TELL SITS DOWN WITH ARIST REUBEN WU TO FOLLOW THE LIGHT INTO THE PLACES FEW WILL GO. IN A WIDE-RANGING CONVERSATION, WU REFRAMES THE LANDSCAPE AS SOMETHING ALIVE WITH INVISIBLE FORCES AND ASKS WHAT REMAINS WHEN THE IMAGE IS NO LONGER PROOF OF ANYTHING.

Mathew: You've talked about photography coming alive for you through travel, through being on the road. Was its something about being in motion itself that activated it? You said if someone had handed you a camera at home, you might not have picked it up the same way.

Reuben: I think it was about being able to escape, and finding something other than music to put my creativity into. I went to university in Sheffield. I did a module in photography... black and white, SLR, developing in the darkroom. The photos were technically fine. They were just aesthetically kind of shit. There was no vision, no style. I just picked up the camera and there was nothing around me that inspired me. I was distracted by the music scene, going out, having fun. After the module I put the camera down.

Reuben: My main passion at that time, other than music, was drawing. That had always been my childhood obsession, right from a very young age. That's why I went into design... it was a way to make money from making things. Photography came later, when I was able to travel the world, get out of my head, out of my geographical home, and not have the time to draw. What started as just digital snapshots became this obsession with film... with the ritual of it, the feel of it, the objectness of old cameras combined with traveling to places no one else was going. It was a way of making something completely new by combining this with that.

Mathew: And you kept your early photography completely separate from the band (Ladytron) and posted anonymously on Flickr. What was that about?

Reuben: I didn't want people to think that a guy in a well-known band was getting into photography and using that platform to get more eyes on his work. The band was very much collaborative with a group. Photography was just me. I wanted it to be separate, and not influenced at all by my other work. And I enjoyed the anonymity. It was fun, posting a photograph from a completely different part of the world, hopping around, people not knowing who I was. They just enjoyed the imagery. In that way, I was able to nurture and develop my own visual language from pretty early on. It wasn't really testing grounds. I just loved it.

Mathew: Chicago was a turning point. Your first residency, your first real collectors, your first exhibitions. Was that the place, or the moment in your career, or both?

Reuben: A combination. The band took a sabbatical in 2011. I was in London. I'd just met someone in Chicago, and eventually I ended up moving there and spending most of the year there. I was in a new country, the band had taken a break, and I was trying to figure out: do I go solo with music, or do I do something else? Photography was the one thing I truly wanted to explore. I did think about getting back into industrial design, but it felt like a step back.

Reuben: In 2013-2014, I did an artist residency at a digital lab called Latitude. I was able to take my entire archive, everything I'd shot on film and badly flatbed scanned, and scan it properly using drum scanners. I learned how to print properly. I learned how to sequence work, create bodies of work. I had my first exhibition and made my first photo sales to real collectors. That time was about rediscovering photography in retrospect... making sense of everything I'd shot over the previous eight, ten years, and planning what might come ahead.

Reuben: And then serendipitously, a friend who I'd known through the band (a production lead at an agency in New York) asked me to direct a commercial spot for GE. Make the music and direct the visuals. I had no clue how to handle those things. I was completely green. But she said: "I want you to do it, let's do this." And she named a budget. I couldn't even process the number. That was my first job. It led to other things, helped me branch into the commercial realm while I kept doing the fine art.

Mathew: Tell me about how the Siren series happened. Because from the outside, your work looks meticulously planned. And then you describe a moment where you just turned the camera ninety degrees.

Reuben: My family takes a week or so vacation on Lake Michigan, on the Michigan side, near a town called White Hall. We stay in a little cottage right on the water. I used that beach to try things out... it's private land, I can do whatever I want. I was expecting a meteor shower. I was experimenting with light painting, but nothing was really working. Didn't have that shape I was looking for. And then, out the corner of my eye, I saw the northern lights happening to the north. That made me pan the camera ninety degrees.

Reuben: What I'm using is a laser fiber optic cable (a strand) attached to the drone. It dangles. The sharp line at the top is where it's attached; the drone is flying in that direction, and that's the duration of the exposure. The bottom of the strand is hanging in the waves. As the waves move in and out, they catch the bottom. As the drone moves, it creates this three-dimensional shape... this curtain-like veil. It only happened because the waves were affecting the form. I realized I'm photographing invisible forces. I'm photographing forces that shape the landscape rather than photographing a landscape.

