Copious Notes

"Howl" by Amy Stein. All images © Amy Stein.

Photographer Amy Stein is a city girl. Primarily, she has lived in Washington, D.C., and New York, where encounters between humans and wildlife usually involve squirrels.

So when she went to the country to work on a project about women and guns, she was surprised to hear about more serious encounters, including a girl seeing a bear on the other side of the chain-link fence that separated her home from the mountains.

“I just became fascinated with these stories and so I set out to re-create these stories,” Stein said by phone from Parsons The New School of Design in New York, where she teaches photography.

The project is Domesticated, on exhibit at The Art Museum at the University of Kentucky as part of the Robert C. May ­Photography Endowment Lecture Series. She will talk about the ­project at 4 p.m. Friday in a free lecture at the UK Student Center’s Worsham Theatre.

"Backyard."

Domesticated started at Dave Clark’s taxidermy shop in Matamoras, Pa., which became the setting for the series.

“He was kind of open-minded to working with an artist like myself,” Stein says. “Through spending time in his store and spending time in the town, I became very interested in the location of the town, which is between the Delaware River and a big mountain park. It’s a small town sort of sandwiched between two natural spaces.

“As I spent more time at Dave Clark’s local ­taxidermy shop, I was hearing more and more about these human-animal encounters that happened at night.”

She tried to wait out some naturally occurring images. For the most part, though, she quickly came to realize that she needed to stage the shots.

"Nursery."

“We set out every weekend to create images related to specific stories,” Stein says of herself and her husband, John, who made regular trips from New York to Matamoras, about 80 miles northwest of the city.

It turned out to be a really good thing to know a taxidermist. Clark or his ­customers would lend Stein the animals that would be posed in a variety of looks: a wolf howling at a ­floodlight in a Target parking lot, a deer lounging in a ­greenhouse, that big black bear startling the little girl at her swimming pool.

“The bear’s face had this ridiculous expression, this open-mouth, aggressive expression,” Stein says of the animal, which eventually was photographed from behind. “It took me a while to realize I need to get behind the bear and show the form of the bear without showing the face because that will have more power and also camouflage this ridiculous expression.”

Stein says she usually had to take some time to talk with the people whom she asked to be in the photos, to help them understand what she was doing and that this wasn’t a “smile for the camera” type of portrait.

“One thing I would always do is bring examples of images that are already made, that are in the style of what I wanted to make,” Stein says. “I was lucky at this point that there were some images in Oprah magazine and some pretty big magazines that had ­published some of the ­images. That gives you immediate credibility in a sense.”

"Fast Food." This photograph is not in the Art Museum at the University of Kentucky exhibit, but it is in the book that accompanies the exhibit.

Some photographs were spontaneous, including Threat, which shows a little boy in the woods with a deer, and Fast Food, which depicts seagulls swooping in to eat a discarded burger and fries in a parking lot.

“It’s a lot easier for animals to eat our refuse and scraps, because they have calories and protein and they don’t have to hunt it,” Stein says.

Animals eating humans’ discards was one of ­several themes in the series, along with fences that people build to put up barriers between themselves and the natural world, even though the ­barriers don’t always hold.

"Trasheaters."

Predator shows a little girl standing in a flowery pink dress at the open gate of her fence as a coyote walks menacingly by. Stein says that sometime later, she heard that the same family had trouble with a bear that wanted to hibernate under their house.

Stein says that despite such annoyances, she found that most of the people knew what they were getting into, living where they live.

“They’re lovely people who want to share the beauty and wonder of their surroundings,” Stein says.

And they have, through her lens.

"Watering Hole."

Sarah Hoskins, whose photographs of African-American hamlets around the Lexington area were the final exhibit in this year’s Robert C. May Photography Endowment Lecture Series at The Art Museum at the University of Kentucky, is scheduled to be profiled today on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Sunday. The show is heard locally on WEKU-88.9 FM. and WUKY-91.3 FM from 8 to 10 a.m.

Sarah Hoskins.

Hoskins and subjects of her photos were interviewed by NPR correspondent Jacki Lyden in Lexington last month, when Hoskins was here for the lecture portion of the series. NPR schedules are subject to change, particularly in the event of breaking news. If the report airs, it should be available at www.npr.org later in the day.

The public radio network first became interested in Hoskins and her work for its Picture Show blog.

Click the play button to hear Sarah Hoskins talk about her work in Central Kentucky and see a slide show of her images.

Equine photography brought Sarah ­Hoskins to Lexington. African-American hamlets around the city and in Central ­Kentucky made the Bluegrass feel like home.

