Jonathan Blaustein: Are you still in love with photography, or has it gotten boring after all these years? Sam Abell: That’s a good question. I was asked by a student what my most significant accomplishment was at National Geographic, after thirty years,
It’s shifted in a good way, away from what you might call the singular successful image, to the sustained body of work. Yes, there are billions more photographers, and billions more photographs every day, but who’s building up a point of view? Who’s photographing with intention, and whose body of work will sustain itself and survive?
“His process is built on the virtue of patience. He looks for structure in a scene, starting almost with a still-life. He dwells on the parts and composes meticulously. Then he waits.
Minutes, days, weeks he waits, coming and going for months even, drafting thousands of times in his head or on film the scene unfolding. Finally it comes. He calls that ‘a breath of life,’— a simple gesture, a gust of wind, a shadow, a sense of mystery that once stilled, creates involvement for the viewer, that ineffable quality of Abell’s work that keeps us looking.”
Abell built a three-decade career as a field photographer for National Geographic based on the lessons he learned from his father and a way of making photographs that he evolved along the way. Abell spoke with PDN from his home in Charlottesville, Virginia, about his work for National Geographic, the way he shoots photographs, and how he brought the two together to create his new book.
