We were lucky to catch up with Blake Williams recently and have shared our conversation below.
Blake, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Have you ever had an amazing boss, mentor or leader leading you? Can you us a story or anecdote that helps illustrate why this person was such a great leader and the impact they had on you or their team?
Andrew Rurik. Go read his post.
Andrew and I were working on a little short film called Open (which won awards, by the way!). We drove to some mountains nearby so that he could shoot some footage of me walking. Just walking in the brush. Imagine two people with backpacks full of gear, driving above Arcadia and walking out-of-breath on these hiking trails, while people who had trained their hiking muscles during the entire pandemic (there was nothing better to do!) sprinted right past us. But, although the goal was to portray me as a relatively outdoorsy person, this is not the story.
Andrew Rurik was once my boss, at a summer camp designed to preach the Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I think I barely said a word to him in the first few months of working as a photographer for him. Most of his communication was a non-verbal gesture with his middle finger. We worked well together.
He texted me once that he opened Spotify on a computer that I had recently used, after I was gone from the job, and saw me listening to bird noises. This is exactly how we became friends. And while he was still my boss, we would listen to Nils Frahm’s “Says” on speakers while my coworkers (who were pining to make out with each other!) told him that he was being distracting. But I guess it did not matter. Nothing we did in that job mattered that much. We got jaded. So, burned out, we hoped the whole department would catch fire and burn to the ground. And maybe in small part because we shared this sentiment, we are still friends. Although I don’t really think of him as my boss anymore, we worked on a short film together, where he was the “director.” Hopefully this story illuminates how impactful this man is as a team leader.
We were driving, I think, to those mountains I mentioned before (which, in my mind, are barely-real mountains). Andrew’s Subaru was full of camera gear. And somewhere along the way, I do not remember exactly how, we realized that Andrew had forgotten his memory cards. All of them. All of the memory cards just slipped from his mind. I looked in my camera so that he could borrow mine, but it was a different format. Shucks. Absolute tragedy here. Apparently the director of this short film totally f*cked up. And so, we had to problem solve. We were on our way to the mountains, by the way! Was there supposed to be an electronics store nearby on our way to the mountains?!
What makes Andrew such a great team leader is that he drove with a face full of shame to the nearest Best Buy and solved the memory card problem. And I will never, ever, let him live it down.
Blake, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I’m Blake Williams, and I practice photography and sometimes other creative practices (like music and writing). I ended up as a photographer by picking up a camera and telling people about it, so much that “Blake” and “photographer” referred to each other in the 2015 Merriam-Webster Thesaurus. Look it up! Of course, I took pictures too, and developed technical skills, so that people could hire me.
My job, as a photographer, is to push one button. That’s all it takes. In an extremely literal sense, my job is merely to make images. What these images represent, or the memories that they hold, is determined by the client. The client, whether they intend to or not, comes up with a vision, and as long as my style can correspond to their vision, I can solve their creative problems.
Which, anecdotally, compared to many of the photographers that I see around me, is what sets me apart. Many follow specific trends and never grow out of them, or they develop only one particular look. I like being versatile.
The “what are you most proud of” question is a tricky one, because it recalls a debate in my family. I’ll lay it out for you. The first position states that pride is a continuous state of being, so that an individual develops a character, with the support of the community around them, that they are consistently proud of. No individual act, event, or situation merits an exceptional amount of pride, because act or event or situation is developed, in a long and subtle continuity, by the individual and community around them.
A second position states that it is sad for an individual not to experience pride in some of their accomplishments. In contrast to the wider-scoped view of the previous position, this one grants an individual the permission to feel pride in themselves in full autonomy. Most people that took this position, whom my family talked to, could only note that they were proud of graduating college.
A third position posits that pride is a sin. Initially, this was sarcastic, but, like all jokes, was taken seriously in the end. Adherents of the second position thought this joke was sad.
Finally, I personally take the fourth position. I go to a pride festival every year, where I actively develop a sense of pride. In this situation, I am most proud of being a gay man.
I think I want potential clients or followers to know that photography itself, really, is one of the most superficial mediums. We can all take a breath of relief now. Because photography doesn’t say much by itself, but always refers to a particular moment—often a particular life—and that life is what contains all the depth we sometimes look for in art. I’m not quite sure why clients should know this, other than if I’m taking their photo, we will be a little more conscious of the types of images we are creating. This is in order that the images might become little synecdoches for something bigger, like a branding strategy or a particular way of feeling. Naturally, all the techniques of lighting and composition follow from an understanding of which type of image the client wants. Which, in the end, requires that I, as a photographer, am authentic and transparent about my perspectives, and that the client feels safe and empowered enough to share their vision too.
Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?
