Transcription of Jeff Roberts for the show Maine Photographers #245
Lisa: As a writer for Maine Magazine and the wellness editor, my job is words. I’m really privileged to work with a number of very talented photographers for our magazines whose job really is the images. Really, Jeff Roberts is one of these photographers who helps make Maine Magazine, Maine Home Design, the publications that they are. Today, we have Jeff Roberts here in the studio with us. He has worked as a photographer internationally from Boston to Burma to Budapest. When not behind a camera, Jeff can be found home brewing beer in a [blizzer 00:03:07], shucking fresh oysters, stoking bonfires, exploring the Maine woods, and willfully getting lost in new places throughout the world. I’m glad you got yourself lost at 75 Market Street. Thanks for coming in.
Jeff: Thanks for having me. It’s great to get lost here.
Lisa: We really enjoy the work that you do. You have an upcoming piece I believe about the fish houses in the June issue of … I think it’s Maine Home Design, is that correct?
Jeff: I believe they’ve actually moved it to Maine Magazine.
Lisa: Maine Magazine.
Jeff: It’s so lifestyle-y and so sort of embodies in the fun of Maine summers that they decided it was more appropriate for Maine Magazine.
Lisa: You’ve done everything. I think you’ve done pieces, you’ve done a lot of work on dwellings, houses and such. You’ve also done some people, you’ve done some images.
Jeff: Yeah, I’m lucky. Throughout my career as a photographer, I’ve shot quite a bit of different types of work. I worked as an international travel photographer for a while. I’ve shot a bunch of fashion and beauty work. Food work, architecture, portraiture. Sort of the gamut of things. Not a whole lot of babies or pets, but aside from that I’ve kind of done it all. I’m really fortunate to have shot so many different genres and sort of have moved my focus from different types of work to the other. I think I’ve now mostly settled on architecture and commercial product photography, but I think the range has been a lot of fun and it’s also helped teach me things for genres, that I’m learning from other genres that I wouldn’t have learned had I stuck with just certain types of photography.
Lisa: Tell me about your photographer’s journey. How did you get to be a photographer in the first place? Why do this?
Jeff: When I was 15, a family friend was nice enough to bring me along to a trip to Africa where we climbed Kilimanjaro and then went on safari. It was two weeks before my 16th birthday. I borrowed my parents’ camera from the 70s. Pretty subpar camera, it was from the 70s. I just had a blast. I absolutely loved capturing the culture, capturing my own adventures, capturing the other side of the world that I was then hooked. I came home and for my 16th birthday, I asked for a more legitimate camera. Took the standard route of taking classes in high school and all that. Then I went on to a regular good old college degree, religious studies, emphasis in Buddhism. Not very applicable to either photography or frankly jobs, the monasteries weren’t hiring a whole lot. From there, I worked with at risk youth for quite a few years but also photography was a hobby of mine throughout and I did a few jobs on the side and it slowly transitioned away from working with the kids to slowly doing more and more photography jobs and eventually just became full time.
Lisa: Why not just jump into photography?
Jeff: Partially because that’s really hard to do. A lot of people want to be a photographer. I’m very fortunate to have made it work as a career. Like most things, I knew nothing about photography. It took a long, long time and a lot of bad pictures to learn how to take some good pictures. I still take a lot of bad pictures. I’m perfectly okay with that. Failures are to be embraced I think.
Lisa: Some of the photos that I saw on your website are just beautiful images of people. Has your experience working with people maybe at at risk youth or maybe with the Buddhist studies, has that enabled you to get better shots of people?
Jeff: I think so. I think frankly a lot of it is my travels and plunging into worlds that are completely unlike my own. I think that could really help. The exploration of other cultures is a lot of fun to me, whether it’s in the middle of India or whether I’m visiting a friend who lives on an island in Canada, I still want to know what the natives in their natural habitat. That applies to Maine, that applies to everywhere. I’m just sort of forever curious. I try to apply that to my photography and I hope that comes through.
Lisa: I’m interested in this, this Buddhist studies idea, I guess because Buddhism has become very popular. It’s become the thing that everybody talks about. We all talk about meta, we all talk about loving kindness, there’s like yogis everywhere although I guess that’s more Hindu, but meditation has become a thing. To actually focus your studies as an undergraduate on that. What was the draw?
