Gregory Eddi Jones
Copyright – Gregory Eddi Jones
Michael Rippy: Let's begin with how you got involved with photography and the first phase of your photographic work.
Gregory Eddi Jones: I went to a community college after high school because I really wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I took a photography class and enjoyed it so much that I just kept taking them. I spent 3 years at Onondaga Community College in Syracuse. I ended up taking every photography class that they offered and eventually had to retake some of the ones I had taken before to continue accessing the facilities.
From there I transferred to RIT and did the undergraduate program there. I haven't told this kind of story in such a long time.
I feel like image-making just really came naturally to me. I think that I've always loved to experiment with different kinds of image-making. I started in a black and white darkroom and went through a color darkroom, did 35 millimeters and then four by five. I experimented with every kind of little genre.
I just tried everything, and once I discovered Photoshop, I think that unlocked something for me because it allowed me to have greater control over the final result of an image. If I was born with any kind of latent talent it would probably be for writing. I think that the editing aspect of Photoshop, like with the editing aspect of writing, is where you can really refine and hone in on your vision and put a fine point on it. Much of my practice is based on manipulation of images.
It's been that way for probably 10 years now. After RIT, I went to Visual Studies Workshop (VSW), which some people know has a bit of a legendary status in the history of photographic education because it was founded in 1969 in Rochester by Nathan Lyons. It was the place to go if you were a photographer at that time and you really wanted to kind of pursue alternative means of image-making.
Back in the 70s, Light Gallery in New York City was the first photography gallery that championed photography as fine art and as a collectible asset. A lot of the artists who were showing there were also teaching at VSW, and the place always had a very experimental DIY sort of ethos. The attitude was, “Let's just take these photographic tools and see how far we can push them into something that you've never seen before.” VSW imprinted my mind with how to approach the medium and what to do with all of these tools that are at our disposal. I think since then, a lot of people might consider me an experimental artist.
MR: Knowing more about your history, and that you are the editor of In The In-Between, it seems that everything changed once you started working with Photoshop and understood the possibilities and what other people had already been doing with digital technology. Could you talk about experimenting with digital technology?
GEJ: Yes. I started In The In-Between in 2012. Part of that was wanting to find like-minded artists who were exploring digital tools. I think that at the time artists were still trying to figure out exactly what Photoshop and other digital tools could do for them. The history of photography is a history of technology, right?
Photographers have been able to use every new tool that has been invented, developed or put into their hands to make a different kind of picture. The evolution of digital tools creates new aesthetics that lead to new theories, which leads to entirely new paradigms and definitions of what photography can be. If we start in the late eighties when Photoshop started to be distributed, there was a period in the early nineties where a certain set of photographers were really starting to experiment with what Photoshop could do.
It led to a lot of interesting but very crude kinds of results. If you track how photographers were using Photoshop from the early nineties through the early 2010s, you can see the evolution of thinking and of the aesthetics and where it went from being a rudimentary hodge-podge of visual information into a kind of realism that you would see with like Jeff Wall or Gregory Crewdson or Andreas Gursky.
Then you get into someone like Kelly Connell and you can see the evolution, it's like a child learning how to color in the lines. That’s what happened collectively among photographers, and that's always fascinated me. In The In-Between was a journal that was dedicated to showing how photographers were using digital tools to create pictures that weren't possible to make just a decade earlier.
MR: Once you enter the digital realm, things really open up. We're very familiar with digital audio technology and the changes it has made. But photography is mostly considered as a straight approach, that “it is what it is.”
Then like you said, as digital infiltrated the photography space, it really started to break it up. A good example for me has always been glitch photography, which was very popular. Once technology starts to infiltrate it, you see that mature also.
GEJ: What really interests me are the experiments and seeing what sticks and what doesn't. The whole macro literature of photography is like this tremendous garden that's filled with all these very strange flowers and plants. When you experiment, it's like planting seeds and seeing what will grow, what can be sustained and what will become an invasive species that's overpopulating the consciousness of the medium. It's all just endlessly fascinating to me.
Something that I find really interesting about digital tools and photography, particularly Photoshop, is that what Photoshop allows you to do is to go through different variations of an image very quickly. If you get to a result you don't like, you can just undo it and try something else. To a large extent, I think the creative process boils down to trial and error. With digital tools, you can go through more trials and more errors at a more rapid clip. I think that it allows for new ideas to form, maybe more quickly than with traditional means of image-making.
