Joanne Barham
Bio
Born in southeastern Virginia and raised in rural farmland territories, I explored my rural county world from an early age, spurring lots of imaginative facades and proposed mysteries along the way. Having read all the Nancy Drew books as a child naturally beckons mystery, danger and intrigue into my imagination. Still to this day, I am constantly ‘exploring’ and finding fresh clues to see and feel in any locale.
I studied photography with Gunars Strazdin at the University of South Carolina and was graduated with a B.F.A. in Photography. After graduation, I worked as the staff photographer at the South Carolina State Museum before moving to New York in 1996. In New York, I began working on commercial and editorial shoots, both fashion and still life. Initially, I was mostly an environmental portrait photographer for hire but over the past eight years I have also moved into architectural landscape photography.
I am drawn to forums of strong line, colour, composition, geometry and overlapping facets. Marginal neighborhoods in New York and New Jersey have been my most recent photographic stomping grounds.
Statement
‘Ozone Park; Palisades Park’ series
Passion for wandering, through streets, fields, forests, town roads and back roads since childhood naturally follows me into my adult life here and now. Exploring the world from a sideline approach and peripheral margins, the wander makes for a peaceful, meditational exploration without harried pace. With this time-slowed-down perspective one can ‘see’ more openly and clearly.
This recent channel (series) of photographs from Ozone Park, Queens and Palisades Park, NJ stems from the beautiful culmination of continuous options for dimension, lines, perspective and visual components that these urban neighborhoods abundantly afford. Multiple decades, overlaps and architectural variances keep the reservoir fresh at every turn. Homes and utility buildings, garnished with landscaped plants or the overgrown fray of nature, own independent landscapes of their own though abutting the neighboring scape immediately. Each prospect mirroring the multitudes of people, chances, architects and builders all present behind both the visible and unperceivable.
By employing a free focus vision, I am able to soften the exactness of time and place, allowing for a diluted anonymity and unconfined landscape. The actuality of focus and sight recognition being reduced frees the mind and eye from the quotidian, and allows all facets to hold equal measure. Angles, contiguousness, lines, colours, fenestration, perspective and dimensions all sing their measure to create a new visual flow of poetic float and imagination. Here are new zones to see, to reflect, to remember and wonder: a liberty, a transport, a renewal.