Stories that matter

The Big Picture: Jennifer Trausch Photographs The Deep South

Gallery by Jeremy Helton on October 21, 2011

Photos: Jennifer Trausch

Artist Jennifer Trausch is the Director of Photography at the 20 X 24 Studio in Manhattan. She has helped artists and photographers realize, and in some cases, discover their vision for over a decade. The 20 X 24 Studio is built around a 239-pound analog camera that shoots 20 X 24 images on Polaroid film. There were six of these cameras built between the years of 1976 and 1978 and three of them are currently in use in different parts of the world. Despite its use of Polaroid film, the 20 X 24 Camera is no mere “point and shoot,” and is rarely used outside of a controlled studio environment. The logistical complexities of using the camera make Trausch’s own personal odyssey with it through out the southeastern United States a remarkable endeavor. The resulting photographic series, The South, is equally remarkable. We asked her to reflect on her own powerful images of America before she heads to Paris to begin working with Impossible Works, a non-profit dedicated to creating a contemporary collection of art works made with instant film.

Turnstyle: How long have you been working with the 20 x 24 Polaroid Camera?

Jennifer Trausch: Exclusively for about ten years, but we go back about fifteen.

Turnstyle: How did you come to work with the camera in New York City?

Trausch: When I was a student I took part in a semester-long internship program at the 20×24 Polaroid Studio. During the internship, I had the opportunity to play around with the camera and make some of my own work, and we bonded! Two years later, after completing my photography degree I was recommended into a position at the 40×80 Studio (with a 40″ x 80″ room-sized camera) where I shot and printed on 8×10 and 20×24 Cameras. Several years later, in 2003, I was asked to take over the camera at the 20×24 Polaroid Studio in Soho, a wonderfully exciting position as the New York camera was handling 70% of all 20 X 24 shoots worldwide at the time. The job was also remarkable for coming with an extraordinary lineup of 20 X 24 art clients including as Chuck Close, William Wegman, David Levinthal, Mary Ellen Mark, Julian Schnabel & Maria Magdalena Campos Pons.

Turnstyle: What was your background before working at the 20 x 24 Studio?

Trausch: My early professional background was a mix of working in arts education, medical photography, and commercial assisting.

Turnstyle: What is your role at the 20 x 24 Studio in New York City?

Trausch: My title is Director of Photography and my role is similar to that of a cinematographer. I operate the 20×24 Camera for all of the Studio’s shoots, but more importantly I work with an artist to create their vision on the 20×24 Camera; from early conversations about the camera and how it sees & works, to the making of final images.

Turnstyle: Describe your relationship with artists and photographers when they come to the studio to use the camera.

Trausch: Each experience is different depending on the person, but in general working on the camera is a team effort. Most days feel like a collaboration, in that the client and I work on the back of the ground glass together, sometimes crammed under a dark cloth. Some days I work with an artist that does not know the technical side of photography, who comes to trust me to do what they need, another day I may have an artist that pushes and question the limits of the camera, and another day I may be corralling four small children to sit together in the same plane of focus!! So there’s always been a good mix of art, commercial projects & editorial work, each of which comes with technical, artistic, and production challenges, and of course the perennial challenge of wrestling a
240-lb object around the room!

Turnstyle: What inspired you to take the camera out of the studio?

Trausch: Over the years I watched how this static camera was always used in similar ways in the studio, mainly how people brought their ideas & objects to it to be photographed. Some of my impulse to take it outside was a reaction to this. Some was the natural reaction of a documentary photographer stuck inside dark photography studios, when she really wanted to be out in the bright world shooting! I was also curious what this awkward, albeit fascinating tool could bring to my documentary sensibility; i.e. could this camera be used freely and loosely, to see a familiar world in a new way.

In the history of the camera there were very few people that took it out into the elements, namely Neil Slavin in his project Britons, and Julian Schnabel. Both of these artists’ work gave me faith to break all of the camera’s rules, to get over the hurdles of taking it outside and trust that interesting things would happen.

