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The Griffin Museum celebrates the craft of photography in all of its forms, as well as highlighting visual artists at the beginning of their creative journey. Over the past thirty years, showcasing luminaries of photography, we have had the pleasure of working with many emerging talents. Perceiving Pathways is a series of interviews, conducted by Tori Currier, looking at some of the artists who have hung on our walls. In conversations with them about their creative paths, often beginning with their first exhibition with us, we share these conversations about the many ways art practices can evolve, and spotlight the various decisions and influences that come together to create the artworks you see. 

It is our hope that these engaging conversations are an opportunity to connect with and learn from artists about themselves and their processes, cultivating deeper appreciation of their artwork and a broader understanding of the photographic arts.

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Jerry Takigawa is an independent photographer, designer, and writer. Joining us for Perceiving Pathways, we discussed his creative path beginning with his 2015 Griffin Exhibition, False Food, which spoke to environmental advocacy and issues of plastic pollution, to recent series including Balancing Cultures, which gives voice to his family’s experiences with WWII American Concentration camps. In conversations about his artwork and workshops, as well as artmaking in the age of Zoom, Jerry illuminates the significance of connection, vulnerability, and embracing the personal in art and life.

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How would you describe your exhibition experience at the Griffin? 

The experience itself was entirely enjoyable. I think Paula had mentally earmarked False Food before we even met in Santa Fe in 2013. The exhibition in 2015 is a fond memory of being able to move about the country freely before the pandemic. 

Tell us how your work has evolved since your 2015 exhibition, False Food.

After the Griffin exhibition, False Food led to many exhibitions including the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco. Paula

generously nominated the project twice for the Prix Pictet. The work has been part of a permanent exhibit at the Monterey Bay Aquarium about ocean plastic pollution and recently featured on the cover of Allison Cobb’s book Plastic: An Autobiography. In 2016, I began work on Balancing Cultures, a photography series about my family’s experience with the WWII American Concentration camps.

Your 2021 Balancing Cultures exhibition started with family photographs. Which ideas and decisions went into the layering of photographs and objects?

The idea underlying Balancing Cultures is about a compulsion to tell the story of a trauma in my parent’s life that became an unconscious driving force in my own life. I wanted to tell that story to the best of my ability—to be their voice. Their hidden emotions surrounding the WWII incarcerations and attendant racism was quietly transferred to the next generation. Decision-making includes holding this subconscious force (to finally say something about the incarceration) along with allowing an intuitive force of receptivity and openness, which guided me in choosing/arranging elements for the images. This kind of decision-making results in what can be called “being in the zone,” where focus is everything and time falls away.

2020 – 2021 were reflective years for many of us. They, too, have shown us how supportive art communities are. Which new thoughts or discoveries about your work/practice and role in the photography community will inform it in the New Year?

If I reflect on my work over the past 4 decades, hindsight is 20-20. I can see how in the Kimono Series, I publicly began to

embrace my Japanese heritage. And in Landscapes of Presence, I allowed myself to work in the Zen moment and develop a still-life approach that would become useful in expressing ideas for years to come. False Food emerged easily from Landscapes of Presence. My still-life approach matured during this series and working with environmental issues was familiar territory for me. Balancing Cultures required tenacity and research. Honestly, with the benefit of hindsight, I can see I’d been working my whole

life toward this project. There were many obstacles inherent in making this work. 1) My parents didn’t speak much about the concentration camps particularly the politics. 2) Their shame about being considered the “enemy” during WWII and their desire to protect me from future such events. 3) Their anger at the loss of their rights as citizens and loss of personal property was not readily expressed and by the same token, their silence transferred these emotions to my brother and me. 4) By expressing these emotions, was I betraying my parent’s silence? I was cautious about sharing this work with the public at first. But surprisingly, the public and the photography community both welcomed and encouraged this work. Ironically, this is one of the primary messages in the PIE Labs (Photography, Ideas, Experience) workshops I created at Center for Photographic Art—the more personal the message, the more universal the audience. I’m learning to embrace life through the personal.

Could you tell us a bit more about your PIE Labs workshops and the primary messages you teach, including the importance of personal messages in art and life?

Essentially, the premise is to loosen up creative calcification and help artists evolve beyond their creative worldview. Unique to the approach, we invited people involved in some aspect of creativity (but not always photography) to allow artists to break out of f-stop thought patterns and delve into the world of creativity: human vulnerability, story, and connection. PIE Labs was once described as not a how-to but a why. 

Reflecting on your path so far, what is one hope or ambition for 2022?

