Welcome to the real photo show and the continuation of my recordings with the wonderful Chico attendees at the 2024 Chico Review. This will probably be the last episode before the deadline passes to apply for the 2025 Chico review, so be sure to check that out@chicoreview.com the keynote speakers this year will be Christopher Anderson, Dana Lixenberg, Matthew Genentempo, Sally Mann, Mark Power, Sage Sohir, Sergio Purtel, and Carla Williams. So not a bad lineup for the 2025 Chica Review. Just visit chicareview.com and click on Apply now. But today we are here to highlight some of the attendees from the 2024 Chico Review. And today we have Kent Andreasen, Andrew McLees, Zilla Bose and Jack McLean. And I have linked to their websites and their Instagrams if they have one in the show notes. So be sure to check those out before, during or after you listen to each of our conversations. All right everyone, thank you for listening. Enjoy this show with the 2024 Chico Review attendees and we will talk soon.
My name is Kent Andreasen, I'm from Cape Town, South Africa and my work, it explores a lot of themes but at the moment I'm working solely on memory and sort of the failings of memory.
So I, I heard you had quite the journey getting here to take six.
Hours, two days in Bozeman. Oh, luggage left at.
Back in Dallas, no shoes.
I was walking around in my slip ons and Bozeman in the.
Wow. Wow. You, you've earned being here.
I'd like to think so. But yeah, I'm very happy to be here.
So yeah, let's, let's get into it. The work you brought you, is that a self bound book you have here?
Yeah, so it's a book dummy. I mean admittedly probably a little bit more polished than it should be for something like this, but yeah, it's something that I've been working on for the last five years. It's called Memory bank and yeah, it explores I think themes around homesickness, my family memories and collective memory because we, we hold on to our memories but you start realizing that comes from your parents.
So homesickness from where? Meaning I work as a commercial photographer.
To fund a lot of the sort of personal work that I want to do. So I'm away from home a lot and there's this constant pull to be elsewhere, so Europe and the United States.
So who and what is in Cape Town?
Cape Town's my family's still there, my two brothers. My brother lives in Hong Kong, and my younger brother lives in London. But my parents are still there. Born and raised, Cape Town, and my partner's still there. So there's very much. Home is always going to be Cape Town and South Africa. But the opportunities are elsewhere at this moment in terms of the commercial side of things and even the art sphere. So it's something that I'm kind of dealing with in my work and just in general life.
And how do you deal with it in work? Like, you know, memory is a suggestive thing. Right. In photography. Right. And so how do you get to that idea of memory?
I mean, it's something that I really struggle with. I mean, I don't really have a very good memory, so it's something that I deal with on a daily basis, but I think it's just exploring for me, this project was. It was interesting because it gives you a talking point to discuss things with your family that you might have not discussed. So things like. I mean, it's a very sort of dark subject matter, but my uncle took his life just before I was born. And one of the images were. The first image in the book is. Is a picture of a gun that for a long time I thought was the gun that my uncle took his life with. But then I actually sat down and had a proper adult conversation with my dad about something like suicide. And he said, no, that's. That's something you've conjured up as a young boy. It's actually just a gun that I've inherited from my. From my grandfather.
So it kind of represents it in two ways then, right? Yeah, it represents what you thought was, you know, this part of. This dark part of your family's history. Yeah, but at the same time, you did it because, you know, your young mind didn't really, you know, was trying to make sense of things. So that's really. It's an interesting metaphor and the idea of a piece that, you know, that represents those two things. Was the discussion of your uncle sort of taboo in the family or.
Yeah, I think. I think the subject of suicide is largely taboo. A lot of. I mean, I think it's also because people are nervous of and scared of bringing up people's emotions and I mean.
Specifically to your family was, did you discuss your uncle? I mean, how early. Clearly you knew about it fairly early on, Right?
Yeah, something I just never discussed. I was too scared to, especially my cousins, to upset them and kind of bring up something that was so evidently hurting them in their daily lives.
Yeah.
It's so apparent that it's affected them quite dearly in terms of how they interact with the world.
