The Power of Walking

Life became incredibly complex and difficult in the early 2010’s. As I cast about trying to figure out how to achieve some semblance of balance in my life, my efforts always seemed to shatter on the shores of time, or lack of it. I never seemed to have enough time to do what needed to be done. I wanted to do something for myself that would allow me to step outside of my life, if only for a few brief minutes, in order to recover somewhat, but everything I tried took too much time and energy. My efforts were just making things worse.

Then, almost in desperation, I hit upon the idea of taking a walk first thing in the morning, before doing anything else. This got me outside and away from the technology that sucked me in far too easily. It did not take me long to realize that even a short walk around the block made a huge difference. Each walk became a time to breathe freely, to let my mind roam where it wanted, to allow my eyes to feast on what was in front of me, to realize that I could break away from the treadmill of demands that threatened to sink me at times. That was how my walking practice began.

Having continued that practice since then, walking was something that I did every day during the pandemic. It thankfully kept me going during some dark times. What a gift! Here is a recent piece written for the New York Times by Francis Sanzaro that speaks to the power of walking far more eloquently than I can: The Next Walk You Take Could Change Your Life.

Stone Work

A favorite book of mine since its publication in 1990 is Stone Work, by John Jerome. In it, the author meditates on the nature of work as he rebuilds a stone wall on his property in western Massachusetts. The following quote perfectly captures how elusive the act of seeing, and understanding what you are seeing, can be:

“I’ve never learned how to focus my attention, just as I never learned to study in school, only to read the books—the stories—that pulled my attention out of me. Actively focusing attention, coming up with enough mental energy to keep attention focused on something, was entirely too much effort. I didn’t know how to do it. I still don’t.  I want to be able to step back and let the sheer beauty of this place overwhelm me, carry me passively along, but clearly that’s all wrong, a sure way to tune out: what I have to do to see into the woods is dig into the details (as Mies van der Rohe pointed out long ago—quoting, I’m sure, someone else). To focus on detail I take notes, attempting to write down the riches of the woods, trying to convince myself that I have gotten those riches. But I haven’t, I never have. I don’t know enough, don’t see enough, don’t know how to see. Don’t know what I’ve seen, what was going on, until I get back and start writing about it, telling myself the story: debriefing myself on the experience. Every time that I see a little bit more, it tells me there are worlds and worlds to see, deeper yet.  The pleasure I get when I see a little tells me that all pleasure, all happiness, lies in seeing more. Whenever I manage to see some tiny bit, I always say to myself again, yes, that’s the way I wish I lived: seeing these things.”

I particularly relate to how hard Jerome digs into what he is trying to understand and how he goes back again and again to grasp it fully. This is what creative work is like- hacking away at something you don’t fully understand and realizing you might never understand it, but that’s ok. And trusting that what you are doing is important, if only to you.

Honoring Author Barry Lopez

There are very few writers who thought as deeply and wrote so eloquently about the natural world and the relationship of humans to it as author Barry Lopez, who died on Christmas Day, 2020. A short film titled Horizons has been put together by award-winning filmmaker Jeremy Seifert in honor of the first anniversary of Lopez’s death. The loss of his voice is profound, but the gift of his writing will continue to resonate for generations to come.

Lopez’s ability to create visual metaphor in the reader’s mind was extraordinary, his storytelling equally so. His writing immerses me in the places and states he describes, and I ask myself whether or not I could do them justice as a photographer. Part of me feels like I would never need to pick up my camera, though, because the richness of his words so perfectly creates a picture of what he wants you to see. What a gift. What a loss.

If you haven’t yet read anything by Barry Lopez, a good place to start would be Arctic Dreams.

Friendship Between Artists

The New York Times T-magazine from April 18 contained an article titled “A Shared Devotion”. Written by Megan O’Grady, it discussed the value of friendships between artists. Friends play different roles in our lives, as evidenced by the fact that we will call certain friends when we are having relationship problems, but others when we need help solving a problem with other things. The friendship between artists is a unique one, though, and such friendships have helped me navigate the coronavirus pandemic.

 As O’Grady put it, “… a real friend can also be counted on to tenderly shelter our idealism in a transactional world: That person who might help us believe, against all odds, in our own consequence as we go about the delicate business of composing a self – an act of imagination in large part, after all. The moral anxiety of any creative practice – standing, as it does, uncredentialed and fiscally insecure, in dubious relation to necessity – can be acute, and it does something to you when someone else believes in you.”  

