Transcription of Maine Photographers #245
Speaker 1: You are listening to Love Maine Radio, hosted by Dr. Lisa Belisle and recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine in Portland. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a writer and physician who practices family medicine and acupuncture in Brunswick, Maine. Show summaries are available at lovemaineradio.com. Here are some highlights from this week’s program.
Jeff: 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.
Trent: I knew deep down that something had to change. I somehow ended up here. I haven’t quite fully digested. I’m always kind of looking forward, how to move forward. I’m not really as much always looking back and wondering exactly why it worked.
Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, Show #245, Maine Photographers, airing for the first time on Sunday, May 29, 2016. We meet many talented photographers through the work that we do with Maine Magazine, Maine Home and Design and Old Port Magazine. Today, we speak with two who have had distinctly different career paths. Jeff Roberts began his love of international photography with a high school adventure. Trent Bell trained in and practiced architecture before finding his vocation as a photographer. Each has a true passion for his work. Thank you for joining us.
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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 blizzard, 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.
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Lisa: We’re fortunate that Maine Magazine, Maine Home Design, Old Port Magazine to work with a number of very talented photographers and one of them is Trent Bell. Trent is a Maine based photographer originally from Virginia. Bell has a master’s in architecture from Andrews University and practiced architecture until he realized he was much better suited to photography and founded Trent Bell Photography. If Bell is not with his wife Amber and two sons, you will find him either working or surfing. Thanks for coming in.
Trent: Absolutely.
Lisa: I’m kind of interested in this morphing over from architecture to photography because while they’re both kind of visual, I’ve interviewed photographers and I’ve interviewed architects and the mindset seems a little different.
Trent: That’s probably why I didn’t last as an architect. I really enjoyed the schooling of architecture. It was very interesting for me to go through high school and everything else and be a very average unengaged student and then to try going at being premed for a while, didn’t work out very well. I actually applied myself and could only really get by with about Bs, low Bs and I realized that trying to go premed or dental would have been an uphill battle. A friend of mine, Caleb Johnson, was going through architecture school and that really intrigued me. When I went into that, I was just like, “Wow. This is really great being creative and thinking in this manner, learning how things go together and why things and the built environment, the designed environment works.”
That was really interesting to me and I loved the schooling of it but then my personality with the day to day workings of actually running a practice came up a little short honestly. I just wasn’t a great … I didn’t have a high tolerance for going to the same place every day at the same desk and the stick-to-it-iveness that’s required for making it through all those details and dealing with clients for such a long period of time. It was wearing me thin and I kind of realized that one life and to do this every day in a way that just doesn’t fit making me happy was something that was very difficult to deal with. To make the choice to walk away from so much education and then three years of professional investments, starting a business with a friend afterwards, was a hard point and decision to come to but it has worked out very well for me luckily.
Lisa: How many years ago did you make that decision?
Trent: It would have been about ten years ago probably to switch or to jump ship and then try and figure out what I was going to do. Because I really had no plan and luckily at the time we didn’t have any children and my wife was working full time. I had the luxury of putting everything I could into starting a business. I was going to start doing property development and buying, flipping houses. This is when the market was spiking and then a friend of mine who’s a commercial photographer out in California suggested, “Why don’t you try architectural photography?”
I’ve been interested in photography in the past but all the complications with actual darkroom work and chemicals and everything else just wasn’t up my alley at all. Where photography came into the digital realm and I’m such a gadget kind of geek with everything else that’s kind of nerdy but I really get into that. It started to combine this very visually creative aesthetic world with a very quick turnaround capability that satisfied my attention span and combined it with all this technical gadgetry. It just kind of came together for me and I just kind of jumped into it and here I am. I lucked out somehow.
Lisa: I think that in some ways, some would say luck, some would say being open to the circumstance, I don’t really know but I think one of the challenges that I often see is that people feel like they have to do something because they need to follow a pattern that everybody else follows, that they need to be good … Say you wanted to do premed for example. You need to be good like all the other premed students. Your mind needs to work like their minds. To be open to finding something that is a good fit for the way that you look at the world, the way that you process things intellectually. That requires kind of a leap of faith in a way.
