Written by Bethany Hallas
Will Crooks has come a long way since first picking up photography at 21 years of age. From the man that doesn’t even write his own artist’s statement, it’s stating the obvious to call him passionate about his craft. Unorthodox and sincere, I left with what was less of an interview and more a conversation that has since left me re-thinking what the end goal of a creative’s career even is.
“I’m not precious about it,” he says. “If all of it were to get erased on a hard drive, it wouldn’t be a nightmare to me.” This susceptibility of medium morphs into a vulnerability that is a constant in photography, and a quality he continues to master attentively. Prior to photography, Will took the most “logical path,” earning a degree at Furman University as an accountant. With a background in sports and boxing, he didn’t consider himself much of a creative till exposed to The Sartorialist, a website filled with photographer Scott Schuman’s portraits of strangers with “interesting, personal styles.”
"How did you get started?"
“In about five years, I probably photographed over 2,000 different strangers, mainly in Greenville, Savannah, and Charleston, stopping people who I thought had an interesting perspective visually. There was kind of a romance to not knowing these people at all — it was almost like falling in love a little bit with a stranger. When you see a stranger, you almost create this whole story in your head, so that’s what it initially was. Fast forward, I was doing that for years, back in the Tumblr days, and then I was in graduate school, only to realize I absolutely hated accounting. I didn't mind the academic nature of it, but I didn't want to submit to cubicle life, and so, on the third day of grad school, I quit because I had a full ride and was told if I left after a week, I’d have to pay back all the money granted. I had already accepted a job offer, and my path was drawn out for the next 10 or 20 years of life — it was a very clear fit.
Stepping away was the most stressful thing I've ever done, because I was a very good student, good at school, and at the top of my class, and had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I then started freelancing in photography because I couldn't figure out anything else I could do. I freelanced for a couple of years and failed miserably, earning next to nothing the first year. I moved back in with my parents, lied my way into my first full-time, real job in photography (it worked), and spent about four years working as a staff photographer and visual director for Community Journals. Since then, I’ve published for Time Magazine and Business Journal, and more recently, spent the past five and a half years by myself, mainly traveling around the Southeast, doing regional coverage stories for a bunch of different national magazines and newspapers. I have no formal education in photography and taught myself everything from YouTube University. I have such a distaste for how photo is sold. I had several photo interns at my old job who had spent three years in school already, and yet had basically unusable skill sets. They hadn't really learned what they needed to if they wanted to make a living as a photographer. On the education side, you'd be better off spending four years assisting under somebody and working on your own portfolio.
"How has technologies prevalence affected your work?"
Photography is what illustration was before photography existed. It's a practical medium, so there are more ways to make money in the medium than any other — whether photographing products for Amazon or working in photojournalism. There are all these different sectors within photography, and I think it exists in a different framework, medium-wise, as there’s a more commercial application versus, painting or sculpture. If you think back to when photography was invented, it coincides with the period painting became obsolete. It’s interesting that the camera coincides with art moving into abstraction and more expression- and perspective-driven work. While AI will obviously eat parts of the market, just like anything will when there's a new technology, I think it will allow photography to expand and reveal the importance of your work being perspective-driven. If you bring a very specific visual take to a project, that's where the advantage is. It's the difference between making a technically good photo and making an interesting photo. because, we think of a photo as reality. We see a picture of ourselves, and we say, “It’s me,” versus, if it were a painting, you understand it's an interpretation. However, a photograph is just as much an interpretation of you as a painting considering even focal lengths of a camera change the distortion of one's face. In the end, it's a box that records light, that's what it's doing. We treat it as reality, and we're more critical of it, which is why it's important for people to realize it's not reality, people can build such a negative or harsh view of themselves under the context that a photo is "real."
"What is your approach towards your subject matter"
I need to be interested in the person themselves. I need that layer because, for me, the camera is an excuse to interact with the world — it's an excuse to meet someone and have a meaningful interaction. What we talk about while we make photos doesn't matter. That's why I love being a photographer — it gives me an excuse to interact with the world. Everyone defines fine art in different ways. Once you put it out in the world, it's up to other people. But usually, I'm making it for a magazine, not for myself. There's personal work I make, and maybe that's closer to fine art, but even then, that's the reason I don't write my artist statements — I just want to make things, and I don't really care where they go or how they're received. Often, photos exist as a photo book rather than individual pieces. I make very few bodies of work that I approach in a way that I think is conceptual enough or driven by a fine art structure. If I'm approaching it from a narrative for a magazine, it's serving a purpose, and I think fine art needs to not have that necessarily commercial component.
"What is your criteria for fine art?"
