At the age of 16, Reuben Radding dropped out of high school to pursue a career in music. Feeling shackled by the homogeneity of suburban DC in the 80’s, Radding pursued a life of art and adventure. Radding played music in punk and grunge brands before venturing to New York City in 1988.
In New York, Radding became integrated in the downtown music scene. It wasn’t until the mid 2000’s when he refocused his attention from music to photography. Radding’s sonic discoveries did not go to waste, though- he uses them to inform his visual ideologies.
Radding’s photography practice serves as a meditative endeavor, walking countless miles through the streets of New York to enter a state of non-self. The result is a body of work that transcends ego and genre.
We got the chance to sit down with Reuben and hear about his work and the creative process behind it.
Impermanent Gallery: As a creative worker, a lot of the things that you have said really resonate with me. Your ideas are similar to some of the most prolific creative thinkers of recent times, such as Rick Rubin and Virgil Abloh. They are two of my biggest inspirations, and I think that you fit right along with them. Are you familiar with their work?
Reuben Radding: I'm familiar with them both. I don't know a whole lot about Abloh, but I was always familiar with Rick Rubin as a record producer. Recently I started getting fed his interviews from the YouTube algorithm but I hadn’t gotten around to watching them. At the same time some people were reaching out to me through social media saying, “the stuff Rick Rubin is talking about is a lot like the things you say.” Then a former student of mine wrote me and she was like, “I got Rick Rubin's book. You're gonna fucking love it.” And so yeah, I checked it out. I totally see the connection because Rubin talks about fundamentals–not so much about the specifics of making a certain thing.
Impermanent: Yeah, and a lot of the fundamentals that you use in photography come from music, right?
Radding: It's true. I mean, sometimes I'm sort of rediscovering things through photography. I’ll make a discovery and then I go, “Oh, that's exactly like this thing from music that I already know.” Or I'll run up against what feels like a brick wall in my photography and I'll think, “Okay, how is this similar to something I've already faced in music?” And there's always a parallel. It's really crazy. There's something about learning stuff through multiple art forms that helps feed that understanding.
Impermanent: Right. And I know I just used the word “inspiration,” a concept that you like to stay away from. But for someone who is starting out in any medium, do you think that it's a good idea to start replicating or finding inspiration from others? Maybe to gain your own creative momentum? Or do you think that's unnecessary?
Radding: I don't think it's necessary, but it doesn't mean that it couldn't be beneficial. Whether you're following somebody else's example or going completely off your own instincts–one way or another, you're gonna develop a vocabulary. When you're new to a medium you have a great possibility of naively displaying your own style. You already have your own vocabulary, but as your freshness fades you’ll tend to lose some of that and become more inhibited. I see our prior knowledge as a potential pitfall, even though it can be helpful. It's all how you use it. Developing that vocabulary needs to be driven by a really honest understanding of what you respond to.
Impermanent: And part of that discovery for you was deciding to only shoot in black and white, right?
Radding: Yeah, but as soon as I committed to black and white I was faced with situations that felt like they needed to be in color… but then I thought, “Well, maybe those situations just aren't for me.” And so moving to black and white ended up solving way more problems than it created. I learned this idea from the poet Richard Hugo that you have to prioritize music over truth. In poetry, If you're valuing truth over music, you might have a line where you're describing somebody with brown eyes… but the word blue really works better. You’re thinking “I can't change the line because their eyes are actually brown,” right? Well if you're trying to make a meaningful poem, you can't be hung up on something like that. In photography we think we're so stuck with reality. Oftentimes the solution is to do some sort of technique to obscure reality and make it more creative, to lean into the fact that photography is always transformative. That's one way. But there's a more fundamental solution for me, which is altering your thinking about your relationship to subject matter. This was all a discovery for me when I switched to black and white. It was a challenge with its own solution, but I'm always in a state of friction with my desires and tastes.
Impermanent: So if someone considers themself a documentary photographer–do you think that they have a different perspective on the music versus truth thing?
Radding: I mean, there's so many different people in that role that it would be completely unfair to make a generalization. The problem for documentary photographers is how to keep from showing weaker pictures in order to convey information. One of my big teachers, though, was a guy named Jeff Jacobson. He prioritized making pictures that are powerful. He liked to have subject matter that had a lot of gravity unto itself without feeling like he had to explain everything about the topic or event.. He liked to shoot the ongoing political landscape and created images with a lot of gravity. I relate to that, but I have found that I like not being dependent on a certain subject matter. Part of that is my desire to be able to do this anywhere, everywhere, and all the time. Feeling like I have to have the right subject matter to go shoot is kind of crippling to me. I totally get why those bigger occasions are powerful, but I feel like it doesn't leave quite as much room for the viewer's imagination or mine. My ego likes to take pictures that I know some people will consider more important because they relate to certain topics, but ultimately, I don't really feel like it's my path. I need to be aware of having an identity. I'm an artist, and that's because of my values, not because of what I can and can't do with a picture. That's what excites me to chase, you know?
