Jennifer B Thoreson

Jennifer B Thoreson is a young visual artist creating staged imagery that is both artistically stylized and meticulously crafted. Drawing inspirations from themes of faith and the intricacy of personal relationships, Jennifer is a dynamic and emotional illustrator of the human heart. With an innate ability to plumb the antique, the work is soulful; seeking the use of the forgotten or discarded, heavily symbolic, eerie and quiet.

Raised in a spiritual and conservative home in rural Texas, Jennifer grew up imaginative, curious, and experimental, and has used her upbringing in her intensely personal artwork to bring insight and awareness using heartfelt, acutely mapped personal experiences.

Jennifer is currently working in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She holds an MFA from the University of New Mexico. Alongside varied private portrait commissions, she is an international speaker and lecturer whose programs are sought after year after year by many professional public and private photographic organizations. Jennifer published her first monograph, Medic, in 2012. She has just completed her latest major body of work entitled Testament, a series of twelve images exploring love relationships and heavy burdens they sustain. Jennifer’s work has been a part of many group and solo exhibitions, and is represented by several major galleries across the country.

Artist Statement: Testament 

In my work, I revisit themes of human fragility, pain, and eventually, recovery. I am attracted to vulnerability, to peeling back a skin that reveals something precious, dark, and insistently tender. I am compelled by the moments where people are on an edge, barely laced together, befriending disaster, remembering something, or exposing something.

I am curious about how relationships survive, why they dissolve, how people love one another, and how such love is expressed. In this work, I am investigating heavy burdens and how we carry them. I am interested in the spiritual labor of bearing weight, submission, futileness, and persistence.

To create the work, I rented an empty house for a year, and transformed it into a makeshift sanctuary, a freighted space for constructing the photographs. I fabricated sculptural objects for each image, using materials such as wool, linen, clay, human hair, and beeswax. The materials borrow symbolic language from the Bible, and create alter-like, fleshy masses. The house reminds me very much of my childhood home, and provides a weighted, sentimental foundation for the images. Every object used in the meticulous staging of each scene references my childhood, and a time of spiritual emergence in my life. I imagine the house as a gateway, the space just before crossing over. The people in the photographs are in the final phase of bearing weight, moments away from finally laying it down. I am seeking the moment of relief, and relishing in the moments just before it occurs.

I like to know and feel the moment where people fall apart, and saturate my work in it. I want to push at a breaking point, and hold out hope for restoration. These photographs are representations of quiet, ultra-still, delicate moments of raw humanness; the phase just after a laboring, aching fall and at the point when renewal inevitably begins.

Heather Evans Smith

From the series, Seen Not Heard 

Heather Evans Smith is an award winning fine art and conceptual portrait photographer based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Her work captures both the everyday and the whimsical, telling stories of women and struggle, reality and the surreal. Smith’s work has been featured in solo and joint exhibitions, magazines, literary journals and online publications. Recently, she was chosen as a winner of Ron Howard’s Project Imaginat10n and one of the Critical Mass Top 50 of 2014.

Artist Statements

From the series, Seen Not Heard 

Seen Not Heard

For the past few years I have been creating images to express the emotions of motherhood. My daughter has never been included in those images. But as she has grown from a baby into a force of nature all her own, I was drawn to pull her into my world of conceptual photography and explore our relationship during a time when emotions of love, stress and confusion are high.

Seen Not Heard takes its title from the Old English adage “To Be Seen and Not Heard”, a term often thrown about in reference to the desired behavior of children. These images are silent, but they create a voluble visual narrative on the relationship between parent and child. They explore the cycles that are passed down through generations and the tension between keeping to what is known and forging a newer, and perhaps stronger, path. As strong as the close, forever bond between mother and daughter is, there also exists a distance inherent between two different individuals.

From the series, The Heart and The Heavy

The Heart and The Heavy

Life is full of stories – some deeply personal and specific, others universally relatable. My story is beautiful and complicated and bittersweet and hard. Life is just that way. So are photographs.

The birth of my daughter was life-changing, but not in the way I expected. Though there has been no greater joy for me, the responsibility of another life has proven to be at times a heavy load. Thinking about this in a literal sense, I imagined a heavy home on my shoulders, yet held tightly with love – a burden and a joy, a challenge and a reprieve. This became the first image in the series The Heart and the Heavy.

From there the stories evolved, just as my life has. The genesis of an image comes from moments of life, like a still from an old movie. Movement and pain and the simple joys of being alive are frozen in time – a study of fictional worlds based in reality. Compelled to shoot these stories, I am haunted for days and months until it is released in an image. Telling someone’s tale in a world not quite like our own.