But so this must be one small piece of this project in that when you talk about homesickness, you're talking about your connection to home. Both the good and the bad. Right. The happy and the sad. It's the whole life that there's the homesickness for. Right, yeah. And the. I've always connected homesickness and nostalgia. Right. Nostalgia, I think, means like ache and pain for home. And so when I talk to my students about nostalgia, I try to steer them away from the idea that this is like this happy thing, like with this dreamy, romantic idea of a time and place. And it's not, it's not that it's true pain.
Yeah. It's something that, I mean, that I find myself dwelling on. And I think times, the ultimate curator of, like you say, it often paints this idyllic picture. But when you actually think of certain times and what you actually were going through, it's not the case. And I think this work that I've been making is. It feels like detective work, like you say. Like I speak about my uncle's suicide, but on the other hand, there are other situations that I thought were dreams or falsified and turned out to be true. So it's a double edged sword. So, yeah, it was really interesting in that regard.
Right. Is there other imagery that points to specific moments in time, moments in your life that's part of this project?
Yeah. So I have a very vivid memory of me being a youngster and I'm looking up at my father. I'm at the bottom of a pool and I can see the motion of the water and I can see him dressed in his best suit and he's looking down at me and sort of like. I wouldn't say horror, but just like, what are you doing down there? And this has turned out to be something that I used to do as a young kid. I would unknowingly just jump in the pool and he'd hear a splash and he'd be just like, just about to go to work and have to run and jump in fully clothed and pull me out of the pool. And these are things that I've then had to sit down and discuss with them and like, do you remember this? Is this something that I've also come up with or dreamt about? So as I say, it's got this like inverse, which is.
Which is really great. It also sounds like you're. You're trying to deal with what Might be romantic memory and fact and fiction. And do you value one thing over another meaning? Like is it all equally important or is it really important to sort of find the factual truthfulness of everything?
No, I'm not holding on to truth at all. I don't think any of the images about truth. I think it's about the conversation points pertaining to what we hold on to as our memories. So I think that's more important to me.
Right.
And it's kind of a talking point. I like talking about the work in this, in this context because it's like I want people to think about their own memories and. Cause some of them use it as gospel almost.
That was gonna be my next question. Is something that personal where you're actually dealing with your own experience of memory or even remembering a dream that has felt like now feels like reality. Right. It's become part of the lore of your life. And then how does that translate to then other people? And so you just said it like you want them to see it and think, oh yeah, I always thought this was true and now I find out this was my dream. Right?
Yeah, for sure. And I mean, the work is quite abstract in that regard. So it's really forcing people to engage with the work as like a stream of consciousness. And really then like with our memories, you have to kind of go back and figure it out, whether there's basis to it or not.
Going back to the idea of nostalgia as being both the good and the pain. Right. So is the literalization of experience through dream, not completely understanding something at a certain age, not understanding a certain interaction, having that kind of compound over time, there could be also a lot of trauma and tragedy in that as well. Right, for sure.
And I mean, we all have that. We get fed from a young age, how we behaved at a certain time, which is kind of unfair in many.
Regards because we're holding ourselves and others to standards that are unreachable or maybe not fair. Right, yeah.
As a four year old, I don't have a fully formulated memory. And you get told you have these character traits. It's like, well, I have to believe you now because I don't have any reference points.
That's right, yeah. Yeah. And that's really interesting. Really interesting. How have your reviews been?
They've been great. I mean, very, very constructive. It's very interesting to see the different taste points of each reviewer, which is nice. So I'm kind of getting all the cards on the table and seeing how they, at the end of the week, how they kind of set out and then kind of taking from that and hopefully because the book needs a little bit of sort of sequencing and massaging, as it were. So it's been very valuable.
Well, this is fantastic. I hope you've caught up on rest and your time zones and everything else.
I'm back to normal, which is great.
Excellent. Nice. Well, really nice to meet you. Thank you.
Thanks very much. Appreciate it.
All right, bye.
My name is Andrew McLees. I am from Portland, Maine. I make work about life and childhood and re. Experiencing bits of your life and finding alternative pathways forward or reprocessing those experiences of childhood.
Hi, Andrew. Welcome. So tell me about the work that you brought.
So I actually brought two bodies of work here to show to the reviewers at Chico. I brought one called Avalanche, which is very much a depiction or a, well, figurative depiction of a dark and unhappy childhood. Like, a lot of neglect in it. Very spare, odd images of bread in bags. And that doesn't sound weird, but when you hang two up with. It gets weird.
