Red Crow Interview with Gabe Cano

Name: Gabriel Cano
Occupation: Co-Owner of Specialty Color Services Custom Photo Lab/ Artist
Location: Santa Barbara


How did you first become interested in Photography?
Ever since I was nine or ten years old I was fascinated by how a camera worked especially the sound of the shutter. The more I started to find out about photography like the idea of printing in a darkroom, the more I became interested. I started taking photography courses as a sophmore in high school. My studies continued from there.


How long have you been taking pictures?
About 19 years now.

What are your artistic influences?
I think the biggest influence on my work would be music. In fact I discovered music before I discovered photography. It's always been an important part of my life. Music has always been an escape while photography has always been more my dialogue. Photographically, I've found the work of Duane Michals to be quite a big influence on me. Luis Gonzales Palma was somone I looked at for inspiration as well. Most recently Masao Yamamoto, Jack Spencer and Keith Carter are photographers I consider to have very meaningful work.

What have you used/learned from another artist lately?
By nature, I tend to like and make things complicated. Masao Yamamoto has taught me how being understated can be so much more powerful and memorable. Simplicity sometimes reveals something completely more significant and accessible and in turn more honest. I guess with age I'm learning to let go a little bit. I think by looking at his work I was able to take that rationale and use it in my own work. The interesting thing to is that when I look at my work as a whole now, the complexities do reveal themselves still. So I guess by looking at the work of Yamamoto I was able to be more intuitive and instead of trying to communicate, I simply let go and let the work come out and start my own dissection of the work after it was done instead of before. I let myself be.


What are you trying to communicate with your art?
I'm looking to make images that look like what I feel like. So it's really less about subject and most about mood. Regret, longing, nostalgia, mystery are all very powerful feelings that I have always been drawn to and try to capture in my work. I like the idea of making work that is very accessible. It's important for me to make work that is both aesthetically beautiful but also thought provoking, meaningful and most importantly very personal to me.

Your photographs have such an ethereal quality to them. Can you tell us a little about your approach to the landscape?
With the landscapes I am looking for something very specific. I'm fortunate enough that the area I live in has many places nearby that have the qualities I love. I don't like grandness. Not in the work anyways. What I look for is more of the non-landscape type of landscape. I like areas that look uninhabited however show traces of life. I look for very simple composition but most importantly, I'm looking for gorgeous morning light.


Was the “path’ series all done in a single shoot or over several days?
Was it a single location? The path series was done at several locations over a course of several months actually. I started shooting in the Ojai, CA area and then worked my way up a bit to Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo and Monterey area.


What do you dream about?
My dreams get recycled quite a bit. I tend to dwell on things so most of the time I'm dreaming about whatever I'm dwelling on, or something related to it. I often dream of going somewhere, usually at some point in the dream I'm either lost or didn't do something well enough, or let someone down. You know, happy things. My most vivid dream is being lost as a kid in this city, and for some reason I go in this doorway which ends up being some sort of cliff that I'm hanging onto.

We have a large 38”x48” print on canvas here at the shop and the path in the image is calling for us to walk down into it. Yet, I find that the much smaller pieces invite the same reaction. Does print size matter?
Yes print size is always an important aspect of my work, and it either works really very small so that the viewer can't just glance at it, instead has to get up close and intimate with the image, or very large so that it puts the viewer in a scene.

My favorite print that we have here at the Gallery is of a bare branched tree and a man hanging upside down in the trunk. He blends into the bark as if the tree and man are ONE. Could you elaborate on the history of this photograph?
For this image, a friend of mine asked to create a dream that he had for the cover a CD. The idea morphed from what he described as somewhat of a pleasant dream into more of a nightmare maybe. The image took some time to create actually, and we struggled sometime to find a tree that would work, however I became so consumed with this project that I started to dream the scene in my own way which was more of a nightmare. In my nightmare there was a battle going around the tree, with canons, rifles and horses. And at some point in the dream this man gets hung upside down.

The time of day that the photograph was taken is very important. Since so much of this image was inspired from dreams I wanted to illustrate or convey a moment in a person's psyche when you just awaken from a dream and you're not quite sure how much of it was a dream and how much of it was real life. That moment where the dream you just had starts to fade and reality starts to creep in. That's why that first morning light was so important and the man is fading into the tree. The dream is getting washed away in a sense.

What do you shoot with?
I shoot with several different cameras. Most of the work that I'm showing here at the Red Crow Anthologies was shot either with a Hasselblad or a Polaroid Land Camera that I broke and made into a pinhole camera.

And our completely RANDOM question to end it all: In honor of our upcoming poetry readings what is your favorite poem of all time?
It's a refrigerator magnet poem that my friend created. It went like this. "You-and-me-beneath-the lake-come-to me-boy-it's-only-water" That grouping of words holds magic.