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Change the Way you See: Art Wolfe, EO74 · The MOOD Podcast

• 0:00
  Matt Jacob: Welcome to the Mood Podcast, uncovering the art of conversation one frame at a time.
• 0:05
  Matt Jacob: I'm your host, matt Jacob, and thank you for joining me in today's conversation, and in this episode I talk with Art Wolff, one of the world's most renowned photographers, whose iconic images have shaped the way we see the natural world.
• 0:19
  Matt Jacob: With a career spanning five decades, art has captured breathtaking landscapes, wildlife and cultural traditions from every corner of the globe.
• 0:28
  Matt Jacob: His work is a testament to visual storytelling, blending artistic vision with a deep commitment to conservation.
• 0:34
  Matt Jacob: From publishing over 100 books to hosting the Emmy-nominated TV series Travels to the Edge and leading multiple workshops and photo tours around the world, art continues to inspire photographers and nature lovers alike, and in my conversation with him, we jump into his journey into becoming a photographer, exploring how his early passion for painting influenced his unique visual style.
• 0:58
  Matt Jacob: We also discussed the making of Travels to the Edge, a series that brought the beauty of remote landscapes and cultures to living rooms worldwide.
• 1:04
  Matt Jacob: We also talked about the challenges of creating work that balances art and advocacy, also the philosophical questions surrounding conservation, the role of photography in preserving our planet and the profound emotional connections that arise from being immersed in nature, as well as different cultures.
• 1:22
  Matt Jacob: I felt it was also salient to touch upon his ethics when leading workshops and photo groups abroad, especially how he approaches entering other cultures' habitats and what he advocates and hopes people do through his approach.
• 1:35
  Matt Jacob: So now I bring you Art Wolff.
• 1:38
  Matt Jacob: Art Wolff, welcome to the Mood Podcast.
• 1:51
  Matt Jacob: Thank you so much for being on here with me today.
• 1:55
  Art Wolfe: Pleasure is all mine, Matt.
• 1:56
  Art Wolfe: Thank you for having me.
• 1:58
  Matt Jacob: Yeah, we've got a lot to talk about.
• 1:59
  Matt Jacob: You've been in this space for a long time, very experienced photographer, and I'm super grateful I've caught you in between travels, which we'll obviously get onto.
• 2:09
  Matt Jacob: But I wanted to start with something I noticed through doing a bit of research.
• 2:14
  Matt Jacob: Obviously I've known about you for a while, but, diving a little bit deeper, there was a quote that you said that really sparked my interest and I wanted to unravel it a little bit more, and that quote was my goal is nothing less than to change the way you see.
• 2:29
  Matt Jacob: Now I don't know when you made that quote or what your intentions behind that was, but please elaborate.
• 2:36
  Art Wolfe: That is really a quote that I was referring to, the classes that I teach.
• 2:41
  Art Wolfe: I do two or three things.
• 2:43
  Art Wolfe: I work on books that feed my heart and my brain.
• 2:47
  Art Wolfe: I take people to places around the world that I love to show them, but I also spend a lot of time teaching workshops.
• 2:57
  Art Wolfe: I have very elaborate and hard-fought lectures and I like nothing more than to take people that only have one way of aiming at a subject and translating it in a unique way, and that's what I really meant and that falls really under the genre of photography as art, where I first give lectures on abstract expressionism, explain the history of that, and then we go out to degraded environments, you know places that people would never think to shoot, and we find things that look like a Jackson Pollock or William de Kooning and other famous artists of the past, and it's a great challenge.
• 3:44
  Art Wolfe: So think of Old Delhi and going into the back alleys and finding walls that have been painted a hundred times and chipped and broken, and people love the challenge and that's really what I meant by that quote.
• 4:02
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• 5:48
  Matt Jacob: All right, see you later.
• 5:49
  Matt Jacob: So tell us how the abstract expressionism came through it and maybe touch upon your background in other forms of art for us.
• 6:01
  Art Wolfe: Well, you know, I was an art major, painting major, but also an art education major, and so abstract expression was the one genre I never got.
• 6:13
  Art Wolfe: So when I first started teaching, just out of college, I was latching on to French Impressionists, because Monet and Renoir and all these other artists really painted landscapes that I was really enamored of.
• 6:29
  Art Wolfe: But abstract expressionists, which meant non-objective, and non-objective means something you're not looking at a house or a horse or something.
• 6:38
  Art Wolfe: That's obvious, the subject.
• 6:40
  Art Wolfe: But these are non-subjects, and so the famous abstract expressionists would say they're paintings and where your imagination begins.
• 6:50
  Art Wolfe: And so I took it on to learn about what I never understood.
• 6:56
  Art Wolfe: And then, once I started understanding it, then I started teaching it and people really took to it.
• 7:03
  Art Wolfe: So it's the most popular workshops that I teach around the country, and I'm just growing, as I.
• 7:10
  Art Wolfe: You know, when I learn something, I teach it.
• 7:12
  Art Wolfe: I don't covet information, I want to share information, and I've always been that way.
• 7:18
  Art Wolfe: So how do you?
• 7:20
  Matt Jacob: go about teaching people.
• 7:21
  Matt Jacob: You talked about abstract expressionism.
• 7:23
  Matt Jacob: You're not quite getting it.
• 7:24
  Matt Jacob: How do you teach people to?
• 7:25
  Art Wolfe: get it?
• 7:26
  Art Wolfe: How do you really open that up in people's mind when what they want to do is photograph a mountain range or an animal or something like that?
• 7:35
  Art Wolfe: I'm taking them polar opposite.
• 7:38
  Art Wolfe: I'm taking them into really junkyards and places that look really unsavory and yet when they come away with something extraordinarily beautiful, it's really highly rewarding.
• 7:51
  Art Wolfe: And I do it through very elaborate, well thought out lectures that I spend years assembling.
• 7:59
  Art Wolfe: So I don't take it lightly and I can.
• 8:03
  Art Wolfe: I show one shot.
• 8:04
  Art Wolfe: You know I'll show a series of shots of Jackson Pollock, which was this painter, if you're not aware, who threw paint on the floor.
• 8:11
  Art Wolfe: And it's just, it's beautiful, but it's completely abstract and complex.
• 8:19
  Art Wolfe: And then I show the side of a freight truck driving 65 miles an hour down a freeway where I've taken a picture of the side of a freight truck driving 65 miles an hour down a freeway where I've taken a picture of the side of the truck and I call it a Jackson Pollock.
• 8:31
  Art Wolfe: Nobody even questions it because in fact it looks just like the previous artwork that I've shown them, and so that really starts to sink in that you can find art anywhere.
