By Lauren Schneidermann
Jessica Ingram was born and raised in Tennessee. She received a degree in Photography and Political Science from New York University and an MFA from California College of the Arts. She is currently a member of the Cause Collective, which is a group of artists creating innovative art in the public realm.

-Let’s discuss your series A Civil Rights Memorial published in Visura Spotlight. What is this series about?  And what drew you to exploring and documenting this subject?

Five years ago, while wandering around downtown Montgomery, Alabama, I picked up a walking tour trail, and found myself facing a large, ornate fountain, situated on a brick pavilion. A Historical Site sign said that I was standing in the former Court Square Slave Market, where slave traders sold men, women, and children to the highest bidder. It presented cold facts, detailing dollar values for slaves at the time and how none were given last names. I was speechless, and I was confused about the relationship of this ornate fountain to the slave market. The fountain was erected at a time when this site was not considered for it’s history, the sign placed in a gesture of reconsideration.  Moreover, the language printed on the sign was so void of sentiment – in no way testifying to the experience and meaning. I watched people pass by and wondered if they knew or thought of the history beneath their feet.

Curious about what I might find at other historical sites (marked or unmarked) through the American South, I began my search. I have been traveling throughout Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana, and documenting sites where Civil Rights era atrocities, Klan activities, and slave trade occurred.  In Pulaski, Tennessee, I found the room where the six original members created the KKK. In Money, Mississippi, I visited the remains of the store where 14-year-old Emmett Till allegedly whistled at a white woman, and the Tallahatchie River, where he was dumped after being tortured and disfigured. I traveled to Midnight, Mississippi, the birthplace of Rainey Poole, and saw the Sunflower River, where Poole was dumped after his murder in 1970. There are no markers in these places. The Southern landscape is swallowing these and other sites.

I am interested in these sites, their memorials or lack thereof, and how the affects of this history still reverberate in these communities and in the landscape. I hope to create this context, and to remember these individuals and events through the images I am taking.  I have found each of these sites through research, and more importantly, have met and talked to family members and local people about the person who was lost, and the effects it has on both the family and the community.  These histories are fresh for the people that lived them.  In the majority of these cases, there was no justice, or justice came late, when cases were reopened in the 1990s and 2000s.  Often confessed murderers who were white, were acquitted by all white juries.  The justice system failed, and this history must also be considered and called to account.  It was not that long ago, and the effects linger.  I am collecting these stories as oral histories, many of which have never been recorded or documented.
My larger body of work is about families and communities. This project is absolutely about that. It is a meditation and a recapturing, a new memorial to these events- some of which have been excluded from the collective and mediated retelling of this period in our history.

-How did you go about locating these sites and were you faced with any obstacles during the process?

I started with a series of questions.  For example, where did the Klan begin?…the actual place.  I knew it started in Pulaski, Tennessee.  I grew up in Nashville which is not far from Pulaski and I remember hearing about the annual rally, and later, as a photojournalist for a newspaper in East Tennessee, I went to one of the rallies.  So I started looking for the actual place.  I looked online, in books, went to Pulaski three times before I found it.  And I found it because I remembered I’d seen a records office in the courthouse.  I went there, it’s on the top floor, and an older woman asked me what I was looking for.  I felt a bit awkward, but then I asked, “Could you point me in the direction of a source that could tell me the actual site where the Klan began.”  She replied, “Would you rather I just give you directions?”  It was amazing.  She had her own Klan research/archive, and she drew me a map which took me about 3 blocks to the site.

Other research I’ve gotten by looking online, talking to family members of victims, journalists, current FBI agents, and ones from the original investigations, cold calling people, and Southern Poverty Law Center has allowed me to access their files.  Often, though, I drive into town, and try to get as close to what I know about the event/site through the information I research before I go.  I was looking for the site where Reverend Lee was murdered in Belzoni, Mississippi.  It was my second visit there.  The first one has been unsuccessful.  So I went back, with the same address I had from my first visit, and I stopped at the local police station.  An officer there took me to see his Dad, and left me there talking with him.  While there, his Dad flagged down an old friend who was driving by, who remembered that the road names and numbers in that area had been changed and who remembered Reverend Lee being murdered. So the officer came back, and took me to the site, and he knew the 90 year old woman that lived across the street, who had always lived there, and she told me the story through the officer, and we found the original house number painted over.  Then the officer and a another officer parked their cars blocking one lane of a not very busy road so I could set up my tripod.

