In the second installment of our deep dive into the world of Ave Pildas, we peel back the layers of his creative process and explore the profound impact of his work on the photographic community and beyond. Here, we uncover the subtleties of Pildas's approach to capturing life's fleeting moments, his philosophical musings on the essence of photography, and how his architectural roots have infused his work with a unique spatial awareness. Join us as we continue our journey through the lens of Ave Pildas, delving into the mind of a man whose images transcend the ordinary, offering viewers a passport to unseen worlds and uncharted emotions.

How do you approach storytelling through your projects and what do you hope your audience takes away from your work?

When I choose a location for taking pictures, I choose with the understanding that there is something interesting or worthwhile happening there. The first thing I wish is that the audience will see what is interesting or worthwhile, or at least expand their perception of what is going on around them. There is so much to see. And if the audience can see more, they might feel more engaged and responsible to participate in the world. They might ask: “Does somebody nearby need help? Is there a way to take care of others? Is there a way to get rid of the trash on the street? Is there a way to have better air? I'm hoping that what people take away from my pictures is that they're part of it and that they need to own it. Not everybody responds that way. I hope to enlighten some people, but I know you can't save everybody.

What has been the most rewarding aspect of your career in photography?

Well, I would have to say that the books of my photographs are at the top of the list. And the reason why books are in this position is because they're going to be around a lot longer than I am. So, they are my legacy. And I'm very attached to legacy. I think it's important that I leave something behind. And what I'm leaving are my photographs. One of the ways to do that is to publish them in a book. Books go into libraries and have a long history, so I think books will continue alongside social media and digital content. There's still a place for books. You can hold them in your hands; they are intimate and personal.

The other thing is that I feel very blessed that I can exist now and share what I see and what interests me with other people. I don't understand what 'retire' means. I'm blessed that I can continue to create. Teaching is close to me, too; sharing information is important. I've faced crises in my life but haven't been brought down by them. You can always rebound from hard times and look on the bright side. I have a very positive view of life; I'm a positive person. I never quit. You can't quit. Life goes on.

Is that something that you also apply for your photography?

Yes, never give up. I don't know what the point of giving up is. You can always find a solution. If you really have something you want to achieve, you can find a way. If one door closes, then you find another open door somewhere. That's a reason to keep going.

When people ask me why I don't stop working because I'm too old, I say “I know what my age is, but I don't feel my age.” I still have thoughts that I can't share with people because they would say, "Oh, that's what a 16-year-old should be thinking. You shouldn't be thinking that."

Have there been any unexpected lessons or insights you gained through your work? Apart from what we just talked about.

Well, I think that when I was younger, I was very closed, wanting everything to be perfect, and not being entirely open to the new. Over the years, I've lightened up a lot. I'm not as rigid. There's plenty of structure in my life and how I approach photography and what I do with the pictures afterwards. But being open to things and not being judgmental has been a positive learning experience. Even though a series of pictures presents a point of view that can be seen as a judgment, I do not pre-conceived the outcome. I'm open to looking, open to taking pictures, and open to discovery. Photography has taught me to be more accepting.

What advice would you give to aspiring photographers who look up to your work?

Find your own voice. Don't try to take pictures like others; it'll never happen. Take pictures of things you're interested in and find your own style. Just take a lot of pictures. I have hundreds of heroes who have influenced me, but I do not try to copy any of them. I'm trying to learn why they take pictures or what they're particularly interested in. I just started a little video series where I talk about people who have influenced me, which is difficult. I'm not very comfortable in that yet. Kudos to you for being able to approach photographers and ask them what they're thinking. You do a really great job, and I wish I was as fluid in my observations of other people or talking about other people's work. I'm not very good at remembering lines, so what I say always has to be off the top of my head.

If I say that I was influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson, I'm not trying to take a picture like Bresson, but I am learning a lesson from Bresson. He taught me patience. That's what I learned from him. He would find a place he thought was interesting and then wait for the decisive moment to photograph, not always, but he would wait for the right moment. I've looked at some of his contact sheets, and how he edits the pictures, capturing the decisive moment. He taught me that. Other people taught me composition, like Irving Penn, a master of composition. I don't try to take pictures like Irving Penn, but I do pay attention to composing the picture. Elliott Erwitt, another one of my heroes, taught me about humor.

Another hero is Gordon Parks. As a kid, my parents subscribed to Life magazine, so I saw his pictures occasionally before I was ever interested in photography. Then I remembered his name and saw a documentary that he did about a young boy named Flavio in Brazil. I looked at the pictures he took over a period of many years, revisiting Flavio from when he was a kid to a young man, and the influence that Parks had over him, which taught me that projects can develop over long periods of time.