• 8:43
  Art Wolfe: You just have to have the imagination and the eye to see it, but it takes time and it takes lectures and it takes redundancy and then suddenly it's like working on a muscle it starts to relax and they start to see art anywhere around them.
• 8:59
  Art Wolfe: And that really is the source of that quote.
• 9:03
  Matt Jacob: Yeah, and isn't that beautiful when you start seeing art everywhere.
• 9:07
  Matt Jacob: That's really the source of such fulfillment and happiness that certainly I believe in life right.
• 9:15
  Art Wolfe: It's a great metaphor.
• 9:16
  Art Wolfe: Finding beauty in decay, birth and renewal.
• 9:19
  Art Wolfe: These are themes, and that is a positive theme, and so I'm all about uplifting, educating, inspiring people.
• 9:29
  Art Wolfe: I've been that way through over 100 books and TV shows and things like that.
• 9:34
  Art Wolfe: I do shoot.
• 9:36
  Art Wolfe: You know degraded environments that have been destroyed by bad policies, or you know fishnets around the neck of a whale or things like that, but what I'm interested in is inspiring people and finding beauty.
• 9:51
  Art Wolfe: That keeps me going for five decades.
• 9:56
  Matt Jacob: So why photography?
• 9:57
  Matt Jacob: How did that come about?
• 9:59
  Art Wolfe: It came out of it was purely accidental.
• 10:03
  Art Wolfe: Actually, I was a painting major at the University of Washington, but I started getting into climbing and I was always one of those kids that was rooting around in the neighborhood woods and hiking.
• 10:15
  Art Wolfe: At college I became friends with other young climbers and so I joined them and started taking an old camera along to document the climbs, to show friends and family where I was going on weekends, and my allegiances shifted from painting to photography little bit by little bit, and by the time I graduated what two degrees, seven years later, I really was much more into photography than painting.
• 10:51
  Art Wolfe: Simply put, it was easier to create an original composition through the photographic medium than to conjure up a meaningful painting from a blank canvas, and so my temperament and the way I am suits photography far better than just sitting at an easel and painting.
• 11:10
  Art Wolfe: And I never looked back at that.
• 11:14
  Art Wolfe: And yet I draw from what I learned from art school and apply it into my painting, into my photographs, and apply it into my painting, into my photographs.
• 11:26
  Art Wolfe: And I remember instructors goading me on never to rest on my laurels or working on previous successes, but to always try new things.
• 11:36
  Art Wolfe: And photographically then, I've expanded and I keep expanding the work I'm doing.
• 11:42
  Art Wolfe: Today people would never expect of me.
• 11:44
  Art Wolfe: I'm doing a book called Act of Faith that looks at world's big religions, but also voodoo, shamanism, things that people would never associate with Art Wolf, the wildlife photographer.
• 11:56
  Art Wolfe: And yet another body of work was called the Human Canvas, where I painted over 100 individuals into really ornate backdrops that I had previously created, and that body of work really shook a lot of people up in a positive way.
• 12:14
  Art Wolfe: But they would never have expected that of me.
• 12:17
  Art Wolfe: So I love to surprise my audience and just when somebody's pigeonholed me into one category, I try intentionally to show a different side and that I really brought forward from what the instructors were really intending for me to do.
• 12:37
  Matt Jacob: So that's a conscious driver of yours to not surprise your audience, but maybe surprise yourself and try something unique and new and iterate for yourself rather than for others, or is there a bit of balance there?
• 12:54
  Art Wolfe: Definitely is to avoid the analogy of a writer's block.
• 12:58
  Art Wolfe: I mean, I have known, and in my professional career, a lot of early colleagues that gave up photography because they kept on doing the same thing and they lost interest.
• 13:09
  Art Wolfe: So you know, I first started in the mountains around Seattle and after I exhausted that I moved further afield, went up to Alaska and when I'd done the West Coast then I jumped the pond and went into Europe and Australia and New Zealand.
• 13:26
  Art Wolfe: I just started traveling everywhere looking for culture shock and things that stimulated my imagination and I suspect, matt, you're exactly wired the same way.
• 13:38
  Matt Jacob: Yeah, absolutely, curiosity, right, and curiosity not just in other things that we can try and create art out of, but curiosity in yourself, right, curiosity.
• 13:47
  Matt Jacob: And what are you?
• 13:47
  Matt Jacob: What?
• 13:48
  Matt Jacob: What we can do, what, what?
• 13:49
  Matt Jacob: What's the next challenge and how can we be better all the time?
• 13:53
  Art Wolfe: well, you know, I I started off with a uh, older man that was into photographing geese and ducks and he had a big.
• 14:01
  Art Wolfe: So I bought a big lens when I could afford it.
• 14:04
  Art Wolfe: And one day we're in the mountains, at the edge of a lake and we're photographing these birds called mergansers.
• 14:11
  Art Wolfe: And I said to Robert there's a bear with a cub right at the edge of the lake.
• 14:17
  Art Wolfe: And he looked at it and he goes yeah, but they're not ducks.
• 14:20
  Art Wolfe: And I couldn't believe that he responded that way.
• 14:23
  Art Wolfe: I was so excited to see a bear with a cub.
• 14:25
  Art Wolfe: I spent all the time photographing it.
• 14:28
  Art Wolfe: Robert, after a while, had every photo of every duck in North America and then he left the field.
• 14:35
  Art Wolfe: He had no interest in photographing anything else and I always use that as an example of somebody that gets so narrow focus that they lose interest.
• 14:45
  Art Wolfe: And I keep on challenging myself to look for new subjects, new ways of shooting the subjects.
• 14:51
  Art Wolfe: I photographed a bunch of books on wildlife, but every book that I've done on wildlife had a different style, different point of view.
• 15:00
  Art Wolfe: One was called Vanishing Act and it was about camouflage in nature point of view.
• 15:05
  Art Wolfe: One was called Vanishing Act and it was about camouflage and nature.
• 15:07
  Art Wolfe: Another one was called Migrations, which was inspired by MC Escher, so it was a book on patterns.
• 15:10
  Art Wolfe: Rhythms from the Wild was a look at wildlife, but with long, exaggeratedly long exposures, so always trying to shoot something different so I don't get bored and it never becomes blasé.
• 15:27
  Art Wolfe: That way it's a difficult balance, isn't it?
• 15:30
  Matt Jacob: Because all of these analogies and cliches of mastering one's craft and the 10,000 hour rule and finding your style and voice and what you want to put out there, and there is an argument to say you can't really be great at anything without doing this, doing it and iterating over and, over and over again, and that is not conducive to wanting to try different things.
• 15:54
  Matt Jacob: But there's an element in there that's always, usually always, a common denominator you are still it's still the same person behind that lens, so there's always going to be some kind of cohesiveness amongst it.
