Krista Steinke

Krista Steinke was born in Richmond, Virginia but grew up mostly in Texas. She received a BA in Art and the Advanced Humanities from Valparaiso University, a BFA in Studio Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a MFA in Photography and Digital Imaging from The Maryland Institute, College of Art. Her work has been included in exhibitions from New York to LA and her time-based work has been featured in film and video festivals around the globe. She has received several awards and fellowships for her work, including an Artist Residency at Light Work, an Image Award from CENTER, Santa Fe, and recently, a 2012 Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation. Krista lives in the Philadelphia area. Her work is represented by the Schmidt Dean Gallery.

View more of her work here 

Ashley Kauschinger: Were you drawn to living on Purgatory Road because of its local folklore? How did the series surrounding this area begin? 

Krista Steinke: Purgatory Road is a wooded pathway (in some ways it is more like an extremely long driveway) leading up to a cabin by a small lake in rural New York State. This property has been in my husband’s family for generations, and I have spent the past twelve summers living in this area. As a professor, I find the summer months off from teaching to be a critical time in terms of my creative work. During the summer, I try to photograph every day; I naturally gravitated towards this place as a subject because of its haunting beauty and uncanny resemblance to a setting in a children’s story. When I first started this project (approximately twelve years ago), I took a straightforward approach to photographing the landscape. However, over time, I realized I was less interested in producing documentary-style photographs and more interested in using the natural environment as a platform for exploring the metaphorical implications behind the folklore that surrounds this area. It took me about ten years to figure out how to execute this project in a way that felt poetic, and at the same time, evoked a sense of place. 

AK: You use handmade filters to help create the aesthetic of these images. Do you feel this creates a barrier, window, and/or passage between one world and another? Do you create a specific filter for each image? 

KS: I have used the terms “window” and “passage” in explaining this work, but I have not thought about the use of filters in terms of “a barrier” – that’s another interesting read on these images. But yes, the concept of portraying a state of “in- between” (i.e., “Purgatory” – figuratively, not literally) is the main theme behind this series. Shooting through these handmade filters, in essence, is a way to obscure or abstract reality and create an illusion that suggests an intersection between two different spaces – a meeting place where two conceptual polarities collide, become blurry, muddied or ambiguous. 

I have over fifty pieces of Plexiglass sheets that were donated to me by a friend who manages a gallery. These vary in length from 5 inches to 8 feet. I first treat them with various painting mediums and then leave them outside to be weathered by the natural elements. They are rained on, bleached out by the sun, and often become embedded with bugs, leaves, spider webs, and dirt. I love the idea of nature serving as both my subject and collaborator. When I head out to shoot along the road, I load up a little red wagon with photo equipment and a random selection of these Plexiglass sheets. I reuse the filters as needed, and their appearance continues to change as they are banged around and left outside over time. 

AK: This series is exploring several concepts-- legends, stages of life, the unconscious, the in-between, the environment, etc. Are these ideas inspired by personal experiences, research, and curiosity? 

KS: Although never directly autobiographical, my work always seems to parallel the events, questions, and issues that infiltrate my everyday life. Research, curiosity, and personal experience all play a role in how my work develops. For years, my ideas have been framed around my interest in narrative, myth, and metaphor, and it is through “research” that I am able to locate stories that can visually inform these ideas. “Curiosity” is usually what drives my interest in experimenting with the photographic medium and finding new ways to approach materials and techniques. “Personal experience” often sets the tone for my work and points to some underlying emotional influence or psychological impulse that compels me to explore a particular subject in depth. The year that I embarked on producing “Purgatory Road”, my father had a life-threatening health scare and had to undergo serious surgery. Fortunately, the outcome was positive, but the experience weighed heavily on my mind that summer and certainly influenced the creative output for this series. 

In general, I have always been interested in creating multilayered work that can be interpreted through a variety of vantage points. My goal is to present open-ended references or unresolved moments which allow for various levels of meaning or associations to emerge. 

AK: What advice would you give about making a cohesive body of work and the editing process? 

