Foley Gallery will be presenting Lauren Henkin’s first New York solo exhibition, The Park, a series of photographs made entirely in New York’s Central Park. Henkin states, “For the last decade, I have studied various aspects of the American landscape. In The Park, my largest body of work to date, I deepen that study, capturing the massive constructed urban space that is New York’s Central Park–and how people engage it.” Yale University’s Special Collections is acquiring the entire portfolio of prints.
Henkin, a visual artist and active member in the arts community, grew up in Maryland, graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in architecture from Washington University in St. Louis and now resides in New York City. We spoke recently, where she revealed insights into her background and work in crafting these images.
Elizabeth Avedon: Tell me about the work in this exhibition. What drew you to Central Park, had you spent time there as a child?
Lauren Henkin: This series began much like others, by walking. I was living in Portland, Oregon. I hadn’t been to New York in a few years, probably the longest stretch I’d ever gone without a visit, and I was able to squeeze in a brief 24 hours, on a trip to visit my family in Washington, DC. I spent 3 ½ days on the train across the country. I was without sleep and pretty exhausted. I planned on spending the single day at the museums and galleries. But it was one of those New York summer days that I would describe as perfect. The sun was out and the temperature was in the low 80s. Without hesitation, I abandoned my indoor plans to spend the day in Central Park. It’s funny because growing up in DC, my parents took my two sisters and me to New York a few times throughout the year, but we never spent time in Central Park. We were always in the museums. So it felt like I had waited a long time to actually see it.
I walked all around the lower half of the park that day photographing. I wasn’t looking for anything particular, just responding to what I saw and experimenting with new perspectives. I took that first set of negatives back to Oregon, made small proof prints and looked at them—for a very long time. Months. I didn’t know what I was looking for in them. I wanted them to speak to me in some way, to say what they wanted to be, to give a direction for a potential project.
Of course, I knew the great history of photography in the park, from Davidson to Friedlander to Meyerowitz to Papageorge. I knew that I would have to say something new. But it wasn’t just those photographers I would need to rise up to. In 2013, Instagram called Central Park the 7th most photographed site in the world. So I would also need to create a project that would surpass the proliferation of imagery taken by the everyday tourist. Would I have something unique to say? That was the question I needed to answer. So I spent a long time looking at the early photographs.
One photograph stuck with me the most (This Park #31). There was something about the way the branches coexists with the building’s reflection. There was a harmony between the built and the natural that I hadn’t expected to see in New York. I became very aware, and very sensitized to the architecture that lives on the periphery of the park. And scale—the extreme differences between the buildings and us. A project slowly began to take shape. I thought, in contrast to those previous series, I could make one where the landscape plays an equal, if not more prominent role in the structure of the photographs as the people do.
I had a few images in my subconscious. One image was one of the first photographs I made in St. Louis’ Forest Park. Others included the beautiful photographs of rocks and dramatic scale of the west of William Henry Jackson and Carlton Watkins. Harry Callahan’s “Eleanor, Port Huron, 1954” of Eleanor laying in the grass surrounded by trees, also stuck with me for a long time. The more I thought and photographed, the stronger I believed that I could present, in visual form, those moments in the park where the architecture, the land and we come together in a completely unique, manufactured urban landscape.
I would spend a total of 5 years on this series, which I titled The Park. I set out to define what that feeling is when you wake up on a Saturday morning and think to yourself, “I want to spend the day in the park.” What is that complex range of emotions and activities that lead you to that feeling? For me, it’s as much about seeing the light on the softball field as it is about the softball. It’s as much about the deep grooves in the rocks as it is about the rock-climbing. It’s as much about the sun on your back as it is about sunbathing. My work is not so much about subject. It’s about developing an intimate relationship with a viewer so that there can be some kind of emotional response to the photographs. I’m not out to answer questions. I’m not out to say to you, here is this place. This is what it looks like in winter, spring, summer and fall. I’m doing this to raise questions—cultural questions, personal questions. And I think that’s the best I can achieve as an artist.
EA: Was there any special printing involved for this show?
LH: For me, it’s always important, in whatever I’m doing in photography, to assert the primacy of the photographic print. The print, as object, is always in the forefront of my thoughts from the beginning of any project. I think about scale, I think about materiality, I think about tone. I give careful consideration to all of those factors.
Usually, I print my own work in pigment. Knowing that some images needed to be experienced large, I turned to my printing mentor and friend, and the best pigment printer I know, Tyler Boley, to work with me on the pigment prints.
In the past, I have experimented in exhibitions by mixing color and black and white, glossy and matte papers, framed and unframed prints. The Park includes a sub-series of photographs of London Plane tree trunks that are all over the park. I felt strongly that these prints should feel raw, more organic. I needed to interpret that in the prints. So, I thought that printing them in silver might be a good solution. Mixing prints will also act as a stopping point in the exhibition, encouraging the viewer to stop and ask wait, what’s happening now?
For these silver prints, I turned to Laurent Girard of Griffin Editions here in New York who I made a few tests with early on in this project in silver. I met with him and Michael Foley to look at some proofs and we felt that those particular images would really be impactful in silver and printed full-frame. They would be a counterpoint to the more formal pigment prints.
EA: Did you formally study photography?