• 16:05
  Matt Jacob: It's just whether you can find that, would you?
• 16:07
  Matt Jacob: Would you agree with that?
• 16:08
  Matt Jacob: I?
• 16:08
  Art Wolfe: totally agree with that, because if I talk about jackson pollock, only one style comes up.
• 16:13
  Art Wolfe: If you think of, well, picasso is a different animal because he sculpted, he painted, he drew a lot of different inspirations, so he was unique.
• 16:24
  Art Wolfe: But so many of the famous artists had a unique vision and a unique style that they stuck with.
• 16:31
  Art Wolfe: And people ask what is your style, my style?
• 16:34
  Art Wolfe: And I have no way of explaining it because I don't think I've got a style.
• 16:39
  Art Wolfe: I try too many things.
• 16:41
  Art Wolfe: So it has been a liability because there's such a broad base of genres, but it keeps me happy.
• 16:49
  Art Wolfe: So you know, and as long as you're happy and moving forward, you've got a reason to get out of bed.
• 16:56
  Matt Jacob: Absolutely.
• 16:57
  Matt Jacob: There's a lot that could be said for that.
• 16:59
  Matt Jacob: Do you find there's a problem of gatekeeping in the photography industry, where a lot of photographers don't want to share their knowledge and education?
• 17:09
  Art Wolfe: Yeah, yeah, and you know I'm single, I don't have children.
• 17:14
  Art Wolfe: My legacy is the work I do and if, looking back after I'm long gone, if I've inspired a generation of people, if I've inspired a generation of people, that is good enough for me and what I have found in parallel, however, that we live at a time where, if a photo appears on Instagram, there could be a flash mob trying to do the same thing at the same location and you could ruin an environment, and so I'm being a little more discreet at this point on where I may have shot a sensitive landscape or a endangered species.
• 17:57
  Art Wolfe: I don't need to spell that out but the style and what I used and all that I share with, and I'll tell you why, because I did a TV series on public TV in the States, but it ultimately aired in 70 countries around the world.
• 18:15
  Art Wolfe: I really didn't think people would go to the extremes that I did to get the images or the locations, and yet people did, and I think I've changed a lot of tribes and locations over the years through my naivety.
• 18:36
  Matt Jacob: Yeah, thank you for that.
• 18:59
  Art Wolfe: So I'm a little more aware that people now are waiting for you or me to show them the really early on and be invited into monasteries and photograph monks and be careful and not intrude on them and give them their own sense of dignity and privacy.
• 19:16
  Art Wolfe: And yet what followed then were people that had no sense about that and they would just overwhelm the monks to the point that suddenly the monks were closing off their monasteries or keeping people out.
• 19:30
  Art Wolfe: So I always thought people would have natural common sense of working around people, and I found that's not true at all.
• 19:39
  Art Wolfe: So it's a learning curve for me.
• 19:42
  Art Wolfe: If I try to think that everybody thinks like me, I'm going to be sorely disappointed, and so a little more caution now is issued.
• 19:52
  Art Wolfe: But I still stick to the fact that I'm going to share whatever I learned today tomorrow to my audience, and you can do that without divulging every you know.
• 20:03
  Art Wolfe: I would give them a roadmap to the location.
• 20:07
  Matt Jacob: Locations and populations are very, very, very sensitive, right?
• 20:11
  Matt Jacob: And, like you said, as we become more digitized and saturated around the photography industry and the world generally, it's such a danger and such a risk to be sharing those types of things.
• 20:23
  Matt Jacob: It's such a danger and such a risk to be sharing those types of things.
• 20:24
  Matt Jacob: And, like you said, the next thing you know, these places are inundated and overwhelmed with tourists who not saying all of them, but you mentioned it and I've experienced it firsthand as well A lot of them don't respect the local culture or the nuances or the language or the cultural practices that have to be abided by.
• 20:46
  Matt Jacob: And, even more so, they don't really understand that you should not just go and point a camera in someone's face just because you've seen it on Instagram, right, and this degrades cultures very quickly.
• 20:59
  Art Wolfe: I'll give you just a brief history.
• 21:02
  Art Wolfe: When I was seven, my mother took me downtown on a bus and we transferred to another bus and I rode about 10 miles from where I lived to a school that was provided post-war families.
• 21:16
  Art Wolfe: And so at seven, after she taught me that I would do it on my own, so every Saturday morning I'd get up and get on the bus and ride downtown and transfer to another bus and ride across the city, and what that did was give me a sense of empowerment and confidence which allowed me then to walk in any city around the planet.
• 21:44
  Art Wolfe: And so I traveled early and often to places that a lot of my colleagues at the same time would never even have thought to go because they were still photographing in Yellowstone or wherever.
• 21:56
  Art Wolfe: And then I met a friend of mine from Romania that became a lifelong friend.
• 22:05
  Art Wolfe: In fact I just talked to him about five months ago.
• 22:07
  Art Wolfe: He lives in Khon Kaen, thailand, and he'll be joining me on the tour of India.
• 22:13
  Art Wolfe: But the two of us went into the Omo River of Ethiopia oh, it has to be 27 years ago and Angela Fisher and Carol Beckwith went in years before and we went in and it was a great time and we were camping, there was no tour company that would take us.
• 22:35
  Art Wolfe: We were just striking out on our own and the photos I took went into a book called Tribes, went into a book called tribes, and then a couple tour companies that kind of are favoring photo tours started going there, and then other people started going there and then the very uh, people that were photographing and there was about seven distinct tribes they started, um, wearing hats that were given to them and t-shirts that were given to them and their culture completely changed, and I feel responsible for that.
• 23:10
  Art Wolfe: And as soon as we lose a culture or a language, the earth is diminished and it just seems like people go seeing people wearing skins or almost no clothing whatsoever.
• 23:20
  Art Wolfe: People go seeing people wearing skins or almost no clothing whatsoever and they feel compelled to take off their T-shirt and baseball hat and give it to them.
• 23:29
  Art Wolfe: But what they're doing is really changing cultures, and so when I later did the TV show Travel clothing, no sunglasses, nothing was left behind, and so that became a philosophy going forward, because I've seen how people really can be inappropriate travelers.
• 24:04
  Matt Jacob: It is difficult to go into these cultures, these places and meet and have these wonderful experience of photographic experiences with these indigenous populations and wherever we might be, and it's difficult to not just take from that and just to take for your own self-interest, which is take photos, essentially, or lead a tour there.
• 24:27
  Matt Jacob: But it's also very easy to, or very, very difficult to, go the other way and want to give them everything, to say thank you and oh, they need this and they need this and they need money, and give them those money because then that just snowballs.
• 24:43
  Matt Jacob: They get used to it.
• 24:43
  Matt Jacob: They may want to be more westernized and be more affluent, essentially, but we all know that that's not a good solution.
