In our newest online exhibition, Corona, we seek to illuminate the best part of our lives and lift us out of darkness. This is a difficult time, and we want to let the light in, lifting our souls into the light.
In science terms, a “corona” is a usually colored circle often seen around and close to a luminous body (such as the sun or moon) caused by diffraction produced by suspended droplets or occasionally particles of dust.
There is no greater way to celebrate our exhibition with the first in a series of interviews with the image makers that inspire us, lift us and show us how to find light in our day.
Today’s featured artist is Leslie Jean-Bart. The Griffin first highlighted his work in 2017, and we look back at it today as we talk to Leslie about this series, light and the idea of Corona.
How does light play in your work?
Person and reflection © Leslie Jean-Bart
To have the shadow and the silhouette aligned as wanted, I needed not just the light, but also a certain angle of the light.
I never fail to see, to observe, and to follow the light. The presence and/or the lack of the presence of light at any degree is the key to it all for me. It is one of the fundamental elements that currently informs most of my work.
In your series Reality & Imagination you use the tidal reflection to illuminate life. Did you find the reflection first? Or did the reflections find you?
© Leslie Jean Bart
The most effective and efficient way for me to answer this second question about my use of the tidal reflection to illuminate life and as to whether I found the reflection first or the other way around would perhaps be for me to speak a bit in general about the framework of the segments of “Reality & Imagination” that these images are a part of.
My process there is a way of seeing driven by a frame of mind at the service of an idea. What I mean exactly is, I chose to accept the upside down world to being as important as if not more so than the right-side up world (frame of mind) as a context within which to explore the interaction that takes place between the culture of the host country and the culture of the immigrant living permanently abroad (idea), while I make use of the movement/motion of the tide with the sand to combine that frame of mind with that idea to tease life from the combination (way of seeing). Because of the frame of mind in use, the images created pull the viewer into a world that seems instantaneously both familiar and unfamiliar. The essence of creating that world is not only in the physical aspect of making the image, but even more so, in the frame of mind that permits me to find the suitable environment to interplay the combined elements.
© Leslie Jean-Bart
Of course, light, timing, composition, patience, purpose, idea(s), being in the moment, being flexible, are all engaged in creating the image as the tide continuously and rapidly transforms each tableau anew in a fraction of a second. I have to remain focused and be present.
How did you first find the idea to capture contrast in organic shape and texture with the hard edge of light reflection?
It all came about by my need to support the phase of the idea I was exploring at that particular time.
© Leslie Jean-Bart
There were a myriad of possibilities in the surroundings of the tide. It was simply a matter of observing, closely evaluating, and selecting an appropriate form(s).
How can a dominant culture be defined vs a culture that’s a guest? After careful evaluation, it was an obvious choice. A silhouette which is more solid, was to represent the host culture. The shadow which is more transparent was to represent the guest culture. By the way, both the silhouette as well as the shadow cannot exist without the presence of light. So there is a common need there. A common need also exists between the host culture and the immigrant culture. The Corona virus has made that definitely overtly apparent.
As I worked on each segment I mentally assigned a very loose characteristic or definition to that given segment. One segment was, say, where the host culture was in charge/doing the viewing, another was the immigrant interacting/doing the watching within the host culture, another was the immigrant culture interacting within its own community. How and what I shot at that particular time was very much influenced by the loose characteristics I assigned to that segment and whatever related thoughts were wafting in my mind on that subject.
© Leslie Jean-Bart
But no matter how loose the given characteristics or definitions were, there is one physical element that I always defined for myself in a singular fashion. That element was the thin white/silvery line of light that sliced in one fashion or another through the frame. I always saw it in some form or another as the dividing line, as the border and entry point between the two cultures.
As a way to give a better understanding of what goes on during the actual shoot, let’s follow through with the last line from my answer to question above, “I have to remain focused and be present”.
© Leslie Jean-Bart
My being completely present means that all research done and/or any thoughts about particular idea(s) are relegated to the deep recess of the mind. It is as if all information were stored in the electronic cloud, and the pertinent bit of information automatically downloaded itself to fluidly inform the image making process. The downloading happened so fluidly pure and fast that physical recognition at that particular moment is of no practical use and so that physical function is disengaged. (Only at the end of the shooting day while reviewing the images does the physical consciousness fully reengaged in that process, and the image files completely expanded themselves to fully reveal their contents. As I focus on an image of interest during the review, what took place at that moment while shooting is vividly replayed in my head.) It’s a surrender to what is, a surrender to the moment while absolutely not losing oneself.
That process of seeing has also become some sort of a blueprint of life for me. I always try to remain open, and to remain present, without losing a sense of myself.
