Above: Along the Tiber. Rome, Italy. 2006.
Today Eternally Cool pays homage to a young artist, Jersey Walz, whose vision of the world was shaped by the childhood she spent in Rome. Trained in both the visual arts and in writing, Jersey has spent the past years taking stunning photos of the places she’s traveled and lived, as well as insightful portraits of artisans, writers, family, and friends.
We’re honored that Jersey agreed to our interview and is allowing us to feature her work on Eternally Cool for her photographs are artful exercises in stillness that compel us to look at our surroundings more carefully. Perhaps this is because the visual world that Jersey presents to her viewers is one that looks familiar but that feels far removed from daily existence. She extracts the hurry and frenzy of daily life from her photographic compositions, so that they beckon their viewers to sit quietly with one another, to perform tasks with concentrated deliberation, and to examine closely the rich shapes and patterns created by the world.
Our interview with Jersey set us to thinking about her particular way of seeing the world and we were struck by her response when asked about a childhood in which she moved to Rome with her family and was faced with the task of negotiating the divide between American and Italian culture. Jersey described her experience in Italy as being “both a part of and apart from my surroundings, a participant and, at the same moment, an observer.” The perception is one that she brilliantly transfers into the photographic medium, for her images paradoxically offer intimate insights of a world seen from afar.
Jersey has shown her work in a variety of group exhibitions in New York City and her photos have been featured in The World of Interiors Magazine as well as in SOMA Magazine. In 2006 she traveled to Ireland to photograph Irish artisans for a book, Cottage Industry, by Betsy Klein. You can see more of her photographs and contact her about purchasing images at her website.
When did you start taking photographs?
I started photographing in college. Although I went in as a creative writing major, by the end of the semester I was spending most of my time in the darkroom, weekends down in New York City, just wandering around with a 35mm. It seemed the best way to address my new surroundings. It was a bit of a culture shock returning to the United States after growing up in Rome. I had a hard time readjusting, especially to American college life.
What inspired you to pursue this as a career path?
I submitted work to group shows while still in school. I sold a few prints to collectors and started working for an artist/photographer. I also did a bit of editorial work and commissioned portraits. About a year and a half ago I had the opportunity to photograph for a book on Irish Artisans. I traveled with the writer for a month in Ireland making portraits of knife makers, basket weavers, butchers, roof thatchers, oatcake makers, in their workshops, homes, stores. This led to other things. I returned to Ireland to re-photograph one of our subjects for The World of Interiors magazine. I just spent the past summer photographing around the Great Lakes and in the Midwest. Fortunately, I work at Cooper Union, a college in New York City, and have the summers off. More than anything, I have made photographing a priority. Everything else just falls into place.
Above left: Oat Cake Maker. 2006. Above right: Goat Cheese Maker. 2006.
What’s your intent as a photographer? Are there specific things you like to show your viewers or specific ideas that you want to convey?
A lot of my original intent had to do with my first experience of photographs. These were the family albums on our coffee table and they were the images I had in mind when I began to make my own.
I have been more recently interested in environmental portraiture. The photographs I was making around the Great Lakes described the activities that take place around these bodies of water, and people I established a relationship with on my travels and their lifestyles. I spent sometime with a woodchopper in Duluth, Minnesota. I was living in a barn with my great aunt on lake Ontario.
You’ve photographed a number of renowned authors. Is that a particular interest of yours? Do you write yourself or have you studied literature?
I spent a few weeks in Cape Cod one summer. The Vonneguts are old family friends, and Kurt had come up for a long weekend to visit his daughter and grandchildren. I was making portraits and enjoying my time out of the city, swimming, bike riding, exploring the sand dunes, eating tomato sandwiches and corn on the cob. Kurt would sit on the porch and smoke, tell stories. He was very impressed with my 4 by 5 wooden field camera and kept calling me Matthew Brady. He agreed to sit for me.
The following academic year I was enrolled in an advanced poetry critique/lecture series class with several poet laureates at my university. My advisor, having seen the portrait of Kurt, asked if I would photograph the writers that were lecturing. (There was also a fiction series) We were renovating the creative writing conference room and she wanted to hang their pictures on the classroom walls. I photographed poets Billy Collins, Robert Hass, Charles Simic as well as the writers Jamaica Kincaid, Tom Wolfe and Michael Cunningham.
Above: Kurt Vonnegut. 2004.
Do you think that writing and photography are in any way similar?
Both photography and writing have been important creative outlets for me. As a child I wrote what I refer to as memory poems. Most of these were an extension of a collection of manila envelopes I had kept in a box, short poems and memories, all revolving around my mother, who died when I was seven. I felt an urgency to record my life and the memory of experience. At some point, photography replaced writing as this tool.
How do you go about creating a portrait? What inspires you?
I photograph with a 4 by 5 view camera. Photographing with this camera is no casual activity. To make a portrait involves a certain amount of participation from the subject, some time to set up, frame, level, and focus. If I am lucky, I am in the right place at the right time, or rather, a beautiful place in nice light with a willing or group of willing subjects.
I am inspired by the ambition of photographers like August Sander and his “People of the 20th Century,” his cataloging of German society with all its bakers, beggars, actors, politicians, students. By the photographs of Harry Callahan, which describe the autobiographical facts of his existence, the integration of life and art, the “where and how he lived, what he saw and how he passed his days.”
Above: Dante in Tree. Sabina, Italy. 2004.
You moved to Rome when you were quite young and lived there until you went to college. Are you conscious of the influence of the city on your artistic and creative vision?
My father won the Rome prize through the American Academy in Rome. He decided, after his one-year fellowship, not to return to the United States. My sister and I were placed into Italian public school. I was not only studying the Pythagorean theorem and the 2nd World War, I was studying them in the wrong language. Within a year I was fluent. In two, I was bilingual and better at grammar then some of my Italian classmates. This experience was very significant to my development both as a writer and a photographer. Not only because of my new sense of language, but an understanding of a whole other set of values, unspoken values that can only be absorbed and appreciated from this total immersion into a culture. Along with this, was the unique role of being both a part of and apart from my surroundings, a participant and, at the same moment, an observer.
Compared to other places you’ve photographed, what do you think makes Rome unique?
The way one period of time sits with another, that a new building might find its home next to a column from two thousand years ago. This is a rich and complex juxtaposition: the sensuous delight of the city and the weight of its history. Rome is provincial. The streets are a wealth of small dramas and gestures.
Above: Lunch. Rome. 2004.
Enjoyed this interview? Read other articles about visual artists Pattie Cronin and John Kelly on Eternally Cool.
