My Southern Soul

My Southern Soul

Artist's Statement: Nicki Huggins
July 6, 2007

I have been a photographer and an artist for most of my life. Long before I was a television producer, marketed “Scared Silent,” the most successful documentary in television history and became a noted historian and collector of American outdoor furniture, I was an artist. And long after those pursuits have run their course in my life, I will still be making art.

The WaterSound Collection is not a retrospective, but a select group of images captured on and near Country Road 30A between the years 1971 through today. It contains the first release of prints, a “boutique” edition, of a larger collection I have entitled My Southern Soul. As such, I have included pieces that are my “working files” for works in progress.

Most of the older images were captured on the back roads between this area and Tallahassee, FL where I was in school in the early seventies. Although I have lived in Los Angeles for thirty years, I have returned to this area to photograph. While most visitors think of relaxing on the scenic beaches, I look forward to dumping gear in my beat-up truck and tooling around the panhandle.

It was revealing to me to see that I am still very interested in process. Process during the analog era involved Polaroid transfer, hand-coloring, negative destruction, and other printing and processing techniques. Process for me now includes an array of sophisticated digital re-imaging techniques, often combined with older alternative processes that I am revisiting, like pinhole photography and platinum/palladium printing.

I shoot medium and large format film then transfer the image to a digital file using a high-end drum scanner. I am very interested in color and tend to work extensively in the color channels to achieve the effects and the overall look of the image. Since I am old-school trained to capture the image in a frame, I don’t often composite other images into my work. Although, if I thought it was appropriate for the piece, I would not hesitate to use all the tools of the artist. This aspect of art, that of the artist creating his or her world as they see it, analog or digital, is timeless. And the feeling of timelessness, of a place that could have been here always in our collective consciousness, was one of my main goals in producing The WaterSound Collection.

The WaterSound Collection is the first US showing printed exclusively with Hewlett Packard’s newly released Z3100 archival 12 ink printer using Crane’s Museo Max paper.

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