Interview With an Artist

Jock Sturges, photographer of beauty and form, is one of this generations most celebrated photographers. Despite being respected by his peers and loved by his subjects, Jock has endured more than his fair share of public criticism. He is a prolific photographer with more than a dozen published works including three limited edition portfolios and nine books, his most recent being a colossal color book titled Life Time published in 2008 by Steidl. You need only view the images that Jock creates to understand the admiration and respect that he holds for the friends that he photographs.

Why do you make photos, what is your purpose?

I make photos first and foremost because I want to own them. If someone else had somehow magically made the same pictures I would still want to own them. My work is not about photography itself per se – rather an overwhelming affection for aspects of identity, beauty and line that I want to see repeated in objects I can admire in permanence.

Photographs are a substitute for something, aren’t they? They are not the reality depicted; they are a simply a thin copy. The reality depicted doesn’t exist any longer because time erases everything, second by second. Sooner than later all things go away despite memory’s best efforts – unless of course one has had the good fortune to have made a successful photograph. In that circumstance a picture has the possibility to actually become memory.

As a young photographer, I was always studying the work of the other photographers whom I admired in an attempt to understand how it was done. I thought then that it was most important to understand how pictures were made technically. But it pretty quickly became apparent to me that the technical engine was far less important than the photographer’s larger motivations in making the work in the first place. It was the “why” it was done that mattered, not the “how”. The how had to be there – the craft understood and perfected – but the big story in pictures had to do with what their makers knew about what they had before their cameras. That’s where their work became fascinating. Their pictures were showing me what they knew that I didn’t.

Since then, that has been my mantra; it is what photography is about that matters to me. All important inspiration and revelation dwells in the “about”.

Where does your subject in art come from and how do you work?

The origin of what I do is simple. The second youngest of five brothers (no sisters) I was sent away to boy’s boarding schools and summer camps starting at age 8 and then at 18 went from there to four years in the US Navy which was pretty much a men’s club at that point in history. Out of the military at 23, I found myself in a small liberal, coed college and thus in the presence of women in a meaningful way for the first time in my life. Glory be. My work of the opposite sex began then and has never stopped. 23 years of deprivation forged an unflagging fascination that endures to this day.

As to how I work with my models, that is even simpler to describe. We spend time together, know each other, family to family, for years. We are friends. And once in a while we make pictures together. I think that only about 1% of my time spent doing my “work” as a photographer consists of the actual taking of pictures. The rest of the time is dedicated to the simple social work that makes the photographs possible.

Once working, I try never to pose my models at all. The models who know me best do this best. They understand that “pose”, as it were, comes from them, from what they do naturally, on their own. This is true of all my best pictures. All of them. I see something organic, that has balance, that speaks to me, and I say, “Don’t move!” And that’s it. When I am lucky.

I was intrigued recently to read a magazine article by the photographer, Renée Jacobs, who had had the rare privilege of interviewing Charis Weston, a seminal figure in the history of American photography and without question one of Edward Weston’s greatest models. When Renée asked her what Weston’s working method had been like she replied that he just told her to do whatever she wanted. He trusted her to be herself and that was enough. I was so moved to read this because Weston’s work has always been so important to me. And now I read that our attitude towards our work is more or less identical. This I like. The important truth is that models know vastly better how to be themselves than any photographer ever can. If you are smart you will
Leave
Them
Be!

~

My pictures are almost always titled with the names of the models and the place and date they were taken. This is because the work derives from them and belongs to them. Their significance in the work vastly exceeds my own as an artist. I owe them everything. I wish more photographers were mindful of this. Without our models we are nothing.

What is the contrast between the intent of your work and the perception of your work?

That is an impossible question to answer because perception varies in every individual, and, more broadly, in every culture. There can only ever be differing perceptions of just what any given body of work or individual art object is. The range of possibilities is near infinite. What one person or group finds unlovely, another might consider transcendent, another shocking, another dull. It is finally not my responsibility nor of any great interest to me to address the external perception of my work at all. But I do not seek to please nobody. Not at all. I want first of all to please the people in my pictures and then, close behind, myself. If my work pleases the people it depicts and meets my own standards then I am done asking questions of it.

As far as I know, my work has never in any instance been found problematic by individuals or social systems in Europe. In the early 90’s, during the federal investigation into my work in the states, the FBI tried to persuade the French to investigate me based on their characterization of my photographs as problematic. The French police wrote them back and said, “Not only are such pictures not illegal in France, we actually think they are quite beautiful”. In the European context, the norm is a sexual maturity that surpasses that of many Americans by a significant margin.

I will say, however, that over the past two decades the intent behind my work has grown to incorporate a modicum of political ambition. Pathologically obsessive interest in humans very often derives from what is hidden, forbidden, not seen. My work hides nothing, conceals nothing and thus in time should hopefully work against such illness. Or so I would like to admire.

With your work being forcedly dragged into the political arena, what effect has that had on the way that you work?

It did initially have some effect because what happened to me in 1990 was not short of terrifying. If the feds had managed to convict me, I would have spent a minimum of ten years in prison which read to me like a death sentence.

When I went back to Europe in the midst of this investigation, I was avoiding a lot of compositional angles that I thought might be problematic, something I had never done before. My wife caught me doing this; she caught me crossing legs and on a few occasions even throwing towels on people. She told me to stop and said that I was effectively instructing my models in shame. Doing this was granting the forces assailing me an immediate victory – something they in no way deserved. She was right. I stopped. I have never sought to alter what I have done since.

How do you let an incident like the one you went through in 1990 not define you as an artist?

Starting in late 1990 during my federal ordeal I found myself doing a series of appearances and lectures around the country. The typical venue was a law school where I was often a panel member addressing the phenomenon of government incursions into private lives. The other panel members were people whose lives had also been aggressed for any number of different reasons at some point in the past — in one case twenty years previously — and there they were — still talking about it, still angry, still obsessed with what had happened to them. I remember thinking that these people were unwittingly giving their enemies a terrible, permanent victory over them. It felt nothing short of tragic to me.

Then, right after my case was dropped by the feds, every major law firm in California wanted to represent me pro bono to go after the SOB’s because their “investigation” had destroyed a fortune in my personal material. I was understandably angry about this so I said, “Sure. Let’s sue the bastards.” But, after a year of endless meetings during the last of which I discovered that the process could take as much as another twelve years or even more, I made up my mind that I was done with it. Finis. I walked out. I wanted to get back to doing what I loved to do, what I knew how to do: making photographs. So I went home and gathered together every document, every legal brief, every press clipping, every shred of paper that had piled up over the two traumatic years of the investigation and threw it all away. I miss none of it. And frankly, I would rather not talk about it anymore because the discussion distracts from looking at whether my work is any good or not based solely on its own merits. And that of course is all I have ever wanted.

Explain your relationship with the people you photograph and what makes your work different than the typical photographer-model relationship.

I know them; it is as simple as that. Every photograph of a person ever made is a record of the relationship between the model and the photographer. And if, as is sadly too often the case, there is no relationship between the two, it is a record of the absence of a relationship which, from my perspective, is a hollow thing.

Consider fashion magazines. Now that the cold war is over, the entire planet can be scoured for beautiful faces. And it is! The greatest models ever found now are paired with some of the most highly skilled photographers ever to work in fashion using the latest, amazing, digital technology. All of these superlative, the best of everything, and still you can buy one of these magazines and throw it away half an hour later. How is it possible that so many superlatives can result in something that is so easy to discard, so unmemorable? I feel that the root cause of this is the lack of relationship, the nearly complete absence of anything human, anything that truly touches us. You wouldn’t throw away books by Mary Ellen Mark or Sally Mann because the human power in their work moves us, reaches us where we live.

So that’s the engine in my work. I know my models very well and that knowledge is present in the photographs. It’s hard to describe this finally because what’s manifest in the images is so subtle, so subliminal It’s impossible to say, It’s here, It’s this, no this and then this… It can’t be done. It’s ephemeral but somehow there. The relationship, the trust, the attitude of the model to the photographer and vice a versa is there — somehow magically included.

It is in the smallest of details that we have the most profound access to the character, personality, and truth of who people really are. You don’t have access to those perceptions in your photographs until you know your models extremely well and you are trusted. Until you trust one another. The act of making photographs is a mutual act; it is collaborative. Collaboration is a very important word in what I do – one of the most important. We make pictures together.

Finally, I should also say that I want to make pictures that reify people, make them feel better about themselves. I want the pictures to expand their sense of self, their sense of what is possible for themselves. Simply put, I want my pictures to have a strong and positive effect in their lives. Photographs can do that. Truly. I know they can because more than a few of my models have told me later in their lives that this was true for them. This also I like.

How do you see? What is it about a scene or subject that speaks to you and causes you to make the photograph?

I will come at this answer from four slightly different directions.

~
- Taste.

I don’t think that anyone would argue against the notion that it is not possible to dictate taste – or at least it shouldn’t be. It is something that is inherent, built into us. What I choose to photograph has everything to do with the unique, densely interwoven tapestry of experience and association that is my life. A vital component of this is all of the art that I have ever looked at. Of course. Everything we have ever done, seen, experienced, endured, loved, hated, etc., etc combines and creates taste. I like this. Never mind why! As one small example: I was a dance photographer working with the San Francisco Ballet and other ballet companies in the Bay Area for fifteen years. My having worked with classically trained dancers for so long is very likely where I developed my appetite for the slender, athletic line that you often see in my work. Imagine that.

Of course what I respond to in the world in general is unique to me and I would never promulgate what I do as what anyone else should do because nobody else has lived precisely my life. Nobody else should have or could possibly have the same precise taste. There is no discussion here of better or worse – just difference.

So, how does one develop taste? The logic is simple. The more art you look at, the better. The richer your experience is in your individual world, the more you read and think and, I dare say, the less you watch television, the better are your chances. The more you work with a camera and then go out and try and try and try again, the more progress you will make. You try to not take picture the way other people would like you to take pictures; you try and find out what is in the world that you want. For yourself. What bite do you want to take out of the world that only you really want? And while your taste and visual appetites can be understood to be the net result of all your experience in life up to any given moment, you can as well reprogram yourself to a higher level by consciously seeking out as much new experience as possible in the arts and elsewhere. You will be what you eat.

~

- The color blue.

If someone were to ask you what your favorite color might be and you were to answer, say, blue – or whatever else might be the truth in your mind — imagine their saying, “Well, that’s wrong. How can you not like green.” You would, I hope, think that they were deranged. We like what we like. How or why is rarely knowable but the truth is that each of us is entirely unique in every aspect of how we work as an aesthetic engine. I’m sometimes a bit cross with art schools where young people are subjected to significant pressure to think in parallel as it were. Politically correct. This fad. That. My idea of a good diagram for an education in the arts would look more like a bomb going off with streaks of light headed in every imaginable direction, each uniquely relevant to the individual truth and potential of each individual student. Zippity. Nothing parallel. Sorry, Derida. Deconstruct that.

