Gosh, I’ve been abbreviating A Photography blog to “APB” and all this time, I could have been using “APho Blo”! What a wasted opportunity!  We will make up for that now.

Today we have an interview with Erin Nicole Johnson, a photographer I find really thoughtful and funny and interesting. I think you will too. read read read. look look look.

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Give me the 411 on yourself- education, background, image-making philosophy; your work is so wonderfully fill of life I can hardly stand it.

I’ve been in too many and not enough places. I grew up in Niles, Michigan, then moved to southern Illinois, then moved back to Michigan in a suburb of Flint when I was 15. I attended the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD—which I graduated from in 2007) but also went to the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto for a semester. After my exchange was over, I took the overnight greyhound bus down from Canada and moved in with a friend in New York. We shared a room (literally—a room) in Washington Heights for a summer and would split the two stacked mattresses apart every night.

I only lived in New York for about four months, and one month of that I ended up going to the art shows in Europe (The Venice Biennale, Dokumenta, Art Basel, and Sculpture Project) on kind of a fake entry pass, where much of the “travel” portfolio on my website was shot. I returned to Minneapolis to finish my final semester, then worked at MCAD for a year as their Communications Intern, producing a lot of the photography seen their publications.

My work is heavily based on stories, and the main bulk of my photographic portfolio (and a project which I’m actually returning to) is from a series actually called “Short Stories”. It was initially inspired by finding some of my mother’s old journals in high school, and finding some parallels between what she felt and what I had felt in high school. By combining some of the passages from her journals, as well as mine, I started to make up the skeleton of the work. So, the first step for me when it comes to creating is research, research, research. Taking the time to feel inspired by many different sources, taking loads of notes, and drawing lots of sketches.

I’m pretty psyched about your artist statement (which is rarely the case) and also with the quotes you use to accompany your work (esp. that Anaïs Nin)- tell me a little bit about how your words and pictures intersect.

Thanks so much! The words mainly come from the stories I find and the notes I’ll scribble down in the corner of a napkin while I’m in a coffee shop. For me, the photographs and the writing is always intertwined (though my website doesn’t have a very accurate portrayal of this and it’s going to be going through some minor revisions) because they’re both about observations. They fill in the blanks for each other, if I don’t have the words to describe the way a moment feels, or in the way a photograph can never seem to completely convey the way the air smelled on a certain day. I also generally try to produce an artist’s book or a zine to encapsulate whatever I’m working on, so I can always keep the two woven together to some degree.

I like that you have a bit of everything going on in your portfolio- travel, portraits, some personal documentary- have you fallen into this path, is there one you’ll pursue more in the future?

What I have on my website currently is kind of an archive of what I’ve done so far. I’ve experimented a lot to see what I like best, but truthfully they’re all basically “personal work”!

With the project (Short Stories) that I’m picking back up on—the bulk of which is in the “Personal Work 1” portfolio—I’m hoping to refine my work and mostly focus on personal/fine art. Its basis is somewhat “recreating memories,” but I wanted the newer photographs to focus on “creating” memories: the people you see in a grocery store that make you wonder about their life (what they do, what their family is like, what they think about), or something caught out of the corner of your eye: a flash of a person standing on their front lawn, etc.

What type of commercial/editorial projects have you been up to lately? What type of editiorial/commercial projects would you like to be up to?

The most recent project was the 2008 Annual Report for Fraser, a Minnesotan non-profit that offers a myriad of resources for people with autism (www.fraser.org). My photograph “Coney Island” was also published on the cover of the Water~Stone Review #12, “In the Frame” this year. After I finished my internship, I took off for two months in Europe when I was photographing what would later become “Live Like This,” so photography jobs have been fairly quiet since I returned, which is fine. I’ve started a fairly interesting new day job, marketing sustainable insulation for houses (crazy, eh?).

I always love working with non-profits and would love to continue shooting portraiture or still-lives for periodicals. I’ve also always wanted to shoot a look-book for a fashion designer, and I’m hoping to work something out once I can find more designers nearby.

Tell me the story of this picture.

It’s sort of a Pandora’s Box! I try to keep my images to be just quiet, ambiguous, and a little strange enough to not give viewers all the answers but hint that there is something slightly sinister about the scene. Some of the more interesting answers was that he’s either the guy with the drugs, because of the tension in his pocketed hand, or it’s a take on Christ’s resurrection with the Virgin Mary.

What is your favorite picture?

I think it might be “Golden Eagle Motel, Golden Arches” because it’s so ridiculous. Attempted sanctity on a motel sign that’s all but shouting, “Go America!” (not to mention motels are not particularly known for being the holiest of places). And what looms in the distance but the Golden Arches themselves? Rather than the gates of heaven, we get burgers. It’s incredibly macabre, but what are the chances of finding this bizarre scene in real life?

Another image that I wanted to make a quick point to is “Puck Better”. If you look closely, on the left hand side under “Welcome to Metro”, you can see the orange Beer Store sign from across the street reflecting (backwards) in the window.

Why Michigan?

That’s a good question, and this answer might be a bit too honest, but after I came back from Europe, I was basically broke. I wanted to take some time to work on my personal photography in hopes of developing a body of work I could use in pursuit of working with galleries, or apply to graduate school. In truth, I’m not really sure where the photographs will take me, but for now I’m just taking things as they come, hoping that I might run into some interesting opportunities along the way. I’m sure in a year or two I’ll end up taking off to somewhere new again!

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Thanks, Erin!

We will end with four pictures and a quote.

“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.”
— Anaïs Nin