Looking Through the Lens
Note: Now that wedding, honeymoon, and moving have all been successfully completed, Words + Images will once again be updated weekly.
Somehow, despite a heat wave and a house full of boxes waiting to be unpacked, I managed to get to the BMA on the last day of Looking Through the Lens, an exhibition of iconic photography from 1900-1960.
A few local bloggers have already reviewed the show, which spanned four large rooms and certainly showcased the breadth of the BMA's photography collection if not their curatorial distinction. However, on the day of my visit I didn't examine the overall energy of the show, nor did I take particular interest in how the pieces communicated with each other on the walls. Blessed with only a few hours to spend with the work, I devoured the work piece by piece, notebook in hand, taking in as many images as I could before the exhibition closed.
It had been about a year since my last opportunity to enjoy art alone in a gallery setting like this. When I haven't been looking at work that interests me on a regular basis, I forget so easily the wealth of ideas and inspiration it can bring.
I won't discuss all my notes at once, but I do want to talk briefly this evening about the artist's hand. Art observers will most commonly refer to “seeing the artist's hand” in a piece of art actually made by hand. A painting or a sculpture, for example, can retain brush strokes or chisel marks to remind the viewer of the hands that created it. When we look at photographs, we likely judge them based on more scientific properties: depth of field, tonal range, composition, subject, or content. In my own work, seeing the process, the evidence of the artist's hand in a photograph, often distracts from true enjoyment of the piece.
The Raoul Ubac montage in Looking Through the Lens fascinated me, perhaps for this reason. The untitled piece featured an interesting study of a woman's face and a glass bottle. Though it looked very clean from afar, that illusion faded when I approached it for further inspection. Along the edges of the photos I saw dents and uneven cuts where the x-acto knife had wandered slightly. I saw where the man had cut the photographs with a tool.
This sight brought to mind my own late nights in the darkroom as an undergrad, utility knife in hand, working at a table cross-hatched with decades of stray x-acto marks. Though I don't always display it in the final project, I can't deny the tactile nature of traditional photo processes. Looking at work that retained some of that hands-on experience placed me squarely in the studio with the photographer, and the surreal imagery brought to mind the fragmented, incomplete images of my own thoughts. I could write a paper on traditional vs. modern photo practices, but for now I will just say I am unsure whether I would have had such a well-rounded experience with the photos had the piece been done in Photoshop.
The photo book by Charles Norman Sladen really stole the show for me, though. I scribbled down notes and gleaned a lot of ideas from the all the big names at the show, but Sladen's book Great Chebeague Island, Maine really took my breath away.
Surprisingly, we know very little about Sladen, save for the fact that he chronicled his family's travels to Great Chebeague Island in these unique and very striking photo books. Sladen pasted five or so pictures, generously spaced, onto the page and extended/embellished them with extremely intricate and talented ink drawings. The photos become only the starting point for a larger scene and Sladen weaves them together like an elaborate dream, all five connected by ink on the page.
Sadly, I have been unable to find images of Sladen's work online, and most references I found were responding to the BMA show. I would love to find a reproduction of the book I saw, but doubt such a thing exists.
I'm sure Looking Through the Lens will come up again in Words + Images. The argument can certainly be made that it lacked cohesion and focus, but the broad sampling of styles, content, and ideas also provided fertile ground for the mind to wander.
Until next week...
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That's an interesting idea, that you wouldn't have had the same experiences if you had worked with all of your photos in Photoshop alone. I know that when I had to cut physical film and tape it back together to make a movie, I absolutely hated it, and I'd never go back there. But it does give you a more exact feel for the medium -- you have to face the movie as a series of still images, and likewise you have to face a photo that's really just a fancy piece of paper. Do you think it's important to know the "old ways" as well as the new?
You know, I do think it's important. During my senior year at Kutztown the final plans were being made for studio renovations, and originally there had been threat of the chemical darkroom not returning when the new building opened in the fall. Of course the photo professors knew better, and the darkroom will be back better than ever when students return in August. Fortunately, there will be studio space for both digital photography and time-based digital work. In my opinion, this is a much-needed upgrade.
While some people refuse to accept digital at all, I think it is vitally important to be fluent in both mediums.
We can't forget the tactile process of making photos, the meditative experience of being in the darkroom, just like we can't deny the world of opportunity digital photography has introduced to us.
The way the work is created contributes to the content and meaning. When I shoot b/w film, I consciously choose my film speed, aperture, filters, etc., all of which affects the final product. A grainy 35mm shot of a decaying industrial scene says something different than a crystal-clear one taken with a large-format camera. I think using the unique properties of digital or film in your work should be interpreted as an artistic choice as well.