~

- Genius.

Everybody is a genius in their own life. I truly believe this. If you can connect artistically with what you personally know about the world, the work that results is going to be exotic and fascinating to a significant portion of the rest of planet. Really. Each of our lives is so different. You are and know so much more than you realize. Paul Strand spent the last decade of his life photographing in his back yard – my favorite of all of his work. See?

~

- What I know that I don’t know.

So here are some things that I know. I know that if I wait for and then work in beautiful light, my chances are better. I know that if I know my models, if we know each other well and there is real affection and appreciation between us, a good relationship en bref, my chances are better. I know that if I pay close attention to the figure/ground problem, if I work with a ground that I know well, a ground that is clean and simple, lyrical, my chances are better. I know that if I keep my pictures simple, uncluttered, well focused in both senses of the word, my chances are better. But I also know that I can do all these things right, perfectly, and make nothing but failed pictures. And then, magically, a good one. And I don’t know why this is. Try as I might, only a very few pictures ever really succeed. And the agent of their delivery seems simply to be luck. Sweet Serendipity. I try equally hard all the time. Twenty are bad, one is good. Why? We don’t get to know.

There is an important addendum to this last thought. After empathy, I believe that there is no more important aspect of character in a photographic artist than humility. Our best images so often arrive by chance. We are entirely dependent on what is outside us, in the world, for our art. Without a subject, without models, we are nothing and thus, in my own mathematics, I never consider myself more important than the people I photograph. Without them I don’t exist. Nope. So, please be kind to your models. Treat them better than well. We owe them everything. I do. You do too.

How do you decide between using color or black and white?

The color/black-and-white dichotomy is interesting because there was a point in time when I wouldn’t have considered doing color. This had to do with the form color pictures could take. Until a very few years ago even the best color prints represented what I considered unacceptably imperfect reproductions of what had been before the camera. But now, with today’s technology, I am able to make color prints that completely satisfy what I want visually in a color photograph. Modern digital printing with Epson printers and their magnificent ink sets have revolutionized the medium for me. Now I love working in color!

For my take on color vs. black and white, let’s start with how I understand the difference between a fine-art photograph and a snapshot. Let’s say that a snapshot is a one-to-one reproduction of that thing there. A fine-art photograph begins with that, but then it steps into metaphor; it becomes about states of being and contains a larger underlying metaphor that surpasses its superficial content. Snapshots are about that thing there. Done. Fine art pictures are about that thing there – and then about the world of ideas that gives us meaning on a larger scale. The translation is from the specific to the general as it were.

You could, for example, say that many of my pictures are about innocence, the complex opposite of innocence, change and evolution. They are about what stays the same and what doesn’t stay the same, about personality and the space between the pictures. All of these ideas and more are more easily advanced in black and white than color because black and white is already one step removed from reality. It rises into metaphor that much more readily. Black and white is not a perfect reproduction of that thing there; it’s a reduced reproduction. Reduced to essentials. Black and white images are, in a funny way, a bit of a cheat, because their remove makes the translation to studies of metaphor that much easier. I will say, though, that, if they are a cheat, they are a more than adequately elegant one because work in black and white will always be my first love in photography.

Color, because it is stuck to reality by its strong inclination towards verisimilitude, is more difficult. But I love this — the fact that color images reproduce the people in my photographs that much more precisely. So I actually like this result and the increased difficulty, the challenge of it!

Further. When I set out to work in color, color in and of itself is never the point. I pretty much ignore it when I am shooting. I am just looking to make pictures that are true. Once in a while the color in an image is in fact remarkable – especially in images made in the rich wash of light so often given to me by late evenings in France. But it is never the point of any given picture. That will always be the transmission of identity.

How important is it to remain true to yourself and your individual vision as an artist?

As far as I am concerned I don’t have any choice; it’s the only thing that I know how to do. It’s not important, it’s not even essential; it’s all I can do.

The question presupposes the notion that there might be another option, that something might conceivably succeed in dissuading me from my commitment to the work. In my case the government didn’t manage this despite their best effort so I can’t imagine any one else pulling it off either.

Does my experience exist as any kind of general model? I can’t say that. I’m leery of people, not least of all myself, who attempt to suggest that what they have done, what they do is the way to go. I do admire committed artists, especially when that commitment hasn’t come free of charge. I suspect many others do as well. But everyone who wanders into art should be allowed to invent themselves step by step – on their own terms. Thus I am inclined away from generalizations about whether or not they should stay the course. To each their own direction.

I will also say this: I don’t consider myself a rocket scientist – my gifts in life are limited. If I am to leave anything of any moment behind me it will require me always to have worked as hard as ever I can with what little I have. I have. I do. I will.

Are you a romantic?

Absolutely and without question. I am a romantic. I am not an atheist but I don’t escape that label by much. (I don’t think that anybody should be that sure about anything.) At the very least, I am profoundly agnostic. But, nevertheless I do have mystery in my life. Truly. I have a profoundly romantic affection for people and I think if I have a religion, that’s it. Other people. Relationships can be and often are transcendental for me. So, am I a romantic? Yes. Thank you. What’s it to you?

How does, or should, the word “passion” relate to an artist?

I was bemused in graduate school when I heard people standing around talking about what they should do in art. I was perplexed that they didn’t know. I never had the least doubts as to what I wanted to do, I always knew. I was lucky — always passionate.

That passion has been tested in the politically correct climate of graduate seminars, by the rabid moral idiocy of government agents, by the occasional poor review in the press and by the jaundiced opinions of a few intemperate personalities from the not-so-Christian right. But I have never been dissuaded by any of them. Not for a second. Depressed? Yes. Once or twice. But never deflected.

When I first began to photograph seriously as a young man it never occurred to me that my lot in the art world would improve past anonymity. I frankly liked making pictures so much that it didn’t seem imaginable that one could have that much fun working and have it result in any material success in the world. So I never counted on success or even really thought about it. I just worked and held other jobs to keep myself in film and paper. Every second I wasn’t working I was shooting or in the darkroom – day and night, night and day. I loved it. Still do.

In fact a tiny percentage of people have the good luck to actually succeed in a substantial way in the arts and become famous, recognized. I have been very lucky in my life to have that happen for me to some small extent. But this is important: As evinced in my own life I think what succeeds is not a thirst for success, but, ironically, just the opposite. If the thirst for success comes before working then the cart is planted solidly in front of the horse and nothing goes anywhere. But when the passion to make the work is so great that the artist in question moves past caring what anybody else thinks – that is when the lightning can strike. When artists do what they do simply because they love doing the work so much that it becomes enough of a reward all by itself – then they have truly solved the art problem. When that happens, the art organically becomes more and more refined, and everything that doesn’t matter gets cut away; that is when the art world sits up and says, “THIS is what we want”!

On the flip side, photographers who decide to attempt to replace passion with intellectual cleverness too often bore me to death. Their ideas are often so abstruse as to be incomprehensible to most of us, and leave one feeling stupid. The emperor’s new clothes. Or their ideas are so simplistic that one or two pictures make the point well enough to make further iterations unnecessary. Very. Thus conceptually derived work rarely contains any degree of passion for me that I find uplifting in any important way. But that is just me – my appetites are rarely thus assuaged.

No, give me the Shelby Lee Adams, the Mary Ellen Marks, the Edward Westons and Sebastian Salgados, the Joseph Sudeks, the Koudelkas, Meatyards and Disfarmers of the world because they were or are truly passionate and that is what I admire. That is the food for me.

Looking back, knowing what you know now, is there anything that you would do differently?

I was thinking about this very question recently on the occasion of my passing 60. (Jesus) In fact, with the obvious exception of my bitter waltz with the feds, I couldn’t think of anything in my life I might wish to have turned out differently. Ah, those federales… That’s the only chapter in my life that I wouldn’t have minded missing. But the only alternate models of comportment that suggest themselves which might have worked to head off that confrontation presuppose a life of fear and paranoia, of self-editing and doubt. Since I have always believed that my pictures have Truth as their essential virtue, there was no charm at all in any of that. So, no. I wouldn’t change a thing.

Besides, going back further, it was so useful to have had a childhood that chased me into the arts. I feel lucky that my art was given to me so simply. Now you don’t see it. Now you do. Ahhh…

There is of course one final and absolute reason I regret nothing in my past. I am astonishingly lucky at this end of my life to be in love with and married to a wife with whom I now share two striking girls: a nine-month-old and a three-year old, Maia, Maeve and Marine. The three of them together make of me as rich a man as one could ever know. If having done a single thing differently in the past risked delivering me to any other destination in life than precisely where I am now, it would hold not an atom of appeal. I am a profoundly lucky man. You see, there it is again.

Luck.

Jock Sturges,
Seattle, 2009

Listen to Jock talk about his new book Life Time.
Jock Sturges Life Time


You can purchase this book from photo-eye.

The content (photos and text) of this interview is copyrighted.
© Feb 09, Timothy S Morehead & Jock Sturges

For more than three decades Shelby Lee Adams has been photographing the holler dwellers of Appalachia, especially those of Eastern Kentucky; this is his culture, this is where he grew up. His first book “Appalachian Portraits” Published in 1993 has been followed by two more; “Appalachian Legacy” - 1998 and “Appalachian Lives” - 2003. The families that Shelby photographs are a little known and under-appreciated part of today’s society and although they have been ostracized by many, they represent a rich and valuable culture with an enormous amount of knowledge to offer. The people that Shelby photographs are more than subjects; they are his friends.

The past few weeks I have been trying to remember when it was that I first saw Shelby’s work but I just can’t remember. I do know however, that it was before I knew what real photography is (or should be) and, at the time, I was not developed enough as a photographer or person to fully understand it. I am not from the hollers of Kentucky where Shelby photographs but I am from the hills and hollers of West Virginia and I certainly have ties to the Appalachian culture.

If I am being totally honest, the first time that I saw a Shelby Lee Adams photograph it was a bit disturbing. It was like looking into a mirror for the first time and seeing someone looking back at me that I didn’t expect. Was it a photograph of me? No it wasn’t but in a way, it was. I knew these people. They were/are my neighbors, family and friends. I had just never seen them up-close and vulnerable before.

Why would anyone want to take pictures of us? The mountains and hollers I could understand, they are beautiful, but why us? Was he making fun of us? I didn’t know what his intentions were and I didn’t care so I never gave it another thought. Now… years later, a more rounded and mature person, I understand his work. Will everyone that views his photos understand? Certainly not. Will everyone try to understand? Once again, the answer is sadly “no”.

