The New York Public Library presents an exhibition called Photography and ruin The exhibition literally deals with photographs that are purposely “ruined” – in that the photographers willingly manipulates the photograph to create a certain effect.
Photographs, often characterized as frozen moments in time, are in truth physical objects in perpetual transition, born from a medium that is itself thought to be disappearing. Created by light falling on photosensitive surfaces, photographs begin as passing instants that continue to evolve as they materialize as images. Even when fixed or printed, photographs remain susceptible to change due to internal flaws, artistic intervention, or environmental factors. As objects in flux from the moment of inception, photographs are like ruins, or fragments of time. Traces and remnants of the past, they are simultaneously stable and transient, present and absent.This exhibition, a rumination on photography and ruin, presents works that themselves reflect on photography’s particular connection to the ephemeral, mutability, and decay. Featured artists include Lorna Bieber, Myra Greene, Rosalie Gwathmey, Yuichi Hibi, Denny Moers, Bruce Nauman, Philip Pocock, Alison Rossiter, Arthur Rothstein, Robert Smithson, Edmund Teske, Robin Waart, and Witho Worms.
Jonathan Pace
Biographies
Lorna Bieber (1949 – )
Although Lorna Bieber does not directly intervene in the photochemical process, she nevertheless likens her process to alchemy. The metaphor is appropriate, because for three decades she has transformed the base materials of her art (found images and stock photographs) into mysterious and beautiful silver prints. This transmutation comes courtesy of a laborious process of photocopying, collaging, cropping, manually enhancing, and rephotographing. In the seriesBabies, Bieber developed a vocabulary of heads, bodies, and backgrounds to create images “meant to feel like fragments of a larger, unknown story.” At the time, she was using a photocopier that printed on paper that measured 18 x 24 1/2 inches; the final silver prints replicated the look of the photocopies and the soft quality of toner on paper.
Edmund Teske (1911 – 1996)
During his multifaceted career, Edmund Teske worked as a photographer for Frank Lloyd Wright, taught at the New Bauhaus Institute of Design in Chicago alongside László Moholy-Nagy, and worked as an assistant to Berenice Abbott in New York. After relocating to Los Angeles in the mid-1940s, he increasingly experimented with photographic techniques and became widely known for a printing process dubbed by Edward Steichen as “duotone solarization.” Similar to the technique later used by Denny Moers, Teske’s process combined solarization (in which re-exposure with bursts of light is used to reverse light and shadow) with changes in the concentration of basic black-and-white chemistry to produce a wide range of colors. Teske apparently produced these effects without the aid of dyes or toners.
Robert Smithson (1938 – 1973)
In addition to site-specific earthworks, in the late 1960s Robert Smithson also created “nonsites,” his term for bins of rocks and gravel culled from actual geographical sites and displayed in galleries alongside maps, writings, and photographs. He then used his photographs of these sites in other works, either placing the images back into the landscape and rephotographing them or, as in this reproduction of a photograph from the 1968 piece Six Stops on a Section, tearing the image into pieces. For Smithson, the nonsites and related works created a dialogue between historical and geological time, both moving inexorably toward ruin: “I’m interested in the disintegration of something built up. . . . There’s this constant fragmentation. . . . The finality is grit.”
Bruce Nauman (1941 – )
A multimedia artist particularly known, as a photographer, for the documentation of his own performances, Bruce Nauman has long been interested in the relationship between language, art, and the materials of everyday life. The recognition, often ironically stated, that both life and art are ephemeral lies at the heart of much of his work. In Burning Small Fires, he literalizes an earlier work of Ed Ruscha, who in 1964 published Burning Small Fires and Milk, a book of commonplace photographs, including some that depict fires. Nauman photographed the burning of his copy of Ruscha’s book, edited the images down to photographs of fire, and bound the uncut sheet into the covers of a book. The unwieldy manipulation of the book, which must be unfolded and refolded, emphasizes the redundancy of the title (burning fires); it also causes constant wear to the paper and echoes the transient nature of photography.
Myra Greene (1975 – )
Myra Greene’s Character Recognition explores issues of racial stereotyping through a fragmentary study of her own ethnic features. Updating the nineteenth-century photographic process called wet collodion, Greene bridges the gap between historical and modern trauma, from ethnographic studies and colonial slavery to racial profiling and contemporary ethnic conflict (often marked by mutilation and disfigurement). To create the unique ambrotypes, Greene coats glass plates with sensitized collodion and places them, while still wet, into the camera. After exposure, the plate is immediately developed. The resulting negative appears as a positive image against the black glass. Here, the telltale signs of the process, drips, pools, and stains, give the works the appearance of photographic relics.