 And who better to understand those forces and that anxiety than another artist? Despite our differences in how we go about making our art, my artist friends understand the relentless questioning about the value, quality and meaning of what we do. When I doubt, they hold me up. When they feel hopeless, I am there for them to do the same.

O’Grady again: “The truth is, none of us do it on our own. Transcendence requires human scaffolding; immortality, a benevolent witness: that fellow traveler holding a lantern in a dark wood, telling us like we are.”

As we slowly emerge from the darkness of the pandemic into the light, I am so grateful for my artist friends. I gain courage and insight from them that I don’t get from any other source. With them at my side, I feel that anything is possible.

Making Art (and Science) is Like an Iceberg

I love the writing of Hope Jahren, an American geochemist and geobiologist. Her memoir, Lab Girl, published in 2016, shows the tenacity and grit required of a woman in the sciences, but there are many passages in it that I relate to as an artist. One section describes the incredibly deep dive that she makes into her research as well as the impossibility of conveying all the challenges she meets along the way in her final research reports.

She says: “I have become proficient at producing a rare species of prose capable of distilling ten years of work by five people into six published pages, written in a language that very few people can read and that no one ever speaks…

Although my publications contain meticulous details of the plants that did grow, the runs that went smoothly, and the data that materialized, they perpetrate a disrespectful amnesia against the entire gardens that rotted in fungus and dismay, the electrical signals that refused to stabilize, and the printer ink cartridges that we secured late at night through nefarious means. I know damn well that if there had been a way to get to success without traveling through disaster someone would have already done it and thus rendered the experiments unnecessary, but there’s still no journal where I can tell the story of how my science is done with both the heart and the hands.”

The image that that conjures up for me is that of an iceberg, 1/10th of which is visible above the waterline, while 9/10ths remains submerged in the depths below. This is exactly what the process of making art is like. The 1/10th is the final piece that people see. But everything that goes before that - the mistakes, the false starts, the disasters, the endless questions to oneself about what the hell you are doing and what the hell is it exactly that you WANT to be doing, the small successes that show you a potential path forward - all that is almost never seen by or shared with an audience. And that stuff is the part that is the most creative, that demands your attention, that intensely excites you, that demands most of your time. You want to share it with the world, but there aren’t many venues in which it can be shared and appreciated.

The closest artists come is when a curator puts together a show about “the creative process”. That kind of show exists in order to showcase exactly what it goes into the making of a piece of art or a project, but they are unfortunately few and far between. I’ve often thought if we artists could share more of our process, that art would be more greatly understood and appreciated.* As it is, we continue to exist as icebergs in a sea that is uncertain of the value we bring to the world.

* (Teaching is similar. Parents and students have very little knowledge of the amount of preparation that goes into teaching and don’t understand how much time it takes to evaluate student work. The coronavirus has revealed to many just how much work goes into teaching. One can only hope that that those lessons will be remembered once in-person school can take place more regularly again.)

Questions for My Father

When my father died, he left behind a collection of over 25,000 Kodak Kodachrome 35mm slides that he had taken between 1945 and 1996. It wasn’t until the mid-’90’s that he went digital, as until then, digital cameras could not capture the kind of color and information that Kodachrome film could. Being the super-organized person he was, he had edited the slides down and stored them in carefully labeled slide carousels so that he could show them at family gatherings.

By the time he passed, I didn’t really know what those carousels contained, as it had been many years since he had shown them. I proceeded to go through every single one, curious to learn what I would find. I quickly realized that my father was interested in two major subjects as a photographer: the natural world and his family.

But there were three slides I came across that shocked me. I literally gasped when I saw them.

Taken in 1982, these three pictures were so unlike any of the others, that I saved them for the treasures they are. Because he appears in all three, they were most likely taken by my mother (at least two of them were, including the one of the left; the last one below is debatable), in locations that are unknown to me.

