Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Areca Roe. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Areca, thanks for joining us today. Can you take us back in time to the first dollar you earned as a creative – how did it happen? What’s the story?

The first print I ever sold was from my beginning darkroom photography class in college. I made a staged photograph based on the novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” and printed it in the darkroom. One of my fellow classmates loved it so much she begged me to sell it to her for $10 (we were all poor!). So I did. It wasn’t about the money of course, but about the fact that she reacted so strongly to my image. It told me I was onto something and gave me motivation to keep going, keep photographing and honing my craft.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m an artist who uses photography and video as my main mediums for expression. I have been fascinated by photographs since I was a kid, and have been doing photography in various capacities for over 20 years. I’ve done a little bit of everything as far as commercial photography (weddings, portraits, real estate, products), but now I teach at the college level and make art.
I aim to create engaging and meaningful art, find interesting and surprising concepts for photographs and videos, and communicate through my art.

I’ve got a bunch of projects in progress at any given point, and that’s how I prefer it. Right now I’m working on an ongoing photo/video project called Stock Pile, which involves absurd responses to stock photo companies’ prompts. I’m also making a stop-motion music video for a musician, and embarking a new series of 3D photographs of figures in various landscapes. Oh, and I recently shot a surreal dance video with some local dancers, and am editing that! I exhibit work in galleries, sell prints, and also make and sell photo books. Recently I had several images from my project Housebroken, in which I photographed unusual pets, included in a wonderful group show at Fotografiska Museum (Stockholm and New York City).

My interests are eclectic, but much of it comes back to our relationship to the natural world—that’s the connective tissue. At the base of it all is my ongoing fascination with photography and video, I have a boundless curiosity about how to make magic happen on these mediums.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

One of the most rewarding parts is the community of amazing artists I get to be a part of—I have the privilege of hanging out with the most creative, talented people and it’s very energizing. Makes me want to be better. I’m a part of three collectives of artists (probably too many) who run a gallery, do pop-up shows, and sell artist books. The talent in all the collectives is tremendous, there’s built-in support for growing your art career, and I learn so much from interacting with and collaborating with fellow artists.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Like everyone, at the start of the pandemic in spring 2020 I had to pivot, hard. I had hopes of working on projects taking portraits of others, but that had to be put on hold. I ended up starting a whole new project, titled Stock Pile, at home that involved photographing myself and my kids (who were suddenly at home all the time, of course), and I’m still continuing the project even now. It’s been quite fruitful. It helped us get through the pandemic with our sanity intact as well!

The project involves responding to stock photo company prompts. Stock photography has held a fascination for me for some time, with its generic ubiquity and bland cheeriness. The images are meant to be both calculatedly specific and multi-use, so they can be sold many times over. It’s big business, and it’s everywhere.

Stock imagery sites put out briefs or prompts predicting to photographers/videographers what is going to be in demand in the coming next month or year. Out of curiosity I began perusing the prompts, and realized they synthesized certain trends in our culture and aspects of this unusual time.

In responding to the prompts, I took quick and strange images and videos at home or close by, using what I had on hand, using myself and my family as models. I took instructions from the briefs—but in a way that misunderstood the text or took it a bit too far, or too literally. In many of the images I heightened the absurdity of the text, or pulled out some fascinating aspect or phrase that deserved further reflection. The prompts seemed frivolous during the events of the pandemic, but still managed to capture the zeitgeist. Occasionally they made me laugh, and I found myself wanting the make work about those in particular.

Contact Info:

• Website: arecaroe.com
• Instagram: @arecaroe

Image Credits
Areca Roe