nathan devries

April 9, 2024

Nathan Devries is a Freshman studying Engineering. He works in film photography with a concentration in black and white film. He was featured in Dialogue 56.1 with two visual art pieces, FEARLESS on pg. 15 and REBIRTH on pg. 28-29. Dialogue’s Editor-in-Chief, Levi Huizenga, spoke to Nathan about his work in last semester’s issue, his entry into film photography, and his work style today.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Levi: Hi Nathan, thanks for sitting down with me to talk. Let’s start at the beginning here. How did you get into photography? Where did that start for you?

Nathan: It started during the pandemic. I was really bored and I was living in Turkey, so I felt like it was a great opportunity to express my creativity and engage with the culture. So I just bought a cheap used camera and went out in the city and I started shooting stuff. Over time I just got better and better at it, and it was so much fun. It was such a good way to engage with people and with the environment, and create memories and art. It’s a beautiful form of art.

L: I’m looking at the cover of Volume 56.1, which you titled “rebirth”, and I’m thinking, ‘This doesn’t look like Turkey.’

N: No, you’re right, this is Azerbaijan, which is nearby to Turkey. What you’re looking at is this $400 million kind of propaganda building. It was full of stuff about anti-Armenian propaganda. Crazy stuff, but it's an absolutely beautiful building. It was a Soviet country before, so a lot of the architecture is very Soviet and very communist. Just the way it contrasted this beautiful organic shape with all the very Soviet, blocky kind of architecture – it was just so beautiful to me. And then of course this just happened to line up, which was wild, the mother with the two kids.

L: So when you're wandering around the city, to what degree are you kind of looking for moments like this? Are you kind of lining yourself up with the shot? Or do things just kind of fall into place?

N: I think it's a mix of both. I feel like there will be things that catch my eye and I'm like, OK, I need to get that thing lined up and really capture this moment. But there's times like this when it's just random and it just happens to line up and, I don't know. I guess maybe it's like the creative eye or something, but I’ll just notice that it’s a beautiful moment and I’ll just immediately go to capture it, and then it turns out amazing. Sometimes it'll just turn out like crap. But that's part of the fun of it, it's just kind of messing around until you get something beautiful.

L: So it seems like there's a lot of different levels of photography. Would you kind of characterize yourself as somebody who is working very technically? I mean, the way you're describing what you're doing is kind of just like, wandering around, exploring, and kind of just letting things happen.

N: Yeah, I think it's more so that than the technical side of stuff. The technical side of stuff is very interesting to me, but, I mean, I'm shooting on like a 30 year old film camera, so I don't feel like I can get super technical, a lot of the time. It’s more about shapes and colors and contrast. That's most of the technical stuff that I'll look at, especially when shooting on black and white, because you lose so much, but then you also put a lot of emphasis on the shapes, which is why this shot really turned out well. They're beautiful shapes and beautiful contrasts and shadows. Even like the jacket contrasting with the background, it wouldn't pop on color like it does on black and white. So I think it's a lot about knowing your format.

L: How long do you think it took you to kind of develop that intuition? How long have you been shooting, period?

N: I've been shooting film for 2-ish years now. I think it took me probably at least a full year to even get some idea of what looks good on what format, because it is very finicky. Each film roll turns out differently. I started on color, which is this whole realm on its own, and then switched to black and white, which I had to learn again. So it's been a long process and even now I'm not confident when I shoot something. I'm not confident that I'll get a good result in the end.

L: What led you to experiment with different stuff? Have you switched cameras a couple of times? Why switch to black and white?

N: I think a big thing was just the aesthetic of film. It just really intrigued me, because I was shooting on a pretty crappy DSLR and like, you're not going to get amazing photos with that, so unless you want to invest like several $1000 in a really good DSLR, the only other option is to just go into film, which I've found much more intriguing anyways. And I wanted to experiment and see what looked good, because I shot a lot of color and you know, you just get bored and you want to try stuff out.

L: I’m looking at another piece of yours in 56.1, “fearless”. What's going on here? How did we get to this interesting location?

N: It's an island off of Istanbul. It takes like an hour-long ferry boat ride. You can just take a public ferry -– it costs like fifty cents. I went with my friends and then we kind of went deep into the forest to this spot that they knew where you could access the beach, and there were these rocks that they would always jump off of. They took me there, and it was right at sunset. I just found a good spot to take a picture of him as he was jumping off it. It turned out to be just absolutely beautiful.

L: So, you decide to go out and take photos. What does that look like for you? Are you organizing trips for yourself? What does that look like when you're in school?

N: I mean, this year it hasn't happened really at all. I don't have a car, so I’m just stuck here. But in the past, I think I've just kind of integrated it into trips that are already happening. Or sometimes I would just ask friends to, like, go hang out, and I just have that in the back of my mind that this would be a great opportunity to get a good photo shoot in. I think a lot of times it does just work seamlessly into other outings, because we got to explore this whole building and like there's a museum in there and tons of stuff. And then I also got to have a really fun photo shoot because of all the beautiful architecture.

L: So are you saying being in Grand Rapids has really hurt the photos that you shoot?

N: I got nothing going on right now. It's kind of miserable. I went back to Istanbul over winter break and I took like four full rolls of shots because I missed it so much. I wanted to take up that opportunity because I know that when I'm here, I don't have anything to shoot.

L: Will we see some of those photos submitted then?

N: Yeah. I think all the ones I submitted for this semester were from that break.

L: Great! I’m excited to see them. Thanks a lot for doing this, Nathan.

N: Sure, yeah, thank you for inviting me.