Jeff: It’s funny. I said I’d never be a thing like my father. He’s a college professor and his focus is Protestantism and how it affected Darwinism and vice versa. I swore I would never be anything like him and I ended up doing basically the exact same thing, just on the other side of the globe with a different religion. When I was 17, because I climbed Kilimanjaro, we were some of the youngest people to ever do what’s considered the hard route. Mountaineering company were interested in some of us becoming guides. I then had a trip to Tibet, Nepal and Thailand when I was 17. That just blew my mind. I really thought the cultures were just incredibly interesting. They were nothing like anything I had ever experienced. Against better judgment and advice, when I was in college, I just took the classes for what I was interested in and come my junior year, I said, “Oh, I should probably pick a major by now,” and looked at what I had the most credits in and realized that I obviously was focusing on Eastern religions. I was really intrigued.
I should add that I left college more confused about my own religion than I entered but I really enjoy studying the culture and the interplay between the culture and religion. It makes my travels more fulfilling because I can … When I’m looking at the art or the sculptures or the carvings or whatever, at least I can understand some of the background and some of the stories.
Lisa: All I’m sitting here thinking as you’re talking is what a gift. What a gift to be 15 years old and on Kilimanjaro and be 17 and all these travels.
Jeff: Truly.
Lisa: What kind of great parents must you have had to let you go out in the world and do that?
Jeff: It’s funny. They were really conflicted. My dad’s a college professor and my mom has always worked for universities. Me leaving school for any reason was really painful for them and difficult to accept. I think in retrospect they’ve realized that those two trips alone, one could argue formed the basis of who I am, my love for travel, my love for photography, and willingness to explore and accept other cultures. It’s completely gift, both in that somebody actually picked up the tab, but also in that it was some of the greatest experiences of my life and planted the seed for my addiction to travel a long time ago. It let me see things that a lot of other people in my school, in my social circuit were not as fortunate to be able to see.
Nowadays when I travel, I try to post ridiculous things on social media and Instagram and all that to try to inspire others to travel because I think it’s something that’s often lost on people. I don’t know if it’s really giving back but I was inspired to travel by others so now I’m trying to do the same for others.
Lisa: Did that require any sort of fearlessness when you were 15?
Jeff: Probably but when you’re a 15 year old boy, you’re pretty darn fearless as it is. It’s funny, my dad did not think I would have wanted to go to Africa. When he was first given the offer for me to go, he said, “No, I don’t think so.” Nothing is more exciting than trying something new and exploring a new place. It was purely fun. Climbing the mountain’s not a whole lot of fun at all times but it was still, even that was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, it was still amazing and fun in a sick sense of the way.
Lisa: What I love about this conversation is that so much of what we do with kids in high school is very tracked, is you do this, then you do this, then you do this. Because you took this detour early on, I think in your mind … Well, I don’t want to presume but it seems like you could have reasonably said, “Well, this is a possibility. Over here is a possibility. I don’t have to be on the same track everybody else is on.”
Jeff: Sure. Sure. I actually delayed getting my driver’s license because of Africa which everybody thought was just absurd but now that I’ve been driving for 15 years, I think the 6 month delay was not a huge sacrifice.
Lisa: That’s a very good example. I think that when we’re young and I would say, even when we’re heading up into middle age, we do things and they seem to have to be on a certain timeline for whatever reason that somebody else has decided that we need to be on that timeline, but then when you look at the bigger picture … What’s the big deal? Where’s the endpoint in all of this?
Jeff: Yeah. I think the traditional timeline is vastly overrated. I think it’s important to find your own way, find your own timeline.
Lisa: How did you end up in Buxton, Maine? You live here now. I know you have an Ocean Park connection with your family.
Jeff: Yes. My great grandfather built a cottage in Ocean Park, 205 years ago, something like that. He had four sons and so that has been split up among the extended family. My mother went there every year of her life for a couple weeks. I’ve gone there every year of my life for a couple weeks. I moved around quite a bit as a kid. I’m originally from Boston, lived in Wisconsin, lived in Michigan. Kind have always thought I would continue to be a nomad. I never lived anywhere longer than five or six years. At once point I had sold everything and was planning to move to Bocas Del Toro, which is an archipelago in Panama because at the time it was incredibly simple or easy residency laws, path to citizenship. You could buy an island for $30,000. You’d build a house on stilts over the water for $30,000, and then you own paradise.
