Photography Quarterly #74

WhatIsTheSubjectOf(In)

Roland Barthes wrote of the photograph (that is, certain photographs) as being able to suggest a meaning different from the literal one. He referred to a Life magazine editor responding to the photographs of Kertesz with the remark that "they spoke too much." "Ultimately," wrote Barthes, "photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks!' 1 I will expand that avowal slightly: photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, and not when it captures, overcomes, and seamlessly presents its subject, but when it is pensive, when it thinks. This is especially true of landscape photography, in which the subject (object) is not one that we (the viewer) can read into easily, the way we can read meaning into a portrait if only because it is a human face (like ours) that carries expression and expressive qualities. The landscape has inherent or

essentialist qualities, to be sure, and to these are added the so-called natural but changing attributes of light, weather, and seasons. And to these, even, may be added attributes that have been made by humans, such as buildings, highways, smoke, fire, strip mines, and dredged rivers. But even those wind up being essentialist qualities of the landscape· we are looking at, though we may read into those attributes differing meanings from what is seen as the literal meaning. It is not easy to subvert the landscape by making a photograph of it. SallyApfelbaum, Kathleen Larkin, Elaine Querry, Elene Tremblay, and Carey Young do that; they make photographs that think.

The thinking is actually an act of deconstructing the subject, the subject being, for the moment, construed as "the landscape," or, at least, the particular landscape being photographed. In the historic tradition of American land-

scape photography, the great "takers" of the pictures were men, and they were usually paid to take the pictures. Timothy O'Sullivan and William Henry Jackson in the nineteenth century, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Eliot Porter in the twentieth century-all were hired by such varying employers as the Union Pacific Railroad, the U.S. Government, commercial magazines, and advertising agencies to photograph the American landscape, or at least some designated part of it. The pictures of Yellowstone or the Grand Tetons, of the Sierra Nevada or Big Sur, of waves, aspen, or fields of wildflowers, are landmark landscape photographs, and often they are stunners. In this genre of photography, the-"direct approach," the landscape is "captured" as subject (also object) and seamlessly presented (in the case of the nineteenth-century photographers, as cleanly as processes and lenses would allow). The viewer is

SallyApfelbaum,Garden #3 (Saratoga Springs, NY), 1993/94

-LandscapePhotography t

made to think that this is what out there looks like, and that out there is vast, unpeopled, pristine, and beautiful. And that this is reality. It is overlooked that many of these photographs were taken to lure settlers out to the deserted West, to lure tourists out to the National Parks, or to lure consumers to purchase products. And it is even further from our minds that such photographs were and remain signifiers for us of cultural values, a tradition of national greatness and democratic ideals, a belief in our manifest destiny as a people, and even a belief in God as Creator. And that those may be the real subjects of these landscape photographs, our real estate. But no, we have been historically seduced into believing that these are simply beautifully taken or captured photographs of a landscape that exists, that is the subject of the photograph. The consequences of such seductions have been important for

Trees, New York State, 1993/94

both the landscape and for landscape photography; Rebecca Solnit encapsulates them perfectly in her article "The Aesthetics of Nature Calendars" when she writes of the rules of that genre:

The photograph itself should be crisp and clean, so as never to call attention to its own creation, but rather to Creation .... A seamlessly transparent presentation ensures that merit is not the result of Art but of Nature, and so the photograph competes-unfairly in many ways-with its subject. 2

Photographs by Apfelbaum, Larkin, Querry, Tremblay, and Young, by contrast, make no such claim, instead calling our attention to the making of the photograph, not the taking of it. By "making" I refer not simply to the mechanical processes of photographythough in some of these works, such processes as multiple-exposing of a

negative, infrared filming, or photographing through unusual filters are chief hallmarks-but to the making of an image, the making of art, and the role the photograph can play in drawing the viewer's attention to the artifice involved in its own making.The subject (object) of such landscape photographs is the landscape and the construction of it through representation.

Sally Apfelbaum's Ektacolor prints are images of landscapes in Paris, Central Park, and Saratoga Springs in New York State. Using one of the oldest components of image-making there i.s-perspective-she photographs her site from north, south, east, and west, and layers these multiple exposures on a single negative. The resulting image, such as Garden #J (Saratoga Springs, N. Y), is strange and decentered, and wreaks havoc with the notion of a firstperson consciousness as photographer/ viewer. The artist uses a system that

SallyApfelbaum,

mara miller

"the artist uses a system that would seem to be precise . .. to create an image that is dislocating"

would seem to be precise and scientific-perspectival viewing-to create effects and an image that in the end is imprecise, unclear, and dislocating. Apfelbaum does not even, strictly speaking, use herself as a centered pivot, in one exact position, turning to all four directions. She moves generally, but not exactly or precisely, to the north or south. These multiple views, then, are even less "real": we never completely comprehend whence (from whom) they were photographed. If they wind up having an unclear relation to the photomaker, they also have an imprecise relation to the natural source of light. In the triptych, Hotel de Ville #2, where again the artist makes four exposures of the site, from the varying location-finding perspectives, at least one of the exposures is of sunlit clouds.As this originary source of light is conflated onto the architectural object/subject, an otherwise drab and

Kathleen Larkin,After the Storm, 1996 undistinguished government building, the entire space is filled and transformed into an ephemeral landscape. Apfelbaum inquires through her images into the tradition of clarity and precision in landscape photography, asking why it may be that "the more precisely space is rendered, the more unreal it seems." Working in a vein not unlike that of video artists Diana Thater and Stan Douglas, whose landscapes also meticulously rip open the seams of landscape (traditionally represented as seamless, even in video), Apfelbaum scrambles formal structure and makes images that demand our acknowledgment of the production and construction of the landscapes.

Revealing the means of production to the viewer is perhaps less assertively enacted in the infrared silver prints of Kathleen Larkin, where unearthly effects are achieved from what at first glance appears to be an unearthly

source of light. Photographing in the wilderness area that is the western Adirondacks, Larkin combines the infrared rays of film with those of natural sunlight to manipulate the image away from a concrete site "taken" at a specific moment and toward a more distant, memorylike perception of the site. In After the Storm, the trees emanate a luminous glow with softly defined edges, rendering it (us) unclear whether these are trees bathed in sunlight, trees with snow covering their branches, or a photographic print that in many ways resembles a negative. The~, too, Larkin chooses a horizon line that contributes to the on-edgedness of the scene. The expanse of empty sky and the foreshortened foreground of water mean that the entire frame appears as a flattened shallow space. Lilies on Parade (South Pond) [illustra¢d on pages 2 and 3]also plays with a horizon that dances from middleground to fore-

"we are aware of the camera's unique role as creator, protector, and narrator of memory"

ground while in this instance using an extremely lengthened foreground to question normal perspective as employed by the "direct approach" landscape photographers. In the nature of her film and through manipulation of perspective, Larkin's images offer a specific if subtle means of further deconstructing the landscape photograph's traditional aesthetic origins.

Elene Tremblay's Ektacolor prints from the Nau/rages series, such as Nau/rage II, also lend themselves to a structuralist interpretation. She filters her subject (object)-the islands of her childhood in Quebec-through colored shards of glass bottles or the hopsacking of potato bags found on-site, and so intervenes in the print openly and unself-consciously: "This filtering is partly a protective gesture in the attempt to seize memories which are escaping," she writes. "Gesture" would seem to understate, however, as the viewer's ini-

EleneTremblay,Naufrages JI, 1995

tial response to this work is less likely to be "where is it?" (the normative first take on landscape photographs) and more apt to be "how is it done?". When we are struck head-on this way by the means of production-bottle-as-lensas well as by the effect of the image, I believe we are witnessing a perfect example of landscape/landscape photograph or subject/subject at peace and honest with itself. As in Larkin's images, we are led down the path of memory and emotional projections, but in this case we are even more aware of the camera's unique role as creator, protector, and narrator of memory in the form of a printed image. An additional complex artifice in Nau/rages is the ovoid shape of the object through which the subject is filtered-a mapping-on of the watery human eye (that stands for memory as opposed to the clearly defined image that stands for real sight), the camera's "eye" or lens,

and the totemic shape of the island (subject) itself. It is interesting, too, that Tremblay speaks of and effects a deliberate "wanting to capture the memory" in contrast to the "capturing" of a landscape/site of the past associated with landscape photography. The pensiveness that Barthes refers to becomes explicit in the Nau/rages series.

