Heather Wetzel

Heather F. Wetzel is an artist working in historic photographic processes, hand papermaking, and book arts. She is currently a Lecturer in the Art Department at The Ohio State University where she was the 2011-2012 Post MFA Fergus Family Fellow in Photography. She earned her Master of Arts & Humanities from Arcadia University in Glenside, Pennsylvania, and her Master of Fine Arts in Visual Studies from the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York. Prior to coming to The Ohio State University, she completed the University of Iowa Center for the Book Graduate Certificate in Book Arts Technologies in 2011. She is a 2012 Photolucida Critical Mass Finalist, as well as a semifinalist and The Print Center's Honorary Council Award of Excellence winner in The Print Center's 87th International Competition. More recently, she was a Review Santa Fe participant. Her work has been widely exhibited, and can be found at the Anzenberger Gallery in Vienna Austria, as well as in multiple collections.

 

Superstitions   

Artist Statement 

Time moves so fast. It seems there is less and less time for the slower things in life. Time to sit and reflect, time to remember, time to notice the little things. Analog ways are being replaced by faster technology. Photographic prints and books are being replaced by intangible, transient digital files made of zeros and ones - no texture, no smell, no weight. I prefer to work at a slower pace, with materials and process playing important roles in my making. My work is grounded in contemplation of life in the 21st Century, examining current social concerns, using a variety of materials and methods.

Squall

The quest for the best form for my ideas to inhabit finds me working in a variety of media, such as historic photographic processes, book structure and content, print, hand paper making, metal, and wood. I am equally concerned with the object and alternative methods of display, and with how my chosen materials support concept and content. I work predominantly with analogue processes, but am also interested in how these methods complement digital technologies, and work to seamlessly integrate digital processes as concepts dictate. My interest in these processes and materials all contribute to my concern in multi-media constructions and art as object.

Impractical Library 

Impractical Library 

Impractical Library 

Webster's New 20th Century 

Webster's New 20th Century 

Impractical Leisure 

Impractical Leisure 

Impractical Leisure 

Impractical Leisure 

Stephanie Shively

Stephanie Shively, a native New Yorker, earned her BFA in Photography from the State University of New York at New Paltz. Shively’s work is fueled by her personal experiences and innermost fears, which she transforms into a universal visual language through hand bound photo books. She has taught photography at the Santa Fe Boys & Girls Club in New Mexico, the Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle, Washington, and the University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina. Shively is passionate about book arts, pushing the boundaries of photography, and nonprofit outreach that focuses on youth and the utilization of art as a mechanism for social change. She currently resides in Columbia, South Carolina with her husband and son, where she is working towards her MFA in Studio Art at the University of South Carolina.

Artist statement: Motherload

Motherload is an exploration of the growth and overwhelming change that manifests when expecting. Pregnancy, despite being awkward, uncomfortable, and stressful, presents itself with certain expectations. We imagine the ideal couple entering this phase of life to be full of joy, smiling carelessly while creating a baby registry and caressing a lovely round belly. Any doubts, worries, leaky nipples, and urinary incontinence should be ignored and kept private. Pregnancy is certainly a beautiful experience, but it scales a complex emotional gamut that is not honestly represented in our culture. These photographs capture the complexity of my own pregnancy and its impact on my relationship with my husband, Tim.

In conjunction with Motherload is an edition of five hand-bound photo books housed in handmade clamshell boxes along with four beeswax covered pigment prints.

Lindsey Beal

Lindsey Beal is a photo-based artist in Providence, Rhode Island where she teaches at Rhode Island College. She has an M.F.A. in Photography from the University of Iowa and a Certificate in Book Arts at the University of Iowa’s Center for the Book. She is represented by Boston's Panopticon Gallery.

Her work combines historical & contemporary women’s lives and feminism with historical photographic processes. She is interested in the photograph as object and often includes sculpture, papermaking and artist books into her work.

Her work has been shown at national museums, galleries and universities and is included in various public & private collections. She recently earned an Honorable Mention for Center Forward 2014 at the Center for Fine Art Photography. She was a Finalist at the 87th Annual International Print Competition at The Print Center and received an Honorable Mention for emerging American photographers by the Magenta Foundation. Her work can be found at lindseybeal.net.