Michael: That's what it looks like from the outside...meticulously planned. And to hear it's this response to what's happening in the moment, that you're actually in that space and present to it...that requires a different kind of preparation.

Reuben: You have to be able to work instinctively, intuitively, without even thinking in order to do this in really uncomfortable conditions and still be open to things. As soon as the process is something you have to consciously think about, everything gets more difficult. If the process is already within you, you work instinctively and you're automatically open to what nature gives you.

Mathew: You've talked about using technology to unlock new ways of seeing. What has it allowed you to see that wasn't available before?

Reuben: I wouldn't really call it technology, because it's hundreds of years old but long exposure, being able to open the shutter for a long time and make a picture I couldn't see, that's the foundation of everything I do. It's always been the backbone. And it's allowed me to build things within that using newer tools (drones, lasers, LEDs) in ways they weren't designed for. There's a John Lester quote: "The art challenges the technology and the technology inspires the art." The art can inspire us to use technology in ways it wasn't designed for, and the technology enables us to create art we've never been able to express before. It's a circle. You have to keep the balance, because as soon as it's all about the technology, it just becomes a demo. There has to be something behind it. What the story is, what you're trying to express.

Reuben: When I first released Lux Noctis... putting lights on drones to illuminate landscapes at night I released the images and the meaning and my inspirations, not the method. When I sent it to blogs, they wanted to lead with: this photographer puts lights on his drones. That's what went viral. The process. But I didn't want to talk about the process...I wanted people to encounter the art first. I still want to keep that mystery. With that specific project, though, there was an "aha" moment when people understood how the images were made. I hadn't anticipated it, but it made them connect with the work more.

Michael: I think the mystery is important. Everyone wants to know the tools, how it was done. Part of me finds that interesting... they're always fascinated, which is part of it. But it can strip the magic.

Reuben: It depends on what the art is. With Siren, I didn't share my method for over a year. I acknowledged it was light painting with a drone and a laser, but I didn't talk about the specifics. I just wanted people to encounter the work, to connect with it. And I think there's something to not wanting the work to be part of a cycle of things that go viral on social media. That's just not something I enjoy.

Mathew: You said once...AI often skims the aesthetics of meaningful things while stripping away the experience and the story beneath them. What gets lost?

Reuben: The entire process. The whole reason I do what I do is because I enjoy the process. I want to be in these places, use cameras, use these tools to create something that rewards me on a creative level, make the image, complete the image. That's craft. All of that is craft. A lot of AI images (not all of them) just strip away all of that and make the superficial.

Mathew: Michael just gave a talk at the Walker. So many of the young people in the audience wanted to get ahead of the process, and skip straight to the result. Michael, you said the middle is where all the meat is. And they were asking: how do we get to the end?

Michael: The process is absolutely the point. For me that's where it lives.

Reuben: It's wild that people think this way now, and that they just want to make the finished thing without going through the making of it. For me, I have to get on a plane, go to a place, basically go on an adventure. That is the fun part. That is such a beautiful part of the process. And then getting into the studio, putting all of these pieces together to create something meaningful that encapsulates that experience. I'm astonished that people want to skip it.

Reuben: One part of photography that has always been important and is more important now than ever is your behind-the-scenes documentation. Your receipts. Proof of work. We're now at a point where those receipts can be faked very easily. You could get Sora to make a crappy phone movie of your camera and tripod in a particular landscape and make it look totally real. But if you're going to go through all of that, you may as well just do the thing.

Mathew: Beyond what you produce you've been to places like Svalbard, you've sat on a brutally frozen lake and experienced something most people never will. That's yours regardless of the photograph.

Reuben: I'm extremely privileged and lucky to be able to do that, and the vast majority of people won't have the time. But you don't have to go to Svalbard to make work. You can make work in your own studio, experiment with the tools you have at home or at school, and try to create something new and meaningful. The point is that you go through the process of making it. You don't shortcut past that to get to an image.

Michael: That's the thing I kept running into during the talk at the Walker. The experience of making is what you get to keep. The work on the wall is for everyone else.

Reuben: Exactly. And the further I get into this (the more immersed I get in the process) the more I want to share those experiences with people who can't have them. Not the image. The experience. That's what I'm trying to figure out how to do next. Immersive environments, projections, sensory spaces. How do you transport someone to a place they'll never go?

That feels like the next question.