Before Lemon Juice, I had spent years doing museum photography while also working inside the fragile economy of adjunct teaching, at one point teaching at three schools at once, with zero accountability from those institutions to care about labor in any real way. It wasn’t those particular schools. It was the industry.
At the same time, I was showing photographs and other work at Vox Populi and publishing books. Roughly 2015 to 2018 was an especially active period for that part of my practice. By then, I felt culturally overeducated for the society I was living in.
Then the pandemic came, and I watched institutions that presented themselves as automatically credible fail to live up to their own standards. It felt like an opportunity to jump in and make an agency that could start engaging with broken institutions.
The city changed for me in those years too. There was a reckless amount of construction and what felt like a growing disregard for the space around us. Our mailbox was stolen twice. My car disappeared for a month and came back with the display in kilometers, needles, pen caps, and a pair of shoes inside. I still wonder where it had been.
There was another Philadelphia practice happening at the same time, outside and on foot.
Jordan Baumgarten and I would meet up masked and walk the city at a distance from each other, making photographs, talking, and smoking weed. We were walking through all of that construction and watching the city change.
I liked photographing Jordan in his haunts and along his ritual walks.
Part of the pleasure was that I could use him almost as a stand-in for myself. Sometimes while I was photographing him I’d joke, “This one is for your Guggenheim application.” We had enough in common—two photography degrees each, both doing the adjunct-photography-teaching hustle, similar backgrounds, and a love of food and humor—that following him through Philadelphia sometimes felt like looking sideways at my own life. He could also feel a little like a younger brother: familiar enough to love, and familiar enough to get annoyed with.
Jordan is driven by his heart and by an allegiance to making Philadelphia a better place. He is absolutely convinced Philadelphia is better than New York City, and I have always been especially quiet about telling him he is wrong. I let him make his case.
He is also extremely loyal. He helped me move at least five times—into a former coffin factory in Fishtown, between storage units, over and over—and none of that shit was light. It was negatives. It was books. He always came through. He and his wife, Anne, were there when Natalee and I got married; Jordan signed as our witness. It wasn’t the first wedding of mine in Philly where Jordan had been a VIP guest.
One of the places I kept photographing him was the vacant lot behind his house—the back lot, as we called it—where Jordan was making photographs for the work that became The Group for Mutual Improvement. That’s where I made Walter and Jordan. I liked that the portrait put him inside the same landscape he was photographing. Jordan was motivated to be a part of and a witness to his neighborhood. He even had pet names for particular sites, like his “Rothko wall.”
Walter and Jordan
Walter, a dog, with Jordan Baumgarten in the back lot, Philadelphia, in the landscape Jordan was photographing for work that became The Group for Mutual Improvement.
FASCIA · Walter + Jordan Portrait / back-lot thread ↗ (opens in a new window)Jordan wasn’t part of this side of my Philadelphia.
Lemon Juice began as a test. I invited people working across photography, design, writing, curatorial thinking, building, and business to try something together. It was supposed to be flexible and listen to itself. The hope was that a larger web of eyes might find opportunities none of us would find alone.
Angela McQuillan worked across graphic design, web design, and physically building things, and was fully on board to give it a go. Roksana Filipowska contributed writing and curatorial thinking, including work around a public Tarot-card-reading event. Other people moved through at different moments.
Amrita Yoga & Wellness had mattered to me long before Lemon Juice. I joined after moving into the coffin factory, during a difficult period in my life, and yoga there became one of the ways I learned to train my focus and stay with myself. I had my spot on the left side of the room, away from the windows. I knew that piece of floor intimately.
Heather Rice later let Natalee and me have that wedding at Amrita. Then, when the pandemic shut nonessential businesses, she trusted me with a key and let me use the studio when I wanted, no strings attached. Later she joined some of our remote meetings to talk through business questions.
FASCIA · Amrita Practice / trust / space ↗ (opens in a new window)
Angela McQuillan · collaboration
Safety shaped everything. The room was roughly 5,000 square feet. I’d have the windows open, double masked in winter, with heaters on the ceiling keeping the room at a normal temperature. Other portrait sessions moved onto rooftops for fresh air. Care wasn’t separate from the projects. It was how they were built.
Secret Pet Menu started in Philadelphia on Valentine’s Day as something kind and COVID-safe. Photographing dogs gave me a way to make pictures and still be around people safely.
Vampire Rules used fiction to let people try to be their own best person, and to think about the undeadness of the pandemic: living in a shell of our former lives. The version online now is version 000, like the first edition of a newsletter. It’s a start, not where it ends up. I’ll come back to it in another edition.
Managing all of this was my first real experience being a creative manager, project pusher, and maker trying to motivate an unpaid labor force. It was creative, but I was doing so much administrative work that I started thinking about administration as an art practice, because it was pretty taxing.
Not everything worked. We tried designing a logo together, in community.
That was a terrible idea—or at least, the way our process turned in on itself was terrible.
The Pennsylvania company was Lemon Juice Projects LLC. In Rochester, I started again as Lemon Juice LLC. I never really said Lemon Juice Projects anyway. I said Lemon Juice. The idea was something you could apply to different projects, so it didn’t need Projects in the name. I kept Projects for the website—one of the projects—and redesigned the logo around the simpler name.
Some of those Philadelphia experiments continue. Secret Pet Menu keeps going as pop-ups in Rochester. Vampire Rules is still at 000. The pandemic archive is still waiting for me.
What I’m interested in now is not what survived intact, but what changed form and kept going.
