Meet the Artist // Samantha Jensen

Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your artistic background?

My name is Samantha Jensen. I was raised in Northern California, and I am now based in Brooklyn. I came to photography through a collage background. I was taught darkroom printing through this incredible artist who taught me through experimentation – solarization, double exposures, etc. The next few years I taught myself how to print professionally in community darkrooms throughout Brooklyn. I think my background in collage as well as trying out all the mistakes of darkroom printing from the start, was important later in my photography work. I feel like I have two different practices, but here at GlogauAir I’m trying to find a way to merge them. My single-image photography work is often about identity, our interior and exterior worlds, and how we exist and navigate within spaces. It’s a mix of portraiture, still lifes, and landscapes. The other practice is collage work – working with fragments of images, ripped paper. It’s more conceptually and definitely more experimental.

What kind of themes do you usually work with?

I often find myself looking at people, relationships, and places and exploring what time does to them. How does time rupture things? What does this look like visually? When I first arrived in Berlin, I spent a lot of time editing an ongoing project called where flowers won’t, time will grow. This project is an ongoing exploration into the changing landscape of California as well as a personal study about the changing landscapes of my own family and the inherited traumas of the body. In this growing collection of photographs, this project seeks to equally position the landscape and my familial subjects as both a witness and the witnessed to the ways the ecosystem of our bodies, our families, and our landscapes are shaped by what is ongoing and chronic.

Rupture and repair are also themes I work with a lot. My work often involves the physical ripping of prints, and I am always drawn to photographing broken things. I mess up stuff. A lot of my work involves scratches and folds and sharp edges. Right now, I am doing experiments on expired darkroom paper where I crumple the paper – which rips the top layer off before exposing. It is not just the fractures I am interested in though, it is also how the disparate pieces get reattached, presenting them to the viewer to be structured anew, employing our desire as humans to heal and preserve relationships.

How do you like living in Berlin? Do you think it affects your art in a way?

I love it. I think arriving here completely shifted the work I had planned to do here. Within a few days here, I thought a lot about Berlin’s flat gray light. The lack of sun. I usually photograph with lots of light and deep shadows. Of course, being in Berlin in January, this is not exactly possible. So I began waking up a bit before the sun and going out in the early mornings on sunnier days, walking around the neighborhood and shooting street still lifes. I had planned to work with only b&w film, but when I came here, I had the urge to fill my studio up with color. Perhaps to compensate for the greyness.

With the street still lives, I wanted to also capture the loneliness I felt at the beginning. I didn’t know anyone here and I usually find people to photograph through friends. I’ve never been like “shit, who do I photograph?” So I just went around, and then I started to fall in love with photographing the streets around me. I call them street still lifes because I wouldn’t say I am a street photographer. These images are a bit different, they’re very close-up. I try to capture the light bouncing off objects, broken windows, trash left behind left behind. I want to abstract the objects a bit, make them into something different. Repurpose.
That said, I am also doing a lot of b&w work – expired paper experiments and silver gelatin printing at Bildband – a very magical darkroom here in Berlin.

How do you like your experience at GlogauAIR so far and living with other artists?

It’s cool, because although the artists on my floor do mostly painting & textile work, I like it because it pushes me to think differently. I think with photography, you can enter this bubble where you’re surrounded only by other photographers and you can stay in that bubble. Then your work starts to look like everyone else’s. I think it’s good to come out of the bubble sometimes and be inspired by different art forms. And I love all the residency visits we do. So, yeah so far, I love it.

Can you tell us about some of your favorite artists or artists who inspire you?

I feel like right now, I am inspired mostly by writers. I’ve been reading Octavia Butler and Clarice Lispector and Etel Adnan here. I love looking at poems, prose, or novels, and then translating the feelings I get from them into a visual practice. I also think I’ve been looking a lot at the work of my professor from ICP, Keisha Scarville. She plays with surrealism and the uncanny and it’s all image-based work. She does a lot of overlapping and collage.