I feel a plethora of feelings and ideas simmering in my consciousness. So many thoughts that, ultimately, are all connected. When I talk about my work, my early days were fraught with a desire to say something with art, but not knowing what was important. Today, I have a better understanding of how and why things are the way they are—and there is no shortage of things to choose from. One assignment for 2022 is to recognize and begin my next project. 

An influence for False Food was an environmental issue, specifically the harmful effects of plastic pollution on Albatross of the Midway Atoll. How do you approach translating critical issues into visual art, whether in terms of style or subject matter?

How indeed. Typically, it will be a fortuitous intersection of a strong feeling about the issue and a visual approach that resonates with expressing that issue. Sometimes I can encapsulate the issue with a title that I “hold” while sorting out the visual approach. Sometimes I just need to start making things. For me, subject matter needs to be rooted in authenticity—something personal, something I feel strongly about. Where do ideas come from? I think there’s a lot to be said for holding the issue(s) and the various visual approaches lightly in a kind of idea soup of consciousness and allow pattern recognition to map out projects. Being able to talk with others about ideas is also useful. Most of the issues that I wish to express are vast in scope. The challenge is to translate a vast problem into an idea that personalizes the expression. By doing that, it becomes more accessible. 

I am curious about your process of how you can sometimes “encapsulate the issue with a title [you] hold while sorting out the visual approach.” Do these titles begin verbally, as words that you transform into visual objects? Can you sometimes visualize artworks through text?

Creating a title can give me a handle on a visual approach. (Yes, they are verbal). A title can suggest a visual starting point that will then have a life of its own. Not sure I can visualize artwork through text; it would be more like visualizing images through feelings. And, feelings can be had through words, ideas, and visuals.  

You’re a photographer, so you’re intrinsically a viewer too! How have your ways of viewing and engaging with photographic art changed over the years? Have they been shaped by how you might prefer your own work to be viewed?

For the past couple of years, viewing photography has been mostly screen-based expanding the field from which I am able to experience other photographer’s work. This has the benefit of diversity of imagery but with the missing in-person experience. The Zoom-based salon world has brought artist’s intentions to the forefront. As has the artist statement, now standard in most juried formats. From a purely visual approach standpoint, I admire images that either I wish I had made or images that resonate with my way of seeing/making. I don’t make work with screens in mind. However, in thinking about making new work, I sometimes rehearse the underlying intention to qualify the idea (to an imaginary audience).   

How have screen-based and Zoom audiences redefined how you, as you have shared, qualify your ideas and processes when thinking about making new work? 

The practice of Zoom presentations is an opportunity to share the backstory about why certain images were made. Scanning Instagram each day brings a wealth of images into my daily experience. When thinking about new work, I find myself mentally rehearsing its intention. Partly to assess what I would tell an audience but also to test whether the visual idea is effective in conveying the premise.  

As creatives, we’re always looking to grow. So, what is one metric of artistic growth as a photographer?

One answer is embedded in your question. I believe personal growth is the same thing as artistic growth. As you grow, your art grows. And as your art grows, you grow. I’ve always allowed myself to have the equipment I needed (and sometimes just wanted) to do photography. Yet, the real advancements in my work have not come from the advances in technology, but from my own personal evolution as a human being and an artist. Ironically, while I’ve always sought to put more of myself into my photographs, it’s my photographs that have informed me about myself. One way to tell if what I’m expressing in my images is personal—does it takes courage to say it? Does it feel risky? Courage is being vulnerable. Courage and vulnerability are two sides of the same personal growth coin. When you’re speaking in the truest, most intimate voice about your life, you are speaking with the universal voice.  —Cheryl Strayed, writer

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Jerry Takigawa is an independent photographer, designer, and writer. He studied photography with Don Worth and is the recipient of many honors and awards including: the Imogen Cunningham Award (1982), the Clarence J. Laughlin Award, New Orleans, LA (2017), Photolucida’s Critical Mass Top 50, Portland, OR (2017, 2020), CENTER Awards, Curator’s Choice First Place, Santa Fe, NM (2018), the Rhonda Wilson Award, Brooklyn, NY (2020), and the Foto Forum Santa Fe Award, Santa Fe NM (2021). His work is in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Crocker Art Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Monterey Museum of Art, and the Library of Congress. Takigawa lives and works in Carmel Valley, California.

 

Follow Jerry’s Path to Creativity:

 

Website: http://takigawaphoto.com/ 

Instagram: @jerrytakigawa
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jerry.takigawa 

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Tori Currier is a curatorial intern at the Griffin Museum of Photography and a senior at Smith College majoring in Art History. Passionate about the photographic arts and public education, she strives to support artists at the Griffin by developing educational features which spotlight their work and amplify their voices.