• 24:53
  Matt Jacob: But there's got to be a good balance somewhere where we're not just taking but we're also not ruining that culture.
• 25:00
  Matt Jacob: How do we go about doing that?
• 25:02
  Matt Jacob: David Elikwu.
• 25:03
  Art Wolfe: Well, first of all, a lot of the cultures we're talking about, for instance, the folks of the Omo.
• 25:09
  Art Wolfe: They're growing crops, they've got corn, they've got grains, they've got happy life.
• 25:16
  Art Wolfe: Honestly, and before I ever pull out a camera and photograph them, I usually put a camera in their hands and have them photograph me and look at the back of the camera now that they can see an image, and they're quite thrilled with that.
• 25:29
  Art Wolfe: They're rarely asking for anything from me, but they're enjoying the experience that somebody's come from afar and finds them interesting, and so it's an interesting diversion from their normal life.
• 25:43
  Art Wolfe: In the case of early travel to the Amazon, they wouldn't even know how to ask for anything, nor would they need it, because they've got their own style of hunting and gathering or growing manioc or other crops.
• 26:01
  Art Wolfe: So I'm not run into people wanting something from me unless it's more of a Western culture or even an Asian culture where they've been.
• 26:12
  Art Wolfe: They're living in the modern world and in fact even the most remote people are modern human beings and so if you treat them with respect, as intelligent humans, they can size you up in a nanosecond.
• 26:25
  Art Wolfe: Whether they have cell phones or technology or not, they can read people really quite fast.
• 26:31
  Art Wolfe: So if you go in there open-hearted and with no objective to take from them other than to engage them in a friendly, nice way, I've never had experiences that led to something ugly or bad taste.
• 26:49
  Art Wolfe: So I've been lucky about that.
• 26:50
  Art Wolfe: But then I grew up understanding a little more about humanity because I paid attention to my friends.
• 27:01
  Art Wolfe: I grew up gay, so we become very aware of people around us.
• 27:06
  Art Wolfe: We know who our friends were and who we would never associate with.
• 27:12
  Art Wolfe: So I think it gives you almost a heads up on seeing how people are reacting to you and whether it's safe for you and all that goes into it goes into it.
• 27:31
  Matt Jacob: Yeah, that's interesting and I'm sure that's shaped your way of thinking about how to express yourself and how to distribute your work accordingly your sexuality was that ever a thing that really you consciously put into or thought about when you were creating art essentially?
• 27:49
  Art Wolfe: You know, I think any gay person growing up in the period of time that I did, of course it dominated your life, but I also was an alpha male.
• 27:58
  Art Wolfe: I had all straight friends.
• 28:00
  Art Wolfe: I even had a gang of kids that kind of roamed the forest and protected the forest.
• 28:05
  Art Wolfe: So I wasn't a shrinking violet.
• 28:07
  Art Wolfe: I never felt inferior to anybody nor superior to anybody.
• 28:13
  Art Wolfe: I just was myself.
• 28:16
  Art Wolfe: But I think being gay you are different in a way, and so you see safe people, you read people that's really what I was getting to.
• 28:29
  Art Wolfe: You read people from afar, you're aware of people and I never went anywhere with fear at all, but I know who to avoid down the road and I guess that's just part of growing up in the period that I did.
• 28:48
  Art Wolfe: And things are very different these days.
• 28:52
  Art Wolfe: Yeah, they are, and all for the right reasons.
• 28:56
  Matt Jacob: Yeah, I hope so.
• 28:57
  Matt Jacob: I hope in your experience they are at least.
• 28:59
  Matt Jacob: You talked about fear.
• 29:02
  Matt Jacob: What do you fear right now?
• 29:05
  Matt Jacob: And being a photographer, a global photographer, who travels the world, does books, tv series, which we're going to touch upon later but what?
• 29:14
  Matt Jacob: What is at the forefront of your fears right now?
• 29:17
  Matt Jacob: We talked about environmental impacts.
• 29:19
  Matt Jacob: The balance between tourism and environmental impacts is that up there near the top definitely.
• 29:25
  Art Wolfe: Uh know, it's no mystery.
• 29:27
  Art Wolfe: The oceans are rising, the earth is warming.
• 29:30
  Art Wolfe: I think if I was a young man that had aspirations of having children, I'd be concerned about that, because what kind of life are your children going to live if things keep going on the same trajectory?
• 29:45
  Art Wolfe: I also am aware that there's a lot of smart people and NGOs that are out there working on behalf of everybody.
• 29:52
  Art Wolfe: They don't make the news.
• 29:54
  Art Wolfe: You know the old term if it bleeds, it leads.
• 29:57
  Art Wolfe: We tend to hear the negative rather than the positive stories.
• 30:02
  Art Wolfe: In fact, the most recent book that I've done is called Wild Lives, and in part it was done because people are overwhelmed with COVID and earth and politics and war and yet they never hear that there's more whales in the ocean than there has been since the 1950s, that there's more mountain lions in North America than there has been in 200 years, that mountain gorillas are growing in population by 10% a year, as are tigers in India.
• 30:33
  Art Wolfe: Those are all positive things that people need to hear.
• 30:37
  Art Wolfe: So it's not all negative and it's not all going to hell in a handbasket, and there's a lot of NGOs working on behalf of the greater good and we just need to hear more of those stories and I have no regrets.
• 30:53
  Art Wolfe: I don't look back with regrets.
• 30:55
  Art Wolfe: There's a lot of things I could have done better, but to try to live in the past and regrets is a useless energy.
• 31:02
  Art Wolfe: I live in the future.
• 31:03
  Art Wolfe: I'm working on books that will see the light of day in a year or two, so everything's about what's next rather than what was.
• 31:14
  Matt Jacob: How do you see the role of photography in that conservation effort, if photography has a role at all?
• 31:20
  Matt Jacob: It?
• 31:21
  Art Wolfe: definitely does.
• 31:22
  Art Wolfe: You know, the written word is very powerful, but one single salient photo can move a lot more people, and so I've seen it with my own work and in my colleagues' work that photos are right in your face.
• 31:35
  Art Wolfe: People identify with the image, and so I see a huge role for photography not only in saving lives of people that are in conflict, but also animals at risk and environments at risk, and so it takes somebody to go there and to bring back and show the world what just written words would not have the same impact on the average human.
• 32:06
  Matt Jacob: Yeah, another quote I found of yours was this it is in the wild places, where the edge of the earth meets the corners of the sky, the human spirit is fed, which I thought was extremely powerful, certainly for someone who enjoys being in nature and wildlife.
• 32:23
  Matt Jacob: How does that belief kind of drive your work in raising awareness about environmental issues and so on?
