Disappointing experiences and unmet expectations of “happy family” have zigzagged through my life. My mother’s parents didn’t raise her. I don’t know why or what happened to them. When I was 13, she died after a three-year-long illness -- no one told me that was going to happen. Nine months later my father married a widow he’d met seven months earlier. I divorced before reaching forty, necessitating shared custody of two young children and causing an overall upheaval of the assumptions I’d held about my life.
All this eventually led to my fascination with early and mid-twentieth century everyday photographs. Nan Goldin wrote, “The snapshot (is) the form of photography that is most defined by love. People take them out of love, and they take them to remember — people, places, and times. They’re about creating a history by recording a history.” When I collaborate with another’s photo, I tease out a common humanity not confined by time, place or circumstance. I explore our shared human condition to better understand my own.
Recently I ran across these prescient words from Ernesto Pujol given in a grad school critique in 2001: “She is a person in a small city, who is a woman, a mother, a former wife, a partner, who is making art about life…processing the domestic — what feminism was and is at its core. It’s the hardest art to make — to take daily life that is so dismissed, unappreciated, under-appreciated in popular culture, and put it into a new spin. I wish her much success in her production, as sometimes I feel that the future humanity (compelling human qualities) of art making may depend on the success of artists such as her.” It was incredibly validating for me to discover that my work had continued along the trajectory he articulated well over a dozen years ago.
In 2001 during my last semester in grad school, I began accumulating found vernacular photographs — my archive now exceeds 65,000 — primarily snapshots and studio portraits. Initially, I made enlarged archival prints from scanned snapshots manipulated in Photoshop. In 2007, fatigued by hours at the keyboard, I began hand-embroidering quotes into studio portraits. Adding famous persons’ words to vernacular images, I could ventriloquize thoughts my aging, maternal (increasingly opinionated) self wanted to express. Later I added illustrative drawings and collaged/juxtaposed images to my work. Stitching by hand is a laborious, time-consuming process that provides me a satisfying, meditative intimacy with these mechanically-captured moments of unknown people’s lives.
There is a richness in vernacular photos whether or not we know the person, place or time. By asking viewers to look carefully — to react to quotations, decipher symbols and signs, and/or puzzle out juxtapositions — I renew and transform their experience of looking at old photographs. By engaging them with other people’s family photos, I alter the way they see their own. They come to realize, as I did, how universal this form of expression is — and how precious.
“Jane Waggoner Deschner’s photo-collages riff perhaps most clearly on the concept of photographic keepsake. Family snapshots, sewn together
and topped with exuberant embroidered doodles and messages, celebrate the medium’s home-spun beginnings while poignantly pushing us
to look more deeply at the artifacts of our own lives.”
~The Embroidered Image, Robert Mann Gallery, NYC
excerpted from website description of their 2014 summer exhibition
All this eventually led to my fascination with early and mid-twentieth century everyday photographs. Nan Goldin wrote, “The snapshot (is) the form of photography that is most defined by love. People take them out of love, and they take them to remember — people, places, and times. They’re about creating a history by recording a history.” When I collaborate with another’s photo, I tease out a common humanity not confined by time, place or circumstance. I explore our shared human condition to better understand my own.
Recently I ran across these prescient words from Ernesto Pujol given in a grad school critique in 2001: “She is a person in a small city, who is a woman, a mother, a former wife, a partner, who is making art about life…processing the domestic — what feminism was and is at its core. It’s the hardest art to make — to take daily life that is so dismissed, unappreciated, under-appreciated in popular culture, and put it into a new spin. I wish her much success in her production, as sometimes I feel that the future humanity (compelling human qualities) of art making may depend on the success of artists such as her.” It was incredibly validating for me to discover that my work had continued along the trajectory he articulated well over a dozen years ago.
In 2001 during my last semester in grad school, I began accumulating found vernacular photographs — my archive now exceeds 65,000 — primarily snapshots and studio portraits. Initially, I made enlarged archival prints from scanned snapshots manipulated in Photoshop. In 2007, fatigued by hours at the keyboard, I began hand-embroidering quotes into studio portraits. Adding famous persons’ words to vernacular images, I could ventriloquize thoughts my aging, maternal (increasingly opinionated) self wanted to express. Later I added illustrative drawings and collaged/juxtaposed images to my work. Stitching by hand is a laborious, time-consuming process that provides me a satisfying, meditative intimacy with these mechanically-captured moments of unknown people’s lives.
There is a richness in vernacular photos whether or not we know the person, place or time. By asking viewers to look carefully — to react to quotations, decipher symbols and signs, and/or puzzle out juxtapositions — I renew and transform their experience of looking at old photographs. By engaging them with other people’s family photos, I alter the way they see their own. They come to realize, as I did, how universal this form of expression is — and how precious.
“Jane Waggoner Deschner’s photo-collages riff perhaps most clearly on the concept of photographic keepsake. Family snapshots, sewn together
and topped with exuberant embroidered doodles and messages, celebrate the medium’s home-spun beginnings while poignantly pushing us
to look more deeply at the artifacts of our own lives.”
~The Embroidered Image, Robert Mann Gallery, NYC
excerpted from website description of their 2014 summer exhibition
