Aylette Jenness has been coming to Wellfleet since childhood. The house she now lives in full-time was bought by her parents in the 1920s. Her mother was the artist Shelby Shackleford; her father was a physicist. Jenness grew up surrounded by figures like Edwin Dickinson (whom she remembers carrying a comb in his back pocket to tend his beard).
Considering her artistic upbringing, it is not surprising that Jenness would become a photographer. When she and her anthropologist ex-husband moved to Alaska and later Nigeria, she brought her camera along, capturing the local people, as well as her two small children.
These experiences are the subject of Sometime a Clear Light, a memoir combining photographs with personal anecdotes. The handsome book was designed by Andrea Pluhar and edited by Chris Wisniewski.
As Jenness’s eyesight is failing, she felt it was especially important to self-publish now. The book was funded in a beautiful way. Jenness’s mother and the artist Janice Biala were good friends who exchanged paintings. One of Biala’s paintings, sold through a dealer, made the book possible. It is available at the Wellfleet Marketplace and will soon be on Amazon.
Jenness is the author of 11 other books, mostly for young people. They expose children to different cultures and families through text and photographs. For many years, Jenness worked as a developer of exhibitions at the Boston Children’s Museum.
Jenness uses 35-mm film exclusively. “My work is very consistent,” she says. Her photographs of Nigeria are housed in the Aylette Jenness Collection at the Smithsonian’s Museum of African Art, “including the ones that are out of focus,” she jokes.
“I’m interested in the lives of women,” Jenness says of her work. The key to photographing mothers and children, she says, is “being quiet and watching, as unobtrusive as possible, respecting what they’re up to.” —Saskia Maxwell Keller