My father has over-drunk and over-smoked for 50 years whenever my mother scolds him.

Miguel, you've had enough to drink, he replies.

Conchita, you want to live forever?

The images of photographers Tony Mendoza and Chaz Kreider are vastly different, but their reasons for making photographs is very similar.

Art just seemed to be something that I could apply myself to that wasn't going to evaporate immediately.

It was like a long distance.

Medium that I could work on and develop and develop and develop.

Whatever furthered my knowledge about photography and art, I took those kind of jobs.

Self-taught, I've worked in various capacities in the photographic field.

I never really took classes.

I just took snapshots all my life and liked pictures and liked to make pictures.

And when I decided to do photography, basically I had been photographing for 10 years and I knew technically what I had to do.

And I just started kind of finding my way and doing more or less what I pleased.

So I got going in this very simple direction, where she is.

To record things around my life.

Tony Mendoza teaches photography at the Ohio State University and publishes his photographs in small books.

The first book I did was this little thing about a cat.

I realized that what I wanted to do was simply to photograph whatever happened in my apartment.

And then I moved from just still photography to still photography with little stories because I realized after a while that when you photograph people, a picture is too ambiguous.

And what interested me was all I knew about these people.

So I got going with writing, telling little stories.

I kind of like this one.

Ann and I were a couple in the commune.

We didn't believe in being possessive or jealous and enjoyed a satisfying relationship for two years.

When we separated, we decided we were mature enough to stay in the house and deal with the difficult feelings surrounding new mates.

Ann became involved with Mark and other men in the house.

I became possessive and jealous.

All my work, everything I've done, I think has drawn some attention has been noticed because it's somewhat unique.

I don't know that, you know, my work is great or whatever, but one thing I know is nobody has done the things I've done, and basically that's a good thing because it hits people out of the blue.

Artists is never poor.

Chaskrider has lived in Columbus for many years.

He supports himself through commercial and fine art photography.

I think a good work of art works on both levels, the content and its formal qualities.

I pick from three general fields.

My interests happen to be, I'm interested in surrealism, Zen Buddhism, and the erotic and the sensual.

So those components are coming into play at all times.

This current body of work is heavily borrowing from the Surrealist tradition.

Still-life landscapes.

It's an incorporation of bringing objects and setting them up and doing a still life, but the the background or the that I've constructed is a miniature landscape like a desert.

I have a sand in the foreground and then in the background a vista or a mountain or some range to create a great sense of distance.

But I'm only really working within a space of maybe 12 feet.

Well in this photograph what we have here are two balls that are quite similar, but as you can see, this one is much larger, that is much smaller.

Through the camera, even those are relatively side by side through the lens, the smaller ball will have an illusion of being much further back in the landscape.

The process I use, I work in black and white and then I pull black and White prints and then apply an aqua dye.

Essentially I hand paint the photographs.

This aqua dye or this method that I use Something allows me to, um...

Either work in a light pastel or go to a real saturated, intense color.

Usually I just do a piece and it comes from, I don't know where, just an idea and then I set it up and after I've executed it, then it begins to say something to me.