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Interview with Jim Lo Scalzo
by Justin Anderson
Jim Lo Scalzo, veteran photographer for U.S. News & World Report, has recently published a deeply compelling memoir that documents his world travels—from leper colonies to angry Mennonites, from the invasion of Iraq to the pristine landscape of Antarctica. (To view his gripping mini-film about the book, click here.)
Justin Anderson, who shares Lo Scalzo's wanderlust, has tracked him down to talk to him about making pictures and making literary art.
Because you are a photographer, I was fully expecting a memoir over-full with visual detail. Instead, I found a decidedly literary approach that seemed to have an innate balance between sense detail and exposition. In what ways do you think your lengthy experience with a camera helps and/or hurts you in your approach to creating scenes and images with words?
The picture making helps me develop a perspective. Think of it as the opposite of Google's satellite imaging—not an automated, robotic perspective but an organic one, an emotional one, one that expresses what I like or dislike about each destination. Writing about these places was merely an extension of that act. And as an added bonus I was able to reference my pictures for all those little details you might otherwise miss or forget.
You said in an earlier interview that Gabriel Garcia Marquez's writing, the way he puts the reader in a specific space, is in some ways akin to the way a picture is created. Would you care to add anything about that?
The difference is that photographers aren't imagining these scenes but standing right before them. The crackheads, the Iraqi insurgents, and the people dead or dying all within an arm's reach. Which is to say that photographers take more risks, endure more hardships, witness more misery in order to practice their craft than fiction writers. Not to minimize Marquez's abilities (I did name my son after the man) or those of other fiction writers, but to put their work in the context of other mediums.
However, if there are similarities between photography, there must also be differences. What unique challenges set writing apart from photography (or vice-versa)?
If I can swap "challenges" for advantages, writing allows for the ability to revise. When I come back from a photo assignment, review my take on the computer, and feel that familiar nag of disappointment, there's nothing I can do to make the pictures better. Pictures either work or don't work; if I fail in the field there's no redo—no revising the situation.
With writing, though, you can keep tweaking your work until its precisely how you want it. It's so liberating—and so annoying, as I found myself obsessing over every sentence.
You describe yourself as a "travel addict" and mention that photography helps enable you to feed that desire. I noticed that the titles of the chapters are spots on the map. In both photography and writing, what approach do you take to capturing place? In what way does a sense of place inform the detail you allow onto the frame/page?
I think it was in the book Independence Day that Frank Bascombe, Richard Ford's angry white realtor, blurts out the phrase "place means nothing." When I read that line I remember thinking how, for a photographer, it's the exact opposite; place means everything. I also remember thinking how fun it would be to write a book with that line as it's thesis: place means everything. And so I developed the memoir as a travelogue, progressing my life through a series of destinations as a way to exemplify this dependence on place.
I'm a travel addict too, and I can't help but wonder what place you will end up in when retirement comes and all that bouncing around ends? What place possesses that special pull, that one thing that makes you never want to leave?
I've never been to a place where I could spend the rest of my life—although I suppose, for a retiree, Manhattan strikes me as appealing. Of course I'd have to hit the Powerball first—or have my book optioned for an HBO special.
How do you approach an otherwise commonplace scene or location and make it seem new and unique?
I'm a big believer in the Jerry Garcia approach; "please don't dominate the rap Jack, if you got nothing new to say." Photographically speaking that means more than applying different techniques, but taking a new look at old or existing stories. A quick example; the magazine recently did a story on the bid to build a wall between the US and Mexico. Instead of running the same pictures we usually do—those of some poor Mexican sitting in the sand with a border agent's flashlight in his face—I proposed we do the story as a series of landscapes, panoramic views of the border itself, so readers can get a feel for the desolation, the emptiness. So I rented a truck, drove the length of the border—from El Paso to San Diego—and in four days we had a different perspective on an old story.
Do you think you will ever do anything like this again?
If you mean going to a place like Antarctica, without a doubt. I want to bring my wife and kids. If you mean writing another book, I'd sooner get a brain aneurism.
Writing a book is like having an affair, only less satisfying. You spend all your free time excusing yourself from your spouse, then burying your head in your laptop. Nights, weekends, holidays—it's a drag.
You admit to allowing a bit of your own "darker side" into this memoir. What part of this was hardest for you to write?
I think the most difficult thing about writing a memoir is standing naked before your peers. In my case it isn't a pretty picture: the aggression, the reproductive issues, the cheating in college. And my failure to become a player in the pantheon of shooters. But then I can't imagine it would be a pretty picture for anyone. I'd like to believe that a person's flaws are what make them beautiful—but that belief may be too self-serving.
At many points, you express your pervading desire to see, feel, and experience as much as possible. What's left in the queue? What experiences do you just have to have? What challenges do you feel a need to overcome? More concisely, where to next?
My fantasy destinations are North Korea, Bhutan, and Libya, in that order. I hope I can get to all of them. Tragically, I'll be spending much of the coming month in the polar opposite of these places—that would be Iowa—for the upcoming caucuses.
Name a writer whose work is currently making you jealous.
For fiction I'll stick with Richard Ford. He's been making me jealous for twenty years (with Rock Springs when I was a teen—and this year with The Lay of the Land). He writes for men, unapologetically.
For nonfiction, Michael Pollan. The guy can make anything interesting—cattle farming, dietary habits, plants(!)—something environmental journalists can't seem to get right.
What kind of child were you?
Solitary. Escapist. Liked to bird watch.
What's your relationship with rejection like?
Intimate. It's something every photographer, even established ones, deal with all the time—the profession is that competitive. You need the skin of a caiman in this profession.
Did you suffer in the process of writing this book? How?
I've often wondered if the heat and radiation from the laptop didn't fuck with my sperm count. But otherwise no, I didn't suffer.
Do you have a writerly habit you'd like to break?
Drinking. It made sitting at the laptop more tolerable.
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Copyright © 2009 The Southeast Review
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