The color prints of Carey Young, whose series Wired focuses on the site of fiber-optic cables being laid for the Internet throughout the London landscape, are thinking photographs. One might say that Young in general works on the edge of what is meant by landscape photography in that much of her image-making concerns itself with cyberspace and virtual reality. In Wired, composition, printing, and intense color saturation produce images that are lushly beautiful while also serving as metaphorical avenues into an argument about technology, landscape, and

"images that confront the issue of taking versus making"

landscape photography. The work questions the pat assumption that technology is a disruptive subject (object) within an otherwise natural and photogenic landscape and that the camera is able to document this binary by simply capturing this site. Young's camera does not document but rather re-stages and manipulates the site through the photographic process, in a manner not dissimilar from that of Gregory Crewdson or Thomas Demand, who completely rebuild a site (using sets and models, respectively) in their studios and then photograph it as if it were a "real" outdoor or indoor landscape. The wires in Wired can be seen sometimes as organic forms, often as detritus, but also frequently as objects of great beauty.As Young fills the open space that is the London landscape with her imagination, she simultaneously fills up the space of the photographic print with a deliberately staged

and fully intellectualized metaphor. Elaine Querry's gelatin silver prints, are to my mind, images that confront in a very complex way the issue of taking versus making an image that this article attempts to foreground. In her site/ choice of subject (America's Southwestern spaces), her type of print (toned gelatin silver), and her apparent references to the more formal compositional modes associated with the direct-approach school, Querry seems to be just a slight gradation beyond the image-capturing wing of the landscape photography phalanx. Her position of the camera and description of the terrain, on an initial take, send us back to those historical black-and-white images that consistently maintained that unity and harmony were the underlying components of the American landscape and the landscape print. Her work uses sharp focus and a long tonal range of grays, as does much of the historical

work we have been discussing.And perhaps more importantly, the images appear to be arguments for the pristine natural beauty of open space versus the peopled ugliness of cultural space. But I find this appearance deceptive: Querry's landscape photographs do not frame a site panoramically or as an object seized by the camera's lens, and her unpeopled sites signify the presence of the absent people in this landscape, the Native Americans whose silence has always been made manifest in direct-approach Western landscape photography. In Amerind Tree at Dusk, for instance, the uneven composition and framing (branches of a bush trailing off the right-hand edge of the print) plus the biomorphic shapes heavily weighing in on the left-of:center horizon line (are they rocks, mounds of earth, or curledup hump-backed strange animals?) operate as complete decentering elements of the landscape and the photograph.

CareyYoung, Untitled, from the series Wired, 1997

"the viewer is made aware of the artist's overt construction of the scene/print"

The viewer is made aware of the artist's overt construction of the scene/print. The resulting image positions itself far, far, away from the reality-capturing method of landscape photography, despite the initially familiar Adams or O'Sullivan "feel."

What do these images-as linked as I have tried to show they are as thinking photographs-have to do with the fact that they were made by women photographers? It is not provable that there is a female or feminine way of photographing the landscape that is distinctly different from a male or masculine way. At least I do not believe it's a provable contention, though it is worth noting that a new sub-set of landscape photographers who are women are huddling around the identification of women with the earth itself, as reproductive or Mother Earth figures with a natural affinity for landscape replication through photography. This assertion,

also, I doubt can be proved. The artists here, by contrast, have opened up a space (and spaces) in which to assert themselves as makers of landscape prints and thus of landscapes.There are men photographers working along similar lines. In the end, the gender difference may simply be that the history of landscape photography shows us so many men working the other side of the street-as takers of the landscapeand no, or almost no women.

MARA MILLER is an independent curator with a particular interest in landscape and photography. She has curated We Meet Beyond the Sea at the Vernicos Center for the Arts in Piraeus, Greece (1997), an exhibition of eight landscape photographers; and A Day in May (1998), where she recreated a nonsite in the forest of Cold Spring, New York.A graduate of the curatorial studies master's program at Bard College, Miller's thesis exhibition was Nature/ Culture and the Postmodern Sublime: The Work of Frank Moore and Gregory Crewdson.

'Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill & Wang, 1971), p. 38.

2 Rebecca Solnit, "Uplift & Separate: The Aesthetics of Nature Calendars;' Art Issues (November/December 1997), p. 15.

She has been working as a consultant at the Storm King Sculpture Center. Her next project will be Art in the Park: Connecticut, an exhibition of landscape art simultaneously sited in a state forest and regional Connecticut museums and galleries.

Elaine Querry,Amerind Tree at Dusk, Dragoon, Arizona, 1995

sallyapfelbaum

(New York, NY)

My photographs in Outsiders all are made up of four exposuresnorth, south, east, and west-views on a single negative. I've worked with this technique for over fifteen years. It provides a way for me to include as much information as possible in the images; it also presents various ways for organizing, interpreting, and unifying a place and information.

I'm interested in how photographic space renders meaning and in the acculturation of nature. I usually photograph in public spaces-some familiar-tourist sites such as the Hotel de Ville in Paris, Central Park, NYC-as well as in some less recognizable, lessknown sites-such as Saratoga Springs, NY; Cherence; and Varengeville-sur-Mer, France.

The space of the photographs in these examples of work differ. Trees, New York State has a specific hypothesis within the multiple exposure approach: the more precisely space is rendered, the less real it seems .. .in both the New York State and Central Park work, clarity is important to me. In the Hotel de Ville

kathleenlarkin

(La Vallette, NJ)

Having grown up on a barrier island on the coast of New Jersey, I have always looked to nature for inspiration.

I am a child of the water-it envelops me.

As I began my treks to the Adirondack Mountains of New York State, I was able to draw parallels between the world I had known, and my new world of wilderness. The extensive amount of lakes has afforded me the opportunity to pursue my water world once again. My viewpoint is, in many cases, taken from my kayak. The freedom to float endlessly, taking in the shoreline, vegetation, and vistas of distant mountains, is key to my ability to document the landscape.

The Adirondaks represent the best of what has been deposited naturally upon the earth.All elements work in unison through composition and illumination.To capture the essence of the place is paramount to me.

In my quest to sight the regular irregularities of the place, I couple my theme with the use of infrared film. My hope is to meld the two components of my work into a suitable visual venue to which a triptych, I am interested viewer can be drawn. in creating a more ephemeral kind of space, in keeping with the sense of anonymous history of the site.

Working with nature and landscape imagery has resulted in finding my way to a deeply subjective, believable visual irrationality.

elainequerry

(Republic of Mexico)

The landscape of southern Arizona is my focus. Specifically, the Texas Canyon area near Dragoon,Arizona, afforded me an opportunity to look closely at the trees and rocks-to study the geographical landscape-and to achieve a sense of that special place. But beyond even the visual rewards, the time during which I did work became for me, a time of emotional focusing, solitude, and of becoming one with my surroundings.

As I worked, I came to know intimately the trees and rocks, and how the light fell in early mornings and late afternoons during the heat of the summers and mild winters in southern Arizona. This place is with me still.

As a child I was fortunate enough to have grandparents who lived on a cattle ranch in New Mexico. My earliest memories are of this ranch, it's geography and the love of the land my grandparents shared with me. I know that this helped me to form who I am and that now, many years later, those memories were what accompanied me as I photographed.

elenetremblay

(Montreal, Quebec)

I try to break the illusion of verisimilitude of photography, to show its material limits andat the same time-to draw a parallel with the way our perception works. I want to rupture the indexical surface of photography and to reconstitute it as an assemblage of forms, motifs-as a bricolage of a fiction-the one of our memory and of our efforts to make meaning.