During that time I was also working as a travel photographer so I did a yearlong project in South and Southeast Asia and halfway through that project, I got an email from my real estate agent/lawyer down in Panama who said that Panama changed all of their residency laws and it was no longer possible. Suddenly you needed a half million dollars and at 27, I was sadly about a half million dollars short of a half million dollars. I quite literally looked at a map. I was on a rural island in Indonesia when I found this out. I looked at a map of the U.S. and said, “Where do I want to go?” I knew that I wanted a place that had great outdoors. I thought about Northern New Mexico, Utah, and Maine. I realized that Maine just sort of fit better politically, culturally, etc. To have New York be five hours away, Montreal five hours away, Boston two hours away.
For me it’s the ideal. I can’t ever imagine leaving because I’m a half an hour from Portland, I’m a half an hour from the ocean and I’m half an hour, maybe 45 minutes from the White Mountains. It’s an amazing thing. It’s something you don’t have in most legitimately cool cities and I think Portland is legitimately cool. We have an amazing restaurant scene, an amazing art scene, amazing music scene. I couldn’t ask for a whole lot more but I still get to live in my own little house out in the woods. For me it’s just perfect. I say this as somebody who’s always lived in cities, so at first, the idea of moving to the woods was a little intimidating. Every horror movie ever has the scary neighbors from outer space and I’ve yet to meet those scary neighbors from outer space. I don’t know. I love living in the woods and I don’t really see myself becoming a city dweller again any time soon.
Lisa: If you’re living out in the woods but you also love to travel, there must be an element of your personality that enjoys solitude, that enjoys quiet and peace and nature.
Jeff: Yeah. I say that with hesitation. I sort of struggle to relax. Relax in the traditional sense of the world. Me exploring something new and tracking down curiosities is my way of relaxing. This winter I spent seven weeks in India and going to the chaotic part of Old Delhi where it’s every … All of your senses are being overloaded. That in an odd way is still relaxing to me. At the same time, walking through the trails that are adjacent to my property, alone in the middle of the night with a full moon reflecting off of the snow and I don’t even need a head lamp, that’s a whole different sense of relaxation, but it’s still tracking down curiosities. It’s still an adventure.
Lisa: What drives you to be so curious?
Jeff: I have no idea. Maybe because a lot of these interesting things were presented to me on my travels when I was young that then sowed the seed of curiosity. I think I’ve always been pretty curious. I’ve asked too many questions too often I think. I’m pretty sure I was a pretty exhausting child. Pretty sure I’m an exhausting 35 year old now too so that’s okay.
Lisa: It’s fine because I think there are people who are content to just …Things around them and things around them. There’s not really, they don’t need to know more. They don’t need to seek anything out. They don’t need to travel anywhere. That’s completely fine.
Jeff: I think that is completely fine and in ways I’m jealous of that because I really fail at finding contentedness just doing whatever I’m doing. I say that, my current lifestyle I’m very happy with and content. It’s not staying within my own box. I fear my own comfort zone. I really like getting pushed out and having to find my way while lost in Japan or whatever else. To me, I’m more comfortable being uncomfortable in that regard I guess.
Lisa: You’d rather the uncertainty of something larger than the restriction of something smaller?
Jeff: Yeah, that’s a great way of putting it.
Lisa: I actually enjoyed watching you go through India this last few months ago. I think that I enjoyed … I was watching you on Instagram so it’s a little bit of the travel voyager in me. I love travel sites. I love travel photography. It was fun to see you doing this stuff. One of the things that you took of a picture of I believe was this enormous tea plantation. It’s staggering to think that what’s happening over there directly impacts what we do over here. My morning cup of whatever it is, revealing.