These pictures are the technical antithesis of the kind of photograph my father sought to achieve, which was to have sharp focus and clear, rich colors. The camera used to take these three was clearly malfunctioning, at least on two of them, and the focus is off. They are also anomalies in terms of content, as he was of the “What you see in the photo is exactly what was in front of my camera.” persuasion. Visual ambiguity in any form was to be avoided. So why did he save these three photographs, which suffer from what would have been to him so many technical and aesthetic flaws?

Did he save them simply because he had no other slides from those days and locations? Why did he save a picture in which the only identifiable thing in it is his hand? (seen on the right) Most of the information in this photograph is indecipherable, and I can’t make out what his hand might be reaching for.

What did the silhouette and reflection in the photograph seen below mean to him? It seemed crazy this last photo is so similar to the work I am doing now (see Witness Marks). It felt like my father was sending me a message of some kind, but what that might be, I have yet to discover. All I know is that that particular picture connected us in some visceral way.

I ultimately saved 2,700 of the family photo slides from all those that he had taken. I value them highly, as they depict five decades of our family history that otherwise would have been lost. But it is these three slides that my creative self is most fascinated by. It’s almost as if my father saved them just for me, knowing that eventually I would find them and wonder why…

Learning from your Audience

I am always interested in how people respond to my work, and particularly what they see in it. It is wonderful when I get feedback in person, which I got during the recent opening of Witness Marks at the Off Ludlow Gallery in Cincinnati. A roughly 5-year old boy came in with his father and they slowly walked through the exhibition, looking carefully at each photograph. When I asked the boy if he had a favorite picture, he pointed to this one:

When I asked him what it was about that picture that he liked, he said it was because all the CD cases were black on the top except for the one exactly in the middle, which was green. “Huh!”, I thought, as I looked more closely at a photograph I had viewed scores of times in the last year. Sure enough, there WAS a green jewelcase nestled in the midst of the others that I had never noticed before. That tiny little detail made a difference once I saw it, as it became a demarcation line, creating two opposing sides and interrupting the flow of CDs on the bookcase. Sometimes it takes the eyes of others to awaken us to what is there:

Witness Marks Opens

Witness Marks opened at the Off Ludlow Gallery in Cincinnati, OH, on September 25. I started photographing two-and-a-half years ago, started the culling and editing process one year ago, and finally feel like I have some idea of what I’ve been doing with these photographs. The kind of images I made when I started in on this project are quite different than those that I am making now. Then, I was content to simply stand in place and photograph my shadow as it inserted itself into the space I was in. Now, I am far more dynamic with how I create the picture, trying to infuse the shadow with more metaphorical meaning in relation to the rest of the scene. It is incredibly informative to see the work up on the walls instead of always looking at them on a screen. It gives me perspective and context for understanding the work that I wouldn’t otherwise have.

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Sincere thanks to Joyce Rich, Michael Roller, Pat Olding, Paige Wideman, Sean Mullaney and John Osterman for all the work they put into making the Off Ludlow Gallery an artist-friendly place to exhibit. Thanks also to Helen Adams for encouraging me to exhibit this work and to FotoFocus for continuing to champion photography in Cincinnati. As always, I couldn’t have done it without Laura Fisher, who has supported me and my work in more ways that I can count.

Culling & Editing a Project

In April of 2018, I began working on a series of pictures that slowly evolved into a project titled Witness Marks. To date, I’ve taken over 3,700 photographs, which, in the digital age, isn’t very much considering what’s possible. But it is an overwhelming number when it comes to trying to make sense out of the work.

I have committed to exhibiting this work in a show in October 2020, and am working hard at choosing images for it. I’ve been using Photo Mechanic 6 to view, organize and manage all these photographs, and it has helped me to quickly be able to prioritize them. After narrowing them down to about 120 images this way, I reached the point where I needed to print them in order to physically be able to look at and organize them. For me, culling and editing on a screen only goes so far, as I find it way more informative and helpful to physically arrange and move pictures around in space. I’ll be in this phase for a while.

Cutting up contact sheets

Arranging and choosing images

Conversing with Photographs

Way back in July, 2017, I read an article in the New York Times that immediately grabbed my interest. It was about an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art titled “Talking Pictures: Camera-Phone Conversations Between Artists”. The curator of the exhibit, Mia Fineman, had become intrigued by the dialogue that is possible between two people who exchange images with no accompanying text. In this case, she invited pairs of artists to create an image-sharing conversation with their smartphones that kept going back and forth. Some used their favorite creative medium (drawing, painting, video, etc.) and photographed the results, while others used straight photographs. The pictorial results were shown at the Met, and I only wish that I had been able to see the show.

