Jody Ake: Santa Fe Workshop Portrait Contest Winner
I recently had the great pleasure to co-juror the Portrait Contest hosted by the Santa Fe Workshops. Over the next several days, I will be featuring the work by several of the winners. Almost a thousand photographers submitted close to 4,000 images and the decision process was a tough one. So many stellar photographs, so I am thrilled to featured these stand-out portraits.
Jody Ake’s Director’s Award image
Ezra
Jody Ake was born in the American South and attended the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico with a major in photography. Later he moved to Portland, Oregon to continue his education. He received a Masters in Photography from the University of Oregon and shortly thereafter relocated to New York City. While living and working in NYC and Brooklyn, Ake continued to explore collodion as his process of choice, shooting portraiture, landscapes and still life subject matter, and has maintained his profession as an independent photographer throughout. He currently lives and works in Portland, Oregon. His self portrait is below.
Jody creates portraits, nudes, still lifes and landscape images using the wet collodion processs. Invented in 1851, the method entails coating a glass plate with collodion and exposing the plate while it is still wet. The end results are ambrotypes, appearing on glass in the form of a negative until backed by black velvet, thus rendering the positive image. Jody is one of a handful of contemporary artists who have revived this photographic method, hand-mixing all of the necessary chemicals for each and every exposure. I am featuring two bodies of work, Portraits and Landscapes, using these methodologies. Needless to say, Jody is a master technician, bringing a strong and consistent sensibility to a process that is unpredictable at best.
I believe the portrait can disclose more about the subject than what is found on the surface. The subject , either willingly or subconsciously, shows us more than he/she intends. The camera can see more than the naked eye, moving past our persona and catching a glimpse of who we really are. With this in mind I turned the camera on myself. I hoped to see deeper, looking to see if there were aspects of myself that would be revealed in the image. After years of self-reflection I started photographing other people, looking for differences and similarities between them and myself.
LANDSCAPES
I have always loved the west. The mountains and desert plains call to me with a promise of adventure and solitude. I travel there as often as I can, amazed at the scope of the land, looking for meaning in the emptiness. I think of early photographers heading west for the first time. Carrying with them their large cameras and working with laborious early processes. Capturing images of the west that most will not see for themselves.
I think of them as I look for signs of those that came before me. Photographing the evidence left behind by progress and expansion. I photograph the New West through an old process, comparing what I find with what those that came before me found.
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![In the early morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963, four members of the United Klans of AmericaÑThomas Edwin Blanton Jr.,Herman Frank Cash, Robert Edward Chambliss, and Bobby Frank CherryÑplanted a minimum of 15 sticks of dynamite with a time delay under the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, close to the basement.
At approximately 10:22 a.m., an anonymous man phoned the 16th Street Baptist Church. The call was answered by the acting Sunday School secretary: a 14-year-old girl named Carolyn Maull. To Maull, the anonymous caller simply said the words, "Three minutes", before terminating the call. Less than one minute later, the bomb exploded as five children were present within the basement assembly, changing into their choir robes in preparation for a sermon entitled "A Love That Forgives". According to one survivor, the explosion shook the entire building and propelled the girls' bodies through the air "like rag dolls".
The explosion blew a hole measuring seven feet in diameter in the church's rear wall, and a crater five feet wide and two feet deep in the ladies' basement lounge, destroying the rear steps to the church and blowing one passing motorist out of his car. Several other cars parked near the site of the blast were destroyed, and windows of properties located more than two blocks from the church were also damaged. All but one of the church's stained-glass windows were destroyed in the explosion. The sole stained-glass window largely undamaged in the explosion depicted Christ leading a group of young children.
Hundreds of individuals, some of them lightly wounded, converged on the church to search the debris for survivors as police erected barricades around the church and several outraged men scuffled with police. An estimated 2,000 black people, many of them hysterical, converged on the scene in the hours following the explosion as the church's pastor, the Reverend John Cross Jr., attempted to placate the crowd by loudly reciting the 23rd Psalm through a bullhorn. One individual who converged on the scene to help search for survivors, Charles Vann, later recollected that he had observed a solitary white man whom he recognized as Robert Edward Chambliss (a known member of the Ku Klux Klan) standing alone and motionless at a barricade. According to Vann's later testimony, Chambliss was standing "looking down toward the church, like a firebug watching his fire".
Four girls, Addie Mae Collins (age 14, born April 18, 1949), Carol Denise McNair (age 11, born November 17, 1951), Carole Robertson (age 14, born April 24, 1949), and Cynthia Wesley (age 14, born April 30, 1949), were killed in the attack. The explosion was so intense that one of the girls' bodies was decapitated and so badly mutilated in the explosion that her body could only be identified through her clothing and a ring, whereas another victim had been killed by a piece of mortar embedded in her skull. The then-pastor of the church, the Reverend John Cross, would recollect in 2001 that the girls' bodies were found "stacked on top of each other, clung together". All four girls were pronounced dead on arrival at the Hillman Emergency Clinic.
More than 20 additional people were injured in the explosion, one of whom was Addie Mae's younger sister, 12-year-old Sarah Collins, who had 21 pieces of glass embedded in her face and was blinded in one eye. In her later recollections of the bombing, Collins would recall that in the moments immediately before the explosion, she had observed her sister, Addie, tying her dress sash.[33] Another sister of Addie Mae Collins, 16-year-old Junie Collins, would later recall that shortly before the explosion, she had been sitting in the basement of the church reading the Bible and had observed Addie Mae Collins tying the dress sash of Carol Denise McNair before she had herself returned upstairs to the ground floor of the church.](http://lenscratch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/001-16th-Street-Baptist-Church-Easter-v2-14x14-150x150.jpg)
