NOMINATED BY STEPHEN SHORE
29—NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT
After teaching photography at Bard College and Parsons, Jasmine Clarke has become a student again herself: She is an MFA candidate in photography at the Yale School of Art. Her tender images of home and family have been shown at the Brooklyn Museum and the Phoenix Art Museum.
“Audre Lorde defines biomythography as a dynamic combination of history, biography, and myth. This is exactly how I think about photographs, as ‘fiction built from many sources.’ Before coming to graduate school, I had a certain idea of what my work looked like, about what kind of pictures I made. This past year has strengthened the factual and relational foundation of my practice, which then allows me to take my images to a more inventive place, weaving together history, reality, and my own imagination.
My photographs ask questions about the nature of seeing. How much do we trust what we’re looking at? I think of my pictures as layered and unfolding. I see memory and family as fragmented, pieced together through images telling interlocking narratives of cultural identity, mythology passed down through generations. Myths, like photographs, exist somewhere between truth and fabrication. I’m interested in what makes a picture complicated, in pictures that ask more questions than [they] give answers. Pictures that are haunting, that you can’t stop thinking about after the image has left your sight.”
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