Umbra

Julie Renée Jones

 
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As a photographer who grew up in the American Midwest, Julie Renée Jones is just as driven by her experience and love for the Midwest and she is by her wish to document those charming and strange moments of mundanity, emotion or the intangible experience of time. In her recent series, “Umbra,” Jones’s family works with and features in her photographs, which adds an intimacy to this surreal body of work. Jones shares with Newfound what it is like to work with family, how she uses photography to capture elusive experiences, and what her day-to-day life is like.

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COURTNEY SIMCHAK: You list the American Midwest as an inspiration for you work. Have you always lived in the Midwest? When did you first realize there was something meaningful about it to you?
 

JULIE RENÉE JONES: Yes, I have lived in the Midwest all my life. I grew up in Dayton, Ohio and moved to Chicago for graduate school before returning to my home to make work and teach. I think there was a part of me that always knew this particular landscape and culture was so important to me and my artistic practice.

I grew up on a slew of movies and books depicting sleepy midwestern towns and the children within them having to overcome or confront some unnatural force or foreboding presence that threatened the perceived safety of their idyllic life. These were my main forms of entertainment and they had an incredible impact on my view of my home and the Midwest as a whole.

Simultaneously the Midwest was also often portrayed as a place that was “average,” “normal,” “sleepy,” or “banal.” I completely accepted that interpretation, often dreaming of the day I could leave to pursue greater adventures and more unique experiences. It was when I first moved to Chicago and finally experienced that distance (both emotional and physical) from my home that I began to realize just how meaningful my home and the Midwest, as a whole, was to me.

Photography can be a powerful tool for documentation and concept, but my interests lie in its ability to hold onto truth and reality while being a tool for deception and magic (for lack of a better word).

SIMCHAK : Your family members are included in many of your photographs. Do you find the process of photographing is different when working with your family?
 

JONES: Absolutely. I have been drawn to photographing my family members since I first picked up a camera to make photographs back in high school. In part, this was due to the fact that they were available, and they wanted to support me in my interests, but I quickly realized there was more to my decision to photograph them then just availability.

Because I am making work about my own experiences of home and childhood it makes sense that I would choose to photograph the people who played a role in those initial memories. This adds another layer to the series “Umbra” in particular, where I am able to recreate the memories or experiences with one family member and create new ones by re-photographing them with a different family member—effectively transforming and confusing the memory in my own mind, and sometimes even within the greater family recollection.

The work also becomes collaborative as my family members respond and react to, not only what I’m asking them to do, but to the idea that I am recreating memories and experiences from my own childhood—a childhood that many of them were a part of. This reaction becomes particularly evocative when it melds with the reaction of being photographed in general, relating back to the way in which most of us experience photography at a young age: as the subject for an awkward family picture. In a more general way, our relationship yields an intimacy that is difficult to replicate when photographing subjects that I am not as familiar with. I use my photography to better understand my family and they use the opportunity to model for the work as a way to understand me in a new way.
 

SIMCHAK : Do you plan your photograph composition ahead of time? Or do you work more candidly?
 

JONES: A little bit of both! Some photographs are more planned and others candid, but all have elements of both in their making. I end up spending a lot of time observing the day-to-day monotony, searching for the moments where that familiarity falters and the magical is able to seep into my reality. This can be a trick of the light, a gesture, where the natural and manicured landscapes meet and clash within a suburban yard.

Later (either minutes or days later), I seek out the family member who I think would work best to recreate that moment of magical realism and ask them to perform a gesture or stand in a certain location to not only capture the lived imaginative moment, but to heighten it.

This spontaneity is necessary—the first pose I generally come up with is not the pose I end up choosing for a final image. Because I am so interested in memory and experience it makes sense that the act of photographing would take on an experience or memory on its own; this is precisely what happens when I allow my subjects to respond to the gesture or environment that I’ve placed them in. This is where I am able to capture the moment of reverie or release as they slip into their own experience and reaction to being photographed and the imaginative moment is able to be seen in the resulting images.
 

SIMCHAK : Your most recent series, “Umbra,” explores the complex relationship we have to childhood, memory and our sense of home—in an imaginative sense and in a physical one. The things that often root us into our sense of home are fleeting moments of memory and connection. What is the most challenging part of making work that is so ephemeral and interior?
 

JONES: Everything! Ha ha. In all seriousness, I came to the visual arts because there was so much about my perceptions of the world, my experiences, and memories that were so intangible, unexplainable, and undefinable. I wanted to express the unknown in my own life through the act of visualizing it, so it goes beyond the purely descriptive. Photography can be a powerful tool for documentation and concept, but my interests lie in its ability to hold onto truth and reality while being a tool for deception and magic (for lack of a better word).

This does make it difficult to put what I’m doing into words at times and I often feel like I am stumbling in the dark when I’m making the work.

So much of what I shoot ends up pushed aside. The image is too contrived, too repetitive, not fantastic or truthful enough. It makes it difficult to separate what is working from what is not, because I do not have a very concrete and clear idea of how I envision the final image to look like. This is why I chose to photograph with film instead of as a digital capture. The process of film helps to separate the time between when the image is taken from when it is finally seen. This enables me to take a step back from the experience of photographing and embrace the memory of the moment afterwards, which fits rather nicely with the fact that my subject is literal memory.

I end up spending a lot of time observing the day-to-day monotony, searching for the moments where that familiarity falters and the magical is able to seep into my reality—this can be a trick of the light, a gesture, where the natural and manicured landscapes meet and clash within a suburban yard.

SIMCHAK : What is an average day for you, both in a mundane way and as an artist?
 

JONES: During the school year, my days are pretty predictable: Monday through Thursday I wake up early and teach late, finally returning home exhausted to binge watch a TV show or play some video games. During the academic year, I reserve Fridays for my studio time, and I force myself to physically be in my studio or out in the field photographing. Sometimes this results in me just sitting and thinking about my practice and where I need to go next, which I believe is kind of a lost moment in our society. So even when I feel like maybe all I did was sit and think on any given day, I consider that a success that I was privileged to have the time to do so.

The summers are different; practically every day I wake up and start my day in the studio—eventually wandering outside to make photographs. Some end up working out well, some don’t. I am not an artist who has a clear distinction between series and ideas—one just melds into the next naturally—so this freedom to just think and create is very important to my practice. I also have two cats, which provide a good bit of distraction through the day. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention their contribution to my mundane life.

SIMCHAK: If you could go back in time, to any place in history, where would you go?
 

JONES: To the beginning—the beginning of human life. I imagine that observing that time would answer so many questions while raising even more. I am drawn to mystery and the unknown, I would love to see the very beginning of our life on this planet to both expand and explain our condition and experiences relative to this reality.

 

Julie Renée Jones is an artist currently residing in Ohio. You can see more of Jones’ work on Instagram @julie.renee.jones.