That's what appeals to me, that it gives you the tools to experiment, to fail and to learn from those failings at an expedited rate.
MR: You mentioned that most of the things that keep you going are through writing now, but you still have your own artistic practice. Can you talk about what you're working on currently and how that feeds into the things that you've been talking about?
GEJ: I just published a book called Promise Land with Self Publish, Be Happy. That work began about four years ago, and comes from a very novel way of image-making. I print composite images onto a paper surface that renders the picture in wet ink. Then I manipulate that ink and make marks in it and let it bleed on the paper and soften the image. Once the ink dries I scan it back into digital, virtual space.
The process allows me to blend the seams of composite and collaged images, so rather than having different image logics that make it obvious that a picture is a composite, the result is more unified and ties all these various image elements together into a single language. Promise Land was a four-year experiment in the potential of that. The project started in 2018, which was at the peak of the post-truth, Trumpian dystopian nightmare that we were living in. Who knows if part two might be coming. But I was thinking a lot about photography’s historical burden of truth-telling, and wanted to make a kind of picture that broke that relationship.
Early on the pictures I was making for Promise Land were very political. In the process of making them, I rediscovered T. S. Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land which is a modernist poem written in the years following World War I. Eliot wrote it in a collage-like, fragmented style. It's difficult to read. The multiple speakers and multiple concurrent narratives leave you, as a reader, unsettled, never quite knowing what's going on. But it’s a beautiful and complex piece of literature.
The Waste Land became the backbone for what Promise Land became. Promise Land is presented as a visual update to that poem. The 100-year anniversary of its publication is happening this Fall, so the publication of the book is fairly timely in that respect. It creates conversation between the pictures and the poem to consider what in our human experience has changed and what hasn't really changed at all. Now that the book is published and working its way into the world, I'm back in the studio experimenting with new ideas.
MR: I can see in the work the reference to fake news and things that we went through recently, but also there is the idea of reversal with the images. Photography was meant to reflect reality. There’s a discussion about how photography isn't reality, but it's the closest we can get to capturing it. What you're doing with these is moving photography back into a painterly space.
It almost reminds me of painting conservation, and how the act of conservation also changes the painting. Your work with these photographs is in some way analogous, and they become something else.
I think the way you approach this is also whimsical. The images you've created are playful, which is a quality that is often lost in the art world.
GEJ: I think a certain kind of dark humor has always been present in my work. If you look back at past projects I've done, my last big project was called Flowers for Donald. Before that, I made an appropriation series called Another 26 Gas Stations which were screen captures of gas station surveillance footage of robberies and fights that I found on YouTube. All throughout those pictures, there are pop-up ads from YouTube that I included in the image. There is this juxtaposition between someone pointing a gun at another person and an ad for sneakers or something. There is a lot of humor and dark humor in the pictures I make. It's not intentional. Maybe it's just part of my natural voice. Back to what you were saying about the pictures of Promise Land being like a reversal. I totally agree.
In some respects, I feel that if you think of photography as a religion, as if I've lost my faith. Or maybe it’s analogous to Martin Luther. I've set out to create my own offshoot, my own set of beliefs about the medium and what it is and what it can do. To the extent that the pictures look painterly, which is a comment that I hear very often, it's not intentional. I think they look painterly only because they don't look like photographs in a lot of ways. It's like a default mode, maybe, but there's certainly something to the fact that I'm using stock photographs, which are very common pictures.
Their meanings or interpretations are typically very simple, and they're designed that way to appeal to the largest demographic possible. As much as the photography world looks at stock photography and has a chuckle about its simplicity, I think that stock photographs are really important in society at large because they offer a central point where people can look at that image and find the same meaning. They offer a shared meaning that we can all find commonality in. But the post-truth condition that we're in attacks these areas of shared meaning and pulls them apart.
It’s creating political issues where there was previously common social ground. Literally, it is pulling the fabric of society apart and bringing us further and further away from shared understanding. An advanced reading of Promise Land is that this is what the pictures are doing. They are taking these common meanings and pulling them apart and making them more complicated to the extent that each viewer will come to the picture and find their own interpretation of it rather than a common interpretation that everyone shares. In a way, it's like critiquing the post-truth condition while also participating in it and becoming part of the problem.
