Tell us more about your background (where you grew up; childhood experiences) and how you came to photography.

I was born and raised on a farm in the Amish Country of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Following high school I entered the Navy where I served for four years, including time on a land base during the Vietnam War. Following military service I worked and traveled around the United States, Caribbean, and Canada. Combing these life-altering experiences with the influences on my extended family of artists, I entered art school and completed a V.A. in 1985 from the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota, Florida with an emphasis in graphic design and strong interest in photography. For many years I have worked as a graphic designer, including the design of flat printed material, packaging, and magazines. Through my work as an art director I have become very attuned to the wide range of photographic approaches and the ability of software, such as Photoshop, to enhance photographic expression. Since 1998 I have devoted myself to photomontage.

Perhaps my work will spark some change in attitudes and behavior.

Can you describe the process you used to create Entropic Kingdom and how you came to it.

In the Entropic Kingdom series I present the tension in the coexistence between man and his environment. Care for the environment and its delicate ecosystems is of great concern to me. After the recent disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, more than ever, I feel the imperative for increasing our efforts and altering our lifestyles to care for the earth. In the Entropic Kingdom series, with the use of symbolism I attempt to reach the viewer at a conscious or unconscious level to encourage thoughtful self-reflection. Perhaps my work will spark some change in attitudes and behavior.

What aspects of photography come easy for you?

In the process of creating a photomontage, what comes most easily to me is the visualization of the final image that I want to create. The process includes first sketching this final image, or an approximation of the image, and then gathering the required shots and pieces. Pieces of the image might include the landscape or background, human figure, animal, and another object. Through the process I might slightly alter my original idea.

What about the more challenging?

Creating a photomontage involves a large amount of post-production. I have to be very thoughtful about honoring my idea for the final image. I want to avoid over-manipulation of the pieces that are included in the final image and ensure that the final gestalt feels authentic, yet a bit disturbing, and not too forced. It’s very easy to take a montage image” over the top” so there is a fine line I have to tread.

Who are some of your photographic influences and inspirations?

Having grown up on a Pennsylvania farm, I have always been very inspired by Andrew Wyeth’s rural landscapes and love affairs with the nature. Like Wyeth, I feel a strong emotional connection with the image that I am creating. In addition, iconic Mexican religious art, various Hispanic photographers such as Graciela Iturbide, magic realism and authors such as Gabriel García Márquez, and a range of contemporary music have inspired both creative and critical thinking. Opportunities to travel and experience different cultures have encouraged my appreciation of multiple artistic perspectives and sparked ideas for my artwork.

On to the exhibit

On Display at Newspace Center for Photography in March

Susan Burnstine
Within Shadows

March 5th through 28th, 2010

Opening Reception: Friday, March 5th 6-9pm
Artist Lecture: Saturday, March 6th 12pm

Susan Burnstine’s ongoing body of work “Within Shadows” explores the fleeting moments between dreaming and waking – the blurred seconds in which imagination and reality collide.

Interview conducted by photographer J Swofford

Can you describe your first involvement in photography?

Going way back to late grade school/junior high, I had an instamatic camera that I used for taking snaps on family trips, summer camp and the like. I would shoot slides and then put on little slide shows for my friends. But my first really serious efforts were in college. I borrowed a friend’s twin-lens Yashica-Mat, got permission to use a faculty darkroom and taught myself to process film and make prints. I put out a perfectly awful book of b&w photos and poetry for my girlfriend at the time and I hope she had the good sense to destroy it a long time ago.

What was the genesis of the “Selective Memories” project?

First off, let me explain that almost every project I do begins with a multitude of ideas. It’s much like composing music or writing a script. Each decision refines the process. I’ll shoot “proof-of-concept” images along the way until I have a good sense of what I’m after, then I set out with intent, much like shooting a commercial assignment. I’ve learned to allow myself to get surprised and to let the images show me the way through twists and turns. Selective Memories started with a desire to work in palladium combined with an admiration for the emotional quality of Susan Burnstine’s work combined with a desire to hit the road and explore beyond my front yard. That all went into the blender. Palladium has an inherent nostalgic quality to it, so I felt that shooting with my vintage Rolleiflex would put me in a good frame of mind. Shallow focus opens the door to mystery, and the more I thought about it, I wanted these to be not literal “road trip” images, but more like fleeting memories of places glimpsed once, of momentary impressions. The final element that caused everything to gel was that my father had a stroke at Christmas last year. As he struggled to recover, and recover he did, there was a period in which his memory was jumbled. He’s always been a great story teller, but for a time, his stories became somewhat random recombinations of the “facts.” If you didn’t know what had actually taken place, his new interpretation made perfect sense. I was just profoundly struck by how fragile memory is, and that’s when I finally knew where this body of work was headed.

Palladium has an inherent nostalgic quality to it, so I felt that shooting with my vintage Rolleiflex would put me in a good frame of mind.

Can you speak to your choices of using black and white and selective focus?

Again, a desire to work in palladium, to get my hands wet again, combined with using selective focus to add mystery and a “memory-like” quality to the image.

What are the overarching themes of “Selective Memories” and how are these the same or different from your other projects?

It’s hard for me to think in terms of any “overarching theme.” I’ve never felt any need to intellectualize what for me is essentially an emotional process; by that I mean that when I make an image it is usually in response to emotional or sensory input. So I’m after emotional content in my images. All of my work, to me, is simply an exploration of what is out there for us to see. I’m interested in telling stories, illustrated by the way I perceive the world.

