Read my interview with Jenny!
http://www.aestheticarchvist.com/#!Jenny-Riffle/c21kp/56f950380cf20a08ed0974f3
Molly Martien: You grew up in the Pacific Northwest. Wow! I love, love, love it out there. It’s one of my favorite places to visit in the U.S.A. How did the Pacific Northwest have an impact upon your childhood? Specifically, I am talking about your series “The Sound of Wind,” in which you talk about photographing the places of your youth before you came to the East coast for school. This series of your photos is my favorite series of yours next to “Scavenger: Adventures in Treasure Hunting,” and “Emily.” I would love to hear what photo in this series is the most special to you and what place that you photographed in this series is the most special to you and why?
Jenny Riffle: Growing up in the Pacific Northwest made for an amazing childhood and I didn’t realize the impact until I grew up, left and lived elsewhere and then came back. Like most things in your childhood - you don’t really know what you have because it is all you have ever known. I was lucky to spend a lot of my time in a cabin in the woods with no running water or electricity, it was a childhood full of make-believe. I was always playing in the forest or running through the meadow fighting imaginary battles. I climbed trees, collected dead insects, got stung way too many times by bees and nettles and mosquitoes, swam in the rivers, and ran around in the woods building forts. I spent my time going between my mother's home in the Skagit Valley and my father’s cabin in the eastern foothills of the Cascade Mountains. There is magic in nature because it is mysterious and beautiful and frightening all at once, that is what is behind my images in The Sound of Wind. Growing up and feeling confident that the pitch black darkness of night with no electricity was safe but at the same time feeling that there was something out there in the darkness waiting to get me.
The image that is most special from The Sound of Wind is The Ants Won’t Bite, which is illustrating one of my childhood fears of all the ants that would live around our fire pit. Once I looked down at my feet and saw that they were covered in ants. I screamed and my dad starting trying to calm me down, telling me that the ants don’t bite. The whole series is playing with my memories of growing up and also my experiences now around the Pacific Northwest.
Jenny Riffle: One of the most special places photographed is a tie between Snoqualmie Evergreens and Winter Beach. Well, in fact it is hard to choose a favorite place because they are all favorite places. The shot of the misty trees makes me think of David Lynch and his series Twin Peaks - specifically the strangeness and mystery of the northwest in that series. There is a scene in Twin Peaks of just the trees blowing in the wind that I think about often. The wind is very powerful and can be an agent of destruction or it can be quite calming.
The beach scene was taken on the Oregon Coast and I used to go there every summer as a child. I have many memories of the ocean and the huge waves and my mother warning me to not swimming out too far because of the undertow. I heard undertow as under toad and imagined a huge toad that would grab my legs and pull me under the water if I went out too far.
Molly Martien: Speaking of the “Emily,” series of photos that you took depicting your sister. I love the idea that you choose your sister’s birthday, and even more I love Nicholas Nixon’s “The Brown Sisters,” was your source of inspiration. That being said, I would love to hear why you decided to include your sister’s girlfriend in the photo over the last two years.
Jenny Riffle: This series is taking shape over time and including Sarah in the series happened very organically - she and my sister started dating and Sarah was hanging around with Emily and I during our portrait sessions from then on. I took photos of Emily by herself for the last three years as well as with Sarah. I think the edit of image for the Emily series could change over time depending on what I do with it, maybe I will want just Emily in all the images, or maybe I will want the images of Sarah and Emily together. There are only 10 years at this point, so ten images in the series and I would wait another 10 years for it become more complete. Then I will see the images all together and decide what works best.
Molly Martien: Lastly, I want to talk with you about your series “Scavenger: Adventures in Treasure Hunting.” These are the photos that first drew me to you. The colors, the lighting, the film grain….wow! What camera did you use? How did you find Riley (The main muse in these photographs)?
Jenny Riffle: We met eleven years ago through my brother who was managing a restaurant that Riley was working at, we used to all hang out and Riley always impressed me with his excellent sense of adventure. One of the first times we spent time together we hiked to some hot springs with a group of friends in the middle of the night and Riley led us up a mountain with no trail and found the hot springs in the dark.
I didn’t start the Scavenger series until about 2009, after we had been dating for 4 years and I began taking a more serious interest in photographing Riley and his obsession. I don’t really make a point of the fact that he is my boyfriend in the statement because the series is not about that, though that doesn’t mean it doesn’t play a part, because of course it does. I am with him all the time on his scavenging adventures and able to take the photos over a long period of time as we move from place to place. I have a romantic view of Riley and his treasure hunting and that is what I portray in the images because that is what I see - Riley as a character in an adventure novel. My view of Riley is exactly that - my view - and it is tangled in with being in love with him so that is part of my obsession with creating the work.
I shoot with a medium format Mamyia 7 camera and a 4x5 large format. The 4x5 images are the close up shots of the objects and the Mamyia images are all the landscapes and shots that were taken when we were out scavenging. I use the Mamyia because it is very portable and I am able to carry it with us wherever we go.
Molly Martien: Jenny, I’d love to hear more about your time at Bard (BFA, Photography), and at the School of Visual Arts (MFA, Photography). Tell me more about how each of these programs has challenged, inspired, and shaped who you are, as well as your art today.
Jenny Riffle: Both programs were perfect for me, though in different ways. At Bard, I started my exploration of photography with a serious obsession with portraiture. This was in the late 90’s and though I may not have realized it at the time, what was happening in photography then influenced my work. Gregory Crewdson, Katy Grannan and Jeff Wall’s images were all colliding in my head and influencing what I was doing. The program was a very traditional fine art program headed by Stephen Shore, so I learned analog color photography and large format and fell in love with both. I started taking portraits of my friends and family that turned into the series The Space in Between. The images are narrative and I struggled with the idea of calling them portraits because of what the word implies, capturing the essence of someone. I was not trying to do that at all, instead I felt the images reflected more of my own emotional state. Like Crewdson and Wall, I felt I was using my subjects as characters playing out a scene, but I did not go so far as to dress them up or actually set up a scene. The program at Bard allowed me access to some amazing professors and the space to think and challenge myself. I felt I came out with a good understanding of being a fine artist, dedicated to being both technically and conceptually proficient. It did lack some preparation for the skills needed on the business side of art, everyone finds ways to support their art differently but it can be the most challenging part of being an artist.
I took a long break between undergrad and grad working in different jobs in a gallery and photo school while still doing my own art and trying to make it all work. I went to grad school 8 years after undergrad and I was really ready to be back in school and excited to spend two years dedicated to making work. I wanted a school that would have more of a balance between fine art and commercial because I felt Bard was lacking in the commercial skills that could be useful in getting some jobs. The School of Visual Arts Photo, Video and Related Media Department was perfect. It was still very dedicated to fine art and conceptual themes but there was also some great classes for studio lighting and digital composition that I felt could be used commercially. During my time at SVA I worked on my Scavenger series and with the help of some incredible professors I really delved into the ideas behind what I was doing with photography and why it was exciting for me. I realized that my main fascination is the power photography has to represent both truth and fiction, and often at the same time. Playing with the line between these two has been a part of my work since the first series I started at Bard, and I continue to think about and expand on that theme.
