Jessica Bee - The Ladies Network March 2016
In his novel Sexus, Henry Miller attempts to do the impossible: define art. “A great work of art, if it accomplishes anything, serves to remind us, or let us say, set us dreaming of all that is fluid and intangible.” While Jessica Bee’s ethereal photographic scenes couldn’t be further from Miller’s smutty novels, this is exactly what her photographs do: set us dreaming.
Her photographs give the curious sensation of being simultaneously caught in a perpetual storm of colour, while swimming in deep water, unable to reach solid ground. Her subjects are serene, undisturbed, and eternal. We see them caught between two worlds – the one from which they emerged, and the one to which they are headed. Looking at one of her photos is like having a daydream lift up in your mind to enchant you, captivate you, and make the real world fade away.
We meet on the terrace of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. Jessica (a.k.a. Jessica Ashley Unknown) talks animatedly about her photography while every move of her hand, adorned in silver, sends sunlight bouncing in all directions, but the moonstone around her neck remains impassive, as you would expect of a stone known for it’s mysterious calming qualities.
It’s hot up here. There are babies crying, waiters shuffling, chairs and tables screeching as they’re being dragged along the ground, but she seems unaware of any of it as she talks about the beginning of her photographic journey.
“At first it was just a hobby,” she says. “My first two rolls had 36 exposures each and I think, maybe 24 came out. So it was really, really bad.
“I just kept going and eventually started getting results I liked and I started blogging so I could keep track of what film I was using, how I did it, what kind
of camera I was using. It just kind of snowballed from there, really. It became more of a passion than a hobby.”
Jessica hasn’t studied photography, she doesn’t use Photoshop, and in her own words isn’t “proficient enough to not have a working light metre,” so how is it possible for her to create such powerful images?
After years of trial and error, and experiments with different cameras, films, and double exposures, she discovered film soaking. Photographic film is basically a strip of transparent plastic that is coated on one side in a gelatin emulsion that contains inconceivably small light-sensitive silver halide crystals. When you soak the film in an acidic solution, the emulsion is dissolved or corroded to the point where light and colours become warped.
She’s tried just about every soak imaginable – coffee, wine, and even urine. “Those ones didn’t really work out,” she says, laughing. “One roll worked but all the other ones were getting stuck and it was really frustrating.”
At the moment her favourite soak is aftershave. She’s not sure if the scent matters, all that is important is the effect it leaves on the film. It’s what makes her photos look like a merging of night and day, of reality and the unconscious. The film takes on wonderfully deep blue and purple hues, like how you’d imagine a clairvoyant sees the world – full of auras – where the seemingly unreal appears more powerful than the real.
The Real in her photographs is the people she loves – her friends and her boyfriend, who regularly pose for her by the water. They appear beautiful and distant, like the moon or a desert oasis. They look like they are tuning into the universe, or listening to the sound of the earth turning.
“For a long time, [the shoots were] anywhere on the beach. At the end of last year I went up to Newcastle and they have these amazing dunes so it looked like we were in the desert when we were really just in these massive sand dunes by the beach, but that was amazing.
“I try not to plan too much when I go out and shoot,” she says, “unless I get something that comes to mind and I really want to create that image, but for the most part I really like going to the place, wherever it is, and just seeing how it feels. I would really love to go to the desert, I would really love to just go on a road trip and pull over and take pictures.”
It’s through this process of soaking, travelling and shooting that Jessica translates her unconscious mind into a visual reality. She creates images that are as profound as dreams: hallucinatory visions that briefly pull us out of ourselves and show us that there is more to reality than we perhaps realised.
You can see Jessica’s photographs as part of the Ludlites’ Head On Photo Festival exhibition on 30 April 2016
How to do your own film soak:
“Soaking is one of those things that everyone does differently. If you look it up you’ll see all kinds of recipes, but this is the way I do it,” Jess explains.
– Keep the film in its canister, take the top off, and pour the aftershave in, making sure to fill it to the brim
– Leave it on a windowsill for 24 hours, topping up the level regularly
– Soak in water for a couple of minutes, then rinse under running water to wash off as much aftershave as possible
– Put it in a bowl of rice for a couple of days to make sure it is completely dry
– Load it into your camera and off you go
Tip #1: Don’t put soaked film in Lomography cameras:
“I won’t put it in any of my Lomography cameras,” Jess says, “because if the film gets stuck, the little spokes that come through the film just rip it and you won’t know that it’s not advancing.”
Tip #2: Always tell your developer that your film has been soaked
“The first developer I was going to was okay with it at first, but then he started getting a bit worried about his equipment and his chemicals and what it was doing to them,” she explains. “I found another guy who knows what I’m doing and he’s happy to develop it for me. But I’ve also come across artists who do what I do and no one wants to develop it for them. There are film labs that will accept soaked rolls but they just want to know that it’s soaked and they’ll do it at the end of the day so they’re the last ones to go through.”
This story originally appeared on The Ladies Network in March, 2016.
Images courtesy of Jessica Bee.