Galeria Valid Foto, Barcelona
I attended the combined opening ceremony for the 12th Julia Margaret Cameron Award for Women Photographers and 12th Pollux Awards at Galeria Valid Foto in Barcelona this May 2019. As an exhibiting artist in both awards, and my second year in a row to receive the JMC Award, it was an honor to come this second time to Barcelona. It felt a bit like coming home, and fitting that it did… because after spending the winter in Europe I had come full circle, and now in the weeks following the exhibition, preparing to return to the United States. My first time in Barcelona, last October, was my first time exhibiting photography at an international show. I arrived in the city roughly twenty-four hours before the opening, after weeks and weeks (well, let’s face it, years) of insane stress in my personal life leading up to my departure. When I got there I promptly put my dog and I to bed in the windowless attic room I had rented and woke up again fourteen hours later. Like an idiot, I had booked a place that was cheap and cute but was half an hour by metro from the exhibition in a city where I had never been, with a language I didn’t speak, and traveling with a dog. I was so disoriented and jet-lagged that it took me three hours to find where the event was taking place and I arrived two hours late for the opening. I felt so sorry for Luna, because it became clear to me then that dogs do, indeed, experience jet-lag, that I bought her tin after tin of Spanish sardines to make up for it.
This second time to Barcelona, Luna and I arrived by boat… a twenty-hour ferry ride from Civitavecchia, Italy. Luna did not relieve herself for the entire sailing, so….the next time your kids claim they have to pee every fifteen minutes of a two-hour car ride, you can tell them about my dog. And unlike your kids, Luna rarely complains, so we slept straight through like little stowaways despite the hoards of young and hormonal Italian men getting drunk, singing at the tops of their lungs and collapsing in giggling heaps in the hallways all night long. But perhaps my brain just plain associates Barcelona with extreme fatigue because I still felt odd waves of exhaustion as I rolled my overstuffed suitcase from the marina to the room I had intelligently rented just blocks from the gallery. The next morning I woke up with a migraine…my second one in the eight months I had been in Europe. I used to get migraines all the time. So often, in fact, that there was a point in my life when I had more days with a migraine than days when I didn’t have one. I also suffered from chronic insomnia…and even as a child was known to pull batteries out of ticking clocks and curl inside kitchen cupboards in my efforts to find dark and quiet places to sleep. In Europe it seems all I do is sleep. I sleep all night…and then sometimes I sleep during the day. This is a totally new Jenny. And it’s an actual miracle, because I can’t really explain why, suddenly, my circadian rhythms stopped popping speed and starting smoking pot instead. But interestingly, when I took a two week trip to visit a friend in Ireland over the holidays I didn’t sleep more than an hour out of each night I was there. Ireland, with its curling-eyebrow curmudgeons, weepy grey skies, and green moss and green mud and green grassy dune landscape reminded me so much of my birthplace on San Juan Island, WA I could have mistaken it for home. If you think it’s impossible to go two weeks on 14 hours of sleep, I will tell you that not only did I go two weeks on fourteen hours of sleep but my friends told me I looked remarkably fresh and “not tired.” But on my first night back in Europe I hit my pillow in Paris like I’d been smacked really hard on the back of the head. I’m convinced now that I fell back into the familiar pattern of insomnia when I hit ground on a familiar island landscape. My advice to people everywhere is this: if you feel like you’re spinning your wheels in bumfuck nowhere and someone has the nerve to chime in unhelpfully with “wherever you go, there you are,” you can just tell them to take their self-righteous cliche and shove it because the world works in mysterious ways and sometimes you were just born in the wrong place.
It’s understandable, then, that the sensories that greeted me upon my return to Spain were good reason to feel a little doom for what I was going home to in June. And Barcelona is a confusing city to be in if you can’t match the energy of its quirky, upbeat vibe. Having a migraine in Barcelona made me feel like I wanted to die. But a very reasonable thing about Europe is that they sell 600mg Ibuprofen at the pharmacies and you don’t need a prescription. So Luna and I arrived at the photography exhibition not long after they opened the doors and by that time, The Migraine had decided to subside. The great thing about international exhibitions is that all of your printing, matting, and framing details are worked out far in advance… so all you have to do is show up and find out where they hung your work. I like to stroll in off the street like a visitor and pretend I don’t know anybody… which is easy, because I don’t and I’m always attending alone.
From my series: Landscape of the Lounge with my Thousand-Pound Hounds
In the 12th JMC Award I was recognized in the non-professional categories of Women Seen by Women, Portrait, Self-Portrait, and Nature. And in the 12th Pollux Awards I was recognized in the professional categories of Nature and Nude Figure. With a combined total of more than twenty photos in the awards, printing and framing the entire lot would have been cost-prohibitive, not to mention the battle of schlepping so many photos home with me after the show, so I chose two from a series that I especially wanted to see in print, and called it good.
