In my day job I am Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where I've been since 1992. I've taught dramatic literature at Georgetown, with a particular interest in the structure of dramatic language and in the Symbolist and Expressionist plays of the late 19th and early 20th century. But my first love was photography.

I bought my first camera and books of and about photography while I was an undergraduate in the late 1960's. By the mid-70’s I was working with a 4x5 view camera, had been in several small shows, and was trying to learn to use Ansel Adams’s Zone System to make better negatives. But it seemed that the more pictures I took, the more boring they were, so after five years I gave up, put the camera in a closet, and began graduate school in Theatre Arts. Another five years later, Ph.D. in hand, I discovered that there were even fewer jobs for dramatic theorists than for photographers, and I began to pursue a career in academic administration. I didn't take another serious photograph for 20 years. . . .

Until 1999, when I pulled the 4x5 out of its latest closet and began to make color transparencies of DC’s national monuments in their urban context, the way they actually look to the people who live and work here. Older, if no wiser, I fell in love all over again. Two years ago I adopted a completely digital workflow. I now shoot with a Hasselblad equipped with a 22MP Imacon back and print on an Epson 9800 inkjet printer. I make very large prints, from 20 to 40 inches high and from 24 inches to 15 feet or more wide. Many of my images can be seen on my website:
www.jimschaeferphotography.com

I am currently working on two projects. One is documenting Rhode Island Ave. (aka US Route 1) from Hyattsville, MD to Logan Circle in D.C. with the goal of showing what non-official Washington looks like.

The second project concerns those photographs I took in the 1970's. I was then living in Minneapolis, where over several years I compulsively photographed several hundred nondescript houses in three different parts of the city using an old twin-lens camera and black-and-white film. Those images didn't "go" anywhere because I didn't have a context in which to understand them or to present them to others. What I DID have was the core idea for a context, a quote from Gaston Bachelard's book, "The Poetics of Space": "In its countless alveoli, space contains compressed time. That is what space is for." But I had to wait 35 years for both the quotation and the photographs to gain meaning for me.

This past summer, I walked around those neighborhoods once again with my old contact sheets. I located about 100 of those houses and have since made the first of several planned trips to re-photograph them and locate others. Eventually I will have an additional link on my website specifically for this project, and I hope to find a venue in Minneapolis to show prints of the images. In the interim, you can see "then and now" photographs of one house by clicking on the "about" page of my website.

Degrees:

Ph.D., Theatre Arts, University of Minnesota, 1984
M.A., Theatre Arts, University of Minnesota, 1980
B.A., Beloit College, Speech and Drama, 1970.