Transcription of Trent Bell for the show Maine Photographers #245
Lisa: We’re fortunate that Maine Magazine, Maine Home Design, Old Port Magazine to work with a number of very talented photographers and one of them is Trent Bell. Trent is a Maine based photographer originally from Virginia. Bell has a master’s in architecture from Andrews University and practiced architecture until he realized he was much better suited to photography and founded Trent Bell Photography. If Bell is not with his wife Amber and two sons, you will find him either working or surfing. Thanks for coming in.
Trent: Absolutely.
Lisa: I’m kind of interested in this morphing over from architecture to photography because while they’re both kind of visual, I’ve interviewed photographers and I’ve interviewed architects and the mindset seems a little different.
Trent: That’s probably why I didn’t last as an architect. I really enjoyed the schooling of architecture. It was very interesting for me to go through high school and everything else and be a very average unengaged student and then to try going at being premed for a while, didn’t work out very well. I actually applied myself and could only really get by with about Bs, low Bs and I realized that trying to go premed or dental would have been an uphill battle. A friend of mine, Caleb Johnson, was going through architecture school and that really intrigued me. When I went into that, I was just like, “Wow. This is really great being creative and thinking in this manner, learning how things go together and why things and the built environment, the designed environment works.”
That was really interesting to me and I loved the schooling of it but then my personality with the day to day workings of actually running a practice came up a little short honestly. I just wasn’t a great … I didn’t have a high tolerance for going to the same place every day at the same desk and the stick-to-it-iveness that’s required for making it through all those details and dealing with clients for such a long period of time. It was wearing me thin and I kind of realized that one life and to do this every day in a way that just doesn’t fit making me happy was something that was very difficult to deal with. To make the choice to walk away from so much education and then three years of professional investments, starting a business with a friend afterwards, was a hard point and decision to come to but it has worked out very well for me luckily.
Lisa: How many years ago did you make that decision?
Trent: It would have been about ten years ago probably to switch or to jump ship and then try and figure out what I was going to do. Because I really had no plan and luckily at the time we didn’t have any children and my wife was working full time. I had the luxury of putting everything I could into starting a business. I was going to start doing property development and buying, flipping houses. This is when the market was spiking and then a friend of mine who’s a commercial photographer out in California suggested, “Why don’t you try architectural photography?”
I’ve been interested in photography in the past but all the complications with actual darkroom work and chemicals and everything else just wasn’t up my alley at all. Where photography came into the digital realm and I’m such a gadget kind of geek with everything else that’s kind of nerdy but I really get into that. It started to combine this very visually creative aesthetic world with a very quick turnaround capability that satisfied my attention span and combined it with all this technical gadgetry. It just kind of came together for me and I just kind of jumped into it and here I am. I lucked out somehow.
Lisa: I think that in some ways, some would say luck, some would say being open to the circumstance, I don’t really know but I think one of the challenges that I often see is that people feel like they have to do something because they need to follow a pattern that everybody else follows, that they need to be good … Say you wanted to do premed for example. You need to be good like all the other premed students. Your mind needs to work like their minds. To be open to finding something that is a good fit for the way that you look at the world, the way that you process things intellectually. That requires kind of a leap of faith in a way.
Trent: Yeah. It is very interesting to me to discover myself, my own abilities and value to what I can contribute, how I can learn, how I can process and how that’s valuable to other people and to come to terms to that eventually. I was raised in a family that was much more so culturally focused around professions like doctor, teacher, pastor, nurse. Things that are direct interaction with people. It was never directly implied or anything else. It was just kind of a cultural typical thing and to really think that I could even go into architecture was kind of a little bit outside the norm but then to switch over to then say, “I’m going to pay for my house off of taking pretty pictures.” When I eventually told my dad, “Yeah, I’m going to become a photographer.” Even when I look back on that now, I’m a little, “What on Earth was I thinking?” Even at the time, his honest reaction was just “What? You can’t make money at that.” He was in no way trying to discourage me or anything else. It was just his gut reaction of there’s no money in there, you can’t do that. You’re not going to be able to make your house payments. You guys are going to be in the poor house. You’re gong to be a starving artist.
Just to have a wife for one that she never once questioned me, never once asked “Are you going to get a weekend job?” Looking back, I have a hard time picturing how she could have had so much confidence in me to make this work. If I were her, I never would have. For some reason, she has always been supportive in that way, as long as we’re not in debt, she kind of was just, “Do whatever you want.” That’s a bit of a luxury on my part. A bit of a tangent there I went off on I guess.
Lisa: No I think it’s an important tangent. I think that when you aren’t happy in what you’re doing or it just doesn’t feel like the right fit, it’s just crucial to have somebody else who says, “That’s okay. We’ll figure this out and as long as we’ve got some basic foundation of security, we can make this work.” Not everybody does have that.