Can you be more specific about “emotional response”?

Perhaps a better way to put this is that I make my images guided by a process that is emotion-based and reactive in nature rather than thought-based or intellectual in nature. The initial construct is thought-based, i.e., “palladium prints from images shot with a Rolleiflex used wide open of moments encountered while mostly driving along the Pacific Coast from Neah Bay to San Diego”. The act of picture-making is emotion-based, reacting to the moment of what I see and how objects and people fall into frame and interact with light, shadow and form.

The act of picture-making is emotion-based, reacting to the moment of what I see…

It’s the difference between a Shastakovich Symphony and a Miles Davis performance. Both can be powerful and moving and appreciated on many levels. The Shastakovich piece is meticulously thought out with every note and every pause placed for a reason, and the piece is full of symbolism accessible pretty much only to those who know the “back-story” as it were. The Miles Davis piece begins with a general construct and then each musician responds “of the moment” as they interact with each other and the construct to create a new interpretation of the piece every time it is performed. These are two fundamentally different ways of working. Most if the time, I work like a jazz musician, improvising and reacting both to the moment and to the general construct of the piece I am working on. One thing you learn as a musician is that you simply cannot “think” your way through a complicated piece, at some point you have to give your “self” over to the music.

So when I say that I hope my viewers have an emotional response, it might be more precise to say that I hope they have a response based on emotion, that I have been able to take them someplace they may not have anticipated going, a response from the heart, not the mind.

The Zen concepts of satori and the koan speak clearly to me.

Aside from thinking in terms of emotion, what are the other common threads between your work? From perusing your website I see water and focus as the most prominent connections.  Can you speak to these or the other common threads in terms of symbolism or what they mean to you personally?

I just don’t think in terms of symbolism, that’s not a meaningful concept to me personally. And yet, I try to make images that have enough unsaid content and/or mystery to them so that they have the potential to take each viewer to a unique place based on that viewer’s own frame of reference. So is that symbolism? I don’t know.

I would hope that there is a sense of continuity in the level of craft exhibited in my work, but equally I would hope that if you chose four random series of images to hang as a show, viewers might have the impression of four different artists at work. I am generally most strongly drawn to light and structure and how these elements interact within the frame. I consciously choose to work with different formats; square, panoramic and rectangular, because it forces me to reconsider anew the relationships of objects one to another and to the frame.

The Zen concepts of satori and the koan speak clearly to me.

What specific impressions are you hoping to impart to the viewer?

I don’t have a political or social agenda, I don’t feel a need to impart any specific message. Nothing wrong with those things, it’s just not me. But whenever I can motivate a viewer to pause, to look twice, or to think about the way they view the world, or to simply enjoy the beauty of a moment I may have been lucky enough to capture, I am a happy guy.

What are the greatest influences for “Selective Memories” and for your work in general?

Without a doubt, music is the greatest influence on my work. It’s what I did before photography, and one of these days I will get back to it. There is a constant soundtrack running in my head when I’m shooting. I draw a lot of personal joy from seeing the work of many visual artists (painters and photographers), but there is no person or school or style that I have any particular desire to emulate.

Can you speak a little bit about how you promote your work?

My promotional efforts go up and down depending on available time. I’m represented by a great gallery, Verve Fine Arts in Santa Fe, and by Kevin Longino, a private dealer. These guys are some of the nicest people I know. They work hard for their artists. I do my part with them by constantly making new work and being a good, reliable business partner. So that’s some of it. I try and go to a review event or two a year to meet new people and build relationships. I try to stay in touch with anyone who shows interest. My website is nearly always up to date. I’m very, very fortunate to have friends that I network with. I try and follow up on any leads and opportunities that come my way. Mostly I am patient, determined and don’t stress.

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I grew up in Los Angeles, in a wonderful neighborhood called Silverlake.  It was an ethnically diverse area, with lots of artists and creative types, located near the original site of the Disney Studios. It was really an ideal place to grow up — surrounded by mid-century architecture, incredible Mexican food, and endless 70-degree days.

I was exposed to art at an early age.  My uncle was an artist, writer, and photographer and had an aesthetic that has influenced me in all areas of my life.  I learned about contemporary architecture, designers like Ray and Charles Eames, and modern art from someone who had rarefied taste. But I was equally influenced by my wonderful parents–their incredible senses of humor, and the neighborhoods of Los Angeles that we explored—Little Toyko, Koreatown, Chinatown, the Latino and Armenian neighborhoods, which gave me an insight into the world.  I loved living in a city where everyone looked different.

How did you first get into photography?

I started expressing myself at an early age—producing comic books, taking ceramics classes, designing clothes, drawing and painting—loving anything to do with art.

After graduating from college, I moved to New York City to make my living as an artist, and although I continued to paint, my career moved into the fashion world. I worked for many years as the Fashion Editor for Vogue Patterns Magazine in New York City, and then continued on in Los Angeles as a freelance photo stylist.  As a fashion editor, I had the privilege of working with many exceptional fashion photographers, including Horst, Mario Testino, Patrick Demarchelier, Arthur Elgort, and Bert Stern.  It didn’t dawn on me until several years later, that I was standing next to some of my best photography teachers.

“I still use the darkroom for my black and white images, and it’s one of my favorite places to be.”

What inspires you, photographically speaking?