Jeff: This is Assam tea. I was driving through. At the time I was staying in far, far east India in a place called Nagaland. Head hunting was happening until 1956. It’s on the border of Burma, it’s this really crazy alien place where almost nobody goes. I had to sign a book when I got there that every Western tourist has to sign and there hadn’t been anybody there in over a week. It’s a pretty interesting place to be and when we had a 10 hour drive from one part of Nagaland to the other, it made more sense to cross over into Assam which is the adjacent state. There we are, driving along and look around and all these tea fields and I see a sign that says “Assam” on there. It is, it’s very interesting because you hear about Assam tea all the time. I’ve spent three and a half months in India back in 2007. It still sort of never clicks until suddenly you’re standing in the middle of a tea plantation surrounded by women picking tea with a sign that says Assam next to you. It’s one of those things that makes this world feel really huge, but also immensely small.
Lisa: I think you also took a picture of … Was it a monkey outside your window in a hotel? Which I found kind of amusing and slightly disturbing.
Jeff: It is. It is a little disturbing. I think of a lot of people who haven’t interacted with monkeys say, “Oh, cute. Monkey.” Monkeys often like to rip your face off. It’s interesting because you’re in India. This is not land of safety glass and tempered glass. I was in Varanasi at the time which is right over the Ganges and I woke up in the morning and there’s literally monkeys tapping on my window. It was an interesting thing. It’s fun though. It was my own personal zoo with a view over the Ganges and the holiest city of India to many. It was pretty amazing. It was one of those times where you have to pinch yourself. I think that room was something like $7 a night too, just to put it out there. The fact that you can have experiences like that just show that it is very possible for anyone to travel. When you can stay at a hotel for $7 a night, I think my own mortgage is a whole heck of a lot more than that. It’s just amazing to be able to have opportunities like that.
Lisa: You bring up a good point. You’re talking about places like India not having tempered glass. There are a lot of safety things that we put into place for good reason here in the United States and actually many other places around the world that when you go to some countries, those don’t exist. There is actually danger in just something like crossing a street.
Jeff: Sure. Especially when you’re in Asia where nobody stops. There’s no such thing as a stoplight. You just sort of have to take a deep breath and just start walking and cars go around you. There’s increased danger. That leads to increased self-reliance and just being smart and using good judgment. When you’re in a car, a lot of times, especially if you’re in a taxi, you don’t have that control so there certainly is an element of risk. I will also say that the most impressive hospital I’ve ever been to was a hospital in India. It was impeccably clean. I met with a doctor within five minutes and I was out of there within about an hour, hour and a half, the entire trip including lunch and medicine and the taxi was $35. It was impeccable care.
Now that was a major city in India, that was in Chennai. You wouldn’t get that if you’re lost in a rural part. I also think that we frankly overexaggerate our own health care and the skills that we have and I think we oftentimes assume that they don’t have decent health care in other countries. To be fair, if you get into a car accident in Burma, Cambodia, or Laos, you’re not going to a hospital there. They’re going to send you to Thailand because that’s the only place they can give you real medical care. There is certainly some inherent risk medically when you’re going to a lot of these places but with the internet, with flights that are constantly available, barring a catastrophic incident, if I break a leg or something like that, I can hop on a plane. That’s what travel insurance is for, there’s evacuation insurance. It’s an amazing thing.
I was in Greece last year and I had some sort of a throat soreness and actually sent a photo of my throat which is an odd photo to send to my doctor here in the U.S. He responded and told me what prescriptions to get. I went to the pharmacy, because it’s Greece, they were closed for five hours I think during the middle of the day for their standard nap. Went back at I think 5:00 and asked for that prescription. They didn’t have that but they had a couple others. I emailed my doctor back. He told me which one to get. Good to go and solved. The internet makes the world a smaller place and it allows us to be a little more adventurous. I didn’t have to set aside two days to try to track down a Greek doctor and all that just for standard antibiotics. It’s a pretty neat thing.
Lisa: I like this idea of self-reliance because although I like safety, obviously, I’m a doctor and I like things that are safe, but I think sometimes it causes us to feel a false sense of security and if you really believe that everything around you is safe, then maybe you don’t pay as close attention as you probably should. I think about this with my children, my older children who travel, especially. I want them to feel safe but I also want them to be aware.
Jeff: Yeah. If we look at the obesity epidemic, you can sit at home safely in your living room and slowly shorten your lifespan by eating too much. You can shorten your lifespan a whole lot of ways. I would rather potentially risk shortening my life span by seeing the world and by experiencing new things. I’ve been to a lot of places and I have knock on wood have not even had really any close calls.
