Today we are pleased to share the work and words of Jeanne Wells.

Please tell us about yourself?

I’m a hermetic, expressive, champion of the everyday. I have spent most of my life in the state of Maine, either by the shore or in the woods and fields, but always surrounded by the natural world. My early life and education were all about music and writing, so I’ve always been a creator of one sort or another.

Why photography?

I never learned to draw or paint. Quite simple, really! And I fell in love with a camera, an old
Rolleiflex SL66, and I wanted that camera to tell me everything that it knew, show me everything that it saw. That has something to do with it as well, I guess.

Please tell us about an image (not your own) that inspired you.

I’ve been inspired by many photographers and images over the years, but I think Joseph Sudek’s Studio Window photographs have stood the test of time – I am as mesmerized and inspired by them now as when I first saw them 20 years ago. They speak to all the mysteries and struggles of the human condition for me. Obfuscation and clarity/music and silence. Outside looking in/inside looking out – that sort of thing. Those elements have a sort of quiet conversation going on that I am always willing to eavesdrop on. I think that has been the foundation of everything I’ve done.

Do you have a mentor or a teacher that has helped you on your creative journey?

In the early days of this century, I had enormous help and encouragement from the Danish
photographers Anders and Emil Schildt. They were both adept at alternative processes and great teachers. They inspired me, answered all my questions about processes, and helped me develop my own way of seeing and thinking. This was in the early days of the internet, and a lot of great internet groups. I was darkroom printing then, experimenting with various methods and processes. Anders said to me once, “there is nothing sadder than a perfect silver gelatin print.” I know that sounds strange, but wow! I got it. It made sense to me immediately that we have to use this art, which is basically reproductive, to express more than pure mechanical reproduction of reality. Or reproduction of what we have learned to do well over and over again.

I’d had to adopt the same attitude in my earlier life as a poet. You have to learn to use the same mundane building blocks – words – that people use to write newspaper articles and scientific reports, only you have to make more. A poem. A magical thing that can’t quite be nailed down. So my course was set, by all the hours I’d spent at my desk with a pen in my hand and all the hours I’d spent making music. To tell the truth, as Emily Dickinson said, but tell it slant. With a camera.

© Jeanne Wells

Please tell us about your process.

These days, I will use anything to make an image – it depends on what I have. Although I do have and do use large format cameras, I find that working with a tripod can change the way I work. So I only use them sometimes, and usually when there’s not a lot of walking involved. I’m inspired by the feel of the camera in my hands, looking through the ground glass at the world around me until I see the thing that jumps out at me.

No matter what I make the capture with, I always print by hand. For the past 12+ years or so that has meant making photogravures with an etching press.

© Jeanne Wells

© Jeanne Wells

© Jeanne Wells

How do you work through times when nothing seems to work?

I leave it alone and trust that it will come. Or, if it doesn’t, I trust that something else will come along. I keep myself multi-disciplinary and always pursuing different things to keep from drying up, creatively. The best gifts of a long creative life? Curiosity, patience, and faith.

What part of image-making do you find the most rewarding?

When working with the camera, I love that kick in the gut you get when you open the shutter and you know that something magical just happened.
When I’m printing a gravure, every aspect of working with the ink on the plate is so rewarding – you have to be present, in your body, in your hands. You need to feel the ink on the plate, feel it warm up and work its way into the etched surface. It’s very visceral and intuitive. You have to trust that the ink and the plate and the paper will deliver much more than you’re capable of planning. Certainly much more than you will see on a computer screen.

What tools have you found essential in the making of your work?

A good lens – a lens that can show the world the way that I see it. For many years everything I did was with a Rolleiflex sl66, with the 80mm Planar lens. These days I often use a Canon 1.2 50mm from an old rangefinder on a mirrorless digital. I don’t like a sharp or contrasty lens and I tend to shoot wide open.This is always changing, and I am willing to let it change as I find new ways of working/seeing.

I also do a lot of photographing with my phone, and these images make fine photogravures, too. Ultimately, though, my hands have to make the print. My sense of emotional perfection has to be true. I have to be willing to leave all the norms of technical perfection behind and go with my own inner sense that always knows how to make an image – often long before my logical self can understand. But that is probably my most essential tool, my dedication to what I call “emotional perfection.”

Is there something in photography that you would like to try in the future?

I can feel something new coming, but I have no idea what it is. I’m always experiment and pushing the limits, and it’s just a matter of seeing what emerges.

How does your art affect the way you see the world?

I don’t see them as two different things. What I see is what I see, and that’s what my work has always been about. There’s no “me” there when I’m working. There’s a simplicity, a luminous silent place, a pause that has a little bit of shimmer. I don’t see that way because I want to make a photograph, I just see that way – and often I don’t photograph it at all. That part – the actual photographing part — doesn’t feel as necessary to me as it used to.

What’s on the horizon?

More teaching, I think. And more blank space.

Thank you Jeanne

To learn more about the work ofJeanne Wells please click on her name.