Clarissa Bonet

Clarissa Bonet lives and works in Chicago, IL. She received her M.F.A. in photography from Columbia College Chicago in 2012 and her B.S. in Photography from the University of Central Florida. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and resides in the collections of The Museum of Contemporary Photography, The South East Museum of Photography, and The Haggerty Museum. Her current work investigated the urban space both physically and psychologically.

Ashley Kauschinger: How did you begin the series, City Space?

Clarissa Bonet: I started making work in reaction to the urban environment after moving to Chicago in 2009. The city was a strange and foreign place to me, and I was instantly intrigued by it. The mundane aspects of daily life were so different from what I was used to. My work is a direct response to my new found environment, and my experiences while living here.

AK: What are your thoughts on having a private or internal experience while in the public of the city? Do you feel this echoes the process of staging photographs while everyone else is going about their life on the street?

CB: My work is rooted in the act of the pedestrian, and personally that is a very private experience. I can’t speak for everyone, but I am often alone when I commute in the city and I prefer it that way. I enjoy the act of looking and experiencing what is going on around me. Often I feel as if I am invisible while the city moves around me. I have never really thought about it impacting the way in which I make-work but I can see the correlation.

AK: What has been inspiring you recently? Are you creating new work?

CB: Lately I have been thinking about the traces and marks people leave behind in the city. For example; graffiti, cigarette butts, gum on the sidewalk, or the text people scratch into the windows of the train. These marks are inspiring; they act as evidence of existence of the people who put them there. The act of mark-making will probably start making its way into my new work.

AK: You graduated from Columbia College Chicago in 2012. What advice do you have for students going through the transition of leaving graduate school?

CB: The transition from grad school can be challenging to navigate at times. While in school you dedicate all your time to the production of your work. Very few people can sustain this after graduating. It’s important to keep the momentum going even if it’s at a slower pace. I had a professor once tell me that I had to treat making work like it was your second job. His words definitely stuck with me and I try to follow his advice.

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. 

Tealia Ellis Ritter

Tealia Ellis Ritter was born in Illinois in 1978. After attending Columbia College Chicago, where she completed her BA in Fine Art Photography, she earned her MFA at the University of Iowa with a major in Fine Art Photography and a minor in Printmaking. Her work has been exhibited internationally, most recently by The New Yorker, at PRC: Exposure 2011, on Women in Photography, by the Corcoran Gallery of Art with 100 Portraits: 100 Photographers, at Catherine Edelman Gallery, by Taschen NYC and at Humble Arts “31 Under 31” exhibition. She now lives and works in the Chicago area with her husband Dave and their son, Finn. 

To view more of Tealia's work, visit her website: http://tealiaellisritter.4ormat.com/

Ashley Kauschinger: What are you thoughts on a perceived persona? Do you feel that your portraits deal with who each person truly is or the persona they project into the world?

Tealia Ellis Ritter: Persona is inescapable. We all have an idea of who we want people to perceive us to be. That idea of who and what we want to present to the world may operate at different strengths in different situations but it is always operating. People express persona in varying ways, clothes, makeup, speech, mannerisms etc. Today persona is magnified by the web where people can truly create and curate their own image.

My portraits deal largely with persona, but I think that by recognizing the persona that someone is trying to portray you often gain more insight into who that person is and what is important to them than you would if you tried to create a portrait about who the person really is. People are complex, lives are complex, there is no way one photograph can tell you who a person really is but it can tell you a little something about who that person was trying to be in the split second that the lens opened. To me that is more interesting. The idea of a person.

AK: What influence do you think your presence as a photographer is contributing to their projection in the moment of capture?
 
TER: There is no doubt that my presence is influencing the subject. We are engaged in a very unnatural act together. I am standing behind a giant camera with a black cloth over my head staring at them. They are trying not to be nervous, trying to be still, trying to please me, trying to look the way they want to look. We are negotiating an experience together and so we both influence one another. The interesting thing is that people want to reveal themselves in some way but they also worry about revealing too much. So during the photo shoots people often tell me very personal things. It is in those moments when people begin to let down their guard but are still conscious of the camera and my presence. I think the most interesting photographs happen during this moment because their real life and their persona are present at the same time.

AK: I find the intense gaze of each of your portraits seductive to look at and examine. How do you arrange and think of each portrait - where do you find your subjects, what connection do they have to one another, and how do you view them together as a series but also as individuals? 

TER: For the most part my subjects are strangers to me. I approach them on the street or in stores/restaurants and ask them if they would like to pose. The work is not about the people being strangers though, so a few of my subjects are people that I know personally. The subjects are all tied together though by geography and the desire to present themselves. I am always a little surprised when people agree to be photographed, it is a brave choice in my mind. The wonderful thing that I have learned from this project is how much people want to be recognized and acknowledged as being special. Even if people don’t agree to pose they always get this huge smile on their face when I approach them and ask if they would like to pose.  I don’t think people feel seen and understood in their lives, so it makes them feel good just to be noticed. Once people have agreed to pose I set up a time and place to meet each subject, generally their house and when I arrive we walk around together and choose one or two locations to take the photos in. 

  I like the setting to either enhance or conflict with the way that the person has presented themselves. At times finding the right spot to set up the image can be challenging, in those circumstances I tend to look for a wall that has nice light where we can shoot a head shot. I always ask people to look directly at the lens (this is hard for some people to do) because I am not trying to create a natural looking scene. I want there to be an awareness by the subject and by the viewer that I am watching you and you are watching me. I like that confrontation. I think each of the images can stand alone and still have merit but as a unit I think the work is more interesting because it delves more deeply into the tension between who people want to be and our perception of who they are. I also think that when you look at the whole body of work there is a sense that many of these people’s dreams for who they want to be will not come true. The sporadic inclusion of objects or interior spaces from the subjects’ homes breaking up the portraits also helps to illuminate the lives behind the portraits. They are like intimate clues.

AK: What is your process and self promotion? How do you balance making work and promoting it?
 
TER: I have made a conscious effort to try to be a better self promoter for a few years now but it does not come naturally to me. I have found a group of people in the photo community that really like my work and champion it. That has been a really wonderful blessing. I’m trying to deal with my shy nature and build on that support. I love making work and have often considered just not showing it but in the end I want to communicate something and that necessitates trying to get the work to be seen. Currently I am trying to find a new balance between making the work, promoting it and being able to be a good mom to a 3 year old. It is definitely hard to balance everything once young children are in the picture. If anyone has any tips on how to strike that balance, I would love to hear them!

Thank you Tealia for having this thoughtful conversation with me!