I have lots of heroes, and I don't try to take pictures like they do, but I always take away something from these photographers. That's also part of education, and my being a professor, to give something but also take something from students. It wasn't just a one-way street. I was always getting something back, which also gave me a chance to practice what I was preaching. That was a good exchange. I enjoyed teaching and was able to influence a lot of students.

Making better designers and better photographers was a goal and a real reward for me. Many of those students have become colleagues, and that’s another reward. Now, I can go out to dinner with them and discuss various topics, and in some cases, I've even become an instructor for their kids. That's a real reward.

Is that how you stay inspired, or is there something you actively do to stay inspired, like looking at pictures of your colleagues, photography books, or even photographs taken at the same place you go to take photos?

Oh yeah, yes, the short answer is yes. Sometimes, I recognize a place where I took a picture and see someone else’s picture of that same location and that I think is better than mine. Then I wonder why I didn’t see it that way. When a former student does something I consider good, I feel proud and think, “Wow, I wish that was mine.” Sometimes I say, “Well, he learned well, and I’m glad.” There are about half a dozen people who were my students who are much more successful than I am, and I’m not envious at all. I’m happy for them; they were energized enough to be rewarded with fame or fortune, and good for them.

Awesome. You have expressed a belief in creating series rather than standalone images. What draws you to this format, and how do you decide on the theme for your series? We talked about it a little bit earlier, but maybe you can expand on your perspective about series.

Well, that's a tough question. I used to think it was hard to tell a story with just one picture. Then I read more about journalistic photographers who try to tell a story with one picture, and I began to see that it is possible. But, if I'm interested in a particular subject matter, like shadows, and I see a shadow of something, I take a picture of that and think, "Oh, this is interesting: shadows." Then I start looking at shadows and thinking, "What's another thing like shadows?" Then I think of silhouettes. So, shadows, silhouettes, and reflections are another dimension. Then a broader subject emerges. One picture doesn't do it for me then. I need to explore this subject because there's more to see. Thus a series starts. I'm very curious. So, if I see a shadow, I wonder, what is it about shadows that interest people? A shadow removes detail, just like a silhouette removes detail, so you're focused on just the shape. Then you question what the shape and content are. It's an exploration. You find a subject, and then you explore it, like discovering a new country. Explorers don't just land and go home; they search. When I discover something new, I must look around.

You mentioned the importance of revisiting and reshooting subjects. How does this practice contribute to the depth of your project?

When I go back to a location I've visited before, it feels like going home. But revisiting also helps if I'm experiencing something like writer’s block, where I can't think of what to photograph. So, if it's a great day for taking pictures, whether it's all gray with no shadows or sunny with lots of shadows, and I don't have a clue what I want to take pictures of, I often revisit a place because that will jumpstart something. When I do that, I often rediscover something. I love to travel and see new places, but when I can't travel to a new place, I rely on past experiences. I've always believed that you could drop me in the middle of nowhere, and I'll find something to photograph. If I revisit a place I've been to, I will find something to photograph, which sometimes fits into a series I have taken or inspires a new one. That's just part of being open.

What advice would you give to photographers on capturing images to tell a story and convey a strong point of view?

Well, changing your station point is very important if you're looking to tell a story. You must look around. You can take a picture from one angle, then move to another station point and take another picture. You must cover all your bases. Often, I get upset with myself after looking at pictures when I take them out of the camera and realize I should have moved around more. Some people say, well, a photographer can overshoot something, taking too many pictures. If you want to tell a story about a particular subject, then I think that you can't take too many pictures. Then the creative process becomes one that you do in editing. And that's a different creative process. And then you can build a story when you're editing your photographs. I think that if you can tell the story in one picture, good for you, kudos to you. But editing is important.

Let's talk about the book Starstruck. So maybe you can take it from the beginning.

Yes, well, I was working at Capitol Records as an art director doing album covers. It was a prestigious job, but I didn't really like the politics of it. Capitol Records was about a hundred meters north of Hollywood Boulevard, where I went to lunch with my colleagues. It was like Times Square West, with lots of shops, restaurants, movie theaters and people. And I always thought, “this would be a great place to take pictures”.

When I stopped working at Capitol Records - I was there only a short time, even though I continued doing work for the entertainment industry - I would go to Hollywood Boulevard to take pictures on my free time. That period marked my birth as a street photographer. One aspect that caught my eye on Hollywood Boulevard, being the center of the entertainment industry, was the presence of half a dozen movie theaters. I began capturing the box offices and facades of these places alongside taking pictures of the people on the street. Initially, I started with the box offices, and a boxed set of prints of these was published in 1975. This collection of prints was called Bijou.

