JaimeBoddorff

Chicago Center for Literature and PhotographyPhotographer Feature

02/27/2014Editor: Rebecca Vipond Brink

Jaime Boddorff is a photographer and artist living in Brooklyn, New York. She spends her spare time cooking and thinking about food, daydreaming about owning a farm, and sewing.

You and your friends seem like a band of roving misfits. Any good road stories?

Ha! Yeah, we are roving misfits! I could go on all day but I think most of my stories rely on knowing the personalities of the people involved. I will say that I feel so incredibly lucky to have the friends that I do. They push me to think and question, their persistence and drive is motivating, their lack of inhibition and shame is inspiring and hilarious, but what it comes down to is that they're all just looking to have a good time and do what they love to do. You have a lot of good stories when you surround yourself with people like that.

You create a sense of home in your pictures: friendly faces, comfortable spaces, Christmas lights, food - is that something you intended to do or do the circumstances just sort of dictate it?

It’s a bit of both. Sense of home and the idea of home is something I’m very interested in and have been focusing on for awhile. It’s fascinating to observe with the way others create a home whether it be a physical, material, and spatial creation, something more abstract like finding home in a specific moment, or something more emotional: something found within other people they surround themselves with. Often it’s a combination. It’s fascinating to observe myself doing it in relation to what I’ve learned by looking at others, and part of the way I do that is to photograph it. It’s like the way a painter will step back from their painting to observe. It’s actually funny you ask this question... I’m working on my second photography book right now and it’s titled “Homebody”.

That being said, movement seems to feature prominently in your photographs, both physical and geographic. How do you go about capturing that in a still?

Yeah, that’s true. I never actually noticed all the movement because it’s just the nature of taking a photograph. You have to pick out which still moment in a series of movements you want to capture, and that’s whether the thing you’re photographing is moving or whether you’re moving.

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