Meet Barry Rosenthal

We were lucky to catch up with Barry Rosenthal recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Barry, really happy you were able to join us today and we’re looking forward to sharing your story and insights with our readers. Let’s start with the heart of it all – purpose. How did you find your purpose?

As a child I was athletic. Nothing exceptional. I enjoyed sports because it was fun. Anything that involved play, chasing a ball or just competing with myself to learn and improve my skills. Academics bored me. Learning by rote meant memorizing facts and dates. Where were the concepts behind these great events. I never knew why the 30 years war differed from the 100 years war.

Turns out I was dyslectic and lived my life not knowing what that meant. I liked making things with my hands but I spent years with little or no encouragement. I bloomed later than most. In college, I finally felt free from the lack of choice of that I had to endure in the K through 12 years. I set my own course, so to speak. This was a powerful moment for me. I was curious to try new ideas.

Sociology became my major. It fit with my family’s leftist politics. I had much to learn and found I liked research. Art courses also interested me. I tried printmaking, then pottery and finally photography. My confidence gradually grew as the choices I made for my education finally had meaning to me. I didn’t think that the roadblocks I had encountered earlier were going to hold me back. When I found that the intro photography course I had just finished was my school’s only photo course, I somehow found a way to take night classes at an art school not far away.

Little did I know that things started to fall into place. At the art school I met other students who were already working on their own projects. I liked the professor and the students were encouraging me to find myself through photography.

Persistence, curiosity and the need to survive were the real lessons I learned. Nothing was going to stop me. I had a passion that fit my personality. Photography is an art where I could work with my hands and my own concepts. Those are the basic principles that I have lived with and this is the short story of how I found my purpose. By the way, I graduated college on the Dean’s List!

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

Jumping ahead in my storyline, it turns out I am not very corporate. Never had a real job. I couldn’t see myself sitting in a cubicle day in and day out. Branding is something I have been aware of almost as long as I’ve been a photographer. Photographers called it self-promotion. Most of us categorize our work to make it easier to be found.

Branding is overused today and reminds me of advertising and influencers. Today, everybody is an influencer and advertising your brand is just what you must do. How to become ‘socially relevant’ was a giant step for me to undertake.

Plastic pollution is my passion. Through much experimentation, false starts and a tetanus shot I formulated an approach to graphically display what I found in my local coastal areas. I go to where the water meets the land. I search the marshes, tidal pools and the overgrowth along abandoned beaches in Brooklyn, New York. My interest in still life brings me back to the studio, first, as a place to sort and dry what I find and then to execute my vision. I have several ways of story telling. Quantity matters, there is so much out where I go to collect. Black or white backgrounds help to isolate and dramatize the work. I fill the frame with a quantity of objects to complete each scheme.

Design, emotion are my tools. When the pattern of ideas is coherent, there is a feeling of calm.
When the idea is fitted together in an unharmonious way the feeling is one of tension. Both are present in my photographs. I use my feelings as an index of the state of my project. My comfort zone has always been uncomfortable. The “emotion economy” has much more appeal to me than the attention economy.

My work went viral almost 15 years ago. Back then I was a fan of a Tumblr site called “Things Neatly Organized”. Before Instagram, social media was limited to Facebook and Tumblr. People would aggregate pictures on a Tumblr page in an organized fashion by color or subject and other people would look through these collections and make their own collections. For several months I was looking at the “Things” site until I realized that my work was a perfect fit. Then I had to come to terms with my basic training in photography, which said “Always protect your work”. Copyright it. Having your images stolen, giving them away for free all added up to my worst nightmare. But my other voice said “Protect it all you want and your work will never be seen”.

The internet was young and innocent. I would trade security for exposure. I put three images up, not on my own site, but on the “Things” site. After all, they already had a built-in audience. A few weeks later people started contacting me. I went from being found to being a “Player” overnight. I learned that teenage girls were making the best Tumblr’s. They had a good eye. They covered a theme thoroughly. They were prolific in posting. Basically, they had good taste and the time to search and edit their pages thoroughly. They were the trend spotters.

The people I wanted to reach were looking at these girl’s well edited selections. It was as if they had a private curator selecting the best images on the internet. Editors from magazines were searching for story ideas and wanted to use my images. The first was a French magazine doing a story on blogging. I said no thank you, very much. I was not a blogger and I wanted the work to be featured, not used as an accessory. The project should shine on its own. “Found in Nature” did just that and the project went global. My confidence grew as the number of postings and published work increased. That was my passive plan for marketing.

The timing was right and millions of people were seeing my collections. The flip side to my self promotion plan was next. No longer passive, my approach became aggressive. I pitched arts and culture and news sites. A simple three line pitch with a few sample images were sent to specific reporters who wrote about the environment from a social or scientific point of view.
One week I pitched the New York Times and Smithsonian Magazine. Two weeks later both stories went live.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

As a child I was athletic. Nothing exceptional. I enjoyed sports because it was fun and I made new friends. Anything that involved play, chasing a ball or just competing with myself to learn and improve my skills.

Academics bored me. Learning by rote meant memorizing facts and dates. Turns out I was dyslectic and lived my life not knowing what that meant. Back then, there was no diagnosis, just remedial reading for me. I liked making things with my hands but I spent years with little or no encouragement. My hands alone didn’t do the work. The ideas came first then I found a way to express that idea. I bloomed later than most. Somehow a college accepted me. I finally felt free from the lack of choice that I had to endure in the K through 12 years. I set my own course, so to speak. This was a powerful moment for me. I was curious to try new ideas.

Sociology became my major. It fits with my family’s leftist politics. I had much to learn and found I liked research. Art courses also interested me. I tried printmaking, then pottery and finally photography. My confidence gradually grew as the choices I made for my education finally had meaning to me. I didn’t think that the roadblocks I had encountered earlier were going to hold me back. When I found that the intro photography course I had just finished was my school’s only photo course, I somehow found a way to take night classes at an art school not far away.

Little did I know that things started to fall into place. At the art school I met other students who were already working on their own projects. I liked the professor and the students were encouraging me to find myself through photography.

Persistence, curiosity and the need to survive were the real lessons. Nothing was going to stop me. I had a passion that fit my personality. Photography is an art where I could work with my hands on my own concepts. These are the basic principles that I have lived with. By the way, I graduated college on the Dean’s List!

I have always found the most difficult way of making my work. It is just something I’m attracted to. I used to think who would want to copy my work because it was so strenuous to make.

As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?

Diane Arbus’ work had a major influence on me. Her book came out in 1971 just as I had moved from taking pictures of shadows and trees. Her work is so powerful. I got lost in the why and how of her work. She brought ‘street photography’ to a new level. Her pictures were haunting. Looking through the book was like witnessing a fire. You couldn’t look but you couldn’t tear yourself away.

She went to great lengths to search out her subjects. She had something to pursue and show to the world. Had she lived, what would she have found next? She broke open the mythology of the American Dream.

Photography had a purpose for me after seeing her book. I started to wean myself from taking random unrelated shots. Projects made sense. From then on working on a project felt like I had been invited to try out my ideas and pursue them. What I learned from Diane Arbus helped me to jump from someone trying to achieve technical skills to conceptual photographer who wanted to tell stories.

Contact Info:

Image Credits

Titles
1 The Grid
2 The Choking Point
3 Blue Ocean
4 Bad Weekend
5 No Vanishing Point
6 Foam Wall with Artist
7 Motor Oil Bottles
8 Sea Life
9 Chip Bags and Candy Wrappers

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