Anne Berry

Anne Berry is a photographic artist from Atlanta, Georgia. Her photographs have been exhibited and published internationally, and she has received numerous awards, including Critical Mass 2012 and 2013 Top 50. Anne is represented by the Catherine Couturier Gallery in Houston. She attended Sweet Briar College (BA) and the University of Georgia (MA). Currently Anne is working on Behind Glass, a collection of images of primates in captivity and Animalia, photogravures of animals. A limited edition book featuring work from this project is available from North Light Press.

  Project Statement: Animalia 

Animalia is a series of photogravure portraits of animals. Wassily Kandinsky teaches that the artist has the ability to “realize the inner sound of things.” I listen for this sound when I photograph animals. People have lost an essential connection to the land and to animals. I photograph animals to remind the viewer of this bond. I am always close to the animal physically, and I establish a connection with it. Capturing these images requires patience and understanding. The animal/human relationship is the cornerstone of my work, and the magic of it inspires me to photograph animals. 

I have chosen to print these images in the photogravure process. This process evokes a feeling of timelessness and produces portraits that stress the dignity and beauty of the animals:

I hope that by looking at my images the viewer will hear the inner melody of the animal, and the lyrics will ask the viewer to consider the animal’s place in the world, to do as Franz Marc instructs, to “contemplate the soul of the animal to divine its way of sight.“

Anne’s photography of animals “vehemently avoids the high resolution color aesthetic of zoological photography, opting instead for a gaze evocative of early pictorialists, who strived to render the photographic distinctly unscientific and launched the then novel medium of photography into the realm of fine art. Within Berry’s jarringly ghostly and ethereal tones, each subject reveals a soulfulness so often hidden in photographs of animals; their struggle is urgently expressionistic, spiritual, dignified, and human." -- Ellyn Ruddick-Sunstein, The Plight of Primates in Captivity, Beautiful Decay, 02/28/14

Rebecca Drolen

Ear Hair

Rebecca Drolen received her MFA in Photography from Indiana University in 2009. She joined the art department at Belmont University in Nashville, TN in the Fall of 2013, before which she served as a Faculty Fellow at the University of Georgia and as an assistant professor at Michigan State University. Drolen’s photographic work explores constructed narratives, using the element of truth that a photograph carries to imagine and validate impossible scenes. Her work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions on a national and international level, notably, the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Texas Tech University, and the Theory of Clouds Gallery in Kobe, Japan. Drolen has had work published in several art magazines and has a piece held in the permanent collection at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

Drainage

Ashley Kauschinger: How did you series, Hair Pieces, begin? What started your interest in how we socially view hair, and the beauty standards associated with it?

Rebecca Drolen: For very many years, I have been a person who is recognizable by my long and somewhat wild hair. My series, Hair Pieces, began with a bit of self-reflection and essentially laughing at myself as I wondered why or how I wrap up so much of my sense of identity in my looks, specifically my hair.

The first image was made when I found a braided ponytail that I had cut off years earlier with intention of donating. For whatever reason, I thought…I can use this! I fashioned the braid into a necktie, put on a short wig, and made the first image of the series, Hair Tie. The image is one part liberating and two parts manic. I loved the notion of telling an ambiguous story with only the figure and their interaction with hair as the contents of the frame.

The Wet Look

AK: After creating this work, what do you think it is that makes hair beautiful and grotesque? Has your perception of your own hair changed?

RD: I entered making this work with a sense of fascination that hair is both beautiful and repulsive in our culture. The fragile influence of context is its only distinction. We see long hair on a woman as a symbol of beauty and femininity, but as soon as the hair is cut or removed the body, we think of it as unsanitary and strange. Likewise, we seem to never have enough hair in the places we want it, and too much hair in the places that we don’t want it to be!

As an artist, I keep coming back to ideas of a common human struggle as a main point of inspiration. Making this work helped me realize how it truly is a futile act to shave hair on one part of the body (knowing it will return all too quickly) while wishing hair in another place would grow faster. I am going to keep doing these rituals of hair removal and growth even though I know they are an endless and useless struggle – that sense of irony and dark humor is both inspiring and entertaining as I make work.

Detangler 

AK: Take us through your photographic process. How do you begin thinking about bringing an image together? How do you think about the construction of an image? What is a day of shooting like for you?

RD: The start of making individual images for this project happened in a lot of different ways. Sometimes I would begin with a phrase that I wanted to illustrate, sometimes I would find an object or prop that I knew I could transform in purpose, and other times I would tinker and struggle through means of illustrating how a view of a certain kind of hair could be forced to walk the line between beautiful and strange.

Simplicity was my one rule in terms of frame construction and design. I wanted the photographs to be illustrative of an idea, but not documentary in nature. The blank spaces and limited depth of foreground to background space allowed the images to feel like the subject offered is something akin to a specimen to be studied.

Each of the images have been shot in my home. I tried to start with as blank a space as is possible and then only add the few necessary elements to tell the story. I made the work while I was mostly alone and became a bit compulsive about arranging and re-arranging items in the frame. The images were all constructed in front of the camera, as opposed to later in post-processing, which means I got to buy a huge amount of synthetic hair!

