jim schaefer photography

17th Ave. South, Minneapolis, MN. 1974, 2007.

In my day job I am a career academic administrator, serving as Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciencs at Georgtown University, where I have been since 1992. Previously I had worked at the University of Minnesota, where I had received my doctorate in theatre arts in 1984. At Georgetown I have taught dramatic literature, with a particular interest in the Symbolist and Expressionist plays of the late 19th and early 20th century. My first love, however, was photography, and for several years now I have taught a graduate seminar on the history and rhetoric of photography as part of our M.A. program in Communication, Culture, and Technology.

I began photographing in the late 1960’s and for ten years I tried very hard to Be A Photographer. I bought a 4x5 view camera, learned the Zone System, bought a lot of books, and managed to get into a few small shows. But when even I began to find my pictures boring, I put the camera in the first of a long series of closets and headed off to grad school in a completely different field. I didn’t take another serious photograph for twenty years.

After I’d been at Georgetown for a number of years, driving into DC every day from the Maryland suburbs, I realized that I had begun once again to “see” photographs all around me. Late in 1999 I pulled the view camera out of its most recent closet and began to shoot color transparencies of the national monuments, trying to capture how they appear to the people who live and work here – that is, in the context of a crowded, traffic-clogged city. After just a couple of days of shooting I was once again hooked.

I have now adopted a fully-digital workflow, shooting with a Hasselblad equipped with a 22MP Imacon back and printing on an Epson 9800 inkjet printer. Many of my photographs are large, multi-image panoramas, 15 or more feet wide.

I am currently working on two projects. One involves documenting U.S. Route 1 (aka Rhode Island Avenue within the District). An extension of the earlier DC project, the objective in this case is to show what unofficial Washington looks like.

The second project is based on a long series of pictures that I had taken in the mid-1970’s in Minneapolis. For several years I had compulsively photographed virtually every house in three different neighborhoods of the city, about 300 different homes in all, using an old Mamiya twin-lens camera and black-and-white film. This past summer, while visiting friends in Minneapolis, I took along the contact sheets from that period and located about 100 of those addresses. This Fall I am returning to begin reshooting those the same locations 30+ years later, this time in digital color. I will then print the pairs of images side-by-side on the same sheet. One example of such a pairing is shown above.