Interview with Dave Jordano

How, why and when did photography begin for you?

It was in December of 1968 while stationed in the military in Germany.  A friend of mine had an Instamatic camera with two frames left on the roll.  We took pictures of each other and went down to the local photo lab on the base and made prints to send back to our parents for Christmas.  The moment I processed the roll of film I was awe struck.  I made the decision that day to become a photographer!   After buying a 35mm Pentax Spotmatic camera and shooting my first roll of film, I remember the elderly German lady who ran the photo lab commenting after seeing my contact sheet, “Oh, Mr. Jordano she said, you must become a photographer”.  She saw something in the pictures that even I had not recognized.  Her name was Frau Nastvogel, and she mentored and taught me until I processed out of the Army a year later.  I literally spent 20 hours a week in the photo lab under her guidance.  More than anyone else, she influenced me with her aesthetic sensitivity and appreciation towards the medium.   I admire many, many dozens of photographers for their work, but admiration should be used as a point of departure , not plagiarism.  It really takes someone who cares deeply about your early development who can guide you towards your intellectual awareness.  I was so fortunate that Frau Nastvogel planted the seed for me.  I dedicated my first book to her memory.

After the military I studied photography in Detroit.  I considered myself a fine art photographer while in school.  I did a lot of large format B & W street/documentary work which was wonderful to do, but after graduation I had to think of something to make a living.  B & W street portraits weren’t going to cut it so I focused on food and product photography and relocated to Chicago in 1977.

Did you transition from commercial to fine art photography in a binary fashion or was it that you just started increasing your focus on specific personal projects ?

I was fortunate to have had a highly successful commercial career for over 25 years, but around 1998-99, with the advent of the digital revolution, I started scanning some of my old B & W negatives from college and making digital prints.  Some of this work still fascinates me even today, but I needed to find a new direction for myself again.  This reawakening, so to speak, got me thinking about producing personal work and in 2001 I started shooting large format B & W images of Chicago bridges which resulted in my first body of work.  Since I had nothing to go by, I basically picked up where I left off in college, doing what felt comfortable and vaguely familiar to me.  The transition into fine art paralleled my decision to start scaling back my commercial work.  A process that took about three years to complete.  Since my commercial and my fine art work were so dissimilar, I found it almost impossible to devote 100% of my time to both, and since I had made what I thought was my contribution to the commercial industry, I felt it was time to move on.

How do the ideas for your projects usually come together?  Are they all generally planned or do the projects come into being a bit on their own?

It’s difficult to say, really.  I’ve been so hard-wired over the years as someone who always shot “straight” with no special effects or manipulative processes in mind.  I love the representational visual vocabulary of a photograph and that philosophy has guided the direction of my work.  My projects stem out of the documentary genre for sure, and I am very much interested in the American cultural identity that makes up and defines specific geographic, ethnic, or religious groups of people.

After completing the Bridge Project, I felt that I was missing an emotional connection in my work.  I wanted to be around or be a part of what people were doing, even if it was in a peripheral role.  What interests me most are the physical markings that people create in order to express themselves.  This included small isolated neighborhoods like Marktown in East Chicago, Indiana, intimate storefront churches on the south side of Chicago, or the broader cultural landscapes of rural Illinois.  These relate because they’re all about people who define themselves through their beliefs, habits, and personal choices, how ever subtle or outrageous they may be.

All of my projects involve a subject that, to be honest, I don’t known much about, but this is the driving force that fuels my creativity and my search for understanding.  It’s like a puzzle.  You start putting the pieces together one by one and hopefully in the end you’ve created a body of work that is complete and meaningful.  I’m not the kind of photographer who is out to save the planet.  I’m far more interested in the idiosyncratic minutia of things.  The more out of the way things are, the better I like it.  But I do hope that I am informing, in my own way,  about the broader picture that defines a segment of who we are culturally as an American society.  I’m pretty single minded and only work on one project at a time until my interest in something else begins to pull me in another direction, but I suspect it will always be about some form of social identity, cultural awareness and connection.

Are there specific things you look for when creating a photo?  Something that stays consistent regardless of the subject or series?

