WHERE WAS IT, THE WORLD? Jo Ann Walters
Cover Image: Hartford, Illinois, 2011-2014 by Jo Ann Walters Where Was It, the World? Š Slocumb Galleries and Jo Ann Walters, 2020 | All rights reserved. Images and artist statements courtesy of the artists. Gallery exhibition documentation photographed by Hannah Taylor and Slocumb Galleries’ staff. All images and work are copyright property of the artist. Catalogue design by Karlota Contreras-Koterbay. ETSU is an AA/EEO employer. ETSU-CAS-0078-19 50
WHERE WAS IT, THE WORLD? Jo Ann Walters
January 13 to February 14, 2020, Slocumb Galleries Presented by the Department of Art & Design and Slocumb Galleries in partnership with the ETSU Student Activities Allocation Committee (SAAC), Photography program under Prof. Tema Stauffer and SG Student Guild
WHERE WAS IT, THE WORLD? Jo Ann Walters The photographic images included in ‘WHERE WAS IT, THE WORLD?’ are part of a widening spectrum of concern related to my decades-long involvement photographing the people and landscape in the industrialized and rural communities in the southern and mid-western United States. I am increasingly drawn to those places both inhabited or vacated by the population destined to become the game’s “nearly men and women”; that is to say, those who have narrowly failed to achieve the success or position promised to them during the rise and fall of globalization. Relevant to the times, I am concerned with the limits of knowledge and representation and the attendant difficulties of locating personal histories within a psycho-geographical landscape. Many of the photographs were made in and around a small, neglected, blue-collar town in the Mississippi River valley where I was born and raised. My grandfather, and then my father, owned a small sheet metal fabrication shop in our town, and for two generations serviced the once vibrant steel and ammunition plants that are now fledgling and in disrepair. Growing up in the second half of the twentieth century my earliest conceptualizations of industrialized labor, much like other girls and women I knew, were vague and ill defined. The factories were merely places along the horizon of the Mississippi River, dull facades with vermiculate patterns, clusters of clouds and haze gray with a nebular glow. ‘WHERE WAS IT, THE WORLD?’ is not meant to be a historical record in the usual sense. It is a work of remembrance, mourning, regret, and conciliation for a different time and place. The photographic images included have been mined from my earliest recollections, those still constellating on the edges of my awareness, and (now) perceived through adult consciousness. All the works in the exhibition are all taken with Mamiya 7-II medium format using Kodak Portra film and printed in archival pigment print, with the exception of one image ‘Eastman Chemical, Kingsport’ taken by Walters with her iPhone during her visit in Tennessee in 2016,
https://www.joannwalters.com/
JO ANN WALTERS Jo Ann Walters is a photographic artist working primarily in the Midwest and Southern United States. She has been described by William Eggleston as, “one of the few independently original photographers working in color today.” Her work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, (NYC), San Francisco MoMA, St. Louis Art Museum, The De Cordova Museum of Art, Bibliotheque Nationale of France, and the Center for Photography, Bombay, India, among others. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant for distinguished writers, choreographers, filmmakers and visual artists, a Ferguson Foundation Award for Outstanding Portraiture, and a Kittredge Award from Harvard University. Her work was shortlisted for the Smithsonian Institution’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition and was nominated for Anonymous Was A Woman. Her work is published in Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort (MoMA), New Color/New Work, Abbeville Press, Ahorn Magazine, Heavy Volume III and DoubleTake. Her first monograph, WOOD RIVER BLUE POOL, was published by image/Text/Ithaca Press, 2018 with an essay by photo historian, Laura Wexler, Yale University, and included a companion novella, Blue Pool Cecelia, by Emma Kemp. Her book was shortlisted for the prestigious Aperture Foundation/Paris Photo, First Book Award, was featured as Photobook of the Month by Charcoal Bools and was included in TIME’s Best Photo Books of 2018. It was also featured on The New Yorker Photo Blog: Searching for the Meaning of Womanhood in White, Middle Class America, with text by Andrea Denhoed. Walters has been on the faculties of Yale University and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She is currently an Associate Professor at Purchase College, State University New York (SUNY).
