Black Bread

by Jamie Campbell

Interview by Report Magazine

What is your connection to photographing animals? Is there an interest with the idea or perception of domestication?

 I think about this daily, and with each passing day I feel further away from a communicable answer. There is a definite level of exchange, which I value like no other.  With that said, I am likely clouded by a mixture of personification and anthropomorphism, which I am sure I unconsciously attribute to the process. 

Photographing an animal is a certain gift. I feel slightly blessed each time. That feeling, in itself, holds my attention and impacts my continual return to the subject. John Berger really laid out the proper words in his book of essays entitled: Why Look At Animals? Here is a quote, which sums it up better than I ever could:

“In the accompanying ideology, animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance. They are the objects of our ever-extending knowledge. What we know about them is an index of our power, and thus an index of what separates us from them. The more we know, the further away they are. With their parallel lives, animals offer man a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange. Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species”.

 Is your work more narrative based or is it working intuitively? Do you approach projects with an idea or let it form as you sort of collect images and notice a theme emerge. 

 My work fits within the idea of an open-ended narrative. Each project deals with its own themes, and the individual images or grouping of images within that project sway or bait a narrative. But, it shifts and twists heavily based on a viewer’s own semiotic influences. I like to leave a lot of room for viewers to get to the final concept, without having to follow a direct narrative. So yes, I work intuitively when creating, and that leads to a project with a strong theme, but loose narrative.

 I don’t have a formula for approaching projects. Sometimes the idea, or metaphor emerges first and that informs the photographic making process. It makes me keep an eye out, or hunt for certain things. Other times the photographs I happen to be making at a point in time encourage an idea. 

Can you talk a little bit about where you live and how that informs your work? There feels like a specific sense of place to your photographs. Is that sort of incidental of you documenting your own life or is it something you work to include? 

 I am not sure how Toronto, Ontario, Canada consciously informs my work. By circumstance, I spend a majority of my time here, so by default it appears. It is familiar. I think though, the vast majority of photographs I allocate as art, or for specific projects, are made outside of Toronto. This is my base, or my anchor. It is where my apartment is, and my cats live here. It is a place I return to. I can’t deny that it holds a heavy influence over me, but I also don’t think it excites me all that much. 

 The sense of place you are referring to in my photographs might be less a geographic factor, and more a poetic sense of aesthetic, or mood, or gesture, or familiarity/unfamiliarity. There isn’t a great vastness to my work. It is close. It focuses on the singular. It is intimate, and I think that confuses an idea of place. 

 My life is inescapable from my work. I’m bringing a camera into my world, and photographing that which presents itself, and that which I think has visual or metaphorical significance. It is almost neither incidental, nor purposeful, but intertwined with process. Can it be both? When you break it down to the simplest form, and take art and intention away – my photographs become a document of my happenings. So even if I wanted to deny that my own life is something I work to include, it is an inherent contributor. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t. At times I am maybe overly conscious, or even self-conscious about my inseparable inclusion.

Can you talk a little bit about Black Bread? It feels like there’s a wide breath of geography to the images as well as a really beautiful and sort of dark look at the natural world. 

Black Bread, when broken down, is a series of photographs visually outlining the poetics of misinterpretation, and ultimately the finding of something, within a failed search for the self. It is accepting that there are the things you don’t know, and the things you can’t know.

I’ve spent a large part of my life trying to really figure out what it means to be Half-Italian. My mother, and her mother, and the many mother’s before them were born in Sicily. In one of my more desperate attempts to connect to a past I’ve never lived, I decided to travel there. I wanted to explore Sicily on my own terms.  I was in search of something familiar, something I thought must be inherently within me. A loose connection, a faint resemblance, anything really? I wanted to feel some innate something. Something so deep in me, I couldn’t have possibly known it was there.

I didn’t find the revelation I was looking for. There were hints, or gestures along the way. There were the kinds of moments that stop you dead. There were double takes, and physical sentimental familiarities that only a person of a particular origin could know. Those kinds of things, however touching they were, were things I already knew. I was in search of the things I couldn’t know. That sort of quest is a contradiction and therefore, I shouldn’t have been so disappointed when I didn’t find what I thought I was looking for.

 It wasn’t until I returned home, and developed my film, that I realized I had unexpectedly found something entirely different from my original intention. And that became the project. Sometimes the search is the answer.  

The geography becomes less a thing of the physical or tangible world, and it takes on the representation of an internal conflict or emotional landscape. Sometimes it is spooky, or dank, or slightly chaotic, at other times serine, inviting, or curious. I think there are moments of clarity, colliding with moments of grievance. And that variation is most evident through the diversity of the geography, which becomes a placeholder for metaphor and the contradicting mood that it takes on.

Is your main source of income as a photographer? If not what sort of things do you do to support yourself? 

I make zero dollars from my photography. At best, I barely break even. And for the sake of full disclosure, my art practice is, more often than not, working within the realm of financial deficit. Besides artist grants, rare commissions, or sparse sales, my financial stability (if you could call it that) comes from working at a local bar. 

It looks like you’re based in Toronto, are there any advantages you see to not living in somewhere like New York or LA? 

 I wish I could say the cost of living, but Toronto is unfortunately on par with the over-pricing of any major North American metropolis. In the case of Toronto specifically, besides Canadian Health Care, the advantages from my experience seem pretty low. It is a nice place to live, with some dear people, but it significantly lacks the reach and resources of a place like say, New York or LA. 

You can see more of Jamie’s work at www.jamiecampbellphotography.com and on IG @odey_plus_bebe