Throughout my career as a fashion editor, a photo editor, an artist, a photographer, a person engaged in the world, I have looked at thousands upon thousands of images. I can still remember album covers, ad campaigns, editorial images that sparked something inside me. Discovering Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, then Diane Arbus and Ralph Meatyard and Matt Mahurin and Keith Carter were wondrous revelations into how we see. For me, it’s finding simplicity in the complex. It’s telling a story but not giving away the ending. Creating a memory that never happened. It’s a little bit of magic combined with poignancy. It’s giving something dignity or a second glance. Making the mundane mysterious. It’s celebrating life in a split second.

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

Anything will spark an idea.  I do get a lot of inspiration from paintings, but I also get inspired from the world around me– looking at out the window as I’m driving, walking my dog, going to a flea market–all sorts of things. I just keep an open mind. I think it’s important to have a deep well of ideas and visual references.  It’s just as important to take things in than to produce them. I usually have 2 or 3 series going at the same time, which helps keep the creativity flowing and I realize that some series allow me to create, and some allow me to explore a subject.  I still use the darkroom for my black and white images, and it’s one of my favorite places to be.

Aline, as a prolific photographer yourself, what kind of advice would you give to young artists that could help them succeed as a fine art photographer?

Hmmm. The fine art world is rapidly changing –the opportunities that once existed and traditional paths to success are morphing into completely different animals. Where the brick and mortar gallery used to be the goal, now many photographers are making a name for themselves through blogs and are selling their work on-line.  Acceptance by not only gallerists and curators is important, but also by your peers who are now creating e-zines, writing blogs, and curating exhibitions. My advice is to be original, and not to lose sight that fine art photography is ultimately a product–that your prints need to be as pristine as your images.  Make prints–it’s important to know what your finished product will look like!  Explore every possibility and make connections.  Let other photographers know that you appreciate their work, compliment a curator on an exhibition, be open to what is going on, and celebrate this community. Good will and giving back counts for a lot.

“I think success is making work that gives you a creative high, a renewed energy, and makes waking up each day a pleasure.”

It’s important for your work to say something, to tell a story, to have a point of view, to have a voice.  And to get back to your question, I’m not sure what success is anymore.  It used to be having an exhibition, or publishing a book, or having a museum purchase your work–and yes, those are all major goals, but with this shifty economy and changing landscape of fine art photography, I think success is making work that gives you a creative high, a renewed energy, and makes waking up each day a pleasure.  We might as well enjoy the process, because we aren’t going to get rich doing this.

Aline Smithson is a busy person, she was recently nominated for the Santa Fe Prize for Photography, you can read an article she wrote on Portland’s Photolucida at F-stop magazine, and be sure to check out her dynamic blog a http://lenscratch.blogspot.com/

Smithson is also featured in the Summer issue of Artworks Magazine, with a 7 page spread featuring her Arrangement in Green and Black images. Find Artworks at Barnes and Nobles.

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I grew up in North Carolina and started taking pictures as a teenager. My mother gave me my first SLR for my 16th birthday, and I started taking some photography classes at a local community college. I was hooked as soon as I saw that first image appear in the darkroom. I moved to California to study photography at the San Francisco Art Institute, then after I graduated with my BFA, I moved to New Zealand for two and a half years. I’ve just come back to the States and am now living in Santa Fe, NM.

What inspires you, photographically speaking?

My projects really tend to connect in some way to what I’m curious about or going through personally at any given time. Since I’ve been moving around pretty often recently, that tends to influence my work quite a bit as well. There’s often a synchronicity in what I’m becoming interested in and where I end up, in ways I don’t realize until I’m living there. New Zealand afforded me the time and space to go on a bit of a spiritual journey and spend some time researching and just being curious about different religious and cultural beliefs and how they are expressed or unified through symbolism. It led to this really meditative process of spending hours constructing scenes on the beaches of New Zealand, which is now the Alchemy series.

“There’s often a synchronicity in what I’m becoming interested in and where I end up, in ways I don’t realize until I’m living there.”

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

My process tends to be very different for each project I work on. Ideas come in different ways, though a lot of times it will be something that just occurs to me one day like the proverbial light bulb switching on. I work pretty slowly, so I scribble everything down in notebooks and an idea will usually fester for a while before I start to research or work on them, unless it’s more of an experiential thing like the Chasing Rainbows series. That was sort of a therapeutic thing for me, photographing around the displacement I felt in leaving the U.S. and moving to New Zealand. I don’t think that series is finished, I will probably keep moving every once in a while or at the very least traveling. Now that I’m getting settled here in Santa Fe and finishing up all that left-brained activity of finding a place to live, a car, etc., I feel like I can start focusing on my next project and getting into the researching & brainstorming bit, then doing some initial shoots to see how the ideas start to take shape visually. I feel like I’m in the right place and I’m excited to see where my work goes next. It’s always a mystery and never what you expect, you just have to let it unfold.

What aspects of photography come easy for you?  What about the more challenging?

Making the pictures comes more naturally for me. I can be as patient or as persistent as I need to be to get my shot. The hardest part is the more practical stuff, like retouching scans, editing, printing, finding ways to get my work out there. I’m still looking for the right venues for my images, and that is a project in itself.

You mentioned you’re moving onto some new projects, care to share any of your ideas or processes?

I want to go further into the sort of mystical ideas I touched on with Alchemy, working with people or in places that are on the edge of what most people would consider normalcy or reality. I’m interested in metaphysical subjects and the idea of our personal experiences of life being largely made up of our own perceptions and beliefs. We’ll see where that takes me!

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How did you first get into photography?

