Robert Farber: I'm happy to be here with Jill Enfield. Jill, I've known for many years, the beauty and sensitivity she captures with her work, not only with photography, but the way she handles her work afterwards as an artist and how she hand paints. Jill is one of the most experienced and respected hand coloring artist. She does fine art work, editorial, and commercial work as well. She's taught hand coloring and non-silver techniques in New York as well as workshops in the U.S. and Europe. And her work is in some of the great corporate collections as well as museums. Jill, I'm a great admirer of your work and I'm sure the people that are listening would love to hear how you got started and some other details about your career.

Jill Enfield: Thank you, Robert. I'm an admirer of your work as well. I really want to talk about how I did get started because it's sort of through back doors. I didn't start out thinking I was going to be a fine art or commercial photographer. I really wasn't sure what kind of photographer I was going to be, I just started shooting and going along and thought I would teach and that would be my life. When I was in college, the last week actually, somebody came in and showed us how to hand paint, and I just got extremely excited and found that I couldn't stop, that all I wanted to do was make pictures and come back and work on them and show my hand work in them. And just change them a little bit, not really have them look like color images, but just a little bit different. I kept going about doing my own work and showing it here and there, and somebody bought my work from a show and it turns out she was the editor of Taxi magazine, which unfortunately is no longer in existence, and she asked if I would do a shoot for her. That's how it began. I said, "Well, I have never done it, but it sound kind of cool and why not." So I started shooting for her and had a great time.

Robert Farber: Was that a fashion shooting you did? What type of shooting was it? And also, when you started hand painting what type of work were you doing at the time?

Jill Enfield: I'll start with the first. When I started with hand painting I was painting on my images that were done with infrared film and they were mostly really similar to what I'm still doing, the architectural images and landscapes and interiors, sort of ethereal, soft images. That's really what Francesca had seen of my work, and that's what she wanted. So the shoot was a still life shoot for Taxi.

Robert Farber: So you were studying photography and then you started hand tinting the photographs at that point. Where were you in school?

Jill Enfield: I was in NYU. I had originally gone to school and dropped out of college because I was not there as a photographer and didn't really understand what I was doing in school. So I dropped out for a little while and worked, then went to some photography workshops, then went back to get my degree. So it was after I had moved up to New York City.

Robert Farber: Let me ask you this, because over the years I've seen a number of people that do hand tinting but you see them here and there, but the only one I've seen of major success and done so beautifully is yourself. How come...how do you get ahead of the competition, what do you think was your reason for your success, besides the quality of your work?

Jill Enfield: That's a very interesting question. I think it has to do with how I look at how I go about my work. I first am a photographer, I take the pictures, think about the composition, think about the lighting, what I want the picture to say, and the color is a part of that. It's not to change the image in a great way, it's to add to the image but in the same way that I saw it when I was photographing it. A lot of people will use it to change the image or to have the hand painting what the image is about, and my pictures, I hope, are not about the hand painting, but about the feeling that you get from looking at the image.

Robert Farber: Now let me ask you, as far as your work and where your concentration is: are you doing your work mostly commercially, fine art, is it a mix? I know you do a lot of workshops and you do lectures, and you're also involved in a new book--can you tell me as far as the mixture of your work commercial to fine art.

Jill Enfield: I try and combine them. I want as much as possible for my commercial work to mesh with my fine art work, so that they are interwoven a great deal. So my time, it depends on the year, some years I don't do much commercial work and I concentrate on my own work and I concentrate on the workshops. Other years I take on more commercial work, and it really is year to year. This year for some reason I'm getting busier commercially, and so that's where I am bending towards, my concentration. But it's interesting because the commercial work has to do with my fine art work, so that I am making portfolios of some architectural places, while I will use that in my fine art work. It will either be hand painted, or be liquid emulsion on the tiles or something to that effect. But I really do feel that they're all meshed together. For example, recently, a hotel wanted to buy work, so while that is a commercial venture. They were very interested in having my work as someone looking at it and saying, "Oh, that looks like Jill Enfield's work on the wall," and it was interesting because as I worked with the curator for that hotel, they ended up picking some images that were actually shot for a commercial assignment for lingerie and another one for shirts and then that's hanging on the wall with a house I happened to shoot while I was walking around in Miami Beach. So it really is intertwined with each other, that they work together.

