Trailblazing photography explores alternatives: some of today's most creative fine art photographers are turning to alternative processes and techniques
Art Business News, Nov, 2004 by Laura Meyers
Continued from page 1.
Photograms can be even less "mediated" by the artist or camera, as Berkeley photographer Susannah Hays discovered during a rainy winter a few years ago. (Photograms dispense with cameras and negatives completely, using only light-sensitive paper and a light source, either outside in sunlight or indoors with artificial light, in a darkroom. Photogram techniques are taught in beginning photography classes and summer camps everywhere, but are really sophisticated art methods used famously by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and his contemporary, Man Ray.)
Stuck indoors on that rainy day, Hays decided to experiment with the photogram process, and grabbed an empty glass bottle off her shelf and placed it on photographic paper. After she exposed the bottle to light, Hays found, to her surprise, that what appeared to the human eye to be a smooth surface was in actuality a swirl of seemingly organic, patterned forms. Hays' "Empty Bottle Series" edition prints start at $800 and are available through Scott Nichols Gallery in San Francisco.
For his part, Abelardo Morell blackens all the windows in a room with a thick covering, usually black vinyl, leaving only a pinhole opening, to transform the interior into a giant pinhole camera. Within the room, Morell uses a large-format view camera to capture the image of the upside-down, outside world, which dances across the interior walls. The juxtapositions attract Morell's interest: the Empire State Building reflected on a bed in midtown Manhattan; the Chrysler Building on the wall and floor of a New York hotel room; and Central Park upside down in an office. Bonni Benrubi Gallery will present these works in "Abelardo Morell: About Time," through Dec. 4, as the inaugural exhibition at the gallery's new space on East 57th Street.
Well-Received
Art dealers, curators and collectors alike have embraced these artistic experiments of pinhole enthusiasts and "grammers"--as Casanave calls herself. For example, artist Derrick Burbul's pinhole photography exhibit, "Vicarious Journey's," was on view in October at the Duluth Art Institute in Minnesota. Burbul constructed dozens of handmade pinhole cameras and sent them to people across the globe, asking the individuals to make images and send them back to him. The exhibit presents Burbul's own work, as well as photographs from throughout the United States and as far away as Japan, El Salvador and Lesotho, in Southern Africa.
Too, the University of Chicago Press recently published "Primal Images," a collection of artist-curator Jerry Burchfield's botanical lumen prints from the Amazon (co-published by the Center for American Places and Laguna Wilderness Press). Burchfield's work has been shown extensively in more than 40 solo exhibitions throughout the United States, Europe and Japan, including a recent exhibition of the "Primal Images" works at the UCR California Museum of Photography in Riverside, CA. Burchfield is not the first artist to use alternative photographic processes, says Jonathan Green, director of the UCR Museum. "Artists as diverse as Andy Warhol, Bea Nettles, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Robert Rauschenberg have used such processes as photograms, camera-less and pinhole images, fabricated negatives, chemical staining, solarization and posterization" explains Green, but adding, "Burchfield has a single focus: the essential qualities of natural objects. These images are highly decorative--they are very much concerned with beauty."
Not too long ago, Burchfield himself curated an exhibit, "Beyond Light," of works by X-ray photographers Steven Meyers, Albert Koetsier and Judith McMillan. In effect, explains Meyers, X-ray photographers make photograms utilizing a different part of the electro-magnetic spectrum, which ranges from visible to infrared light. The subject--be it a flower specimen or an insect (as Koetsier has explored)--is placed directly on the film, rather than photographic paper, and then exposed with a focused X-ray beam rather than light.
"It brings a look to art that isn't normally seen outside of medicine," says Meyers. "Probably someone in every radiology lab in the country has snapped a few flower prints"--though not everyone has received the collector attention garnered by artists like Meyers, Koetsier and McMillan. McMillan is represented by the Benrubi Gallery, while Meyers and Koetsier have exhibited at Spiritus' space among others. Meyers' editions are also published by Poems Art Publishing.
Buyers don't always know what they are looking at when they discover Meyers' and Koetsier's images, according to Spiritus, who also handles works by Burchfield. "People don't know why the objects are see-through, and they are not expecting that my answer will be X-ray" says Spiritus. But apparently they like what they see, as Spiritus sells many X-ray photographs to hospitals, as well as individual collectors.
Of course, X-ray fine art photography isn't completely newfangled. In the 1930s, Dain Tasker used X-rays to make art images of flowers. But his work was set aside and nearly forgotten. Found a few years ago, the images were called pioneering works and eventually were auctioned for more than $25,000 each.
Similarly, pinhole photography isn't new, but it has been considered "trendy" for more than a decade, according to self-taught pinhole photographer Eric Renner, who heads the Pinhole Resource, both an archive and a photographic supply house. "I started the Pinhole Resource because I thought there was a real need to create an archive of pinhole photographs. During the 1890s through 1910, there was a lot of pinhole done, but most of the images did not survive," Renner notes. He now has a collection of about 4,000 pinhole photographs from many artists worldwide.
In 1988, the Fine Arts Museum of Long Island organized "Through a Pinhole Darkly," an exhibition of 45 international artists using pinhole techniques. That same year, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Seville, Spain, and the Center for Contemporary Arts of Santa Fe, NM, also mounted pinhole photography exhibitions. When the Museum of Fine Art in Boston presented an exhibition of photograms and other alternative photographic processes by Adam Fuss, there were 68,428 visitors to the show, which was on view from September 2002 through January 2003.
Last year, Rotovision published "Adventures With Pinhole and Home-Made Cameras: From Tin Cans to Precision Engineering," by John Evans, which features images from artists using a variety of imaginative cameras, including a beer can pierced with a pinhole. Recently, pinhole has become so popular that, for the past four years, there has been an official Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day, held annually on the last Sunday in April. In 2003, some 1,082 images from 43 countries were uploaded on the event's official Web site.
For reprints of this article, contact LaTonya Brumitt @ 314-824-5504, or e-mail labrumitt@pfpublish.com
SOURCES
GALLERIES:
* Bonni Benrubi Gallery (artists Abelardo Morell, Judith McMillan, Luca Pagliari), 212-517-3766
* Susan Spiritus Fine Art(artists Jerry Burchfield, Steven N. Meyers, Albert Koetsler), 949-474-4321
* Lisa Harris Gallery (artist Christopher Haris), 206-443-3315
* RobinVenutti (artist Martha Casanave) 831-372-7515
* Scott Nichols Gallery (artist Susannah Hays) 415-788-4641
ARTISTS:
* Jesseca Ferguson, 617-482-8018
* Thomas Hudson Reeve, kat@katakismet.com
* Bethany de Forest, bethany@pinhole.nl
* Rowena Dugdale, +011 44 117 9662808
* Steven Berkman, 626-791-1332
ORGANIZATIONS AND PUBLISHERS:
* Pinhole Resource (artists Eric Renner and Nancy Spencer), 505-536-9942;
* Poems Art Publishing (artist Steven N. Meyers--posters), 845-398-2262
* The Pinhole Gallery Online, www.pinhole.org
COPYRIGHT 2004 Pfingsten Publishing, LLC
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
Top of Page