Turns out some people who go to RISD actually end up making GREAT art. Jeff Barnett-Winsby is one of those people. But if the making-great-art-thing doesn't work out, he'll always have auto-theft to fall back on. Read on!

Chief Magazine: So what’s your name?

Jeff Barnett-Winsby: Jeffrey Robert Barnett-Winsby.

That’s a long name.

It is a long name.  I’m not royalty.

And when’d you start shooting?

I guess I was about nineteen.  And uh, in a clichéd way, I moved back from Europe and picked it up.

What were you doing in Europe?

I dropped out of college.

Good!

Yeah, waited tables, saved some money, went to Europe.  Thought I would figure out what was going on.  No idea, just developed a drinking problem.

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How long did you fuck around over there?

You know, not that long actually. Four months will do a lot of damage.

Yeah?  Oh ok, that was quick.

Real quick.  I think I went through about ten grand.

Damn.

Yeah.  Well I was, uh, a good waiter.

Ok, well I guess. Damn. All right, so you just came back and you picked up a camera?

Um, we had one in the basement.  It was sort of that basic and simple and, you know, I think I really wanted to be in a band, and I really couldn’t play a guitar, and I didn’t have much patience, so photography seemed like this immediate medium that made a lot of sense to me.  And I spent the next year taking horrifyingly bad pictures. That I thought were really good, so, you know.

What was the stuff you started shooting?

You know, there was absolutely no focus, but eventually I got into documentary and that’s—when I graduated from school, undergrad—that’s what I was doing.  I was photographing a single father and daughter, who lived in, actually poverty, but they had an amazing relationship and their life was pretty positive, even though they didn’t really have any money.  And I felt like I wanted to prove that or something.  I wanted to think about how, um, people equate resources, often times, with the quality of parenting, and I felt like this was a glaring case of completely the opposite.  He actually had a whole lot more time.  And that seemed to be the real key.  And so the relationship was actually really beautiful.  And she had a mother; she was around too, but mainly I focused on them—on the father and child.  It was a good experience, really.

How did you come across them?

I was a bartender.  He was a regular at my bar.
 
No shit.  That’s a pretty good access point.

Yeah, he was really comfortable.  He wasn’t a big drinker or anything.  He’d come in and have a beer after work or something, but a really nice guy.  And it was a bar where everyone sort of hung out.  It was also a coffee shop, so I mean, he may have been there for coffee or whatever.

Gotcha.

It opened at like six in the morning and closed at 2:30.

So I guess just a local spot that he could be at.

Exactly. Exactly.  It was downtown too. Everybody walks so—

Gotcha.  Wait, so where was this?

Lawrence, Kansas.

Oh, cool.  So, I guess, what followed that?

Uh, after that I graduated, from undergrad.  I spent about a year and a half or two years in Lawrence.  I was working for a commercial photographer and we were doing just really corporate things and I knew that I wanted to go to graduate school, and so I started making work with that in mind.  I started to think about color and the pass time between the strictly black and white traditionalist documentarian, and I also switched to digital at that point.  I was about twenty-one, twenty-two.  And um, I started making sort of like, American landscape.  Youthful street culture portraits that, you know, everyone makes?

Sure.

So I went through that and that’s what I applied to school with.  That’s what I got in with.  I mean, I had no idea what I was doing and neither did he.

Ok.  And where did you end up going for grad?

I went to RISD.

Gotcha.  And how did the work there vary from like, you know, the work you were doing in undergrad?

Drastically different.  And I think that’s one of the reasons to really go.  You’re meant to sort of be broken down and really figure out why you do things, and sort of grow from there.  My work personally, for the first year, was just in this absolutely strange state.  I tried everything; I was printing self-portraits on birthday cakes and would consume one and let the other one rot in crit. [laughs] you know, three months later.  And then I was just onto ideas.  I just wanted to talk about ideas and that’s it.  And then I moved into prison work.  I’ve always been fascinated with prison.  I went to sort of a “boarding school” parading—or I guess it’s a reform school—parading as a boarding school and, you know, I guess, in my mind, I was like the Count of Monte-Cristo.  I was this, you know, wrongfully imprisoned person and I was going to come out fighting and I would speak Latin or something.  I'd have a fencing, you know, fencing career!  And so, I decided, you know, prison’s great.  And I’m from Kansas where everybody knows each other and my dad, at one point, worked in the prison system, and he was able to help me sort of talk to people and get in there.  It took some work, but eventually I started shooting interiors only; I wasn’t interested in portraits.