Artist Statement:
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 they intend. 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.
Jody Ake creates portraits, nudes, still lives, and landscape images using the wet collodion printing process, an historic photographic technique. Ake is one of a handful of contemporary artists who have revived this process.
He holds a BFA from the College of Santa Fe and an MFA from the University of Oregon.
Ake participated in the 1999 Oregon Biennial and he has been featured in “Photography’s Antiquarian Avant-Garde: The New Wave in Old Processes,” as well as “The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes.” He was also featured in an article on black identity in Aperture Magazine. He was featured in “Dandy Lion: (Re)Articulating Black Masculine Identity , as well as the traveling museum exhibition and the group exhibition, “Five Alchemists: Contemporary Photographers Explore 19th-Century Techniques,” Wichita Art Museum,Wichita, Kansas, USA.
Jody currently lives and works in Portland, OR.