KS: From my experience, creating a cohesive body of work takes time, exploration, revision, reflection, and then more revision. As much as I dislike writing artist statements and grant proposals, I find the writing process to be a critical component in helping me articulate the ideas and intentions that I am trying to visually communicate. My writing changes as the work changes – it is an ongoing, fluid process. The element of time has also been important in the evolution of my work. For me, it has been necessary to give ideas the space to incubate, brew, and ripen. (As I already mentioned, it has taken almost twelve years for “Purgatory Road” to be realized, and the series is still in progress.) 

When it comes to “reflection”, seeking critical feedback from someone with an objective point of view can be extremely valuable. As the saying goes, “photographers are the worst editors of their own work”. With that in mind, I think it is advantageous to seek the support of others who can provide honest, solid feedback. My husband, for example, is trained as a painter and works in digital media. He has a unique perspective as an artist and always seems to find bizarre connections in my work that I would have never considered without his input. (He is also my worst critic, so once I get through a critique with him, I am good to go.) Portfolio reviews are also ideal moments to observe how work is communicating to an outside audience. On average, I like to attend at least one professional portfolio review a year. Preparing for the portfolio review can be a helpful exercise in learning how to strategically edit and sequence work, as the order and the amount of images presented can be critical in how a body of work is ultimately perceived. Finally, in creating a cohesive series, it’s important to remember that not every image in the mix needs to be a home run or stand-alone piece. Images that are small, quiet pauses can be powerful, poignant moments when viewing the work in its entirety.

Antone Dolezal

Antone Dolezal is a New Mexico based photographer and writer. He is a member of the new media collective Finite Foto, and his writing has appeared in various photographic publications including photo-eye Magazine and Fraction. Antone received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the College of Santa Fe in 2006.

View more of Antone's work here

Ashley Kauschinger: I feel your work holds a close relationship to the FSA and that generation of photographers. Do you feel linked to that time in photography? 

Antone Dolezal: My personal connection to the FSA generation doesn’t go very far. When I first started Ghost Town back in 2009 I looked through a good deal of FSA photographs that documented the Dust Bowl as a reference and jumping off point. James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was an influential book in that it helped get the wheels turning with how I would approach telling a story about the Panhandle of Oklahoma, a place once devastated by the Dust Bowl and geographically referred to as No Man’s Land.

With that said, this project isn’t really a documentation, but a fictitious exploration into the myth of No Man’s Land. Within the last few hundred years it is a place that has violently changed hands numerous times between Mexican and American Cowboys, Native Americans and Eastern European Immigrants. The communities have witnessed severe drought and rebirth, poverty and prosperity. I wanted to incorporate this history, while also creating a place that came from my own imagination -- inspired from old stories and songs written about this land. It’s a lonely and spooky expanse and if you stay out there long enough that past reminisce has a definite way of presenting itself… so for me it became a perfect place for creation.

AK: Do you have a personal connection to the panhandle of Oklahoma?

AD: I feel a strong connection to The Great Plains in general. I grew up in North Eastern Oklahoma, just before you get into the Ozark Hills and I still love going back and exploring the old run-down towns and landscapes of Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri and Arkansas. There is a strong tradition of oral storytelling, folklore and bawdy humor in that part of the country, and it’s been a powerful influence on how I express the places I photograph.

AK: Your images seem to create a conversation with the land-- what it has seen, created, destroyed, lived through. What does this land experience presently? Does anyone live or work in the places you photograph? 

AD: Yeah, I’m really glad you pointed that out. Even though I chose to leave out any portraiture in this series, Ghost Town is very much about the interaction of people within the landscape and the relics and memories that are left behind. There is mixture of decay and rebirth throughout the whole project and my hope is that while some of the images display a certain sense of loneliness and despair, there is also the notion of a definite resilience within the landscape.

Other than a few communities, most of No Man’s Land is pretty desolate today. Even with all of the open space between towns, I’m still mesmerized by what I find out there. I was driving through about a month ago – in the middle of nowhere -- and watched two huge Dromedary Camels barreling across the plain. I have never seen anything like it and was blown away! The light was perfect, and was beautiful in a very post-apocalyptic sort of way.

AK: What myths, tall tales, movies, books, songs, artists have influenced you? 

