June 2008

Jessica Ingram was born and raised in Tennessee. She received degrees in Photography and Political Science from New York University and her MFA from California College of the Arts. She was included in 25 Under 25, (PowerHouse Books 2003) and American Photography 20. She contributed to What We Want Is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art (SUNY Press 2004). Along the Way, a video she completed with the Cause Collective was a 2008 Official Selection at the Sundance Film Festival. Jessica’s work is motivated by her desire to understand how people relate, what they long for, and what motivates the choices they make. Along with her art practice, Jessica develops and leads community based arts programs, most recently Fostering Art, a photography and writing program for foster youth in the San Francisco Bay Area. Jessica lives between Nashville, TN and New York where she teaches at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Parsons the New School of Design, and works with PixelPress Magazine.

It looks like all of these photos were shot in the same day. How long have you been working on this series?
‘It’s interesting that they look like they were shot on the same day. I started this series in some form in 1999, though I have been photographing my family since I was a kid with a Kodak 110 camera. In 1999, though, I moved back home after college and started looking more, and thinking about focusing on my family more. I love the images from 1999-2001. I was shooting everything while I was with my family. In 2001, though, I moved to San Francisco for grad school and kept trying to make work there, and wasn’t happy with the work, so I started shooting for long periods at home, and then going back to SF to print and think about it, which was a new and wonderful experience. Before I had always lived where I was working, and the separation of making work one place and dealing with it in another was nice. So I worked on it in a very focused way from 2001-2003 in grad school, and then continued after for a couple of years, and honestly, I still work on it. I just finished some portraits on my great aunts and uncle that I will add to it. It doesn’t feel finished. I’m still learning a lot about my family, and it’s a wonderful, and difficult, but ultimately worthwhile experience’.

How did this series come about?
‘It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how and why I started this series. I really have been photographing my family for as long as I have been taking photographs. In college, I took some pictures of my family over the Christmas holiday, and I clearly remember feeling, after printing the work prints, that I had taken photographs that actually communicated something-they expressed how I was feeling. And at that moment, I realized that photographs can have power, that they can say something. It was big moment for me. I also know that I use photography and the experiences I have with people through photographing them, as a way to ask questions, and to gain entry. This is true of photographing my family as well. I wanted to really look at them, and understand my relationship to them, and ask questions’.

Where do you find you do your best work?
‘I have done projects in other cities, in New York, and I’ve done a couple of projects in San Francisco, that I am just wrapping up, and I love them. I do feel pulled back to the Southeast U.S., and to where I’m from-very often. When I have project ideas, they are almost always are based in the Southeast, and usually in Tennessee and Alabama. I live and work in New York now, but am back home a lot to make work. I’m typing this at my mom’s kitchen table in Nashville, TN’.

Gregory Krum was born and raised in Portland, Oregon and studied biology, sculpture and design at Portland State University. After a study abroad program in Italy with the University of Georgia he relocated to New York where he received his Master’s degree in studio art from New York University and the International Center for Photography. His work has been shown in venues such as the Armory Show, Spencer Brownstone Gallery, Soren Christiansen Gallery in New Orleans and most recently Jen Bekman Gallery. He was awarded the Jack Goodman Scholarship for Art and Technology and his work has been written about and published in the Paris-based magazine Purple. In 2007 he was co-curator of an art exhibition entitled ‘The Wrong Store’ with Kantor/Feuer gallery in New York. Working within the genres of landscape and interior, Krum’s work explores diverse themes such as love, failure, commerce, and desire within a larger context of space and organization. His subjects have included dust, devotional offerings, seaside villages, and Parisian houseboats.

Many of your photographs have a trespassing feel to them. Is this intentional?
‘Sort of. Often there is a lot of effort to remove as much as possible any evidence of the camera, its optics or the feeling that someone was there taking a picture. For me, however, I wanted the camera to be very present. But it probably feels like trespassing because I generally was. It was not about asking for permission it was about ducking in, using a chair on a table as a tripod and making the picture while no one was looking’.

What inspired your Hard Times series?
‘I was really interested in two things at once, the sort of formal concern with the actual arrangement of objects and the palette of spaces and then exploring the delicate emotional stories carried within these interiors, especially ones that are caught off guard. This was the beginning of a search for the type of picture I wanted to make, but did not know what it should look like. I knew all the things I didn’t want it to be: cruel, heroic, sappy, clean, desolate, I was trying to find an antidote to the ironic and also to the documentary’.

It looks as though you have been working on this series for a number of years, are you constantly on the lookout for Interiors Considering Varying Degrees of Failure?
‘Yes, because it was not something that I could in any way create or research or even expect to find. It was not an investigation of, say, my friends’ homes, or a document of people living in a particular place. But for years I was really searching, although now I think the series is finished. The final pictures were made last summer in Sri Lanka, in a house that the writer Paul Bowles used to own. The current owner has a perfectly framed tattered flag, I guess from a previous boat or something named Hard Times’.

Do you carry your camera with you all the time or only when you have a specific project in mind?
‘I make most of my work while away from New York, so while traveling, I always have the camera with me. Recently, however, I have been focusing on more specific subjects, disparate things like dust in the air, a village in China, or devotional offerings in Indonesia, but all somehow related to the theme of arrangement and visual language. So now a lot of time is spent figuring out exactly what I will photograph and then I’ll go with the camera and do it’.

Born and raised in Shanghai, China. Shen Wei is a fine art photographer currently based in New York City. Shen’s photographs have been widely exhibited, including Griffin Museum of Photography, Seattle Center on Contemporary Art, Zone: Chelsea Center for the Arts, Australia Center for Photography, Lincoln Center and Saatchi Gallery at the Zoo Art Fair. His photographs have been featured in various publications such as American Photo, Chinese Photography, PDN, Vision and La Tempestad.

Who are your subjects and how do you go about finding them?
‘Most of my subjects are strangers; very few are people I know. I find my subjects through many different methods, such as at social events, through friends, on the Internet, and by approaching them on location’

How do you go about putting strangers at ease when photographing them?
‘It is a complicated process. Every one of my subjects is different. Everyone has their own interest in the situation. What I do is just try to have natural and comfortable communications with them. I see them as my new friends, not just models’.

Do you have specific ideas on how you want to photograph your subjects or do you let them lead the way?
‘I talk to my subjects before I start shooting. When we communicate well, often we just work together. I usually let my subjects do whatever they are comfortable with. I like the moment when emotion appears naturally’.

Has there ever been an occasion when you have felt uncomfortable photographing one of your subjects?
‘Of course, there are a few times, but I always manage to overcome the awkwardness’.