Nau/rages shows an ambiguous relationship to the world of the island.The island is at once paradise, prison, monstrous, scary, mysterious, unattainable, refuge The island, like a body, imposes physical limits to the self and yet allows it to survive. It offers a paradoxical encounter of liberty and imprisonment which forces the individuals stranded on their shores to a fundamental introspection on their survival capacity and their relationship to others.

These small islands are close to the shore of the St. Lawrence river where I used to spend my summer as a child. I wanted to capture the memory I had of their beauty and isolation as well as their effect on my imagination.They were spaces for the projection of fantasies and I wanted them to retain that power as photographs.

artists'statements

I took color photographs through bottles and found objects on site-(blue and green bottles and a torn potato sack).This filtering is partly a protective gesture in the attempt to seize memories which are escaping.

careyyoung

(London, England)

My work inhabits a gap between the physical and the digital, and perhaps operates as a form of translation service between the two.

Wired is a photographic series which exposes a possible secret life of fibreoptic cables. The images portray the material fabric behind the so-called information revolution: the tiny, delicate strands which enable electronic data transmission. Severed from the network, however, the wires take on more ambiguous identities.

The wires are photographed as they mimic characteristics of their surroundings, and appear to inhabit worlds which are both recognizably familiar (the doorstep, the street, the pile of leaves) and the unfamiliar, since the wires transform the scene into a border territory between our world and theirs. Embedded in rock or earth, for example, they seem at a point of balance, both desiring and resisting an organic identity.

These images could be seen as surveillance or satellite data of a technological landscape, or as forensic evidence at the scene of a crime.The wires seem to have aims of their own, which we can interpret but not fully comprehend.Jewellike and yet covered in the filth of the everyday, the wires seems as vulnerable and fallible as if they were alive.

••MarieCarbo

"I want to go to Madagascar, but we have to find it here."

-Marie Carbo

Everyone lives with some kind of longing. For Marie Carbo, the longing for land is especially strong. Like me, another city-dweller living in Philadelphia, she wants two acres of her own to cultivate, plant, and nurture, to turn into a garden. To begin to satisfy this need to create beauty with flowers and foliage and to do the pleasurable work of gardening, Carbo has begged and borrowed space wherever she can.With the help of a friend, she built a brick planter box across the street in front of a neighbor's house. Not a small box the size of a whiskey barrel, mind you, but a wrap-around-thecorner elephant of a box planted with crossvine, hardy oranges, smokebush, and roses.A heavily flowering datura that she planted next to a nearby parking lot sends its strong fragrance for a city block in the evening air. She has her eye on a postage-stamp backyard visible from her back window for an arboretum.

All of this I understand. Yet spending time with Carbo, it soon becomes clear that a corresponding need exists that begins to clarify her work in photography. We go for a walk along the Schuylkill River between the South Street and Walnut Street Bridges. Across the river is the expressway, built several stories high above the water, with weed trees starting to grow in recesses underneath the roadway.We walk first through a park, sheltering during a brief shower under a dense zelkova, the kind of tree now known as a street tree, selected by city planners for its size, shape, tolerances, and other desirable properties. Further along in the park is a fenced and padlocked community vegetable and flower garden, followed by a new asphalt parking lot for condominiums under construction. Then we get to our destination. Like many cities, but perhaps more so than most, Philadel-

phia has its wastelands, now increasing faster than development and reclamation. Between the river and the city are Conrail tracks bordered by a rank meadow of dogfennel and pokeweed that feels somehow nestled below the city and hidden from it.A wide path that is frequently and illegally used by joggers and pedestrians commuting from West Philadelphia to Center City runs through it, and here Carbo relaxes into the kind of space that is the canvas for her art.As much as she needs to create, organize, and control, she is drawn to the experi-

ence of being in a wild, abandoned place like this one, especially one that is set apart, even a little dangerous. For her, such places are as inviting and stimulating as any ordered garden. It occurs to me that the intense need to experience space and to find the right kind of emotionally satisfying space is something that artists and gardeners have in common and is probably not consciously or strongly felt by everyone. Both artists and gardeners are inspired to create works of art that communicate the experien.ce of space in an immediate and visceral way.

martha mock

Vesse~ 1989,gelatin silver print, 33x26"

"the intense need to experience space and to find emotionally satisfying space is something that artists and gardeners have in common"

open spaces frightened and repelled her. She was also attracted by places like St. Mark's Square, with its raised gravestones that reminded her of a medieval landscape. Landscape, foreign to her as a child, became for her as an adult a goal and an imaginative ideal.

Returning to Philadelphia, Carbo began exploring her neighborhood, something that she still does frequently. She found an overgrown area below the South Street Bridge, only a few blocks from her apartment. In a place where people were not, trees grew along the water's edge in an architecture of neglect.Their roots protruded in a tangle above the ground, and their trunks leaned toward the river from the action of the changing water level and the urge toward light. Branches, alive and dead, formed a wantonly inharmonious canopy overhead. Stumps, weeds, and debris littered a forbidding understory.Yet this unprepossessing, unclaimed place invited Carbo to enter and share its secrets.

Carbo, born in 1954,grew up in Upper Darby, a suburb of Philadelphia.As she accurately points out, there is no landscape there. Her father died when she was eight. Her mother, a secondgeneration Italian immigrant, raised her children to be, as Carbo describes it, more American than Americans; she served her friends pound cake and coffee, not cannoli and cappuccino. Carbo's gardening genes came from her Italian-speaking, hard-headed grandfather, who grew wine grapes, herbs, cannas, and roses in Yeadon, Pennsylvania. But her first idea of land-

scape came during travel to college in Villanova, when glimpses of wooded lots became the forests of her imagination. After a seminar at Moore College of Art in Philadelphia, Carbo transferred to the School ofVisualArts in New York and was drawn to enclosed gardens in the middle of the city, like Gramercy Park, gardens that seemed to her to be in some way more important than ordinary landscape. Their illusive privacy, intimacy, and otherness struck an emotional chord that was a revelation to her; correspondingly, she realized that vast

Vessel is one photograph of this place, printed to 33 x 26 inches on black-and-white paper. Using a 4 x 5inch-format camera with a long lens, she made one long exposure, broken up into many two-to three-second exposures, a technique she uses in most all of her work because of the low light levels in the places where she photographs and because she intends to make large prints. Her technique allows for both a density of detail and a spirit of animation within a compressed space.

In Vessel Carbo creates the sense that the river ( or a precious portion thereof) is cradled within the central space of the image formed by the trees and bank. Around the edges of the image, the confining quality of shapes is intensified. In the lower left corner, tre~ and river knit together in a way that solidifies the water and stops its flow out of the image. The bridge, the only straight line in the image, weaves in and out of the trees in exactly the right place for balance

Under the South Street Bridge, 1988, gelatin silver print, 30x23"

"places that by sudden movement or change of light, the imagination can readily inhabit with wildlife or strange otherworldly creatures;,

but only as a bare suggestion of itself. On the right, tree roots seem to grow upward as the river bank appears to drop off precipitously, creating an equilibrium that accentuates the central vessel shape.The balance achieved by this photograph is nothing short of phenomenal. Every element falls or flows away and holds its place simultaneously. The water contained in the center is given an outline that at once advances and recedes and thus a presence like that of a gazing ball set in a flower bed extends our usual perceptions of reality. In Carbo's rebuilding of the visual field of this place, it is as if wild nature has found a way to find its own raw beauty and to treasure and protect something of its own.

In another photograph, Under the South Street Bridge, the imaginative value of compressed, flat space is evident. Carbo's photographs are strongly influenced by her interest in theater sets. In high school she and her twin sister were much involved in a local theater group, and after graduating from the School of Visual Arts, she was directed toward a career in lighting for films and theater (an illness brought her home to Philadelphia). She intends that the spaces she creates in her photographs be impenetrable in the way of the intensely detailed and miniaturized landscapes in Flemish painting. One would have to transform in some way to enter them, to become an actor or a bird or a Lilliputian. For this reason, she not only flattens but angles her images to the point where they are also too precarious to enter. In Under the South Street Bridge space is compressed and then bifurcated diagonally in such a way as to give the illusion of a pool in that the large tree to the left of the frame is reflected.A ghostly figure, the anima that occasionally visits her landscapes, also appears bifurcated, a creature with legs at either end, diving and disappearing into itself and by implication out of the image along the illusory divide of sky and water.