It started with a Yashica range finder my brother handed me when I had to do some now forgotten high school project. All I can remember is that the black and white prints took too long to come back from the camera store and that were very dull and gray. In a matter of weeks I had a stack of books from the library and was processing film and making prints in the bathroom. The textures of the natural world and my girlfriend were my primary subjects. My interest did not move to the next level until my father found me a job on campus working in a lab charged with providing photographic services for faculty. I was still in high school. This is where I learned everything. The boss was the daughter of a photographer who had served at some level in the Third Reich.  She was a perfectionist – always sending me back to the darkroom to redo jobs. I spent my entire time in college working in this lab. Looking back, it was absolutely fabulous as I learned a great deal technically and had almost unlimited access to materials and equipment. The lab was also located within one of the university libraries so I was able to spend a lot of time looking at photography books – mostly the classic European street photographers and photographers of the Farm Security Administration. My work, at the time, was your basic third generation street photography influenced by Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank as well as Winogrand and Friedlander.

We are featuring your Salt Prints and Cyanotypes, please tell me how you first adopted these processes in your work and why?

The late Todd Walker, who taught at UF in the 1960s and early 1970s, introduced me to historical processes.  At the time, I was rather ambivalent about working with these processes as making prints took too long and they just did not look like photographs to me. A growing interest in photo history – particularly the nineteenth century – brought me back to historical processes in the late 1970s. The more I read about photography’s early practitioners, the more it seemed that they understood photography as a hybrid printing process that relied upon light sensitive chemicals rather than inks.

“And once I ceased holding photographs hostage to reality, the visual territory expanded exponentially.”

I was also intrigued by the idea of engaging in a different way with the materials of photography. I think I was reacting to how photographic materials were so standardized and beginning to be limited in terms of paper types and surfaces. What really attracted me was the simple act of sensitizing watercolor paper and printing in sunlight.  I don’t want to make this seem too precious but working with old processes made me feel like I was actually making something. Every print was different and the visual possibilities seemed unlimited. In time, my understanding of how a photograph could be made, how it could look, and how it might function as a picture changed dramatically. I realized that there was no fixed or definitive “look” a photograph had to have. A picture made with light sensitive materials could look like anything. And once I ceased holding photographs hostage to reality, the visual territory expanded exponentially. That’s the short story of why I am attracted to working with old processes…

Your shift from “reality” picture making to a more historic and ephemeral “old process” seems to coincide with current trends in fine art photography.  Do you think it’s safe to assume this has something to do with the “digital age” of photography – or something else entirely?

I believe that digital photography has had a significant effect upon the rise or resurgence of historical processes in a couple of interesting ways. On one hand, the manual nature of making pictures with old processes taps into an ancient sense we have about art as something that is “made” by a human. I just don’t experience this with digital photography and particularly with making a digital print. The control and perfection possible with digital photography has very little appeal to me. I like the uncertainty, the unique look of every print, and the unexpected results that seem to be part and parcel of making pictures using chemicals and light.

The curious thing is that the same digital technology that may have nudged people towards manual processes has also made these processes more accessible. With most historical processes, you have to make your print via contact. Many practitioners work with large format negatives and others go through a process of bumping up 35mm or roll film negatives onto larger sheet film. The latter approach is time consuming and the results, in my opinion, are just adequate. About four years ago, I began exploring making digital negatives on paper and transparency film. It worked quite well and has proven to be indispensable in my teaching. More important is that this technical breakthrough led to a transformation in how I visualize my pictures.

“…photographers and viewers of photography began realizing that a photograph is also as a picture. And like any other kind of picture, photographs need not always reference reality.”

Manipulating my images on a computer screen altered my understanding of photography from an act defined by a split second at a given aperture to an open-ended process with unlimited possibilities. To put it another way, I began using the camera to take photographs and the computer to make pictures. This distinction may seem trivial but it has broadened my understanding of how a photograph can be made, how it can look, and how it can function as a picture.

In relation to the shift from “reality” picture making, it seems obvious that software like Photoshop allows users to create pictures that deviate from reality-based picture making. We can’t forget, however, that fabricated or staged photography has been a significant mode in the medium long before the advent of digital photo. But what I think happened over the past twenty years or so is that photographers and viewers of photography began realizing that a photograph is also as a picture. And like any other kind of picture, photographs need not always reference reality.

You mentioned you’re early photographic influences.  Currently, do you have any peers who’s work you respect?

There are a number of photographers I admire but I don’t know if I have been directly influenced by their work. I’ve always liked the sheer intelligence of Duane Michals’ work. I like the inventiveness of Robert and Shana Park-Harrison, and Gregory Crewdson’s work is so wonderfully creepy. I have also enjoyed a lot of the work of Dan Estabrook. I don’t know him but I connect with his visual sensibility and how he uses old processes to create pictures that don’t look contemporary. As far as working with historical processes, he appears to have an acute understand how to match content with process.  His pictures appear to be partial documents from another time and place…little fragments that appear significant but are ultimately incomprehensible. That’s my kind of picture.  I have to admit, however, that I don’t pay as much attention to contemporary work as I should. My interest is more with the past than the present. I am attracted to a handful of Czech photographers…Jaromir Funke, Frantisek Drtikol and others working between the two world wars. I am also interested in nineteenth century photographers – particularly the so-called French Primitives and British Amateurs of the 1840s and 1850s.

You have a quite a bit of curatorial experience, what motivates you to not only be an artist but be also be an art advocate?

