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! 

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.