VIEW CAMERA INTERVIEW ARTICLE
For JAN CAMP, becoming an artist was not so much a choice of profession as a path she was destined to journey. Growing up in a large Italian-American family with a mother who was once an opera singer and a father who was once a gymnast, she was encouraged to explore her creativity throughout her childhood. Her aunt taught her to oil paint when she was twelve. Camp believes that even by the early age of five there was something within her committed to living her life as an artist. Camp is remarkably clear that there is no separation between her life and her art.
Having started her artistic life as a painter, Camp was introduced to photography at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. She worked in photographic services shooting, printing, and supervising work-study students. Photography proved to be more than a job for her.
"My career as an artist has always been directed by my own life. I take a look at what's happening in my own life and how I can integrate art practice with actually living and being a mother and working on other kinds of projects, such as film and video."
Over the course of her life, Camp has worked in graphic design, film, video, interactive video, and publishing. She has raised a family. She built Iris Arts and Education Group, Inc. in Berkeley, CA, a nonprofit organization to critique work in progress, including visual art, documentary video, literary and performance art. Any of those interests might have developed into a career in there own right, but Camp discovered that she "couldn't stop making art" no matter what else was going on in her life. In 1990, she decided that there was no other career for her. It was time to "go for it."
"I've been doing photography since the mid '70's and in 1990, I decided that I wanted to get much more serious in my use of photography. I wanted to really question myself. Where do I fit in this world? What am I doing with this medium? And how do I enter into the international conversation? So I decided to do two workshops. I did one with Sally Mann who is definitely content oriented and uses a view camera, and I did one with Oliver Gagliani who is very much one of the last living zone system masters that originally worked with Minor White and Ansel Adams. I saw two extremes in the use of black and white large format photography. I audited classes at the University of Chicago in the history of photography, image in film, and photography and gender studies and really tried to get a background on what is this thing called photography because we see it everywhere.
"There are many ways you can go with photography. You can go commercial, technical, art, documentary, or journalistic. There are many branches of this thing we call photography. I clearly kept coming back to art photography no matter what I investigated. I kept coming back to the idea that art is where my voice can be the strongest and I can define the quality of life that I want to have. I don't want to be in the world of commercial photography or in the world of news, though I want to comment on both of those things.
Although her photographic work did not produced sufficient income to support her and her children while they were growing up and Camp had to work at other jobs, Camp always made a conscious decision to make her living in ways that allowed her to hold her photographic work close to her heart and soul–working part-time at something other than photography and being free to do photography any way she wanted. Her still life photographs are spawned from the concerns and circumstances of her own life and society as a whole. Unlike many visual artists-especially still life artists-the form, color, texture, or arrangement of the objects are secondary to what she is trying to communicate. "I start with ideas," she explains. "If I observe in my friends and in society–repeatedly–a certain idea that I want to work with, I look to my own life and my close personal circumstances and think about how this idea manifests itself for me. How do I personally see it in the world. "Each of my pieces takes four or five days to put together. They are like little dramas. I start with an idea or a corner of a room or an object that presents me with an idea — and then I just follow it for a few days.
"The main thrust of my work is to take the very traditional medium of zone system black and white photography using the silver print and to make the most beautiful print I can but to give it a little twist in the subject matter. I want to bring to the medium and the tradition of the medium a little bit of a feminist experience that can be shared regardless of gender. I want to make powerful images, but ones that embrace vulnerability as well.
"My still lifes are probably not traditional still lifes because I have added the figure, but in some way they do use a traditional form. When I look at a traditional still life, I see very inanimate objects arranged for the camera in a very objective kind of way. They're placed together so that you are looking at these objects that are very still. They are just placed there. They're more about form, I think, than content, in the traditional dialogue about form and content. So, I've tried to marry the two things — using the mirror to put the figure into the still life and using light and shadow as yet another element. A different kind of dynamic starts to happen."
Camp builds her still lifes in a corner of her home in Berkeley, CA, drawing on her own experiences and objects that have personal meaning to her, but creating an image with a more universal message. The "twist" she seeks to add to the traditional black and white image is designed to shift the viewer's awareness, to help the viewer think about things in a different way. Camp is not shy about making sure that the viewer understands where she is coming from. The title of each of her pieces alludes to the idea it is meant to explore and yet is sufficiently open ended to allow the viewer to filter it — and the image — through his or her experiences and thoughts.
