Interview: Julia Larberg - Photographer and Yoga Teacher
We like to take time to highlight women we see out in the world doing their part to make the world a little nicer. In this Real Nice Lady Spotlight, we’re talking to Julia Larberg, photographer and yoga teacher, about how leaning into yoga led her back into photography.
Job Title/Profession
Photographer/Yoga Teacher
Favorite Drink?
Coffee.
Favorite Food?
Lamb vindaloo or the spicy avocado burger from Burg and Barrel.
Karaoke Song?
“bloodline” by Ariana Grande but if the mood is right, I’ll try to sing anything.
What song are you listening to on repeat right now?
“Sagittarius” by Trevor Hall
Female icon you would be for Halloween?
St. Joan of Arc, hands down. She wore male clothing during a time where that was unheard of, led the French army to victory at 18, and predicted the deaths of her catcallers on her way to demand the king assign her an army to lead. I also imagine a sword would be fun to carry around.
Telling as little or as much as you want, how are you feeling these days?
These days I feel like I sway between a bit wigged out and extremely focused. I am feeling both extremely grateful for the honesty and passion and intentionality of this particular moment in time. There’s so much creativity, righteous anger, compassion, and fierce love of one another that I can’t help but to be in awe.
On the other hand, I’ve had pretty rough bouts of anxiety and depression because of the state of the world. There’s so much hurt and suffering behind righteous anger. People are dying by the thousands each week in the U.S., a stable job and adequate food is a privilege, and the people in charge of protecting us are sometimes deliberately failing in pursuit of a political or financial incentive. It’s a lot to hold space for.
What part(s) of your life during the pandemic have made you rethink your "normal" life?
I feel the biggest thing I have had to rethink is my relationship to food. I would cover a lot of being busy with eating out or getting a coffee to offer a bit of soothing comfort to myself. While I miss sitting in the Broadway RoCo and sipping coffee, I’ve found a lot of joy in the ritual of making my own coffee in the morning or of making myself wholesome food that tastes delicious and is nourishing to my body. Being able to slow down has offered a space to rethink why I was going that fast in the first place.
What first attracted you to your current profession?
What first attracted me to seriously making photographs was being able to see objects in the same way we see with our eyeballs but in a different context. Making art photographs provided a visual method of communication that was more refined than what I felt I could express with words. I wanted to be able to explore that in my own art and to offer a version of that to the clients I work with.
I didn't set out to teach yoga; I went to 200 Hour Yoga teacher training for myself and my mental health. I first found Yoga in a weekly trauma-sensitive class offered through MOCSA (Metropolitan Organization to Counter Sexual Assault) and found it to be so important to my journey of coming back to myself and taking ownership of my body. Yoga has been an opportunity to go toe-to-toe with my ego, with all that I think I am and am not, and then to see that I am the only person that limits myself in my thinking. I recognize the fact that I have privilege as an able-bodied white woman growing up in the middle class and there are many, many doors open to me that do not open as easily/are closed to other individuals. For me, it is about recognizing the internal dialogue and making space for all that is and all that can be. I have found so much space for self-love and care and awareness in Yoga that I hope to share it with those I teach and photograph.
What style of photography do you find yourself drawn to creating? What ideas/emotions do you find yourself capturing the most?
I find myself drawn to creating traditional photographs, utilizing objects and people to convey a message, concept, or narrative. Before the pandemic, I had been experimenting with black and white film and fiber printing in the darkroom. It has added a completely different element to the photographs. It's been interesting to explore how this type of print participates in the photograph in such a bold way.
I find myself attempting to visually document the internal experience of various life experiences. My project 'The Days That End in Why' came from confusion, hurt, hope, and the rollercoaster of healing from adverse encounters. It represents some of the weirdness of how time passes through that. I find myself now pursuing photographs of myself in a wild nude self-portrait project. I’m curious about concepts around identity, how the self interacts with the self-portrait, and at what point the self dissolves and becomes something other in the frame. To use some words from a dear friend, we tend to fossilize our identities and this project explores where the self dissolves in a self-portrait.
What is your creative process like?