In this time of Corona, how do you find light in your day?
© Leslie Jean-Bart
I try to create, that always brings in the light, especially when it’s all flowing. But a sure boost is to blast music at a high decibel with the headphone on for a short period of time. Unwise, but it works and it’s fun. Am spending time making videos about what I am doing, and how the shelter-in-place is affecting me.
What is next for you creatively? What are you working on?
I just completed a new series titled “Echoes of Past Present”
Two short videos from the ones I have been making gives a visual idea about the series. Please see links below to view. The first link is the very first video done.
Echoes of Past Present Video One. Echoes of the Past Present Video Two.
About Leslie Jean-Bart
Born in Haiti where he acquired his love for the ocean, Leslie Jean-Bart has been living in New York City since he arrived in the US in 1967. After earning a master’s degree in Journalism from Columbia University, Jean-Bart embarked on a photography career that resulted in the creation of images that have garnered awards and recognition.
Earlier days found Jean-Bart on staff at Sotheby’s and Christie’s where he was surrounded daily by the world’s greatest art. Freelance assignments took him all over the world, as he shot for clients in Japan, Brazil, Iceland, Cyprus and Portugal. His commitment to his craft and his defined vision, resulted in a variety of commercial projects, and several published award winning books. A special collage project of Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker for the Verve Music Group was cited for excellence.
Jean-Bart began exhibiting in 2001, when a number of his collages were part of the exhibit “Committed To The Image: Contemporary Black Photographers” at The Brooklyn Museum. From 2001-2003 he took part in a number of group exhibits at Monique Goldstrom Gallery
in SoHo, NYC.
During the last several years Jean-Bart put his career, but not his art on hold. Committed to the care of his mother who has dementia, Jean-Bart became her daily guardian. During this very trying time he soothed his soul by photographing water and reflections. The call to somehow combine the ocean or water and the camera was never far from his mind during the past two decades, and in 2009 the call became a mission and a project was birthed.
The ensuing series titled “Reality and Imagination“ is the culmination of years of working the science and magic that is photography and a never ending love of water, light, shape, form and collage.
The idea for my book came from several years ago when I was pondering ways to visualize questions about the believability of photographs and their presentation of the “truth”. It occurred to me to create my own sets with tiny actors and light them and photograph them depicting scenes that might have happened or could happen and that were narratively suggestive, but not singular stories- the scenes could be interpreted in multiple ways, though they almost always suggested that something “bad” had happened or was going to happen. I additionally shot my own large background photographs from real world views and blended my fake world and real world parts together visually through lighting. So, the work presents real still life objects in a false scenario against reproduced backgrounds of actual landscapes, lit in a studio, digitally recorded and presented as archivally printed transparencies in led backlit frames- multilayers of real and unreal, or true and false. When I created enough of the pieces for a series, I of course, thought of presenting them together as a book- the book form of course, makes it easier to show the work rather than hauling around light boxes, but there is something certainly missing when looking at the images on a page versus lit up on a wall. So, I included a view of several pieces lit up and installed on a wall as the first image in the book.
To answer the question about what I would want viewers to think about, I will take a few bits from my book’s introduction– The Constructed Scenarios series was created to involve viewers in the act of photographic analysis. The work walks a path between staged setup and photographically real representation. They are intentionally created to engage viewers into their invented narratives- the tableaus are specific enough to be familiar, but not so realistic as to be convincing illusions. These images are both story and still life, photographic reality and theatrical performance, small scale illusion and real world mimic. They present semi-factual information requiring analysis of their elements and an engaged interpretive skill- abilities that are sincerely needed to consider the truth in our vast image and information environments.
What would you like us as viewers to take away from your after seeing your work and words?
…I am very much influenced by various ‘ painting movements.’ ( Surrealism.
The images have not been manipulated. Everything is as seen through the viewfinder.
After seeing my book, I would like readers to feel compassionate and connected – to others on the autism spectrum and to one another. We all have some of the traits of autism, and it is through these commonalities (and hopefully through my work as well) that we can connect. I want people to have a more nuanced view of autism – not solely as a disability but as a gift as well.
These Years Gone By… is a love story told through my grandparents letters from World War II. Shortly after my grandmother’s death in 2008, my mother discovered about 300 letters that my grandparents had written to each other during World War II. They had been kept by my grandmother for over 60 years and inherited by my mother. These letters provided a new insight for my family into the lives of my grandparents during this critical time in world history. From these letters, artifacts and old family photos, I have woven together a narrative that tells the story of this challenging time in their personal history.