When I started this blog it was my intention, more of a hope really, to discover the motivation of the photographers that are making images that I consider to be “above and beyond”. I wasn’t sure if these artists would open up to me and if they did, would they tell the truth? With each interview I am finding out that these individuals are willing and want to communicate why they do what they do, and in that, we discover why they are who they are as well. This could not be more evident than with Shelby Adams.

This interview will be a hard read for some. It will deeply move and inspire some and it will enrage others. Some of you will probably come away thinking that it has nothing to do with photography, you would be wrong. It has everything to do with photography, especially that of Shelby Lee Adams. Following is the reason Shelby is the artist he is today and the reason he will forever be one of the most important and influential photographers of this generation.

- Tim Morehead, Site Administrator

Shelby with camera

For more than three decades Shelby Lee Adams has been photographing the “holler dwellers” of his native Appalachia. These are a people rich in culture and heritage, unfortunately they are mostly forgotten part of America. Ostracized by the majority of outsiders and a large part of their own communities these individuals have a lot to offer to those willing enough to embrace them. Shelby Lee Adams is not your typical photographer, these holler dwellers are not only the subjects of Shelby’s images; these people that collaborate with him in photographs are also his friends.

Grandma and cat

“Photographers tend not to photograph what they can’t see, which is the very reason one should try to attempt it. Otherwise we’re going to go on forever just photographing more faces and more rooms and more places. Photography has to transcend description. It has to go beyond description to bring insight into the subject, or reveal the subject, not as it looks, but how does it feel?” – Duane Michals

This is Shelby’s response to the above quote;

In 1973 I attended my first workshop with Duane Michals. It was a very positive experience, I was then twenty-three and looking for direction. He did this book called Journey of the Spirit After Death that I still have. This book illustrated death, life, angels, God, and the entire life cycle in a straightforward metaphorical sequential manner that was simply executed. It inspired me to perceive the potential for photography’s representation of the life cycle.

Well…. that’s what photography is about, but I kinda feel negative undertones of what he’s saying here by his references to [only] photographing environments or places; I feel we have always limited our experience of straight photography. Serious photography should be able to transcend description, especially documentary. If you look at something long enough it speaks to you and moves you, don’t look with just your intellect but with your entire being.

What I am trying to do with my work is to stay within a realistic realm and expand documentary [photography] to an artistic and humanistic metaphor, to convey a poetic form of feeling as Michals describes but do it with photographs of real human beings. I think we as a society often tend to view the descriptive face and we pull back and recoil, averting contact, that’s unfortunate. At least this portrait photographer is trying to photograph the human portrait to represent a universal communicant, as a poem, as a piece of music or written as a writer expresses himself in words. Suffering is a part of life and Art; we must accept this and resist recoiling in order to transform the document and ourselves into a transcendent communicating feeling, which I believe is what Duane Michals is saying. But he is also defining documentary as… well, limited. It doesn’t have to be that. He says that we are just going to keep photographing places and rooms and we are never really gonna get anywhere.

So, how do we transcend description? Maybe that is the beginning of the problem. To understand, transcending description is not looking above documentary photography or people. Let’s incorporate and recognize documentary photography as an equal element in the arts. How we develop and form our very attitude is where many of us fall short. Integrating one’s emotions and heart with the intellect represents that process for me. Beauty is easily appreciated, the darker part of nature must be also, and we need both to reflect a balanced sensitivity to humanity and the arts.

We, as objective viewers of documentary photography look at things from the outside, which is descriptive. We have to learn to look at photographs representing humanity with our hearts and minds from the inside. Stop idealizing. Stop objectifying. It is a balance and challenge to accept all, to get beyond just description; conceptualization by itself doesn’t work, just experience and let yourself feel the work. Understanding that there is no definite answer disturbs some; it’s about subjecting yourself to unknown experiences with an open mind that teaches us acceptance, if nothing else.

I believe the straight approach or formal approach, whatever you want to call my style of photography does that and more. That is my goal and my intentions, to celebrate our vulnerability and contradictions. The postmodern approach of the last 25 years has been predominately to isolate, separate and desensitize our emotions separating them from the human intellect. You can replace one with the other, but what are you accomplishing, separation and fragmentation? Is the world a better place now? Emotion is not solely of the mind but a part of the whole person, it take’s all of what is human (mind, body, spirit and emotions) to help improve our situation.

Minor White, photographer and educator while the editor of Aperture, said; “The documentary photograph, the literal image, is the ultimate illusion, the hopeless illusion, the dangerous illusion because the documentary perpetrates the illusion that life itself is the only reality. The documentary obscures metaphysics, the science of the real. The truth is… photography is the grand illusion. Let the camera metamorphose and in exercising its transforming power be true to itself.”

White also went on to say that we only photograph what we have already experienced, and what we are prepared to see. In other words, if we listen to our true inner voice and choose to follow it, it evolves and leads us just by the nature of picking up the camera. What we are attracted to photograph is our known or unconscious experiences and identity in life. That I believe. I have worked with dedication and an open attitude toward my people [the Appalachian community] from the beginning. I am always searching. Yeats said, “I am looking for the face I had before the world was made.”

I could conclude that my work is about finding the love I never had from my early life. All the mountain families I’ve photographed over the years openly accept me with love and respect, something my outwardly beautiful middle class Appalachian background did not provide. That has triggered my quest to find, share and say that love permeates this work and these people. Difficult as things are, there is an indelible accepting loving spirit that these people have, that’s missing from much of mainstream American art and society. Outward appearances do not portray the inner person, that’s always changing. Art transcends, so does the human spirit.

It is our value judgments that we bring especially to documentary that need reevaluation.

Freddie’s Place

What I enjoy about reading and viewing your work is that you have the ability to connect with the common man in a way that we can understand it.

I have had some good teachers.

Jiddu Krishnamurti, a spiritual teacher or a life teacher, if you will, that I’ve studied and read - people tend to get squeamish when you say spiritual teacher like it’s something bad for you [chuckles]; Jiddu Krishnamurti was a great teacher and I have read and studied several of his books. The reason that I was interested in reading about his life was that as a young man he had become very successful as a spiritual leader but one day he called together all of his followers and he disassembled his entire organization and all of the ideologies that were gathered around his teachings. He started over again to help the common man think for himself, without dogma. He did not want to be put on a pedestal; he wanted to be useful, teaching the common man. He devoted his life to writing and focusing on the human being as a “teachable” [laughs].

My first serious study, for ten years between the age of eighteen and twenty-eight, was of the art and poetry of the English poet William Blake. His ideas were founded in the depth of humanity, while some of his books are easy to read some of his work is very dense and difficult to read. I think his book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a great book for photographers because it is about the contraries; positive and negative contrast that we all experience.

Blake and Krishnamurti both deal with the full experience of inner human life; they both go to the darkest depths and to the highest states of knowledge and fulfillment. That seems to me what an artist should try and achieve with his chosen work. Don’t eliminate, try and make an image, try and execute a vision, take a path where you include all states of the human psyche in whatever approach you develop. Love and hate are seemingly contrary, yet very connected. Life and death, violence and peace, pleasure and pain, the dichotomy and contradictions are endless.

To photograph this life with my people [the Appalachian community] is endless because they are open to expression. They are not naive.

Having a somewhat practical sense, my pictures are intended both for my people in Appalachia as well as a museum in New York City. I believe that photography and art should and can serve all people; that’s part of my mission, to bring together culture, not to isolate.

Shithead the Pony with Noble Family

Is showing stuff that isn’t physically viewable intuitive to the way that you work or is it a conscious decision for you to show the unseen?

We need to disarm our attitudes as critics and viewers in the arts and how we view humanity represented.

Both of the quotes (Duane Michals and Minor White) that I mentioned are about limiting documentary photography from the onset and that is what I am trying to get beyond.

Now, to answer your question… When I am working in a formal manner trying to make a photograph, I set up my picture frame, I know where my right and my left edge is, I know where top bottom and middle is and I know what my lighting is doing. I am concentrating on my subjects and my vision and I am letting things happen simultaneously.

Your subjects bring in elements that contribute, or not, and if you resist you lose everything in the frame. But, if you give good direction, then you and your subjects benefit by communicating what has been anticipated or previsualized. It all happens spontaneously in a few moments. I am working formally but I am also open, interactive and spontaneous with my subjects and that brings up an invisible happening that one doesn’t preconceive. You are just engaging in life but in a way you are setting up a theater to let life happen, so that it can be photographed with your subject’s voice and your vision and time count. Your subjects are your collaborators who know you and you know them very well; you’ve done this a hundred times and things happen. That, to me, is acknowledging life and documentary as part of the process. It is directing the mood of the picture but it is also engaging with your subject and giving them an opportunity to express themselves, to speak and to be visible. Too much contemporary photography is absorbed in voices, lost in emptiness or promoting consumerism.

When I make an intimate portrait, with just one person engaging the camera I am still doing the same interacting but one might not see that in the picture. In the eighties I started telling my subjects to look into the front of the lens and find their own reflection. I work with a lens that is about three inches wide so when my subjects look at the lens and find their reflection, there is an unconscious acknowledgment that happens. They drop their guard releasing themselves and they become engaged. At the moment when that happens, I push the cable release. In this approach, the subject is obviously having their picture made, they are a participating subject but they’re also looking for themselves within the reflection of the lens which then confronts you, the viewer, with a more intimate portrait of that person; they are looking right at you and themselves at the same time. To me this conveys a more intimate reality of the person being photographed; them and you together, engaged.

Who is to say what and who is viewable? What is politically correct when so much of politics is corrupt? To what edge do I wish to take my audience? No serious artist wishes to repulse his audience. That is self-defeating.

There has been and still is a lot of adversity and unfairness practiced within my cultural environment, as everywhere. My subjects bear witness to their own treatment, by their own mountain people. It is our responsibility as participants in this world to see our injustice and hypocrisy and how we inflict it on each other. We should recognize this and make improvements on how we view and live with each other, not just in Appalachia, but universally.

It was never a conscious effort on my part to focus on the invisible [unseen] people as you say. But, the most soulful, honest, giving, loving and revealing portraits often come from those in deepest distress. This is part of my vision and sensitivity with people, a gift I must see through. To expand our tolerance levels and understandings of diversity in physical, mental and social interactions is crucial. Developing acceptability and compassion for others is all part of my works intentions. If we resist, we continue to isolate each other in society. We have not advanced as much as we think we have when our very instinctive nature is to resist difference.

In 1971 Walker Evans, while teaching at Yale, showed his graduate students photographs, stated in his lecture; “After all, pictures are a matter of feeling and it’s hard for a literary society to understand pictures because we don’t feel. But I would like you to open up and just receive these, not with your mind but with your feelings.”