Interview

From the series, Seen Not Heard 

Ashley Kauschinger: The Heart and The Heavy and Seen Not Heard both explore emotions associated with your daughter. How did these two bodies of work come about and develop? Did one grow out of the other? How are they connected and different?

Heather Evans Smith: At the end of 2011 an image kept entering my thoughts of a woman in a field, house strapped to her back, holding it tightly with love yet with so much weight. That vision became the first image in the series The Heart and The Heavy. My daughter at that time was two and I was experiencing some of the most powerful emotions that I had ever felt: love, connection, stress, heaviness. For the rest of the series I explored different emotions through images of myself and others. After two years of working on the series I was ready to approach something different. My first inclination was to take some of my previous The Heart and The Heavy ideas and try them with a child. I wanted to see how the image changed with a simple change of age. That idea morphed into using my daughter as a model and exploring the parent/child relationship through conceptual imagery.

From the series, Seen Not Heard 

AK: What brings you inspiration?

HES: I am inspired by many things: a song lyric, a vintage item of clothing, an emotion, daily life, an old movie. I keep my mind open to new ideas and immediately jot them down. Sometimes I will shoot these images right away and at times it may take years for the timing to be right.

From the series, Seen Not Heard 

AK: How do you go about constructing narratives within your images?

HES: Some ideas are specific at the time of the shoot and others tend to reveal multiple layers after the photograph has gone out into the world. I tend to think about the idea or emotion I want to express first and then how I can show that visually in the photograph. This can also happen in reverse order. When I stumbled upon a vintage hand-painted puppet theatre, I had no idea what I would use it for. That prop started the brainstorming that later became the image, The Roles We Play.

From the series, The Heart and The Heavy

AK: What technical approach do you take in your work? 

HES: In The Heart and The Heavy series I wanted the images to look as real as possible, so everything is there at the time of the shoot. For the image Collide, instead of photoshopping the beach balls in later, I had 4 friends throwing balls at different heights in the background. Photoshop is definitely involved to a degree but all the details are originally in the frame for a realistic look. Most of the images are shot at 16mm for a cinematic feel.

For the series Seen Not Heard the approach is simpler. I shoot in the darker rooms of my house with open windows to create a more painterly light. Since the images are of my daughter, the series is more personal and shot closer with a 35mm prime lens.

From the series, The Heart and The Heavy

AK: How do you think about the balance of life and being an artist?

HES: It is difficult being a full-time mom and artist. I don’t get to go out and shoot on a whim. Though limited, my time dedicated to my art is used wisely. Luckily with Seen Not Heard I am not searching for a certain sliver of time to shoot with a model or in a specific location, for my model and location is within my home. This isn’t always going to be the case, however, it has been nice to bring my daughter into my world of photography.

From the series, The Heart and The Heavy

Laura Pannack

Laura Pannack is a London based Photographer. She was educated at the University of Brighton Central Saint Martins College of Art and LCC. Her work has been extensively exhibited and published both in the UK and internationally, including at The National Portrait Gallery, The Houses of Parliament, Somerset House, and the Royal Festival Hall in London.

View more of her work here 

Young Love Statement 

I think we often have quite a pessimistic notion of young relationships and forget that sometimes the simplicity of young love can form very strong relationships. Our ‘first love’ is a relationship we never forget and can act as template for future behavior and expectations in the future. A relationship free of worry, responsibility, experience and future plans can ultimately lead to one of fun and intimacy. Perhaps young people rely on relationships to ease the burden of the frightening time of handling adolescence and all its uncertainties; finding support in someone who will not judge but share the experience. Who will despite any fears or insecurities we may have, accept and love us.

But this is not to invalidate this partnership, as we all engage in romances for our own reasons. Creatures of self-gain it is through out ties with others that we establish a sense of self and a clearer understanding of acceptable emotional behavior. This lack of experience and perhaps vulnerability means that our early relationships are not sheltered by the protective walls we embellish to defend ourselves from our previous damaging experiences. We embrace all the relationship has to give, we accept and believe the emotions of the other half and we do not question their actions, as we have no reason to.

It seems that as we evolve and new generations form, the sanctity of marriage and traditional notions of romance hold less importance than it once did. Divorce is no longer a taboo and the increase in liberal views has encouraged society to be more forgiving of unconventional relationships. During a period of heightened emotional changes and the complications and new found territory of love and relationships brings into questions many issues that surround shaping who we grow up to become. The often perceived naivety can be viewed as a brave invincibility and produce a bond of unsheltered shared emotions, truly revealing oneself to another individual.

