Alumni feature – Jessica Todd Harper

We asked Jessica a 2001 MFA alum to answer a few questions about her career

What are doing professionally?
My chief focus is my fine art work.  I have a new book, The Home Stage, coming out in November http://www.artbook.com/9788862083645.html with essays from Alain de Botton and Alison Nordström.  There will be exhibitions in New York, France, Philadelphia, and Atlanta which will accompany the book. I also shoot editorial and commercial work when contracted through my agent, JMI Inc in NYC. I also photograph portraits and weddings as commissions.

How has your education helped you after graduation, preparation for your first job, and in your career since?
RIT helped me lessen my fear of technical things and refine my understanding of what constitutes a really good print.  I had great practice having my work critiqued which so helped me build up my confidence required to face the art world. It also allowed me to teach, something I did for 9 years.

How you are using social media in your professional work?
I use Facebook and I’m on Instagram. Mostly I try to email or telephone people!

How has being a photographer helped you in other aspects of your life ?
My personal life is very integrated with my professional life.  Both of my books have been chiefly about my family.  Apart from collectors buying the work, others see those images and they want to hire me to photograph stories about families or their own family.

On another note, I think being a photographer helps you to notice things around you.  I always thought that with my students I was chiefly teaching them to see better.  Photography was just the mechanism by which to practice that skill.

Here are some upcoming events that might be of interest to the RIT community.

Rick Wester Fine Art, NYC- show opening on Thursday November 6th, 2014
Paris Photo- book signing at 5:00pm on Friday November 14, 2104 at the Damiani booth

BIO
Jessica Todd Harper spent hours of her childhood wandering around museums looking at depictions of interior and family life by painters such as Mary Cassatt, Vermeer and John Singer Sargent. After a childhood of copying these artists with crayons and later pastels, she turned to photography and started looking at the families around her. The sold out “Interior Exposure” (Damiani 2008) was her first book of photographs about family and won recognition from sources as varied as Oprah Magazine, PDN, and the NY Photo Festival.  Her latest book “The Home Stage” is out in November 2014 and explores the way the home is the first stage on which children learn how to live.

Jessica’s photographs have been discussed in The New Yorker, Photo District News, Camera Austria, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, among others.  Her work recently appeared in museums across the country in  “Masterpieces of American Photography”, George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film’s traveling exhibit of work from their collection. She was a project competition winner at Center, Santa Fe and one of “PDN’s 30: Our Choice of Emerging Photographers to Watch”.  Harper received her BA in history of art from Bryn Mawr College and her MFA in photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology. She has taught at The ICP, Haverford College and Swarthmore College. Harper is represented by Rick Wester Fine Art in New York  and Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta.  She lives with her husband and children outside of Philadelphia, PA.

To see more of Jessica’s work visit:
http://www.jessicatoddharper.com