I have always been intrigued by how photographs “speak” to viewers, and the idea of a visual back-and-forth like the one in this exhibit totally grabs me. I already do a version of this on Snapchat with my kids, but it would be exciting to dig into it with another visual artist.

Sharing Art With Others

I just love it when something completely unexpected happens that relates to art. Today my (snail) mailbox yielded up a hand-addressed envelope. Since that doesn’t happen much anymore, I was immediately intrigued, and became even more so when I discovered that it had been sent from England.

There were two postcards inside. Here is the first one:

Ali had stamped and addressed the second card to herself on one side, and had left the other side blank. She requested that I draw something on it (since all artists must be able to “draw”, sigh…), so I printed out an image from my current project (which can be seen on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/janealdenstevens/?hl=en), taped it on, and wrote a brief message:

You never know who will find you and your work nowadays, and it’s a blast when something random like this happens.

When a Project Finds You...

In my experience as an artist, I have found that sometimes I have quite consciously looked for, chosen, and worked on a project. At other times, a project has found me. This happened to me earlier this year when I spent two months cleaning out the house that my parents had lived in for nearly 70 years.

One morning, I walked through the dining room and saw the shadow of a chair being cast against a door. What I registered was how empty that chair-shadow looked, and it made me think of how the family would never again sit around that table to share a meal in that house. I took a picture of it... just because it seemed important to.

The next day, the sun streamed through the bathroom window. After showering, I opened the door and saw that my silhouette was being cast onto the opposite wall. I remembered the photograph of the chair I had taken the previous day, and suddenly realized that these shadows perfectly summed up what I was experiencing at that time: loss, the fugitive nature of time and memory, emptiness.

I realized that these pictures could speak for me at a time when words were simply inadequate, and kept taking them for the next two months until I left the house for the last time. I'm now sifting through the more than 3,000 images that I took, still amazed at how suddenly this project emerged, and how it found me when I wasn't even looking.

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Finding Your Audience: The MVS Master Class in Tucson

I attended the Mary Virginia Swanson Master Class in Marketing in Tucson, AZ, last month. It was amazing- jam-packed with more information than I could begin to describe here. It covered the role of the photobook in an artist's career, how to work with galleries, the role of portfolio reviews, the importance of editing one's work, how curators and gallerists find artists, correct archiving of photographic prints, and far more. We were honored to have people like photographer and editor Joan Liftin, photobook artist Philip Zimmermann, gallery owner Terry Etherton, independent curator Trudy Wilner Stack, and photographer Susan Burnstine contribute to the experience, along with many others. In addition, the class was able to take early-morning hikes into the mountains surrounding Tucson to contemplate the sunrise before the day's work began. Most of all, it was wonderful to share work and thoughts with the other participants and get to know each other.

What were my biggest takeaways?

• The success of your portfolio is dependent primarily on your clarity of vision as expressed in the work, and the quality of its technical execution.
• The many options for keeping your work in the public eye.
• The importance of consistency in how you market your work.

The following images provide a small glimpse into the experience. Besides the sunrise shot, the center image shows Janet Huston discussing her work with Mary Virginia Swanson, Tillman Crane, and Lee Welke Bass. The image on the right shows Lisa Nebenzahl, Anna LaBenz, Sonja Rieger, Sirous Partovi.

PhotoNOLA 2017

I was fortunate to have been able to participate in the portfolio reviews at PhotoNOLA recently. The reviewers were engaged and easy to talk to, and the organization of the event was perfect. As always when artists talk to a variety of people about their work, the opinions I got were wildly divergent. Some felt that the path my work is on is spot on, while others felt that I needed to rethink what I am doing. The task now is to take all that feedback and figure out what is or isn't relevant to my goals.

