Jesse D Graham
naarm-based photographer
interviews with friends
I used to work at a small community newspaper.
This is what I looked like then. ooofta
The pay was horrific. I got yelled at a fair bit. I saw more car crashes than I’d like to think about, even now.
But I also got to interview people just about every day, which felt big and important and good. I got to write about people doing things they love, about the people they are in love with, about the people they lost. It’s special to have a platform to tell people’s stories, and I’d like to think I did good with it.
I’ve missed that a lot in my new corporate job (pay is good, and I don’t have to photograph crashed cars in front of their distraught owners and emergency services, so I’ll take the trade).
When I worked at the paper, I had a little Olympus dictaphone. It was a cute little silver number, which was terribly scratched up by the time I finished there. The battery compartment was blue at the top from when I left a battery in for too long and it started to burst. The mic would pick up anything close to it - which was sometimes me note-taking on a computer, more than it was the voices of the people I was talking to (side note: love a clicky clacky keyboard). But it was a handy little tool and with it I recorded hundreds of hours of chatting - some conversations heartwarming and a lot of them more tense than revealing.
Also, believe it or not, people don’t always love it when you stand a microphone in front of them on a table when you’re chatting, or hold it towards their mouth. Even when the interview is good.
That little microphone is goneski - I leant it to someone, or it was chucked in a move or it’s still hiding in the folds of some old jacket, battery slowly expanding powdery acid through its plastic backing. I hope someone is out there, using it to run amok a little bit.
But anyway, I’ve missed interviewing people. Less the journalism and more the joy of someone telling you about themselves, something they like, something they hate, and the little sparky connection you witness when their thoughts, like puzzle pieces, fall into place.
In lockdown, I bought myself a snazzy new set of microphones. The idea is to use them to do more filming, maybe work on a short film, but I’ve also been using them to record little interviews with friends.
One of my best pals, Jesse, showed me some questions a talk show host would ask his guests at the end of their time together.
I like thinking things through, unless that thing is a creative project, so I took my little mics and my little questions and went out into the great pale yonder.
This is the result.
