Artist Narrative: Photography Background and Practice
James Gehrt
I have always felt like I was a photographer before I knew what photography was.
As a child, I remember being drawn to shapes, patterns, and the way things lined up visually. I vividly remember watching clouds, corn fields, power lines, buildings, and reflections from the back seat of my parents’ car. I did not know I was looking photographically. I only knew the world kept arranging itself into images.
One of my earliest experiences with photography happened when I was about twelve, on a bus trip to Washington, D.C. with my mother. I photographed anything that caught my attention with a Kodak 110 camera at the Smithsonian Institute. Looking back, it feels strangely fitting that some of my first photographs were made in and around museums. Later, when I was sixteen, I won one hundred dollars from a soda can contest. I thought about buying a turntable, but instead I bought a Fujica AX-3, my first 35mm camera. A family friend gave me an enlarger, and I turned the bathroom in my parents’ basement into a darkroom and taught myself how to develop and print.
After high school, I attended community college and discovered photographer Paul Strand while writing a research paper. His work changed something for me. For the first time, I saw photographs that felt connected to the way I had always looked at the world, and I knew photography was what I wanted to pursue. I spent the next year working at a camera store and saving money, then studied photography at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where I earned my BFA. I became immersed in black-and-white photography, large-format cameras, printing, and tonal control. Lee Friedlander’s Like a One-Eyed Cat exhibition in Atlanta greatly influenced me. Friedlander’s use of the camera by building relationships through reflections, shadows, signs, windows, and visual collisions made me look deeper at the world around me.
After college, I became known as a black-and-white printer and technician. I moved to New England, printed for photographers including Bill Arnold in Florence, Massachusetts, and assisted commercial photographers. Much of my early professional identity came from reading negatives, controlling tone, and making strong prints. That experience eventually led to a position as lab manager at the Chicago Albumen Works, where I made duplicate negatives for museums and collections, printed with historical and alternative processes, and worked closely with archival collections. I was reading about and researching historic photographs while I was handling them and helping preserve them. I later worked at Mount Holyoke College digitizing library and archival collections, while earning a master’s degree in library and information science with a concentration in archives and photographic collections.
I now teach Photographic Archives in the graduate program at Simmons University. The course covers the identification, history, care, and preservation of photographs, but it also asks larger questions about meaning. I have come to think of photography as involving four participants: the photographer, the subject, the viewer, and the historian. The photographer makes the first choices, the subject carries its own presence, the viewer brings experience, and the historian tries to understand what has survived and what has been lost. Together, these perspectives play an important role in the evolving meaning of a photograph over time.
Photography is not simply something I do. It is one of the central parts of my identity. I photograph because of what I see, but I also study photography’s history, collect photographic objects, teach preservation, and continue learning about its many processes. All of that filters back into my own photographs.
Through these chapters of my life, I have continued to carry a camera. My photographs usually begin with a visual connection to the light, shape, object, gesture, shadow, or juxtaposition. I do not believe an image or a project has to begin with a complete explanation. Sometimes the photographing comes first, and the understanding develops later through editing, printing, and returning to my older images. My projects have taken many forms, including silver gelatin prints, books, installations, alternative processes, and ambrotypes on glass. I think of the whole history of photography as my toolbox for experiementation and discovery.
For my project, A Simple Circle, I worked with the circular image format of the original Kodak camera from the late nineteenth century, bringing together contemporary circular photographs with original Kodak cameras, advertisements, and photographs made by unknown people more than a century ago.
My long-term project Seat of the Muses began with photographs I made in museums dating back to the early 1990s. I have returned to that subject throughout my life, photographing museum objects, specimens, architecture, reflections, display cases, shadows, and the relationship between an object and the institution that holds it. More recently, I began reinterpreting some of those photographs through wet-plate collodion, creating large ambrotypes on glass by projecting an image through a process lens onto a sensitized glass plate. The plate is not a reproduction made to look like an old photograph. It is a new photographic object created through a conversation between technology, nineteenth-century chemistry, museum history, and my own archive.
My photographs have been exhibited in galleries, colleges, and photography organizations, appeared in The Paris Review, and been reviewed in The Boston Globe. I have received awards including the Dr. Estelle Jussim Award and a Bronze Award in the Fine Art category of the reFocus Black and White Photography Awards. I am grateful for that recognition, but photography itself is still the reward. The act of seeing, feeling, and recording is at the center of it for me.
I understand that the photograph is only the beginning. The image enters a larger history. It becomes an object, a record, an interpretation, and eventually something that may be understood in ways I cannot predict. That uncertainty is part of what keeps photography alive for me. I continue to experience and discover what a photograph can be.