Through the Lens: A Look into Photographer Jennifer Bouchard

(Above: Natame, from Bouchard's Polaroid collection,

source: www.jbbouchard.com)

     Sitting in front of a brick wall, adorned in abstract paintings at the ultimate art student hangout: Kafein, photographer Jennifer Bouchard (27) sips her raspberry lemonade and settles into her cozy chair. Bouchard is a Montreal-born photographer who focuses on the denaturalization of the photograph through the manual destruction of Polaroid pictures. She received her DEC in Photography at Cégep André-Laurendau and shortly after that, received a residency in Brussels, Belgium to work with the theme of History and Memory. For her 2009 series, on prisoners of war, she received the Grand Jury Prize, presented at the Maison de la Culture Marie Uguay exhibit on History and Memory. She later received a degree in Visual Arts with a specialization in Photography at the University of Ottawa.

Having studied photography in a technical capacity in both Cégep and University, Bouchard claims that transitioning into abstraction from portrait photography is “like painting, when you learn how to paint, you learn about the non-abstract things and then when you’re really good at it, then you go and think about painting and you deconstruct what you’ve learned.” She attributes her success in abstraction to her core knowledge of techniques like the rule-of-thirds which she incorporates into her pieces, even when they are deconstructed. Bouchard, a long-standing lover of photography, attributes her affinity for deconstructing Polaroids to a Belgian photographer friend: Bérangère Saunier, whom she met while completing a residency in Brussels. Saunier’s work with experimental Polaroid photography inspired Bouchard, who, at the time, was looking for a new medium for her art. “She came to visit me after she went to New York and she brought me my first bag of expired Polaroid (film),” Bouchard muses, “so I went to the nearest thrift shop and I got a Polaroid for like $5, it worked, thank god. So I started doing Polaroids and I thought: this is cool, this is different, let’s start doing that!” With this new platform for her photography, Bouchard claims that she had her concerns about it becoming too “Instagram-ey”, in the sense that Polaroids have recently become a popular photo option in the social media stratosphere. To differentiate herself, she claims to have put her Polaroids through the ringer: “I did everything to them, I put them in the microwave, in the oven, I set them on fire and even put them on ice.” When asked about her process for this destruction of these photographs she claims that it was “random” and stemmed from her tiring of her photography being “technically very good” and wanting to do something that better represented her creative self. Her new series was very well received, the photo shown above (Natame) being one of her first sales. The image is a superimposed photo of two of Bouchard’s friends and was bought by the University of Ottawa as a gift for a foreign professor. Bouchard’s pieces can be up to 6 feet tall in order for the audience to really see the textures in the images. She then moved even further into abstraction by layering up to 5 photographs together to create a “mountain” effect wherein the texture was so vivid that “people actually tried to touch it, people were convinced that they were 3D!” She claims that this heightened level of abstraction forced her audience to really look at the photograph instead of seeing them and thinking “oh, that’s a polaroid of a woman” and moving on. With her new pieces, they are forced to really look and think “well, what is that?” Bouchard calls herself a “creep” when referring to her exhibits, where she likes to act as a fly on the wall to really ascertain how the audience is receiving her work. Despite her degrees and success, she states that she only completely decided that “this is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life, for better or for worse” two years ago. In true artist’s fashion, Jennifer Bouchard considers her pieces as her babies claiming that she never gets rid of anything and follows each idea (good or bad) all the way through because the bad ideas have led her to some great pieces. When asked when she knows a piece is done, Bouchard describes this as a “vulnerable” state, she says that even just choosing a frame can take hours, “it’s like your baby, you work on it for so long but at some point you just have to let it go.”

Bouchard is continuing her work with abstraction and denaturalization, pushing it to new levels. She aims to make her art a full-time job in the near future. She attributes her inspiration to artistic influences: fellow artists and assigned art spaces and she hopes to get to a place where her pieces are no longer about photography but about the textures and the landscapes. She looks at photography as a platform upon which a new art form is born where mediums collide (paint, film, sculpture) and refuses to label or conform to a standard when it comes to her work.

-Hayley-Quinn