Interview with Peter Kayafas

Kalispell Montana 2014 © Peter Kayafas

Interview conducted by Micaela Bahn

Peter Kayafas is an award-winning photographer, professor, publisher, and board member at Yaddo––the oldest artist residency program in the United States. His not-for-profit, Eakins Press Foundation, is one of the most important small presses in the history of photography, having published books by Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, and Carl Van Vechten, among others. I spoke with him over Zoom about his role as a photography professor, and how the transference of knowledge intersects with his own creative work.

Musée: Before I ask you about your position as an educator, how would you describe your own photography, as well as how you began taking photographs?

Glasgow Montana 2014 © Peter Kayafas

Peter Kayafas: My father is a photographer, so I grew up around photography. There was a period in high school when I started to realize I was able to do something with pictures that I couldn’t do with anything else. So, I left a small town to go to NYU Tisch, but mostly because it was a really good excuse to be in New York.

Musée: And this eventually led you to teaching?

Peter: It wasn’t until well after I had graduated that I became interested in teaching. It started with lectures that I’d be invited to do, and I really enjoyed that. At some point, a friend who had been teaching at Pratt recommended me to replace a professor who had become suddenly ill, and one thing led to another. The best way to describe my own photography is that it feeds on a multitude of different things that I do in my life and one of the most important things that I have done for the last twenty years is teach. 

Musée: In what way do you see teaching feeding into your own work?

Peter: It's what keeps me honest about the things that I believe in. It reminds me to pay attention to what is important about photography, but also what the realistic expectations are of what photography can be and do in our culture.

Okmulgee Oklahoma 2015 © Peter Kayafas

Musée: Your career trajectory was not particularly traditional, and I'm sure that's very reassuring for your students to see.

Peter: One of the things that I try to stress as much as I can to my students is, allow yourself to be surprised by finding deep nourishment in places where you did not expect it. That holds true for everything, whether it's a relationship, a job, or a creative inspiration. Working as a publisher and teacher galvanizes my work as an artist.

Musée: I’ve heard from a number of visual art professors that teaching via Zoom is ten times the work and half the reward.

Twin Bridges Montana 2014 © Peter Kayafas

Peter: Yes. With my beginning photography class, the objectives are all based around learning how to use manual cameras, develop film, and print in the darkroom. The extended version of that is learning about editing and thinking about how photography can be used to tell stories. Fortunately, it’s been hybrid teaching, so I was able to physically work with them with the camera, albeit with a mask on and socially distanced, and with only half the class in the darkroom at a time. I had to do everything twice in the lab section. Frankly, it was exhausting.

Musée: The last year has been tumultuous for people. You said that these are intro photography students, but have you seen them reacting to this in their approaches to image-making?

Peter: There’s very little difference between what I'm seeing my students doing right now to what I've seen them do in the past. Part of it is that they're starting from scratch in this class and learning what their relationship is to the medium. The actual pictures themselves fit into several different categories, but most interesting to me is this place of discovery of self, city, and photography. I try to help my students come up with a multilayered definition of what makes a good photograph. One definition is, if you can't quite describe it and you need to actually look at it, that's probably a good photograph. 

Twin Bridges Montana 2014 © Peter Kayafas

Musée: So, in short, not really.

Peter: I think that it would probably be different if I was teaching my junior research class or a senior thesis class where they are theoretically much more sophisticated in using the medium to address a question or propose a thesis.

Musée: Is there a distinct difference from when you yourself were a student? 

Peter: I really want to impress upon as many people as I can including my students that being a photography student at Pratt, SVA, Cal Arts, or Mass Art is a very rarefied and privileged thing to be doing. There is a much-needed correction that’s been happening in our society, that's becoming more mainstream—that people should not be disadvantaged because of their gender expression, sexuality, the way they look, and the things over which they have no control. That’s entering the academy in ways that are really exciting and necessary and also problematic. There are certain people in photography and Pratt who are particularly focused on identity, what that means, and who has a right to define it. I think those conversations are really important, but I also worry sometimes that they are impediments to the exploration of the medium. For instance, I will have a critique environment where we are all talking about one student’s work and then people say explicitly, “I don't want to tell them how I feel because I don’t want to offend them.” 

Musée: That’s hard because it can mean that the artist being critiqued doesn’t receive the criticism they want or need.

Crow Agency Montana 2014 © Peter Kayafas

Peter: They’re depending on their peers and professor for a reaction. And that breaks my heart because there is a way to tell somebody what their work is doing to you and a way of reacting to it in a pure, productive, generous way that may also offend. Most of my students are not like that, but they’re also nineteen-year-olds who want to be with each other, to make work that’s important, move people, be moved; and all of this other political stuff––including to a certain degree the pandemic––is noise that gets heard and influences them, but it’s also just noise to that process. I think it is possible for people to work today without it being about the pandemic or the social-political division of our society. It's possible for people to make really important work without the subtext being one of the things that have come to consume our social media. And I'd like to encourage that as a professor.

You can find Kayafas’s new photography book The Way West here