© David Kelley from the series 'Rare Earth Image Bank'. (China-East Asia, Inner Mongolia, Group of People, Society, Adult, Adults Only, Aspirations, Beautiful People, Business, Colleague, Dancer, Employee, Fashion Model, Armed Forces, Happiness, Inner Mongolia, Manual Labor, Military, Mongolian Culture, Teamwork, Success, Togetherness, Men, Military, Women, Working, Young Women), 2020

Hello David, What about the places where you have grown up. Any memories?

David Kelley (DK): I grew up in the western United States mining country, in Colorado and Wyoming. My father worked for a construction equipment and steel company in Casper, Wyoming. He rented and sold mining parts to nearby coal and uranium mines. In the eighties, Casper was not unlike Baotou today, albeit more modest in scale, population, and economy. The state once had a substantial Indigenous population; mostly eliminated by forced migration and genocide, the people now amount to just 2% of the population. One night I was woken by my father and driven to see a train wreck. Yellow floodlights showed a line of tipped hopper cars, their contents spilled on the tracks. Our lives in rural Wyoming enmeshed in extraction meant that occasionally industrial accidents were entertainment.

While filming in a “Western” model condo in a new Baotou housing complex, potential buyers were led by a salesman past our photoshoot to see the fully staged apartments. We arranged a trade with the developer, we used the model apartment for our family dinner photograph and he used our photographs for promoting his development. Downstairs, the entrance to the complex was festooned for a country fair food carnival, Go-Kart rides for kids, a Ferris wheel, and scale model of the future development. I was reminded of similar Sunday home tours with my family. We coveted the latest home and garden designs on offer for a newly risen and aspirational middle-class. On the modest salaries of a schoolteacher and salesman, my parents built a new house and raised three children in a city funded by extraction.

© David Kelley from the series 'Rare Earth Image Bank'. (China-East Asia, Campus Photos, High School, Physics Lab, Classroom, Computer, Education, Group of People, Horizontal, Indoors, Laptop, Learning, Mongolian Culture, STEM - Topic, Student, Teamwork, Technology, Teenager, University, Using Laptop, Working Photos), 2020

What about photography, when did you step into the visual world?

DK: I studied English and creative writing in college. My last year I took one history of photography course that inspired me to pick up a camera. After graduating from college, I moved to Vietnam for a year and took photographs in and around Ho Chi Minh City. This was followed by a move to New York where I became a studio manager for a commercial photographer. My formal training in photography happened in advertising studios in SoHo in New York in the nineties. I opened a small studio in Brooklyn with a friend where we shot portraits for music magazines and record labels. After 9-11, I got serious about making art so I closed the studio and moved to California to get a Master of Fine Art at the University of California Irvine.

How do you cope with fast interconnections and instant sharing? How this is affecting your practice?

DK: Because I came up before social media it is a foreign impulse for me, but I have an intrinsic desire to consider the formal aspects of the medium of photography as it evolves. This is why I made these stock photos in Baotou. My desire is to consider the material origins of the medium of digital photography, how rare earth elements compose camera lenses, sensors, and batteries. These images are made to exist in different places and never fully belong. I submitted the photos to Getty Images iStock and I have shown them in a gallery. They are a kind of trojan horse in the commercial photo world, and in the fine art world.

© David Kelley from the series 'Rare Earth Image Bank'. (China-East Asia, Adult, Adults Only, Business, Businessman, Clean Suit, Confidence, Inner Mongolia, Males, Men, One Man Only, One Young Man, One Person, Portrait, Studio Shot), 2020

How would you describe your approach to the medium?

DK: I work with photography because of its unstable position as both a documentary/realist medium, and simultaneously a performative, fictional, and ideological one. It is a uniquely interdisciplinary medium that allows me the latitude to address my concerns which include: the effects of global capitalism, resource extraction, and shifting physical and political landscapes. I am Influenced by a range of visual traditions including experimental documentary, ethnography, performance, and avant-garde cinema.

As an educator, Associate Professor of the Practice of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California, what are the challenges of pedagogy in a scenario in which images are no longer exclusive of a few but a widespread communication tool?

