This year’s Yale MFA Photography thesis show, presented at Yancey Richardson, offers a snapshot of where the medium is headed. Through installation, sculpture, performance, documentary and experimental image-making, the artists explore family, identity, memory, queer community, religion, illness and technology. Elephant shares an excerpt from their panel discussion, moderated by co-curator Archie Caride.
ARCHIE CARIDE: I wanted to start by giving you all a chance to introduce yourselves, where you’re from, and your work.
ANDREW WARNER: My name is Andrew. Before school, I came from the Bay Area. I treat photography as a mediator between myself and dissecting systems and structures of power.
JOHN SHEN: My name is John. I was originally born in China, I grew up in New Zealand, and I’ve been in the US since 2016. My work [in this exhibition] is part of a series that I call Stranger in the Land, that’s taken place all across the US. It’s an exploration of my own relationship as an immigrant to America, American myths, and the fantasy of what the landscape can hold.
CHRISTOPHER POSTLEWAITE: My name is Christopher. I’m a photographer and musician based in Philadelphia, where I lived and worked before attending Yale. My work [in this exhibition] is part of an ongoing body of work that I’ve been calling Photo Booth. My pictures are made with my friends and family in Philadelphia about my relationship to the people in my community and the spaces that we inhabit.
OLIVIA REAVEY: I’m Olivia. I’m from Massachusetts and I was living in New York before going to school. I work in the dark room and I’m really interested in the body. I’m interested in found objects interacting with the body and how I can make an image that encapsulates what it is to have a body.
EM WALL: I’m Em. I’m originally from Michigan. I grew up in a large Mormon household and my work is a lot about ideas of religion and how it doesn’t quite fit with my ideas of gender and sexuality and how to raise a family. I have four kids and [my work explores] how to raise them coming from such a large religious family.
CHRISTIAN BADACH: My name is Christian. Before school, I was living in a very small village in western Massachusetts, [which is] where a lot of my current concerns emerged from. My work is primarily interested in visually decoding the ways in which natural and unnatural fluctuations within a rural setting and seasonal cycles have the ability to affect things such as movement, behavior, and psychology.
FAITH COUCH: My name is Faith and I’m originally from North Carolina. Prior to my MFA, I was in Baltimore for ten years. In my work, I primarily explore building cinematic Black memory landscapes that feel very time agnostic, as [though] it could be contemporary or in the ‘70s or ‘60s. I’m really interested in the interiority of Black life by using color and gestures that we’ve seen throughout cinematic histories to emphasize what life can look like and be.
JASMINE CLARKE: My name is Jasmine. I was born and raised in Brooklyn. [My work in this exhibition] is part of an ongoing project photographing in and around Flatbush, Brooklyn, mainly in my nana’s home and backyard. My dad’s side of the family immigrated from Jamaica in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s, so [I am] thinking about ideas of home in a new place and concepts of biomythography, which Audre Lorde coins as combining biography, history, and myth. [I am also interested in] the topographical features of Brooklyn in smaller vignetted moments.
CHEN XIANGYUN: My name is Chen Xiangyun, I go by Chen, and I am from Fujian, China. I have an installation in the project gallery called Jajang Billiards. I mainly wanted to tell stories about my pool community based in Flushing, New York.
ARCHIE: This exhibition represents the final culminating moment of your last two years together. This is reflected in the title, Once More, With Feeling. I want to look back on the last two years, starting immediately before you went to Yale. I’m curious where you were with photography at that time. Why did you feel it was time for grad school and what did you hope to achieve there?
JASMINE: Before doing this program, I was living in Brooklyn and teaching photography at Bard College and at Parsons School of Design. I didn’t expect to teach so soon after completing undergrad and I had always felt that the Yale MFA program was something that I really wanted to do. If I was going to temporarily leave this [teaching] position that I loved so much, that’s where I wanted to go.
EM: I had just had my fourth kid and had been obsessively taking photos since finishing my undergrad and knew it was probably about time to get out of my own echo chamber to get broader feedback about photography and working with photography.
CHRISTOPHER: I had about eight and a half years between finishing undergrad and [beginning] graduate school. I spent a lot of those years working full-time jobs and making my work on weekends or at nights and in between. I hit a point where I really wanted to make a commitment to have two years to assess where I’d been with my work and to have the space and time to explore a deeper investigation of what I’ve been doing.