Lydia Panas

Lydia Panas is an award-winning photographer whose work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad, and has won numerous awards. She was one of nine International Discoveries, Houston Fotofest in 2007. Her work is included in numerous collections, including Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Brooklyn Museum, and Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago. Lydia has degrees from Boston College, the School of Visual Arts, New York University/International Center of Photography, as well as an Independent Study Fellowship from the Whitney Museum of American Art. Lydia has taught photography at a number of institutions, including The Museum of Modern Art, Lafayette, Muhlenberg and Moravian Colleges, Kutztown University, The Maine Media Workshops, The Vermont College MFA program, and the Baum School of Art/Lehigh Carbon Community College.

Lydia will be giving a Photographer's Lecture at the ICP on Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Tickets can be purchased here

Veiw more of Lydia's work here

Ashley Kauschinger: In your process of portraiture, you ask your subject to answer the questions: 

What do you long for?

What do you regret?

What are you afraid of?

Why these questions? What do you feel they reveal about your subjects? What are your answers to these questions? 

Lydia Panas: I started asking these questions in 2011. I’m really interested in what people feel, what they think about and how they are affected by what happens to them.  These questions speak to the fundamental aspects of who we are as humans.  They tell a lot about someone. If you understand what you long for and what you regret you know something important about yourself. Originally I heard the first two, What do you long for? and  What do you regret?  in an interview with the writer David Grossman, who asked them before he wrote his beautiful book To the End of the Land, which is about love, death, families, relationships, connections and conflict.

Fear is also a concept I am interested in.  I worked with it before in a video installation piece.  During the 2004 presidential election when fear was used as a political issue, I video-taped fifty people and asked them nineteen questions about what they were afraid of.  The project is intimate and revealing.  It is more about how people speak to their fears than what they are specifically afraid of.   I’m interested in how honestly people are willing to look at themselves and in art that speaks to essential areas of the self.

With these three questions, What do you long for? What do you regret? and What are you afraid of? I ask my models to email their answers after the shoot.  Often they send them much later.  Their insights add an additional layer to the images. One curator described them as secrets that we get to see.

Making a great picture requires trust and it requires love.  I feel very close to someone when I take pictures. We have to trust each other. These questions require that trust goes one step further.I was touched by the models’ honesty, especially since I did not know most of them well. I continue to ask these questions whenever I photograph someone. I continue to ask them of myself as well.

My longings and fears are remnants from my early years.

I long for unconditional love.  I’m still afraid of being left alone or of abandonment.

I regret how long it took me to believe in myself.

AK: In The Mark of Abel you transitioned from photographing your family to working with other families. What brought on your decision to venture out of your own family tree? What did you learn about yourself and your family from photographing others?

LP: I photographed my own family for years. I love to photograph them. The best aspect of taking pictures of someone is how long you get to look at them. I always feel more comfortable asking family members to pose than friends or strangers, but as they have little interest, I had to go outside the family. 

Photographing people I don’t know as well, is a challenge. The unknown that is part of portraiture is both unsettling and exciting.  I am always afraid that I won’t see anything, that I will disappoint both the model and myself. However, it’s a good challenge and the tension it poses is some of what you see in the images. When I do things that are out of my comfort zone, I feel more satisfied.  

The Mark of Abel was a transitional project. I started the project without a theme and after numerous shoots, I realized how interested I was in family relationships, how family members react to one another in the most subtle ways, and most importantly, how much I was able to see when I looked through the lens.

Making photographs helps me understand things about myself.  It helps me organize the world and keep things in perspective. It gives me comfort to translate what I feel and see, and continues to amaze me that I can see these things on paper. Making photographs gives me focus and meaning. I am grateful to have this in my life. 

AK: You recently had a monograph, The Mark of Abel, published by Kehrer Verlag. Can you speak about your experience, artistically and monetarily in creating this book? 

LP: Making a book is a rewarding experience.  In the case of The Mark of Abel, it was the culmination of years of work on a project that always felt like a narrative.  I wanted early on to see this work in a book. The narrative can be accessed through the sequencing of the photographs and by two excellent essays, which are very different from one another, and touch upon distinct aspects of the work. The critic and writer, George Slade, wrote a piercing essay about how I work photographically.  The author, Maile Meloy wrote lovingly about familial experience and how it teaches us to live. The book has been received well. It depicts relationships as a continuum. Individually the images are of specific people.  Together, they speak to the complexities of the human condition.

Working with Kehrer was a great experience.  They are organized and timely. The schedule was arranged ahead of time and we stayed on target.  I worked with their designer, Katharina Stumpf, who was a good listener and sent me designs with my aims in mind.  She was great to work with. Books are a good exercise in editing and sequencing. They are also a good way to finalize a project.  They can help lay a project to rest. Monetary reward is not part of the equation. In most cases you have to raise funds, but through book sales, limited edition / print sets and the sale of prints due to interest in the book, you can recoup most of it.

A book, however can bring more attention to the work and it is a permanent and physical reminder of the project and all it entailed.  It was an especially rewarding experience.