Witho Worms (1979 – )
Witho Worms has documented coal slag heaps in Northern Europe since 2006. From each “mountain” of slag he photographs, he takes a sample of coal and grinds it down to a pigment, which he then uses to make contact-carbon prints of the site. The resulting pictures can be seen as fragments of the mountains they depict. “In this work,” according to Worms, “object and subject, mountain and photograph, have become one.” Carbon printing, which uses pigmented gelatin in place of metals or dyes to form images, was developed in the 1860s as a way of addressing the tendency of photographs to fade and discolor over time. Just as the slag heaps serve as reminders of bygone industrial production, the carbon prints are anachronistic material objects, seemingly out of place in a digital age dominated by binary code.
Alison Rossiter (1953 – )
Drawing on her training in photograph conservation, Alison Rossiter elicits found and latent imagery (left by fingerprints, moisture, humidity, or accidental exposure) from expired photographic papers without the use of a camera. Sometimes, she simply develops the paper to reveal the hidden traces of random physical contact from the past. In most cases, however, she purposefully manipulates the developer to bring out the intrinsic qualities of different papers, from velvety surfaces to polished silver tones. Whether dipping paper into the developer, pooling developer on the paper and letting it run, or pouring Abstract Expressionist zips and drips, Rossiter brings out the material beauty of decades of neglect and decay. “Ultimately,” she writes, “the Lament pieces are a tribute to the medium that is disappearing.”
Yuichi Hibi (1964 – )
Originally an actor and filmmaker, Yuichi Hibi began making photographs after moving to New York, where he has lived and worked since 1988. His background in film is evident in Greetings from . . . Shanghai, a series of photographs from his first visit to China in 2007. Confronted with omnipresent construction and urban sprawl, Hibi found himself seeking out the older parts of Shanghai, venturing down small alleys to create images that look like stills from a vintage Chinese film. To emphasize this old-world feeling, Hibi printed his images on expired photographic paper, resulting in an allover gray tone. The outdated appearance of the prints refers to the passing of a way of life—and perhaps, of a medium. “Shanghai made me question my own world,” writes Hibi. “Why is it that I am always searching for something nostalgic to hold on to?”
Rosalie Gwathmey (1908 – 2001) and Arthur Rothstein (1915 – 1985)
Rosalie Gwathmey and Arthur Rothstein were both members of the New York Photo League, a cooperative of amateur and professional photographers whose activities formed an important backdrop for American photography in the 1930s and 1940s. Gwathmey originally trained as a painter, at the Pennsylvania Academy of Arts and the Art Students League of New York, before turning to photography. Rothstein, who founded the University Camera Club at Columbia University, was the first photographer sent out by Roy Stryker to document the rural poor for the Farm Security Administration.
Gwathmey renounced photography in 1951 owing to pressure from McCarthy-era politics, the disbanding of the Photo League, and FBI harassment of her husband, the painter Robert Gwathmey. She then destroyed her negatives and donated her prints to The New York Public Library. Rothstein’s photograph, like that of Gwathmey, was also printed from a negative that was later destroyed. It was “killed” by Stryker, who punched holes into negatives that he chose not to include in the final archive of the FSA project. Prints from these negatives, before Stryker punched them, are rare. These two photographs by Gwathmey and Rothstein are therefore orphaned ruins—fragile physical remnants of their originary camera images.
And finally about that George Washington image, it was taken by an unknown photographer but featured in the exhibition because it is a Daguerreotype circa 1850. Here is what Stephen wrote about it: Daguerreotypes are unique photographs with mirrorlike surfaces on silver or silver-coated copper plates. Unlike most paper photographs, daguerreotypes are not produced from negatives, and their images may appear either positive or negative depending on the angle at which light is reflected onto the surface of the plate. Although often considered among the most stable kinds of photographs, particularly in terms of resistance to fading in light, daguerreotypes are in fact quite delicate, susceptible to tarnish and abrasion. For this reason they are typically gilded to increase durability, placed in sealed packages behind glass, and then framed or encased. The daguerreotype on display, which was made as a visual reference to the now scarcely visible portrait, was likely never properly housed before entering the Library’s collections. Decades of exposure and handling provide a rare view of an organically aged daguerreotype.
Photography and ruin
Until May 6, 2012
The New York Public Library
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
42nd Street and 5th Avenue
New York, NY 10018-2788
