Transcribing an interview with J.J. Tiziou isn’t easy. He’s a self-admitted mumbler, and interviewing him at The Last Drop meant that coffee grinders and cell phones and conversation were all periodically competing with him on the recording. But he was one of those interviews that was much better done in person than via email or over the phone. Jacques-Jean Tiziou is…if I called him a character, it might not be an exaggeration. Prior to this interview, our longest conversation ended with him saying, “I don’t know how you feel about a stranger sticking a knife in your mouth…” and then sticking a pocket knife in my mouth to get a rogue strawberry seed left over from a smoothie I’d had at lunchtime. Our interview at The Last Drop was pleasantly free of pointy objects, but no less free of fun conversation.

How would you describe what you do?
I take lots of pictures with people. Usually with people doing stuff.

That’s very specific.
Yeah.

Do you have any special areas of focus?
Mostly documentary-style portraiture. I do a lot of performing arts stuff, too. People in their natural elements. I’ve gotten more involved in political activism type stuff, and now that I’m a little more settled with life in general, I’m trying to dedicate a little bit more of my resources to doing social justice work.

Do you have a favorite subject?
People doing stuff. I’m not really compelled to go take pictures of trees or flowers.

How long have you been photographing Philly?
About ten years.

And how’d you end up here?
Came here for undergrad, went to Penn. Stuck around.

And you studied photography at Penn?
Started off as a biochem major. Then I was a bio major. Then I became a double major in bio and fine arts. Then I got put on leave at school because I was getting into some trouble. And then I ended up with a degree in fine arts, concentrating in photography. So, it took a while to figure out. I was always into the photo thing, but I didn’t think I’d do it seriously. I’d pictured myself working in a biochem lab and shooting for a music magazine on the side. But it took over my life.

How does your family feel about what you do?
Took them a while to come around to it, because they really thought I wasn’t going to be able to do it seriously, that I was screwing up other opportunities. Then they realized I could pay my own rent and survive okay.

So when you’re shooting, do you usually shoot on film or digital media?
It’s been about three years since I last developed a roll of film. I’m all digital now.

Do you notice a difference?
It’s funny, because that’s a question that comes up a lot. It’s tricky in some ways because I’m very much a traditionalist in that I was raised in the photojournalism school of don’t mess with your pictures, don’t Photoshop your pictures, just do what you can get in the dark room. Basic color contrast and stuff. But people could do a lot of manipulation in the dark room. But then again, I wouldn’t really touch film anymore. I’m very much into the new technology. People were messing with their pictures by airbrushing them in the dark room twenty years ago, and I don’t do that kind of work.

More with J.J. Tiziou after the jump...

Could you talk a little about the “field trips” that you’ve been taking?
It was sort of an idea that gradually evolved a couple of years ago when I was juggling a lot of part-time jobs. Before I had anything fulltime. I was down, shooting a conference in Northern Virginia and I made a friend who is an artist in North Carolina who needed some help setting up a website, making slides of her work, that sort of thing. She was really cool, and we got along really well, and she said, “I can’t really pay you properly, but I can probably buy you a plane ticket to Durham, put you up and show you around. We’ll have a good time.” And it was great fun, and it got me thinking about how with digital photography, things are a lot more portable, it’s a lot easier to share with other people. It’s a different breakdown of costs. You can do things for people, even if they can’t pay you immediately, because the major cost is time. You can be more flexible in your billing as long as it refers you to something down the road to help subsidize it. And it always does. So I started putting out this offer of working on a sliding scale, or pro bono, while traveling, sort of as an excuse to get around, check out some different experiences. It turned out pretty well. Sometimes I managed to find some travel, and other times I’ve had to fund some travel myself: it’s a nice organic mix of traveling and portfolio building and networking. It’s allowed me to get around and help people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford professional photography to get something. And I get my work out there, and it’s referred me to other jobs that can pay for it. It’s worked out pretty well.

Where has your favorite trip been?
No favorites. Different ones for different reasons. If anything, the whole experience is my favorite trip. My favorite place is still Philly, but I’ve been lucky enough to get to a lot of places, and I can’t just narrow one down.

Do you have any fun stories from the road?
Many, many. I have some friends who look at this and say, it’s so glamorous, I travel around and take pictures for a living. But then again, I stare at my computer a lot. I only publicize the fun glamour parts of it. But when I’m sitting home on my computer for fourteen hours a day, sifting through pictures back and forth, that’s not glamorous at all. Even when I’m traveling, like, I used to be really outdoorsy and backpack through the woods and all, but now, my life is about the same here as it is anywhere else. I find a coffee shop with free wireless internet, and you’ll find me camping out there staring at my computer. I can be shooting in Oregon or whatever, but honestly, the pictures aren’t that different, they’re the same type as what I’d be shooting here. But I do get to meet a lot of cool people, shoot a lot of cool things. I’ve liked different trips for different reasons, is really the whole answer.

