Jossea K. Rilea
  Author + Dreamer
 

ARTIST STATEMENT

My photography captures nature from an imaginative, artistic, detailed perspective to inspire new ways of seeing the natural world. I fell in love with our planet meandering around the mountains, rivers, lakes and valleys in national and state parks in New Zealand, Canada and the United States as well as "forest bathing" in my own backyard. 

HOW I GOT INTO PHOTOGRAPHY

My introduction to photography happened at Camp Chingachgook on Lake George in New York where I spent rainy camp days hanging out in the dark room developing photos I had taken of a cat stuck in a tree. I over-developed all of these photos, probably because I loved swishing the photo paper around in the "magical" chemicals a little too much. The pinhole photography J-term class I took at Middlebury College (that I actually got credit for) piqued my interest in the art form some more. I was amazed at the quality of photos I could take with only a shoebox and the sun. But once again, I never quite got the exact science behind the development process (maybe it was because the dark room was in the basement of the dining hall and I had recently watched too many scary movies). What I remember the most about the other photography classes that I took were the professors questioning the validity of the emerging technologies and the huge wave of change happening in the industry, "What is the definition of photography now that everything can be manipulated?" But for me, this all sounded so exciting! Photography, I thought, combined my love for film and my love for art into one perfect way of expressing myself! During my senior summer, I led backpacking trips for international youth from Iraq, Iran, Switzerland, the UK, Canada and the US through Ansel Adams Wilderness in the Sierra Nevada, California. Here, I got to dabble in black and white photography inspired by the greatness of his work. At this point, I really thought photography was going to open up as a possible career path for me but as fate would have it, the timing of my immersion into the field was short lived. For a graduation gift from Middlebury, my parents unknowingly gifted me with arguably the last known non-digital camera on planet earth (with huge lens, expensive gear, etc) and a plane ticket to New Zealand. Unfortunately, during a fun photo adventure on a beach in Hawaii, a bunch of sand got in the lens and ruined the roll of film I was just about to develop, along with all the memories. By the time I got back to New York, the camera seemed like ancient technology. When I saw the price tags for the new digital cameras on the market (3K and up), I took this as a sign that my short lived photography career was over. I didn't know exactly where photography was heading, so I decided to wait it out a bit to make sure I wasn't going to get caught up on another cusp of another evolution and waste another couple thousand dollars on expensive equipment that might not work in a few years. In the meantime, I got sidetracked into other creative outlets and ways of expressing myself. But I never lost my "eye" and vision for seeing the photos that I wanted to capture. As I completed the Adirondack Fire Tower Challenge (hiking 23 mountains in the Adirondacks and Catskills), I took a lot of photos in my mind's eye of imaginative and creative images I saw along the trails - faces in the rocks, mystical creatures made of moss, patterns in the trees, designs in the dirt. Finally, a decade and a half later, I'm starting to rediscover my love for photography once again. Even though digital technology is "old" now, I'm still so amazed that I can take high quality photos on a device that fits into my pocket and has no complicated development process involved!