Editor’s note: This story originally appeared in the winter 2023 issue of Washington Coast Magazine, a publication produced by The Daily World.
Jade Black wants to promote healing through art, which made the last official day of summer less than ideal.
Black and her husband Junior met with Washington Coast Magazine on Sept. 22 to show how Black — a fine art self-portrait photographer — creates. But the weather that evening in Ocean Shores got in the way.
A blue sky with sparse clouds and the temperature in the high-60s caused a delay in Black’s process. Given more dramatic weather — rain, gray skies, a chill in the air, you know, Grays Harbor — is part of her intended art, she had to adjust. So instead, she chose a row of bushes that provided shade from the sun. Along with the wall of bushes, there were two trees positioned in front of the bushes that worked as a frame.
Black, donning a purple dress, explained why her art’s purpose is promoting healing through art.
“I use my emotions to give me inspiration for my art and in-turn, people look at my art and heal. It’s a healing process for me and for others, but my main inspiration can come from anywhere,” Black said. “This dress is today’s inspiration, so it really just depends. Like if you were walking around and you smelled a cinnamon roll? All of a sudden you’re inspired to get a cinnamon roll. It’s sort of like that. You find inspiration everywhere, if you’re looking for it, if you’re open to it.”
Black said her purpose of healing people stems from growing up in foster care.
“I was a foster child my whole life and that comes with a lot of stuff,” Black said. “It’s probably a lifetime of healing just there, especially since I was in a home that was not very kind. It was very difficult to grow up there, but I made it. And I know there are other children and other adults who are currently or have been in a similar situation, so being a survivor I feel my purpose is to not only heal for myself but to show others they can do it as well. And also for people who have gone through completely different circumstances and aren’t artistically inclined, they can still use art to heal, whether it’s a coloring book or doodling.”
Black grew up as an artist
“Ever since I can remember I’ve been drawing,” Black said. “Learning shading in second grade, that was really exciting. “And then I started learning painting and then graphic design. I was sort of uninspired by those (forms) so I jumped into photography about 10 years ago. I was shooting weddings and graduation pictures and things like that, but it wasn’t doing anything for me. It was sort of a job at that point. I wanted something deeper, a deeper connection to what I was creating and putting out in the world.”
While Black still shoots photographs for her art, she doesn’t need the perfect lighting, doesn’t need to align the f-stop, aperture and the shutter speed the way the technical side of photography does. She called those qualities the math side of photography and she finds it boring. What she shoots now, she finds it anything but boring.
“Anything that doesn’t light my fire, I don’t want to participate in,” Black said.
One event in particular that lit her fire in the last few years was her move up from the Southern California desert up to Washington state in 2019.
“I wake up every day really inspired,” Black said. “I have so many ideas it’s hard for me to pick one, focus on it and create it. I’m just overwhelmed by excitement and inspiration all the time.”
She said the sun drains her. That’s not good when she said she was used to seeing probably 350 sunny days per year.
“When it’s moody, I feel alive,” Black said about Grays Harbor’s gray skies, rain and wind.
“Previous to that I was shooting self-portraits but they weren’t nearly as, I don’t know what to call it, yummy as they are now.” Black said. “They were kind of mediocre. I created them, they were fine, but it’s the environment. I needed to be inspired by my environment. I was in the desert, which is not inspiring. So now that I’m here, I’m always inspired.”
Black knows her reason for moving to Western Washington — the rain — doesn’t make a lot of sense to a lot of other people. She’s fine with it.
“At first it was, people couldn’t understand that,” Black said. “I think people know me well enough now that they just accept me for it. But when I do talk to new people about it I just explain I spent the first 31 years of my life in a place it never rained, didn’t have green anywhere, and it was dead and gross. I think people can sort of get onboard with that. But yeah, they were very perplexed at first. But I match it, you know? Just as they match the dry. People match their environments.”
Her right-hand man
While Jade has the eye for what works and she comes up with the ideas, she couldn’t execute her art without her husband Junior, whom she met and befriended when she first moved to Grays Harbor. He’s on set with her anytime he can be.
“He’s my behind-the-scenes guy,” Black said. “So while I’m shooting, he gets video and picture so I can put together my behind-the-scenes-content, which is super-duper important. I need that.”
Junior also hauls equipment and stands where she wants to shoot, to make sure the focus is right. Think of an actor standing on his mark.
“I shoot with a baby lens, which is manual-focus only. It only has one single pinpoint of focus, the rest is blurry,” Black said. “With self-portraits, usually I would just go to my spot and hit the shutter half-way down and it would automatically focus. But since I use a manual lens, I have to focus it manually. But I can’t focus the lens and be in my spot at the same time, so he very kindly stands where I want him to. I set my focus and then he makes an X in the ground. I need that, so he is huge in my process.”
In addition to having her husband by her side, having the needed equipment and having the openness to drive all over to find the right setting, Black also draws kind of a storyboard that you might see in film or television.
“When I see the picture in my head, say for example this dress, I haven’t done this yet because I wanted to do it now,” Black said. “I see this dress and I’m like ‘oh my gosh, I just got inspiration for that dress.’ So I always make my pictures in square format because to me it seems like more of a piece of art. It’s not a snapshot, not just a photograph.”
Black plans it out with a rough sketch so she can get it out of her head.
“This dress is really cool, I love the shimmering of it,” Black said. “What I want to do is I want to just stand there in a pose. I want to take just a simple portrait. And then in Photoshop, I’m going to sample the same color purple and I’m going to start making my dress into smoke. So then, all right, smoke, purple, I’ll do forest, just anything that will help me figure out everything that I’m doing.”