If all of your professional life has revolved around the arts and art education, it only seems natural that you would be an art advocate. I ran a small university gallery for twenty-five years and all my energy was directed towards producing exhibitions that would be intelligible and interesting to the general public while accommodating the desires of the artist. I also taught photography and photo history during this period. Most of the time, both aspects of my job were quite satisfying even if I felt frustrated because I wanted more time to devote to my own work. Now that I am teaching full-time and have more time to devote to my own work, I find that most of my energy is directed toward teaching.  My own work is important to me but I just can’t imagine devoting myself to it exclusively. I like to think that I have naturally moved towards what I do best – teach – which is a very important kind of advocacy.

“I like to think that I have naturally moved towards what I do best – teach – which is a very important kind of advocacy.”

What do you find is the most rewarding thing about being a professor in photography?

It’s pretty damn corny but I just love seeing a student get excited about what they are doing. Teaching technique is easy. What’s difficult is figuring out how to establish an atmosphere in which a student can get genuinely excited about the complexities and rewards of making pictures. When this happens, the teacher-student relationship shifts into a special territory were each starts learning from the other. I don’t have a specific recipe for how to make this happen but I introduce students to history and a little theory, make them write about their work, direct them to others who have similar interests, and try to continue the conversation about their work and photography beyond the confines of the classroom.  As I indicated above, teaching technique is not that hard to do. Oftentimes, this is all a student wants or all they can handle. That’s just the way it is and I don’t let it affect my overall agenda. I try to remember that everyone has different motives for being in school of for what they want to do with photography – and I try to be as helpful as I can regardless of their level of interest.

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I have amazing memories of my childhood in South France, probably because of how absorbent and sentient you are at such a young age, but also because of how more fragrant, colorful and bright it is in comparison with Brittany. A typical day in Brittany, pretty much anytime in the year, is cool (low 60ºF), humid, windy and more importantly…grey. On the other hand the fact that it is surrounded by the Atlantic ocean on its South and West side as well as by the English Channel on its North side makes up for it. Standing on the Breton seaside is the best way to experience what Brittany is about: natural granite coasts, preserved beaches without any buildings, small traditional fishing villages; the sea also has a unique magnetic presence over there, and the color palette is incredibly nuanced, especially in the greens and the blues where it incorporates a pinkish pastel like tint. I have many favorite places in Brittany, but Saint Malo is THE place where I feel drawn to the most. My mother was born there, and the city itself has left intact its unique historical culture: that of an all surrounded fortified pirates city (called “Corsaires”) that the British never managed to take.

How did you first get into photography?

Well, for a very long time I was only interested in Philosophy and Poetry. That’s all I read and studied until I was about 22 or 23 years old. That means that my overall artistic background, paradoxically, isn’t visually-based but rather motivated by a certain thought process similar to philosophical questioning (what if?). I like to think of the work I produce as propositions, conditional images trying to assert the validity of a viewpoint by letting reality refutes it or on the contrary corroborates it.

“I like to think of the work I produce as propositions”

Anyhow, I eventually came to photography because of my big brother Gabriel, who was a year and a half older than me. Gabriel tragically died of a sudden cancer when he was 25, this was a very traumatic event for me, as for the rest of my family. He was the one doing photography, had been for years since his late teenage years. Progressively he started putting his cameras in my hands, talking to me about technical and artistic aspects of photography. I guess it was a huge passion for him and he couldn’t resist sharing it, sharing his enthusiasm for being able to translate so much of one’s world into a photograph. My brother and I were not very close until then. Sadly I think it may have simply been because of how thin our age difference was during our teens. We grew apart in order to affirm ourselves, we even often grew in opposition just as a principle, i.e. if Gabriel liked one thing I had to like another and vice versa. Anyway, I always felt Photography was the one thing my big brother gave me willingly, with such generosity and pleasure that I just couldn’t turn it down, I had to start doing it because I so much loved our relationship around it. At least that’s how it was in the beginning, as I quickly grew found of the medium in a more autonomous view. For maybe two years I shared Photography with Gabriel, we didn’t really engage in common projects but we exchanged lenses, mutually criticized our shots, went to the photo stores together…I remember this one day when I bought this new Nikon camera (F90). I went to my mother’s with it and Gabriel was there too. It was so funny, when he saw the box his face lit up and he looked at me, incredibly surprised, then he jumped on his feet and played with it for an hour like a baby child. He was so excited for me.

Like so many amateur photographers I did 35 mm black-and-white photography as a hobby for a while, shooting friends, art festivals, developing my films in my tiny student apartment bathroom. Then after Gabriel died, I was so confused, all I felt was that I needed to go far far away from everything. So I applied for this American international student exchange program at my home university in Rennes and luckily, almost amazingly I should say, I was selected (I wasn’t a language student, so this was very unusual). That’s how I landed in Carbondale, IL for the first time in 99. I was supposed to study Information & Communication sciences there, but after a few days I decided to enroll exclusively into Photography courses. That’s pretty much when Photography became the most important thing in my life, without me realizing I was actually deciding so. I haven’t stopped photographing since then.

You hold a BA in Philosophy and an MFA in Photography.  In what ways to you think the fusion of these two disciplines have influenced your outlook on art and your personal photography.

