How did you get to this realization?

I got interested in photography in high school, because as a fat, pimply, teenage kid in the 1950s, photography magazines, particularly the annuals that they put out every year, were the only place where such a young fellow as myself could find pictures of naked women. But to my credit, I eventually turned the page. The magazines would have portfolios of Edward Weston, Steiglitz, and Steichen, and I got really interested in those.

I was going to go to school for photography, but I didn’t have the chemistry background at the time. At that time there were no art schools for photography, either, as everything was very technical. My idea was then to get my degree and pick up photography after college.

Unfortunately, I discovered the short stories of James Joyce when I was a freshman.

Unfortunately?

I say unfortunately because it was unfortunate for my photography, but I’ll say fortunately otherwise, because it was in that moment that I knew what I wanted to do. I was writing and writing, until, oh I don’t know, five or six years after graduating when I came across Wright Morris’ book God’s Country and My People, and I thought, “wow, you can do them both.” So I got back into photography and worked in both for quite a long time.

In San Francisco I met some really good photographers and studied with a guy named Oliver Gagliani. He was a master in the traditional sense of Ansel Adams. He was very technical, very scientific. Their idea was to thoroughly understand the materials of photography and put that into the scene. I wasn’t so technical, but it helped me. I was his teaching assistant for a number of years, where we taught the Zone System where you manipulate the development of film in order to fit within the range of the paper. You could either expand the development or compress it to fit it into that grayscale. All of that helped me discover how to do extreme contractions. Photographing inside a room, which I love, is so much more different than photographing in outdoor light. With his system you can capture what is inside the room and what is outside the window by compressing the development of the negative.

This is something you experimented with in Kitchen Things, right?

Yes, if you look at the negatives of my series Kitchen Things, you will see that they are actually very flat. But you can expand what is there in the development and get a full range of gray tones. I wanted to make everything look like it was floating, and I first thought about hanging the items from black threads. But I realized I didn’t have to do that if you had the right lens, distance, and background. As a lighting director friend of mine says, soft light goes everywhere. Which is what you get inside of a light tent, which is what I used to photograph everything in Kitchen Things. It’s great light. 

I remember working on the exhibition for your steel mill photos, years ago. Could you talk about these photos?

I got a grant from Light Work at the University of Syracuse so that I could come back into western Pennsylvania and photograph the mill towns where I grew up. This was the mid-70s. Everything was thriving, and everybody thought this growth would never end. I spent two and half months photographing all the different mill towns north of Pittsburgh, which had rarely been done. The south and east, sure, but nothing north. It was with a 4x5 view camera with a tripod and a large black focusing cloth. I became a show in itself! When I’d set up on the side of the street people would stop me and ask, “What are you doing?” I’d tell them what I was photographing, and asked if I could photograph inside their house, as well. You’d be amazed at how many people said yes! They were so gracious. They didn’t know me, but they’d give me full range of their house. And the photos inside would take a very long time, sometimes twenty-minute exposures, so while we waited, we would have coffee and they’d tell me stories. The people were just wonderful.

At the time, the Farmer’s National Bank in Beaver Valley was in deep trouble. My father and uncle’s accounting firm, Snodgrass and Company, was auditing the books and issuing checks to everyone. So everyone knew who I was. They’d say “Oh, you’re part of those big people up in Pittsburgh.” And I’d say, “No, I’m just normal sized, thank you.” But that also provided a level of trust with the people, which allowed me to hear all these stories.

When there Was Steel was the final series I did on the steel mills. I wrote a book to go with all those photographs. The Hienz History Center, when they mounted my AfterImage show, kind of took umbrage of me trying to write a history of the steel industry because it was very personal, it was my slant on it. They said, “Dick, we have scholars that can write that for us,” and so I continued to write my stories.

Can you talk about why your photos never have people in them?

