Ward Long

In our conversation, you spoke about how your studies prepared you for the life you thought you wanted, only to find yourself unsure of who you were beyond your resume. Could you talk a bit about that journey, and how photography became a path to discovering your sense of self?

In high school, I spent all of my time getting ready for college. When I actually got to college, I realized that I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t have a personality beyond test-taker, grade-getter, merit-badge-collector, achievement-enjoyer. I wasn’t happy, I didn’t know what I wanted, and it was hard to imagine life after graduation.

I stopped going to class and started hanging out at the school library. I knew how to study, so I started looking through art books and novels. I felt drawn to these unruly and unstructured areas of inquiry. I tried to make things. As a success-seeking perfectionist, it was hard to be patient with my own early writings or drawings. But when I took pictures, the camera did all of the work. Every color in the sunset, every rock in the road, everything was instantly described and rendered. Taking long drives with my camera was a way to start spending time with myself. Every picture I took said “I was here.” That was enough. As I spent time looking at all the pictures I had taken, I started to see myself in them. I got to know my own sorrows, joys, and longings. The pictures became a place where my outer self and inner self could hang out. 

It took a long time for me to take my photographs seriously and think of myself as an artist. Photography was so precious to me, such a private thing, and I had complicated feelings about sharing any of that.


Part of following a creative path means reckoning with the forces that can make you want to give up. Can you share your perspective on the idea that “everything wants you to quit,” and how learning to coexist with that feeling has helped you keep going?

It feels like everything in the world is telling you to quit. Making art requires time, materials, space, and focus. Those four things are always in short supply. Getting more of one often means losing some of another. It’s a constant challenge. No one asks for your art, no one thinks they need it, and no one can even see it until you make it. Even in your best-case-scenario wildest dreams, few people will ever see your art, and even fewer will understand it. As if that’s not enough, your art won’t be good at first. Your work won’t look like all the wonderful things that inspired you to get started. When your art is good, it might take a long time to notice it, and longer still to nurture it.

“Don’t quit” is a simplifying mantra. It’s an invitation to let go of expectations, judgements, and all kinds of painful self-doubt. I don’t need to make a masterpiece today, or have a great idea for a project or apply for a prize or update my website. I just need to not quit. 

If I don’t quit, whatever got me to make art in the first place will carry me along. The pictures and words and drawings and poems will come. It will look different each day, I won’t know what comes next, and that’s not my problem. There’s only one rule.


In our conversation, you said, “If photographs were math, they would prove themselves.”How does incorporating your writing help give voice to what remains unspoken in an image? Why is it important to you to fill that space? 

Looking at a photograph is a subjective experience that draws on memory, personal associations, visual conventions, historical tropes, and cultural assumptions. However much information is captured in the frame, there’s always so much context that gets cropped out. For better or worse, there’s so much room for speculation, mystery and imagination. One silent moment can’t be the whole truth. 

When I’m putting pictures together, I often include text to guide the viewer from one to the next. Since photographs are treated like scientific evidence, they tend to take on an air of unchecked, distant objectivity. Adding text can help establish another point of view, hopefully more personal and poetic. I think of how a film score can add emphasis and underscore emotions in a movie. It’s a delicate balance: I don’t want the words to become captions for the images, or the photographs to become only illustrations of the text. I want both elements to contribute to the whole and still leave enough room for the reader’s imagination. 

We talked about how engaging with your own photographs sparks a dialogue with yourself, one that deepens your understanding of your own sense of being. Could you introduce us to your series Stranger Come Home, and share how the process of making those images supported you during that period of your life?

Stranger Come Home is about longing for steady love and dreaming about what could have been. My long-term relationship ended. Circumstances were complicated, and I ended up living alone in the apartment that we had shared for months and months. It was like living in a museum of the painful recent past. I looked through every closet and cupboard for signs of what went wrong. I finally moved out, sold all my furniture, and shoved my books into storage. I visited my parents and friends across the country, trying to figure out how to put the pieces back together.

I took pictures along the way, shooting with a newfound awareness of the emotional charge of domestic details. What rug might make love stay? Where might the toothbrushes of togetherness be found? I started a new relationship and had the feeling that I was somehow re-enacting the last one. Making photographs kept me going, and I had a place to put my feelings. I would take a walk with my camera and a twisted tree or a dark van full of ravens would appear. But, as Johnny Bristol sings, memories don’t leave like people do. The photographs of the last relationship stayed still as I moved on and changed. I took new pictures to fill in the gaps, charting the distance between what was, what could have been, and what was yet to come. 

On the opposite end of dialogue with yourself, can you share how your series Summer Sublet was approached in a more observational manner? How does using that approach help you create images where you, the subject, and the viewer all feel like you're inhabiting the same space?

I was looking for love and a place to belong in Stranger Come Home, and I found it in Summer Sublet. After all my breakups and living in ten places in two years, I landed in Oakland. At first I was renting a perfect shack by the water and the railroad from a kind hippie carpenter. But then he kicked me out to turn the place into an AirBnb. So I need a place to stay, and my friend Ara said I should move into the big house on Montgomery Street. So that’s how I came to live with Alice, Hannah, Sarah, Bianca, and Kate. Looking back, I wonder why they picked me as a roommate. I never had sisters, and I never lived in a place like this. There was a big spirit of play and adventure and love and closeness. They cooked together and parked their dirt bikes in the basement and wore whatever the fuck they wanted. I felt awkward, conspicuously tall, male, and square. But they welcomed me, and the house changed my heart. 

I started taking some still lives of all the mismatched and unclaimed belongings of roommates past. As we all got closer, I started photographing our time together. Observational pictures of gestures and details grew into frontal portraits with a direct gaze. I wanted to convey all my love and admiration for these incredibly self-possessed strong people. It was like we were in a staring contest, and the camera shutter blinked first. I wanted the power of that gaze to pass right through the camera and beam out of the print on the wall or the book in your lap. I started to think about the camera as an instrument of mutual care and generosity. I wanted to create a space where the viewer, the photographer, and the person in front of the camera might all meet on equal footing, to behold and to be held. We all have so much to learn from each other.

I shared the pictures with the house as I made them. It felt like everyone was busy dyeing fabrics, sewing clothes for a children’s play, hammering rings on a jewelry bench. My photographs were in good creative company, and they were part of our community. It was a very special time, but I think about those feelings when I make new portraits. Being seen takes so much vulnerability. How can I match that with care and compassion? How can I use light and space and composition to show you what I have seen?

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