Photo: Ryan McIntosh, from Japan (Silence) (2024)

The second issue of Overshoot focuses on Ryan McIntosh’s current solo show at Marshall Contemporary.

I sat down with Ryan after an epic trip to Santa Fe, NM, over Earth Day, where we started designing “Tracy Hills,” our upcoming two-volume set of books with Radius Books.

I met Ryan in June 2021 via a mutual friend. While our processes are vastly different—he shoots with an 8×10″ in black-and-white, while I am more of a “digital native”—we bonded over our shared concern for the landscape and the human condition in the twenty-first century. Not only that, but we also share many photographic references, as well as aesthetic and conceptual preoccupations. For example, the Rondal Partridge picture Ryan brings up in his answer was allowed me to make critical claims in my practice-based PhD thesis (2017-2018).

If you find yourself in Santa Monica, visit his sumptuous solo show “These Ideas Were Not Mine, Yet I Had Them” at Marshall Contemporary, on view until May 10, 2025.

Yogan Muller: Your solo show at Marshall Contemporary in Santa Monica, CA, showcases 20+ years of image-making. What can our readers expect to see in the show?

Ryan McIntosh: The exhibition was never intended to be a mini retrospective of sorts, but the prints that Douglas Marshall and I selected for the show ended up spanning nearly 2/3rd of life, with some photos going back to my first roll of film shot in high school! I was personally shocked to see the consistency of image making and print quality given the wide range of photographs, but I’ve also never changed cameras, film or paper since out of high school. The exhibition combines eight different bodies of work alongside original vintage prints by historic photographer who have consciously or unconsciously influenced my vision or photographic approach. The vintage prints in the show are from my personal collection and photos I’ve lived with on the walls of my house for many years, so I’ve written small reflective statements about each one in the show.

Nearly all the prints in the show are the same 8×10” size, and displayed in large grids of groupings. It’s almost an overwhelming amount of prints, but I wanted the exhibition to read much like a book and allow the viewer to spend more time engaging with the work on an intimate level.

Installation views of Ryan McIntosh’s solo show at Marshall Contemporary, Santa Monica, CA. Courtesy: Thomas Blank.

YM: Your pictures reflect a deep concern for the landscape of Southern California. Do you remember when our ravaging ecological footprint became a central focus of your work? What was the impulse?

RM: I’ve always considered myself a “landscape photographer”, as most of my photographs have been made in the natural environment. A lot of this interest came from the inspiration of Ansel Adams and the F/64 era photographers when my grandmother gifting me an Ansel Adams book while in high school. While I was impressed by Adams grand and glorious landscapes of Yosemite, my experience of visiting Yosemite was always a disappointment. The park was overrun with tourists and cars, the landscape was dry and trampled, and rarely did I ever experience any weather or clouds like those pictured in Adams best known photographs. Like many amateur photographers, I visited Yosemite in hopes of making photographs… but I never made any pictures I felt were successful.

Despite Adams strong interest in conservation, making beautiful photographs of nature accomplishes very little to directly save it, and Adams never intentionally made a creative photograph that related directly to an environmental issue. His greatest photos, though visually thrilling, ultimately induced tranquillity through beauty–not a useful emotion to promote concern, reform, nor foster any sense of responsibility.

In my currently exhibition at Marshall Contemporary, I’ve included a photograph by Rondal Partridge’s of Half Dome in Yosemite which shows a more typical view that visitors would experience in the park, and it is quite the contrast to what Adams revealed in his work. Partridge humorously titled this photo “Pave it and Paint it Green”. This photograph might be more humorous if it wasn’t so gravely serious.

The more I photograph, the less I find myself in pursuit of beauty within my work. It has become increasingly hard to turn a blind eye towards the damage that humans inflect upon the environment. More recently, I often find myself looking down and photographing the ground beneath my feet, which is often littered with the detritus of life. The act of photographing vast landscapes has become less and less interesting to me, mainly because it has become clear that the horizon promises nothing.

Photo: Ryan McIntosh, Storm Drain, Tracy Hills, CA, from the series Tracy Hills (2021-2024)

YM: I admire your incredibly resolved and delicately balanced 8×10” black-and-white contact prints. Can you tell us more about your printing practice and the materials you use?

