Searching for a Sense of Place

Ian White talks to us about his photography journey, both before and after winning the #NewVisions2022 student photo competition

Photo 2019 © Ian White | FUJIFILM X-Pro3 and FUJINON XF23mmF1.4 R, 1/50 sec at F1.4, ISO 6400

Fujifilm’s Create Forever program exists to highlight and support up and coming image makers doing meaningful work and telling amazing stories. One such remarkable creative is Nashville, Tennessee-based photographer and educator Ian White, grand prize winner of the Texas Photographic Society (TPS) #NewVisions2022 competition.

Ian describes his artistic style as ‘lyrical documentary’.

“It’s a complicated way of saying I don’t work in the studio,” he explains. “I go out in the world with my camera to photograph people, places, and things, trying to contain it all in the end image. But most of it is just intuitive wandering.”

For Ian, the process of making images is just as, if not more, important than the resulting image itself. His photographic peregrinations are a kind of search for connection with strangers; for poetry, wonder, or meaning in the everyday scenes that populate the world with story. It’s a process and style rooted in Ian’s first transformative experience with a camera.

It was 2010. Ian was in high school at the time, and he and his family were walking around Bernal Heights inSan Francisco. He watched as his uncle pulled out a smartphone and started making landscape photos of the city and the bay, framing the panoramic views stretching all the way out to Oakland and Berkeley. When his uncle showed him the images he had made, Ian was blown away. Then he handed off the camera phone, and set Ian loose.

“I was running around the hill trying to recreate my versions of his photos,” Ian remembers. “It was around sunset, and I still remember that feeling of pure ecstasy. It was just joy, this overwhelming joy. From that point forward, I was interested in photography and how to get better at it. That experience started everything for me.”

Photo 2019 © Ian White | FUJIFILM X-Pro3 and FUJINON XF23mmF1.4 R, 1/50 sec at F1.4, ISO 6400

Photo 2019 © Ian White | FUJIFILM X-Pro3 and FUJINON XF23mmF1.4 R, 1/120 sec at F2, ISO 6400

Finding the Call

From there, Ian got his own camera and started making photos of life in high school: pictures of friends, coastal landscapes, scenes from his hometown of San Diego.

“At that point, I had no idea about the language of photography,” he says. “I didn’t take any photography classes of any serious note.”

Ian loved creating images, but it was still ‘just a hobby’, rather than a professional aspiration. When it came time to go to college, he chose to study business – the practical option. But he couldn’t shake photography’s siren call. During his junior year, he went to visit a friend studying abroad in Florence, Italy, and brought along a film camera – there it was, the same spark of joy, that ineffable right-ness. When Ian returned to California for his final year of college, he started frequenting the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to soak in all the photography he could.

“One of the first shows I saw was a Walker Evans retrospective,” he says. “That’s the point in my story where my brain basically shattered. I had this notion of art in a museum being very pretentious and kind of unreachable. Then I saw Walker Evans’ work and the spirit of it was so humble. I had a simple realization that this was just a man out in the world with his camera, like me.

From there, Ian’s obsession with photography began to snowball. He started reading about the history, buying photo books to study, and – of course – making images. And yet, at least on paper, he was still a business student. After graduation, he found himself at a crossroads, faced with the question of his future: would he pursue the world of business, a surer path, but one he knew his heart wasn’t in? Or would he pursue photography?

“I felt like I needed to latch onto something, to plant my flag,” he says. “That summer, I had one evening where I felt so strongly about this passion, I literally said out loud to myself: ‘I’m going to dedicate the rest of my life to photography’.”

Photo 2020 © Ian White | FUJIFILM X-Pro3 and FUJINON XF23mmF1.4 R, 1/250 sec at F16, ISO 400

Stretching His Wings

From 2017 to 2020, Ian worked on a photo project he called Seabird. Five, six, sometimes seven days a week, he would go make photos on the Oceanside Pier near his house in San Diego – some of which are featured in this article.