F. Sort of like details of things. Yeah, Odd details, but details that might refer to domesticity.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
It's almost a response to the pleasures and comforts of domestic terror.
Pleasures and terrors of P.L. de Corsha Museum of Modern Art. Yep, yep. Yeah, yeah. And so that work is very personal. It has come from personal experience.
Yeah, of course. I. I mean, again, it's the personal specific of, like, I just tried to mine into my own sort of childhood as much as possible, and hopefully other people can relate or.
Well, that's. That's the trick. Right. Is how you make work that is relevant to you because it's personal.
Right.
And. And still opens up that. The ability for others to either identify or understand. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. And how's that been going with reviews and all?
It's been going over really well.
Yeah.
Actually, that's great. Been very happy to show it.
And. And how specific do you have to be about your personal details in order to talk about the work or look at the work.
Not that much. Because once you say, like, sad childhood, I would stay up all night in a dark room or I'd never talk to anybody. People get that. You don't have to go into the exact specifics of this one time.
No, I mean in terms of cause and reaction. You know what I mean? And don't answer this. What I'm saying is, is this like a domestic abuse situation? Is this like a personal psychological situation? Is this mental health? Is this.
No, no. I tend to Be pretty straightforward with that and just be like, no, it's more mental health. It's not like, again, it's like. I call it a generically crappy childhood of like.
Well, it's more universal that way.
Yeah, but that's what I mean. It's like, yeah, it's like, I didn't get the shit kicked out of me, but, like, it was still not great.
Right. And is there resolution in the work?
I believe so. But honestly, that's where the other body of work that I brought comes in.
Let's talk about it.
Yeah, that's tentatively called no Time Wasted. I just talked to Brian Skutma. He's maybe not so fond of the title no Time Wasted. So it's probably going to get changed.
So one of the things I should let listeners know when I'm doing this, you're all coming here with your head spinning sometimes and you've just had a review and someone just told you something. And. Yeah, sometimes I feel like maybe it's not even fair to me to say how the reviews are going. Cause you're still processing. Right?
No, but I mean, also, I've been in grad school for the last 18 months. So to me, this is like kind of an average week.
Okay, good.
Not an average week, but, like, I've done enough crits now that it's like, no, no, this is what we're gonna.
Hopefully it's a little better than this.
This is business as usual. Yeah, for sure.
But tell me about the second body work.
Second body work is much more. It's uplifting. It's the sister book to Avalanche. It's about going out into the outdoors and, like, having, like, a jo. Joyous childhood and like, those long summer hours and light and.
Is it literally like the good part of your childhood, or are you making too big metaphors?
Childhood that I would have liked.
It's what you would have liked.
Yeah, it's like idealized childhood.
That's really interesting. Why are they separate?
The work that I make and the mode that it is made in doesn't sit with each other.
Explain that.
Yeah, I mean, like, again, Avalanche is high contrast flash, like pushed. I mean, it was shot on 4, 5, so it's not like grainy, grainy, but, like, it's got some grit to it.
Right, right. Is a reference to discomfort and. Yeah, exactly.
And no Time Wasted. It's soft pastoral. Yeah, no, it totally is. It would be nice to release them in a box set or something like that. But, yeah, they're a different thing.
Well, just. Just the fact that they are so interestingly related, like fact and fantasy and reality and idealism. Totally. That's really interesting. Yeah. Y. Well, thank you. Thank you for sharing that.
Definitely.
Yeah. All right, bye, everyone.
Cool. Hi, my name is Zilla Bose. I'm from Wales in the uk and I'm an artist and filmmaker.
Oh, nice. Well, welcome, Zyla.
Hi.
Yeah, yeah. So tell me about the work you're showing here today.
So I've brought two projects that are really possibly one project. So I have been working in an area of mid Wales where there's a community of people who are farming in the uplands in the mountains, and I've been based in that area for about three years, maybe a bit longer on and off. And my work looks at the space which is sort of changing due to issues to do with the climate crisis. So there are going to be new management of the uplands and changes such as planting more trees or changing the type of grazing. So the farmers are mainly hill farmers and they will be potentially in the future, fewer sheep on the hills and more like cattle and just fewer animals in general and more plants. So my project looks at both the space and the projects look at the space and look at the community of people whose practices are threatened.
