Lives of the Artists: Jessica Holder

Hola, I’m Jessica Holder D., photographer since 1985, and this is my story:

I think that a person is like the weather where they live. Well, I was born and I still live in Puerto Montt in southern Chile, a rainy and dark zone most of the year. Here life is lived inwards, and both photography and writing have always represented my inner world.

In childhood, I started my love of art in the magical worlds of theatre, old photos, nature, and with my father’s old Rolleiflex . . . then as a teenager, poetry filled the days, studying architecture, and after leaving home for the academy, photography, photography of film, of emulsion, and working in the darkroom in the attic of an old house.

It was at the time in college in Stgo de Chile, crossed by idealism, rootlessness and personal battles, where I developed my own creative world, photography that I call photoexpressionism, a dark period, where my emotions and my existential problems could be expressed, rather than the path designated by tradition, as I was to be a doctor or architect.

I confess that I loved the sarcasm in this art but over the years and children, came other motivations, the return to nature, the need to maximize my closeness with the natural order. And these things gave me another conviction and aesthetic: photonaturalismo–nature and subjectivism—where in nature is also the subjectivity of oneself, the metaphor of feelings, ideas and spirit.

For example in the picture, “The forest in love” (above), so many times I was in the woods looking for my obesesion, a magic moment of light and the presence of these creatures of the vegetable and animal kingdom creating an ethereal presence, completely perfect, the most beautiful scene, all talking to me, all set there.

The lens of the camera is looking for the spontaneous, natural, and ephemeral. I try not to alter the light in the magic of natural light, that is beauty. That’s what I have been developing lately, but urban and abstract photography are also very attractive fields for me to capture and study.

Sometimes the frame edited with digital tools has been a means of expression, like my work in the darkroom. As in any art, technique in photography is at the service of expression, I love the composition in both color and black and white for aesthetic value.

My photoblog is www.jeckah.shutterchance.com

This autobiography is part of the Escape into Life Lives of the Artists project.