MR: I tend to come from the approach that you can interpret work without an understanding of the artist’s intentions. I think you're proving that now you need to take both into account. I tend to approach it in the first way initially, but then the more I learn about the work, I get drawn more and more into it. But it's usually that first look that draws you in. If you can't connect with it, initially, you're left wondering why you are looking at this.
Once you're pulled in and hear how the artist thinks about it, you can actually see it in the work, which is very important. You're not just laying this on the top to try to convince people that this is what the work is about, but when you talk about it, you can actually see it.
GEJ: Yes. It's like a buffet. It's like through Promise Land I want to offer audiences a little bit of everything, whatever appeals to them in terms of what they value in art and photography. If it's purely visual, I think viewers can have that, enjoy it and move on, but if they're interested in delving into the political issues, cultural issues, or the theoretical, all of that is on the table too if you want to put that on your plate – but you don't have to. I just wanted to make a body of work that felt really rich in the way that The Waste Land felt. Every time I read that poem, I would find something new in it. It was like this deep, deep well that you could never get to the bottom of.
I think that what I wanted to try to do visually with this work is to have it seem like it's so enriched that you could always revisit it and find a new treasure to bring back with you.
MR: Yes, I think it's working exactly how you were hoping it would. It works on multiple levels and is darkly humorous. It also can feel frustrating, as if there's something a little off that you can't quite put your finger on.
Let's move now to the world of NFT artworks.You’ve created another publication called PhotoVerso. Can you introduce PhotoVerso?
GEJ: PhotoVerso is a weekly newsletter that I write, which gets published every Saturday morning. Basically, I want it to feel like the newspaper for the NFT photography world. Each week, I share updates on what the larger NFT photo organizations are doing. I share the work of new artists who are entering the space. I have a weekly short form interview with a photographer of the week where we highlight their work. I have a short column called The Collector's Corner where I talk about issues relating to collecting photography NFTs, the values that are ascribed to them and things like that.
I think that for a lot of people entering the NFT world, it can be very difficult to find a center of gravity to understand what is going on with all of this. There are a lot of technical and cultural hurdles that people have to jump over to become involved because this isn't like the traditional art world. I wanted PhotoVerso to be an entry point for new photographers, curators and gallerists to start to understand what's happening with photography in this new world. Though much of the content is tailored for collectors.
MR: I fall on the skeptical side of the NFT space. I think you are on the other side, with those that have really embraced it. It reminds me of things that I was interested in before I started hearing about NFT, for example, digital art on screens in galleries. How can NFTs help move that forward?
GEJ: I got interested in NFTs fairly early because I've always been interested in new technology. I think in relationship to photography, again, with what I did with In The In-Between, it's just my natural curiosity about how photography and digital tools mesh to create something new. I see NFTs in a lot of different ways, but in general its important to remember that the history of photography is a history of technology, not just in terms of the technology used to make photographs, but the tools that are used and created to distribute photographs.
The NFT is to me like a distribution model. It's a new publishing paradigm. You can think of what Instagram did to change perspectives on photography, and I think the NFT world will have an equally powerful influence on how people think about and distribute and circulate pictures. I'm also interested in how some photographers are looking towards blockchain and thinking about a form of blockchain-native photography and how these new tools can influence new approaches to making images, either by using the technology itself, with smart contracts and coding to create an types of algorithmic images, or by using the existing culture of the NFT world as an influence for making new pictures.
I think we've started to see a little bit of each of those paths already and I'm really eager to see what's still to come over the next few months or over the next year.
Then, as you said, the mediation of the screen and how photography is unique in that it doesn't really have a natural medium, it's like the little fish in the primordial ocean that leaps onto the shore. It looks for a place to live and keeps evolving. There was a time when the photograph could exist only on a piece of glass or a piece of tin. Then it migrated to paper, and then to cellulose film, and it keeps jumping and morphing from one form to the next.
I feel like we're overdue to consider photography as being native to the screen itself. That's what NFTs can embrace, the screen-based experience of art as its native form.