Turnstyle: To what degree was taking the camera out of the studio a departure from how the camera is normally used?
Trausch: A huge departure. There are many reasons the camera is used the way it is: First and foremost it is a studio camera that weighs 240lbs and when expanded it is about as large as a refrigerator! It requires a lot of light and is used primarily with high powered flash to get a workable amount of focus. It is rare that the camera is used with available light as the exposures can get quite long. And people generally do not take the camera outside because it can be such a finicky, sensitive machine – it reacts to temperature and humidity, dust, light streaming through all the holes, and it’s rarely happy being dragged over boardwalks, bumpy gravel roads, and rickety dancehall floors.

Turnstyle: Where did you take the camera?

Trausch: The project started when there was a cancellation in the 20×24 Studio’s schedule that left the camera suddenly available for one straight week, which was rare. My assistant and I rented a truck and just hit the road, ready to shoot anything. We needed to choose which way we were going to drive out of New York city, and we chose south, partly because we needed warmer temperatures for the film to work outside, and partly because it was a part of the US that I knew almost nothing about, and what little I knew wasn’t from direct experience.

Turnstyle: Why did you take it to that region of the country and to those specific locations?

Trausch: Again some of it was a reaction. Over the years as the film has gotten more and more expensive, the 20×24 has gone back in time to being a camera for the wealthy patrons of New York. My reaction was to take into places where people would never otherwise have the chance to see it or experience it; and for me that meant small towns.

The locations themselves were often happenstance. For example, sometimes we went to a town just because we thought it was a place whose name might answer some of our questions about the South: Lost City, New Roads, Southland, or we went because liked the name Hot Coffee or Two Egg. More often than not, if someone suggested a place, an event, or someone we had to meet, we would go.

Turnstyle: Why choose B&W for this project?

Trausch: Most of the Polaroid films available in 20×24 format are slow speed and would have required incredibly long exposures or extra lighting to work in the field. B & W is rated around ISO 400 and was able to offer the most possibilities for shooting in any condition, as its sensitivity to temperature and mixed lighting are less constraining than the other 20×24 films. So again, practical constraints guided my initial decision, but then it happened that shooting with long exposures made the B & W film a little muddier and grittier, which very much carried the feel of how I was working and how I experienced the South.

Turnstyle: What were the responses you got from people when you began shooting down south?

Trausch: Love, hate & everything in between! In general, people were warm & inviting, especially if they were asked to take part in it. Because I was able to share the pictures as they were being made, people stayed engaged and would give as much time as was needed. There was often a small crowd watching.

Over the five years I took shooting the project, I had plenty of other, less positive reactions from people, most memorably mistrust and suspicion. People worried that an outsider might depict them in a bad light, or that somehow sharing their lives or their image would get them in trouble or somehow bring them attention, and in some cases attention, which was, the last thing people wanted.

Even when we weren’t out shooting, in the tiny towns we were in it was usually pretty clear that we were outsiders, so we were often stared at while we ate at restaurants or drank in bars, which got really old after a while.
The vehicles we drove made it even harder to blend in – we usually worked in a large truck with a lift gate on the back, and for one trip worked out of a 25 foot RV. Hardly anyone knew what to make of us, but their suppositions were by turns amusing and insulting – people confused us for being filthy rich, undercover cops, dykes, the Bloodmobile, salesladies, people running from the law, and on and on.

Turnstyle: To what degree, if at all, did you see this as a documentary project?

Trausch: The premise of the trip, at least initially, was as a documentary project, to talk about a broad place at a particular moment in time. But then the images evolved into stories of that place, less as facts, more as loose vignettes that left room for your imagination.

The project also didn’t end up as just a survey, recording some particular aspect of the region – It was much closer to a record of the particular kinds of experiences we had in this place, with this giant camera. I wouldn’t point to the project and say ‘this is a project about rural life in the south, or about poverty, or race, or ruin’, or anything like that. I didn’t go into it knowing what I wanted to shoot either, like I had for my previous project, Skateland. The images for this project came about so randomly, so serendipitously, and we just tried to be as open as possible, both to the intriguing things the south put in front of us and it’s effects on us personally over time, both good and bad.

