Learning to find inspiration in the dysfunctional.

Question: Who are you?

Copeland: My name is Sebastian Copeland.  I’m a photographer, lecturer, and an environmental advocate. 

Question: Why did growing up in Britain and France teach you to “find inspiration in dysfunction?”

Copeland: Well I mean I was jokingly referring to the age-old conflict between England and France.  And my parents decided to challenge that tradition and were not very successful at it.  So I was . . .  My mother is British, and my father is French.  They separated fairly early, but luckily they have remained friends.  It was dysfunctional at first.  It’s challenging at times for a child, I think, to be bicultural.  But it paid off in spades later on in life, so it has given me some tools to deal with a variety and discrepancies between cultures.  And as it is now I consider myself to be tri-cultural, because I’ve lived in America for . . . in excess of 25 years I think.  Yeah 25 years.  So just . . . I think it’s great to be able to . . .  First of all I’m bilingual and that helps; and then tri-cultural in the sense that I can navigate between these different countries and feel either not completely at home, but certainly not completely foreign either.  My father is a classical conductor, and there is a long family lineage in that discipline.  My great uncle was a very famous pianist who was ____________ favorite pianist.  And so I was brought up in environmental classical music, which translated later on in jazz; and then of course in my rebellious stage, that translated not surprisingly, I suppose, in punk rock.  So I had a sort of fairly broad range of musical exposure.  And to this day I consider music to come in two genres, and that is good and bad.