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On the morning of my 6th birthday, mom and dad gave me an easel with a set of paints and brushes. But before I could get a good grip on the easel, I was pried free and put on a school bus to endure 8 hours of Catholic education. It seemed like the second hand on every classroom's clock at the Academy of St. Dorothy was broken that December day of 1974. I could have sworn I even saw one tick backwards. After the dismissal bell rang I was the first brat on the school bus home. The only thing that made the thirty-minute journey endurable was that Jack-the-bus-driver had on my favorite radio station that played lots of Carpenters songs. Before the bus could come to a halt at the foot of our driveway, I had broken through the swinging doors, run passed a freshly baked yellow cake with chocolate frosting, and hurried into my playroom where the new easel awaited. More than 30 years have since passed. But the way I feel about my camera today is not far from the emotions I experienced on that December 1974 afternoon. In short, I still love making pictures.
When asked as a kindergartener what I wanted to be when I grow up, I’d usually respond, "an artist." But I was always told that if I chose that career path that I’d die poor. It seems funny now, but when I was 5 years old those words were very frightening. They didn’t stop me though and throughout my childhood I kept a sketchbook handy at all times. I spent most of my summers with mom, dad, grandma, and grandpa drawing on the porch of our tiny lake house in Beach Lake, Pennsylvania. My subjects were almost always trees, especially solitary ones. My mom has always been my best friend so when I was sent off to kindergarten at the age of 4 I had a hard time adjusting to the 7 hours without her. I was able to hold myself together for a few hours, but when recess came and the other kids headed for the see-saws, I headed for a very large old oak tree where I was able to hide and let go of a good cry. I still find great comfort in lonely looking trees, and often photograph any that I am fortunate enough to stumble upon.
Late one evening when I was 12 years old, my family returned to New York after spending the summer in Pennsylvania. All my paintings and sketchbooks and all our clothes were tightly packed in the car. It was so late that we decided to empty the car in the morning. When I awoke the next day, I saw my mom and dad with a very upset look on their faces and I saw a big empty space in our driveway where a Buick should have been. The car had been stolen the night before, along with everything we had in the car including my short lifetime’s work of sketches and paintings. I was so disheartened by the loss that I gave up my lofty dreams of becoming an artist. Everyone is right, I thought. I’ll just die poor anyway.
So I diverted my focus away from my easel, studied hard and somehow managed to get myself into Princeton with the intention of becoming a corporate lawyer on Wall Street. My God. What the hell was I thinking? After getting a big red ‘D’ in Economics 101, my academic advisor informed me that it might be of benefit to remap my career path. So I became an English Literature major after a patient creative writing professor took interest in me and taught me how to more effectively use a typewriter. After reading "Wuthering Heights" for the first time, I developed a crush on the Bronte sisters and read all of their books and essays. My senior thesis was an analysis of Emily Bronte’s strict religious upbringing and its influence on the book, "Jane Eyre."
After graduating from Princeton in 1990, I accepted a job offer working for a private sector corporation that built and managed prisons. I took the job because it was located in Nashville, Tennessee, a city that I fell in love with from the first week my college roommate took me there to see his home. I spent over 2 years traveling around the United States driving from prison to prison, writing detailed reports about how each facility was doing. In the winter of 1992, I was selected to join a team of 6 that would be in charge of opening a 1200 bed maximum-security detention facility in Davidson County. Because it was a Nashville based corporation, this facility was to serve as a shiny example of the benefits of private prison management. After nearly a year of 80 hour work weeks with no vacation, the first batch of 100 inmates were lead through intake and tucked in to shiny new rubber mattresses and starchy white sheets. Every week another 100 inmates checked in, and since one of the many hats I wore was Inmate Grievance Coordinator, every new inmate meant another new complainer. It was about this time in my life that I began drinking heavily. In the winter of 1993, Warden Sharon Johnson did one of the nicest things that anyone has every done for me…she forced me to resign. "You are miserable here and you will always be miserable here," she said. You are on the middle rung of a corporate ladder you were never meant to climb." Thank you Sharon Johnson…you saved my life.
I started designing websites in 1994. My mom and dad had bought me a Commodore 64 computer for Christmas in 1980 so I was already fluent in a variety of computer languages. Combined with my overactive imagination, web and graphics design was a far better match for me than explaining to rapists and murderers why their breakfast’s powdered eggs were cold. I named my little design studio "the Treetop" for its woodsy location and my affinity for trees. It has provided me with an ample stream of income that I have been mainlining into my photography hobby since watching an episode of my favorite television show, "Northern Exposure."
It would seem that one of my greatest artistic influences is a fictitious one since I bought my first serious camera about 11 years ago after watching reruns of every episode of Northern Exposure from the Pilot to the Finale. My roommate K.C. and I used to meet every weekday in front of the television at 5:00 since the A&E channel started running the show in syndication. My favorite character was Chris Stevens; radio personality, catapult builder, spiritual expediter, petty thief, philosopher, philanderer, and mixed media metal sculptor. During the 5 seasons the show ran, I watched Chris blossom from a glib ex-con into a true artist and wondered why I couldn’t do the same.
