Why Photobooks Will Outlast the Internet - Matthew Genitempo (Part 2)

Matthew Genitempo (0:00)

The photographs that interest me the most are the ones that I kinda don't remember taking. All we're doing is fictions. Sometimes I wish that there were two of me because it's so difficult to deal with your own work.

Matt Jacob (0:13)

Meet Matthew Genitempo, photographer, publisher, and the maker of three books, Jasper, Mother of Dogs, and Dogbreath.

Jasper is my favorite photo book, and after all these years I still imagine and dream about what it means, unsure if I want the answer, if there is one to find, or if any of that actually mattered. We talk in this conversation about the critique that sent him into the woods and the time he spent there with men who had cut themselves off from society, about shooting his flow camera fast, about the people he dedicated his books to, and the boy who is the source of narration for Dogbreath without ever appearing in it.

Matthew Genitempo (1:10)

My dad was in a hunting accident. Shotgun spray had had gone across him and had blinded him in one of his eyes. My mom said that he would just kind of disappear on the weekends and like just kind of go into these rural places. Did you see your dad in these men? Yeah, I mean to some extent, yeah. Maybe I was dealing with being on the edge of at the time I was on the edge of becoming 40 and kind of looking back at a lot of things. I had a gun pulled on me one time, I was shot at one time, and like a week or two went by, and I get this phone call from this unknown number, and it is Dove's ant. And she was letting me know that Dove had taken his own life.

Matt Jacob (1:52)

If you're an emerging photographer still getting in your own way, wondering what to say with your images and how to say them, this is a conversation about what it takes to stop piece together something profound and what it might cost you in the process.

Matthew Genitempo (2:06)

I'm gonna be uh an optimist about this one. I still have a lot of self-doubt about work, but like the one thing that I feel still pretty good about is if I just do the work, if I just go out and make the pictures and trust myself that something's gonna happen, that it will find itself, it'll if I it'll find its own way. Maybe we'll put more of an emphasis on the book and more people will want to make books and enjoy books, and the future might be bright. I would give this this advice to myself now and to myself 15 years ago, but this is part two of my conversation with Matthew Genitempo.

Matt Jacob (2:56)

You can find part one in the link in the description or on my channel posted from the previous week. Thanks as always for listening, and I hope you enjoy the rest of this episode.

I could talk for hours about Jasper, but we we we shall move on because after a book like that, the next thing that you ended up turning your attention to a few years later was um your second book, Mother of Dogs. Um can you can you give us a quick overview of that and how that that came about and the the conceptual conceptualization of it?

Matthew Genitempo (3:36)

Um well I I had actually started Dogbreath before Mother of Dogs, but I mean obviously no nobody knows that because it came out a couple years later. But um yeah, COVID had started. Um and so um Ada, who is my wife, but my girlfriend at the time, um, she was living in Tucson and um COVID kind of forced us to consolidate our lives. So she um moved to MARFA and um, you know, I I I feel guilty saying this, but like the the beginning of COVID was really lovely for us because we had ever we had never lived together and we had like we're like you know, she moved all her stuff in and it just felt it was just nice, you know. It was just like the first time, first time living together, and um yeah, I feel guilty saying that because the world was like in such a shit place, but we were just like we kind of had our own little spot in Marfa.

Um so uh what initially happened was uh Brad Feuerhelm did a uh a series of books. It's like this box set that that uh void put out um uh called Bleak House. And so he had reached out, I want to say to like 14 or 15 different photographers and said, like, hey, we're gonna do these these small books. There's uh it's gonna be a small edition of like 25 uh or 50 or something, and um they're gonna be kind of COVID projects. So I was like, okay, cool, I'll you know, I'll do that. So um started making the work. Um, and um, you know, the house, the house that we lived at in Marfa um is is right across the street from some train tracks. And um uh, you know, when I first moved in, I was like, I'm never gonna get used to these, I'm never gonna get used to this train because it would like it was so loud and um uh it just would shake the entire house and um and it ended up being kind of more of a comfort. Um but we actually lived next to a train that co-blocks that way, and it's like it's just kind of nice to to hear the train go by.