Interview by Julian Lucas | Photography by Janet Solval

Janet Solval was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA up until this year she recently moved to Brooklyn, New York. Besides these two contrasting cities she has never lived anywhere else. Janet became interested in photography during an 8thgrade field trip. While abroad in England her friends and classmates all purchased lots of disposable cameras. “After that trip to England I continued to buy disposable cameras to document my friends. Seeing their faces light up when I showed them the prints of themselves from the weeks before made me want to keep shooting”, Janet explained. Janet begged her mom for a small digital point and shoot for her next birthday, it was a Kodak digital that I had seen in a magazine. “My mom bought me the camera, and that was all I could think of after that”.

Did you photograph randomly before becoming interested in a specific projects?

I photograph randomly pretty often because I enjoy snapshots, but I also have projects in mind while I do so. The projects We Crush the Sky, Bloom, and The Great Soaps have been meticulously thought out and edited down from a lot of images. Although in the end all three projects were very different. We Crush the Sky was one of my first projects consisting of only photographs, it culminated as a set of silver gelatin prints. The end result of Bloom was a showcase of the ephemera surrounding the project, exhibited in a vitrine. For The Great Soaps I set out to make an image of two soap bars merging. This project was based on ideas about love and touch, the final form was a double sided poster. I have also had many other projects that stem from news articles I have read and conversations I have with friends.

Would you care to share your first photographic project that may not be on your website?

The first photographic project that I saw through was We Crush the Sky, which is on my site. I can share one other that I worked on pretty early on after. WCTS, that I do not have on my website. I was calling the project "Quality of Life". Quality of Life was about homelessness in Los Angeles and laws that residents in more affluent areas of the city were trying to pass in order to maintain their "quality of life" that then would force homeless people out of the area. The law would prevent people from being able to sleep in their own cars. Visually the project was about the erasure of homeless people. I wanted to use photos of homeless people, but there is a photographer's dilemma about photographing homeless people without consent. So I went on Google and took images from there to use. I erased the homeless person's silhouette out of the image and inserted a second image in its place. The secondary image were images that tried to shine a light on the different reasons why someone might be homeless including mental illness, the housing bubble, and war (veterans not being taken care of). This project aimed to point at two issues, the first being the laws trying to be passed and the second reasons why someone might be homeless.

Another project I worked on for a long time was also about homelessness and this time I used shopping carts as stand-ins for them. I would see a lot of shopping carts being used by homeless people, but also many abandoned all over the city. It felt like they had a kinship and were a great symbol for capitalism and its effect on the working class.

Does feminism influence your work? As a feminist, what is your view on the female gaze? Male gaze?

Yes, definitely. I think the idea of being a feminist is still stigmatized, but it is just fighting for your rights. It is important though to remember that feminism only works if it is intersectional. Fighting for ALL women's rights, Black women, Brown women, Asian women, etc and the same goes forfighting for Black lives. If you don't fight for ALL Black lives, you are being selective and that is not true equity.

I see you support and fight for social justice has you focused your work towards the fight?

Yes. Personally being a woman, being a queer woman, a queer woman of color, a queer woman of color who has immigrant parents and family members, you can't avoid it. But that is not to say that my art is simply about some of the things that define me. I focus on things that are part of my story but not necessarily about my identity as well.

Can you explain your project Bloom?

Bloom was a mail subscription project I made in 2015. It grew out of a need to create my own network of support. I was seeing a lot of articles about women getting harassed online because they had armpit hair. It really bothered me that someone would get put down for something that happens naturally to most people. The project was about self-acceptance, it was community creating, and it tried to raise awareness of injustices women have to deal with. Women have to live with unrealistic standards of body image and they have to fight for control over their own bodies constantly.

I created a raffle on social media, people could let me know if they wanted to be a part of this subscription and I chose 5 people randomly and I also sent it to five other people, like my idol Miranda July, Barack Obama, the CEO of Hobby Lobby (A very conservative republican), and a couple other people. I shaved one armpit, and started documenting the growth of the hair each week. The picture became a postcard, and I would mail it to the 10 recipients weekly along with an art piece for that week. The first art piece was a poem about the removal of the hair. For the second week, I made a paintbrush from the hair I removed the first week. I used the brush and watercolor to paint the recipient's favorite flower on a postcard. The third week was a graphic of the hair growth for that week. During the fourth week I finished editing a video that I shot before shaving my armpit. The video was of me washing and caring for my armpit hair, a sort of spa day for my armpit. I sent the participants a link on a postcard with a password to watch the video, it is now available without a password on my site. For the final week, I asked the five participants to send me a picture of their armpit. I turned their digital files into slides and painted handheld slide viewers in gold and sent them the slide of their own armpit and the viewer. This final gesture was made to put focus on their own bodies and to let them know that whether they kept their hair or not was their choice and it was for them only.

What is your favorite place to eat while in Los Angeles? New York?

I am still looking for a favorite spot to eat in NYC, I like to joke and say that my favorite spot is a hot dog cart in front of the MET. I enjoy it very much, because it is cheap, so I'll go with that. In Los Angeles I very much enjoy eating at the Little Jewel of New Orleans, they have great Po' Boys, I like to eat the blackened chicken po' boy with an order of fries.

Website | Contact
JanetSolval.com
Instagram: @janetsolval

Julian Lucas, is fine art photographer, photojournalist, and creative strategist. Julian also works as a housing specialist which, includes linking homeless veterans to housing. Julian has lived in Chicago, Inglewood, Portland, and the suburbs of Los Angeles County including Pomona.