In Conversation: Tomiko Jones
Tomiko Jones’s work is linked to the identity of place in social, cultural, and geographical terms, and explores transitions in the landscape with particular attention to public lands. Jones received her Master of Fine Arts in Photography with a Certificate in Museum Studies from the University of Arizona in Tuscon in 2008.
Almost every summer, my father would pile us into the car and take us to explore the treasures of the nation, our public lands. Many miles of open land lay in between, and watching the landscape pass by had a profound effect on me over the years. I would want to stop and explore, but as we were always headed for a destination, there was never enough time. This created in me a longing to return, a feeling that stays with me today.
The overarching element throughout my work is a relationship to place, a loose mapping that echoes the internal terrain of thought. Water is ever present, shaping my identity. It represents generational migration from Japan to Hawai’i to California, to Washington and is imaged in photographic works and as reflecting pools for projected video in site-responsive installations. Growing up in multiple cultures and countercultures, with changing paradigms in technology, science and society, continues to have an effect on my practice.
Exploring the geography of changing landscapes, I search for places I can feel a sense of communication. I often work at dusk, when color bleeds from the sky and the sublime reveals itself. I find quiet, yet significant moments in the transitional place between land and water, destruction and reclamation, thought and action.
Rattlesnake Lake
Rattlesnake Lake is a long-term photographic project in the Cedar River Watershed in Washington State. When I first went to Rattlesnake Lake, it smelled of summer and promised happy memories. When I returned in the winter, I found a mud puddle and an hundred enormous stumps. Once an indigenous site, the area was deforested and a town was built, which later was destroyed by flooding. Today the lake is an overflow reservoir of drinking water for the city of Seattle. In Rattlesnake Lake,an embodiment of spirit is imagined as a lone figure moving through a place of layered, untold histories. The series is photographed with a 4x5 field camera, reminiscent of those used for 19th century Western geological surveys by European settlers. A bucket of lake water is collected to rinse the photographic film; dirt and leaves rub together and onto the film, leaving artifacts behind and tearing small pieces of silver away—a conversation between place and image.
SPE MCC: Why photography?
Tomiko Jones: If I could tell a story with my mind, I would not need a visual image to illustrate it. I am not faithful to any particular way of imaging, but for me photography – the act of drawing light – remains to be one of the most direct ways of communicating and connecting with the world around me, a world I feel in such deep awe of, yet struggle to understand how humankind behaves within it and with one another. I’m captivated by the magic of the photograph. Although there are many ways in which I experience the world, the place where my camera comes out are these quiet moments of pause. I did not always photograph like this, but this is how photography has found me. In many projects, this way of witnessing and becoming — is essential to the work I am making. There are times I simply observe, an image forms in my mind which later becomes an “image” existing in space and time that is not a print, but rather physically experienced, in moving form like video projections, in objects, and in movement of passing through an installation.
SPE MCC: Who or what influences your work?
TJ: In the past five or so years, I have reflected back onto my childhood as the generator of my sense for deeper exploration. I mention in my statement about the long road trips through the landscape and the longing that grew from that time. In the most classic of touristic gestures we would set forth in a camper. My father’s interest in engineering, science, technology, and world religions was evident in our family excursions, although I would not notice it until I was much older. We visited “feats of engineering” – WPA dams, bridges and buildings were favorite places on our way to admire “feats of nature” such as Yellowstone, Yosemite and Niagara Falls. We went to observatories and planetariums and spent nights watching the sky for meteorite showers. As a kid, I thought I would be an astronomer, a shipwright, a cartographer, a pilot.
Cultural practice and belief, and the hybrid stages in-between, as I respond to both similarity and difference in the communities I find myself immersed in. As an undergraduate, I studied cultural anthropology with an emphasis in religious and spiritual beliefs, and remember reading that one of the things people most attach themselves to when they relocate/migrate are ritual habits - whether that is the food you prepare, how you pray, or the way you enter a guest’s home. Maybe they are the “manners” or the “way you do things”. Place and tradition are important to my mother. I feel that all the things I was taught by my elders and the ones I have learned (or unlearned) along the way will continue to influence the choices I make within my practice, from the materials I work with, to the places I go. I hesitate to say this, but recently I was talking to a woman, a professor I never had, but in ways became a mentor when I last saw her. I was telling her about how everything is significant in each image, video, installation, and that it draws heavily from my Japanese cultural influence, layered and hybrid as it is, from folk songs, to paper or porcelain objects, to water, reflection, origin and passage of life, to ritual, all performed together in a new form to become the art, what’s made from all that cacophony. That’s what I’m making. I was hesitant to name all these things, because alone they tell too much about identity, and that’s not what I want to point to first thing, but it’s integral to the work, as it’s made from oneself. It’s all so closely intertwined.
