Mind Over Mirrors: A Photo Essay of the San Juan Islands
In April 2007, I packed up the essentials and moved about 3000 miles west to one of the more remote of the San Juan Islands in the Salish Sea. What was initially going to be a three to six month change of pace from my Bushwick, Brooklyn, life turned out to be three years of island dwelling on a five square mile island. Though it was situated right between Seattle and Vancouver and only 90 miles from both cities, it took anywhere between six and nine hours – or maybe more, depending on the weather) to get into “town”, as the island did not have ferry service.
In late 2007, I bought a plastic camera, ordered about 10 rolls of 120mm black & white and color film, and I started documenting my surroundings. I wasn’t really interested in showcasing divine shots of nature. Rather, what I found when I began receiving prints in the mail from the developer was that something else was being captured with the film. The technical simplicity of the camera and the way light was interacting with the film created an energy that resonated with my music & performances up until that point. Of course, there were 12 shots on a roll, so if two or three of those came out looking okay, then I was doing pretty good because chance often played a huge role with the variables of the camera/film.
During my time on island, I did occasionally get up to Vancouver/Seattle for a performance, or go on tour with Peeesseye in Europe, but the ongoing performing dialogue that was an everyday part of my life back in Brooklyn was displaced by these new environs and basic tasks of rural living. Hauling water, chopping firewood, working as a restoration forester on nature preserves, hunting/fishing, jerry-rigging whatever was breaking, plumbing, farming, animal husbandry, pruning fruit trees were just some of the tasks. I was fortunate to have a piano in my cabin and that was the bulk of my musical daily practice for a period of time, but all-in-all I found that shooting the photos throughout my day proved to be a cathartic experience – similar to performing. I was left with 5″ x 5″ prints that captured some point in time and for me they all had a performative effect to them. I look at them today and imagine they are stills of a film, probably since I remember taking each shot and can vaguely remember the time before and after the shot was taken. Or at least some approximate dream-like memory of what was going on.
In January 2010, I said goodbye to island living and moved to Seattle. I have since begun recording a new solo project called Mind Over Mirrors, which I could not have started without this experience. – Jaime Fennelly
Tags: Brooklyn, Bushwick, Jaime Fennelly, peeesseye, plastic camera, PSI, San Juan Islands, Seattle, Vancouver, Washington