The Art of the Personal Project: Janelle Jones

The Art of the Personal Project is a crucial element to let potential buyers see how you think creatively on your own.  I am drawn to personal projects that have an interesting vision or that show something I have never seen before.  In this thread, I’ll include a link to each personal project with the artist statement so you can see more of the project. Please note: This thread is not affiliated with any company; I’m just featuring projects that I find.  Please DO NOT send me your work.  I do not take submissions.

Today’s featured artist:  Janelle Jones

This personal project grew out of a desire to inject energy into my work, creatively and visually, and to explore the human form. I’ve focused on still life for most of my career and part of my interest in that is due to how careful and considered still life photography can be. It took me a long time to learn the technical skills of still life photography, but a longer time to figure out how a “Janelle Jones” still life photo should look, and once I did, I didn’t want to get stuck there. I wanted to push myself to be less cautious and to figure out how I could photograph new, less predictable subjects while keeping my own distinct visual sensibility.

I had also been wanting to photograph my sister, Lindsey Jones, a talented modern dancer who also lives in New York City. Watching a professional dancer like Lindsey at work, particularly in rehearsal or before the movement is polished and perfect, can be a truly revelatory moment about beauty and caliber of the human body. Dancers practice to be able to control their bodies’ most minute muscle movements. Lindsey’s movement is particularly impactful because of her long limbs and acute awareness of shape and space.

She’s also very energetic. So a collaboration between us seemed like the perfect way to inject energy into my work, and challenge myself on how to light and represent the human body and movement.

Lindsey and I also share a visual sensibility, and we have both long loved the work of Norman McLaren, a Scottish Canadian animator whose short animations are bold, colorful, and often hypnotically repetitive. McLaren’s Canon (1964) and Pas de Deux (1968) are both studies in motion and play on manipulation of time and space. Those two animation pieces inspired the decision to use in-camera multiple exposure and motion blur to play with how we translated dance, a medium dependent on time and space, into a single-frame photograph. Lindsey’s clothing in the photographs was also influenced by the eye-popping colors of McLaren’s works.

This project was a true experiment and collaboration between photographer and subject. It’s an exploration I hope to continue finding fresh ways to challenge myself, collaborating with other artists, and bringing new ideas into my work while staying rooted in the precision and intentionality that have always defined my photography.

To see more of this project, click here

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APE contributor Suzanne Sease currently works as a consultant for photographers and illustrators around the world.  She has been involved in the photography and illustration advertising and in-house corporate industry for decades.  After establishing the art-buying department at The Martin Agency, then working for Kaplan-Thaler, Capital One, Best Buy and numerous smaller agencies and companies, she decided to be a consultant in 1999.  Follow her on Instagram