That’s a really good question, because since I started studying Photography in the US that’s all I vowed to do: to turn complex philosophical questionings into photographic scenarios. I’ve always thought that eventually Philosophy was a transitionary medium for me, in the sense that ultimately I would need to act upon my understandings to make my life meaningful. As much as I enjoyed (and still do) reading Heidegger or Wittgenstein, I feel that what remains of what they offer to the avid reader, this incredible thurst for existence, is too precious to sit on it. Or to just think about it. Real understanding affects your life concretely, it dictates choices that somehow make up who you are. My own way of acting upon philosophical understanding is to picture it photographically. That’s the reason why most of the time I conceive of a project intellectually first, until it involves less controlable realities like affections.

“Reality exists unformatted, unarticulated, and I think Photography relates to it similarly”

Thinking of it, the one thing that made me stick with Photography is the fact that it enables you, it invites you I should say, to reach for things outside of the boundaries of language. Reality exists unformatted, unarticulated, and I think Photography relates to it similarly. Photography concentrates, unveils and proposes to see (in French I would say “donne à voir”, gives to see) aspects of reality that we don’t dare considering outside of it.

In your artist statement for “Mammal Thoughts” you talk about human’s difficulty in reflecting upon their own physicality.  Can expand on this and why it inspired you to use meat as metaphor.

Well the meat, as you said, is indeed standing in this imagery as a visual  metaphor. That means that while looking at these images the viewer needs to understand that the meat laid out isn’t real but that on the contrary it represents a mental projection of the mind operation of the portrayed character. The whole series entertains a complicated and plural relationship with photographic representation: on different levels the Mammal Thoughts photographs are simultaneously about portraiture, (thought) performance, documentation (of the performance) and ultimately Photography’s inability to ever materialize – or descriptively add into the factual account of its statements – the subjective or narrative point of view of one’s consciousness.

Photography is like our mind, it always excludes the photographer – as well as the looker or the thinker- from the materials produced or presented. Fundamentally, one can not experience the objective encounter of his/her own physicality in the world. That means that I will never be able to “see” myself as I see any other person. I will never experience such an objective viewpoint about myself as a person. There is something extremely unsettling about this, that the medium of photography uniquely comments on.

Fundamentally, one can not experience the objective encounter of his/her own physicality in the world.

As a photographic experimentation, I wanted to see how photography could describe, notice, infuse or simply “mean” factually the very content of such particular thoughts: that of having someone perform a strange act of thought, i.e. thinking of oneself as just being his/her own body. All the photographed characters in this series have been briefed before their respective shooting about the philosophical background implied in this work. I first met each of them and talked to them for an hour or so about Cartesian philosophy (I think therefore I am) and about Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception. These researches actually constituted my MFA thesis and the Mammal Thoughts series ended up being my thesis work.

Anyhow, what I asked of each of them was to perform the same act of thinking: they all had a week or two to think about their relationship to their own bodies. Did they think they were, as individuals, more than their bodies? Did they enjoy the idea of possibly being nothing more than a corporeal identity, or were they on the contrary very frustrated with it? Were they comfortable with the fact that we are all conditionally physical in order to exist in the world? Or were they on the opposite trying to overlook that reality as much as they could? For many of the characters personal, religious and spiritual believes interplayed with the set problematic, as they didn’t agree that their individual identity was the sole attribute of their bodies. While others felt that being physical transcribed mostly as pleasures, pains or social aesthetic concerns.

So these photographed people in essence both re-enacted their original thought about who they are as bodies in their portrait, while also symbolically acting it out through a collaborative choice of location, clothing and props. Some models took responsibility in choosing what to do and where, but others didn’t wish to, in which case I solely decided of their photographic scenario according to what our conversations.

In the end each portrait represented:

1. a photographic document of the active thinking effort of the character to try to think themselves only as physical beings, and a portrait of them as doing such performance
2. a photographic document atesting that the content of their thoughts wasn’t actually manifested photographically, even though it constituted the subject of the image
3. as such a document atesting of Photography’s failure to represent such subjects (contenus de pensée, in French)
4. a photographic document atesting of one’s inability to embrace their own physical presence in the world objectively
5. photography’s symbolic remedy to this failure pictured as raw meat in the scenes

I see you also teach Independent Film (along with Digital Imaging) at Governors State University, What role does film making play in your artwork (if any)?

I actually don’t teach Independent Film, only disciplines related to the still image (Photography and Digital Imaging). However I am one of four faculty teaching in the Independent Film & Digital Imaging MFA program at Governors State University, and as such my artistic views very frequently inter-cross with the moving images.

What do you find is the most rewarding thing about being a professor?

I think that being a professor forces me to keep questioning the medium with which I create. Every time that I re-explore problematics inherent to Photography in class, be they of philosophical, aesthetical or theoretical nature, I feel like renewing an original, authentic understanding of it.

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Where did you grow up?  Can you tell me what it was like for you growing up?

I was a tomboy and so this change suited me well.  I’m an only child, and we joke that I was my father’s only son, so I learned a lot of handy things about carpentry and power tools from following him around.  In college, we built my first darkroom together in a little building on my parents’ land, which including digging a trench to the septic tank and nearly electrocuting ourselves wiring the building.

“In college, we built my first darkroom together in a little building on my parents’ land, which including digging a trench to the septic tank and nearly electrocuting ourselves wiring the building.”

I have great parents and am still very close to them.  They were always extremely supportive in whatever I chose to pursue (including my 10-minute interests in piano, woodworking, sidewalk-chalk artistry, beauty pageants, stamp-collecting, and basketball).  Over the course of my life, my family has had times of great abundance, and then has also had very lean times, which I think has left me with the empathy to relate to a wide range of the ways people live economically and socially.  Both of my parents are hardworking, and have completely changed careers several times during their lives. As an adult, I find myself unusually comfortable with change and adaption. I think their example has had a big impact on me because these were always such courageous risks they took, and it taught me to always challenge myself and to remember that we never stop changing or growing.