After building the set for her story, exposing the image and spending time in the darkroom to produce the image, Camp spends an additional approximated 12 hours over the course of a week to four weeks painting them. As she paints, the idea continues to develop and eventually she has-not a photograph, not a painting, but a visual representation of an idea. This is the essence of her art.
After half a lifetime of working and living as a photographer, Camp is determined and articulate about what she is doing in her work. It is, in her words, "my way of joining the international conversation," and she thinks a great deal about what she has to say. "It has not been easy for me to become conscious and literate about what I am doing," Camp admits. "It's much easier to just let the spirit move you, do whatever you do, put it out there and not ever have to really say anything about it. But we're in the 90's and I think that we as artists owe it to our society and our culture to be able to give that kind of consciousness to the work. There is so much out there that is subconscious, that is subliminal and that is just pounding away at us. It's not okay just to sit back and be quiet and say, 'Well it's an image, like it or leave it.' We really do have some added responsibility just because of the time in history in which we are making art." Camp focuses more on her content than on her medium. "To me taking a photograph and having it become technically beautiful in a silver print is only part of it. The other is why? Why take the photograph? Why do you want this to go out into the world? "My broad concern is with representation and the way the mind works dramatically-to construct the present from thoughts, perceptions, and actions. Memory and desire are brought to each moment through past experience mixed with the prevailing legends in culture, science, and history. "American myths on the nightly news, in advertising, and in art bombard us with dramatic postures that only vicariously relate to our everyday life. As viewers we are pulled away from intimacy toward fear and desire, with diminishing possibilities for satisfaction. Beauty is encoded with sex and violence, and the need for critical thinking gets lost. I use photography to make portraits of the way people exist as thinking, feeling individuals, and painting to enrich and simplify complex images.
"I grew up with the hand-painted family portrait as a symbol of virtue and achievement for my Italian-American family – as a truth, a proof of our assimilation into the American middle-class. The smiling portraits represented aspiration and direction. My images are not about photography or painting, they are about representing the construction of reality.
It may not be "about" photography, but Camp is definitely proficient with the form. She began exhibiting her work in 1979. She has shown work from Amherst, MA to San Francisco and many places in between.
Her most recent exhibit was at the Sherry Frumkin Gallery in Santa Monica, CA in April. Camp participated in the installation of the exhibit and found the arranging of the work and the space for viewing to be an exhilarating extension of her art. The painted pieces were mounted on brushed aluminum and hung in suspension several inches from the wall, adding a sculptural element to the work. The black and white portfolio pieces were propped against the wall supported by delicate metal rails eliminating the need for frames or Plexiglas. The nontraditional presentation, in addition to being starkly beautiful and striking, is consistent with Camp's belief that her work is not about photography or painting but visual representation of ideas. Camp says that she is not planning to add digital photography to her repertoire. "I feel about digital photography probably the way that zone system photographers feel about my photography which is 'it's just something different." I'11 be a slop and dunk photographer as long as I am doing it because I prefer the dark room to the computer screen. I think that's what it's really about. What do you prefer to do with your time, energy, and life. Digital photography is going to become another art medium. We are in an age of digital language. We now have to go beyond the technique and the medium and we have to see what ideas we are actually promoting. We have to come up with some new solutions for how to make art more viable, more relevant.
Camp feels strongly that artists have a responsibility to contribute images to the world that will provide some balance to the barrage of images from advertising and industry that promote unreasonable expectations and desire. "Object of Desire is the picture for me that really talks about this idea. The pears are perfectly lined up, the candlesticks are there-yet the flame is in the mirror and you can't get to the wick. Sometimes, even when you think you have everything perfectly arranged as you think it should be you just can't get there from here. Camp believes that photographers need to work to find their own voice their own way to make their contribution to society. It is as much a part of the process of learning to be a photographer as learning to use the equipment and the chemicals.
She speaks to aspiring artists. "Imitation is not bad, but you have to see it as your notebook-or your workbook. It is not going to be your final product. You can learn something technically and visually by imitating what you've already seen and liked. Getting to the place where you then make an original image is about finding your own voice and understanding what you think about and the way that you see. " One should never forget one's failures. The things that don't work for you are really important information. If you are always trying to make something that is perfect, then you are probably going to imitate something that you've seen that is perfect and you are never going to get to your own piece. Don't be afraid to make work that ends up boring or ugly and doesn't say what you want it to say.
"Being an artist is not about making a product. Being an artist is all about how you live your life and the way that you process information.
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MAY/JUNE 1996, p. 28