I was trained in portrait studies in Beaver Falls. But what I found was that anytime you are taking a portrait of somebody, you are essentially taking a portrait of a mask. People put on an expression of what they want to look like. Or if you’re a certain type of photographer, you try to “grab their essence” when they aren’t looking. I look at a photograph of a room or objects as non-figurative portraits. I think the objects that you collect and surround yourself with say more about you than any kind of portrait could. It’s the things you keep near you that are important to you. That really says who you are. It’s what you do, not what you say. And a portrait is what you say you are. But you take a picture of a person’s room… that’s them. I think of peoples’ rooms as a stage set, this is where they live and who they truly are.

This is something I was really trying to capture in Kitchen Things, too. I do believe, I have no idea how, that the spirit of the people who have used an object becomes part of that object. So if you take a picture of somebody’s hammer, you’re getting something of the spirit of the person who had used that hammer. That’s what I was thinking about in Kitchen Things. That first potato masher… I picked it up, I felt the weight of it, and I thought, “How many people had used her? She has a story.”

Working in both traditional photography, historical fiction writing, and creating all the series you’ve made… do you think you are unique?

I suppose I do think I’m unique… but also, I’m not. Everything is a plus and a minus to me. It’s a matter of balance. I’m just like everybody else, but I’m also not at all like anybody else. We’re all unique in some way and we’re all the same, it’s all part of a fatal game that none of us get out of alive.

I’ve never liked single photographs unless they have a story to them. I like a sequence. It would drive me nuts for a long time – I’d be like, “wow, I’ve got texture, I’ve got composition… who cares?” It didn’t say anything. It didn’t say anything about the people’s lives who were involved with that photograph. When I was in my senior year at Berkeley I was reading haikus a lot. One day I came across a haiku by Basho, probably the greatest of the haiku poets. There was one that spoke to me directly, and it went, “It is deep autumn. Me neighbor, how does he live?” And I thought: that’s it. Right there. That sums up everything I’ve ever tried to do.

What’s next for Dick Snodgrass?

I’m doing another book right now… I’ve been trying to write a follow up to The House with Round Windows for at least a dozen years. I’ve written four different books. None of them work. I mean, they’re complete, but… the last one I finally said, “Well, time to delete it.”

The House with Round Windows follows the relationship between me and my brother up to a certain point, when I’m starting college. It talks a lot about his poetics and his theories. But I wanted to do a follow up to that, to the point where I discovered that his ideas were crap. I mean I used to worship him, but then I realized he was destructive. The springboard of his work was the death of my older sister, Barbara. He decided that she ended her own life just by willing herself to die, that she had nothing to live for at the age of 28. He blamed her death on my mother. I mean there’s no question about his poetry, it’s brilliant, but he laid these ideas on me when I was 18. It was sort of like psychotherapeutic intervention. It was like I was brainwashed; I was his disciple. 

So, how did I discovered my brother was misguided… As I said, the exposures took a very long time. I used a certain type of film that would capture all the nuances of light. So here I am, photographing this house with the round windows, with the intent to show the terrible conditions that raised us. My mother is there, and because of my brother I already have this idea of who she is. I believed him, that she was some sort of monster. So I’d set the exposure, and to give my mother something to do -- she was in her 70s -- I would give her the calculations. The film speed, the exposure rate, reciprocity factors, yadda yadda yadda. She’d write it all down and then tell me how long it should take. So we’d set the timer and we’d talk. I’d end up hearing the family stories from her side, and it was… wow. Very different. This woman had been through hell. Her prized eldest son, who she valued above everything, hated her immensely. She knew that, and she lived with it. So when I’d see my brother and he'd start one of those rampages about “that f-ing woman --” I’d say, “You know, brother, I don’t think that’s right.” He would then turn his rage, and I mean rage, onto me. He’d call me every name in the book, tell me I’m blind to the facts. But I knew that wasn’t true. I want to write about that. Not to condemn him, but to show that there are many sides to every story.

I’ve been trying to do this four times… I finally think I have the framework for it. So, I’m writing it again. I hope I live long enough to finish it.