internet and media and marketing to some degree.

I grew up with blogs too, and I was always interested in the way blogs were transforming the media landscape. I was jumping on that right away. Come 2007, when social media started erupting, I was like, “Listen, I want to work on the Internet. If I’m going to do it, I think I have to go try to build my own brand and prove that I can do it.”

How Bryan s Blog Evolved into a Print Magazine and Then a Podcast

Bryan Formhals: I started a website called LPV, La Pura Vida, which basically where I would edit and share photography that I was finding on Flickr, because I was a big member of the Flickr community. That’s where I started. I started out as a photography blogger and evolved the blog into a magazine, LPV Magazine. I jumped on Twitter right away. In 2007, I built a pretty large following with LPV.

In 2014 or something, TIME named it one of the best art Twitter feeds. I got a little bit of recognition for what I was doing with LPV. We published seven magazines, which I was really excited about. At the time, I started to see a lot of other people doing magazines. I get really anxious and don’t want to do whatever everyone else is doing. I took a little bit off. I’ve done the podcast for a season. I was happy with it, but from a technical perspective, it wasn’t so great.

I started working with my buddy Tom, and last fall, we started doing Season 2. The LPV Show essentially has me talking to photographers about their processes and photo books. It’s a small niche. The photo book culture is booming. It’s nice. It’s not something that s going to attract a huge audience. It’s something that I really enjoy. I love talking to artists. I love getting into their influences, their inspirations, how they work, how they come up with their ideas. Right now, for me, the photo book is the thing I m focused on, what I’m most passionate about. It brings all that stuff together.

I’m on vacation this week. I do have a day job. If you look me up, you’ll be able to find it. I do work in content marketing as well for a rather large photography brand.

Basically, I exist in this photography Internet world in many different ways. I’ve been involved with that for going on seven or eight years now. That’s probably what I am first. Obviously, I do love photography and I’m out working on my projects. I have no delusions of that I ll ever be a professional photographer or show in galleries or things like that. I really do it as my love for photography and art and how important that is to me, my personal growth, and who I am as a person. I couldn’t possibly imagine not making photographs or trying to make art. It really balances everything out for me. I try to keep busy. I’m having no problems doing that these days.

Stefanie Flaxman: Good. That’s good. It’s a part of you, so there’s no reason to stifle it, or at least that is what you discovered, it sounds like.

Bryan Formhals: Yeah, absolutely. It’s such a cliché. You hear it a million times. If you’re doing what you love, you’re never working. I’ve gotten that synergy in the last couple of years where my day jobs keeps me challenged. I love it, and I love what I’m doing, and it revolves around photography, so I’m right there.

Then when I’m off the clock, I’m hanging out with amazing photographers and artists and talking to them, or pursuing my own stuff. I like being busy, and I like having a lot of things to do. I know for some people, multi-tasking can be difficult, but for me, that’s my brain. You don’t understand.

Stefanie Flaxman: You have to be all over the place in lots of different places.

Why Bryan Loves Copy Editors

Bryan Formhals: Yeah. Obviously, there’s some drawbacks to it. When we were talking about editors before, I forgot to mention that the people I respect most are copy editors. You mentioned the book I co-published, that’s called Photographers’ Sketchbooks. In that book, me and co-author Stephen McLaren basically looked at the processes of 43 contemporary photographers and how they develop their project.

Working with a copy editor on that blew my mind. Writing, for me, is very difficult. I’d put in the copy and send it to the copy editor. I was like, “Oh man, I’m so embarrassed.” After she went through it, I was like, “Man, I sound pretty good. I could be a real writer if I actually work with the copy editor and didn’t just post or publish on Tumblr or WordPress. Obviously, we worked together as editors way back when. Copy editors, to me — there’s something amazing.

Stefanie Flaxman: It’s a good collaboration, and I bet that copy editor has a lot of satisfaction that she helped you produce something that was your true vision of what you wanted to release.

