JoAnn Teel
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PHOTOGRAPHY WAS MY BEGINNING
I started shooting photos on a Graflex 4x5 Large Format Press Camera in the 1960s. My father was a photographer by trade having learned the skill while serving in the Army during WWII and then continued doing the work professionally as a civilian for the Army and shot weddings et al as a sideline on the weekends. When I was 15, he gave me a Argus Argoflex Seventy-Five Twin Reflex camera and it was on that camera that I shot the first photo that I ever developed in a darkroom, i.e., Hingham, Massachusetts, which I have included in my collection here. The original is old and certainly faded but it was my beginning and I still have that camera.
Hingham, Massachusetts - 1972
Between freshman and sophomore year of high school, both of my friends moved to other states so when I went to visit one in Massachusetts, I brought my Argus camera with me and the rest is history.
I was almost 16 years old by then and I remember standing in my friend’s backyard and shooting a beautiful sunrise as it came through the trees.
According to my photography teacher after I developed the photo, “It was a triumph.” and that felt good to almost 16-year old me.
My father did not have a creative eye as he was a practical photographer who took pictures of what the Army needed and then did stock wedding photos from the 1950s to about 1980. I, on the other hand, framed photos everywhere I went and the images that I still have from back then saw things from a different perspective than he did. I saw texture and color and targeted the micro-parts of a beautiful scene to get to the details in it often overlooked. I still do that.
Although photography is just one part of me as a creative maker, it is nonetheless my foundation and my connection to my father.
MY LOVE OF CLAY
While on summer break from college, I worked in a pottery studio as an assistant who was responsible for making clay and glazes. It was a wonderful time for me as I would go to work and be in the midst of the amazing creative energy of the women who ran the place…both local art teachers working at the county park each summer.
