REID YALOM is a Northern California photographer whose work has been published and exhibited over a 30 year period. A graduate of Stanford University and the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, Yalom trained as an assistant to photographer Mark Citret. Yalom prints his own images, in silver and in archival pigments. Published works include: One Foot in Romania: Editor Vellant, Bucharest, 2024; Colonial Noir: Images from Mexico, Stanford University Press 2004; The American Resting Place: A History of American Cemeteries with author Marilyn Yalom, Houghton Mifflin, 2008; In 2022 he contributed 25 photographs to the best selling German edition of A Matter of Life and Death by Irvin D. Yalom and Marilyn Yalom, Penguin/Random House, 2022.
Toba Singer: Where, where does the story of your photography career begin?
Reid Yalom: I started taking an interest in photography in my teenage years. I started taking over the family pictures. We were traveling in Europe then. My parents were taking sabbaticals in Europe. When I went off to college, I couldn’t wait to take my first photography class. I took photography classes throughout my four years there.
TS: Are you saying you didn’t stumble into it, had it in mind from childhood? As you matured, how did you begin to see your path?
RY: I was fascinated by it, from slightly before college, but didn’t really think about it as a career. It just drew me, and I had other interests, several bouts of school along the way, several degrees and years of exploring things, but it always interested me the most. It didn’t offer a lot of career opportunities early on. As I approached my 30th birthday I felt I needed to make a decision about what to do with my life. From when I finished college at 22 until 26, I was a ski instructor, working in bars, traveling, and did some graduate work at Monterey Institute in International Studies (now Middlebury Institute) where in 1983 I got a Master’s degree.
TS: Did your degree and the work you did, dovetail with your interest in photography or were these two separate streams?
RY: I really loved studying history and geopolitics. I did a summer graduate program at Tufts International Relations, which is one of the premiere diplomatic schools. I thought about becoming a diplomat. Instead, I ended up taking a job in the budding computer industry and I worked in international sales. That’s when I decided to go back and take some more photography courses. So, I took some courses at UC Berkeley Extension in photography and met a couple of very good photographers and this will dovetail back to the international a little bit later, but I worked with Mark Citret there, a first rate photographer. I took this course in Large Format Photography. He’s still active. He had been Ansel Adams’ assistant for five years. He’s one of the better-known teachers and one of a handful of top printers over the last quarter century of traditional photography. We became friends and then I became his assistant for about four years. So, I learned from him and that was the point where I really learned how to do proper photography. Besides just liking art photography, I took pictures. I tried to make my own way, but didn’t yet have a path because I hadn’t followed the traditional one, not having done an MFA program and not being part of that community. So, somehow, I became part of the community. I had learned how to do Larger Format I’d been doing darkroom printing work since having taken college courses in the late ‘70s. There had been a gap where I hadn’t been doing any darkroom work, just shooting color slides. But then I began to learn the techniques of the master photographer. So, I became serious printer and master of darkroom technique. I built my own darkroom or rented space, and then built a space. So, from then on, for the next 20-odd years I had my own darkroom space that I that was a professional level printing facility.
TS: Did you have clients who brought their work to you to be printed?
RY: No, I was doing fine art printing for exhibitions, for myself. Around 1994, I started doing some commercial work. There were 10 years or a little longer doing that before digital came into its own, where I was still printing, shooting dark black & white film work. This book on the history of American cemeteries was shot entirely with medium format Hasselblad lenses and these thousands of prints in hundreds and hundreds were made into original prints in the darkroom. You would deliver original prints to the publishers and they would reproduce them, as opposed to now, delivering them in a digital format. So, these are all beautiful black & white prints. It starts with the earliest that—Jamestown and before that, Indian Mountain. So, this is a history, the early period. We spent a couple years photographing this, really a joint project between my mother and myself.
TS: What role did she play?