• 32:31
  Art Wolfe: Well, you know, that phrase was actually used as part of an Everest expedition that I was invited on in the winter of 1984.
• 32:41
  Art Wolfe: We were the first Western expedition allowed into Tibet by the Chinese government up the northeast ridge.
• 32:48
  Art Wolfe: There was no Google Earth, there was no living human being that had ever climbed successfully, and so we were feeling like we're going into the great unknown.
• 32:59
  Art Wolfe: And yet it was one of the greatest things I ever got involved with, simply because it was one of the last great expeditions, and so we were out of communication with the outside world for three months in the winter.
• 33:12
  Art Wolfe: It was hard, it was cold, it was inspiring.
• 33:17
  Art Wolfe: The beauty of the Himalaya from the north side, from the Tibetan side of the range, was under photographed and I just enjoyed the camaraderie and the experience.
• 33:28
  Art Wolfe: But I always felt that when I got into mountains.
• 33:32
  Art Wolfe: So over the years I've been to every big mountain range on earth, and when I go into the mountains it just reminds me of my roots, of being in my early 20s and standing on a mountain range looking over the summits of many peaks.
• 33:47
  Art Wolfe: But I think that spirit was implicit in Western culture, especially in the United States, where we started on the East Coast, and the people that were the outliers kept moving west until we hit where I live, right here on the West Coast of North America, and so now the great unknown lies beneath the ocean or in the skies above, and there are people that are wanting to explore every aspect of Earth, but also space.
• 34:18
  Art Wolfe: So I think it's just inherent in the human spirit to want to go and see the unknown.
• 34:24
  Art Wolfe: I don't think that actually answered specifically your question, but that is really the origin of that phrase.
• 34:35
  Matt Jacob: Yeah, no, I love it.
• 34:37
  Matt Jacob: And I didn't know it was from so long ago, so that adds even more gravitas to it.
• 34:41
  Matt Jacob: And yeah, that's wonderful.
• 34:43
  Matt Jacob: And obviously travel has been in your blood all your life and you did this.
• 34:48
  Matt Jacob: You mentioned earlier the Travel to the Edge series.
• 34:50
  Matt Jacob: I haven't had the pleasure of watching.
• 34:52
  Matt Jacob: I've seen a few clips.
• 34:53
  Matt Jacob: Can you tell us a little bit more about that series, Because there's a lot of episodes?
• 34:58
  Matt Jacob: Right, it was over a couple of seasons and multiple episodes.
• 35:02
  Art Wolfe: It was one of the hardest things I ever did, because we would do three episodes at a time and you shoot.
• 35:10
  Art Wolfe: Well, for our 28-minute episode you'd shoot 30 hours, and I like efficiency.
• 35:17
  Art Wolfe: I'm sparing in what I shoot and so I don't shoot a lot of everything, hoping that there's a couple of good shots in there.
• 35:25
  Art Wolfe: At this point in my career, after 50 years, whatever I'm shooting I'm using, and so it was hard for me to work with a film crew which were professional but they would back up and back up, and back up and to repeat lines and all of that was drudgery.
• 35:45
  Art Wolfe: Now the good side of it was it was a small film crew and we were able to get funding from Microsoft and Canon and we were able to go into places that I wouldn't have been able to afford at the time, from Mali Africa going to Antarctica since the early 80s.
• 36:06
  Art Wolfe: So I had been down there many, many times.
• 36:08
  Art Wolfe: But it was nice to bring the film crew to South Georgia or the Antarctic Peninsula or the Sahara Desert or, and so I love taking the crew to places that I knew and places I had never been to, and originally it was going to be just for American audiences, but then, since I owned the series, we were able to broker it through Boston Public TV and they sold it throughout Europe.
• 36:38
  Art Wolfe: Al Jazeera was the first entity to buy it and it was broadcast throughout the out there Arab world.
• 36:44
  Art Wolfe: And so for me, growing up poor, really poor, in Seattle, I never would have dreamed that something I helped create could be broadcast around the world, so it seemed like the future was limitless, and it still feels that way.
• 37:04
  Art Wolfe: I'm always surprised on how your name gets out, my name gets out to the world.
• 37:10
  Art Wolfe: Now I just did an interview yesterday morning with a lady from Tbilisi, georgia, and I've never been there, and so she's asking questions about Wild Lives, the most recent book, and I'm still I mean, I'm always thrilled.
• 37:26
  Art Wolfe: It's never.
• 37:28
  Art Wolfe: We don't turn down interviews.
• 37:29
  Art Wolfe: I like to share whatever I know with the audience, and so people like you that have really robust audiences.
• 37:37
  Art Wolfe: Of course, I'm going to do your podcast I'd be an idiot not to do it so but it's also great to have a conversation with somebody that is also a very fine photographer oh well, thank you very much, I'll take that as a compliment um, very honest, it's special to have you on and I wish we could have you on for longer and we're going to wrap this up soon.
• 38:01
  Matt Jacob: Um, I just wanted to dive a little bit deep into the, the travels to the edge, because, as a photographer, looking at a very successful photographer like you've been doing it for a couple of decades then how does one even attempt to do something like a TV series?
• 38:21
  Matt Jacob: Because as photographers, we don't even think really about like, oh, I'm going to want to go do a TV series about traveling and taking photos, I mean in our dreams.
• 38:29
  Matt Jacob: Yeah, how did it all come about?
• 38:32
  Matt Jacob: What was the intent and the purpose behind it?
• 38:35
  Art Wolfe: Well, first of all it was a personal challenge because I was one of those kids that was a saboteur.
• 38:40
  Art Wolfe: In high school, junior high, I'd sit in the back of the class and make a wisecrack and embarrass somebody up in front of the class, but when it was my time to get up in front, I would just go white.
• 38:56
  Art Wolfe: I could not carry on a conversation until college where, in the second degree that I got, which was art education, I was forced to take speech class and then be a substitute art teacher in the school district, and I make the analogy.
• 39:11
  Art Wolfe: It was like a coyote being cornered they either fight or they die.
• 39:17
  Art Wolfe: And I learned that if I could say words with confidence, that people would listen, and that helped me immensely on selling stories to National Geographic or Audubon or any of a number of national magazines.
• 39:32
  Art Wolfe: And so it was a personal challenge that here is this guy.
• 39:35
  Art Wolfe: Even though I was an alpha male, I was still, like most people, petrified in presenting in front of an audience.
• 39:42
  Art Wolfe: It's one of the most common fears of men and so it gave me the encouragement to do a TV show.
• 39:50
  Art Wolfe: I started giving lectures once I got a little older and I loved getting in front of audiences and making them laugh, and so the TV show was just a continuum of those public presentations.
