Joe Rogan Experience #1910 - Mark Laita

(drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.

Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (instrumental music plays) Hello, Mark.

Hey, Joe.

How do you do what you do and maintain any-

Mental health?

Yeah.

(laughs)

(laughs) Let's just tell everybody-

Let's-

... you, uh, you have the YouTube show, Soft White Underbelly, which, uh, I, I found a while back and I, I just watched one video and then I went down the rabbit hole. And now, today I binged a bunch of them preparing for this and poof. Dude, it's so sad and so heartbreaking and, um, you interview all kinds of people, addicts, uh, prostitutes, johns, uh, gang members, and, uh, why Soft White Underbelly? Why'd you come up with that name?

Um, I, you know, I remember my dad when I was in the '60s, '70s, talking on the phone with, you know, I, I heard that ter- that term being used to, you know, it's, it's like a, an al- an analogy for the, the vulnerable part of, of whatever you're talking about. I don't, I don't hear that term anymore, but I remember it back then. And I always thought it was a cool name. Blue Oyster Cult used it as their original name before Blue Oyster Cult, um, so I just ... It was a fun name. Makes people wonder what the hell it's all about.

Well, it's very appropriate.

Yeah, yeah, I think it's fitting for what I'm doing.

Completely. How did you get involved in interviewing all of these people that are sort of downcast from society?

So I'm, uh, I've been an advertising photographer since I was 14 years old, or, or after high school really and went to college for it, but I was always into photography and then I got into advertising and I did that for decades and decades. Had a great career and then what happened is, you know, you do it... My advertising work was so slick and beautiful and perfect and everything's retouched so it's, it's better than life. And you do that for decades and you get burnt out and you, you just get fed up with the perfection and all the aspirational aspects of advertising and I just wanted something that was real. You know, I, I recognize that there are things going on in the world that weren't so perfect and I, I just felt like my life was out, out of balance because e- you know, like I didn't wanna grow old and have my kids say, you know, "What, what did your dad do?" "Oh, he, he shot advertising his whole life." I wanted to do something different and I've always done these side projects even when I was a teenager in Chicago. I, uh, I was always fascinated with the drunks on Madison Avenue on the west side. You see these guys sleeping on park benches and just with a paper bag and a bottle in their hands. It's like, what? It was such a, it's such a interesting lifestyle to me because I didn't grow up like that. I grew up, you know, in a pretty perfect household. Mom and dad, parents loved me, it was great, but I was fascinated with all that dark stuff and, uh, that continued throughout my career. I was always like doing portraits of people like that and, you know, I didn't really do much with it until about 1999 I started, uh, working, you know, while I was doing advertising I would sneak away whenever I had a hole in my schedule which wasn't often but I, you know, for 10, over nine or 10 years I went to each of the lower 48 states and started photographing everything that exists in the US, uh, cowboys in Wyoming, drunken Indians in New Mexico, ballerinas in New York City, repo men in Oklahoma, auto mechanics in Alabama, peda- uh, uh, pedophiles (laughs) in, uh, all over the country, um, polygamists in Utah, Am- the Amish in Pennsylvania. Just everything, like everything that kind of fits for... Oh, that's Pennsylvania, they have Amish there so I would pick that and I'd hunt it down and find it. So I got really good at finding these subcultures that we've all heard about but you didn't really know if, you know... Some of them are easier to find. Drug addicts are easy to find, um, but there's other subcultures that I've found that are, that are more difficult to find and certainly difficult to photograph and now it's really difficult to interview. So I did that book, came out in 2010, cre- it's called Created Equal and I was really proud of it. Put, you know, my heart and soul into it, but it, it didn't really... Like I would, I would sit at, at a table and somebody's looking at it and they would go, "Oh, what did he sound like? What did the cowboy sound like? What did he... How did he get like this? How did, how did he get this career? What was his childhood like?" You know, all these questions. And I didn't, honestly, didn't know it for each of these 200 portraits in that book and I realized if I'm gonna make this really stick the way I wanted it to, I'm gonna have to do it with, with an interview as a backstory. So it's a portrait and then I would just do these interviews that might just exist behind the, the portrait as you're looking at it and that's how I started. And you know, I had, I had... I always had studios like, like on Skid Row like while I was doing advertising in LA at my LA studio I'd had another studio down on Skid Row which was, you know, cheap and, you know, I would just sneak away there on, on s- slow days and just photograph all the cr- the, uh, the drug addicts, the, the prostitutes, the transgenders, the mental health, you know, the people that are off their rockers, everything, gang members and, uh, I loved doing it but I never really did anything with that until I started... Canon came out with a Canon 5D which is a cam- uh, a still camera that did video and I just was playing around. I do- I never shot video in my life and I'm like let me just put this thing on a tripod and interview somebody and there was this girl Caroline who was a, a heroin addict prostitute down on Skid Row and I was like, "Hey." You know, I got to know her and I said, "Hey, would you wanna just sit and tell me your life story?" And she goes, "Sure, I'll do it." So she sat down and did this and it was heartbreaking like Jesus Chri- I just hit a grand slam my first time at bat, like, like a really like horrifying story and she, uh... So I did that and I was like wow, that was, that was amazing. I started doing a few more and they were all interesting in their own way. Every single one was diff- you know, very different and interesting and I'm like, "May- maybe there's something here."And, uh, went through a divorce, went through, you know, my mom, uh, went through a lot of stuff. My mom died. Uh, went through a divorce. Uh, my advertising industry- you know, advertising industry changed a lot in th- in those years. Like, th- this was like f- seven years ago, seven, eight years ago. And I just, I gave up my studio and I just kind of like didn't know what I was doing with my life. And I, I had all these storage units for all my studio equipment and my furniture. I was building a house, so I had all my furniture in the house. Had like four or five different storage units around the city. I'm like, "Let me just consolidate all these into one big space and maybe I'll have room for a studio up front and I'll start doing those portraits and those interviews I was doing on Skid Row before and s- just see if I enjoy doing that." 'Cause I didn't know what I want to do with the rest of my life. You know, I was like, I wasn't doing advertising anymore and, uh, I didn't know what I was. You know, I just, I was just drifting and I started doing these and I just loved it. Just loved it. And I started doing them every day. And I've done it pretty much every day for over three years now.