After completing my education in Europe, I went back to the U.S. I continued to return to Europe in the summers. One summer I carried a group of photographs to Zoom Magazine in Paris in a backpack designed solely for carrying photographs. I presented about 100 photographs of Hollywood Boulevard to the editors. They were impressed and decided to publish a ten-page spread in 1976. Some pictures were contact size, with sometimes thirty on a page, and others were full-page. Following this publication, a couple of other magazines featured my work, and then the pictures were put to rest. They were stored in envelopes with the contact sheet and filed away.

Almost forty years later, a writer found a copy of that publication and some pictures were published again. That occurrence made me think these Hollywood Boulevard photographs might become a book. I pulled all the pictures out of my storage and consulted a couple of publisher friends.

The first couple of publishers I approached weren't interested, except for Chris Pichler of Nazraeli Press, who had published a small book of my early box office pictures titled Bijoux in 2016. He said, "Ave, I think these are good pictures, but they're not for me. I know a publisher who would love them." That publisher was Clint Woodside of Deadbeat Club Press. So, I took them to Clint, and we started looking through hundreds of contact sheets. He found photographs that I had dismissed, ones I thought weren't good or didn't achieve what I was after. I hadn't remembered those pictures, nor some of the ones I thought were good. Revisiting them was a whole new experience, and I found photographs I had overlooked.

Clint found photographs that I had never considered good, but they told a story to him. We edited the book together, making for a much better book than my first edit. Having new eyes look at those pictures was a real plus.

So the common theme was you just walked around Hollywood Boulevard and took photos, right?

Well, all those pictures, or I would say 90% of them, were taken with my camera on a tripod. I would find a location that I liked, that made a good background, and set the camera up on the tripod. Then, I had a very long cable release, probably about three meters long. The camera was sitting there, and I was walking around from one side to another with the cable release in my hand. If I saw somebody coming down the street and thought that they would make a good picture, I was ready to shoot before they ever reached the camera. Since I was standing away from the camera, not behind it, I knew when the subject came into the camera's field of vision. That's when I took the picture. I knew that I wanted them, for example, in the center, or that I wanted them in a particular position in the frame. Often, I started talking to them before I took the picture, and continued the conversation after I took the picture. I varied the locations, not so much the distance from the subject matter but the location of the camera. Sometimes I would set the camera down very low, so it was at knee level because I thought, could I take pictures of people without showing their faces? That was interesting, to take headless portraits, but not as interesting as when the camera was down low, when people started ducking into the picture. They would put their heads down low, engaging in what we call “photo bombing” today. “Photo bombing” was not a term back then, but they wanted to sneak into the picture. Well, I wasn't expecting that, but as soon as that started to happen, I clicked the shutter. And then I had a collection of people ducking into the frame. I found that very interesting.

Generally, I would set up my camera and start talking to someone. One of my first sequence pictures was based on a guy named Charles, who got off a bus carrying a little stool. He was a well-dressed African American who was returning from the racetrack, watching the horses run and placing bets. I asked if I could take his picture because I admired how nicely he was dressed. He sat down, and I started taking pictures of him. Soon, people were gathering behind him, wanting to know why I was taking pictures of him. Then I took pictures of Charles with bystanders in the frame. Then, a very big guy, a character actor living in Hollywood named Simon, came and got very close to Charles, prompting Charles to decide to move on. This led to a sequence of events captured in my photographs, showcasing the interaction between Charles, the bystanders, and Simon, who essentially pushed Charles out of the frame. This little story took half a dozen or more pictures to tell. Being there and taking single pictures of people walking past my camera also started me taking sequence pictures, which marked the beginning of my exploration into sequential photography. As soon as I realized I was capturing pictures in sequence to tell a story, I became interested in Duane Michaels and other sequence photographers. I continue to take sequence pictures to this day, whenever I find an interesting location, regardless of the country, just to tell a story.

I really like what you did with your paper movies.

Oh, the paper movies, I just called them paper movies after I started taking sequence pictures. The paper movies started out always being shot on a tripod, with a lot of control there. More recently, the camera is handheld, so I am freer to move around. These shots evolved from taking pictures of a single person in front of a set or moving across the frame to shots that are more of a marriage between the human subject, architecture and location.

For instance, in Rome, at the Capitol stairs, I was off to the side, not straight on, taking pictures of the staircase while people were walking up and down. Sometimes the people are closer to the camera, sometimes they're further away, and the images become very abstract. The stairs hold them together.

