Reticent Revelations

THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF JOHANNA WOLFE

By Tom Stoelker

The innocence and vulnerability in the young girl’s face are palpable. Fifteen-year-old Erin is eating a pomegranate that rests in her lap. Acne dapples her thin, pale nose. Dark blond hair falls about her bare hunched shoulders. Late afternoon light filters through the lush Floridian foliage, but none falls on her. Soft cool light embraces her face. Behind, a sprinkling of Christmas lights suggests incongruous festivity. We are above, looking down. She is below, dainty, delicate and sweet. She eats the seeds, her fingers stained crimson. The fruit invites. Is there a knife?

Three tiers of overstuffed grey velour cushions cascade down the sofa’s back. It’s big. It’s dirty. It’s ugly. The sofa is surrounded by tall grass and sparkling water. At the horizon, flat wetlands meet tropical brush. One third of the sofa is out of crop. Overhead, the Everglade’s noonday sun casts unforgiving shadows and flattens the already drab color.

These two images represent the dichotomy found in the work of photographer Johanna Wolfe. For several years Wolfe has photographed a variety of urban landscapes devoid of people. Only in the last two years has she begun to substantially shift to portraits, mostly of her young brothers and sisters living in Miami. Through the photographs of the children glimpses of the artist emerge which are not seen in the landscapes.

Wolfe likes being behind her camera, not in front of it. Her personal strength is obvious to anyone who meets her. Yet her while her photography has backbone, finding the source from which it springs is a complicated matter. She is not as interested in the limelight as she is in the art that might get her there. However, she has chosen a trade where egos and publicity often matter as much as the art. This makes Wolfe not just an anomaly in her field, but perhaps an anomaly of her generation. Wolfe does not have a Facebook account. She has no Web site. She shoots film.

Born in Miami to a surgeon father and police detective mother, Wolfe’s parents both came to the marriage with children of their own. Her mom had one son and her dad a son and daughter. After Johanna came her sister Olivia. The marriage lasted until Wolfe was about five. Her dad remarried and had six children with his current wife, bringing Wolfe’s brood of siblings to a total of ten.

Family and friends described a certain quiet and steady awareness in her early years. Her mother, however, remembered a more telling detail: a comment her young daughter made which all these years later still intrigues her.

“She was three and a half or four,” recalled Jody Wolfe. “She just looked at me and said, ‘You know mommy when I grow up I’ll push you in a swing and when you get to be my age I’ll drive you in a car.’ For her, time and space were interchangeable.”

Wolfe’s life growing up in Miami could be described as comfortable, if only for the private schools she attended. In her sophomore year at Ransom Everglades School she took her first black and white photography class. She developed her own film. She left Miami to major in art history at Columbia University.

During her senior year she took a part time job assisting Joe Holtzman, editor in chief and art director of Nest Magazine. Wolfe learned a lot from Holtzman. Though now defunct, the publication is still regarded as one of best interior design magazines ever published, a hybrid of art and commerce with photographers pulled from both the editorial world and the Chelsea gallery scene.

After graduating in 2002, Wolfe returned home to Miami to work at the film festival for a couple of seasons and eventually moved into television production. Within a few years, she became disillusioned with the commercial aspects and desired to do “something a bit more honest.” She applied to several schools but was only serious about Columbia. The reason was Thomas Roma, director of the photography program.

“She has dozens, literally dozens, of voices in her ears right now,” Roma said of Wolfe’s graduate critiques, and while he may leave her alone to do her work, his voice is the one she hears the most.

“There’s a rigor to the way I teach photography and I’m pretty well known for it,” said Roma. “I insist they approach a photograph as if it’s never been seen before. In order to edit your own work you have to put yourself in the mind of the viewer.”

To that end, Roma’s philosophy has succeeded marvelously. There is no need to explain anything to the viewer about Wolfe’s work; it’s all in the photograph.

***

A note on the wall reads “Mom cleaning guns in garden.” Rimbaud, Neruda and Lorca sit on a bookshelf. A series of 4 x 5 photos is pasted backwards on the wall; each photo reveals a date-stamp on the back. A small red futon hunkers in the corner. Incandescent light bounces off the walls, giving the room a warm glow. Johanna Wolfe wanders back from the darkroom into her studio, white wires dangling from her ears. The sound of children wafts in through an open window. There is no sign of Wolfe’s medium format camera. She shoots on a Mamiya 7. Wolfe is tall, with long, light brown hair, fair skin and hazel eyes, or are they blue; it’s hard to say as their color is deflected behind a pair of smart rectangular glasses. She is twenty-nine years old and beautiful, though she doesn’t flaunt it. It is difficult to imagine her in a dress and heels.

