ANDREW MUSSON & RANDALL PHENNING, CENTRITIS, USA

How did you guys meet and at what point did you decide to start Centritis?

R: We kind of just “met”, I guess over flickr. I liked Andrew’s work a bunch and he is a pretty positive person so that was cool. Kind of odd that we’ve never actually had a conversation; for all I know Musson has a really beautiful singing voice. I had the idea for Centritis just one night while looking at some photos, nothing dramatic, but I knew if I wanted to do something big like that that I would need someone who was into the idea too. So I pitched it to Andrew and he was onboard. He was actually the one who came up with the idea of the interviews/blog.

A: We’re pretty much e-friends. I live in New York and he lives in southern California so meeting in reality is sorta hard. But conversely I think it’s pretty neat we’re on opposite coasts rather than within the same city. But getting back to the story of our beginnings: I wanted to start something online to tap into all the great photography I thought was being unnoticed and rather ignored on flickr and I talked about it with Randall a week maybe before “Centritis” was started. And one day I come home and notice he made a group called “Centritis” with a theme in centered photos and he asked me to join up with him and, rather naturally I think, we expanded it into a blog focusing on interviews. We just recently started our new section called “Celections” which something I think the both of us had in the mind from the beginning but it just took us a while to implement it. It’s odd though, that we started backwards compared to most other interview blogs out there. Most usually start out as a simple photo blog and later expand into interviews, we on the other hand started with interviews and expanded with the creation of a photo blog. “Celections” has more going for it than a standard photo blog with our “one sentence-one photograph” philosophy I think. It opens up a lot of lyrical and abstract possibilities that you can’t find many other places.

What is your usual way of finding people? Do you mostly feature people whose work you’ve been following for quite some times or do you actively look for people on the internet?

R: Turn ons:

- Natural light or really well controlled flashes

- film

- smart choices with composition/depth of field.

- giving priority over all of that to capture a specific moment. Blurriness, focus, color, doesn’t matter if you miss the shot. Worst feeling too. In fact a lot of really good photos are blurry.

- people who draw. I am still trying to track down an artist who uses paper and watercolors or ink or something other than a camera to interview.

Turn offs:

- 365 projects

- HDR

- Over-worked digital photos

- really-to-the-point-of-not-knowing-what-I-am-looking-at-grainy-film-photos

- typing with dashes in between words.

-photos of nothing or photos without a point

A: I think it’s a heavy mix of both finding talented people on flickr, or wanting to interview someone we “know” in some sense and think they should be interviewed. We’ve mostly focused on flickr thus far and I believe we’ll eventually start widening our scope outside it. There is a fair amount of talented people older than us that have fantastic websites but not the former.

What do you look for in a photographer’s work? What catches your eye?

R: I just want there to be a moment that I am looking at. I want to be drawn to the photo or to try and understand it more, you know?

A: Same here, moments are really important to me. I don’t look for a particular style or anything, it’s just about whether or not the photographer can make me feel or see the same thing they did when they took the photograph.

Who would you say was the best or most surprising find?

R: The best find, for me, was the first person we asked to interview. He still hasn’t sent back the questions with his answers so I’m not sure what is going on with that but his photos made me lose it when I first found them. I found them when I was probably 18 just cruising flickr and I completely lost track of time, ended up spending 3+ hours just looking at his stuff. To this day they are literally the most beautiful work I have ever seen on flickr. If he made a book I would buy it without a doubt.

A: Hmm, it’s hard to say, though I think the most fun interview to work on was the interview with Alex J Goss & Alexa Rae West. It was just so much fun to talk freely and for the first real time with great and talented people like that. Hopefully we do more chat-type interviews in the future.

You ask very interesting, well-researched questions. What is your process for asking questions? Do you write them down as they come or do you look at the work and outline the main questions afterwards?

R: I just look at the person’s work and think of stuff that I would ask them if we were sitting down together in a class or something. I am into art history and stuff but I don’t know if that gives me any qualification toward asking better questions. A homeless dude could probably ask just mind-blowing questions. How is that relevant to what you asked? It’s not. This is why I ask questions because I suck at answering them. But the whole reason we choose someone to interview is because their work is thought provoking, so in essence the quality of the questions is a direct result of the quality of the interviewees work.

A: It also depends on the type of interview we want to do, like with Van Robinson and with Goss & West we started with a slate of questions, but many more were added on the fly during the interview depending on what direction the interview was taking. But for the most part we take awhile to study that photographers work and we send each other our (usually 4 or 5 each) questions. Then end up editing each other’s questions and combine them together into a flow that makes sense. But like Randall mentioned, our questions wouldn’t be good if we didn’t have such great work to study.

You are both talented photographers yourselves. How does looking and questioning other people’s work influence your own work?

R: It helps so much. Seriously I think everyone should latently write down questions or even send questions to photographers/artists who they enjoy. You start looking at things a little differently for sure.

A: Hmm, I think for the most part it inspires me to take better photographs. Both Randall and I are super critical of our respective work and we’re constantly working towards a better photograph. But ultimately I think it must start with being satisfied in your own work first, external inspirations/influences fit in somewhere down along the line.

What is next for Centritis?

R: I want to do a live interview, chatroulette style. I don’t know though, Colin Kenneff’s videos were big for me I think. I don’t see a lot of people featuring someone like that right now. Maybe 3D videos?

A: We do want to do things a bit differently from most other blogs, and explore the limits of the interview format. Also I want to collect our “Celections” into to something like end-of-the-year digital zine. But we’re still talking about that. Who knows.

top photos: Randall Phenning, bottom ones: Andrew Musson

www.centritis.com/