Photographer based in Richmond, VA
Shane Rocheleau
Tell us about yourself, what's your background?
I was born on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, USA. I lived there until moving to the Burlington, Vermont area for college where I studied English and Psychology. I’ve also lived in Maryland, Virginia, and Wisconsin. I now again live in Richmond, Virginia. I have a Master of Fine Arts degree and have taught photography at several institutions. For the moment, I’m a full time artist. It feels like a dream sometimes.
It sounds hokey, I know, but I think photography found me. I wanted to be a writer and wasn’t on a quest for another medium. I was 22 and heading across the United States with two friends on a post-college cross-country trip. I’m not sure I expected to succeed, but, nonetheless, I decided I should try to write the Great American Road Trip Novel. (My naïveté knew no bounds!) Our first morning, after camping the night on the shore of Lake Eerie, we awoke rearing for the road. My buddy handed me his little Kodak Advantix camera on the Eerie beach: “Take a quick pic of me”. When I released the shutter I discovered something; I just didn’t know what. I never gave him that camera back.
Later in the trip, somewhere in Wyoming in July, 1999 I realized what I had discovered on the shore of Lake Eerie: I want to make pictures.
But why the camera, right? Over time the answer to this question shifts, expands, contracts. Right now, it feels almost simple: I want to make, desperately. I’ve made drawings and written a lot in my life. I love each of those media. But the camera demands that I enter the world outside my skull and convene with it. The camera ensures that I have adventures out there. It also ensures that for spurts while photographing, I slow down to almost absolute zero. When I’m under the dark cloth before my ground glass, I disappear. It’s as if I become the world, without boundary, and lose all anxiety and fear. Very little feels so right as that.
Left: Jack, 2023; Right: Motel, Elko, NV, 2023
“I’m fascinated and shocked by human pathology — especially psychic — both in the individual and the collective."
Bonneville Salt Flats, UT, 2023
What are you currently working on and where did the inspiration for it come from?
Speaking of dreams! In April, 2023, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation gave me the honor of my professional life: a Guggenheim Fellowship. Since, I have been working on the project I proposed to them, the one same featured here.
I like to see under the hood and always assume others do to. So here’s the first paragraph from my Guggenheim proposal:
“The American system cannibalizes its non-wealthy citizens in both explicit and implicit ways. It does so, however, by deceiving its subjects into complicity; where there should be class solidarity, there is, instead, an individual and collective mobilization against each other. Addiction reigns here, a product of depression and anxiety and themselves products of the insecurity borne by this cruel system. My newest project – working title, This Most Monstrous Food – is my most ambitious to date. Using the Donner Party’s travels and tribulations as a framework, the project will interrogate the social mechanisms driving this societal cannibalism: fascism, misinformation, America-mythologizing propaganda and its whitewashed history – each driving racism, tribalism, and inter-class warfare (amongst other unfortunate conditions).”
On a Hill near St. Mary's KS, 2024
Those of you who read my artist statement — included on the Innovate Grant website — might see how this project has expanded & deepened while also remaining tethered to my original ideas and impulses. It’s all so exciting to me even if also profoundly dark.
My inspiration? Ten thousand things. Here’s a short — if partial — answer from someone who has lots of difficulty with brevity:
I’m fascinated and shocked by human pathology — especially psychic — both in the individual and the collective. In the United States, there’s no shortage. The nation spearheads and/or inspires global imperialism & colonialism. The state religion is Capitalism. Our histories are myths. What is it called when a parent tells a child over and over that their experience isn’t real? Gaslighting. We Americans have been gaslit.
Diorama at the Archway Memorial, 2024
To be reductive, gaslighting is abusive and abuse yields pathology. Mental Health here is a thriving, robust industry. Industry under Capitalism has no care for people, only for profit. It’s no wonder the United States is a global leader in genocide, gun violence, mass & serial killing, imprisonment, social isolation, military spending…and on and on and on.
This Most Monstrous Food responds to my life experience, to the substance of all my past projects, to my continued research and reading. It responds to my engagement with an honest, complicated American history and with the pathological — and the aberrant — in both the individual and the collective. It quite simply feels like the most energetic and natural expression of my fascination and shock at what America honestly is and what it has consistently wrought.
In the studio
Innovation does not only happen in the field of technology — it occurs everyday in a creative practice. What do you do for inspiration?
