JONATHAN CHERRY: Who inspires your practice?

LANE COLLINS: I wouldn’t blame it on anyone in particular. I get ideas or inspiration from everywhere, a picture in a book I flipped through at a used bookstore, a conversation with a friend, a feeling, a sensation, staring up at the giant moon on the horizon or taking in a huge desert landscape. I love the little bits of magic in the details of life. I just love seeing.

JC: I love the series ‘ladakh india’ - how did it all start and whats it all about?

I traveled to Ladakh as part of a student trip led by Linda Connor at the San Francisco Art Institute in the summer of 2005. I was in my senior year and had never done any real travel. Ladakh is an area in the Himalayas at the very northern tip of India. It shares a border as well as a lot of cultural similarities with Tibet. We spent three weeks there, based in Leh, and it was a completely life-altering experience for me in so many ways. My eyes were opened to a totally new perspective of the world, and I think if it weren’t for that trip I never would have had the guts to move to New Zealand for two years.

It’s interesting that you’re drawn to that work actually, as I’m planning for my first trip back to Leh about six months from now. I’m hoping to spend another three weeks there and want to add to the series. On the SFAI trip, our schedule was jam-packed with visits to ancient monasteries, palaces, remote villages, and we even had a very special opportunity to visit and be blessed by an oracle. I’m incredibly grateful for every single day I spent there, but I also look forward to going back and exploring the area at my own speed and with a new perspective. My work has started to take on a more esoteric path and I imagine I’ll be photographing with that in mind. And I definitely plan to revisit the oracle. Ladakh is an incredible, magical place and I hope I’ll have the opportunity to return there several times throughout my life.

JC: The above image from the india series is striking; what is it?

LC: We were on a long drive to an incredible gompa called Lamayuru, in Kargil. The roads out there are nothing but switchbacks and loose gravel climbing up the side of high desert mountains, so we would often stop for photo breaks. I made this picture at an overlook after an especially hairy climb. Prayer flags are everywhere in the region, often strewn from the tops of impossible-looking mountains. Someone had placed these prayer flags over some rocks at the overlook, and I loved how they look with the lichen and the strange barren mountains in the background. I have an album of personal snapshots from this trip on Flickr, and here you can see two of my travel mates photographing at the same spot.

JC: How did you find making images in India?

LC: It was nothing short of amazing. The Ladakhi people are so incredibly generous and open to being photographed. And the landscape is sometimes like being on the moon. There is so much color and texture to absolutely everything. I love making pictures there. And I definitely recommend passing your camera around. Here is a photo a monk took of other monks with my digital camera.

JC: What equipment do you use?

LC: For the past few years I’ve been shooting exclusively with a Hasselblad 503CW. The India work was all made with Mamiya 645 and 7 cameras. I recently picked up a Pentax 6x7 and will definitely be lugging both the Pentax and Hassy with me to India.

JC: What is ‘alchemy’ about?

LC: I like to think of Alchemy as coming from that state between wakefulness and falling asleep. Sometimes it very literally does, I will occasionally get visions of images for the series before I fall asleep or as I’m waking up. For me the pictures are kind of suspended in time and space, emitting slow waves of unconscious thought. It’s kind of just letting an odd sort of magic be the perspective of the world, like how our dreams have this seemingly nonsensical vocabulary and yet it is so real and can evoke such strong emotions from us in that sleep state.

I’ve been really drawn to symbols and archetypal imagery and I’m exploring that a lot in this project. I have my personal reasons for making the pictures I do, but I tend to feel that doesn’t matter in terms of viewing them — I’m more interested in what they evoke in other people. Logically they’re really strange images, I mean what the hell is that dog doing on a beach wearing a crown, right? But people will pick up on something in there and keep getting pulled back to one or two of the images in particular. For whatever reason some specific image or symbol just hits them at a deep level. With every other series I’ve done there’s usually one or two pictures that stand out as a crowd favorite, but with this project everyone has a different picture they connect to. It’s really fascinating to access that in people and I’m having a lot of fun exploring it.

JC: What is next in the pipe line for you photographically?

LC: I’ve decided to make a desert series for the Alchemy project next, and I’m also very interested  in working around metaphysical and occult concepts. I have many, many ideas for new projects and I’m looking forward to seeing how things shape up.