TCF Ep. 454 - Stella Johnson

The Candid Frame: Conversations on Photography

Ibarionex R. Perello

Cameras, Art, Photoshop, Visual Arts, Career, Interviews, Photographers, Arts, Photography, Photo, Digital

4.8 • 749 Ratings

🗓️ 11 February 2019

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Stella Johnson is a photographer and educator known for her passionate and honest documentary projects. She received a Core Fulbright Scholar Grant to photograph in Mexico in 2003, and Fulbright Senior Specialist grants to teach in Mexico in 2006 and in Colombia in 2018. The University of Maine Press published her monograph, Al Sol: Photographs from Mexico, Cameroon, and Nicaragua in 2008. Johnson’s photographs have been widely exhibited in the United States and internationally. A dedicated educator, Johnson holds teaching positions at Boston University and Lesley University College of Art and Design. She also teaches workshops in Greece, Cuba, and Mexico. She was a 2013 finalist for the Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship, Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50, and a nominee for the Boston Foundation’s Brother Thomas Fellowship. Johnson’s work has received numerous honors including a New England Foundation for the Arts Cultural Collaborative Artist-in-Residence Grant and Julia Margaret Cameron Award. Johnson holds a BFA from The San Francisco Art Institute and an MS in journalism from Boston University. Her work is held in public collections including The DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, The Haggerty Museum of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Portland Museum of Art, and The Southeast Museum of Photography, among others. Resources: Download the free Candid Frame app for your favorite smart device. Click here to download for . Click here to download Support the work we do at The Candid Frame with contributing to our Patreon effort. You can do this by visiting or visiting the website and clicking on the Patreon button. You can also provide a one-time donation via . You can follow Ibarionex on and .

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Eibody in X, and this is the candid frame.
0:21.3	When it comes to certain types of photography, such as travel or street photography,
0:27.2	people are often used as objects, visual elements that help to complete a composition.
0:34.1	And while that approach can result in stunning and beautiful imagery,
0:38.3	they can often lack any sense of intimacy and humanity.
0:43.6	Now, that's not to say that those kinds of images are incapable of expressing those human qualities.
0:50.6	It just becomes that much more of a challenge to do so. For a photographer and
0:56.7	educator Stella Johnson, her photographs are all about intimacy and relationships. She combines
1:04.9	the compositional skills of a street photographer with the sensitivity and awareness of a documentary photographer
1:12.0	to produce images that leave you feeling as if you are looking at more than just a well-crafted
1:18.9	photograph. Her decades-long work documenting families in Greece in Mexico demonstrate her ability
1:26.3	to express what it means to be human.
1:30.0	A chance encounter that might have resulted in a simple environmental portrait for any other
1:35.6	photographer began decades-long relationships that resulted in an amazing body of work.
1:42.8	Well, the first time I did it was in 1987.
1:47.0	I went to San Bartolo-Koyote, which happens to be 10 kilometers from where I'm sitting right now.
1:53.0	And it was a dirt road, and I went down the dirt road, and I saw this woman making her black pottery,
1:59.0	and I asked her if I could photograph her in very,
2:01.5	very broken Spanish at that point, okay?
2:04.4	And she said, okay, and I had Essex 70 film, and she had five kids.
2:09.7	The youngest was five, and I put the SX70 camera in his hands and showed them how to take
2:14.7	pictures.
	...

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