Trent: Yeah. It is very interesting to me to discover myself, my own abilities and value to what I can contribute, how I can learn, how I can process and how that’s valuable to other people and to come to terms to that eventually. I was raised in a family that was much more so culturally focused around professions like doctor, teacher, pastor, nurse. Things that are direct interaction with people. It was never directly implied or anything else. It was just kind of a cultural typical thing and to really think that I could even go into architecture was kind of a little bit outside the norm but then to switch over to then say, “I’m going to pay for my house off of taking pretty pictures.” When I eventually told my dad, “Yeah, I’m going to become a photographer.” Even when I look back on that now, I’m a little, “What on Earth was I thinking?” Even at the time, his honest reaction was just “What? You can’t make money at that.” He was in no way trying to discourage me or anything else. It was just his gut reaction of there’s no money in there, you can’t do that. You’re not going to be able to make your house payments. You guys are going to be in the poor house. You’re gong to be a starving artist.
Just to have a wife for one that she never once questioned me, never once asked “Are you going to get a weekend job?” Looking back, I have a hard time picturing how she could have had so much confidence in me to make this work. If I were her, I never would have. For some reason, she has always been supportive in that way, as long as we’re not in debt, she kind of was just, “Do whatever you want.” That’s a bit of a luxury on my part. A bit of a tangent there I went off on I guess.
Lisa: No I think it’s an important tangent. I think that when you aren’t happy in what you’re doing or it just doesn’t feel like the right fit, it’s just crucial to have somebody else who says, “That’s okay. We’ll figure this out and as long as we’ve got some basic foundation of security, we can make this work.” Not everybody does have that.
Trent: Yeah. Coming to that decision point is very difficult to step outside of that norm. We were in no financial terrible position because my wife was working full time as a physical therapist and we didn’t have kids, but to step away from, to make that choice to say this really isn’t working for me, I’m going to step away from this master’s degree in architecture and three years of trying to start a business, was very difficult and very painful in many ways. I knew deep down that something had to change and I somehow ended up here. I haven’t quite fully digested it. I’m always looking forward of how to move forward so I’m not really as much always looking back and wondering exactly why it worked but …
Lisa: The fact that you and I are sitting here having this conversation should be evidence to you, people who listen to this show that I kind of understand what you’re talking about. I’m trained as a physician. My job is a physician. Most people would say, “You need to go be a physician,” because that’s how people make that car payments and their mortgages. Having a radio show or writing for the magazines, those are just also equally important. To be able to say, “It’s okay, I can be a doctor but I can also be this,” or I can do something a little bit different. I don’t have to follow the path that other people believe is the one that makes the most sense.
Trent: It is interesting. I’ve heard a lot of people discuss it, your education, what it can apply to as far as the total well being of someone. You obviously have a huge background then in understanding the human body and then how it translates into possibly mental well-being, spiritual well-being and everything else. The architectural background has a huge amount of influence on why I’ve been able to make my house payments as a photographer. To have that aesthetic training and to approach the subject matter that I most typically work with is a huge … One informs the other.
Lisa: That’s actually a really good point in that it’s not wasted. It’s not like your master’s in architecture was wasted when you became a photographer. It just was used in a different way.
Trent: Right. A lot of people email me and ask me, “I’m thinking about being a photographer. What’s your advice?” I usually respond to people saying, “Get to know really well the subject that you want to shoot, that you’re interested in.” If it’s shooting cars, I’d almost say get more of an education in cars than in photography. I had no training whatsoever in photography other than what Chet Williams has taught me, a good friend of mine, and an immense amount of stuff that [Irvin Serrano 00:40:42] taught me. An incredible photographer who I owe a lot of thanks to for everything that he shared with me. Knowing your subjects that you’re shooting is going to give you that ability to translate your aesthetic and mental voice through imagery and communicate that whereas if you’re so focused on just the technical aspects of things and getting this image perfect, you can look through a ton of my images and see a lot of technical imperfections but I think more often the thing that sings the most and connects most with people is going to be the emotion communicated through composition and lighting primarily. I always tell people really understand your subject and then composition and lighting and then the technical aspect really.
Lisa: Irvin Serrano is someone who’s worked with magazines also quite a lot and he does do beautiful work. The fact that he’s here as are a lot of other really talented artists, photographers and artists of other sorts, here in Maine, it seems like such an interesting opportunity that we would all come to this state that is in many places quite rural. The creativity, the talent that we have right here. Has that surprised you?