Artist Statement: Transmission

A bacterial sexually transmitted infection is a living, growing, mutating thing that exists within the human body. The act of transmission is often sexy; yet what is transmitted is menacing. The bacterial STIs before you (BV, Chlamydia, Trichomonas, Gonorrhea and Syphilis) can be silent for women and have little to no symptoms for men: they reveal themselves mainly through medical tests. Without testing, the cycle continues: without noticeable symptoms, no treatments are received; without treatments, the infections are unknowingly passed to others. Though mostly silent, all of these infections have potentially catastrophic side effects like pelvic inflammatory disease, joint disease, meningitis, sterility and fatal pregnancies. Although we should have eradicated these long ago, bacterial STIs continue to exist. Frighteningly, they are beginning to mutate and become drug resistant; gonorrhea specifically has outgrown our current treatments. Due to the recession, many non-profit clinics in which these STIs could be identified and treated have closed. What once seemed like a scary yet treatable nuisance or temporary problem is becoming a major public-health concern.

Transmission’s images are created by using open-source imagery from the Center for Disease Control. The images were altered, and then converted into digital negatives, which were used to print the cyanotypes. The prints are embedded in resin within Petri dishes. Each STI is represented in various images and whose information and prevention can be read about in the accompanying artist book.

 

Frank Hamrick

 I have been an admirer of Frank Hamrick's photography and book arts for some time, and was inspired when I saw his work in person at the exhibition, Pathways, that just closed at the McMaster Gallery at the University of South Carolina. Below find a few insights Frank shared about his work and process.

Frank Hamrick is an associate professor at Louisiana Tech University. His work mixes photography, storytelling, handmade books and found objects. Frank received his BFA from The University of Georgia and his MFA from New Mexico State University. NPR has written about Frank’s handmade books and in 2012 Oxford American Magazine listed Frank as one of the 100 Superstars of Southern Art. His work is housed in collections including the Georgia Museum of Art and The Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans.

Ashley Kauschinger: What role does the personal play in your work?

Frank Hamrick: I have made satisfying work of strangers and places I’ve visited, but most of my work is tied to my connection to places I have lived and people who are close to me. Photographer Christine Shank once said the most personal work is the most universal. I find that to be true as long as the work leaves an entry point for viewers to relate to the content.

AK: How did you get involved with alternative processes, and what are your thoughts about its uses in contemporary photography?

FH: Digital photography has made things more accessible to people but also leaves many feeling removed from the process. These hands on, alternative methods being practiced can be seen as a reaction to the proliferation of digital processes, but there are also a lot of analog/digital hybrid processes being developed.

My bookmaking is a good example of blending analog and digital methods.

A few years ago one of my graduate students had been unsuccessfully trying to learn how to make tintypes. I did not know how to guide him. My solution was to start learning the process over winter break and then return to school and show him.

I usually challenge myself with learning something new each year, whether it is how to expose an image onto a leaf using its chlorophyll or how to create and document a camera obscura. Then I share that information to my students and peers.

AK: You are an accomplished book artist. Do your books inform your photographic work? Or do they communicate what can’t be said through photography alone?

FH: People like my images on the wall but my photographs tend to resonate better with viewers when they are sequenced and presented as books, something the viewer can hold and turn its pages, rather than standing across the room looking at it on the wall in a “do not touch” situation.

If you were to think of a photograph in the same way you consider a single song, then an artists’ book is similar to an entire album of music complete with cover art and liner notes. The artists’ book allows me to combine imagery and text and incorporate materials, like handmade paper, and processes, such as staining and letterpress printing, to create unique or limited works of art.

AK: What is your editing process? How does it differ when you are sequencing a book vs. an exhibition?

FH: When making a book I prefer to choose a photographic series that I feel is finished or at least there is a completed chapter in the series. I do not want to create a photography book of new work and then a week later make a new photograph that I wish was in that book. I spend a fair amount of time thinking about the possible connections that can be made between the images on the left and right spreads in the book. I also consider the overall arch of the story the images convey in the book. My books tend to have a small selection of images. Past books have ranged between 6 – 24 images depending on the project. It is not unusual for good images to be left out of a book because it did not fit in the sequence and story told by that particular book.