DOG Town Jo Ann Walters “In the winter of 2004, I began work on DOG Town, a series of photographic views and characterizations, made in a small, neglected working class town in the Mississippi River valley where I was born and raised. My grandfather, and then my father, owned a small sheet metal fabrication shop in our town, and for two generations, serviced the once vibrant steel and ammunition plants that are now fledgling and in disrepair. Growing up in the second half of the twentieth century my conceptualizations of industrial labor, like many of the girls and women I knew, were vague and ill defined. The factories were merely places along the horizon of the river, dull facades with vermiculate patterns and clusters of indistinct stars, or clouds and haze, gray with a nebular glow. Nearly everyone I knew had fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, friends and lovers who labored in these local factories, working night shifts, calculating the material and emotional expense of holiday pay and overtime, and who often drank hard and steady. Together these pictures comprise a quiet, often starkly beautiful meditation on the mineral wastes and dregs of an unsparing indifferent economy. And, though I have employed the elegant, wellworn mannerisms of photographic documentation, Dog Town is not merely a historical record. It is also an elegiac work of remembrance, mourning, regret and conciliation for my father and men at work in a different time and place. The images that follow are mined from my earliest recollections, those still constellating on the edges of my awareness, and (now) perceived through adult consciousness. They are made up of tired light, dog days and falling, rendering time through the strange and luminous reflections of winter light.�
Alton, Illinois, 2012. Mamiya 7-II, medium format, Kodak Portra film. Archival pigment print.
Alton, Illinois, 2012. Mamiya 7-II, medium format, Kodak Portra film. Archival pigment print.
Hartford, Illinois, 2011-2014. Mamiya 7-II, medium format, Kodak Portra film. Archival pigment print.
Alton, Illinois, 2016. Mamiya 7-II, medium format, Kodak Portra film. Archival pigment print.
Indiana, 2019. Mamiya 7-II, medium format, Kodak Portra film. Archival pigment print.
Indiana, 1996. Mamiya 7-II, medium format, Kodak Portra film. Archival pigment print.
Indiana, 2018. Mamiya 7-II, medium format, Kodak Portra film. Archival pigment print.
East St. Louis, Illinois, 2014. Mamiya 7-II, medium format, Kodak Portra film. Archival pigment print.
Alton, Illinois, 2010. Mamiya 7-II, medium format, Kodak Portra film. Archival pigment print.
Georgia, 2012-2015. Mamiya 7-II, medium format, Kodak Portra film. Archival pigment print.
Alton, Illinois, 2014. Mamiya 7-II, medium format, Kodak Portra film. Archival pigment print.
Georgia, 2015. Mamiya 7-II, medium format, Kodak Portra film. Archival pigment print.
Virginia, 2015. Mamiya 7-II, medium format, Kodak Portra film. Archival pigment print.
Mississippi River, Godfrey, Illinois, 2020. Mamiya 7-II, medium format, Kodak Portra film. Archival pigment print.
Pennsylvania, 2019. Mamiya 7-II, medium format, Kodak Portra film. Archival pigment print.
Pennsylvania, 2015. Mamiya 7-II, medium format, Kodak Portra film. Archival pigment print.
Eastman Chemical, Kingsport, Tennessee, 2016. Digital photo from iPhone. Archival pigment print.
Alton, Illinois, 2016. Mamiya 7-II, medium format, kodak Portra film. Archival pigment print.
West Alton, Illinois, 2015. Mamiya 7-II, medium format, kodak Portra film. Archival pigment print.
