Week Thirteen: Jeff Whetstone

Timothy O' Sullivan 

Combining two vastly different elements of the world into one method and form of creation is an incredible skill to discover and achieve effectively. After attending Wednesday’s lecture given by photographer Jeff Whetstone, I have never been more impressed, infatuated, and bewilder, by one singular artist who was able to do just that. Whetstone has truly jumped boundaries and has created art through the means of another field of study. Jeff Whetstone, a native southerner, graduated in 1990 from Duke University was trained in the practice of zoology. 

The collection of pieces that Whetstone discussed in his lecture, allowed for a strong understand of the expansive variety of images that fall under the same category. Starting with a video piece tilted Drawing E. Obsoleta; he used sixteen-millimeter film that was pushed two hundred percent, which allowed for the removal of shadows to create an optical illusion effect throughout the piece, this video depicts the mountain ranges of North Carolina, with a black rat snake. The Tennessee born artist has combined his skills in zoology and ecology to create photos that highlight the wilderness in its newest definition that consists of the human presence. Gaining inspiration from nineteenth century photographers, including William Henry Jackson, Timothy O’Sullivan and the early works of photographer Roger Ballen, Jeff Whetstone has been able to establish himself as one of the most unique cotemporary photographers.

Whetstone showed several pieces from his collections, including Central Range, New Wilderness, and Post Pleistocene. By choosing these specific selections, Whetstone was able to clearly establish his genre, but also his immense skill in expanding on this topic in so many different formatted images. One in particular that I found incredibly impressive came from his work within the collection, Frame / Ablate. This video piece was made with the use of an electron microscope. Whetstone was simply asked to make art with an incredibly scientific tool, and that he did. Not only did he create a very appealing video piece, he also was able to combine his passion of nature. He used pieces of his own skin that created landscapes underneath the scope. Within one singular piece, Whetstone was able to successfully combine both his fields of study and passion, into one illuminating and unconventional art form.

Jeff Whetstone’s other compilations consisted of tremendous compositions of the integration of humans and nature. In a lecture that went for almost two hours, Whetstone said more about his unique art of photography that could have comprehended, however, after hearing him discuss the elements that made up his Cave collection and his distinguished portraits and landscape of an area that he s so familiar with, but many outsiders aren’t, he truly has to ability to capture a movement that was not planned or set up, but that surrounds us every single day. A significant quote that came from Whetstone’s lecture that I made sure to write in heavy, bolded letters is that the “formal elements are in need of being broken.” As a photographer, I couldn’t be more inclined to emphasize this statement as monumental.  In our environment, everything tends to be static. It is gradually changing, but tends to be viewed in the same way it has always been. With Whetstone, and photography as a whole, we genuinely as artist have the privilege and skill to break that norm and reveal and display the world in a form that not many have witnessed or interpreted in that way before.