This is Rumbel Strip Vermont, America Heilman. Today, an interview with photographer Jamie Cope.

Jamie's house is filled with vivid pictures of people, not provocative or shocking, but there's

an intimacy in her portraits as though she's looking into the people she's photographing and they're letting her. I couldn't help wondering how she did it.

What were they talking about? How did she catch them being so much themselves?

Jamie was born in 1921. themselves.

Jamie was born in 1921 and grew up in Hollywood in the 20s and 30s

when films were black and white and when they used natural light

as the main source of illumination. For over 30 years, Cope produced black and white

portraits using natural light and with incredible attention to the subtleties of Shadow. We sat on her couch in Montpelier and talked for the better part of

an afternoon about photography, marriage, eating tacos on Ulvera Street in Los Angeles.

If you want to look at the photographs we talk about in this interview,

they're all on my website, Rumbull Strip Vermont.com.

In this first segment, Jamie talks about how she got started as a photographer.

Welcome.

When we divorced, which we should have done earlier in the his career and on my career of being a

housewife when we divorced I didn't I didn't have anything to do because I was a

housewife a professional housewife that's all I did and give parties to this faculty and you know all that

adversarial problems that you have. So I was in therapy with a fine psychiatrist and he asked me, now what are you

going to do? I say said I don't know. So I began thinking well I always wanted a

degree in college and I knew that I had a sensitivity to art. So I went down to the

Maryland Art Institute, signed up, and took a photography course.

And I don't know why I took a photography course, because I just popped in my head. When I did take a photography

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