A lot of sketchy things go down in Griffith Park. My first memory of the grounds included young boys trying to sell me a woman’s bicycle and stumbling across various profilactics and paraphanelia like a kid on an Easter egg hunt. Anything goes; drug deals, covert meetings [Craigslist or walk-ins], co-ed sports, and even experimental photography all seem commonplace. A while ago, you might have happened across a woman with a camera. Upon detecting someone else around, you would see her quickly, nervously throwing a tarp over what looked to be animal skins. And you’d be right. The woman was photographing squirrel pelts in different environments as her first project in grad school. Her name is Nicole Belle, and while these animal photos might never become public, she was very close to having a chance breakthrough.
Nicole Belle is a photographer that grew up without any promising art skills or much interest in art or photography for that matter. She didn’t show exceptional skills in drawing or painting growing up, and, consequently, she wasn’t pegged as a precocious artist in childhood. Instead, if you must apply that oh-so-popular tag ’emerging’ to her, she eventually emerged as an artist through a series of occupational red herrings and through defining what did not interest her or play on her strengths per se.
Not knowing what to be when you grow up, for twenty-somethings, has become a modus vivendi for young Americans. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Americans averaged 10 jobs between the ages of 18 and 34 in 2002, and the average number of jobs has jumped to 14 in 2007. Clearly, trends suggest that young Americans are taking longer to settle down in a career, have children, and define themselves as proper adults.
Born in Ohio and reared in Minneapolis, Belle spent her childhood enjoying the amenities of a bigger city tucked into a small town Midwest mentality. Her mother was a college counselor, so Belle left most of her future’s planning up to her mother, the expert. Unfortunately, in what would clearly affect the trajectory of her career and her life, Belle’s mother died during her senior year. After a single, short visit to New York, Belle decided she would study French literature at NYU, despite the fact that she was not necessarily the star French student in high school.
However, Nicole’s interest in learning befit the big city. She was at the point in her life “when a dork or nerd was starting to earn cultural relevance.” Belle spent a year in France, studying the language and writing, and returned with an urging to taste the publishing world. It did not take long to realize that “publishing wasn’t playing on [her] strengths.” After meeting with her father and calculating a budget for her to continue living in Manhattan, Belle realized that she could not afford her lifestyle, and she opted to move back home to regroup and save up some money for whatever was to come next.
While dating a photojournalist, Belle was inspired and determined to learn and master photography. He bought her first camera, the Pentax K1000, and she enrolled in her first printing class. Fittingly, Belle’s first roll of film that [she] developed and printed were all pictures of [her] that other people had taken because they knew how to use the camera and [she] didn’t. As her interest in photography grew, so did her sense of loneliness and isolation. All of a sudden,’New York’seemed feasible again, and she returned to New York while working in the Associated Press’ archives. It was arguably there, trolling through a mammoth collection of photos from around the world, that Belle’s fascination with others’ photos and portraits would be cemented and eventually lead to her current work.
Again, though, photojournalism was too straightforward and rigid for Belle. Yet she enrolled at the Rochester Institute for Technology to study photography. Somewhere along the way, the curriculum forced the artist to clearly pick a side: commercial photography or fine art photography. It was finally there, in the badgering cold of Rochester, that Belle realized that fine art was the direction she was headed and that she should pursue that and only that.
Belle made the choice to move to California for grad School, opting to earn a master’s at UC Riverside. In Belle’s mind, the choice of living as an artist in the Southland was a solid one, because of its “cooler, easier art scene…[with] lots of art schools, schools connected to the art industry in a much realer way [than New York].” While critics of Los Angeles’ relative youth claim that L.A. does not have the history and cemented institutions that other major art capitols share, it had the same openness to new blood and ideas that has attracted artists like Belle. For Belle and her husband, “it’s become condusive to our lifestyles…or vice versa and seems easier to live the life we want to live.”
Perhaps what the outside world has not wholly considered is, that while L.A. might be young as a city and as an ‘art city,’ this is the place where media comes to be archived. After working on her pelt project, Belle would chance upon a thrift store in Pasadena and uncover pristine negatives from a commercial photographer named Rev Sanchez. She bought several of the negatives on a whim, purely in admiration of the richness and nostalgia that they implied. She “didn’t think [she] was going to do anything with them. They were these little potent bombs with campy nostalgia.” They were fashion portraits of children [she has surmised that they can vaguely be dated in the late ’60s to early ’70s]. Sanchez was “a local photographer who was a professional…he had died,” and the thrift store had obtained his complete archives. However, the artist has not found much more information on the late photographer than that; the rest is up to creative speculation.
At the same time, Belle was working on self portraiture where she would obscure parts of her face or body, often contorting in bizarre poses in her apartment. She was (and still is) rather uncomfortable working with models or ‘real people’ in photography. This would pose a problem, seeing as she loves how the human form and face can be captured by the camera. The self-portraiture and dealing with dead animals were two ways of circumnavigating this reluctance to work with others.
Sanchez’s negatives also provided a way to deal with the human form without having to deal with other humans. Belle was inspired to scan the negatives and start playing with them in Photoshop. Since most of the photos were taken from a locked position on a tripod, she could superimpose various shots from the same setup and have an immediate doubling or tripling of the models in the same scene. Immediately, once the figures were multiplied, the images took on a boldness and provocativeness that was absent from the single images. The multiplication reminds us that these images are part of a series, that these children are posing, trying to act like adults, which usually meant assuming a sexuality that was just parroting cliche.
The work has received strong reaction in her student exhibitions, causing a dispute between those who believe the work is brand new but executed with very believable pastiche. “People have placed bets…[Belle has] to prove one of them right, one of them wrong.” Also, the children in the photographs exude overt sexuality, yet Belle has not received a lot of comments regarding their sexuality. “People don’t talk to me…so much about that,” most likely because of the general fear of discussing child sexuality. However, Belle feels the “role of advertising” is the key force which “dictates how [the children are] supposed to act when they’re modeling.” In this way, a culture’s children most directly reflect and mimic the values and forces forged by their progenitors.
Her thesis show signals the debut of a very interesting new perspective in the local visual culture. It may have not been the most direct path, but after a series of steps in the right direction, Belle has arrived and matured into her own enigmatic eye.