DK: Much in our pedagogy is changing to address the speed and mutability of the medium which is impacted by the smartphone and social media; we have introduced courses like ”Theorizing Instagram” and “Digital Collage.” However, the issues these new media introduce aren’t entirely new. The core issues of the medium of photography which has always dealt with visuality, memory, history, ethics, economics, politics and ideology, race, gender, sexuality are still key. Photo education is and will always be an evolving, moving, time-based discipline that is a tertiary relationship between the teacher, the student, and the outside photo worlds.

Your series 'Rare Earth Image Bank' was shortlisted for Urbanautica Institute Awards 2020. Can you briefly introduce what motivated you to start this project?

DK: Rare earth elements are a necessity for making cameras, computers, and phones, but also green technology like electric cars and wind turbines. When you read about them you learn how divisive they are. Much reporting on their extraction in China is about the environmental devastation, such as the sprawling tailings ponds that continue to pollute the groundwater and sicken humans and animals. You also read about China’s monopoly on their production and how they have weaponized this position, as when they enacted a temporary embargo on sales to Japan in 2010, because of a shipping dispute in the East China Sea.

© David Kelley from the series 'Rare Earth Image Bank'. (China-East Asia, Inner Mongolia, Adult, Adults Only, Agricultural Field, Beauty, Business, Computer, Data, Happiness, Horizontal, Internet, Laptop, Lifestyle, Males, Men, Nature, One Man Only, Outdoor, Rural Scene, Technology, Using Laptop, Wireless Technology, Working, Young Men), 2020

I visited Baotou to learn more about the industry. This was during the ongoing US-China trade war, and in a time when China’s current premier, Xi Jinping, had ended his term limits and was continuing a nationwide anti-corruption campaign. He was also cracking down on Hui and Uyghur Muslim minority populations in Xinjiang and Gansu, frontier territories similar to Inner Mongolia, rich in natural resources. Multiculturalism is essential to China’s national identity but is treated as a challenge to its authority. My cousin has family living in Inner Mongolia who offered to help me, but when they learned my subject was rare earth, they declined the offer. To avoid censorship, I chose to represent the story of rare earth elements through the commercial genre of lifestyle stock photography. I cast ethnically Mongolian actors, when I could, to draw attention to how culture and cultural heritage are used to promote the nation, its industries, and development programs like Belt and Road.

In Baotou, considered the “rare earth mining capital of the world", you chose to work through the idiom of commercial photography. Why?

DK: Stock photography is an intentionally generic, commercial genre. The images are latent and undeveloped, waiting in digital archives for a client to find a purpose for them. In this way stock photography agencies are like mining companies, extracting raw material, molding it into commercial products, and bestowing it with an exchange value. 

© David Kelley from the series 'Rare Earth Image Bank'. (China-East Asia, Inner Mongolia, Girl, Hugging, Soldier, Men, Military, Smiling, Armed Forces, Army Soldier, Embracing, Family, Love-Emotion, Absence, Arrival, Bonding, Camouflage Clothing, Child, Daughter, Defending, Fathers, Females, Hugging Self, Insurance, Mongolian Culture, Mongolian Ethnicity, Veteran, War, Women, Working), 2020

© David Kelley from the series 'Rare Earth Image Bank'. (Military Woman, Letter, Military Base, Adult, Adults Only, Armed Forces, Army, Beautiful Woman, Camouflage Clothing, Cheerful, China-East Asia, Contemplation, Domestic Life, Females, Holding Photos, Horizontal, Human Body Part, Human Hand, Looking, Memories, Mongolian Culture, One Young Woman Only, Religious Cross, War, Young Adult, Young Women), 2020

Because making straight documentary photos at the mines was an impossibility, and perhaps not the best way to tell the story of rare earth elements, I chose to use digital stock photography. I knew that I would introduce them to the stock photo market so that they would become commodities like the minerals used to make them, and perhaps the images would be used to promote the industries that make use of rare earth elements.

What difficulties and challenges did you face in doing the project?

DK: I was surveilled while in Baotou. My assistant had called hotels in Bayan Obo, the main mine town to see if I could stay there as a foreigner. The police traced our call back to Baotou and told our hotel to kick us out. We had to move to one of two hotels in Baotou designated for foreigners. Additionally, one model asked me to sign a contract that I wouldn’t use the pictures of her to insult or criticize the nation of China. That was an eye-opening example of self-censorship and self-preservation.

