New Exhibition: Feature Photography

                                 © Jocelyn Lee

The exhibition "Portraiture Now: Feature Photography" recently opened at the National Portrait Gallery.  Come and see this new exhibition of works by six critically acclaimed photographers—Katy Grannan, Jocelyn Lee, Ryan McGinley, Steve Pyke, Martin Schoeller and Alec Soth. 

Often working on a specific commission or editorial assignment for publications such as the New Yorker, Esquire and the New York Times Magazine, these photographers compose portraits that cause us to pause and reflect.  The exhibition runs through September 27, 2009, and is on view on the museum’s first floor. 

NPG associate curator of photographs, Frank Goodyear, sat down with photographer Jocelyn Lee to discuss her work. Lee’s photographs for this exhibition were drawn from work that she has completed in Maine, a place where she has spent much time. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Lee has served as a professor of photography at Princeton University since 2003.

JL: I think if I hadn’t found photography, I think the field I would have gone into would have been psychology.  I studied philosophy for the same reasons that I was studying photography.  It was a way of sort of thinking about basic issues of what it means to be alive.  It sounds pretentious, but that was essentially what drew me to both of those subjects.  Asking basic questions of how we find meaning in our lives. 

The portrait allows me to spend time with one other person, and to have a kind of intimate exchange that the rhythm of the regular world does not allow.  It’s a way to slow things down and really consider what it is to be a human being, living here on this earth, looking the way we do.  Aging, going through all of the life transitions that we go through—from adolescence, puberty, middle age, illness, love, death—all of those things.  It’s a way to study them slowly and collaboratively with other people.

FG: Do you talk with your subjects a lot about what you are striving to achieve in a particular picture?  To what extent do you deliberately kind of pre-visualize what you want to do?  Or is it more intuitive?

JL:  I would say that I do pre-visualize it—somewhat.  But again this goes back to the question about why I love photography.  If it was purely pre-visualized, then I could imagine these being drawings, or paintings, or collage, or something else.  But part of what is so magical to me about the medium of photography, is that I can never ultimately control the subject. And what they bring to the shoot, or the event, or the drama, or the narrative, is ultimately their own mystery.  And that, in the end, is what makes the picture strong. 

Some of my least successful pictures are those that have been so pre-visualized that I’m controlling all aspects of it. And my stronger pictures are the pictures where there’s this collaboration between my initial fantasy, sense of narrative, and the collaboration between the innate mystery of the person who is posing for me.

So when I look at the pictures now, as much as I’ve made them, the strongest pictures I feel are still a gift from the other person.  I still see them as something that, in part, has been given to me by the subject. 

FG: You teach at Princeton University—what are the lessons that you are trying to instill in young photographers?  What kind of advice are you constantly reasserting in their own careers?

JL: I love teaching photography because it’s the coming together of the world, and how the photographer feels about the world.  Very quickly, a student can begin to make meaningful photographs that comment on their perceptions of the world.  It’s very different from drawing, it’s very different from painting, it’s very different from sculpture.  The entry level skill is achieved pretty quickly. 

I think the biggest contribution that I can give to my students is to be honest with yourself, and be sincere.  What do you want to talk about? You’re given this incredible power so quickly. You have a camera, and you’ve got the entire world at your disposal.  What do you want to talk about?  In every gesture with the camera, you’re making a decision: what you point the camera at, how you frame that photograph.  You’re commenting on the world.  You’re editing the world.  And you’re giving it to us as a story.  So I think photography is really a powerful thing for students who have ideas, who are visual, and want to say something. 

Listen to the entire interview with Jocelyn Lee (26:20)

To view more of Jocelyn Lee's work, and photographs by the other artists featured in "Portraiture Now: Feature Photography," be sure to see the online exhibition. 

Untitled (Kara on Easter)/Jocelyn Lee, 1999/Chromogenic print/Collection of the artist/© Jocelyn Lee

Untitled (Inuit woman in hospital, Rankin Island)/Jocelyn Lee, 2002/Chromogenic print/Published in the New York Times Magazine, May 5, 2002/Collection of the artist/© Jocelyn Lee

Comments

[Daniel]

Hey, I like what you've compiled here. I'm heading over to the Gallery right now.

[Daniel Burtea]

I was a professional photographer between 1979-1984, but I had to give up photography due to drastic changes in my life.
Reading this article I realized that I have similar habits, or behavior as Jocelyn Lee.
Most of the time when I pass by people on the street my curious eyes are trying to go behind the sad or smiling faces to discover "the mystery of the person". Over the years I have become more sensitive to the people around me and life in general.
This article influenced me to reconsider my photographic options. Thank you Jocelyn Lee.