Episode 97: Creating in Isolation, Peeling Back the Layers, and Connecting to Nature with Photographer Beth Galton
Podcast
Episode 97: Creating in Isolation, Peeling Back the Layers, and Connecting to Nature with Photographer Beth Galton
“I spent so much of my life protecting myself, not putting myself out there.” —Beth Galton
Welcome to this week’s episode, which is all about celebrating the shift from creating in isolation to launching your work into the world. I’m joined by Beth Galton, an award winning photo-based artist.
Beth shares about her experimental creative process and what it was like to be an artist living in New York City during the pandemic.
She also shares the fear and doubt that can come with sharing a new project publicly. Plus, using your voice when you were told to be “seen and not heard.”
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform while you cook, clean, or create.
What’s in This Episode:
Beth tells us about how she became a photographer after quitting her secure job as an administrative assistant. After just one day in a photography studio, she knew she found what she wanted to do.
That certainty led her to assisting established photographers while she honed her craft before later launching her own commercial photography career.
Beth opens up about what it was like to use photography to process the isolation and anxiety of the COVID-19 pandemic and how she prepared for the shutdown as an artist.
Beth shares her struggles with self-doubt and fears of putting her personal work out there, and how she is working to overcome those challenges through promoting the Kickstarter campaign for her new photo book project.
Topics Covered:
Approaching the world in your own creative way, even if you’re not a traditional artist
The power of being in community with others
The power of finding a creative medium as a form of self-expression and using it as a path to finding your unique voice
The isolation of the pandemic and what it was like to be in NYC during lockdown
Connecting to nature through photography and using found materials as inspiration
Struggling with self-doubt and a fear of putting personal work out into the world
Favorite Quotes:
“I spent so much of my life protecting myself, not putting myself out there.”
“In retrospect the photos were about my anxiety. About everything being out of control. It became my way of expressing those anxieties.”
“When I have creative blocks, I tend to kind of go back to who I am. I think about those first photographs that I took and the excitement I felt and what I was trying to express.”
I am excited to hear your thoughts! Let’s continue the conversation on IG. Tag me @chefcarlacontreras and @bethgaltonstudio
Eat Well,
xo Chef Carla
PS: Are you craving community this season? Dreaming of starting your own Substack? Join us on November 21st for Getting Started & Build Your Community On Substack 101!
Disclaimer: Always seek the counsel of a qualified medical practitioner or other healthcare provider for an individual consultation before making any significant changes to your health, lifestyle, or to answer questions about specific medical conditions. This podcast is for entertainment and information purposes only.
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About Beth Galton
Debra supports women to claim their magic through energetic alignment and intBeth Galton is a photo-based artist, with an educational background in the natural sciences and three decades of experience as a professional photographer in the editorial and commercial arena. These elements of her history are the lens through which she explores the world.
Collecting objects, allowing time to affect botanical matter, these are the tools Beth uses to construct still life portraits. The stories speak to the cycles of nature, our connection to aging and mortality, and the fragility and resilience of the human experience. As a lifelong learner, Beth uses current technology to help articulate her message. She loves to harness natural light
to capture the compositions by using a large format camera and digital back. Beth’s fine art and professional work have won numerous accolades and been exhibited extensively throughout her career. Several of her personal projects have gained national and international regard.
Beth lives and works in New York City, where she is moved and inspired by the city every day.
Find + Work With Deb:
Full Transcript:
Carla Contreras (00:01):
Welcome to Nourishing Creativity. The cycle of the last few years has left you and me feeling mentally, physically, emotionally, and creatively drained, nourish your very full life through interviews with creatives and entrepreneurs about how they create and move through their creative blocks. If you don't know me, I'm Chef Carla Contreras, a food stylist and content strategist. You can find me, chef Carla Contreras, across all social media platforms and more information in today's show notes. Beth, welcome to the podcast. Can you share with us who you are and how you serve your community?
Beth Galton (00:47):
Thank you, Carla. I am a creative soul. Creativity plays such an important part of my life and who I am in my relationship to my family. I've raised a son in Manhattan, my friends. Being creative is very, very important to me. It makes me feel whole in terms of my community, especially at this point in my life. I feel like it's so important to give back that I have all this knowledge. I have hopefully a little wisdom that I can kind of help people as they move through whatever they're moving through. So I've gotten involved in some photographic communities where I can, I'll talk to groups of people who are just starting with photography. There are a lot of senior groups that they want to take photographs, but they're not quite sure how to approach it. So I've had a really good time working with those groups, with high school kids, with all different kinds of groups. And then I'm involved in my neighborhood in the Community Block association when there are problems on the block and in my building with the co-op board that I'm on. So it's important that I contribute.
Carla Contreras (02:01):
Beth, can you share with us your last meal?
Beth Galton (02:03):
My last meal was a piece of toast with almond butter and an apple cut up on top of it that I wolfed down as I was making my lunch, I was cutting up fennel and tomatoes, and I saw a can of tuna in there with a bunch of lettuce.