Trent: Yeah. Coming to that decision point is very difficult to step outside of that norm. We were in no financial terrible position because my wife was working full time as a physical therapist and we didn’t have kids, but to step away from, to make that choice to say this really isn’t working for me, I’m going to step away from this master’s degree in architecture and three years of trying to start a business, was very difficult and very painful in many ways. I knew deep down that something had to change and I somehow ended up here. I haven’t quite fully digested it. I’m always looking forward of how to move forward so I’m not really as much always looking back and wondering exactly why it worked but …
Lisa: The fact that you and I are sitting here having this conversation should be evidence to you, people who listen to this show that I kind of understand what you’re talking about. I’m trained as a physician. My job is a physician. Most people would say, “You need to go be a physician,” because that’s how people make that car payments and their mortgages. Having a radio show or writing for the magazines, those are just also equally important. To be able to say, “It’s okay, I can be a doctor but I can also be this,” or I can do something a little bit different. I don’t have to follow the path that other people believe is the one that makes the most sense.
Trent: It is interesting. I’ve heard a lot of people discuss it, your education, what it can apply to as far as the total well being of someone. You obviously have a huge background then in understanding the human body and then how it translates into possibly mental well-being, spiritual well-being and everything else. The architectural background has a huge amount of influence on why I’ve been able to make my house payments as a photographer. To have that aesthetic training and to approach the subject matter that I most typically work with is a huge … One informs the other.
Lisa: That’s actually a really good point in that it’s not wasted. It’s not like your master’s in architecture was wasted when you became a photographer. It just was used in a different way.
Trent: Right. A lot of people email me and ask me, “I’m thinking about being a photographer. What’s your advice?” I usually respond to people saying, “Get to know really well the subject that you want to shoot, that you’re interested in.” If it’s shooting cars, I’d almost say get more of an education in cars than in photography. I had no training whatsoever in photography other than what Chet Williams has taught me, a good friend of mine, and an immense amount of stuff that [Irvin Serrano 00:40:42] taught me. An incredible photographer who I owe a lot of thanks to for everything that he shared with me. Knowing your subjects that you’re shooting is going to give you that ability to translate your aesthetic and mental voice through imagery and communicate that whereas if you’re so focused on just the technical aspects of things and getting this image perfect, you can look through a ton of my images and see a lot of technical imperfections but I think more often the thing that sings the most and connects most with people is going to be the emotion communicated through composition and lighting primarily. I always tell people really understand your subject and then composition and lighting and then the technical aspect really.
Lisa: Irvin Serrano is someone who’s worked with magazines also quite a lot and he does do beautiful work. The fact that he’s here as are a lot of other really talented artists, photographers and artists of other sorts, here in Maine, it seems like such an interesting opportunity that we would all come to this state that is in many places quite rural. The creativity, the talent that we have right here. Has that surprised you?
Trent: No. I look at it as I think there is a high percentage of creatives would be fairly introverted and will want to for one, be in a place where they can find peace and time to be reflective and space to be reflective and also want that somewhat of a blank slate kind of atmosphere. Artists purchase blank canvas, not paintings. People with money that appreciate what artists do purchase what they do. That’s a lot of what attracted me to Biddeford is that it’s more so a blank slate and Maine to a large degree is a blank slate. The creative atmosphere in Maine and the amount of people I’ve seen move here from away is vastly changed in the last decade, decade and a half since I’ve been here. That doesn’t really surprise me just because of my mentality and why I’m here and why I would think others are here. It seems like a place of opportunity whereas if you’re thinking of it purely as a business place, I would think Kevin’s kind of proved that wrong where he came here from … I think he was from Massachusetts somewhere but saw an opportunity in a state that’s one of the worst in the country to do business in supposedly.
The people that run the Indian restaurant in Biddeford. He came here on a lottery, a visa lottery from India, and he arrived in New York with $20 in his pocket and now is in Maine and owns three restaurants. How can you tell me? He owns a really nice house in Saco, drives a really nice car, owns three profitable, very profitable businesses. How can you tell me that Maine’s a bad place to do business when someone with $20 and a work ethic now owns a very nice house, very nice car. You know. It’s all in your state of mind and I think people are attracted to Maine because there’s opportunity which if you’re going to New York City you’re going to be paying these ridiculous prices for everything.
As a creative, I own a huge amount of my own gear and everything else largely due to not having to pay huge amounts for studio fees, living fees, everything, which allows me to do self projects that are far more creative and fund them myself to a degree. It allows me more of that creative freedom. I’m living in much more of a blank slate for creativity than someone who’s saddled themselves with trying to live in New York City where there might be a lot of work going on, but it’s other people’s ideas that they’re servicing, whereas I have the ability, a little more so maybe, to service my own ideas and my own creativity outside of the commercial work that I do.
Lisa: You’re right that Kevin Thomas, who originally is actually from Aroostook County, and then moved to Massachusetts and then came back, you’re right that he saw kind of a space to start these magazines along with his co-owner Susan Grisanti. He has been very successful. I think people have kind of doubted that that would be so. Sometimes I think that people have a hard time, if they can’t picture what might be, they have a hard time supporting a possibility.