Trent: No. I look at it as I think there is a high percentage of creatives would be fairly introverted and will want to for one, be in a place where they can find peace and time to be reflective and space to be reflective and also want that somewhat of a blank slate kind of atmosphere. Artists purchase blank canvas, not paintings. People with money that appreciate what artists do purchase what they do. That’s a lot of what attracted me to Biddeford is that it’s more so a blank slate and Maine to a large degree is a blank slate. The creative atmosphere in Maine and the amount of people I’ve seen move here from away is vastly changed in the last decade, decade and a half since I’ve been here. That doesn’t really surprise me just because of my mentality and why I’m here and why I would think others are here. It seems like a place of opportunity whereas if you’re thinking of it purely as a business place, I would think Kevin’s kind of proved that wrong where he came here from … I think he was from Massachusetts somewhere but saw an opportunity in a state that’s one of the worst in the country to do business in supposedly.
The people that run the Indian restaurant in Biddeford. He came here on a lottery, a visa lottery from India, and he arrived in New York with $20 in his pocket and now is in Maine and owns three restaurants. How can you tell me? He owns a really nice house in Saco, drives a really nice car, owns three profitable, very profitable businesses. How can you tell me that Maine’s a bad place to do business when someone with $20 and a work ethic now owns a very nice house, very nice car. You know. It’s all in your state of mind and I think people are attracted to Maine because there’s opportunity which if you’re going to New York City you’re going to be paying these ridiculous prices for everything.
As a creative, I own a huge amount of my own gear and everything else largely due to not having to pay huge amounts for studio fees, living fees, everything, which allows me to do self projects that are far more creative and fund them myself to a degree. It allows me more of that creative freedom. I’m living in much more of a blank slate for creativity than someone who’s saddled themselves with trying to live in New York City where there might be a lot of work going on, but it’s other people’s ideas that they’re servicing, whereas I have the ability, a little more so maybe, to service my own ideas and my own creativity outside of the commercial work that I do.
Lisa: You’re right that Kevin Thomas, who originally is actually from Aroostook County, and then moved to Massachusetts and then came back, you’re right that he saw kind of a space to start these magazines along with his co-owner Susan Grisanti. He has been very successful. I think people have kind of doubted that that would be so. Sometimes I think that people have a hard time, if they can’t picture what might be, they have a hard time supporting a possibility.
Trent: Oh yeah. Especially to start when they did with the whole digital revolution really of ending print essentially to a large degree and to still have been successful at it with avant-garde business practices and everything else if that’s the right word, has made a name for himself, made a huge brand in Maine, has added to the architectural design community and benefited that part of the community to a huge degree I know. It’s all about fresh perspective and seeing the opportunity and there’s a lot of pitfalls in different ways that you can do that and offend people and make people like you and everything else. I mean, it’s here and it’s helping a lot of people and a lot of the Maine economy at the same time. It’s different people’s perspective and opportunity, so …
Lisa: Talk to me about some of the projects that you do that really are your projects, the ones that people don’t hire you for but that you really believe strongly in yourself.
Trent: I shared a studio space with Irvin Serrano for a little while and he did a really great project on I believe women that were going through cancer and it was a portrait series. I just read a lot on how personal projects are just good for your own business to do. I kept thinking, “I really got to do something like this.” I had a friend that was convicted of a crime and sentenced to about 36 years in prison and that sat on my mind for quite some time. I just kept thinking about it because we were very similar growing up, all the same interests and everything else. He wasn’t going to be able to be with his kids anymore. They were going to be, who knows how old by the time he got out, everything else. That just sat on me and made me reflect a lot on my own life and how things could have been different possibly but why, when we were so similar, why are they so different?
My studio manager and I sat down to try and conceive an idea for a personal project and this was on my mind. I said, “Hey. Why don’t we do a thing, portraits of prison inmates?” He was kind of, “How are you going to get access to these guys? This is ridiculous.” I was like, “It’ll happen. Don’t worry about it.” At the same time, we knew that just portraits are going to be engaging but they’re not going to be a huge … It’s just going to be a portrait. We talked some more about it and came up with the idea of having them write a handwritten letter to their younger self and then putting that handwritten letter around their portrait. It’s been an incredible thing to see still media connect individuals of such different background to watch people stand in front of these and take in the inmates’ letter, which is … You’re basically at that point eavesdropping because the letter is written to the younger inmate, not you, but you’re there reading it, looking at their portrait, eavesdropping with their voice in your head.