 

Instagram: @torilcurrier

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Perceiving Pathways | Meggan Gould

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The Griffin Museum celebrates the craft of photography in all of its forms, as well as highlighting visual artists at the beginning of their creative journey. Over the past thirty years, showcasing luminaries of photography, we have had the pleasure of working with many emerging talents. Perceiving Pathways is a series of interviews, conducted by Tori Currier, looking at some of the artists who have hung on our walls. In conversations with them about their creative paths, often beginning with their first exhibition with us, we share these conversations about the many ways art practices can evolve, and spotlight the various decisions and influences that come together to create the artworks you see. It is our hope that these engaging conversations are an opportunity to connect with and learn from artists about themselves and their processes, cultivating deeper appreciation of their artwork and a broader understanding of the photographic arts.

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Meggan Gould is a photographer, educator, and published author working outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her 2015 Griffin Museum exhibition, Viewfinders, focused on the camera apparatus itself to consider “histories of looking.” We were delighted to speak with Meggan about how her work has evolved since Viewfinders, her new book, Sorry, No Pictures, and her use of alternative processes in her recent series Happy Time.

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How would you describe your exhibition experience at the Griffin? 

Paula had reached out a few years after meeting in passing at a portfolio review, remembering the Viewfinders specifically and wanting to exhibit them. Unfortunately, I never got to see the exhibition – I had a very young baby and at the last moment had to cancel the travel from New Mexico to Boston because of sickness. Frances and Paula were amazing to work with from afar, and I am always so impressed by the Griffin as a consistent presence supporting both emerging and established artists. 

Tell us how your work has evolved since your 2015 exhibition, Viewfinders.

I have continued to make work that pokes at how we look at the world using photography, at the authority of branding, at why/how we are supposed to use technologies in certain ways. I tease apart and deliberately misuse/misinterpret/look askance at tools. I magnify and rework printer test patterns, I dunk household items in jars of recovered pigment inks from my printer, I rework the iconography from cameras into elaborate autobiographical narratives….  I love to have my hand confront the machinery of vision, and everything I end up making is deeply grounded in and indebted to photo geekery, as the viewfinders were. Much of my recent work wanders in and out of photographic print as output, however, employing drawing, stenciling, knitting, sewing—all with a messy overlay of photographic ink, language, and tool dissection.

In the summer of 2021, I published a book, Sorry, No Pictures, using both text and images to probe my personal relationship to the medium. It was the first time I had embraced writing as part of my practice. In it, I write about machines, mothering, teaching, messes, travel, ink stains, open boxes of photosensitive paper, bird-watching, influences, failures, languages, clogged nozzles, clocks, humility, and labor. It felt like an embrace of joy from muddy waters, and a solidification of the permission I have been giving myself to have more fun with iterations of output. 

Congratulations on your book! So, in Sorry, No Pictures, you wrote on topics which have emerged in your visual art practice. In which ways do the written word and photographic art work together in your book?

I think of the book as more of a long-form opportunity to come to terms with my own practice – to find joy in unearthing coherence therein – and the images are almost secondary. When I give an artist talk, the relationship between the two is, perhaps, flipped – the images take precedence, and my voice/words are there to move through the images, holding them up, bolstering them. In the book, I allowed myself (for the first time) to give the words dominance; the photographs are used to hint at the larger collection of work.

2020 – 2021 were reflective years for many of us. They, too, have shown us how supportive art communities are. Which new thoughts or discoveries about your work/practice and role in the photography community will inform it in the New Year?

I might say that I wish these years had been particularly reflective! Some eventual reflections emerge amid the tedium and stress…. I did not find the sudden loss of social expectations overly troubling. My practice is not particularly outward-facing in the ways I make work, and my studio is 100 feet from my main house, so I theoretically had the luxury of both time and space to expand into in terms of making. I also, however, had two schooling children suddenly and ALWAYS at home, and somehow that distance of 100 feet was often unnavigable, thanks to other needs. Teaching online and endless meetings on Zoom were the odd emotional drain that they were for everyone. Lessons learned: trust in self and the momentum of routines, trust in projects finding their own momentum through labor. I made a lot of side projects, things that may never become anything else, things that required the slow accretion of tedious time. Every day, for example, I made one lumen print of my daily tea mug next to Zoom meeting set-up, and every day I made a photograph of my domestic prison (!) at 10:10. I found intermittent joy in this reconfigured reality, and allowed my practice to overlap with my domestic life in a way I never have before.

