I don’t think Jody Ake is afraid to remember his near brush with death in New Mexico when he was tossed out of a sunroof, 70’ into the air, fractured a whole mess of bones, including spinal in two places. As a 20 year old undergraduate student at the College of Santa Fe, an unsuspecting passenger majoring in Sculpture, his entire world up ended, (blink) just like that car on a fateful day in a very young man’s life. What was Jody’s life like for the next 7 months in a body cast? I can’t imagine. seeing yourself as a new, altered person, his entire life changed at (gulp) breakneck speed. When it was time, he picked himself up, brushed off and returned to his studies as an art student.
Prior to the accident, Jody was staying in Boston where he saw a sculpture titled “The Greek Slave”, an 1850’s statue by the artist, Hiram Powers. It was about a woman being sold as a sexual slave and was to influence Ake’s decision to major in sculpture as an undergraduate student.
The Slave has been taken from one of the Greek Islands by the Turks, in the time of the Greek Revolution; the history of which is familiar to all. Her father and mother…., have been destroyed by her foes, and she alone preserved as a treasure too valuable to be thrown away. Sold in a Constantinople market, the sculpture represents a being superior to suffering, and raised above degradation, by inward purity and force of character. Thus the “The Greek Slave” is an emblem of the trial to which all humanity is subject, and may be regarded as a type of resignation, uncompromising virtue, or sublime patience.
Back to Jody’s broken back, which ended that potential career choice for lack of the physical strength necessary to carve or fabricate sculptural objects. Shifting focus in graduate school to photography, he chose not to entirely abandon dreams of “carving beautifully nude women”, like “ The Greek Slave”. At first, he “couldn’t find his voice” in an academic world full of art history, philosophy, the frustration of “not knowing what (he) was looking for”, a cathartic, near fatal accident, a fertile and underutilized mind during a long painful recovery. So, in search for something that wouldn’t bore him, Jody turned the camera towards himself in a quest that is ongoing to date and inclusive of other models. (But he did mention that before all is said and done, he pictures himself mightily carving away at his perfectly sculpted beauty of a woman.)
From edgy landscapes exploding with industrial buildings, racing tire tracks on a grandiose file of dirt, a parched and desolate field, utilizing special lighting and a mid 19th century photo process called wet plate collodion involving a large format camera, glass plates and hand mixed chemicals for each exposure, Jody has become iconic in the field of wet plate collodion ambrotypes. His gritty, somehow sparkling portraits of people appear to us viewers to be waiting for something (or other) to end. Still lifes paused, missing the caption or explanation, because why am I looking at a gorgeously poised wild root trapped inside a period glass and sterling bottle or a proud bulbous flower with dying leaves? About his fashion photos and burlesque images of women, philosophically imbedded with suggestions and questions about body image, with a strong sense of the subject looking outside of the photograph, but unclear about who she is looking at, gender-ly speaking.
The photos on Market Street are “dark…with baggage…not happy…and the historical process, wet plate collodion, is not a happy cheery one” according to Jody, which, he explains, emerged from the “industrial age and was used to document death and post mortem babies. It was the last visual record of people going off to war. The history of photography is imbedded in the dark history of America and the civil war….the bloodiest….” Witness the synergy in Jody’s work: The combination of self, history, craftsmanship, the witty interpretation and overlay of the (21st century) familiar and Dutch 17th century painting, American Civil War history and human rights, a rarified photographic process putting the artist in contact with a history in which we are (suggested in his images) yet still embroiled.
Underlying Jody’s work is a small voice that sorts itself out in his prints and gracefully expands into a bellow with reminders that we are mortal and life is brief. While regarding life/ death values, he presents a seemingly crumbling world with assortments of people and things - de-composing and re-composing– while they look back at us and maybe, just maybe, they know what we are thinking. Or do we?
Jody Ake’s work has been exhibited nationally, from east to west coast, and publications can be found on line as well as at his website: http://jodyake.com/ In 1998, he earned his Masters of Fine Arts at the University of Oregon. He currently lives in Brooklyn and works in lower Manhattan, teaches high school kids, was involved in a photo cooperative in Tribeca, and balances his work between his own studio work and commercial photography. His most recently published work is in the April 2007 issue of Ebony with a 10 page spread of his photographs. In Jan. 2007 he shot musician, John Legend at Pochran Studios for Uptown Magazine. Photographs are included in his website. His most recent exhibition was at NYU in New York City.
