VIEW CAMERA INTERVIEW ARTICLE
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"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.
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