“She’s a purist,” says her father, Tony Wolfe. “She’s working with film.”

“I don’t think I am a purist,” says Wolfe, unaware of her father’s comment. “It’s a connection to the materials. Light hitting the film, light hitting the paper. I can’t relate to working on my computer. I doubt there will come a day when I’ll use digital again.”

Being in Wolfe’s studio while looking at her work is an exercise in juxtaposition. What one sees in her photos is not what one feels in her presence. The studio is anchored and real, solid and homey. Her photos are discombobulating and throw the viewer off balance.

“Literally on the edge or approaching the edge,” says Wolfe. “It’s like a place and a non place. This is all the stuff I think of—when I think about it.”

Wolfe considers her landscapes to be more akin to portraits, or in the case of the Everglades photos, more like crime scene photography. That particular series is both timely and timeless, as the photos capture a housing bubble gone bust at the point where Miami’s suburban sprawl meets the Everglades National Park. In them, one can see the ebb and flow of the economy as housing developments near the preserve push up to its boundary only to be reclaimed by nature. In one photo, a lone shell of a house sits as its tropical surroundings appear to lurch toward it.

“All these projects would die halfway through and people were living right next door to them,” said Wolfe.

In another Everglades photo, a plastic bag rests in the crux of a tree. Others show a highway slicing through the area with cultivated land to the right and tropical overgrowth to the left. More garbage, more roads, American flags, roadside memorials and plastic debris abound. A sign reading, “No hay trabajo.” These are photos of an area Wolfe knows well. One senses something personal and didactic. Many young photographers hone their craft on the inanimate, the still, the cooperative subject. But Wolfe’s Everglades photos have a liveliness, which while existing in her other photographs, is distinct here in the narratives. The tension between the ephemeral pollution and the vital Everglades seems personal. She is at home and speaks with an authority that we come to believe only a local can muster.

The “crime scene” photographs have a precision, an exactness, that some of her earlier pictures share. In an operating room series, she photographed medical procedures in the incongruously lovely light of the operating table. The precision of the photos mirrors the procedure itself, that of a single incision on a man’s scalp in a reduction of the frontal brow procedure. Gaining access to the operation was an outgrowth of her production days. The scene is bloody, but organized. Its oddly beautiful quality is likely derived from her being the child of a surgeon; the photos convey a respect for the procedure as well as for the patient.

At the old Brooklyn Navy Yards, Wolfe photographed dilapidated homes left to decay on the base. When Wolfe’s mother looks at the photos, she imagines a place still alive with officers and recalls a country at war. In some rooms, rococo plaster moldings cling bravely to the ceiling while others, long since fallen, lay in piles of white dust on the floor. Jody Wolfe cited the Navy Yard photos as examples of her daughter’s continued fascination with the interchangeability of time and space.

The similarities to her parents’ occupations and the way Wolfe shoots a landscape is not entirely incidental. “There’s something very similar,” said her mother. “If you’re a researcher of any kind you’re trying to tell a story. Research is research, is research.”

Yet there is something else at work. Wolfe’s maintains an adamant refusal to see the mundane as mundane. Her location photographs are never touristy. To her, the plastic bag and the overstuffed sofa have more to say about the Everglades than a pink flamingo ever could. Though familiar landmarks are avoided, a sense of place still emerges.

Her sister Olivia tells a revealing anecdote of their visit to India, “To me, she was taking pictures of the most remote thing. The Taj Mahal is in the background, all the tourists facing it and Jo looking for what else there was to see—swimming upstream.”

Wolfe laughed at the memory. “I didn’t take one picture of it. There was this banal ditch behind us, it was like a swamp. I took that. I could not bring myself to take a picture of the monument.”

Another urban landscape series taken in Cuba focuses on an abandoned bridge. The peeling yellow paint exposes the red rust of the iron underneath. The disembodied abstract forms of the bridge cut the frame in strong diagonal lines and supply rhythm with their repeated angles. In another photo taken on the beach, a chain link fence forms a monolith that takes up one third of the shot. Once again, the content refuses to rely on clichés, in this case Cuban ones, such as old American cars or peeled pastel colored plaster. In Cuba, Wolfe once again presses the viewer to look with an exact eye at a place that lies in between and on the edge.

