Meet a Knight: Photographer Jo Sittenfeld

Ms. Sittenfeld snapping a photo.

Our series "Meet a Knight" features discussions with members of the PCD community. We are beginning the year by speaking with the faculty and staff who are new to the school this year. After starting with college counselor Terry Ward last week, today's chat is with Art Teacher Jo Sittenfeld.

Ms. Sittenfeld actually joined PCD last spring, so this marks her first full school year at 660 Waterman Ave. She is a woman who wears many hats. At PCD she teaches photography and digital media. She also works as an adjunct professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she currently teaches a range of photography classes and in RISD's "Project Open Door," an after-school program aimed at getting high school students interested in art. She somehow manages to take photographs for her own work, which she has exhibited all over the country. You can find her around PCD every day, either teaching a class or shooting photos of our busy students.

@PCD: Hi Jo, thank you so much for talking with us. How did you get into photography?

JS: Well I feel like my mom actually steered me--she would always get me these biographies of Margaret Bourque-White and all these pioneering women photographers when I was around eight. But when I was in college I took a photo class. I'd always loved art and art history, and thought it was this side thing I would do, and that I would be an English major or a science major or something like that. But during my sophomore year I took a photo class and it sort of changed my world and my life, and ever since then I have been doing photography steadily. I was an Art and Art History major and got my teaching certification, and from there taught high school art before I came to RISD and got my MFA in photography. It's always been this balance between making art and teaching it, which for me is a really good balance.

Ms. Sittenfeld's students editing photos

@PCD: What have you been working on personally recently?

JS: (laughs) Well, now I teach a lot and I have a new baby, so right now it's less and less. My husband is also a photographer, so we shoot a lot of weddings on weekends, and sometimes I think, "I have so many jobs," but then I realize that my different jobs influence other projects. It's not too compartmentalized. 

@PCD: I've noticed these photos that are in the lobby of Lund Hall right now – would you mind telling us what they are all about?

JS: I was in a show at a museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts a year and a half ago. It was about how the history of Plymouth is seen and interpreted today. The museum invited me to go to Plymouth and do a project, so I chose to go there and photograph the visitors and the historians who work in the Wampanoag homesite at Plymouth Plantation. A lot of people think about Plymouth, about what the settlers were doing, but what's much more interesting and complicated is how the Native population both historically and in a contemporary way explain, answer, and deal with these super charged questions of identity and belonging and history. I do a lot of portraiture, and the people who I met were really dynamic. But they were also dealing with these culturally charged questions on a minute-by-minute basis where they were being asked these really inappropriate and sometimes racist questions. They were helping to inform people from school kids all the way to adults on who they [the Wampanoag] were and are and how they belong at this crucially important site to white American history. And they're contrasted with my husband's photos that show how people today have taken the idea of the pilgrims and Mayflower and just slapped it on really ugly buildings – the Plymouth Colony Condominiums, Pilgrim Auto Sales, the Miles Standish Liquor Store – it's a really weird situation there.

@PCD: What are you doing at PCD right now?

JS: I started at the very end of last year, and this year I am teaching Upper School photo and video as well as a Middle School photo class. The challenge for me – well, these students, their lives are over-saturated with photography, and they have Facebook accounts and Tumblr accounts and Instagram accounts. We live in a visually rich culture, which is great, but I want to help them understand the distinctions between imagery with meaning and imagery that's just fluff or pretty. To make interesting art and talk about other people's interesting art. It's really exciting. They're growing up in a very different time - because of this digital revolution - than I did, and I feel that they have all these tools and this software at their fingertips, but it's important that they use it in a mature and compelling way. But it's also a great time to have fun, to make cool imaginative stuff. I also believe as an art teacher that it's important to foster a love of the arts, something that will last, and part of that is making art more accessible.

 @PCD: Are there any ongoing projects you can tell us about?

JS: Well, the students all have Tumblr accounts – they're just getting started but we might be able to link to them later on. It intersects with their lives in a way photos on the wall don't, so they are taking photos of their lives. This week they have to photograph breakfast. I want to stress story telling. The students don't realize that their lives are totally photogenic and interesting because they have access to their families and their friends. It's always this thing I have to explain to them, that pictures of your mom – not everyone could take a great picture of her because no one knows her as well as you do. They see these things so much in their own lives that they dismiss them, when of course the opposite should be true. I have a student who says  her hometown  of "Rehoboth is boring," so she made a whole project about how boring Rehoboth was. It's hard for students sometimes to see the interesting visual things happening in their lives, but they're there. That student's project on Rehoboth being boring was really interesting.

@PCD: Well thank you so much for speaking with us!

JS: My pleasure – thanks!