RY: She’s Marilyn Yalom, the writer; she did the text. Initially, it was her project. She’d published a a few books that had been quite successful and well known: “The History of the Wife,” and another called “The History of the Breast.” Knopf was her publisher. We had a good agent, Sandy Dijkstra, who represented Amy Tan. She was my mother’s and then my father Dr. Irvin Yalom’s agent for his books. The story behind this is that there is a cemetery in Palo Alto, on Arastradero, and my mother regularly visited her mother’s grave there. She noticed how in Palo Alto, there were so many different cultural influences, people coming from all over the world. So, she said to Sandy, “I’d like to do a book on a year in the in the life of the cemetery,” and this is why Sandy is such a good agent. She said, “You know, that’s just too small a project. We’d never make any money because we could never sell it. But if you want to do a history of American cemeteries, the whole country, I can sell it.” And and she did. And we got it. We had a substantial advance, enough that we could afford to travel for two years to cemeteries all around the country, photographing. I became a co-collaborator on the project, in charge of transportation, choosing locales, going solo to New Orleans just after Hurricane Katrina.
TS: If you could dedicate a month to a photo journey anywhere in the world, where would you go?
RY: Since 1995, I’ve made it my life’s focus to go somewhere every year, a few places, repeatedly. I’ve gone to Mexico five times in six years because I like to dig deep. This is where international relations come in to play. I did a deep dive into old Mexico from 1996 to 2005, quite a bit of that time in the Yucatan, focused on early Spanish and the interaction between it and native architecture. I went to Indonesia, exploring Sumatra, another deep dive, including Dutch areas. The “Sumatra Rain” photograph, became the preface to the Mexican work with colonial columns, and light, mirroring the technique of Giorgio De Chirico. My book, “Colonial Noir: images from Mexico,” used that photo, in black & white medium and large format, the photos from which were shown in 2004 in several exhibitions. The Mexican Consul came, and I was interviewed by Mexican TV.
I went from that project into the book project with my mother. My father wrote “Staring at the Sun” about aging and death. My mother did cemeteries, to take up the cultural aspects of death and dying. This was an exploration of cemeteries and it changed our relationship from parent/child to collaborators.
After this project, I had time and funds and thought, “Where do I want to go next?” I decided to explore Vietnam. A touchpoint in my life were the anti-war protests at Stanford during the Vietnam War. At 18, I was assigned a draft number. I knew of older brothers of my friends who had gone off to Vietnam. There was one idea that interested me. It was to use my large view camera, with larger film and a tripod, focusing on the French colonial period. There is a lot for the photographer in quotidian life, surrounded by a husk of history. I had been reading about Vietnam’s history before the American period, and came to the conclusion that documentation would be important because much of the architecture in the cities is now falling down. Saigon is rebuilding, but Hanoi has old lighthouses, trains, and prisons. I went way up into the countryside. I met a young guy during my first time in Hanoi. He gave me rides on his motorcycle. I trusted him and when he asked if I wanted more rides, I hired him as my photo assistant. Over a five-year period, we explored details of the country, and are still friends.
TS: What’s the most gratifying experience that stays with you?
RY: The project with my mother was the most satisfying but when it came to taking risks, I was fearless in Mexico, traveling alone, hopping on busses and moving trains. There was a flow to that work, I was moving all the time, on a strange sleep schedule, up at 4 a.m., getting into a dream state. In the intro to that book, I wrote about the influence of Gabriel García Márquez. After that, I switched to digital. After meeting my companion Loredanna, a Romanian psychologist, I went to Romania and began photographing there for seven or eight years, and the last few years, I have been photographing in Greece and Crete. You get into small villages, off the beaten track.
TS: You had famous parents. Could put together a photo essay that expresses authentic feelings, as opposed to supposed-to feelings about, your relationship to your celebrity parents, about what for such children fits or doesn’t fit neatly into their parents’ jigsaw-puzzle lives?
RY: I have been doing some writing the last number of years, more poetry than essays. Short prose pieces and poetry, and most of it is autobiographical, a Book Link project. Every couple of pages has a photograph, not documentary. They are art pieces that have a similar mood to the writings. “The Professors’ Son.” It will be published in Greece because there is a good publisher there who published this book and all my parents’ books. Greece is a place where the Yalom name is well-known. In 2010 I went to Greece, they did a Greek version of our book. I did an exhibition in Thessaloniki. I will go there next summer to plan another exhibition. I have mixed feelings about my family. My mother was more supportive than my father. There were plusses and minuses. I am pointing those who ask questions about my relationships with them to this next book.
