INTERVIEW: Simon Suparatana Blitzer and Maxwell Lincoln Neubacher

INTERVIEW

Maggie Aulman

10/1/202615 min read

Simon, Maxwell and I have been planning this exhibition together since March of this year. Meeting at least once a week, since then, we have had a chance to deeply explore their collections and artistic practices. Even so, each conversation and each time I look at their photos, I learn something new.

Although after six months of working together, you might expect I know everything, but there were many questions I still had left. In Simon’s apartment in the Mile End, Maxwell, Simon and I spoke about it all, ahead of the exposition we all have been working so hard to make the best as possible.

This exposition explores how they have constructed identity, belonging, and memory through moments of transition and uncertainty throughout their lives. When planning a show, logistics take up a lot of space, and this conversation gave us a moment to pause that work of the how, and focus back to the why.

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MAGGIE: So, can you tell me the full story of how you met?

SIMON: We came to play a show in Montreal. I was in a band called Beach Season with my friend Sam, who lives downstairs. We knew Max's roommate, Rob, at the time. We must have been playing POP Montreal. But, we just crashed in his basement. It wasn't even on the couch; it was under the stairs.

MAXWELL: I used to have a two floor apartment when I first moved here. It was sick. I was right across the street from Concordia, on St. Mathieu. Instead of dividing it into two apartments, which they had done on the other side of the street, this just had two floors, but underneath the stairs was a big enough room because it wasn't two apartments. It was a full closed door room, and there was a double mattress and a small desk and a lamp. We had art on the walls, and it was like this little Harry Potter room, we called it. We had so many friends that would come to crash there! We didn’t hang out too much then, but then Rob, who is the connection, moved back out west, and then Sam and Simon basically moved here.

After Rob left, I had a Calgarian void. So I was just like, ‘can I hang out with you guys?’ And then we all became very close, but we started saying it was a big crew and then, yeah, they took me in. They took me under their wing and it's just been us hanging out all the time ever since then.

MAGGIE: Aw that’s lovely! Well, you, Max, at the time were at Concordia in the photo program and had an interest in photography, but Simon, did you also have an interest in photography at that time?

SIMON: I was a career musician at that time, but back then I was also always shooting. I was trying to do a thing where I would meet artists and take photographs of them, and I was also trying to make album artworks for people at the time. I was shooting all in film as well, no digitals.

MAGGIE: And did you ever think that you would do an exhibition like this together?

SIMON: Not necessarily together, but I've worked with Max at Dime on certain projects. I saw his show in 2023, and I thought ‘this is sick!’. It inspired me to want to do some shows too, but it wasn't until I got this grant and I had accomplished this work that I seriously thought about turning it into an exhibition. And then, I thought that it would be great, especially for me to introduce myself into the scene a bit more, to do it with someone like Max, who's a really good friend and also just has done this before and knows what he's doing.

MAGGIE: Cool, and how have each of your practices influenced one another? Especially since working more together on this show?

MAXWELL: Well, I feel like it's made me take my work a little bit more seriously and have more intent with certain things. I think a lot of times, especially when I was doing this the last time, I was just throwing a lot at the wall and was like, ‘this is good’, and ‘I like this’, and ‘this is fine’. I'm just gonna put it out. But this time around, I feel like I'm trying to think a bit more critically and be more conscious about what I'm picking and why I'm doing it. I think that's from watching Simon edit and work on this project. A grant is such a grand thing and you have to think of every aspect, but when you're doing it self-funded like I did before, it was just kind of like, ‘uh, whatever I want goes’. It's nice to have that viewpoint and see all the processes that Simon had to go through.

SIMON: Yeah and for me, I learned a lot from how he did the last show, and it definitely gave me a lot of ideas on how to run this show and how to present it and think of ideas to involve more of the community members. In 2023, Max had a wall of photos that people submitted to directly involve the community. So that really inspired me to do more things like that for our show. And then even when talking about our themes and how they can connect, or how they're the same, or how they're different, it made me think more about my project and learn even more in depth about my project by just having those conversations.

MAGGIE: How has your friendship influenced the way you see and understand each other's work?

SIMON: I think it makes it really easy to talk about our work, to each other, without being afraid to offend anyone. We can be really honest with each other about what we think. Being friends makes it so much easier to communicate and not have to worry about stepping on toes or anything.

MAXWELL: Yeah, I think it's interesting to watch Simon and how much of a perfectionist he is in certain things. I think it's cool to come together and I feel like maybe we balance each other out in ways where it's a nice collaborative effort.

MAGGIE: And what does the title of 50/50 mean to each of you?