I have enjoyed the pandemic’s condensing of space, allowing artist talks to be virtually attended at a great distance, and I feel like there has been something of a collapse of boundaries. Something I hope to continue into the new year is an ongoing resolution to reach out more to artists whose work I admire, but do not know. Most of us have contact information directly listed on our websites; why don’t we tell people how much their work has moved us? I try to make it a habit to simply send a quick email, or a physical book, to artists, when their work brings me joy. I tell students that much of the role of a critique conversation is simply that of an act of attention, and I love to spread this in a way that seems to have an odd social block to it. We should spread appreciation more!

Other than that, I don’t know what my role in the photography community is, exactly – a provocateur of the medium? I have often felt somewhat outside of much of the photography community, with a very different approach to using/looking at the medium.  

Reflecting on your path so far, what is one hope or ambition for 2022?

A few! To stay steady (myself and the world both) in the face of unrelenting political, environmental, pandemic stress feels like the most one can really hope for, on this last day of 2021. To see more art in physical form. To write more. 

For Viewfinders, you talked about how history is represented in a viewfinder’s glass through dust and scratches. In a way, they become lenses of times past that we continue to look through. How does your 2020-21 series, Happy Time, extend your ideas of the camera as connected to time? How have your modes of representation changed?

Happy Time started with a photography professor of mine, many years ago, who pointed out that clocks are inevitably stuck, in camera and watch advertisement, at ten minutes past ten o’clock. It’s one of these glorious moments that one doesn’t tend to notice, but then cannot unsee, once noticed– and these are the things I have loved to photograph over the years – those insidious things we can’t not notice, once brought to our attention (greasy fingerprint patters on an iPad, markings inside a camera’s viewfinder, glue on the backs of photographs). In the case of the clock, it’s such a capitalist convention – the implication of a smile, meant to make us feel happy/inclined to buy the watch/clock on display. It’s a silly convention made for a photographic moment, and I chose to lean into it during the months of quarantine. Every day, at 10:10, I would stop and make a photograph, hovering in the space of enforced happy time. It’s not a habitual mode of representation for me, to document my daily life in this way, so it also felt forced, tedious, calisthenic-like. 

I have simultaneously been turning the happy time clock into long-form (long exposures of hours, days, weeks) camera-less anthotypes, using plant-based emulsions to very, very slowly draw out the happy time moment in the lurid colors of turmeric, prickly pear cactus, spinach, spirulina, pomegranate…. This has become another avenue for exploring the domestic (kitchen!), while simultaneously trying to imagine a feasible future for photography, in the face of environmental catastrophe. What if I couldn’t run endless water, to wash film, in the desert? What if economic collapse triggered the end of data banks and digital file storage? I’m currently making endless material tests, trying to perfect waxed paper negatives, evaluating exposure needs, appropriate paper surfaces, and hovering in the space of unmoving clock faces (10:10, and the Doomsday clock, hovering at 100 seconds to humanity’s midnight doom). The trickery of photographic time, and cultural associations embedded therein, certainly is a steady thread. 

As I hinted above, my modes of representation change regularly. Recent work includes embroidered lumen prints, massive stencils on gallery walls, dyed cotton masks and tampons, straight inkjet prints, stitched digital imagery, photosensitive spinach prints….  It has taken me a long time to understand, and eventually embrace, how unwavering the conceptual backbone of what I am looking at stays, despite the physical disparities of the work itself. 

These days, how we experience time in general certainly feels unique. There has been a sense of monotony, and a

blurring together. Would you say that your processes for Happy Time, such as photographing at a fixed time each day and creating anthotypes, allow you to explore time in a way that sets photography apart from other art forms?

If anything, I have certainly been exploiting the fundamental nature of the medium—if distilled to light’s action on photosensitive material—in two dramatically different ways. Time did, indeed, feel simultaneously slow and fast over the course of the past two years, and I suppose these two ways of working reflect extremes of photographic possibility. The accretion of a body of work based in “quick” time of standard(ish) 1/60th of a second exposures, but repeated daily, in conjunction with a body of work built up from excruciatingly slow exposures of hours, days, weeks, months…. And all with a never-changing clock face, unfazed by the passage of time (however that passage might feel/be experienced). Time, in both cases, delivers me the photographs.

You’re a photographer, so you’re intrinsically a viewer too! How have your ways of viewing and engaging with photographic art changed over the years? Have they been shaped by how you might prefer your own work to be viewed?

I don’t tire of images, really in any form. I maintain a space for being surprised by what a photograph can do. I like them on walls, I like them in jpegs, I like them in family photo albums, I like them in advertisements, I like them in books, I like them as sculptures. I’m ridiculously open to photographic encounters. If anything has changed for me over the years, it is that I want to know more back stories about artists, and how they came to make the work they make – I want to know the profound complexities of others –maybe because it makes me feel better about my own.

