Introducing Frank Rodriguez

Age: 35
Gender: Male
Occupation: Marketing Consultant

Photography Website and Blog: www.organicphoto.com

"You click some good personality," one of your customers wrote of your photography. It is clear that you have a gift for capturing human emotion and essence in your work. How has your interest in people and your skills in photographing them developed over the years?

The motivation for buying my first camera at 16 was to photograph the friends I made at summer camp. I enjoy many types of photography, but people are by far the most interesting subject to me. This eventually led me into event photography where there are often many opportunities for capturing human emotion and essence (to use your phrase), but there are usually very small windows of opportunities for making those photographs. As my eye and my equipment improved, I got more hits. After nearly 20 years of making photographs, I enjoy being at the point where I can often anticipate opportunities and capture many more hits than misses. I also have to thank digital technology because it's a feedback system that has allowed me to improve my skills more than film photography did. I should mention that I credit much of my people photo skills to having only made black and white photographs for my first several years in photography. Color is a giant distraction from the essence of a portrait. I love color, but I have no use for it if it doesn't serve the photograph. I turn many of my digital photos into black and white.

Your website is called organicphoto.com . What is the origin of that name?

I wanted a short and catchy name that was either descriptive or evocative of what I do. I originally wanted to get imagesniper.com but everyone I ran the name past reacted very negatively. A few weeks after trying to figure out a name, the name came to me in my sleep. I immediately knew this was the one so I got up and bought it.

You have a collection of photos from the annual Burning Man festival on your site. Can you tell me a bit more about the festival, how you came to be involved, and what its appeal is to you as a photographer?

I first learned about Burning Man from a National Geographic cover story many years ago. The cover photo was an elderly woman wearing a skin tight fluorescent tie-dye outfit and she was walking through a sandstorm in the middle of the desert. It looked like something out of an alternate reality. I was instantly intrigued, but it wasn't until 2004 when I read a Craigslist post of a person who was asking for help in driving their Volkswagen bus to Burning Man that I made the effort to get there. I was motivated by a desire to see a different aspect of American culture than I'd ever experienced. I'm half Puerto-Rican and I grew up in a Hispanic and black neighborhood, so white culture always seemed lacking in flavor to me. Culturally speaking, Burning Man is an entirely new level of flavor! It's also the greatest place on earth for a people photographer.

What is your history with photography? (How did it become your form of creative expression?)

As I mentioned, my original motivation was simply to photograph the friends I made at summer camp, but after having a terrific experience in my senior year of high school of making short films with Super 8 movie cameras, I became enamored with the visual arts. While in college, photography distinguished itself to me as a means to work independently, so I changed my focus to photography and I just keep getting deeper as I learn more about digital photography while also returning to my film roots by exploring medium format and Polaroid photography.

You wrote on your blog: "Most of the serious photographers I know do not shoot for money, they shoot for the love of it ..." This seems to be true for most people in creative professions, as well as service jobs like education and law enforcement. We all need money to pay the electric bill, but we do the work because we love it. Meanwhile, the bankers and engineers and salesmen are scooping up a bigger share of the profits and really do seem to make money multiply. What is your take on what this represents in our society? Is one group more self-serving than the other? How does money create a disconnect between a society and its values? (pick any or all of these questions)

That question deserves more attention than I'm qualified to give, but my take is that these seemingly opposite pursuits (chasing the almighty dollar vs following your bliss) are both expressions of a person's values and priorities, but it's important to note that these pursuits need not be mutually exclusive. There are many successful people who give back in different ways, so I don't think one group is more self-serving than the other. Money creates a disconnect in society by putting too much emphasis on personal gain to the exclusion of values and community.

In our day to day lives, the majority of our personal interactions are with people who serve a business purpose to us. We go to work with people because it results in a paycheck. We go to the store and buy from people who sell what we want. If you take public transportation to work, it's expected that no one talk to anyone else because everyone's purpose for being there is to get to the place where they earn a paycheck. This voluntary isolation from the many people around us creates a mental prison similar to the one that happens when a dog is put on a leash from the time it's a puppy. The limitation of that leash will become ingrained to the point that you can eventually take that leash off and the dog still won't go beyond the limitations of that leash. I think many of us are doing the same thing to ourselves when we isolate ourselves from people who don't serve an economic interest to us.

My wife and I had a tremendous experience at the Burning Man festival in Nevada over Labor Day week. Imagine living in a city of 45,000 people where you can't buy anything. In its place is a gifting economy where people are encouraged to give gifts to strangers, expecting nothing in return. Being gifted by strangers has the overwhelming effect of inspiring most people to reciprocate, not just to the stranger giving you a gift, but to everyone you come in contact with. People don't seem so weird or menacing when they're giving you a gift, so our usual defenses and excuses for not interacting with people are quickly and effectively broken down. Until I experienced this, I didn't realize how much I accepted the usual way that people in our society interact with each other. Money itself isn't bad, but our relationship with it has definitely made our society poorer in spirit.