Now, forty years later, as I compose paper movies on the computer, I sometimes manipulate the pictures, turning them upside down or flipping them left to right or right to left to fit the architecture together. The people, the element in the frame that is not controlled, confront or become a contrast to the architecture. It's always a learning process, an exploration of what else I can do with this and what I'm going to discover. It's often very selfish; what am I going to get out of this? After I discover something, then I'm willing to share it, but while I'm photographing, I am very self-absorbed. I'm in my own zone when I'm taking pictures.

Was there a certain moment when you of realized you can do something like that?

Yes, one photo is static, but when you string many together, you can make motion out of stills. You can make something that moves. In “Hong Kong Horizontal”, I was at the airport in Hong Kong, waiting for a connecting flight, and I started taking pictures looking down at an escalator. And the escalator was empty. It was just an architectural picture. And then a plane arrived, and people got off the plane and they were all headed to customs or baggage claim. At first there were a few people who stepped onto the escalator, and I took a picture, and then there were more people, and then there even more people. I took those pictures one at a time, and when I strung them together, when I put them adjacent to each other, it looked like the people were moving on the escalator. Another example occurred when I was sitting on a bench in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and I observed people walking through an exhibit called “Sum of Days” by Carlito Carvalhosa. The people were walking behind a translucent curtain and the curtain was undulating; it appeared to be a tunnel with a curtain on each side. When a person walked through, the curtain would move, but my station point did not. Then, when I edited the pictures and strung them together, at first there was one person going through, then another person in a different place of the frame, then a group of people. This placement suggested motion.

Did you take it with this intention, or was it something you discovered later in the post-process or when you printed?

I discovered it in the editing process. I was just sitting there, observing, thinking it's interesting when one person goes through, and it's interesting when a larger group of people goes through. But I had no idea what I was going to do with the pictures while I was taking them. After I came back and looked at the pictures on my computer screen, I started to imagine how they could become a sequence. I was working very old school. The MOMA pictures were taken 40 years after my Hollywood Boulevard experiences. They were digital pictures. At first, I printed up contact sheets, cut the contact sheets apart, and arranged the individual contact prints on a light box. I then placed a piece of glass over the top to keep them flat. Sometimes I would turn the pictures upside down to see what they would look like if I reversed them, but it was all done with hand manipulation until I was satisfied with the arrangement. Then I put numbers, file numbers, on each of the contact prints. I went to the computer and drew a grid, or several different grids. Sometimes the units were five across, five down, sometimes horizontal, sometimes vertical. I would marry up the grid to the contact prints, then bring each photo file into the grid in Photoshop, i.e. drop the images in. If it worked, fine. If not, I'd eliminate that layer and replace it with another one until I got what I wanted. It became an editing process on the computer. The first ones I did were all done by hand, by gluing the contacts onto a piece of board.

So would you say it's because of the experimenting and trying new things you were able to realize that you discovered something you didn't know about before?

Absolutely. You know, I love the thrill of discovery. It's like getting high. Taking a good picture also makes me high. If I do a piece and I think it's good, I am elated.

Do you think your architectural background had a role in this?

Yes, I do. I think that everything you've learned, right from the beginning, becomes the base, so you're always drawing from your past knowledge, from what you learned, even if you don't realize it. The base is always there and it pushes to the surface. Even the smallest thing comes to the surface sometimes. And when you recognize it, you have a good laugh. Laughing at oneself is something everyone should do.

What is advice you would offer; you would give to someone who wants to make better photos?

Keep taking photos. That question is kind of loaded. There are people who take pictures for years and years and never get better. They just don't improve. But most people improve with experience.

Do you do something to actively improve your photos? Maybe, show your pictures to someone or compare it or talk about it or, something like that.

Well, I'm not afraid of criticism. I think criticism can be constructive. So, sometimes people offer me positive criticism, and sometimes negative. If the criticism is from someone I respect, I listen and pay attention. If it's from someone who doesn't know what they're talking about, because everyone has an opinion, I thank them but don't take their advice to heart. To make a better picture, a bit of talent and being prepared is essential. Understanding what your camera can do and knowing the process means using those tools creatively. Everyone is creative in some way. To improve, look at other peoples’ photographs, understand why certain images are renowned. Not just one picture but the lifetime work of a photographer. This process gives you an idea of what you can do to improve, not by copying but by finding your own voice.

I love what I do, and I'm really blessed that I can keep doing what I do. I'm blessed that I'm still excited about photography, that I'm healthy, and that I can continue to work. I just hope that I have at least another ten years to continue working and making images that I feel are relevant, that I think are important, and that show people what's out there.

Martin:

Alright, thank you. Very much for your time.

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