This project is more of a curatorial effort through family history with artifacts and old family photos. While this project is narrative driven and embraces my interest in family and world history my other work is slightly different.
My photography has always focused on images of the stuff of daily life ordinarily passed by or kept at the periphery. This approach was named ‘something and nothing’ by Charlotte Cotton in 2009 in her book ‘the photograph as contemporary art.’ These images interrogate the intimate cycles of identity, self-preservation and mortality.
Mike Callaghan’s work focuses on fragmentation, rearrangement and reinterpretation while considering the intimate cycles of identity, preservation and mortality. Mike interrogates the subtlety of gesture and the subtlety of difference in a moment when frameworks of relationships are at once prominently visible and exhaustively hidden.
My father was a superb fine art photographer. In 1999, he and I published a book together about his life’s work. The book, Reflections, consisted of 100 of his photographs and six interviews that I did with him about his aesthetic and his process. Writing the book together was an intimate and extraordinary experience. I learned so much about the life of an artist.
When my Dad died and the sun went out. I felt the night sky open to infinity, icily reaching away from me in emptiness. For two years, nothing could console me for his loss. But then I took up my camera again. Without any conscious purpose, I began to photograph at night. At first, my photos were mostly black, sometimes with a tiny dot of the moon in the far distance. But, in time, more points of light crept in. Increasingly, I became more interested in finding light than in recording darkness. The dark of night became a space with the potential for illumination, for complexity, for life and liveliness, even for warmth.
What was the inspiration for the book project?
Artist Statement As a child I spent many hours roaming the maze of rooms in my father’s furniture store. The shapes that filled these make-believe spaces, 1960’s reproductions of ‘Early American’ furniture became imprinted in my consciousness. Without realizing it I committed these shapes to memory.
I first started using X-rays as a tool to visually explore objects in 2010 when I took a box full of my daughters’ dolls to work. The X-rays were ghost-like and haunting, and I liked them. I could literally see beneath the surface (as the photography cliché goes). The source of X-rays is a linear accelerator– the same machine that is used to treat cancer patients. But treating dolls with cancer killing rays was not the end goal, of course. I continued making X-rays with other objects from diverse sources such as nature (birds, seed pods, skulls), flea markets (vacuum tubes and light meters), and musical instruments.. Five years ago, I started X-raying cameras Actually, I X-ray anything that seems interesting to me and fits on a few pieces of film or the digital imager. I have a small collection of thirty cameras that I started X-raying in 2015. I made a few prints and showed them to my photography friends. Many of them let me borrow their cameras to X-ray. After three years I had made x-rays of 130 cameras. The idea of the book came from a portfolio review of the camera X-rays by Jennifer Yoffy in Atlanta. It was published in December 2018 by Fraction Editions and 500 copies were printed.
This work uses x-rays to explore the micro-evolution of cameras and is a metaphor about the limits of evolution. While form and media may have changed, the camera is still a camera: a tool to create images by capturing photons of light. Today’s sophisticated digital cameras look and operate far differently than the first cameras of the nineteenth century, however the essentials have not changed. The photographer points a contraption with a lens towards the subject to encode its likeness on a storage medium, be it film or digital sensor. And this contraption has been manufactured in many wonderful and clever designs, the complexity usually hidden inside. While making these x-rays, I have been surprised and astonished by what I found inside the cameras. The lens, when imaged from the side, contain a multi-element train of perfectly shaped glass forms whose purpose is to collect and direct light towards the target.
The idea was formed when I started a series called Treasures: 44 objects, about all the things I’ve known for my whole life that live at my mothers house. The end product was a 6 x 8 x 3.5 inch wood box which included all 44 objects on 5 x 7 inch cards, Edition of 3. I decided to start putting all my fine art in book form for my family or anyone to easily enjoy. Treasures: objects I’ve known all my life, was perfect to start with, as I felt like it was already a book, and all the images were ready to go.
Treasures is a short story if you read the back of each card. Each card tells a bit about the life of the object. The images might trigger your emotions about objects you may have grown up with, so I want you to feel a connection to an object and have your own memory.
Treasures is a humorous look at the objects people live with, that we build our lives around, that we give breath to, and how they eventually become part of our lives – and tell our stories.
Artist Statement: Caught In The Looking Glass is a handmade artist’s book that celebrates random reflections that appear on a shiny surface. Twelve color images illustrate that, indeed, another world can exist within the frame of a mirror. This lay-flat book contains twelve images that were captured in or around a chateau in the South of France. Inside covers are lined with mirrored paper; the book is enclosed by a soft, paper slip case.