In photography, there's a lot of wandering around. I take pictures and process them, allowing myself to be drawn to what I'm drawn to, with a general rule of coming back to a single subject multiple times in quiet and stillness. Photographing is a meditative experience for me. After I print them, I lay all of them out on the floor and try to get a gist of what's happening. It generally involves wine/whiskey/tea, talking to my cat, taking breaks to read parts from whatever book or quote is resonating with me at the time, and dancing to various funk music. There's some weird arm waving, too? It's always an adventure and my cat looks at me like I’ve lost it and loafs on the print I need to move.
Yoga is pretty similar. While I’m not actively teaching at the moment, my practice has been exploratory and supportive. To me, it's more important to have a playlist I love or a space that feels safe than to know exactly what I'm going to do while I'm on my mat. Music is so important to both creative processes that I end up laying on my floor and closing my eyes to see how the song feels. I’m still making playlists for classes so if I can picture a Yoga flow to it, it goes on the playlist. By then, I have a starting point to also know what kind of class I'd teach with that. After that, I generally think about something I feel either I’ve been needing to hear or that my inner child might need to hear, trusting that we're never alone and those words will meet in the way they need at the moment. I place a lot of emphasis on self-love and compassion in my practices because so often we forget about it.
What is your favorite thing about your industry? Your least favorite?
My favorite thing about the photo industry is the sense of community. I have been fortunate to know many badass artists making badass work. One of my favorite moments was a photo salon of sorts I helped to organize over the summer. We originally got together to look at work we were making and talk about different residency and exhibition opportunities in the area but we all brought a dish for dinner and had a potluck. It was so wholesome and provided a space for friendships to be established outside of the photographs. We transitioned to an online platform right before the pandemic hit and it has been a gift to have that community over the past months. My least favorite thing about the photo industry is how we are judgemental of each other's work due to 1) over-saturation of the field and 2) cut-throat nature of capitalism, among other reasons. We all want to provide the best product to our ideal clients at a price that we can live on and judging each other and undercutting each other will not get us any closer to the goals of individual success and respect as creatives.
My favorite thing about teaching Yoga is feeling the exhales of my students as they arrive on their mat. It's almost tangible about ten minutes after class starts and we're about three fourths of the way through the intro breathing exercises. I love the space for that experience of self and the falling away of the busyness. My least favorite is the racism, cultural appropriation, and lack of training in some 200RYTs. Short teacher training, ones consisting of 3-5 weeks, are not long enough to provide an adequate understanding of the history and philosophy of Yoga or of practical anatomy so as to not hurt students. There are so many wonderful things about the practice and by marketing it as 'stretching' or 'fat-burning' discards that awareness. There's so many times Sanskrit is eliminated from classes, so many times that people with large bodies or who are non-white are discriminated against in class. I find that you have to pursue methods of inclusive teaching rather than them being fully incorporated into the teacher training. If you'd like to learn more about those aspects of the Yoga industry, I highly recommend listening to the podcast Yoga is Dead. It's by two Indian-American Yoga teachers who serve honesty and realness within Yoga. The first episode is called 'White Women Killed Yoga' and it's fantastic.
What do you want for the future of your industry?
For both photography and Yoga, I would like to see more community and inclusivity. More compassion and empathy for all of our various experiences.
What advice would you give other women trying to succeed in your industry?
You're going to fail, and you're going to fail hard. It'll be embarrassing but it's an opportunity to reevaluate and offer yourself some compassion. Berating yourself will get you nowhere. Success, in whatever that looks like to you, is a path. You are going to succeed beyond what you ever could imagine you could do because of the lessons you learned in your darkest moments.
Your intuition is your most powerful guide and it won't lead you astray, even if it feels wild or unrelated.
Work hard. Read a lot. Go to networking events. Get outside of your comfort zone. Cry when you need to and pick yourself back up. Take care of yourself. You are your most valuable asset and leading a balanced life is the best investment you can make in your long-term success. In other semi-cliché words, the best way to win a marathon is by taking breaks when you need it rather than sprinting the entire time.
Be compassionate. Speak your truth even if it's scary and unfamiliar. I promise, it gets easier with time. Above all, try your best to be kind to everyone and write thank-you notes. The little things go a long way.