This anima reappears in photographs made further up the Schuylkill,

past the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Waterworks, and the Sculpture Garden, at the Glendenning Rock Garden and Promontory Rock, a natural bridge over Kelly Drive, a scenic commuter route along the river.All of this land is under the auspices of the Fairmount Park Association, and, while it is heavily used, once again parts of it are decidedly unkempt. There's something remarkable about the vegetation in this city. Because of the large amount of the green space here, combined with many aging buildings, bridges, outdoor sculpture,

and monuments, there is the potential for a truly old-world seediness. Both large areas and small pockets of land exist in plain view, full of their own unchecked, unmanaged forces of living and dying. These are the kind of places that, by a sudden movement or change of light, the imagination can readily inhabit with wildlife or strange otherworldly creatures. In the photographs Carbo made here, space is filled with rampant vegetation, water, and the added element of stone. In Reflecting Pool a stone wall seems to slide inexorably along a slope of

Reflecti11g Poot 1987, gelatin silver print, 30x23"

"a dreamlike state where the sensation of falling and soaring exist together"

decomposition into a bright pool, not of water but of bottomless light. A hand, fingers fully splayed, materializes on the edge of the image against the wall as if to arrest its fall. Yet it is small and fragile like an oak leaf, turning in its own flight downward. In another photograph, a kneeling shape emerges out of light and shadow.This figure has no substance apart from the image, yet it becomes a focal point within disordered space.

Leaving the river's edge, Carbo began a fascinating new body of work in 1992 at a clean landfill located next

to the suburb where she grew up. In this place of no landscape, she ironically made up one out of virtually nothing but a hole in the ground-in fact,a dump.With the owner's permission (although she sometimes hid and worked after hours) she spent two years photographing this fifty-footdeep cavity as it filled incrementally with cement, granite, marble, and earth. After a rain, water would pool on the bottom and in pockets on the sides, and plants would grow, only to be swallowed up by fresh debris. Working in this place was precarious

but thrilling for Carbo. Her photographs convey the dislocation of the experience, the utter otherness of the place. In her photographs of this site, scale is ambiguous, and top and bottom, foreground and background, continually shift their positions. With no secure vantage point and no horizon, orientation is lost and we see a suspended landscape that could only be perceived through the artist's eye. When I look at these images, I feel almost as if I am going into a dreamlike state where the sensation of falling and soaring exist together. In people with a fear of heights, the most frightening feeling is the growing impulse to hurl oneself over the edge, to give in to the inevitable. Indeed, one of Carbo's most brilliant images from this series is called Pushing Off I imagine that her landscapes would be the compensatory beauty for such a flight.

In this same series, which as a whole is entitled Breathing in the Element, Carbo brings in the spirit of animation in a different way. Feelings of motion-of pouring, rolling, sliding, merging, swallowing-are an essential part of these landscapes. They are in no way static aftermaths of natural or manmade forces. Carbo is down in the boiling porridge pot, inside the yeasty dough, showing us the active process of transformation.

The writings of Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space (1958, translated 1964) are an important source of ideas about landscape for Carbo.A French philosopher of science who late in his career turned to the conside ration of aesthetic issues, Bachelard wrote about the psychological reality of spaces such as houses, corners, nests, and shells, and of the miniature in the poetic imagination. His ideas about the miniature are especially inspiring to Carbo.Analyzing a fantastic tale by Charles Nodier, Bachelard writes, "Happy at being in a small space, he realizes an experience of topophilia; that is, once inside the miniature house, he sees its vast number of rooms;from

Pushing Off, 1993, gelatin silver print, 32x25"

"logic and representation are replaced by sensation an1 magic"

the interior he discovers interior beauty. Here we have an inversion of perspective, which is either fleeting or captivating, according to the talent of the narrator, or the reader's capacity for dream." 1

Carbo's spaces are miniatures in the sense that they are alternate but fully detailed worlds set apart by their self-contained inaccessibility. Her riverbanks and landfill are small, enclosed places that leave the larger landscape-that is, their contextbehind and expand to suggest a larger imaginative experience. By compressing for~ound and background in the picture plane, Carbo creates an internal perspective that gives her the ability to create the walls, ceilings, doors, and windows, the many rooms, of her dream landscape. Logic and representation are replaced by sensation and magic. It's interesting to me that Carbo always refers to her photograph,s of the landfill as her "quarry" s~ries even though the functions of the two places are opposites. Perhaps this is rightfully so because, in her mind, her work is about filling and expanding space at the same time. The idea of creating an interior reality also provides a way of understanding the repeated use of pools in her images. These pools of water or light both reflect and absorb, adding to the dislocations of space she creates. Because they occupy unexpected and seemingly unstable positions, they become entry and exit points to and from her imaginary landscapes.

Carbo's work is predicated upon the idea of the attraction of specific kinds of places to the individual. Most people want to visit certain countries or cities or have experienced places that feel right emotionally without being able to say why. Recently, Carbo has begun sneaking into a fenced-off area of several acres in the city containing derelict abandoned buildings. Here, as she describes it, vegetation has taken over in a most amazing and disorientating way. Hedges have grown to three stories high. Buildings feel like they are sinking into the

ground. Living and dying things exist close together, evoking one another. In her mind's eye, this place is Cuba or Madagascar or somewhere she knows intuitively she wants to experience. This kind of perceptual and emotional experience is vital to her and intrinsic to her work.The psychological reality and beauty of such connections are internalized in these photographs.

1 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 149.

MARTHAMOCK is a freelance writer living in Philadelphia. She was formerly associate curator of photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (for nineteen years). Mock organized museum exhibitions including Emmet Gowin: Photographs and Frederick H. Evans: The Desired Haven.

From the series Breathing in the Element, 1992, gelatin silver print, 21 ¾xi 7¾"

HorizonsofLanguage pip day

"... we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades ·of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another."

Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces," Diacritics 16-1, Spring 1986

THE RAW AND THE COOKED

Seven newborn kittens are placed into a bucket of water. They look like rats there, trying to swim around, their eyes not yet opened. Large hands lift a similar bucket filled, too, with water, and place it in the first bucket. The kittens disappear from view.

This was the farm. Kittens were drowned, calves were plucked from the big rear ends of cows, and my seven-year-old tastebuds enjoyed equally the eggs we collected in the mornings as the meat of the chickens who laid them. With my siblings, I rode the ice floes in the river when winter was breaking and learned the trick of holding a lit match to a leech sucking on a leg. Summer afternoons were spent walking through the cornfields, the forest, the pastures, the river bed. Eyes always on the ground-looking for snakes, stones, crayfish, avoiding cow patties and stinging nettles.

I have no memories of the horizon at the farm.just the land. It was only later, when literature, poetry, painting, photography, film, turned my eyes skyward that I learned the word "landscape." The city introduced me to the countryside, to gardens. History lessons taught me wilderness.

THE FILTER

There is a certain safety and distance in the interpretation of the landscape through video.The camera acts as a filter and allows an aloofness, a documentary aspect, a distance in relation to the subject which at once frames it and keeps the familiar world of technology close at hand.

Yet there is an ambiguity in the relationship between technology and nature which figures in the work of Celia Ayneto, Nancy Golden, Linda Post, Laura Stein, and Edie Winograde. Each of these artists' approaches is distinctly individual, reflecting the range and complexity of urban relations to the natural. It is in this relation itself that the concept of landscape takes shape. I

Common, though, to all five of the artists, nature itself is not altered in the work. To a greater or lesser degree, it is in the alteration of the perception of nature-in the camera in situ, or in the editing room-that these five women stake their claim: they plant their flags electronically, not for a piece of land but for the "experience" offered by the land, filtered and re-presented to the viewer. Neither overcome by the sublime nor empowered by their own acts of defiance, these urban artists do not venture out to the wilderness to cock their brave legs on mountaintops.2 Importantly, too,none of these artists bodily places herself before the camera.The artists' experiences are thus wholly filtered through the camera and, as such, need to be read in an interpretive manner.3

Landscape is something that sometimes we seek out, something that sometimes occurs to us, acts upon us here and there, and is processed in relation to/within the framework of our urban existences.