“I was introduced to one woman named Lydia Talbert, and I was ­introduced to Maddoxtown Church,” Hoskins, left, says of her friend from the New Zion ­community who has since died. “And from there, what happens is, it gets to be a trust thing. I met one person and they led me to somebody else, and they led me to somebody else. I never thought I would be doing this for 10 years.”

Now, the results of her decade of ­visiting New Zion, Uttingertown and other communities are on display at The Art Museum at the University of Kentucky. Hoskins will give an address at UK’s ­Worsham Theatre on Friday as part of the Robert C. May Photography Endowment Lecture Series.

“I think it’s really important that it is in Kentucky,” says Hoskins, who lives with her family north of Chicago. “I’ve always given lectures, and this work was incorporated with other ­projects. This is the first time I will give a lecture solely on this project, and it’s an honor to do it in Kentucky.”

She says she talked to residents of the communities where she worked to make sure they were OK with having their pictures displayed at the ­museum. Many residents plan to come to the lecture. When she has spoken before, Hoskins has ended her lectures with a photo and recording of the Jimtown Male Chorus, and her camera can be heard clicking in the ­background. The group will sing at Hoskins’ lecture.

Her appearance bookends this year’s Robert C. May series with strong Kentucky themes; the first one, last fall, showcased the ­photography of The Washington Post’s Jahi ­Chikwendiu, who grew up in ­Lexington and started his photography career at the Herald-Leader.

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"Milkless" (2004) -- Jahi Chikwendiu encountered this young mother in the Ouri Cassoni refugee camp just outside Baha'i, Chad. He recalls: "She's holding this baby under her veil. And through the veil, I can see the silhouette of her nursing the baby. So, I took a lot of photos before I approached her. But I'm sure she saw me taking pictures, she just went about her business. Then, when I finally approached her, she started to talk about her and her baby and nursing. That's when she tells me that she's nursing but she has no milk. And she thinks that she doesn't have any milk because of the trauma she experienced. Having her whole village bombed in the middle of the night. And having so many people killed in front of her face and having to scatter from her village." Descriptions and images courtesy of The Art Museum at the University of Kentucky. All images copyright The Washington Post.

I know I am not the only person at the Lexington Herald-Leader who knew Jahi Chikwendiu was a remarkable talent the moment I met him. So his award winning career at The Washington Post comes as no surprise, nor does the decision of the Art Museum at the University of Kentucky to show Jahi’s work as part of the prestigious Robert C. May Photography Endowment Lecture Series. To preview his exhibit, I caught up with Jahi earlier this week before he started a busy day on the job for the Post.

Click the play button to hear our podcast with Jahi Chikwendiu:

[podcast]http://copiousnotes.bloginky.com/files/2009/10/091001jahi-podcast.mp3[/podcast]

Copious Notes podcasts are available on iTunes.

Here are a few more images from the exhibit.

"Sally Sami, a blogger who left her home country of Egypt (reflected)" (2007) -- Digital print Courtesy of the artist and The Washington Post In Egypt, there are growing restrictions on bloggers who receive threats of arrest for expressing and publishing what are considered anti-government and/or anti-Islam views. Another Egyptian blogger, Karim Amer, was jailed by an Egyptian court for four years for “insulting Islam.”

"Wall of Thorns" (2004) -- Hawa Oosman Adam rests in her temporary home of thorns and twigs where IDP's (internally displaced people) have made an impromptu camp on the outskirts of Nera, Sudan. Some families, including Hawa's, have had to move six times during the course of this 20-month-old conflict where African settlements are being attacked by the government with the help of militias known as the janjaweed.

"Darfur Sandstorm" (2004) -- On his first day in a vast refugee camp in Darfur, Chikwendiu was standing on a water truck at the edge of the camp to survey the scene when a dust storm rolled up. He recalls: "I started noticing people's attention go to an area behind the camp ... I didn't even know what it was. So maybe within a few minutes I figured I'd better get off of this truck. I take off running, and within seconds, wham! I just get hit by this wall of wind, and the sand is moving so hard that it's kind of slicing against you.I just remember looking for shelter. I saw these guys walking and I saw them jump in a tent. So I just jumped in the tent with them. They seemed OK with my being there, because we started giving each other the thumbs up.I was just sitting there waiting for ... hoping, praying that I wouldn't be impaled by something flying. So then, I got myself together. I had a few handkerchiefs that I wrapped around my camera and my face. I fashioned a camera hood out of my handkerchiefs. I started walking around, looking through my camera. Not even taking pictures. Because it was the only way that I could see. The sand was just slicing at my eyes. So, for a while after that, my vision was blurry where the sand had just scarred my eye lenses."

“Black Hawk Down” (2003) — Mourners at the Washington D.C. funeral of a soldier killed in a Black Hawk helicopter crash in Iraq.

Click here to read our story about Jahi.

Click here to see more of Jahi’s work at his website.