I think one aspect of my work deals with irony and juxtaposition.  One example is a shot I took recently.  A woman was pulling weeds in the corner of her yard where a small fence had sectioned off her property from the expansive landscape in the background.  To me, it seemed that she had missed the whole point of why she chose to live there in the first place.  By defining her property with borders she was acknowledging that the landscape beyond had taken on a secondary role thus diminishing its importance.  It was like not being able to see the forest for the trees.  Basically, my work attempts to encapsulate the feeling of a place or an idea through observation and selection, as most documentary photographers do.  I think if you present things in a clear and direst way with your audience the work will relate and begin to build upon itself.  I think another quality of my work deals with the level of respect I have for all things I photograph, whether I’m being sarcastic or showing reverence.  It’s through this approach that I hope, different bodies of work find a common thread.

Would you mind picking a photo you think carries an interesting story and tell us the story behind it?

I was traveling this fall in NW Illinois during a heavy downpour when I noticed a man walking along the side of the road.  He was drenched from head to toe.  I stopped and asked him if he would like a ride, which he accepted.  I was heading south and not being able to get out of the car to do any shooting, we spent a good two hours driving together.  You can find out a lot about a person in two hours, pretty much their life history actually.  Dan was in his late fifties and had been a drifter since 1992, going to all parts of the country for seasonal work, but never staying in one place.  He spoke about working for the CIA and doing covert ops in Viet Nam.  He knew all about helicopters, how they worked,  and avionics.  He was very knowledgeable in electronics and electrical generators.  He even claimed to have invented a turbine motor that nearly powered itself.  He was so convincing that I thought that he must have done some of the things he spoke about.  But when he said that outer space was only three miles above the surface of the earth, and that the CIA performed gamma ray tests on his brain which caused him to lose his memory for a decade, I began to have my doubts.   But this was a man who was genuinely good natured, kind, and gentle to the core.  I couldn’t imagine how he had survived all these years with such a distorted reality.  Was he really crazy?  Perhaps.  Was he a victim of a society that let him fall through the cracks?  Definitely.  When we got to Savanna, IL I took him to a Laundromat to dry out his coat, but the rest of his clothes were still soaked.  We went to a resale shop where I bought him a new coat (waterproof), pants, shirt, sweater, and socks.  The lady in the store, after hearing my story, only charged me $2.00 for everything.  She was an angel.  It was still raining so I put  Dan up in a motel for the night, gave him $20.00 and wished him well.  The story here is that we’re people first and photographers second.  I took his portrait in a McDonald’s parking lot after we stuffed ourselves on big macs.

How has your project or the story it tells, Prairieland, evolved since you started it in 2005?

I think the story has always been the same.  People living outside the conventional norms of society expressing themselves in ways that are unique or unusual.  I’ve been challenged by the perceived notion of Illinois being this pastoral idyll filled with natural fields of flowing prairie grass, and have realized a different outcome.  I can say that I’ve felt a lot more empathy for the people, places, and things I see when I’m out taking pictures.  I witness a lot of poverty and small hamlets that look like there in some third world country instead of in Illinois.  This isn’t the main focus of my project, but you can’t help but be affected by it.  It does get under your skin.  A lot of people I photograph are very marginalized, living from hand to mouth.

Would you mind talking a bit about your philosophy behind some of the tools you use to create your work?

I went digital when Hasselblad introduced their revolutionary H1 medium format digital camera.  I think it was around 2004-05.  Before that I was a large format film guy, but their camera convinced me that digital had finally arrived on a professional level.  I’m now on my third generation camera and use the H3IID coupled with the 39MB digital back.  It’s amazing, I can making 48 X 36 inch inkjet prints that rival or surpass those shot with 4 X 5 film.  The H4 with the 60MB back is due out in early 2010 and I’ll be looking into that.  What erks me is how fast the technology moves thus making your major financial investment in equipment practically worthless within a couple of years.  I bought an 8 X 10 Sinar P view camera around 1985 and used it for 20 years.  It must have paid for itself 100 times over.  It’s nearly impossible to do that with a digital set-up today.  My other tools are PhotoShop CS4, and I print with the Epson 9880 using the ImagePrint RIP software while printing on Ilford Galerie Gold Fibre Silk paper.  It’s a sweet combination.

If you were to recommend another artist work for others to look at who would you recommend?

There are so many great photographers doing work right now,  but three who I really admire are, Alec Soth, Edward Burtynsky, and Simon Roberts, to name just a few.

Sincerest appreciation to Dave Jordano for participating in this interview.  You can find his book Articles of Faith at Photo-Eye along with other publications.  Please visit Dave’s site to see much more of his work.  A must see.