My culture is a culture of soulful “feelers” who have different values than mainstream America and they are in want and need of understanding and respect. Let’s study within ourselves quietly and reflectively asking why do certain photographs make us uncomfortable? There lies the work, the transcendence and integration, overcoming our own fears, judgments and insecurity. Some would call this psychological work. Maybe it is but studying what makes us uncomfortable is productive work. The power of documentary [photography] is its ability to reach out beyond itself; we get trapped to often in truth or fiction issues, forgetting the feelings the work really conveys.

Today we are even more isolated from our feelings and in order to make effective art and to bring about change and transformation we have to work with the whole condition and intellect; the whole human being and our vulnerable emotions. What my fieldwork has taught me in 35 years is that, when we confront and develop our self-knowledge it deepens relationships with others making life extraordinary. Unfortunately, for many reasons our art culture in America today seems to be moving in opposition to that, saluting indifference and embracing façade; isolating the intellect from the heart and denying the relation of the inner to the outer, making doubt and vacillation truth.

For me to photograph the difficult, the unseen people, is to share the independent spirit of a person that has evolved out of a sea of adversity, retaining and assimilating independence and freedom in spite of restraint. Creating a view of themselves in the world that is unique, without direction and compromise or impetus. They hear voices of creativity independent of the system we embrace.
If left alone to our own devices, where does our creativity take us? In the mountains of Eastern Kentucky I have been amazed how many people I’ve discovered that live an independent self sustained life much like that of an artist; many evolving into individuated unique human beings. Ready made art and folk artists comes to mind, but I have found something else. Self made folks.

Photographs capture the outward manifestations and words describe what we think we see and understand. I’m proud to have known all these folks; they are inspiration, because the world is so full of the compromised. I leave you with a few names of people that fit this description from my photographic life. Bertha Banks, Lee Hall, Homer Childers, Ellis Bailey, Scotty Stidham, Nora Logan, Burt Slone, Rachel Riddle, Harlan Slone, Dan Slone, Gracie Hollins and James Napier to name a few. They are our heroes who have made a life from nothing given them, not beaten down, and never giving up. These too are the people who pray for forgiveness for the ruthless and inwardly poor who hurt them. We could all learn from their example.

Hardburley Porch

We are all inundated every day with thousands of images to the point that we have become visually ambivalent. How do you break through the numbness and complacency?

Having the viewer connect with the work has become the ultimate challenge.

Most of us today respond only to things that affect us personally. The more personal and centered I become in myself, the more I hope the viewer will quiet down (however you want to take that) and spend time with my photographs, that will reach and engage them. Hopefully they will attain the deeper communications within the intentions of the photographs and recognize the environments and the feelings expressed by my subjects and myself.

Everyone is different; it takes approximately three visits and sitting in the gallery environment for a while for some to understand. Others never make the effort. The first visit is usually visceral; the viewer usually reacts while resisting or absorbing; often times both. If one returns a second time, the viewer usually finds something to build a relationship too, a childhood memory, an empathetic experience or they explore an unconscious connection. During the third visit, one relates and reads the photographs free flowing, like listening to a symphony. Their interpretations are their own, as it should be, but interrelating with the work. That process is what I call Art, nonlinear processing which inspires communication and growth. This is work that requires time to penetrate and understand within yourself.

Books and the Internet are media vehicles that can also communicate in a similar manner. All take time. Everyone has twenty artists, twenty projects and twenty DVD’s that they are interested in and need time for. We have become an emotionally self-absorbed, over stimulated and fragmented society. If you can quiet yourself enough, black and white imagery today is ideal for meditative unlocking, releasing and interrelating sensory communications. Portraiture is infinite in providing maps of expressions within the psyche and hidden meanings to contemplate.

I used to be a college professor and I’ve found that fieldwork… fieldwork is becoming an archaic process… But it is what people benefit from the most. Go out and get involved in something, in fieldwork you really learn who you are. Fieldwork grounds you, and gives you the opportunity to interact with people discovering your own reality. You don’t know who you are until you are in the middle of it; that would be my message to students and to young people. Go work on an Indian reservation, go work in an inner city ghetto, get involved in a political campaign, take on environmental issues, just get involved with people. Travel is the greatest gift to fight and free yourself from cultural conditioning; you often aren’t aware of having any unconscious prejudice.

We seem to have more inner feelings today, paying more attention to ourselves, but we have fewer feelings for or about others and the state of the world. Emotions seem to have come to serve personal gratification only, rather than moral or social interaction; narcissism comes to mind. Emotions are strongly shaped by the media today; the media is guiding us on how to sublimate feelings. Existence must be experienced individually in order for us to utilize this precious gift called life.

People make right or wrong decisions every day that affect the living and dying. Can virtual reality contribute to this process? Yes, just as other inspired concepts have and will continue to evolve? Someone needs to take Virtual Reality into fieldwork. VR database gloves, wearable computing clothing needs to be launched and studied within our oral traditional cultures to learn what modern man is loosing.

I love my mountain culture because it is an oral culture, expressing face-to-face interaction. Rooted in sensual dimensions of experience, the body is a big part of our experience here. Learn from it.

There is still much to be learned from oral cultures and they are evolving and changing all the time to protect their own value systems, we just don’t see it. We don’t see a lot because it isn’t formatted for HD TV. Actually, most of us only see the world through very narrow blinders; we just allude to a worldview. Ambivalence and ambiguity rule much of our emotional life; we have an abundance of material but only a few healthy passionate artistic commitments.

“People walk the roads, but they can’t see.
It’s what anybody’s thinkin’ about, when they see somethin’.
It’s only what you thinkin’ is what you see.”
Hort Collins, Hooterville

James and Clapper

Do you feel that artists need to build a relationship with their subjects or do they need to remain detached?

I have always said about my work that it is subjective, personal and autobiographical. My first book was published in 1993 and this is basically the description used.

Ok… well then, the documentary photographer is objective. Right? But all along I have said that I am subjective so I guess what I am doing is drawing a line and asking can you see a difference? Isn’t this objective view what critics define as limiting? Mine is a personal quest of a personal experience and concern. Assignment work of course is to describe a situation with sensitivity and feeling to strangers but its intent is objective documentary. The FSA work as I see it was assignment work, the ultimate benchmark-defining documentary [photography]. People still confuse the two approaches and, without study, the outward results do perhaps appear the same.

One might observe the subjective personal motivation and intent of the artist with his subjects to see how subjective relationships inform the photographs in time and space. Relationships open up the person willingly. It really isn’t about subjective/objective relationships, we as a culture and society just want to continue keeping some folks away from ourselves because we fear them. We need our distance and don’t wish to reevaluate.

In my fieldwork I call myself a participant observer. That means that I go into an environment and I get involved. I listen to families tell stories about their life, who their relationships are with, how their children behave and then I share what’s going on in my life, personally and professionally, we have a meal together and then we make pictures.

I am not an objective observer, I am a participant observer. Participating initiates give and take in knowing and photographing people and making formal portraits. For me, it is the most effective way to be and to make good pictures that I feel are honest and have dignity. You have to know and understand your subject’s values and beliefs. Plus, it helps to approach this work non-judgmentally, only then can the artist subjectivity resonate.

My subjects tell me what they like and dislike about photographs and we study the Polaroid’s. There is this continual dialog that goes on. The dialog and the repeating visits are very important because these are real relationships. The pictures that I make are built on other pictures and our personal histories. My subjects have the memory of the picture we made five years ago or six months ago; I always bring back pictures for my subjects and that triggers new pictures and new ideas.

So, I call my work collaborative because my subjects respond to the picture from a year ago and they have an idea of where and what they want to do in the new picture. It’s collaboration, I am the director guiding the shoot and I understand that, I wouldn’t want it any other way. However, my subjects view and critique the Polaroid’s and pictures, respond to them, and then we make new photographs. There’s a lot of give and take.

When I have someone in front of the camera I’m always curious about what he or she is thinking, how do they feel? If they start to cry and tell me what’s going on in their life at that moment I try and incorporate that feeling into the photo session. I will be patient and ask them to tell me their story; that is again what I call observing and participating with the subject but it’s also just being a human being. Then I ask permission to take a picture and they give me a more shared and knowledgeable photograph. The time shared together and the conversation gives something to my subjects and myself immediately, not just a Polaroid. The conversation remains confidential inviting you the viewer to resonate and question the emotional feelings conveyed within the photograph. Next year with the same subject we make another new photograph; life gives us another lesson and circumstance to witness. My photographs and relationships build on each other. I don’t know anyone else who works in this manner.

I want to know how people are feeling, what’s going on in their life before, during and after I make their portrait. That’s important, it doesn’t mean that you have to do that to make great pictures, obviously many photographers don’t. Time, multiple perspectives and relationship are part of the process for me; I’m also a part of this culture. In my opinion, you can’t get close enough to your subjects and I have never lost interest in doing so. People are incredibly fascinating and complex, especially from the inside which so affects what one presents to the outside.

Cody at Swimming Pool

Do you consider yourself to be an anthropologist of sorts?

Boy that comes up a lot.

Anthropology is the science of studying people, their culture and behaviors but I am not approaching fieldwork with any set methodologies, I would probably be the world’s worst anthropologist because I don’t follow any of the rules [laughs]. A great book on anthropology is “Tristes Tropiques” [1955] by Levi-Strauss; he spent five years once with the Indians in the rain forest of Brazil and he describes his mindset. “There is no way out of the dilemma. His sin is to be bound to two cultures, and therefore, to none. He calls his predicament an abyss out of which he can communicate with no one - except perhaps his cat.” He refers to his working process as a kind of forbidden knowledge between two worlds and the people, only to be understood by a few subtle investigators. I identify with his description; to be involved is a total experience.

To give an example; my first ten years photographing after graduate school, I was academic and idealistic using what I called the “Robert Cole’s Rules of Order” approach in executing fieldwork and I had read and studied his excellent opus work “Children of Crisis,” series. I was pretty firm about not having too close of a relationship with my subjects, getting close but not too close and certainly not contributing to the wrong causes; an alcoholics drinking for example. Alcoholism is a problem with some families I work with, some, not many.

I had not found my own way of working with people yet.

After my first ten years, I yearned to help people more and I’d give them money for groceries only to find out that they would end up buying alcohol. Then, instead of giving money, I would go buy groceries but I would end up spending half of the day going to rural stores and driving back and forth and then they would turn around and sell what I gave them for half value to buy alcohol. So you don’t really end up helping anyone, just frustrating yourself. Further, I found out that my people could only get to local bootleggers to purchase alcohol and their prices were twice what it cost me to bring in a six-pack or a pint of liquor. I reevaluated my idealism on this issue long ago and I now, when visiting, contribute small amounts of alcohol to someone who drinks.