• 40:05
  Art Wolfe: And so I still do it Like in February I'll be before 2,000 people in Freiburg, germany, at an opera house that I helped open on one of their first performances.
• 40:20
  Art Wolfe: And it's funny because I've been going to Germany for 25 years and originally you would have an interpreter on stage and you couldn't make jokes because it would not translate.
• 40:31
  Art Wolfe: And when I was in Fribourg about four years ago on the grand opening of the opera house, every little joke, every nuance people were getting so long gone were the interpreters.
• 40:43
  Art Wolfe: They just understand English so well these days and Germany is a great country for nature and photography.
• 40:51
  Art Wolfe: They just love nature.
• 40:53
  Art Wolfe: They're very similar to Americans in their love of nature and photography, so it's a good audience for me.
• 41:00
  Art Wolfe: When a book comes out in English, it generally is printed in German as well.
• 41:04
  Matt Jacob: Wow, okay, and how did that Travel to the edge series shape your perspective on, well, kind of, what was the result of it internally, more than anything else, you know, how did it change your viewpoints, if anything, on the global cultures and landscapes?
• 41:21
  Art Wolfe: Do you know?
• 41:21
  Art Wolfe: I was a couple of years after the show ended.
• 41:26
  Art Wolfe: I was in Iceland and I was at a waterfall on a private property and I had never I've been to Iceland many, many times but here I'm in Iceland, at a waterfall, on a private ranch, and nobody was there except for Gabrielle Jacan, this Romanian assistant friend of mine, and he's on a bridge.
• 41:48
  Art Wolfe: I'm off the bridge, I'm up at the waterfall photographing, and then suddenly I turn around and there's 25 people on the bridge acting, all animated, and I thought, okay, shit, they are angry that I'm in their picture.
• 42:00
  Art Wolfe: So I packed up my camera, started walking back to this bridge, but they keep watching me rather than the waterfall, and like, come on, get over it.
• 42:10
  Art Wolfe: I'm opening the shot up for you.
• 42:12
  Art Wolfe: And then, when I got up on the bridge, a couple of them were like pounding their heart and I had no idea what was going on and, as it turned out, it was a photo club from Madrid, spain, and they had seen this episode that I had done.
• 42:27
  Art Wolfe: And now they recognized me, even from behind, all bundled up with a wool hat, but they recognized me and suddenly the power of the TV show came coming back to me and I have to say I was thrilled.
• 42:44
  Art Wolfe: I posed with every one of them.
• 42:45
  Art Wolfe: They were so happy to to me.
• 42:45
  Art Wolfe: And I have to say I was thrilled.
• 42:46
  Art Wolfe: I posed with every one of them.
• 42:46
  Art Wolfe: They were so happy to meet me and it was like God I keep on harking back to being that kid in the outskirts of Seattle.
• 42:55
  Art Wolfe: Family had no money.
• 42:57
  Art Wolfe: We never really traveled very far.
• 42:59
  Art Wolfe: And now people from Madrid, which I've never been to, are thrilled to meet me and I just.
• 43:05
  Art Wolfe: It was really quite gratifying for me to know that that camera that my parents gave me it was old used Konica camera became literally a passport to the world.
• 43:19
  Art Wolfe: And so you know, there's still.
• 43:22
  Art Wolfe: There's not a lot of money in this business.
• 43:24
  Art Wolfe: You have to do it because you have a passion for it, and so I never think about money.
• 43:29
  Art Wolfe: I'm thinking about the next project or the next destination.
• 43:34
  Matt Jacob: At what point do you start thinking about money, though?
• 43:35
  Matt Jacob: Because obviously we have to.
• 43:36
  Matt Jacob: As photographers, whether we're beginners or advanced, we have to still pay the bills.
• 43:43
  Art Wolfe: We pay the bills by working seven days a week.
• 43:45
  Art Wolfe: I never take a vacation.
• 43:47
  Art Wolfe: I am always breathing and living this, uh.
• 43:50
  Art Wolfe: And so I'm always working and people say, oh yeah, you must take a vacation.
• 43:54
  Art Wolfe: It's like, no, I I'm not one to lay on a beach, I'm, I'm all about the next adventure.
• 44:02
  Art Wolfe: So, and my staff, which are downstairs downstairs is a small dedicated staff.
• 44:07
  Art Wolfe: Two of the women have worked for me for 32 years.
• 44:11
  Art Wolfe: Gabrielle has been working with me for 30 years.
• 44:14
  Art Wolfe: I'm longevity with people, so I'm very loyal to them, they're loyal to me and we just make ends meet.
• 44:21
  Art Wolfe: But we're not buying brand new you know Teslas nor would I now anyways, yeah, let's not mention Elon.
• 44:35
  Matt Jacob: That's wonderful.
• 44:36
  Matt Jacob: I love that.
• 44:39
  Matt Jacob: That you've said that about longevity with your staff, and that's something I really want to strive for as well.
• 44:43
  Matt Jacob: You know, grow together.
• 44:45
  Matt Jacob: They're growth partners as much as they are, you know, members of staff or employed staff, right.
• 44:49
  Matt Jacob: So, yeah, this whole thing, this whole endeavor, is a vocation, without vacation, right.
• 44:55
  Matt Jacob: It's something that we just love to do and we'll always do, whether it makes a lot of money or not.
• 45:01
  Matt Jacob: So, yeah, I love that.
• 45:03
  Matt Jacob: It's such a huge inspiration for other people.
• 45:05
  Matt Jacob: So, thank you.
• 45:06
  Matt Jacob: Why do you and I love that little anecdote about being in Iceland those people really cheering for you?
• 45:14
  Matt Jacob: Why do you think that people, your audience, is your audience?
• 45:19
  Matt Jacob: Why do you think people follow you and are interested and love what you do?
• 45:24
  Art Wolfe: I think I'm basically very honest and open and I think that they like that.
• 45:29
  Art Wolfe: I think people are drawn to people that don't have ulterior motives or agendas, that aren't out there and open, and so I think we live in a time where local and national and international politicians are working on behalf of their own greed, so I think people are drawn to people that have a feeling for the greater good, and that's really the way I see myself Tell us the journey towards that, and I'm sure you've been that way for your whole life.
• 46:05
  Matt Jacob: but you must have made many mistakes over your time as a photographer.
• 46:09
  Matt Jacob: Are there any that kind of spring out to you as we're talking, now that you've learned really big lessons from?
• 46:16
  Art Wolfe: I think that every trip I go on I'm learning a new lesson.
• 46:19
  Art Wolfe: You know, everything that has happened to a photographer has happened to me tenfold, including not having film in the camera and or washing pants that had film in the pants and everything.
• 46:34
  Art Wolfe: You know, every mistake you could make has happened to me multiple, multiple times and you just kind of say a few bad words and you move on, but that's it.