Bryan Formhals: Yeah, absolutely. She would constantly be saying that without the writers, there would be nothing there. She has that admiration for writers and for language. It’s such a learning process, the things that they point out of the way you write and some things that you might say over and over again, or different ways of phrasing. Man, it made me feel good about my writing. I wish I could have that copy editor with me all the time. Attention to detail is not my strong suit, so I’m even more impressed by what they do.

Stefanie Flaxman: Okay, Photographers’ Sketchbooks. It sounds like you collaborate a lot, because you have a collaboration going on with the podcast. The book that you co-authored involved a lot of other photographers. You want to get in the mind of the artist.

The Benefits of Collaboration

Bryan Formhals: Yeah, absolutely. Collaboration to me, it’s something I’m always thinking about. It’s something I always want to challenge myself on, because it’s incredibly difficult. I’ve had collaborations go sour. They blow up, or it doesn’t work out. You learn that that’s part of the deal when you’re dealing with artists and photographers. It doesn’t work. Why does the band break up after their one-hit album? Now I see it from the inside.

I like the challenge. I like the challenge of seeing how other people think and how your ideas and their ideas can coalesce and mix and turn into something new. When I’m doing the podcast, the moment I know it’s really working is when me and the person I’m interviewing get in that headspace where we’re sharing ideas and we’re developing it together. To me, that’s so incredibly fun.

It goes back to when I did improv comedy when I lived in Minneapolis in the early 2000s.That was the most creatively fulfilling time of anything that I’ve ever done because working with five people in that headspace was amazing. Something I’ve always tried to do in everything that I’m doing is to work closely with people and artists, and develop big ideas. It’s what I do, I guess.

What Improv Can Teach You about Consistently Writing Strong Content

Stefanie Flaxman: That’s funny that you mentioned improv. I’ve been thinking of improv a lot lately, because I think it’s such an important skill to have. Podcasting is still somewhat new to me, so I was thinking, “Man, those skills if you can really sharpen them, then you’re on it. You’re prepared for anything.” It’s funny that you mentioned it.

We met about 10 years ago. Your roommate did improv too. This memory just came back to me. Right? Who was that? You don t have to say his name.

Bryan Formhals: Yeah. What was his name? Carl, maybe? No, I can’t remember the name.

Stefanie Flaxman: Okay. We don’t need to reveal exactly who he was.

Bryan Formhals: It’s just because I’m old. I forget everyone’s names. I’m terrible with names, awful. It was Phil. We moved from Minneapolis together. He did improv.

It is an amazing skill. It’s difficult to describe. One of the important things is listening, too. You have to be listening constantly. The key phrase in improv is Yes and. I believe I read this. You know you’ve used Yes and before, where it’s like you accept what your partner says and you try to build on it. It’s one of those fundamental aspects of any sort of creative collaboration that you can apply to anything.

Stefanie Flaxman: Right. It’s such a widespread tip, because it could also be the same in writing. I was thinking of screenplays, but also in content writing. From the headlines to the first paragraph, everything has to push the story forward in some way that holds the audience’s attention and is engaging. I think there’s a cool writing tip in there.

Definitely with improv, I always think that you have to go with it. There can’t be someone who’s like “We’re at a dentist’s office,” and the other person is like, “No, we’re at my mother-in-law’s 70th birthday party.”

Bryan Formhals: Exactly. It’s such a painful lesson when that starts happening and the teachers stop you, and it’s like, “No, no, no.” I was terrible at improv, too, though, but it s something I’m glad I did for my own creativity.

Even when I’m out taking pictures, I roam around. I go wherever the impulse takes me. I use improv in almost everything. Even in terms of content marketing, what’s going on the web is that you have to almost have that improvisational mindset, because the ground is shifting beneath us so often. I’ve seen those shifts happen so quickly. If you don’t have the ability to synthesize what’s going on and react quickly, I don’t know how you’re going to survive in this environment. There are so many reasons to take that mindset.

Another big thing with that, too,...