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ARTIST PROFILE

Photographer Janet Woodcock
Honoring Tradition

Profile by Elissa Lash

I never thought I’d be faced with extinction,” declares Janet Woodcock. It sounds as if she is beginning a dangerous confession, but the statement is accompanied with a modest half smile. “It keeps getting harder to get a hold of what I need. Much of what I use is manufactured abroad.”

Woodcock isn’t trying to procure anything illegal, she’s simply attempting to restock her darkroom. Her photography, both a career and passion, primarily relies on a technique called silver print or gelatin silver print. The process developed in 1871 whereby a suspension of silver salts in gelatin is coated onto a support such as glass, plastic, film, or fiber based paper.

Her approach is traditional, but innovative in its focus on the established labor-intensive darkroom methods and techniques, like silver print. Her hands-on way of working could be seen as old-fashioned in this age of digital photography, but she feels strongly these techniques must not become obsolete. She is glad to see many photography schools moving again toward teaching a darkroom-inclusive curriculum. Janet only uses digital cameras to capture her prints for posting on her website, or online applications to art shows.

“I use film, and print in a darkroom. I work only with medium format cameras, and my negatives are only two and quarter inches square, a little bigger than someone who shoots with a 35mm. I make fiber-based black and white prints, and then tone the prints with hand-mixed toners to push the image, to warm it or enrich the blacks. This way I can shift it in subtle ways.”

On a recent project, her From the Earth (the Secret Life of Vegetables) series, she was using the Polaroid positive technique, which involves the photographer pulling apart the developing packet to expose on one side the Polaroid image and on the other side, what Janet describes with delight as a “smushy mess.” The messy side is utilized by soaking it in sodium sulfite to create a negative. She has heard that flat Coke works as well, but has not tried it yet. “Please don’t try this at home,” she cautions. The effect in the vegetable series contains both silvery ethereal elements, and dark velvet almost sepulchral shadows. “All the undeveloped particles gather around the edge, it’s beautiful … but right in the middle the Polaroid Corporation went belly-up. That was it. Usually a series doesn’t end until I’m emotionally done but in this case …”

She understands the appeal of digital and can appreciate artists who prefer the new technology, but she feels compelled to work more traditionally. “I print only full frame, and I never crop my negatives. I make myself work for the image. I had a teacher in a photojournalism class who wouldn’t let us crop. He said, “Photography is not a spectator sport, if you don’t like your image, move!”

He was tough on his students, but she found this approach exciting. It made sense to her. He compared the camera to a painter’s canvas. “He told us you must always have awareness of all the elements and know everything that’s happening, what’s going on in every corner and all around the edges – and you should know when all the elements coalesce into that moment.” Her teacher told them a story about an old-time newspaperman sent to photograph the World Series with a 35mm camera. These were the days when most used the Speed Graphic cameras with sheet film, which meant fewer images. The newspaperman had not worked with a 35 mm before and he only took five pictures in total. When the darkroom technician developed the film expecting to weed through dozens of negatives, he was shocked to see only five images. Then he realized that these pictures had perfectly captured the five most important moments of the game.

For Janet the lesson was clear. “That revealed the most important thing you need to do – you need to watch and look and be totally connected with that moment.” The lesson has remained with her and became a foundation stone in her artistic vision.

“The negative that I create is not something I’m going to go and chop up later. If it’s not all there then I go back. This man made me become so connected. It’s what I love about traditional photography, the connection to the real world. You can’t make that up. That to me is its power. I’m so convinced that for me this is the way to work, so it was a little scary when it seemed like the papers and films I use weren’t available. There was a time when I honestly thought it was going to die. I was worried.”

Woodcock works in series. She shoots scenes or objects that relate to each other, or tell a story both individually and as a group. It’s an organic process. She describes the process of choosing the next study as “stumbling upon” a new theme. “It’s not an intellectual decision. I don’t declare I’m going to do portraits of farm animals and then set out to do it. The subject is usually something unexpected, something I wasn’t even aware of – but it finds me, and I realize this thing is really amazing, then I ask myself, 'what else is here?'” She compares it to peeling an onion, pulling away layers, allowing for the process to become a little messy if necessary.

Her series of farm animal portraits began with a dog officer and a thirteen-year-old cocker spaniel that had been abandoned. Beth, the officer, was determined to find a home for the dog and brought him back to her home on the late Ann Hopkins’ West Tisbury farm. The winter was approaching, and the elderly pooch was getting chilly, so Beth approached clothing designer Betsy Edge about making a coat for him. Instead Betsy offered Beth the phone number of her dear friend Janet Woodcock as a possible new owner.

Janet couldn’t refuse. She went to the farm to retrieve her new charge and was told to wait for a moment in the goat pen. “I’d never been close to a goat before. They are amazing, so beautiful, so funny. One was untying my shoe, one was going into my pocket. I took pictures. Of course those shots were nothing, but I went back the next day. I had to find out what was going on there.”