1 The idea of"landscape" itself being a human construction.

2 There is a long tradition of flag planting in the arts. In early "earth art" Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, and Richard Serra, to name a few, made enormous interventions in the landscape ranging from a huge gash in the desert to the Spiral Jetty to the insertion of large steel forms into the landscape. British artists Hamish Fulton and Richard Long made simpler marks, traversing the landscape, arranging stones, marking trails, and photographing their experiences.Anna Mendieta and other women were more engaged with the idea of the body inscribed in the landscape or the body as landscape, sometimes leaving a permanent trace in nature, sometimes an ephemeral one, but always altering the landscape. Given the political topography of the time, it is not surprising that such extreme measures were being taken.

3 The human presence is overt in the work but generally affiliated with the camera through various points of views or through the deliberate manipulation of the video. The artists are obviously not simply "reporters" -they are very present, subjectively manipulating the viewer's reading of the work.

FRAME_ OF REFERENCE

The story goes that a film made in a European capital-showing its towering architecture, dense traffic, and bustling way of life-was shown to a group of people living in a remote region with no contact with urban life. Expecting an amazed response to what they had witnessed, the viewers were asked to recount what they had seen. They could recall only the chicken that had fleetingly crossed the screen.

At the farm we had a large picture window in the kitchen. It didn't look out over a wide, sweeping vista, but gave way onto a bit of lawn, the overgrown barnyard and the horseshoe of three large barns beyond.

By working in single channel, the video artists Ayneto, Golden, Post, Stein, and Winograde, are tapping into the two-dimensionality of the screen while exploring three-dimensional space. The surface of the monitor directly orients their videos toward the long history of landscape painting, photography, and other two-dimensional translations of t_hesubject. Unlike video installation, where bodily immersion is of essence to the exp~rience of a piece,4 access to the single-channel work is oriented toward the frame, and the relationship of the audience to the contents of that frame. The experirnce of space and time, unique to each medium in art, is particularly complexly activated by single~channel video.

There is an obvious temporal aspect to be considered that is of essence to video. Its relationship to the passage of time in other media will be explored later in this essay. Important to note here is that each of the five artists in the program use this temporal quality of the medium in very pointed ways. The videos in the program vary dramatically in length, and the differing ways in which time is incorporated become an integral element or key to the reading of the work. Each video piece maintains in the viewer a fluctuation between an awareness of the passage of time before a monitor and the seductive magic of the electronic picture window. Horizons of Language provides evidence of five very different interpretations of the human construction which is the notion of landscape: from the rapid and highly manipulated, as in Nancy Golden's 40-second condensed cross-country trip, Soul Murder, to the nearly still, as in Linda Post's MOON (WATCH), a slow and subtle contemplative piece.

Lingering over the slow trajectory of the moon in Linda Post's MOON (WATCH), one sinks into the screen, almost experiencing the "real thing". The predominantly stationary camera records, in real time, the fifteen-minute passage of the moon across the field of view, with the camera repositioned three times throughout to recapture the moving moon within the frame. The technical interludes are incorporated "as a way to deflate the attempted ideal experience of watching the moon .... You go back and forth between knowing it is a compromised experience, mediated, and wanting to forget and have that experience. In the end, it's thinking about one's own desire for a certain quality of experience."5

nature < technology < nature

The subjugation of the natural to technology, and the reverse relation, is intrinsically linked to the temporal and spatial factors employed in the work of the artists in Horizons of Language. Like Post, each of the artists manipulates the viewer, playing within the conditioning we are subject to: living framed experience.

4 The subject of landscape has been addressed in video art since the medium's inception, and often incorporated into installation work. By "surrounding" the viewer in three dimensions artists like Nam June Paik and Mary Lucier approximated the sublime, all-encompassing nature of nature. The work has been effective in that format, lending itself to the then newly available equipment, and commenting on the politics of the relationship between the developing technological age and the increasing lack of contact with the "Golden Age".

5 Excerpt from an email from Linda Post.August, 1998.

PICTURE WINDOW

In painting and sculpture, in poetry, in literature, in photography, and more recently in film and video, paradigms for considering landscape-in the general terms of utopia, of conquest, of notions of the sublime-have been "established"; through repetition, they have become firmly entrenched in our optical language. They are so perfectly integrated into our vocabulary that we forget to question their roots.

MOTHER NATURE or MEETING THE MAKER

Laura Stein's past experiments with nature have included the "deformation" of tomatoes by growing them into molds of cartoon characters.The ripened red fruit sometimes succumbs to the mold, resulting in a nearly perfect Sylvester the Cat, or defies it, bursting out at the seams, foiling the experiment. But each success and each failure makes its point. Mother Nature is not to be predicted.

In her video Inside Out Stein again toys with the natural and enters the labyrinth, a human construction loaded with mythological associations. Built for human folly, the labyrinth is traversed by the camera. In the editing room, the journey is then sped up, slowed down, and accompanied by music that is both haunting and uplifting.

e-mail· Pip to Laura, August, 1998:

I have in mind a general idea of utopia-a place that is developed and exists in the mind-in relation to video-a place that exists but is ephemeral, "captured", if you will, in the unique mindscape of video time and space. The important thing, I think, in relation to your work and the idea of utopia is the element of construction involved in the building of it. In Inside Out you are obviously interested in the human presence-the manicured labyrinth and the chimney and rooftop that reappears again and again in the tape. It strikes me that while the fear and unease of navigating the terrain of the labyrinth is very present, and even emphasized by the manipulation of the tape and the music, there is also a distancing from the "landscape"of the labyrinth that is created by the presence of the camera, even though it is given a very human char-

Laura to Pip:

What I'm interested in is the play back and forth between our culture and the world it lives in. We construct and maintain [the labyrinth], which is structured as any socialized situation-part natural, part contrived-primarily, paying attention to our behavior to "it", rather than within it. To "it", is the peeing-on-the-bush syndrome. Conceptually, the culture behaves toward nature as a one-way street, missing half of the picture. To me it is the perfect example of our relationship to ourselves. It has to do with utopia, in the striving to perfection-that tacit social code tirelessly hopes to lead us to. I view this social code as the c,;ux of the dilemma. Society as a whole requires it-without it, things would not be pretty-but in turn we are required to live within an external structure. We haven't personally created our world-we train ourselves based on external stimuli-

acter-through movement, etc., and by the editing itself that is comforting. Let me clarify: the presence of the familiar "realm" of technology lends a certain ease to the relationship formed with the menacing "natural" subject.

The labyrinth also falls somewhere between the natural and the urban-this is the perfect symbol-the labyrinth itself-for the zone that I think many urbanites exist in when considering landscape.

so there is an inherent conflict between that external pressure or influence and personal desire. That moment of conflicf is what I was getting at in Inside Out. Our relationship to nature in many ways is a demonstration of that containment and fear of venturing outside the approved area,

I am also really interested in the idea that none of the artists in the video program altered nature-the claiming of territory happens electronically, and is based more on the "experience"ofthe landscape than of the "conquering"of it. It is in this remove that I am particularly interested. Is it in this technological manipulation that the experience is claimed? or fear of the unknown.

"The knowledge of nature that we seek is not just reverential, emphasizing a need to show respect for nature, but also aspires to accuracy."6

MANIFEST DESTINY or . .. THE WEST IS WON or . PISSING IN THE SNOW

The train works its way across the United States, bringing progress in its wake. Unstoppable, all-powerful conquering machine. Nature is tamed, distance neutered.

or EDIE'S EASTWARD EXPANSION

e-mail· Edie to Pip; excerpts, August, 1998:

The trip itself was really to make the video .... I had noticed the things I liked about the view from the train on shorter train trips, and had also done some photographing and videoing from cars, and especially from bridges. The idea to do it all the way across the country on the train just came to me at one point. This section seemed a good example of the transition I always found so interesting, as it repeated itself over and over across the country, from open space to town. You always see the traces of infrastructure even in the middle of nowhere-the train itself, roads, bridges, telephone and electric lines, factories, then it becomes more concentrated, you get farms,then suburbs, then cities or towns, then backwards, then it repeats There is a kind

Edie Winograde is one of a long line of artists to use the train as her means to access unknown territories. She documents the nowhere, no time of train travel; her camera recording the journey, the landscape she passes by, almost passively. Winograde is present in the glimpses every now and then of her reflection in the glass, in the sound of her breathing, and slight movements. She is at once there and not there. Her alternating presence and absence mirrors the awareness of the audience of the self before the work.