***

In discussing the Everglades photos Jody Wolfe noted, “I think it’s a way to bringing disparate parts together.” Perhaps the same could be said of Wolfe’s other body of work, the portraits of her young family members. In content, it would seem that the photos of the children are a total departure but given the difference in their ages and the distance she now lives from them, the subject once again returns to lapsed time and space. The fact that they are half brothers and sisters provides the middle ground quality found in the other photographs. In contrast to the landscapes, the depth of field in the photographs of her siblings is highly selective. The backgrounds are sparse and unimportant. They show the children with an unsmiling gravity that belies their years.

In one photo, two teenage girls lean against the back door of an SUV. The smaller of the two, slightly out of focus, glares at the other. Is it sisterly tension? Jealousy? The moment looks put on, stilted, but somehow not quite posed.

“There’s a fine line between posed and choreographed,” explained Wolfe. “Photographing children is what I hope makes people relate to that awkwardness. I get to use them as stand-ins for my experience.”

In another photo of two little boys, one is seated. He is round-faced with hair neatly combed. The other boy is standing. He is thin-faced with messy, spiky hair. Both look straight into the camera, nonplussed.

Wolfe’s fifteen-year-old sister Erin, who knows the photo well, explains. “Anthony is a really old soul and he is kind. Conner is kind of a dreamer, mentally and emotionally. They’re on the same level.” Erin said the boys like being photographed. “Every little kid likes attention to be paid to them.”

But it is the photograph of Erin eating the pomegranate that has garnered the most attention from her colleagues. It is a photo in which tension snaps audibly. All the horizons and landscapes from Brooklyn to Cuba to India and back are captured in her blank stare. She eats the pomegranate and the viewer asks, “What is she thinking?” And each walks away with a different answer.

“Oh, the pomegranate! It’s so evocative of violence,” said Alicia Mountain, an undergraduate student mentored by Wolfe. “As a woman, looking at that photograph it put me in the uncomfortable position of being in the male point of view, the subjugation. Her big eyes too much exposed. Having that power made me uncomfortable.”

“That photo is really charged,” agreed Wolfe. “That’s my position, a little mysterious, a little quiet. So much of what I do has to do with suggestion.”

The suggestions in Wolfe’s work are as varied as the viewer, but something else happens when a person is conveying a suggestion as opposed to a landscape. Setting aside the richly endowed symbolic heritage of the pomegranate and simply noting the fact that it sits in the lap of an adolescent girl conjures up notions of fertility and sexuality. This alone is a sharp departure from Wolfe’s desolate, crumbling buildings and bridges. Setting aside the knowledge that it is a photo of her sister and simply noting that she is human is enough to observe that Wolfe is no longer dealing with the suggestion of humanity, but rather she is looking at life itself—her life. The camera has turned from distant landscapes to the psychological interiors of home.

“I told her I don’t think you’ll ever take a better picture. Keep on doing that kid,” said Roma. “When she looks at the shot she’ll have to keep asking herself why it’s better.”

This is not to say that Wolfe’s landscape photography is lesser than. Wolfe still views her landscapes as portraits. The dispassionate manner in which the children look at the camera can be viewed as a landscape too, though it is hard to deny the warmth. The children photos share the same quiet simplicity, a hallmark of Wolfe’s work, if not her being. She is obviously not interested in mugging or grandstanding. In pure photographic terms, that seems to be the point.

“It’s about being there, being in the world,” she said of the medium. “But many [photographers] are trying to push what photography can do—a new way to use a camera. They’re trying to trail blaze and do something that’s never been done, never been seen.”

With her calm steady demeanor and her reticence to talk about herself, it would seem that Wolf’s work ethic speaks loudest. She admits to working through her ideas, and as though through sheer volume of taking pictures, editing, and developing them, the great pictures emerge. This seems to be the case with the sofa shot. It stands apart from the other Everglades photos. And while she will not allow anyone to see her contact sheets, she does show several different angles of the shot in her portfolio, but only one gets hung on the wall of her studio.

This is also the case with the pomegranate shot. There among all the other wonderful photos of her family, this one emerges as iconic and supreme. In the face of her little sister, Wolfe found her monument, her Taj Majal.

To see the pomegranate photo link here.