If what I read has impacted my entrepreneurial thinking, it probably has not been in a profitable way. I remember that I was on a plane almost a year ago, reading Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire (which for me, is part of a large conservationist reading list). Abbey talks about the slow-motion destruction of our wild lands, even inside of our national parks, which are supposedly “preserved.” We favor convenience, like paved roads and parking lots. And he continues to question what people overlook in their desire for profit, that we might be missing something valuable by our participation in contemporary society.
And I was sitting there, trapped in this cylinder shooting through the sky at 600 miles per hour, having a somewhat surreal moment with this book. I was surrounded by a couple of creative people who had spent the morning in the airport drinking alcohol at 9AM, talking about so many different brands they were excited to shoot, as we were flying through the country to take photos of hats. That’s it. Hats, of all things. They were paying me a chunk of money for it, and we flew over this Western region that Abbey describes, so that it could be a backdrop for the hats. All of this so that the hat company could have pictures to post on their social media, so that they could sell more hats. And I could not stop thinking about Abbey’s polemical and somewhat naïve critique of capitalism: that we’re obsessed with producing more and more objects that we do not need. It’s a pretty basic critique. I kept thinking of how we could have shot the whole thing locally and avoided emitting all that carbon in the sky.
Abbey, and a few others like him who fall into what some call the “Earthist” camp, have forced me to think about what it means to be an entrepreneur, especially when I’m working in an industry that uses the images I produce to perpetuate what might be relatively trivial consumption. This Earthist camp of thinking advocates for more localized, responsible, and community-based production of the things we need, regarding the environment often at the expense of our own convenience. But as an entrepreneur, I’m not just dealing with the environment.
The question that responsible entrepreneurship boils down to is a value question: is it worth, at the expense of my own livelihood, questioning where a paycheck comes from? In an attempt to answer that question more broadly, virtue ethicists like Ryan Darr, in his article “Climate Change, Individual Obligations and the Virtue of Justice,” speak of rendering others their rights. When our relationships are mediated by difficult or potentially harmful social situations, like, in this case, climate change (but this could be a stand-in for many other social issues), we owe it to each other to maintain our relationships in new ways that mitigate, for example, overconsumption.
That might be a total mouthful. But quite simply, in terms of entrepreneurship, this means that it is important to make sure that how I perform business is also a thoughtful engagement with a vision towards a better world.
A few other books I’d recommend, that I’ve sort-of embodied when I’m on a shoot, are In Search of the Good Life by Rebecca Todd Peters, The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry, and The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber. For essays: Giorgio Agamben’s The Six Most Beautiful Minutes in the History of Cinema. And videos: “THE GAP by Ira Glass” (https://vimeo.com/85040589) and open (https://vimeo.com/708101580)
Have you ever had to pivot?
I went back to school after working full time as a photographer, and sometimes videographer, and eventually website-coder, at summer camp. I dropped out right before, from a computer science program, and really just committed to school. They say that once you leave school and come back, a switch flips in your brain and you become absolutely ravenous for knowledge. And so, I found myself putting photography on the backburner while I pursued a religious studies degree, first at community college and then at California State University Long Beach.
At the same time, (I mentioned this before) I had been working at a Christian camp, and was simultaneously coming out of the closet as gay, and also studying religion academically (which scared a lot of my Christian friends). So there was a lot going on, and I ended up losing a lot of the connections I had in order to secure clients. And it also meant that I had a lot to process and reconsider, both personally about how I was raised, but also what it meant to take photos of clients who thought I was going to hell. I ended up disconnecting from a lot of people, because I did not have the energy to continually lead such difficult conversations with those close to me. It was a strange time, but a story that’s been mirrored by other gay photographers I’ve talked to.
What ended up happening is that I put my camera down for a while. I read books instead, trying to capture an inner life instead of the outer one. I let the photography passion kind-of die, and really only wanted to take pictures of the horizon for a few years. And while all of this was happening, my friend was filming me for a short film that we were working on, which, I mentioned that before too, did pretty well in the festival circuit. I spoke a bit about this experience there.
I think it was a good and necessary pivot, but a difficult one. Sometimes, when shoots aren’t coming in as often, I get filled with remorse for losing my connections, and wish that I could just go to one of those churches that secretly believes that gay people should not get married, where networking happens so consistently and easily. There’s this contemplative saying, describing us like a dog running in a field. But if we’ve grown up in a cage all our lives, then sometimes we refuse to run free, and stay where it seems safe: inside the cage.
The thing sticks with me from this pivot, hopefully marking a direction of growth, is a curiosity of how I can be successful in photography while finding new and creative ways to do business. Because who would want to live their lives always caged?
Contact Info:
- Website: http://blakeaw.ca
- Instagram: blakesque
- Twitter: uberblake
Image Credits
Betsy Johnson (for the photo of Blake Williams)