Interview with Michelle Dunn Marsh

by Rachel Phillips

Michelle Dunn Marsh will speak Saturday, May 7 at 3:00 pm PST

In-person festival registration is available at the door

Rachel Phillips: Michelle, we are so excited for you to speak at the Medium Festival! It’s unusual for us to have a lecture by someone who isn’t a photographer. What are some of the hats you have worn in your career?

Michelle Dunn Marsh: Oh, the hats! designer, professor, editor of art + design, curator, executive director, publisher. But perhaps my favorite (self-inflicted) titles are professional viewer of photographs, custodian, and picture-slinger.

RP: Picture-slinger! I’m going to have to steal that one. How do these favorite chosen titles manifest in your workday?

MDM: Broadly put, I foster—in any way possible—an awareness of and appreciation for significant photography. With Minor Matters I acquire, edit, design, and seek to publish visual books by artists whose viewpoints may not otherwise be highlighted. I also lecture, moderate panels, and speak on publishing, the photograph as an object, and on the medium in contemporary culture. Lately I’ve been speaking more on cultural identities and the importance of diverse perspectives in our field.

RP: That sounds kaleidoscopic! Tell me a bit about the photographic memoir, Seeing Being Seen, that you have written. It will be available at the festival!

MDM: The book is a follow-up to a 2019 exhibition of the same name—I was asked to share my life journey, through my work, at a heritage museum. I was resistant to that idea, but the institution’s curator (now director) persisted and I finally agreed. Thinking about valuable professional experiences with colleagues and photographers, about anguish and joy in the realities of the career paths I’d embarked upon was educational, and the book became a space to engage with the nuances, as well as highlight more photographers than the exhibition could accommodate.

RP: It’s hard sometimes find the courage to tell our truths, isn’t it? How did it feel to be the subject rather than the slinger?

MDM: Weird! For readers not steeped in photography, I was interested in showing a single subject through the eyes of different photographers, to highlight the variety of approaches within the medium. The only easily-accessible example I had was myself. The exhibition had three photographs of me—the 2019 wet-plate collodion on the book’s cover by Will Wilson, my 1995 graduation from Bard College by Stephen Shore, and a portrait Sylvia Plachy made in 2012. The book includes fourteen more, from snapshots to portraits. It’s interesting that when I look at the capital-P photographs, I don’t really see myself—I see the photographers, and what they’ve revealed in or about me.

RP: I’m assuming your memoir also has other photographs, and of course you’ll be giving a slideshow talk at the Medium Festival. Did the writing come first, or the images?

MDM: Definitely the images. The art photographs in the book are prints I live with, so I see most of them daily. Writing about them, and about their makers, was another matter. At first I was writing within the context of a book layout, as the designer in me was concerned that the words not overwhelm the photographs. Two readers pushed me to move away from that, to write, and then re-integrate the words and the photographs. It was a turning point, and the moment when I had to accept that while this was about the photographs and the photographers, it was also about me.

RP: For co-publishers (and Medium attendees!), your book includes a workbook, Reading Photographs, guiding viewers to "distinguish between what we see, and how we emotionally respond to what we are seeing.” This is a fascinating notion to me, and a timely one. Without giving too much away, can you describe what you mean by that differentiation a little bit?

MDM: Spending time examining and responding to a still photograph slows our instinctual process of seeing. With a few simple prompts we can teach our brains to separate our personal interpretations of an image from what is visually present. This is a process anyone can absorb. There are deeper layers, but bringing a broad audience to that first awareness is paramount.

RP: You’ve written that, “The near-constant narrative today of suppression of women and underrepresented populations in the United States is important, and it is exhausting. It is time to speak of successes. Acknowledging systemic inequities can be done through uplifting long-demonstrated resilience.” I really like this notion of celebration and acknowledging achievement and resilience as an antidote to that fatigue.

MDM: Seeing myself through failures is easier than through successes. Acknowledging success was uncomfortable and embarrassing, but also extraordinary. If Nancy McKay at Highline Heritage Museum hadn’t pushed me to do so, I don’t think I would have taken a step back to celebrate all I’ve been a part of these last nearly thirty years in photography. I’ve also recognized that speaking about professional accomplishments inclusive of my personal identity as a first generation, mixed, bicoastal woman is important. If we don’t address pervasive misogyny and microagressions based on ethnicities and class, if we don’t move forward to tolerate viewpoints we may not understand or agree with, we will never normalize the presence of difference, and we need it. We need a variety of backgrounds and viewpoints at every table of authority in the United States today.

RP: We are so fortunate you decided to make this book, Michelle, and all of us at Medium can’t wait to see it and to hear much more during your talk at the festival.