MAXWELL: Well, initially, it was just an idea that if we're going to do this show together, we’re splitting everything down the middle, half and half, equal parts, no one's outshining somebody else. There's no more work than the other person. It’s very much a one for one kind of thing. It’s 50/50. But then I think it just kind of evolved into being more thematic. It's about dualism. There's two parts; one that's us, one that's the community. One that's the work, and the other, it's the party/event. It's the me, it's the Simon. It’s the idea that this is for everybody, and there's no, ‘we're better than you’ or ego in this.

SIMON: I agree with all that. I think you can extrapolate many different meanings from it. The more we talk about it and the deeper we get into it, the more meanings we find for it.

MAGGIE: Yeah, even just in the themes that we are exploring like youth and coming of age, there's like two sides to the same coin of Max looking at young adults in their 20s and Simon looking at growing older from a child or moving to new places. I think we learn more and more about that meaning as we go.

So, what does the medium of analog photography allow for in supporting the themes of identity, memory, and youth, especially when youth culture now is more reliant on hyperdigital technologies.

MAXWELL: I've always shot film since I was 14 and I think it's just cool. I think it's always been cool in a sense that it's just so mechanical and so physical and tangible. I guess those would be the three big words, but it's an art, it's a science, it's all of it in one. So film hit all those little points of things that I was interested in. But I think in this context, the negative, which represents the memory, is there, it is solid. It’s not a file, it's a piece of cellulose. It’s cool that you can have this thing, and no matter what, if you print it or whatever, it's still yours. And that's really fun to me! I think that makes negatives like these stamps that you can keep forever. I think it's important in this work that, as we change, remembering exactly what these moments were like.

SIMON: Yeah. I think it's just very nostalgic to even look at film photographs. For me, childhood photos are film photos. Now maybe it's becoming less and less so, but I still like to hold onto the nostalgic idea of looking at an album of printed film photos with your family. Using this medium, especially for retrospectively looking at a childhood, is very connected to that idea of just being a kid, and my parents taking photos on film cameras.

MAXWELL: It might be easier to shoot digital, but we're choosing the hard way to really dive into why we took the photo, what the photo means, and what's the point of this all?

MAGGIE: Yeah, it allows for viewers to take more time looking at the work and have more intention with that look. So, Max, what moments specifically are in your collection? Pick maybe one of the works that you're showing and tell me a little more about the story of what you remember when you look at it.

MAXWELL: Well, this collection takes off right after I did my last show, in July 2023. I was sent on a trip to Japan with work, which was a career highlight, probably. It was such an amazing trip! I think that the images that I took for work were great, but the images I took behind the scenes, and at other points on the trip were amazing. There's about four or five images in this whole thing that are from that trip because they're so profound in my mind. And now, three years later, being able to show those images is huge. There’s also trips where I've been skateboarding, there's trips with friends, cottage weekends, visiting friends, and weddings that I've been to. It almost feels like I was driving by when I took all of these photos, like it just kind of happened naturally. It's a great way to look at life; just bumping into people's lives and leaving then coming back, and just enjoying it with them. I think it's really fun.

MAGGIE: Something you wrote before was that “photos are rapidly consumed and forgotten, and even real embodied experiences” can be like that as well sometimes. Maybe as a result of our relationship with photography through media and social media, how can this collection and the way this exhibition is organized remedy this kind of ill of society?

MAXWELL: Well, I think one way is the need to catalog and categorize everything in this medium. I love going back, even if it's just on my phone, but going back and looking through memories and favoriting things or putting things in folders and organizing. Although I'm not the best at it, it's still a nice practice to remind yourself of what happened in these moments. But then I think when shooting with film, you are cataloging in your head. Like, I can almost remember every film photo. Not every photo that I've taken, but in a sense, what I was doing and why it's there. I know kind of roughly what was happening that day. And I think that shooting on film almost cements it or inferences it into your brain. I think anybody can do this. There's no need to do this in an exposition, but it could be a folder or it could be a catalog or a photo book. I love sending stuff to friends when I scroll back and say, ‘hey remember this?’ It's a pretty cliche practice, but it's just so fun to do. And it's so fun to really timestamp that and remember those memories.

I do think there is so much more intentionality behind film photography than digital. You really are thinking a lot more about your shots. You're doing some manual work, but, even with film, if you're on like a point shoot, it's still an automatic button. It’s just one button. But I think there's almost like a worry that it's gonna be blurry or it's not gonna come out.

MAGGIE: This process creates a certain anxiety.

MAXWELL: Yeah, it's an anxiety. It imprints it on your brain. I'm shooting a lot of times with auto focus with an internal light meter doing a lot of bracketing work. But the limited number of shots and not being able to immediately see the image after you take it, creates a stress. It's really just like anxiety, but yeah it's funny how that is sometimes exciting.

MAGGIE: Simon, when you were taking these photos in Alberta in 2025, were you thinking a lot about your earliest moments in Alberta and your perception at this age and reflecting on your childhood? How did it feel going back into this mindset to reproduce that childlike vision now as an adult?