TS: If you could sit down with a photographer from any period to have a discussion, who would you choose?
RY: The photographer who has influenced my work is André Kertész, a Hungarian who lived in Paris. I saw his work while I was in college. There were wonderful compositions, certain elements that make the world appear so magical that you could never know what might happen the next moment. Another is Henri Cartier Bresson, as I’ve moved away from large format to digital, where there are so many more possibilities using art and science since the first photographs, nearly 200 years ago. As I’ve embraced the changes, I see things that are more do-able and things that were do-able previously—still life, scenic—that anybody can do that now that they are more accessible, where frontiers are less found in static imagery, and more in what is motion-related. This allows us to dig into how time is involved with photography. It’s something that’s evident in my book on Romania. The photographer can anticipate through composition how things are about to move. I’m working with smaller cameras, light and color, moving back to black & white when I finish this project.
TS: What event in your photographic life evokes a salient memory?
RY: We all have fantasies, looking back, if I had made this or that decision at this or that time, would I have become wealthy or had a different life? I wouldn’t want to change things, because you go through these progressions, you finish a project and it’s like a new personality has come into your life and I can’t imagine that not being part of who I am. The experiences I had in Vietnam, for example. Do I like photography because I like traveling? It’s hard to poinpoint.
TS: Future projects?
RY: When I work in Romania, I do a lot of photos of the Black Sea that go back to Greek and Roman times, so that’s a book project, using film last summer with a vintage camera. In California, I photographed a large format California coastline series focused on what people do at the seashore but different from what’s expected. Here, they come to the edge of a continent, and look out on where exploration ends, a solitary relationship between people and their environment.
TS: Anything else?
RY: I’d like to comment on what it’s like to become a photographer. I was hesitant early on because I come from academic family and was discouraged from getting an MFA and internalized that to think I’d do something they considered more important. At some point, when I was hitting 30, photography is what I wanted to do, regardless of outcome. It afforded a certain way of seeing the world. I’d offer as a corollary, Bob Dylan—you’re raised in one way, and wanted to be a troubadour and became that person, in my case, a photographer who chronicles the world, searching out places. When you’re young and think you’re the smartest and best and it’s your right to do these things. At some time, it switches over to being a privilege, a privilege to have the time and make it possible, financially, I don’t take it as lightly as I used to. Most of the people I grew up with around Stanford are adventurous people who made their own way.
TS: Is there a through line that connects your experiences as a photographer that frames them?
RY: A thread running through my personal narrative is that as a youngster i admired the work of photographers, writers, and artists. These were the wise people who showed us the deeper aspects of our life and the surrounding universe; the ones who searched out the mysteries, showed them to us and sometimes hinted at answers. In my younger years, I felt that I had neither the means nor the insight to attempt this work, though my early work in photography showed me small glimpses of what I might aspire to become. I didn’t have the preternatural ability of a Baudelaire or a Picasso, or other gifted young people. I required practice, seasoning, and greater knowledge about the world before my work could blossom.
It may be self evident that one becomes a writer by writing, a troubador by traveling and playing music, and a photographer by photographing. But it is something more than that, each art form allowing the practitioner to present a view of the world using the senses of that art form. Perhaps at a deeper level, by living in that art form’s reality, you begin to see the world through that perspective. For me that is what it has meant to become a photographer. I am aware of the minute details of the changing weather, a leaf changing color, the intersection of time, as people cross on a street, and likewise, the slowly measured time as a vine, ever so slowly, climbs a fence. Composition, color, or black & white tones, presence or absence of light, even emotional moments of human expressions, are the tools of of the photographer, yet for me the capture or the documenting of precise moments is the essence. In my latter years, this has also begun to express itself in poetry.
Toba Singer
