© Antone Dolezal & Lara Shipley, from 'Devil's Promenade

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

Antone Dolezal (AD): We are both from the Ozark region of the United States and come from big story telling families. Oral storytelling has historically been an important cultural tradition of this area, something deeply embedded in our experiences growing up in the Ozarks. Those memories of hearing tall tales and even religious sermons have influenced how we interpret this place.

Lara Shipley (LS): We were also deeply influenced by the landscape. The Ozarks is a very rural and isolated part of the United States. It’s a beautiful place, with lakes, rivers and heavily wooded hills. Growing up, I spent a lot of time in the woods. It was a place to have adventures as a kid or to escape as a teenager. I have so many memories of being in the woods, especially the magic of being there after dark. Those experiences—a mix of excitement, fear, freedom, and escape—influenced the way we depicted the landscape for this project.

© Antone Dolezal & Lara Shipley, from 'Devil's Promenade

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

LS: I became excited about photography in high school. Growing up in the Ozarks, I was so hungry to see more of the world and photography seemed like a great way to do that. I worked at a fast food restaurant in my hometown to save up enough to buy my first 35mm film camera. My dad took me to a short photography class at a community college an hour away. But it wasn’t until I went to college that I had the opportunity to really immerse myself in photography.

AD: For a while, my father was a newspaper photographer, which introduced me to printing in the darkroom. It wasn’t until I went to college in Santa Fe, New Mexico that I started dedicating myself to photography.

How would you describe your approach to the medium?

AD: Our approach has changed a lot since we began collaborating. We started out as documentary photographers, but now draw on elements of performance, staging, digital manipulation and working closely with the archive. Often, the projects we do are about how communities interpret the world through myths or folktales and some narratives we pursue are linked to real historical events. So taking a multi-genre approach gives us a lot of latitude to blend different layers of storytelling.

LS: Like Antone said, storytelling is central to our projects together. An openness to experimentation to find new ways to connect with viewers and best communicate narrative keeps the work evolving.

© Antone Dolezal & Lara Shipley, from 'Devil's Promenade

© Antone Dolezal & Lara Shipley, from 'Devil's Promenade

Your work Devil's Promenade was shortlisted for Urbanautica Institute Awards 2020. Can you briefly introduce what motivated you to start this project?

AD: We wanted to make a project about the place we grew up but had since moved away from. Devil’s Promenade is in part a celebration of the oral storytelling and folkloric traditions we grew up with. But it’s also about certain cultural and political aspects that have changed or seem amplified since we started revisiting this place as adults.

LS: in our experience, the Ozarks can be an overlooked or misunderstood place. We wanted to make a project that connected outsiders to the psychology and culture of the Ozarks in hopes to complicate often simplified narratives about this part of the country.

© Antone Dolezal & Lara Shipley, from 'Devil's Promenade

Devil's Promenade is also a collaborative project. Can you tell us something about how you "act together" and how your partnership impacts the creative and operative process?

AD: Both of us have different sensibilities and strengths that we bring to the table and that tends to produce a stronger more nuanced series. We generally work for several weeks to a month in the field and then will spend many months going through our images or video work in the studio. We are really focused, but in that process, we tend to have a lot of fun working together and that has been an important aspect of our longevity as collaborators.

LS: The projects we take on can be physically and mentally taxing. Especially a project like Devil’s Promenade, where we were camping in the woods for most of the production. The fact that we enjoy working together and are supportive of each other’s ideas is a big part of how we undertake such large scale, multi-year projects.

© Antone Dolezal & Lara Shipley, from 'Devil's Promenade

We read on the synopsis: "This region is marked by isolated poverty, a wariness of outsiders, and a struggle between heaven and hell that factors into the everyday conversation". I wonder if there's any political claim on local America? And what are your assumptions regarding this land?

AD: There is a cultural divide and deep distrust between urban and rural America. We often see rural America fall victim to generalizations and assumptions in the media. With Devil’s Promenade, we wanted to portray the Ozarks as a place that was just as complex and worthy of attention as the rest of the country. If you want to know what’s happening politically in the United States, understanding the struggles and lives of rural communities is a good place to start.

LS: Absolutely. And because there is so much division and mistrust, we often hear the Ozarks, and other rural places, described as good places full of good people or bad places full of bad people. Growing up there, we know it’s way more complicated! We were very aware of these perceptions making the work and strove to make a project that acknowledged the complexities of Ozark life.

© Antone Dolezal & Lara Shipley, from 'Devil's Promenade

The work also blends folklore and local history. Can you tell us something about the "back-end" research process? And did you feel the need to compare yourself with others during this project? To talk to historians and sociologists to fill in the cognitive gaps you felt?

AD: Our work is thoroughly researched. We spend a lot of time reading books on Ozark history and folklore, but we have also spent countless hours researching archives such as the University of Arkansas Special Collections and the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History. Many of the photographs in our book come from these archives.

As academics and visual artists, our research is key to fully realize the conceptual elements of our work. There is cross-over with other researchers in this field, we give lectures at academic conferences on folklore, etc., but we rely primarily on our own abilities and knowledge as folklorists and historians.

LS: In addition to looking at more formal archives, we also spent a lot of time talking to people we met and reading local blogs and Facebook. It was very important for us to understand not just what stories and histories were documented by academics, but what was still remembered and told in the community. The results were really fascinating! We learned that a lot of people were still very engaged in folkloric stories and had their own personal experiences to share. A lot of the text in our book Devil’s Promenade, came from these conversations.

