A Few Questions for Jo Ann Walters

I met Jo Ann Walters in the summer of 2002 at the Maine Photography Workshops. I was working as a teaching assistant, helping a different photographer each week in the classroom. That summer would end up being an important one for me personally and professionally. I was new to photography and hungry to absorb as much as I could from the teachers and students who were passing through. Jo Ann arrived toward the end of July and within the first few hours of working with her I could tell that I was in the presence of a naturally gifted teacher and exceptionally talented artist. The week I spent working with her changed the trajectory of my career. She introduced me to the concept of photography as art and steered me toward pursuing an MFA.

Jo Ann is now the head of the photography department at SUNY Purchase, where I also teach. All my students who know her sing her praises as an educator, photographer and person. They respect and admire her, something many of us who teach strive for, to earn the respect and admiration of our students.

I've also admired Jo Ann's work for years and was thrilled when Kris Graves announced that he would exhibit her work in November. I asked Jo Ann if she would be up for a quick interview. I was very happy when she agreed. This post comes late in the show's run. It closes on Saturday, December 18. If you're in New York and haven't yet seen it you have a few days.

Amy Stein: Your show VANITY + CONSOLATION, that opened at Kris Graves Projects and runs through December 19th, is an examination women and girls in intimate domestic spaces in the small blue color town of Alton, Ill. Can you tell us more about this series?

Jo Ann Walters: All of my work, VANITY + CONSOLATION, DOG TOWN, my early landscape work THRESHOLDS and other side projects can in one way or another be traced back to my experiences growing up in southern Illinois in the 1950’s and 60’s and the choices I made in response to my background.

VANITY + CONSOLATION is, perhaps, my most personal work. The pictures are like secrets you tell someone in confidence but might not to everyone. In my introduction to the entire work, made up of approximately 70 pictures, I describe the shock and isolation that I felt as I began to move further and further from home. In addition to Illinois, I’ve lived in New Orleans, Arizona, Maine and Connecticut where I presently reside. These are unique cultural places within the United States. They each resist the bland sameness usually associated with this country and particularly the mid west.

There is this geographical distance, but there is also the emotional and intellectual distance I traveled. These portraits of young women, mothers and their children comes from my desire to remember where I came from, to understand what I have gained by leaving home, and also to see and feel what I have lost by leaving home.

One of many ways of understanding VANITY + CONSOLATION is as a covert portrait of a runaway. Alice Munro, one of the finest authors I have ever read, has a collection of short stories titled Runaway. I am mesmerized by the varied associations of the title. For example, “Runaway” is a proper name. It might be read as an archetype. It might also be understood as a secret and internal female voice of warning or command to runaway directed toward the women and girls Munro writes about.

There are two pictures in the VANITY + CONSOLATION that suggest this notion of a “runaway” as deep content in the work. One photograph, depicts a young girl on a bicycle riding past a suburban home that might be her own. While passing, she looks back over her shoulder at the front door that seems to be beckoning. It is lit with the gleaming gold of sunset. (Of course, this photograph references two of William Eggleston’s pictures in The Guide. Inside his book, the first picture is of a front door of a suburban home decorated with a basket of artificial flowers and then there is picture of the tricycle on the cover. However, as you move through the sequence of pictures in my work, you see that I reference his work, but use the imagery to different ends.

Another clue is the photograph of the teenage girl with chipped blue fingernails wearing a baggy grey sweatshirt. She has this beautiful distorted Inge -like body in the picture. There is an Adidas lanyard hanging from her neck that holds a set of keys. The keys dangle between her thighs. She is sitting on a guardrail. One fictive interpretation might be that she is a teenage runaway. There is a surprising anecdote about this portrait. The young woman in the picture told me that she had just discovered that she was pregnant.

I like to work long and hard on projects, often for a decade or more. I want my work to feel like a living thing with many layered meanings, emotional range and depths of feeling. I look thoughtfully and carefully when making pictures as well as afterwards when editing and printing. The constellation of particulars, the details, the associations of the subject matter, the skeletal structure and the color and textures of weather and atmosphere that hold a picture together. And then there is the whole, wonderful puzzle of many images to contend with and to make sense of. I build visual motifs out of these elemental details by weaving them together into what I hope are stories of deep inwardness through strange and beautiful appearances.

The motivation for this work was originally a way of validating the righteousness of my new found life away from the Midwest and the burdens I associated with it; the oppressive religious dictates of Catholism, the intellectual and emotional oversimplification of women, the dictate to be seen and not heard, the inevitable future of children and the narrow range of intellectual work. The Emily Dickenson poem 505 describes what might be at stake by staying rather than leaving, of being created rather than creating.

I would not paint—a picture—
I'd rather be the One
Its bright impossibility
To dwell—delicious—on—…

But it’s funny though how the world refuses simple characterization. You won’t find consolation in what passes for the new. Rather you will find it in despised places and corners of your imagination. It might be easier to picture what I mean if I can deviate a bit and talk about making pictures for my newer work DOG TOWN. I started by driving around in the bad neighborhoods, photographing vacant lots, railroad lines, burned-out buildings. These are the parts of my hometown that show the deep scars of industrialism. I was looking for something that nobody else wanted anymore, something anonymous, something forgotten.

By extension, in VANITY + CONSOLATION I try to show the cracks in what seems like an ancient and nearly impenetrable psychic wall of vanity. These are the whorled places that hold the sweet and aching sadness of our desire and beauty.