Impermanent: Yeah, I’ve heard you say, “My photos show my values not my value,” or something along the lines of that.
Radding: Right. Well, I hope so. I can't imagine any of my pictures representing whatever my value is as a person. But I think my values are inevitably portrayed in the pictures I'm making. They feel almost involuntary.
Impermanent: The word “involuntary” reminds me of your music being improvisational and experimental. Where do you see the parallels between your photography and your music? Does one type of genre or sound align with your visual work most?
Radding: I don't think it can be demonstrated that literally, but I definitely understand the connection. When I started playing music on some kind of professional level, I was always coming back to the avant garde, improvised music. I worked as a freelance musician and I was gaining all kinds of skills and experiences and being a part of communities and all of this amazing shit. I had a really eclectic taste and a real desire to be a working artist. I wanted to let all of these experiences accumulate inside of me and get mixed up into this new soup that comes out when I'm improvising.
Impermanent: I definitely feel the absence of genre in your work.
Radding: If you play music and you play a genre, there's a built-in vocabulary to that music, and you get to mess with that vocabulary: add to it, subtract from it, bring in influences from other genres, and do things to subvert it. Hopefully you make the genre grow. You can do any of those things in improvised music, but the basic endeavor of improvisation is absent of a specific sonic target. Its common vocabulary is risk. There may be a moment where outside influences are appropriate, but most improvisers hope to develop a personal language. When I get up to improvise with someone else, it's about what we have to say in this new moment, not about doing something that we know how to do already. In that scene, you could hear three different guitar players in one night, and with your eyes closed, know exactly who each one was because they had radically different approaches. You could hear somebody who plays a flute that doesn’t even sound like a flute. When I'm doing photography I feel close to that, but I'd say my photo models are a bit more conventional. Even my riskiest photos still use the material of real life. So it’s a little different from the abstract world of improvised music or nonrepresentational art in terms of outcomes. I have this really deep desire to make art out of real life. That's what makes things very confusing. A lot of people think you are a documentarian if you're still dealing with the real world. Different pictures, though, incorporate more ambiguity than others, so there's not an easy answer to this question. But for me, I want to walk out my door every fucking day and not know what I'm gonna chase and not know what it's gonna look like when I'm done. There’s a sense of risk that I feel walking out into the world with no plan, no guarantees, and no allegiance to anything. The chance that I'll be surprised is so much more exciting to me than some assurance of preselected material. I want to be making pictures for myself with no particular themes or need to tell you something specific. But similar to when I was playing more music, I’ve always taken other photography jobs shooting weddings, band photos, and such… something’s got to pay for this, right? The thing that really altered the course of things for me was COVID, because when COVID happened, everything that I was doing for money vanished overnight. And so all I had left was my art. I went into overdrive, and just started going really hard in the street. It’s changed everything.
Impermanent: Your zines during COVID really exploded for you, right?
Radding: COVID zines went well. I had put a couple out the previous year just as something to do. I found myself with no way to make a dollar, so I did a little print sale that was helpful, but you can't do those every month. So then I thought, “Well, I know how to do a zine.” So I did this one called Corona Diary which sold out really fast. Then a couple months later I'm going, “Man, I don't know how I'm gonna keep making money,” so I did a second one. I certainly had enough pictures because I was out every day for 8 to 15 miles. The second zine did well, but I thought, “No way can I put out a third one.” I have a really bad relationship with self promotion. A real problem of mine is this expectation that people are gonna think I'm egocentric or high on myself. I feel like putting work into the world is actually important, but then I have this inhibition because I feel like if I shout from the rooftops people are gonna be like, “Who does this fucking guy think he is?” To this day, every time I make any sort of post that's promotional I feel sick inside, but I do it because I have to to sustain myself. Despite my physical and emotional discomfort around it, I did the third Corona Diary zine. I've been expecting waves of haters since the beginning of 2020, and they haven't really been showing up en masse. So, you know, I don't worry too much about it. But yes, it was a big change. Moving my workshops online was also a big change. I was just about to host a workshop in my home when COVID hit. Then we moved online and suddenly I was working with people who were from all these different places. I had students in Canada, California, Boston, Texas, and now I get people from Europe and Asia too. It's made my life so much more interesting as well as bringing me business.