Turnstyle: You have done quite a bit of environmental portraiture in the past. Do you consider projects like Skateland and this series to be documentary work?

Trausch: Yes and no. The images from my south series started from a moment that I saw and felt and wanted to communicate, but that initial moment can change so much when you use a big camera, first off because there is more time that passes as you are making the image. While you are in that process of making, you depart from what was, and enter a more active or reactive role of what it is to become, this can change quite simply by someone giving a new expression or the wind blowing. That being said, even after the moment adjusts, changes, reacts to me observing it, the essence of what I originally found interesting or compelling is still usually there. It’s just shifted or opened ever so slightly.

Turnstyle: What draws you to working with large format Polaroid film?

Trausch: I started as a painter and for me the large format Polaroid medium carries a feeling and sensibility that is aligned with how I see. These films have an incredible mix of crisp detail and painterly softness. The process involves making a contact print from a giant negative, and because it is a diffusion transfer process, the silvers or color dyes that are pulled over to the paper are softened within this process.
The instantaneous way of working and sharing with whomever I’m shooting is also important. While you can equate it to a digital way of working, in that you see and build an image as you work, there is nothing like doing this at a full scale print size; You really know when you got it.

Turnstyle: What were you trying to capture with the project?

Trausch: I think one of my lifelong goals, as a photographer has been to try to get to bottom of the feeling of a place. And for me the small details are what best communicate this feeling of place; the sweet, smoky smells of a day long barbecue, the pride of a hardworking gourd farmer with his fingers in his own soil, the humidity and sweat everywhere all the time, the flotsam slowly making its way across a heavy swamp.
In the end, I gravitated toward the warmth of the people in the South, contrasted markedly with their at-times intense suspicion; also the growth and lavishness of the landscape, coupled with a heaviness and listlessness that hangs in the air, and, quite simply, the pace of this place that seemed like it was in no rush to get anywhere.

Turnstyle: Describe the process of locating subjects on the road and convincing people to let you take their picture.

Trausch: I purposefully chose not to produce these shoots that the camera and I would find our way; this is romantic almost to excess, which I now know.

Working this way meant that it was a mix of wandering and always looking to serendipitous connections where one shoot would lead to another.

So as to not feel too lost, my assistant Kim Venable and I would make a list of things we were looking for – traditions and customs, everyday activities, common foods, etc.

What I chose to shoot also reflected what we had access to in our life on the road – public meeting places such as general stores, the ubiquitous steam-table buffets, beauty salons, church picnics or the local snow cone truck.

Lastly we tried to shoot things that reflected our own experience of these places. For example, our life on the road was greatly affected by the elements – Water, wind, weather, soil and every kind of bug known to man were, for better or worse, a big part of our life on these trips, so they naturally became one of our themes and something I actively tried to include in the body of work.

In terms of asking people to take part, I was always honest with people that I was an artist shooting images in the South. In terms of when to bring the camera out, I used intuition. If people seemed wary of working with us, I would spend hours talking to them before attempting to bring out the camera for a shot. If people needed a lot of convincing, it usually wasn’t worth it. Although there were exceptions to this, for instance when we waited three days for Maxine, the no-nonsense, gun-wielding owner of the town general store, to get comfortable enough with us to take out her gun for a shoot.

Turnstyle: Do you view the people you photographed as subjects, participants, and collaborators? How did you initially define their role?

Trausch: I thought of them as subjects first and foremost. But because of the Polaroid process and my ability to share what we were making as I was making it, they became collaborators and performers within that.

Each image would build and grow over several exposures and while you may not get that sense from the work, there was often a conversation had around an image and a decision about what to do next. And then we would ‘perform’, in the loosest sense.

Turnstyle: Has your definition of their role changed over time?

Trausch: At a certain point it became difficult to manage people’s expectations about their pictures as sometimes my vision for the image didn’t fit with their idea of ‘good photography’. For example, overtime I began to shoot less straight portraiture as we know it, and started to drag the exposures so that it was more about the feeling of that person moving in or through the environment, and less about their identity or what they were wearing or what year it was. This all sounds simple enough, but for some people it was an insult that they gave me their time and then the image wasn’t about their individuality. But I couldn’t hide the pictures!

