Today we’d like to introduce you to Mary Jo Hoffman.
Hi Mary Jo, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I was a scientist–an aeronautical/astronautical engineer to be exact–before I was an artist. The natural world drew me in first not as a source of beauty to observe, but as an expression of mathematics, physics, and evolution: I loved natural shapes for the trial-and-error perfection of their function; I loved seed pods for the ingenuity of their dispersal mechanisms; I loved the algorithms of spirals, saw toothed leaf tips, and the shapes of trees that imitated the shapes of rivers and their tributaries. The subjects I picked each day for STILL were originally an expression of wonder that the flora and fauna surrounding me could fill so many specific roles, and present so many different faces.
Today, I am an artist who takes one stylized photo every day of found nature on a white or black background. I have been doing this for over 10 years, I have never missed a day, and I do not work ahead! I am 58 years old, have been married to (James Beard Award-winning!) food writer Steve Hoffman (@sjrhoffman) for over 30 years, and they have 2 kids (age 23 and 17). We live in St.Paul, Minnesota, but the family spends a lot of time in our adopted second home in Languedoc, southern France.
I am currently working on a STILL book that will be available from Monacelli Press in Spring 2024.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
STILL can be done in tiny increments throughout the day: gathering, arranging, photographing, editing, and posting. On busy days, each of the steps can be done in a few minutes or less. On open days, I can spend as much as an hour or two if I want. Because of this flexibility, I have had very few obstacles or challenges with STILL.
I designed STILL specifically to fit into the bit and pieces of time that are available in a busy mid-life household with kids and careers. For ten years I have been able to make one image-a-day without interruption. Now, it has become a habit. I still love doing it, I never tire of the hunt for new subjects, and seeing my final creations still brings me joy–every day.
My biggest challenge has been in deciding how to evolve this daily creative practice into more of a fine art practice (or whether I even want to (lol). STILL is a daily delight, but it probably needs to evolve.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
STILL is a digital photography project that began on January 1, 2012, as a daily creative discipline and has since evolved into an ongoing meditation on what it means to live in relation to the natural world through the simple act of paying attention to one’s immediate surroundings in a persistent and regular way.
The rules were simple but important: found nature, every day, minimally manipulated, photographed on a white or black background using only natural light. No natural subject was too small or too ordinary. A roadkill blue jay, by way of example.
As the project progressed, so too my definition of seasonality was redefined. I noticed not big sweeping changes in temperature and light, but daily changes. I noticed the exact day the sap began to run. The day the first catkins exploded. The day the lilacs opened. And the day the first orange maple leaf appeared. And I captured it all, one high-resolution image at a time, for ten years.
The attentiveness required to make an image a day led to a depth of understanding I had not expected. The more narrow and deep I went, the more my world expanded.
Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
It has never been a better time to be an artist because social media made sharing one’s work available to all, with no gatekeepers. However, that accessibility comes with a cost, and it means that we all spend a part of each day packaging our work for those platforms. Some artists absorbed this new burden intuitively, others struggled with it, and some actively fight it. It also means there is a lot of noise out there. So getting traction gets harder all the time. But overall, the democratization of the art world has been a boon to artists.
As a maker whose work gets used without permission all the time, I am also looking forward to blockchain technology (web 3.0) that will help me retain authorship of my work, and get fairly compensated each time it is reused.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://stillblog.net/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maryjohoffman/