In this segment of her larger project Grand: Excerpt (10 Minutes in Nevada) one can't help but think of spaghetti Westerns, of the behind-thepainted-scene views of Hollywood sets that frame the reading of the video.7 In this particular segment of her journey the tracks are slightly curved, and the lens combined with the glass give an oddly rounded at the edges quality to the video. It all looks grandly fake: a landscape created with the viewer's eyes in mind. But interspersed with the open vistas are the backyards of houses built along the tracks. Debris and junk not meant to be viewed is clearly visible from the vantage point of the train window. Houses back onto the tracks,ignoring-not presenting themselves for consumption bythe passing trains. The occupants of the houses count on the fleetingness of the glance of the train travellers.

6 David Reason, "A Hard Singing of Country," in the exhibition catalogue The Unpainted Landscape , Graeme Murray Gallery, Edinburgh. London: Coracle Press, 1998), p. 28.

7 I return, again, to the notion that our perception is conditioned by images ingrained through exposure and repetition.

of rhythm to it.Also, the interaction between the infrastructure and the landscape is pretty easy to see in the West, with less trees in the way I am partial to the Western landscape anyway.

One of the reasons I felt so strongly about the idea of using the train to capture landscape imagery has to do with the history of landscape photography in this country being tied very strongly to the history of the train, which is of course also the story of westward expansion, manifest destiny, and you know the rest. But many of the classic images of the American landscape taken in the late 1B00's were on geological surveys to find the best route for the transcontinental railway I went from west to east because that type of exploration is all over now, the train is there, and maybe even not for much longer. This was a sort of reverse Geological Survey cross-section.

THE DURATION OF A GLANCE

Nancy Golden's Soul Murder: a cross-country tour; a forty-second document of a trip across the U.S.

SOUL MURDER

FLEEING ATLANTA, HEADED FOR CHACO CANYON, NEW MEXICO ... I WAS NOT JUST DRIVING BUT WAS DRIVEN ... AN ADRENALIN DRIVE ...

DRIVING TO DISTANCE MYSELF FROM A NEAR FATAL EVENT ... AND I BELIEVED IF I COULD DRIVE STRAIGHT THROUGH WITHOUT STOPPING I WOULD BE HEALED.

THE CORE IMAGERY IS A ROLL OF SUPER 8 FILM SHOT SINGLE FRAME ON THE ROAD.

THE LANDSCAPE IS "PAINTED" UPON ... DESERT AND WATER ARE SUPERIMPOSED. THE AUDIO IS A "SCREAM"... THE ROAR OF THE FALLS AND THE SUBWAY TRAIN. TIME IS COMPRESSED AND SEEMS A VERY LONG SHORT TIME ... LIKE HOLDING YOUR BREATH UNDER WATER.

SOUL MURDER RECREATES THE EXPERIENCE OF A JOURNEY AND THE EVENT THAT PRECIPITATED IT.8

artist,August, 1998.

Golden conflates time and distance, not through the sheer determination of recording it all but by giving us an all-encompassing glimpse.The camera acts as her tool, the lens is at once her weapon and her shield. In Soul Murder the land is infused with the terror of her experience, by disorienting linear, temporal, an,d spatial constructs. Golden virtually attacks the audience; we are lost in the sound and visually dislocating nature of the piece, barely able to attempt to read it. Golden's video perhaps most closely approaches the sublime.9

THE THEATER OF DESIRE

"My first contact with photography was at the age of 14 in a Jesuit school with a photography workshop, something that wasn't common for Spanish schools then.The long trips to school each day over the rolling hills of Aragon and through the area's surprising valleys began to take on a new meaning: travelling along the highway, I was mesmerized by the constant transformation of the fields and the alternating colors; the abandoned ruins suddenly became fragmented, isolated from everything, framed by a new point of view.These elements as fragments became even more animated, like the ruins or the silos; they seemed to tell stories." 10

The camera does not move beyond the deserted crossroads, but hovers at the moment of choice, before one road out and another, cir~ling, savouring the mounting anticipation. Celia Ayneto uses motion and time effects in post production to emphasize those in the original footage in her video Passage #5. It is through editing and her use of music that she alters reality, making it "more hers" .A fantasy world is constructed to form a bridge between experience (the known) and the projected or distant (the unknown). It is through a constructed narrative that the audience is drawn into the work-the dreamlike quality afforded by the editing induces us to construct our own fantasies and to read our own stories into the depicted scene: to make it "more ours". But at the moment of decision, when it appears that the viewer will actually be led somewhere by the camera (which opts for a particular route), the music and pace first quicken then fade and the video is over.We never arrive.The moment of climax is suspended and the audience realizes that through all of the "making-it-ours", the artist had never relinquished control.

9 Golden approaches the sublime. The discourse surrounding notions of the sublime and the impossibility of depicting or representing it through landscape art are far too complex to discuss in this short essay. I would venture to say, though, that there is a parallel to the sublime in nature that can, in fact, be approached through technology-the "Creator" takes on human and technological form.

IOExcerpt from a text by CeliaAyneto, April, 1998.

VIDEO SEDUCTION

"If nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture, and I prefer houses to the open air. In a house we all feel of the same proportions. Everything is subordinated to us, fashioned for our use and our pleasure. Egotism itself, which is so necessary for a proper sense of human dignity, is entirely the result of indoor life. Out of doors one becomes abstract and impersonal, one's individuality absolutely leaves one."

- Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying London: Penguin Books, 1995, p5.

In a sense it is the poets, the photographers, the writers, the artists, the film makers who have created an "architecture" of language within which to couch our fears of the great out-of-doors. Nature, in fact, not architecture, has been increasingly "subordinated to us, fashioned for our use and pleasure", through art, and very literally in the paths and hiking trails of our "parklands". But, as the video program suggests by presenting five distinct and complex versions of relationships to the landscape, the tension between finding ("experiencing", just plain "having") a subjective response to the natural and combatting one formed for us by those poets, photographers, writers, artists, and film makers is a complicated business. The fear is perhaps still in line with Wilde's notion of becoming "impersonal, one's individuality absolutely leav[ing] one", but through one's lack of a "natural" connection to the land around one's self. Whatever natural may mean. The artists each play with these ambiguous and varied relationships we have formed over the centuries with the land, seducing the viewer 11 with video into another "familiar" reading of the landscape, then pulling the grass out from under her feet.

11 THE READER AND THE VIEWER

I find myself automatically writing here and throughout the text "viewer" which I continually re-word as "audience". I think it is an important distinction which leads me to include here some notes on the apprehension of the phenomenon of landscape in video If one looks at a landscape and watches a home video, what term would we use for the audience's apprehension of the videos in the progam Horizons of Language?We would normally classify the audience as viewer, since these videos impose a condition of viewing; the time factor and the formal presence of the audience within a specific space. In each of the works in Horizons of Language, the artists acknowledge that the temporal and spatial factors are imposed, but within that framework, they attempt to confound the audience by alternately or simultaneously allowing for the seduction of passivity and evoking an actively contemplative attitude. In the example of Oriental scroll painting, the work is unravelled at a chosen pace and the episodic narratives within the landscape are read actively. But if it is control over the pace of the unraveUing that determines the degree of engagement of the viewer how does one bypass the passive connotations of the act of viewing within the medium of video to reach the active reading a work?