• 46:46
  Art Wolfe: You just struggle on and know that we're all human and we all trip over stumps and we all fall backwards and yeah, it would be a comedy if we had every mishap filmed and strung together.
• 47:03
  Art Wolfe: It would be a very popular show because we are just like everybody else.
• 47:10
  Matt Jacob: And so how, in the same breath, how do you define growth as an artist?
• 47:15
  Matt Jacob: Because as artists, we always want to be.
• 47:17
  Matt Jacob: You know, we talked about this at the top of the show, right?
• 47:19
  Matt Jacob: We always want to be moving forward, we always want to be evolving, doing something different.
• 47:23
  Matt Jacob: How would you define, or at least explain that definition of growth as an artist?
• 47:29
  Art Wolfe: well for me.
• 47:29
  Art Wolfe: I'm a better photographer today than I was last year, and it's not that my skills holding a camera is any better.
• 47:36
  Art Wolfe: Certainly, cameras are getting better, but it's the intellect and the eye and the imagination that gets more and more nuanced.
• 47:43
  Art Wolfe: The more you stick with it, you see things faster.
• 47:46
  Art Wolfe: You see things that you might not have considered five years ago, but you are now, and so that's growth and you want to be at the end of this line, shooting things that reveal a subject in a very different way, a different perspective, a different style.
• 48:06
  Art Wolfe: Something new is what we're offering people, and you know it's harder to engage people today because there's so much competing.
• 48:15
  Art Wolfe: You know there's so much on TV.
• 48:17
  Art Wolfe: There's so much new programs.
• 48:20
  Art Wolfe: There's AI coming along.
• 48:23
  Art Wolfe: You know I'm not fearful of AI so much because I think still the authenticity and the honesty of photography is if it's revealed.
• 48:34
  Art Wolfe: People are still going to be drawn towards something that they know the sky really was above that mountain range, and so there's a value in that, and people want honesty.
• 48:45
  Art Wolfe: They don't want to marvel at something that was a creation.
• 48:48
  Art Wolfe: Oh, even though I just saw Gladiator in the movie and I loved it and the way they use AI to build ancient Rome was amazing.
• 48:59
  Art Wolfe: But it's still a movie and you walk out of the theater and two days later you're kind of forgetting about the whole endeavor.
• 49:05
  Matt Jacob: But people, if they see a photo that really touches them and it's meaningful and it's real, that lasts a much longer with people so how do we get to that where we're seeing much quicker and we're, we're, we're, we're more evolved artists, it becomes more naturally, more natural to us.
• 49:26
  Matt Jacob: How do we, how do we get to that point?
• 49:29
  Matt Jacob: If I'm a beginner photographer, how do you teach people to get to that point where okay, I'm not, I don't need to worry about camera settings, right, they are just the camera settings.
• 49:39
  Matt Jacob: How do I see things better?
• 49:40
  Matt Jacob: How do I express my vision better?
• 49:42
  Matt Jacob: How do we get from A to B?
• 49:44
  Art Wolfe: faster.
• 49:45
  Art Wolfe: Well, I think you do it through redundancy and really well thought out lectures and articulating what they're viewing.
• 49:57
  Art Wolfe: And if it's an effective articulation and images at the same time, people can learn really fast.
• 50:05
  Art Wolfe: People can say oh well, you were born with talent.
• 50:10
  Art Wolfe: Well, that's like dismissing a concert pianist that spends hours a day practicing his or her craft.
• 50:18
  Art Wolfe: Yeah, there are certain people that have maybe a better aptitude for this or that, but that alone won't get you where you want to go.
• 50:28
  Art Wolfe: You have to practice, you have to breathe it, you have to live it.
• 50:31
  Art Wolfe: This is not a job, this is life that both you and I are involved with, and you have to be willing to have that life.
• 50:41
  Art Wolfe: Because it's not nine to five and what's the earning hours for the first year?
• 50:46
  Art Wolfe: It's none of that.
• 50:48
  Art Wolfe: You don't even think about that.
• 50:49
  Art Wolfe: And yet there's people that come up and they want to know what's the first year salary like is like, if you're asking that question, you're never going to be that so Well, it's analogous to asking the question what settings did you use?
• 51:03
  Matt Jacob: or what camera did you use, right?
• 51:05
  Matt Jacob: So, okay, that question is of an importance, but it's not of the importance that we're looking at.
• 51:12
  Matt Jacob: And so with it, there is this mindset shift.
• 51:14
  Matt Jacob: I think in order to be great at what you do in your craft, you have to have that mindset and, like you said, be willing to just work hard all the time, practice all the time and just live it.
• 51:26
  Matt Jacob: I tell people it just is like make, it is so, it's just, it is your life all the time.
• 51:32
  Matt Jacob: You don't even think about it being something or having a label to it, just is.
• 51:39
  Art Wolfe: I couldn't agree more.
• 51:41
  Matt Jacob: All right, last few questions.
• 51:43
  Matt Jacob: I'll let you go.
• 51:44
  Matt Jacob: It's getting dark, I can see it's getting dark in Seattle it's dark in Seattle.
• 51:49
  Matt Jacob: When we talk about gear.
• 51:52
  Matt Jacob: Just give us an idea.
• 51:53
  Matt Jacob: There's a lot of gear nerds out there and they're probably begging me to ask what type of equipment you use.
• 51:58
  Matt Jacob: Give us a rundown.
• 52:06
  Art Wolfe: Okay, I have two camera bodies I'm packing for this long trip.
• 52:07
  Art Wolfe: I've got two camera bodies, one's in a duffel wrapped in bubble wrap, the other's in a little backpack.
• 52:10
  Art Wolfe: I've got one to 500 Canon and a 14 millimeter, and I surmise that's all I need.
• 52:16
  Art Wolfe: And then I've got underwater housing with a different camera and lens.
• 52:19
  Art Wolfe: It's interesting that when I teach a workshop, at the end of the workshop I have no knowledge.
• 52:25
  Art Wolfe: Who's got Nikon, sony, canon?
• 52:27
  Art Wolfe: I don't.
• 52:28
  Art Wolfe: I'm totally not a geek, you know.
• 52:32
  Art Wolfe: I know more about the animal and the forest and the tree and the birds than the cameras.
• 52:37
  Art Wolfe: I know probably 5% of what my camera can do.
• 52:40
  Art Wolfe: So I'm totally not into technology.
• 52:43
  Art Wolfe: And so it's funny.
• 52:45
  Art Wolfe: You asked that question because and I know people want to know but I am so not interested and I have to have somebody read the instructions and explain it to me, and then I get it because I'm so adverse to reading instructions and especially, you know from Japanese cameras the way they write manuals.