One of my favorite events was the PhotoWalk, at which the photographers spread their work out on tables in a large hall (unheated- thus the jackets we were all wearing), and to which the reviewers and the public were invited. The turnout was great and the conversations lively:

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New Orleans is a great city and I saw some really moving art while I was there, particularly at the New Orleans Museum of Art. It was there that I saw a sublime exhibition of ceramics by Japanese artists titled New Forms, New Voices. I also discovered the paintings of Barkley L. Hendricks, whose portraits were utterly compelling. I don't often feel that a city has a sense of humor, but New Orleans definitely does. There is no better proof of that than the bronze plaque set into the sidewalk in front of the tiny diner that I ate breakfast in each morning:

Trip to Berlin- Initial Thoughts

The 10 days that I recently spent in Berlin were an amazing mix of many great things: art, food, architecture and people. A particular highlight was the Ars Electronica exhibition, in which 14 international artists presented work that dealt with the topic of encounters. So many of the pieces were thought-provoking, but the "Body Paint" work by Exonemo of Japan, and "The Wall of Gazes" series by Mariano Sardón in collaboration with Mariano Sigman from Argentina were especially riveting. Both of those series compelled me to stand in front of them for long periods of time, asking me to ponder what they were saying about identity. Amazing work, both conceptually and technically.

But I also enjoyed Berlin for the odd things that I saw there- moments of visual serendipity that went against the grain of the self-contained nature of the city. Here are some of them:

Blink Cincinnati

I went to Blink Cincinnati, an after-dark lights festival in Cincinnati, Ohio, this weekend. As a photographer, anything to do with light, shadow and form is something I want to engage with. For me, it's research for future ideas. They did a fantastic job- and the downtown was as crowded as I have ever experienced it. Loved it!

Memorable Quotes- Sting

Whenever creative people talk about their medium, whether it be writing, dance, painting, sculpture, ceramics, music, film, etc., they always speak for artists in other mediums. This is because creative concerns and methods are essentially universal to all artists, regardless of medium. I read an interview with Sting recently in which he talked about his creative process. Substitute the word "photography" for "music", and this thought is equally relevant:

"Music is like a sea without a horizon and without a reason for being. Making music is a wonderful adventure without borders - exactly like love. You never get to the bottom of the person you love. The closer you get, the more you understand about how little you know of them. That means that there is a lot of work yet to be done."

Exactly.

Memorable Quotes- Jerry Uelsmann & Duane Michals

There are a many thoughtful photographers out there who speak eloquently about their work and photography in general, but few are as inspiring as Jerry Uelsmann and Duane Michals. (I could list more, like Kip Fulbeck, for instance, but will limit myself for now.) Last month I attended the Society for Photographic Education's national conference, where 82-year old Uelsmann was a featured speaker. Here are a few of the more memorable things he said:

"I asked an historian, "What IS history?", and he answered, "History amounts to those things that you choose to remember."

"The camera is a license to explore."

"The viewer always completes the image."

"Art is one of those areas where there is more than one right answer."

"Once you think you know everything, the questioning stops."

And perhaps my favorite: "I don't want this presentation to be a snore-fest with yawn-sauce on the side."

Michals, who is now 85, was equally entertaining and challenging when I heard him speak at the Cincinnati Art Museum in 2000. Here are some of his most memorable lines:

"Do not try to be perfect, please. Perfect is boring. Your humanity lies in your vulnerability."

"Pay attention to your mind. You put crap in your mind, you get crap in your life. You put good things in your mind, you get good things in your life."

"I think about thinking."

"Don't come crying to me because nothing happened. Nothing happened because you didn't make it happen."

"You have 2 choices in life: doing and bullshit. Don't tell me what you are going to do. Show me what you have done."

"Guess when you were born? You were born now."

When golfer Arnold Palmer died in 2016, it was written of him, "People loved him because, in a world of sullen superstars, Palmer radiated joy and delight in the treasures of his life... He had a wonderful time being Arnold Palmer and squeezed every drop of juice from the experience." The same can be said about Uelsmann and Michals, both giants of 20th century photography.

The Challenge of Titling Artwork

Giving titles to artwork is a challenging but rewarding part of the creative process. Although I am sure that there are many artists out there who have no problem coming up with titles, there are many others for whom it is a difficult or thankless task. I've talked with artists who hate assigning titles, and often default to "Untitled No. XXX" for their work. This is, of course, an option, but one that can work against an artist in certain respects. First, it can make it challenging to figure out which piece a potential buyer or curator is talking about unless you are an artist who has a great inventory system that allows for quickly finding your artwork in your archives. The longer you make art, the harder it may be to identify and find an untitled piece without a detailed and up-to-date inventory database. (I'm speaking from personal experience here.) Second, it can turn off certain viewers and buyers who welcome titles, as they can add meaning or provide insight into the work.