Artist Statement: As a diehard New Yorker, I have often admired the flowers one may find in her neighborhood bodega. Bodegas are unique and ubiquitous to the various neighborhoods in New York City; of course, pending gentrification. Their locations span from the Bronx to the Lower Eastside and Queens, Staten Island and Brooklyn. They are reliable 24 hour stores where one can purchase a beverage, lottery tickets, smokes or a sandwich. Many are also places where you could buy a colorful bouquet of flowers in a pinch. Wrapped in cellophane, these bouquets are specifically identified as ‘Bodega Flowers’. Some may view these flowers as ‘cheap or less than’ but that’s simply not the case. Roses come in every color, Daisies are pretty, and fluorescent Pom Poms are for the taking. Bodega Flowers are for everyone and they are truly beautiful!
The idea for this project came when I found out that the new art teacher in my son’s grade school was teaching the class to color within the lines. I knew that if I confronted her in an argument that she had a bad idea, I would loose the argument. So I choose to undermine her teaching by having my son create photograms in our bedroom – bathroom. I began that series in 1984 with each of my kids taking turns posing and then we developed the photograms in the bathroom. I came back to photograms fifteen years later, in 1999 with professional models. A second time I came back to the photograms with professional models around 2015. This when I came up with the idea of creating a book with these three sets of images.
Interestingly enough, I found that in all the images I shot for Notes in Passing, there was only one that contained a person, & even then, the person was far away & very blurry.
Some of the folks I approached declined my request, but over 750 acquiesced with kindness, support & good humor. Some also shared bits of information about themselves. All revealed the strength, diversity & uniqueness of the community I call home. They taught me that assuming anything about someone merely from how they look can be a sad mistake & that there is a universality in the challenges that life throws our way.
Artist Statement: When my mom, who had Alzheimer’s, died, I stored the possessions of hers that were hardest to part with in my attic, which also holds the remnants of my own past lives. “The Attic” is my effort to record and honor the people, places and influences represented by all that I’ve stashed on that echoey top floor.
She has shown her photography throughout the U.S. in solo & juried exhibitions, including winning one of four WorkingArtist.org photography awards in 2018 as well as first prize in Soho Photo Gallery’s 2019 Annual Juried Exhibition. Four books of her work have been published: She Began to Realize (funded in part by the NEA), The View From Here, Radius: One Year Five Miles, & The Attic.
Where did the idea for the book come from?
Artist Statement: Hāfu2Hāfu is an ongoing worldwide photography project exploring what it means to be hāfu – a person with one Japanese parent. Japanese-Belgian photographer Tetsuro Miyazaki has interviewed and portrayed fellow Japanese hāfu, with a parent from nearly 100 different countries. The 120 people in this book do not answer questions but ask them: each hāfu poses a question to you, the viewer. With these questions, Hāfu2Hāfu is creating dialogue and stimulates self-reflection about identity, so that we can find answers of our own.
In the late 1960’s in now defunct Swiss magazine Camera I became aware of the work of W. Eugene Smith, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brassaï, Eugene Atgét and others. I was blown away by their artful, straightforward, humane way of making a story telling photograph.
I’ve photographed for publications, book, corporate, industrial, health care, education and non-profit foundations. From oil rig workers in the Gulf of Mexico to corporate executives to river rafting blind teenagers to artists in China. Many other people and situations, including for myself.
After World War II the city exploded outward leaving behind unwanted remnants of a past city. People moved from the city proper to growing suburbs. With the arrival of shopping malls began the creeping neglect of downtown. By the 1970’s, in its last hurrah, old time downtown was a twinkle in the eye of developers. Although still a lively shopping neighborhood for many that lived in and around the inner-city.
I am a veterinarian, and probably because of this, I always have had an interest in wildlife photography. In 2006 I was fortunate to be able to photograph the “Critically Endangered” mountain gorillas in the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, a dense forest in southwest Uganda. I entered the forest from Buhoma, a village near one of the entrance gates. During that same trip I met some Batwa Pygmies, ancient hunter-gatherers who had lived traditional lifestyles for millennia in the same forest. They then resided in Buhoma, and were said by the tour guide to be happy not to be living in the forest any longer. This was belied by their demeanor and living circumstances.
I had read about the conflict between animal protection and the Maasai in Tanzania, which had a similar impact on that tribe of people. And after meeting the Batwa in 2006, I wanted to learn more about them, show and tell the story of these diminutive people, and the impact on them of the eviction. I had the opportunity to do so when I returned to Uganda in 2017. I once again photographed the mountain gorillas but I also had had meetings set up with the Batwa; I interviewed nine of them, who gave accounts of their previous way of life, told a story derived from their ancient and rich oral history, and reported the impact the eviction has had on their lives and culture. The concept behind my approach is that the story of a people is best told by compiling stories of individuals, rather than reporting a summary. Photographs of the Batwa were acquired during the interviews, and as they demonstrated how they previously had existed in the forest. These images and narratives document both sides of the thorny question of how best to protect endangered wild animals. On the one hand, the population of mountain gorillas has increased associated with their protection. They remain “Endangered,” but are no longer considered “Critically Endangered.” On the other hand, this has come at great expense to the Batwa Pygmies.
