We Want to Live in Sam Hodge’s Photos Please
Millie Stein quizzes photographer Sam Hodge over a mid-morning hot chocolate.
As Sam Hodge’s subjects will attest, the moment he captures on film seems infinitely more sublime than the one that really existed. That’s why we all love, and want to live inside, his photographs. We spoke about this over mid-morning hot chocolate.
Millie Stein: People always say the same stuff about your photos, me included; they’re nostalgic, spontaneous…
Sam Hodge: Yeah, and “where’s the camera?”
MS: Do you identify with that?
SH: I don’t think about it. I go out and take photos. I don’t think there’s anything special about taking photos or being a photographer.
MS: But you’ve made a career out of it.
SH: No! I don’t make any money.
MS: Was being a photographer a conscious choice?
SH: It’s kind of like: I can’t do anything else. I used to want to be a filmmaker. I had to take stills from films I was working on and realised I liked the control of the still image. I thought I’d try to get on to fashion shoots, but I hated it so much. It was so dull. I could have been working in a sandwich shop and it wouldn’t have been any different.
MS: Does a good photo require intimacy?
SH: I’ve always said it requires honesty. I don’t see how it’s that impossible to take a good photo, or to set it up to look intimate, but in an unexplainable way, humans are capable of telling whether something is real.
MS: Do you consider your own photographs art?
SH: I think they look good when they’re hung up. I tend to stare at them a lot when they’re blown up and in frames. Aesthetically, I feel pleased when I see them.
MS: For your most recent book, Pretty Telling I Suppose, you let the publishers at Rainoff Books choose which photos were to go in. How was that?
SH: It was a nice experiment to see what other people want. I like if I’m not that comfortable with something or if I feel like it’s not very safe - I think that means something. The only thing I was worried about was that they’d see that I’m a really shit photographer but I just know how to edit.
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