Woodcock began by centering her photographs on Hopkins’ farm. “Ann taught me a lot about animals. I had grown up in an urban area. I knew nothing.” She knew a series was brewing, but she wasn’t sure what the focus would be.

“Once I realized – I’m making portraits here – I had to think about what does it mean to make portraits? Portraits are collaborative. The animals need to know what I’m doing. They need to be part of it, so I’m not sneaking around.” Janet set parameters for herself including using only a normal lens for the camera so she had to be physically close to her subjects. She found that her own guidelines defined the project. “Sometimes when you’re working on portraits your subject is having a bad day and doesn’t want to be photographed. You just come back another day.”

What emerged from this collaboration is the Barnyard series, each picture a thoughtful and nuanced study of a living being, as well as a new relationship. She named her canine companion Dude, and took him on shoots all over the Island. He lived to the ripe old age of 18.
The animal portraits were well received, and it was difficult to end the Barnyard series. Janet explains, “I had to make the decision to end. It had been seven years. I needed to see what else is in me.” With the completion of the sociable Barnyard series, Janet felt lost. She’d been watching a cardinal’s nest in her yard, when a nor’easter hit. “I went out to see what had happened, branches had come crashing down and there was this nest, intact, still there, surrounded by the tangle of destruction.” There was something there to explore – a theme of refuge and endurance that seemed to connect beautifully to Woodcock’s home base of Martha’s Vineyard, where she lives in a small house in the woods.

The Vineyard is a key component of Woodcock’s being able to do the work she loves. “It’s not that I’m tied to the Island as a subject, although people do ask me at shows if I have pictures of certain places here. But that’s not what I do.” She nods gently out the café window, which offers a view of Main Street, Vineyard Haven, where two women are wheeling a stroller chatting amiably. “I find this a community that is very supportive of artists, of living a rich, full life that is scaled-down. I don’t feel I’m unusual in what I’m trying to do, ignore technology to focus on craft. Plus I have access to the natural world in a way that is so immediate. I grew up in Detroit, and now I’m sleeping in a screened-in porch. Living here infuses how I see things.”

As a child, growing up in a Detroit suburb, Janet remembers awaiting the arrival of her family’s Life magazine each week. The photo spreads meant exposure to new places and different people. Her voice, as she describes the transporting experience of these pictures, contains both intimacy and reverence.

“I loved pictures. I was fascinated by the family Brownie camera. I didn’t yet see myself as a photographer, I just thought pictures, real pictures were great.”

Her grandmother passed away when Janet was 18, leaving the grandchildren money to help them go to college. One afternoon Janet was walking past a camera shop in downtown Detroit and saw in the window a 4 x 5 Beseler enlarger. “Now I’d never been in a darkroom in my life. I knew nothing about it.” She inhales deeply before she continues, “they also had a Rolleiflex Twin Lens camera – and I just walked in and bought them. I just bought the stuff! It was a huge amount of money then, and I had no idea what to do with any of it.” She erupts in a giggle. “I think I wanted to be Margaret Bourke White. I wanted her life, and I think that’s what I was imagining – this picture of her photographing from the top of a building in New York city, sitting on a gargoyle. She was doing things that women didn’t do. She was daring, she traveled.”

Although Janet did study some photography in college, she didn’t pursue it after school. But she never got rid of her enlarger and her Rolleiflex. She was about to turn 30, and she wondered what she was doing with her life. A friend asked if she could do anything what would it be? Without skipping a beat, Janet answered “I’d be a photographer like Margaret Bourke White… It was that simple. I’d answered my question. I applied to and was accepted into the Art Institute of Boston … and I fell in love with photography all over again.”

The love remains. She describes her current life as “the definition of a fantasy fulfilled.” She considers her biggest challenge to be the unanswered question, “can I continue to make the kind of images I want to make and not succumb to the current technology? I don’t want someone else to make my prints. I don’t want to sit at a computer screen. It would be joyless. I must have joy in my work.”

In pursuit of that joy, Janet is learning wet-plate technique, to make her own emulsions, and figured out how to build a light table for her Relics series about cherished found objects from the past. She is undaunted in the face of increasingly popular technology. She knows her photography must be more tactile. She remembers a favorite image by Duane Michals, of a man and woman sitting on the edge of a bed, on the front the photographer had written: “This photograph is my proof. There was that afternoon, when things were still good between us … It did happen. She did love me. Look see for yourself!”

“That’s how I feel about my photography – if we let go of these techniques, what happens to the proof? This is the proof of what is happening. I want my camera to be with that Vineyard sunrise. Proof! It’s an old fashioned way of thinking about life, but I can’t give it up.”

For more information about Janet and her work visit: www.janetwoodcock.com.