Spiral 

AK: Can you discuss a bit about the jewelry pieces and what they signify in the series?

RD: The jewelry pieces that are a part of the series offer a tip of the hat to one of the main elements of historic inspiration for the project: Victorian Mourning Jewelry. After the death of her husband, Queen Victoria spent the remaining decades of her life in public mourning in the late 19th century. Her celebrity and influence over culture at the time meant that it became fashionable to mourn, thus an industry of mourning formed. One very popular product/service of that emerged at the time was jewelry pieces made from the hair of a deceased loved one. The hair was intricately woven in to bracelets, lockets, and other ornate casings. While our current culture may get squeamish or find it morbid to wear the hair of the departed, at the time it was an incredibly sentimental and loving gesture.

There is something about the archival, lasting quality of hair as well as its link to memory that is mirrored in how we treasure and store photographs of loved ones. This link was one part of the compulsion to make my jewelry objects of hair mixed with images. I was also interested in twisting the sentimentality of the Victorian pieces and instead mourn the loss of the hair itself. Commemorated and given a sense of nostalgia within my jewelry pieces is hair that may have otherwise been undesirable – toe hair, eyebrow tweezings, etc. Instead of the hair being discarded, it is elevated to a state of beloved memory.

Shearing

AK: What advice do you have for fine art photographers navigating the world? What has been your process of finding funding, time, and jobs after you graduated?

RD: You have to be consumed with the will to make work and willing to put in a lot of hours to do so. There are countless distractions and no right answers or direct paths toward success. It seems incredibly important to show up, work hard, meet other people who are making art, create community, and take a lot of risks. It can be overwhelming to observe how many talented Photographers are making work right now, but there is always room for unique voices and compelling new images. The most important element in staying motivated is to remain sincere as you find the content that you care about and are willing to take some authority to speak about in your art-making. Other than that, whether it is jobs, exhibition opportunities, or reaching out to new artist friends, I try to put myself out there as much as possible, manage my disappointment with failures, and let the successful moments fuel me forward!

Hair Cut

Natalie Krick

Natalie Krick (born 1986 in Portland, Oregon) graduated from Columbia College Chicago with her MFA in photography this year. She received her BFA in photography from School of Visual Arts in 2008.  She has been published in many online sources such as Lenscratch, Conscientious, and FlakPhoto. 

To find out more about Natalie, visit her website: http://nataliekrick.com/index.html

Ashley Kauschinger: In your series, Natural Deceptions, you are drawn to the idea of beauty and sexuality in its complex forms. What drew you to place these ideas on the face and body of your mother? How does that relationship function in the shooting process?

Natalie Krick: I was photographing a variety of women when I first started to create work that was influenced by my conflicting attraction and apprehension to images of female beauty and sexuality.  I have always been attracted to glamor, cosmetics and the act of creating a façade. I find the superficial to be revealing and complicated. I am also very intrigued by the way that the body is sexualized through imagery. All bodies are inherently sexual but women especially are made to appear more sexual through the way they are dressed, posed or made up.  In some ways, women are sexualized through clichés and artifice.  I started photographing my mother because she was available and I felt comfortable asking her to do certain things. I began steadily photographing her because I was drawn to her age and the way our relationship shaped how the photographs were read. The fact that she is my mother might provoke more questions than it answers but I like the idea that I am photographing the woman that one day I might become.

AK: Your mother often looks like a completely different person from image to image. Sometimes she looks coy, confident, masculine, and feminine. She somehow has the ability to portray a full scope of personas. Is this something that has been consciously done? Do you plan the ideas of sexuality that will be explored within the series?

NK: The poses, styling and way that my mother performs are planned. Usually I have a certain pose or a particular shade of nail polish or an outfit in mind but other aspects unfolds while we make pictures together. I am interested in how the “dress up” quality of the pictures can be interpreted as her trying on and constructing different facades and appearances but I also think that something darker can be read in the images. I think at a certain point an unstable identity might start to read as an unstable psychology.

AK: What are some of your influences? How do you feel you fit into contemporary art?

NK: Recently I have been watching Pedro Almodovar’s films.  I love his campy and unnerving exaggerated constructions of femininity. I love Diane Arbus. I am constantly fascinated and influenced by popular culture. As for the art world, I am more concerned with being aware of contemporary art and culture. I am trying to find my niche. I am interested in complicating the common binary that women are either empowered by their sexuality or victimized by it, which I find to be a contemporary feminist viewpoint.

AK: What is your process of self-promotion? How do you create a balance between making work and creating it?

NK: To be honest, I’m pretty new to the process of self-promotion. I’ve been sending my work out to different blogs and entering juried shows. I am hesitant about many juried shows and I think it is important to be selective.  Making photographs, working my day job and promoting myself is quite a balancing act but I have managed so far by obsessively making to do lists.

Thank you Natalie for sharing your powerful work.