Andrew D McClees’ MFA is from Hartford Art School’s international low residency photography program, which is notable for having specialized in photo books. His cohort’s program ran from August 2022 - August 2024. During his time in grad school, McClees continued living and working in Portland, Maine throughout the program, staying close to his home of Lewiston while producing his work at the Bakery Photo Collective. This interview delves into McClees’ MFA thesis book titled Agartha, his personal artistic influences, and beliefs. 

LP:

How did the Hartford MFA program specifically help to direct your work and influence your artistic process? 

AM:

For me what I got out of Hartford (MFA program) was I really learned to push my work ethic to the limit and I also learned how to take really big creative risks and personal risks in my art, where I might not have been so inclined to do that before… I decided to go sit inside and learn how to shoot inside my home. I’ve been living at my childhood home while in grad school and wanted to lean into how a more intimate, closer setting felt more dangerous (for me) to shoot, so much so that I managed to complete an entire body of work, after really tapping into that place.

LP:

How do you think someone else would describe your work? 

AM:

[I think viewers would describe the work as]... Loud, subtle, aggressive, assertive, high-contrast and brightly colored. Very intimate subjects, but at the same time kinda loud and weird. Personally, I would say I like to make assertive use of light to make off-beat observations of places, people, and things that defy easy description.

LP:

What was one of the biggest takeaways from the MFA program? Any advice for aspiring artists or photography students alike?

AM:

I think, honestly, dig deep, [and] work hard is the best advice I could offer… you really gotta want to do [photography] to the point where you're willing to risk some things and you have to be willing to put yourself out there to get the most out of it. Learning to get out of my own way and embrace earnesty was a big part of grad school for me.

LP:

Who are some of your biggest artistic inspirations and how does researching other artists inform your work?

AM:

The three photographers are Micheal Schmidt, Eugene Atget and Gregory Halpern. Mike Kelley (conceptual sculptural artist) is actually a huge influence on me… as well as the painters Jan Van Eyck and Tom McGrath… I actually don't look at a lot of other photography right now – there's this problem where if you look at too much photography it gets very easy to start making the same works as other people. I’ve mostly been looking towards paintings and sculptures, and contemporary art. I don’t want to be a Schmidt clone or Halpern clone - there's only so many cameras and so many types of film and so many ways to develop it… It gets to be a comparison game quickly – you gotta learn to think (or see) differently.

LP:

Personally, I enjoy discussing the morality and philosophy of photography. Can you speak to some of your personal experiences or beliefs you've uncovered while working as a photographer? 

AM:

I take a pretty amoral view of photography. Photography is just a sample of photons hitting a light sensitive medium, everything beyond that is pretty negotiable to me… It’s pretty fungible and I think that a lot of people are too set on the traditional photojournalism definition of photography as a way to ‘make truth.’ But nothing you see is really real either, so how could photography grasp at a truth… For me it's more so about earnestness. I am trying to show [viewers] this because I find it beautiful and fascinating and because there's so much out there. I just want you to take it at face value, you have to be willing to meet me halfway and accept the work for what it is. I can’t give you any more guarantees than that.

LP:

Describe your MFA thesis in five words or less. How do these works perform for you, what do they speak to?

AM:

Tiny, loud, weird, colorful, quiet. And I know loud and quiet are contradictory but it’s small/quiet moments made loud and big, and overwhelming weird moments made smaller and more inviting… To me a lot of the time I feel like I don’t exist. I left Maine when I was eighteen to go to undergrad and then live in LA and a whole bunch of other places… I don't have a lot of friends here – so sometimes it creates this feeling like I don’t really exist and a lot of the images I am making are of things that you don’t see or don’t immediately exist to the average person, but in reality they’re right there and you just have to be willing to see them. My book, Agartha, it’s about amplifying these small moments and overseen things as sort of a metaphor for myself. I use a lot of dialectical reasoning within my work by playing with concepts that appear purely paradoxical but aren’t. They require you to try to resolve them within yourself.

LP:

Technically speaking, explain a little bit about your photography process, equipment etc. How do concept, subject and the technicality of photography coincide for you? 

AM:

For Agartha specifically I used a Nikon-D810, standard lens and a flash a lot of the time… an older DSLR. Digital cameras mimic the way our brains work a lot more closely than analog cameras do. What happens is our brains take in all the sensory information and they compile a mini-video over the last fifteen seconds of input to tell us what we see. So when light goes into a digital camera it goes through the sensor and then into the camera brain and then it spits out the image in the back and we then have to interpolate the data – very similar to how the human brain operates. This relationship coincides well with how I explore non-realities.

Andrew’s reflections on his shooting practice 

AM:

When I’m out shooting I actually don’t think about anything. It’s basically limited to, ‘I should move three feet left or five feet right, up or down, kneel or bend over, or do a push-up.’ For me it's just about entering an open place psychologically where I can just see the images if I have a strong enough driver (leading image) to make them. I find a lot of the time when you set out to make work about a given subject you end up making work that’s in service of it but not particularly nourishing or interesting – But when you open yourself up, there's undiscovered pathways and you get a lot more out of it subject-wise. The technical end comes in when you are trying to show other people your work… you want to show the best version of the work, a version that they can understand and honors the original idea… I have no control over how people perceive or understand the work, but I can offer a really good tangible product and I really believe in that… craftsmanship counts.

LP:

What is next for you, Andrew? Any future ideas or projects? 

AM:

I have a project where I go and photograph down by the river near my house, photographing people enjoying their summers… I’m planning on doing that for another year until the end of next summer – I’m back using black and white film for that, so it’s been nice to get back to basics (for me) – running around with a big clunky medium-format camera. I want to do a project on shooting New Hampshire… and I am also going to apply to the Van Eyck Academy, hopefully working and studying more overseas. I’m looking forward to where that could take my work. 

Andrew D McClees has been a Bakery Photo Collective member since 2022 and is teaching a Zine Workshop which begins September 11, 2024.

Lisa Powledge interned at the Bakery for the summer of 2024 and is a MECAD student beginning her junior year.

Interview by Lisa Powledge: 2024 Summer intern at the BPC