© David Kelley from the series 'Rare Earth Image Bank'. (Adult, China-East Asia, Employment and Labor Photos, Fashion Model, Hardhat, Mining-Natural Resources, Mongolian Culture, Occupation, One Person, People, Tattoo, Tibetan Buddhism, White Background, Young Adult), 2020

What kind of relationship did you manage to establish with the people photographed?

DK: My relationship with my subjects was mostly contractual. I hired them as models via an open call over WeChat (a Chinese social media app). Some were professional models or actors, while others were just friends of the local creative community in Baotou. They all accepted the work as a paid job. One model was a friend of my assistant who happened to be studying in Portland Oregon, where I was born. We have stayed in contact via social media. I also chat occasionally with another model who works in Baotou and is not a professional model. My assistant is from Guangzhou and she is working in video production and internet journalism for publications like Vice, National Geographic, and Chinese websites. She has become a friend and we continue to communicate about creative projects.

© David Kelley from the series 'Rare Earth Image Bank'. (Adult, China-East Asia, Family, Communication, Happiness, Holding, Inner Mongolia, Mobile Phone, Mother, One Parent, Portable Information Device, Single Mother, Smart Phone, Togethernesst), 2020

How do you think you will be able to involve in the dissemination of the results of this project? Have you had any feedback already?

DK: The work lives in two sites – as stock images for use on iStock a Getty Images site, where it has been selling in a royalty-free class of stock images. They are exhibited in fine art galleries and museums. I have shown them in an exhibition in Los Angeles at the LA Municipal Gallery (LAMAG) in a show titled Archive Machines in 2020. There is also talk of an exhibition in Paris at a new gallery run by a digital retoucher named Philippe Lepaulard. I gave a public lecture at UC Irvine last month that was well received.

What did you learn new during this work, and how does this project fit into your creative path that mixes different approaches and ways to address issues related to global capitalism, to contemporary cultural and political landscapes?

DK: I have a background in commercial photo in NY in the nineties. I have avoided those skills for many years in favor of a more pared down and minimal approach to conceptual documentary projects. When I began researching 'Rare Earth Image Bank' it became clear to me that using both the polished façade of commercial photography and its digital, state-of-the-art infrastructures would be an appropriate and interesting way to tell my story. In essence, I am using the medium to comment on the medium. I am still discovering the potential of this approach and how it will influence my future projects.

 
© David Kelley from the series 'Rare Earth Image Bank'. (Celebration, Cheerful, Child, China-East Asia, Chinese Culture, Crockery, Daughter, Dinner, Domestic Life, Event, Family, Father, Food, Girls, Grapes, Happiness, Healthy Eating, Home Interior, Horizontal, Husband, Idyllic, Inner Mongolia, Luxury, Middle Class, Mongolian Culture, Mother, Perfection, Slice of Cake, Table, Togetherness, Women), 2020

Observing 'Rare Earth Image Bank' and your other projects, I have the impression that they function as thought devices, which slip beyond aesthetic speculation, to push the viewer to question the subject from a different angle. Tools that unlock like an optical unconscious...

DK: Thank you for your comment. I do hope that they might do work like that, as thought devices. I am still in the process of considering how best to present this work to audiences. The background story is complex, but I hope the uncanny, and obtuse qualities of the images allow them to speak for themselves.

© David Kelley from the series 'Rare Earth Image Bank'. (Wind Farm, Engineer, China-East Asia, Men, Adult, Business Finance and Industry, Computer, Confidence, Electricity, Environmental Conservation, Fuel and Power, Horizontal, Inner Mongolia, Loft Apartment, Middle Class, Mongolian Culture, Sustainable Energy, Technology Photos, Turbine, White Collar, Wind Power, Young Adult, Young Men), 2020

I wonder about the creative process and methodology you follow when it comes to engaging with different topics, environments. Any suggestions or recommendations for aspiring young artists?

DK: I don’t know if I have a smart, concise methodology to bestow to young artists. For me, making art is a messy, expansive, and speculative process of reading, traveling, testing, failing, fundraising, and persistent practice of everyday life. My advice is to pace yourself.

Could you mention any book that is meaningful with respect to the project and your work in general?

DK: 1) Estelle Blaschke, Banking on Images, The Bettman Archives and Corbis (Leipzig: Specter Books, 2016) | 2) Julie Michelle Klinger, Rare Earth Frontiers, From Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2017). 

LINKS
David Kelley (website)