Adam Ekberg is a photographer whose work lives in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the George Eastman Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Worcester Art Museum. His solo exhibition Minor Spectacles ran at the George Eastman Museum in 2023.

Adam and I met years ago when our kids were in forest school together in rural New Jersey — one of those places where you sign a waiver so your preschooler can use an axe. He's one of the most delightfully goofy people I know, and also one of the most serious artists I know. Those things are connected, and I wanted to understand how.

This conversation covers enormous ground. It begins with a barn fire — a four-year-old in spaceship pajamas holding a glow stick, watching hundreds of feet of flame erase something he took for granted was permanent. From there we move through the man across the street who taught Adam to watch ants for hours, through years of caring for people with HIV and AIDS in early-2000s Portland, to a night on a mountain in Maine when a disco ball, a flashlight, and a smoke machine produced the photograph that made everything snap into focus.

We talk about the game of Go and why clinging to what mattered fifty moves ago will kill you. About riding a bicycle at twelve miles an hour as a way of not quite being anywhere. About the difference between making something for real and making it in Photoshop — and whether that difference matters. About the pocket watch his dying friend gave him with a note that said have a different relationship to time.

And we talk about boredom — specifically, what lives on the other side of it. The land within all of our minds that opens up when you sit with the discomfort long enough to push through.

Fair warning: the range of this conversation goes from Bluey to Walter Benjamin.

(cover photo: A Disco Ball on the Mountain, 2005, courtesy of the artist and CLAMP, New York)

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