Turnstyle: In what way did your role as the photographer change during the project?

Trausch: The work, and I, changed a lot over the five years it took to complete the project. (I tried to shoot once a year, with each consecutive shoot having more & more travel time). At first my shooting was purely documentary (in that I wasn’t altering reality), or as much as one could be with a 20×24! I was recording quickly what I saw and reacted to as I travelled. But then I started to realize that I didn’t always want to give the whole story away, that for me mystery and the South were intertwined. And with the way I had chosen to shoot with available light, which often meant not a lot of light, I was forced to let things move over long exposures with a very limited depth of field. This way of seeing really changed the work and how I experienced the South. Sometimes it felt like I was making two parallel bodies of work, one very sharp and real side and another loose and surreal side, but eventually found a way for them to talk to each other.

Turnstyle: Where has the series been seen since you finished the project?

Trausch: I let it sit and settle and breathe for six months before I tackled the editing. It’s been good to give a project time, as the shooting itself was intense and draining both mentally and physically. Pieces go in and out for exhibitions, and I am pulling together the edit for a book. Most recently it showed at the Flanders Art Gallery in Raleigh, NC.

Turnstyle: Are their any upcoming exhibitions of the series? Where? When?

Trausch: The next solo exhibition will be at Snite Museum at the University of Notre Dame in January 2013

Turnstyle: How did the project change your practice?

Trausch: I think I might do something a little easier next time, at least physically.
Ok, maybe that’s a lie; I still have yet to choose the easy way! Hopefully my next project at least will require less bug spray.

Turnstyle: How did the project change your perspective?

Trausch: It was strange to feel like an outsider in your own country, and it took some time to make peace with that and to understand why bringing a 20×24 into the picture may have heightened that. Most memorably, we were told stories about how the bluebirds and blue jays do not mix (gays, blacks & whites) and were initially dumbfounded by “coonass” jokes which turned out to be not quite the racial slur that we thought, but in these and many other similar situations we realized we were not in a position to fight against a mentality that profoundly disagreed with without putting ourselves in a potentially unsafe situation.

Yet while those situations made us feel like we were on the outside looking in, there were plenty of other experiences that opened us back up with people offering to house us, to feed us when it was clear that they did not have much, and to have a wonderful openness and curiosity about us and how we came to be there.

Turnstyle: What were some of the logistical challenges of the project?

Trausch: As I had limited access to equipment and film, there was a lot of pressure when I was the on the road to get a lot done in a short amount of time.

In reaction to this, for one of my last trips I shot for ten weeks straight on the road which gave me more freedom, but I forgot to leave time for recovering for exhaustion!

As I said earlier the camera was not made to work outside and is prone to light leaks so this meant the camera and I were swathed in dark cloth in 100 degree sunny and humid weather. We pushed the beast of a camera up hills, into swamps, through mud and rain, up and over train tracks, taking risks and never knowing if it would be worth the effort. But in retrospect it almost always was, though if we had dumped the camera into a swamp I might have a very different answer!

Turnstyle: What were the artistic challenges of the project?

Trausch: I think in past art making, I usually define a rough idea or concept for a body of work and then make it. Here I wasn’t sure what I was after for several years, and I had chosen such a large and varied region, so the concepts for the work were developed more along the way and in the editing process. Because of the time span of five years of shoots, it was a bit long and torturous to not really know what it was about until the end! But it was also remarkable to watch the project shift and grow.

I also struggled with the idea of making lasting connections. I would spend three hours or day with people knowing I would probably never see them again. I think this was difficult for me, as I do believe in giving back to the community or person from which you shared. In the end I had to accept the moments we shared in making was what it was about.

To learn more about Jennifer Trausch’s work go to http://www.jennifertrausch.com/

To learn more about the 20×24 Studio in NYC go to http://20x24studio.com/

To learn more about Impossible Works go to http://www.impossible-works.com/