An anthropologist’s approach would be to observe only and certainly not contribute but I became friends with my subjects and that changed everything. Some people are going to do what they are going to do regardless, and many do take advantage. The approach I used my first 10 years changed for many reasons.

If you get involved with people and you participate in their lives, you have to be willing to accept the way it is and “it” is part of the menu. That is part of life here and when I finally accepted that instead of my academic background idealism relationships deepened for me.

I am not supporting any negative addictive problems at all. You have to accept people in their daily life and if you want to truly understand people, how much can you really change? How much change can I bring? I can support people’s positive behavior in feeling good about themselves. When they see my books and see their pictures in my books and read their own words, they feel good about who they are. My work helps with building self-esteem and that is something I never thought possible when starting out. You can help some people to gain self-respect by giving attention in a difficult landscape where they don’t even have their basic human spirit recognized. It’s hard to comprehend in America. Some get put down by their own conditioned prejudice people that have just a little bit more than they do. I have learned to help people by just being friends but it’s not the anthropological approach.

Regarding dress and what people wear photographing, I rarely engage in that kind of dialogue. I photograph people usually how they appear when I arrive to photograph; it is their decision.

One of my friends said, “We enjoy having you here and having things done we never had before. Ain’t no way we see it any other way, we see it only in a good way. If anything, your pictures help more than anything, you let the people have the books and they enjoy seeing their selves in the books and what you write up. They always somebody that’s goin to be against you, in everything, don’t care what you do. Your work is original. It’s real life and it’s the way we live.” - Sherman Jacobs, 2008.

The Cock Fighter

From studying your work and having somewhat of a sense of who you are, I know that you consider what you do to be a great responsibility. How do you hold yourself accountable for what you show?

I am comfortable with my work and in myself and my subjects certainly have to be comfortable with things. The first step that happens when I am working on a book or an exhibition is that my subjects get a print of the final piece and we have a conversation. Making pictures is one thing when you are having fun and giving people Polaroid’s but when you are having your subjects sign a release for publication or presentation to the public it is different and you are responsible for explaining what you are presenting. My subjects are comfortable with me, I am representing them and it is an agreement that is reached between us. Rarely, but because of a divorce or change in a family situation some photographs have not been published, more for children’s concerns.

If my subjects are fine and I’m ok with it, it takes a couple of years to get to publication and then it’s released or shown in a gallery. We both live with the work for a while. That’s how I’ve always worked; that entire process can happen in a year but it usually takes a couple of years or much longer.

I’m not sure that I have answered your question. Accountability – what does that mean? It’s being responsible. You have to be responsible to your subjects and you have to be comfortable and responsible to yourself. And the third thing is the viewer; I want to challenge my viewer to challenge themselves. I want them to emotionally and intellectually see and experience material that they’ve never dealt with before. We often think we have, but we really haven’t.

We [the human race] are not dealing with the way in which more than half the word is living today. We need to learn from this world and we need to do so not as an economics study but as human beings. As artists, it starts with how were looking at each other. My audience and my training were in the more “elite” artistic world as a college professor and educator and I find people from this world more resistive. Academics often only want to theorize and articulate about certain concepts of culture and humanity. Oh great [sarcastically], but there’s a whole lot more and if we are really gonna make art that’s going to help the world and be insightful teachers we have to deal with our own shadows first. Please, stop blaming. Engage yourself.

We [the world] are always in a war somewhere. Why is that? Why don’t we really examine why it is that we are violent? I am not talking about the Appalachian stereotypes of violence; I am talking about human beings being human beings. We’re greedy, we form opinions and judgments to quickly and this is the beginning of violence; it hasn’t changed in thousands of years. Until we start dealing with this mindset as human beings and artists start incorporating basic emotional responses and human vulnerability as part of their work how we see each other is not going to improve. We are not improving because we are in denial about who we are and how we see each other. Categorization itself is a mental weapon of aggression. My people [the Appalachian community] have suffered from this for generations.

We view the photographic icons of the depression as conditions but the war in Iraq as a situation. If you look at the populations of the world we are seventy percent in poverty and we feel threatened because it’s the majority. We are becoming more a closed gated community of rich and poor. Look at this as a two way street, they [the impoverished] have something to give and offer; we have a lot to give and offer each other but we need to connect in creative ways where we are not threatened and going ‘eechh’, you’re shocking and your pictures are dirty, it isn’t any of that! Dirt is also a prejudice to over come! ewwh!

Where is our maturity and responsibility?

It’s much easier to blame the artist than it is to see his vision. Please, look for the splendor beneath the sod; with your heart and mind together. Love, it’s a flower that’s as beautiful as anything in the world; you just need to look with an open heart and honest emotions, things will come, open your closed and conditioned reactive mind. This is not an ideal world. Look harder and see what people who have nothing have. Develop attention, tolerance and patience that might lead to compassion for each other.

I am not a negative person. I am very much an optimist but we need to look at the world with knowing eyes, negotiate and talk to each other and stop feeling threatened. The poor of the world are innovators that will survive. The art gallery should be a learning laboratory; a place to study and experiment. Too often today it is filled with multiple identities confusing the viewer with compliancy, surfaces, masks and costumes. It is conceptual of the mind only, where the face and mask are easily interchangeable, to what purpose?

Dan, Krissy and Leddie

How do you feel about artists that create images solely for shock value? (I asked this question because I have heard numerous people say that Shelby makes the images that he makes just for the shock value.)

Starting out as an art student I was always in the library reading the biographies of artists. It is important to understand the motivations behind the artist who’s making the work; that is fascinating and intriguing to me. I can’t get enough of that, can’t know enough about an artist’s essential motivations that creates great creative work.

One example to be more specific would be the painter Francis Bacon who is one of my favorite artists. When I first saw his paintings, I think it was in the Marlboro Gallery in NYC, I started studying his work and the beautiful monographs that have been produced but I had never read a biography on his life until about five years ago.

Many people think and it has been repeatedly said that Bacon paints shocking pictures. The primal screaming pope and the images of animal carcasses with people in front of them; people say that his work is violent and nightmarish. I have always found it [his work] fascinating, somewhat from the dark side but I also think that his work is beautiful. He would say, “Majestic.”

So, when I read Bacon’s biography I found that his father was a racing horse attendant, alcoholic and cared for horses in racing stables. When Francis was young he got a severe beating from his father with some leather horse riding implements in a barn and it obviously affected him for the rest of his life. A truly creative sensitive person has to process and work with what is given him.

I think that one’s artwork tends to bring out what one’s life and childhood experiences are, consciously and even more unconsciously. To me, his work demonstrates a way for him to express life and knowing that fact makes me appreciate his work more. We all suffer in this life and have to go through living. Like it or not, that’s life and Bacon was able to transform his into these incredible paintings that are shown around the world today. It’s personal, but through art he has been able to depict life and transform as a metaphor that communicates and invites all of us to participate.
To quote Francis Bacon in conversation with David Sylvester:

David Sylvester: “Well, I think that a lot of the problem of the artist today, and the sort of impotence one feels in art today, is that people actually don’t know what to paint.”

Francis Bacon: “Isn’t it that one wants a thing to be factual as possible and at the same time as deeply suggestive or deeply unlocking of areas of sensation other than simple illustration of the object that you set out to do? Isn’t that what all art is about? I suppose I’m lucky in that images just drop in as if they were handed down to me. Really, I think of myself as a maker of images. The image matters more than the beauty of the paint.”
Knowing the personal story behind the person some intentions of the artist carries through. I think if someone is making shocking pictures just to be shocking that doesn’t last long and in the system that we have for evaluating art, it may take time, but it will be revealed for what it is. Basically, I believe in our artistic processes of evaluation even though currently, I find it really boring sometimes now going to galleries [laughs].

Some people do find my work disturbing. My work is not done with my subjects feeling disturbed and I don’t feel disturbed or feel that I am even trying to make a disturbing picture; but, I am not going to ignore certain situations or conditions that my people live in. Krishnamurti made a great observation; he said that if you look into the shadows long enough you find that there is great beauty there. I say you need to study yourself and your own emotions more; asking why you are reacting to things the way you are.

Our personal experiences, or lack of, determine how we view or refuse to see parts of life and art. One thing serious photography does is bring up a mirror to our unconscious, it reflects some experience that we’ve had earlier in life that might have made us uncomfortable or damaged us, for example; growing up in poverty, being victimized or living around someone that is maimed or harming others. Photographs can bring up or mirror back to us a lot of our suppressed states of mind; with a little patience this helps us reflect on our lives and bring into reality certain events so we can accept ourselves and grow. Art and photography, as with religion in Appalachia, helps us metamorphose ourselves and get to a more balanced state of acceptance and being whole.

I am symbolically working with certain syntax of the alphabet or colors from the artist’s palette in my Appalachian culture, emphasizing some less resonated but very important vowels and hues, not eliminating or picking more popular or palatable forms; that would make me more conventional. It’s as if my work selected me to consider and express some of the more somber forms of communication from my homeland. Remember, I am photographing living people who share boundaries of their life that are most unique and they need confidentiality. The photograph must say it all, nonlinearly and that is a restraint and discipline I welcome.

I read an interview by Tori Amos where she stated that at the beginning of her career the only thing that she seemed to do was piss people off when what she really meant to do is penetrate. You want to penetrate people with your message; you don’t want to just send them off. But, some don’t wish to see what your gift is.

I have always viewed my work to be an exploratory study. Sometimes you have to view a set of pictures and ask yourself “Why am I reacting this way?” This is serious stuff [voice changes to a somber serious tone], other people’s lives are in these pictures, far more than just my own; this is not my ego just making pictures. My subjects are committed to sharing their lives and helping to make these images. I have very committed criteria for making the kinds of pictures that I do. My subjects need recognition as human beings, ample amounts in fact; they don’t need more welfare checks.

There is also much enjoyment and satisfaction from the making of these images. This is soulful, playful and healing work for many.

The Purse

What affect did your father’s attitude toward the holler dwellers have on what you do today?

I had a father who grew up in shame of his culture and himself, so he worked to become successful, middle class and a company man. He worked for a gas conversion company and traveled around the country and Europe, so my childhood was spent growing up all around the country, always going back home to Kentucky for Christmas and summers. In a way I grew up in two worlds simultaneously. My grandparents, on both sides of my family, had big farms in Appalachia and were natives to their hollers. It was a wonderful place to visit and grow up as a child.