You’re in Philly all fall, but do you know where you’re heading next?
No, and I’m very happy about that. I’m so behind on everything. The last couple of years, I’ve been shooting and shooting and shooting. Now I’m sitting at home, and I’ve got about a quarter of a million pictures and my website hasn’t been updated in two years. I need to be making sense of that before I go running off again. I still have a lot of organizational infrastructure that I need to build to make things run more efficiently in the future. So I’m taking it easy for the fall. Have a little personal time. Stay home, be home long enough to have food in the fridge without it rotting, hang out with my wonderful new housemates. Be on top of life, in a healthier manner. There’s a lot of catching up to do at this point. And then straightening out for whatever happens next. I may be heading back to Honduras with this group of doctors and med students that I’ve worked with in the past, from New York. It’s on the radar. There were some things that I was maybe supposed to do in October that I’m not really following up on because I really need a break.

You were also all over PLAF. How was that? Any festival favorites or memorable moments?
The most memorable moment has nothing to do with the Festival. The festival was a blast this year. It was my fourth year doing it and I don’t know if I’ll ever do it again—it kicked my butt this year. But I got talked into shooting a wedding in DC the first weekend of the festival, and I ended up shooting all day Saturday during the day, staying at the Cabaret till three a.m. to photograph there, then I ran to be on a five a.m. train to D.C., took four thousand wedding photos there, came back to Philly, started the first set downloading, shot more photos at the Cabaret that evening, came back home, found a little bug with my computer that I thought I fixed but hadn’t, set the second batch of files downloading, and then in the morning, wiped all my cards and then around noon, I realized that I had just deleted half of the wedding pictures. I realized in time to be able to recover them, but it took five of my awesome neighbors loaning me their laptops and I had to run a recovery operation on my computer that lasted well into the morning, so I ended up pulling two all-nighters right at the beginning of the Festival, unrelated to the Festival, and then I was just fried the rest of the time. That’s one of the scary things about digital photography. Everything I’ve done the last few years is ones and zeroes on hard drives. I was amazingly lucky to be able to recover it all. Had I noticed six hours later, it would have been irreplaceable.

Otherwise, I think Convent was my favorite show. House was up there. Get Your War On—and you should link to that comic from Phillyist and tell everyone in Philly to write to Citypaper and Philadelphia Weekly and get them to syndicate the strip. The Rude Mechanicals’ adaptation of it was really fun. Philadelphia Weekly carried for a while, and I’d love to see it back in our local papers. The Inquirer could do it too. It’s too controversial for them, but brilliant.

You have Philadelphia Open Studios coming up. Could you talk about what the idea of Philly Open Studios is, and about what you’re going to be doing?
The Philadelphia Open Studio tour is, I think, in their seventh running. The general premise is, artists across town open up their workspaces and people come through to check out what they’re doing. It takes different formats. Some people set up exhibits in their places, and other people just have a big mess and say, “Here’s how I work—what?” It’s two weekends, the first is artists west of Broad, the second is artists east of Broad, and I’ve been jumping around a little bit between personal work and fine art work and documentary work and commercial work, and it all gets blurred together a bit. I’m really a big slacker about printing and showing my work. I shoot it and I get out to the people who are directly involved with it right away, but then I don’t go back through and edit it a second time for myself and say, okay, here’s what I want to print out, here’s what I want to put in a portfolio, here’s what I want to hang on a wall. I’m trying to get a little better about that. Later on I may even try to get some cash by selling some prints to people. It’d be helpful. I’m trying to pursue that a little more actively, but I’m still not ready to be doing a bunch of print sales and that type of thing. But I’m going to throw some stuff up on the walls, and I’m borrowing some projectors from friends to show some slide shows. I’m going to break out my old undergrad senior thesis with the light box that I built. Two hundred eighty-eight pictures. Hang out, chat with whoever happens to wander through the neighborhood to look at pictures.

After POST, do you know what’s next (other than trying to catch up on life)?
No, that’s the plan. If I can actually get to a point where I’m bored and don’t know what to do, it would be really exciting. I’m trying to lay low till I can get closer to that. Problem is, things pop up, things always pop up.

Do you have any words of advice for artists who want to be doing what you’re doing—supporting themselves by making art?
Back up your data. Back up your data. And, shoot what you want to shoot. That’s one of the things that’s been really great with digital photography. The flexibility to just get out there and shoot without having to worry about, this is going to cost me a hundred dollars in film and processing tomorrow. You’ve gotta pay for a camera, you’ve gotta pay for a hard drive, etcetera, etcetera, down the road, but you have all this extra flexibility to get out there and really photograph what you’re interested in photographing. And don’t shoot what you think other people want to shoot. Shoot what you want to shoot and the market will find you. It works out.

Budget’s another thing. I’ve had a lot of people complain that they’re not able to afford this or that. But then I see them spending a lot of money on food, or on driving their cars when they could very easily bike, whatever. Depends on what your priorities are. I have friends who have nice apartments in Rittenhouse Square, and I was living month-to-month in a house share for three hundred bucks a month. It’s just about where your priorities are. You’ll figure it out.

Embedded slideshow full of PLAF goodness by J.J. Tiziou.