Searching for the Meaning of Womanhood in White, Blue-Collar America By Andrea DenHoed, Copy Chief of New Yorker.com October 3, 2018 “Wood River Blue Pool,” a new collection of photographs by Jo Ann Walters, takes its name from two bodies of water that lie near her home town of Alton, Illinois. The first is a small tributary that threads along the edge of town, dividing it from its neighbors and connecting it to the flow of the Mississippi. The other is a pool formed in a disused quarry near the river. According to local legend, it might be bottomless, and its dark waters might hold an entire locomotive. There have been many deaths there, and it is said to be haunted. Walters began taking the photographs in the series in 1985. She visited small, working-class towns, much like Alton, around the country, and found herself gravitating toward the women and children she encountered. She has said that she was seeking out surrogates in the images she captured, peering into the depths of these spaces and the people who inhabit them as a means of exploring and expressing her own memories and interiority. “I have tried to show what it felt like to grow up female in a small relatively isolated blue-collar town in Middle America,” she told Ahorn magazine. “I felt compelled to look closely, ritualistically, again and again, at the nearly impenetrable, seamless construction of stereotypes surrounding childhood, girlhood, motherhood and womanhood.” Inseparable from the way of life that Walters documents is her awareness of the fraught racial history of her home town. Alton lies just across the Mississippi from St. Louis, Missouri, where slavery was once legal; before abolition, the city was both an active station on the Underground Railroad and a base for slave-catchers hoping to capture escapees who had made it across the river. Alton today is predominantly white and largely segregated, as it was when Walters (who is white) was growing up. In an essay accompanying the collection, the scholar Laura Wexler quotes Walters describing the one time she heard race discussed during school, when a white classmate compared interracial marriage to breeding “a poodle with a mutt.” The people in these portraits appear to live in a similarly unchallenged white world. They occupy “Leave It to Beaver” houses with tastefully colored slat siding, and in these houses they nurture and groom and prepare for performance in the outside world. Like Walters when she was young, the women pictured might not realize that they are living out a carefully guarded fantasy. As Wexler writes, “Their whiteness is the prize around which our patriarchy has been constructed.” Walters shows us her subjects in sunlight, mostly outdoors but in domestic landscapes—front and back yards, gardens, suburban sidewalks and parks—where the chaos of nature is given strict
parameters. The women and children, likewise, are wild but contained. Two little girls with their heads thrown back to face the light, apparently in a moment of ecstatic rapture, nonetheless look a little pained, as though the gesture were forced, choreographed along with their neatly matching hair and pretty little-girl outfits. A young woman with dark braids and blue eyes, wearing a sleek green swimsuit, stands in doorway with a baby on her hip. She looks ennobled, capable, mighty, but the interior of her home, behind her, gapes darkly, like an unfilled cavity. The effect of many of these photos is simultaneously lulling and disquieting. Walters finds grace and beauty in the embraces, games, and laughter of her subjects, and yet, even amid all this family love, each of them appears to be somehow alone.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/searching-for-the-meaning-of-womanhood-inwhite-blue-collar-america
Vanity + Consolation Jo Ann Walters “I grew up in the Middle West in a small blue-collar town on the Mississippi River and experienced estrangement and shock as I moved farther and farther away from home. After photographing the landscape in the small villages and towns where I had once lived, I began my portraits of women, girls, children and their families as a way to look inward and remember, to question my surroundings and to examine what felt like a kind of homelessness. My imaginative response was to retreat inside. I rarely ventured outside homes, backyards and private gardens intent on showing the complexities and forcefulness of inner life. The landscape receded, still important and symbolic, but now becoming a ground to build character. After all, the world I photograph remains the world of my childhood. I have tried to make pictures from this place, the place of an insider, with all of the contradictions and ambivalence this implies. The women and girls in my pictures stand in as surrogates struggling with conflict between heart and body. The challenge as I see it is to break through an ancient and nearly impenetrable surface of vanity and to seek out the small cracks, the holes and whorled places that hold our pain, our sadness and our beauty. I understand my work much like one understands a rudimentary map. It is a modest effort to understand the diffuse and complicated scale of spirit and sensuality.�
Holly Springs, Mississippi, 1988. Mamiya 7-II, medium format, Kodak Portra film. Archival pigment print.