• 53:06
  Art Wolfe: It's like what.
• 53:07
  Art Wolfe: So that's my answer to you.
• 53:11
  Matt Jacob: That's why I moved away from Sony.
• 53:13
  Matt Jacob: Actually, I used to shoot Sony um back in the day and I just couldn't get used to the the I.
• 53:18
  Matt Jacob: The cameras are great, Like the image quality, amazing, the glass that would go with these cameras I'm talking like the Sony a nine, A7R III, these types of things, Amazing.
• 53:29
  Matt Jacob: But I just did not like the menu functions.
• 53:31
  Matt Jacob: I did not like the user interface.
• 53:33
  Matt Jacob: I just wanted something simple and that's why eventually, when I could afford it, I went to Hasselblad.
• 53:37
  Matt Jacob: Hasselblad just have very, very simple menu functions.
• 53:41
  Matt Jacob: I'm exactly like you.
• 53:42
  Matt Jacob: I don't read instructions.
• 53:43
  Matt Jacob: Unfortunately for my wife, who always lambasts me about that, I never read instructions.
• 53:50
  Matt Jacob: It's just ah, I'll fix it.
• 53:50
  Matt Jacob: I think that's a man thing.
• 53:51
  Matt Jacob: Right, I'll just get on with it.
• 53:53
  Matt Jacob: I'll figure it out.
• 53:54
  Matt Jacob: But yeah, I feel your pain.
• 53:57
  Matt Jacob: Is that something that you talk about on your workshop as well?
• 53:59
  Matt Jacob: You don't really teach that.
• 54:02
  Matt Jacob: We say workshops or photo tours.
• 54:04
  Matt Jacob: Tell us a little bit more about those experiences.
• 54:08
  Matt Jacob: If I'm a client, how am I going to experience this?
• 54:10
  Art Wolfe: Yeah, you're going to learn a lot about seeing and imagination.
• 54:14
  Art Wolfe: I do have assistants that are the techs that can help somebody struggling with a branded camera.
• 54:20
  Art Wolfe: But I tell everybody, before you arrive at a workshop with me, read at least to know how to use your camera.
• 54:24
  Art Wolfe: But I tell everybody, before you arrive at a workshop with me, read at least to know how to use your camera, because I don't want to waste time trying to figure out your camera and you hand me a Sony and I'm going to look at it like a chimpanzee.
• 54:37
  Art Wolfe: I wouldn't know anything about that, but I want people that can at least take a picture with it so that we get that behind us.
• 54:46
  Art Wolfe: And then we're really talking about subject and finding subjects.
• 54:50
  Art Wolfe: You know, and I told them, this isn't about rainbows and sunsets and waterfalls.
• 54:56
  Art Wolfe: This is about finding things that people step on on their way to the viewpoint.
• 55:01
  Art Wolfe: And if we can get that across, then it starts to open up people's image and I love that because it's.
• 55:08
  Matt Jacob: People are so happy when you give them license to shoot something different yeah, I'd love that and, uh, I, I work on that myself a lot as well.
• 55:21
  Matt Jacob: People, people get very because people see an image and they just go.
• 55:25
  Matt Jacob: Well, well, I want to take exactly that, right, I want to be able to take a shot like that, and that's okay.
• 55:31
  Matt Jacob: But you have to kind of go through the whole process yourself to really understand and learn how to capture something like that and, more importantly, think outside of that photo and those types and styles of images and think about how to tell a story or how to add context and narrative to a book or a series of images, right, because photography is not just about an image that looks really nice that's part of it, of course but people I find that in my experiences or people just want well, I'll just want to take this beautiful shot of a waterfall, right, okay, okay, great, but what about all of this other stuff that you know we can use and see and express with?
• 56:10
  Matt Jacob: Um?
• 56:11
  Matt Jacob: So I I kind of I love the fact that there are people out there like you doing these workshops in in that type of way and and educating people in a in an experiential way to to be able to see different things.
• 56:25
  Art Wolfe: Yeah, it's pretty rewarding when you know you really opened up people's imaginations and that's a big thing for me.
• 56:34
  Matt Jacob: Well, you've opened up my imagination today.
• 56:35
  Matt Jacob: Thank you so much for talking with me.
• 56:37
  Matt Jacob: Huge inspiration, and I wish you the best of luck on the trip.
• 56:42
  Matt Jacob: You've got a big tour.
• 56:43
  Matt Jacob: Tell us a little bit about what is this tour that you do.
• 56:46
  Matt Jacob: Is it more workshops, or is it commercial stuff, or what?
• 56:49
  Art Wolfe: No, well, there's no workshop.
• 56:51
  Art Wolfe: I mean, I'm taking people to the Qum and they're going to be shocked to see all the crazy things that Nagasa does and the holy men do.
• 57:01
  Art Wolfe: It's culture shock, you know, everything's going to be different for them.
• 57:06
  Art Wolfe: Food's different, the atmosphere is different, the people are different.
• 57:09
  Art Wolfe: So culture shock is for me.
• 57:12
  Art Wolfe: You find new subjects and new inspiration, so I love it.
• 57:17
  Art Wolfe: I've kind of done my underwater work on this previous book on wildlife.
• 57:24
  Art Wolfe: I did coral work down in Indonesia, but I'm just going with a friend that wants me to come along and then he's going to continue on to India and so I didn't want to say no and I don't want to stay in cold, dark Seattle right now.
• 57:41
  Art Wolfe: So I'd rather be diving, but I'm not a great diver, but I'm um tenacious, so I I'll learn, relearn how to use my underwater housing and have fun and stay warm.
• 57:56
  Art Wolfe: But that's the trip, yeah yeah, well, thank you.
• 58:00
  Matt Jacob: Um, we never touched upon your name, but for the record and for the audience, your my friends started abridging it to art, which is short for Arthur and Wolf.
• 58:29
  Art Wolfe: Yeah, that's it.
• 58:30
  Art Wolfe: But the people always ask, yeah, you made your name up and I'll say, yeah, my real name's Melvin Pickles, and they go.
• 58:37
  Art Wolfe: Really I said, no, I'm not the type that would make up a name.
• 58:41
  Art Wolfe: I don't live in Los Angeles, I live in Seattle.
• 58:46
  Matt Jacob: All right, meldon.
• 58:47
  Matt Jacob: Well, thanks so much for chatting with me.
• 58:51
  Matt Jacob: I wish you the best of luck in the future.
• 58:53
  Matt Jacob: We'll keep watching your incredible content, incredible photos, and yeah, until the next time.
• 58:58
  Matt Jacob: Thank you so much, yeah.
• 59:00
  Art Wolfe: I hope there will be a next time.
• 59:02
  Art Wolfe: Thanks, Matt.