Robert Farber: Well, Jill, you've taken your hand painting, your hand tinting with photographs, and you're using it for things like commercial work: lingerie ads, fashion, illustration, advertising, and also selling it to galleries or through galleries, and your hotels and different decorative places. Also, I know you're in some museums and you're working on your new book. Before we get in to the book, let me ask you, as far as the technology that's happening because of the use of Photoshop, and with Photoshop you can almost make (or even through other computer programs) almost make it like a hand tinted or hand painted photograph look. Are you using that technology, or using Photoshop now to create your images. How are you working with it?

Jill Enfield: I'm not really making my images through Photoshop. I use the computer and Photoshop for different uses. I will scan my images in and print them out and make books that the dealers can use, or the galleries can use. I can use it to show people other work, besides what might be on the wall or what might be in the bins. but otherwise I odn't really utilize in that way. You can repeat everything, at this point, in Photoshop, there's no question, that somebody couldn't. And in fact, I have for an article, gone into Photoshop and painted an image, and it doesn't look much different than what I do by hand.

Robert Farber: Then why are you continually doing it by hand as opposed to using Photoshop?

Jill Enfield: Because I like it. I like the tactile quality of having something in my hand and creating it and touching it and feeling it as I'm working with the image and the paper, other than using the mouse or a pen and working with a screen on a computer. I just--I'm a painter, I like to have--I like to get dirty.

Robert Farber: That's a good answer...but basically, do you feel you can get the same quality (I don't want to say you can't get the same quality), but once again, I want people listening to this to really be clear is you first have to be a good photographer and not try to cover up your images with painting. But do you think you could enhance the same way using Photoshop if someone was skilled at it?

Jill Enfield: I think that people definitely could repeat anything at this point on the computers. Everything is so sophisticated. The computer is a tool, so it's a matter of deciding on what tool you want to use. A painter chooses a brush, a photographer chooses a camera. Do you want large format, you know 35 mm, what do you want to use as a tool. I prefer to use my hand and a brush so that I can feel it and that's how I get more involved in the image. I'm right there on top of it. So it's just a choice.

Robert Farber: What advice can you give to someone starting out who is interested, whether it's just photography itself, but through your own experience to go about getting their work published or going about starting their career in photography?

Jill Enfield: It has to be a passion to them, the photography itself, before they even go and show it to people, they need to know that this is what they want to do, this is their love, this is what they want to wake up and do every morning. And once they have that, that will build their confidence. Then they can start showing their work to people, and I think that they need to decide what, or discover what they want their voice to be in their images, and how they want to come across. They are not always going to be on the other side of the desk when they are showing their work to a magazine publisher or to a gallery owner. So you have to make sure that what you are thinking about, what you want your pictures to say can be said within those slides or within that book you're sending to those people.

Robert Farber: Where is your career going, which direction? If you could just tell us more about that...

Jill Enfield: This year is a pretty special year for me because my book will be coming out. It's a book on alternative processes. ???? is distributing it, and it's called, right now as a working title, but it's Photo Imaging: A Visual Guide to Alternative Processes and Techniques, which is a mouthful. But it's just to get the point across that it's not just a how-to book. Each chapter will have over twenty images in it with a description on how to achieve those results. So that's really what I'm concentrating on right now, and the book deals, of course, with hand painting and infrared film, but it also goes into making an enlarged negative and doing platinum palladian prints, and ???? cyana types and van dike browns and liquid emulsion.

Robert Farber: And also, what's that project you're working on with National Geographic?

Jill Enfield: That was--I'm glad you brought that up because that is something very close to my heart. It's exciting. It's unusual for National Geographic, it's something that I thought would not really happen in a magazine in that they're having my work in the magazine in the way of a collaboration, where Annie Belt did take the pictures. I usually don't paint on other people's work, but it seemed like an exciting project, and so I'm doing that. Annie took the pictures and then I hand painted them, and it's a story on William Bartram. It was just...it was a neat thing to do and very different. Usually when I do something for a magazine, it's myself and the art director, the photo editor. So this was a really unusual way of working.

Robert Farber: Well, Jill, thank you very much and I wish you continued success and we look forward to both the National Geographic, your other work, and of course your new book.

Jill Enfield: Thank you, very much.

Note: The above is a transcript of Robert Farber's interview with Jill Enfield. It has undergone some editing for improved readibility. You may also wish--or prefer--to listen to the actual original interview while viewing some of Ms. Enfield's images.