Until March 28, 2025, the Joseph Bellows Gallery in La Jolla shows an exhibition entitled In Search of the Perfect Palm – Polaroids by Charles Johnstone.
The exhibition presents Johnstone’s homage to the 19th Century explorer and photographer Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey. In 1842, Girault de Prangey set out on a three-year expedition to the Eastern Mediterranean equipped with a camera and a newfound knowledge of the Daguerreotype process. On this journey he came across a palm tree near the Church of Saints Theodore in Athens that would prove to be a subject worthy of his camera. The view captured by Girault de Prangey in one of photography’s earliest processes was very modern and unusual for its time, depicting a close-up view of the palm’s fronds against the sky. In 2019, upon seeing this full plate daguerreotype image made by Girault de Prangey in the exhibition, A Monumental Journey held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Johnstone was inspired to search for the perfect palm.
In Search of the Perfect Palm will feature two distinct processes, small-scale direct positive Polaroid prints and larger scale Fresson pigment prints. The unique Polaroid prints created by Johnstone on expired batches of Polaroid film stock render his selected palms small in scale, and with the intimacy of viewing akin to the solidarity of beholding a Daguerreotype. The larger work is printed through the 19th Century Fresson printing process, first developed in France. This carbon process produces a richly textured image with the mood of a charcoal drawing combined with the clarity of a photograph. In Johnstone’s photographs, the palm tree is held against the same cerulean sky that the artist encountered in Girault de Prangey’s photograph, and rendered with the inherent artifacts and image inconsistencies that are characteristic of the unpredictable nature of expired film, recalling results indicative to early Daguerreotype images. With this, Johnstone’s work forms a link to the medium’s past, while suggesting the immediacy of the present through the photographer’s quest to capture a fleeting sense of the beauty and symbolism his subject conveys.
Charles Johnstone is a self-taught photographer, whose works feature his immediate surroundings and environments encountered during travel. His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Berlin. Johnstone’s books and photographs are included in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of the City of New York, and the International Center of Photography. He was the subject of the 2022 documentary, Remnants of Memory, a film that celebrates beauty in the overlooked, anonymous objects we pass every day, in which Johnstone explores the vivid canals and ancient passageways of Venice, Italy in search of a new book project.
In Search of the Perfect Palm – Polaroids by Charles Johnstone
Until March 28, 2025
Joseph Bellows Gallery
7661 Girard Avenue
La Jolla CA 92037
858 456 5620
www.josephbellows.com
