Discoveries of the Meeting Place

Wall Text by Andy Grundberg, 1998

When you are visited by what seems like 50 photographers in four days, you can’t always keep them straight in your mind. Or their work. Usually I remember the pictures, but the maker’s identity often slides into a void. What sticks photograph and photographer together for me is the conjunction of pictures that speak for themselves and photographers who speak well of them.

Jan Camp’s "Reflections from Mid Life" stayed in my mind long after I saw them [at FotoFest, in 1996] because of their complex simplicity. I admire the way she used mirrors and other reflective surfaces within a tightly framed interior space to open a dialogue between inside and outside, materiality and spirit, reality and illusion, psyche and physique. The reflected presence of the body provides a sense of self-analysis as well as a sense of humor. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cringe at the sight of a pair of high-heeled legs dangling from mid-air. I liked feeling the ambiguity of my own feelings when confronting these images.

Jan is like her pictures. We talked in the claustrophobic hothouse of the Meeting Place, hunched together over a folding table like prisoner and public defender, but she unboxed a conversation that took us from the pictures to art, film, the aging process and the tasks of mid life. Not bad for 15 minutes.

I honestly don't know if Jan will make pictures this good again, but I bet she will. The moral of Jan's story is to keep working past the moment when we give up hope of becoming prodigies.