When did you start making artwork?
As a child I was into painting and drawing, due largely to my mother’s example.  My mom painted as a hobby and I began taking classes with her, and then continued with art electives in high school and early college. I became a bit more practical in college when I had to decide on a career and I somehow ended up in the business department studying finance. (I know. What was I thinking?)
At some point, my roommate brought home an old SLR that a relative had given her and it intrigued me.  I bought a crappy camera and started taking bad pictures and was completely in love with the process of it.  By my senior year, I was working in a local photo lab, and was also in a serious relationship with a very talented musician whose own career plans were making the prospects for my finance degree look extremely boring.  During a summer internship in London (at a now defunct financial institution that I won’t name), I called my boyfriend and announced I was “Going To Be A Photographer”.

“I bought a crappy camera and started taking bad pictures and was completely in love with the process of it.”

I finished the degree, married the musician, and we moved to Nashville where I turned my focus toward matching my skills to the level of my enthusiasm. I assisted other photographers, I shot for the local paper, and then worked nights in my own little darkroom and eventually started showing my artwork locally.
The early influences of painting and drawing have always stayed with me, and I still love to experiment mixing mediums, manipulating photographs, or taking them beyond documentation, and into the realm of my own emotion and imagination.

We are featuring your farm series, what draws you to this theme and why?
THE FARM series is taken at my husband’s family farm in rural Kansas.  His grandparents are wheat farmers and the land has been in the family for many generations.  My father-in-law and his 4 siblings grew up on the farm, then moved away to start families and careers.  They all made regular pilgrimages back to the farm, however, and so my husband grew up spending summers and holidays in his grandparent’s farmhouse.  This continued into his adult life, and when we started dating I began making the trips as well.
My own childhood was split between several states and, like many Americans, our own family history was vague beyond the last generation.  So I was very intrigued by this Kansas family who had such a rich trove of history that all related to a specific plot of earth.  It was amazing to walk the fields and be shown the exact embankment where Great-Great-Grandfather Silas built a temporary sod house when he first claimed the land. What stories! I also began to note how growing up with this heritage had shaped and influenced the lives of the family members, and how their identities were in some way tied to this land.  This seemed a very special and unusual thing: the most American of stories, but at the same time so unusual for an American family today.
My first trip to the farm coincided with my initial interest in photography in college, so the farm was one of my earliest subjects. Very little came of those early shoots, and it took quite a number of years before I even realized that this was becoming a ‘project’.   It’s been about 15 years since my first visit to the farm and I’ve continued to photograph there on most every visit. I’ve photographed the farm with every camera I’ve ever owned, from 35mm to 4×5 and everywhere in-between.  The subject matter that I photographed was just as diverse.  At some point I realized that I had serious choices to make about how I would edit this project and what I wanted to say.
In the end, this is not a story about a particular family, but rather about a larger sense of place and history, and about the power of memory and story in our lives.  It’s about the things that tie us together, and the things that bring us back.

“It’s (The Farm Series) about the things that tie us together, and the things that bring us back.”

What is your favorite subject to shoot?
Wow, that is hard to say. I shoot such a wide range of subject matter – people, animals, environment and landscapes. I guess I am drawn to subjects that have a poetic or lyrical quality and that offer several layers of metaphor that present different directions that the viewer can go within the image. I notice I am often drawn to things that have character and have been around a while, which explains my fascination with ‘old stuff’.

Who are some of your photographic influences and inspirations?
I think I draw creative inspiration from a wide range of sources – music, film, painting, even nature. My husband, Jared, is a singer-songwriter so music is a big part of my life and creates a bit of a creative soundtrack for my own work. I am drawn to a lot of work from latin artists – painters, sculptors, mixed media artists. One of my favorite museums ins the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) in Long Beach, CA. I always see so much work that is rich and bold and full of life.
Some of my favorite contemporary photographers are Sebastiao Salgado, Raymond Meeks, Debbie Caffrey, Todd Hido, Pentti Sammallahti.

What is the most important thing you’ve learned about being an artist?
That living a full and creative life is part of being an artist and is the first step to actually making art. The work we make has to flow from who we are and what we love. Life and art are inextricably linked.

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Where did you grow up? Can you tell me what it was like for you growing up?

I use to take a lot of pictures when I was a kid. My parents always had the latest popular cameras. I was also fascinated by the itinerant photographers that would pass in our street, took photographs of our cottages and then would sell the image mounted in a small key-chain viewer.
I had a wonderful childhood, but absolutely without any artistic surrounding. My parents were middle income workers for whom a museum visit was not part of a fun thing to do. Reading was my favorite escaping way. From age eight I started to read all novels that were available. Reading made me travel and discover the world.

When did you start making artwork?
In 1988 after living in Europe for a while I moved to Montreal, the largest city of the province.
I discovered photography when a friend lend me her reflex camera to photograph my 6 months old daughter. I then bought an old 35mm camera. Very fast my interests got broader. In 1996 I quit my nursing job and took a commercial photography course. I then worked a few years as a photography assistant while doing a lot of personal contracts, mostly industrial photography. It’s while doing those contracts that I started to develop a personal style and began to be recognized for it.
I discovered the artistic potential of Polaroid while working with Polaroid Polagraph 35mm film, an absolutely extraordinary high contrast film. It’s with this film that I started working on more consistent body of work, the first one being the quarry project.