Impermanent: Totally. It’s incredible how some amazing things arose out of a terrible situation. I want to move us over to the topic of storytelling… Your Instagram bio says “visual story ruiner.” Are you doing the opposite of storytelling in your work?
Radding: Yeah, it's sort of a cheeky, contrarian statement about myself. I see so many people involved in photography right now who call themselves visual storytellers. Some of these people are really good at what they do, and I have nothing but respect for them. But there's this humongous number of people who just adopt terms like that who are not storytellers. Either they don't tell stories or they don't tell them well. It's a really fun thing to say about yourself I guess, because it makes you feel like you're something more. I don't buy it most of the time- I have too much respect for story. I was trying to be a fiction writer at one point, and I studied story very carefully because I was very bad at it. I didn't understand how to embrace plot and still do the things I was good at. It was not so different from some of the conundrums I live in now. But I eventually learned what story is made out of, and that's not what I see in most “visual storytellers’” work. Stories are about change and conflict, but what people will call stories now are just clues to relationships or a demonstrated understanding of what is going on in a moment. But that doesn't make it a story. If you see a kid with an ice cream cone and they're giving it a big lick, that's not a story.
Impermanent: It’s just one scene in the story.
Radding: It's a kid with an ice cream cone, right? And that's fine- I have no quarrel with these things. But when people use terms as a smoke screen, it doesn't impress me–it does the opposite. People could be doing some really special things if they drop this idea of creating a narrative. Even when I do things that are thematic, there's a case to be made that I'm not actually telling a story or a truth. Instead of trying to pretend otherwise, I found it funny to just say, well, I'm a visual story ruiner.
Impermanent: Gotcha. You mentioned a little bit ago that the chance of being surprised is very exciting to you. When you're taking a photo, do you always see the significance of the image? Or do you sometimes notice an element afterwards that makes the entire photo work?
Radding: There's no one way that it happens- It's a million different ways. Very often I just sense potential in something. I have to work quickly enough to get the moment because so much of what I'm going for tends to be these really fleeting moments. And so I don’t have a whole lot of time to make any decisions. You’ve got to just grab that shit. And so in that action, sometimes my approach completely obliterates the thing that made me interested in it in the first place. Sometimes that's a good thing, and sometimes it ruins it. Whether any one of these pictures is going to be a failure or a hidden gem is completely unpredictable.
Impermanent: Shooting digital, how often are you actually snapping the shutter? Is it way more than it would be if you were shooting film?
Radding: Probably, but it doesn't have a whole lot of bearing on success rates or something like that. The longer I do this, the more I just laugh at success rates or the idea of them. The only thing that I know for sure is that being out more seems to help, but it doesn't necessarily mean that taking more shots helps. I have walked around for seven hours, felt like I got nothing, and then in five minutes I get three shots that are interesting. You don't know which five minutes of the day that's gonna happen, so you just gotta be out there. That's not a function of taking more shots- it's a function of taking on this practice for more hours of the day. Pressing the button more times isn't a guarantee of much, so film versus digital has no real effect on that. Sometimes I think if I won the lottery and I could afford to shoot all the film I want, I’d change to film tomorrow.
Impermanent: So it’s the financial incentive too.
Radding: Yeah. Hell yeah. When I stopped shooting film it was way cheaper than it is now. It’s insane. At this point I would have to change how I shoot. I couldn't afford to shoot 1500 exposures a week, which is probably a typical number for me. It would be financially impossible. Even if I could afford it, what about the time? If I were to develop that much film I wouldn’t have time to be out on the streets, to teach, and do whatever else I do. I really did love film cameras and I loved working with a mechanical device rather than a computerized one. I loved the physicality of negatives. It's enchanting. I'm not putting film down, but I got to a point where continuing to make pictures as much as I want has to be my first priority. I want to always be able to take pictures. I’ve got an apartment, a computer, and a camera. I have everything I need to do this. In my dream life, I have a space outside of where I live to house my stuff and deal with my photographic life. But honestly, I would strongly suspect that if I got there, I would look back and think my happiest days were when I was just sitting in my apartment with my students on Zoom.
Impermanent: That’s beautiful.