Lisa: You’ve been from Boston to Burma to Budapest. You’ve talked about Greece, you’ve talked about Mount Kilimanjaro. What are some of your favorites?
Jeff: The default I usually say would be India and Burma were my two favorites. India because it’s such a huge country. English is spoken sort of everywhere. They’ve got I believe hundreds of languages. I know it’s at least 200 languages yet because of English colonization, still English is the common bond for language. It’s accessible even when you go to the really remote places. Because you hop in a car or train for four hours and it feels like you’re in a new country because culturally, it’s so different in different regions.
Burma would be the other favorite of mine just because frankly for a long time, I think still our government says do not go there because if something happens to you, we can’t help. You have to play it extra safe. You have to be careful who you talk to and be careful what you say. I’m a very politically minded person but I definitely did not talk politics in Burma, both for my own safety but also for the safety of anyone I talk to. I don’t want to get anyone else in trouble, any of the locals in trouble. I was riding home one day from a temple sitting in a bicycle rickshaw and there the passenger seat is sidecar of the bicycle. The guy is bicycling along, he looks over to me and he says, “Do you think we’ve really been on the moon?” This is an amazing conversation, amazing question to have and a question that you wouldn’t have if you’re on the backpacker circuit of Thailand. I’ve been to Thailand, I enjoy that backpacker circuit, but having these amazing authentic conversations with somebody who is apparently as curious as I am in the middle of sort of nowhere is just such an amazing opportunity. I really enjoyed that.
On the flip side of those two, Japan is right up there for me as well. I’m actually headed back to Japan in a week. Japan is interesting in a complete different way in that culturally it is so different from the U.S. There’s not a whole lot of English spoken. I’ve never been so lost in my life as the times I’ve spent in Japan. That’s the fun in it too. While I usually try to travel in the developing world or whatever else frankly for budget reasons, Japan is the opposite of that but it can still be done cheaply. That adds a level of adventure to it as well.
Lisa: As someone who’s actually been to so many different places, what do you think when you see the translations of whatever this is back in the United States? Does that make sense? Like if you’ve actually been to Mexico and you’ve been in a place that serves authentic Mexican food or authentic Mexican tapestries for example. When you come back to the United States and you see our translation of it.
Jeff: You know it’s interesting. I think it’s funny. If you pass Mexicali Blues here in Portland, it’s an entire store full of things that are sold in India and things like that. It’s funny to see. Some people would call it cultural appropriation. Some people think that’s inherently a bad thing. I enjoy the fact that we as in the global community are bringing goods and culture and food from India, from Mexico, from wherever, because I think it allows people who are here in Maine to be able to experience those places without having to leave Maine. It’s not always easy to leave Maine, whether it’s the cost of a plane ticket or whether it’s a job schedule or whether it’s family or friends. A lot of people depend on each other. It can be tough to go to these places. I think it’s great that they have it, that it all sort of … Thanks to globalization, which is very much a double-edged sword, it’s really neat to be able to experience bits of India and Mexico or really every country. You can get great Burmese food in New York. It’s a lot quicker car ride than it is a flight to Burma.
Lisa: Jeff I know we can see your work in upcoming issues of Maine Magazine, Maine Home Design. I think you have quite a lot of stuff that’s on the horizon this summer. What about other work that you’ve done? How could people find you?
Jeff: I’ve got a few different websites. My architecture, food and product work is all on jeffrobertsimaging.com. My fashion and beauty work is on jeffrobertsphoto.com and my travel photography work is on eyeballglobal.com. There’s a few different websites. Sort of too much to keep track of. Then there’s nerdy old Instagram, which is instagram.com at jeffrobertsphoto.
Lisa: I appreciate your willingness to show us all the parts of the world that not everybody gets a chance to visit. Maybe someday I’ll go hang out in Assam and hang out with the monkeys in that part of India.
Jeff: It’s great.
Lisa: I’m also very grateful that you bring your eye back here to Maine and you make it available to the people that read our magazines and I appreciate your taking the time to talk with us today. We’ve been speaking with Jeff Roberts who has worked as a photographer internationally from Boston to Burma to Budapest. Thanks for coming in.
Jeff: Thank you so much for having me.