OLIVIA: I was a waitress at Café Gitane, and I didn’t wanna be a waitress at Café Gitane. So I went to grad school, and they went bankrupt.
FAITH: I wanted to be amongst people who were really committed to their craft, who were interested in interrogating their work, and who were interested in being in a community of scholars. That really allowed me to flourish: to have time to share information and bounce off each other really helped my craft and how I saw the world.
CHRISTIAN: I was living in this very small village in Massachusetts all by myself. I didn’t know anyone and I was the youngest person there by quite a long shot. I had come from suburban Jersey, so this very wild, untouched landscape was something entirely new to me. I made work there for about two years before applying [to Yale]. Similar to what Em said, I really felt that I was in my own echo chamber and was looking for a way to progress the work out of this stuck place.
CHEN: I was in New York. I was in my fourth year of a project, a portrait of queer people of color around the states and I fell flat and I felt school two years might help me to develop my own language.
ARCHIE: Many of you cited an interest to engage with other like-minded people and photographers. I’m curious if there were moments where your practices bumped up against one another or bled into one another, moments of transformation or conversations that you remember between each other that had an impact on your work.
CHRISTIAN: The summer between my first and second year, I went to Arkansas for a month to photograph people who were a part of the back-to-land movement during the ’60s and ’70s. And when I got back [to Yale], I was like, “Okay, like I need to, I need to find something similar to that in the Northeast.” I happened upon Cedar’s house–I had photographed her the year before–and I [thought], “This could be something new, this could be a project.” I called Olivia [Reavey] and I said, “Olivia, I don’t know what to do.” And she told me, “You have to do it. You have to do it and don’t look back.” If I [had] not had that conversation with Olivia, my work would not be in the place that it is now.
ARCHIE: Olivia, why did you tell him he had to do it?
OLIVIA: Christian is super stubborn. So maybe it’s just fun to tell stubborn people to do things and see if they do them.
CHRISTIAN: And Olivia’s usually right.
JOHN: I remember conversations with you, Chris [Christopher Postlewaite], and [we would say], “Just make the photographs and we’ll talk about the rest later on.”
ANDREW: We are, in a sense, one organism, and that was apparent from the beginning. But there were beautiful moments of understanding and maybe a little bit of pushback when it was important to hear pushback.
ARCHIE: When you get pushback or negative feedback, it can feel like being knocked down. A lot of artists struggle with figuring out how to get back up. Do you have advice?
FAITH: I think part of being an artist that’s really dedicated to their craft is being open to critique because people who actually care about your work and who wanna see you go far are giving you that critique. It requires you to put your ego aside. It’s such an intimate space to be in with someone, your work is so personal, you’re pouring your heart out. You have to really learn to trust the people who have done the work already and who want to see you thrive.
JASMINE: I think one of the benefits of [critique] is that it gives you language around your work. Sometimes you don’t have the answers in the moment, but over the course of the [last] two years, one of the things that I’ve loved so much about this program is that you leave with so much language to talk about your work and your peers’ work.
CHRISTIAN: It’s about picking yourself back up because you have to; you have no other options. These are necessary steps in working through what will hopefully be a lifelong practice.
EM: I would make myself go out and take more photos. I could always be okay with whatever was said as long as I felt like I was putting in the work.
CHEN: And I cannot label any of the directions that I took as “wrong.” I think that’s what school is for, exploring and being free. So any direction I took, I appreciate it. I look at every single project as a manifestation of the wrong directions.
JOHN: When a caterpillar goes through metamorphosis and turns itself into a chrysalis, every cell in that caterpillar’s body gets liquefied to reform into a butterfly. That must be such a painful process and I think all growth is very painful. It’s inevitable and impossible to escape, but then on the other side of it is transformation. I think all of us have gone through that. It’s pretty amazing to be on the other side and see the kind of work that I’m making now; I could have never imagined it before the program.
ARCHIE: Your thesis show at Yale was called Picture Show, and the introductory essay begins with the question: “Why make photographs now?” We’ll get to that question, but first, let’s craft a working definition of how photographs operate today.
FAITH: Unlike painting or sculpture or drawing, photography has always been used as a social tool to help people understand what’s going on in the world. It’s a huge part of how people actually learn about life and [come to] understand the world around them. Making images is really important because it’s an offering to ask [people] to reimagine their own lives or to think about how different life can be outside of the one that they have. That offering gives people agency to think deeper and more critically about what’s happening in the world and who they are and their place in the world.
