We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Liz Potter a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Liz, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

I’ve always been creative, so learning to do what I do now has been a life-long journey. It happened organically because it’s just part of who I am. But to pinpoint photography specifically, it started in college when I changed majors from fine art to photojournalism.

Creativity blossoms when exploration is involved, and exploration takes time. I would never speed anything up, even if I could go back in time! I often discover different ways of doing things, or have ideas I never would have considered if I didn’t take the time to play around with mediums instead of focusing on some sort of “perfect” outcome. I think that’s one of the essential skills in creativity- to allow messing up, allow time to practice and play.

The only obstacle that stands in my way is probably what every artist encounters: we need more time and more money to learn all we want to learn! I’m very interested in labor-intensive analog processes that require not only learning a technique but also being able to afford and collect all the equipment needed to produce work.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I work in analog photography, both traditional black-and-white film and darkroom work and alternative methods such as cyanotype. Having a background in photojournalism in the late 1980s and 90s, I didn’t enter photography when there was a choice between digital and analog, so it’s simply what I was taught. I love the hands-on process of analog work, so digital never appealed to me. It’s just a whole different medium.

I’m not a photographer for hire like a wedding or portrait photographer—that all seems so hard! I think the pressure would be too much for me. I shoot what I want and craft bodies of work based on very personal things in hopes they resonate with others.

Over the past several years I worked very hard on trying to merge my personal life with my art and photography life by choosing to use my life to document. And I don’t mean document as in “the day in the life of Liz Potter”, I mean document the things that I surround myself with in the region where I live, which is a rural, West Texas, high desert landscape. This way of living and working allows me to spend time in places I love and use those places as a studio or subject matter.

One of my favorite things to do is tent camp. I have the luxury of living near an extremely remote and rugged state park (Big Bend Ranch State Park), where I can go off-grid, with no one around for miles, and shoot photos that then turn into projects.

This might come across as wildly self-indulgent, but my hope is that through the work I do I can inspire slowing down in life, enjoying nature, seeking adventures big and small, and for other creatives- inspire work outside of their usual work flow.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

With my background in photojournalism, I mainly shot what is considered a more documentary style for many decades. In early 2018, I moved from Austin, Texas, to a small rural town in the southwestern area of the state, where I started to explore the region with my camera. I met people, day-tripped to other small towns, documented small town life, went to events, and enjoyed capturing this new life I had created on black and white film.

When the pandemic hit, my life was radically turned upside down. The type of photography I had always known and enjoyed came to a halt. There were no more events, travel was often depressing, and I had no interest shooting photos of people wearing masks. But I had to find my way- I couldn’t let the pandemic kill something that was such a huge part of my life.

After listening to a podcast about old box cameras, I remembered I had one and dug it out of a closet to inspect it. It happened to be an old, metal box camera someone had made into a pinhole camera (a lens-less camera). I had never shot pinhole before, but I suddenly had the time to learn, and that started off a whole series of pinhole ghost self-portraits.

I also dug out a 1914 folding camera that I assumed was too old and crusty to use. However, after ordering some film adapters for it and loading it with medium-format film, I found another way to continue with photography, but in a different way than I had prior to the pandemic.

The following years sent me into directions I might never have explored if not for that awful year where the limitations led to finding new ways. I have since shot with many more formats, added another self-portrait series using a medium format film, panoramic camera, learned cyanotype, and started to shoot Polaroid and use that medium to expand into other works.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

Not to be morose, but at 58 there’s more life behind me than could ever be in front of me. I don’t want to live a life confined by what I “should” be doing. Maybe I’m dipping my toe a little too deep into the “jack of all trades, master of none” with how I want to gulp down every technique and explore mediums and subjects at a pace that sometimes leaves behind the meatier work, but it makes me happy! I can always return to projects once I get some new thing out of my system.

As simple as it sounds, my goal is to be grounded and happy. Creating in any form keeps both of those a part of my life, even when the thread is really thin. I always have something to fall back on.

In the art world, there is always deep, meaningful work that brings attention to topics that can often be depressing. Climate change, racism, sexism, poverty, homelessness, and other subjects artists have explored and shared in their artwork to bring awareness and change. I don’t have a voice for that. I do have a voice, as a single, independent person, that I always hope inspires someone to be bolder, find what grounds them, to seek moments of stillness when everything seems too chaotic. I’ve had to learn this, and it has become a great source of power to combat things in life that feel overwhelming.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.lizpotterphotography.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lizpotterphotography/