MR: I think that cuts across a lot of art forms. You have digital painting now and wave-video works. I think that's a good analogy of the growth and evolution of how it functions. You still have traditional painting and traditional photography. I'm not dismissing any of that, but digital technology is pulling more things into it, because the tools are getting so much better. And similarly, there are different contexts for NFTs, especially in photography.
Artists and photographers need to explain this more to their consumers, or their patrons, or however you want to identify them, that their work fits in a certain genre of photography. You have art photography or documentary photography, which can also bleed into art photography, but then you have things that are more commercial. Some people don't want to make those distinctions but I think depending on the audience that you're speaking to, you have to pull them in.
GEJ: Absolutely. The NFT art ecosystem is an entirely new kind of culture from what we've experienced before. If we're talking about buying and selling photographs, the market is defined by collectors who have money to buy the work. The vast majority of collectors within this ecosystem don't have backgrounds in photography or art history. It's an entirely new collector base without a foundation of what has been traditionally valuable within say the gallery or auction house world.
They're just buying work that they like. There is a culture of dedicated photography collectors that has emerged, that I think has begun to privile more sophisticated work. But at the moment this whole ecosystem is a free-for-all. Any photographer can join. Anyone can be part of the community. It's not like the traditional photo world. It's not as segmented into different camps or conceptual values. It's all blended together in a big soup, and we haven't had anything like this before.
When I first really entered the space full-time at the end of last summer, it felt like transferring to a new high school and trying to figure out who I'm going to sit with at the lunch table. Who within the space can I really connect with and be friends with? And who are those people who share the same kinds of values as I do in thinking about photography, cryptocurrency, politics or whatever? The only way to find that sense of community is to participate and start having conversations with people and figuring out, where do I fit within all of this? Where is my place within the social dynamic or cultural dynamic? Then what can I contribute to it in my own way?
It can take a lot of time, but I feel like there is a bond among photographers in the space. We're all on this boat charting into this new land, and regardless of whether there's a nature photographer who I would have hobnobbed with in a past artist's life, we're on the same boat together and we have the chance to help to build what this community will become together. I think that's a super interesting dynamic.
MR: That's great. I agree. It's like being on the open sea, and it's interesting to see what's coming up on the horizon. I just want to thank you for the interview. I also want to thank Matthew Porter for directing me to you and suggesting you as the first interview in getting into this NFT space. Your newsletter, PhotoVerso, provides some context for where we're going because there are other artists to come that I think you've featured in PhotoVerso that will help the skeptics get a better idea of what we’re entering into.
GEJ: It's really like everyone within the space is free to build, create and make. It's still open-ended. The architecture, the infrastructure of the NFT photography world is not set in stone. The village is built, but it's not a city yet. There's so much possibility and potential to create something that will help define the NFT photography world. If you do believe that NFTs are here to stay, then we're only in year one, essentially, and we'll have decades and decades ahead until whatever might come next. It's all very fascinating to me.
MR: It's all here to stay. Blockchain is definitely not going anywhere. There are very much more knowledgeable people than you or I that have completely bought into it. These are people that are deep into how the software works and how integral it is to financial systems. Those people are not abandoning it, so it's not going anywhere. We just got to keep building on it.
GEJ: Yes, and it is fair to be skeptical because this world is still very nascient and it's not perfect. The central gravity of all of this is the money that's flowing in this ecosystem, the value of cryptocurrency and how much people have made by being early investors, which is making a lot of this collecting activity possible. The financial aspect of it being the center of gravity, I think it does turn a lot of people off because art is being commoditized first and considered as art second.
Again, anyone can participate in this NFT world and make of it what they want to. I think that it doesn't have to be about sales or making money for everybody. It could be about exploring new potentials for photography and what the medium can be within this new technological paradigm. It goes back to when Joel Meyerowitz, Mitch Epstein and William Eggleston started making pictures in color and going against decades-long traditions of photographers making pictures in black and white. It is the question of, "Does this belong?" "Is this something that we can consider the future of photography? Or is this sacrilege?" The same was true for digital cameras. Every new technological revolution within photography has spurred enormous backlash or push back against those who don't want the traditions to change. It’s something to be mindful of in relationship to the skepticism of how photography fits within this new world is that there is a lot of precedent for this in the past.