And is it this grazing of sheep and cattle and all that? Is that part of the destruction?
It could. It's argued that it is, but also I think just agriculture is a way of life in Wales, and so it's not just looking at. And there are big changes across all of agriculture coming now in the next. They've just come, and there are protests now in the uk. So my project doesn't really look at that directly. It more looks at kind of the space. So one of the projects is in moonlight, and I'm trying to look at the difference, the transition, I guess, between nature and people and trying to examine that more slowly and try and kind of see it more differently. Yeah. And then the other part of the project looks at the working practices of the community of people who still use. Some of them, still use horses in the hill.
So this is an agricultural community. It's. It's old, it's traditional and historic. And how is that community responding?
Well, I really only got involved with. Originally, I was just photographing and writing about the area and I was just more interested in moonlight and darkness.
You actually said you've only been there three years. Did you go up to do this work?
Yes, I went up as an artist in residence and I stayed. So originally I Was there just for a month, and then I ended up staying.
But did this idea about climate change and the agrarian communities, was that why you went to do the residency, or is that what you discovered while you were at the residency?
I went to do the residency to look at darkness. I'd spent a lot of time, like, investigating my inner darkness and writing. I'm also a writer, so I was writing about that mainly in poetry. And I was writing about it. It felt very solipsistic. And so I was like, what?
Endlessly writing by yourself felt solipsistic.
I know. So I thought, oh, I've got to do something. El Tired of myself, I can't cope anymore. And I was living in a rural area. I was living up a mountain in a much more mountainous area, actually. And I saw this. It was quite a prestigious residency and I applied for it and I went along. And my idea was because it's an international dark sky park, so there's no light pollution. My idea was to kind of work with that, to take photographs, maybe take photographs, but actually more interview people who were in darkness, to explore darkness and how actually in the dark is not really dark. So that's what my writing was about, was about how there's light. Light in darkness. And, you know.
No, it's an interesting idea. It's like there's visual obscurity, but doesn't mean all. Everything is obscured. Right.
I think that's it. Or that you can find something different. And that led to me. And so. But I was encouraged by the people who run the residency, who are these very compassionate artists. And it was very rare to kind of like take photographs, which. And I'm a filmmaker by training and I. I don't ever use photography as kind of referencing for my work. So I then went to do the. I then went to do that and actually it just took a very long. It took a process and ended up working with Moonlight. But at the same time, the community of people there, because I was sort of employed by their employers in a way. I mean, not their employers, but their tenant farmers.
Oh.
So the land is managed by an estate, and that estate were sort of part of the program. They were one of the organizations running the program. The other organizations were the Arts Council.
But it sounds like that the idea of the darkness has worked your way into this other idea. Right.
And so the people then encouraged me to photograph them. They saw that I had this. I think they thought my camera was quite fancy. I mean, it wasn't, but it maybe looked it. And so they encouraged me to photograph them. And I think because I was like. They brought me into their community. I attended some community events and I got to know people. I worked, you know, I wanted to get to know people. And so they invited me to hang out with them in a way or to photograph things. And that just became. I just became part of the community very quickly because that's how they're like that, what they're like there. If you move into that community, which is, you know, very small, but it's also cut off. And, like, I didn't have. I had a generator, but I had no electricity, and I had, you know, things like that. You know, I didn't have a mobile phone signal, Internet. So, you know, in a way, you kind of rely on the people around you. So they brought me in, and I think that was a. It was really incredible. So I started photographing them in moonlight as well as the kind of nature that I was photographing. And then in the day, I would photograph the sheep gatherings where they bring the sheep down off the mountain. So one of my projects is looking at the relationship between nature and people and moonlight. And then the other one is. Is photographing the sheep gatherings on horseback.
Yeah. Do you consider it a kind of activist project or more of a documentary? This is how I see it, how I observe it, and how I see a connection between the people, the land. And then we'll get to the idea of the darkness.
Yeah, I think it's. I think of it all as being art. So aspects of it are documentary, aspects of it are political in as much as I'm trying to look at how to hold the pain of loss through the importance of climate change, but also with a huge amount of respect for my friends in the community.
When you say loss, though, are you talking about a loss of a way of life?
