Portfolio 

Looking

Shot around the world, this series savors moments and places of vision. Revealing more a traveling of mindset than a specific geography, the images capture being immersed in the visual, whether intense color or the calm of a distant outlook. Looking features two large-scale color digital print series, one of flowers shot close-up and out-of-focus, the other of people looking at views, seen individually and juxtaposed in diptychs and triptychs.

1924

80 years after my grandparents married, I came across a short 35 mm film of their wedding. At the time, my grandfather worked for Pathe cinema in Dublin. I can only imagine the conversation: “Doing anything Saturday? Any left over film? Do us a favor and shoot a reel?” Projecting their vibrant image on a cinematic screen was an amazing experience, re-imagining family narratives. Shot with a view camera the images were contact printed, at times combined with self-portraits, recalling a mantelpiece portrait of my grandmother.

Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh, USA, has often been photographed with an eye to both the splendor and poverty wrought by its industrial history. I was curious about creating a different kind of portrait. The series features twenty photographs ranging from key architectural landmarks such as the city’s bridges to more intimate portraits of neighborhood houses. Each image is printed in black and white on warm tone paper and toned with selenium.

Wrapped

In the winter months strange burlap creatures populate Toronto, Ontario’s highways. These wrapped trees fascinate me.  After living in Canada I began to photograph them on return visits, scouring the landscape, persuading loved ones to drop me on the sides of highways, and withstanding frostbite to take hundreds of shots. As if stills from a singular film portrait, ethereal and otherworldly, they conjure very human images of striving and struggle.

Baroque

Brazil is a whirl of color and contradictions, haunting social forces and inventiveness. The Mosteiro de São Bento (Monastery of Saint Benedict) located in Rio de Janeiro embodies such juxtapositions. Built by slaves, still emanating the religious chants of Benedictines, the simple late Renaissance façade belies an other-worldly Baroque interior exploding with gold painted excess and incongruous life. 

Arvores

Daily walks, rituals of marking time, the simplicity of documenting what is, almost effortlessly, captures a filmic portrait of an unfolding spring.   Rather than a singular rootedness, it is as if a rhizomatic world has been upended in plain view – a force field of dialogue, teeming connectivity, alliances, assemblages, and multiplicity.

Photographer: J Gogan

Born and educated in Dublin, Ireland, J Gogan currently lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. A curator and educator, she has been engaged in issues of art and art-making for over 25 years. An active photographer over the last fifteen years she has had one solo exhibition and participated in a number of group shows. In 2004 she received a Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ Degree Certificate in Photography and was awarded one of their Emerging Photographer Grants.