BY GAIA MUSACCHIO
1. Tell us about your approach to photography. How it all started? What are your memories of your first shots?
My mother handed me the family point-and-pray 35mm Kodak camera at my sister’s 8th grade graduation. It was my job to finish out the roll of 24-exposure film so we could take it Walmart and wait an hour for the film to get processed. I relished in the little orange strips of plastic and the 4x6 prints that came in that plastic padded pouch. I got to see my work realized, a kind of somewhat instant gratification in a tangible form. That feeling wasn’t lost on me as a teeanger when I first began taking pictures a little more seriously down by the creek in my old neighborhood. I made long exposure pictures of the water, transformed into silk on the rocks and my dad’s white truck going up and down the hills in that same neighborhood in the piedmont of North Carolina. I was interested in what the camera could see that I couldn’t see regularly and, in a way, I’m still after that view of the world: to make what’s before our regular eyes seem more interesting.
© Aaron Canipe
2. How did your research evolve with respect to those early days?
It evovled in that my work came back, geographically, to where it first began. I wanted to photograph more than what that creek had to offer so I escaped to study in Washington, DC. While I was there, thoughts of home came to me while walking down Pennsylvania Avenue and I missed it like I never thought I would. I started to see in my mind’s eye, the entire world reflected in the creek’s waters.
3. Tell us about your educational path. You recent graduate from the Corcoran College of Art + Design with a BFA in fine art photography. What are your best memories of your studies. What was your relationship with photography when you started?
I had a great teacher in high school that encouraged us a great deal to work in the darkroom. I believe we were the last class to use that space. The camera was our central tool whereas my other education in the arts focused the possibilities of charcoal, pastel, graphite, watercolor, etc. I guess it was harder for me to choose a voice out of all those. The camera was much more elusive to me. I went to the Corcoran with a little darkroom experience and knowledge of some of the big names in photography’s history. But from the first few sessions in my first photography class, my eyes were gradually more opened to photographers like William Eggleston and Robert Frank. Some of my best memories took place in the darkroom, hunkered down with bottled water, snacks, in for a full day of printing. There was a much more communal atmosphere in that darkroom that’s a lot harder to replicate at the computer.
© Aaron Canipe
4. What were the courses that you are passionate about and which have remained meaningful for you.
All of them. Every class was meaningful in my growth as an artist. Of course the photography classes helped me the most to keenly understand my medium. The core classes were central to my craft and formulation of my own questions. A set of classes I feel especially grateful for were color photography. Just like I was a part of the last group of students in high school to use the black and white darkroom, I was also a part of the last few classes to use the color processsor with Kodak Endura papers. As a part of that class, I was immeresed into the world of photobooks and it made me want to make my own.
© Aaron Canipe
5. Any professor or teacher that has allowed you to better understand your work?
I was alluding to Terri’s color and advanced color photography classes. Jen made me work my hardest at photography in the darkroom and learn all the photographic styles and see what I liked best. Claudia and Margaret shaped me in the formative semesters at school, made me an adequate printer and better speaker about my own work. Jared pushed me to really find my voice in photography and see where it could reach and Frank helped me in innumerable ways to create and work with my digital files for printing.
6. About your work now. How would you described your personal research in general?
My work now is fully rooted in North Carolina. I’m looking for how the piedmont region has changed through history and what it means to be living in this part of the South that’s growing up.
© Aaron Canipe
7. Do you have any preferences in terms of cameras and format?
Whichever format helps me say what I want to say in a picture. When I need everything included in the photograph, down to the last detail in the landscape, 4x5 is my preference, but when I need something a little more swift, 6x7 is my go-to. That stout rectangle sort of encompasses the world in a way that’s congruent to how I think.
8. Tell us about ‘Native Place’.
Native Place is my undergraduate thesis project. The pictures are mainly from my hometown of Hickory, North Carolina and they’re about growing up. It’s about my own memories coming up as well as the stories and family members and friends that I’ve carried with me. I’ve used hand-applied text at the bottom of the images and by themselves to tell those stories.
© Aaron Canipe
9. Is there any contemporary artist or photographer, even if young and emerging, that influenced you in some way?
For my money, you can’t get any more inspirational and influential than my friends Nate and Jordan and the work they show and books they publish at Empty Stretch. My classmates, past and present, continue to educate my own work.
© Aaron Canipe
10. Three books of photography that you recommend?
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans
Beauty in Photography by Robert Adams
Hotel Oracle by Jason Fulford
11. Is there any show you’ve seen recently that you find inspiring?
The MFA thesis exibitions at Duke University.
© Aaron Canipe
12. Projects that you are working on now and plans for the future?
It’s an untitled project as of now, but I’m currently working on my masters thesis project at Duke, assembling my committes and gathering reading sources that will stay with me while I’m out in the field. I’m also working on a new zine of past work that I’m just now beginning to see through and preparing to teach my first class in photography. My future lies in that, I think, in trying to be like the amazing faculty I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know. I want to make the same impact they had on me.