Yeah, future loss of a way of life and community. And, you know, people who farm in that area, but also other areas, but specifically with the very kind of, like, old skills that they have for herding sheep on hills there, they've learned from their families. And it's gone back 600 years in places, in families, that's a very deep loss. That's one that's impossible for those of us who haven't had that to understand. I think my. Some of my family, I think, in the past were farmers. It's difficult to.
You're not sure?
Well, it's difficult to know exactly which strands, but they don't farm anymore, and I think there's a loss of land in that it's felt in an intergenerational pain.
This might sound a little flip, but it's not. If you dig far enough back on all of us, we're going to have farmers and agricultural history in our lives.
All of us and many different countries.
Yeah, yeah. But I'd like to sort of pivot to then how portraiture and landscape and all that is changed by combining with this idea of darkness.
Well, it's interesting. So I think what I ended up realizing was that I wanted to create in the images in moonlight. I wanted to create what I saw with my eyes on an image. And when you don't see when there's light or no light at night, when there's moonlight or no moonlight, you can see that, I think is not something we understand because all our ancestors actually.
Would have, but we don't in terms of, you know, the character of the people, the character of the place. Often at night, low light first. Oh, is this color black and white?
So the moonlight project is color. And then the more documentary, potentially project of the sheep gatherings is black and white panoramic or black and white.
So. Which is interesting because what happens in that moonlight is the colors start to disappear. Things become more silvery. Also, there's a reversal of sort of light and dark. Right. The land might be brighter, the sky might be darker, depending on the situation. And then you're doing the sheep and landscape in black, black and white. So you're. There's almost a marrying of daylight and nighttime through the use of color and no color. Right.
It's true. I mean, I think one of the things that is surprising when you see some of the images is they look bright or brighter than we think moonlight is.
Right.
But if you spend seven hours in moonlight or if you sit. You know, I used to work in moonlight. I used to try and write. I've written poetry for this project in moonlight and people. It's hard for me to explain that actually it is really bright up there in full moon, you can see miles plenty.
Right.
But it's hard. But. Yeah, but I think some of the images could probably. I could edit them a little bit darker and I could create a sort of sense of transition. So it's not all one brightness. And I think that's what I've learned from here is like thinking about creating an imprint, making a book. You can have more narrative. And so sort of it's helpful to think about. Think about moonlight as not being one constant, like, big shining thing, as having kind of gradation.
It's like, thinking about daylight is one thing. It's not. Right, right. No, that's really interesting.
So that's helped. That's helped. And that's what I've learned, sort of. I haven't had all my reviews, but what I've learned from people so far. And, you know, and also just people's reactions, like, I don't need to know. This is moonlight, people. Oh, interesting. Some people have said, well, it just looks different. And in Wales I've been in, some of the work has been shown, some of it's won a couple of, like, British awards. And some of the work was acquired by our national museum. And so I've had do a few, not a lot of interviews. And people often ask me what it is about moonlight that I think is interesting and why have I chosen moonlight? That's a big question. And actually, I think it's because you see differently in moonlight. And you see, I always use the word partial. So moonlight seems to light some things and not others. Like what you were saying about, you know, the colors being reflected and then.
The light and dark being.
Yeah. And the sky, for example, being darker than the landscape, which is really true. And actually, I think. But also if you're in a forest or you're under a cover, a canopy of trees, the things that you see in daylight might not necessarily appear bright in moonlight. And that's so fascinating. And to photograph that, even if you were looking at the photographs and you didn't know that they were in moonlight, they would. Something would seem different or uncanny or off. That's a very interesting feeling to give an image.
There's a little surrealism involved.
So I guess for me, I'm like, when people have asked me, well, what are you trying to do with this work? And I think in the end, it's a feeling that I'm trying to create. And that's not something that's easy to explain. I'm really bad at talking about that.
Well, that's part of being here, and that's great. That's a good place to end on. Thank you very much.
That's great. Thanks so much for talking to me.
Yeah. And good luck with the rest of the week.
Thank you.
All right, bye.
Bye.
Hi, my name is Jack McLean. I am a veteran photographer based in Sydney, Australia, and my practice includes just about anything, but I specialize in historical photographic processes. Tintype and calotype printing and salt printing, albumin printing, that sort of stuff.
That sounds fantastic. So what did you bring to Chico this week?