When I looked back, remembered and gave myself over to search and questioning, I came away with much more than I had bargained for. What was first experienced through distance and fascination, my earliest pictures of this subject attest to this, turned into something far too complex to be depicted solely through irony. Instead, I found the swirl and ache of regret and beauty. I made a picture once, as part of Dog Town, of an empty roadside fruit stand along the highway on one of my many road trips. It had a weathered sign that had once said PEACHES, but the “p” and the “e” were nearly worn away. The first impression reads that it said ACHES before the rest of the word begins to appear. This photograph didn’t make it into the final edit though I printed and re-printed it and tried and tried to make it work. Memory and the sensual are intrinsically linked and in the end I couldn’t breathe life into it. Despite my desire it stubbornly refused to move beyond the illustrative.

AS: As someone who doesn't work on projects so close to home, I always wonder how you (and photographers like Doug Dubois and Chris Verene, for example) separate your personal interest in the subject from your instincts as a photographer. Or do you? Are you trying to make the intimate universal?

JAW: This is an ongoing dilemma, a paradox really, and elemental tension that I wrestle with. It is a question of separating and integrating at once the complex emotions, associations, memories and conceptual attitudes related to one’s home and family with the analytical and evaluative criteria of judgment. I want to translate and make my beliefs and values accessible to a larger world. The goal I think is to find a visual correlative in the world that translates photographically. I’ve learned to trust my intuitive gifts as well as my intellectual ones. I treat all with equal respect. In my best work you can feel that same genrative tension and conflict. You can see the tension of wrestling to keep all in suspension so I can call on any or all when needed. These oppositions are not so much reconciled as accepted. When I work, I try to hold making, knowing and judging in meaningful suspension and trust that what is necessary will come to my aid. It’s a matter of preparation, practice and attention. Of course this is a gross simplification of the process.

I think reaching for the universal is a kind of a religious impulse. Though I am concerned with the first and last questions of spirit and sensuality, I find meaning and consolation in particulars. I am not so much trying to make the intimate universal as attempting to make the intimate graceful and particular.

AS: Your series Thresholds was included in the seminal book New Color/New Work, by Sally Eauclaire, published in 1984, which places you among the masters of early color photography, including Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld, Mitch Epstein and William Eggleston. As one of the few photographers celebrated for color photography during this time did you have the sense that your work was challenging the conventions of art photography? Was there camaraderie among your contemporaries that spoke of this movement and pushed the work towards greater acceptance?

JAW: Challenging convention? Certainly not at first. I grew up in southern Illinois in a working class town. I had little access to or knowledge of a visual creative world. I went to schools too poor for art classes. I became interested in photography after I graduated from college. My mother and I took a photography class from a high school shop teacher in a neighboring town that had grown up around oil refineries. These same oil refineries have since become part of my current project DOG TOWN.

I moved to New Orleans and had a friend from Arkansas that had grown up on a soybean and peanut plantation. He had been in New York City on business trip and returned with a gift -- William Eggleston’s The Guide. He said Eggleston’s pictures looked just like where he had grown up. Eggleston’s work was strange, fascinating and opaque. I looked at it over and over again for many years. But it was really a combination of Eggleston and Atget that set the wheels in motion. I saw an exhibit of Atget’s gardens curated by Jackie Onassis at the old ICP that set the wheels in motion. I still remember the dizzying affect Atget’s photographs had on me, as well as, the four exhibitions of Atget’s work curated by John Szwarkowski for the Museum of Modern Art. Eggleston and Atget! Strange bedfellows? Maybe, maybe not.

Was there camaraderie among your contemporaries that spoke of this movement and pushed the work towards greater acceptance? Though I eventually met and was mentored by other photographers working in color, I was from Middle America, younger and female, unlike most associated with the “new color”. I was working in the Midwest far from the cultural sophistication of New York City and went on to graduate school in Ohio. Between academic years I met Len Jenshel at the Maine Photographic Workshops when I was his teaching assistant. He was a great support. It was his unabashed embrace of beauty in color that struck me and caused me to question my own relation to beauty. I had been skeptical of beauty and did not quite know how to distinguish it from sentimentality. William Butler Yeats has spoken to the difference between sentiment and sentimentality. Sentimentality, he says, is the hollow image of unfullfilled desire. This conflict continues to be a subject in my work. I make subtle distinctions between the two. Joel Sternfeld’s work was amazing! The beauty, restraint and surprise. He wrote for my Guggenheim application. Richard Misrach use of color was intensely beautiful, minimal and atmospheric. Desert Cantos has a literary component that the best of the work associated with this period of color share.

It wasn’t until I began my very first teaching position at Yale University in 1985 where I taught for 8 years, that I came to truly understand the photographic world as part of a greater cultural debate and the aesthetics of color as part of a contemporary landscape movement. Shortly after my hire I won a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel and photograph alongside the length of the Mississippi River. During that time I met and had the exceptional opportunity to live with the Eggleston family in Memphis, Tennessee for several months, and to use their home as a base while I photographed in the south. I looked at hundreds of Bill’s photographs and had long, concentrated opportunities to discuss my work with him. We shared an experience of growing up outside of New York City, in isolated regions of the country. Southern Illinois is at once middle and southern. Much of southern Illinois was pro-confederacy during the civil war. The citizens of my hometown stoned an abolitionist journalist to death. At the same time, there was an underground railroad that transported runaway slaves to the north.

I am not savvy in business, though I suppose it wouldn’t be a bad thing to improve in this regard, that is, as long as I stay true to what I believe in. This is easier said than done. I have been and remain on the fringes commercially speaking. I am also on the outskirts imaginatively. This is good. Imagination (“Poetry”) flows "From ranches of isolation… /Raw towns that we believe and die in.” I concur with W.H. Auden above and William Carlos Williams below.

Look at
what passes for the new:
You will not find it there but in
despised poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

Thursday, December 16, 2010

A Few Questions for Jo Ann Walters