Carla Contreras (02:19):
That sounds delicious.
Beth Galton (02:21):
It is.
Carla Contreras (02:22):
How do you define creativity?
Beth Galton (02:25):
I think that we think about when you say the word creativity, everybody thinks of an artist, but I think of it as in a broader term, I think that everybody can be creative. You don't have to pick up a paintbrush, you can be an accountant, you can be a basketball player. It's really about how you approach the world and what you're doing in a creative way,
Carla Contreras (02:49):
And that's how you transitioned into photography. Right.
Beth Galton (02:52):
I went to a small to world arts school and I have a fine art degree, and I took a lot of biology at the same time. I did a lot of botany and learning about animals and plants, but I graduated from college and was totally lost and ended up sleeping on the couch of my parents. I couldn't afford, I was living with my boyfriend. I couldn't afford the rent. So they found a job for me at NYU as an administrative assistant, and it was like perfect job. Four weeks vacation. I wore a skirt every day, but I was so lost. It didn't fit who I was. I was typing, I was watching all these kids around me being creative, and I was being creative. So I had found photography when I was in college, and I thought, well, maybe that's something I should explore In college, I was always very insecure about my work, could I be any good?
(03:50)
And I thought, well, I can't just go out in the world to be a photographer. How can I learn about being a photographer? And somebody suggested that I try assisting, and I found a photographer and his assistant who I interviewed with. They spent an hour and a half making me carry equipment around the studio trying to convince me that I didn't want to be a photographer. It was a dying field. And at that point I thought, this is it. This is what I want to do. So I quit my job. My parents freaked out. First day I was unemployed, I went out and at the time, the New York Times used to have placement agencies for photography assistants. They had two of them. And the first one I went to, they laughed at me and said, you didn't go to RIT, we can't place you. And the second one said, we can get your job penny jewelry in a catalog company and with the hopes that you could get into the photographic end of it.
(04:46)
So I called the photographer and I said, should I take this job? What do you think? He's like, don't take it. Come to my studio, go through a source book, and then go door to door, which is what people did at that time. So I appeared at his studio and I saw he was in the middle of a catalog. He had just moved in there with boxes everywhere. And I said, do you want some help? Because everybody kept saying, do you have any experience? And I thought, if I could say I worked for somebody, they have to say, how long did you offer them? Then I would have to say half a a day or whatever it was. But I worked for him, and at the end of the day, he said, I'm going to pay you to the end of this job. And then I wheedled my way into his studio and I spent a year and a half learning working for him. And it was there that I kind of was exposed to bookkeeping and styling and be an assistant, and I was still very insecure about my own abilities. Could I actually be a photographer? But it taught me the craft. And over the three year period that I assisted, I learned the craft of photography and realized that that's who I was.
Carla Contreras (05:55):
What is your current relationship with creativity?
Beth Galton (05:58):
At the moment, I'm really wrapped up in this Kickstarter campaign so that I'm not taking photographs. I'm focused on how to promote it and how best to kind of express what the book is about. And that in itself is kind of a creative endeavor. I think this whole particular process is pretty scary for me because I've spent so much of my life protecting myself, not putting myself out there. I've learned how to do it through taking photographs for clients, but now this particular project is about me and putting myself out there. So it's really been a big eyeopening kind of learning process of learning to see what my fears are and realizing that the only way that I'm going to make this book successful is to really put myself out there and expose what I'm thinking and feeling, and that'll be okay. It won't backfire on me that in a way, if anything, I think it will make the whole process more successful.
Carla Contreras (07:01):
And what are those fears? Will you share them with us?
Beth Galton (07:04):
I was raised in a environment where you were seen and not heard, and then I was also challenged in school. I had learning issues that were never diagnosed, so I never felt confident in my abilities, and those have traveled with me my whole life. I remember thinking when I first started in photography, my career kind of took off, and I thought, they don't really know that I'm not this good. I always doubted my abilities. And it wasn't until I was in my forties that I had a very difficult time because the business got turned upside down that I then had to reinvent myself. And I thought, oh, maybe I am okay. Maybe I, I'm good. And really, the more time I've allowed myself to spend on my personal projects, it's kind of taught me how to have a voice and not be afraid of expressing who I am and what I'm feeling and thinking. So the Kickstarter is just a continuation of pushing myself to say, this is who I am and this is what I'm thinking, and my thoughts have some value, and hopefully you can identify with it and relate to it in some kind of way and get something from it.
Carla Contreras (08:19):
Beth, can you share with us how you nourish your creativity and what was your creative process during Covid?
Beth Galton (08:26):
Just before the shutdown, I thought I need to have a camera and a tripod and a couple of stands in my apartment. I thought, well, they were saying we'd be home for two weeks, and I thought, well, I might need to be able to take a photograph, something that kind of nourishes me. So I brought my equipment home and I started taking pictures of the food that was coming into the apartment, all the food we had washed and sanitized and before started to make it into dinner. And then I lost interest really quickly. There was so many people hungry, that's all you read about in the news. So I kind of got distracted and with the New York Times and the Washington Post and all the maps and charts that you saw, and I thought these are really important. And what kind of blew me away is that these dots were people.