Much in the style of Walker Evans, he photographed moments of everyday life – glove-shod digits handling nets and fishing line, gleeful swimmers leaping from the pier into the ocean, lights in the fog, silhouettes, and sandy beaches. Eventually, he submitted his Seabird portfolio to an MFA program for photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, and was accepted. For the next two years, he honed his craft, building his skills, wandering Rochester’s snowy neighborhoods in search of visual poetry, and putting his work out into the world more and more.

Last year, encouraged by his professors, Ian applied for the TPS #NewVisions2022 photo contest. Much to his surprise, his portrait of a shaggy-haired drummer boy won the grand prize: FUJIFILM X-T4 camera with XF18-55mmF2.8-4 R LM OIS lens.

“That was my second or third Fujifilm,” he explains. “I’ve been using Fujifilm cameras since probably 2018. Seabird was made half on FUJIFILM X100 and half on FUJIFILM X-Pro3. I love Fujifilm because it’s the closest thing to the film experience. It’s such a great tool that doesn’t get in the way like another camera might.”

For an artist so concerned with his sense of connection to the people and places he photographs, that kind of pure, film-like experience is crucial.

His images – now honed and tested by time, study, and practice – straddle fact and fiction, documentary photography, and visual poetry. They’re less concerned with reflecting reality than with thematic interpretation, conveying a sense or experience of a place.

Photo 2020 © Ian White | FUJIFILM X-Pro3 and FUJINON XF23mmF1.4 R, 1/250 sec at F16, ISO 400

From oceanside piers to American fairgrounds, greasy New York diners to rusted-out bridges spanning Tennessee creeks, his work depicts normal people in everyday situations. At first glance they may appear unremarkable, but a closer look inevitably reveals hidden depths, a glimpse into the complex layers of a place or person that sit just below the surface.

“I’m interested in how the camera can describe the quotidian rhythms of a place,” Ian says. “A natural landscape made in Rochester versus Nashville may seem like it would be the same kind of picture, but because of the inherent social, economic, cultural qualities of a place, they’re going to describe two very different experiences.”

Casting for Connection

Ian describes his photographic practice as ‘an act of faith’. With every wandering search for photos, he is casting out for hope, for connection in a world marked by polarization, hate, and isolation

“Whenever I go out to make images, I’m looking for a strong connection and shared curiosity,” Ian reveals. “It helps me find likeness. If nothing else, I got to meet another human. I’m definitely interested in making a beautiful picture. But more so, photography allows me to have this relationship with the world and other people’s lives that otherwise I wouldn’t have. The world is hard. It owes me absolutely nothing. But if I’m open, curious and present enough, I might be able to see those moments when the universe gives me a flicker of hope.”

For Ian, photography is a constant rediscovery that the world is more than just the lonely thought in our heads, but instead a vast mosaic of wonder wrought with moments of beauty, of humans in all their complexity, of magic. And if Ian can find that with his camera, he will.

“The world constantly presents itself in ways I could never imagine,” he says. “The photograph I want, the photo in my head, so rarely shows itself. But the photograph I need will come instead. And I know that the more I go out there, the more I put myself in a position of serendipity, the higher the chance that will happen.”

His is a unique practice, a unique perspective that yields remarkable results. These days, Ian gets to share that perspective and experience with a new generation of image makers. After earning his MFA in 2022, he moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where he now teaches in the photography program at Middle Tennessee State University. Every day, he gets to pour into his students – teaching not only the craft, but the art of image making; inspiring them to find their voice and build creative practices to seek out meaning and poetry in the world.

“You can’t make pictures by sitting on a couch,” he tells them. “You’ve got to put yourself in a position to see.”

Selections for the Texas Photographic Society #NewVisions2023 collegiate student photo competition will be announced soon, so stay tuned to the website here. Winners will receive cash prizes and a FUJIFILM X-T30 II camera with FUJINON XF18-55mmF2.8-4 R LM OIS lens.