Exhibitions tend to be more open. I do think about the sequence in a show like I do in a book. But I take more risks, often showing new images or ones I am curious to see how people respond. Often my exhibitions include photographs that do not make their way into my books because over time they are replaced by new, stronger images.

AK: You are also an Associate Professor at Louisiana Tech University. How do you find balance between teaching, your artist practice, and life?

FH: It is challenging to balance being a professor, a working artist and having any sort of personal life. Teaching has changed so much in the past ten years. Students expect their professors and course material to be accessible 24/7 now that we have e-mail and online class resources like Moodle/Blackboard. There are many more tasks attached to teaching now compared to when I first started.

As far as making artwork, I photograph my garden along with my family and friends as a way to balance making artwork and maintaining relationships and activities that matter to me. I blend trips to see family and friends with visiting curators and teaching workshops.

Photographer and Educator, Eliot Dudik, said something to the effect that artists do not get to stop for weekends and holidays. He is right if you want to get anything accomplished.

When I was a teenager, one of my mentors said, “You’re fucking up if you’re watching television.” I apply the philosophy to my life, asking myself, “How does this contribute towards my goals?”

Ellen Wallenstein

Wolf Kahn, painter

Ellen Wallenstein is a photographer and book artist from New York City. She teaches at Pratt Institute and the School of Visual Arts, and writes articles and book reviews for photography magazines. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is in the collections of many national museums archives and libraries. Wallenstein earned a BA in Art History from SUNY Stony Brook (1974) and a MFA in photography from Pratt Institute (1978). She is a NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts) Fellow in Photography. Her work has been nominated for the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award for Magazine Photography and the Santa Fe Prize. She has just published “Respecting My Elders”, a first volume of portraits of creative people over 80 who have affected the American culture. (http://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/530767)

View more of Ellen's work here
Purchase her book, "Respecting My Elders" here 

Editta Sherman, photographer on the cover of "Respecting my Elders"

Ashley Kauschinger: What inspired you to begin your project "Respecting My Elders"?

Ellen Wallenstein: I always follow my instincts and I’ve been led to interesting projects. I was drawn to this at a certain age and for certain reasons. I could not have done this work before I was fifty but I can see how it’s connected to my earlier work. My Dad died in his late sevenies, in 1996. He and I had been good friends. I couldn’t be there when he was dying, which led me to think about being a comfort to others at that time. So I trained to become a hospice volunteer. I was assigned to Anne, who was in her mid-eighties, the age my father would have been. What I expected - a short-term volunteer situation - turned into a deep, lasting and meaningful friendship. I made many photographs in her apartment and of her life over a period of time; those photographs (“Opus for Anne”) earned me a NYFA Fellowship and changed my life as an artist. When she died I decided to photograph other people of her generation (my parents’ generation). After photographing my mother and her friends and my friends’ parents I began to write to people who I admired who had influenced me artistically and intellectually. The photographers, the artists, the writers. I was pleasantly surprised to get some positive answers to my letters of inquiry.

Lois Dodd, painter

AK: How has this project grown? What has it taught you about art, life, and yourself?

EW: I tend to work on long-term projects slowly, and to take photographs in spurts, when I can make time. This project grew from a vague idea of making portraits into a book. It took a number of years to do this first volume; I’m looking forward to getting back to the process of shooting. Art and Life- small words, big questions! Art is about the power of practice and perseverence, of working at something over one’s lifetime. Hopefully creating something worthwhile to share with others. As Edward Albee wrote to me “Be useful, be useful. Do something that matters with your life”. Life is by its nature about aging. I take photographs to make a record and preserve the present. I am trying to portray older artists in all their beauty. Most of my subjects were still busy at their craft, and had a sense of theirselves and their accomplishments. For myself, working on a long-term project means dealing with all that can mean - fits and starts, mountains of lists, sending out inquiries, following up with appointments, trying to stay organized, obsessing. At least that’s my experience. No one is making me do this: it’s a labor of love. I also found that I can’t do this alone or in a vacuum. I appreciate all the feedback I’ve gotten along the way from friends and colleagues. And my husband, also a photographer- my biggest blessing- he’s incredibly supportive in so many ways. I am so lucky to have a wonderful and loving partner.