My father Jesse had this sense of shame about his culture. He was the exact opposite of his brother, Doctor Lundy Adams. Doc helped fund my art school and college education and he, like myself, loved the mountain people. He dedicated his life to the care of mountain people; the holler dwellers as we call them, and both men, my father and my uncle were big influences in my life. They both had very different approaches to how they viewed their life and their very cultural roots.

Lucky for me I had both, but I think most families are like that. Two brothers are always going to view the same situation differently. So, within the culture that I am photographing, the people are divided as to how they view themselves and live. And there’s a lot of “shame dumping” there that needs to be overcome.

When I use the word shame I am not saying it just about Appalachians, I am saying it as a word common to all. We all have shame, especially subcultures, and we all have core shame that needs to be addressed as part of our human responsibility.

“Human life is by its very nature shameful, and the repression of this fact becomes the hidden cause of much cultural damage.”
Mary Ayers, Author – “The Eyes of Shame”

See clearly what shame does in our society, to our group psyche and personal inner consciousness. Confronting this in the art galleries with documentary [photography] is my way. This can help us to interact more peacefully, see our insecurities for what they are. It can help make a better world, to curtail aggression and violence, to see and stop antagonism. We can all benefit from overcoming certain mental attitudes in which we are culturally conditioned. Traveling as I did throughout my childhood gave me a unique perspective.

Louverna’s Funeral with Brothers

Explain the ritual of photographing home funerals.

I think the funeral ritual does need to be explained.

How the Appalachians view funerals it is not a morbid thing at all, and this is very important for you to understand.

If you look at the culture and at what pictures they have hanging in their living rooms, represented is the entire cycle of life. It usually starts out with a baby picture, a picture of the couple when they got married or, if they didn’t get a picture, then there is usually a picture of the guy in uniform when he has just returned from the military with his wife and kids. Then there are lots of grandbaby pictures with grandma and pictures of the children. Then you have the funeral pictures.

What the funeral picture means [for Appalachians] is that it’s the last time a family member can have pictures made with their loving relative. When I do these photos I usually make several compositions. Last summer at a funeral I made about twelve different 4×5 compositions; all the brothers around the coffin, the sisters around the coffin, the husband’s side of the family, the wife’s side of the family and then the grandchildren. Everyone is having their picture made at the funeral because it’s their last opportunity to say good-bye and remember their deceased relative. It’s a formality. It’s a positive picture because it’s an opportunity for them to be photographed for the last time with the deceased that they love.

Now, when someone is buried they are buried with half a dozen or so family pictures placed in the coffin. Pictures of the spouse and relatives go in the coffin with the deceased. A lot of people aren’t aware of this, but this is an example of how important pictures are to the Appalachians. I have been told that some of my pictures have been buried with the deceased because my photos were their favorite pictures. To me, that is the highest honor that I can be paid by my subjects. Appalachian children are raised to know that death is a part of life and I feel they have a healthier view of life than those of us who are in constant denial of death.

Once I was at Harvard doing a slide lecture and I put a slide on of my first home funeral photo made in 1990 and a man asked me how I could get people to let me photograph a home funeral? It’s real simple, you can’t! You absolutely cannot photograph a home funeral; the family has to ask you. It only happens when you already have an established relationship and you are friends with the family. It is an intimate formalized ritual that Appalachians honor.

Tyler and Sheba

What is it exactly that you refer to as “the disrespected life”?

I grew up in the war on poverty era in the nineteen sixties when LBJ came to Appalachia and started what became a media frenzy of photographing and filming Appalachian’s and poverty. Welfare, health care and social services programs were implemented and this was called the “War On Poverty” program. I was in high school then and I remember the pictures and stories coming out in Life, Look and other national magazines. My uncle, being a doctor, traveled and treated mountain patients; I would go with him so I knew some of these people. In fact, I had met and taken some of these photographers to meet and photograph people I knew. There was this sense of shame about poverty that was created by the media then, it was unintentional but that’s what happened.

The needs were certainly there and the government was trying to help but how need was represented was compromising to the people. A lot of times the people felt objectified and used as examples, statistics and figures for government surveys. There were a lot of successful people living in Appalachia even then and they resented the association.

I hated photography during my high school days and I hated photographers [laughs]. I felt that they were hurting my people and it was emotionally difficult for me growing up and wanting to be an outsider. I wanted to get away and go to art school, go to college; this sense of shame and betrayal was part of my high school experience.

What that [ the “War On Poverty” program] created and what I still see today, even though Appalachia has colleges, super highways, schools, hospitals and all of the modern conveniences there is still, particularly within the successful Appalachians, a deep resentment towards the poor. There is, what I call, this invisible conditioned prejudice.

I photograph only the holler dwellers that suffer still today from much of that resentment. They are the ones most open to being photographed. To photograph them outside of their home environments and with other groups would make them feel ostracized.

I am trying to be polite here in describing this.

It’s a complicated culture. In Appalachia today we have millionaires and multi millionaires, outsiders and insiders running an active coal industry and local people that have benefited from the national energy crisis. It is not one economic situation; we have an upper class, a new middle class the locals call the WalMart crowd, the welfare people and then we have the people that I photograph. The people I photograph are the holler dwellers and there is social isolating prejudice, sometimes self inflicted.

If you could, imagine living your whole life feeling put down, devalued, cheated and not having…… barely the essentials. It’s a difficult life and I’m trying to say; “These people are real, laudable, deserving of praise and encouragement. They need respect and deserve it.”

Their children continue dropping out of high schools because they don’t like something said or done to them. On a deeper level in conversations, it’s because they were shamed in school or town by someone and made to feel inferior by a teacher, classmate or part time employer; its effect is stunning, it doesn’t take much there and everyone knows this. We are a mixed society contaminated by insecurity about who we are and we constantly rate and devalue each other. The self-esteem is so low for many of the holler dwellers, when bussed to town to get their education many young people feel inferior and defensive. Now, because of the countries energy needs, the country people have more income and jobs and we unfortunately have an invasion of drug related activity and this young group is even more vulnerable.

I try and treat people with respect and you wouldn’t believe what that does on a day-to-day basis when you visit families and you shake hands, share a sandwich, eat with them and treat them like an equal. They aren’t treated that way, with respect, in their own town or on their work sites - that is a really sad thing to say and [Shelby says to me, the author of this interview] please feel free to publish this because after thirty-five years I don’t care anymore. It needs to be said.

Some have described it as an old world feudal system of employment and living, for others it’s described as a leveling culture.

My culture suffers from an inherited conditional prejudice created generations ago; the media endorsed it, it is complicated and not correcting itself. The drug problem is killing people I know and care about. Low self-esteem contributes to addictive behaviors we all know this. I think it is about time that I’ve said this in print and not fear the consequences. I love these people; we are all ashamed to say that certain behaviors exist in America, that’s not my agenda. My concern is that all people should be treated with dignity and given respect and opportunities, they should not be blamed or made to suffer for others lack of compassion and support. Think. Their plight is not well known. They are truly “unseen” by society.

Visibility is valuable to these people. It is as valuable as their economic situation, as it is with any people; they just want some gratification and respect. They don’t want money and handouts they just want to be treated respectfully and given fair opportunities. We do not know the term discrimination or understand federal civil rights laws in the hollers. A ‘‘protected class” does not exist here, unless ones family has the money to isolate themselves. I know this because I’m now photographing and working with families for four generations, all generations talk to me and until we start seeing each other more supportively certain families’ situations will not improve. Coming from a low economic background and being from the “wrong” family name carries the weight of generations.

When Appalachian students go to some of the local government-supported colleges that teach people to become responsible social workers, nurses, technicians, educators and teachers they often never really leave Appalachia. They never see or experience a wider view. When those students come back to the hollers as social workers and teachers some have an attitude of empowerment that can be harmful to those they serve, especially now, with the new “home made” chemical and dangerous prescription drugs so easily available. Almost any slight of superiority, degradation, even healthy criticism to the young holler dweller can create an excuse to alcoholically and drug binge. Today we have dangerous methamphetamine and oxycontin drugs easily available; a young person’s first binge can lead to death and sooner or later often does.

Rehab programs are more active than churches today, with many repeat attendees. The people that need help sometimes end up having a harder time. An attitude by some is conveyed that you are “no count,” when the person needs support.

I have to say, there are many people (social workers and teachers) that are very dedicated, understanding, inspirational workers, and then there are the others who, intentionally or not, may be contributing to the problem. It is a very complex problem.

We have created a new subculture of takers and system abusers too. Still, I can’t help but wonder if in the 1970’s when the “War on Poverty” programs were implemented, if we as a culture would have came together in direct relationship to one another, supporting each other fully instead of chastising and degrading ourselves as we still do now, wouldn’t we be in a better place today? Wouldn’t there be fewer deaths in our region attributed to drug over doses [OD’s] in our youthful population now? Just an idealistic thought I suppose.

Treating someone with human dignity and respect, and restoring dignity and building trust is not that hard of a job, but it takes time.

Ten years into my work, I received a severe back injury after a fall in 1984. I’d fallen backwards off a ladder in my studio. I was paralyzed in my left side and leg from a sciatic nerve back injury and left out of work for a year and a half. During 1984 and 1985 I didn’t photograph because I wasn’t able to travel to Kentucky. When I was able to return I had changed my perspective, I needed my subjects and friends help to photograph, I couldn’t even lift my camera to set it on a tripod. That’s when my subjects realized this man is here because he really loves taking pictures of us that much so we are going to help him. I needed help. Maybe more importantly, their prayers and spiritual beliefs were comforting, healing and made me feel more accepted. My emotional and physical vulnerability became acutely real. I realized I needed others in my life for multiple reasons and I reached out, maybe for the first time.

Believe it or not, the families got together and assigned high school kids every week to assist and help me. I would have a different student each week assisting; I could drive, they would miss work, summer school or free time. I didn’t really pay them, I would buy them lunch and “pop” and keep them fed and they would take me around, we photographed every day. The community in Appalachia came together for me when I really needed it and that’s when I let go of my idealistic views. The social anthropologist photographer was no more and I related to people more openly in personal ways because I realized I had their love and support. My illness served as a catalyst for my change, my work has become more my own with genuine richness and depth.

That began my interconnectedness with the community; folks started telling me more about themselves, their neighbor’s behaviors and family secrets. That material would never have surfaced without me totally being accepted by the people. It informs the photographs. The community shame and disrespect of the holler dwellers was not something that I even recognized until years after my illness. My level of depth with these people and understandings, accepting and loving them has really grown as time evolved. Now we can openly talk about love or dishonor.

I read somewhere; “as our self importance diminishes our humility increases”. I’ve found that in my thirty-five years with these people. Their message of need is not about poverty, more about being respected and I know, ironically, wouldn’t you know it, by speaking of this I am considered to be disrespecting these people. [I chuckle and he chuckles] I know… I know.