Website design also opened the studio doors of one of the world’s greatest photographers, Senor Jim McGuire. After designing his website, he invited me to work as his assistant for a day while he shot his 556th album cover for one of Nashville's many great musicians. I learned more about photography during that shoot than in the 5 years prior, including such invaluable lessons as "heavy background props require a sandbag to hold them upright," and, "if your subject is uncomfortable or nervous in front of a camera, get them drunk." Since the day I met him, McGuire has been a constant source of knowledge, inspiration, friendship, and thoroughbred handicapping statistics.
In the spring of 2001, I was asked by two dear friends to photograph their wedding in Ireland. The day before I was set to take off for the emerald isle, I forgot to pull the emergency brake on my car and accidentally sent it down the end of my driveway into a conveniently placed elm tree 200 feet below. Despite this and an intense fear of flying, I went to Ireland where my life would change more dramatically for the better than at any other time in my life with the exception of when I married my beautiful and incredibly patient roommate, the former K.C. Abbott. Viewing the Irish landscape through a camera lens is a joy that I wish to share with everyone. Since I can’t afford that many Aer Lingus plane tickets, the best way I know how to share my visual discoveries is to print photographs of the many places I have been fortunate enough to travel to.
There may finally come a day when I can look in the mirror and call myself an artist. For now, I am content to be a student of photography and of life, attempting to preserve the unpreservable and immortalize the mortal. Whether it is the face of an aging young woman or the face of an eroding Irish cliffside, my images are the precious crumbs of my life experience. When I am just ashes in a County Clare breeze, I hope that these photographs will serve as a gentle reminder of the places I visited and the friendly faces I knew along the way.
Artist Statement
About My Work
from film to finished print
I make photographs because their creation is an opportunity to revisit and wander around my most beloved corners of the world. I discover new layers and emotions in the landscape every time my camera and I revisit a destination. Landscape photographs are crumbs compared to the reality of being there. But when I am 4000 miles removed from the landscape, they are delicious crumbs upon which to feast.
I approach each piece of film like a painting that will never be finished no matter how many brushstrokes or coats of paint I apply. Because these are not so much photographs as they are my rendering of a mental picture that I brought home with me that, no matter how faithfully I try, I inevitably fail to precisely portray on paper. I only print a negative when I reach a compromise with my will to evolve it further. My pictures wonʼt reach a final state until I reach a final state. Thus, I have been self-conditioned to never print runs of more than a few at a time, knowing that in a matter of months (or sometimes minutes) of examining the finished print, that I will want to again tinker with the compositionʼs colors, contrast, and cropping...and destroy all of the predecessors that made it to paper.
All of my photographs are printed digitally on Hahnemuhle Fine Art papers using Vivera pigment inks that are rated fade-free for 200 years by Wilhelm Imaging Research. Each print is then taken into a dust-free environment where I spray it with a mix of archival, giclee varnishes, and subsequently bake them in a hot press for a hard, smooth, and lustrous finish. This is a very time consuming, expensive, and backbreaking process that makes it impossible for me to print more than a few per day. But I believe the results are well worth the effort, as the texture of the final print is closer to the painting that is floating in my head.
The entire process is my lifeʼs greatest joy; from the 5:00 a.m. morning hikes with my camera; the weeks spent lying on cliff edges in horizontal rain waiting for a momentary miracle of sunlight and wings; the thousands of hours spent making careful adjustments to the negatives using only Adobe Photoshop and a pint of Guinness, to the moment the image dries and is held up to my favorite light bulb.
I will never outsource the creation of my photographs to a lab. Why should I pay someone to deprive me of all that pleasure? Every print I sign is therefore ʽlimitedʼ not only due to my abundant neuroses and severe droughts of concentration, but rare too in that it came exclusively from my own sore hands and obviously deteriorating mind. In addition, every print is guaranteed for as long as I live. If you own one of my photos and it becomes damaged in any way, whether by fire, flood, or a frisky feline, just mail the charred and/or shredded remains to my studio and I will happily send you a shiny new one gratis.
I reserve the right to print, reprint, retouch, and do whatever the hell I want to my pictures for as long as I am blessed to be able to. So that I can be as accurate and honest with the generous people who collect my work, my numbering system in the bottom left hand corner of the print refers to the number of ʽidenticalʼ prints in a run. After which, I may choose to revisit the picture and reprint it with both subtle and dramatic changes. I refuse to compromise my creative journey to edition my prints in neatly piled stacks of 25, and hope that you can understand and appreciate why.
If you ever have any questions about the story behind a specific image, where it was taken, and what it means to me, I am always eager to share. I can be contacted via email at nikolai@nikolai.com, phone (615) 376-8838, or at my live-in hilltop studio at 845 West Hillview Drive, Brentwood, TN 37027. Thank you for your kind, albeit surprising interest in me.
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-John Michael Nikolai
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