What is your definition of success and has it changed since you started on your path to success?
If there's a moment where I stop and say, "Well, I'm finished here! I've completed what I've come to do and there's nothing left," is the day where I failed. To me, success is celebrating the journey and the present moment, knowing that rest and breaks are important and trusting I will continually learn and grow. I used to think there was a point that I'd reach and be satisfied and that success was some invisible finish line in the future. For me, it has changed in that I've made it past experiences that I came back from experiences that brought me to my knees. Success is that I'm not only surviving, but that I'm thriving and making decisions for myself and my work that serve the health and longevity of both.
You work in two industries where people trust you with your expertise and skill, leaving a lot of pressure on you, how do you separate yourself from the high pressure situations and take care of yourself?
I try to view taking care of myself like caring for my most cherished lover. Even when I'm busy and there's a lot going on, I try to do the little things like taking myself to coffee or dinner or solo dance parties. With the pandemic, I now place more emphasis in taking breaks away from my phone and to spend time in nature. I keep to a routine in the morning, plan time to make and enjoy nutritious meals for myself during the week, and offer myself words of forgiveness and compassion when I inevitably make a mistake. I try to minimize their occurrence but they happen because I'm human and imperfect. All I can do is acknowledge them, learn from them, and move forward. The little moments are sustaining moments in any relationship, but especially within the relationship to ourselves.
What was a formative moment in your life that made you who you are?
Yoga school. They weren't kidding when they said that in the cosmic way that Yoga works, the unnecessary will burn away and will leave an unanticipated richness of life in its wake. In the ten months I was in school, I ended a serious romantic relationship, my mom had a massive stroke and almost died, I was accepted to my first solo photographic exhibition, I celebrated my sexuality by dating around and honoring my singleness, I lost the core of my close friends, gained new friends, changed jobs twice, and met my current partner who brings a joy and adventure to my life I never trusted to exist.
It led to a different kind of confidence and a greater trust in myself. I failed hard when I first attempted my undergraduate degree five years ago. Yoga school was my first time going back to a continuing education program and it represented a personal commitment to continuing my education. In completing my certificate, I (kind of) overcame my fear of failing in my degree. I am going back to school to complete my BFA in Photography this spring at Bard College. I was accepted to both Bard College and Syracuse University and being accepted to both is a source of pride for me. Bard is my dream school and I don’t have words for how excited I am to study there. Yoga school and all that happened during that time frame allowed me to see that I truly am strong enough, good enough, and worthy of pursuing higher education in something I love.
When do you feel the strongest in your life? When do you feel the most vulnerable in your life?
I think I’ve rewritten my response for this 15 times. Out of all of the moments I can come up with when I feel strong and when I feel vulnerable, it’s doing new things. I feel strongest when I’m doing something new or am embarking on a grand adventure because of the opportunity for success. I feel most vulnerable when I’m doing something new or am embarking on a grand adventure because of the possibility of failure. I think strength is in the ability to be vulnerable and vice versa.
What have you been doing to maintain your mental health since the pandemic hit?
I’ve been doing a lot of online Yoga classes - I have been loving Jessamyn Stanely’s online offerings as well as making sure to eat and rest. I even put eating reminders in my phone! I’ll talk to my therapist when I need to, take walks, and make sure I’m responding to my friends. I have a habit of becoming a hermit under stress and bottling everything up. I’m making it a priority to check in on my friends and family and ask for a space to talk when I need it.
Who are five women that inspire you?
1. St. Joan of Arc.
2. Rebecca Solnit.
3. Sally Mann.
4. Carrie Mae Weems.
5. My mom, Debbie Williams.
6. Berenice Abbott.
7. Greta Thunberg.
8. My grandmas, Betty McMahon and Joan Wohlers.
9. Frida Kahlo.
10. Maya Angelou.
Ope, wait that's more than 5.
Check out Julia’s holiday print sale, featuring her Prairie Grasses series by clicking HERE. The sale runs through December 20th and 10% of the profits from 8x8 prints are going to KC Tenants.
