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PDN: You also do advertising work. Can you talk briefly about the
Prescriptives account you worked on. . . . How did that come about?
"Magic" Campaign |
JOYCE TENNESON: Every once in a while I'm lucky enough to get
a wonderful advertising assignment, and working with Prescriptives/Magic has been
a very pleasant experience, because they actually came to me after seeing an image—the
one that I just showed you from Transformations. The company was developing
a product line to show the "Inner Light" of women.And it was wonderful that they
came directly to me, rather than hiring somebody to copy me, which is often, unfortunately,
what can happen. I think the images that we have done together have really suited
their needs and it's been a pleasant experience for me as well.
PDN: I know that mentoring is very important to you. Did your mentoring
program, Light Warriors come before the book Light Warriors?
JOYCE TENNESON: Actually, I started the non-profit Light Warriors
organization after the book was finished. My editor at Bulfinch Press needed copy
for the book flap and we were thinking about the organization, but we hadn't yet
worked it all out. We mentioned the organization in the Light Warriors
book flap copy, so it sort of took on a life of its own very quickly, thanks in
part to the Santa Fe Photo Workshops, who already had a non-profit organization
in place. They offered to do the legal work and the accounting work, and we became
a division of the nonprofit Santa Fe Center for Visual Arts. We are up and running
now and we're really hoping that a lot of people who are looking at this Web site
will go into www.lightwarriors.org.
We have various internship programs being offered, as well as a scholarship this
year, and we'll be having other kinds of networking that might be of interest
to many, many people.
PDN: Why is the mentoring program so important to you?
JOYCE TENNESON: I think that as important as my art has been,
and as important as my relationships have been to me, I think that perhaps I'll
be equally as proud of my teaching/facilitator experiences. I've always been involved
in education and I continue to give it a very high priority in my life. I just
feel that mentoring is something I wished for my son, and I think it's what we
all wish for our children and our nephews, or nieces, or godchildren, or whatever.
We just wish somebody would take an interest in them at a critical point in their
life and see who they are and connect them with people that could make their life
change or grow in a positive way. I've seen the power of mentoring many times—I
just wanted to put some effort behind changing consciousness about the fact that
we can all, with very little time and no money, actually change people's lives
just through being aware of who they are and what they need at that particular
moment, and by connecting them to resources that we could probably access if we
just gave it some thought.
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