Research is a mixed bag.  And confronting people is a mixed bag.  Sometimes I feel good about it, and have confidence, and sometimes I struggle.  One year I remember a trip where it felt like I’d had the wind knocked out of me.  I lost my courage for a bit and had some doubts about my purpose.  But I overcame that and kept going.  Long projects are commitments, and can be up and down, but you have to stick with it and believe in your work.

-People walk by these unnoticed sights everyday. You express in your personal statement that your “hope is that the viewer will consider the relationship of the history within current contexts” What do you mean by this.

I mean a lot of things…I mean the way that history gets written, and by whom, and who is left out of that and why.  I mean that many of these people I am memorializing paved the way for the rest of us, paved the way for Obama, by things like driving out into rural Mississippi to register black people to vote, and then they lost their lives for that.  And their were witnesses to these murders, but still the white man that killed the black man was acquitted by an all white jury…what does this mean for our prison system and justice system that this is legacy. What does this mean for how people feel powerful or powerless?  This history is not long past, and so much has changed, but I think that a lot still needs to be acknowledged.  There are many people out there calling out this history, working to bring justice, to educate, and to fight hatred and racism.  I am encouraged and inspired by these people and their efforts.  People like John Lewis, Jerry Mitchell, Stanley Nelson, John Seigenthaler, Thomas Moore and The Southern Poverty Law Center, just to name a few.

-Are you done photographing Civil Rights memorials? And what are you working on next?

I am almost done, though I could go on and on, and maybe I will.  Just today someone told me a story I had never heard before about an event in East Tennessee.  I am also recording oral histories, and am gearing up for a book dummy.  I would love to see the work published, and I would also love to see a full exhibit of the work.  I would also like to organize the source research in a way for it to be included in the book, and use the oral histories in an installation of the work.

I have some ideas for future projects.  One in particular will have me back home in East Tennessee.  I miss portraiture, and I am a little fatigued with long periods on the road by myself, so we’ll see.  There are always things I want to photograph, and I have so much Civil Rights work to sift through, but also all the photographs I take in between and day to day.

I am also in a collective (www.causecollective.com).  So in the middle of these personal projects, I am also working on collective projects.  We just finished a permanent commission for the Oakland Museum of California.

-What advice would you give to other emerging photographers?

KEEP GOING-in all aspects, no matter the failures or rejections!  Meet people, stay in touch, and be as nice and supportive to yourself as you are to your peers.  I can be my own worst enemy and critic.

http://www.visuramagazine.com/vm/spotlight-jessica-ingram

http://jessingram.com/home.html

By Lauren Schneidermann

Mikko Takkunen was born in Finalnd in 1979. He studied politics and international relations at Aberdeen University in Scotland. In 2005 he moved to Wales and studied Photojournalism at Swansea Metropolitan University. He graduated in 2009, and currently works as a freelance photographer in Swansea, Wales.

Can you tell me a little about your background….where you are from and how you you got started as a photographer?

I’m originally from Finland, but I’ve been living in the UK now for nearly eight years having first moved to Scotland in 2002 to study Politics and International Relations in Aberdeen University. I didn’t pick up a camera until I was 25. I bought my first proper camera just  to record hiking trips with my university friends, but soon photography became a passion and by the time I was graduating from Aberdeen University in 2006, I had already decided that I wanted to become a documentary photographer and I ended up enrolling on another university course, this time BA Photojournalism in Swansea Metropolitan University in Wales. I finished that course in 2009.  During 2009 I was given the Runner-Up Prize in the Guardian Student Photographer of the Year competition and shortlisted in the student series of both New York Photo Awards and PDN Photo Annual. In the spring of 2010 I was chosen as one of the two Finnish nominees for the Joop Swart Masterclass ( I didn’t get in, unfortunately), and I was awarded the Young Photographer of the Year prize by the Finnish Press Photographers’ Association. So there has been a bit recognition,  which feels nice but  I’m still at the very beginning of my photography career, and I do sometimes still have to rely on other jobs to keep me going.

-Can you explain your work as a whole and the series Post-War Recovery in Sierra Leone featured in Visura Spotlight?

Most of my work so far has been self-assigned and it is always related to some political or societal issue I’ve been interested in and wanted to document.  That is also true in regards to the Sierra Leone work that was featured in Visura Spotlight. It’s my history with some NGOs  from the time I was still living in Finland as well as my later international relations studies that has drawn me to document the issues I have covered.

-How did you get involved with the Finnish Refugee Council in Sierra Leone? Can you describe your experience of collaborating with a Non Governmental Organization. Also what kind of impact did this exposure have on Sierra Leone and on yourself. Do you believe that photography can promote change and awareness?

