On October 4th, 2023, Aniaya Jones sat down with Professor Daniel Schlapbach, who has been teaching at Loyola University Maryland since 1999. He is a Professor of the Fine Arts program and Photography.
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Aniaya Jones: What is your name and profession at Loyola?
Daniel Schlapbach: I'm Dan Schlapbach and I'm Professor of Photography and Fine Arts.
Aniaya Jones: What kind of art do you like to create in your profession?
Daniel Schlapbach: I like to make a version of ten types, which is a 19th century process of coating a piece of metal with this chemical, which makes it light sensitive, although I do it with glass. So you coat the glass with this material and make an exposure, and then it ends up being a transparent piece of glass with an image on it. So I start out with that, and then I'll take a digital image and put it behind it.
Daniel Schlapbach: So create the wet plate glass image in front and a digital image back behind it. And they merge to create a sort of single photograph where I try to merge those two ideas to create a new meaning of how this image has an image, this image has a meaning, this image has a meaning, and then when they get put together, they create a new meaning. So that's what I'm really interested in doing, is sort of merging images in different ways, sequencing them, ordering them, but to create new meaning by the context of the photographs.
Aniaya Jones: When did you first find your passion for photography, arts and things like that?
Daniel Schlapbach: I've been a photographer at very beginning. I began playing with my dad's cameras before I even knew how to take pictures. So he had a flash that had this little reflector in the back that opened up like an umbrella. And I just loved to play with that little thing. I loved to play with the gadgets of it. And then I realized finally, oh, you can make images with this. And I remember the first time my dad let me use his camera.
Daniel Schlapbach: I'd been reading photography books, and I did every experiment I could. Every exposure was a different experiment, trying just to play, to sort of see what I could do with this. And then from there began to I was a high school photographer for the yearbook and for the newspapers and really sort of really then from junior high on forward, I've been interested in photography.
Aniaya Jones: Okay, so how did you personally balance being a student not as a teacher, but as a student and then also doing art, like in college and things like that?
Daniel Schlapbach: Yeah, I remember the first time I didn't go into college as an art student. I wanted to be a cosmologist. I wanted to be like Carl Sagan or Neil degrasse Tyson. I wanted to explore the infinite. And I think in some ways I'm doing that in a different way now. But I went
in as a physics major, and so I didn't really think I could make a living as a photographer and didn't really sort of pursue it in that way.
And sort of a variety of things that sort of fell aside until I finally took a photography class. And I remember taking that class, going around and photographing, and at some point I realized that I'm doing homework. This is something I have to do for a class. This is not just for fun. I'm getting this is something I need to do. And it was a real sort of click in my mind that sort of what I was doing had value, had worth
It wasn't just simply sort of taking pictures for fun. I was making photographs for a class. And it really sort of changed my whole way of thinking about it, that it wasn't just a hobby, it was a passion that I could turn into something that had value in it.
Aniaya Jones: Thank you so much, Professor Daniel Schlapbach!
Interviewer: Aniaya Jones
Interviewee: Professor Daniel Schlapbach
Topic: How Did Professor Dan Become a Photographer
Interview Date: 10/4/2023
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