We Heart Iheartphotograph's Laurel Ptak!

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Laurel Ptak, founder of iheartphotograph.com, with Amani Olu, director of the Bond Street Gallery

iheartphotograph.com is an incredible resource for photographers and curators and lovers of great photography everywhere. Laurel Ptak, the founder, has been banging out extraordinary posts for a while now, and she's garnering accolades from the art world for her knack to find and present the best of contemporary photography. She's lately ventured outside the virtual realm to produce gallery shows that are upping the ante in all sorts of ways. You can find Laurel's hard work on display at her third exhibition, currently on view as part of the show, "Young Curators, New Ideas" at the Bond Street Gallery in Brooklyn though September 6. She shares the gallery with a talented group of curators including Alana Celii and Grant Willing (Fjord Photo), Michael Bühler-Rose, Jon Feinstein (Humble Arts Foundation), Amy Stein (amysteinphoto.blogspot.com) and Lumi Tan (Why + Wherefore). While at the opening, I dragged her away from the hundreds of people trying to get a minute with her, and spent probably too much time discussing everything from GIFs to this crazy Internet photography boom we're smack in the middle of. I'm so lucky!!!

Hi Laurel. You're awesome. I've been a dedicated fan of your blog for a while now. How long have you been doing this?
It all started in December of 2006, and I've updated it nearly every day since. I was looking today, and there have been over a thousand posts. And that's not including the pic-of-the-day stuff either. There must be over 2,000 photographer's work presented there.

That’s crazy! What an extraordinarily dedicated blogger you are. What's your process? Where do you find all this stuff?
Well, it totally varies. Lately I've been sooo fucking busy. I used to be a lot more active in finding work. But now the process has changed. The thing is, people are now emailing me all this amazing stuff everyday.

Yes, I wanted to ask you about that: Laurel Ptak, how many emails do you get in a day? On average. I mean, have you ever even attempted to find that out? We're curious.
It's a MOUNTAIN. I always feel like such an asshole. I could NEVER respond to all of them. I don't know how many it is.

Has this always been a goal of yours? The curating thing?
I never had any ambitions like this.

You're kidding me.
No, I'm not joking. I was doing this for myself. I would wake up in the morning in my fucking underpants and drink my coffee at the computer, you know? It was super lo-fi. Really.

So what got you started in this whole mess?
I've been involved in the photo stuff for a long time. After college I worked as a book editor at Aperture, then I worked at the Guggenheim, editing exhibition catalogues. I used to do commercial photography, like, I shot party pics for Gawker --

YOU DID NOT.
Yeah.

NO WAY. How many people know about this?
I don't know... I think I'm nearing retirement. I really love the curating thing. It's what I was born to do. It's so interesting, because my ideas about photography have changed so much since then.

OK: Film vs. Digital. Discuss.
It's funny, I don't even think about that anymore. I think what makes me different from a "normal" curator, you know, sitting at a desk in a museum, is that my entire curatorial practice is looking at people's websites. It's all virtual. It's all digital. So, someone may be shooting in film, but I'm only ever seeing it digitally. I'm only seeing it online.

That's so cool. I'm so over the snobbery. Film is cool. Digital is great, too. Just do something interesting with anything and I'm likely to be into it. Put a little SOUL into it, you know? But, the Internet poses problems. How do you SELL Internet art? How do you present it in a gallery? These are questions that you are taking on and working out brilliantly in this new show here. You're dealing with GIFs. TALK TO ME.
My whole thing is, I could never buy a photograph that I like because I'm too poor. But these GIFs are sold individually. They're 20 bucks a piece. So it's art that people can AFFORD. And to make it more exciting to those who might want to own one, the files are digitally delivered by the artists themselves with a personalized note. But right now, they're here, in a gallery space -- we're not trying to make them these really rarified things.

You asked your artists to do what, exactly?
Well, first of all, I had, like, a week and a half to put all this together, including coming up with an idea. So I just emailed a bunch of the people whose work I thought would translate best for this kind of lo-fi, antiquated digital format. And I just said, OK, you have three days to make an animated GIF. It was weird, because I didn't know what was going to happen. I thought everyone was gonna write back, "Fuck you! I'm in Tahiti right now," or something like that. And you know, considering that they only had three days, the stuff they produced is fucking mind blowing.

You're really bringing something different to the table. I love it.
Well, one thing I'm really into is this question of how can you use these kinds of digital practices to revolutionize curatorial practices as we know it? You know, most photo curators are dealing with the photograph and doing studio visits and having this kind of analog experience. And I'm just so excited to explore new ways to present digital art, because it's such an emerging field.

Totally. So what's next for you?
This next show I'm working on is cool. It's coming up in November in Denmark. The idea is an exhibition that evolves at the same moment in time as the blog. So literally, I'm in New York hitting the publish button on iheartphotograph, and at the same time, they're printing up those images and putting them into a really cool exhibition space that's in a gallery in this really amazing old town called Viborg. So it creates this interesting link between the two locations. The show evolves over time. In this case, over the period of a month. It should be really fun. We're gonna do a catalog and maybe a symposium on the state of contemporary photography and all that great stuff.

That is some next-level shit right there!
I try, man. Every time I do something new, I'm really trying to up the ante and keep it interesting for myself. I'm interested in this whole online photo curating thing, and how popular it's getting. I'm really wanting to use that momentum to reconsider what the curatorial process is and how it can change in our digital age.

I love it. What's the name of this epic show?
Right now I'm calling it "Blog as Exhibition" but that's sort of dorky. I have to see how that translates to Danish, to know if it's a go or not.

Oh yeah, totally. It HAS to ROLLL off the Danish tongue, I love it. OK. That's it. Anything else you'd like to add?
I just want everyone to know what a top-notch interviewer you are. That's it.

YAAAAAAAAY