I knew from early on that I wanted to do some work with NGOs and the Finnish Refugee Council was one of the organisations I looked into. They run aid projects in several post-conflict countries through Africa and Eastern Europe and I got in touch with them suggesting to go and document one of their project countries. It was the FRC who suggested for me to go to Sierra Leone. The collaboration with organisation worked beautifully. Our understanding in the beginning was that they would help me visit the projects and that in exchange I would give them some of the photos. However, in the end FRC ended up giving me and my traveling companion, fellow photographer Conor O’Leary a driver/translator, who took us around the country for an entire month. We visited several project towns and villages throughout Sierra Leone, during which I did a lot of video and interviews on top of the black and white images, as well as digital still photographs. In the end the FRC paid me for the videos and interviews and I managed to recoup all the money I had spent on the trip. The Finnish Refugee Council is funded mostly by donations and they have used my photographs extensively on their website, magazine, fundraising events etc, and I would like to think that my photographs and other material have been beneficial in funding future FRC projects in Sierra Leone as well as elsewhere, by showing what kind of projects FRC was supporting in Sierra Leone, and by connecting the Finnish audience to the stories of the Sierra Leoneans interviewed, and by showing needs for further aid.  The trip to Sierra Leone was a tremendous experience, my first to anywhere in Africa. My main aim is to be working for the mainstream media, but NGO work did feel very rewarding, and I would love to do that type of work more.

Photography, in a journalistic and documentary sense, can provide a record of reality unlike any other medium. It has an important role to play in recording world history, as well as shedding light on issues that might otherwise remain unknown, misunderstood or distant, and through this photography can also promote change and awareness. Not all photography is like this, nor does it have to be, of course. Photography can also be about providing purely aesthetic pleasure or displaying creative expression.

-You are the creator of an online, all things photojournalism blog. How did you come about creating Photojournalism Links, and why do you think it is important to the photography world?

I was spending loads of time online looking for great photography as I still do and at one point I just thought that it would be great to put all the links online somewhere rather than just bookmark them on my browser, so others could find the same material easier. So it started pretty much as my personal online photography bookmarks archive. During the first year, it was mostly only my closest friends visiting the site, but it has since become quite popular with close to 30,000 views a month. It’s also great that a lot of photographers as well as some agencies have got in touch with me, sometimes just to say ‘hey man, thanks for the blog’, but also to send information on new projects, essays, and interviews. Makes my life easier when I don’t have to go and hunt for the material all the time. Twitter has brought a major change as well. Nowadays I find the majority of the material put on Photojournalism Links through the 200 or so Twitter feeds I follow. I don’t know if my blog is important to the photography world – you said it ! – but it does seem based on all the emails I’ve received that Photojournalism Links is well-read among both emerging and well-established documentary photographers worldwide as well as some agencies. I could have never imagined this when I first started the blog. Working on the blog can be very time-consuming of course, but  I feel like there are now so many people reading it, that I definitely can’t stop, nor would I want to, but I do sometimes feel like taking a day-off, but then I always immediately start feeling guilty! It’s very much a passion and I feel like I’ve managed to create quite a unique archive of photojournalism and documentary photography material in terms of links to interviews, articles, and essays, which is a nice reward in itself.

-What advice would you give to other emerging photographers?

I don’t know if I’m in the position to give any advice, as I still consider myself very much an emerging photographer, but this is what I’ve been telling myself:  “Work on projects you find interesting. If you are not passionate about your work, it shows. And don’t forget, there are stories outside every doorstep. You don’t necessarily have to travel to the other side of the world in search of them.”

One advice, or request perhaps, I can definitely make is that should you have a story that you haven’t been able to get published anywhere: put it on your website, send me the link, and I”ll put  it on Photojournalism Links. You’d be surprised of all the people that might see the work as a result. You can email me at mikko@mikkotakkunen.com.

By Lauren Schneidermann

Michael Itkoff was born in Philadelphia, Pa, and currently lives in New York City. He is a photographer and one of the founding editors of Daylight Magazine.

-Between Two Lakes, is a very personal series.  How is it different working on a personal story(photographing people and places you are very familiar with), than working on a story you have little or no personal connection to?

Often it is easier to leverage an editorial sensibility, to superimpose a cohesive narrative, when shooting a subject with more distance. Personal projects can be more difficult to produce successfully since intimate associations and allusions will not necessarily translate to a viewing audience.

-You express in your statement in Spotlight that like the cabin, you exist between two opposing ways of living, between physical manifestations of exploitation and preservation. Tell me more about this statement and what your images reveal about your life. In other words, why do you feel this way?