PIP DAY is an independent curator and writer living and working in New York City. She is the arts editor for the NYC based monthly Wipe Magazine. Until 1998, Day was the curator at Artists' Space in New York City where she curated the exhibi· tions: SCOPE (a video festival); Through the Tulips and the Red Red Rose.Anne Gardiner; Permutations, Savor: Karen Kimmel; and Tampering with the Reel. In 1996, Day received her M.A. in Curatorial Studies at the Center for Curatorial Studies,Bard College with a thesis exhibition Shifting Spaces:Reading the Shadows, Stan Douglas and NicholasAJricano.

OPPORTUNITYKNOCKS / PROFESSIONALSERVICESFOROURREADERS

INTERNSHIPS can open a world, if you are in college studying art or just out; if you are changing careers, or if you want to learn something new. This is the way to find out first-hand what it takes to work in the arts and prepare yourself for any number ofjobs that may be available in the field. Many organizations provide valuable internship opportunities as part oftheir educational programs-it is good to scan web sites ofyour favorite museum or gallery-more times than not internships and/or volunteer spots may be available.

CENTER FOR PHOTOGRAPHY AT WOODSTOCK

Arts Administration Training

This internship offers the training opportunity to work with the Center staff in running a not-for-profit organization, including implementing our year-round programs in education, exhibition, publication, and services for artists. Interns learn about contemporary photography, meet artists, help edit our magazine, host exhibitions, and learn business practices and fundraising strategies associated with a not-for-profit artist's space dedicated to serving contemporary photography. Year-round opportunities available.

Woodstock Photography Workshops

Interns in this program are given the opportunity to participate in the renown Woodstock Photography Workshop and Lecture Series, now in its twenty-second year, in exchange for facilitating events and working with visiting name artists. JuneOctober, interviews in March and April. For more information please call '914-679-9957, or visit on-line: Http:/ /www.cpw.org/.Application by interview only.

APERTURE

The work-scholar program brings individuals of promise from around the world into sustained contact with all of Aperture's activities. Work-scholars are directly engaged in the writing, editing, design, prc;>duction, and marketing of one of photography's most significant publications; in the exhibition program, in the maintenance and use of the Strand archive; and in business operations essential to a non-profit organization. Dates are Jan. - June, or July - Dec., designed for a six month, full-time commitment. For more information please write:Aperture, workscholar coordinator, 20 East 23'• St, New York, NY I 00 I O.http://www.Aperture.org.

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

The internship program at MOMA is designed to introduce participants to specific areas of the museum profession, and are offered in the fall, spring, and summer. For deadlines, applications, and more information visit their web site: Http:// www.moma.org/, call 212 708 9795, or e-mail: moma internship@moma.org.

FILM /VIDEO ARTS

This internship program provides independent film and video artists with the opportunity to develop their work by granting them free accessto F/VA equipment, facilities, courses, and workshops on a standby basis in exchange for a minimum of sixteen hours of work per week. For more information on this internship or other opportunities at F/VA, please contact Duana C. Butler at (tel) 212-6739361 or (fax) 212-475-3467, F/VA 817 Broadway, 2°• fl, NY, NY I 0003.

CENTER FOR PHOTOGRAPHY/ CALL FOR ENTRIES

Future/Perfect - ModernFablesofLove,Death, & Desire. We seek imagery and mixed media that use visual tools to ransack the past, explore the current passion for uncovering personal secrets; explore memory, and loss. Based on myths of yesterday, we are looking for artists who look toward tomorrow, appropriating icons from the last centuries.

MoonlightBecomesYou - aThousand & One Nightsof Peace on Earth. As we enter the new millennium, the Centers seeks work by artists who-like magicians-transform the frog into the prince. Spinning light, behold the power to summon beauty, and make the strength of attraction an advantage.

To Enter: Send twenty slides, carefully labeled with your name, address, and phone number, a resume and/or bio, and a statement on your work to: CPW, 59 Tinker St. Woodstock, NY 12498. Be sure to include a note about which show you are submitting work for.You must include a 8 1 / 2 x I I", self addressed.stamped (pre-paid) envelope if you would like the slides returned.

rtOTED BOOKS

TheCenterfor Photography'slibraryis opento all individuals,free of charge,Wed- Sun,12 to 5 pm, or byappointment.Wl thankthose whohavegenerouslydonatedqualitybooksto thisholdingand welcomenewadditions.Recentdonationsinclude:

AustralianColors I ImagesoftheOutback,photographyandtext by Bill Bachman,additionaltext by Tim Winton;AmphotoArt, an imprintof Watson-GuptillPublications,NY,NY;1998,256 pages, hardcover,with 331 color photographs.

BruceDavidson:CentralPark,prefaceby ElizabethBarlowRogers, commentaryby MarieWinn;Aperture,NY,NY;1995,unpaginated, hardcover,black-&-whitephotographs.Gift of DavidKarp.

Eden:SelectedPhotographsofMelanieEveBarocas,selfpublished,Guilford,CT;1998,52 pages,hardcover,black-&-white photographs.

GhostRanch:LandofLight I ThePhotographsofJanetRussek andDavidScheinbaum,with introductionby EdwardHall,essays by LesleyPolig-KempesandRinaSwentzel!;BalconyPress,LA, CA;1997,96 pages,softcover,black-&-whitephotographs.

Kenrolzu:PhotographsinPlatinum,with essay_byAlisonDevine Nordstrom;HowardGreenbergGallery,NY,NY;1995,catalog,52 pages,softcover,tri-toneblack-&-whitephotographs.

OnPlanetEarth:TravelsinanUnfamiliarLand,photographsby JanStaller,story by LucSante;Aperture,NY,NY;1997,98 pages, hardcover,color photographs.

PeopleoftheRoad I TheIrishTravelers,photographsandwriting by MathiasOppersdorff;SyracuseUniversityPress,Syracuse,NY; 1997,96 pages,hardcover,black-&-whitephotographs.

TheArtofInterruption:realism,photography,andtheeveryday, by John Roberts;ManchesterUniversityPress,Manchester, England;distributedin the USAby St. Martin'sPress,Inc. NY,NY; 1998,242 pages,softcover,black-&-whiteillustrations.

Timeframes:TheStoryofPhotography, by IanJeffrey;Amphoto Art, an imprintof Watson-GuptillPublications,NY,NY;1998,224 pages,hardcover,colorandblack-&-whitepictures.

TwoTimesIntro:OntheRoadwithPattiSmith,photographsby MichaelStipe,OliverRay,writingsby WilliamS. Burroughsand others;A RayGunbook,publishedby Little Brown& Co.(Canada); 1998,unpaginated,hardcover,black-&-whitephotographs.

Vodou:VisionsandVoicesofHaiti,photographsbyPhyllis Galembo,introductionby GerdesFleurant;TenSpeedPress, Berkeley,Ca;1998,114 pages,softcover,color photographs.

ThreeArtists'BooksbyFrancoisDeschamps:MemoireD'un VoyageenOceanie,1995;AGuidetoAntipodea,1992;and The ReturnofTheSlapstickPapyrus,1998;variouspublishers, softcover.

© 1996 Sarah Greer Mecklem, Reliquary I

TheCenterSlideRegistryis a selectedslidearchiveof contemporaryimagesof photography,mixedmedia,and digitalimagery. It providesa bridgebetweenartists curators/collectors/andtheCenter,makingcontemporary workeasyto access-by appointment-Wednesday

throughSunday,noonto 5 pm.Artistswhowishto have workincludedin theRegistryshouldcontacttheCenterfor detailsonthisspecialmembershipopportunity.Fromthe RegistrytheCenterstaffselectssoloexhibitionsand featuresexceptionalimagesin the Quarterly

As a child in the 1950's, I often hiked up Overlook Mountain in the Catskill Mountains.At the summit I eagerly explored an old mountain house. Under construction for a decade beginning in 1927 and abandoned in the 1940's, the poured concrete structure retained its wooden inner structure;floors, stairs, walls, and lookout tower. It was my urgent desire and fear to discover the rattlesnakes known to abide in the cellars and to learn the stories that haunted the empty halls. Thirty years later; in 1989, I returned to find the ruined building burned, open to the sky; an extended family of trees inhabiting the main parlor; and a wild meadow struggling to carpet the central hall.