Frankie on Porch

“Only when one approaches the work of art nonjudgmentally does it begin to reveal the artist’s personality and creativity and their relationship.’’

Donald Kuspit, “The End of Art”

First and foremost I wish to thank Tim Morehead for his interest in my work and support in the making of this interview and site, it is rare today one is given an opportunity to express themselves openly without the filters of the sponsoring institution. Courage is still among us. Readers and support came from John Wyatt, Howard Zoubek and Bill Back. I especially wish to thank Bill for his knowledge, time, insight and editing skills. This interview and site is dedicated to my Kentucky friends Roxanne, Donnie, Junior and Ronnie who have each individually and together struggled with the loss of a loved one recently. May you each find peace, fulfillment, dignity and a renewed life, by the grace of God.

Workshop with Shelby; Lakewood, Colorado August 17-21

Alchemy : The Art of the Environmental Portrait with Shelby Lee Adams

For more information or to register visit this link: http://workingwithartists.org/workshops/environport.html

The content (photos and text) of this interview is copyrighted.
© Jan 09, Timothy S Morehead & Shelby Lee Adams

You can view more of Shelby’s work and read his thoughts here:
http://Shelby Lee Adams Blog

A few other places that Shelby has been featured:

Kevin Connolly, The Rolling Exhibition
The Aroostook Review, Interview
Lenswork Quarterly, Volume 27: Interview
Contemporary Documentary Photography in Appalachia
Portraits and Dreams (video)
Rory Kennedy
Smithsonian American Art Museum
University Press of Mississippi
Mike Johnson’s “The Online Photographer”
Peter Bryenton’s “Intervallic”
Curt Miller’s Photo Blog
“The True Meaning of Pictures” (Video)

Jody Ake creates portraits, nudes, still lifes and landscape images using the wet collodion process, an historic photographic technique which involves using a large format camera and glass plates. Ake is one of a handful of contemporary artists who have revived this photographic method, hand-mixing all of the necessary chemicals for each and every exposure. He holds a BFA from the College of Santa Fe and BFA from the University of Oregon. He currently lives and works in New York.

[This interview was conducted by telephone]

I understand that you studied photography in college.

I received my BFA in Santa Fe New Mexico and my Masters from the University of Oregon, both in photography.

When did you realize that you wanted to be a photographer?

Actually I never really wanted to be a photographer. I originally went to undergrad art school because no other college would take me. I went to study sculpture; I did sculpture for the first year and a half. Then in 1990 I was in a car accident and I hurt myself really bad so I couldn’t physically work in the sculpture department any longer; I couldn’t physically do what I wanted to do.

I had studied photography in high school, I had a camera and it was fun but I never approached it as my main creative outlet. Photography is a lot less physically demanding so I slowly just transferred over into photography.

I always wanted to draw and paint as well but I can’t draw and I paint. If I could paint I would be a painter in a heartbeat but, I can’t and photography was the easiest medium for me to work in. I have enjoyed it but I never went to school thinking that I was going to be a photographer. I only ended up being a photographer because I couldn’t physically do the three dimensional work that I wanted to do.

What type of sculpture did you used to do?

I was working with metal planes (sheets). When I was in Santa Fe we were only an hour from Los Alamos Labs where they do nuclear testing and top secret weapons testing. Once a month they would have a surplus sale in Los Alamos, they would have this huge lot full of just stuff and you would buy it by the lot. My friends and I would go there and buy all kinds of stuff. We would buy sheets of metal.

I originally wanted to work with stone; with alabaster and marble. I was into this classical idea of human form and I wanted to carve it. But at that time I was experimenting with welding and metal and with planes. I was experimenting with metal and larger forms. It was my first year of college so I was really doing basic sculpture 101.

If you could be a painter what would you paint?

I am not really sure anymore. I assume that they would be very similar to my photographs, they would be very similar.

There was a time when I was experimenting photographically with staged environments. I would paint large environments but… I can’t paint and I can’t draw but I have always loved that medium.

Where did you grow up?

My dad was a business man and he worked for a company that moved around every four to five years.

I was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. I lived in Arkansas a while but my family moved around a lot. We left Arkansas and went to Amarillo, Texas when I was young and then we moved back to Little Rock. From there we moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma where I went to High School and then I left Tulsa and went to New Mexico to attend college. I took a semester off and went to NY and then back to New Mexico to finish school. I then moved to Portland, Oregon and then to Eugene to go to graduate school. After I finished Graduate School I went back to Portland and eventually moved to NY.

I have jumped around a bit.

How old are you?

38

Is there anyone else in your family that is artistically inclined?

My brother is. He went to business school but dropped out, after a while he went back to school for photography but he switched to a more three dimensional form of art like pottery.

He and his wife had a business for fifteen years or so where they made jewelry from recyclable items like a bottle caps and stuff. They are really folk artists.

You kind of backed into photography. At what point did you realize that it was going to be something that you would pursue?

My sophomore year of college is when I had the bad car accident so it was pretty much wiped out. My junior year I became more focused and by my senior year I realized that it was a great outlet for me. There was something more to it; I wasn’t just going to class. I was really injured but I started realizing that were possibilities for me again that I hadn’t realized before.

After I got out of school I took a year or two off and did whatever. I didn’t take a lot of pictures but I traveled a lot and around 1996 I knew that this is what I wanted to do. I was 26 years old, I was out of undergraduate for two years and I hadn’t done anything. I decided that I either needed to go back to school and work on my Masters and make a life decision that photography was going to be my thing or I needed to go find a job.

I didn’t want a job. It was a goal in my life from the time that I was a small child to never have a job job. So I made a decision that photography was going to be my direction.

Do you think that you personally could have become a photographer without going to art school?

I don’t think that I would have the discipline. If I didn’t go to art school like I did immediately after High School I would have ended up going to some state school and I probably would have flunked out. I was not a good student. If I had to go to a normal school I know I would have flunked out, I just didn’t have the discipline to study.

I took a lot of art classes in high school and by my senior year I was taking two to four hours of art classes a day. It was my high school art teacher that encouraged me to continue along that path. He told me “you are really good three dimensionally, you think about things this way and you should continue this when you get out of school.”

I wasn’t thinking about going to art school. I wasn’t thinking about going to school at all but then I got recruited by the head of the art department in Santa Fe.He would actually go out to the high school, art shows and competitions in the surrounding states and find perspective students. He approached me and offered me financial help but I turned him down and didn’t go for a semester. It took me a semester of going to community college in Tulsa for six months in order for me to want to get the hell out.

I wasn’t making any real conscious decision about the future at the time, I just wanted out of Oklahoma.

Can you teach somebody to be an artist or is it an innate ability?

I think that it is a little bit of both. I think that there are a lot of people out there that are making work that is very text book. They have good composition because they learned about proportion and the golden rectangle.

Then there are people that have gone through some experiences and they might have a little bit of a dark side, they’ve got a unique perspective and something that they want to say.

Those are the two types of artist that I see.

There are a lot of people that are making art that is not technically that great but it’s really full of emotion and power because they are dying to get whatever this is out of them. Then I see a lot of work that is technically good but it doesn’t have much of a soul. It all kind of depends on what you define as art.

How do you define art?

I don’t really know. I don’t even like my art all the time.

I live in NY and my wife and I never go to openings any more. She used to work at an art gallery, we have friends that own art galleries, and we have gone to a thousand openings. We don’t go any more because half the time we don’t like that crowd and most of the time I don’t like the work.

I don’t know what art is any more, especially in NY because the art market has been blown so out of proportion.

What is it about your own art that you don’t like?

Maybe I am just getting tired of looking at it. After seeing it so often… don’t get me wrong… there are glass plates of mine that I look at and still think they are the coolest thing ever. Repeated exposure to my own work over and over; it just begins to get repetitive.

Also it is really hard to work in the process. It is very time consuming and sometimes it doesn’t really work, it’s not like film. You can put a sheet of film in your camera and it’s going to work.

Collodion has so many variables that a lot of times it doesn’t work. It takes a long time to figure things out. When you are on the road and your shooting in the field it takes an hour to set up your dark room and a half hour to get your camera in position. Then the wind blows and your camera shifts and everything is out of focus. On top of that you can’t get your exposure right. It’s all that.

I don’t like the fact that I can’t seem to get out of bed before dawn to go somewhere and set up and actually produce enough work in a day. If I am on the road I am really lucky to get one image a day. It gets frustrating. I think I am coming down on myself because I am not producing enough work. I am frustrated because I am not producing the work that I want to be doing, or think that I should be doing.

I am down on myself for not progressing or being too lazy or not working enough that makes me not like my work more than the actual work itself.

Do you work with any other photographic medium?

No.

I mean…. well, I do shoot film. Like here in NY when I do fashion oriented stuff I will experiment and shoot a mixture of collodion and film but I never go out and just shoot a roll of 35mm.

Does shooting collodion make you feel more like an artist?

Ummmm….. no. Not more like an artist than shooting film; I felt like an artist when I was shooting film. It does make me feel like I am mastering a medium or that it has helped me produce a style that maybe I wouldn’t have had if I had stuck with film.

The late Bob Carlos Clarke once said that “fashion photography is the stupidest thing that you can do with a camera”. How do you feel about that statement?

First, I would never say that I am a fashion photographer. I will shoot fashion oriented things for myself and for work. The fashion world… it really is the weirdest thing in the entire world, it’s so bizarre. There is so much money and there is so much power, a perceived power over the silliest things.

Shooting fashion can actually be a lot of fun. You usually have a great wardrobe stylist who is bringing in totally cool clothes. You have somebody that is doing something extremely interesting with hair and makeup and you usually have a bit of a budget so you can do these kinds of things that you can’t do alone.

But, the attitudes are so pretentious that is ridiculous, it’s absolutely ridiculous. I enjoy it but it’s completely pretentious bullshit. It drives me nuts. The entire fashion world is really kind of beyond me.

What do you feel is the most important element of your pictures? Is it your subjects, is it the process or is it your vision and concepts?

I would hate to think that my process is the main attraction to my work because that makes me sound like I am not a good photographer. I do think that the process is a lot of it. Most people are immediately curious about how I am photographing. Most people don’t realize that you can do alternative or antiquated processes any more.

I think the look is very distinctive. There are a lot of other photographers doing collodion but their images don’t look like mine. So I don’t know if there is one aspect, if it’s my personal vision or if it’s the process… I don’t really know what the most important part is. I think it’s a mixture of everything.

I like to think that I look at things a little differently than most other people and I also think that I have mastery of the process that most people don’t have. Most people working in collodion have recently stumbled on to it but I started eleven years ago.

