Jeff Whetstone was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee and has been photographing
and writing about the relationship between man and nature since he received
a Zoology degree from Duke University in 1990. Whetstone served for five
years as an artist-in residence at Appalshop, Inc., a media arts center
located in coalfields of eastern Kentucky. While working at Appalshop, Whetstone
was the project director for the Before the Flood exhibition that premiered
at the National Folk Festival. His photographs and writing have been featured
in Southern Changes, DoubleTake, Southern Exposure,
Daylight Magazine and elsewhere.
After receiving his MFA in photography from Yale in 2001, he was awarded
the prestigious Sakier Prize for photography. Since then, his work has been
exhibited internationally and received reviews in The Village Voice,
New York Times, New Yorker Magazine, and the Los Angeles
Times. Whetstone teaches at the Art Department of the University of
North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Whetstone was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship
in 2007 for a body of work entitled, New Wilderness.
His current body of work, Post-Pleistocene, is a study of cave markings
in the Saltpetre caves of Tennessee and Alabama. Since the Civil War, when
these caves were used to produce gunpowder, people of the region have been
marking the cave walls. The photographs depict the primal satisfaction of
mark making and the human fascination with self, sexuality, and color. When
the work on these cave walls are compared to Pleistocene era art making
like those in the caves of Lascaux, one can imagine the course of human
evolution - from frank representations of nature, to layered, expressive
gestures that reflect a culture fascinated with personal identity.
Whetstone photographed these caves from the vantage point of an artist,
an explorer, an evolutionist, and a native son. These catacombs elicit and
archive the drawn voices of wild adolescents, civil war deserters, explorers,
criminals, and scientists. And it is these individuals who express the very
traits that our species has relied upon to adapt, make art and evolve.
Post-Pleistocene 2006-2007 [view
images]
New Wilderness 2001-2006 [view
images]