Between Two Lakes is a long-term project that has changed over the course of the shooting process. Like the landscape, and myself, it is still a work in progress.
Every day I am faced with choices large and small that collectively define how I am living in the world. There are countless temptations to either accept the status quo of mindless consumption—corn syrup fueled bliss—or to conscientiously oppose it through will, planning and maintaining a critical sensibility.

-Many people believe that photography is a dying field–what do you think about that? And where do you see the future of photography?

To be honest I do not believe anybody actually thinks photography is dying. If anything the conception of photography existing separate from other communicative mediums is becoming outmoded. The number of people making images is indeed growing exponentially higher each day but I, for one,  am excited by the increased employment of the photographic language as part of a universal global dialogue.

-What advice would you give to other emerging photographers?

Making pictures is an incredibly powerful way to make meaning from experience. Photography provides a great excuse to explore your interests, to talk to strangers, to study the world. Photograph what you love, and the rest be damned.

http://www.visuramagazine.com/vm/spotlight-michael-itkoff

http://www.michaelitkoff.com/

By Lauren Schneidermann

Brent Lewin received a degree in psychology from the University of Toronto in Toronto, Canada. Only After traveling through India and South East Asia for two years, did Brent begin to pursue photography. He was recently selected by PDN as one of the 30 emerging photographers in 2010.

-Can you describe your work? and talk a little about the series Want Not Waste Not featured in Visura Spotlight?

My work is documentary in nature with a strong emphasis on the aesthetic. Want Not Waste Not is a series of pictures that I took at various tipping floors and material recovery facilities (MRFs) in the Greater Toronto Area over the course of a couple months. They are simple images with a simple message: We produce an enormous amount of waste that does not disappear when it leaves our front lawns. While shooting these tipping floors and MRFs, I came to view them as symbols of our own malaise and inaction. Just as the tipping floors have been filled with waste, over the past few years we have been inundated with messages about how we are a wasteful society. These messages accumulate in our minds, and they remain there as we idle and come up with piecemeal solutions; they remain there with too little impact on our everyday lives, allowing us to avoid facing up to the sheer scale of our unsustainable levels of consumption.

-In the text accompanying Want Not Waste Not, you mention the impact shooting the series with medium format film had on you. Can you expand on this. How important was it to photograph this series with film rather than with a digital camera? And on other projects, do you usually shoot with film or digitally?

Well my main motivation in shooting this series on film was just to experience shooting with film, something I had never done before. I like to blow prints up quite large and I was really curious about the quality of Mamiya lenses and the limits printing from a 6×7 negative. I think leaving the digital camera at home and just bringing a film camera with slow speed film forced me to slow down and really think about what I was going to shoot, very meditative. Then there was also the cost of film which pushed me further to limit my shooting and just try and find ‘the shot’. Looking back I didn’t really shoot a lot of film at all, most scenes I took only one frame.
For most projects I shoot digital which has many advantages when I’m out shooting ‘in the moment’. I do use film cameras for other projects, I recently completed a series shot on a 35mm stereo camera which I exhibited on toy viewmasters and I have a great 4×5 view camera that I have been using for a portrait series I’m working on, the quality and the detail is just freaky!

-Aside from the Want Not Waste Not series you have been photographing elephants in Thailand, how did you begin to photograph elephants? why? And what is it like working so closely with elephants?

I’ve always had a fascination with elephants. I had been to Thailand before as a tourist and had seen the street elephants in Bangkok. It wasn’t until I got into photography and ended up back in Bangkok that I had the time and reason to explore the issues about elephants in Thailand. After shooting the Urban Jungle series I was hooked on the story, it’s something that just keeps growing. Working closely with the elephants is great, the majority of mahouts I spent time with treated their elephants well and loved them. While photographing the street begging groups in Bangkok I always used to arrive at their camp sites long before the mahouts would wake. I would wander over the elephants and bond. We as humans know a lot about elephants but I think they understand a lot about us too. Some highlights of working with these elephants include joining the mahouts in bathing them which is the time when I truly see the deep relationship between the mahout and elephant, one of love. Riding an elephant through rush hour on the streets of Bangkok was also pretty surreal.

—What has photography—as a form of visual expression— allowed you to do, if anything— that strikes you as an important instrument to acquire even at a later time in your life.

As an artist it’s given me a much needed creative outlet. As a person it’s allowed me to explore the world around me and better understand issues and ultimately myself. It’s also an instrument to raise awareness and mobilize people to take action, something that is just starting to come to fruition with my work with elephants in Thailand.

-What advice would you give to other emerging photographers out there?

Shoot what you love (but find ways to make money as well).

http://www.visuramagazine.com/vm/spotlight-brent-lewin

http://brentlewin.com/