Interview With an Artist

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/

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 26th, 2008 at 12:09 am and is filed under Photographers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.