How do I prefer my work to be viewed? This gives me pause. Fundamentally, having anyone encounter work in any manner (even subpar jpegs, floating alone) is, of course, just fine. That said, I have always struggled with the legibility of my work, or my tendency towards obtuse/layered meanings, and accepting that much of that is lost in translation/viewing. I love to give artist lectures, and they become something of a performance of everything I tried to wrap into my book; they put me there to present the work as a package that gets to emerge as more cohesive than it feels while in process, to spin from it a narrative reasoning/reckoning with my words, my personality, my stupid jokes.  

What is it you like to know about fellow photographers? How does knowing it influence your perception of their work as well as cultivate the attention and appreciation you mentioned earlier in our discussion?

I’m easily persuaded to like work that might not have spoken to me, otherwise, by falling for an artist’s practice/thought process itself. I find that this usually does not come across in artist statements accompanying a lot of work – statements are often dry or difficult to parse. I like behind-the-scenes glimpses of what a practice entails for others, I love to indulge in knowing how other people work…. I like to know what they obsess over. Perhaps it just makes me feel better about my own blindered obsessions!

As creatives, we’re always looking to grow. So, what is one metric of artistic growth as a photographer?

Humility.  

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Meggan Gould is a photographer living and working outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of New Mexico. She is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she studied anthropology, the SALT Institute for Documentary Studies, where she studied non-fiction writing, and Speos (Paris Photographic Institute), where she finally began her studies in photography. She received an MFA in photography from the University of Massachusetts – Dartmouth. Her photographs have been featured in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally. Her multifaceted practice uses photography, drawing, sculpture, and installation in an open-ended dissection of vision and photographic tools.

 

Follow Meggan’s Path to Creativity:

Website: http://www.meggangould.net  

Instagram: @megganlgould

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Tori Currier is a curatorial intern at the Griffin Museum of Photography and a senior at Smith College majoring in Art History. Passionate about the photographic arts and public education, she strives to support artists at the Griffin by developing educational features which spotlight their work and amplify their voices.

Instagram: @torilcurrier

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Chris Aluka Berry is a documentary photographer based in Atlanta, Georgia whose long form essays challenge cultural norms and racial stereotypes by exploring race, class, and faith within underrepresented communities. Second Chances: Josh’s Salvation, documents Joshua Reynold’s life in prison. His hope is that this project can show the humanity of the prison population and the love and empathy than can result from programs such as the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation program. We asked Chris some questions, and are excited to share his answers below.

Tell us how you first connected to the Griffin Museum.

I first learned about the Griffin Museum when Paula Tognarelli contacted me to ask if she could showcase my work, “Second Chances: Josh’s Salvation.”

How do you involve photography in your everyday life? Can you tell us about any images or artists that have caught your attention recently?

I engage photography in my everyday life by teaching photography at PACE Academy to middle school students. I carry my camera with me often. And I make my living as a photographer so I’m shooting something most days of the week.

Please tell us a little about your series Second Chances: Josh’s Salvation, and how it was conceived.

This project started when I was working as a photojournalist at The State Newspaper in Columbia, SC. I had spent a lot of time in the horse communities in Camden, SC, when I found out about the prison program, the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation Program. I had worked on several projects that involved life in prison, and have always had a deep love for horses and other animals. It took several years to get the warden to give me permission to come into the prison and let me work on the project. Sometimes persistence pays off. In this case it resulted in me spending a year going back and forth into the prison to tell Josh’s story.

Has there been a Griffin Museum exhibition that has particularly engaged or moved you?

Unfortunately, I have yet to see the exhibitions of the Griffin Museum. I live in Atlanta and don’t have the opportunity to travel to Boston much. Now that I know about the Griffin I plan on following along with the exhibitions and I hope to be able to visit the museum in person soon.

What is your favorite place to escape to?

My favorite place to escape to is the Appalachian mountains of Western North Carolina.

What is a book, song or visual obsession you have at the moment?

My current visual obsession is my ongoing photo series, which will be published as a book in 2023, entitled, Affrilachia: The Remnant that Remains. For the past five years, I have documented African American communities in the southern Appalachian mountains.

If you could be in a room with anyone to have a conversation, who would it be and what would you talk about?

If I could have a conversation with anyone, it would be Jesus Christ of Nazareth. I would love to know if he really is the son of God. If so, what is God like? And what does the after-life look like? I would also be curious to know what his favorite food is.

Does he like chocolate?  And I would most definitely try and make his photograph.