10 Questions with Photographer | Ben Fraternale | ISSUE #275

Through interviews with individuals who pursue photographic expression through unique perspectives, we explore the origins of their creative practice, their philosophies, and their artistic processes, delivering new inspiration to photographers and photo media around the world.

In this issue, we speak with America-based photographer and director Ben Fraternale. We explore their creative beginnings, the ideas and perspectives they hold dear, and how their approach to image-making offers valuable insights into contemporary photographic culture. Preserving these thoughts and experiences in writing today may help support and enrich the future of photography.
Through these “10 Questions,” we take a closer look at the process behind how their work comes into being.

My passion for photography grew out of necessity. Two things happened simultaneously: first, the global shift into digital camera technology lead to my family becoming disinterested in photography, leaving a sudden gap in the documentation of our lives.

As I noticed this gulf in any images of anything relating to our existence, I was deeply compelled to pick up the camera and take over the photography duties.

Meanwhile, as a teenager I began independently covering the Arena Football League through my own website, videos, and a radio show. Photography was a necessity to support that passion and at a very young age I was credentialed press for nationally televised football games, giving me a proto-film school for image making, filmmaking, design, and many of the skills I still use today.

With the spark for my photographic journey originating from a feeling of unrecorded, disappearing life, that theme has inadvertently carried into my body of work.

Much of what I do focuses on the fading landscape of America and capturing what little remains of the mid-century optimism that colored the streets, signs, and surroundings of every day life. I hunt for these places and elements through sprawling road trips, determined to find the remnants of an aesthetic in time.

As the years pass, more and more of the places I have photographed see turnover and destruction, imbuing the images with an archival weight that, as a collection, tells a broad visual story.

As a director and photographer, my work takes me all over the world, which gives me the opportunity to seek the furthest corners of obscurity and novelty in this country (America) and others.

My comfort zone is behind the wheel of a rental car, driving through endless desert roads to find towns which still contain morsels of a lost aesthetic identity.

There’s significant planning, but also a randomness inherent to the U.S., which allows me to explore for countless hours, sometimes down hopeless paths, where I try to find something that fits within the scope of my ongoing projects.

The impermanence of life itself has always made photography essential to me, and especially analog photography.
Knowing that I will disappear like many of the subjects I seek is as much a motivator as the photography itself. I am driven to create a record to leave behind, and through Polaroid I am creating that physical record whenever I hit the shutter.

No one will comb through a hard drive in 200 years to look for pictures, but they may leaf through my endless boxes of Polaroids from all over the world, as a unique memento of a life lived.

“The Leaning Tree” is one of my all-time favorites. It’s simple, enriched by the beautiful light at Joshua Tree National Park, and is not even typical of my work.

But, this tree is unique and emotive - I have returned several times to the park and found myself back at this very same tree.

There’s something about it always being there for me that resonates with the themes I seek to shoot - it, too, will be gone one day, like the architecture and man-made surroundings that line the small towns of America.

But, for this small moment in time, I can return to it over and over before it’s gone - and naturally, take a Polaroid.

AI has stripped the truth out of image making, and separated the concept of an image from photography itself.

In this era, I find Polaroid all the more salient, a cure for the toxicity of false images, and a solution for creating something real, irreproducible, and one-of-a-kind.

America is so sprawling and its photography scenes are seemingly random given the internet gives voice to practically anything, but I have found my home within the analog space.

There are enough foundational institutions that solely support film photography, and even specifically Polaroid, that a huge community can be supported from coast to coast.

The Polaroid community, a niche of that niche, is particularly strong given it was founded in the anxiety of the format itself going extinct, and then being reborn, only 18 years ago. This gives the movement a grassroots essence while growing large enough to support an entire cottage industry.

It's these people, the Polaroid obsessed, that have given me a home wherever I travel in the country, and give me the security that no matter what bizarre backroad I wind down, someone will be happy to lend their couch to me, as long as I brought my Polaroid SX-70.

I recently spent a bit of time in China, engrossing myself in the photography scene that is blooming in a country that discouraged the use of photography until quite recently.
With China being so separated from the United States both culturally and socially, I was blown away to see the country’s newfound interest in Polaroid, which has caught fire over there.

It showed me that no matter where you are on this planet, if the internet is prevalent and technology has made daily life increasingly intangible, everyone is seeking a reprieve.

We’re all looking for something to put us in touch with something tactile, slower, and real, in a time where very little of life ticks those boxes.

It doesn’t matter how independently developed the culture is, something innately human is driving us to seek analog respites from modernity’s punishing digitalization.

As years turn to decades, it’s clear that my life will always be focused on some form of preservation.

Whether that is through storytelling in filmmaking, photography, and/or art itself, I have an insatiable drive to capture life in my own way as the present fades into the past.

Language, governments, and war can’t stop us from connecting with each other.

Humans, at their core, are beautiful, but the condition of politics and technology too often cloud our ability to see that. I have seen time and time again that the reality of humankind is much sweeter than we’re lead to believe every day.

And, through art, we can forge unlikely connections regardless of the powers that haunt us from above.