It is this value-added aspect of titling artwork that makes me work hard at coming up with an effective title. Titling forces me to engage with my art in a different way than when I am making technical or aesthetic decisions about it. I title all the artwork that I exhibit, making sure to title each body of work, as well as each piece within a series.

Sometimes titling is really hard. This was the case for the overall title of the body of work that became "Tears of Stone: World War I Remembered". I agonized over what the title should be, making long lists of potential titles, all of which were lame or awful. It wasn't until I was passing by one of my bookcases and my eye fell on a Chieftains CD titled "Tears of Stone" that I had a eureka moment. Conversely, sometimes titling is drop-dead easy. This was the case with each image in the "Tears of Stone" series.  Rather than give the pictures metaphorical titles, I knew that many viewers would be very interested in the type of place and the location at which each shot was taken. The location would further indicate the scope of the war's impact the nations that fought in it. Here's an example:

On the other hand, sometimes metaphorical titles can be very effective. Here's an example from "The Primitive Streak" series that functions both literally and metaphorically, and which depicts my nieces as they neared the end of their childhood:

How do you come up with a great title for a piece of art? For me, it varies. Sometimes it comes from an external source like a discussion I have with a friend, a line in a book, newspaper, poem or song, or from listening to a podcast, as happened with the two series "The Wind Telephone" (This American Life) and "The Primitive Streak" (Radiolab). Sometimes a title is suggested by the artwork itself as I work on it. Using a thesaurus can be enormously helpful. I now keep an ongoing list of potential titles, knowing that I may never create a piece that matches up to one of those titles.

The main criteria I use for judging whether a title is effective or notis, "Does it add something to the experience of looking at the art without explaining too much?"

There really isn't one defining formula for creating successful titles for your artwork. Here are three different blogs that make excellent suggestions:

http://www.nicholaswilton.com/2014/08/06/how-to-title-your-art-so-it-sells/

https://renee-phillips.com/think-titles-art-matter/

How to Find the Perfect Title for Art

The Value of Feedback from Viewers

Once an exhibition goes up, it can be difficult for artists to get feedback about viewers' reaction to the work, especially if the venue is not in the place you live. But because "The Thread in the River" is currently being shown at the Weston Art Gallery in Cincinnati (until April 2), I have been able to meet with multiple classes of high school and university students who have shared their thoughts about what they see in the work and how they experience it. This has, in turn, led me to think a lot about how I might proceed as I continue to develop this project. A student asked me why I presented the images that appear in "Twelve Summers" as a video animation, rather than as still images. 

My answer was that I had tried out numerous ways of presenting them as still images, both on the wall and in book format. But nothing I tried captured the idea of the sometimes subtle transformation of a child from one age to the next. I was also failing in conveying the idea that our childhood selves are still buried somewhere deep inside us, despite the layers of complexity that we gain as we age into adulthood. Putting these pictures into a video that allowed for layering them with different levels of opacity allowed me to speak to these ideas successfully. This conversation made me ask myself in what other ways I could use video presentations for future work.

Discussing "The Wind Telephone" with students reinforced for me how important it is to not have the work answer too many questions for the viewer, to let the audience ask and answer questions for themselves.

They liked it a lot that this particular body of work didn't explain the answers that my relatives gave me when responding to the questions I had asked of them. The students said that it made them ask themselves what their own answers would be to these questions, and made them more interested in the work.

One series, titled "The Long Arc", consists of many self-portraits that I began taking when I got pregnant in 1995 and continue to take up to the present day. I asked the students what they saw as the difference between my self-portraits and "selfies", as they take them and understand them. One students' reply has stuck with me (and I'm paraphrasing a bit here): "Selfies are all about covering up who you really are, while your pictures are about revealing who you really are."

While talking with these students, I felt like I was learning things about my own work that I hadn't yet seen. Unless I am invited to an exhibition venue to talk about my work, opportunities to talk with viewers in a gallery while a show is up don't happen a lot. Because this is the first time that this work has been exhibited, I'm grateful that I've been able to get this kind of feedback.