Producer: Annie Frisbie
Editor: Jessica Buritica

Photo by Dirk Anschütz

The Zoom In Podcast theme song is "Now It's On" by Grandaddy, courtesy of V2 Records.

From Dirk Anschütz's site:

Dirk Anschütz was born and raised in the small German town of Ottweller. At age 22 he came to New York and after a short stint as a babysitter in the Hamptons, got into photography. He now lives in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Jen Bradbury: Dirk Anschütz came to my apartment to take some pictures for Germany's Allegra magazine. That's how we met. He was pretty goofy and game for just about anything. We ended up driving around in his good old beater of a station wagon and climbing trees on the grounds of the Cloisters.

That day, I discovered that Dirk and I share a deep (only slightly embarassing) love for John Wayne movies. And country music. And baseball (oh, wait, that's just him). For a German dude, he's the most all-American guy I know. It's not so much a contradiction as it as a complicated and delicate balance. Not surprisingly, that same sense of balance emerges in his photographs. Whether it's landscapes or portraiture, his work maintains an excellent and essential tension between disparate emotions or qualities. If a picture seems funny, you're likely to also feel an underlying sense of melancholy. A sweet portrait might reveal a little trap-door of nastiness. And over a gentle landscape hovers an invisible umbrella of loneliness. Nothing is as straight forward as it seems in Dirk's photographs. It's why I find them so compelling.