I wish the reader to meet, see and learn about the Batwa Pygmies. I also wish them to meet the gorillas, and appreciate the need to protect endangered animal species. But they should coe to understand that in the process of protecting the animals, the people to be affected by animal protection, who often are of an indigenous culture, must be considered at least as carefully and well as non-human animals – both are precious. The reader should please know that 100% of the money from sales of the book, through either the publisher (
In December 2017, we again visited Uganda. The primary reason was to attend Amos’s graduation from the International Health Sciences University in Kampala, the Ugandan capital, with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing. Amos told us that he was the first person in his village to attain a BS degree. He now is doing an internship in Kampala and is pursuing an MS degree in public health – in his internship he now is on the front line of fighting the Covid19 epidemic there. Denis finished his nursing certificate recently, and now has opened a clinic for the poor in Buhoma. He is waiting for the epidemic to hit there. It is noteworthy that gorillas are susceptible to coronaviruses, so this pandemic could be devastating both the people and the gorillas.
Flora and Fauna evolved from my 2016 solo exhibition of found photographic compositions of dead birds, fish, insects, industrial debris and hospital waste found in the Gowanus Canal. I moved the project into my studio to have more control over staged lighting and composition of Post-Mortem Portraits.I wanted the viewer to embrace a heightened celebration of death as the force that makes life most mysterious and compelling by staging dead creatures and natural beauty through a fairly indirect and palatable metaphor. The series is inspired by Surrealism, 17th Century Dutch and Flemish painting and Victorian Post-Mortem Photography.
People of the Scorched Earth is a collection of fictional photographic landscapes created in response to the recent manifestations of and climate change including extreme fires, floods and monster storms around the world. It’s a series about grief and horror presented in a seductive, fantastical storybook landscapes scenes from the future and the past. My intention was to induce a state of psychological conflict somewhere between destructive impulses and denial, rationalizations and magical thinking and power of healing and resilience in the natural world.
What is your next project? – 
I live in a small town, at least spatially, in Greater Boston. The town is five and a half square miles with 42,000 residents and an abundance of tiny, often unseen critters lurking in its yards—yards measured in square feet, not acres. With a couple of chairs and a few flowers, a small suburban oasis was created on the patio. But those wasps…and these tiny spiders that seem to jump into thin air? What else is living around me?
My main inspiration for this book project came from seeing the incredible jungle-covered ruins of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Being surrounded by these ancient structures of a lost kingdom that have been completely reclaimed by the natural environment was a very powerful experience. After researching literature such as 
I wanted to take this concept and visualize it in a contemporary sense because we are facing many of the same problems as these ancient civilizations, but on a much larger scale. 
The idea for Imperfect came from a series of images I had stored away and labeled “failed photographs”. They were images I thought had something wrong with each, yet I still was very drawn to the feeling of them so I decided to make the series into a book.
I am mainly focused on an extensive book project of my series Exist that I started in 2011, which I hope to be published as a larger run hard cover book eventually. I am also in the midst of releasing a group photography zine with my publishing partner, Grace Tyson at Goldenrod Editions (a small publishing company we started last year), where we have included almost 70 artists. We also plan to release more of our own work as small run artist books down the line!
Living here in coastal Maine we get some pretty amazing fog. And being outdoors in the fog is so much fun, because your mind starts playing tricks on you. We can always “see” something hidden in the fog, whether it is there or not. Not all the images in the book are from Maine, photographing in fog has long been a personal favorite.
Well I was going to be taking several bookmaking classes this spring and summer, I hope that at least some of them are able to happen. I wanted to put together a small book on the Olson House (the house made famous by Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World). While access to the house had been fairly open and easy for a long time, it is now no longer possible to photograph inside and you now need to be on a museum tour to get into the house. I am hoping to be able to create Photo Gravures of my images and make them into a book.
The day I moved to a desert as a teenager, someone welcoming me to the area said, “Look how big the sky is!” I became intrigued with how landscapes that are void of most vegetation can strikingly portray the illusion of vast spaciousness, as well as allow for a direct experience with the raw forms, colors and surfaces that might otherwise be obscured by grass, moss, or trees.