At the time of this article I have been recognized in a total of six international awards for photography and the crazy thing is… when I show up for the ceremonies I instantly feel like I don’t belong. I actually try to get through the evening without being noticed as an exhibiting artist. Forget asking a stranger to take my photo next to my photos. Just… no. It’s like reliving my first day of kindergarten the moment I walk through the door. Like…if I don’t make eye contact, maybe nobody will even notice me and I won’t have to talk at all. My awkwardness only increases as I slowly realize I am the only person there unaccompanied by another human. Since I’ve done everything by myself since about age one you’d think I’d be used to this by now but I’m not. Let me tell you something ladies…single women in their thirties are not as common on this side of the pond and people assume there’s something off about you if you show up to events on your own. It doesn’t help much that European women are obsessed with beauty and always dressed to the nines with high heels, pantyhose, hair extensions, collagen lip injections, and full makeup jobs. They attend gallery debuts with husbands on their arms and designer dogs in their handbags. Meanwhile…no matter how nicely I wash my hair or make certain I wear underwear I still manage to look like I just crawled out of a borrowed tent after six weeks of camping. And it’s only when I go to these gallery openings and watch the happy couples and friends and family members all celebrating together that my normally confidently single and stubborn and independent American self feels like the awkward teenaged loner I never really grew out of.
But as per her nature, Luna made short work of my shortcomings in friend-making and perused the patrons for pets whilst I humbled myself with all the amazing photography from artists all over the world. The vivid, gritty and yet somehow still tender Americana captured in the portraiture by Kennady Schneider brought me back to her photos several times that evening. And a three-part series of self-portraiture by Harper Bella and her American flag was so familiar and beautiful and strong that my breath caught in my throat when I saw her there, elegantly in person aside from her photos.
The strikingly beautiful face of African youth in a color portrait by Erika Blanco is so lovely in its simplicity that its watery sunshine on brown skin made my eyes watery, too.
Liza Botkin’s single black and white image of double mannequins in the bathroom mirror caught my eye from across the room with its incredible composition and eerie emotion… I can relate, somehow, to those mannequins and it makes me uneasy.
And Yoshie Nishikawa’s nude figure portraiture from Japan with subjects as delicate as porcelain dolls is more exquisite than I could ever describe in words. Which is the trouble with trying to write about an art form that’s purely visual. It doesn’t really work that way and neither do my cell phone photos of their photos. For pete’s sake people… if you want to appreciate art… support an artist, buy their work, and go to their art shows.
When Luna and I left Galeria Valid Foto that evening, the sun had set over Barcelona in a great big bloom of pink and purple plumes. We slipped through the soft spring air of the busy city streets and I felt happy, after all, that I had made the journey again to this part of the world to see my photos displayed on a special wall. For as much as I fein being tortured, I am extremely honored to be recognized for my work in photography with these prestigious awards. The process is both uplifting and humbling….and each time hard for me to believe my work wasn’t chosen by mistake. How many awards will it take before I am convinced that I am not a perpetual fluke-in-the-making?
I’m not certain that’s why I keep answering the calls for entries. I’ve said before that artists serve their hearts on platters for all of humanity to feed from. And to be recognized for it confirms that there is indeed humanity out there, receiving. But on an even deeper level, I believe art to be the most fundamental expression of humankind; and as crucial to culture as oxygen to breathing. And just like the lungs of a great collective creature, artists process the essence of being, and express for us translations of the obvious and mysterious, the weird and the ordinary, the exuberant and exhausted, the laughter and anguish and joy and sadness in languages we needn’t learn for we were already born with the knowing. This personal inward journey of the artist made public through the process of sharing art is about as traditional as making a campfire and shitting behind a bush. Only, perhaps more like shitting behind a bush and then telling stories about it around the campfire. Either way… it goes way back. And perhaps why I needn’t chide myself for showing up at gallery openings looking like I’ve just been camping.
For more information about The Photography Gala Awards and how you get involved, please see their website at: https://www.thegalaawards.com/
In the 12th Julia Margaret Cameron Award, a total of 760 photographers from 72 countries submitted 5,800 photographs that were considered by jurors Julia Fullerton-Batten, Andrea Star-Reese, and Laura Pannock.
In the 12th Pollux Awards, a total of 682 photographers from 67 countries submitted 4,220 photographs for consideration by juror Phillip Brookman.
Selected works from both awards is exhibited at Galeria Valid Foto in Barcelona, Spain May 8 - 24, 2019. To see the entire results galleries, please refer to the following links:
The 12th Julia Margaret Cameron Award: https://www.thegalaawards.com/results-of-the-12-jmca
The 12th Pollux Awards: https://www.thegalaawards.com/results-12th-pollux-awards
From left to right: photographer Saskia Bruinsma (Netherlands) with her photos, dead animals by Anne-Grethe Henriksen (Norway), portraiture by Kate Stanworth (United Kingdom), abstract black and white by Viky Garden (New Zealand).
My peers.