Capturing Beauty Through a Unique Lens: An Interview with Dave Krugman
What makes a moment beautiful? How do we capture beauty before it fades away? With a passion for both traditional film photography and modern digital techniques, Dave Krugman has established himself as a versatile and innovative artist in the ever-evolving world of photography.
In this interview, Dave shares his insights on how new technologies are changing the landscape of photography. He also discusses the balance between intentionality and experimentation in his work, highlighting ways of fostering creativity.
However, beyond just capturing stunning images, Dave also believes in the power of photography to change our perspective and see beauty in the world. He encourages aspiring photographers to approach their work with curiosity and a willingness to explore different perspectives.
Virginia Valenzuela: Can you share a bit about your artistic journey and what inspires you to break out your camera?
Dave Krugman: Yeah, absolutely. When I was a kid, my father was very encouraging of my creative leanings. He would read to us every night before we went to bed. He’d read us great books, really deep, complex books, and that helped me build visual worlds in my mind. Just listening to text and translating it into visuals. I’ve always been a very visual person, and during that reading I would doodle and draw. And I always found that I was not great at translating what was in my mind into a good illustration or a representation of what I was seeing in my head. So when I was a bit older, I discovered photography and this was the tool that allowed me to directly translate the world into reality, and so I really got into it and fell in love with the craft.
At summer camp I started doing darkroom black and white photography. And then that evolved into experimentation with film and all sorts of other types of photography throughout my high school career. As digital cameras became a little bit better, I started moving into the digital sphere and then, of course, iPhone cameras came out. And then we entered this era of Instagram and smartphones kind of combined to create the printing press for photography and democratized visual literacy.
I ended up studying psychology at Boston University, which helped me understand the dynamics of social media. And social media was really my launchpad into a creative career in the photographic arts. So I leveraged that into a job in advertising, and I started learning a lot about marketing and then went freelance for a few years. And then when Covid hit and a lot of work dried up, I ended up finding web3 and becoming infatuated with the idea of digital objects and onchain activity, and cryptocurrencies. And crowdfunding art projects with NFTs and stuff like that. So that kind of brings us up to where we are today. And I’ve just really loved the entire arc of my creative journey.
Virginia Valenzuela: I didn’t know you studied psychology. That makes a lot of sense.
Dave Krugman: Yeah, it helped.
Virginia Valenzuela: Yeah, helps with everything right? That’s a great jumping off point for the next question.
Dave Krugman: Yep.
Virginia Valenzuela: How has your experience in web3 shaped your perspective on the intersection between digital and physical art?
Dave Krugman: I never really found traction as a physical artist. All of my work was always living in digital social spaces, except that we were kind of playing for monopoly money. We’re competing for likes and for attention and that doesn’t really translate well. That’s a hard conversion to make into actual currencies that I can pay my rent with. I was lucky enough to do very well with that stuff.
However, I think when I embraced blockchain and cryptocurrencies as a mechanism to fund my artistic practice, it really helped because all of a sudden, the internet had a new economic model that wasn’t dependent on my proximity to commercial brands. Everything I did working with brands on Instagram had some degree of compromise. They have a vision, they have a goal, they have something they need to accomplish, and my art can help them accomplish that. But it means translating my creativity to fit into their world.
The cool thing about what I’m able to do with blockchain and NFTs and peer currencies is that I’m able to present an idea to the community. This is the price of entry to participate in this project and then I can go out and, basically, just self fund the wildest creative ideas that I have and I don’t have to make any sort of compromises to advertising interests or corporate interests. So to me, this is an entirely new way to fund creativity on the internet. And prior to this, it seemed to me that the only way to fund creative ideas on the Internet, save for things like Gofundme and Kickstarter, was to cozy up to corporations and to advertising companies and say, “I will sell my credibility to you in order to pay the bills and then work on my art in my spare time.” So blockchain and NFTs have given me an ability to make art my full-time job and to do things that I could never do with corporate funding.
Virginia Valenzuela: Totally. The next couple of questions are kind of from the point of view of the people who are interacting with this contest. So without getting too detailed into photography jargon, in your view, what differentiates a photo from good to spectacular? What takes it up to that next level?
Dave Krugman: I think I’ll talk about this by talking about some of the mistakes I see in photography. One of the mistakes I see in photography is that people are often just amazed by the color and the fidelity and sharpness of a digital image. But then they forget to have a subject. The best way to describe the Holy Grail in photography is probably Henri Cartier-Barrens’ famous statement of the decisive moment.
