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Photography \ Master`s Showcase \ Previous Exhibits \ Andrew Eccles

Jerry Avenaim

Previous Exhibits

Norman Jean Roy

David Hume Kennerly

Julie Dennis Brothers

Is there one point in time when you said to yourself: "Hey, something really, really important happened to me, something that changed my life photographically, now I am ready to take the next step, now I am going to move ahead"?
There was a trigger and it was perhaps in many ways a sad one. I think it was fundamental in changing the direction of my career. It was when my father passed away in 1989. I was very sad, very confused, and did
not know exactly how to handle it.

There had just been an oil spill in Valdez, Alaska, and for various reasons I found some parallels in my father’s life and in the situation in Valdez. There were common things about the two experiences for me.

One of the things that struck me about Valdez was watching on the news, these clean up crews literally sitting on beaches wiping rocks off with these clean cloths and putting rocks, one-by-one in into clean piles. It just seemed like such an insurmountable amount of work. So much of the coast line had been spoiled, and I thought: How do they begin to put this back together?

There was something that I experienced when my father died which had been so painful, and so difficult, that I did not know how I was going to put the pieces of my life back together and go on with things, and I somehow found a parallel experience between these two different events.

I was completely compelled to go to Alaska. It literally just came to me while I was lining up for a movie in New York. I just looked at the person I was with and said I have to go. They asked where I was going and I said Alaska.

The next day I was looking through Atlas’ and reserving plane tickets. And I went. I went by myself, and I took my camera and worked very hard at getting access to the parts of coast line that were spoiled. I felt that I had to photograph these people that were putting this situation back together, and that somehow
by seeing them do this it would help. It would be therapeutic.

And it was. Psychologically it gave me a lot of strength. And photographically, it was the first subject I had taken on for a reason, other than having been assigned to take a picture. It was something that I choose to do, something close to my heart, something that meant a lot to me, and also something where my photographs
might help or make a difference to other people as well.

For me this was definitely a turning point in the way I thought about taking photographs.
Even in my college days, I always knew that I wanted to take pictures that would somehow have an impact on people, somehow influence them, somehow make them feel something, and this was the first time I had actually been able to do that.

Once they were published I began to get offers to do similar types of stories in other parts of the country. That is the work that I am proudest of and that is the kind of work I aspire to do down the road when I feel that I have gained enough financial security and am able to pull away from my commercial work schedule.

What is the most interesting or stimulating project you’ve undertaken?
The one that turned me on the most was when Art and Antiques Magazine asked me to go into the deep south to photograph what they call Outsider Artists, which we also call Folk Artists.

Outsider Artists are essentially creative people who are self-taught. The project was to send me throughout the deep south to photograph 12 or 13 of these artists who were being exploited by certain galleries and gallery owners mainly in the Northeast, New York and Boston.

The process that was happening at the time, and we are talking about ’92, is the gallery owners were getting hip to the fact that the work of some of these Outsider Artists was really catching on, so they were going down to where these people lived to buy their work directly.

Now, I have to explain, we are talking about incredibly prolific, very arty people. These are people that weren’t creating for any other reason but to create, they could not help themselves. They would get up in the morning and paint, or they would sculpt. So a lot of them had houses filled with work; stacked up against the walls. One of the artists had about two acres of property where every tree on the property had sculpture hanging from it. It was all over his fences, everywhere.

Some gallery owners would go down and offer these artists virtually nothing. Like: I’ll give you $350 to take everything you have in your house; essentially raping the artistic environment; filling up trucks and bringing it up here and then marking it up by two to three zeros; certain pieces going for as much as $25,000, and the artists only receiving a miniscule part of the sale.

Our story was to go down and identify these artists, celebrate them and their work, show our collectors and people who would read a magazine like Art and Antiques: These are the real people, the real artists, look at their faces, look at their hands, look at what they are doing. And, now, look at the way they live.

None of us could imagine living the way some of these people live. Tiny houses, maybe 200 or 300 square feet, with a bed and nothing else. No heat. No running water. These are people whose paintings were sometimes selling at galleries for thousands and thousands of dollars.

It was a fascinating story for me because I adored these people. To see the creative process in its purest form. These people do not care about being famous, they didn’t care about galleries, they just wanted to be paid fairly. But they needed to be educated about the whole economic process, so that’s what we were there doing.

It was also an incredibly rewarding project because it did lead to a certain amount of change. The galleries could not get away with it anymore, the public became hip to the fact that they were paying a lot of money for art where the artists were hardly being compensated at all.

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