On the Record

© Amy Stein

"I don't loathe interviews, I'm just one of those people who makes music because I find it difficult to talk."

- PJ Harvey

This year I have been asked to do several interviews about my work. The most recent interview with UNseeN Magazine was just published on their Web site along with a nifty Flash presentation of my Stranded series. I find being interviewed an awkward exercise because, like Polly Jean, I am more comfortable making work than talking about it. I'm not a shrinking violet, but it challenges my humble tendencies to talk at length about myself.

As I have done more interviews I have become more comfortable with the process and grown more sure of my words and more sure of my work. It may seem weird for a visual medium, but the exercise of talking about your images in an interview challenges you to glimpse new layers of meaning and develop new relationships with photos you are all too familiar with. When you live day in, day out, with the same images you can start to get detached and even bored with them--it's probably not unlike Kansas having to play Dust In The Wind every night. I'm starting to realize that having focused conversations about your photography can not only reconnect you to the work and can rekindle that love affair, but may be just as important to the process as printing and editing.