Black said the late summer portrait was a simple shoot.
What happens in a complex shoot
“There have been other photoshoots where I need like five different shots specifically,” Black said. “I would have to plan it out so I don’t forget anything. It’s really simple to do, especially when it’s cold and you’re freezing. You know your brain function slows down, so I’ve gone out and I’ve missed things because I was so cold and I didn’t have it planned out. Whereas if everything is written down and it’s planned out, like ‘OK, I need this shot with this shot, with this shot,’ then I go through the checklist, basically. And also, if something’s not going to work I can pretty much figure it out during this phase if it’s gonna work or not.”
And then she finds a location. When she scouts, she’s “always observant,” she takes note of a certain spot she finds interesting and then she mentally files it.
“For example, this is awesome,” Black said about the bushes with the trees as a frame. “On a sunny day I can come here because it’s in the shade, except in the morning time, but I don’t typically shoot in the morning time anyways.”
Black also lists her needed props and other equipment she needs for shoots. Her shoots can take her hours away.
One of her first times shooting in the Pacific Northwest was near the Quinault Rainforest.
“I had this great idea to get a bucket of red paint and have him dump it over my head while I was sitting in the forest. Sounds like a great idea right?” Black said sarcastically. “Don’t pour latex paint all over your body and your hair, it’s awful. We just drove around until I saw a spot in the forest that I wanted to go to. We pulled over on the side of the road. We went not too far from the road, we could still see it, still see the vehicle. Luckily I brought a large, plastic sheet with me to put down on the forest floor because I didn’t want to leave a mess. Sure enough, he was pouring the paint over me and I was covered in red paint. It was freezing. This was in the wintertime, it was very, very cold with very cold, red paint. After we shot I was covered in red paint. He gets me to the vehicle. Because I was covered in paint, I had to be in the back. It was an SUV with no tinted windows. So he put down the plastic sheeting and me on top. I was sort of curled into a fetal position sort of. He went back and was cleaning up. It looked bloody. It looked like a murder scene had happened. While we were shooting, a police officer drove by. He just slowed down and kind of like watched for a little, and then left.”
Then Junior drove Black home as she was curled up in the fetal position, covered in red paint in the back of an SUV with no tinted windows.
“It looked like I was a corpse,” Black said. “That was probably the most interesting photoshoot.”
Black also recalled a second trip where they went to the Capitol State Forest. She had him tie her to a tree.
“I was nude, with a red ribbon,” Black said. “We heard gunshots in the background. We realized it was hunting season. We were imagining what that would look like if someone was looking through a scope and saw this female being tied to a tree. Luckily I got the shot and we packed up and we left. That was another very, completely Jade Black photoshoot right there.”
Junior said he was “probably more nervous than anything,” during that shoot.
Black said she wanted to thank Brooke Shaden, who mentored Black.
“She sort of normalized darkness for me,” Black said. “A lot of people are normally so afraid of it. I was never afraid to create darkness in my art. But she made me feel like it was OK to express things that aren’t comfortable for other people. I’m not here to make people comfortable. I want them to be very uncomfortable so they can face themselves and figure out why they’re uncomfortable. Hopefully they can identify that and heal from it. If I make light and bright, sunny, you’re just going to be like ‘oh, what a pretty picture,’ and then you’re going to walk away. There’s nothing memorable about that. But if you see something that’s dark and sort of stops you in your tracks and makes you feel uncomfortable, you have no choice but to figure out ‘why does this make me feel weird? I don’t like it.’ If you don’t like it, perfect. That’s what I want from you. I want you to figure out why. My art is not just for me. It’s for you too.”
How art helps
Black’s art is kind of like the difference between hearing a light, pop song versus hearing a song that makes you feel emotions because it’s not rainbows and sunshine, there’s depth to it.
“It’s the understanding,” Black said. “I want people to know that I’ve been there, I know how you feel and you can make it through. I promise. And I will be here with you. If people don’t feel like they’re understood, they’re probably not going to heal. They’re gonna be depressed and they’re gonna shut themselves out. If I can provide any sort of solace for anybody, that’s perfect.”
Matthew N. Wells / The Daily World Jade Black’s husband, Junior, is an essential part to much of her work. While Junior can’t be at every shoot, he’s at as many as he can be. Junior is standing there so Jade can figure out if it’s the right spot for her next photograph. Jade uses a camera that has a single point focus, so she’s trying to make sure when she stands there and poses, the shot works. Junior is also using an iPhone to stream Jade’s photoshoot to her Instagram followers.
Jade Black, a fine art self-portrait photographer, poses in a marked spot during the last summer day in Ocean Shores. Black uses a camera with a single-point focus lens so she has to set everything up before she poses. This shoot was to show her Instagram followers part of her process. The finished product should look much more dramatic. (Matthew N. Wells / The Daily World)
Jade Black One of Jade Black’s portraits she shared depicts her surviving through awful conditions. “She’d seen many things, oh so many,” she states in an Instagram post about this piece. “Carcasses of memories past still haunted her in her dreams. Sludge and muck oozed and clung threatening her very survival. But on she soared separate from the rest of the world. Her walls would not crumble nor a rock would she swing but alas she’d journey on until the sky meets the edge of the sea.”
Matthew N. Wells / The Daily World Jade Black, a self-portrait photographer, explains what goes into her art. This photo shows Black wearing part of a tree and a nest at Damon Point. “I got this branch and I put it on my head,” Black said. “And then in Photoshop I went ahead and took the nest that I photographed and I put it on my head as well to make it look like I’m sort of a tree with a nest on my head.” Search online for “www.jade-black.com” to find more of Black’s work.