Then of course, observing the everyday in the world around me, walking down the street, the way light falls on a piece of trash or through a shop window or watching clouds blowing across a mountaintop.
SPE MCC: Name three contemporary photographers that you’re into right now.
TJ: Now I feel like I am in an interview and next I’ll have to suggest three theoretical essays I would include in my syllabus! Gosh, photographers I’m into right now, this is always a hard one. I will always feel like I am leaving someone out! I have been looking a lot outside of the photographic medium lately, so let me see about three I have seen or been reminded of lately.
LaToya Ruby Frazier has a way of photographing that is so honest, that describes both a place and an intimacy, at once documentary and an exploration of family. Recently she has had a lot of well-deserved attention for winning the MacArthur Grant. Her work “…address class inequity, access to health care, and environmental racism. This work is not solely social documentary. These are psychological portraits of the identity of the body and how surrounding outside space shapes and forms it physically. I view Grandma Ruby, Mom and myself as one entity. There is an intergenerational transference of our identities existing in the history of Braddock, Pennsylvania.”
I saw Diana Matar’s “Evidence/Evidence” work recently at FotoFest in the “Discoveries of the Meeting Place”. She photographs places where something happened we can no longer see. Her father-in-law, a Libyan political dissident, was forcibly disappeared. “My father-in-law's disappearance was part of a larger story of political struggle in Libya. After the 2011 revolution, I wanted to photograph specific locations where atrocities had taken place under the Gaddafi regime. Libyans knew and spoke of the events that occurred at these sites, but almost all of the evidence had been destroyed.”
While I’m into the recently seen category, at FotoFest, “Mountains of Uncertainty” by Roberto Fernández Ibáñez, are gorgeous prints that are one of the most visceral visual interpretation of environmental data I’ve seen; abstracted landscapes made with the mordançage technique. “Mountains and mathematical graphs: landscapes similar in shape, but opposite in essence. Behind the ephemeral financial status of companies or countries and the changes in environmental and social trends, lays the serene presence of perennial, undulated mountains that call me to inner peace and reflection. So, when the heavy weight of technology, speculation and political interests exhausts me, I search and find shelter in my own mountains.”
In my curatorial role, we’re showing Ibáñez’s prints at the Desai | Matta Gallery, The Arts at CIIS in San Francisco this summer.
SPE MCC: How does language inform image or vice versa?
TJ: Both, but I will find this hard to describe since I have to use words! I have used text quite frequently with images, and often titles are mined from my notes. I admire writers so much in their ability to transport readers to such a rich, visual world. I know I am influenced by reading, but it is not easily traced, more like an image forms in my mind when I am reading and I know it will come into play at some point, whether I remember it or not. I particularly love phrases, sayings, figures of speech; they can spark an idea. I’m also aware of the vernacular language that we use, how the origin of words are often deeply seated in racism, historical narratives, hierarchy, and can find myself stopped in my tracks when I don’t know the right word to say because they all seem wrong. I think it’s important to interrogate our use of language.
Having recently travelled to a place where I don’t speak the language, much communication was delivered through the body, and I especially noticed how it was so different in the way people greeted one another.
SPE MCC: What is the biggest challenge you face when making work?
TJ: Knowing when I am finished. This challenge is primarily pressure from the outside world, a production-driven, product-oriented world that expects “projects”, “bodies of work”, “new series”. Although I may at times single-mindedly embark on an idea that will reach a conclusion I can envision, most of my work operates in long interrelated, overlapping arcs. It takes a long time for me to develop a relationship with the place/idea/feeling - it grows and changes, and I continue to explore long after showing a “finished work”. For instance, I started photographing with my 4x5 at Rattlesnake Lake in 2000! I don’t know how many pictures I made, but I didn’t show a comprehensive selection until I received the En Foco Fellowship and had to finish it for exhibition. And I’m still taking pictures there! I also made the video “drowning, drawing” and still have tons of untapped footage. Obviously, having a deadline helps!
All images courtesy Tomiko Jones from her series Rattlesnake Lake. To view more of her work, please visit her website.
