Thursday, April 9, 2015

Introducing... Johanna Hooson


Si : Hi Johanna, welcome to the blog. First off, could you tell us a bit about yourself?

Johanna: I am a photographer who lives and works in Leeds. I also work part-time as a Therapeutic Social Worker, mainly with children and young people post-abuse. In this role I help children make sense of their experiences and reframe their narratives into stories of survival and hope as well as acknowledging loss and pain. This idea of transformative stories has been important to me in preparing photographs for the stations of the cross exhibition. I have been looking at images of the cross and thinking about how an instrument of torture and death has become a symbol of hope and life.


Si : I love your photographs.... there's a sense of solitude in them, and a real stillness; there are no human figures in your work, yet there's a sense of human presence there somehow.
And there's a lovely melancholy about them too...

I'm wondering if that's just me projecting my own personality and interests onto the images, or if those are things that you're conscious of when you're making the work?


Johanna : That's interesting, people often say that I have a calm presence. I think it's a quality that helps in my therapeutic work, and perhaps it's something I create unconsciously in my photography too. I find that I need time away from people to rebalance my self, and you’re right, I don’t include people in my photographs generally, but I do like to photograph manmade structures and design, particularly everyday objects that tend to get overlooked, such as manhole covers, air-bricks, ridge tiles and telephone/electricity poles. I’m also drawn to things that are weathered or damaged, which makes them interesting to me, but perhaps also creates a sense of melancholy.  



Si : There's a lot of pattern in your work, and an interest in the shapes and spaces that exist between things. To the point where things become almost abstracted at times...


Johanna : Yes, I think this is partly due to some of my professional photography being used in cd artwork, so I have become conscious of needing to leave spaces for typography! But I am often more interested by pattern within something or in a collection of things, rather than depicting the whole. I feel more comfortable as an observer than a participant often, and my photographs are an extension of that. Perhaps because of this I see shape or patterns that others don’t notice. 


I often revisit favourite places again and again and take photographs of the same things which are transformed because of a different light/colour/weather. I also use depth of field, focus and framing to capture patterns and shapes that interest me. This can lead to abstraction! 



Si : I really like that idea of revisiting places and seeing the subtle differences - Jo Dunn has that same thing going on in her work I think...
I also love the idea of the Artist as someone who seeks out the stuff that other people miss...

I'd be interested too, to find out how your professional, commissioned photography work relates to the images that you make for yourself - whether or not there's a clear divide between the two? (And if so, how you approach to each type of work differs…)

Johanna: Yes, I love Jo Dunn’s series of paintings of Gledhow Valley Woods; the images of ‘condemned' trees with their yellow spots. As well as noticing and depicting things others may overlook, blemishes and anomalies add interest for me, whether they’re natural or created by people. 

There isn’t a clear divide in my work between the commissioned and the not. I tend to suggest a current obsession will work well! The only difference is, as I said earlier, I need to be more conscious of leaving some space for words, and imagining the proportions differently when I’m taking the shots, so that they will work as square images. When I’m taking photographs of anything that I think would work as a cd cover I tend to take some shots like this now anyway, just in case! Instagram has made many people rediscover the art of the square image, like the polaroid print. It changes your sense of composition.



Si: Finally, is there anywhere that we can go to see more of your work?

Johanna: Yes, I have a website, johannahooson.com. You can also find me beginning to use Instagram (constantagirl) and Facebook (Johanna Hooson, photographer).






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