[KELP JOURNAL] Let’s jump right in: your bio says that you are a “folk photographer” and I don’t think I have ever heard that term. Can you explain what that is and if it differs from other types of photography, like landscape or portrait?
[JOHN REPP] I began calling myself a “folk photographer” in my standard contributor’s note once I’d begun submitting pieces to magazines and journals three or four years ago. Since I have virtually no technical training yet don’t think my stuff fits the “outsider” or “naive” artist labels, I thought “folk photographer” best fit. But “thought” may overstate matters: the phrase came to me at some point, and it clicked (so to speak). I also unobtrusively (I hope) manipulate via Apple Photos the most evocative images from a trove of family snapshots going back to 1905. My paternal grandfather snapped most of these (and occasionally noted time of day, f-stop, and type of lens filter on the backs of individual prints), and from the evidence, we share (sixty-seven years after his death) powerfully similar aesthetics. So “folk”, I guess, also fits what I’m up to because in “collaborating” with my dead grandfather and having no interest in “intention,” I’m part of a familial folk tradition.
[KJ] I usually ask photographers what makes them take a shot, but I am also wondering if being a folk photographer influences your choices in any way?
[JR] I’m not aware of any influences other than whatever in a particular moment draws my eye. I am powerfully influenced by the pleasure certain photographers have given me, especially documentary and “street” photographers, from Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen to Vivian Maier and W. Eugene Smith and Robert Frank and the like. I’m not aware of any intention to replicate their work, but I’m sure that deep pleasure is doing something in the psyche.
[KJ] Speaking of photos, I chose these photos because they all have this haunting aesthetic, like a pervasive loneliness, perhaps due to the absence in them; the absence of people, of human-made objects, of bright light. Is this something you were intentionally trying to capture and convey to the viewers?
[JR] Thank you! It’s fascinating to see how the photos come across. I resist the notion of “intention” when it comes to art-making, partly because it’s so akin to “planning.” When something in the world compels me to do something with it—record it, describe it, riff on it, pry it apart, and generally work hard to make it beautiful—that’s the whole ballgame, to coin a cliché. For the photographs you’ll publish, I was, yes, powerfully struck by the light in those moments—a dramatic shift in weather, a coming shift from high tide to low, and in “Dividing Creek” maybe the irony that the “creek” is actually a sand road that “lights” the salt marsh on either side, while “Equinox Dawn” embodies shifts from night to day and season to season. This is all conceptualizing after the fact, though.
[KJ] I noticed that you are also a multi-disciplinary artist as well, soon to release your twelfth book of poetry. I am so intrigued by creators who work in a variety of media and I always wonder if a project calls to you to be in a specific form or if you have to play around with an idea before it finds the right one?
[JR] Oh, it’s all about playing around! You can always trust the material to eventually find its form if the “you,” the ego, can just get out of the way.
John Repp is a poet, fiction writer, folk photographer, and digital collagist living in Erie, Pennsylvania. Seven Kitchens Press has just published his twelfth chapbook of poetry, Star Shine in the Pines.