Radding: Like, how fucking lucky am I? I feel like those lessons I learned in the very beginning of getting into photography seriously were so important. I’ve seen a fuck load of bitterness from photographers who come through art school with very specific ideas of where success lives. But they didn't find it so easy to get into those arenas, whether it was outlets to have work published, or galleries. If they couldn't get attention from these very specific places they felt like they were pieces of shit. That doesn't seem like a life I want. I've already been through this with music. There's all these gatekeepers that you think you have to get past. I feel the same way with photography- I don't need these industry people to do what I do. I wouldn’t turn away their attention if they brought it my way, but our views of the world have to be less limited. When you're young, you only see certain avenues as legit, but there's so many different ways to have an art life. They should be driven by your actual appetites and desires. I've learned that what makes me really happy above all else is living in the work. I developed this crazy idea in my head as a young kid that an artist's life was 24/7. There was no normal time–you’re just like living the dream all the time. It was a very unrealistic childish view that I internalized on a biological level. So I was always unhappy as a musician. I always felt impatient, dissatisfied, and frustrated with waiting… but boy, photography is such a gift. I don't ever have to wait. I can take a picture whenever I want, and all of my decisions keep being fueled by that need. I'm ready to take a picture at any time, anywhere, 24/7. I don't have to, but the fact that I could makes me feel so free; so unburdened. I don't have to wait for subject matter. I don't have to wait for an assignment. I don't have to wait for a deal with a gallery. I just get to do what I do all the time, and I just wanna work.
Impermanent: Yeah, dude. I'm suffering from that 24/7 concept. I force myself to always carry a camera on me, but I'm stressing about counting my rolls and exposures. I think I have to figure that out too.
Radding: Maybe, maybe not. The answers have to come from within you. I meet lots of young people though who get really hung up on these things because what's driving their decisions is not an honest self exploration. At the end of the day, you gotta go wait, “who am I?” And for me, it's more important to be able to go out and take pictures every day than it is to over-determine what my work needs to be. Even just focusing on a specific neighborhood or something would start to feel really contrary to my larger spiritual need.
Impermanent: Totally. I was thinking about that concept because you talk about authenticity a lot. You have mentioned this term, “the authentic self” a couple of times. You have a very unique and unconventional life story… but let’s take a scenario of someone living, for lack of a better term, “a regular life.” They have a day job, value security, and are pretty content with that. I'm curious what you think their most authentic self might be.
Radding: I think you have to understand that you aren't what you do. Practice in Buddhism and meditation can be a helpful place to start. For me, street photography is really just a version of meditation. I spend shit loads of hours alone, chasing something and seeing lots of nothing. When I’m in the streets I am observing myself to the point of exhaustion and then there come these moments where it sort of lifts- much like an enlightenment experience. What I find is that the photography practice, or any practice, is an avenue towards connecting with that authentic self. Too much of what we try to do with pictures is fueled by external observation, tastes, and decisions. Ideas like, “I want to be this kind of photographer,” or “I want to do this kind of picture,” or “I want to be respected by these kinds of people.” When you're really in touch with the impermanence of your life these things seem ridiculous. I recently took a lot of inspiration from the comedian Garry Shandling. I was a big fan of The Larry Sanders Show. The show was about a guy who hosts a talk show, but when you get into it, you realize it’s not really about that… It's about all of these really incredible human dynamics. Shandling wanted to show that everybody in the show is stupid, everybody's smart, everybody's bumbling, everybody's adept, everybody's selfish… everybody's all these things all at the same time. What the show is really about is people who are trying to get love, but all this shit of human failing gets in the way. On the most basic level, we all just want to love and to connect and not have any barriers between us, but we also have these things that keep that from happening. People think, “How am I gonna be perceived if I say this?” Or “What does it mean about me if I don't get this job?” Letting go of worries is manifested in my art. If I can sufficiently drop my ego, I might have a chance at making a picture that isn't about my ego, and I might have a shot at producing something that feels truly organic to who I am. What I deeply desire is to not be determined by taste or cool or ego or contrivance or over-determining. This is where that collaboration with the world comes in such handy. I only have so much ability to control my photos anyway, so why not lean into the lack of control? By photographing life unfolding without a theme or a topic, I see this incredible opportunity to explore something authentically me. I've also lived the art life long enough to know that you don't always know what you're making as you're making it. You might need time to look back on it to even understand what you've done or its significance to you. Walking without knowing is a gift. The solution I needed was to go completely down the road of not knowing, and to trust that it might lead to something even better than my thinking.
Impermanent: I love that. You really can't fucking calculate this stuff.
Radding: No. And when people calculate stuff it's sometimes just a matter of luck that they were in the right place at the right time anyway. God bless them–whatever gets you there is great, but I don't have anything that I'm beholden to. I'm just out here for myself. I'm just gonna go out and see what strikes me. Something may look boring right now but in 10 years the world will be transformed.
