Al Sol
October 7 – 31, 2010
Before I knew it, I was imagining a way to be a photographer. I was imagining a kind of abstract focus that had not yet come into focus. Restlessness and curiosity led me to travel to places far enough away from my immediate world to have an open field. There’s a magnetism that led me to those places, to imagine what I wanted to do with my camera.
I went to villages that reminded me of my grandmothers’ villages, whether I knew it or not, and once there observed the sun coming up, and where people were going. I found people to be with, to live with, to photograph over lengths of time, weeks or years.
This is how I found what I imagined I would do with my camera – travel and find people I could be close to. There’s the shift from my urban-suburban world to an opposite pared-down world, there’s the pieces fitting together, there’s a structure of community and daily life.
There’s a somewhat intuitive series of decisions and still I’m letting things pull me along. I’ m going along with the momentum of people’s lives. Things fall into place. That’s how AL SOL was made.
Then there is fear, anticipation, trial and error, sweat, jitters, getting familiar with unfamiliarity. But these are a few elements of looking for a way to work, live, and make things. I am always sorry when it is time to leave.
You could say the book is a record of a person reconstructing memory from the sum of its parts. Or a person constructing the possibility of a future. AL SOL is the outcome of plans and experiments that started at the moment I first realized I had to have a camera.
Stella Johnson. 2009
I photographed with a Leica M-6 and a Summicron-M 35 mm lens. I used Tri-x film exclusively, for consistency. Negatives were scanned on the Imacon drum scanner and printed on Crane’s archival Museo Silver Rag.
Stella Johnson is a second-generation Greek-American whose ethno-centered childhood engendered her hyphenated life. Her photography has become a means of understanding the profound impact of heritage on one’s identity.
Johnson is informed by her grandparents’ stories about the villages they fled as children. For years she photographed in Mexico, Nicaragua, and Cameroon, recording and living what happened in remote villages: the negotiations and interactions of individuals surviving with little or no resources. So often, she has found, we miss the very things in front of us.
History, art, culture, and identity are issues that Johnson has worked across her career as an artist, educator, and mentor. She prioritizes lifelong connections with the people she’s photographed. Over forty years she has been fiercely and compassionately dedicated to places and people from Mexico, Cameroon, and Greece to her hometown of Boston and the surrounding urban areas of New England.