© Antone Dolezal & Lara Shipley, from 'Devil's Promenade

The Ozark Light represents for the community a desire for redemption? Can you develop this statement? And how does this "concept-image" translate into your project?

LS: The cornerstone of Devil’s Promenade is the story of the Ozark Light, described by locals as a strange orb of light seen on chance nights on a road known as the Spook Light Road. Locals also claim to see the Devil on the road at night, giving passersby the chance to exchange a wish for their soul. We view this story as the perfect metaphor for searching and desire and the pull between dark and light that finds its way into rural Ozark life.

AD: The story of meeting the Devil on the road comes from European folklore. We thought it was interesting that this story became embedded in the Ozark wilderness. We think it’s lasted so long, being passed down through Ozark families, because it resonates with Ozark life. It’s a story about fate: you come to this place, and you might find something beautiful or something dark, and you don’t know which until it happens.

© Antone Dolezal & Lara Shipley, from 'Devil's Promenade

© Antone Dolezal & Lara Shipley, from 'Devil's Promenade

Tell us something about the people you portrayed. Was it difficult to gain trust and overcome cultural barriers? What type of relationship did you establish with the people you portrayed? What criteria did you choose to represent them?

LS: Most people we met were really interested in the focus of local folklore and history. Like I said, we spent a lot of time just talking to people and recording their stories in addition to taking portraits. I think this effort to portray Ozark culture in a way that felt authentic to the experience of growing up there resonated with the people we met really opened doors for us.

AD: It’s important to remember that this is the place we are from. Even though we live in large urban areas now, we share a lot in common with folks who live in the rural Ozarks. We are transparent in our intentions with everyone we photograph. We carry around books of our work and make sure everyone knows this is where these photographs are going to end up.

We also form friendships and attachments to many of the people we photograph. This project took as nearly 10 years to complete and we feel a strong desire to portray this place and people in a respectful, yet non-romanticized way.

© Antone Dolezal & Lara Shipley, from 'Devil's Promenade

© Antone Dolezal & Lara Shipley, from 'Devil's Promenade

© Antone Dolezal & Lara Shipley, from 'Devil's Promenade

You also mention the fact that you are not documenting but rather trying to build a narrative. What's the difference in your perspective? And how this work has informed your practice?

LS: though we are trying to portray something authentic about Ozark culture, we want to be clear that Devil’s Promenade is heavily influenced by our own experiences and memories here. Though not explicitly so, it’s a very personal project for me. The story of the Devil’s Promenade—the story of a road that you enter looking for something beautiful but possibly finding damnation—resonated with my own experience as a restless teenager, and that time of life where you can recklessly make choices that can change the course of your life for good or bad.

AD: In this work, there are a lot of elements to how we are building a narrative. We use our own documentary style photographs, staged and performative images, elaborate lighting for our night landscapes and then we are mixing in text, quotes and archival materials. All these factors create a narrative that looks at the historical and the contemporary to tell a long-form narrative.

© Antone Dolezal & Lara Shipley, from 'Devil's Promenade

Devil's Promenade is also a book. How did you come to the idea of it and how have you developed the publication? Any takeaway? Are books your favorite channel to express your works?

LS: Our work requires some immersion by the viewer to be understood. This can’t be achieved from a single image out of context, but through a larger exhibition of the work or as a book. The book form makes a lot of sense for the way we work because it’s a natural form for including text as well as photographs. I also love that the book is a bit of a time-based medium. Though less exact than with video, you do have a bit more control of the experience of the viewer through the work. That deep dive into photographs that hit different emotional notes—beauty, terror—feels more align with our own experience growing up in the Ozarks and making work there today. I love the opportunity the book gives us to bring that experience to the viewer.

AD: We certainly love the book form and are always thinking about how our work will fit into a photobook. In 2015, we self-published a three-volume series titled the Spook Light Chronicles. Each book contained its own narrative, but collectively all of the stories in these books fit under the umbrella that is Devil’s Promenade.

Devil’s Promenade was published in 2021 with Overlapse. It is a much larger volume, containing many more previously unseen images, and contains a broader overall narrative with many peaks and valleys that take you through a focused look on the Ozark community and our relationship to this place.

© Antone Dolezal & Lara Shipley, from 'Devil's Promenade

© book 'Devil's Promenade by Antone Dolezal & Lara Shipley

© Antone Dolezal & Lara Shipley, from 'Devil's Promenade

© Antone Dolezal & Lara Shipley, from 'Devil's Promenade

© Antone Dolezal & Lara Shipley, from 'Devil's Promenade

Photography is also a learning process? What you have achieved from this experience?

LS: I wanted to go back to the Ozarks because I had a lot of unresolved feelings about my experiences there, particularly intense religious or dangerous experiences that feel so remote from my life today. Making photographs gave me the opportunity to process these experiences. This experience of immersing myself in the lives of others definitely makes me a more empathetic person and pushes me to constantly reconsider what I think I know about a place. Even a place that I am from.

AD: Devil’s Promenade pushed us to experiment outside of our comfort zone. It was also a project that forced us to deeply consider how we wanted to represent Ozark culture and life. It took years and through all of that work gave us the experience to grow and mature as visual storytellers.

© Antone Dolezal & Lara Shipley, from 'Devil's Promenade

Today there is a lot of buzz about image-making. As for your work, what are the difficulties you encounter in telling and disseminating your work?

The biggest difficulty is when a writer or viewer makes negative assumptions about the people we photograph or the Ozarks in general. We work hard to not romanticize this place and to give a real sense of what life can be like here.

Antone Dolezal (website)
Lara Shipley (website)
Devil's Promenade Book