AK: You are also a book artist. How do you feel these two parts of your working process inform one another? How do you feel creating an artists book differs from a photo book?

EW: Making photographs and making books are different in some ways and similar in others. Both require visual skills, technique and practice. I make photographs as a habit, and as a meditation, a centering for myself. I carry a small camera with me all the time in case I see something that intrigues me. (No, I don’t have an Iphone, yet.) Or a bigger camera when I go to make a formal portrait. Sometimes the photos become part of a book. As a book artist I’m concerned with making a physical object to contain my art- be it photographs, collages or words. I’m concerned with particulars, such as which is the correct form for the imagery -a scroll? a fan? an accordion? a group of sewn signatures? And how do the images tell a story or illustrate an idea. You have to be ruthless about what works and what doesn’t because one wrong picture or placement can mess up the entire book. A book is more complicated, it has to work on many levels. (The three Cs- Craft, Concept and Content.) And sequence. And text, or no text, if text where, what size and which font. An artist book is a book created by an artist from start to finish - physically made by the person whose work it contains. A photo book can be an artists book; many artist books are photo books.

Rebecca Lepkoff, photographer

AK: On your resume, it says that you were an assistant to W. Eugene Smith in 1977, a year before his death. He is one of my favorite photographers, and so I must ask, what was he like? Did you get to spend any time with him before his death?

EW: Nice, funny, open, great to be around. He seemed much older than he was, actually. Literally, he’d been through the war. He was only 58, a few years younger than I am now. I was 25. He looked more like 75 to me, then. Of course I was a bit intimidated on meeting him as I’d studied his work- his photographs are so great. His output, his determination was remarkable.. All his stories for Life Magazine, the Pittsburgh Project, the Jazz Loft, Minamata…he was a true documentarian artist. And a master printer. But also just a man, you know? A very cool guy. I am so fortunate and grateful for the experience of knowing him for a bit. The year I knew him was his last in New York City; he was getting ready to move his collection and himself to Arizona, to the Center for Creative Photography where his work was to be archived at, and I believe he was going to teach out there as well. My assistant job was less photographic and more clerical; you might call it an internship today. I wrote correspondence, ran errands, bought his supplies, dusted things off - (he had a complete set of Camera Work that needed attention.) Organized, packed up boxes and hung out, with him and my friend Tom Okada, who was his major assistant. Gene paid me $5/hour, all of which I ended up giving back to him by buying one of his photographs. At that time in his life he really needed the money- part of why he was moving to Arizona. It was the mid-1970s, and the city and everyone was in a financial crisis. And he was no longer working for magazines. Everything was changing. I heard he died of a heart attack in a supermarket. Which is a sad end as he’d been through so much. But he left an incredible legacy of work which is being preserved and managed. He is honored through the International Center of Photography’s W. Eugene Smith Award, given annually to a photojournalist. I think he would be proud of all the photographers who won this award (and the countless others who toil every day all over the world.)

Edward Albee, playwright

AK: What is your process of self promotion? How do you balance your life with creating art?

EW: I’ve been a teaching artist for over 30 years so self-promotion is something I’m really just learning about. The most important thing I did for myself was to start a website, in 2005. I was going to show in an International exhibition in Madrid and realized I needed to have a presence on the web, and a business card. So I was prepared, if also lucky, to be discovered and recognized after many years of work. When I started fundraising for my book I hired someone to do “social media”. It helps to have someone else toot your horn. I’m on Facebook and have a presence there, on my own page and in some groups. I don’t Twitter, yet. This stuff takes up too much time! I’d rather be photographing or writing. I’m an artist - I photograph, I write, I make collages. I make books, sometimes with all three. And as I mention above I’ve been a teaching artist for so many years- instructing and inspiring others and being inspired back. Teaching forces me to be creative - to continue making images, and books- to keep pace with what younger people are doing and thinking. I also try to take classes so as to maintain my (computer) skills, and to remember how it feels to be on the other side of the desk. I was part-time for many years and did other things for money - worked in archives and museums; worked for the city; read tarot cards… I always managed to take photographs for myself along the way. I’m currently an adjunct professor at two schools and between them I can support myself. I’ve worked long and hard for this, so I’m appreciative of the attention being given me right now. Thank you so much for the opportunity to talk with you