Primarily, I try to be present. When I’m present in my world, I can see its richness and nuance. I can see where it overlays with what authority wants me to believe, and I can see very clearly where it doesn’t.
I read and work and play a lot.
William Shakespeare is widely considered the greatest writer of the English language. Perhaps it’s worth noting that not only was his vocabulary two or three times the size of mine, but he also added over a thousand words to the English vocabulary. I voraciously seek to expand my photographic language.
I resist (self) definition when I can. I am not a portrait photographer or a landscape photographer or a street photographer or a large format photographer or an analog photographer. I make all the pictures I want to make and try make all the others. Every time I go out to photograph, I’m sure to make a picture I’ve never made before, something that feels new and unfamiliar. I try to try it all. I experiment and play and fail and fail. I don’t ignore any of my pictures; I learn from them all. I actively seek to define all my rules, unconscious and conscious alike, and I actively break those rules.
I play the long game and learn and grow. I’m patient as much as I’m able to be. I listen.
When I’m doing all that, inspiration is always close.
In the studio
Many artists live by their routines, what does that look like for you?
Routine is super important to me. Without it, my brain becomes weary and scattered. But my routine is very much dictated by present reality. At the moment, I am a full time artist, and, generally speaking, today I have a fairly set routine (one that will, whenever I make my way back to the money making world, change in perhaps dramatic ways).
As for now? I try to get out of bed sometime before 530a. I grab my coffee then read until my 7 year old son awakens around 645a. Studio morning ends briefly. He and I usually hang for an hour or so getting ready for school. After he gets the bus at 745a, I usually head upstairs to my attic studio to work on whatever needs the work that morning. I eat at 10a then work some more. At 1:30p or so, I head downstairs, eat a light lunch, then go to the gym (and yes, I consider going to the gym part of my studio routine). I usually roll back up to the house just as my son arrives home at 3p.
No eating in the studio ever. Gotta keep that separate. I only drink coffee or water up there. I may listen to music or I may not. Perhaps I’ll dig into a history or psychoanalysis or eastern religion podcast. I try to play those noisy things by ear. Sometimes I need quiet, other times melody, and still others a bit of narrative to straighten my thoughts.
As I answer these questions now, only babbling birds interrupt the silence.
Who are your biggest influences?
Here are a few off the top of my head:
My wife and children
My college friends, who are my oldest friends
I have a handful of really close friends who are artists, photographers, and writers who help me with any and every aspect of my art and process. I need their honest and direct and caring voices. Artistically, they influence me most these days.
Vladimir Nabokov, Cormac McCarthy, Tony Morrison, Hermann Hesse
Chuang Tzu and Thich Nhat Hanh
Pearl Jam, Pink Floyd, Tom Waits
Dirty Three when I need instruments and Hope Sandoval when I need a soothing voice
Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Egon Schiele, Kara Walker
Katy Grannan, Gary Schneider, Lynn Cohen, Wynn Bullock, Dana Lixenberg, Michael Schmidt
Are there books or films that are an important source of inspiration?
I tend to pull a little bit from many different places, some new and some old (but enduring). Here’s severely truncated list:
Books: Kon Tiki, Lolita, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Into the Wild, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Steppenwolf, Blood Meridian, The Executioner’s Song, Hurricane Season, Columbus and Other Cannibals, Silencing the Past, Grapes of Wrath
Films: Goonies, Stand By Me, Dead Poets Society, Seven, Mulholland Drive, Happiness, The Big Lebowski, Shawshank Redemption, Irreversible, The Holy Mountain, and, at this very moment, Train Dreams
What is the best piece of advice you’ve been given?
Trust yourself.
Run marathons not sprints.
Don’t compare yourself to others.
Invite your demons to dinner.
What is the best advice you would give to other artists?
I answered somewhere above “What do you do for inspiration?” Most of that answer could also be taken as advice. But also:
Fail. FAIL! There’s no single way to be an artist: at all costs, seek a way that feels good and right and true to you. Remember that trends are mechanisms of control. If you need to make art about puppies or sports or flowers, do it. Listen but don’t follow. Participate in larger worlds. Let your fears be beacons. Don’t let others define greatness for you. Don’t make consumables.
Stay up to date with Shane Rocheleau
Website ShaneRocheleau.com