It was really an extension of wanting to try and do something that could without really any other financial bias other than doing something that was good for exposure and everything else which has turned out to be in that way but to really do a project that focused directly on human issues, social issues. I was really inspired by how that connected with people and it’s really sparked a lot more of that desire in me to continue to focus on projects like that. Last summer, we did a video project. One of Kevin’s sons actually interned with us and helped us a lot on that. It was around a lot of the homeless and panhandling and vigils that you’ll see around Portland. We interviewed about 17 individuals and an administrative person over at Preble Street and we’ve had all that footage transcribed and we’re kind of sitting through it right now, making a narrative out of it, trying to figure out what story is there, hopefully going to get Governor LePage to sit down for an interview to give his two cents on that.
Focusing in on these type of more emotional, social issues is where I’m going with it personally. We’re also … The same thing we did with prison inmates, we’re also doing with individuals, the same treatment as far as a portrait and a letter to their younger self ensconced around them. We’re doing this with individuals that have gone from being atheist to now belief in a deity and also individuals that have gone from belief in a deity to atheist. We’ll be able to see this very transitional point in people’s lives where they’ve really had this transition in belief. I personally have experienced a pretty bad disillusion if that’s the right word of my faith in the past eight years probably. This is the natural way I guess for me to explore this is to interact with others that have had a similar transition at least in both ways. I’m pretty much stuck right in the middle. We’re also doing the same reflect project treatment to individuals that know they’re about to die. We’ve had about four participants so far. As you can imagine, it’s not easy to convince someone on their death bed to, “Hey, sit for a portrait and write us a letter.” The ones we’ve been able to get to contribute so far have been extremely moving and very valuable.
It’s going to take some time but I think in the long run both of those are going to be really great projects. The other big one we’re working on right now is kind of another documentary around my own experience of now turning 40 here in about a month and an impulsive purchase of a 1990s Toyota van on the other side of the country and the ensuing road trip home interviewing individuals that can answer questions that I now have to the disillusion of my own faith. Interviewing big cheeses in the Jewish community, Mormon community, atheist community, Satanist community, scientists around evolution, human behaviorists, and then just the adventure of a road trip and interacting with just the common people you’d bounce stuff off of. That’s going to be happening this summer. That’s a really big project that we’re working on finding different funding and everything for and outlets for. It’ll be exciting.
Lisa: You’ve got a lot going on.
Trent: A lot going on. I have to try and figure out how to make money in there somewhere too. See how that goes.
Lisa: Seems like there will be something that will come through. I’m just guessing on this one.
Trent: Okay, good.
Lisa: So far it’s worked all right though.
Trent: So far.
Lisa: Yeah. We’ve been speaking with Trent Bell who’s a Maine based photographer. Trent, how do people find out more about the work that you do?
Trent: Just go into trentbell.com or Instagram at trentbellphotography or Facebook page. I think we’re on Twitter but I just really copy everything that I put on Instagram to Twitter and Facebook.
Lisa: However people find you, I encourage them to do so. You’re doing some great work, not only for the magazines for Kevin Thomas and Susan Grisanti but also it sounds like these other projects are pretty great. I wish you all the best and thank for coming in and talking to us today.
Trent: Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you.
Lisa: You have been listening to Love Maine Radio, Show #245, Maine photographers. Our guests have included Jeff Roberts and Trent Bell. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit lovemaineradio.com. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter as Dr. Lisa and see my running, travel, food and wellness photos as bountiful1 on Instagram. We love to hear from you so please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also, let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope you have enjoyed our Maine Photographers show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.
Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is made possible with the support of Berlin City Honda, The Rooms by Harding Lee Smith, Maine Magazine, Portland Art Gallery, and Art Collector Maine. Audio production and original music have been provided by Spencer Albee. Our editorial producer is Kelly Chase. Our assistant producer is Shelby Watson. Our community development manager is Casey Lovejoy. Our executive producers are Kevin Thomas, Susan Grisanti, and Dr. Lisa Belisle. For more information on our hosts, production team, Maine Magazine, or any of the guests featured here today, please visit us at lovemaineradio.com.
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