(09:16)
They were people that were getting sick. They were not just dots. So I started screen grabbing them and I thought somehow I would use them, and I thought a lot about it for a while, and I started printing them out. And I thought, well, for me, botanicals always represented life and nature and well, maybe, and they've played an important role in my photographs. And I said, how do I get those into this? Combine them with these maps and charts, maybe by combining them that it will give humanity to these pieces of paper. So I started playing with it, and it was really an exciting, freeing experience because there were no clients, there were no assistants. I had to figure out if I can't get my camera high enough, what coffee tables are high enough that I can put them on my computer, sat on a cooler.
(10:09)
I could let go of all the parameters that I had in a commercial studio and just take photographs. And it took me back to basics, and it made me realize that you need so little to take a photograph. I had a stand. I wreaked some things up, I put it next to a window, and I started making photographs. So it was really an exciting experience for me. And I started with everything being sharpened and focused. And then I thought, I need movement in these. I felt this need to have movement, and there became more and more movement in these photographs. And I think now in retrospect, it was about my anxiety of everything being out of control, and it was my way of expressing those anxieties. I left out an important thing. Every time I took a photograph, I would be very mindful about what was on that piece of paper that I had printed out, and how did those words or those images or the combination of things that I put together made me feel. And that's what I really focused on trying to put into that image as I was making it.
Carla Contreras (11:18):
And so what was it like to be in isolation and did that play a role in these photos?
Beth Galton (11:26):
New York was ground zero. I went from a place that was vibrant with millions of people to nobody on the streets. You'd look out the windows and there'd be no cars and no people walking. I can't help but feel like that isolation and frustration and not be able to go out and having the interpersonal relationships that went on in the household that those fed into these photographs.
Carla Contreras (11:52):
And what would you like people to take away from receiving a copy of this book?
Beth Galton (11:57):
I see this book as kind of a testament to the time it's my record of living in Manhattan during the pandemic, during the lockdown, but I think that my hope is that it's universal, that everybody who reads it will see themselves in it and reflect about their own experience of what they live through.
Carla Contreras (12:19):
Beth, can you tell us about Creative Blocks?
Beth Galton (12:21):
It's kind of multifaceted for me. I do a lot of looking. I go to museums, I go to galleries. I look online. I'm always looking, as well as nature kind of helps feed my creative blocks. If I can take a walk, I can pick up some leaves, I can breathe some fresh air. But probably the biggest thing for me, when I have creative boxes, I tend to kind of go back to who I am. I think about those first photographs that I took and the excitement I felt and what I was trying to express, and it kind of grounds me back into who I am and what I'm trying to say. And for me, that's the most successful thing is that if I kind of tap into myself that helps me get through these blocks.
Carla Contreras (13:10):
Can you share with us about how emotions move through your photographs?
Beth Galton (13:16):
I came from a house where you didn't express emotions and everything was family was the most important thing. You never said anything negative about your family. And I think it affected my photographs for a long time. I felt like I could only go so far in putting my emotions into my photographs. And then I had a period where all my parents passed away, and all of a sudden it kind of opened the floodgates and allowed me to tap into who I was and how I'm feeling. And it's become more and more important every time I start on a photo series to kind of say, well, what do I want to say? And it doesn't mean that I know what I want to say. When I started to it, like this last series, I did London Plain Trees. I just picked up this bark on the street, and I thought, the bark is so incredible.
(14:08)
What can I do with it? And I kept taking pictures, and then all of a sudden I thought, well, it's kind of about peeling away layers, and it's what I've been trying to do is peel away layers and find out who I am in my core. And I thought, well, what if I take photos of myself naked with my iPhone and then print them out and distort them and combine them with the bark, and then all of a sudden it all came together, like this whole new series. And then as I was doing that, then those feelings kind of come forward and tap into it as I'm creating the images.
Carla Contreras (14:41):
Oh my gosh, this is so cool. I can't wait to see these.
Beth Galton (14:45):
Thank you. They won Sony World Photography Award. They came in third place this year, so I got to go to London to the big event they have. So it was very exciting to receive such recognition.
Carla Contreras (14:57):
That's awesome. Congratulations.
Beth Galton (14:59):
Thank you.
Carla Contreras (15:00):
Beth, can you share with us how we can find you, how we can support you, how we can work with you?
Beth Galton (15:05):
I am working very hard to be on social media. You can find me on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn under Beth Galton studio, as well as I have two websites, beth galton.com and beth galton fine art.com, and all my social and my websites link back to the Kickstarter that I'm trying to raise funds for.
Carla Contreras (15:28):
Thanks so much for tuning in to Nourishing Creativity. You can find me, chef Carla Contreras across all social media platforms and more information in today's show notes. While you have your phone out, please leave a review on iTunes or Spotify. This is how others find this show. I really appreciate your support sending you and yours so much love.