There is a moment that is a little bit more precise than the moment before or the moment after. And the goal of the photographer, I think, is to position oneself to capture those moments, to trap them in amber a bit, so that you can take these moments of fleeting beauty that exist only for a fraction of a second, and you actually can freeze them and present them to a willing audience and say, “look how beautiful the world can be.”
But a lot of photographers will just point their camera at something. They’ll take a picture and they don’t consider, what was the best construction, composition-wise, of this moment? What was the millisecond where that moment of action was happening?
A famous Bresson photo [“Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare” (1932)] is this guy walking on the ladder from a puddle. His foot is about to hit the water but in the photo it has not hit the water yet. So there’s all this potential energy stored in that photograph and that’s a decisive moment, for example. And so I would just say that the thing that differentiates a mediocre photograph from a classic, iconic photograph is the ability of the photographer to identify and then technically execute on that decisive moment.
Virginia Valenzuela: I love that. It’s like capturing tension in one second.
Dave Krugman: Exactly.
Virginia Valenzuela: Are there any themes or emotions that you’re hoping to see in the submissions for this photo contest?
Dave Krugman: I would just like to see from my perspective as a street photographer. I look at New York City as this beautiful muse. And it’s this whirlwind of circumstance and overlaps and humans interacting with each other, humans interacting with their environment. And I’m always looking for moments that have a little bit of poetry inside of them. I mean, one of the captions in one of my one of ones is, “New York is a city of street corner stanzas.” I really do think about photographs as poems. And so, what visual vocabulary will people use to make a dense, yet concise story with visual images? And that to me is the difference between a successful photograph and one that is just a pretty picture.
Virginia Valenzuela: Okay, so the next section is inspiration and creativity. What advice would you give to budding photographers who are looking to push the boundaries of their creative expression?
Dave Krugman: Shoot as much as you can. You learn every time you hit that shutter button and there’s no amount of studying or reading or scrolling through social media that will improve your photography one bit. The thing that will improve your photography is to take and make images. You need to be out in the world. You need to look at the way light is interacting with transparencies, with reflections. You need to understand how your camera works intuitively. You need to shoot enough so that your camera is an extension of your body, and your mind and an extension of your visual cortex. So the number one piece of advice is to stop trying to learn about it. Just go out and do it and learn from your own trial and error. Learn from your own perspective and the way that you want to see it absorb and interpret the world.
Virginia Valenzuela: That’s just like writing poetry. You just gotta fail until you fail less.
Dave Krugman: Yeah.
Virginia Valenzuela: What do you hope participants will learn about themselves and their craft through participating in this AR contest?
Dave Krugman: Beyond just photography, I would like them to see the potential that is unlocked when you free your photography from a four-by-five inch rectangle. I think that’s one of the best things that’s gonna come out of this AR movement, breaking free from the confines and constraints of the screen.
I just think if we’re building towards a world where art is swirling through your perspective, while you’re walking through the city. The potential for that is, a thousand times more than the potential of an iPhone screen. So I would like to see people working in ways that respect that transition.
This is a future that isn’t built yet. It’s super fertile ground for innovation. So I would like to see people pushing it beyond just an image that fits on a screen. I think the thing that is so exciting about it is that it’s the next paradigm shift in the way that we consume visual content and text.
It’s the size of the world instead of the size of your hand, which I think is really compelling.
Virginia Valenzuela: Finally, are there any other ways you see augmented reality and photography moving forward together?
Dave Krugman: Yeah, 100%. I mean, I could imagine a world where I can be walking down the street with my friend and they say, how was your trip to Tokyo? And then all of a sudden I just had a button and in front of us is a whole gallery floating of all the images I took. And we can zoom, and we can dive into those worlds and, maybe some of them are like light, lidar scans that you can actually walk through and observe and look around.
I’m a science fiction maximalist. All the technology we have was written about and ideated about before it existed. I mean, you have to start with ideas. You don’t start with the technology. So I’m really excited about this landscape of ideas around AR.
I just can’t wait to see how people use that. I mean, yeah, I think that “world is a gallery” is an interesting approach, but also if I did a lidar scan or some three-dimensional mapping of an alleyway in Taiwan and then I could have my friend walk through it. But it’s in Central Park and then they have a virtual camera, so they can relive and reshoot that same experience that I was shooting. Just in real time in front of them. So ideas like that really get me excited about the future of augmented reality as an intersection with photography.
Virginia Valenzuela: All right, Dave, sounds like we need to collab on some speculative fiction.
Dave Krugman: Let’s do it.
Dave’s passion for his craft shines through as he discusses how he sees his role as a photographer: not just to document reality but to capture it through his own unique lens. His advice and insights on creativity, technology, and finding beauty in unexpected places will leave readers inspired to pick up their cameras and see the world with fresh eyes.