Impermanent: Definitely. So is there a distinct line between the photos that you choose to show versus the ones that you don't choose? Is there a gray area where you might look back on an image 10 years down the road and realize that this actually does belong in the photos that you choose for yourself?
Radding: It's kind of rare that I go back through old work and find something that I completely missed. There have been times where I had a little bit of interest in a photo, but didn't think it was my best, and now I see how it's way more interesting than I had originally thought. But there's so many things that I value for my own reasons. There's also things that I don't show that I still have a real attachment to. I have gazillions of pictures of my wife–many of which I don't show but are still hugely important to me. My photographs end up serving as a diary. By incessantly taking pictures, I have this partial record of how I've spent my time. I love photography as my art, but it's also just part of my life. It's so many things all at once when you really get deep with it. There's so many pictures that I have, but I don't consider them part of my work with a capital W. And I'm totally into that. At this point, for so many people, taking photos is a compulsion to make a record of what blew your mind today, or what's exciting to you in this moment. I respect the impulse. I feel like that impulse is way more pure than having an idea for an “art project.” So much good stuff comes out of those kinds of impulses… and a lot of garbage too. But I want it all. Photography is just a hell of a way to engage with things, you know?
Impermanent: Yeah, agreed. Sometimes I take a photo that originally looks like garbage but has some hidden potential… How much do you generally edit a photo to fix its problems?
Radding: As little as I can get away with. I don't have any orthodoxies. If a crop is gonna make something better without introducing a new problem, I'll crop. If burning and dodging makes it better, I'll do it. I try to take a really similar approach to what film photographers do in a dark room. People like to tell you that you have to make the picture in the camera, and you shouldn’t crop, and all of these kinds of conventional wisdoms. But I don't really respond well to conventional wisdom. Probably because it’s conventional! If I can make something better by ignoring your conventional wisdom, I'm gonna do it. It’s funny because we never see pictures in their ideal presentations anymore. You walked into this room and saw these prints on the wall and were like, “Oh my God, this is actually the first time I've ever seen any of your pictures on a physical wall, and not on a glowing screen.” I make little adjustments on pictures depending on how they're going to be seen. For Instagram, I might change the brightness a tiny bit because I know how it's going to be seen in that format. In music you master things for different formats. You’re gonna master differently for a cassette than you do for a CD. There's different approaches you gotta take for different delivery systems, and I don't see any reason not to do that with photos. People have this idea of a final reality. Galleries and museums will ask you, “What are the dimensions of that photograph?” Well, I can tell you the dimensions of this print but institutional language wants it to be a “true artifact.” A photograph could be a negative, it could be a digital file, and all of these other things. We live in a different world now. What is the correct presentation of these things? Well, it's a moving target, you know? Loads of great work have been presented in multiple ways that can all work nicely.
Impermanent: That makes a ton of sense, especially because most photographs are viewed on social media now. I think this could be a nice question to close out our conversation… Do you still feel your work changing at this point in your career? And even getting better?
Radding: Yeah.
Impermanent: …
Radding: …
Impermanent: Ok, perfect, we’ll end on that.
Radding: Haha that'd be a great way to finish… but yes, for sure. Every few years I go through a period of feeling like I'm in a big plateau where I'm just spinning my wheels. Sometimes I make really interesting pictures and then it flattens out to where it's just not exciting to me anymore. Sometimes I feel like I'm just making tons and tons of garbage, and then I'll struggle my way out of that. The answer always comes in the form of finding a new problem to solve, or accidentally finding a new solution. I came to photography so late that I wouldn’t dare buy any idea that I've finished or have done the best that I could do. And what the world decides is my best is not going to be up to me. The most celebrated music in my past has often not been the things that I thought were the best. There are so many random factors that decide what gets celebrated, and they have nothing to do with my thinking. Many of the things that we consider important were maligned in their time. Whatever I think I'm doing, I don't know how the world's gonna see it. There are things I've done that have fallen really flat, didn't sell, or nobody seemed to give a shit. For all I know these are going to be the exact things that distinguish me 20 years from now. Or maybe I'll be completely forgotten by then. I have no fucking clue. There does seem to be a connection between pictures getting older and people appreciating them more, though. I just love the path. I want to be on the path, and I can't really draw too many conclusions about best or better. Maybe someday I'll be crippled or not have the ability to do what I do for one reason or another. But right now, while I have the ability to go out and make work, I just have to have faith that around the corner there's something else that matters.