Well, last year I Did an exhibition called Stories of the Dogs. I sat down with about 52 veterans of the Vietnam War and we would have conversations. I avoided the word interview. As a veteran, you people say, what was combat like? Or what was this experience like? And you learn very quickly what the safe stories are and you repeat those safe stories to people who just don't have the context and you repeat those for years, decades perhaps. And I wanted to give these veterans a space to talk about anything they wanted to talk about. And I would record those conversations. At the end of that time, when they were through talking, we would go and make their wet plate portrait. And that was done in collaboration with the ANZAC Memorial in Sydney. And we exhibited that for about six months. Just came down the end of January. And so I feel like what we published is the catalog for that is a good rough draft for book publication. I feel like there's a real. It has, the work has a lot of potential for that. So that's the body of work that I brought here.
What brought you or what connected you to this topic?
Yeah, I started, I was finishing. I have really good timing. I started my Master's of photography coinciding with the onset of the pandemic. So I had moved to Melbourne to start the Masters of Photography program there. I found a place to live. Our classes met once and then I was in this one bedroom apartment for like the better part of two years. And I really didn't expect my own experience as a veteran to kind of bleed in there. And for a variety of reasons, a bunch of my work towards the end for my major project was veteran centric. And I moved back up to Sydney and I had this idea for the process that I use, but I met with this one retired general and he's like, well, it's kind of an interesting idea, but why don't you focus it down a little bit, focus on a particular group of veterans. And that was really helpful. And that's when I made. I had contacts at the ANZAC Memorial and we started talking about what might be possible.
Right, the veterans that you're talking to, are we talking about Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam and, oh, so much older.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So these are, these are people in their 70s to 80s and they're really at a legacy moment they're thinking about. And I think for some of them, I want to be very clear, it was an absolute privilege to listen to these people and the stuff they'd share was just incredible. And I think for some of them it was just about having no expectations about where that conversation was going to go and that they were in charge of it. That gave them the freedom to discuss some of it. And I think, you know, there's a huge difference between, like, when you're a combat veteran, at least that stuff never leaves you. And, you know, it's not like you obsess about it every day, but you think about it probably more days than not, but you don't verbalize it. And for a lot of these people to verbalize that experience, I think a lot of that ended up on the plates at the end of the day. I hope it did.
Yeah. You know, here in the States, there was always the perception that Vietnam vets never talked about it. It wasn't until maybe Iraq that it became more acceptable to share and talk about it. Did you have that experience as well?
Yeah, the Vietnam veterans in Australia were treated much the same way. And then in 1985, they had this big kind of welcome home parade as part of Anzac Day, and that was sort of the leak in the dike. And other things have kind of trickled through since then, but I think a lot of them, you know, they're used to telling. One of the things I wanted to do because of the age of these people, and we're losing these stories every day. Right. The history with a capital H has been done. It's been done really well. But I wanted the human anecdotal history. That's where I feel like we have a lot to lose as a culture and as a society, and I wanted to get to that.
Yeah. Especially with. With the age. Now, are the stories presented as text with the photos, or do you like. If it was in a gallery, would you play the stories and have headphones and.
Well, my original conception for it was, what I did was with the recordings, I would make transcripts, and I wanted to. My original vision for exhibition was the plate on the wall and kind of like a sound bite, you know, something that they had told me about their experience. And really, that's the other thing about the catalog. We didn't have space for all the text and the things. So it was pictures on the wall and who these people were and so on. The catalog was that. And I think there's a number of artists, Duane Michaels, people like that. I really saw their words and that text as part of the work, not separate from words. Plus text makes the. The artwork.
It's not a caption.
Yeah, right, right, exactly.
Yeah, yeah. How have the reviews been?
Look, I've had a great time. Like, it's a. Again, if you want to know if somebody was asking me, how do I prepare for this?
Yeah.
Just be ready to be a sponge in front of a fire hose. You know, it's just going to be a lot of information.
Sure, sure, sure.
And that takes energy, too.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I know it. And there's got to be recovery time.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But that's great. Well, thank you very much. Thanks for sharing this.
Thank you. Michael.
Real photo show is produced by me, Michael Chovendalton, music by Mateo Chovendalton and Jim Raimundo. If you like the show, please rate and review with all the stars on your listening platform.