Janet Worne - Thoughtful Photography

Web Page Update

I have updated my web page to reflect more of my art photography. Take a look... www.janetworne.com

Arcadian Landscape

I was sitting in a small restaurant with a view of Mont St Michel in the North of France, having the most delicious lamb dish. Hearing a commotion outside I turned to see hundreds of sheep (and lambs) being herded through town. Right then and there, I resolved to: a) come back the next evening at the same time to photograph the scene, and b) never eat lamb again.

Arcadia is the mythological home of Pan and pastoral paradise represented in poetic fantasy. This scene, with sheep kicking up dust in the shadow of a medieval abbey on the coast of Normandy, is my idea of a poetic fantasy.

Tessa the Paper Dog

   Tessa, my retired search and rescue dog, has found new employment as a Paper Dog. Every morning she fetches the newspaper from the end of the driveway. Two papers on Sundays. Teaching her this was my Father's Day present to my husband. This was my first experimentation with a Flipvideo camera. It was easy to use and small enough to take anywhere.

Albuquerque Photographers Gallery

Since retiring from the fulfilling-yet-financially struggling world of newspaper photography, my work has begun a new direction. I have joined the Albuquerque Photographers Gallery in Old Town. The official website description reads:

“The Albuquerque Photographers Gallery is the only cooperative art gallery in New Mexico dedicated solely to exhibiting and promoting contemporary fine-art photography by local photographers.”

This is a new adventure for me and living in New Mexico has given me a fresh array of subjects to explore visually. I am the tenth member and I enjoy being part of a community of photographers again. Because this is a coop, I take my turn working in the gallery 3 days a month. It’s wonderful to be out talking to people about photography and their experiences in New Mexico.

I like to think that there was art in all my photojournalism work, but now I have a venue to pursue art for art sake.

Unintentional Sabbatical

I know, I know. I have fallen off the face of the blogosphere. My computer died a while back and it was in and out of the shop for three weeks. I felt like I had both hands tied behind my back. Nothing was right with the world until I got my computer back. I finally got it back with a new (bigger) hard drive, new display, new housing, two new fans and a few other little odds and ends—all this a few days BEFORE my warranty expired. This was quite an ad for the benefits of paying extra for Apple Care on a new Mac.

So that doesn’t explain my extended absence. I guess it’s like belonging to a gym and getting into a routine of always going at a particular time without fail. Then your schedule changes or you get sick and your routine goes out the window. It is so hard to get back into it. Pathetic, I know, but that’s my excuse and I’m sticking with it.

Maybe I needed a break. I think I’m going through some sort of major change now and I don’t know yet how this is going to end up. I was a staff photographer for newspapers for 26 years and that ended abruptly when I quit and moved to New Mexico. As we all know newspapers are hurting and unlikely to recover any time soon, if ever. Work for freelance photographers is almost non-existent here so I find I must reinvent myself. I keep telling myself: change is good, change is exciting. It’s like a death/rebirth thing. If I work at it, the new me can be even better than before.

History is full of women artists and photographers who took risks and made the necessary changes in their lives so that they could live up to their potential and express themselves artistically.

Maybe if I take inspiration from these women who went before me I can find the strength to take new risks and step into the next chapter of my life with confidence. I will try to do that in future postings by looking backward at the lives of some of these brave women so that I may look forward to my future life, whatever it may hold.

Happy Birthday Hilary

My baby girl is 26. Yikes!!!

Happy Birthday Tessa

My dog, Tessa, is 6 years old today. It's hard to believe.
She is still an amazing dog with a personality that won't quit. She was a search and rescue dog for 4 years. The very first mission I took her on was as a small puppy. It was a house fire and one person was missing inside. My older dog, Dakhota, found the body and afterward, when the firefighters were finishing up, I walked Tessa around the scene to get her used to uneven footing and all the smells.

Happy Birthday Heather

Well--almost. My oldest daughter turns 30 (yikes!) on April 25th but I will be out of town then so this birthday wish is a little early.

This was taken 27 years ago on a drive trip across the country. I told her to run up and down a hill, yelling at the top of her lungs, during a rest stop to let off steam. What a cutie!

Deeper Sense of Wonder

Remember when you first started out in photography? Maybe you’re there now. Everything is brand new. Exciting. You’re like a child seeing the world for the first time. And now, with a camera in your hand, you can capture that excitement in a way no one else can and hold it frozen forever in the magic of your photographs.

Fast-forward 27 years. You’ve been fortunate enough to have made your living out of that love of photography. It has been a wonderful, exciting time yet you realize that all those years of trying to please editors and molding your vision to someone else’s story has changed your perspective. Reading the Minor White quote in yesterday’s post you concede that maybe you’ve lost some of that youthful “innocence of eye”. Perhaps you dig through some of your work from your carefree early days. You see that you lacked the experience and skills you now possess but there is a playfulness and freshness that is currently missing from your work. What happened?

This is where I find myself now. As an adult, my viewpoint is not as fresh as that of a child because my eye is tainted by the lens of experience. I often wonder, can I recapture the magic and still retain what I have gained from experience and maturity? The real trick may be to let go of the voices in my head telling me to shoot what they (the editors) want and to rediscover what makes me happy. I think what most editors want is that freshness and sense of wonder anyway.

Perhaps now, with a renewed self-awareness about my work, I can come full circle and find within myself an even deeper sense of wonder.

Today I Have Hope

 
On the eve of Barack Obama’s inauguration I am thinking about race relations in our country and what this new president means to America.

I grew up in a small Quaker neighborhood in Delaware in the sixties that consisted of twelve houses.  Three families were African American. Two were Italian, one was Polish, one was German/Chinese and I believe the rest were Caucasian unless my memory is missing something. We were a tight-knit group and it was a wonderful atmosphere for a child to grow up in. When my parents bought the house, they were approached by the neighborhood association and told that if they were prejudiced in any way they were not welcome. This was during a time when most neighborhoods were doing the opposite.

Fast forward to the nineties in Lexington, Kentucky. I was covering race riots that resulted from when a white cop shot and killed a black kid. I inadvertently got caught in the middle of a crowd of angry protestors. I was alone in the projects. They surrounded me, taunted me, tried to steal my cameras, punched me in the head and tried to pull me to the ground. Somehow, I managed to keep my cool, get to my car and drive off, very badly frightened and bruised.

I ended up interviewed on national television and I think the interviewer was a little disappointed that I wasn’t angry and didn’t say anything more divisive. But I honestly believed that I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I could understand their frustration and anger. And there were many blacks there that day that did try to help me.

A year later I worked on a race relations project for the Herald-Leader (see my “Coming Together” post from June). The whole experience left me wondering if we had made any progress at all since Martin Luther King’s time. Of course we have, at least legally, but  on a more subtle, personal level---have we?

Today, I have hope. Today, as I see what very-soon-to-be-president Obama has done for our nation I am more proud of my country than I have ever been.

Today I feel like my country comes a little closer to matching that little neighborhood I grew up in.