Magazines hold this cool intersection of commerce but also art. You're working with a team that consists of the designer, photo editor, and writer, and collaborate on putting work out into the world, which is a cool aspect of the photography medium — being part of telling interesting stories and being put in situations I wouldn't seek out for myself normally. For one project, I met an EPA scientist who, in the ’90s and early 2000s, was an early whistleblower about toxic PSA levels to the EPA, and they didn't listen. So I like the chance to meet people that are fairly obsessive about what they do and make something interesting. I have to make things, because that is the most important thing for me to do. And that’s something I can accomplish with commercial work, which is more structured because you’re forced to work within a certain box but still have interesting projects and freedom to create. I like the box that you're put in, where you're forced to work within parameters that have certain technical issues to deal with. That's easier for me than if you give me a blank piece of paper — I can't draw anything. I'm better with a framework where there's some clarity, rather than nothing. It's interesting to have a project where you're going to the boring suburban home to photograph somebody who's not used to being photographed. How do you make something evocative and powerful that goes along with it being an investigative journalism piece? How do you marry that? I like that challenge. There are very generic, boring pictures out there, so I'm always asking myself: How can I flip this? I like that kind of problem-solving — asking, how is this kind of person usually photographed? How can I create something that has an evocative mood and not what you'd expect, and manipulate those factors for something interesting?
“How long did it take you to feel confident in your work?”
I wake up after most big assignments at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning the next day and think about every single thing I should have done differently for hours before starting my day. However, if you're comfortable, you're not growing. You can always make the work more interesting. You can connect with the subject matter. You can make the light more interesting and have better composition or a more interesting concept. I don't think I was particularly talented at photography, I'm just good at consistently studying good work, and trying to improve upon it with each issue. One of my favorite photographers would be Christopher Anderson, I have all his photo books. He started off as a war photographer and photojournalist working in challenging conflict zones. Then he made a book about his son's birth and his father dying, and found this lane of photography that is more creatively driven, living in a lot of different spaces, and using different visual voices. He has a rich, beautiful color palette that feels painterly, and his sense of turning the everyday into something more cinematic connects with me. For other work I make, a photographer I reference that would be more fine art (I hate the word fine art) is Jack Davison, who references surrealists and 1950s photography but brings it into a contemporary setting with work that’s poignant but still playful. He doesn't take it too seriously. So those are two people I always come back to and who forever stay with me. There's a carousel of other people whose vision moves around based on the project I’m working on.
"It’s clearly come alive to you..."
I think it kind of circles back to what I said earlier — to me, the camera is an excuse to interact with the world. It's a tool in which you can see everything. It's corny, but it's a way to express something without words. You can condense something into a very instantaneous image that communicates with someone and doesn't require understanding the same language.
A few summers ago, I was in Japan for work and went back to my street photography roots, photographing strangers. There was a language barrier with every single person, so I used my Google Translate, and then when I showed them the photo, they could understand. The fact that it crosses that boundary of language and culture so effectively — photography works on a lot of levels. We all use it and It's a language that we all speak now. Every one of us has a camera in our pocket every day, and we all have a distinct language for it. It's one of the few mediums that everyone is using every day. There are photographers I follow from a bunch of different countries, and I can't read what their posts say, but I don't need that to be able to interact with their work. Most people aren't sharing journal entries — they're sharing photographs. I carry a small pocket camera on me pretty much 24/7 — it’s my version of a diary. So I use it to document my life and little things. It’s what I call light sketches; it's just a way of seeing the world and of being present. Sure, a lot of people say this, but it's really easy to get sucked into social media and be on your phone, and it's nice to have a reason to not be looking at your phone screen. You can be out on a walk, you can be out on a drive, and you can see something — and it's a way to find something extremely beautiful. Photography is infinitely complex. There are so many parts of it that you can get better at. I've never had a photo I've made that couldn’t have been better. There's always a way to make it better, and yet it still does the job of effectively communicating and connecting people, which is the cool part about it. Photography is the way you see, and when being photographed, it's intimate to see how someone else sees you. Even if they share a photo dump, the point of it is you're getting to see through your friend's eyes and see what they bothered to choose to stop and take a photo of.
"Your favorite shoot?"
There was an early assignment that was one of my first national jobs, and part of the reason I went on my own was I wanted to know if I was good for Greenville on a small market level, or if I could do bigger. So it was a little bit of everything. I had to go out on my own to have those opportunities, and I did a shoot for British GQ early on, photographing this NFT artist who had sold a piece at Christie’s for about $70 million. Photographing another artist is kind of collaborative. I like seeing their spaces, as it's sort of a window into their brain. Often, they're more down for different ideas. I remember I hardly slept — I did so much research. That was a really important shoot for me. It showed me that I could work in the same space as people I saw as my heroes or mentors, and I could be in that same place. But the most important work I've made is really the photographs of my family because, again, the camera stops time — which, when you really think about it, is magic.
I remember finding a drawer full of old photographs of my parents before my brother and I had been born. They weren't parents yet and were younger than I was when I found them, so I got to see them in a way that I could never have seen them. It was this window into who they were before I existed, in a way I can never see. I'm not very precious about my work. If all my hard drives blew up, I don’t really care. But photos I've made of my dad, or family, or my brother who passed — those are the most precious photos to me, because I can’t make them again. I've had a lot of loss in my life, so as long as I have a finger to push the shutter button and one eye that works, I can make pictures. It's something that I can always have and can always use to interact with the world.