Jason Francisco: Emory's Visual Arts Department Welcomes Its Newest Faculty Member

Jason Francisco, an acclaimed photographer, writer, and book artist, has joined the Emory College faculty as Associate Professor of Visual Arts (Photography). An exhibition of his photographs, A Concern with History (2003), will be on view at the Visual Arts Building from October 16 – December 18, with an opening reception on Thursday, October 16 from 5:00 - 7:00 p.m.

Francisco recently shared his insights on photography, teaching, and his vision for the Visual Arts Department with Mary Catherine Johnson.

Q: Why did you become a photographer?
A: The truth is I’m still ‘becoming’ a photographer. I suspect that if I ‘were’ a photographer it would mean I would be finished with photography. To arrive constantly at the beginning, not the beginning of inexperience but the beginnings that happen through experience, this is my life in photography. It’s not so much that I decided to become a photographer, it’s rather akin to something that I think Seamus Heaney said: “I wrote a few lines of verse and suddenly it was a life.”

Q: What were some of the events in your life that sparked your interest in photography?
A: When I was a child, I remember first noticing a manual camera that an aunt of mine had. I felt a gravity about the object that I couldn’t explain. At thirteen my father gave me a used camera as a gift, and slowly I taught myself to use it. Eventually I taught myself to use a makeshift darkroom that I set up on a card table in the garage. I worked only at night. I remember washing prints in a bucket with a hose by moonlight. Having photography as a creative outlet helped me cope with my adolescence. I knew little to nothing of the history of photography, but I developed a strong interest in abstract painting – Kandinsky, Malevich, Klee, Cezanne – and I wanted to make my own abstract pictures with a camera.

Q: Those are some very sophisticated interests for a teenager.
A: I was a geek! I was interested in books, art, and music from a young age. I once tried to get a girl to talk to me at an eighth grade dance by asking her “Have you read T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets?” Needless to say, she didn’t dance with me. On a more serious level, my father, whose opinion was of course very important to me, began to see me as an “intellectual,” which was not exactly a good thing—rather too close to what the older generations in my family called in Yiddish a luftmensch, a good-for-nothing, someone wasting life, getting nowhere, in my case by living in the head.

Q: Did you begin a more formal study of photography in college?
A: Photography classes weren’t offered at Columbia when I was an undergraduate there, but I continued to use my camera. I talked a security guard into giving me a key to what turned out to be a small, long-unused darkroom. I was studying philosophy, literature, and history, spending most of my time reading. Photography was an emotional outlet. Things changed in my last year of college. I was teaching myself to play blues harmonica and one day I approached a guy on the street in San Francisco who was playing a harmonica. I got into a conversation with him, and eventually I asked if I could photograph him. That interaction was pivotal for me; a single conversation taught me so much. Before that, photography had been a private activity and in one conversation on one afternoon I realized that it could lead me into the world, that it could connect me. I’m quite shy by nature and photography somehow allowed me to approach people, to meet them, to learn and maybe to tell their stories.

Q: Where did photography take you after college?
A: At first I was living la vie d’artiste (or la vie d’luftmensch?) on very little money – writing, working at night, and photographing during the day. I had become deeply interested in Indian and Buddhist philosophy after studying with Robert Thurman at Columbia. I wanted to learn Sanskrit, and I decided to try to learn it in India—why not? So I found a teacher, and went to live and study in Visakhapatnam, a town in southeastern India. With my teacher I would study in the mornings, and photograph in the afternoon. Eventually I spent three years in an intensive photographic and scholarly project that looked at and into rural India. From that time forward I began to work on long term projects that attempt not just to picture the world using photography, but to think through it using pictures, and of course to ‘feel through’ it also.

Q: What are some other photography projects that you have undertaken?
A: Many of my projects are described on my website (http://jasonfrancisco.net/), but broadly they involve social justice, difference and otherness, historical loss and the challenges of historical memory, diaspora, and the contradictions of American cities and American ideals. My 2006 book from Stanford University Press, Far from Zion: Jews, Diaspora, Memory, considers the Ashkenazic Jewish experience in Europe and North America during the last century.

Q: Tell me about the books you’re working on now.
A: I’m working on a manuscript for a title which will be part of a new series from the University of California Press, called Defining Moments in American Photography. My essay looks at what the photograph says about testimony through photography that also calls itself art, and my partner, Anne McCauley from Princeton, is writing about the ways the picture addresses the complications of the immigrant experience and the anxieties of newly forming American-ness. This comes on top of ongoing photographic and research projects on San Francisco’s Chinatown, the Chinese diaspora in 19 th-century rural California, the Germantown section of Philadelphia, a book of pictures on the landscape of the Shoah with poetry by Paul Celan that I’ve translated, a book of short stories about American Jewish life, and a book about post September 11 th America, called After the American Century.

Q: Why did you choose to come to Emory?
A: I wanted to be a part of a significantly more engaged community—a first-tier intellectual community that values creative work as a labor of ideas as much as a purely aesthetic undertaking. I knew I had found that kind of community at Emory when I first visited here for an interview - the difference between what Emory offers and what I had been part of previously is palpable. The longer I’m here, the more delighted I am with my choice.

Q: How does teaching fit into your life as an artist?
A: As with other disciplines in research institutions, teaching is something you’re expected more or less to pick up through experience. I count myself lucky to have the example of my own teacher, Joel Leivick—an exceptionally sensitive photographer and supple thinker who is to me the gold standard of an artist educator. Through my experiences at both Rutgers and Stanford teaching has become central to my conception of what I’m doing as an artist—an extension of being a photographer and being a writer. I should say that I favor a non-hierarchical classroom, in which I function as guide and coach rather than judge. My task is not to fill the students with “my” knowledge, but to direct what I know toward them, in discrete ways particular to each student, so that each comes to know himself and herself through this medium that we have in common.

Q: Your appointment at Emory coincides with the Visual Arts Program transitioning to a full department, which became official in mid-September. What is your vision for the new department, particularly relative to the arts in general at Emory?
A: I believe that Emory is a place where invention in the arts is possible and the will is there to make it happen. I am eager to join the other arts supporters on campus to advocate for the necessity of the arts here. I would like to raise the profile of the Visual Arts Gallery through programming of a consistently high quality. I want people to expect that they will always find stimulating and provocative exhibitions from around the world here. I envision an ambitious curriculum within each medium that makes connections with other departments through collaborations and cross-listings and appeals to students beyond a narrow arts audience. This will require more faculty and expanded facilities, as well as a graduate program. I would also like to work with the Admissions office to attract more students who are serious about art and will continue to be serious about it after they leave Emory. One of the best ways for our new department to gain notoriety is through the success of our graduates.

Q: Just for Fun: What do you enjoy doing when you are not photographing?
A: [producing a ukulele from behind his desk]: I’ll show you. I started playing the ukulele – which means “dancing flea” by the way - as an offshoot of classical guitar studies, and I was particularly drawn to Hawaiian songs in the acoustic tradition, called ki ho`alu, or “slack key.” I find this music plaintive, bittersweet, a little melancholic, and a little buoyant—it touches me. The song I’m about to sing for you is a traditional Hawaiian folk song. It’s from the point of view of a grandparent, telling his granddaughter how cherished she is. Please excuse my bad singing voice! [Francisco performs Ka Pua U`i (The Beautiful Flower) by Bina Mossman.]

Edited by Jessica Moore
Communications Coordinator
Arts at Emory