#1910 - Mark Laita

Joe Rogan (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Hello, Mark. How do you do what you do and maintain any...

Mark Laita (0:19)

Mental health?

Joe Rogan (0:20)

Yeah.

Let's just tell everybody, you have the YouTube show Soft White Underbelly, which I found a while back, and I just watched one video, and then I went down the rabbit hole. And now, today, I binged a bunch of them, preparing for this. Dude, it's so sad and so heartbreaking, and you interview all kinds of people, addicts, prostitutes, johns, gang members, and why Soft White Underbelly? Why did you come up with that name?

Mark Laita (0:59)

I remember my dad, when I was in the 60s, 70s, talking on the phone with... I heard that term being used to...

It's like an analogy for the vulnerable part of whatever you're talking about. I don't hear that term anymore, but I remember it back then. And I always thought it was a cool name. Blue Oyster Cult used it as their original name before Blue Oyster Cult.

So it was a fun name. It makes people wonder what the hell it's all about.

Joe Rogan (1:26)

Well, it's very appropriate.

Mark Laita (1:28)

Yeah, yeah. I think it's fitting for what I'm doing.

Joe Rogan (1:29)

Completely. How did you get involved in interviewing all of these people that are sort of downcast from society?

Mark Laita (1:36)

So I've been an advertising photographer since I was 14 years old, or after high school, really. I went to college for it, but I was always into photography. And then I got into advertising, and I did that for decades and decades. I had a great career. And then what happened is, you know, my advertising work was so slick and beautiful and perfect, and everything is retouched, so it's better than life.

And you do that for decades, and you get burnt out. And you just get fed up with the perfection and all the aspirational aspects of advertising. And I just wanted something that was real. You know, I recognized that there were things going on in the world that weren't so perfect. And I just felt like my life was out of balance, because I didn't want to grow old and have my kids say, you know, what did your dad do? Oh, he shot advertising his whole life. I want to do something different. And I've always done these side projects. Even when I was a teenager in Chicago, I was always fascinated with the drunks on Madison Avenue on the west side. You see these guys sleeping on park benches and just with a paper bag and a bottle in their hands. It was such an interesting lifestyle to me, because I didn't grow up like that. I grew up in a pretty perfect household. Mom and dad, parents loved me. It was great.

But I was fascinated with all that dark stuff. And that continued throughout my career. I was always doing portraits of people like that. And I didn't really do much with it until about 1999, I started working. While I was doing advertising, I would sneak away whenever I had a hole in my schedule, which wasn't often. But over nine or ten years, I went to each of the lower 48 states and started photographing everything that exists in the US.

Cowboys in Wyoming, drunken Indians in New Mexico, ballerinas in New York City, repo men in Oklahoma, auto mechanics in Alabama, pedophiles all over the country, polygamists in Utah, the Amish in Pennsylvania, just everything that kind of fits, oh, that's Pennsylvania, they have Amish there. So I would pick that and I'd hunt it down and find it. So I got really good at finding these subcultures that we've all heard about, but you didn't really know if, you know, some of them are easy to find. Drug addicts are easy to find.

But there's other subcultures that I found that are more difficult to find and certainly difficult to photograph, and now really difficult to interview. So I did that book, came out in 2010, it's called Created Equal.

And I was really proud of it, put, you know, my heart and soul into it. But it didn't really, like, I would sit at a table when somebody's looking at it, and they would go, oh, what did he sound like?

What did the cowboy sound like? What did he, how did he get like this? How did he get this career? What was his childhood like? All these questions. And I didn't, honestly didn't know it for each of these 200 portraits in that book. And I realized if I'm going to make this really stick the way I wanted it to, I'm going to have to do it with an interview as a backstory. So it's a portrait, and then I would just do these interviews that might just exist behind the portrait as you're looking at it. And that's how I started. And I had, I always had studios like on Skid Row, like while I was doing advertising in LA, at my LA studio. I had another studio down on Skid Row, which was, you know, cheap. And I would just sneak away there on slow days and just photograph all the drug addicts, the prostitutes, the transgenders, the mental health, you know, the people that are off, the rockers, everything, gang members. And I loved doing it, but I never really did anything with that until I started.