When I started there were only a handful of people using the process. There wasn’t Google, I had to learn everything myself. I like to think my work is different because I have spent the last eleven years experimenting.

How do you handle inquiries about your process? Do you share or guard your techniques?

I do a little bit of both. I usually end up sharing quite a bit of information. I don’t know anything that you can’t read in a book or you can’t find online.

You can’t learn how to work with collodion by reading a book. Someone needs to be there the first couple times to show you how to pour a plate. You can read about it all you want but until someone does it in front of you and you watch them it doesn’t make any sense.

I don’t know any ultra secrets; I just know what I like to do after a decade of doing it.

Is there such a thing as “the perfect image”?

I’m not sure. I don’t think that I’ve ever shot one.

I can always find something wrong with my stuff. My plates always have a scratch somewhere. Or there’s some area that’s slightly out of focus that I don’t want to be. Or the tone is just a little too warm. Or it’s a tad over exposed. Or there’s dust in the collodion. Or the varnish isn’t perfect.

Technically I never have a perfect photograph, not a perfect ambrotype. I don’t have enough of an ego to say that I have taken a perfect image.

I am not sure what a perfect image would be. Maybe Paolo Rovesi’s nudi series, those images are so simple that they’re perfect. Ansel Adams’ Moonrise over Hernandez, Ansel is such a cliché but man that photograph is awesome. But I don’t know if a perfect photograph actually exists.

Do you have a favorite image?

My all time favorite photograph is Self Portrait as a Drowned Man by Hippolyte Bayard. I love the picture and I love the story behind it, I think that it’s the coolest picture ever. And it was one of the first photographs ever made.

Photography to me is all about the stories. Images that have a story behind them make me like the photograph more. Stories are what make a photograph interesting to me.

What’s your story? Why did you start making collodion images?

The reason that I do what I do is, like I mentioned earlier… I was in college for sculpture and one day I get a call from my best friend in high school. He was freaking out and proceeded to tell me about two friends of mine that had passed away.

One friend was driving and as he went to pass another car he hit a truck and it killed him. The other friend of mine went to my first friends’ funeral and on the way home he fell asleep at the wheel and had a wreck. He died from complications of that wreck.

I received the call the day of my second friend’s funeral, they were so close together. They were still in Tulsa but I packed up and left all of my friends. It freaked me out, I have had friend’s parents die and family members die but I had have never had someone my own age die. Then two have two of them die at once was a big shock and it really affected me.

Two days later my girlfriend was flying home to see her parents. We lived in Santa Fe and the nearest airport is in Albuquerque. I took the afternoon off to drive her to the airport. She was actually driving, I was going to take her car home and go back a week later and pick her up. While we were on our way to Albuquerque we ended up in a very bad car accident that was similar to one of my other friends.

I was ejected from the car through the sun roof and I landed seventy five feet down the road (on the access road). I landed straight up and down on my feet. I broke a lot of bones in my feet and I broke my spine in two places; I woke up a day later in the hospital.

It was freaky, two of my friends just died. Greg died, Daniel died and everyone is freaked out about who the third person will be. Everyone worried; we are very superstitious. Snakes travel in pairs, death comes in threes. Everyone’s being careful; nobody’s driving because we are all waiting on the third person to die. We are all wondering who it’s going to be. We talk about it and two days later I end up in this car accident.

For some reason I didn’t die and I should have. It is very unlikely that I could have survived the way that I did because there wasn’t much of the passenger side left of the car. I survived being bounced around in the car and I survived the ejection. I was extremely lucky that the car didn’t roll on me and crush me. I survived all of these variables; I got extremely lucky and didn’t die. I did break a shit load of stuff and I hurt every day.

(My girlfriend was totally fine. Not a stitch.)

There is this weird… it is weird that my two friends died and two days later I should have died but I didn’t. That is what made me become interested in art more as something more than a means to pick up chicks and party the way that I did in college.

It took me years to cope with stuff.

When I was still an undergrad I started dabbling with self portraits. When I got into graduate school things were conceptually more intense. I was still dealing with all of this crap that happened to me and why I survived and my friends didn’t. I started working purely with self portraits and I would assume these different historical or fictional characters based on other artists’ self portraits. From the Dutch painting era of the fifteen hundreds on up but they all dealt with mortality. They are all talking about the self as artist, as the creator and your own mortality.

I started making these images trying to figure out why I was different than my friends. Why didn’t I die? My thesis project was about mortality. I was trying to see something different in myself; I was looking to see why I was different.

I kept that up for years but after I moved to NY I got tired of looking at myself. I started to realize that maybe it’s not me and I started taking pictures of other people trying to see what it is about them. I switched from trying to find that something that I didn’t know about myself to trying to find that something reflected in other people.

When I make portraits of people I am always looking for that something that makes them different from me. I am still looking for the reason that I am still alive in myself but I am also trying to find something similar in other people to compare them in contrast to myself.

Have you learned anything about yourself?

For a while I thought that I did but now I am not really sure anymore.

I used to concentrate on the eyes; I thought it was all about the eyes. I always try and have the eyes perfectly in focus because I believe this process alone is like a magical alchemy. You mix up all of these alcohols, ethers and different chemicals and you put it all together…… and you know…… I always try and take portraits of people with their eyes showing. The eyes are the windows to the soul.

I used to play this game [chuckles] where people come out really scary. Their eyes are jet black, they look like demons. And sometimes they come out with their skin glowing and they’re beautiful and they look like angels. I used to play this game where I thought that I could tell if a person was good or evil by the way their plate comes out [laughs]. I believed that the silver and ether would act differently to more than just the visible light source; it was actually capturing more of what the sitter was really portraying.

Do you believe in angels and demons?

Sure. I’ve never seen an angel; I have definitely felt evil. There is evil in all of us. But yeah… there has got to be more to this existence than we can see.

Are you a spiritual person?

Spiritual yes, religious no.

I am constantly going through a battle in my head about if we are just bugs. If all of this is just a chemical mistake that formed life and when you die you die and you are just energy and matter, which is how I really see it.

I think it’s too hard to believe that there is some old dude with a white beard that is God. But yet I have experienced enough weirdness to believe, and I want to believe, there is something more to this mortal coil than this brief life.

Why do you continue making these images?

The process alone is a very a difficult process. It’s a lot of work and it’s challenging. I am very process oriented and I like the challenge. I love that you have to kind of juggle the chemicals and finesse it to make everything work. And I’m always excited to see what people are gonna look like; [childlike giddiness in his voice] I still think that I might get a little glimpse of their soul and be able to tell if they’re good or evil. I am always super curious about how the person is going to look.

I’m always shocked at the plate, most of the time because it transcends their physical being. When I get that first plate I am always shocked and amazed that it worked.

I keep doing it because I am curious and I’m interested and it’s just what I do. I don’t know anything else but photography.

Is what you do important?

It’s important to me.

People (like you) like my images and every once in a while someone contact me and say that I inspired them to work in this direction or to learn a new process. It’s flattering to think that you can do something and have other people respond to it. So, I think in that way everyone’s work is important because you are influencing other people.

Compared to the crisis in the Middle East and our health care system – no. Sometimes I think that it’s foolish when compared to the world that we live in. The world is in such disarray that I am not sure what’s important any more.

But, it’s important to me and it’s satisfying. When I talk to people that tell me that it’s helped them in some way it makes me feel good.

If, for whatever reason, you could only make one more image in your life and it was the last image that you would ever make; what would it be?

It would be a picture of myself.

If I had two pictures, if I could make two… I would photograph Tom Waits and then myself. He’s my idol, I dream to photograph him.

What would your wife think about you using your last two images to photograph yourself and Tom Waits?

[laughs] On one level she would understand [continually laughing] and on another level she would be like why the hell wasn’t it me?

If I had three more photographs to take…….. [more laughing]

Why did you move to NY?

I lived here for a while when I was in college. I had a couple of friends that moved to NY a year before I did and I was planning on going back to NY when I got out of graduate school.

I was living with a woman who was from San Francisco. I wanted to move back to NY but she wanted to stay on the West Coast so we agreed on Portland. We lived in Portland for a little over a year and the relationship went horribly horribly wrong. We had a nasty break up and I’m like… “fuck this, I’m running”.

I happen to have a friend that had a similar experience a year before. I just happen to be stopping by for a visit and he told me that he wanted to “run” and I said “ok, I’ll take you”. I had a friend with a spare bedroom in NY so I said “fuck it”, packed up my shit and moved to NY.

What is it like being an artist in NY?

It’s probably the hardest place you can be. Everyone thinks you can move to NY because there are artists everywhere and there are hundreds of galleries.

Rent is so high and everything costs so much. Everyone’s a freaking artist here, which is cool, but everyone’s fighting for the same bad Brooklyn gallery. There’s a lot of competition.

It used to be that the city was kind of supportive. There would be areas that were cheaper and you had full communities of artists that hung out in the same bars and partied together. It isn’t like that anymore. It’s hard.

How do you feel about people’s reaction to your work?

It is rare that I receive a negative reaction to my work. Every once in a while someone will say, “These are great but it’s a cheap gimmick” and I’m like “what do you mean it’s a cheap gimmick?”

I don’t agree that it’s a gimmick but I don’t show my work that much. I don’t show because it’s not about the work anymore; it’s about the hype that the work has gotten. I have a good friend that owns a high end photo gallery but I am not what she looks for. I have gotten real tired of trying to figure out where I fit in so I just kind of quit.

It’s not the smartest thing for me to do because I am really poor. If I had a show and actually sold some work it would change my financial situation dramatically right now.

I do show my work occasionally at educational venues like colleges and museums. If it is at a school I will usually do a workshop or a public demonstration or maybe a private demonstration for their photo class. I will talk about the history of the process and why I work with it and I’ll make a plate in front of the kids. I do that once or twice a year and I find it really rewarding.

I really should try and show the work in an actual commercial gallery because I could use the cash.

What’s your biggest fear?

Hmmmm. I really don’t like spiders and needles. Those are my biggest physical fears.

I am a non-resident student adviser for the masters program at the Maine College of Art (MECA). I see a graduate student every few weeks and I brought in some books that I read in college that I thought would help them. One of the books is Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance by Geoffrey Batchen.

The very last paragraph in the book explains why we are so fascinated with photographs from our history. It’s kind of morbid because people took these photographs to be remembered by but when you look at them you have no idea who these people are. It’s terrifying to think that some day we will be an old faded photograph and no one will remember us. (Geoffrey Batchen says it better than I did, I didn’t do it justice)

That has recently been a concern to me. That all of this doesn’t really mean anything and that one day all I will be is a trunk full of ambrotypes of myself and no one will know who they are.

You can view more of Jody’s work at his website/

http://www.jodyake.com/