Interview

by Davin Risk

MR: Suburban spaces are fairly integral to your photography. Can you talk about the balance between your intuitive and emotional responses to these spaces and how you approach them intellectually?

SP: I end up there. I began ending up there as a little kid, drawn in by a feeling that I compared to the sensation of walking down a "city street" (which my definition of surely differs from those embedded in classic urban settings, not the towering empty storefront wonderlands of the Downtown South). Why did the low profile buildings, crackled asphalt, and big skies actually feel so different? Why is this where we shop? I lived my life in these spaces. They weren't suburban, they were pre-urban. They were small towns. They aged and aged with no complaint. Empty buildings lingered. Change manifested in newly painted yellow lines on the highway, in acres of trees flattened and hauled away, in people's front yards.

I spent my earliest years in the middle of a soybean/rice field (depending on the season) in a house built the year before I was born. I had family in Little Rock and we'd drive up there a lot - the very act of which taught me about Place and how those places start and stop. I continue to be compelled by the thoughts I had as a five-year-old in a backseat, on an innocent quest for understanding my reaction to things I see. Why certain kinds of light make me tingly. Why colors can be defined as perfect and you can't stop looking at them. Why inanimate objects can be arranged so amusingly. Why people made the world look like this.

School sent me into a book-and-lecture-bound quest for understanding this, for learning the history and the social impetus behind settlement and building. Unlike most, I had my camera. I had started shooting - collecting, I might call it - in high school. I always liked to collect rocks, to draw floorplans and diagrams. I grew up rifling through any old box of photos I could find. All of these weird qualities combined in an obsession with picture-taking that flamed from the first camera-click.

Through college, my photography became another language altogether, one that spoke on my behalf. When you're talking about Suburbia, about the way people have developed the land and continue to develop it, things get unclear, foggy with emotion and opinion. I learned immediately that they very act of exploring these non-urban spaces (suburban implies that an urban element exists, which in many cases it does not), often in an effort to critique them, leads to a love for them.

Something makes sense out there. It's not just the pictures - it's the act of taking them. It's exploring the unexplored. It's my own personal manifest destiny over this country. I'm simultaneously exploring my own head while exploring the sides of freeways, the forested ends of housing developments, the come-and-gone concrete of some old strip mall, the shiny-plastic-streamer celebrations of a brand new one. I'm giving meaning to color for the hell of it, seeking out things that make me laugh, things that give real evidence of people and the bizarre nature of the world we have built for ourselves. As time passes, I realize that I can do this anywhere. As long as I have a car, though, you'll find me somewhere on the outskirts. That's where new things can happen.

MR: How has travel effected your photography?

SP: Travel is a necessity. If it's thirty minutes away or 12 hours - it's a force behind everything I do. It makes sparks. It's addictive. All good things are seen through the windows of an automobile.

The love was born, as aforementioned, in the backseat of a car that seemed to fly through the fields until the freeway sound started and make-believe-skyscraper granary buildings were replaced by the real thing, even if there were just a few tall ones, growing out of the Arkansas plains. This was bolstered by a series of trips that my aunt and uncle would take my brother and I on throughout our childhood - Washington DC, Chicago, Kansas City, San Diego, Seattle, San Antonio, Durango, Santa Fe - from dirt and grass to airplanes and hotels, I learned Escape at an early age. I'd take pride in my map-reading skills. By the time I hit 16, I found opportunities to get on the road, to travel with bands, to keep seeing. At 18 I was in my own band, booking tours, charting voyages, and driving, driving, driving. I wasn't photographing as much as I was looking. It was on the road that I realized that I was always taking pictures, that it didn't matter if I had a camera in-hand. Writing lyrics once, I scrawled the phrase "blinking like clicking."

The act of driving across the U.S. (and into Canada) allowed me to experience the spacial and architectural gradation of Place on a large scale. I saw hundreds of unique places while simultaneously seeing the same things in every town and city. Sleeping on floors, meeting scores of new people, eating all kinds of food, sweating, screaming, seeing the landscape change from wetlands to mountains in one day, swimming in the dark, learning every highway number - it's a way of life unto itself and it's one that fosters my photography. It involves every sense. It's a little insane. It's perfect.

I'm still figuring out what it all truly means to me, too. I stopped touring in 2001, but I've been living off that road-education for the past years. I continue to travel, but it's become more of a vacation from a day-job than anything else - a reaction rather than a quest. I don't know if I like that.

I live in a house that I'm quite obsessed with, a 1969 concrete-and-glass dwelling, smack dab in a jungle at the bottom of Florida, the bottom of the USA. There's something about owning the roof over your head, about owning history and keeping it alive. My productivity is beginning to boom, esp. with the record label making opportunities for creativity....but I feel as if I am manufacturing my road-spirit out of thin air, out of a narrow swampy radius.

MR: You often work with highly saturated colours within a somewhat "neutral" scene. How does that manifest itself as part of your process?

SP: It's a scavenger hunt. I drive until I see it. I wait for clouds and storms. I wait for overcast days when colors tend to open up fully. It's all light. My imagination comes into play - I personify objects, I imagine the moment they were dropped on the land, I imagine them being gone. I see the brand new building in 30 years. I see the little trees, held up with wooden sticks, grown to great heights. I think I time travel a little bit, back into my memory and forward into someone else's...

That's all just in my head, though. I usually just say out loud "that looks good." I make a u-turn, go back to the scene. I walk around. I'll snap one or two pictures. Sometimes I just shoot out of my car window. I move on.

It's blinking. It's the stuff we all see. I guess I wait for it to look just right, to show off what it truly is. In the process, normal everyday things take on some otherworldly quality - but that's how I see everything. It all glows with possibility.

I use a camera, film, and my head to remember things. Often, the film and the memory agree. If they don't, I'll take the liberty to make something a little brighter. My best pictures are the ones that need no coaxing to show pure reality. It surprises me just how real my images are.

MR: Since you relocated to Miami has your photography changed or do you find that the elements you were previously looking for are even more pervasive there? Miami conjures up saturated images fairly readily.

SP: The photographic possibility of Miami was a huge reason for me deciding to move here. A few visits sent my head spinning and I dreamed of wandering around this whole region, making new perfect pictures and furthering my vocabulary. After living here for a little over a year, I have definitely opened up a new dialogue. A dialog delayed, perhaps.

Moving makes you see your life in stages. Moving somewhere strange makes you think a hell of a lot. I have been adapting for months, integrating a job, new friends, and a curious geographical position into my photography habit. It's a battle - not for any notable level of negativity but for its intensity. It's about getting old, I guess. Bills and mortgage. Running a record label. In the midst of it all, photography is winning (I just quit my day job). Like a language, it makes sense. When I walk out the door, when I break through the traffic and the expected, I find the "outskirts" here. They're everywhere. This is the oddest place for a city to happen, and it's exploding. Since my pictures are based on the experience of a place or event - not just what is in the frame - I've got to feel it. Miami, for all it's obvious flair, is not simple. The very things I was attracted to upon moving here are the last things I visit. I find myself seeking a whole new frontier, which is probably exactly what I need. I think I will see it here soon. But everyday I see the sign for I-95 and I find myself counting the roads it leads to...10..20..30..40.. 55..65..75..85....

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Sara Padgett is a Florida-based photographer, designer, and co-owner of Hometapes Recordings. For more of her work, visit sarapadgett.com