Godfrey, Illinois, circa 2012-2014. Mamiya 7-II, medium format, Kodak Portra film. Archival pigment print.
Godfrey, Illinois, circa 2012. Mamiya 7-II, medium format, Kodak Portra film. Archival pigment print.
Louisiana, 2012. Mamiya 7-II, medium format, Kodak Portra film. Archival pigment print.
Phoenix, Arizona, 1990. Mamiya 7-II, medium format, Kodak Portra film. Archival pigment print.
Grafton, Illinois, 1992. Mamiya 7-II, medium format, Kodak Portra film. Archival pigment print.
Grafton, Illinois, 2016. Mamiya 7-II, medium format, Kodak Portra film. Archival pigment print.
Alton, Illinois, 2017. Mamiya 7-II, medium format, Kodak Portra film. Archival pigment print.
Hazelton, Pennsylvania, 2012. Mamiya 7-II, medium format, Kodak Portra film. Archival pigment print.
Department of Art & Design
Slocumb Galleries
The ETSU Department of Art & Design provides comprehensive training in the visual arts and art history. Students develop problem-solving skills, a strong work ethic, and an ability to communicate verbally and visually through their time with us. Alumni from our program are thriving in various careers in the arts. The faculty includes internationally exhibited artists, published authors, and a Guggenheim Fellow. Within the College of Arts & Sciences, it is affiliated with the Mary B. Martin School of the Arts at ETSU, which sponsors an eclectic calendar of visiting artists, curators, art historians, and exhibitions on the ETSU campus each semester.
The ETSU Slocumb Galleries and Tipton Gallery, promote the understanding, production, and appreciation of visual arts in support of the academic experience and the cultural development of surrounding communities. The galleries’ mission is to develop creative excellence, foster interdisciplinary collaborations, promote inclusivity and encourage critical thinking by providing access and platform for innovative ideas and diverse exhibitions.
The facilities are comprehensive, with materials and spaces for Graphic Design, Fibers, Painting, Printmaking, Ceramics, Drawing, Jewelry & Metals, Sculpture, Analog and Digital Photography, and Extended Media. We have two exhibition spaces, the Slocumb Galleries and a satellite gallery in downtown Johnson City, Tipton Gallery, that host exhibitions by students, visiting artists, and faculty. The Department of Art & Design is accredited by NASAD, The National Association of Schools of Art and Design, and is a member of CAA, the College Art Association; SECAC, Southeastern College Art Conference; ISC, the International Sculpture Center, and is a consortium member of SACI, Studio Art Centers International, based in Florence, Italy. Annual study abroad opportunities are available to all ETSU students; the Ceramics program offers an annual workshop in Spannochia, Italy. Degrees offered: Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) in Studio Art Bachelor of Fine Arts (B.F.A.) in Studio Art Bachelor of Fine Arts (B.F.A.) in Graphic Design Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in Art History Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in Studio Art Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in Studio Art with minor in Education Minors in Studio Art and Art History etsu.edu/cas/art
SG features Visiting Artists’ Exhibitions and Lecture series, curated/juried exhibitions, and MFA / BFA / BA student exhibitions. The Tipton Gallery, initially a student exhibition space, organizes monthly art activities in coordination with Downtown JC First Fridays and festivals. The exhibitions, art educational programming and community engagement activities promote formally/ artistically diverse, cuturally/socially relevant and thoughtprovoking images that encourage critical discourse. The annual National Juried Art Exhibition features emerging, and established contemporary artists who employ diverse media and innovative techniques that contribute to the evolving definition and trends in American art. Supported by Department of Art & Design, Office of the President, in partnership with academic units and funding support from Student Activities Allocation Committee (SAAC) Funds, Student Government Association (SGA), Friends of SG, the Arts Fund from East Tennessee Foundation and the Tennessee Arts Commission. etsu.edu/cas/art/galleries
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