AD: Looking at a lot of photography has been the biggest influence with regards to informing my own work. I worked at Photo-eye Books for three years and literally buried myself in images. I left that job with a completely different understanding and appreciation for the history of photography. One of my good friends in Santa Fe, Melanie McWhorter, shared a working space with me and she taught me more about the medium than I would have ever learned by going to graduate school. My work and knowledge really developed during my time there.

Outside of Ghost Town, I am working on a collaborative project with Arizona based photographer Lara Shipley titled The Devil’s Promenade. It’s a project that explores a specific folklore legend in the Ozarks. What drew Lara and I there were tales of a mysterious light that appears on chance nights far outside of the small town of Hornet, MS. Locals call it the Spooklight and it has become this tall-tale that for many symbolizes the local community’s desire for redemption and fear of slipping into darkness. It’s a wild story and we have taken on the task of photographing and interviewing people who have first hand accounts of interactions with the light and the myths that surround it. While universal and familiar, we found that this story has played a significant role in shaping the identity of this place.

Working so closely with Lara on this project has really challenged my own notions of how to approach a story as complicated as the one we are attempting to tell. I think it is a project neither of us could do on our own, and speaking for myself, this project has taken me way out of my comfort zone and I am a much stronger artist after partaking in this collaboration. It’s influenced my other work tremendously.

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

AD: It’s funny, for the most part I just try to keep close friends and let Karma and hard work run its course. The photo community in Santa Fe has really pushed me to develop my work and ideas and has supported me in countless ways. My friend David Bram of Fraction Magazine saw the Ghost Town work a few years ago and invited me to show it through Fraction. It really wasn’t ready and I was a little self-conscious of it at the time, but the response was fantastic and it gave me a strong self-confidence to continue with this project.  Since then I’ve been quietly working on shooting, editing and asking advice from people whose opinions I respect, which has eventually led to being invited to have a solo exhibition and public lecture of Ghost Town at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design. Seeing the work up on the wall helped me to realize it was time to start promoting it, so I have submitted to a few online sources and galleries that I really like and think the work fits into and next fall I hope to attend the photoNOLA portfolio reviews, which will be the first time presenting my work in the review setting. Other than that I’ll be out on the road for most of the spring and summer to work on my other projects! 

Photo Friday: Alain Greloud

This Photo Friday I'm excited to share the work of Alain Greloud. This work has a certain quiet energy that is memerizing and powerful. The photographs make me feel introspective and drive a desire to create narratives about small moments. 

Alain states, "My photographic research is mostly influenced by travel and literature. More contemplative and narrative than informative, my photos – tinged with solitude – are often polysemous and leave much room for the imagination and reflection. If my work is sometimes marked by the notable absence of human presence, I also treat the theme of humanity more directly through portraiture, notably man’s place in his environment and the the body’s place in spaces.

I studied law and journalism but I work now exclusively as a freelance photographer. I think of photography as poetic introspection, a reflection on the world around us that we often do not know how to see. I live and work in Paris, France. "

View more of Alain's work here

Lara Shipley

Lara Shipley is from rural Missouri and currently lives in Phoenix, Arizona. She is an artist who primarily makes work about people and their relationships with the out-of-the-way places they call home. Lara has credits at newspapers and magazines in the United States and abroad, such as The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, Mother Jones Magazine, Costa Rica’s national paper La Nacion, GOOD Magazine, Gatopardo Magazine, The Miami Herald and Fraction Magazine. Before moving to Arizona she was a photography producer for National Geographic and a freelance photographer in Washington D.C. She received a Bachelors degree in Photojournalism from the University of Missouri in 2004. She is currently a Masters of Fine Art candidate studying photography at the Arizona State University Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts.

View more of Lara's work here:www.larashipley.com

Ashley Kauschinger: How did your series Coming, Going and Staying begin and evolve? What are some of your influences in creating your fictional world?

Lara Shipley: The series began when I moved to Arizona two and a half years ago. I had been working on a project in the midwest exploring ideas of identity related to place, particularly rural places similar to the small town where I grew up. I was attracted to isolated communities I found in Southern Arizona because they reminded me of my home town while also feeling very new for me, steeped in the issues and cultures unique to this region. I found that I was meeting people who felt very familiar. I was interested in how people from small towns seem to have a lot in common no matter where they are located, but also how aspects of this region; it's proximity to the Mexican border and the Tohono O'odham reservation, the extreme desert climate and isolation, the politics of the state of Arizona, and many other things, affect the people who live there. 