The site work developed organically. I started in 1993 by cleaning away the hiker/camper trash to allow expanded growth. In 1994 I began to garden within the premises, bringing daily offerings of wildflower bouquets and transplanting native flora to accelerate the reforestation process. My efforts to reclaim the meager soil unearthed a trove of ancient trash, historic fragments, melted glass, mirrors, nails, and hardware; a material palette for new-made artifacts.

I wanted to tell the history of the place at the site itself, but I did not want to make a permanent display. My interest was in the transformation taking place. The subject was change.

In the summer of 1995, I installed a pictorial history of the three hotels built at that site between 1871 and 1940. Enlarged from original, historical snapshots, postcards, and advertisements, the photographs and texts were mounted directly on the cement walls. Exposed to weather and people, the images would deteriorate over an unspecified length of time, a metaphor for the reality of the hotel itself In keeping with my concern for environmental revitalization, the materials were all biodegradable, soaked in liquid fertilizer; so that they would contribute to the nourishment of the soil when they peeled off the walls.

A year later; the photo installation remained virtually unadulterated with minimal defacement or graffiti but for the slow process of decay which draws its own allusion to change: a violent and colorful weathering which spreads over so gently

across the photo images. Without a constant attention, the gardening quickly achieved its own chaotic whim, struggling against seasons and path walkers to gain its own foot hold.

In September 1998, three years later, the impact of weathering decay has profoundly changed the photographs, although a ghost of the original images remain amidst the colorful abstraction of the whole page. I installed new color Xeroxes of the original photographs, much smaller in size, on top of the originals, a fresh layer of old history, repeating itself

Reliquary #l and #2 combine snapshots and found materials from the ruins. The assemblages abstract the photographic images from their original meaning, suing them for texture, palette, or as unexplained subject matter to tell new stories.

Daughter ofWoodstock painters,Austin Mecklem and Marianne Appel, Sarah Greer Mecklem was born in Kingston, raised with her family in Woodstock, New York, until she moved to New York City at the age of ten. Sarah attended the High School of Music andArt and Cooper Union. She dropped out of art school in 1966 and opened a boutique in the East Village selling handmade toys and clothing. She later became involved in developing community and public art programs for cooperative mural projects. She spent over twelve years curating exhibitions reflecting artists' concern with social and political awareness.

In 1989 Sarah began to return to the Catskill area as a Byrdcliffe Arts Colony resident. Over this time she conceived a project on the history of the Overlook Mountain houses, which she installed in 1994/95 with support from the Douglas C. James Charitable Trust, and Woodstock Guild/Byrdcliffe Artists Residency Program, Bruce Tovsky,AlfEvers, Jack Robinson; and it continues to be made possible by the LearningAlliance,Terra Nova Magazine; and MIT Press.The 1998 exhibition at the Center for Photography at Woodstock enabled Sarah to present a documentary synopsis of Recycling the Mountain House. Sarah has recently bought a building in the historic Rondout area of Kingston, New York, where her father often made collages and painted in the 1930s.

© 1996 Sarah Greer Mecklem, Reliqua7 #2

o_f__th_!l Arts

U.S.Postage PAID Woodstock,NY 12498 PermitNo.33

NYSCA

The Photographers' Fund fellowship project, begun by the Center for Photography in 1980, was specifically developed to serve rural artists from Upstate New York. Photographers submit portfolios of their work to jurors for review. Since 1995 two artists have been selected to each receive a fellowship of$ I ,000 Photographers are free to use the money to support their creative careers. Their only service requirement is to donate one of their images to the Center's permanent collection. The fellowship serves to reward emerging photographic artists of exceptional talent and is often the first serious form of recognition for rural artists.

The Photographers' Fund is enriched by individual donors; total to l 998 is $40,100 to fellows (below).

The Center for Photography at Woodstock Photographers' Fund Recipients

Lori Adams

Christopher Allibone

Rhonda MooreAndcrson

Timothy Archibald

Ann Warner Arlen

Joan Barker

Martin Benjamin

Phyllis Bilick

Liz Blum

Roberto Bocci

Brenda Black

David Brickman

Vince Cianni

Jennifer Curry

John P Delaney

Lucinda Devlin

Richard Edelman

Nancy Engel

Will Faller

Donna Fitzgerald

Lisa Kay Folsom

Tara Fracalossi

Phyllis Galembo

Charles Gatewood

Debra Goldman

Verne Henshall

Wendy Holmes

Forrest J-lolzapfel

David Horton

Kenrn lzu

Bil Jaeger

Gail Nadeau Keller

Tatana Kellner

John Kleinhans

Katharine Kreisher

Ed Lwino

Lawrence Lewis

Nancy Lloyd

Nancy MacNamara

Tanya Marcuse Matuschka

Mary Ellen Matise

Mark McCarty

Marilyn McLaren

Andrea Modica

Judith Mohns

Joan Monastero

Rocco Nigro

Linda Robbennolt

Patricia Scialo

George W. Simmons

Cinthia Singleton

Fran Smulcheski

Charles Steckler

John Swain

Sydney Thompson

eilTrager

Ann Marie Tuite

Jack Wilkerson

Diane Zucker

THECENTERFORPHOTOGRAPHY ATWOODSTOCKISHONORED TO THA 1KTHOSEWHOHAVEMADE CONTRIBUTIONS TO COMINGHOME

BUILDINGOURFUTURE

CAPITALCAMPAIGN1998

FUNDDRIVETOMATCHOURAWARD OF$50,000FROMTHENEWYORK STATECOUNCILONTHEARTS CAPITALPROGRAM:

Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld Law Firm; the Milton and SallyAvery Arts Foundation; Bruce Bennett; Ellen Carey; Stephen Cohen Gallery; Richard Edelman; Susan Ferris; Linda Freeman &Arthur Hochstein; Phyllis Galembo; Edward Garbarino; Howard Greenberg Gallery; Suzanne & John Golden; David Hall; Sue Hartshorn; Rollin Hill; Stuart Howard; WM. Hunt; IBM gift match program; Kenro Izu; Douglas James; Greg & Louise Kandel; Peter & Barbara Kenner; Kevin & Jane Kenyon;Arie Kopelman/NY Gold; Sara Kuniyoshi; Rebecca Lawton; Gail LeBoff; Doug Levere; Ellen & David Levy; Eric Lindbloom; Peter MacGill; George Maggiolo; Betty Marks; Marcia Reid Marstecl; Elliott Meisel; Bill Mindlin/Photo in NY;Andy Moss/Digital Design Studio; Marc Miller;Jeff Milstein; Gloria Nimetz; Jose Picayo; Lilo Raymond;Joan & Farrell Reynolds; George Riling;John Schupf; Stephanie & Fred Shuman; Ken Shung; Alan Siegel; Robert Stang;Albert & Harriet Tannin; Neil Trager & Ann Lovett; David Teft; Bob Wagner; Steve Zagar.

Sunday,April 11 -SundayMay23

CENTEREXHIBITIONS

COMMONBOUNDARY CuratorSandraPhilips, SanFranciscoMnseumofModernArt,CA

New work by nationally based creators who carry us forward into a new millenium.

TEENAGEPHOTOGRAPHERS

FROMTHEHUDSONVALLEY CuratorJojoAns,CPW

Sunday,June 6 -Sunday,July 18

COMINGOFAGE INTHEAMERICANSOUTH CuratorKateMenconeri,CPW

Creative photographers explore a parallel visual expression to that of the so-called Southern Literary Tradition.

SOLO:KATHYVARGAS HASTAYANOVERT£/ HASTAVERT£OTRAVEZ

Mixed media installation by an artist from San Antonio, Texas.

Sunday,August I -Sunday,Sept 12

GUESSWHO'SCOMINGTHISSUMMER?

Images by the 1999 artists teaching the Woodstock Photography Workshops. .g

SOLO:DANNYTISDALE ARTISTFORCHANGE [

A resident of Compton, California, presents a photographic installation that addresses race, power, and the fragmentation of daily life. @