RM: The decision to work almost exclusively with the 8×10 view camera was my attempt to simplify my photographic practice while achieving the finest prints I could possibly make. This may seem counterintuitive to some, given that I’m typically carrying 40+ pounds of camera gear (camera, tripod, four lenses, film holders, dark cloth) on me while I’m in the field, but it’s more about the process of using the large format camera which simplify how I visualize and compose photographs in the field. Photography is extremely technical, and many people get caught up in all the technology of the process which I have zero interest in. Attempting to control or remove as many variables in the process has been a priority.

Ryan McIntosh in the field in Tracy Hills, 2022. Photo: Yogan Muller.

My work has always conformed to the traditional materials of the medium, and my prints are all the same size as my 8×10 negatives, so there is no degree of enlargement or loss in image quality. Size is also something I have zero interest in challenging. Most photographs I see printed in exhibitions are unnecessarily large… too much surface area, too much paper, and usually at the expense of the actual image.

In the recent decade, obtaining the Kodak AZO silver chloride paper I use has become difficult since it was discontinued around 2005. Thankfully I have a large supply of it on hand, but I’m constantly buying any vintage box I can find. The paper does not age the same way as modern photo paper, so often times boxes from the 1940’s can still be useable. My supply is not infinite however, so my prints are kept to small editions, typically between two to five prints max of any photograph.

YM: I am curious about your relationship to writing. I can see commonalities between how you craft your pictures and texts. In both, there’s a fine grain and a genuine attempt to capture complex life movements in elegant, concise sentences.

RM: Writing about photographs has become a recent practice which was partially inspired by John Szarkowski’s book “Looking at Photographs” from 1973 and Robert Adams book “Art Can Help” from 2017. Both book discuss individual photographs from a contemplative and personal perspective which is free from opacity of typical art jargon vocabulary. Writing about photographs becomes more of a personal meditation and engagement with art that helps me understand its existence, both for my own work and of others.

YM: The title of your solo show “These Ideas Were Not Mine, Yet I Had Them” is also how you captioned a small series of AI-generated images based on landscape photographs you shot in May 2023. I want to stay with AI for a moment because AI-generated (synthetic) images directly impact photography’s relationship to facts and information. How do you think this relationship will evolve in a world awash in synthetic images whose origin is increasingly difficult to establish, particularly in the online domain?

RM: I should first clarify that those AI-generated images of palm trees were not made by me, but rather a friend who used my photos as prompts to create them right around the time that AI technologies were becoming accessible.

AI-generated image based on Ryan McIntosh’s images.

Photo: Ryan McIntosh, from the series Elysian Park (2017-current).

These are indeed very scary times. AI will eventually impact every aspect of human life, and likely do more harm than good. It has already been reported by Gladstone-AI that “AI poses an extinction-level threat to the human species.” It’s already causing massive disruption with job displacement, misinformation, deepfakes, social manipulation, privacy issues, etc. Not to mention the energy consumption and carbon emissions to run AI which will rapidly increase greenhouse gas emissions and also deplete our fresh water supply.

Concerning AI photography, eventually no one will know what’s real and what’s not. As a photographer, one thing has shown to be certain, and that is the mind can only faithfully rest on the stability of truth. As photographers, we now have a great responsibility on our shoulders to uphold some type of truth within the medium.

YM: I am convinced, nonetheless, that the attention to the appearances of the world photography amplifies is necessary to maintain–and perhaps cherish, especially regarding the human condition and landscape in the 21st century. Incidentally, in the same post, you wrote: “Ultimately, for me, photography is about self-exploration, discovery, growth, and having a relationship with our physical world. Making photographs is a reason to see and experience life.” It’s not only an ode to photography, it’s an ode to life itself.

RM: Art has always been a means of communication for me, and I often find myself more concerned with information over aesthetics. I’ve chosen to use pictures to communicate because I feel I’m better at that than I am at using words. With my writings, I don’t attempt or claim to say anything profound, yet I hope that my photographs can communicate on that level with much greater truth, clarity, and impact than words could ever express.

Photo: Ryan McIntosh, from the series Japan (Silence) (2024)

Biography: Ryan McIntosh, born in California in 1984, is a Los Angeles-based artist and photographer. He received his MFA in Printmaking from Rhode Island School of Design, and his BFA in Photography from University of Arizona. Ryan’s recent work revolves around mankind impact on the natural environment and the changing landscape of the Southwest. He photographs exclusively with an 8×10-inch view camera, committing himself to producing only handmade silver chloride contact prints in the traditional wet darkroom processes. He is represented by Marshall Contemporary, Santa Monica, CA, Peter Fetterman Gallery, Santa Monica, CA, and Seagrave Gallery, Capitola, CA.