My background is in journalism, but I am heavily influenced by short stories and narrative non-fiction. I would like my work to exist somewhere in between, where I am being both inspired by the world I find and inventing images based on my memories and imaginings. It's more important to me to try to evoke an emotional response from my viewer by describing the way a place feels than documenting what I think it is (which I think is impossible anyway). I think I would get bored if my images were all staged or all from found situations. I enjoy using photography as an excuse to get out of my own life a little bit, but I also believe my interaction and interpretation is an important part of the work. One example of the way I'm working is Gabriel Garcia Marquez's fictional city Macondo. It is a place of Marquez's invention, but it is heavily inspired by his childhood town. I am also very inspired by tv shows about small towns such as Twin Peaks and Northern Exposure. I love how in both of these shows the town is a character that feels both real and fantastical. It's a world based on real places and it feels like you could step into it, but it's all fiction. 

AK: What is your attraction to the Borderlands? Does your own identity relate to this location (or emotion)? 

LS: I am very interested in how people are fixed or untethered to place. While working on this project I began to notice how much the borderlands are about movement and migration. There is the obvious example of the migrants coming from Mexico and Latin America, who pass through this area in high numbers but go mainly unseen. But there are many other migrants here as well: border agents frequently come in 45 day stints and then are transferred elsewhere, snow birds (Midwestern and Canadian retirees) come every winter and leave as soon as it gets warm, even the mining industry that helped create many of these communities was relatively short lived. When the mines got all they could from the ground they closed and people moved on. Besides for the Tohono O'odham, who have lived in this region for no one knows how long, it's been a place that people come for a period of time to get what they need and then leave again, whether that be passage to a different country or a more comfortable winter, it all felt related to me. At some point after spending so much time in this region I began to consider my own involvement and to realize that I was a migrant here as well. 

At the same time like all small towns there are attractive aspects to growing up there but also a reality of limited opportunity. I felt my own conflicted emotions when faced with young people deciding whether to stay in their hometowns or to move on to less isolated towns with more options. So even in this region that feels marked by movement some people felt stuck to me. 

AK: This work complexly moves through different landscapes, scenes, portraits, etc. What is your process of shooting, editing and sequencing a series? 

LS: When I'm shooting I sometimes have plans, like a portrait session or an event, but usually I'm either just driving or walking around or I'm spending time with people I meet and seeing where that leads. Some of my portraits result from spending a lot of time with a subject, creating different scenes, while others result from people I have met where I meet them. So there is a lot of variety in my working style. 

I'm very interested in the editing and sequencing stages. I first fell in love with fine art photography while working at Photo-eye, the photography book store in Santa Fe. So sequencing and image relationships are something that I am always thinking about. I also enjoy experimenting with combining photographs with writing. I am currently working on a series of books that I think of as short stories related to this project. They are artists books that combine sets of photographs with poems or essays. I plan to release three of them this spring. 

AK: How do you promote your work? How do you work on creating balance between making work and promoting it? 

LS: I don't like to promote work before I've had a chance to develop it fully. I have been working on this project for a few years now, and for the first year and a half I didn't try to promote it at all, but now that I am wrapping up making the work I will put more of my efforts in sharing it with others. This project has been published in GOOD Magazine and Fraction Magazine. Images from the project have been exhibited at the University of Arizona Art Museum in Tucson, AZ, Project Basho in Philadelphia, PA and Newspace for Contemporary Photography in Portland, OR. I am currently planning an exhibition of the work at the Norhtlight Gallery in Arizona this March. 

Photo Friday: Joel Robison

When I came across Joel's work, I was humbled by his ability to create worlds full of magic and contemplation. His work fills me with a renewed sense of passion for photography. They remind me that art is about expression, life and wonder. I am happy to share Joel's work on this Photo Friday! 

Contact Joel here: robison_joel@hotmail.com

View more of his work here: 

http://joelrobisonphoto.wordpress.com/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/joel_r/galleries/