“I remember making the images and feeling such harmony and balance between my vision and the way to express it.”

Why are you drawn to your Polaroid pinhole toy camera? What does it do for you other cameras do not?
In 2001 I won one of the Polaroid International professional contest first place, and ended up with tons of Polaroid Polagraph as a prize. When I won again in 2004, I decided to get a broader selection of Polaroid product and ordered a Polaroid pinhole toy camera.

I still remember the first image I made with the camera, a view of a lake and foliage which appeared to reflect the feelings I had looking at the scenery. From then on I started to use it more and more, always with Polaroid 669 film that gives long exposures a characteristic blue tint. When I did bring the camera to Magdalen’s Islands, I remember making the images and feeling such harmony and balance between my vision and the way to express it.

The Polaroid pinhole is made of cardboard and I assembled it with black electrician tape. The shutter is a black tape that I take off and on to open and close it. I don’t have to think about metering, viewfinder, aperture, lens… everything is so intuitive and runs smoothly. This camera has almost become an extension of my brain and eyes. When I look at my subject, I see immediately what I want to get on the Polaroid. I then plunge in sort of a meditative state, when nothing else around me seems to exist. Very often I sit on the ground with the camera for hours, shooting until I exactly get what I feel. When I finally have THE one, the feeling of accomplishment and fulfillment is incredible.
With Polaroid closing all their production lines, I did stock quite a large amount of film but eventually will have to stop using Polaroid. Makes me very sad. But I did start back to use film with a Diana and Brownie Hawkeye.

What are your favorite subjects to shoot?
My favorite subjects are seascapes, wrecked boats, boats, and boat’s names. Anything related to that will appeal to me. I can walk on the beach for hours. When I travel I look for boats. I even found one on the side of road 66 in California.
Architecture is another one. I went to Bangkok for a few days last year, and was thrilled to see how well the ancient palaces came out on Polaroid.

I also love old hotels and motels, abandoned houses and cars. Anything that reflects man’s trace and passage, even when the memories are not necessarily flattering for us, human gender.
I often get the sense that I am the only survivor on earth when I go to these places and record images of that loneliness.

Who are some of your photographic heroes and why?
Michael Kenna is truly my favorite photographer, for the incredible night landscapes that he makes. Even tough I don’t make portraits, Sebastio Salgado is one that I admire the most for his humanity and the human suffering history that he has capture through out the years. Dorothea Lange for her innovative and tenacious recording of the grand depression period.

“Photography is not just an image on paper, it’s a little piece of yourself that your sharing with others.”

What is the greatest photographic lesson you’ve learned?
That no matter how good a technical photographer you are, if there is no reflection of your emotion it will be difficult to touch and reach others with your work. Photography is not just an image on paper, it’s a little piece of yourself that your sharing with others.

So learn the technique up to a point where you will no longer need it.

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1. Where did you grow up? Can you tell me what it was like for you growing up?

I was originally born in Hanoi; my families were among the boat people who left Vietnam in the late 70s.

We came to live in England where I grew up in the South, in a small town with small attitudes. As far as I can remember I desperately craved an opportunity to break free and find my independence and individuality.

My parents tried to give me a strict traditional upbringing where creativity was tolerated but certainly not encouraged. After many battles my rebellious nature finally took over when I made my escape at 17.

2. When did you start making artwork?

I have always sought ways to develop and express my creativity through various art forms including music and video.

I discovered my passion for photography whilst trying to work on an idea for a short film, I found that I kept reaching for my SLR over my video camera.

3. We are featuring your pinhole photography, what draws you to this technique and why?

Pinhole began for me as an experiment. I had been playing around with cheap toy cameras and utilizing the unique results gained from the lo-fi equipment. Therefore I thought what could be more crappy than making my own camera. I just love the tin pot-ness of my biscuitcam, where I can achieve an incredible quality of image while details like mega pixels and ISOs are just meaningless.

Pinhole completely appeals to my nature as a photographer as I tend to work instinctively, so without a viewfinder or light meter I will line up my camera, look at the sky and guess the minutes to count away.

When I pinhole I concentrate on creating atmosphere over worrying about technical precision. I love photographing the portraits as the mood that I can conjure up simply astounds me every time.

4. Who or what inspires your creativity?

I’m inspired by images of the past, decay, travel, industry, people, stories…

One of my projects includes a photo blog called the Lost Promenade. It gives me the opportunity to seek out my inspirations through visiting various seaside towns around the coast of Britain. My photos are probably quite romantic as I try to capture the atmosphere, the fading grandeur, the strange quirks of the place as we explore ….each trip is like living out a childhood outing to the sea….. It’s also a good opportunity to go prop/costume scouting for my pinhole portrait shots!

5. What is the biggest lesson you’ve learned?

I used to I feel under pressure to try and develop a personal style in my work in order to stand apart from everyone else. I used to get frustrated about being able to find my niche.

The problem is that there’s a tendency to mirror your peers, mentors, and influences which I sought to avoid. For me personal style developed through life experience and practical experience.

Now, I look over my body of work and I can see how my style and individuality has shaped over time and I realize there’s no point in being impatient as you can’t rush the creative process.

6. If you were to teach a class on photography, what would be your first advice to your students?

I would tell my students that if they wanted a lesson in the history of photography and the text book way of doing things then this is not the class for them. I would tell them not to get weighed down with technique and the correct way of doing things but to just go out, take risks and experiment.

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