LH: I studied architecture at Washington University in St. Louis in the mid-90s. I was part of one of the last graduating classes to still draw everything by hand. I was lucky to be part of a small class that was extremely ambitious and experimental. We pushed each other—hard. The education included working in various media including drawing, painting, sculpture, graphic arts, photography, and furniture design. You name it, we were asked to design or build it. We then moved, in the last two years, more heavily into the design of functional space. Looking back, I practiced architecture more as sculpture than as design—I built an endless number of models, I drew—and pushed myself to create meaningful space with the tools of form, light and scale.
The most important skill that I learned was how to convey three-dimensional space in two. Most of my learning and inspiration came from architects like Herzog and de Meuron, Alvaro Siza and Enric Miralles. I was trying to understand how you impose on the land with a built form. The site where the building would reside, for me, was what had to be respected, documented and eventually enhanced. I would spend endless hours at the sites for my projects—walking, looking, observing and imagining—How does light interact with this piece of land? What is the experience of being there? And, how can I best communicate it? These were the questions that I obsessed over.
Much of my study came from looking at how buildings were photographed. So my introduction to photography actually came from architectural photographers and architects primarily interested in showing the interaction of a newly built form and its context in the landscape.
At the end, I began photographing more and more and working in the tiny darkroom we had. I connected with the one professor who was an architectural photographer. He worked with me outside of any formal class structure and I started photographing primarily to document the sites where my projects were located—as a way to record and envision what might be incorporated into these views — to imagine what could be there, as much as to see what was there. Then and now, I am drawn to the environmental portrait, where the land and space are the primary subjects. When I look back on those images, I understand that I was photographing to figure how to transform those sites—that the photographs represented temporary conditions in the landscape whose purpose was to create something new. They served as permanent records of a place and time, but the ideas represented, and the intent with which they were taken was to show impermanence. This tension would become the conceptual foundation for most of my work as an artist.
I took a one-credit class where the only assignment was to give a presentation on one photographer. Doing the research for my presentation pushed me into another section of the art library where I discovered a wealth of images I had never seen before. I knew definitively, when I saw his work, that the photographer I wanted to talk about was Harry Callahan. I strongly connected with his photographs of buildings and form, especially ones of urban elevations because I was drawing buildings in this way, over and over again. I could appreciate his sensitivity to any site, whether it was the urban landscape, the natural, or one made by the human body. Callahan was such a well-rounded, gifted photographer. When I saw his prints in a retrospective at the National Gallery in 1996—right as I graduated school—I knew that I wanted to shift from architecture to photography.
EA: Where did you move after Washington University?
LH: After school in St. Louis, I moved back to Washington, DC. I worked for a few years as an architect, but quickly realized, that what stimulated so much creativity in me in school was not what the profession was. I was working on commercial banks and large urban public planning projects. I was completely bored.
I started shooting around my house, in my house, on day trips. I went hunting. For both education and images like Callahan’s that I could relate to, that incorporated architecture and landscape. A huge influence would become George Tice, who, like Callahan, photographed both the urban and natural environments. Tice’s seminal series, Paterson and Urban Landscapes would become guides. Seeing them freed me of the naïve preconception that I would have to go to the southwest or west coast to be a landscape photographer. I could photograph what interested me in urban areas on the east coast. I studied Tice’s incredible eye for line and composition. I was in awe of his ability to depict depth, subtlety and humor. I knew that I would have to perfect two things before I started any kind of serious project—the negative and the print. George Tice is an incredibly gifted printer in both silver and platinum and eventually, I went to Maine to study with him to learn how to print, and more important, how to interpret an image in the print.
But, I wasn’t just looking at photographers. I was also investigating painters and sculptors like Willem de Kooning, Louise Nevelson, Giorgio Morandi and Andrew Wyeth. I studied Wyeth’s Christina’s World in particular. There was something about the composition of that painting, the longing in it, the importance of the foreground and the way he leads you from the foreground to the background. I’ve had this image close to me for most of my life.
EA: Were you always focused on landscapes?
LH: Yes. I have a strong connection to land. From a young age, my father used to take me on hikes in the woods. My mother spent 20+ years working for the Sierra Club. The environment, and what it gives and how little it receives, is heavy on my mind all the time. As Robert Adams said, “But the example of trees does suggest a harmony for which it seems right to dream.” Native American writer N. Scott Momaday wrote, “Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder upon it, to dwell upon it.” I suppose a big part of it is about surrender, about giving myself over to a particular place. I feel most at ease when I’m out by myself shooting in the absolute quiet. I can be very slow about my process. I’m not a religious person, but when out in the woods, I feel outside of myself. There’s something very important to me about being around that which is much older, that which will, hopefully, outlive me. It’s both humbling and a challenge—to properly render its importance in the photographs.
EA: The Yale University’s Beinecke Special Collections Library acquired this series. How has that impacted your work or your outlook on your work?
LH: Yale’s Beinecke Special Collections acquired 100 prints. What was most satisfying about it (beyond the obvious) is that they wanted the entire set of prints from The Park as well as my very first body of work, a series I made in West Virginia titled Charleston. I don’t think that it has or will impact my work or my outlook on the work. I think it’s important though, for all of us working hard, sometimes in isolation, to find someone that really gets what you’re doing from the subject of the photographs to how the prints are made. I know for me, that has been the biggest impact, finding a curator at Yale who understands what I do, why I do it and can tie all of it together enough to want to protect not just the prints, but the evolution of my work. That’s pretty special.
Elizabeth Avedon
EXHIBITION
Lauren Henkin: The Park
April 30-June 8, 2014
Foley Gallery
97 Allen Street
New York, NY 10002
USA