JASMINE: For me, photography is about the act of noticing; it’s an observational practice. We live in an [increasingly] image-based society, so I can’t think of anything more important than learning about looking and making pictures. I see it as very empathetic.
JOHN: I think about “Capital P” Photography, the literal translation of the word: “to draw with light” and as an index of the world. I really see the practice as something that forces you out into the world. The work that we’re making is indexed from the physical world. The indexical nature of the medium always will give you something more than you could have ever imagined.
All photographers are forced to reckon with the constraint [of the camera]. As artists, we’re always trying to break that [constraint]. Olivia, your work deals with that, right? In terms of pushing back against the apparatus of photography. So many of us are interested in beginning to reveal the kind of hidden hand that the apparatus is guiding you in. There’s a certain way that the engineer or the designer of your camera wants you to use it to make a certain kind of image. There’s always a tension between the photographer and the camera. It’s a collaborator, but sometimes it can also sabotage you.
OLIVIA: I think you put it very well. Photography is really rich with potential to break the rules, which is really exciting. I like that it’s meant to be a reflection of reality, but it doesn’t have to be. And it isn’t to me.
ARCHIE: As John was saying, photography can force you out into the world. I’m interested in those of you who reject that and instead turn towards yourself or your family. Can you speak to the decision to turn inwards rather than venturing outwards?
CHEN: While doing this project, one of the [core] questions was: can exteriors be equal to interiors? It’s important for us to go out into the world and interact and make connections and bring pictures and experiences back. Perhaps that’s more precious to us.
EM: I think my pictures are the strongest when they’re about myself. Sometimes I’ve tried to venture out in the world and make something else and it doesn’t quite work out. I have come to realize that I photograph what I most care about, and that’s my interior, whether it’s pictures of myself or my family or my kids or my queer siblings. I am really interested in the family album as a way to mark time, to see how things are changing within an ecosystem, specifically the family, and how things evolve. How my big conservative Mormon family is now this queer entanglement of family and how I can mark that through photography.
ANDREW: For me, it’s extremely difficult to be a photographer that goes out into the world and finds pictures. The ability to be a world builder was extremely fascinating to me. My practice really stripped away the world and brought it into the studio. I like to control every bit of the frame, and right now, the only way I know how to do that is to put a backdrop up and negate what’s happening outside.
CHRISTIAN: Looking for pictures is a very difficult thing, but when it works, it can be so extremely validating. I think that validation comes out of a lot of research, a lot of time, and not having anything to show for it. I think that same potential also [exists in] a space or place that you have a certain level of control over.
ARCHIE: Why make photographs now?
CHRISTOPHER: Our histories and image culture are constantly evolving. As artists and as photographers, we can write those histories and we can talk about our experience in our time.
JOHN: I think there’s more of a need for photographs now than ever before. I think back to the show about degenerate art in Nazi Germany at the time, and throughout history when artists and thinkers and creatives were censored. Censoring gives us a clue as to sort of the power of images and aesthetics. With photography today, technology is becoming largely adopted that takes away the necessity for photographers in a traditional sense. It used to be that if you wanted product photography, fashion [photography], or any [other] sort of image, it necessitated a creative human being to make that happen. Now that’s becoming less and less prevalent and needed. I think that’s why it’s really important to make photographs now.
ANDREW: Look, we’re in a race between the painters and the sculptors and they’ve got a 500 year head start on us. We always kind of cheekily joked about that. Photography is a beautiful thing. To be able to frame the world that you want to have seen. That is an extremely powerful tool in the hands of a human. And power is a beautiful thing.
FAITH: As humans, we always crave beauty and aesthetics. At a time where we are inundated with really terrible images of the awful atrocities that are happening all over the world and in the United States, I think that there has to be a space where we get to see beauty, and we get to see how other people are living, and we get to see how artists are creating these worlds as an offering and an alternative way of looking at how humanity still can be a very beautiful place. I think that’s always gonna be important, and now more than ever.
CHRISTIAN: For me, it’s the only thing that I have. To be tasked with this tool that you’ve dedicated yourself to and to continuously work through this desire to convey universal feelings of things that are beautiful, but also things that are very dark and scary. I think that’s always valuable, and I think it’s valuable now too.