Trent: Oh yeah. Especially to start when they did with the whole digital revolution really of ending print essentially to a large degree and to still have been successful at it with avant-garde business practices and everything else if that’s the right word, has made a name for himself, made a huge brand in Maine, has added to the architectural design community and benefited that part of the community to a huge degree I know. It’s all about fresh perspective and seeing the opportunity and there’s a lot of pitfalls in different ways that you can do that and offend people and make people like you and everything else. I mean, it’s here and it’s helping a lot of people and a lot of the Maine economy at the same time. It’s different people’s perspective and opportunity, so …
Lisa: Talk to me about some of the projects that you do that really are your projects, the ones that people don’t hire you for but that you really believe strongly in yourself.
Trent: I shared a studio space with Irvin Serrano for a little while and he did a really great project on I believe women that were going through cancer and it was a portrait series. I just read a lot on how personal projects are just good for your own business to do. I kept thinking, “I really got to do something like this.” I had a friend that was convicted of a crime and sentenced to about 36 years in prison and that sat on my mind for quite some time. I just kept thinking about it because we were very similar growing up, all the same interests and everything else. He wasn’t going to be able to be with his kids anymore. They were going to be, who knows how old by the time he got out, everything else. That just sat on me and made me reflect a lot on my own life and how things could have been different possibly but why, when we were so similar, why are they so different?
My studio manager and I sat down to try and conceive an idea for a personal project and this was on my mind. I said, “Hey. Why don’t we do a thing, portraits of prison inmates?” He was kind of, “How are you going to get access to these guys? This is ridiculous.” I was like, “It’ll happen. Don’t worry about it.” At the same time, we knew that just portraits are going to be engaging but they’re not going to be a huge … It’s just going to be a portrait. We talked some more about it and came up with the idea of having them write a handwritten letter to their younger self and then putting that handwritten letter around their portrait. It’s been an incredible thing to see still media connect individuals of such different background to watch people stand in front of these and take in the inmates’ letter, which is … You’re basically at that point eavesdropping because the letter is written to the younger inmate, not you, but you’re there reading it, looking at their portrait, eavesdropping with their voice in your head.
It was really an extension of wanting to try and do something that could without really any other financial bias other than doing something that was good for exposure and everything else which has turned out to be in that way but to really do a project that focused directly on human issues, social issues. I was really inspired by how that connected with people and it’s really sparked a lot more of that desire in me to continue to focus on projects like that. Last summer, we did a video project. One of Kevin’s sons actually interned with us and helped us a lot on that. It was around a lot of the homeless and panhandling and vigils that you’ll see around Portland. We interviewed about 17 individuals and an administrative person over at Preble Street and we’ve had all that footage transcribed and we’re kind of sitting through it right now, making a narrative out of it, trying to figure out what story is there, hopefully going to get Governor LePage to sit down for an interview to give his two cents on that.
Focusing in on these type of more emotional, social issues is where I’m going with it personally. We’re also … The same thing we did with prison inmates, we’re also doing with individuals, the same treatment as far as a portrait and a letter to their younger self ensconced around them. We’re doing this with individuals that have gone from being atheist to now belief in a deity and also individuals that have gone from belief in a deity to atheist. We’ll be able to see this very transitional point in people’s lives where they’ve really had this transition in belief. I personally have experienced a pretty bad disillusion if that’s the right word of my faith in the past eight years probably. This is the natural way I guess for me to explore this is to interact with others that have had a similar transition at least in both ways. I’m pretty much stuck right in the middle. We’re also doing the same reflect project treatment to individuals that know they’re about to die. We’ve had about four participants so far. As you can imagine, it’s not easy to convince someone on their death bed to, “Hey, sit for a portrait and write us a letter.” The ones we’ve been able to get to contribute so far have been extremely moving and very valuable.
It’s going to take some time but I think in the long run both of those are going to be really great projects. The other big one we’re working on right now is kind of another documentary around my own experience of now turning 40 here in about a month and an impulsive purchase of a 1990s Toyota van on the other side of the country and the ensuing road trip home interviewing individuals that can answer questions that I now have to the disillusion of my own faith. Interviewing big cheeses in the Jewish community, Mormon community, atheist community, Satanist community, scientists around evolution, human behaviorists, and then just the adventure of a road trip and interacting with just the common people you’d bounce stuff off of. That’s going to be happening this summer. That’s a really big project that we’re working on finding different funding and everything for and outlets for. It’ll be exciting.
Lisa: You’ve got a lot going on.
Trent: A lot going on. I have to try and figure out how to make money in there somewhere too. See how that goes.
Lisa: Seems like there will be something that will come through. I’m just guessing on this one.
Trent: Okay, good.
Lisa: So far it’s worked all right though.
Trent: So far.
Lisa: Yeah. We’ve been speaking with Trent Bell who’s a Maine based photographer. Trent, how do people find out more about the work that you do?
Trent: Just go into trentbell.com or Instagram at trentbellphotography or Facebook page. I think we’re on Twitter but I just really copy everything that I put on Instagram to Twitter and Facebook.
Lisa: However people find you, I encourage them to do so. You’re doing some great work, not only for the magazines for Kevin Thomas and Susan Grisanti but also it sounds like these other projects are pretty great. I wish you all the best and thank for coming in and talking to us today.
Trent: Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you.